B007P4V3G4 EBOK (61 page)

At that moment I heard the crunching of gravel: footsteps!
Instinctively I cast down my torch. I expected a cry as though I
had wounded him or had torn a bandage from his face. However,
the first change evoked by those sounds now took place within
myself. It was the thought of a minute ago which, in its full stature
and accompanied by all the signs of sobering-up after my mild
intoxication, stepped forward as though around a comer of my
consciousness. In three seconds I knew everything again, in three
seconds I had fallen back thirteen years, right through the night,
right through time. Hurriedly, the thought let itself be viewed
from all angles like a beggar showing his wounds, who fuses with
the giver, who forces himself up against him and most of all would
like to pass on all the diseases ploughing his skin, just to be sure of
the compassion he's asking for ... Disease, death, a death bed? ...

Indeed, an entire night 1 -had watched over him, fighting sleep and
boredom. A long night of emptiness, and one in which no thoughts
of any importance could have touched my spirit. When morning
approached, he called me to him, with his feeble voice, and then I
saw that he had become young like the stone statue earlier on,
smooth and untroubled before he would die, as though he wished to
overtake a distant past chunk of his youth, and in doing so was not
content with thinking and dreaming alone but had also adjusted his
appearance. He was barely able to speak any more by then, and half
an hour later it was all over. But who knows with what child's game
he had been occupied with a few minutes prior to his death, in what
childish difficulties he had still entangled himself? Who knows what
toil it cost him to go so far back in his life that was already barely a
life any more! How strange and not to be unriddled, this return into
himself, this completion in which life, winding youth like an ultimate
loop around deepest old age, ties itself in a knot which can never be
unpicked ... And I? That I saw it and did not understand! That he
was my father and yet someone else - an ordinary, untragic death
bed without gestures, and which I had thought little of during those
thirteen years - and that I only understood now it was too late,
even - after this warning, this announcement - too late for the one
who had provoked that memory ...

Noises ... Outside of myself again!

A door was opened, conversation: a woman's voice. At the
same time, blinding white light flared up, drawing forth an unreal,
hard garden, one I could not have expected to be there. Gruesomely
rectilinear yew hedges, shaved bare, cut through the night, their
leaves snappy and tightly packed together like little scalpels; each
bit of gravel seemed to glint individually, without cohering with
neighbouring ones. In front of me lay the beginning of the drive, a
drive for machines: white, smooth and soulless. When I moved a
little further to the left, I noticed the electric light above the door
which was half open; an iron boot scraper lay on the step. A male
figure moved along the drive in my direction, youthful and slim,
but his gait was almost stumbling; behind him, slower, a much
older woman, with grey hair the light gleamed through, silvery,
who now called out a second time: a name I didn't
But the young man had already reached me and grabbed my arm:

'He's dead and you could have saved him! Why didn't you
come sooner! He's dead, he's dead ...'

His voice sounded hoarse and tremulous; I looked him straight
in the face, which was still catching some reflected light, a
crooked, confused face, deathly pale, with eyes like chasms; and all
surrounded by long, black hair. With his unmoulded features from
which the nose, lonely and helpless, appeared to detach itself, he
seemed a boy of not yet twenty. Now the old woman joined us,
my presence not getting through to her, apparently:

'Come, come back home now; you shouldn't ... That's the last
thing, you're not at that stage yet, you can't go back yet. .
.'

Half sternly, half soothingly, she put her hand on his shoulder.
But again he turned to me:

'You could have saved him, you're too late, why didn't you
persevere for longer, why ...7'

Full of hunger, all reproach, his eyes regarded me; his hands
were folded as though he would pray to me, or only to give me
strength even though it did seem too late for everything ...

What was I to reply? I sensed nothing uncommon in what he
said. I was too late, I knew. Again I thought of the stone face; the
transition had taken place too soon for me to have been able
already to banish him from my thoughts. And, quick as lightning,
his question continued in my mind in a different form: why had I
not shone on to him for longer, why had I allowed myself to be
distracted? And particularly as regards the memory of that deathbed of thirteen years ago that popped up again, more threatening than
a moment ago, I felt all too clearly how sorely I had failed, now
and in the past already, too. For only now did I realise why my
father had become more youthful in his death throes. It was to
spare me, not to burden my shoulders with what everybody who
feels guilty and tortured by remorse when he sees his father die,
must bear anyway, even when there has never been any real cause
for such things. Through the alteration to his appearance, everything had transpired unnoticeably and more soothingly, through
the support of that curiously rejuvenated face, though in reality he
was even older than one could ever become in this life. But
bridging time, that other, real deathbed for which he had judged
me not worthy, had travelled along with me now to reveal itself
fiercely all of sudden - fiercely like a reproach, fiercer still than
self-reproach and yet akin to self-reproach. For I could have
stopped him, the way I had done with the stone face! Even if it
had only been five seconds more: I could have let him
who knows, death might have beat a retreat, demoralised, frightened off already by that short-lived resistance. No, no, it was
not to spare me even so: it had been a chance he had given me
which I had not managed to take advantage of! Not for me had he
rejuvenated himself, but for my help which he
hoped for! Who knows the fluctuations of the heart beat, or the
life force of a dying brain? I should have spoken with him, not
stand there with a hand on my chin and thoughts of the nuisance
of a funeral in my head; I should have pursued that miraculous
rejuvenation, laughingly, cheeringly, and bringing all our shared
self-confidence to bear, I should have pointed old portraits out to
him, memories that are eternal, a childhood that returns, time and
again, the tremendous life force that exceeds everything, death
included, the ...

