Dousa had gone to ride some distance away from the others, perhaps in order not to have to hear the hollow sounds of the gents from Leiden, or not to have to smell the bailiff's sour pong - he could not smell the stench of death yet, in any case, even though the wind was in his direction. Like this, at a distance from the others and distancing himself from the unimaginable whale, his thinking regained its familiar lightness. His thoughts burbled up like bubbles of air from the dark depths and burst open at the surface, merging with total airiness. The arrival of the whale was, for the time being, an incomprehensible event, it was true, but Dousa was convinced that there would be a time when he could confidently surrender himself to complete knowing.
And so each had his own thoughts on the whale and nobody knew that the whale had disappeared long since, and that behind them two men were lugging a corpse, stumbling under the weight of their burden and walking ever faster because of this, and nobody knew that there was nothing there to be understood - except for the deceased, perhaps; maybe he had realised it, just for an instant, before the incomprehensible enclosed him forever.
Out in front went Humpkin, to fetch the nets - and behind him, his dead father was being dragged through the dunes, and Humpkin knew nothing at all of this and thought that something big was going to be caught with those nets.
Simon Vestdijk
The third house, standing out from the night and at the same time, as though with a reticent gesture, allowing the light from my torch to skim untouched along its gable, was larger than both the other ones. A hat-like roof rose up in the pallid darkness; some low outbuildings stood to one side. It was located quite close to the road, and when my eyes had grown slightly accustomed to the sparse light, I discovered that the entrance was situated in a side road, or it was possible that the road my path would have to lead to was the main one, for it was hard to judge the width of either of them. For a while, the problem of those two roads took the place of what ought to be so much closer to my heart, but then, interrupting this idle ponder with a jolt, I began to think intensely about my situation.
I must have lost my way. My host had warned me, for that matter, about this part of the road - oh, how I now longed for his dune villa with the two table lamps below which our wine had gleamed! - but he had warned me about the fierce dogs, not for what I was about to experience now. Experience: already with a certain foretaste of mysteries which appeared to lay themselves down from the night wind on my tongue, past which my own wine-breath engulfed me.
Assume I knew the region. Not as a part of this area of dunes to be indicated at random, in which case I would have to have been there before, but as something one has read about long, long ago, or has dreamed about, and of which one has always borne along the vaguely drawn model. Every landscape knows such road complexes which, like Gordian knots in an innocent looking network, wait for years, indeed for centuries even, for a traveller who will become ensnared in them. Mostly there is a windmill in the vicinity, one lacking sails like a guide who has given up and draws in his arm. Cats skulk around there. They ought to mark these places on maps in a special colour, but no. Because they must not resemble each other - that would be too easy by half! - each of them displays different inessentials, in this case those large, detached houses, almost feudal, which marked entire tracts of their surroundings in their survey as being dark and inaccessible, or that lonely garden - it's known even though it isn't seen - with the two broken plaster statues in it and many gusts of wind where the summer house once stood ... And I wondered why, in darkness and in such ambiguous places, the world has to be so different, so much deeper, more despairing, and with the particular kind of feigning that determines the honesty of night ... Let me dream some more, I thought, until I'm past this house, for its intentions towards me can't be that good ... Two plaster statues, broken - but of identical manufacture? ...
Let's assume, let's believe the wind indeed returned to that garden and created a life from nothing, one which was lost again and yet is still there, even though it is not seen by Again, I tore myself from ponder that could serve no purpose: the longwinded and free translation of four glasses of wine and wild conversations ...
Right in front of me, the road seemed to break off all of a sudden; an edge shimmered there; cobbles, far apart, made way for a little wilderness of thistles and rubbish; there the cats would have to stalk through, there the windmill had stood or the burned down farm or what-you-will. And there too, probably, was the centre, the junction, the most lonely of all, where all the strands conspired; I had expected to get there and yet I could not reach it even though I was there now ... Again my thoughts grew confused.
The torch, my sword of Alexander, would have to find everything from now on, and free me of this confusion. For a few moments this distracted me: a round patch of light that becomes elliptical, stretches out an arm, embraces the night expansively and, hesitating, hovering, beating almost in time to the pulse, returns, half way, and then fragments itself in a pale rain of light on leaves and gravel, or feels along boards down which splinters, gnarls and heads of nails run towards it as though deranged. But then the house drew my attention again, the way it stood there so tall and remote. Long, straight walls, walls to walk along after a nocturnal conversation that asks no sorrow of us, only petrification ... In what way the gable had been decorated or overgrown, I could not make out at first. Soon, however, my torch discovered the capricious, lissome creepers which, struggling, bent upwards as though they were seeking a window or a hand - each branch, each leaf quickly provided with a Chinese shadow behind, which moved away a little, crept back again and instantly became more distinct. Stone frames, I made out, around the windows, in front of which the shutters had been closed. Still I let my cone of light rise and fall a few cycles, meanwhile already forming the intention to walk on and seek the road in accordance with my friend's instructions, when the shine attached itself to something above me, and me along with it, as though I was being directed by a power in, or attached to the house which had seized the torch. I looked more closely, there: a grave head of stone.
