‘I know,’ said Hanck. ‘I’m proud of you.’
‘Me too. I have to be content.’
‘Content?’ It sounded like the viewpoint of someone who was old and worn-out, or a desperate attempt to convince himself of this, when the spirit was still bubbling in a body that was spent. He had to say it: ‘You’re just saying that to comfort me.’
‘Absolutely not,’ said Toby. ‘I mean it. I don’t give a shit about you.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Not unless you get hold of yourself.’
‘I promise I will. I’ve never had anyone else to care about.’
‘I know.’
‘I didn’t know what love was.’
‘I realised that. But I was so furious at you for a while.’
‘Why?’
‘I met Mamma.’
‘What did she say?’ Hanck glanced around, nervously, almost guiltily, as if he feared seeing her somewhere close by.
‘She wasn’t the person I thought she was.’
‘No,’ said Hanck. ‘Of course not.’
‘Why did you make it all up?’
‘What was I supposed to do? You were so young. You wanted to know. I had so little to tell you. It wasn’t enough.’
‘You could have told me the truth.’
‘The truth?’
‘The simple truth.’
‘It was too awful.’
‘It’s still too awful. She looks terrible. She thought that I knew. I felt so stupid, and then I got mad at you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Nothing matched.’
‘Maybe you can get to know each other now.’
‘I don’t know if I want to. Or if she does.’
‘Should I talk to her?’
‘You don’t love her enough.’
‘What can I do?’
‘Nada. Rien. I’m over it. I’m not mad at you any more.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I think I understand.’
‘What?’
‘Why you made up everything.’
Hanck looked at his son, saw that he knew, that he understood. All he could do was give him a mute hug, hold him, stroke his head.
Would he ever find words for this? There were words for practically everything, every object and phenomenon. In the known world. In the ordered world. But this was chaos.
‘The Old Man,’ said Hanck, ‘is demanding that I write a report.’
‘The Old Man? Have you met him?’
‘Yes, that’s the way it goes.’ And then, quite naturally, he added, ‘But I don’t know.’
It sounded as if that were the right thing to say.
‘Did you have to stand in the queue?’
‘I had to stoop to that, yes.’
Toby nodded.
‘Otherwise I would have never been able to come here.’
‘So what kind of report?’
‘About you,’ said Hanck. ‘And me. About us.’
‘Then at least you have a reason for going back home.’
‘I don’t think I can.’
‘What? Go back or write the report?’
‘Write,’ said Hanck. ‘I don’t know whether I want to.’
‘If he demands it, then you have to do it.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You will. I can tell you will. Was that why you came here?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘To ask my permission?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Go home, Pappa. There’s something you have to do.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘I’m here. I’ll be waiting.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can. If you don’t go, then I will. There is a death after death . . .’
‘No, wait.’
‘I’m going.’
‘No,’ said Hanck. ‘I’ll go. Stay here. I’ll be back soon. My dear, beloved boy, stay here . . .’
‘Okay,’ said Toby. ‘But then I want to watch you leave.’
Hanck stood up. His legs could hardly hold him up. He needed help to stay on his feet until his strength returned.
‘I want to watch you leave.’
‘You will.’
‘Don’t look back.’
‘I love you. I’ll keep talking about you until we meet again.’
‘As long as I don’t have to listen. Don’t forget your hat.
And take those ridiculous coverings off your shoes . . .’
Eventually he was once again outdoors, under an open sky, in another region, another climate; he stood near a drab exit with automatic doors under a sign with a red X and the words ‘Exit/Way Out’ and he had the sun in his eyes, dazzled but with no fear of harm; he saw a park with benches and litter bins, signs forbidding the walking of dogs, and well-tended flower beds along raked paths. He saw roses growing along paths that he had never taken.
Every path led out into the wild. There were trees, wild trees beneath a clear sky, a whole forest, needle-covered paths with roots that had cropped up and were polished shiny by those who had gone astray before him, who had seen moss and lichen on the rocks in the shadows like he did, heard insects buzzing and animals rustling in the thickets with the same surprise.
Blue-tinged mountains in the distance.
In the world that had been described to him as an intolerable chaos, ravaged by disease and lawlessness, a wasteland, devastated, perilous and poisoned, there was also this.
He began walking, slowly and cautiously, unaccustomed to the ground beneath him. He should have felt afraid and lost when faced with this almost impenetrable wilderness. He lacked faith and felt no trust, he understood nothing of what he saw, these forms in nature, what they were supposed to be called, how they fitted together. But he took it all in with an open heart. Wanting to see. Daring to see.
Black moiré shimmer in the shadow of a pine tree.
‘Time flies . . .’
They had waited for him. He should have felt flattered.
‘Leave me alone.’
‘He’s recovering . . .’
‘So it seems.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To scatter my son’s ashes.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re walking with such firm steps.’
‘I’m following a path.’
‘There are other paths.’
