B007P4V3G4 EBOK

by Richard Huijing

  'You've left the vent open too long,' she says. 'The stove's got red cheeks.'

  She's now standing by the stove, bent over, Herbert thinks. I should walk up to her and give her squat bottom a shove. A wee taste of purgatory. But she'd scream the place down. I'm wearing my slippers. Before my shoes were on and I was out through the door, the neighbours would be here already.

  'Mind you don't go drawing on the windows, Herbert. Once they've dried, I can barely get them clean again. You might wash them for me.'

  'I'm not washing anything. I just want to have enough of a view. Let the moisture evaporate: good for the plants.'

  'But it's bad for the furniture; it makes them warp, Herbert. Just bear that in mind, would you? Peter, Peterkin! Come here lad, come!'

  That hairy predator approaches to comfort her after the defeat I've inflicted on her, he thinks.

  He hears the cat's paws tap the lino. It jumps up at her and climbs up her pinny. She croons over it as over a newborn babe.

  Barren womb, yieldless acre, he thinks. Why didn't your womb open itself up to me twenty years ago? Why were you like a pollarded willow that fails to sprout in Spring? I would have had a daughter of twenty by now. The scent of young female flesh in the house. Tunes being hummed, the tripping of high heels, rouge to lend some colour still to my old age. Let's think, now let's think clearly.

  Herbert leans his torso forward so his head rests against the cold, damp window.

  Ah, that's wonderful! I'm in Rome, sitting on a terrace: a hot summer's afternoon. The tarmac's billowing because of the heat. I order a glass of beer, icy cold. I press the glass to my forehead. The cold makes its way through my brain down to my backbone. What was it again I wanted to think about? Ah, yes: why do men always murder their wives in a rage while the balance of their minds is disturbed? Why not a trip to Austria? A hearty walk, a mountain trek? D'you hear that yodeller in the valley over there, Liesbeth? Look, there he is! If I go and stand on this rocky promontory, I can see him sitting there. Where, Herbert? I don't see or hear him. Bend over a bit more! Look, he's sitting there surrounded by columbine, further down the valley. Then a goodly poke with the walking stick and those two hundred pounds souring my existence tumble out of my life.

  He suddenly gives a start because of the shrill squeal of tram brakes. It sounds like the screaming of a hare being jumped by a stoat. He looks down. The tram moves off slowly. Then, all of a sudden, there's a woman lying on the traffic island. The parts of her lower legs dangling beyond the kerb are at an angle of almost ninety degrees to the parts on the traffic island. It is as if her instep reaches a tremendous way up, or her knee joint has slid down. Blood runs along the edge of the traffic island towards the rails. The tram halts, grindingly. A conductor runs to the motionless body, bends over it. He shouts something to the driver, steps on to the pavement and enters a shop.

  He's going to ring the paramedics, Herbert thinks. Perfectly pointless. Why not quietly leave her to bleed to death? Why must her husband drag out his twilight years behind a wheelchair?

  People abandon cars, bicycles, prams, and hurry to the fateful spot. They surround the victim the way carrion beetles do the cadaver of a mole.

  Didn't I hear deathwatch beetles in the bars of the bed this morning? So it was inescapable. Look: the windows are weeping.

  Herbert follows the drops that jerkily draw vertical lines among the curves. Then he turns round.

  'Can you see, Liesbeth, what's on that piece of paper in the milkman's window? Your eyes are better than mine. Might even be a special offer.'

  Liesbeth sets the cat down on the chair and totters over to the window. Herbert walks to the stove and holds his hands above it in the rising warmth.

  Wonderful, those hot water springs in Iceland, he thinks. Would the winter be a severe one? The signs are favourable. Would it be suspect to buy a refrigerator at the beginning of Winter? Wouldn't it rouse suspicion? Shucks: there are people who buy a camping tent in January. Didn't I myself once stand beside a girl buying a bathing costume when it was twenty degrees below? But there are indoor swimming pools, of course. And aren't there any houses where the heat's tropical in winter? I can't hear anything by the window yet. Might the mortal ... ehm, might the remaining mother (in-law, grand and great-grand) have been carted off already? That'd be a pity. Haven't heard the siren yet, for that matter. Or are there so many people standing around now that it's as though someone is offering something for sale, just like that, right out in the street?