I was surprised. There was even a kind of hilarity that gripped me, a sequence of bouts of laughter somewhere in my body which, for that matter, were unable to penetrate my still half-inebriated consciousness. Be that as it may, I felt at once to be thrown together with the stone head as though with a chum in trouble: he, too, was lost, one might assume; he, too, - I now suddenly saw the creepers as vines - must be inebriated, lost, and cast out by life, though it would not be easy to ascertain whether he was all these things by day as well, when walls, plants and stone ornaments lead so different an existence than at night. No, little could be said about that. For example, did he like living in the light or was he a loner, a shaded one? He remained almost invisible by day, behind those tangled branches sprouting in all directions, like over-abundant antlers, from his skull. Thus he lived as though in a cool grotto. But now, at this nocturnal hour, my light seized him in the right place, unlocked his eyelids, flared his nostrils, and finally, when my hand had begun to tremble a little less, it showed his forehead lofted high above the broad shadows of the eyebrows climbing it like tired thoughts. Vague was the direction the eyes were looking in, though what they expressed spoke clearly of the satisfaction of knowing someone to be below who wished to shine on the forgotten one of this house! A quiet smile, a few lines in the comers of the eyes: and already I no longer felt any regret about my nocturnal jaunt. Firmly, I directed the torch to engender new life this way in one who, through the chill association with leaf and stem, could only still be accustomed to the colour of green mould, who for years now had no longer found any profile and who now tasted the light as though from behind vines. I had been drinking: he too must drink; I gave him plenty. The branches swiped back and forth in the wind but I didn't allow myself to be chased off, no matter how much they flailed and waved. I had found a confidant. Who was he7 Did this house have more of such heads? But no, this I didn't want to bel
ieve; and how could it be possible, for that matter, now that I had found him and wanted to stay with him till morning, not wanting to leave before all loneliness and deprivation had been shone from his face! ...
But my cone of light had slipped away, suddenly, because of an uncontrolled movement of my hand. Search now! High and low, left and right: of course he still had to be there ... There. I struck his face as though with a snow ball - he laughed. So young that face now looked, younger than a moment before, and the creepers branches now suited him better. And even though my hand trembled mercilessly, I wanted to carry on for as long as possible, for it seemed as though he changed in the beam of light, becoming ever more youthful under my hand, fresh and revived like a god of antiquity. Was I myself creating him from nothing? Was it possible to make statues of marble or stone assume any age by any kind of lighting? Whatever the case, I was the creator, no matter what; he owed everything to me, right down to the vines which, shimmering red, grew up contrastingly from within the green under the magic power of my circle of light. And, though the night wind was cooling down so that I shivered and had to button up my clothes more tightly, again and again I engrossed myself in the stone face that gleamed with inviolable youth.
Inviolable? Having reached a peak which did not seem easy to surpass any further, it was now as though he resisted something, as though he attempted to surmount something which my torch would have to assist him with. Carefully, I aimed the beam of light in such a way that branches cast as few shadows as possible, but there was always one which would not allow itself to be passed, a fat, hairy one: I could make it out clearly from below. Then, when I dropped the torch a little, he suddenly resembled someone drowned among seaweed and polyps, pallid and swollen, but how rapidly could that image not be dispelled! He lived and revived, time and again, feverish and inextinguishable; he drank my light, radiating it in all directions, though I was never able to chase away that high shadow running from his eyebrows across his forehead because I was standing too low down. Then I stepped back to try it from a greater distance: in an instant he had disappeared. No wonder, I thought, that he can only seldom be seen by day; what would he not give always to have such a life, the way it was now! From time to time it seemed again as though a smile was playing on his lips, but now it continued to be a smile of youth, self-evident and effortless: youth doesn't have enough wrinkles yet to smile truly; this was the natural smile of sleep and innocence I had conjured up there in the twinkling of an eye.
