The Book of Revelation

by Rupert Thomson

  I felt no sadness as I drove, no sense of bitterness or remorse. No, none of that. Instead, there was a feeling of suspension. As if, after days of weighing too much, I now weighed almost nothing. I noticed how the trees shivered at the edge of the road, and how the sunlight silvered all their leaves. I noticed the rush of cool air through the half-open window, air that seemed delicately laced with salt. I was using only the bright parts of my mind, the shiny surfaces: if I tried to imagine the inside of my head I saw something smooth and concave, something lustrous, and nothing could find purchase there, everything slid effortlessly away.

  I think there’s a sense in which all dancers are introspective. There’s also a sense in which they’re vain. It’s part of being self-critical, and self-criticism, if you’re a dancer, is central to your art: you have to know how to exploit it to your advantage. If you had visited the apartment where I lived with Brigitte you would have seen photos of us everywhere. It wasn’t exhibitionism exactly—or, if it was, then it was only because our art revolved around exhibiting ourselves. Dancers spend more time in front of the mirror than any other profession I can think of. They study every aspect of themselves—every muscle, every tendon, every line of every limb. They learn their bodies off by heart. They are exploring their own potential, but they are also looking for limitations, flaws. So they can work on them. In that respect, their vanity is a form of meditation, even of perfectionism. Of course, some dancers take it to extremes. Vivian, for instance. There was always something wrong with Vivian—or not wrong, necessarily, but not quite right. Her sensitivity to her own physical condition was so highly developed, so finely tuned, that she would feel injuries coming, injuries that often never actually arrived. If you walked up to Vivian and said, How are you?, she would take the question literally. On a good day she would say something laconic like, Oh, you know, I’ll survive. Otherwise you would have to listen to a whole litany of ailments. And then there was Milo, of course—Milodrama, as we called him. . . . This degree of self-absorption was not unusual in the world of dance, but I was outside it now. I had left it behind. I had been freed from something I had lived with for many years—lived by, you might almost say. I had been freed from something I had loved. It was a freedom, finally, that had no qualities, neither good nor bad. It was only unequivocal. It was a freedom such as death might give you.

  •

  The house stood at the top of a small incline, which Isabel liked to refer to as the highest point in Holland. As I drove up the long, curving road I was surprised to see her step out of her garden gate—surprised because I had not told her when I was coming. Even at a distance, she was recognisable; with her straight back and her chin slightly raised, she often looked as if she was reviewing troops. She was wearing a plain white dress that afternoon, and she had coiled her hair into a chignon. Sunglasses hung against her breastbone on a silver chain. I parked the car and walked towards her with a bunch of Montenegro lilies I had bought in a flower shop on the way down.

  “I heard the door-bell,” she said, “but there was no one there,” and she frowned quickly and then shook her head, as if she thought she might be going mad.

  “You were a few minutes early,” I said, “that’s all.”

  I kissed her three times, as is the Dutch custom, then handed her the lilies. She looked down at them, but only for a moment.

  “Exquisite,” she said.

  I couldn’t help smiling. I had seen Isabel with bouquets so many times—on stage, in dressing-rooms, at parties—and though she often appeared offhand, if not downright unappreciative, I knew this had less to do with arrogance than with its opposite, a kind of modesty, a feeling of general unworthiness, an inevitable dissatisfaction with whatever it was that she had achieved.

  We turned and walked into the house. In the hallway we came across a stocky middle-aged man. He had black hair and dark eyes, and he was slitting a letter open with a paper-knife. I remember thinking that the suit he was wearing was exactly the same colour as milk chocolate.

  “Isabel,” he said, “I thought you were in Oslo.”

  Isabel said she wasn’t leaving until Friday, as he knew perfectly well; she had told him so at least half a dozen times. The man listened to her with an expression that was both sombre and amused. His eyes dropped momentarily to the lilies she was holding, then lifted again—not to her face, though, but to mine. His gaze was oddly appraising, as if he remembered hearing something about me and was now measuring me against it. Isabel introduced us. The man’s name was Paul Bouhtala, and he was a neighbour of hers. When she told him I would be spending the summer in her apartment, he suggested we might have dinner together one night—but only if I had time, of course. I smiled and thanked him for the invitation.

