B007P4V3G4 EBOK (59 page)

Thus, these two went one way and the rest went the other -
and all had the conviction that it was the right way, the way they
were going.

The weather turned even grimmer. It seemed as if the storm was
trying to sweep the countryside empty and that the rain gushed
across the land to erase the last traces. Seen in this light, those
going along the road - both the few going the one way as the
many going the other - gave the impression in their doggedness
of resisting with full commitment their disappearance.

One might also say, however, that, going along the road, they
were already disappearing.

When the great exodus reached beyond the village by the sea,
the survivors left their houses and their dead and joined the trek,
pot luck. They did not think of it as disappearing: they thought
they were on their way somewhere.

Those on foot got sorely in the way of the horsemen; time and
again, the gentlemen had to rein in their horses - something they
did with reluctance for, best of all, they would have preferred to
have left those superfluous and useless dolts to their fate, but one
thought that the other thought it was their duty as gentlemen to
stay here and to watch over the rearguard of mankind. Dousa was
surprised that these people - who could not read nor write and
therefore had to be thought of as equal to the horse he was sitting
on, less than that even, perhaps, taken that at least you could still
ride a horse - could force their way into his life, just like that, as if his spirit was a hostelry where one might barge in, muddy feet and
all, no questions asked. Like an ugly word in a poem, this was the
way one ought to be able to scratch out all those ugly and
superfluous people. What was he to do with that little lot?
Woutersz, more businesslike (in the case where his lord's thinking
might best be compared to a bird, probably a crow, his thinking
might best be said, if it had to be a bird, to resemble a chicken
scuttling about round the house, trained on the low-down-to-earth
and not realising that it had been able to fly at one time), this
good bailiff thought that the obtrusive refugees might be housed
in the convent of Saint Barbara. This was, it was true, a wreck
without a roof, since the heretics had set fire to it, but for those
fishermen, who according to him were all heretics, it was good
enough. He thought that was just the thing for fishermen to do, to
fall into heresy: on the boundless sea, which was no one's and
therefore no rule of law applied there, the divine did not reveal
itself in sacred forms and appearances so that it was almost
understandable that those seamen began to get all kinds of ideas
into their heads. Perhaps there were a few among the populace
getting under their feet here, who had defiled the convent at the
time and had decapitated the Saint of Noordwijk. In that case it
would even be an act of justice to have them spend the night in
the ruin of their own creation.

Dousa just let the bailiff talk. And when the latter fell silent, he
assented with a slight, absentminded nod of the head. He had
already forgotten his irritation as regards the homeless again. The
sight of the whale had made his thoughts heavy so that these sank
away repeatedly into the depths of his thinking where it was dark
and oppressive like in a cellar or a deep pit, and where he could no
longer hear the bailiff.

The gentlemen, each ensnared in their own way in the unrest of
incomprehensible thoughts, did not notice that they passed the
place where the three hunters had last been seen. They had no eye
for it, not even the ones from Leiden. In their defence, it might be
put forward that there were so many empty spots that it could
hardly be called negligence either that they did not see this
particular one where the hunters had been and were now no
longer it was a trifle hard on the hunters to have
to disappear without being missed by anyone.

Meanwhile, the procession made such slow progress that it
began to look more as if people were standing still. That hunch backed fisherman's brat walking out in front, he was a long way
ahead already. The footsloggers shuffled through the leafmould
and the puddles of rainwater. It might have been a sorry sight, but
the gentlemen were not in the mood for compassion; their desire
was more one of beating the hordes with sticks. As though their
horses were having to drag a cart without wheels through the
mud, this was what they felt like - a heavy and in fact superfluous
task which only occurred because that damned cart just happened
to be there.

