B007P4V3G4 EBOK (62 page)

He's going to ring the paramedics, Herbert thinks. Perfectly
pointless. Why not quietly leave her to bleed to death? Why must
her husband drag out his twilight years behind a wheelchair?

People abandon cars, bicycles, prams, and hurry to the fateful
spot. They surround the victim the way carrion beetles do the
cadaver of a mole.

Didn't I hear deathwatch beetles in the bars of the bed this
morning? So it was inescapable. Look: the windows are weeping.

Herbert follows the drops that jerkily draw vertical lines among
the curves. Then he turns round.

'Can you see, Liesbeth, what's on that piece of paper in the
milkman's window? Your eyes are better than mine. Might even be
a special offer.'

Liesbeth sets the cat down on the chair and totters over to the
window. Herbert walks to the stove and holds his hands above it
in the rising warmth.

Wonderful, those hot water springs in Iceland, he thinks. Would
the winter be a severe one? The signs are favourable. Would it be
suspect to buy a refrigerator at the beginning of Winter? Wouldn't
it rouse suspicion? Shucks: there are people who buy a camping
tent in January. Didn't I myself once stand beside a girl buying a
bathing costume when it was twenty degrees below? But there are
indoor swimming pools, of course. And aren't there any houses
where the heat's tropical in winter? I can't hear anything by the
window yet. Might the mortal ... ehm, might the remaining
mother (in-law, grand and great-grand) have been carted off
already? That'd be a pity. Haven't heard the siren yet, for that
matter. Or are there so many people standing around now that it's
as though someone is offering something for sale, just like that,
right out in the street?

I must keep a grip on myself, Liesbeth thinks, and with both
hands she presses her stomach. There isn't even a piece of paper in
the window: he spares me nothing. The blood! She must be
draining dry.

She feels the contents of her stomach rise. Quickly, she walks to
the door.

'And could you read what was there?' Herbert asks.

He hears the toilet seat being raised with a bang.

A coarse brain but an oversensitive stomach, he thinks.

A siren sounds outside. He walks to the window. A cream
coloured car stops at the traffic island. Hurriedly, two men jump
out, pull a stretcher from the back of the car and set it down beside
the body. Then they pick it up and put it on the stretcher. The left
foot, bobbing up and down, perpendicular in its stocking, ends up
next to the stretcher. One of the men shoves it back on with his
foot.

Liesbeth comes in again.

'It's busy in the street,' Herbert says.

'That's what I saw too, just now. There seems to have been an
accident. I couldn't see.'

'Best thing, too,' Herbert replies as he draws a little landscape
with a windmill in the top comer of the window. 'You've got
enough of a weak stomach as it is. You'd be upset for days.
Assuming it was an accident, then it was caused by the tram. Not
a pretty sight at all. Those iron wheels shear the lot off, clean. I
once ... Hey, why are you leaving the room in such a hurry?'

Retching, Liesbeth runs to the toilet.

Dinner-for-one this evening, Herbert thinks, rubbing his hands.
I'll put the newspaper behind my plate, up against the condiment
set. A feast!

When Herbert has reached the top of the stairs, the door to his
apartment opens. Liesbeth steps out into the hall.

'Oh, you shouldn't have, Herbert,' she says, ticking him off.

'What shouldn't I have?' Herbert asks, leering with screwed up
eyes at the red face.

'Such a big one, far too much space for a small family.'

'Oh, the fridge - has the fridge arrived? I thought it'd take them
hours. Hoisting it up and so on.'

'No, they managed it the ordinary way, up the stairs. But such a
big one, Herbert; it really is too much.'

'What rot - this is no ordinary birthday: you turned fifty today.
Half a century.'

Too many, he adds in his mind, half a century too many.

'Come on, show me,' he says cheerfully.

He follows her to the kitchen.

'It's a whopper indeed,' he says, once he's standing in the
kitchen in front of the gleaming white enamel. 'It looked much
smaller in the shop.'

What a magnificent sight, he thinks, the polar ice cap seen from a stratospheric aircraft. It gleams and glistens in the polar light.
Now for an axe, and we can start on conservation.

'You would have done better to wait till summer, Herbert; it's
cold enough here now.'