  “Paul used to be a diamond merchant, among other things,” Isabel told me as she opened the door to her apartment. “I think he retired, though.” She let out a sigh, which had more to do with how she viewed her own retirement, I felt, than that of Paul Bouhtala.

  We sat on her terrace at the back of the house and drank home-made lemonade. I felt sure she noticed the grazes on my wrists, but she didn’t ask me what had happened—not on that afternoon, not on any afternoon. She didn’t even allude to it. And yet I had the feeling that if I had wanted to talk to her she would have listened. She had worked with dancers for more than half her life. She understood when to stand back and give them space, and when to intervene.

  These are the people I have learned to value most, the people who know how to do that. That tact, that lightness of touch, that grace—I see it as a form of wisdom. They’re not born with it, these people. Nobody is. It’s a quality you have to identify in yourself and then develop.

  •

  That night Isabel cooked a light supper—fettuccine with wild mushrooms, and a salad of tomatoes and fresh basil. We drank a bottle of chilled white wine, following it with small glasses of a pear liqueur that she had distilled herself. With coffee, she smoked several Egyptian cigarettes, which smelled of wood, and also, somehow, of cream. She had started smoking in her sixties, and held her cigarettes horizontally, between finger and thumb, which gave her—or so I always thought—the air of somebody who gambled. Light-headed from the alcohol, I asked her about her early life, the years just before the war. I had heard whispers of a lesbian affair. While still married to a Dutch industrialist, she was supposed to have fallen for a prima ballerina from the Ukraine. The details were shadowy and scandalous.

  “You’re not really interested, are you?” she said, watching me through smoke that twisted in front of her like pale undergrowth.

  I assured her that I was.

  “You’re humouring me,” she said.

  I smiled. “I wouldn’t dare.”

  “It’s the most terrible thing about being old,” she said. “Nobody wants to listen to your stories—and you have so many!” She chuckled, then coughed, and, reaching over, tapped a length of ash into the silver dish at her elbow.

  That is my most enduring memory of that first night in Bloemendaal—the creamy sawdust smell of the Egyptian cigarettes she was smoking, that and something she told me about the ballerina.

  “The most extraordinary thing. . . .” Isabel’s voice was low, and it had filled with a kind of wonder, as if what was stored in her memory still surprised her. “This girl had a birthmark on her back, at the bottom of her spine. It was a pale-pink colour, about so big.” She measured two inches in the air with her finger and thumb. “And you know what? It looked like a sea-horse. . . .” She paused, thinking back. “Exactly like a sea-horse,” she said, and then she shook her head and leaned back in her chair, her eyes lifting past my shoulder, drifting into the shadows behind me.

  •

  The spare room lay at the far end of the apartment, above the study. I had to climb a wrought-iron spiral staircase, past shelves crammed unevenly with books, then grope my way down an unlit corridor that was so narrow that my shoulders brushed against the walls. Eventually, I
came to a door. Easing it open, I reached round to the right and found the light-switch. The room was not quite as I had remembered it. With its metal frame and its white counterpane, the single bed looked spartan, almost monastic—where was the divan Brigitte and I had slept in?—but the walls had been painted a powdery egg-shell blue, and the chest at the foot of the bed looked as if it might once have held a pirate captain’s treasure. On the bedside table stood a vase of irises. On the floor lay a simple rug whose rich pale colours made me think of the Sahara, though I had never actually been there. There was only one window, and it was set into the slanting wall that faced the bed, and opened outwards in two halves, the way shutters do. It was so quiet in the room that the air seemed to be making a sound of its own.

  On that first night I leaned on the windowsill, a little drunk, and watched the blackness of the forest pulse and swirl. I thought of the pink sea-horse at the bottom of the ballerina’s spine, then I thought of the coin-shaped scar on the hip-bone of a woman I had called Astrid. After that my mind went blank.

