by Norman Lock
He thinks again of the secret pleasure he felt—in his very loins!—when he did touch it. And then he is ashamed, remembering Karin in Papendrecht—how sad she must be to hear the rain on the roof of their little house. For Peter knows of the torrents descending on his homeland.
Karin is sad. The rain rains. Peter walks up and down, looking in the windows of the chic shops of Cannes and dreaming of secret pleasures, of applause. And I? I sit and write yet another story of my friends Peter and Karin K., who are real and imaginary at the same time.
And Maus the dog?
Maus hides under the bed because of the rain beating on the roof and because he knows what neither Peter nor Karin does (nor I myself knew until a moment ago): The Merwede is rising! It is about to breach the banks, spill into the streets of Papendrecht, and, within hours, submerge the town to its second-story windowsills!
How is it that Maus knows before I, the author, do? I do not have an answer for you; but I suspect that there are areas of consciousness, even that attributed to dogs, which withhold themselves from my interventions in the world. Yes, yes!—Maus is a creature of my imagination; but he is also a real dog that barks at the postman, likes to gnaw at Peter’s boot, and will, when alarmed by presentiments beyond my ken, crawl under the bed.
But for the moment, Karin and Maus are safe while the riverbank holds its own against the turbid Merwede—a river, by the way, that begins as the Waal and ends in the Noordzee at Hollands Diep. It is a gray river, Karin says, except at the beltmill, when it becomes “an exotic, deep blue.”
Why not, dear reader (I do not know if you are a gentle one)—why not learn some geography while you are beguiling yourself with this story, which I shall call “Tango in Amsterdam,” although it has nothing to do with dancing or Amsterdam. Are you beguiled? How should I know? I can read the minds of only Peter and his Karin and also of their Maus—and with only partial success because of my limited omniscience. Yours, reader, is entirely unknown to me.
Karin stops worrying about Peter long enough to fall asleep. The rain—the rain—the rain! It makes one sleepy.
Would you care to know what it is that Karin is dreaming?
Windmills.
Always, she dreams of windmills when it is raining.
I have written already of Karin’s fascination for them, these Dutch icons. You know it has been her dream and Peter’s (and—for all I know—Maus’s) to live in a refurbished windmill. People do do that, in the same way that people live in train stations, schoolhouses, and churches once the buildings have lost their original intention. This is interesting, I think: how something can stop meaning one thing and start meaning something else entirely.
Like Tango in Amsterdam—a real Dutch film.
I would like a drink but decide against it for now. Today is my birthday. I think I can be forgiven this personal note in a narrative that is, admittedly, slow to develop. I am today fifty-two and am thinking maybe it is time to do something about my drinking. Oh, gin—I could compose an ode on you, especially Bombay or the excellent blue Sapphire! Beer is also good, if not for the body, for the soul, the spirituality of man, which is constituted, in part, of Fuggle hops—of this I am sure!
On! as Beckett would say, exhorting his characters as they flounder in a swamp or mud or in their own mired minds.
Mud. The Merwede has breached the banks of Papendrecht and is now turning its paths to mud. See how the water swells and sweeps its wet hem across the soccer field where Peter will sometimes kick the ball to Maus on a summer morning.
Maus. Is he still under the bed, do you think?
No, he has gone to the bedroom window to bark at the rising water.
Woef, woef! Wat doet dat water in de straat? Kijk daar, Karin, een eend zwemt voorbij!—which is Dutch for “Woof, woof! What is all that water doing in the street? And look there, Karin, a duck swimming by!”
Don’t be surprised that Maus understands that the proper place for ducks is in the pond or in the canal but—please!—not in the middle of B. Street. He is an unusually intelligent animal.
(Have you never heard of the Dutchman Jakob Boehme? He believed that Adam spoke to Eve, when he spoke to her at all, in the language of animals. Boehme wrote that we will speak this “natural” language once again when we enter Paradise. When we no longer have need of words. I think this language may well sound like Dutch to unaccustomed ears.)
