Rituals (17 page)

Behind Bernard's display window a beige screen had been let down. The yellow craziness of a first tram broke the spell, but all the seats were empty. The driver sat in it like a dummy. In place of the raku bowl there was nothing, but he did not have to close his eyes to see it — black, gleaming, and threatening — a harbinger of death. When he rang Philip Taads's bell, the door opened at once.

*       *

"I sleep very little," said Philip Taads. He was sitting in the same place as yesterday and wore a plain blue kimono. "Sleeping is senseless. A peculiar form of absence that has no meaning. One of all the people you are is resting, the others remain awake. The fewer people you are, the better you sleep."

"If you don't sleep, what do you do?"

"I sit here."

Here. That could only be the particular spot where he was actually sitting now.

"But what do you do?"

Taads laughed.

"Yoga?"

"Yoga, Zen, Tao, meditation, kono-mama, they're all just words."

"Meditate? What about?"

"The question is wrong. I think about nothing."

"Then you might as well be asleep."

"When I sleep, I dream. I don't have any control over that."

"Dreams are necessary."

Taads shrugged his shoulders. "For whom? I find them irritating. All kinds of people appear in them that I haven't asked to see, and things happen that I don't want. And make no mistake, these events and these people may not be real, although I am not sure what that means exactly, but you see them with your real eyes while you are asleep. They have measured it. Your eyes keep moving back and forth and follow those nonexistent people closely. I find that irritating."

"I dreamt of your father last night," said Inni. "And of you."

"That I find irritating, too," said Taads. "I was here. I wasn't with you. What did you dream?"

"You were both dead, and you were having a hostile conversation with each other. I couldn't make out what you were saying."

Taads rocked slowly from side to side.

"When I say I think about nothing," he said finally, "I don't mean
nothingness.
That is nonsense. Tao is eternal and spontaneous. It has no name. You cannot describe it. It is at the same time the beginning of everything and the way in which everything happens. It is not-anything."

Inni did not know what to answer. Suddenly, behind the slow figure in his white monastery, he saw Taads senior looming up on his skis, speeding down a snowy, fairly steep slope.

"The trouble is," said Philip Taads, "that in these things the thought is not contained in the words. Zen uses few words and many examples. To someone who is not familiar with it, it all seems nonsense. All mysticism is always nonsense. Even Christian mysticism, where it overlaps with Buddhism, as it does in Meister Eckhart. To Eckhart, God is both being and nonbeing. You see, nothingness is never far away. The hole, is what the Buddhists call it."

Taads now made the face of someone about to quote something, and said, "I say this: God must be very I, and I must be very God, so all-consumingly
one
that this he and this I are one
is
and are in this isness eternally working at one and the same thing. But as long as this he and this I, that is, God and the soul, are not one single here and one single now, the I cannot work with or be one with the he."

"Isness?"

"Isticheit."

"A nice word." Inni savoured it once again. "Isness."

It was as if Taads suddenly took courage. "According to Chuang Tzu ..."

"Chuang who?"

"Tzu, a Taoist. All things are in a constant state of self-transformation, each in its own way. In this everlasting change, they appear and disappear. What we call 'time' plays no role whatsoever. All things are equal."

Inni heard the father — "I am a colleague of all that exists." For people who had never talked to each other, the Taadses were in amazing agreement, but the idea that a train of thought could be hereditary was unpalatable. What might his own vanished father have transmitted to him?

"But what does this have to do with Eckhart's god?"

"God is a mere word, too." I see.

"Reality and unreality," Taads continued, "good and evil, life and death, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, all things that are opposite are basically one and the same."

Now he looks like Jesus in the temple, thought Inni. He knows it all. If everything was the same, you wouldn't need to bother about anything.

"But how can you live with that in practical terms?"

Taads did not answer. In a homespun universe of fifty square metres, there was perhaps no need for an answer. Inni felt an uncontrollable urge to get up, and did so. I haven't had enough sleep, he thought. When he stood behind Taads, now a blue-swathed, gently rocking dummy whose lower half had disappeared into the floor, he said, "I thought all those doctrines or whatever you call them were meant to achieve harmony somehow with everything that exists. That seemed to me to contradict what you said yesterday. Someone who opts out, that is not harmony."

