Stolen Pleasures (26 page)

The horses were halted. The driver waited for someone to climb down. Nobody did, “Tycho Brahe,” he said to the air.

Noel leaped down and helped her down, and the horses clopped on.

No bicycle, no wagon appeared along the road from either horizon. The silence must be the presence of the sea, unseen but all around, a silence not to be trusted. Across the road, a deserted Turistgarden, white slat tables and chairs under trees, and, farther back, a yellow-brick hotel strung with colored lightbulbs. On their side of the empty road, a redbrick church with a slate roof, with pink roses in the yard, and, back along the road a few steps, the Tycho Brahe Museet. Closed, so small it must contain only a few precious books, a few drawings.

Giant mulberry trees towered over the little museum, and there, under the trees, a tall stone statue. The Astronomer.

“It's him!” Noel hurried toward it, as though the statue was the man himself, about to flee.

She found him roaming around the statue, gazing up with scholarly respect and peering down at the indecipherable inscription carved along the base. Almost twice as tall as any man, the Astronomer wore a ruff around his neck, a cloak that hung way down to the soles of his boots, knickers of many stony folds, and down at his side he held a quadrant. His head thrown back, he was scanning the heavens, his goatee pointing at the large shallow bowl of earth where his observatory had been. Out in the fields behind
the Astronomer, a farmer was burning chaff, and the long, long ribbon of smoke stayed close to the ground. A tractor started up, and a frightened rabbit bounded along before it.

Noel took her hand and led her down the slope of the wide grassy bowl, and they stood within the lost observatory, within the Castle of the Heavens, as fancifully, as airily beautiful as castles that are only imagined. Every stone gone, carried away by the peasants, nothing left, and, where the foundation had been, now filled with five centuries of earth. A toad at her feet stayed where it was, unafraid of large, slow animals. Up there at the top of the castle in the night, how did the Astronomer look to a boy on the highest branch, straining his neck to see? Was he plotting an invasion of the heavens? Was he a predator on the trail of one of those heavenly creatures formed of stars? Night after night, did the peasants lie awake, expecting avenging angels to come swooping down?

“Eleanor, are you hungry? Are you thirsty?”

They sat down by the toad, and Noel brought up from his knapsack a bottle of mineral water, cheese, bread, sweet crackers, raisins, and chocolates.

“If you eat this raisin, all my wishes will come true.” He kissed her temple.

She took the raisin on her lip and swallowed it. All his wishes, she knew, were for her recovery and hers were not. With jokes, with conundrums, he hoped to take her back to that spirited time at the beginning of their future together. A young couple again, picnicking on the spot from where a universe had flowered.

Along the road, in search of the Astronomer's underground observatory, Noel's light boots stirring up puffs of dust, her sandals
stirring up none. She had got so thin, her bare legs, so thin, were a warning to her. The winds, Noel was saying, had buffeted the castle, interfering with the precision of observations, and so the Astronomer had taken his instruments underground. And what did the people think of
that,
she wondered. What did they think when they saw him walking along this very road at night, wrapped in his long cloak, his gleamy, gloomy eyes always upward, at his side a servant with a lantern, cautioning him about his step. Did they think he was hiding from the wrath of God? That all would perish but not him? That when he poked his nose out of his underground refuge, that silver nose that replaced his own lost in a duel, it would not melt, it would only turn gold, reflecting the unearthly, revenging fire?

Off to the side of the road, children were running about within a fantasy circle no larger than their own yard, a playground of copper objects in the geometrical shapes of a dome, a tent, a cone, upon a carpet of short, dry grass.

“Come look,” Noel said, and she stepped into the circle.

Skylights, these copper forms were the Astronomer's skylights that he had opened to the night's panorama, segment by segment. Scales of green-blue patina covered them, and hinges hung loose. The little girl slid down the slanting copper lid over the entrance door, and the two boys followed after, all shouting dares, their voices ringing far on the still air. Then on they went, circling the skylights.