But the night strode on and with this a creeping change came over his face, one which had announced itself already a few moments earlier when shadows were playing across his features. Wrinkles returned, crystallised, first hiding themselves in the corners of his mouth and eyes, then shooting across cheeks and forehead; pitiable grooves waged war on one another, still cancelling each other out for a while, but then everything moved unstoppably towards old age. How to preserve him from this? I kept my hand as steady as possible; there was no film of moisture on the lens of the torch; no chill mist floated by. For a moment he stared at me as though reproaching me, then he sank even more deeply into his own destruction, assailed by fatal decay I had so gladly wished to hold at bay, for I felt that everything was at stake now, that in a few minutes' time he would be beyond Perfectly lonely it was, all around me: no dog barked, no light anywhere, the house seemed uninhabited. I had every chance ahead of me, if only my will would remain sufficient! Even now I hoped for him, indeed I believed, I demanded, that the cycle of mounting youthfulness would begin again; but it was not only ageing from which he now suffered: pain too, sorrow, despair, mortal terror ... Every expression of human woe I saw pass over stone that night, vague but unmistakable and not suited to any explanation other than of the woeful afflictions they evoked within myself ... Then again, it was as though he was on the verge of coming down to whisper his secret to me which would rob me of all peace; he pleaded, he prayed, his cheeks hollowed, beard stubble grew rampant, grizzling in the light; had he had a body, he would have knelt down or writhed about in agony, but his body was no longer there any more, surely: the house was his body, the ground upon which the house was built, the fields around it, the night ... And how old and far away and irretrievable the night And then, all of a sudden, I understood that he must be the one, doomed to restlessness, who controlled this landscape and who had lured me here in order to have me share in his misery. I was seized by impotence. I wished to get away but could not. Trails, fragments of my initial thoughts coursed through my mind, and behind them a fresh thought arose, not to be caught in words yet, a thought I was not yet ready for, as all my attention was being taken up ... My arm stiffened; with muscles growing more powerless all the time I trained the light on to the same spot. And his eyes just stared, stared - and slowly they sucked me towards him...
At that moment I heard the crunching of gravel: footsteps! Instinctively I cast down my torch. I expected a cry as though I had wounded him or had torn a bandage from his face. However, the first change evoked by those sounds now took place within myself. It was the thought of a minute ago which, in its full stature and accompanied by all the signs of sobering-up after my mild intoxication, stepped forward as though around a comer of my consciousness. In three seconds I knew everything again, in three seconds I had fallen back thirteen years, right through the night, right through time. Hurriedly, the thought let itself be viewed from all angles like a beggar showing his wounds, who fuses with the giver, who forces himself up against him and most of all would like to pass on all the diseases ploughing his skin, just to be sure of the compassion he's asking for ... Disease, death, a death bed? ...
Indeed, an entire night 1 -had watched over him, fighting sleep and boredom. A long night of emptiness, and one in which no thoughts of any importance could have touched my spirit. When morning approached, he called me to him, with his feeble voice, and then I saw that he had become young like the stone statue earlier on, smooth and untroubled before he would die, as though he wished to overtake a distant past chunk of his youth, and in doing so was not content with thinking and dreaming alone but had also adjusted his appearance. He was barely able to speak any more by then, and half an hour later it was all over. But who knows with what child's game he had been occupied with a few minutes prior to his death, in what childish difficulties he had still entangled himself? Who knows what toil it cost him to go so far back in his life that was already barely a life any more! How strange and not to be unriddled, this return into himself, this completion in which life, winding youth like an ultimate loop around deepest old age, ties itself in a knot which can never be unpicked ... And I? That I saw it and did not understand! That he was my father and yet someone else - an ordinary, untragic death bed without gestures, and which I had thought little of during those thirteen years - and that I only understood now it was too late, even - after this warning, this announcement - too late for the one who had provoked that memory ...
Noises ... Outside of myself again!
A door was opened, conversation: a woman's voice. At the same time, blinding white light flared up, drawing forth an unreal, hard garden, one I could not have expected to be there. Gruesomely rectilinear yew hedges, shaved bare, cut through the night, their leaves snappy and tightly packed together like little scalpels; each bit of gravel seemed to glint individually, without cohering with neighbouring ones. In front of me lay the beginning of the drive, a drive for machines: white, smooth and soulless. When I moved a little further to the left, I noticed the electric light above the door which was half open; an iron boot scraper lay on the step. A male figure moved along the drive in my direction, youthful and slim, but his gait was almost stumbling; behind him, slower, a much older woman, with grey hair the light gleamed through, silvery, who now called out a second time: a name I didn't But the young man had already reached me and grabbed my arm:
'He's dead and you could have saved him! Why didn't you come sooner! He's dead, he's dead ...'
His voice sounded
hoarse and tremulous; I looked him straight in the face, which was still catching some reflected light, a crooked, confused face, deathly pale, with eyes like chasms; and all surrounded by long, black hair. With his unmoulded features from which the nose, lonely and helpless, appeared to detach itself, he seemed a boy of not yet twenty. Now the old woman joined us, my presence not getting through to her, apparently:
'Come, come back home now; you shouldn't ... That's the last thing, you're not at that stage yet, you can't go back yet. . .'
Half sternly, half soothingly, she put her hand on his shoulder. But again he turned to me:
'You could have saved him, you're too late, why didn't you persevere for longer, why ...7'
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy Page 42
