the voices came echoing over from the little island. “Just coming,” I replied quickly, and glad to escape more embarrassment I threw myself vigorously into the water. A couple of diving strokes, the inspiring pleasure of driving myself forward through the water, the clarity and cold of the unfeeling element, and already that dangerous murmuring and hissing in my blood receded, as if washed away by a stronger, purer pleasure. I soon caught up with the other two, challenged the lecturer, who was not a very strong athlete, to a series of competitions in which I emerged the victor, and then we swam back to the little tongue of land where my teacher’s wife, who had stayed behind and was already dressed again, was waiting to organize a cheerful picnic unpacked from the baskets we had brought along. But exuberant as the light-hearted conversation was between the four of us, we two involuntarily avoided speaking to each other directly—we talked and laughed as if ignoring one another. And when our glances did meet we hastily looked away again, in an unspoken complicity of feeling: the embarrassment of the little incident had not yet ebbed away, and each of us sensed, ashamed and uneasy, that the other was remembering it too.
