Rituals (16 page)

They had laughed heartily at that, but then the monk had asked the writer: "And what about you? I don't suppose this is the first time you have visited a monastery? Have you never wanted to get in?"

His reply had been of an equally devastating simplicity, and Inni had always remembered it. "The world is my monastery," the writer had replied, and the monk had laughed in his turn and said he understood.

"The world is my monastery." But Taads had turned himself into a monk for the sole purpose, by his own account, of meditating himself to death. Surely that could not be based on any oriental doctrine. As soon as sacrifices were made, you were back at Golgotha, and clearly, Philip Taads could find no deliverance without slaughtering someone, even if it was himself.

"Nonsense, mere bravado," Inni muttered. "People who say they'll do it, won't." But even that seemed to be no longer true these days.

As though pulled by a string, he turned into a side street leading towards the Spiegelgracht. When he got there, he realized why. He had left his print at Riezenkamp's. For the second time that day, he entered the hallowed silence of the shop. None of the Buddhas had stirred. Nothing and no one had disturbed their everlasting meditation.

"Aha, Mr Wintrop," said the art dealer. "I was about to phone our friend Roozenboom, but now you are here yourself. I didn't know you knew Mr Taads."

"I knew his father."

"Ah, did you?" And after a moment's well-bred hesitation, "Someone from Indonesia?"

"No, from Twente."

"Ah, the mother, then. Hm, a strange man, a strange man. I have a standing agreement with him, that I will let him know whenever I have an important chawan."

"A chawan? "

"A tea bowl. Of a particular kind, that is. Only raku. No shino, no orige, even though you do get beautiful specimens among those, too. No, it has to be raku and nothing else, and preferably a Sonyu, that is, Raku VI. You know, the great masters, whether they are potters or kabuki actors, operate, if you can call it that, in dynasties."

"Mr Taads gave me a lecture on it."

"Did he indeed? The difficulty is that the great bowls of these true masters are all known by name. Look" — he leafed through a book that was still lying in front of him — "there are still a few famous bowls by this Sonyu that have survived . . . komeki, the tortoise, that is black raku . . . and then you have kuruma, the cartwheel ... a beauty, red raku . . . personally I like that one best . . . shigure, spring rain . . . also red . . . but all of them priceless, if they ever come up for sale at all. The only thing I can really hope for as far as Mr Taads is concerned is a less well-known bowl by one of these gentlemen, but, well, the times are against him. The connoisseurs and the passionate collectors are being squeezed out by the investors. I offered him deferred terms, because I trust him implicitly. But he refused. 'That does not fit in with my plans.' So I imagine it will take some time. I shouldn't think he has a very high income, would you?"

"No idea. How did you get to know him?"

"Don't laugh. From yoga."

Yoga. It was difficult indeed to picture this tall, fleshy body in a yoga position.

"There was a rather curious ad in the paper, and both of us replied to it. Taads was already much into Zen at the time and knew much more about these things than I did. I was thinking more in purely plebeian terms — body exercise, relaxation, et cetera. No mumbo jumbo. But it took a grip on me. The teacher seemed to me, Dutch Calvinist that I am, quite as odd a customer as Taads — a South American Jew with a dash of Red Indian blood in him. A very compelling person."

It was as though Riezenkamp were having to suppress a slight shudder at this point. A shadow moved across his face and no doubt spread right down the white body underneath the worsted pinstripes.

"Yoga, proper yoga, should not be underestimated. This man, thank God, did not spin us any metaphysical yarn. He just sat there, a sort of latter-day saint, always dressed in black, and talked to us very slowly. He made us tighten and relax separate parts of the body and taught us how to forget them, not to feel them any more. Then they were simply no longer there. At first I thought it was wonderful. It gave me a tremendous feeling of well-being. But on Taads it had quite a different effect. After one of those sessions he had a terrible crying fit, as if he were about to throw up his whole inside, so violent. And another time he couldn't get his hands out of a cramp. Perhaps I ought not to tell you this, but it frightened the wits out of me. If that is the effect it has on him, I thought, what is it doing to me?

