Rituals (7 page)

The silence of the man who had just spoken at such length became emphatic. Had he been tried and found wanting?

The woods became sparser and lighter, the trees opened out, and through the last remaining, meagre battle formations, he saw a tall shield of light through which they would shortly walk and which veiled the purple heath in a dreamy, hazy glow, making everything seem very empty and very still.

He would have liked to pause. Better still he would have liked to lie down, to press his face into those sharp, crumbly plants, his body against the ground, as he so often did when he was alone, because then he felt he could slowly merge with the earth, really get inside it with his knees, his chest, and his chin, with everything that was hard and bony about him. Thus he would not be like a cat lying on a cushion. No, he would be more like the half silted-up wreckage of a ship. But for that kind of love affair, there was no place on a woodland walk with Arnold Taads. He was convinced that if he slowed down, his name would boom across the heath as if he were a dog.

Or had Taads already forgotten him? He did not look up or back and would probably have been able to walk the same route blindfolded, with the same rhythmic, mechanical movements. A wound-up toy soldier on the march. As they reached the house, the clock struck seven.

*       *

Time, Inni learned that day, was the father of all things in Arnold Taads's life. He had divided the empty, dangerous expanse of the day into a number of precisely measured parts, and the boundary posts at the beginning and end of each part determined his day with unrelenting sternness. Had he been older, Inni would have known that the fear that dominated Arnold Taads demanded its tithes in hours, half hours, and quarter hours, randomly applied points of fracture in the invisible element through which we must wade as long as we live. It was as if, in an endless desert, someone had singled out a particular grain of sand and decided that only there could he eat and read. Each of these preappointed grains of sand called forth, with compelling force, its own complementary activity. A mere ten millimetres further and fate would strike. Someone arriving ten minutes early or late was not welcome. The maniacal second hand turned the first page, played the first note on the piano, or, as now, put a pan of goulash on the stove on the last stroke of seven.

"I cook once a week," said Arnold Taads, "usually a stew. And soup. I make exactly enough, seven portions for myself and one for a guest. If no one comes, Athos gets it."

Inni was pleased he would be eating the dog's portion. He did not care much for dogs, especially when they lived in such suffocating symbiosis with their masters. It struck quarter past seven, and they sat down at the table.

"When we visit your Aunt Therese next week," said Taads, "you will find it a complete madhouse. Most of the Wintrops have a screw loose, but when it comes to choosing a mate, total lunacy takes over. Mostly they tend to pick someone who is quite normal, and then they drive him insane in the shortest possible time, or else they take someone they don't have to spend any effort on because he is soft in the head already. After I had given your aunt the push, she married an absolute imbecile, with money of course, and she became very unhappy as a result, as you have been able to observe for yourself. A number one neurotic. I am glad I got out in time. She was a beautiful woman in the old days, very attractive, but with a kind of impetuous possessiveness that frightened me. Your whole family frightened me, actually. They have two faults: they never know where to draw the line, and they refuse to suffer. By that I mean this: they deny everything that borders on the unpleasant. They turn away from it. They know sentimentality but not loyalty. When things get tough, they are off. Your aunt finds it amusing to dump you here on my doorstep, but she should have known better than to pick an ex-notary. We shall concoct a tidy little settlement out of this for you. Why I bother, God knows. Probably out of spite. But you seem to have a certain talent, although I wouldn't know what for."

He ate in the same way that he walked — fast, with mechanical movements. A feeding automaton. If for whatever reason, thought Inni, he suddenly looked sideways, that independent arm, driven by a different authority, would poke the fork into his cheek. Half past seven, clearing the table and making coffee. Quarter to eight, coffee and "my fourth cigarette. The fifth I smoke before I go to bed."

The heavy scent of a Black Beauty wafted through the room.

"What is it like," asked Arnold Taads, "not to have a father?"

This man asked only questions to which there were no answers. So Inni did not reply. Not to have a father was
not
to have something. So there was nothing to say about it.

"Did you ever miss him?"

"No."

"Did you know him?"

"Until I was ten."

"What do you remember of him?"