Noel opened a section of the dome, and the children came up beside them, the little girl pressing close to her. Seven feet or so down to the earth floor, to rocks and bottles and rainwater. While
Noel and the children looked down, while the children shuffled their black leather sabots, and a rooster crowed nearby, she gazed at the girl's blond hair, how silky, how shiningly new under the sky. The little girl was the first to laugh, a mocking titter, and the boys took it up, roughly. They already knew there was nothing down there.

 

OUT ON THE sea again, the waters darker, films of rain in the distance, the island sliding under. Through heavy dusk, the boat approached Landskrona, and, from far, she mistook the trees of the town for black piles of iron ore.

They sat in a dimly lit waiting station, on a bench against the wall. She was thinking that there was an everywhere that Noel and the others could never measure, even with their perfect and indisputable instruments, even with the finest device of all which was their minds, and this everywhere, always beyond them, was grief and was what inconsolable meant. She was thinking that someone, somewhere in the world, goes out into that everywhere and never comes back. Noel touched her knee, bringing her back.

Yellow lights, white lights were moving toward them through the murky night, along with the hushing presence of a large boat bound for Copenhagen. She wanted to stay up on the deck, in a sheltered place, watching for shore lights. Noel said it was too cold up there, but he wouldn't go down into the salon unless she came with him. She went down, then, into the rousing noise of drinkers at every table and the portable organ's music, pounded out by a young man in suit and tie. Glasses were everywhere on red tablecloths, gliding on spilled beer. A woman was dancing alone among the dancing couples, her eyes closed, the flesh of her lifted arms swaying.

Noel found places for them at a long table near the entrance. She sat down next to a handsome old man in a dark suit, and a dancing restlessness in his legs brought his heavy shoe against her sandaled foot. Unaware of her presence until then, he looked at her and apologized. Then he looked at her longer, trying to see if he knew her, if she had left her place for a while and now had come back and was beside him again.

Noel, leaning across her, asked him where the boat was from.

An excursion boat, he said, leaving Copenhagen in the morning and returning at night, and the whole day's pleasure was evident on his rosy face, a look that was perfectly at home and that might have been there the first day of his life.

“American?” he asked Noel.

Noel nodded.

“Did you come by flying machine?”

She nodded, looking into his face and imagining him as a boy, out in the night, his eyes lifted to a moving light lower than the stars, an amazing machine that flew through the air and filled the dome of the sky with an echoing roar. An event as much of a miracle as the Astronomer's star.

“We went to Tycho Brahe's island,” she said.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “A tourist garden is there. My sister was there for the honeymoon.”

“One night,” she told him, “he saw an immense star that wasn't there before. He said it meant the death of princes, all sorts of sad things. He believed, you see, that our destiny is in the stars.”

He was amused by her, she could see. He must hear this kind of talk from strangers in taverns, fellow passengers aboard excursion
boats, their need to be intimately serious rising fast like the foam on their beers.

“Yourself,” she said, “do you believe that?”

“Ah, yes. Yes.”

They held each other's gaze, the way she'd seen strangers do in a public place like this, people caught up in a surprising kinship sparked by the closeness of bodies. Strongly old, this man. How many beloved faces had he gazed into just as he was gazing into hers? The other faces gone, each one, while he lived on and on. A time to be born and a time to die. Wasn't that the only way to accept their going? Wasn't that the portent in every star in the sky and in every sky that ever was? He must know this, and know it by heart.

An uproar, louder shouts, louder music, everyone cheering on a young man who had leaped to a tabletop and was dancing up there.

 

IN THE TAXI to their tranquil street of trees, Noel was silent, wondering, she knew, if she had gone over the edge, if she had given over her mind to the Astronomer's superstitious one.

A lamp was on in the hall, for them. The little family was asleep. When he lay down in his separate bed, he leaned over her and brushed the wisps of hair from her forehead, hoping to clear her mind by clearing her brow. She lifted her arms, and, holding him, a picture of the Astronomer composed itself for her eyes and for her hand someday, up in his observatory, the young Brahe, his face lifted to that brilliancy, to that inescapable portent, its reflection floating in his eyes, and in the gems on his plump fingers, and in the waters of a fountain, and on every leaf turned toward the heavens.