'That's just why it's so practical now. You won't have to turn
down the heating in the evening any more 'cause otherwise your
food'll go off. And no waiting for hours in the morning until it's
warmed up a bit here. Just take a look,' he says cheerfully, pulling
the door of the fridge wide open. 'Just you take a look: the space! I
bet you could go and sit in it in Summer, when it's hot.'

'Now you really are exaggerating Herbert,' Liesbeth says, estimating its volume by eye.

'Exaggerate? I never exaggerate.'

With a clatter, he removes the horizontal aluminium racks.

'I think you could take the cat in with you too. No, no kidding:
you try it, Liesbeth. My lumbago's giving me gip.'

Blood, blood, he thinks, I'll bring it about without spilling blood.
The heavens regard me with favour. There'll be no writing on the
wall.

'Well, alright then, 'cause it's my birthday,' Liesbeth says, laughing. 'But it's a strange experiment.'

She sets her bottom down on the floor of the fridge, wraps her
arms round her drawn-up knees and swivels herself inside.

'Enduring the worst heat of August would be easier than sitting
in this position, I think.'

With a powerful sweep, Herbert throws the door shut. Then he
puts the plug in the socket.

I can hear her shouting but I can't make out what she's saying,
he thinks.

He walks to the living room, switches the radio on and sits
down in the tub chair beside it. Circumspectly, he takes a cigar
from the cigar case, licks the outer leaf and presses it down. He
twiddles the radio until a nice little tune breezes into the room.
From the blue banks of cloud that linger in the middle of the room,
the temptations of a life of freedom drift towards him. They spin in
the surf of his imagination. He gives them girls' names and those
of flowers.

There'll be ice flowers on her pupils; she'll be sitting there,
hunched up like the tree mummies of Central American Indians. I
could have a hole made in the bottom of my car with a broad pipe
through it, reaching down to the road. Then, one rainy day, I put her in the back. On the bumpy rural roads, I shove her down the
pipe, head first, so that her hair rests on the cobbles. And then I
drive about until there's nothing left but the soles of her feet. I
won't take her glasses off. But I won't even be able to straighten
her out. She'll have wriggled her way into the most impossible
angles. She always did. I'll avail myself of other means to get rid of
her, as it happens. Now won't I just, you white-shirts you?

Walking over to the window, he addresses the seagulls diving
down into the street, after bread being thrown from a window somewhere.

'I'll be spoiling you, lads! For the time being, your hungry beaks
won't be eating dry bread any more: they'll be red with all the
raw.'

A grand moment, Herbert thinks, eye to eye with the deep freeze
princess. A fortnight past already: she'll be feeling the cold.

He pulls open the door of the fridge. With a jump, daylight
takes possession of polar night. Liesbeth still sits there exactly the
way he last saw her. Her hands rest calmly on her tummy,
between the hillocks of her bosom and her thighs. Her glasses are
covered in a thin, matt layer of ice as though, with its fragile
wings, a butterfly seeks to protect her eyes from the cold. Icicles
formed by the condensing water, with pointed fingers probe the
hoarfrosted shrubbery of her hair. Her mouth hangs open. The
pink tongue of land lies speechless, riveted down in the bitter ice
of the inland sea of her oral cavity. An elegantly curved little rod
of ice runs from her bottom lip to the remnants of food on her
chest, as though her last thoughts had been of the fountains of
Italy.

Herbert bends forward and looks intently at the food remnants.

Not such a peaceful death as first it had seemed from the
resignedly folded hands on the stomach, he thinks. Perhaps that
was a whim of the last death throes. Let's take a peek at the eyes.

Carefully, he grips the frame between the lenses. With his
fingertips he stirs the cold marble of her forehead and the bridge of
her nose. The cold spreads up to his wrists. He has to apply force
for a moment in order to free the spectacles. Then he sees what
the butterfly was trying to spare him. Her eyes have bulged out so
far that, Herbert suspects, the lenses have prevented them from
drooping even further. They hang down over the bottom eyelids
like infertile, greenish owl's eggs that have been cast out from the red and yellow veined nest of the eye sockets. In blind suspicion,
the pupils stare down sideways into the remnants of food. When
Herbert replaces the specs, those pupils stare through them like the
eyes of a sea monster through the steamed up pane of an
aquarium. He staggers in front of the fridge.

