B007P4V3G4 EBOK (57 page)

There were horses trampling and snorting in that little lane,
reins were tugged and flanks were prodded with heels; for a
moment all stood at right angles to one another and no one knew
who wanted to go where - but the next moment all were off at a
canter in pursuit of the hurrying Woutersz, and the bailiff led
along the literary scholars in ignorance.

Again they went along the Gooweg and turned off right, down
the Heiligenweg. At St Hieronymus-In-Deserto they reduced speed,
for in the churchyard the pit was open and the priest was busy
sprinkling the dead with holy water as if something was still meant
to grow forth from that corpse-cradle. A dog was bothersomely
cunning about in front of his feet but the priest dared not give the
creature a kick, bearing in mind the sacred actions undertaken. The
dog sniffed between his legs and tried to get near the pit,
something the priest countered with half-hearted movements. From
a distance, a few stood watching. In front of the wall of the charnel
house a choir had been arranged. With booming men's voices it
sang a Dies Irae that fell quite dead under the bare sky.

Through the open church doors they heard the true believers
hurling abuse. They had been locked up in the lofts above the
galleries where previously the skulls had been stored. Dousa had
been surprised that the church had decided on this course of action, but the priest had explained to him that he himself had
urged the inquisitors to be allowed to lock up the heretics in the
former charnel lofts so they would serve as frightening examples
to those still erring. The prisoners had disturbed the liturgy with
their hollering - and they would even chuck their excreta down
during the eucharist. Churchgoers had complained but the priest
had been adamant. He saw the Christian faith as a kind of wagerof-battle with evil, and he took pride in drowning the noise of the
heretics with communal singing and thus have the corpus christi
gain victory under a bombardment of heretic filth. When the
faithful stayed away in great numbers, the priest reviewed his
teachings and from then on, at the sacred hours, the prisoners
would be bound and gagged or even knocked unconscious.

Beyond the church the gallows began. These stood among the
trees so one would only see them when watching out for them.
From the odd one a forgotten skeleton would be dangling, but
most of them were empty because the followers of the new faith
had been warned in time and had been able to go to ground. The
empty gallows stood along the Heiligenweg and along the Oude
Zeeweg in the dunes; like herons at the water's edge, quiet and
assured, they stood, all the way down to Noordwijk-op-Zee.

Along this road they continued on their way.

The friends from Leiden, who had been looking forward to cosy
chats in a summer house, were getting fed up now and they asked
where all this was taking them. Dousa did not know. I don't know,
he said, and cantered off after Woutersz. You go from here to
there, he thought, from there to yonder, but you get nowhere, for
it is the world that is sliding from underneath if you
look back you can see it disappear. Dousa wanted to hold on to
this might be able to use it for a poem,
when suddenly he was made to sidestep a dead tree-trunk, it had
already evaporated. He did still try to track it down, but it was not
to be found. How curious, the way thoughts came and went as
you progressed, as though the head was making its own journey
through the landscapes of the mind.

Somewhere between two gallows the bailiff halted. This was
where they had last been seen. He was talking about the three
cousins of his lord's wife who had gone out hunting and had not
returned from the storm. At first, Dousa did not know what this
was all about. The cousins, the Van Zuylen cousins, said the bailiff;
they had gone out hunting and had not returned. Dousa thought: is this what I had to come along for all this way, for my wife's
cousins? The Leiden friends, on the contrary, seemed to take the
greatest possible interest in the case. They bounced back out of
their decline. All kinds of details they wanted to know, such as the
shoes the hunters had been wearing and whether or not they had
gone on horseback; they wanted to know times and distances -
and they whispered among themselves no end. Dousa did not
understand how they could get so bothered about a load of
cousins, and another's at that. The thought of those missing
evoked in him an atmosphere of fleshiness: fat little hands gesticulating in full rooms and wasting time with a great ado about nothing,
and he concluded that their disappearance amounted to no great
loss.

Already, Dousa wanted to turn back on the spot but Woutersz
gave him a sign. There was more: they must go on.

