"Taads carried on with it. Whether he still does it now, I don't know. Maybe he has got just as far as the teacher by now. I never talk about it with him, out of embarrassment, I think. He seems to me the sort of person that goes to any lengths, and I think he has organized his entire life around it. And yet he still has that tenseness, that is what I find so strange. You never see him in a bar, women I have never heard him speak of, and the only time I have ever seen him talking to someone else was today, to you. And those bowls, of course, they have something to do with it as well. It is all connected with the tea ceremony and therefore with Zen. He lives in his own Japan, our friend. What do you think of it?"
"It doesn't really mean much to me," said Inni. "Strange wisdoms from the Far East being sold to the unhappy Western middle classes. But I daresay it's better than heroin."
Not much of an answer, he thought, but the subject did not interest him, or rather, he did not want to have anything to do with it.
"The curious thing is," said Riezenkamp, who evidently preferred to pursue his own line of thought, "that so much of what is being preached or claimed by those people — I still do take some kind of interest in it — is demonstrable nonsense, and this is true both for some theories on yoga and for the physical aspects of meditation, and that nevertheless the effect can prove beneficial."
"The same is true of the Last Rites," said Inni crustily, but of course, a Calvinist wouldn't understand about that. Riezenkamp was silent. Outside, a sudden rough gust of wind bent the branches of the trees with a furious blow. In a few moments it would be pouring rain, and he had no umbrella with him. This day was beginning to weigh heavily. A girl, dead pigeons, a shadow from the underworld, an oriental madman, sermons, and now this sudden decline of a summer day that disagreeably seemed to herald autumn, that sad season which should still be so far away.
The art dealer did not notice his impatience.
"I see Taads has given you his favourite book to read," he said. "I know it, it's superb. There is both a lot of action in it, and very little. It's full of nuances, small shifts with dramatic consequences. If anyone has ever succeeded in weaving the tea ceremony into a story, Kawabata has, brilliantly. You don't often find that, an object as the main character of a story."
To Inni's dismay he took yet another book out of the bookcase.
"I only show you this so you will know what shino looks like. If you have a physical image of it, you will understand the book better."
The white hands turned the pages. What exactly was so mysterious about bowls, or about chalices for that matter? Upside-down skulls that no longer contained anything, that were no longer turned towards the earth but towards heaven. They were things into which you could put something, but only something that came from above, from the higher world of suns, moons, gods, and stars. An object that could at the same time be empty and full was in itself somehow mysterious, but that could equally well be said of a plastic cup. So the material of which it was made must have something to do with it as well. The gold of the chalice evoked blood and wine. And when you looked at these shino bowls, it seemed inconceivable that anyone should ever drink anything from these grey and whitish chalices painted with light purple brush strokes, other than the rarefied, bitter green liquid Philip Taads had given him. If Christ had been born in China or Japan, tea would now be turned into blood every day on five continents. But in the tea ceremony it was not so much the tea that mattered, he realized, as the way in which you drank it. The form of the ceremony ultimately had to lead to an inner experience that pointed the way to the closed gardens of mysticism. What a strange animal was man, always somehow needing objects, "made" things with which to facilitate his journey to the twilit realms of the higher world.
Cars began to sound their horns outside. Somewhere a truck was blocking the road, and mankind, which not so long ago had landed on the moon in one graceful leap, uttered its displeasure with the enraged screams of an orangutan unable to find any bananas.
"In 1480," said Riezenkamp, "but nobody knows this, a witch cursed this spot and said that Amsterdam would perish in chaos and hellish noise."