Precisely because they could not make progress, the gentlemen
thought with regret of all those things they would have been able
to do if they had not been obliged to be toiling their way through
the mud here, and had it not rained; and it seemed as if it was
because of the mud and the rain and the others that, irritatingly,
they had ended up in an incomprehensible confusion. The Leiden
friends believed themselves to have been thwarted in their scientific
work; they missed their numbers which they had been forced to
leave behind near the whale and which now would certainly be
wiped out. And the falling rain fell like a curtain, depriving them of
their vision. But Dousa, too, sinking away into his thoughts as if
into a deep sleep, felt uprooted and harried. He wanted to be with
his books, in the shelter of their spines standing like watchmen
around him and giving him cover against the unthinkable and
incomprehensible that was life outside. Even the bailiff, a down-toearth man after all, was in a kind of hurry to escape. He was no
man for whales and now there was nothing here he might call
upon, he longed for the return of the familiar and he believed to be
able to find this again were he to return to the place whence he
had left, that is to say, home, where the world was but a thought,
an ordered thought that was complete and with which, therefore,
he no longer had to bother himself.

Thus, the gentlemen all had a place - elsewhere, yonder, over
there - where truth would be. And instead of making them
despondent, the notion of over there, yonder and elsewhere gave
them hope and an urge to go on as if they did not know that,
rather than a case of going on, this was a one of escaping, of
trying to escape the hopelessness.

And the homeless followed, full of trust, and they did not know
that there was no roof either in the place where they would be
housed.

Further on, or further back (for this was becoming ever more difficult to distinguish) the two fishermen reached the end, or the
beginning, maybe, of the road. They descended the path to the sea
and arrived on the beach. The storm made them bend over like
porters and this was how it came about that amidst all the empty
spaces they did not notice the empty space the whale had left
behind. Nor did they see the empty space on the dunes where
the saint with the dogcart had been standing. The place where the
Admiral was lying was, in a sense, empty too, but this the
fishermen only noticed when they felt how cold death had made
their leader. It gave them a shock, but not too bad a one, for one
of them had already seen many go before and the other, by way of
a down-payment, had already surrendered his own eye. And yet,
encountering so much motionlessness, they did not know what to
do. The Admiral was not stiff yet and it appeared as if he could
live if he did his best to do so. Only his eyes betrayed that
nothing would come of this - a gaze that did not reflect, or it
would have to be that which someone dead could see. This was
why his eyes were closed with careful hand, not because the
deceased might thus be comforted, but so as not to have to see the
empty space into which he must stare forever.

Were one to look at one deceased for a long time, one might
think him lonely and helpless, the way he lay there and did not
understand what had happened to him. Just take his shoes: made
from sturdy leather and fit for brisk walks, but no one could tell
any longer where they had been and where they had wanted to
go. All had been for nothing and it seemed that this was why he
lay there, so mute and lame, as if an indissoluble despondence had
come over him. Each morning he had put on his shoes to go
somewhere, doing this on the assumption that it served some
purpose, and he had not known that his life was like that of a
traveller who stays the night in a hostelry along the way: when he
breaks up camp, there is nothing that remains, except perhaps for a
broken shoelace, a tom-off button or a stale crust of bread. That
shoelace or that button might mean something: a present from a
former mistress whose passion, like the shoe and the smock, had
worn out; or an heirloom, dutifully worn until threadbare, even the
crust of bread might have a meaning, but there was no one who
might a girl would turn up to sweep them up, a
blonde girl who thought of a cheerful future; she perhaps would
polish the button to a shine and keep it, but the shoelace and the
crust of bread would be thrown away. Thus the deceased would have to allow that what once had been his life would fall apart into
mere objects such as laces, buttons and crusts of bread which, of
no use to others, were thrown away as rubbish, and that only a
shiny button would remain, for instance. One might say that the
deceased, through that which is taken from him, becomes another,
in a way, but one might just as easily say that he can no longer be
designated by words such as 'another' and that he might best be
compared to a torn-off button - the button of a traveller who
spent the night along the way, the button which was picked up by
a blonde girl, not to sew it back onto the smock it had burst from,
but because it gleamed so beautifully and - for the time being -
because it was such a pity to do away with it. And yet the
deceased would have to allow that even that button, dulled
through neglect, would be thrown away, one day.

