“Oh? But doesn’t the saying go the other way? Isn’t it arrats gorriak eguraldi?”
“That is how the saying goes, M’sieur. However…” Pierre’s eyes glittered with conspiratorial slyness as he tapped the side of his long nose. “…everything depends on the phase of the moon.”
“Oh?”
Pierre closed his eyes and nodded slowly, smiling benevolently on the ignorance of all outlanders, even such basically good men as M’sieur Hel. “When the moon is ascending, the rule is as you have said; but when the moon is descending, it is the other way.”
“I see. Then when the moon is descending it is: Goiz gorriak dakarke uri?”
Pierre frowned, uncomfortable about being forced to a firm prediction. He considered for a moment before answering. “That varies, M’sieur.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“And… there is an additional complication.”
“You’re going to tell me about it.”
Pierre glanced about uneasily and shifted to French, to avoid the risk of offending the earth spirits who, of course, understand only Basque. “Vous voyez, M’sieur, de temps en temps, la lune se trompe!”
Hel drew a long breath and shook his head. “Good morning, Pierre.”
“Good morning, M’sieur.” Pierre tottered down the path to see if there was something else requiring his attention.
His eyes closed and his mind afloat, Hel sat neckdeep in the Japanese wooden tub filled with water so hot that lowering himself into it had been an experience on the limen between pain and pleasure. The servants had fired up the wood-stoked water boiler as soon as they heard that M. Hel was approaching from Larrau, and by the time he had scrubbed himself thoroughly and taken a shock shower in icy water, his Japanese tub was full, and the small bathing room was billowing with dense steam.
Hana dozed across from him, sitting on a higher bench that allowed her to sit neck-deep too. As always when they bathed together, their feet were in casual embrace.
“Do you want to know about the visitor, Nicholai?”
Hel shook his head slowly, not willing to interrupt his comatose relaxation. “Later,” he muttered.
After a quarter of an hour, the water cooled enough that it was possible to make a movement in the tub without discomfort. He opened his eyes and smiled sleepily at Hana. “One grows old, my friend. After a couple of days in the mountains, the bath becomes more a medical necessity than a pleasure.”
Hana smiled back and squeezed his foot between hers. “Was it a good cave?”
He nodded. “An easy one, really. A walk-in cave with no long crawls, no siphons. Still, it was just about all the work my body could handle.”
He climbed the steps on the side of the tub and slid back the padded panel that closed the bathing room off from the small Japanese garden he had been perfecting for the past fifteen years, and which he assumed would be acceptable in another fifteen. Steam billowed past him into the cool air, which felt bracing on his skin, still tight and tingling from the heat. He had learned that a hot tub, twenty minutes of light meditation, an hour of lovemaking, and a quick shower replenished his body and spirit better than a night’s sleep; and this routine was habitual with him upon returning from a caving bash or, in the old days, from a counterterrorist stunt.
Hana left the tub and put a lightly padded kimono over her still-wet body. She helped him into his bathing kimono, and they walked across the garden, where he stopped for a moment to adjust a sounding stone in the stream leading from the small pond because the water was low and the sound of it was too treble to please him. The bathing room with its thick plank walls was half hidden in a stand of bamboo that bordered the garden on three sides. Across from it was a low structure of dark wood and sliding paper panels that contained his Japanese room, where he studied and meditated, and his “gun room,” where he kept the implements of the trade from which he had recently retired. The fourth side of the garden was closed off by the back of his château, and both of the Japanese buildings were freestanding, so as to avoid breaking the mansard perfection of its marble facade. He had worked through all of one summer, building the Japanese structures with two craftsmen he brought from Kyushu for the purpose, men old enough to remember how to work in wood-and-wedge.
Kneeling at a low lacquered table, facing out toward the Japanese garden, they took a light meal of melon balls (warm, to accent the musky flavor), tart plums (glaucous, icy, and full of juice), unflavored rice cakes, and a half glass of chilled Irouléguy.
The meal done, Hana rose from the table. “Shall I close the panels?”
“Leave one ajar, so we can see the garden.”
Hana smiled. Nicholai and his garden… like a father with a delicate but willful child. The garden was the most important of his possessions, and often, after a trip, he would return home unannounced, change clothes, and work in the garden for hours before anyone knew he was home. To him, the garden with its subtle articulations was a concrete statement of shibumi, and there was an autumnal correctness to the fact that he would probably not live to see its full statement.
She let her kimono fall away. “Shall we have a wager?”
He laughed. “All right. The winner receives… let’s see. How about one half-hour of the Delight of the Razor?”
“Fine. I am sure I shall enjoy it very much.”
“That sure of yourself?”
“My good friend, you have been off in the mountains for three days. Your body has been manufacturing love, but there has been no outlet. You are at a great disadvantage in the wager.”
“We shall see.”
With Hana and Nicholai, the foreplay was as much mental as physical. They were both Stage IV lovemakers, she by virtue of her excellent training, he because of the mental control he had learned as a youth, and his gift of proximity sense, which allowed him to eavesdrop on his partner’s sensations and know precisely where she was in relation to climax contractions. The game was to cause the other to climax first, and it was played with no holds or techniques barred. To the winner went the Delight of the Razor, a deeply relaxing thrill massage in which the skin of the arms, legs, chest, back, stomach, and pubes is lightly brushed with a keenly honed razor. The tingling delight, and the background fear of a slip, combine to require the person receiving the massage to relax completely as the only alternative to unbearable tension and pleasure. Typically, the Delight of the Razor begins with the extremities, sweeping waves of thrill inward as the razor approaches the erogenous areas, which become ardent with pleasure and the shadow of fear. There are subtleties of technique when the razor comes to these zones that are dangerous to describe.
The Delight of the Razor culminates in quick oral lovemaking.
Whichever of them won the wager by making the other climax first would receive the Delight of the Razor, and there was a special cachet to their way of playing the game. They knew one another well enough to bring both of them to the threshold of climax quickly, and the game was played out there, on the teetering edge of pleasure and control.
It was not until after he got away from Sugamo Prison and began his life in the West that Hel’s sexual experience took on form and articulation. Before that there had been only amateur play. His relationship with Mariko had not been physical in essence; it had been youthful affection, and their bungling sexual experiences had been nothing more than a physical footnote to their gentle and uncertain affection.
With the Tanaka sisters, Hel entered Stage I lovemaking, that healthy and simplistic stage of sexual curiosity during which strong young animals brimming with the impulse to continue their species exercise themselves on one another’s bodies. Although plebeian and monotonic, Stage I is wholesome and honest, and Hel enjoyed his time spent in that rank, regretting only that so many people are sensationally crippled by their cultures and can accept the strong, sweaty lovemaking of Stage I only when disguised as romance, love, affection, or even self-expression. In their confusion, they build relationships upon the sand of passion. Hel considered it a great pity that mass man had come into contact with romantic literature, which created expectations beyond the likelihood of fulfillment and contributed to that marital delinquency characteristic of Western sexual adolescents.