by Roy Jacobsen
“I truly don’t know, but perhaps you should say straight out that you want her, and now, and then at least there is no doubt concerning which question she is answering?”
This is strong stuff from a man of the cloth, but Father Rampart has lived for many years, heard a lot and understood most, so Robert follows his advice, but would you believe it, she manages to wriggle out of it again. And afterwards she withers before his eyes; he is struck by a sense that he has offended his own mother, it is a familiar feeling, but in his youthful exuberance he thought he had got past that, now it tells him he didn’t deserve Brigitte, she is too pure, so he stops seeing her, his feet won’t take him there, and she stops seeing him. They cast stolen glances at each other, thinking the other doesn’t notice, but this is nothing to build dreams on. Thank God I escaped, Robert thinks, all of this has really been the complicated conquest of a different woman, a woman he already has a relationship with.
Leni is ten years older than him, she teaches aesthetics and literature at the school where he is a pupil himself, and her gym-teacher husband hasn’t lived up to expectations; he has given her two children in quick succession, a boy and a girl, whom Leni has named after her father and mother, but that is his sole contribution if Leni is to be believed – he has no language, by which she means he has neither anything to say nor any interest in listening to what she has on her mind, to words which can change the world if only you believe in them – but you are so young, Robert!
Yes, he’s not very mature but he is tough and knows what he wants and there is no stopping him anymore, and from the fiasco with Brigitte he has also learned that when love fails, half a person is lost, at least, life becomes a lie, unreal and meaningless when first you have loved and no longer do. And Leni yields slowly and calmly to the overpowering pressure, then one day she takes over and leads him by the hand along life’s meandering paths of bliss, elegant circumlocutions of which Father Rampart listens to in the confession box every Saturday between five and seven. They meet in the forest, or at her house on Sunday afternoons when the kids are resting and the gym teacher is conducting training sessions with the local gymnastics club on the sports field. Or they sometimes bump into each other when Robert visits Léon in Dorscheid and Leni just happens to be at home in the room she slept in as a child, the room which has been untouched since then, with all its memories, both good and bad.
Léon doesn’t see through much of this, but his non-wife, “the beautiful Agnes”, does. She smiles and sees to it that Leni’s tiny tots have their own room, because she nurtures high hopes for this passion that has invaded her arid home, we all have our problems, and Agnes’ two teenage sons are no blinder than Markus, they nudge each other in the ribs and act like the unbearable interlopers they have always been.
But it is not these few knowing onlookers who complicate the relationship, it is Leni herself.
“I daren’t imagine what your mother will say if she finds out about us,” she says one day, when they have been walking in the forest around Dorscheid to admire a sundial which Léon has erected on a solitary hill with a fine view of everything that means anything in this world, and she says it with an ambivalent curl of her mouth, as if she meant to say “when your mother finds out about us.” For Leni is waiting for an opportunity to inform Maria, she says without articulating the words, since Robert has everything the gym teacher lacks, both language and a lingering embrace, she says bluntly, so she is never going to let go of him – never!
These prospects fill him with a hitherto unknown panic; it is one thing not being able to live without Leni (and thinking about the curves of her hips at all times of the day and night, also when he is asleep, and about her hands and her sea-green eyes and her utter contempt for all and sundry – there is a vitality in Leni, life and action), and quite another the thought of his mother getting to hear about the arrangement, this must not happen, and on the horizon there are exams looming, which he won’t be able to concentrate on.
Robert has plans to sort out all this mess. Things don’t go well, and this time he can’t visit Father Rampart, who has been Léon’s failed spiritual adviser for ten years and knows both him and Leni a little too well – and not least Maria – to be able to act with the necessary objectivity, Robert feels, so it will have to be Markus once again, the only person who really knows how to keep a secret.
11
Robert arranges a time with Markus, which isn’t normally necessary, but it is now, and the following Saturday afternoon he goes over to his house. Nella is alone there and says that Markus has gone on ahead, and adds with a peculiar smile:
“But you can shout. His hearing’s fine.” Robert nods and sets off up the hill behind the houses, along a path they call Via Dolorosa because it is steep and invisible and the thoughts people think while walking along it are painful, and here it is more like summer, the earth is steaming even though the foliage has already shut out the sun, the crystal drops drip from the trees, and the ground squelches beneath his feet. He spots Delilah, Markus’ indomitable dog, sniffing around in her own world, but she walks a few steps alongside him and then leaves him, and Robert has a sudden insight, he knows what answer Markus will give him:
“Even an idiot can see there is only one option. Keep your indiscretions to yourself for three years. By that time Leni will be sick of you or you will be sick of her or else neither of you will be sick of the other and you can get married without Maria batting an eyelid.”
