B007P4V3G4 EBOK (33 page)

Baldur's calculation was exactly right. The moment he thought:
watch out, he might well now appear, Simon's front legs came up
over the edge. Baldur struck, but only at those front legs, not at
the head. Simon drew back fiercely, but Baldur was still able to
pinch one off. Hurriedly, Simon slid down a fresh thread from join
r3 to the bottom of the door, and disappeared there, one leg short.
A fight was pointless now for Baldur's strength was young and
hard.

Baldur watched him go and he now surveyed the new situation.
The way Simon had made use of one of his threads, he now could
deploy what Simon had wrought. Quellyn was certain not to
return, for no one fought with half a front leg.

But the formula for his web was no good any more. Both q as
well as r had changed and the tension which would now fall on the
foundation thread was too great.

The thread needed to be doubled and this was what Baldur was
going to do, quickly. He worked until dark and then he went to
sleep in the corner and next morning he began afresh, the moment
it became light. The threads were barely moist; the spot in the roof
frame was as favourable as possible and in the course of the
morning the highly complex web reached completion. Baldur
withdrew into the centre of it and there he began a battle against
the thoughts occurring to him. He looked along the threads of the web. Bar that wasted one along the door, there were no flaws in it,
though the form wasn't pleasing because of the annexation of
Simon's part. Baldur ground his jaws together, for he had to do
something to quell the satisfaction gaining hold of him even so. He
ground them so hard that the desire to have something in between
to be ground down overtook him, trembling. Oh, blow me, what a
web, he thought. What an achievement, what an overwhelming
good, what irreplaceable worth. And in spite of his firm intention
never to recite a rhyme again, one arrived nevertheless:

A nice little ditty but dangerous to give in to that gift. It was for
the second time, though, that Baldur had raised the subject of
calcium and he went and thought a bit about this now. He must
have hit on it because of the hard grinding of his jaws and that urge
to grind something down, but he felt that there had to be something
else behind it as well. Something that, amongst other things, was
connected with the quickly forsworn youth and the doom he had
felt when that one front leg of Simon P. Quellyn's was snapped off
and dropped down so unexpectedly and pointlessly. A strange
rhyme, Baldur thought, that of the marshal on his threads. He raised
himself up and considered the reach of his net and the marshal's eye
in charge of it. But just when this made him tingle for a moment,
something happened again that confirmed his abhorrence of life.

A fat wasp who had been getting up to heaven-knows-what in
the loft of the bam, came flying out with a great racket. It touched
thread g5, stood on its head there because it got caught for a
moment, but then it began to beat its wings and twist its hindquarters so impetuously that the thread first gave and then shot loose
from join p2. Gone, the fat wasp, and the entire g-section of the
new web had been distorted, and dangled there feebly. Baldur was
instantly on the edge of the tattered part. He ground with temper
and trembling watched the wasp, who had a good length of thread
trailing behind him, go. 'Gunk!', he cried, as loud as he could.
'Gunk, blundering stop-squirt, blubber gunk.' But the wasp had
gone and it was very quiet now, after all that noise.

Baldur shut his jaws. He was almost vomiting and rather wished
that it would be calcium then.

'Never, no one,' he then shouted, hoarsely. And with this,
Baldur D. Quorg indicated that from now on he would never
engage with anyone ever again, didn't want to see anyone again,
wished to speak to no one and to look no one in the face again.

Then he began the repairs.

But what is it to repair something that has been perfect and had
tension, and had been woven and joined exactly according to the
formulae?

What is it to repair a work that has come forth from nothing
through calculations and through industry and strength and
through bodily material, by one's own thread? What is it to repair
threads that existed in space like crystallised silence and are now
destroyed and disjointed, and which from now on can only tarnish
a creation, a true creation?

The web was repaired. Indeed it was. But it was no longer a net
that could be compared with what once had been. It was a solution
Baldur had thought up for the repairs. The only good one, even, for
when the repair was done there was cohesion in the web again and
it transmitted the vibration of every movement made, in or against
it. But that vibration was no longer clear and gleaming and
faultless: it was dull and laboured. It had become a practical aid.

While Baldur was still busy, he felt the net tremble a few times.
There was prey therefore; he must set out after it. But he didn't; he
went on working first. He used the auxiliary formula for restoring
tensions, but he calculated them sadly, for the web was no longer a
thing that was there for ever, a thing that allows no thoughts of
decay, a thing there, the way you yourself are there.

The wasp was no longer a gunk but a scourge and a continuous
betrayal. Only when it became dark did the repair reach completion
and only then did Baldur go along the threads to the point where
they had got caught: the flies Guwel, Roesk and Drod and the
gnats Zuuwkin, Resie, Zamiel, Luuk and Frizoen. They were almost
dead already when Baldur struck so they were barely startled any
more. Baldur then withdrew, not into the nucleus of the web but
into the comer of the door. He bit off the pointless thread still
hanging there so that it floated down. But this made no headway.
The web was too tattered for that. Baldur closed his eyes; he slept.

It is dark and dead quiet. Countless is the number of living
creatures. On this side of the earth they are almost all asleep, most
of them very well hidden and impossible to find. Baldur D. Quorg
is impossible to find too, for not only he has crept into the dark corner of the loft door below the roof of the farm barn, but also
beneath the dust and a piece of dead leaf that has been trapped
there for ages already and is decaying. His first web hangs
motionless across the door and since he has devoured Zuuwkin and the
other gnats, and Guwel and Roesk and Drod, there are three more
gnats, flying in the night and wanting to go into the dark of the
bam, who have got caught, that's to say: Zarina, Loes and Rufkin.
These are now dying there and, nervous and frightened, they look
around them. If they should set to work thoughtfully - as thoughtfully as Baldur works - they would be able to free themselves, but
they set to work wildly and jittery. Rufkin has said so once or
twice: 'If you think everything through in advance then you
actually do things very stupidly, in retrospect. But I'm just always
so pleased I'm alive.' When it gets light they will all be dead from
fatigue because they wanted to get out of that web so wildly all
that time. They will not be given a monumental tomb though
Rufkin was one whom life blessed frequently.

