In the fields horses, machines, men, and women work with clutching hands the color of wheat. This land has always provided work and bread. In order to keep your business going and if possible to expand it a little, you need a partner. Yet here too people have long preferred to marry for love. There is one person, one imponderable miracle who alone fits into your world. What is more reassuring than to lead that heaven on earth into your kitchen, your stables? Isn’t it by far the best thing to temper the madness of your heart, which was really unbearable, with a set of plowshares, an apron, a table for your children, a vegetable garden, a whole string of cows? And then one day love subsides and becomes so calm that you scarcely notice it anymore.
Lucie was a child who in the past often fell asleep at school during lessons. She folded her arms wide on the desk, laid down her head, and closed her eyes. I always thought that I understood everything better than she did. I left the village and started roaming. She became a farmer’s wife. She got up at six in the morning and went into the kitchen to attend to the dogs. She turned on the radio and woke the children. As she made coffee she loosened her rope-like plaits. Spring after spring the morning would come when you could see her on the path next to the orchard watching her husband’s car leave, a woman with sturdy knees who patiently showed that she understood it all. She was in love with a stranger. The man who slept with her, who was allowed back every autumn to snuggle up to her in bed, must be infinitely familiar to her, but preferably also infinitely strange. She had what you call curled lips. Who are you? they asked. And what adventures have you had? Then they were silent. With her elbows on the table or slumped in the old armchair, she waited for the story that was about to come. She was his sultan. For sixteen years, autumn and winter and spring, she could be quite sure that he wouldn’t leave her.
She thought it strange that she wasn’t allowed to give birth at home. He took her to the hospital at the last moment and there one foggy morning Katharina was born. She thought it was odd and was ashamed when after a routine house call by the GP he wanted to know which cup the doctor had drunk from.
“Was it this one?”
She nodded and looked quite curiously with him at the crockery on the worktop. The used cups, the spoons and a couple of plates looked perfectly normal as far as she was concerned. The doctor was an elderly man with gray tufts above his deep-set eyes.
“Was it this one? Do you swear?”
She hesitated and bent down to stroke the dog who was snuffling around her feet.
“Oh, Joseph,” she muttered, “do stop it.”
Then she had the fright of her life from the rattling and she saw him sweep all the chinaware together. Busily, but without a trace of malice, he went to and fro between the kitchen and the pantry a few times to throw everything into the trash.
The fact that he wore the same suit every day, that he made her roast hedgehogs for supper, that he didn’t want to hear her peeing under any circumstances, that he cried at a film on television, that he was able to cure a horse that had something baffling wrong with it for weeks by giving it a cut in the neck with a razor-sharp knife, allowing the blood to escape in violent spurts, and then binding the skin very tightly with a piece of string.. . she thought it was all strange and wonderful. She shook her head, stroked him a little, at least when they were alone together, or said as if everything had totally passed her by: “Another week and we’ll have snow. Why don’t we start clearing up the sheet iron and the chains tomorrow.”
And then he would obey her. He would clear the yard ready for winter while she currycombed the horses. He would help his father-in-law in the greenhouse, move pipes, and do carpentry work, while she handled the tack room. He carried the children in his arms, stroked them and kissed them and never hit them until they were nine, she did that. Everything fit in their life. She walked through the dried-up mud. He stood at the bar of The Tap. She cut cabbage, apples, potatoes and mashed the whole lot together. He smoked and watched television. The wind lashed the house, metallic skies moved in from the west, and at night a jet of water splashed from a leak in the gutter. When he suggested the plan of partially dismantling a broken-down Mercedes, fitting a speed reduction on the rear axle with a chain, lengthening the crankshaft, and so in a trice turning it into a kerosene-powered tractor, she looked at his gesticulations and thought it was a good idea. She also liked the way he dealt with horses, which obeyed him, and with dogs, which sometimes, because of the respect in which he was held by them, sank to the ground and crawled up to him on their bellies. In winter it was icy fields, ringing bells, birds. The horses sometimes in the stable for too long. It was like an intoxication to exercise those frenzied animals side by side with that man. To take that semi-hardened road past Smeenk’s factory, to reach the edge of the wood, turn right and immediately left again, jump over a plank bridge, follow a sandy road that ended in a Y-shaped fork, and after about four hundred yards reach a stretch of heather fields that have a staggering grace particularly in winter. In the spring she sometimes accompanied him to the river. While he inspected his clumsy fishing tackle, she sat next to the bait can. She liked his bossiness and noisiness, his unusual use of words, and when he wasn’t in her direct vicinity the world went slightly askew. When he came, everything was all right again. Beside her there was a faint cry. She knew that one. The lead-weighted line swung up and she knew that he had a bite, as always very quickly with bait passed through oak resin. In other words: The months went by and Lucie, constantly close to her husband, saw her love mapped out a little at a time.