The blue shape slumped slightly.

"What's the use of all this meditation?" Inni noticed how his own voice had the high-pitched, I-have-you-there tone of a prosecutor in an American television courtroom.

"May I try to explain?" The voice sounded meek now, but it was a long time before it spoke again.

"If you have never thought about it in this way, what I say must sound like nonsense. If you simply want to look at it in purely Western terms, I am a pathological case, right? Someone who for whatever reasons, background, circumstances, the whole lot, cannot cope any longer and says he has had enough of it. It happens that I am not the only one. What the East has given me is the thought that this I of mine is not so unique. Nothing much will be lost when it disappears. It isn't important. I am a hindrance to the world, and the world is a hindrance to me. There will only be harmony if I get rid of both at once. What dies in that case is a bundle of circumstances that bore my name, plus the limited and moreover constantly changing knowledge that these circumstances had about themselves. It doesn't matter to me. I have learnt not to be afraid. That in itself is quite a lot, and I am not capable of anything more. In a Zen monastery I would probably get the stick mercilessly, because it's all no good, but it satisfies me. What I have achieved is negative. I am no longer afraid, and I can quietly dissolve myself the way you dissolve a bottle of poison in an ocean. The ocean won't feel any ill effect, and the poison has been freed from a great burden; it does not have to be poison any more."

"And is that the only solution?"

"What I lack is love."

The words were uttered so desolately that for a moment Inni felt an impulse to lay his hand on that stubbornly self-absorbed head. He thought of a line from a Spanish or South American poet he had once read somewhere, which he had never been able to forget: "Man is a sad mammal that combs its hair."

"Would you please sit down again?" The voice sounded now more drawling than ever and had an undertone of protest. Inni felt he was disturbing an established order here — here, too. He looked at his watch.

"You can't stand any more of it, can you?" said Taads.

"There's an auction at Mak van Waay's." It sounded ridiculous.

"There's plenty of time. You want to get away."

"Yes."

"You think I'm crazy."

"No, I don't. But it oppresses me."

"Me, too. But what is it exactly that oppresses you?"

Inni said nothing and went to the door. When he reached it, he turned. Taads had closed his eyes and was sitting very still.

If this were a movie, I would have walked out long ago, thought Inni. He saw himself standing by the door, tired, balding, a man of the world in decline, someone on his way to an art auction, someone who had strayed into the house of a madman.

"I could have forced myself to adapt," said Taads. "In this world the individual self is of such importance that it is allowed to become absorbed in itself and to grub around in its trivial personal history for years on end with the help of a psychiatrist, so as to be able to cope. But I don't think that is important enough. And then suicide is no longer a disgrace. If I had done it earlier, I would have done it in hatred, but that is no longer the case."

"Hatred?"

"I used to hate the world. People, smells, dogs, feet, telephones, newspapers, voices — everything filled me with the greatest disgust. I have always been afraid I might murder somebody. Suicide is when you have been all around the world with your fear and your aggression and you end up by yourself again."

"It remains aggression."

"Not necessarily."

"What are you waiting for then?"

"For the right moment. The time has not yet come." He said it amiably, as if he were talking to a child.

"You are crazy," said Inni impotently.

"And that is also a mere word." Taads laughed and started rocking from side to side, a blue, human pendulum counting down the time to an as yet invisible moment when the clockface would be allowed to melt and float away to a place where no numbers existed. He was no longer looking at Inni and seemed almost happy, an artist after the performance. The audience slowly opened the door. Street sounds, which did not belong to this room, entered, but Taads did not look up. The door closed behind Inni with a sucking noise, as if as much air as possible were trying to escape with him to the outside world where the anarchic freedom of the Amsterdam day enveloped him. He needed a shower before going to the auction. He would not visit this Taads again for some time.