  I must keep a grip on myself, Liesbeth thinks, and with both hands she presses her stomach. There isn't even a piece of paper in the window: he spares me nothing. The blood! She must be draining dry.

  She feels the contents of her stomach rise. Quickly, she walks to the door.

  'And could you read what was there?' Herbert asks.

  He hears the toilet seat being raised with a bang.

  A coarse brain but an oversensitive stomach, he thinks.

  A siren sounds outside. He walks to the window. A cream coloured car stops at the traffic island. Hurriedly, two men jump out, pull a stretcher from the back of the car and set it down beside the body. Then they pick it up and put it on the stretcher. The left foot, bobbing up and down, perpendicular in its stocking, ends up next to the stretcher. One of the men shoves it back on with his foot.

  Liesbeth comes in again.

  'It's busy in the street,' Herbert says.

  'That's what I saw too, just now. There seems to have been an accident. I couldn't see.'

  'Best thing, too,' Herbert replies as he draws a little landscape with a windmill in the top comer of the window. 'You've got enough of a weak stomach as it is. You'd be upset for days. Assuming it was an accident, then it was caused by the tram. Not a pretty sight at all. Those iron wheels shear the lot off, clean. I once ... Hey, why are you leaving the room in such a hurry?'

  Retching, Liesbeth runs to the toilet.

  Dinner-for-one this evening, Herbert thinks, rubbing his hands. I'll put the newspaper behind my plate, up against the condiment set. A feast!

  When Herbert has reached the top of the stairs, the door to his apartment opens. Liesbeth steps out into the hall.

  'Oh, you shouldn't have, Herbert,' she says, ticking him off.

  'What shouldn't I have?' Herbert asks, leering with screwed up eyes at the red face.

  'Such a big one, far too much space for a small family.'

  'Oh, the fridge - has the fridge arrived? I thought it'd take them hours. Hoisting it up and so on.'

  'No, they managed it the ordinary way, up the stairs. But such a big one, Herbert; it really is too much.'

  'What rot - this is no ordinary birthday: you turned fifty today. Half a century.'

  Too many, he adds in his mind, half a century too many.

  'Come on, show me,' he says cheerfully.

  He follows her to the kitchen.

  'It's a whopper indeed,' he says, once he's standing in the kitchen in front of the gleaming white enamel. 'It looked much smaller in the shop.'

  What a magnificent sight, he thinks, the polar ice cap seen from a stratospheric aircraft. It gleams and glistens in the polar light. Now for an axe, and we can start on conservation.

  'You would have done better to wait till summer, Herbert; it's cold enough here now.'

  'That's just why it's so practical now. You won't have to turn down the heating in the evening any more 'cause otherwise your food'll go off. And no waiting for hours in the morning until it's warmed up a bit here. Just take a look,' he says cheerfully, pulling the door of the fridge wide open. 'Just you take a look: the space! I bet you could go and sit in it in Summer, when it's hot.'

  'Now you really are exaggerating Herbert,' Liesbeth says, estimating its volume by eye.

  'Exaggerate? I never exaggerate.'

  With a clatter, he removes the horizontal aluminium racks.

  'I think you could take the cat in with you too. No, no kidding: you try it, Liesbeth. My lu
mbago's giving me gip.'

  Blood, blood, he thinks, I'll bring it about without spilling blood. The heavens regard me with favour. There'll be no writing on the wall.

  'Well, alright then, 'cause it's my birthday,' Liesbeth says, laughing. 'But it's a strange experiment.'

  She sets her bottom down on the floor of the fridge, wraps her arms round her drawn-up knees and swivels herself inside.

  'Enduring the worst heat of August would be easier than sitting in this position, I think.'

  With a powerful sweep, Herbert throws the door shut. Then he puts the plug in the socket.

  I can hear her shouting but I can't make out what she's saying, he thinks.