Until it’s time for a break, a breather. He roams across the Balkans, she schools Bellaheleen and Lucky Boy, whom she wants to take to the competition in Zwolle in September. She gives the children candy and fruit, and strips of tripe to the dogs. With her father and a few laborers she’s standing by the edge of the cornfield, smoking. She hears the rustling wood behind her projecting the sound of a voice that is hoarse and loud. And then it changes into a rustle made by a tangle of birds when it suddenly flies up into the sky where an avenue of heavy white clouds glides past in its stately way. Symptoms of a delirium. A plate creeps to the edge of the table and falls. A crow sits in a tree meowing like a cat. Party tricks of an infatuation that wanders freely across the farmyard. September comes. She feels a tickling in her stomach. When she wakes up a week later, she smells a scent of iron and damp rope. He is lying with his face toward her, sound asleep.
He always asked her first about the jumpers.
“How is Bellaheleen going?”
“Like an athlete, Joseph, oh yes, you’ll see.”
It was morning. She walked to the stables with him with an infant on her arm.
“If you just let her loose, you don’t have to teach her any movement.” She burst out laughing. There was a lump of hilarity in her throat. “Stepping to the side, Joseph, she does it just like that!”
He pushed his way into the stables ahead of her. In the wash room the stableboy was grooming Lucky Boy.
“So fussy!” she explained while Joseph stroked the animal and talked to him. “Active, and nicely on the foreleg and never has his ears on his neck when you push. But he’s so fussy, yes he is.”
She told him about the summer. She made a gift, in words, of the past months — the work, the deals, the breaking-in, the dressage — and made it clear to him that she had been at the center of that dressage. “Damn it, Joseph, you can only do it with a horse that wants to.”
“Lucky Boy, Timone, Bellaheleen,” said Joseph with pleasure, strolling past the stalls. “Yes, they’re all kinds of hot-blooded creatures.”
“And they have to be!” she nodded vehemently. “The good-natured ones, those horses that are so malleable, oh, Joseph, in the end you simply have to kick them to get them to work! ”
Later in the morning he presented his news. They were sitting inside, at the table. Joseph, with his hat still on, told her and the stable boy and Gerard that the day before he’d driven home from Magdebu
rg in one haul. Because of an old man who was with him, a distant relative on his grandmother’s side, he’d made a detour to the caravan site in Stein.
In order to say something, she asked, “What was his name?”
“It was Lazaro Theodorovic,” said Joseph, and added that he was a Bosnian, from a very old family of bear trainers.
The milk came to the boil in a saucepan on the stove. She got up.
“My eyes had seen him all summer,” said Joseph. “He had a sharp face that got even sharper in the dusk. He had a funereal voice.”
She stared at him, the pan and the whisk in her hands.
“He wore a red cloth around his head, a kind of turban.”
There was a flush in her face when she poured the coffee. Smiling in bafflement, no one knew why, she pushed plates and cake forks across the cloth.
