Rituals (10 page)

"Poor soul," he said. His face had taken on a sad expression. He looked at Inni. The mud had definitely changed colour, darkened by a veil of old-man's sorrow.

"Poor soul. You must not take that in the way people usually use the term. We," — and he swept his hand through the air as if the entire Catholic church were gathered around him — "we call the souls in purgatory 'poor' souls because they have to suffer greatly and live in separation from God and can do nothing towards shortening their own suffering. Though purgatory . . . purgatory, will he manage to get even there? No one who has been incorporated in the Church, which means all of us here" — and he pointed at the empty chairs — "can be saved unless he perseveres in his love for God, so this applies to Mr Taads as well. The breach with God is a mortal sin. And the punishment for mortal sin is hell." He closed his eyes. What he saw behind those thin, closed screens must have been terrible, for when he opened them again, it looked as if the mud had darkened a degree further.

"Do you believe in hell?"

"No," said Inni.

"Hell," said Monsignor Terruwe, "is a mystery, and now I am going to have a snooze."

And then there were only two, thought Inni, when the purple-black figure headed as if on invisible rails towards the door. The uncle snored, but on his face there was an expression of reluctance. Someone else, also sitting in that chair, refused to sleep and yet was forced to do so.

Inni had not heard Petra coming in and gave a start when she stroked his hair.

"Oh dearie me, what a pale little boy have we here," she said, and something in the way she spoke caused tears to spring to his eyes. He was not used to people being nice to him.

"Oh my, oh my," she said, "oh my, oh my, oh my. Come on, let's first pack this one off to his room."

She briefly pressed herself against him. He felt her breasts against his chest and clung to her as if he were in danger of drowning.

"What a skinny little feller you are," she said. "Let's dry those little tears of yours, shall we?"

The uncle would not wake from his stupor, but the other one, the unwilling sleeper inside him, stood up and allowed himself to be dragged from the room, up the stairs, and into a bedroom where his aunt was lying in state, like a corpse whose eyes no one had taken the trouble to close.

"Pills," said Petra softly.

They undressed the uncle and lowered him onto the pink catafalque, alongside the other corpse.

"I am ill," said Inni.

Holding his hand, she took him to his room, opened the windows wide, put him down on the bed, and left. Downstairs he heard a clock strike, a strange, high sound marking some impossible hour. The next day, Taads would explain to him that it was a ship's bell striking, but now it seemed as if everything was rattling and clattering, for in this impossible but clearly indicated hour the room rolled from side to side like a ship. He himself was lying in the centre of the movement, a still object, until the great rotation lifted him up and drove him as if by a piston to the window. He felt as if he were vomiting out his whole inside and as if even that were not enough, even the empty feeling that followed wanted to get out and kept obstinately and frantically rising and tugging at his gorge. Tears poured out of his eyes. Below him he saw the dark hole of the garden, and although the rolling had now abated, he held on to the windowsill in a desperate grip. His whole life had to come out. Secret substances that for years had lodged resentfully in his feet, his legs, his brains, screamed to be set free. The whole huge crowd of memories and humiliations, his stupid loneliness — everything had to be thrown into that dark hole of a garden, disappear, become invisible. It had to be chucked away like so much sour, malevolent matter. It had to be cast outside where it would dissolve forever and so would he. He did not want to exist any longer. For the first time in his life this thought became a possibility, simply by being thought.

He heard the door open behind him and knew it was she. Bare feet, he thought, she is in her bare feet. The feet, harbingers of bliss, brought her close behind him. It must be something very thin she was wearing. She crossed her arms over his chest and rocked him gently back and forth as if she knew what he had just been thinking. Without shoes she was scarcely taller than he. A few more times his body convulsed. Then she said softly, "Ssh, ssh."

Not until some time later did she lead him to the washstand, make him dry his tears, blow his nose, clean his teeth, drink. Then she undressed him, put him to bed, turned the light off, and lay down beside him.