He thought about his father, but because it was virtually the first time he had ever done so deliberately, he found it difficult. His father used to say "so long" when leaving the house, and once he had hit his mother in Inni's presence, and, as Inni had gathered, on other occasions too, when he was not present. And one night when, woken by the air raid siren, he had rushed down the stairs in a panic, he had surprised his father on the sofa with the nursemaid. From that, in retrospect, somewhat uncomfortable position, he had ordered Inni back to his bedroom. Later his father had married the nursemaid, his mother having disappeared as a result of one of those mysterious manoeuvres with which grown-ups bend the world to their will. Inni had stayed with his father and the girl, but in the hunger winter he had been sent to his mother, who lived somewhere in Gelderland. At the end of that winter his father had been killed during the bombing of The Hague. The news had filled Inni with pride. Now he, too, was really part of the war.

He had never seen his father's grave, and when he had begun to take an interest in it, it was no longer there. It had been cleared, someone told him — a very special variant of "cleared away" — and so he had remembered this: his father had been cleared away. In yellowy war photographs he would see a balding man with sharp features, a sombre clerk from the late Middle Ages, although his mother had told him he used to dance on bar tables, to gypsy music. These were the memories he had of his father, and there was only one conclusion: his father was well and truly dead.

"I don't remember much."

Then Taads again, this time in the disguise of a professor. "Sartre says that if you have no father, you are not burdened with a super-ego. No father on your back, no bullying regulating factor in your life. Nothing to rebel against or to hate or to measure your conduct against."

I don't know about that, thought Inni. If it meant that he was alone in the world, it was correct. That was just what he felt, too, and it suited him splendidly. Other people, like the man facing him now, had to be kept at a distance. And they should not talk too much about him either. So long as they talked about themselves, or about his relations, none of whom he knew anyway, it was fine. He had twice been expelled from boarding school because he "did not fit in with the other boys", he "did not join in", he "had a perfidious influence on the other students". They hated him — that would have been a more accurate way of putting it. They had put litanies of hatred in his bed ("Sour lemon, pray for us"), but it had left him strangely unmoved. Those boys were different. On visiting days they were surrounded by families, fathers in brown suits and mothers in floral-print dresses. He had nothing to do with them, any more than with this man here who had come straying into his life. He refused to allow them in, that was what it boiled down to. It was just as if everything happened in a film. He might be sitting in the audience following the action attentively, certainly if the actors were as fascinating as this one, but really to be part of it was impossible. He remained, even when he felt sympathy for the actor, an onlooker. If you kept silent, the stories would come all by themselves.

And come they did.

In that silent room, the story of his family was unfolded, as in a recitative according to the gospel of Arnold Taads. There was no place in this devastating account for the light relief of an aria. Instead, there came every now and again, welling up from an abyss of doom and sorrow, the deep sigh of the dog, which the anonymous composer had interpolated in masterly fashion; for exactly in the brief interval after the description of yet another Wintrop folly, aberration, or monstrous deed, the dog, with a perfect sense of timing, let a thrust of air escape from the subterranean labyrinths to which he was apparently connected.

Did they rehearse? wondered Inni. Dogs do not live all that long, and with one extra portion of goulash a week they clearly did not expect too many visitors. The only possible answer was that these lectures, sermons, recitatives, were also delivered in solitude, with the dog doing duty as continuo, punctuation, and emphasis. Light, air — this talented animal had learned to fill the invisible airstream that envelops us and partly flows through us, with affects and affirmations. He had discovered the meaning of destiny and disgust, not leaving them hanging in the indifferent surrounding air, prey to the destructive metronomics of the mantelpiece clock. On the contrary he filled the air in artistic convolution with his one-eyed master, with something that was at the same time the echo of what had just been uttered and a lighter, more vicious whiplash forcing the soloist to maintain the tension thus far achieved.

*       *

This tension, Inni was to learn, was a negative force. He did not appreciate it immediately, though that first evening already contained the seed of his friendship with Arnold Taads. One of his characteristics — and this, too, he did not know at the time, because whatever his own views on the matter, he had simply not yet lived long enough — was that he could never turn his back on anyone in whom he had once become interested. Often these were what the outside world, the world of all other people combined, would call "odd fish", people who seemed totally incongruous with Inni's sarcastic or urbane style. "There's another one from Inni's sewer, madhouse, collection, underworld . . . Who on earth did I see you with at Schiphol yesterday? . . . How can you possibly spend an evening with
her?
... Are you still seeing that same girl?"

