Rituals (8 page)

"I can't go back to the Rocky Mountains," said Arnold Taads. "Too old. They don't want me any more. That is why I go to a lonely valley in the Swiss Alps every year. You probably can't form a mental picture of it, and I shan't tell you where it is. I never do. I rent a deserted farmhouse that the owners use only in the summer. People, even those people, have become soft, pampered. Nobody can be alone any more, and no one wants to be alone. They refuse to face the winter and the loneliness up there. As soon as the first snow falls, the valley becomes totally isolated. You can only get there on skis."

"What about food?" asked Inni.

"I go down to fetch it once every two weeks. I don't need much. You can live on very little, but nobody knows that these days. In any case I can't carry much on my back, because it is a six-hour trip."

Inni nodded. Six hours! "How am I to imagine that?" he asked.

Arnold Taads screwed up one eye into something that looked like an obscene wink which lasted for several minutes.

"Like this," he said. "Stand beside me." (This was to become Inni's celebrated mime number on skis.) "We're going up, we're climbing. Sharp east wind. Unpleasant. Remember, you're carrying a rucksack on your back. It's heavy. There's fourteen days' food in it, for the dog as well. We have another four hours to go. Look at me."

The eye was still screwed up.

"You've still got your eye open. I can see with only one eye. The blind eye is closed now. Shut your right eye. That distorts the perspective, and it eliminates a good thirty per cent of normal vision. Look. Quite dangerous on a trip like this. Try it out."

Part of the right half of the room was cut off.

"If I go too fast, there is always a risk of something — a stone, a branch, an obstacle that I don't see."

"And then?"

Arnold Taads had sat down again. Inni found it difficult to imagine that the reopened, gleaming eye was really a hole which distorted the world so that the left eye had to fight a double battle to guard its owner against a fatal fall in the snow or on the ice.

"Then I might fall and break my leg. In theory, but it is possible."

The east wind blew through the room. The afternoon sun reflected the blinding light of the glacier in his one eye. No houses anywhere, no people. The world as it had always been, without interference. In the vast, white space lay a small figure, the skis jutting out crosswise like the first sticks of a campfire. A doll's leg twisted the wrong way round. "And what will you do then?"

Freeze to death of course, he thought, but for the answer that came he was unprepared.

"Then I give the Alpine distress signal." And without any warning his host bellowed "Hilfe!" raised his hand in adjuration as if to summon the same cruel silence to the room as reigned in that distant fateful valley, and then silently but with open mouth counted up to three and called out again "Hilfe!" one, two, three, "Hilfe!" His face turned purple in the process, and the glass eye looked as if it was about to pop out of its socket, through the terrible force of the shout.

Inni looked at the contorted, distressed carnival mask in front of him. Never before had he seen such a defenceless face. He felt embarrassment and pity — the embarrassment that he would always feel in the presence of someone else's intimate actions and the pity for a man who has been lying with a broken leg in a deserted valley for years and has no one to tell it to.

"I will keep on doing that, three times in a row, counting up to three each time until I have no strength left. Sound carries a long way in the mountains."

"But if there is no one there to hear?"

"Then the sound does not exist. Only I hear it. But it is not intended for me. If that sound does not reach the stranger for whom it is intended, it does not exist. And it won't take long before I shall not exist any more, either. You freeze, you become drowsy, you don't call out any more, you die."

Of course the dog did not understand these words, but the decisive tone born out of future disaster could not fail to produce an effect. Athos got up, whimpered softly, and shook himself as if to throw something off.

"By the time they start looking for me, Athos will already be dead," said Taads. "That is what troubles me most of all. My own death is a calculated risk, and there ought to be a way to safeguard Athos from that. But there isn't."

It was the first time that someone had told Inni Wintrop the precise details of his death, even though it would be years before it occurred.

*       *

Opulence, not wealth, was the word to describe the interior of his aunt's spacious villa. Chesterfields, seventeenth-century cupboards, paintings of the Dutch school, a voluptuous Renaissance ivory crucifix, entire families of Sevres and Limoges, Persian carpets, servants — he was being wrapped up in it all as in a warm shawl.

