Man or spirit, what seek'st thou here?
He, however, no longer seeks. For from the darkest of treetops, perfectly close by, the bird-voice trills toward him: a melting mordent, a swelling, jubilant crash. Staggering, he approaches. He drops to his knees.
Olga! his lips stammer, I am here! ... Then a green glow of light dawns before his breaking eye, a Gloria of nightingale notes rushingly envelops him, intoxicating, a wave of forest-flower scents rushes towards him, a balmy wind like one that caresses the fields in June nights appears, whirling, to take him up on high - and, enshrouding, a rain of leaves descends from the verdure on to that husk now abandoned, left behind in the blueberry bushes, wet with dew.
Helene Nolthenius
'... but you have been acquainted with this a long time already, M'Lud, as the members of the jury have been also. It cannot have escaped your notice that the conclusion the Public Prosecutor has reached holds no water. Only the adder that bit my wife might be accused of culpable homicide, at best. At the place where I found her, she was dead; had been for years even, perhaps, I don't know: there's no time down there. Black-haired I descended, white I returned: that's what I know. Culpable homicide! My life it was that I risked to give her life again. What the Public Prosecutor means is not that I drove my wife to her death but that I failed to drive her from it. I don't seek to deny this. I should only wish to deny that I looked back out of negligence, or because I doubted the promise of the gods. I knew my looking back would be fatal. You, Mrs Prosecutor, would have to accuse me of murder ... had Eurydice been alive at that moment. I looked because I did not want her back.
'... May I continue? Your interruptions, members of the jury, would gain in quality were you to shout a little more tunefully. M'Lud, what I should like to explain in these last words you have permitted me is this: that solely the living learn from death. The spirit of one who dies stultifies. Growth is no longer possible. Death encapsulates the spirit the way the Egyptians did the body. It is right like this. How else would the dead endure the horrors of the underworld? The living who descend are spared nothing, however. I, ladies of the jury - I have passed straight through hell. That I survived this I owe to my music, to my kithara here. The point at issue is that my music, too, has returned to earth whitehaired, and that Eurydice has not wished to understand this.
Wright: you do not do so either. Your expertise in this matter reaches no further than the tinkling of the tambourine and the shriek of the Phrygian reed pipe; but any professional can tell you that the work of my youth relates to what I play now as does the plain surface to the cube. Death gave it a new dimension.
'Begging M'Lud's pardon: that's no digression. Had my wife paid attention to this, she would now be alive. There was no place for that kind of attention in the mummy of her child's brain. She was dead, after all.
'I have heard my journey down described as the adventure of a lovelorn strolling player. Perhaps it may have started that way: as an adventure and a challenge. I had celebrated triumphs in the upper world so why not in the nether one too? Such hubris did not last long, however. The deeper I penetrated the darkness, the more deeply the darkness penetrated me. The song that mollified the hound of hell darkened with each subsequent variation. All the pitiableness of those who heard it sucked tightly on to the sounds. The yearning of Tantalus, the toiling of Sisyphus, the exhaustion of the Danaids. But so did their crime; their remorse too, likewise the irreparable nature of their deeds; and surrounding this the relentless hissing and shrieking of the Furies who stole after me like beggars do after a stranger. My journey must have taken months, months during which dismay made me into another person and my kithara into a new instrument. How otherwise would I have been able to penetrate the grimness of Hades and melt the frozen tears of Persephone? That which I sang for them was the very last song before my voice gave way. Beyond suffering made sound, there is nothing more. That's why the gods had to hear my prayer. They advocated against it; they warned me of the dangers; they pointed out to me that my wife, blameless as she was, did not feel unhappy in their realm. But they had to hear me: such is the power of music.