The ones from Leiden who had expected to be turning off down
the dune track, retraced their steps, non-plussed. They would
gladly have set off on a man-hunt for the disappeared gentry, with
lots of trampling of hooves on the dull moss and cries of 'this
way!', and an exciting catharsis with three run-through corpses in a
thorny thicket. They did not understand how the two others could
allow this spectacle to elude them, but they followed on, without
protest. They were beginning to suffer saddle pains, for that
matter: they were used to sitting down, but not on horseback.
They were tired and Dousa, too, was tired, and this made them
amenable.

All rode on, following the bailiff down the deep cart tracks
among the gallows. The bells of Maria-ter-Zee sounded in the
distance. The sky darkened, the wind got up, and soon it began to
rain. It suddenly seemed much later, now drab-grey clouds blacked
out the sun. As if the low sky lay heavily upon them, thus the
horsemen bowed their heads. The birds, which at the announcement
of the bad weather had been skimming criss-cross above their
heads, had disappeared. Where do birds actually shelter, Dousa
wondered. Behind the dunes roared the sea. It was here that the
land met its end.

From a taller dune they saw what they had come for: the floods
of the past night had swept away the dune-side facing the sea and
the water had streamed freely into the fishing village. The chapel
was awash; against its walls two little boats bobbed up and down.
They saw people sitting on the roofs of the houses; other houses had collapsed. A few men waded through the knee-high water,
pushing along possessions a-top pieces of driftwood. But when
they took a better look they saw that these were not possessions
but corpses which had been tied to planks and doors, corpses
which were being taken to dry land where they were laid down
alongside other corpses. Then they would be untied and the wood
would serve once more as a floating bier. There was no hurrying
here which was why things looked as if this was the way they
were meant to be. From a little distance away a few old dears were
watching the way things are always watched when something
changes place. So they were not watching the corpses lying there,
a little gawkily, with feet that could walk no longer and hands that
could no longer grasp and a head that never again would understand why it had ended up just there. The spectators had no
interest in the corpses, abandoned by the soul, unprotected and
defenceless, now seeking shelter in the void of the sky, no, they
were watching the men pushing bier after bier through the black
water, but it could also be that they were watching the raindrops,
splashing and drawing rings, and the wake of the bier, drawing
lines instead, and how the wind wiped all of this out.

The bailiff pointed downwards and asked Dousa what was to be
done about this. How was he to know? How am I to know that, I
who do not even know where birds take shelter in autumn when it
rains and the trees are bare. I don't know, he said, and the bailiff
did not know either.

Because they were getting cold up there on top of that dune in
full force of the wind, they went on. There was more, the bailiff
said, further on, down on the beach. And they saw the beach
through a breach in the dunes and behind it lay the sea the way it
always does. They descended; the horses slithered and were
startled when they stepped into the cold water. Everybody watched
the horsemen going along, one behind the other, through the water.
The men with the biers stood still and looked up at the horsemen,
and the old dears on dry land, too, watched how the gentlemen
high up on their horses passed by them. Only once the gentlemen had passed from view did they continue with recovering the
dead and watching the black water the dead were being fished out
from, and only then did they hear the bells tolling because the
birds did not sing and the women did not sing at their stoves and
because the souls were lost and could not be found again.

4

The beached whale lay motionless, waiting, and the bystanders
looked on and waited too. They stood at a safe distance and they
had brought along knives and axes - just in case - even though
they did not know whether they would be able to kill it, given the
tremendous dimensions of the creature. Neither did they know
what to do should they unexpectedly succeed. Most of all, they
wished it would go away so that they, too, could go away. But it
did not go away, and neither did they. The rain tapped on their
caps and fell noiselessly on both land and sea. The drops splashed
on the whaleskin, slick as oil, and pearled down; it seemed as if the
whale shivered but it was the rain, splashing. The ones who had
been standing there longest maintained that they had seen it laugh.
The comers of its mouth twitched, they said. Why it had laughed,
they did not know. Bloated and cumbrous, it lay on dry land and
birds skimmed over the top of it and pecked at its skin. Had it not
laughed, one might have thought that it was dead, the more so as
it stank like the grave. No one would then have to be afraid of the
whale, but for the fact that it was so large, it deprived all that
surrounded it of its meaning.