Something the deceased had to allow, too, was that the fishermen
hauled him upright, and tried rather awkwardly to lift him, treatment
under which, had he still been alive, he would definitely have felt
uncomfortable. Because they were not convinced that the deceased
was not aware of anything, the fishermen apologised in between
their groaning and sighing. That he could no longer walk was an
established fact and because of this he came off the ground,
upsadaisy, by his ankles and armpits. Lugging him was no great
burden to them, going across the firm, wet sand, but when they got
to the dunes they were obliged to lower the corpse and they
dragged it, each to an arm, through the sand. His head lolled
crookedly to one side and sand got into his hair and on to his mouth
and eyelids. At the top of the dunes they had to catch their breath
for a moment, for the corpse was rather heavy after all. Had they
not been so busy catching their breaths there, it might have amazed
them that someone deceased is just as heavy as someone living. A
soul, which is life, weighs nothing. This could have been one of
Dousa's thoughts, but he was further ahead and did not know that
death was dogging his footsteps; he might have thought that, as a
dead body weighs just as much as a living one, one has carried the
burden of death along with one all that time, without knowing, and
that in dying one only loses something, something weighing
nothing, a trinket, perhaps even less than that, a mere trifle,
something that perhaps may never have been. An incomprehensible
thought, the way everything became incomprehensible were one to
think about it for long enough. But the fishermen did not think.
They got up again, lifted up the corpse, and continued on their way.

After some time they noticed that the corpse began to stink of
excreta. Because it was stinking so badly they could have thrown
the corpse into the bushes; however, they did not dare do this for
they knew that the dead must be buried near a church because the
soul can only wrest itself free properly in hallowed soil. Also, they
were gaining sight of the procession with the horsemen so that it
did not seem that far any more, even though the procession still
had a goodly way to go.

The horsemen only noticed that they were being impeded in
their progress; they did not know that behind them the two
fishermen, stinking death between them, were coming ever closer.

Only the Leiden friends had a tendency to look back, not
because they had begun to smell death, but because they knew
their numbers were in the sand, defenceless. They repeated the six
hundred, threescore and six, giving voice to it in three-part
harmony, so that their knowledge seemed to be stored more in the
tongue than in memory, the tongue hopping agilely back and forth
from teeth to roof of mouth, ringing out Leiden science in an
almost oracular, and in any case artful fashion. Because of the
continual repetition, the numbers threatened to lose their meaning,
however, which was why the Leiden gents preferred to turn back
most of all: to see whether the numbers in the sand really did exist.
The bailiff, too, was one who had to see a thing in order to believe
it. A limiting characteristic which preserved him from inflammatory
thoughts and from thoughts in general, for that matter. Now that
he had not seen the whale for a while, its terrifying aspect already
began to fade in his memory and it would not be long before the
wondrous fish would have been reduced in his head to the neatly
arranged measurements of a greasy old herring. This, too, explained
his dullness: even though he had actually seen a whale, he would
still speak of herrings, not out of modesty, definitely not, his
character was in fact as bloated as rolmops that have been in pickle
for too long, but because his thinking was incapable of containing
anything larger.

Dousa had gone to ride some distance away from the others,
perhaps in order not to have to hear the hollow sounds of the
gents from Leiden, or not to have to smell the bailiff's sour pong -
he could not smell the stench of death yet, in any case, even
though the wind was in his direction. Like this, at a distance from
the others and distancing himself from the unimaginable whale, his
thinking regained its familiar lightness. His thoughts burbled up like bubbles of air from the dark depths and burst open at the
surface, merging with total airiness. The arrival of the whale was,
for the time being, an incomprehensible event, it was true, but
Dousa was convinced that there would be a time when he could
confidently surrender himself to complete knowing.