'Eurydice was fetched from the pasture of asphodels where she had woven wreaths in the half light. She left her girl friends in no different a manner from that which she was wont to do in the sunlight among the narcissi. To me, too, she at once picked up the thread of conversation where she'd left off, as though nothing had happened. As you know, I was not permitted to see her. The gaze of one living destroys the last germs of life in one dead, like a deadly ray. I was not allowed to look back but there was no question of doubting the divine word: I could hear her, couldn't I! Her little mouth never stopped. It never did on earth either unless she was sleeping. I had relished her euphonious chatter though I seldom heeded it. It gave me a feeling of peace and domesticity. It still did so when we began our trek upwards. It might be that the reunion - in sound, I should say - had something of an anticlimax after all the horrors. But that she was with me again, this made me deeply happy. I loved Eurydice so very dearly indeed. The promise the gods had asked, that I should remain faithful to her for life: I gave this with a laugh, one I thought back to many a time later.
'Perhaps if the way back had not taken so long. Perhaps if I had been less tired and not so shattered by what I had experienced. Perhaps if Eurydice hadn't disturbed my thought with questions that required an answer - on fashion? About a kitchen recipe? I don't know any more. If only she had realised something, a hint even. of the unparalleled thing taking place there, or had even had the remotest attention for the cries of woe of the shades which wafted like vapour around well, yes; and if only those shades themselves had left us in peace. But those shades were jealous. They became malevolent. They pressed ever closer around us so I could no longer see the path. There was nothing to be done about it: I had to forge my way back like I had done the way down there: with music. The moment I began to play, they recoiled and became silent, enthralled by their own, sung suffering. Just one kept holding forth, undaunted: my wife.
'She had done so in the past too. When she wasn't dancing to my music she'd be talking right through it. In the past that didn't matter so much. It was background music I created in the past. The Muse who had made me the darling of thousands was a popular one. Curious: I only realised this at that moment, the moment I could no longer bear Eurydice's chatter. It must have taken weeks, my attempts to explain to her what had changed. As often as my tired arm let the kithara droop I would repeat that there is music ... that I had been the first to create music which cannot suffer disturbance. Music which must be listened to, must be experienced, which is born from all the joy of the world and all the agony of hell. Music that has priority. Music before which all other things must give way. Did I say that Eurydice didn't understand? She did not wish to understand. I had tamed Cerberus, had comforted Sisyphus, even moved the Furies. My wife chattered. And slowly, slowly her tittle-tattle turned into reproach and accusation. She loathed what I played. She was not sufficiently dead not to feel the threat of this new music. She became jealous of it: my art had become her rival ... and I began to realise that she was right. The woman I had fetched from the deepest of night would upon her return never again be number one to me. It was this the gods had warned me for. This was the reason why they had me swear fealty to the sulking child trudging on behind me. They knew that the radiant being who had entered their place would have to leave hell a fiend of that ilk. Because only the living learn from death and the dead cannot follow such growth. And I saw what would have to happen, irrevocably: two lily-white little hands in a strangulating grip around the throat of my art. That's when I looked round.
'Members of the jury, you are about to retire to consider your verdict. A formality. I know your conclusion. In my youth I, like anyone else, have consulted the oracle. When I learnt from the jailor that all of you: prosecutor, judge and members of the jury, belonged to the extremist women's group I kept Eurydice from, I knew that I had
met the Maenads who according to the prediction will kill me. This is why I have made no attempt to make you well disposed. Likewise, I shall not plead for mercy later on. Those who serve justice cannot condemn me: to kill one dead is no crime. But you do not serve Justice: you serve Fate. I am at peace with that Fate. After all, Eurydice's place has not remained unfilled: now they are the Furies of self-reproach who pursue me. It cannot be long now or their hissing and shrieking will drown out my music. There is but one place where they will leave me in peace. That place has been given me by Hades, the All Providing One, to look forward to. Far away in the nether sea lies the blessed isle of the Syrens, the Muses of Death. There, those who have served the Muses of Life repose for eternity. M'Lud, members of the jury: your verdict and sentence is my letter of safe-conduct to Elysium.'