The night that had seemed so dark while the lamp was on, now appeared to grow lighter and lighter and began to drive the darkness out of the room. Light or dark, neither could win the battle, and it ended in a still, grey twilight from which they began to loom up to each other. They caressed and kissed, and he saw her slowly changing, too. It was as if her face disappeared and another came in its place, wilder and at the same time remoter. The person that held him and was held by him was very close to him and yet at the same time somewhere else. For the first time he saw that he could bring this about. He found her with his hand, and suddenly she was crouched on her hands and knees, grunting and sighing. Detached she was, far away. It was ominous. A force was breaking loose in her, enabling her to do all the things he would never be able to do — forget her name, this house, this room, and him. And yet it was him she grabbed by the loins, made roll over on top of her, and pulled inside her. Melancholy, desolation, lust, they toiled together in the big bed, sweating and groaning as if in a fight, and all the time it was as if she were in terrible pain, as if she wanted to be released from her body — she, too — as if she wanted at the same time to cling to him and shake him off.

When it was all over, she lay very still, staring at the ceiling with wide-open eyes. He kept looking at her and saw the shadows of her ordinary face slowly resuming their usual places, chasing away the other, more mysterious face that now faded and fled into the vanishing night, among the first sounds of the birds, where it belonged.

"Ah you," she said, slowly sitting up. And all of a sudden changes were taking place inside her as well. Doors were slamming, names returning. Mockery radiated out of her eyes again, and she laughed and said, "There, that makes two mortal sins in one day."

And later, when they were both sitting with their backs leaning against the wall, smoking cigarettes (Golden Fiction, her brand), she put her hands between his legs and laughed, "That big feller of yours has gone small again." And then, with surprise: "But you've got no nozzle. Why is that?"

"I have been circumcised," he said.

"Just like Our Lord?"

"That's right."

She shrieked with laughter.

"When you were a baby?"

"No. Last year."

Time for deep silence.

"Why?"

"Because it hurt when I went to bed with anyone. It was too narrow down there."

"Ooooh." She bent over and looked. He stroked her hair.

"But you're not a Jew, are you?"

"No. That has nothing to do with it."

She sat up straight and pondered about something. Finally she said it.

"You've got sad eyes and devil's eyes. Jewish eyes."

*       *

His circumcision. A friend who lived in the same lodging house had taken him to the surgeon, who was to perform the operation at his home. It was a bright winter afternoon. He was a small Jewish doctor with, most appropriately, a thick German accent and a very Germanic nurse inside whom, thought Inni, the surgeon could easily be tucked away for the night.

The little man told him to undress, peered at him, and said, "A mere trifle. Sister, can ve haf zee injection, ja?"

Suddenly he was lying on a table, and everyone knows that from that position the world looks different. The giantess, who suddenly had no legs and was sailing beside him as if she were sitting in a boat, said, "You will only have a local anaesthetic."

Local! He wanted to lift his head to see what was going to happen.

"Lie still."

Bare winter branches with hoar frost. White, shiny, knobby bones in front of the window. And on the wall Rembrandt's
Anatomy Lesson —
but his patient was already dead. So were Professor Tulp and his painter. Not this Tulp, though. He was standing in a corner, busy with something big and curved that looked like scissors.

"I vas a frient of your poet Schlauerhof." He did not pronounce the second
f
of Schlauerhoff. Hofe. "A very remarkable man, but unhappy, very unhappy. Alvayss trouble vith vomen, alvayss arguments. And sick, very sick."

The needle with which the nurse suddenly came sailing along out of the void was big enough to knock out a calf.

"Ho, ho, we'd like to crawl away, would we?" said the nurse good-humouredly and grabbed his fleeing organ. Shot on the wing, he had time to think, but then he saw the needle take a plunge, and he felt the flaming pain of the jab going through the puny victim that lay in her large German hand like a dead mouse.

"Poor Schlauerhof. So many years dead already."

Then they left him lying for a time. The ballet dancer in the reproduction danced on one leg through his tears. Now I can never fuck again, he thought. Never again.

A thin, hairy wrist lifted a gold watch to a pair of dark, gleaming eyes. So.

Now there came scissors, a bandage, and a bowl. He could not see properly until the mouse was lifted by the scruff with thumb and forefinger and stared at him from the horizon. The points of the scissors were semicurved, a crooked nickel bird's beak resolutely pecking at his skin. He felt the snips as if something that resisted were being nibbled at. He felt no pain, but there was something else, something he could never explain, not even later. He just felt the sound of the snipping, at the same time soft and crunchy. The smaller hand raised up a bloody rag of skin in the air.

