He waited for her to elaborate, but nothing came. She was too deeply embedded in her own thoughts. This was the damage that had been done to her. All of a sudden he knew what he could say.
“It was you that night, wasn’t it.”
She became so still then that he could see her pulse sending tremors across the surface of her skin.
“I woke up a few nights ago,” he said, still using the same gentle voice. “Someone was lying next to me. It was you.”
She turned and fitted herself against him, her left leg drawn up over his thighs, her head resting on his shoulder. He looked at her left hand lying on his chest, her short, pale fingers aligning themselves with the gaps between his ribs. He could feel her heart reverberating through his body. It was beating as fast as a small animal’s.
“I must warn you,” she said.
“Warn me? What about?”
“They have things planned.”
“What things?”
“Things I could not have thought of.”
“They’re angry with me. . . .”
“Perhaps. But also you are here. It is because you’re here.”
“Can you talk to them?”
“Talk to them?”
“Stop them.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Please,” he said.
Lifting her head, she reached out with one hand and touched his lips. This was her way of saying that she couldn’t help him. Her fingers smelled of onions and candle-wax.
He lay there quietly, beneath her weight.
“It was you I shouted at,” he said after a while.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry if I shouted,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“You frightened me.”
“I’m sorry.”
He heard rain on the skylight and thought of people cycling home with their heads lowered, the metal tramlines shining. . . . In his mind he leaned on black railings and stared down at a canal. The water looked studded, punctured—sharp, somehow. Like a bed of nails.
They have things planned.
Sometime later he woke up to find that Maude had gone, though the smell of candle-wax and onions was still there, rising into his nostrils from the places on his body where her hands had rested.
•
His dreams were fuelled by a terrible anxiety that night. There were no landscapes any more, no views at all, only the bare white walls of the white room, only the skylight with its empty square of sky. He would see himself suspended upside-down, hoisted on a complex web of ropes and pulleys. He would be turning slowly in mid-air, like a carcass on a hook, his body trussed, blood flooding into the cramped spaces, the cavities and hollows, behind his eyes. There would be a woman in the room with him, a naked figure in the shadows near the door, and all she would be wearing was a hood of deepest black. It would look as if her head was missing, as if a headless body was standing in the room, and he would hear it whispering, this headless body, Beautiful, so beautiful. . . . Then he would wake again, and it would be hard to know whether he was alone or not, he couldn’t always see into the corners, not at night, and the darkness hissing, buzzing, like a thousand shrunken voices all muttering at once, and he would look down at his body, which was laid out in the manner of an offering, a sacrifice, and he would find that he no longer knew what was a dream and what wasn’t, and he would wonder which was worse. . . .
In a way, being awake was easier. At least he could make an attempt to control things. Awake, he could try and hypnotise himself into a different place, his only refuge being the obvious one, that of his past life, but it was difficult to sustain, and in the end it was pointless too, perhaps. As soon as the images he summoned from the past began to falter, the room would assert itself, parts of it becoming visible, like skin showing through wet clothes. There it would be, stark and white, but never quite dispassionate, somehow, how could it be with all those rings and straps and bolts, every one of which, he now knew, had been designed with some exquisite torture or perversion in mind. The hooks and rails. The washing-machine. The dull-black rubber mat. A blandness about it all, an everyday brutality—predictable, unchanging, remorseless.
The room was always there.
•
And so it came, the day of his mutilation.
He was lying on the floor, as usual, when the door opened and the women filed in, one by one. All three of them were wearing red hoods over their heads. All three of them were naked. They looked like the cardinals of some arcane or sacrilegious church. The hairs lifted on his arms. There had been a change in the women. He could feel it. It was as if, in stripping themselves of their clothes, they had removed all decency, all inhibition. As if, naked, they might be capable of truly monstrous things.
Just then, the sun came out. The shaft of light that reached from the skylight to the floor was so rich in colour, so thick and golden, that it gave the impression of being solid, like a buttress. The women stood beyond it, plunged into a kind of shadow suddenly. When they moved towards him, passing through the sunlight, it was an eerie moment, almost supernatural, like watching ghosts walk through a wall. He felt as though the fabric of the world had been tampered with, which only added to his suspicion that the women were beyond all natural law.
Maude was carrying an oblong metal box, he noticed, and Astrid had a screwdriver in her hand. For a moment, he was reassured. They were going to adjust the rails that held him to the floor, perhaps. Tighten something that was loose. Later, he would look back on that thought with grim amusement.
Was it another punishment? They didn’t say. In the end, he didn’t think it was. It was simply that they had exhausted one line of fantasy, and now they were about to explore another. No hard feelings, nothing personal. What had Maude said?
Because you’re here.
They gathered round him, all scarlet hoods and pale flesh. His eyes darted from the turquoise vein that twisted down into Maude’s groin to the scar on Astrid’s hip, which was like the imprint of a coin, to Gertrude’s pubic hair, shot through with hints of darkest red, settling at last on the box that Maude had placed on the floor beside him. He had seen something like it once before. It had belonged to his grandfather, who had acted in amateur theatricals, and it had contained all kinds of make-up—eye-liner, grease-paint, rouge. . . . But why had Maude brought it into the room with her?
