TABOO

The corridors and rooms of the hotel are undergoing a drastic transformation. The lift before which the man and woman had glanced last looks heavy with the temporary suspension of time, is now filled with strapping, dust-covered workmen in dark blue overalls and steel helmets. There are four of them who completely fill the lift so that they have to lean their heads forwards to fit into the confined space. The doors clanging shut have no note of finality as before. Higher levels are reached by the lift. More rooms are being worked upon. One of these rooms is a bathroom from where a snake goddess one early evening emerged and descended to her own small temple, curious to see how an admirer reacted to the long flowing cotton dress in patterned blue, soft blue. The dress falls easily about her cleansed and anointed body, her skin glows in the affirmation of well-being after the perfumed, comforting water.

The visitor retreads the corridors, unnoticed by the workmen sitting in the front office amid the the empty shelves that were once filled with vistitors' keys. Early morning is not a time to suspect that old events are being revisited. He knows the way, the twists of the corridor, the odd chunks of plaster and masonry through which he treads make it appear that the old building is in the final stages of its destruction rather than its renovation, but the descent to the basement by the dark stairs has as much allure and appeal as previously. Below there is a quietness and removal from the hectic pace of the world. Down and around another corner he comes to the room with its opened French windows, its small courtyard beyond where he had been lovingly groomed, the light is transfixing in its purity, the windows that were once closed are now open, entirely intact and token of a world that has been newly revealed. The transcendence of limit and flight into freedom is always fresh and whole. It possesses the seductive whisper of each spring. Now the cleared room has an air of already having been restored and made intact. All that is needed to complete the scene are two people, male and female, trying to build a bridge across a chasm.

It is 1943. In Germany there is an atmosphere of all-pervasive purpose. Trains filled to the very tops of the railway trucks run unlit through the night heading for the East, through Berlin and onwards towards Prussia, Poland, Russia, towards the Urals where huge armies are engaged in battle. Stalingrad has been under siege for a year, the inhabitants are holding on but only by resorting to cannibalism. Once carefree parents watch through swollen popping eyes at every move their pathetically weakened children make, grimly aware that they may easily fall prey ot the gangs of hunger-crazed people who stalk the ruins.

The cold from Siberia is sweeping over the ruins, over the facing armies, bringing a frozen snow that adds to the misery and deprivation as it bites into the flesh and remorselessly chooses its victims. The raw Russian recruits speak a different language to the silent morose men they join at the front. They are from the Asian hinterland where they have seen - and perpetrated - most the outrages which man is capable of inflicting on man, especially in the endless spaces of the steppes where there is only the law of survival, by some means. Back home in Wuppertal, Inge wondered about her engineer husband, Klaus, away at the front throwing bridges across icy rivers, no longer unduly disturbed by the razed villages he passes through . Inge sensed enough at home of the black unyielding clouds hanging over the country, speaking of calls for still more sacrifices in the name of victory. All over the Ruhr she could see gangs of slave labourers filing of the factories late at night, their skin a blueish-black when caught in the occasional chink of light escaping from a window. There was a massive cloud of smoke over the whole Ruhr region by day and by night. Production had to be increased, the Fuhrer insisted, notwithstanding the bombing raids. Inge had stopped wondering which city would be hit next. Dortmund she had heard was already largely in ruins. Yet production was back to former levels within 6 weeks of the worst raids. Huge lorry convoys constantly passed through Wuppertal carrying vital parts for bombed factories. She had heard rumours that Hamburg had been the scene of a particularly ghastly raid where fire storms had raged out of control - once the phosphorescent bombs had been concentrated into a few areas, the wind was sucked into the vacuum and created a firestorm enacting an apocalyptic vision of the end. There were no survivors where the storm passed.

