The Fisherman (22 page)

And then the ground levels, and he’s running towards Andrea. He tries to bring himself to a stop, but it’s as if there’s a weight hung from his neck, pulling him on. On legs at their very limit, legs like taffy, he stumbles past Andrea, one, two, three steps, when the weight around his neck pulls him to his knees. Hand still on his axe, Jacob leans forward. Andrea—he has to see to Andrea. If only his heart wouldn’t beat so fast. It seems to be taking all his strength into itself. Muscles trembling, he tries to stand, cannot. There is a noise in front of him, a sound his brain is telling him he should know. He raises his head and what he beholds chases all thought of his discomfort—all thought—from his mind.

XXI

Maybe fifty yards away, an ocean crashes its waves against a rocky shore. Jacob has seen the ocean, before—he had to cross one to travel to America—but that in no way prepared him for this one. This is an ocean whose water is dark, as if Jacob is seeing it at night, as if it’s made of night. It’s an ocean in storm. Even though the sky above is clear, the dark water lifts itself in frothing waves large as houses. Some of these burst on the jagged boulders that constitute the beach, shooting spray high into the air. Others smash into one another, larger waves sweeping over smaller ones, consuming them, rows of smaller waves angling into larger ones, collapsing them. It’s as if this is a spot where a host of opposing currents converge. A few hundred yards from the stony beach—it’s hard to estimate distances with any accuracy in this tumult, but much too close for comfort, let alone sanity—something enormous raises itself amidst the waves. For a moment, Jacob’s mind insists that what arcs out of the water is an island, because there is no living creature that big in all of creation. Then it moves, first rising even higher, into a more severe arch, then subsiding, lifting itself from the waves at both ends while relaxing its middle into a gradual curve, the whole of its dull surface traversed by the ripples of what Jacob understands are great muscles flexing and releasing, and there’s no doubt this is alive. Before now, if you had asked Jacob to name the largest thing he’s ever seen, he might have answered with St. Stephen’s cathedral, in Vienna. But the beast against whose scaly side the black water batters itself dwarfs that structure. There is so much of it that its very presence presses on Jacob, as if mere proximity to it might be sufficient to snuff him out, like a candle in a hurricane.

Because of the creature, Jacob fails to notice any of what’s closer to him until Angelo comes huffing behind him. His “Mother of God!” jolts Jacob out of the fog that’s enveloped him. It requires a vigorous shaking to bring Andrea out of his reverie, but by the time Italo and Rainer have joined the three of them, Jacob has risen to his feet and is surveying the ground between the beach and himself. He sees the blood first. The soil bordering the beach is soaked in it. It collects in bright red puddles, winds its red way to the rocky shore. Its source is a trio of carcasses, two to the right, and one to the left. They’re cattle—bulls, Jacob thinks—but of such a breed as might inhabit a child’s fairy tale. Each animal is large as a small elephant, its hide a rich, sunset gold. Were it not for the beast filling the ocean, Jacob would be awed by the cattle’s size; as it is, he is impressed by them. The bull to the left, and one of those to the right, have been decapitated, the heavy heads set between them, beside what seems to be an anchor; albeit, an anchor that might have held fast the ship that brought him across the Atlantic. Instead of splitting into a pair of arms, the thick shank divides into three upward-curving lengths of metal, all of them tipped with a barb longer than Jacob is tall. It’s a hook, he understands, the bulls’ heads the bait to be impaled on the points. There’s no line tied to the eye, though there are plenty to choose from. The ground this side of the slaughtered cattle is full of rope, coils of it, stacks of it, heaps of it. There is coarse rope wide as a strong man’s arm. There is smooth rope slender as a shoelace. There’s rope smeared with what might be pitch. There’s rope white as milk.

Some of the rope has already been put to use. Between where it’s piled and Jacob and his fellows stand are what appear to be a half-dozen round, wooden tables, each of such a dimension as to suggest it’s for the herders who raise the giant cattle. They’re stumps, Jacob realizes, the stumps of trees that must have towered overhead like skyscrapers. None of them is higher than his chest, now. At varying distances from the ground, holes have been bored through the stumps. Rope has been threaded through the holes and out around the remnants of the trees, tied at irregular intervals into elaborate knots, secured to the wood at other spots with large metal staples. From the wrap around each abbreviated trunk, a length of rope runs out to the left of the dead bulls, into the ocean. Most of the ropes stretch taut into and under the waves. Jacob can see them thrumming, like guitar strings being tightened to the point of snapping. These lines are joined by a dozen or so from the left, on the far side of the stream that raced Jacob down the hill and surges to the ocean. These ropes, too, are held fast by a group of enormous tree stumps. Beyond them, the headless remains of more of the great cattle lie under a buzzing cloud of greenish flies.