"Do you know, after a while you begin to realize that you cannot detach all these things from the rest of your life. If you were to go on with it, you would have to change your life, become a different person, if that were possible. I mean, you don't have to have a philosophy yourself or believe in anything, but it gradually alters your personality. At least that was how I felt about it. You change, you develop a different outlook on life — it isn't just a bit of gymnastics — well, and then, your outlook on life, on the world, that is, what you
are.
And this is very true in my case. Being an art dealer, a much-scorned species, I do, after all, have to function in the world. I began to wonder whether it wasn't going to do me more harm than good. I was quite used to myself as I was. For instance, I was beginning to find my glass of beer at Hoppe 's rather vulgar, to mention something trivial. Let's put it this way: it called for more than I had, or than I was prepared to give, and in the end I stopped going." He rubbed his eyes briefly and continued. "I am surrounded by the sublime all day, even though I have a fairly perverse relationship with it. To put it bluntly, I hadn't the guts to go on. I explained this to the teacher and he understood. He told me he had twice given it up himself because he was afraid of losing himself. That was how he put it. He probably didn't mean the same thing as I did. Obviously, it's very far-reaching if you do that sort of thing professionally" — again that shudder — "but anyhow, he said he understood.

"Taads carried on with it. Whether he still does it now, I don't know. Maybe he has got just as far as the teacher by now. I never talk about it with him, out of embarrassment, I think. He seems to me the sort of person that goes to any lengths, and I think he has organized his entire life around it. And yet he still has that tenseness, that is what I find so strange. You never see him in a bar, women I have never heard him speak of, and the only time I have ever seen him talking to someone else was today, to you. And those bowls, of course, they have something to do with it as well. It is all connected with the tea ceremony and therefore with Zen. He lives in his own Japan, our friend. What do you think of it?"

"It doesn't really mean much to me," said Inni. "Strange wisdoms from the Far East being sold to the unhappy Western middle classes. But I daresay it's better than heroin."

Not much of an answer, he thought, but the subject did not interest him, or rather, he did not want to have anything to do with it.

"The curious thing is," said Riezenkamp, who evidently preferred to pursue his own line of thought, "that so much of what is being preached or claimed by those people — I still do take some kind of interest in it — is demonstrable nonsense, and this is true both for some theories on yoga and for the physical aspects of meditation, and that nevertheless the effect can prove beneficial."

"The same is true of the Last Rites," said Inni crustily, but of course, a Calvinist wouldn't understand about that. Riezenkamp was silent. Outside, a sudden rough gust of wind bent the branches of the trees with a furious blow. In a few moments it would be pouring rain, and he had no umbrella with him. This day was beginning to weigh heavily. A girl, dead pigeons, a shadow from the underworld, an oriental madman, sermons, and now this sudden decline of a summer day that disagreeably seemed to herald autumn, that sad season which should still be so far away.

The art dealer did not notice his impatience.

"I see Taads has given you his favourite book to read," he said. "I know it, it's superb. There is both a lot of action in it, and very little. It's full of nuances, small shifts with dramatic consequences. If anyone has ever succeeded in weaving the tea ceremony into a story, Kawabata has, brilliantly. You don't often find that, an object as the main character of a story."

To Inni's dismay he took yet another book out of the bookcase.

"I only show you this so you will know what shino looks like. If you have a physical image of it, you will understand the book better."

The white hands turned the pages. What exactly was so mysterious about bowls, or about chalices for that matter? Upside-down skulls that no longer contained anything, that were no longer turned towards the earth but towards heaven. They were things into which you could put something, but only something that came from above, from the higher world of suns, moons, gods, and stars. An object that could at the same time be empty and full was in itself somehow mysterious, but that could equally well be said of a plastic cup. So the material of which it was made must have something to do with it as well. The gold of the chalice evoked blood and wine. And when you looked at these shino bowls, it seemed inconceivable that anyone should ever drink anything from these grey and whitish chalices painted with light purple brush strokes, other than the rarefied, bitter green liquid Philip Taads had given him. If Christ had been born in China or Japan, tea would now be turned into blood every day on five continents. But in the tea ceremony it was not so much the tea that mattered, he realized, as the way in which you drank it. The form of the ceremony ultimately had to lead to an inner experience that pointed the way to the closed gardens of mysticism. What a strange animal was man, always somehow needing objects, "made" things with which to facilitate his journey to the twilit realms of the higher world.

Cars began to sound their horns outside. Somewhere a truck was blocking the road, and mankind, which not so long ago had landed on the moon in one graceful leap, uttered its displeasure with the enraged screams of an orangutan unable to find any bananas.