Klaus' infrequent letters home did not speculate on the outcome of the war. Inge felt viscerally th old threat and memory of being overrun by invaders from the East, there had to be one final encounter to stop them. It had been so with the Mongols who were eventually brought to a halt in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it had been so with the Huns who had brought down the first Roman Empire, she had come to realise. They were a godless people, but once the conquests had been made perhaps a new, more enlightened order would take over. Now the order of the day was work, duty and, if necessary, death. Inge knew her people's resolve would not falter, even if the British and Americans were to bomb each city into smoking ruins (and that did seem their intention). Her people would fight till five minutes past midnight.

It was not the time to bring forth children. It would take Inge 12 more years to feel secure enought to make that commitment to the future. She was not to know that for a similarly aged English woman working on the aircraft production lines in Britain, this commitment was being made as she became pregnant and then presented a 'darling little man' to a husband she would not see until the war was over and he returned from South Africa.

Inge walked down the hill into the town of Wuppertal, momentarily starting as a train thundered overhead, almost invisible without its lights. The long pillars supporting the bridge visibly shook, however, the curved arches held firm. It was five in the morning and the streets wre already filled with heavily wrapped muffled figures walking, like her, down towards the factories turning out weapons of war, row after row of squat glinting metal shapes, sinister and silent. The all-clear of a siren sounded from over the hills in the direction of Dusseldorf. Once the train had passed it was silent, still too dark for even the earliest harbingers of dawn to begin their morning song. She regretted she would not hear this brief welcome from the natural world. Her youth hgad turned into an apprenticeship to death, the radio and newspapers coached her expertly in its ways. All she knew for certain was that the battle for Russia had not been decisively won yet in the vast lands sprawling out from the German homeland, but there had been more than enough sacrifice. Klaus had mentioned that he was near to Moscow in one early letter - it had seemed that, as with France, the Fuhrer had been able to bring off the impossible, she remembered the newspaper picture of the General Staff as the decision to invade Russia was made, each face was staring into a future that was momentous in its import. Klaus' last letter, some three months previously, had been from the Ukraine, it spoke of shortages and deprivations for the soldiers, the land was stripped bare, prisoners were being turned out into the fields to eat grass. 'The East' , Klaus had written,' has a long knowledge of the nature of man. It is where we came from, recently in historical time. It is easy to see how superfluous man is to creation in these endless flat lands, and how simple it is to revert to our old ways. It is as if we are exterminating the Slav as surely as Cro-Magnon man hunted down and killed Neanderthal man. It is pitiless. The oriental Russians have no European inhibitions, is a race war with no mercy expected or shown. I believe the land will use the regulator of its winter to bring this to an end, a white-blanketed buried charnel house that history may one day almost forget just as we have almost forgotten the nations wiped out by the Mongols.'

Inge had reached the bottom of the hill and noticed the first smudges of dawn, the false dawn, high in the black sky. Then she entered the factory past the elderly guards, proud and despotic with the power of their new weapons. A file of wide-eyed unblinking workers from the foundryy's night shift passed here as unearthly as ghosts. Inge only recognised their East European features and walked by without looking in their direction. In the darkness it was as if she were on a vast cruel stage in a sequence depicting the worst imaginations of all mankind's history. There was an air of no-one being there and yet at the same time every persona and event had an hypnotic presence as though a current of electricity was lighting the set in a theatre of the absurd. Her thoughts were fragmented, she performed the function assigned to her. 12 hours on the production lines inspecting her gang's work required complete concentration. Besides, it was unwise to engage in all but the most harmless of conversations, those who spoke out against the conditions or who speculated that the war was not necessarily won suddenly disappeared, and no-one spoke of them again. Anyone could be an informer.Either from a sense of duty, or because they had been placed there for that purpose by the Gestapo. The day passed without any air raid warnings - although day attacks were becoming more frequent. Six months before there had been too many fifghters for the British to risk daytime raids. But now the American air armadas had grown in size while the British lines of bombers could take an hour to pass over their target, bombs falling indiscrimiately all over the countryside about the target or town. There was no doubt it was deliberate, the civilian population was as much a target as the armament factories. Besides, the vital factories, like the one where Inge worked, were dug into hillsides.