“This will be painful,” Gertrude said.
He looked up at her, his throat constricting. “What do you mean? What are you going to do?”
“Perhaps it’s better we don’t say.”
She took hold of his underpants and pulled them down to his ankles.
“No,” he said suddenly. His voice sounded almost strident in the silence and—odd, this—exactly like his father’s.
“There could be advantages,” Astrid said. “There could be benefits. In time.”
There was no comfort in the woman’s ambiguities—he had learned that early on. He stared at the screwdriver she was holding. It had a transparent, bright-yellow handle. The tip was half a centimetre wide.
“You’re not—” He faltered, unable to put his feelings into words.
“The reason why this will be painful,” Gertrude said, “is because we have no anaesthetic.”
“A screwdriver, though,” he said uselessly.
He turned to the woman he called Maude, wishing that he knew her real name.
“Help me,” he said. “Please.”
But she only turned her head to one side, as if embarrassed or ashamed.
The other women spoke to her quickly in Dutch, their voices calm, insistent. What were they telling her? That she shouldn’t listen to him? That everything was going to be all right? He watched as Maude opened the metal box and took out a packet of cotton swabs and a bottle of what looked like iodine.
Not make-up, then. First-aid.
“And now,” Gertrude said, motioning to Astrid.
The women crouched aroun
d him on the floor, Gertrude to the left of him, Astrid on his right, Maude between his legs. Gertrude pinched his nostrils, and when he opened his mouth to breathe, she put a piece of balled-up rag in it, then reached into Maude’s metal box and lifted out a roll of silver insulation tape. She tore off a strip of tape and stuck it over the lower half of his face. The rag tasted of diesel oil.
Astrid took hold of his foreskin between her finger and thumb and lifted it away from his penis, stretching it until the light shone through it. She placed the tip of the screwdriver against the skin and then pushed firmly. The screwdriver broke through. He could see the wide, sharp tip poking out the other side. He remembered being surprised by how red the blood was, a red that was so bright and clean that it looked new. He remembered seeing drops of blood lying in his pubic hair, like berries, as if they had grown there.
All this, as if from a great distance. . . .
By the time he came round, the women had fixed a ring through the hole. At first he could not understand how they had managed it, then he saw that one section of the ring was thicker, and had a lock built into it. The ring was a dull silver colour, an alloy of some kind, and measured more than an inch in diameter. He supposed they must have bought it specially.
They had not pierced his penis, only the foreskin, and now Maude was bending over him, a cotton swab poised between her fingers. The bright flash of pain as she dabbed iodine on to the punctured skin was almost enough to make him pass out for a second time. With his mouth taped up, though, he could hardly make a sound. His pain stayed inside him. They didn’t want to hear it. As he lay there, floating in and out of consciousness, he had a keen sense of the hopelessness of his predicament: they could do anything they wanted—anything at all. . . .
•
Later, when the wound had been cleaned, the women brought a length of chain into the room. They attached one end to the ring in his penis and the other to a solid iron staple that had been driven into the wall behind him, then they freed him from the stainless-steel rails and clustered round him. Their hoods had the effect of making them appear utterly without feeling, without conscience, and this contrasted oddly with their voices, which sounded tender, concerned, even encouraging. Though his wrists and ankles would often still be shackled, they told him, he would have more freedom of movement from now on. He would be able to stand up, walk a little. Maybe even dance. It’s what we want most of all, one of the women said, to see you dance. He shook his head. What they were saying seemed like mockery. How could they put him through these endless, grotesque ordeals and still claim that they cared for him? And another thing. He had given up the idea of distinguishing between their voices. If he thought he could find an ally, or win some kind of leverage, he was fooling himself. Their voices were neither human nor individual. They were the voices of a single creature: his jailer, his tormentor.
One of them held out two white tablets on the palm of her hand. Codeine, she said. She put the tablets on his tongue, one at a time, holding a glass of water to his mouth so he could wash them down. He lay back on the mat. The sky had clouded over. The golden buttress no longer angled down into the room. In the new half-light the stinging at the centre of his body was like a colour. Not a colour he could name, though. No, it was too brilliant for that. Every now and then it grew in size until it surrounded him completely. At times, he felt as if he was actually inside it.
Through this haze he heard the women’s voices:
“You should rest now—”
“We’ll check on you in the night—”
“We’ll take care of you—”
“The wound, it will heal. Don’t worry—”
“Rest now—”
•
Though he was given pain-killers at regular intervals throughout the night he slept fitfully, the skin that divided sleep from waking membrane-thin, translucent. It must have been a form of delirium. His dreams, when they came, were specific and repetitive, almost circular, and they never strayed too far from reality. Once, he woke, or thought he woke, to see the bright-orange coffin lying on the floor beside him. It did not change shape, though, or move across the room. It stayed exactly where it was, for hours. Another time, he dreamed that he had been chained to a brick wall. His penis had a rusty iron padlock attached to it, such as you might find on the door of an abandoned barn, and the wound was raw, sticky with pus. He let his head fall back against the wall. The bricks had a blackened quality, as if they had once stood too close to a fire, as if they had been scorched. A wind roared and rattled in the air.