Because the whale was so unconscionably large and the bystanders therefore insignificant, the feeling crept over them that this had
something to do with God and that He had sent the whale as a
sign.

At the same time, a stranger had arrived on a dogcart. Nobody
had spoken to him for he had not ventured in their midst. He kept
himself apart and did not seem to wonder at the calamity that
gripped the community's spirits and kept them low. From a
distance one might believe him to be a monk, but on looking
closely one saw that he was not wearing a habit but a horse
blanket, bound by a rope round his waist. Because of this miserable
blanket some saw in him a mendicant monk from an unknown
order, others thought he was an anabaptist, but no one excluded
the possibility that here might be a case of the appearance of a
saint. This was because of his head which was bald and as smooth
as the polished wood of statues, but it was especially because of
his eyes. These were of an impenetrable grey which reminded one
of the indifference of November skies: these were eyes that had
seen too much and from which all wonder had been erased, eyes
that looked from a yonder as from within a different world. Since the whale had appeared he had stood on top of the dunes and
looked down on all. The curious ones on the beach were afraid of
him and at the same time they hated him because he stood on top
there and looked down on them. It might be that he was looking
with his autumnal eyes at the beached whale, it might be that he
was looking down on the bystanders who hid themselves behind
each other's backs and waited for that which eluded them for the
time being. It might also be that his eyes were tired and found rest
in the far beyond. That was why they hated him: because he left
them in uncertainty.

The appearances numbered three: the storm, the whale and the
saint on the dogcart. According to some, however, they numbered
four: the storm, the whale, the saint and the floods. Again others
came to five or six or seven - and thus the truth fell apart into multiplicity.

When the Lord of Noordwijk rode on to the beach, all faith and
hope was placed in him. He was a well-travelled and well-read man
and though they themselves were neither one nor the other, they
suspected that these matters were connected with the truth. To
them, truth was something in which they would never have a part,
something which revealed itself in matters incomprehensible, the
way one can see lightning but not where it comes from, and they
suspected, without realising this, that truth kept itself hidden in a
distant yonder, in an unknown realm which might only be found
by following the, to them, unfathomable and obscurely twisting
paths of script. They themselves were not capable of thinking
things any other way than they were; they lived in a world which
was self-evident, no matter what - even doom had acquired
something familiar so that it had become unimaginable that there
had been a time when the whale had not been lying on the beach
and that there had not been any corpses floating down the streets.

Dousa was startled when he discovered the whale, but because
he saw that bailiff Woutersz, who had been here earlier, was
observing him from the side to sound out his reaction, he let as
little as possible be seen. So this was why the man had kept silent
so mysteriously on the way here. And for a moment he held
Woutersz responsible for the total disarray in his demesne. This
was a pointless and unsatisfactory impulse, as he could not stand
disarray even if this might be charged to Woutersz's account.
Therefore he recovered himself and sought a description or an allencompassing idea which would give meaning to what he saw. He ought Pliny to mind with the classics he always had the
experience of entering an ordered space, each word in its own
place within the indissoluble context of grammar. However, his
large memory notwithstanding, he was unable to remember
whether there was any report in the Naturalis Historia of a balaena
or a phallaina, as the whale was called in Greek. Nor could he
remember himself as ever having devoted any extended thought
to the phenomenon of the whale. It was, in as far as he had any
image of it at all, a mythological monster, a creature of fable like
the griffon, the centaur and the flying horse - and he was surprised
that, without ever having seen such an apparition before, he had
recognised the creature at once. How curious, he concluded, the
way everything became curious if only one thought about it for
long enough. So now a whale had ended up within his thought.
But the whale swimming about in his mind was a different one
from that one there, stinking on the beach, and he could not
understand how this was possible. How could that whale have
ended up in his head - and why was it different from the one on
the beach? He felt he was approaching the essence of something,
though he knew not of what, but soon the perception had already
lost its coherence.