"A mere trifle. As I said. Sew it up, nurse."

Needle and thread — someone was about to darn a sock — sewed him up, sewed up the mouse for good. A mouse sausage. Never again!

He no longer looked. Somewhere in the numb flesh threads were being pulled in and out, in and out. Until there came a movement that had something definitive about it, then nothing more.

"Nurse!" Irritation. "Nurse! A hundred times I have told you to tie ze knot like zeess, not like zat. It is ugly."

"Shall I do it again, Doctor?"

"No, don't bozzer. It vas no Praxiteles anyway."

Then there was a lot of messing about down there, but he had said good-bye to it and was living in a small universe of grief. Something had been taken away from him. He heard isolated words, "bismuth . . . plaster . . . plenty, plenty", but he did not want to have anything to do with it any more. He felt only this strange sadness. Sadness and humiliation.

"Zere. Stand up." Slowly he let himself slide down from the table.

"Careful!"

Suddenly everybody was walking again. The room had regained its lower half, in which he, too, was standing up, between his legs a proboscis of gauze held together by sticking plaster, in which there burned yellow patches ("bismuth").

"You don't have any nerves, at least."

That's what you think, you sod, you butcher. But I would have bitten off my tongue rather than give a squeal in front of you and that Kriemhilde.

Wide-legged, he staggered about the room, a drunken old man. His whole body had become a mere enclosure around this one defect.

"Ze Arabs never make so much fuss."

They had hoisted him into his trousers, and he had grown dizzy with pain in the process.

In his friend's room, a dark den full of snakes and toads in terrariums, he had waited, with an ever grubbier, ever more sordid penis sheath until he had healed. And now she was looking at it, as seriously as she had listened to his story.

"I think it looks nice," she said.

Slowly she bent over and took him in her mouth. He felt her breasts each time they touched the inside of his calves. Each time her head came up, he saw part of her forehead, the slant of her obliquely set eyebrows. She had closed her eyes, she was working, and there was something devout and pure about it. He was sitting very still, but grimly clutched the sheet with both hands as if the moment, when it came, might blow him away. When it did come, he felt himself draining away, but she remained half thrown forward, her full, beautiful shoulders resting on his knees. Only after some while did she raise herself, her mouth closed. The slanting green eyes laughed, and again, as earlier in the afternoon, she briefly stuck out her tongue with that white, shiny, drifting cloudlet on it, swallowed, and said mockingly, "Three?"

They sat still for a while. He put his hands under her, soft, wet, and delicious. They rocked, shifted, and swayed, muttering soft words, kissing, and whispering spells until the white daylight stood in the room and she laid him down, stroked him, and left. A great addiction had begun. Her fiancé would return from Korea, and Inni would never kiss her or touch her again. They would vanish from each other's lives and die separately. The great black void would eat them and absorb them in separate places, but they would never (never?) forget each other, and his whole life would revolve around women. He would seek this again and again among passersby, friends, whores, and strangers. Women were the rulers of the world, simply because they held him under their command. He would never feel again that he "took" or "conquered" one of them, or whatever other stupid terminology had been invented to conceal the truth: that man, that he, delivered himself up to women with an absolute surrender which invariably caused misunderstanding. If the world was a mystery, then women were the force that maintained this pulsating mystery. They, and only they, had access to it. If anything in this world could be understood, it would have to be understood by means of women. Friendship with men could go a long way, but it only touched the rational side of things, which some women possessed in addition, as an extra. Women were more honest, more direct, than words. They were media. He often had the feeling that women allowed him as far as possible to be a woman, and that without this he would be unable to survive. Not that he had ever wanted to be a woman physically, but in this way, with the woman in his male body, he experienced a mysterious sensation of duplicity. He was what people called a woman's man, but in the sense that in mythology someone can be a birdman. He hated the attitude of most men toward women, for although he did the same things as they, his motivation was different. He
knew
what he sought. Sex was never really what mattered most, sex was merely the delicious vehicle. Women, all women, were a means to come close to, to come within the orbit of, the secret of which they and not the men were the guardians. Through men, but this he would not be able to formulate until much later, you learn how the world is. Through women you learn
what
it is. And this night, on which a thousand other nights, rooms, and bodies would be superimposed, was the most unforgettable of all.