Rituals (11 page)

He woke up from a tap on the door and her voice.

"Your aunt wants to know if you're coming to Mass."

He was still aware of her smell. Footsteps sounded in the corridors, and downstairs in the hall a small procession was waiting — the uncle, his aunt, and the chamberlain, with the morning sun gleaming on the purple watered silk of his sash.

In church he let Pergolesi, the Gregorian chants, the three slow-dancing dervishes in green, the sermon (
"That
is the mystery which we cannot comprehend: He is both man
and
God. Through his mysterious humanity we share in the divine. Truly we ought to be in ecstasy every day, always, every hour, but we are too small, too wretched . . ."), the consecration, the bells, the candles, flow over him. He peered at the stained-glass windows with their ever-different, ever-same images from a world he had left behind for good. Would she be in church?

To the wooden back of the pew in front of him, brass plates had been fixed with his name coupled to that of his uncle — Donders-Wintrop — but of course she was not allowed to sit there. He saw her only when she came forward to take Communion, all the way from the back of the church. Her fourth mortal sin, he thought, and followed her. When she turned from the Communion rail, he caught a brief glimpse of the host on her tongue. Her eyes looked into his, the mockery in them now very lightly veiled by something else, but he would never know what. He loved her, she would confess everything, or not, and after a few weeks she would marry her soldier from Korea. He would never see her again. Now he himself knelt, saw the priest's hand approaching (calf's flesh), momentarily felt an urge to bite into it hard, but instead stuck out his tongue. The dry, light substance fleetingly clung to the soft, moist flesh of his tongue. Then he swallowed and God began to seek His way down to his intestines where — this now seemed inevitable — He would be transformed into seed. And not into anything else.

Taads was waiting by the house. He had already finished his breakfast and had "had some sandwiches packed" for Inni to eat in the car. As they took their leave, his aunt told him she had arranged something with Taads, he would hear about it later. She said she had been pleased to see he had gone to Communion, and then she looked away. Petra he saw once more, but when he approached her, she took a step back and shook her head almost imperceptibly.

"Bye-bye," she said, and turned around and walked off to the kitchen. He retained the vision of her green eyes.

His aunt had settled a sum of money on him of which he could draw the interest. It was not much, said Taads, but enough for someone of his age to manage on. Nor did he have to worry about the future, but about that no details were provided at this stage.

In the years that followed, he saw Arnold Taads regularly, always according to the same ritual: walk, reading hour, goulash, always in the same bitter atmosphere of self-inflicted, deadly loneliness aggravated by growing maniacal insomnia. His contempt for mankind turned to savage hate. The winters spent in his "deserted valley" became longer. In 1960 Inni received a first and last letter from him.

"Dear friend, my dog Athos has died. He had a brain tumour. I shot him myself, which I am certain he did not realize. The shot echoed unbearably long — it is very empty here in the mountains. I buried him under the snow. Best wishes, regards to Zita. Yours, Arnold Taads."

A few months later he heard from his aunt that Arnold Taads was dead. As he had not turned up in the village on his usual shopping expedition, a rescue team had gone out to look for him. They had found him, frozen to death, his rucksack empty, not very far from his hut. Inni wondered whether he had sounded the Alpine distress signal. But no one would ever know. The frozen man was cremated, and now there existed no longer in the world an Arnold Taads.

III - PHILIP TAADS 1973

The Philosophy of Tea . . . is a moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe

OKAKURA KAKUZO
The Book of Tea

Ne pas naître est sans contredit la meilleure formule qui soit. Elle n'est malheureusement à la portée de personne

To fail to be born is incontestably the best formula possible. Unfortunately it does not lie within any person's reach

E. M. CIORAN
De l'inconvénent d'être né

PHILIP TAADS 1973

T
HERE
WERE
DAYS
, thought Inni Wintrop, when it seemed as if a recurrent, fairly absurd phenomenon were trying to prove that the world is an absurdity that can best be approached with nonchalance, because life would otherwise become unbearable.

