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“Uncle Alf, I’m not sure—”

In a tolerant, teacherly, quiet way, he told her, “Do as I say.”

She did. She was in free fall and knew it. She felt hellbent and unruly, as if she were riding a flood that was seeking the sea, the wild tide of it erasing all fences, boundaries, government, calendars, plans, and intentions. She heard a male voice in her head say, Aren’t you the fat cow?, and she flicked off the overhead light so that there was only the yellow glow from the wall sconces. And then she walked naked to the high, wide, feather bed and sat with primly crossed legs on the gold satin quilt.

“Don’t look,” he said, so she held her stare on the floor as she understood him to be shaking the trousers off his skin

ny legs and folding them onto a hanger. She’d forgotten that he wore long underwear in winter. She stole glimpses of the jiggle of his soft flesh as he shrugged and fought and jumped his way out of the underwear and jammed it into a laundry basket. Eyeing his niece to ensure her shyness, he posed as he did in his Brownshirt photographs, his features ferocious, his fists clenched, his flabby stomach sucked in and his chest inflated, his head haughtily high. And then he said, “Look now.”

She found his pose ludicrous, but hid it, and she hid, too, the fact that his maleness was so odd and disconcerting, for he had skin so white it seemed powdered, no formation of muscles in his shoulders or arms, the hairless, female breasts of a girl in puberty, and a flaccid, purple, uncircumcized penis that was like a short thumb above a boy’s compact scrotum. She shifted her gaze to Adolf Ziegler’s healthy nude.

“I have had the benefit of seeing you,” her uncle said. “And now we are on the same footing.”

She asked in a flat voice, “Are we going to make love?”

She watched his shadow shift shapes on the floor as he crossed to her. She shivered with cold. She felt the feather bed sag with his weight as he sat just beside her. “Aren’t you the randy harlot,” he said with a smile. “To try to rush me like that.”

She was exhausted and did not know why. “What then? Shall we kiss?”

Considering and striking various options, he finally said, “Walk to the closet.”

She felt his leer like hands as she did.

“On the floor inside are my jackboots. Put them on.”

She did.

“And hanging inside the door is my dog whip.”

She got it but said, “I find this distinctly odd.”

“Hush,” he said. “Walk to me now.”

The jackboots were so loose they fell from her feet as she walked, so she shuffled to within a foot of him and found herself giggling, and then she faced his hot glare and was silent again.

There was no letup to his glare as it journeyed down to the great curiosities of her breasts. Was he trying to make her feel ugly? Leaning forward, he laid out a gray-coated tongue and licked circles around her right nipple, then took it between his teeth and tugged until it hurt. Seeing her wince, he smiled and said, “Teach me.”

“Tenderly,” she said.

“With the whip, I mean. Teach me.”

She heard the male voice in her head say, Hit him. “Hit you?”

“Yes!”

“I can’t.”

“Hit the side of your boot with the whip.”

She stropped it.

“Oh, that’s it. Again.”

She did.

His jaws widened like a python’s and he hideously took as much of her full left breast in his mouth as he could, hurtfully sucking and swallowing it until she whacked a jackboot with the whip and said, “No!”

Withdrawing his mouth from her breast, he smiled. “Aren’t you quick.”