The reality of the staring boy's face made me come to my
senses once again. A question forced its way to the forefront,
gained power over me: I had to utter it. I made a step closer to
him so we were standing eye to eye.

'Is it your father who has died?' I asked softly.

He recoiled, but no reply came from his lips. He now leant
sideways, up against the woman who might be a nurse or a
mother, and who had kept her arms stretched out as though to
receive him. His face fascinated me like a mirror. What was it that
strange smile wanted? I no longer expected a reply. Behind them, I saw the hard, white garden shrink far back, become hazy, die away
... It was as though his face came very close to mine, closer still
... But how long had this been going on for? ... Years? ...

How dark it now was. Dark as though nothing had happened
and nothing would ever happen again. Could I still hear footsteps?
The light had gone out all too suddenly, and the night wind with
its whisperings had taken possession of me again so irresistibly
that I wasn't able to make out whether the young man walked
back to the house along that gravelly drive, or whether he
disappeared a different way. Blinded by that rapid transition from
light to darkness, anaesthetized by emotions without a name, I
only felt capable of making a step forwards after a number of
minutes, the way a sick man does when setting his feet on the
ground for the first time.

I didn't search for the stone face. I knew I could no longer get in
contact with him nor could he with me. Till morning, I roamed
that inhospitable landscape without equal on any map. Poplars
whispered by my side, endless fences fled ahead of me in despair;
they curved and seemed about to return to the same spot again;
constellations I did not recognise gleamed in the sky above. Never
did I see that house again nor have I ever known what might be
true of all this - and whether indeed a father died that night.

Jan Wolkers

Herbert stands in front of the steamed-up window of his apartment
on the fifth, and top, floor. His hands in his dressing gown
pockets, he listens to the rushing in his ears.

I'm in a bit of a state, he thinks, I'm a doomed man, though it
may take another ten years. Ten more years with Liesbeth. Horror!
I'm perspiring as if I have a fever, yet I haven't one.

He digs his nails into the palms of his clammy hands. The only
thing he sees through the foggy window is the Belisha beacon on the
opposite side of the road. As if he's standing on a tall mountain and
an orange full moon, having just risen above the horizon, is being
hidden from view, time and again, by fast moving clouds. Like he has
seen in films run at a higher speed. But the flickering, on-off, is too
regular and disturbs the illusion. He takes his hand from his pocket
and, fingers slightly apart, he draws long, parallel curves down the
moist honeycomb, as though he's caressing a woman's long hair. The
Belisha ends up on a post of licorice allsorts; the traffic island with its
yellow bollards, poisonous aniline blue lights burning within,
becomes visible. Of the trees in the park only the trunks can be seen.
The tops have been devoured by the mist insects. The houses are
wrapped in damp sheets. A neon adyertising sign loses its purchasing
power and acquires a lofty meaning. A red cross on waves of mist.
Herbert puts his hand back in his pocket when the door opens behind
him. Liesbeth shuffles into the room. She sighs and pokes the fire.

'You've left the vent open too long,' she says. 'The stove's got
red cheeks.'

She's now standing by the stove, bent over, Herbert thinks. I
should walk up to her and give her squat bottom a shove. A wee
taste of purgatory. But she'd scream the place down. I'm wearing
my slippers. Before my shoes were on and I was out through the
door, the neighbours would be here already.

'Mind you don't go drawing on the windows, Herbert. Once
they've dried, I can barely get them clean again. You might wash
them for me.'

'I'm not washing anything. I just want to have enough of a
view. Let the moisture evaporate: good for the plants.'

'But it's bad for the furniture; it makes them warp, Herbert. Just
bear that in mind, would you? Peter, Peterkin! Come here lad,
come!'

That hairy predator approaches to comfort her after the defeat
I've inflicted on her, he thinks.

He hears the cat's paws tap the lino. It jumps up at her and
climbs up her pinny. She croons over it as over a newborn babe.

Barren womb, yieldless acre, he thinks. Why didn't your womb
open itself up to me twenty years ago? Why were you like a
pollarded willow that fails to sprout in Spring? I would have had a
daughter of twenty by now. The scent of young female flesh in
the house. Tunes being hummed, the tripping of high heels, rouge
to lend some colour still to my old age. Let's think, now let's think
clearly.

Herbert leans his torso forward so his head rests against the
cold, damp window.

Ah, that's wonderful! I'm in Rome, sitting on a terrace: a hot
summer's afternoon. The tarmac's billowing because of the heat. I
order a glass of beer, icy cold. I press the glass to my forehead.
The cold makes its way through my brain down to my backbone.
What was it again I wanted to think about? Ah, yes: why do men
always murder their wives in a rage while the balance of their
minds is disturbed? Why not a trip to Austria? A hearty walk, a
mountain trek? D'you hear that yodeller in the valley over there,
Liesbeth? Look, there he is! If I go and stand on this rocky
promontory, I can see him sitting there. Where, Herbert? I don't
see or hear him. Bend over a bit more! Look, he's sitting there
surrounded by columbine, further down the valley. Then a goodly
poke with the walking stick and those two hundred pounds
souring my existence tumble out of my life.

He suddenly gives a start because of the shrill squeal of tram
brakes. It sounds like the screaming of a hare being jumped by a
stoat. He looks down. The tram moves off slowly. Then, all of a
sudden, there's a woman lying on the traffic island. The parts of
her lower legs dangling beyond the kerb are at an angle of almost
ninety degrees to the parts on the traffic island. It is as if her instep
reaches a tremendous way up, or her knee joint has slid down.
Blood runs along the edge of the traffic island towards the rails.
The tram halts, grindingly. A conductor runs to the motionless body, bends over it. He shouts something to the driver, steps on
to the pavement and enters a shop.