“But by then I’ll be twenty-one and she’ll be thirty,” Robert might protest, deep in thought, wary of being persuaded once again to adopt a strategy which is not to his benefit but his mother’s.
“So?” Markus will answer. “You can’t be young and old at the same time, no more than you can be both here and there. Leave the rest to God and Leni, if she’s as smart as you believe…”
That is how the conversation will go. No doubt about it. Robert has found a solution on his own, he’s pleased with it, even though it only means that he already knows, without asking, what Markus will answer, if he answers at all. He senses there is something false and unreal about all this, as though he is still a jumble of other people’s opinions. But so what? He sits down under a hazelnut tree with newly sprung leaves on its gnarled branches and knows that he will soon be visiting Leni, even if it is in broad daylight and the middle of the afternoon when she has two friends visiting her to make arrangements for a charity bazaar to fund new floodlights for the chateau, and that he will get her away for a private tête-a-tête, where he will present his plan, three years, it is a long time to wait, probably longer for him than for her, but she will quickly consider it and see from his face that he means it and is serious, and she will agree without a second thought.
But now he walks on, with Delilah, who has reappeared, and down in the next valley he meets his old friend by a stream where in an earlier life they had fished for trout; the blind man is sitting on the remains of a stone wall by an old mill, and Robert sees that he has been crying.
“Is that you, Robert?” he mutters, staring into space, a completely unnecessary precaution, for no-one ever comes here. Robert sits down next to him and listens to yet another depressing monologue about the war:
“What’s happened to them?” Markus wonders out loud. “Where have they gone, all the armies? This is the most inexplicable of all mysteries – they are still out here, or they are living somewhere else, if they ever existed at all, I mean, propaganda is not exactly an unknown phenomenon in war, nor mass graves or the destruction of rolls of men – for no-one disappears, Robert, without a hefty dollop of magic, but no event in our country’s history has been scrutinised more closely than this, and we are talking about six to ten divisions. They are still wandering around in our forests like flickering images in the minds of those they left behind; they are the ones I talk to when I’m sitting here on a day like this, it has been heart-rending…”
Markus says no more, leans back and stares up at the
sky, and there – above the massive oak crowns in the north – a gigantic orange sun is rising with a small grey tassel beneath, a wicker basket, they now see, the sun is a hot-air balloon, and there is a man on board, a black silhouette darting to and fro in a desperate attempt to manoeuvre it. It clears the ridge of the hill by a hair’s breadth and sinks slowly but surely like a stone in honey to the valley bottom, where the basket makes a controlled landing on the banks of the river, without a sound. A man in a pale khaki uniform, leather helmet and flying goggles jumps out and runs round a beech tree with a rope to moor it, then turns to the onlookers and says:
“Treibstoffmangel,” out of fuel, and grabs them by the hand with what seems like flustered relief. He is a university lecturer in Bonn, that is where he is heading, from Bastogne, trying to beat a distance record set by a colleague who covered the Aachen–Trier stretch in the same balloon, which of course they built themselves, the wind has let him down and, on top of that, he has eaten all his provisions…
The two dumbstruck eyewitnesses see immediately that Markus has given himself away to such an extent that now he cannot become blind again, which means that he cannot accompany this man to town and help him to buy whatever he needs – it will have to be Robert, while he and Delilah guard the craft?
The pilot nods his approval and on the way to town expounds on the laws of thermodynamics, which get up to such strange antics here above the Ardennes, he is working on some mathematical models which in time will be of benefit to the burgeoning aircraft industry and is trying out his ideas himself, as people used to do in the olden days, so the idea and the inventor can be obliterated at a stroke if they are no good, heh-heh.
Maria is not at home, so Robert grabs some food without having to answer any awkward questions while the pilot fills his jerrycans in Markus’ stable, after which they hurry back to where the blind man is waiting, impatient and ill at ease, anxious to get the madman off again before the enormous balloon attracts too much attention. But the German is in no hurry at all and what is more the hot air burner is in no hurry either, and it takes time to fill a whole gigantic fabric bag, so Markus says they will have to be getting home, but as the pilot is about to take off he asks them if they want to go with him.