T
HE SILENT TRAIN ascended through forest and alongside a torrent so cold and so swift the water was white, and small white birds flew up like spray. On a bridge undergoing repairs the train came to a halt. Just outside Thomas Lang's window, a workman in a black knit cap was hammering at a railing, and the silence all around isolated each ring of the hammer.

Lang arrived in Grindelwald in the evening, coming from Bern where, contrary to his intention to call on a friend from the States and tell him about the insoluble task his memoirs had become, he had stayed only half a day and called on no one. In the early night he wandered along a path on the outskirts of the town. The day was a national holiday, and fireworks opened in languid sprays all around in the dusk, and the boom of fireworks echoed against the mountains. Someone approached him on the path, a figure twice as tall as himself. Closer, he saw it was a little girl, half as tall as himself, carrying a long stick covered with tallow, the torch at its tip casting around her a high, black figure of shadows. Up on the dark
mountains small lights burned here and there, far, far apart—fires perched on the night itself. In the morning, a snowy mountain stood just outside his hotel window, brought closer by the sun almost to within reach of his hand.

On a small, quiet train he went higher, up to Kleine Scheidegg, up to an old hotel where twelve years ago he had stayed a few days in winter, and not alone. The mountains had impressed him then as a phenomenon on display, but now he was shocked by their immensity, hypnotized by their beauty and crystal silence. Cowbells and voices rang in the silence with an entrancingly pure pitch, and the density of the stone was silence in another guise.

The elderly, elegant manager registered him at the desk in the small lobby. A very tall, strong man, also elderly, in a dark green apron, whom Lang had observed carrying up four suitcases at a time, carried up his two, while another assistant, also in a green apron, a slight, dark man, surely Spanish, graciously shy, stepped in a lively way to the foot of the wide, curving staircase and gestured for him to go up. Lang climbed the stairs with his hand on the rail. He had not often assisted himself that way and had no need to now. He was an erect, lean, and healthy sixty, and why, then, was his hand on the banister?

The silence in the room was like an invasion, a possession by the great silent mountains. The cloth on the walls, a print of pastoral scenes with amorous couples, flute players, and lambs, roused a memory of another room, somewhere else in this hotel, where he had lain in an embrace with a woman who, at the time, was very dear. All that he remembered of the previous visit were the three persons he had been traveling with—the woman, a close friend,
and the friend's wife—all now no longer in touch with him and perhaps not with one another. They had come to watch a movie being made of a novel of his. In the novel there had been only a brief mention of the Alps, but the movie director and the scriptwriter had worked out a counterfeit scene from that remark, and he had watched, amused and apart.

Once in the night he was wakened by his heart. His heart always wakened him in time for him to witness his own dying, and he waited now with his hand over his chest. When the fear subsided he took his notebook from the bedside table and fumbled to uncap his pen. Through the translucent curtains the sky and the white mountains gave him enough light to write by, but his hand was given no reason to write. Was this another place he would leave, his notebook empty? Traveling all spring and into the summer, he had found no place where he could begin his memoirs. If one place had been so full of the sound of the ocean—not just the waves, whose monotonous beat often went unheard, but the threat in the depths—another place was too full of the sounds of the city—insane noises. And in quiet places he heard, in memory, the voices of his healers back in the States, men who had never truly known just what it was he had lost, and gave the loss such facile names—confidence, faith, whatever—and the names of several persons who had been dear to him and were lost to him. These healers had promised him his completed memoirs, and other novels in the future, if only he would begin, because, they said, work itself wrought miracles and brought the spirit back from the grave. But there was a loss beyond their probing, a loss they were unwilling to accept as the finality he knew it was, a loss, a failing, that might even be commonplace
and yet was a sacrilege. It was indifference, like a drugged sleep, to everyone else on earth. Ah, how could that change have come about in himself when his very reason for writing had been the belief that all life was miraculous?