The siren wailed and Inge joined the weary crowd of workers filing past the aged guards at the factory gates. Children rushed forward to greet their mothers, an easy happiness flitting momentarily across their faces before they assumed their more usual puzzled and stoical expression. Some of the children were only five or six, and appeared to have come down to the factory by themselves. They would grow up to be a very independent generation.

Elizabeth felt glowing fresh after her bath and she tingled a little more as Reception rang through to tell her that Martin had arrived to see her. Wearing her new full-length blue-flowered cotton dress from India she came up the stairs and with a slow gliding walk appeared before the waiting figure of Martin.

'So how was your trip to the country?' he asked smiling in response to her smile.

It was always the same. The reciprocated effortless smile whenever they met, spontaneous and instant. It had never happened to her like that before.

'Oh it was beautiful,' she said as they began walking down the stairs to her room. 'I spent three days walking all the time.Friesland is so unspoilt, lakes that stretch for miles, forests with no-one in them.'

Martin was obviously glad to see her. There were a few days left before her departure. Now she had to tell him she had chosen a day.

'Do you know when you'll be going back?'

'Next week,' she replied, looking directly into his eyes as she softly spoke the words.

He said nothing, put his arm around her waist, eager to touch her. She opened the door and ushered him in, her brown hair waving gently over her green eyes, eyes that had both depth and elusiveness. He was smiling broadly, she felt herself doing the same. They were a perfect reciprocation of each other in both movement and expression, all the more perfect because of its unconsciousness.

'Would you like a drink, I still have most of the Martini left.' she said, turning away from him so that her dress swirled and followed her to the small cabinet where the bottle of Martini and two glasses waited.

She felt his arm lightly coming round her shaped waist, and did not move, preferring to watch the alcohol splashing into the two freshly washed glasses. The perfume of the bath water was heightened by the light feeling her dress gave her. The water had cleansed away the wear and tear of the train journey coming back after the weekend with Gerard, a friend who had become a lover. On her first visit to Holland it would have seemed like a violation if he had become that intimate. But Martin had broken down her sense of being disloyal to Reinhard if she experimented. Besides, it had been difficult to resist when she was a house guest of Gerard and his sister Maria. He had entered the pink wallpaper-covered bedroom early in the day carrying a bottle of champagne. The farmhouse looked out over the lakes. They had had a wonderful walk the previous day. She knew why he had come into the room but did not more than raise her eyebrows slowly when he sat on the bed. Soon he had drawn back the covers and was beside her. Leaping out of bed would have created bad feelings, friends can impose in subtle and demanding ways. He had been a good lover, tender, considerate, only lacking the surrender of passion. Perhaps she had been unwise to tell him of her problem with Reinhard. His failure to excite her. Or was it the fear of pregnancy? Or her parents' disapproval of him?

Martin sat on the mattress beside Elizabeth drinking the Martini quickly.

'I thought it was going to be at least another week after that,' he said. 'What about the holiday too?'

'I talked with Reinhard for a long time at the end of last week, he's very depressed, I have to go.'

The blond hair of Martin fell forward as he leant over the mattress to put his glass on the floor. Elizabeth studied the hair she had so recently cut. She knew its texture and its fineness, she ran her fingers through the locks slowly and gave his head a gentle rub of affection.

'If I had found a better job I might have stayed a couple of years,' she said. Her eyes were soft as she spoke, hinting at the wellsprings of feeling waiting to be tapped.

'So you're going on holiday with him?'

'I've made a deal to go with him.'

'I've been paid the money for the painting today.'

'How much?' she asked.

'Three thousand guilders,' he coolly replied watching her face.

'Yes that would pay for our holiday,' she said.

'I regard the money as half yours, you were the inspiration for the picture.'