  He walks to the living room, switches the radio on and sits down in the tub chair beside it. Circumspectly, he takes a cigar from the cigar case, licks the outer leaf and presses it down. He twiddles the radio until a nice little tune breezes into the room. From the blue banks of cloud that linger in the middle of the room, the temptations of a life of freedom drift towards him. They spin in the surf of his imagination. He gives them girls' names and those of flowers.

  There'll be ice flowers on her pupils; she'll be sitting there, hunched up like the tree mummies of Central American Indians. I could have a hole made in the bottom of my car with a broad pipe through it, reaching down to the road. Then, one rainy day, I put her in the back. On the bumpy rural roads, I shove her down the pipe, head first, so that her hair rests on the cobbles. And then I drive about until there's nothing left but the soles of her feet. I won't take her glasses off. But I won't even be able to straighten her out. She'll have wriggled her way into the most impossible angles. She always did. I'll avail myself of other means to get rid of her, as it happens. Now won't I just, you white-shirts you?

  Walking over to the window, he addresses the seagulls diving down into the street, after bread being thrown from a window somewhere.

  'I'll be spoiling you, lads! For the time being, your hungry beaks won't be eating dry bread any more: they'll be red with all the raw.'

  A grand moment, Herbert thinks, eye to eye with the deep freeze princess. A fortnight past already: she'll be feeling the cold.

  He pulls open the door of the fridge. With a jump, daylight takes possession of polar night. Liesbeth still sits there exactly the way he last saw her. Her hands rest calmly on her tummy, between the hillocks of her bosom and her thighs. Her glasses are covered in a thin, matt layer of ice as though, with its fragile wings, a butterfly seeks to protect her eyes from the cold. Icicles formed by the condensing water, with pointed fingers probe the hoarfrosted shrubbery of her hair. Her mouth hangs open. The pink tongue of land lies speechless, riveted down in the bitter ice of the inland sea of her oral cavity. An elegantly curved little rod of ice runs from her bottom lip to the remnants of food on her chest, as though her last thoughts had been of the fountains of Italy.

  Herbert bends forward and looks intently at the food remnants.

  Not such a peaceful death as first it had seemed from the resignedly folded hands on the stomach, he thinks. Perhaps that was a whim of the last death throes. Let's take a peek at the eyes.

  Carefully, he grips the frame between the lenses. With his fingertips he stirs the cold marble of her forehead and the bridge of her nose. The cold spreads up to his wrists. He has to apply force for a moment in order to free the spectacles. Then he sees what the butterfly was trying to spare him. Her eyes have bulged out so far that, Herbert suspects, the lenses have prevented them from drooping even further. They hang down over the bottom eyelids like infertile, greenish owl's eggs that have been cast out from the red and yellow veined nest of the eye sockets. In blind suspicion, the pupils stare down sideways into the remnants of food. When Herbert replaces the specs, those pupils stare through them like the eyes of a sea monster through the steamed up pane of an aquarium. He staggers in front of the fridge.

  I'm overcome by the cold, he thinks. I -must have a drink. I must raise my glass to this memorable fact.

  He goes to the living room; he pours himself a glass of genever, warms himself in front of the fire. The liquor warms him all the way down to his digestive tract.

  'Now what have we got?' he mutters, taking a sip from the glass at each object he mentions. 'A sharp little cleaver for between the joints, a saw for the bones, a razor sharp knife for flesh and tendons, a chopping board, plastic sheeting, a nutmeg mill. And a glass for the eyes.'

  Triumphantly, he raises the glass aloft. Then he goes to the kitchen, spreads a sheet of plastic in front of the refrigerator and fetches the tools from the cabinet. He goes down on his knees in front of the fridge and tries to turn Liesbeth ninety degrees by her ankles, something he only succeeds in after a great deal of effort, for she is frozen to the sides of the fridge in some places. Then he drags her forward so her lower body ends up resting on the plastic.

  To be pruned as soon as possible, he thinks, flipping her shoes from her feet with the cleaver. I'll try to get rid of a leg today.

