Supernatural Tales 15

by Walter, Adam

  I remember one moment, before things took the queer turn they did, when I seemed to see the essence of myself in the scene around me. A mass of clouds was driving in from the east. The sky had darkened. I stopped to check my map beside some well-grown trees at a place where the canal turned away from the path and disappeared behind tall grasses. Everything around me was threshing in the wind; the map was twisting in my hands; the boughs overhead seemed to be shedding flakes of shadow onto the surface of the water, making it flicker and turning it black, like a distillation of tears. In that moment I stepped back from the course of my life and saw the joy and pain of it without reference to incidents or people, just its sadness and beauty and agitation in the play of light and shadow and rainy wind.

  And my eye was drawn irresistibly to the core of the scene before me, to the darkest, coldest spot at the bend of the canal where the gleams did not reach and the water was still.

  I was tired and out-of-sorts by the time I got to Tsjerkesleat, the next village on an empty stretch of the Snitserdyke. I hadn’t planned to stop there, but the light was already failing, though it was only four o’clock. With its air of drab propriety and nondescript chapel it was not an attractive place. No one was about and no lamplight was visible behind the close-shuttered fronts of the cottages. It struck me as odd that I could hear nothing of the life that must be going on within, no clatter of pots, no raised voices, just the drizzle of rain on the pavement.

  I rode right through without seeing any sign of a room for rent, turned back and tried the side streets where I had no better luck, though I moved quite far into them, going back and forth and always away from the central square, as if along the sections of a spider’s web. Once I saw someone scurrying ahead of me, a grey shape bent upon some errand, but he was gone before I could reach him and for some reason I was reluctant to call out.

  After half an hour I began to feel rather desperate, as well as wet and hungry. The next town was a good ten miles away and there was no reason to think it would be more hospitable than Tsjerkesleat. It looked as though I should have to spend the night on the open polder. I got off my bicycle and pushed it disconsolately in what I thought was the direction of the high road.

  Even now, I am not sure how to account for my difficulty in getting free of the place. The rain made the narrow streets all look alike and muted any sound of traffic there might have been. That was part of it. But it is also the case that I fell into a sort of daydream or brown study as I went. My mind grew into the sense that I was struggling futilely with my cold, damp surroundings and that the struggle was a permanent condition. As a result, I only half-attended to the turns I was making and half-forgot my purpose in making them.

  After a dreary period which may only have lasted a few minutes, I realized that I was completely lost. The nearest street sign showed that I was in the Oudezijds Nijeholtwoldestraat. Yet I was fairly sure that, the last time I had looked, I had been in the Oudezijds Nijeholtbosjestraat. In any case this was information without meaning, since the scale of my map did not extend to the names of village byways.

  When I finally passed an open shop I nearly overlooked it and went right by. It took me a moment to register the movement I had just glimpsed behind the dingy door-curtain, and to realize what it meant. Even then, I didn’t go in right away. The place was singularly unalluring. A hodgepodge of dingy second-hand goods was laid out in the window: old handkerchiefs, a lacklustre tea service, a rack of pipes with well-chewed stems. On the grimy pane in tangled script was written the word Uitdrager. A rag-and-bone shop, evidently.

  Inside it was dark, dirty and so cluttered as to resemble a cave. Articles of every description were piled on shelves and stacked on the floor: lamps, books, chests of drawers, trays filled with shirt studs and cigarette tins and holiday souvenirs, packets of bolts, packets of washers, chintz, bathroom fixtures, pincushions, watch chains, broken dolls, broken hinges, broken wireless receivers...

  Here and there something better could be seen. I noticed a rather good landscape behind a row of sprung seat cushions, and some of the delftware looked tolerable. But there was no discernment or method in the selection. I moved cautiously down an aisle between banks of piled junk, peering around me in fascination and distaste. The cash desk at the back of the room was unattended, and before I could make up my mind to raisemy voice my eye fell on an object of peculiarly disagreeable appearance.