But all that came later.

Now it was Arnold Taads, a man whose relations with the world had been unsuccessful and who therefore pushed the world away from himself in high-pitched, sharp tones as if he were still its master. If this messenger of renunciation had been the fifth Evangelist, he would have had a seagull as his symbol, a solitary grey shape on a rock, standing out against the darker shades of an ominous sky. Inni had seen them in nature films, stalked by telephoto lenses. How they suddenly threw their beaks wide open, let out a piercing cry of rage and warning, and with vigorous wingbeats, swept into the sky, where still alone, they sailed away on an invisible, gently heaving airstream. And then again, at intervals those cries, as if something had to be slashed, demolished.

The clock struck. The man and the dog stood up.

"I'll take you to the bus stop," said Arnold Taads.

From a stand in the hall he took a wooden, umbrellalike object covered with a kind of shiny parchment.

"This is a parong," he said. Indeed, no sooner were they outside than the rain was making loud tapping noises on the stretched surface. Everything fitted. As they walked down the garden path, Inni looked back at the house, and even more than when they were inside, he was conscious of the fierce loneliness to which this man had condemned himself. There are many different forms of suffering, and although Inni, in retrospect, must have had his fair share of unhappiness, it is nevertheless rare for the raw state of suffering to be revealed to someone of his age as clearly as happened now. Suffering, not as an event, but as a deliberately sought, irrevocable punishment. Irrevocable because no other people were involved in it, because this man who was marching along beside him so buoyantly and robustly, like an athlete who has beaten the world record, appeared to suffer from himself, in himself. Without being able to define it at the time, Inni knew he was here confronted with the smell of death, a realm from which one cannot return if, perhaps by accident or simply through inattention, one has strayed into it.

He was relieved when the bus, exactly on time, drove off. Arnold Taads and his dog had already vanished into the night, the rain, the woods.

The bus, the train, the long walk down the tree-lined roads of Hilversum, along which the villas stood like dark tombs in their gardens, and sultry, heavy scents of flowers after rain — among all this sweetness was a strange taste of farewell. To what exactly he did not yet know, but that a farewell had to be said, was certain.

That night he did not dream of Arnold Taads because he could not sleep. Yet the vision he had, in which Taads played a part, was more like a dream than anything else. His host was sitting opposite him, exactly as he had done in reality that evening. He was undoubtedly the same man who had taken him to the bus stop a few hours earlier, the man with the two skins and the one eye, a person who had appeared in his life as an instrument of fate. Inni could never refrain from attaching to the word
appear
that special significance that, for Catholics, it has had since Fatima and Lourdes. Nor could it be denied that Arnold Taads was more of an apparition than anything else, and a seated one at that, a variant never mentioned with reference to the Virgin Mother. The other paraphernalia were all there. From the standard lamp poured a constant nimbus of electrified sanctity around the battered face. The only thing that did not really fit was that this sanctity was unwilling to impart itself to the actual face, which with its many incongruities, appeared to preclude serenity. This was a saint broken in two, who had already suffered so much that he was allowed to bathe in this unearthly glow but whose face still showed so many traces of other, darker worlds that you could not even be sure you were not dealing with a deceptive manifestation of the devil. And now a pimple, lump, wart - he wasn't sure exactly what — some kind of unevenness, an imperfection of the skin, had become noticeable, and the heavenly lamplight carved more sharply the two deep, scornful, tormented furrows running from the sides of the nose to the mouth. Even more than the eyes, because even the blind, directionless eye joined in and filled at least half of the geometric room with unseen torments, he remembered in the half-sleep of that night those two furrows that, like thin puppet strings, controlled the corners of the mouth, making them rise and fall independently of each other. Inni was to regale his friends with the associated story until well into old age, though never without feeling a knife-thrust of guilt towards the dead man he was betraying, who had, in fact, perished through the impact of that story.