“What?” a voice calls. “What is it you want?” The words are uttered in German, but it is a version of the tongue that is crusted with age. The man who asked the question is standing behind the one bull whose head has not been removed. The animal’s bulk must have concealed him. He is wearing a rugged apron that appears to have been stitched together from a number of mismatched pieces of material, and that is spattered and caked with gore, as is the sizable knife in his right hand. Beneath the patchwork apron, he is dressed in a white shirt and black pants whose best days are long behind them. His hair is lank, greasy, his chin fringed by a stringy beard, the face between young, almost boyish. He must be Rainer’s Fisherman, but if you told Jacob he was a junior butcher, he’d believe you.

“The ropes,” Rainer says. “Go.”

Italo advances to the closest of the stumps, circles the spot where the rope reaches to the ocean, and swings his axe at it. The rope isn’t especially thick, but the axe rebounds from it with a crack and a shower of sparks. Italo steps back as if pulled by his axe’s rebound. The rope has been cut only a little. Italo frowns, and strikes again.

“Hurry!” Rainer shouts at the others, who are still standing, watching Italo’s efforts. Angelo runs to the next closest tree stump and commences chopping at its rope. His cheeks burning, Jacob follows suit. Rainer shoves Andrea forward, and he stumbles to the nearest stump.

The rope Jacob is faced with is stout, its rough surface shining with the fishhooks whose eyes have been braided into it. The majority of them are the size you would employ to lever a trout or bass out of a stream, but there are a few clearly fashioned for larger sport, including a hook as large as Jacob’s hand that swings wildly from side to side when he strikes the rope. From its width, Jacob expects the rope will not be easily cut. What he does not expect is the sensation that runs up the axe when its blade bites the fibers. The shaft twists in his hands, as if the axe has connected to a source of tremendous power. Jacob has a vision of himself trying to sever a lightning bolt. There’s a flat crack and the axe is flung back with such force it’s almost torn form his grip. The scorch of burnt hair stings his nostrils. He’s cut the rope, but just barely.

Around him, the air snaps with the crack of his companions’ axes connecting with these strange ropes. A rapid-fire burst of Italian that’s probably a prayer bursts from Angelo’s lips as his axe flies up from the rope it’s struck. The recoil flings Andrea’s axe out of his hands, over his head, and onto the ground behind him. Only Italo succeeds in maintaining something like a regular rhythm, though the sweat already soaking the back of his shirt testifies to the effort it’s costing him. Jacob adjusts his grip and raises his axe.

Throughout all this, which hasn’t taken more than a minute or two, the Fisherman has remained in place, watching the five of them. When Jacob is three difficult strokes into his task, the Fisherman leaves his spot beside the great bull’s carcass and walks toward the stream. He still has hold of that knife, though he carries it almost casually. Jacob doesn’t care for the sight of him approaching the frothing water, doesn’t like the deliberation with which the man kneels beside it and plunges the bloody knife down into it, but Rainer hasn’t told him to stop chopping, so he delivers a fourth and a fifth blow to the rope. He is making progress. The dense strands that compose the rope are separating, however reluctantly. As each does, he’s aware of something escaping from it, a force that eddies in the air around him, stirring the hairs on his arms, the back of his neck.