  Oh, no! Nothing like what you imagine. No shrunken heads or bent surgical instruments. Nothing so macabre. It was just an imitation baroque wall-clock with allegorical figures: Atlas bearing the world; a hefty, diapered Artemis. What made it horrible to me was the dust that furred their shoulders. It was so thick that it sat up in spires, like iron filings.

  Can you see why that got to me? Soft, ordinary dust had been allowed to settle over many years. That it had collected in spires showed that it had never been disturbed, for the merest current of air would have knocked the spires down. Each settling mote, that found a layer of motes to support it, kept its place. But the spires sharpened themselves as they grew. Every layer was narrower than the one beneath it, and the motes on the edges, lacking adequate support, tumbled down the slope. Nothing inexplicable or melodramatic. Just ordinary dust...

  I have said there was no one at the cash desk. In fact, though, there was; I had just failed to notice her. A strange mistake to have made, I know, given my eagerness to find someone and settle my sleeping arrangements. But there it is.

  She was an older woman of a common Dutch type, with a long face, very pale skin and pale eyes (light grey, I think) and what I can only call an abstracted expression, as if she had withdrawn completely into her own thoughts. On that account it could almost be said that she wasn’t really there – not all of her, anyway. I’ve sometimes wondered if her inward absence didn’t blind me to her outward presence, which was itself so self-effacing.

  She wasn’t doing anything, just sitting in half-profile behind and slightly to one side of the desk, with her hands folded in her lap. It seemed to me there was something antiquated about the way she was dressed, but I may have been confusing ordinary village attire with the sober finery of those northern Renaissance portrait subjects she reminded me of. There’s a Memling at Bruges that is very like her, with the hair pulled back under a linen wimple and the grey-blue skin stretched tightly over the skull. Only Memling’s picture has a definiteness about it that was missing from my impression of this woman.

  It may be for that reason, too, that I can report so little of what she actually said, though we did communicate in a rudimentary pidgin of German and English. When I asked if she could suggest a lodging-house or pension in the town, she nodded at a card on the desk on which was written, KAMER VRIJ. I was greatly relieved, especially when she gave me to understand that I could have tea and biscuits for three florins more than the price of the room. It struck me, however, that while she was thus solving my problems with a quiet word or two, her sober mien never brightened, and she never looked at me.

  Her gaze rested sometimes on the photograph of a young soldier in a small oval frame on her desk; and when we moved to her sitting-room, where I was duly regaled with tea, I noticed another photograph of the same young man, in mufti this time and a year or two younger. From this I gathered that she had lost a son in the war.

  She was not one to chat, and my own efforts at conversation were half-hearted, for I was exhausted by the strain of the past hour and at the same time almost giddy with relief.

  She showed me where I might wash and left me to settle down for the night. I cannot say that I cared for my room, which showed signs of the same neglect I had noticed in the shop. The furniture and decorations had been given a wipe with the dust-cloth at some not-too-distant date, but I was conscious nevertheless of such deeply ingrained filth in the corners and behind the visible surfaces that I found it difficult to relax.

  My bed, too, was unpleasantly low, and set in the darkest corner. When I got into it, it pro
ved to tilt up slightly at the foot. Whether for this or some other reason I did not sleep well: my dreams turned repeatedly on the notion that I was being tipped head-long into a hole. I felt quite ragged in the morning, and when I had made my ablutions and drunk some more strong Frisian tea, I was ready to leave.

  She was sitting in the same attitude, behind and slightly to one side of the desk, with her hands in her lap and her eyes turned away. It was clearer and colder than the day before, but even so I still could not get a definite view of her. It struck me that my inability to see her properly mirrored her own avoidant gaze – but you will say this was nonsense. Her words were civil enough, but the apathy of her manner gave them a hollow ring. I settled my bill and was turning to go when she spoke again. My weak German hindered me.

  “An Andenken? You wish me to have an Andenken?” I pieced together the parts of the word. “Perhaps you mean a souvenir?”