There were days, for instance, when you kept meeting cripples, days with too many blind people, days when you saw three times in succession a left shoe lying by the roadside. It seemed as if all these things were trying to mean something, but could not. They left only a vague sense of unease, as if somewhere there existed a dark plan for the world that allowed itself to be hinted at only in this clumsy way.

The day on which he was destined to meet Philip Taads, of whose existence he had hitherto been unaware, was the day of the three doves. The dead one, the live one, and the dazed one, which could not possibly have been one and the same, because he had seen the dead one first. These three, he thought later, had made an attempt at annunciation that had succeeded insofar as it had made the encounter with Taads the Younger more mysterious.

It was now 1973, and Inni had turned forty in a decade he did not approve of. One ought not, he felt, to live in the second half of any century, and this particular century was altogether bad. There was something sad and at the same time ridiculous about all these fading years piling on top of one another until at last the millennium arrived. And they contained a contradiction, too: in order to reach the hundred, and in this case the thousand, that had to be completed, one had to add them up; but the feeling that went with the process seemed to have more to do with subtraction. It was as if no one, especially not Time, could wait for those ever dustier, ever higher figures finally to be declared void by a revolution of a row of glittering, perfectly shaped noughts, whereupon they would be relegated to the scrap heap of history. The only people apparently still sure of anything in these days of superstitious expectation were the Pope, the sixth of his name already, a white-robed Italian with an unusually tormented face that faintly resembled Eichmann's, and a number of terrorists of different persuasions, who tried in vain to anticipate the great witches' cauldron. The fact that he was now forty no longer in itself bothered Inni very much.

"Forty," he said, "is the age at which you have to do everything for the third time, or else you'll have to start training to be a cross-tempered old man," and he had decided to do the latter.

After Zita, he had had a long-lasting affair with an actress who had finally, in self-preservation, turned him out of the house like an old chair.

"What I miss most about her," he said to his friend the writer, "is her absence. These people are never at home. You get addicted to that."

He now lived alone and intended to keep it that way. The years passed, but even this was noticeable only in photographs. He bought and sold things, was not addicted to drugs, smoked less than one packet of Egyptian cigarettes a day, and drank neither more nor less than most of his friends.

This was the situation on the radiant June morning when, on the bridge between the Heerenstraat and the Prinsenstraat, a dove flew straight at him as if to bore itself into his heart. Instead, it smashed against a car approaching from the Prinsengracht. The car drove on and the pigeon was left lying in the street, a grey and dusty, suddenly silly-looking little thing. A blonde-haired girl got off her bicycle and went up to the pigeon at the same time as Inni.

"Is it dead, do you think?" she asked.

He crouched down and turned the bird onto its back. The head did not turn with the rest of the body and continued to stare at the road surface.

"Finito," said Inni.

The girl put her bike away.

"I daren't pick it up," she said, "Will you?"

She used the familiar form of you. As long as they still do that, I am not yet old, thought Inni, picking up the pigeon. He did not like pigeons. They were not a bit like the image he used to have of the Holy Ghost, and the fact that all those promises of peace had never come to anything was probably their fault as well. Two white, softly cooing doves in the garden of a Tuscan villa, that was all right, but the grey hordes marching across the Dam Square with spurs on their boots (their heads making those idiotic mechanical pecking movements) could surely have nothing to do with a Spirit which had allegedly chosen that particular shape in which to descend upon Mary.

"What are you going to do with it?" asked the girl.

Inni looked around and saw on the bridge a wooden skip belonging to the Council. He went up to it. It was full of sand. Gently he laid the pigeon in it. The girl had followed him. An erotic moment. Man with dead dove, girl with bike and blue eyes. She was beautiful.

"Don't put it in there," she said. "The workmen will chuck it straight into the canal."

What does it matter whether it rots away in sand or in water, thought Inni, who often claimed he would prefer to be blown up after his death. But this was not the moment to hold a discourse on transience.

"Are you in a hurry?" he asked.