But I, of course, knew what was preoccupying her. Lazaro Theodorovic, she repeated in her mind. Lazaro Theodorovic. Did she see the sharp cheekbones of the face in the dusk? Could she imagine that funereal voice? What Joseph had told her in words that immediately moved her belonged to a story from which she was completely excluded, and I knew that she thought: So much the better. Why should she be in search of herself? Wasn’t she the thing that she knew the taste of all her life? With her nose above the coffee with hot milk, she meditated on the red cloth, which may have been wrapped around the skull of an old man like a turban, although she didn’t know precisely how.
It would be quite a while before she was to hear any more about Theodorovic. Those first days were so busy. As he was painting the chicken run, Joseph told her a couple of other stories. He was frank. He was the wanderer. The fact that he went away in the summer really didn’t mean that he excluded her. For example, one evening in November he said, “I’ll tell you about Parasja.” At the beginning Gerard and a couple of the children were there too. She was the granddaughter of a carpet dealer from Banja Luka whose half brother was unforgivably insulted by a distant blood relation of Joseph’s. Lucie nodded. She listened as well as she could. She never tried to find out in what way and to what extent the mysteries that radiated toward her in evocative sentences had to do with the world. Had he never seen her again? Hadn’t he looked for her everywhere? She asked when the story was finished, and she only did so to keep the voice going for a little while longer.
One afternoon in May she had an accident on her horse. It can happen to the best of us. She was riding past a rye field on a newly trained bay gelding when the animal, alarmed by some black plastic flapping in the wind, jumped to the side and slipped into the ditch beside the road. Less than five minutes later, a woman in a car who drove up behind her noticed Lucie. Pale and with a dislocated vertebra in her neck, she was walking along the shoulder. She must have lost consciousness for a moment. When she came around and saw the horse was no longer there, there was nothing to do but to walk home.
Christina Cruyse stopped. She was already reaching over to her right to open the door and drive Lucie home.
“They’re all a bundle of nerves,” she said a little later, half mocking, half serious, when Lucie, sitting next to her, had told her about the black plastic and the ditch. They were already turning into the farmyard. The bay gelding was waiting under the linden tree. They got out. Christina Cruyse wanted to lend a hand by unsaddling the horse and taking it to the stall.
“There’s no need,” said Lucie.
When Joseph came home at about three, he found it very quiet everywhere. The children were still at school and Gerard was nowhere. In the bedroom he found Lucie, not quite herself, on the embroidered blanket. Her eyes were half open and the irises were black. He squatted next to the bed and looked at the beads of sweat on her nose and upper lip. He’d never seen a woman with such white skin. When she recognized him, she smiled at him, like a lost child, he thought.
Although he’d actually been on the point of leaving, Joseph stayed at home for two of the three weeks during which Lucie wasn’t allowed to turn her neck. And although he was no longer in the mood for it, there were moments when he sat orating with his back to the window as though it were winter. I’ve never found out what precisely he had in mind when he talked about the Vogelsberg, the tents near a mining village in Serbia, the water buffalo, the mountain roads, the money that was called dinar or florint. They were fragments of himself that he offered her. But when she asked about Theodorovic, and he actually started talking about him, then it was as if I were the one lying there, flat on my back on the sofa with a plaster collar around my neck.
“Theodorovic,” said Joseph, “arrived in Kampen with a group of ten or twelve people on a boat from Lemmer. It was long before the war. They had a couple of bears and a donkey with them and they intended to go through the streets making music. But Kampen wouldn’t let them come ashore.”
Part Three
1
And so the next morning they sailed on. In the harbor of Harderwijk, part of the company disembarked without any problem. How those people fared in the town and the villages of the hinterland is not relevant here. Suffice it to say that the family of Lazaro Theodorovic and his sister’s family and a granny, along with their animals, continued the voyage. It was a cloudy day and very windy. Small birds of prey circled the ship. The light of the autumn day was already growing pale by the time they reached Huizen, a village with a thousand inhabitants most of whom would die without ever having seen anything except water, ships’ masts with black sails, and fish. They moored at a quiet hour. Theodorovic and his people were able to bring the animals from the hold onto the gangplank without any trouble and walk off with them along a dike lined with trees. Three girls coming toward them arm in arm stood stock-still and looked back at them for quite a while afterward.”