  “Ja, ja, souvenir,” she said, making a slow, mechanical gesture round the shop. “Ein Stück—one piece. Anything you like.”

  This would have seemed a handsome offer if I could have connected it to any warmth of feeling on her part. But she spoke in such an indifferent tone that I felt she was only discharging a ceremonial obligation. There was not the least trace of friendliness in her manner and she still did not meet my eye.

  I looked round for some suitable trinket—anything would do.

  “Take your time,” she said, with slow emphasis.

  “It is awfully decent of you,” I said. “That landscape is fine, but I should hate to separate it from its frame; and as I’m on my bicycle...”

  What else could I choose? A plate? It would never survive the journey in my rucksack. I noticed a rack of mixed clothes down another aisle. One or two of the neckties weren’t bad...

  “What about this?” I asked, taking a dark blue jacket on its hanger from the rack. It was cut in an old-fashioned style, somewhat high-waisted and long, but the material was excellent and the condition good. I put down my pack and tried it on.

  “Seems to be my size. Just right in fact.”

  I reflected that I had sent my own jacket ahead from Zwolle with the rest of my things, and that the weather was turning colder.

  “I’ll take this, if I may,” I said.

  For the first time she looked straight at me. ‘“You choose the jacket?” she said.

  “Why . . . yes, if that’s all right.”

  “Very fine, very old,” she said, rising unexpectedly and coming to me. “Ladies of the town, they make. Many ladies, weduwes, many years.” Her knobby hands fluttered like moths about my shoulders as she patted and smoothed it into place.

  “It has a history, then?” I asked, somewhat startled by her sudden animation. But her answer was lost to me in the babble of Dutch and Frisian that came from her. I caught jasje, which seemed to mean jacket; jasje and weduwes were repeated. In the meantime she was chivvying me towards the door, and in less than a minute I found myself in the street again, overwhelmed by her voluble good wishes for a safe journey (I suppose they were), and left to find my way.

  That was the last I ever saw of her.

  In the clear morning light I had no trouble proceeding. There were people about, and the chapel spire, in plain sight, pointed me back to the town square. Before long I was on the road to Leeuwarden again, pedalling smoothly and delighting in the warmth and dashing cut of my new jacket.

  Only one other incident of note occurred before I reached the city. It is perhaps entirely irrelevant, as well as trivial, yet I mention it because it was unpleasant in a way that I connect with the unpleasantness of that night in Tsjerkesleat. As the afternoon drew on the sky clouded over, and I was lucky to find an agreeable lunch-room just as it started to rain. I prolonged my meal with a cigar and a glass of oude jenever, and at last, when the sun came out, I resumed my way, enjoying the exertion that drove me through space on my own power.

  Somewhere between Eagum and Wergea, just a few miles south of Leeuwarden, the path dips into a grove of elms thickly set with grass and undergrowth. The air is cool and moist, the light dim and green. I was leaning into the descent, confident in my steady hand though I could not see very far ahead, when I noticed what looked like dozens of short, black twigs strewn laterally across the path in front of me, and at the same time, heard a series of moist, popping noises superimposed on a continuous undertone, like that of sticky mastication, arising from my tyres.

  Squinting into the gloom, I realized I was riding through a herd of black slugs, hundreds, perhaps thousands strong, that was migrating from one side of the path to the other. I could just make out the jellylike horns and rippled shoulders of the nearest ones as my tyres cut through them. Exclaiming with horror and disgust, not so much at them as at what I was doing to them, I tried to steer a zigzag course, but it was hopeless. My speed was too great to permit of nice manoeuvres, nor could I stop without dismounting and crushing more of them underfoot; so, willy-nilly, with a sickening heart, I drove straight on for perhaps ten seconds more, doing horrible execution on my “grandpa’s bike”, now transformed into a murderous juggernaut.