Elizabeth said nothing, smiled whimsically. She leant over to put her glass on the floor beside that of Martin's. Her cotton dress rose up over her knee. The Anglo-Dutchman looked at the smooth shape presented by the folded leg, placed his hand quickly upon the knee and turned to lean over the torso of ELizabeth. She lay back upon the bed, moisture in her eyes, uneasy at what would transpire, regretful at having to disappoint him.

'I don't think it's a good time,' she said softly.

'I could make you,' he laughed.

'Have you ever made a girl?'

'Yes and no.'

'You know I trust you.'

'You are very beautiful.'

His hand was stroking her leg, working imperceptibly upwards. She felt the inside of her thighs being gently squeezed, the soft massaging produced small waves of anticipated pleasure further still up her legs. She could have been above him, regally erect, arms waving like branches in a wind, snakes shooting out of her tousled hair as she received her tribute of his animal prowess. But she wanted to wait, till evening perhaps, certainly to wait. It was always difficult to say goodbye. It was like the time when Reinhard had gone back to Germany and Martin had taken her to a great showroom on the canals where art exhibitions were held, the most prestigious art exhibitions. They had been sitting on the floor, her with tears in her eyes as she told him it was too early after Reinhard's depature. At least she had waited a week.

The worshippers of Dionysus held their rites of abandonment and entrancement in the very heat of summer. The open hills of dry, dusty Greece with their tall, straight trees allow some cooling air, indeed when it rains the air can be filled with the heady scent of a pine forest. In such an environment the body can return to its former ease in a beneficent warmth, at which point its internal harmony can be savoured and rediscovered. The preparation for a ritual trance requires a heightening of the senses' awareness and the mood of receptivity. The goddess within felt sure of herself. The room was humidly hot as the day had been. They had met in the cold, in the early hints that winter's rigid grip was beginning to weaken. The desires that had been incubated then only now could work through to their fruition. They had started a new life in Amsterdam, it could never be the same again for either of them.

She brushed his hand away. He pushed it back angrily and suddenly was running his palm over her curled pubic hair, aware that she wore nothing under her blue dress.

'No, you don't' Elizabeth said softly, at the same time pulling at his hand with some strength..

Their eyes met in in a cold appraisal of each other's mood.

'You want to, be honest,' he replied equally softly, moving his palm about her pelvic mount, pushing down on the raised bone as his head looked down on her. She wriggled on the mattress, pushing on the inside of his arm.

'I don't want to, you heard.'

'You want to.'

'How the hell do you know?'

She glowered into his face. He continued to brush the short crisp hair. She would resist him. She would decide when he could make love to her, as she had done at the beginning. It in no way meant she was forsaking Reinhard. She had asked, 'Why do you want to make love to me when you know I have a boyfriend?'

She had let him know where he stood. It had never been an all-consuming affair with Reinhard, more the love of trusting companions and friends and all the more permanent because of that. He accepted her decisions, especially about sex. The agreement to prematurely withdraw when she periodically came off the pill. He treated her with respect and understanding. She had learnt how to direct and control him while in return he supplied the stability she needed, being subject to whirlstorms of anger and hurt from somewhere deep inside, uncontrollable forces with a life of their own.

Elizabeth made a lunge for the top of the mattress in an effort to escape the insistent hand. Martin was temporarily taken off balance but soon the larger heavier figure of the six-foot man was on top of her five and half foot frame pinning her down, the hand upon her scheide, her breasts pushed down hard by his weight, just as it had been the first time but now there was no tenderness in the face barely above hers.

'I'm not going to let you,' she whispered, her upwelling feelings of contempt showing in the half lowered eyelids through which she stared intently at him. It was a wordless communication. After long seconds he spoke.

'You think you can just announce you're going and decide that's the end, don't you? Do you really think I'd let you go that easily?'

He took his hand away but only to begin undoing his belt. In spite of herself, her vagina was wet, he had that effect upon her, unlike Reinhard. At the level of physical attraction she flowed copiously after just looking at the forceful eyes that brooked no opposition.