"No."

"Give me that bag then." From her handlebar hung a plastic bag, one from the Athenaeum Book Store.

"What's in there?"

"A book by Jan Wolkers."

"It can go in there then," said Inni. "There's no blood."

He put the pigeon in the bag.

"Jump on the back."

He took her bike without looking at her and rode off.

"Hey," she said. He heard her rapid footsteps and felt her jumping on the back of the bike. In the shop windows he caught brief glimpses of something that looked like happiness. Middle-aged gentleman on girl's bicycle, girl in jeans and white trainers on the back.

He rode down the Prinsengracht to the Haarlemmerdijk and from a distance saw the barriers of the bridge going down. They got off, and as the bridge slowly rose, they saw the second dove. It was sitting inside one of the open metal supports under the bridge, totally unconcerned as it allowed itself to be lifted up like a child on the Ferris wheel.

For a moment Inni felt an impulse to take the dead pigeon out of the plastic bag and lift it up like a peace offering to its slowly ascending living colleague, but he did not think the girl would like it. And besides, what would be the meaning of such a gesture? He shuddered, as usual not knowing why. The pigeon came down again and vanished invulnerably under the asphalt. They cycled on, to the Westerpark. With her small, brown hands, the girl dug a grave in the damp, black earth, somewhere in a corner.

"Deep enough?"

"For a pigeon, yes."

He laid the bird, which was now wearing its head like a hood on its back, into the hole. Together they smoothed the loose earth on top of it.

"Shall we go and have a drink?" he asked.

"All right."

Something in this minimal death, either the death itself or the summary ritual surrounding it, had made them allies. Something now had to happen, and if this something had anything to do with death, it would not be obvious. He cycled along the Nassaukade. She was not heavy. This was what pleased him most about his strange life — that when he had got up that morning, he had not known that he would now be cycling here with a girl at his back, but that such a possibility was always there. It gave him, he thought, something invincible. He looked at the faces of the men in the oncoming cars, and he knew that his life, in its absurdity, was right. Emptiness, loneliness, anxiety — these were the drawbacks — but there were also compensations, and this was one of them. She was humming softly and then fell silent. She said suddenly, as if she had taken a decision, "This is where I live."

It was more like an order than a statement. He obeyed and followed her pointing finger into the Second Hugo de Grootstraat. With a heavy iron chain she tied her bike to a parking meter and opened a door. Without a word she led the way, up endless flights of stairs. Promiscuity in Amsterdam had a lot to do with stairs, especially in younger circles. He climbed calmly behind the trainers, regulating his breathing so that he would not be panting when they came to the top. They climbed very high indeed, to a small room with a skylight. Plants, books in an orange crate, an Elvis Presley poster, a copy of
Vrij Nederland,
breathtakingly tiny, white and light-blue panties strung out on a line in front of the open window. The notion, he thought, of happiness mingled with melancholy was a cliche, as was this room, as was he himself in this room. It had all happened before. It had to be longed for every time afresh, but it had already happened. She put on a record that he vaguely recognized, and turned towards him. This, he understood, was a generation that did not waste time. They put you on and they took you off like a glove, efficient actions following quick decisions. Sometimes it was more like a form of work than anything else.

She stood facing him. She was almost as tall as he, and he looked straight into her blue eyes. They stood solemnly, but with a gravity you could see the bottom of, a gravity without structure. She had not suffered yet, and that was not accidental either. Suffering, he had learned, could be refused, as it commonly was these days.

She undressed him, he undressed her, and they lay down side by side. She smelled of girl. He stroked her, and twice she pushed his hand a fraction, saying "No, not here, there," and then appeared to forget him. The body as gadget. She came without a hitch in the mechanism. There was something very
sweet
about it, he thought. His own performance seemed like a huge car in a narrow English country lane. A few years later, half the American car industry would slump, as a result of just such an anachronism. There was still a lot to be learned in beds. He lay still for a while and felt the small (tennis? basketball?) air-cooled hands stroking his back.