  I can only tell you that this incident threw me back into the dejection from which I had struggled to emerge since Kobold de Balg offered me the job a week before. In a curious way, too, it set me up for the apprehensions that began to work upon my reason. I don’t want to claim any special authenticity for them. As I told you at the start, there was never any question of a sudden intrusion; and since the whole business ended with my nervous collapse I cannot be sure that what I have to report are facts, and not delusions.

  I had telegraphed ahead to Professor de Balg and arranged to meet him at the university. I remembered him as a man of vital presence, big but not fat, with a short spade beard and a booming voice. My first impression on catching sight of him again, was that he had sadly aged. True, his stature was the same, and his hair was still more brown than grey; but there was about him a defeated air, as if he had been perforated (I thought) and the breath of life were slowly leaking out of him. This impression was confirmed by a reticence in the way he greeted me, a tepidity in his smile and handshake, that were disappointing after the encouragement of his letter and threw a shadow over our meeting.

  I took a small flat on the Bonifatiusplein, opposite the old church, and spent an hour or two setting up house. The picture of Kobald de Balg recurred to me as I worked, and the wan, cold light that played over it somehow chilled the pleasure I would have felt in puttering about the place, unpacking and bestowing my things and generally making myself at home.

  When I turned out the pockets of my new jacket I made a surprising discovery. A flash of orange caught my eye; I investigated, and found that the insides of both pockets were lined with silk—and what silk! Not sober panels in a congruent shade of blue or grey, but finely-worked mosaics of small, grosgrain pieces, each vividly coloured and stitched to the others with great skill—by “the ladies of the town”, I realized, remembering the words of my Tsjerkesleat landlady.

  I turned the pockets inside out and studied the linings at length, amazed at the quality of the needlework, the marvellous integration of pure, disparate hues, orange and gold but also scarlet, green, blue and white, sometimes banded, sometimes diagonally striped, with here and there a curious emblem or paraphe in the centre. The small, oblong patches reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think of what. After a while I gave it up, but my satisfaction in the choice I had made was increased, and I wore the jacket thereafter with a sense that my pockets were lined with jewels.

  In general, though, the days and weeks that followed were marked by a steady decline in my morale. The fall semester began, and I entered upon my teaching duties with a degree of enthusiasm that surprised me, following as it did on the complete desolation of my hopes in the life I had left behind. But – whether because my expectations were too high, or because I lacked the gift of inspiring interest in my own subject – I soon noticed that my stud
ents’ attention was fading. I seemed unable to connect with them, either during my twice-weekly lectures or in the advanced seminar I gave on Wednesday afternoons.

  On one occasion, just as I was warming to some point of esoteric interest, I looked up from my notes and felt suddenly alone, as if I were chattering into a void filled with distant tailor’s dummies. It gave me a shock, I can tell you. Instead of people, I seemed to be speaking to a lot of dry husks which, if I had but poked them with my pen, would have broken apart with a dusty, crumbling sound. But they were too far away for that. I seemed to see them through an expanse of mote-filled air – lifeless mannequins on the fringes of my vision.

  I faltered, lost my place, and a feeling of complete dislocation came over me. After a moment, one or two of the mannequins looked up, and I saw that I had been mistaken; of course they were alive, listening to me quietly, recording my words. Yet even their renewed animation had something dim about it, and did not entirely erase the impression I had just received.

  I had looked forward to getting to know the city of Leeuwarden, but there too I was disappointed. A cast lay over the old houses and narrow streets, not just of age, but of sorrow and failure, that worked subtly and constantly on my mind.

  At first I tried to account for it in terms of what I knew of the history of the place: In 1637, the very cobblestones below my window had run with blood when the Duke of Alva ordered the simultaneous beheading of fifty-seven noblemen. But after a week or two, when I had settled into a daily routine and come to know some of the inhabitants by sight, I realised that the place took its melancholy air directly from them, and that the sorrows of the dead (whatever they were) merely resonated in sympathy with those of the living, like overtones in the musical scale.