'Why, why?' she asked, 'I hate you.'

He said nothing, continued to gaze icily into her face, knew how she felt, but it was strange to her, this side he had uncovered. He unzipped his flies, there was an eerie inevitability about it, he really was going to, there was now no waiting for her to undress him as previously, everything was the same, everything was different.

'I did another painting last week,' he whispered in her ear as she lay immobile. His voice was hoarse, insistent. She became aware of the perspiration on his face and her own fetid glow from struggling with him. Even though he was obviously stronger she determined to show him in reality she had almost as much strength, she was not some decorative flower as he might like to think. She was undefeated, not of that last generation, part of the richest country in Europe. Though few realised it, there was a new reality.

The Russian armies have pushed the forces of the Third Reich back slowly and inexorably through all of European Russia supplied by the great industrial machine of the United States. As they progress through Poland and Central Europe, the German border beckons across the wide open plains. The battle has torn the heart and entrails out of the land as efficiently as a mediaeval executioner skilled in the art of hanging, drawing and quartering. For the second time in four years the tanks and infantry, the artillery and bombers have ploughed the fields and the villages. A heroine of the Resistance lies agonised in the frozen snow, a breast has been sadistically removed before death so that her beauty could know its disfigurement. In death her face has a tortured eleoquence of extreme pain irreversibly mixed in the defiance. A young face whose only unasked question is 'Why?'. It is the evil of war to remove all the normal parameters of behaviour, to act out the unthought but compulsive drives, to dull the senses until evil assumes an acceptable reality. The frightened faces of the men about to be hanged. Their voices have dried in their throats, two of the three men even have eyes that have become saddened with the knowledge of their own certain death. The last man's eyes look out at the scene as he stands on a box with a noose around his neck, bewildered and unbelieving. His two companions have the boxes kicked away and they swing broken necked before his eyes which give out the electric message that he cannot possibly be about to die. I who have never sought high position, I am a poacher, not a manipulator of men. The Nazi officer comes up behind him, he feels the box being kicked away, his neck clicks sickeningly, there is a fierce current of pain, he does not die immediately, there is a long suspenison of time. He is one of three figures swinging forlornly on makeshift gallows on the Polish side of the German border. The Russian forces, as they push relentlessly forward, are given a dispensation from the highest level, they may take whatever revenge they like on the German population. Millions are fleeing from the wrath to come as the indescribably tired German troops fight on, joined by ever younger recruits sent up to the front by a leader who never speaks to the populace, whose only command is to continue the fight, leaving only scorched earth for the invader, these Asiatics recruited from the Kazach Hills, the West Siberian Plain and the Central Siberian Plateau, who only know and love strange sounding rivers like the Tunguska, Lena and Yenisey. Now they are crossing the Vistula, the Warta, finally the Oder. Much of the population of Danzig flees in terror upon evey available ship but still more are left behind to await their fate at the hands of the avenging armies.

A Russian tank column rolls into a village of three hundred people, a farming community where there are only old men, women in dark, dirty clothes and children sheltering behind their mothers' tattered skirts gazing uncomprehendingly and wild-eyed at the disdainful Russian officer standing at the head of his column in a tank turret. The soldiers have come to a halt in the village square, beyond the fields look white, ghostly. Two of the oldest men in the village, the most respected, walk up to the stationary tank taking care to raise their hats to the conqueror. A young junior officer jumps down from the tank behind the leader. He had European features unlike most of the troops with their close cropped heads, barely lidded eyes, harshly cut lips and protruding cheek bones. He orders the two old men to assemble all the village inhabitants in the square within 10 minutes.

'Alles leute,' he stresses in rudimentary German.