In that dream, as in almost all the others, there were two levels of consciousness, two levels that coexisted and sometimes even overlapped. On the one hand he was bewildered, shocked and numb with horror at the situation in which he found himself. On the other he was looking forward to the moment when he could shake off what he knew to be a dream, when he realised that none of it was true.
The cruelty of waking to the soft chink of the chain’s links moving. . . .
The truth lay in the dream, of course, outside it too, and the misery that he experienced as he shifted on the mat was hard to bear.
Sometimes he would catch a glimpse of himself in one of the steel rings that held his wrists. He could only ever see himself in fragments. A cheekbone, an eyebrow. Part of an ear. He was like a vase that had been broken thousands of years ago. He would never be whole again. He only existed in pieces. In memory.
He turned slowly, gingerly, on to his side and pushed his shackled hands towards his groin, as close as they would go. Somehow, the mere fact of proximity was soothing.
A milky glow spilling from the skylight.
The ticklish, slightly peppery smell of dust between the floorboards.
That low groaning he could hear, a sound that was so constant, so present in the room that it seemed to have a form—a dog run over by a car, a coat thrown on the ground—that groaning sound, that was him.
•
He no longer knew what day it was, no longer cared. His suffering had made an irrelevance of things like that. There was only pain, and the need to be delivered from it. Sometimes, when the codeine floated him beyond its reach, people would appear in the room. He could not be certain, then, if he was dreaming or hallucinating. Probably it did not matter.
Brigitte was the first to come. She sat on his left, facing the door. Her legs lay flat on the floor, at right-angles to one another. Her hands rested in her lap. She was wearing a loose-fitting, pale-blue T-shirt he had never seen before, but her hair was tied back with the usual scrap of mauve velvet. As he watched, she bent her forehead to her right knee, then straightened up again, her right arm lifting into the air beside her ear. This series of movements had the ease, the fluidity, of a reflex, as though she hadn’t really been aware of what she was doing. Her dark eyes stared into the middle distance.
“Our time is almost over,” she said.
He could feel his heart push against the inside of his chest, like something trying to escape. What did she mean?
“You and me,” she said, as if his thoughts were audible. “Our time together.”
“No,” he said, “you’re wrong.” His throat was dry. He swallowed. “You just have to wait till I get out of here, wait till I’m free.”
She reached up with both hands to adjust the piece of mauve velvet, then she turned to face him. In her eyes he could see nothing but indifference. She had the look of somebody who didn’t know him. Who had never known him.
“You’ll never be free,” she said.
“I will,” he said. Though, suddenly, he wasn’t sure.
She shook her head and stared into the distance again.
“No,” she said.
He looked away from her, unable to find the words with which to contradict her. When he turned to her again, she was no longer there.
Sometime later, in the middle of the night, his family appeared—his mother and his father, both still young, in their fifties, and his brother, Edwar
d, who worked for a bank in Tokyo. His father and his brother had dressed for the occasion, in identical grey suits. His mother was wearing a cardigan over a pleated skirt. People often said that he took after his mother, though he couldn’t really see it, except in the eyes, perhaps, which were hazel and sloped upwards at the corners, giving them both a faintly Slavic look. She seemed more preoccupied than usual, her head craning on its slender neck, as if she was peering deep into the corners of the room. “Well,” she said at last, “this isn’t so bad, is it.” His father nodded in absent-minded agreement, one hand lifting to smooth his thinning hair. Edward, meanwhile, had tucked one highly polished heel against the far wall and was measuring dimensions, as if he was thinking of putting in an offer for the property. That was just like Edward. He watched his family, half despairing, half amused. Eventually, his mother came and stood beside him. She did not appear to find the situation out of the ordinary at all. She simply smiled at him, and then repeated herself: “Really, darling, it’s not that bad.”
He wasn’t sure how to interpret their behaviour. Did they genuinely not notice that he had been mutilated, that he had been chained to a wall? Or were they pretending not to notice, so as to disguise their embarrassment, their shame? Or—more subtle, this—were they trying to offer him a message of hope, trying to give him strength, but using an oblique, almost coded approach in case his captors overheard? Before he could decide, his mother caught sight of the full moon floating in the skylight. A gasp came out of her, a soft sound that signified both shock and wonder, and she began to spin, some part of her knowing that everybody’s eyes were fixed on her, the other part not caring. Her skirt flared out all round her, making the shape of a mushroom in the ghostly, silver air. . . .
Other people came to visit him as well, all sorts of people from his life. Bert Gischler, the company director. Stefan Elmers, the photographer. Even his mentor Isabel van Zaanen appeared, wearing an ankle-length fur coat and diamond earrings, as if she had arrived straight from a première. Isabel had worked for the company as a guest choreographer for many years, and he owed much of his success to her advice and inspiration. Standing by the wall, she lit one of her Egyptian cigarettes. “Remember what Balanchine said,” she told him. “’First comes the sweat, then comes the beauty.’” She smiled to herself—Balanchine had been a friend of hers—then she walked over and bent down so he could touch his lips to her cheek.
The Book of Revelation Page 7