I'm overcome by the cold, he thinks. I -must have a drink. I must
raise my glass to this memorable fact.

He goes to the living room; he pours himself a glass of genever,
warms himself in front of the fire. The liquor warms him all the
way down to his digestive tract.

'Now what have we got?' he mutters, taking a sip from the glass
at each object he mentions. 'A sharp little cleaver for between the
joints, a saw for the bones, a razor sharp knife for flesh and
tendons, a chopping board, plastic sheeting, a nutmeg mill. And a
glass for the eyes.'

Triumphantly, he raises the glass aloft. Then he goes to the
kitchen, spreads a sheet of plastic in front of the refrigerator and
fetches the tools from the cabinet. He goes down on his knees in
front of the fridge and tries to turn Liesbeth ninety degrees by her
ankles, something he only succeeds in after a great deal of effort,
for she is frozen to the sides of the fridge in some places. Then
he drags her forward so her lower body ends up resting on the
plastic.

To be pruned as soon as possible, he thinks, flipping her shoes
from her feet with the cleaver. I'll try to get rid of a leg today.

With an old-fashioned razor he draws a furrow in her right leg,
exactly along the seam of her stocking which he peals from her leg
like bark. Then he cuts her clothes away at the hip, the imprint of
them visible on her skin as if she is wrapped in thin tarlatan. The
flesh is hard and cuts easily. Not without anatomical insight, he
severs the leg from the torso at the hip joint, returns the body in
the same position to the fridge and closes the door. Then he lets
his knife sink deep into the fluvial landscape of her varicose veins
and begins to cut off long strips of flesh. The knife makes a sound
like skates on mirror-finish ice. When he has divested the thigh and
shin bones of flesh, he strikes the foot off with his cleaver. He then
begins to cut the long strips of flesh carefully into little cubes he
tosses into a large, shallow tray.

The feet are too complicated to bone for my liking. I can simply
put them out by the dustbins tomorrow. Perhaps it would be
better, however, if I was first to fit them with the antique lace-up bootees. Let's chop things up as small as possible. They're guzzlers;
they'll polish things off as they are, too.

With a swing, he lets the cleaver come down on the bunions.
The toes hop forward, away from the foot, like small, pale frogs.
Purple splinters rain down on the plastic.

I used to sit in the garden like this, Herbert thinks, wiping the
sweat from his forehead. The purple flowers of the lilac dropping
around me. In front of me in the loose sand were corks in a long
row, wriggling insects pinned to them. I let down a woollen thread
into a bottle of petrol and laid that across the caterpillars, beetles
and locusts. Then I lit both ends. Once the flames met, the insects
would be lying there with burnt off legs and wings. Of some,
the body had split open like a roast chestnut. Thick, white
goo bulged out. You're worse than Nero, my father said, and he
raised blisters on my bottom. You're just like your uncle Louis; he's
a bad'un too. Uncle Louis! When there was just a butt left of his
cigar, he would walk out into the garden with it. He would stay
and wait by the balsam at the back of the garden until a bumble
bee came to fetch honey from a flower. Then he'd tap the ash from
the butt, suck it so it got a fiery dome at the tip, and put it in the
calyx. Can you hear him buzz, little Herbert? he would ask. D'you
know what he's saying? He's saying the Lord's Prayer. Soon, when
uncle Louis was staying with us, moist brown cigar butts would be
sticking up from all the pink calyxes of the balsam, like arses just
about to relieve themselves. Uncle Louis, a sensitive man, stimulating his conscience with the annihilation of little insects, Herbert
thinks, touched.

'I've become a big game hunter,' he mutters.

He roots with the cleaver in the splintered heel bone. Then he
takes up the board and slides the shattered foot on top of the meat
in the tray.

That'll do: they'll devour the chaff with the wheat; they'll make
no bones about it.

He takes the tray and walks with it to the hall. He sets it down
there, takes out a step ladder and puts it underneath the hatch in
the ceiling. He mounts the steps carefully, undoes the hooks and
pushes the hatch open. Shrieking, seagulls fly up from the edge of
the roof when suddenly his head appears above the antediluvian
landscape of tar and shingle.