The two men do as they are bid, they recognise they are conquered. Before the war, they, like many in the village, opposed the Nazis, the villagers trust them, they were young children when Prussia defeated France in 1870 but the ethos of that victorious generation sits upon them and gives them authority. In only four minutes they have assembled almost all of the people from their houses where they had been sullenly waiting for the conquering army. The commanding officer, Asiatic in features, makes an impatient gesture from his tank turret. The people are to line up in single file. The villagers comply, wordlessly. The commander speaks quietly to the younger officer who is wearing a less crumpled uniform than his superior, though neither - by German Army standards - look like officers, so heavily stained are they with mud and oil, dried blood and grease.Their faces have a leather like look, incapable of registering emotion, so thick and unmoving are the folds of flesh.The European officer salutes his commander who stares at some fixed point which may be the end of the long line of 300 people. He walks deliberately along the line, stopping at a few places where he very slowly motions with one finger for the old man or young woman - it is always a young woman - to step forward. The first three women he selects do as they are told. The fourth woman he stops at is carrying a young child in her arms.

'Nicht, das Kind,' he orders icily and points at the ground where he orders her to lay the year-old boy child.

The woman slowly shakes her head, her eyes do not leave the palest of pale blue eyes of the Russian officer. He equally slowly pulls out a revolver and places it firmly against the side of her head. She looks witheringly ahead, her eyes noticing the sky where dark grey-blue clouds threaten more snow. The gun fires, the woman crumples to the ground with the child being showered from the blood pumping out of the great gaping wound. After a long pause the child begins to cry, hesitantly at first and then with a great wail, at a pitch several times higher than would normally be considered possible. It is a terrrible wail that pierces the hearts of all the villagers with tidings of their own imminent death. Moving on down the line the officer picks out a dozen more women and a dozen men. He raises his hand and a gang of Russian troops run up to the men standing out of the line. They are thrown on the ground peremptorily; while they kick and curse, their trousers are removed and then their testicles. The women wail and scream at the horror taking place feet away, then while the villagers look on and the castrated men look on , the troops begin raping the women. The Russian commander disappears inside his tank. It roars into life, followed by the line of tanks behind. With a sudden start the tank rolls over the first man in the line, moves on to the next and the next.

The one survivor in the village, a woman who was raped by the troops for hours on end, never spoke of what happened that day. But the young boy who had been working his father's farm several miles away, said he had heard the screams clearly, terrible screams that still awoke him at night forty years later, the screams of the damned being sent to hell.

The worshippers of Dionysus, having liberally drunk of his wine, sometimes would come across a man in the forests who - in their frenzy - they tore to pieces. The women were not in a fury of hatred but of all-consuming passion. They wished to possess him. Just as the modern young adolescents can be observed attempting to touch their idol and tear one small piece of clothing from him and so acquire his radiance and power.

Elizabeth felt bathed in a great heat as she pushed angrily against the weight of Martin pinning her down to the mattress.

'I'm glad I decided not to stay. And I thought I knew you,' she hissed at him.

He was like a man possessed, angry and hurt that she was going but swept away by the idea of taking her, capturing he, destroying the love link.

'I have finished a picture for you today - the parting picture - a blind man is in a doorway singing at the crowds as they walk past the stalls in Waterlooplein on a Saturday. Near him is a stall loaded with fruits, especially apples. We are walking past him, we did the day you told me in the cafe you didn't want to sleep with me anymore. It's called ''The sweetest apple is soonest to sour''.'

She did not move but now his hand again caressed the crisp hair about her vagina, his finger lightly moved along the line of the outer lips sliding slowly along the gathering moisture there, while all the time he looked searchingly into her face anxious for some sign of acceptance. She gave none, preferring to stare ahead, she would not submit. He had to accept the decision she had made. She was going.

'You are destroying my feelings for you,' she said.

'You are going anyway.'

'I certainly am now.'

She was surprised at how calmly she spoke. Inside her stomach churned from the shock of her ever courteous suitor and friend turning into an obsessed man, mad to take her. She had thought she knew him but even having viewed his most sexually charged paintings she still found this brutal display of power shocking - and challenging.