"How people can live among the shit of the past is a mystery to me,"  said Taads when they were alone for a moment.

"Everything is tainted. Everything has already been admired by others. Antique stinks. Hundreds of eyes that have rotted away long ago have looked at it. You can tolerate it only if you have a junkyard inside yourself as well."

Inni did not reply. If this was so contemptible, there must be something wrong with him too. He thought it was all blissfully comfortable, and at the same time it expressed power and therefore distance from the world outside.

"Therese, a bourgeois is being born this afternoon," said Taads as his aunt entered the room. "And you are standing by the cradle. Just look at the delighted face of your new nephew. He recognizes his natural surroundings. Watch the easy grace with which he is immediately turning into a Wintrop."

Arnold Taads's entry had been impressive enough. Even when formulating it to himself, Inni thought it sounded exaggerated. But that afternoon he had discovered, for once not judging by his own example, that a distance can exist between people which expresses such a terrible otherness that anyone witnessing it will almost die of melancholy. Everyone knows these things, but no one has always known them — upright-walking creatures of the same species, who moreover use the same language to make it clear to each other that there is an unbridgeable chasm between them. A fool — this Inni could see, too — had arranged this lunch. The three plates from which they were to eat — the "uncle" had not yet manifested himself — were practically engulfed by an overabundance of cold meats. My God, how many ways there are to mess about with the corpses of animals. Smoked, boiled, roasted, in aspic, blood red, black and white checkered, fatty pink, murky white, marbled, pressed, ground, sliced. Thus death lay displayed on the blue-patterned Meissen. Not even a whole school could have eaten all that. Taads, who looked much smaller in this house, stood behind the chair assigned to him and surveyed the battlefield. Filtered sunlight caressed the white, the yellow, the soft, the hard, and the blue-veined cheeses.

"This is a Brabant lunch," said his aunt. She raised her face towards Taads, full of anticipation. It was for him she had put on this display. Taads remained silent. The single eye scanned the table mercilessly, relentlessly. At last the verdict came, a whiplash. "I say, Therese, haven't you got any ham?"

His aunt reeled under the blow. Red blotches rushed to her face. She staggered out of the room, and from the hall they heard a long, smothered wail that ran up the stairs at a gallop and vanished behind the slam of a door.

"This is a Brabant lunch," Taads said with satisfaction as he sat down. "Revolting late-Burgundian affectation. Those wealthy textile farmers still seem to think they are the heirs of the Burgundian court. This is the Bavaria of the Netherlands, my boy. A Calvinist doesn't belong here."

"I thought you were a Catholic, too," said Inni.

"North of the great rivers, all Dutchmen are Calvinists. We don't believe in too much, too long, or too dear. If these people here had their way, you'd be sitting at the table until three o'clock."

There was a tap on the door. A girl came in with a dish of ham that she put down in front of Taads.

"Will this be all right, sir?"

She was tall and slender, with big breasts and a crooked comedian's face in which green eyes could barely control their laughter. She spoke with a broad Brabant accent.

Inni fell in love with her. Later (the dreadful, mischievous later that seemed to rule over everything and in which all experiences were to be filed as in a court of law), he would define those sudden, senseless infatuations: "The physical element has almost nothing to do with it. At most it helps to make you aware of it a little sooner. It is the knowledge, instinctive, sudden, and sure, that somebody is okay."

"Okay?"

"Yes, that she is in tune with herself. I can't fall for someone who is not in tune with herself. And the other keystone — it is a structure after all — is that you know she has something for you."

"Has something for you?"

"Yes. That if the time and the place are right, there is a logic in the encounter."