  With an old-fashioned razor he draws a furrow in her right leg, exactly along the seam of her stocking which he peals from her leg like bark. Then he cuts her clothes away at the hip, the imprint of them visible on her skin as if she is wrapped in thin tarlatan. The flesh is hard and cuts easily. Not without anatomical insight, he severs the leg from the torso at the hip joint, returns the body in the same position to the fridge and closes the door. Then he lets his knife sink deep into the fluvial landscape of her varicose veins and begins to cut off long strips of flesh. The knife makes a sound like skates on mirror-finish ice. When he has divested the thigh and shin bones of flesh, he strikes the foot off with his cleaver. He then begins to cut the long strips of flesh carefully into little cubes he tosses into a large, shallow tray.

  The feet are too complicated to bone for my liking. I can simply put them out by the dustbins tomorrow. Perhaps it would be better, however, if I was first to fit them with the antique lace-up bootees. Let's chop things up as small as possible. They're guzzlers; they'll polish things off as they are, too.

  With a swing, he lets the cleaver come down on the bunions. The toes hop forward, away from the foot, like small, pale frogs. Purple splinters rain down on the plastic.

  I used to sit in the garden like this, Herbert thinks, wiping the sweat from his forehead. The purple flowers of the lilac dropping around me. In front of me in the loose sand were corks in a long row, wriggling insects pinned to them. I let down a woollen thread into a bottle of petrol and laid that across the caterpillars, beetles and locusts. Then I lit both ends. Once the flames met, the insects would be lying there with burnt off legs and wings. Of some, the body had split open like a roast chestnut. Thick, white goo bulged out. You're worse than Nero, my father said, and he raised blisters on my bottom. You're just like your uncle Louis; he's a bad'un too. Uncle Louis! When there was just a butt left of his cigar, he would walk out into the garden with it. He would stay and wait by the balsam at the back of the garden until a bumble bee came to fetch honey from a flower. Then he'd tap the ash from the butt, suck it so it got a fiery dome at the tip, and put it in the calyx. Can you hear him buzz, little Herbert? he would ask. D'you know what he's saying? He's saying the Lord's Prayer. Soon, when uncle Louis was staying with us, moist brown cigar butts would be sticking up from all the pink calyxes of the balsam, like arses just about to relieve themselves. Uncle Louis, a sensitive man, stimulating his conscience with the annihilation of little insects, Herbert thinks, touched.

  'I've become a big game hunter,' he mutters.

  He roots with the cleaver in the splintered heel bone. Then he takes up the board and slides the shattered foot on top of the meat in the tray.

  That'll do: they'll devour the chaff with the wheat; they'll make no bones about it.

  He takes the tray and walks with it to the hall. He sets it down there, takes out a step ladder and puts it underneath the hatch in the ceiling. He mounts the steps carefully, undoes the hooks and pushes the hatch op
en. Shrieking, seagulls fly up from the edge of the roof when suddenly his head appears above the antediluvian landscape of tar and shingle.

  No one can see a thing here, he thinks: there are no taller buildings in the vicinity.

  He goes down, takes the tray of meat and, holding it above his head, he climbs back up. Sliding it across the shingle, he shoves the tray a little further away from the hatch, out on to the roof.

  If the dead can still feel anything, she must assume she'll share in the Kingdom of Heaven limb by limb. Come on then lads, come on! Just you tuck in. Here lies the manna of twenty years unhappy married life.

  Herbert moves down a step, pulls the hatch up over the edge and, through a crack, he watches the seagulls who continue to sit motionless on the edge of the roof in the red light of the setting sun hanging between dark swordfish clouds above the grimy city.

  Herbert is sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Round slices of bone are lying around him on the plastic. The electric nutmeg mill whirs beside him.

  Liesbeth has no relatives any more, he thinks. Friends and acquaintances have stayed away for years already, driven away by the stale smell she spread. Which leaves the neighbours. When do I actually see the neighbours? Never, surely. Liesbeth hasn't been out in months. Even the shopkeepers no longer ask after her. It'll take years before anyone hits on the idea of asking me how she is. And I will have forgotten it myself by then; my mind'll be a blank. Perhaps, should a seagull be flying over, I'll point up above. And they will say: Oh, she's passed away in peace you mean. Yes, passed away in peace, I'll then ice-cold peace.