She would contest his strength. He pulled her dress up revealing her flat belly and crisp brown pubic hair. She tried to pull the dress down again but he was insistent. While he kept his weight upon her he swivelled round so that his mouth could kiss her pubic hair. They were locked in a fierce equilibrium with her pushing up as hard as he pushed down. His fingers rubbed either side of her clitoris which pushed outwards from the barely opened lips, a pink white in colour. The fingers descended to run along the inside of the outer lips, sensations of intermingled warmth and coldness spread slowly through her belly and thighs, not at all like the heat and comfort

he had previously spread so effortlessly through her. Elizabeth realised he would soon attempt full intercourse. She resisted the compelling urge to move in time with the fingers pushing into her increasingly moist passage, sliding slowly between the clinging walls. She felt removed, watching down on the pleasure it gave, a cold hypnotic charge was taking her over. His erect penis was very close to her face brushing against strands of her hair, but she ignored its attraction, as she sensed its power to penetrate right through her.

The lingam is covered every day by pious Indian women with a garland of flowers. Water is splashed over the upstanding stone and descends to the receptacle of the yoni below.

The great humidity in the room made their bodies glisten with sweat, they slid over each other effortlessly. He swivelled round so that their faces were almost touching again and placed one leg between her partially open legs to prise them further apart. He moved his other leg between hers and very very slowly won the battle to open her up. She was almost as strong as him, the effort was intense for both. His penis was rubbing against her vagina's lips, he was not very hard, she could feel that. He was into her, pushing slowly and remorselessly inwards while she lay perfectly still.

'Make love, make love,' he whispered.

She began to fell spasms of heat arising in her belly, even though trying to remain still she was reacting a little more to each thrust of the penis inside her. Her breathing became laboured, sighs breaking the silence as she began to move with him, as she had done before, they had a perfect reciprocation of movement.The thrusts became less frequent, he was snorting.

'Make love, ' he panted, looking appealingly at her, 'I'm not enjoying this either.'

She said nothing.But her vagina gripped onto him as she felt him becoming soft, she was losing him, he would soon be out of her.

'I can't hold it anymore,' she apologised, very softly.

He came out of her, lay on top of her panting for breath, his hand rubbing the mound of pubic hair again.

'I need to go to the toilet,' she said eventually.

'If I let you go, you won't come back again.'

'We can't stay like this all evening. I want you to go.'

His finger was moving very slowly along the wet outer lips of her vagina but she could feel every nick of his fingernails.

'Your fingernails are hurting,' she said quietly, aware that he did not wish to hurt her.

The phone on the small cabinet began to ring.

'I'd better answer that,' Elizabeth said.

'Why?'

'It might be upstairs, I do work here you know.'

Strangely, in her hour of trauma, it was a journalist who was on the phone. A married man who was a very good friend. Elizabeth had worked for him the first time she had come to Holland when she was 19. She managed to be calm enough, while Martin stood a yard away from her, blocking the entrance to the door.Then realising she was not going to say anything he went back to lie upon the bed.

Elizabeth finished the call, then quickly flashed the reception upstairs by moving the receiver's buttons.

'Hans,' she said urgently into the phone, 'Komm hier, es ist wichtig.'

She put the phone down, turned to face Martin.

'You'd better get dressed, Hans is coming down.'

'No,' Martin coolly replied, lying back upon the bed, naked from the waist down.

Elizabeth looked at the white figure and saw he was not worried if Hans saw him like that.

'If you won't go, I will,' she said.

Before he could get to the door, she had slipped out, giving him a cold appraising look.

'I knew I couldn't trust you,' Martin angrily shouted at her.

We hope you have enjoyed the first chapter of the book, now you can
ORDER TABOO FOR FREE

---

(c) David Stuart Ryan, Kozmik Press, 1996
Rights enquiries to: Kozmik Press
134 Elsenham Street
London SW18 5NP
UK

---