Karin’s anxiety has been mounting with the water. She remembers well the stories her mother used to tell her of the terrible flood of ’53, which wrought so much devastation in the Netherlands. But I must leave Karin a moment to answer an e-mail from a man perplexed in Pasadena: What do you mean by writing such things as these Peter and Karin stories? (Stories?!) They are even worse than your so-called histories of the imagination. They eat themselves up as they go along, like a snake that swallows its own tail. For your own good, pal—give it up!
Indignant in Pasadena
Dear Pasadena:
What you say is true: My stories do devour themselves on the way to being told. They do so to achieve a kind of lightness—the lightness praised by Calvino and also by Ionesco, who wrote: “I feel I am invaded by heavy forces.” I am worn out by gravity. Or maybe it is that I do not know yet how to tell a story?
N.
Dear N:
If you don’t know how to write stories, you have no business taking up a person’s valuable time. I’m surprised you got this crap into a magazine in the first place. Who’d you have to pay off and how much?
Infuriated in Pasadena
Infuriated:
Perhaps if I explain myself: I am, in these stories, proposing myself as a subject of fiction in the same way that Peter and Karin are both real and fictional. Again, in the interests of weakening the gravitational attraction that binds me to what I am.
N.
Nuts to you, Lock! And who wants to hear about your drinking problem!
Pissed off in Pasadena
Instead of e-mails—let’s make them telegrams to delay the narrative time so that Karin may devise a plan to escape her bedroom, now that the river has surrounded her little house.
Singing telegrams delivered by a charming chanteuse named Amelia, who is studying opera at the university. She sings sweetly to my ears. (Sorry, I have not the skill to reproduce the melody.) She is attractive in her official Western Union uniform but refuses each time to have a drink with me. An honest young woman, although I am disappointed she is not so convivial as she is lyrical. It is better not to drink alone, as anyone will tell you.
Karin has once more fallen asleep.
“Wake up, Karin!” I shout, as if my unaided voice could make itself heard from New Jersey!
Wake up, Karin! I type peremptorily.
She opens an eye, then closes it, preferring unconsciousness to the experience of drowning.
Maus begins to lick Karin’s face. And she wakes.
Outside, the sky is gray. The water is gray. The houses are gray. It is grayly raining. Gray is the color of herring, which the Dutch love to eat. The duck was nicely yellow but is nowhere now to be seen. The telegrams were blue. E-mails are colorless and inhuman. I wonder if one day there will be no more stamps in the world, when things are finally and completely electronic? Think of the loss—not only to philatelists but also to the ordinary man or woman who is charmed by the colors and images on stamps. I have a number of lovely ones from Holland, snipped from envelopes bearing greetings and little gifts from my two friends there.
(What now? I wish, for once, something could happen on its own!)
Karin takes a telescope from her desk and, standing by the window, examines the submerged streets and the rooftops of Papendrecht. Thank you, Karin, for showing initiative! And thank you, Hans Lippershey, the Dutchman who invented the instrument in 1608. Where would Galileo have been without the Dutch? A serious consideration! The Dutch have done much for civilization besides: such as putting mayonnaise on french fries.
Can Karin see the sea from her window? I don’t know. But if she could, she would see Peter sailing bravely to rescue his little family in a yacht stolen from the quay at Cannes.
Ha, dear reader, I have played an excellent trick on you, I think! While I have been going on, digressively, about the Dutch and their place in history, the story has been advancing! Digression is the soul of my art.
On the Riviera, Peter held a gun to the captain’s head and was fully prepared to use it. But it was unnecessary; for while studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, the captain had written his dissertation on Erasmus and wished to visit Rotterdam—a short train ride from Papendrecht. He never wanted to be the captain of a yacht but was compelled by circumstances. He had gotten a linguist pregnant in the spring of 1968, when all the world went mad. But that—as they like to say—is another story. (What isn’t?)
Let me describe, instead, the coming of Peter across the Pol-derland, now flooded by the North Sea.