‘This happens to be the one.’
‘You have to go home. You made a promise.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘A lot has been going on . . .’
‘. . . that ought to interest you.’
‘Like what?’
‘He’s been caught.’
Hanck stopped, with one leg resting against a toppled tree trunk.
‘He?’
‘The inscrutable one.’
‘The murderer.’
‘The airborne one.’
‘The outlaw.’
‘The seducer.’
‘The family man.’
‘The queer.’
‘The marvellous one.’
‘The Old Man thought you ought to know.’
‘It was in your waters, so to speak, that the net was cast.’
‘And the punishment?’
‘Already carried out.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘No. Too easy.’
‘You’re not the only one who wanted to see good, old-fashioned remorse.’
‘Has he expressed remorse?’
‘Most likely.’
‘How?’ said Hanck. ‘I want to know how.’
‘Difficult to describe.’
‘Worth seeing . . .’
‘This way . . .’ And soon, farther off: ‘This way.’
Soon it was looming in front of him, a mighty granite plinth, and at the base of this formation was the entrance to a cave. The ground in front of the opening was trampled flat, as if by many feet; it was foul
and dead. Nothing could grow there.
Hanck hesitated, as if before a bloody turnstile.
‘It’s free.’
‘Free admission . . .’
Inside awaited a scene that was of particularly cunning cruelty.
Loki was bound, lying next to several boulders in a cold and damp pit. He was unrecognisable.
Above his head, on a ledge in the rock, coiled a long snake that now and then spat venom on the naked captive.
His wife Sigyn was there. She held a bowl under the jaws of the snake to catch the corrosive acid. When the bowl was full, it had to be emptied onto the ground outside the cave. Each time this happened, a few drops landed on the defenceless Loki. He roared and yanked on his shackles, making the ground shake. So great was his pain.
A picture of the gods’ punishment and a wife’s compassion, perhaps.
‘Ponder carefully what you see.’ It was cold and matter-of-fact advice.
Hanck forced himself to study every detail as intently as he could. It was revolting, but worth the effort.
The mechanism was rather simple, almost self-perpetuating. The requirements were access to venom, gravity and the patience of a wife.
Something in the woman’s expression indicated that this could go on for all eternity as far as she was concerned. Her patience was as reliable as the gravitational pull of the earth. To put it quite simply, she radiated a surprising resolve. The torment had been going on for a while now, and she had become accustomed to it, or at least was making the best of things. Other than that, there were also traces of desperation, tears and cries of anguish and horror – outbursts that had raged, fallen silent and hardened into a darkness in her eyes.
But that was not all.
Now and then, in between harrowing shouts of pain and despair, in moments of calm – of the kind that can arise around a hopeless, chronic invalid – the man could be heard whispering or snarling: ‘Go . . . get out of here . . .’, and even more touching: ‘Please . . .’, and when he wasn’t obeyed: ‘Begone, old woman!’
It sounded almost like a grandiose exhortation; the concern of a man who was lost for the one who had a chance of saving herself.
She was still young, she had her whole life left to live. She was beautiful, she could find another husband, start over. She didn’t have to sacrifice herself, spend the rest of her life in this hopeless pit.
Her refusal to obey such loving advice could, in turn, seem just as grandiose. She said, calmly and firmly, ‘I’ll never abandon you.’
‘How touching,’ Hanck heard. Cold, without an ounce of compassion.
Because there was something that he’d missed. ‘Look at the shackles.’
They didn’t look especially remarkable. There were no straps of tanned leather, no ropes of tarred hawsers, no cables of tempered steel. They looked mostly like thin, soft ribbons, supple and pliable.
‘They were still warm when they were tied.’
The ravens explained. Loki had gone to ground, with his wife and their two sons, heading for the mountains to hide. It would have worked out fine if he had stayed there, if he’d had a stronger character. But he just couldn’t do it. His passions or inclinations, call them what you will, drew him away from there, down to the city, the taverns, all the temptations. And while there he was discovered, of course, recognised and shadowed, followed all the way home to his secret hiding place. A troop had surrounded the area, plucking up first one son, then the other, forcing one brother to stab a knife into the other, to slit open his belly, rip out his guts and, before he lost his senses, wind them into a handy ball. Eight metres of intestines, a paltry twine, one might think, but the husband and father who is tied with that bond will never be able to get loose.
What could release five fathoms of such guilt?
Perhaps behind the prisoner’s entreaty was concern for his wife, but also a simple, selfish calculation – if she stopped protecting him from the snake’s venom, he could open his mouth, swallow drop after drop, and finally be allowed to die.
Behind her apparent sacrifice, there was also a less compassionate calculation. The man she loved and to whom she had sworn to be faithful had betrayed her year in and year out. If she hadn’t had those two sons to care for, she might have given up long ago. Now they too had been involved, dragged into their father’s world of deceit and inconceivable cruelty.
