The women had warned her, in the days before her wedding. Most of them spoke of the casual brutality of men, like dogs that mount bitches, boars on sows. It will hurt, they warned her, when he forces his way in the first time. But it's over soon - he'll finish quickly.
Many of them also had private advice, which they dared not let others hear because it confessed too much about their own lives. One who took her aside warned her not to cry out in pain - some men will think it should always be like that, they'll come back for more of your pain instead of for your love. Several told her to pretend that she enjoyed it, because a good man has to believe he's pleasing his wife. If you don't make him welcome, he'll find someone else who will. Others told her to be grateful when he found someone else, because then he'd only bother her when it was time to make babies.
Another told her that Ivan looked like the type who would be weak in bed, who wouldn't have the strength in him to finish. You have to coax him, she said. You have to entice him. Though how that was done, the woman wouldn't say.
And then there were the few who laughed at all warnings. One of them said, "You'll love it. He'll never be enough for you, though, this weakling who can't lift a sword. Better take a lover or two on the side. What he doesn't know won't hurt him, and there's no reason for a woman to be without the only pleasure God gives us."
All this advice - and it had told her nothing. She put it all out of her mind. Whatever it was, women managed to endure it or there'd be no children in the world. So, after listening to all the women, after watching the animals from childhood on, she could only experience for herself, when Ivan showed her, what this man did with this woman in his bed.
None of their advice applied to Ivan.
He was so gentle, whispering to her, asking her sometimes, "Is that good? Does that please you?" and other times, "You are so beautiful." Here, he would whisper, this curve, this hollow, this crest, I can't believe that I am the man who can touch this loveliness, that you're giving this to me. Unfamiliar feelings swept over her, strange changes in her body, trembling in places where she had never trembled, new tensions, new longings. He was so slow, she grew impatient. "Now," she whispered, pressing herself to him, but he answered, "Soon, not yet, soon."
"How do you know?" she asked. "You've never done this either."
"I've read books," he said, laughing softly. "I studied hard for this."
She didn't believe him at first - no one could write about this, it was far too private - and so she began to think maybe this was a kind of magic, too, that he was casting spells on her body, that he was in control of what she felt, making her body do things it had never done, could never have done before she came to his bed.
And then he told her that she was ready, and he was right. As the women had warned her, there was pain, but it was not as awful as they said, and even though it took the edge off the pleasure, it did not dull the love that swept through her. She clung to him, would not let him go when he finished, and he laughed again and held her, stroked her, as she also caressed him. Until he fell asleep. Until she also slept.
Now, remembering it in the morning, she wondered: Why did I wait? He had this gift for me all along.
But she knew the answer. She could not have received the gift until she loved him, and she could not have come to love him without seeing him first in his own world, his own family - in a place where he was a man held in respect, and not a despised stranger. His was a gift with no one fit to receive it, until now.
He stirred. Maybe he felt her gaze on him; maybe it was the change in her breathing; maybe it was a dream of her that woke him. He turned his head and saw her and searched her face. For what? It reminded her of yesterday, that