Gerard Reve
On a Wednesday afternoon in December, when the weather was dark, I tried to wrench loose a downpipe at the rear of the house; this didn't work, however. With a hammer, I then smashed a number of thin branches of the red flowering currant on a post of the garden fence. The weather remained dark.
I couldn't think of anything else to do and went on my way to Dirk Heuvelberg. (As far as my memory went back, he had always lived next door to us. At four years of age, he was still unable to speak; until his third year he had gone on all fours. I also still recall how, when we were little, he would come running up to our kitchen door on outstretched arms and legs: his arrival he would announce by screaming. If invited to do so, he would eat horse turds off the street. Later on, he was still able to move quickly on all fours and even then he didn't speak with ease. He was eager to tell, with a certain pride, that his tongue was too long and was on too loose a string: to corroborate this assertion he would make loud clapping noises with it. On that autumn afternoon, too, in the back room of his house, he still spoke with difficulty and indistinctly, in stumbling bursts of words. His stature had remained small. I was eleven years old at the time.)
A yellowy-pale boy was visiting him whom I did not know. He was standing in front of the window and he greeted me hesitantly and timidly. 'He's Werther Nieland,' said Dirk. They were building a hoisting machine from a meccano set, one they wanted to have powered by a windmill, but this they hadn't started on at all yet.
'Better make the windmill first,' I said. 'That's much more important. Once you know how much power there is, only then can you work out how you must build the crane. And whether you should take a large or a small wheel. For that matter,' I continued, 'you have to choose someone who's boss during the building. Best would be someone who lives in the house next to the mill for instance, or close by.' I uttered this last sentence softly so they couldn't hear it. A silence arose for a moment which filled the small dark room. (It had dark brown wallpaper, all the woodwork had been painted dark green and there were terra cotta crocheted curtains hanging there.)
While the silence continued, I scrutinized the new boy. He was skinny and gangly in appearance and a little taller than me. His face wore an indifferent and bored expression; he made his thick, moist lips protrude too far. He had deep-set, dark eyes and black curly hair. His forehead was low. The skin of his face was uneven and displayed flaky bits. I had the desire to torment him, one way or another, or to injure him on the sly. 'Don't you think so too, Werther, that we must make the windmill first?' I asked. 'Yes, that's fine,' he replied indifferently, without looking me in the face. 'He's an animal that likes to have a nibble,' I said inwardly, I know this.' Both of us, while Dirk was busy screwing something down, looked outside into the newly dug garden; an old washtub and a few weathered planks were lying on the bare earth. A mist of moisture and settling smoke hung between the roofs. I went and stood close to Werther and, without either of them being able to see, I made half-suppressed punching movements in his direction.
Though Dirk, too, did agree with my proposal concerning the windmill, we didn't go and build it but continued to sit together without doing a thing. 'You don't have to start making a windmill if you don't want to,' I said. 'But that's very stupid, 'cause you can learn a lot from it.' Dusk was falling. Werther, listen,' I said. 'D'you live in a house where a lot of wind comes past?' He did not answer. 'Then I could come and help you,' I continued, 'then we'll make a windmill you can run appliances off in the kitchen. I can do that, easy, 'cause I've got time. And to promise a thing and then not do it, that's something I don't do.' I was feverishly intent on ways to visit him at home.
Werther took no notice of my words, perhaps because I didn't speak loudly enough and because we were listening to vague music from the wireless coming through to us from the front of the house.
It was already late in the afternoon when we went outside and ambled along, the three of us. The street lamps were already lit. Werther declared he had to go home; we continued to accompany him. He lived in a self-contained first-floor flat on a corner where the development came to an end and which had a view on to the wide parklands that stretched out as far as the dike.
'Sure enough,' I said, 'when it blows here, there's a lot of wind: I can tell even now. Do you have a veranda?' Werther did not allow either of us to come along upstairs, however. When he was already standing in the doorway, I went up close to him and hurriedly asked, without Dirk being able to hear, when I could come to make the windmill.
'I'm allowed to have boys visit me on Saturday afternoons,' he said, and he closed the door.