A man like that should not be granted the mercy of death. Her patience would sharpen the torment, prolong the torture. She didn’t want to start over somewhere else. She wanted to be right here.
Hanck saw what it was that seemed strange about her face. Behind the haggard expression of horror there was also an element of bitter triumph, or the solace that can be found in the words ‘What did I tell you?!’
‘Have you looked your fill?’ said one raven.
‘Are you satisfied?’ said the other.
Hanck was done. He didn’t need to see more. Whether he was satisfied or not remained unsaid.
They left the cave. The ground where Sigyn emptied the bowl of venom was poisoned. A dead space.
Hanck stood there for a moment, looking at the sterile, barren ground. That was where he would scatter his son’s ashes. That was where they would do some good.
If only for a blade of grass.
The rain poured down. A thick stream from a leaking roof gutter that had rusted through drummed onto the window ledge. It had been going on for months now, the whole city had been flushed clean, thoroughly soaked. Reservoirs and pools were full to the brim. Stairwells and vestibules had begun to smell foul, rank and sour from mildew and mould that had crept up along the floors. Drains were overflowing, entire sections of the city were starting to smell like an open sewer.
But it would soon be over, at least for this time around. One day the rain would stop. It wouldn’t taper off, turn to drizzle or to scattered showers that came and went. It would just stop, abruptly, like a sudden power outage.
That was what he had to look forward to. Everything else was uncertain.
He could sit at his workbench in his workshop from morning to night, with a bottle of vodka and a glass, a revolver, a piece of brick and an old typewriter that still didn’t show any signs of rust. It was fully functional.
As was the revolver. He knew that he would never use it, at least not to threaten anyone or to coerce anything, such as remorse or answers to certain questions. He had seen what he wanted to see, heard what he needed to hear.
Not that he had gained any definitive clarity. Questions still remained. His need to have them answered in a satisfactory manner had only made their number increase, prompting new questions, pointing out connections and associations that made the uncertainties even greater and more numerous.
He would have to live with them, these anomalies, these meaningless speculations that follow a life cut short.
That too was a certainty.
But he didn’t know whether he’d be able to bear it. He had to make his way forward, breath by breath, day by day.
Many people throw themselves into their grief and fumble about in the dark, fall down, end up bloody. They emerge as soon as they can, badly lacerated, with a sort of hate-filled hunger and their spirit darkened for all time.
But it’s possible to enter your grief with no intention of coming out, with no intentions at all because there is nothing else to do. You fumble about in the dark, like the others, fall over and hurt yourself, just like the others. But cuts and bruises will heal and fade, while you remain in there until your eyes get used to the dark and begin to see how even blackness has its nuances.
It takes time to get used to it. A situation that gradually becomes clear.
But everything was rained away, washed clean. Perhaps even the emptiness would be leached out, become colourless and transparent.
Perhaps one day he would have only one question left, utterly forgotten by the future, like a sprig preserved between the pages of an old book that he had never opened.
/> Could he ever forgive?
He would never be able to understand. But forgive? What would it mean for him to forgive? That his love for the one he had lost could be set free and used for anything whatever, even for the most absurd: to embrace even death?
Would it then be just as strong and powerful? And above all, was it genuine or fabricated?
The revolver could never force any answers.
But perhaps the typewriter could. He was bound to it by a promise: to bear witness, to tell a story, to deliver a report about love, as he had experienced it.
At the same time he had been presented with an odd predicament: that the world would continue to exist until love was explained.
The destroyer of the world would lie bound in his cave as long as love remained a mystery. Or at least until someone with an open heart felt capable of forgiving him, with sincere and genuine love.
That would dissolve his guilt, set him free. Not changed in the least; rather, he would be hardened in his determination to destroy the world. He would join with the powers in Muspelheim and launch the last, devastating battle.
Then it was said that the sun would turn black, the earth would sink into the sea, the gleaming stars would fall from the heavens; flames would lick at the bulwark of life, the heat would blaze towards the sky.
There was no sophistry about it, it was a simple observation: that deep, acknowledged love can take on any sort of appearance, embrace anyone and anything, grow, develop and change, until in the end it resembles its own opposite. But it could never be shaped into a tool, an instrument in the service of any one person.
Every description of love had to be highly provisional, a suggestion, a temporary compromise to rally round for the moment. Soon all the conditions may have changed, and the presentation of circumstances would have to be redone, using new words.
Love refused to be defined, because it was impossible to explain, because perfect love destroys and any attempt to define it presented the perfect balance of terror, for an eternity of eternities.
Hanck wondered whether he was prepared to dedicate his life to such an arduous and risky endeavour. He had promised to do so. It was a matter of honour. He had made a few binding promises in his day, and had always considered it his duty to keep them.
But this was different, associated with a risk that was actually negligible, and yet it did exist. A troublesome dilemma, even for a person with modest expectations.
The Hurricane Party Page 25