  A wind moved through the trees. There was a delicious smell of pine-needles mixed with sea-salt and damp earth.

  I slept heavily and did not dream.

  At ten o’clock the next morning I woke to see a thin bar of sunlight lying on the floor like a misplaced stair-rod. Still half-asleep, I felt it was telling me I should tread carefully. There were folds and wrinkles in the world. There were pieces missing. If I wasn’t careful I could trip and fall.

  •

  Four days after I arrived, Isabel left for Oslo. She would be away until the beginning of September. From that moment on, I had the apartment to myself. What did I do during those first few weeks? Things I had done as a child, I suppose. In the mornings I would sunbathe on the terrace with Isabel’s transistor radio playing close to my ear, or else I would lie on her sofa, reading books. Later, I would go for long walks through the forest or across the dunes; I had never explored the Dutch coast before—I’d never had the time—and I quickly grew to love its wide, bleak beaches, its lack of markings. In the afternoons I slept in the pale-blue room with the window open. Sounds filtered through to me—a car climbing the hill in low gear, the murmur of voices in the garden, a distant plane. . . . At least once a day I drove down to the sea and swam—before breakfast, usually, or late in the evening, when there was almost no one else about. This is what I had discovered, that I wanted nothing to do with people. I didn’t want to be seen, by anyone.

  Odd then that I should take Paul Bouhtala up on his offer of dinner. With his thick waist and his glossy black moustache, Bouhtala looked more Mexican than Dutch. Though his eyes were deep-set, they were large and heavy-lidded, and he would study me with an air of boredom and world-weariness that I found daunting. Still, I ate with him on a number of occasions that summer. He lived in a ground-floor apartment which could only be reached with difficulty: either you had to follow an intricate series of staircases and passage-ways—this was the indoor route—or you had to work your way round the outside of the house, negotiating a vegetable patch, several beds of nettles, and an orchard of apple trees that had been left untended for years. In his dark rooms, which were hung with lithographs and tapestries, he told me about his travels, his business schemes, his double-dealings (his willingness to make confessions contrasted strangely with his surroundings, which would lead you to expect the opposite—mystery and obfuscation). I would sit on his brown velvet sofa by the window, and I would listen quite happily for hours, losing all awareness of my own existence, losing myself in his. The whites of his eyes were almost too white, I remember, reminding me of porcelain, and he had a disconcerting way of smoothing his moustache. First, he would press two fingers to his upper lip, then, slowly, sensuously, the two fingers would separate into a V. This gesture was so deliberate that I often wondered whether it was not some kind of signal that I ought to recognise, a sign to which I might be expected to respond—but perhaps I was reading too much into the situation. Like Isabel, he asked nothing of me except my presence, and it occurred to me, after a while, that she might actually have asked him to keep me company. At times I felt as if everyone had been told to be kind to me, even people I didn’t know, and I realised that, sooner or later, I would tire of this, I would rebel. . . .

  •

  It was a hot summer, the hottest for many years. I watched my body slowly darken in the sunlight. I watched it heal. In the evenings I sat outside with the french windows open, candles burning on the oak table in the living-room behind me. I would listen to records on Isabel’s old-fashioned stereo—Mahler, Puccini, Bach—the candles restless in the dark air, the wild garden below the terrace alive with rustling and shadows. Sometimes the phone rang—a naïve sound, too eager, somehow, almost desperate. If I answered it, it was always someone asking for Isabel. I didn’t feel neglected. I wasn’t unhappy either. Words like happiness just didn’t seem to apply.

  My thirtieth birthday came and went, uncelebrated. In the evening I called my parents, in England. I had last spoken to them on the day after I was released, and my mother’s voice had sounded shaky, fearful. I told her it had been a big fuss about nothing. I had wanted to get away, that was all; I had needed time to think (I thought she would believe this because, as a thirteen or fourteen year old, I used to ride out to the New Forest at midnight on my bicycle, only to find her waiting for me in the kitchen, worried sick, when I returned). It had been difficult to lie to her, though, not least because I had the memory of her appearing in the white room and spinning beneath the full moon in her pleated skirt. Even now, it was hard to convince myself that she knew nothing about what had happened.