Logic. The very word would make any lover run a mile. But that was just it. It had to be entirely logical, going to bed with such a person. You knew it would happen because it had to happen. The only thing left to be done was to inform the other person. That was the seduction. The certainty of the outcome was a great help. That, and the strange contradiction that the bed bit was not the main thing at all. This you began to see more clearly when, on occasion, you yourself were the other person. What mattered was whether you were in tune. But the longing, the quivering, that odd, desperate feeling, always the same, which he experienced now at this table, watching her walk so straight and hearing her say that one sentence with that deliciously soft lilt while she glanced at him briefly with her green mocking eyes that laughed at "that old fool with his glass eye and that skinny young one with his funny look as if he couldn't keep his eyes off you" — that had to be there first. Only then came the "verification", a question of adoration, of woman worship. He had been declared mad by his friends as he was off on one of his missions again, flying to the other end of the world merely to follow a line, a thought that someone had left in him and that he had to verify at all costs. Was it so or was it not so? Would he have a chance, with that person, of a life that, if he chose to take it, would become a reality? That was the point. The search was a labour of love, but he could not explain this to anyone.

"And if you're not in tune?"

No. Quite clearly, no one understood anything about it except the women themselves. And then you were in tune.

His aunt did not appear again, and Taads's merciless clock struck here, too. Between three and four he would have his snooze, even had he been at Novaya Zemlya. Inni walked aimlessly about the house and after much hesitation opened the kitchen door. The girl was sitting by a large table, polishing silver.

"Hello," said Inni.

She did not reply, but smiled, unless it was mockery. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Inni."

She exploded with laughter. Her breasts shook. He was consumed by desire. He went up to her and put his hand on her head.

"Hoho," she said, but sat very still until she suddenly picked up a large, freshly polished spoon and held it up with the convex side towards him. Everything he hated in his face was magnified, elongated, emphasized.

"I'm Petra," she said. On this rock, this soft, round rock, he thought later, he had built his church. For there was no doubt about it — on that day women had become his religion, the centre, the essence of everything, the great cartwheel on which the world turned.

"What sign are you?"

"Leo." And before she could say anything, he added quickly: "My number is one, my metal gold, my star the sun. And my profession is either king or banker."

"Oy-oy," she said, and put his hand on the table amid the silver. "Shall I show you the village?"

They walked among the Saturday afternoon bustle in the village street. People kept greeting them, and inquisitive glances were cast at him.

"Where are we going?"

"To the woods. But you mustn't tell your aunt."

In the woods it was quiet and cool. They both stuck out their hand at the same moment and walked on holding hands under the tall trees. It would never be so simple again. The leaves, the trees, the lofty beams of mysterious light in the half-dark — everything contributed.

They lay down and he kissed her breasts and her hair, and she held him very close to her and stroked the back of his neck. With a voice that came from beside his face, she told him about her life. She still had her father and mother, and she had been to domestic science school, and she had eight brothers and sisters, and she preferred to work for his aunt rather than at the factory, and her fiancé was a volunteer in Korea, and when he came back in two weeks' time, they were going to get married.

Then she turned around, a girl transformed into a cloud of infinite tenderness. He was no longer able to see what she was doing, but he could feel how she ran cool fingers over his belly, a trail followed by equally cool lips, continually interrupted by tiny, warm licks of her tongue. He raised his head to look at her. She was lying half on top of him. Of her head he saw only the mass of dark hair. Her right hand, the hand that an hour earlier had placed a dish of ham before Arnold Taads, stood firmly braced among the moss and the dead, softly crackling beech leaves. For the first time he felt that blend of love, longing, and emotion for which he would from now on have to search all his life. Her head moved gently. He had a feeling as though he were being drunk from, and then he no longer had any feeling or thought. He saw only the black hair and the firm hand in the moss, detached from everything. And then he spilled out into her mouth, at the same time suddenly grabbing her hair and, as she said later, hurting her.

For a while they lay without moving. Then she raised her head and, still with that hand as a pivot, swung a quarter turn towards him. In her eyes there was still a trace of mockery, but mingled now with triumph and tenderness. She smiled, opened her mouth briefly so that he saw his white seed on her pink tongue, rolled her eyes as though imitating a film star, and swallowed. Then she turned around altogether, stretched herself headlong on top of him, kissed him full on the mouth, and said, "Come on, let's go."