The dark sea is etched by wind. The yacht is knotted up in waves as it plunges from one sliding trough to the next. The salt sea scours its decks, which are empty in this storm; the elemental wind lashes the yacht’s bright pennants. Birds wheel in the confused air, screeching a guttural Dutch translation of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. (Well, why not!) Titanic forces are loosed upon the world. It is all very thrilling; and despite his anxiety, Peter is happy to be in it. He stands in the pilothouse, beside the captain. They are singing—some song or other. A sea shanty, “I’m Ahab the Sailor Man!”—some lively maritime air. They are snug inside peacoats and wear, for preference, sailor’s hats in the French style, with red pom-poms stuck on the top. Peter and the captain have grown by several feet since leaving Gibraltar, to achieve heroic stature. Their penises, which are in the classical mold, bring to mind Michelangelo’s David; but they remain limply buttoned up inside their naval bell-bottoms. Peter and the captain are friends, but not overly friendly. (I resist the impulse to have them dance a tango in the pilothouse, however much a bravura moment it might be.)
Karin spies the yacht now through her telescope. She paints a picture of it in watercolors. (She, too, is an artist and must grapple with her art, no matter how dire the straits.) It turns out to be a fine picture and will, in years to come, hang in the Papendrecht town hall to commemorate this dramatic event in the unofficial history of the nation.
And Maus?
Running in circles round the room in anticipation of rescue and of reunion with his beloved master, Peter.
The yacht stops outside the house. The anchor drops onto the street below. Peter breaks a window with an ax and climbs into the bedroom. He embraces Karin and pats Maus affectionately on the head. Thus Odysseus, returning at last to his Penelope, must have greeted his dog before slaying the suitors. Peter wonders if there is time to make love to Karin, who has never looked so desirable. He feels—how does Eliot phrase it in The Waste Land? “Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain… .” Yes, Peter feels his own dull root now stirring inside his bell-bottoms. But no—he decides against it. For the river has risen to an inch below the windowsill; and the captain, who has shut his eyes shyly, is honking his yacht horn!
Hurry!
Peter hands Karin over to the captain, and Maus, in his arms, jumps onto the yacht as the house begins to uproot, like a tooth loosening in the gum.
No, let’s leave the house where it is. Let us, in fact, leave all the houses intact so that when the Merwede recedes next week, their owners can return and live in them again without so much as a muddy rug to mark the river’s ever having left its bed. Not one teacup shall have been broken during this latest intervention, not one antimacassar soiled—this, good people of Papendrecht, I promise you!
Peter and Karin are cruising to the Canaries, those “Fortunate Islands” ravaged by the Dutch in 1599. The Dutch couple is below, in the master stateroom, folded together sweetly, while the Indian Ocean drums the hull. Maus sits at the captain’s feet as he steers for Tenerife. A parrot sits companionably on the captain’s shoulder. All is as it ought to be. The sky, yellow like an egg yolk, leaks into the water rimming the horizon—the water strewn with orchids, red and blue. Big beams of orange light fall against the yacht. The yacht flies a flag emblazoned with the Palme d’Or. The parrot speaks Parrot; the captain sings; Peter and Karin kiss and cuddle; Maus hopes there will be a Canary Island bitch to keep him company.
I turn off the machine and go upstairs in search of my wife to see what comfort we might offer each other in the gathering New Jersey dusk. Whether we might not speak a little the sensual language admired by Jakob Boehme. And should Helen withhold comfort (for reasons known only to women), there are gin and a tin of herring to see me into night. And beyond that, who can say?
The Brothers Ascend
For Kathryn Rantala
1.
Finally, we went to Madame Sosostris, the clairvoyante, because of the darkness—the darkness that was now general over Dayton. We were anxious, of course, and mystified as to its meaning. Its meaning escaped us, although we pondered it ceaselessly—in private and in public assemblies at the town hall.
“I’m sorry,” she said, spreading her hands in helplessness. “The glass is clouded.”
“Ah!” we cried in our desperate desire to know.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated sincerely. Having fled Tereu in panic, she had made Dayton her home; and the darkness that lay like a hand upon the heart unnerved her, too.
She covered the glass with a purple cloth.