The Fisherman remains bent at the stream, the knife and the hand holding it underwater, for a long time, enough for Jacob to have cut almost halfway through his rope, Italo three-quarters of the way through his. Jacob has been expecting Rainer to approach the man, confront him, but it’s only as he’s rising from the stream and turning to them that Rainer strides past Jacob. From his efforts, Jacob is drenched in sweat. Sweat matts his hair to his head, streams down his forehead, runs into his eyes, blurring his vision. For this reason, he isn’t sure whether, when he sees the water clinging to the Fisherman’s arm, from his elbow to the tip of his knife, as if he’s wearing it, his eyes are playing tricks on him. The Fisherman snaps his arm, as if he were cracking a whip, and the water rushes to the knife, gathering around it in a globe. Rainer breaks into a run, and it’s this that convinces Jacob his eyesight is fine. A flick of the wrist, and the ball of water surrounding the Fisherman’s knife elongates, lancing at Italo, who’s holding his axe above his head, ready for the next cut. Before the water-spear can reach him, Rainer’s at his side, his right hand holding his axe marked side forward, his left making a sweeping motion outward. Like a snake sliding around a rock, the water curves away from Italo and Rainer. Instead, it targets Angelo.

Jacob is close enough to him to mark the exact location the water strikes, the hollow at the base of the throat, and to hear the sound it makes as it punctures the skin and streams into the wound, the whoosh of water descending a drain. Angelo goes rigid, his mouth gaping, his eyes bulging, while the water invades him. Andrea shouts, “Angelo!” Jacob knows he should do something, but it’s as if his arms and legs have locked. Before movement has returned to them, the tail end of the water-spear has left the Fisherman’s blade and vanished into the wound in Angelo’s throat.

XXII

His axe gripped near the end with both hands, Rainer advances on the Fisherman, who half-crouches, as if weighing another plunge of his hand into the stream. Italo resumes chopping through his rope. Angelo turns to face Jacob. He moves stiffly, as if the water that’s entered the hole in his throat has swollen his joints. A sheen of what appears to be sweat shines on Angelo’s face, his hands—the Fisherman’s water, Jacob realizes, seeping out Angelo’s pores. As if he’s crying uncontrollably, Angelo’s eyes shimmer. Beneath the water, they’re gold. Jacob groans, and as if in response to his displeasure, Angelo coughs. It’s a rough, wet noise, the sound of a man trying to clear his lungs of the water that’s drowning them. Little spouts of water splash from the wound in his throat as the cough goes on and on and on, bending Angelo over with its force.

Within each liquid bark, Jacob hears something else, what might almost be a word, words. There’s a language forcing itself out of Angelo, a harsh assemblage of phlegmy coughs, grunts, and clicks of the tongue that Jacob nonetheless understands. It’s not so much that he can translate individual words as it is that he can see their subject. More than see—for an instant, it’s as if he’s inside what’s being described. One moment, he’s hovering airplane-high in the air, so far up the coastline below him might be the kind of oversized map you sometimes encounter on the floors of museums. He doesn’t recognize the contours of the shore, but he already knows the black ocean, as he knows that the humps rising from it, parallel to the coast, aren’t islands, but more of the great beast he’s watched shift its back in front of him, Rainer’s Leviathan. And this might well be the Biblical personage, because it continues along the shore in both directions, to the limit of Jacob’s view. From points up and down the coast, a lattice of fine lines stretches to the water, some of them ending at one of the enormous humps, others plunging beneath the waves. The Fisherman has done this, Jacob understands. Working over a length of time Jacob does not even want to consider, the man with the lank hair and scraggly beard has cast his lines and lodged his hooks into the bulk of this immensity with a patience that’s equal measures mad and heroic. He has brought this monster, this god-beast, to the brink of complete capture, and while doing so must be a trespass of a fundamental order, Jacob cannot help himself from admiring the man.

With unnerving speed, the scene beneath begins to draw closer. Though he can feel his feet planted on the ground, Jacob has the sensation of dropping from a great height, like a bird who’s lost the use of his wings. Wind pushes against him as the ground gains in definition. Through eyelids squinted almost shut, he sees that the ropes directly below him are also fastened to the remains of giant trees. His ears fill with roaring, the sound of the air he’s plummeting through. It is absurd—his feet rest firmly on the red soil. He hears Angelo expelling the jagged language from a throat that must be raw from it. He is standing listening to Angelo, and he is dropping towards a tree stump the width of a field, and when he strikes that expanse of blond wood, Jacob knows he will fall over, dead. He closes his eyes, but it makes no difference. The tree stump fills his vision, a wooden plane. He sees that the rope tied around it has been painted with symbols, angular markings midway between pictures and letters. They appear to float above the fibers. What a peculiar detail, he thinks, to accompany him out of this life.