  “Happy birthday, darling,” my mother said. “How are you?”

  “I’m all right. I’m fine.”

  “Are you doing something special tonight?”

  “Not really, no.”

  I could see my mother clearly. When she talked on the phone she would always hold the receiver against her ear so tightly and with such determination that she reminded me of someone gluing a handle back on to a jug.

  She told me that she had tried to call me earlier, but that nobody had answered. I wasn’t staying at the apartment any more, I said. I had moved out for a while. I gave her the number at Isabel’s.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” my mother asked again.

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  Thirty, I thought. My mind was empty. I felt nothing.

  We talked for another five or ten minutes, firstly about my father, who was working too hard, apparently (my father ran a business that supplied industrial vacuum cleaners to big manufacturers), then about my brother, who had said that he would be coming home for Christmas. She asked me when I was coming home, and I told her it would be soon, though I didn’t think that that was true.

  Later, when the phone-call was over, I drove down to the beach. I walked along the hard, flat sand for about a mile, then I turned inland, through the dunes. I couldn’t go to England—not yet, anyway. I would never be able to carry it off. I loved my parents, I always had, but this was something they couldn’t help me with.

  There were times during that summer when the darkness was coming down and the green floorboards in Isabel’s apartment looked almost black. The flames of the candles staggered as the cool night air circled the room. I would turn towards the phone, which crouched on a round wooden table in the corner, and I would think of calling Brigitte, but it was funny, even before I rejected it as an idea, I would find that I had forgotten the number, a number that had been my own for the past seven years.

  •

  Every so often, when I was least expecting it, I would catch a glimpse of a white wall studded with an array of brackets, clamps and rings, or a woman wearing nothing except a scarlet hood. It felt like a story I had heard third-hand, it had happened to someone else, a person I would never meet, a stranger, and yet, when those images flashed before my eyes, my entire body heated up and suddenly my heart was beating
too solidly inside my chest, making the same sound that a sledge-hammer would make if you raised it above your head and brought it down repeatedly on someone’s lawn.

  One night, in Paul Bouhtala’s apartment, I was studying the pictures on his living-room walls when I noticed a framed black-and-white photograph of a Japanese man lying on a couch. He was naked except for a loincloth, and his body was covered with tattoos.

  “Do you like it?”

  I turned sharply. Bouhtala was watching me from the shadows on the far side of the room, where he was mixing himself a cocktail.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “I took the picture in Yokohama, more than thirty years ago. . . .”

  He embarked on the kind of story that was typical of him—one which involved, if I remember rightly, a Korean transsexual, a knife-fight and a boat-load of narcotics.

  “You don’t have a tattoo, I suppose,” he said, already sounding disappointed.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  And then, with a start, I realised that I had lied.

  “What is it?” Bouhtala asked, still watching me with interest, this time from his brown leather armchair by the fireplace. A maraschino cherry glowed like a gem-stone in the bottom of his glass.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I was thinking of someone else. A friend.”

  Later that night, in Isabel’s apartment, I undressed and stood in front of the bathroom mirror. The marks around my wrists and ankles had long since faded, but Maude’s tattoo still showed, her claim on me scratched crudely into my skin.

  •

  The following morning I drove to the railway station in Bloemendaal and bought a ticket to Amsterdam. I changed trains in Haarlem, then sat by the window, watching the flat green land rush past. I had been away for two months. It seemed even longer. My stomach tightened, and, reaching into my pocket, I took out the notebook I had brought with me. Over breakfast I had copied down the names and addresses of all the tattoo parlours in the Amsterdam phone directory. I opened my notebook and ran through the list, trying to work out which would be the best. I had no way of knowing, of course. In the end, I chose one more or less at random, simply on the basis that I knew the street. Looking out of the window again, I saw apartment buildings sliding by, their façades decorated with dreary squares of yellow, red and blue. The suburbs of the city.