Here Joseph was interrupted by the barking of one of the dogs in the yard. From his chair by the window he peered outside over his shoulder for a moment: an overcast evening in May. It’s nothing, I thought impatiently, go on with the story. It’s just a car turning. Two beams of light crossed the path, then there was silence. It was dusky and warm in the kitchen. I heard Gerard sigh sleepily in the corner next to the stove. But Lucie, stretched out almost invisible on the sofa, raised a hand to indicate: Go on, and then?
“They slept in an open barn,” said Joseph. “Opposite a huge windmill with sails on gilded axles that swished around all night long like souls in torment.”
“So they were given a roof for the night by the farmer?” asked Lucie.
“Bear trainers are always given a roof for the night.”
Why’s that?”
“Every farmer knows that a bear takes away and drives out the plagues of the farmyard.”
“Does a farmer know that?”
“Even if he’s never seen a bear before, he knows.”
Joseph thought for a moment, frowned and sought out Lucie’s face with his eyes. “I’m telling you things just as I heard them from Ottoman, Theodorovic’s son,” he said. “He’s a blacksmith and lives in a village near Mostar. I won’t forget that fellow anytime soon. Bear training is in his blood. If I tell you this evening how a girl at the market in Weesp was bitten to death by a bear, then that story comes from the area around Mostar in Bosnia, where we were sitting under the moon together one evening after the meal. If I tell you that the girl was dressed like a queen, with gold needles along her forehead and a pointed cap of gauze, then I do so in words that are the property of my cousin Ottoman. May his life be a pleasurable stroll from now on. May his enemies perish in jail!”
Joseph began coughing at length, and with a kind of satisfaction. Satisfaction that he’d settled the copyright? Afterward his voice sounded deep and soft, but perfectly intelligible even to me.
That Saturday they gave their first performance in the village. To the whine of an ancient rebec, a four-stringed fiddle from the Balkans that was played by Theodorovic’s brother-in-law with alarming obsession, they came very solemnly down the main street. At the front the two bears
, urged on by Theodorovic in the garb of a beggar and his sister in a pair of gold-embroidered Turkish trousers. Occasionally the bears would raise themselves on their hind legs and, as if searching for an audience, turn their half-blind faces toward the windows of the houses. The inhabitants of the fishing village were interested and appeared in the street. They laughed at the four children who, true to habit, extended their hands in a begging gesture. A double line of schoolboys, at a sign from their teacher, split into two and stood with their hats off, to allow the donkey with the granny on it to pass.
They arrived in the market square. It was on the dot of eleven. For a moment the rebec was drowned out by a rattling carillon. Then all that remained was the voice of Theodorovic, who in order to rouse the curiosity of the public had begun a speech in the Ursari language, looking each person in turn imperiously in the eye. The girl, one of the three who had been walking along the dike the evening before, was at the front.
She was pretty, a little on the plump side. According to Ottoman, she had the moon-colored skin and the languorous look of a fourteen-year-old who would soon be betrothed to a man. As yet she wasn’t wearing festive clothes. That idea wasn’t to occur to her until later, shortly before the bear bit her, on that farewell afternoon in Weesp. When Theodorovic, who was about to end his speech, looked into her eyes as the last person in the audience, he realized that no power on earth would be able to distract those gray depths from something awesome behind his back: one of the bears, his own, called Bruin. Without delay he leaped aside and pointed to the bear with his six-foot-long stick.
“Hoppa, Bruin!”
The animal trotted forward on all fours. The tambourine began its goading.
“Hoppa, Bruin, Stara Planina. Hop, hop, hop!”
Then facing the gaze of the girl, the honey-brown animal rose wildly, its front paws outstretched with claws that reminded her of something for which there were neither words nor concepts. The face with its snout was set in an amiable grin, and seeing its narrow eyes she understood that there are two sides to everything.
Duke of Egypt Page 10