When I got home, in order to ponder, I made my way into the box room near the garden, where I kept secret documents. Here I wrote in pencil on an old piece of wrapping paper: 'There is to be a club. Important messages have already been despatched. If there's anyone who wants to muck it up, he'll be punished. Sunday, Werther becomes a member'. I hid this sheet under a chest, where it joined other inscribed papers.
That same evening, in the kitchen, I discovered a broad flower vase of clear glass without ridges or curves, one which really was a round aquarium in fact; I was allowed to use it as such from then on. Next day, I put the sticklebacks I had gone to catch immediately after school inside it instead of throwing them into hedges or down sewers or on to the street, as I was wont to do. I looked at them through the glass which seemed to enlarge them slightly. Soon they were boring me already. I scooped them out, one by one, and with a paring knife I cut their heads off. 'These are the executions,' I said softly, 'for you are the dangerous water kings.' For this activity I had selected a sheltered part of the garden, obscured from the eyes of possible spectators. I dug a little hole in which I carefully buried the dead creatures in a row, their heads joined up to them once more: before filling it in, I sprinkled it with petals of old faded tulips from the living room.
Thereupon I went to the canal once more to fetch a second catch. On the way back it seemed to threaten to rain; this failed to materialise, however. When I had returned to the garden, I suddenly thought the cutting off of heads a cumbersome and time consuming job, so I began to construct a chopping implement from meccano parts into which I wanted to screw down a razor blade; in doing so, however, I had an accident.
While fixing it, my left hand slipped and the index finger was driven with force along the blade: it was sliced open from the tip to well past the middle; the wound was deep and bled profusely. I became dizzy and nauseous and went inside.
My mother bandaged the wound. 'It was a razor blade,' I said in a plaintive tone of voice. 'I wasn't even playing about with it: I wanted to make something from it.' I understood that the small animals that told each other everything, after all, had caused me the accident.
'You'd better be careful with that,' my mother said. 'Best not to go walking outside with that if it's very cold. You know what happened to Spaander.'
(He was an acquaintance who once had suffered a similar injury. He lived in the Vrolikstraat and made a living sharpening people's knives and scissors, going around town in a cart. This man, while sharpening something, had happened to cut his thumb out on the street. Bitter cold prevail
ed; the soaked bandage became hard and, without him noticing, the thumb froze so that half of it had to be amputated. Though it had nothing to do with it, my mother, when relating this event at length, would tell me as an encore that his son, in the one single room their dwelling fact would be held up to me, time and time studying to be a teacher without allowing himself to be distracted by chit-chat. 'You see: now that's what I call pluck,' she would then say. I knew that, even if our house were made up of ten rooms, I would never be able to learn anything. Each time the man came to us, I was allowed to see the stump of thumb and feel it. He would always come alone. 'He has a fool of a wife,' my mother would say regularly. Over and over, she would tell how, through some prolapse or other, this woman had got a very large paunch for which a medical corset had been prescribed. Because she went out to work daily and the corset impeded her, she had not worn the corset for more than a day. When she's washing the floor, her stomach hangs down to the ground,' my mother related. 'And she's thirty-four years old. Isn't that dreadful?')
She impressed the accident with the thumb upon me once more at length. 'You mustn't go about in the cold, not in any circumstance,' she repeated emphatically. When a mild frost set in, she even wished me to stay inside all weekend, but a solution was found in the end: from pale-blue flannel she made a little protective cover for the bandage, with two ribbons tied round the wrist. I would now go out into the garden again for hours.
I did not complete the chopping implement: the parts, wrapped in newspaper, I put away in the box room. The water in the glass vase had frozen: the fish were stuck, rigid, in the middle, close to the surface inside the clump of ice: the vase itself had cracked. I studied the fish closely. 'They're magicians,' I said out loud, "course I know that.' I buried the vase, with all that was inside it, as deeply as possible. 'They can't come up any more,' I thought. It had turned Saturday already.
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy Page 27