*       *

Whether his Catholic past had anything to do with it, Inni did not know, but it turned out otherwise. From time to time he made what he called a pilgrimage to the monastery high up in the mountains. It gave him a pleasant feeling of continuity. Taads was always at home and there was no further talk of suicide, so that Inni began to suspect that the lonely monk had decided to allow the moment of his chosen and his natural death to coincide. The Seventies rolled unhurriedly through time, and the world, like Inni himself and the city in which he lived, seemed slowly to disintegrate. People lived alone, and in the evenings they flocked despairingly together in brown, crowded cafes. The women's weeklies told him that he had reached the male menopause, and this fitted in amazingly well with the collapse of the stock exchange and the disembowelled streets of Amsterdam, which by way of compensation, shifted its position agreeably further and further into Africa and Asia. He still lived on his own, travelled widely, and fell in love from time to time, though he found it extremely difficult to take this seriously. For the rest, he did what he had always done. As far as he could see, the world was moving, in an orderly capitalist fashion, towards a logical, perhaps provisional, perhaps permanent, end. When the dollar fell, gold rose; when interest rates went up, the property market collapsed; and as the number of bankruptcies multiplied, rare books increased in value. There was order in this chaos, and anyone who kept his eyes open was in no danger of crashing into a tree, though admittedly you needed a car.

After the bald-headed bell ringers, there now appeared tall white turbans, rastafarian hairdos, and Jesus children in the streets. The end of time was at hand, and he did not think that was a bad thing. The deluge should not come after us; we ought to experience it. A Renaissance drawing, a Cerutti suit, his own worries, a Gesualdo madrigal, against this background acquired a relief that calmer times would not have accorded them; and the prospect of presently seeing politicians, economists, and nations sinking into a gigantic muck heap of their own making gave him tremendous satisfaction. His friends explained to him that this was a frivolous attitude, both nihilistic and wicked. He knew it was not, but did not contradict them. He thought that, unlike most people, he had simply refused to let himself be brainwashed by newspapers, television, eschatologies, and philosophies into believing that "in spite of everything" this was an acceptable world simply because it existed. It would never become acceptable. Beloved maybe, acceptable never. It had been in existence for only a few thousand years, something had gone irrevocably wrong, and now a fresh start had to be made. The loyalty to objects, to people, or to himself, which he felt in his everyday life, altered nothing in this insight. The universe could do quite well without this world, and the world could do quite well without people, things, and Inni Wintrop for a while. But unlike Arnold and Philip Taads, he did not mind waiting for events to take their course. After all, it might take another  thousand  years.   He  had  a  first-class  seat  in  the auditorium, and the play was by turns horrific, lyrical, comic, tender, cruel, and obscene.

*       *

Five years after his first encounter with Philip Taads, Inni received a phone call from Riezenkamp. They, too, had met several times during these five years, and Taads had often been the subject of their conversation.

"Mr Wintrop," said Riezenkamp's voice in the telephone, "I think the moment has arrived. I picked up something quite remarkable for our friend Taads at the Drouot auction, though I admit I can't quite imagine how he will be able to pay for it. He is coming to have a look at it. Would you like to be there?"

"A chawan?" asked Inni. He had done his homework.

"Classical akaraku. A marvel."

The eternal repetition of events. As he crossed the bridge over the Prinsengracht and the Spiegelgracht, he could already see Taads, a solitary figure in the rain. A great sadness descended on him, and he made up his mind not to show it. Somehow or other they had reached the last phase of this crazy affair.

The autumn wind chased tatters of orange and brown leaves across the pavement towards Taads, so that it looked as though, in spite of the rain, he was standing in a flickering, moving fire. But rain or fire, it could not hurt him. He stood nailed to the ground, his gaze fixed on the bowl in the window. Inni joined him, but said nothing. The bowl had the same colour as the dead leaves, all dead leaves together - the gleam of crystallized ginger, sweet and bitter, hard and soft, the luxurious fire of decay. It was a wide bowl, almost clumsy, not made by man but born in an unnameable prehistory. Whereas the black bowl had been threatening, this one was beyond such interpretations. The thought that things had to be seen by people in order to exist was not valid here, for if there were such a thing as a nirvana for objects, this raku tea bowl had reached it aeons ago. Inni realized that Taads dared not go into the shop. He looked at his face sideways. It was more oriental, more closed than ever, but in the eyes burned a fire that inspired terror. When Inni turned away he saw Riezenkamp inside the shop gazing at Taads as Taads was gazing at the bowl. As in old drawings explaining the rules of perspective, he could have drawn the line that ran from himself to Riezenkamp, from Riezenkamp to Taads, from Taads to the bowl.