When Baldur finds the three gnats - for that matter, there are
sure to be more by that web will still be new and fresh.
He will devour his prey but probably without being triumphant,
for when he emerges from beneath his leaf and sees the web
glinting in the light, his satisfaction over the construction has
passed and it will be clear to him how vulnerable his work is. And
so it is. If they are going to fetch sacks from the loft today then
the farmer will swipe that web out of his way with a single stroke
of his arm; it could also start to rain hard or a chicken, in its
boundless folly, could go and try to get into the loft. There's a
great chance, when it gets dark again, that the entire web will be
dangling about in mucky tatters, rubbish and dirt; and who will
comfort Baldur then?

He is still asleep, but when he wakes later on a new experience
will await him: the fact that he can move provokes unease within
him. The hinges of his legs and grabbers and of his neck and his
hindquarters displease him, that's to say, the circumstance that
everything there is able to move. It is as though the night has taught
him something of the meaning of 'calcium hidden well' in his
marshal-on-the-threads ditty. Life should be more insignificant.
And it should lie like a small control centre in the calcium box of
his head with for its sole instrument his eyes with which to leer
and to determine how rightly he has foregone more of life than
necessary in order to reject all.

But everything did still move and Baldur ran out on to his
threads. Two gnats had joined the three of that night: Diek and
Snuis. These were still alive and Baldur stayed and watched them
for a while before he struck, and he devoured them as like-minded
ones, for it was clear that they pleaded for the end when they
made out Baldur on the thread.

The web in the door remained in use for ten days or so, but
then sacks indeed had to be fetched from the loft, and the first tore
the net in the comer as if it had never been there. Baldur managed
to escape and disappeared into the same skirting board Simon P.
Quellyn had fled through. From there he set off on the journey
down: he walked a long, long way across the ground and then
reached a pear tree in the yard. Here he made his second web,
from the lowest branch to the trunk. Much smaller than the first
but magnificently constructed, too, and refined in structure. When
it had been there for a day, a cock who crowed every morning in
that branch of the pear tree, sagged backwards rather oddly, so
that he plunged from that branch and, fluttering, tumbled right
through the web.

Then Baldur made a web in the window of the farm's living
room. This was fantastic, for a light burned there in the evening
and the gnats arrived in throngs. But the farmer's wife was very
tidy so, after two days, she appeared with a mop, and that was
therefore that.

After his sojourn in front of the window, Baldur wove a web
against the hen-roost. A dangerous place, one would say, but he
stuck it out here a very long time, for the chickens never flew into
that roost, walking studiously through the little archway instead;
many gnats appeared in the swayingly warm air of the chicken
coop and nobody was mad enough to go and wield a mop there.
Baldur was only forced to give up this web when it had become
too old and too dirty and too bedraggled to be used still. Not that
he was still relying on the warning system of the vibrations in the
web when something flew up against it. He leered, for although he
could move he yet played the game of the calcium box where
the little control centre had been stored which wanted to spy
exclusively. Sometimes, because of this, he was already at his
victims' side before these were actually well and truly stuck to the
thread. This gave them an easy death, still quite ecstatic because of
that trembling air from the hen-roost.

When Baldur left this net, he made one in a little window of the pigsty, then one near the hay stack, then one near the big barn
once again, and then another one again in the pear tree. He grew
older and bigger and his body became harder and more calcified,
and the hinges became more of a struggle. On rare occasions he
would kill another spider and occupy its net. He never thought
any more, except when making a web; but construction, too, was
in fact an almost automatic thing to him and he made no mistakes.
He no longer swung and he made no rhymes. And it was
as though his bitterness had become a new organ inside him,
producing calcium.

One day, he left the yard and went out on to the road. knowing
quite well that booty would be thinner there, knowing quite well
that there would be no protection from wind and rain. Walking
along the road he tested his jaws. These were rock hard and a
touch grainy; for the first time in ages there was something like
satisfaction in Baldur, who closed his eyes for a short while and did
not leer. Then he climbed a tree and, having arrived on the first
branch, he deliberated a little. It would have to be not too high up
and not too low down. And it would have to be open. It became a
masterpiece of constructional daring. There was no unevenness to
it, the joins were accurately placed down to the last millimetre and
they sat so tightly around the threads that it was barely possible
to discern the ties. It was as though a mathematically creative hand
was laying down a form for all time, for eternity, unsurpassable.

When the web was done, Baldur D. Quorg went and sat at its
edge and he leered. Nothing came into it. It was as if nothing was
flying any longer in the world. On the road, too, there was
nothing to be seen. Baldur sat motionless and after a while he no
longer leered. He looked at his joints. The sockets were smooth
and white. He stretched his legs and looked again: it was possible
to efface each movement. Beneath the calcium roof of his skull, his
brain lay in a calcium box. It had become smaller and no longer
allowed much thought. More space had risen up around it, in
which there was perfect silence. His heart was still beating and
propelled something through his body and through the channels in
the calcium. This was cruel, and again Baldur repressed the satisfaction and made the bitterness work, so the propulsion that continued
might deposit calcium too. Something flew into the web that
shivered like a carillon, but Baldur did not look. Even his leering he
had to surrender, he understood.