"In 1480," said Riezenkamp, "but nobody knows this, a witch cursed this spot and said that Amsterdam would perish in chaos and hellish noise."

He put his hand on the inscrutable Buddha mask and said, "The falsification lies perhaps in this, that such faces, and all they ever uttered, could only come into existence in a world without noise." He paused briefly so as to allow the swelling wail of dozens of horns to be heard in its fullness, and continued. "Can you imagine how incredibly quiet it was everywhere, when the gentlemen from this world" — he made a vague circular gesture towards the battalions of meditating Asians behind him — "were hatching and proclaiming their ideas? Anyone who now tries to follow these ideas in order to find the road back to what they were talking about, is faced with obstacles that would have driven an entire tribe of oriental ascetics into the ravine. The world from which they felt it so necessary to retreat would have seemed idyllic to us. We live in a vision of hell, and we have actually got used to it." He looked at his statues and continued, "We have become different people. We still look the same, but we have nothing in common with them any more. We are differently programmed. Anyone who now wants to become like them must acquire a big dose of madness first; otherwise he will no longer be able to bear the life of our world. We are not designed for their kind of life."

It began to rain at last, and hard, too. The drops exploded on the shiny roofs of the cars, which did not stop honking.

A few forlorn cyclists, bent under the castigating, lashing rain, tried to weave their way among the roaring vehicles.

"Do you know," said Riezenkamp, "sometimes I think we deserve heaven simply by living in these times. Nothing is right any longer. It's about time they dropped that damn thing. Just imagine the wonderful silence that would follow."

That night, when Inni Wintrop dreamed for the first time of the second Taads, he also dreamed for the second time of the first Taads. It was not a pleasant experience. The Taadses were having a conversation together, the content of which ceased to have any meaning as soon as he woke up. It was the sight of them that was so unpleasant. Impatient hatred against languid hatred, a tedious and then suddenly biting dialogue between two corpses. For there was no doubt, both Taadses were somewhere where they could not be seen except by someone whose eyes were closed, a tossing and turning dreamer who wiped the sweat from his face, woke up, went to the open window, and looked out over the black silence of the canal. What the dreamer felt was fear.

From another open window came the sound of a clock striking four. Inni groped his way back to bed and switched on the light. Half-open on his pillow lay the book by Kawabata, a mortally dangerous web spun out of gossamer words in which people were trapped and tea bowls were in command — bowls that preserved and destroyed the spirits of their previous owners or, as in this story, were themselves destroyed.

Four o'clock. He did not know whether he would fall asleep again. It was too late for a sleeping pill, but the risk that the watchmen of the realm of the dead would let out Arnold and Philip Taads a second time that night was too great. Why had the dream been so frightening? No one had threatened him, and what was spoken he had been unable to understand. But perhaps that was precisely the reason: he had quite simply not existed. It was only then he remembered that Philip Taads was not dead at all, but alive.
If
he was still alive. Inni got up and dressed. The first greyness was beginning to creep up from the paving stones, brushing against the walls and pulling the shapes of houses and trees out of the all-embracing protection of the night. Where to? He decided to retrace the route he had taken the day before.

Nothing irreparable had happened. The city had kept each place intact. Where the first pigeon had hit the car, he stopped. The pigeon had shed no blood, and there was nothing to be seen. He walked where he had cycled. On the back of his imaginary bike sat the imaginary girl. It would be like this when you were really old — a city full of imaginary houses and women, rooms and girls. The bridge by the park was now an ordinary roadway. He walked over the second pigeon, which was no doubt fast asleep beneath his feet. The park gates were open. The damp smell of soil. He searched for the spot where they had buried the pigeon, but could not find it. The earth was still wet from the rain. Among the many waterlogged footsteps must be hers, too. And his. It was as if they had been drowned. He could not find her house either. The darkness had gone, but the light had not yet become daylight. It looked as if the city were dreaming — a gruesome nineteenth-century dream of rows of brick houses and blind windows with net curtains like shrouds. No girls lived in the rooms behind them, and he could not possibly have lain there on a bed the previous morning, with a stream of golden hair in his hands. Did anybody live here at all? As he walked, he listened to his own loud, lonely footsteps, and because he was listening, he quickened his pace. The dusty shape of the third pigeon was still imprinted on Bender's window. The rain had failed to wash it away. So it must all have really happened.