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And so the narrator, who conceals the beloved in a hidden, dirt-floored reading room in his or her cellar, begins a great love affair--a contrast in almost every way from the narrator's bloodless, unconsummated marriage. An act so personal as saving one's secret beloved and keeping him alive for two years in a cellar room may not be exactly heroic, as the narrator admits. Soon after his arrival, the narrator brought down to the captive two shirts from his or her dead father's wardrobe, and two sets of underwear--one belonging to the narrator and another to the narrator's spouse, Jude.
I liked to think of him clad alternatingly in men¹s and women's undergarments beneath his trousers; it was a mild way of humiliating him. Blame it on the war but I wanted to maintain a certain ascendancy over him, make his life easier but not too easy, in the same way as you might keep a canary in a cage and pretend you¹ve forgotten to change its water just so that it can't bathe properly. I could have done much worse, for he was at my mercy.But power, in a love affair, is no simple matter. The narrator still burns for the young soldier. "The dim light down there hid him from me and increased my desire, just as the darkness makes an amusement park ghost train exciting. But what about him? Was he grateful to me for saving him; would that be enough to win him over?"
While the narrator's uncertain gender deliciously complicates the relationship between the soldier and his rescuer/captor, the shell game of pronouns and descriptions required to maintain this gender-ambiguous status may annoy some readers. But it also has the effect of implicating the reader in the murky ethics of the situation, since it is the reader's decision, at any moment, which direction the gender should go. It's a gimmick, yes, like the backward narrative of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, but one which heightens the pathos of an almost unbearably affecting story. --Regina Marler
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