He put his hand on the inscrutable Buddha mask and said, "The falsification lies perhaps in this, that such faces, and all they ever uttered, could only come into existence in a world without noise." He paused briefly so as to allow the swelling wail of dozens of horns to be heard in its fullness, and continued. "Can you imagine how incredibly quiet it was everywhere, when the gentlemen from this world" — he made a vague circular gesture towards the battalions of meditating Asians behind him — "were hatching and proclaiming their ideas? Anyone who now tries to follow these ideas in order to find the road back to what they were talking about, is faced with obstacles that would have driven an entire tribe of oriental ascetics into the ravine. The world from which they felt it so necessary to retreat would have seemed idyllic to us. We live in a vision of hell, and we have actually got used to it." He looked at his statues and continued, "We have become different people. We still look the same, but we have nothing in common with them any more. We are differently programmed. Anyone who now wants to become like them must acquire a big dose of madness first; otherwise he will no longer be able to bear the life of our world. We are not designed for their kind of life."
It began to rain at last, and hard, too. The drops exploded on the shiny roofs of the cars, which did not stop honking.
A few forlorn cyclists, bent under the castigating, lashing rain, tried to weave their way among the roaring vehicles.
"Do you know," said Riezenkamp, "sometimes I think we deserve heaven simply by living in these times. Nothing is right any longer. It's about time they dropped that damn thing. Just imagine the wonderful silence that would follow."
That night, when Inni Wintrop dreamed for the first time of the second Taads, he also dreamed for the second time of the first Taads. It was not a pleasant experience. The Taadses were having a conversation together, the content of which ceased to have any meaning as soon as he woke up. It was the sight of them that was so unpleasant. Impatient hatred against languid hatred, a tedious and then suddenly biting dialogue between two corpses. For there was no doubt, both Taadses were somewhere where they could not be seen except by someone whose eyes were closed, a tossing and turning dreamer who wiped the sweat from his face, woke up, went to the open window, and looked out over the black silence of the canal. What the dreamer felt was fear.
From another open window came the sound of a clock striking four. Inni groped his way back to bed and switched on the light. Half-open on his pillow lay the book by Kawabata, a mortally dangerous web spun out of gossamer words in which people were trapped and tea bowls were in command — bowls that preserved and destroyed the spirits of their previous owners or, as in this story, were themselves destroyed.
Four o'clock. He did not know whether he would fall asleep again. It was too late for a sleeping pill, but the risk that the watchmen of the realm of the dead would let out Arnold and Philip Taads a second time that night was too great. Why had the dream been so frightening? No one had threatened him, and what was spoken he had been unable to understand. But perhaps that was precisely the reason: he had quite simply not existed. It was only then he remembered that Philip Taads was not dead at all, but alive. If he was still alive. Inni got up and dressed. The first greyness was beginning to creep up from the paving stones, brushing against the walls and pulling the shapes of houses and trees out of the all-embracing protection of the night. Where to? He decided to retrace the route he had taken the day before.
Nothing irreparable had happened. The city had kept each place intact. Where the first pigeon had hit the car, he stopped. The pigeon had shed no blood, and there was nothing to be seen. He walked where he had cycled. On the back of his imaginary bike sat the imaginary girl. It would be like this when you were really old — a city full of imaginary houses and women, rooms and girls. The bridge by the park was now an ordinary roadway. He walked over the sec
ond pigeon, which was no doubt fast asleep beneath his feet. The park gates were open. The damp smell of soil. He searched for the spot where they had buried the pigeon, but could not find it. The earth was still wet from the rain. Among the many waterlogged footsteps must be hers, too. And his. It was as if they had been drowned. He could not find her house either. The darkness had gone, but the light had not yet become daylight. It looked as if the city were dreaming — a gruesome nineteenth-century dream of rows of brick houses and blind windows with net curtains like shrouds. No girls lived in the rooms behind them, and he could not possibly have lain there on a bed the previous morning, with a stream of golden hair in his hands. Did anybody live here at all? As he walked, he listened to his own loud, lonely footsteps, and because he was listening, he quickened his pace. The dusty shape of the third pigeon was still imprinted on Bender's window. The rain had failed to wash it away. So it must all have really happened.
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 watc
h.
"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.
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