“Would you like tea?” she asked gravely, embarrassed at having failed us.
We shook our heads and trooped out the door, pausing on the sidewalk a moment to tip our hats to Wilbur and Orville, who did not tip theirs in return or make any other sign of acknowledgment. We were not offended, knowing their minds were preoccupied with gravity.
Buttoned up in long black coats, Wilbur and Orville walked past, derbies plumb on their high foreheads, behind which filaments of science and intuition knit into shining ideas, which could not, however, illuminate the unnatural night. Inseparable, the brothers communed with each other silently, in an immaculate exchange of thought.
Some boys appeared, offering to sell us torches. Most of our deputation bought them; but I would not, preferring the dark as I made my way down Dayton’s empty streets, which bristled with iron railings and wooden palings, to Stella’s.
2.
“I’m afraid,” Stella whispered in the darkness of her little room.
“It is nothing,” I said, unbuttoning my shirt.
“Nothing?”
“A phenomenon—meteorological or hysterical; nothing more.”
“Still …”
The ellipsis was audible; it plashed upon the silence. In it I detected something other than her uncertainty. I detected her dread. Not of the darkness but of what it augured. I sought to calm her—sought her hand and stroked it.
“Night—real or imagined,” I said soothingly. “Only night.”
“Night that never ends.” She shuddered.
“An endless time in which to make love,” I said, loosening her hair.
“But the sun doesn’t rise!”
“Perhaps it does, but we can’t see it rise.”
My hands trembled at her blouse’s buttons.
“But why?”
I shrugged—not knowing, not caring at the moment. Wanting her. Letting my hands behave rudely. Their fingers made a kind of twittering song inside her chemise. The fingers of the hands: They had their way. There was nothing I could do to stop them.
“I’ll bet the brothers know,” she said, sulking.
Perhaps.
“Wilbur and Orville … Orville and Wilbur,” she continued uncertainly.
They were, after all, indistinguishable.
“Ask them!” she entreated.
“The brothers are busy.”
“Do you believe in the aeroplane?” she asked after a moment’s hesitation.
&n
bsp; I wasn’t sure. I cranked the gramophone.
How lovely the music coming out of the dark! And the woman in it!
3.
Shall I describe to you Dayton? An American town, in southwest Ohio, where the Great Miami River joins the Stillwater. There, the brothers had a bicycle shop. Once I had worked for them, oiling chains and tightening spokes. Dayton had been a pleasant town dreaming slow river dreams in unending sunshine. Before the sun disappeared from the sky. I rode now on my Wright brothers bicycle to the river, to listen to it sing among the stones, and saw Huck and Jim fetch up in a raft.
You shout, Liar! Theirs was the Mississippi River, which is not in Ohio!
I reply imperturbably, Maybe not in any geography book. But the Mississippi that runs through mythology, the Mississippi of the imagination—that river lapped the green shores of Dayton. Was beaten into foam by the brightly painted paddle wheels of steamers. Was—after years of naïve sunshine—surprised at the sudden dark.
You say, Was?
I reply, Until what was hiding in the night, what is meant by the dark, jumped out to scare us beyond hope. Was—I repeat—and is, alas, no longer.
“Hello,” said Huck.
“Hello,” said Jim.
“Hello,” I said, turning my bicycle lantern on them. “How is the journey?”
“Finished,” said Huck, coming up the bank toward me. “Is it always so dark?”
“Lately.”
“Dark as the inside of Becky’s cave. Dark as old Jim here.”
Jim joined us in the little spill of light. Like Huck, he had grown noticeably older with each step taken away from the river. The river, which lay down in its bed like a man sunk in dreams of a woman glimpsed once on the street, a woman whose head he had not the power to turn.
“It’s technically unexplainable,” I said, gesturing at the dark all around us; “though personally, I think it signifies the end of childhood.”
“The end of innocence at any rate,” said Jim. He lit a cigar, smoked a moment in silent contemplation of its own radiant end, then continued: “The mythology of light has, in this place, bumped up against the mythology of darkness—and sunk.”