“Won’t we be too heavy?” Markus asks, suddenly a different person.
“Not at all. I have several hundred kilos of sand on board. All I have to do is chuck it out.”
“Er, well…” Markus says. “What do you think, Robert?”
Roberts looks at his old friend, sends Leni a warm thought, and they clamber aboard, they rise from the ground while Delilah runs around below in circles, growling, and has no idea what has become of them because dogs never look into the air; the three of them slowly ascend in the swaying gondola, while the professor empties the sandbags over the treetops as if from Our Lord’s own salt cellar and sings pop songs at the top of his voice, they soar like birds to dizzying heights, down on the left the outskirts of Clervaux appear, and Robert sees the rooftops and the crooked walls, the road to school and the school, the chateau which looks like a large fox trap, cars which hardly move, and people out for a Sunday walk, who stop one after the other to lean back casually in mute wonderment.
The gentle breeze turns west, and they pass Vianden after half an hour, but as they glide into Germany and Schnee-Eifel, Robert notices that Markus has lost interest in the professor’s lectures.
“What a wonderful view,” he mumbles with the same soul-shaking awe that must seize a blind man when he regains his sight, as once had been his plan, let there be light and there was light. And this awe is transmitted to his young friend, Robert, because everything is changed for him too, it is now of absolutely no consequence to him what his mother might be hiding with regard to true or untrue secrets about his origins. Who doesn’t fabricate an image of their own life, and of others too? Who doesn’t cling resolutely to the world we can live with? And the next moment Markus comes out with what is on his mind:
“Even though we never talk about this,” he says, glancing warily at the professor, who has taken a break from his sermon and is smoking a pipe while navigating with a steady hand, “you know, don’t you, that we lost a son in Russia. A couple of days ago we received another letter, informing us that he was alive, somewhere in the Eastern Bloc, not far from Dresden. Nella doesn’t know I’ve read it. She hasn’t shown it to me yet. She doesn’t think I can take it as we’ve received letters like this before, from people who think they know something. There’s no truth in what they say, of course, but it’s always me it hits harder, that’s what she thinks anyway…”
Robert can see Nella’s expression – “His hearing’s fine, anyway” – accompanied by a scornful smile, or gloating, from a woman he considered had no more substance than the clothes she wore.
“He was registered as ‘Vermisst’,” said Markus, “missing in action, like so many others. That’s what has been going through my mind for all these years in the shadows, two questions I must have an answer to: Could I have done anything for him? That’s how parents think. Could his superiors have done anything? That’s how the courts of law and God think. Two small questions, these are what I have been grappling with, day and night, in the dark, since the sun doesn’t shine on me, I don’t know whether it does on you?”
All of this happened early in the summer of 1963. And for the first time Robert began to doubt whether Markus was of this world, but this was not the reason they called him “The Wizard of Clervaux”. The Wizard of Clervaux sits, blind and happy, on a chair in the midst of a crowd of kids telling Ardennes folk tales, sometimes about the mysterious and dangerous “Knife-Thrower” whom no-one knows but who is still there, it is said, just like the bridge at Frankmühle. In the most boring scenario he regales them with a parable, at great length, about St Hubertus, the apostle of the Ardennes, who saw a deer on the crest of a hill in the morning mist bearing the cross of the Lord, or often also the whole of His head, with the crown of thorns, in the antlers; they can’t hear the soft patter of the falling rain, so he makes the sounds himself.
Shark
In the 1570s Prince William of Orange sat ensconced in his castle at Dillenburg, near Wiesbaden, fervidly fantasising about driving Philip II and his energetic general the Duke of Alba out of the Netherlands. The Spaniards were plundering the region and taking anything of value, everything it produced and owned, art and crops and goods and gold, not only that, they had even levied a new tax on real estate, a transfer tax, to get their hands on the dust which God enhances a commodity with just by letting it pass from hand to hand.
It made William ill. He not only saw himself as the legitimate heir to several thrones but also as the incarnation of the true faith’s conception of justice and law, a man who could not sit still while the earth was groaning and panting, so he concocted plans and schemes to combat the Mediterranean oppressors, only to drop them just as quickly, in the name of common sense, as he put it, made new ones and ordered mass dismissals of “useless staff”, a term he virtually made synonymous with the court’s honourable, to varying degrees, administrative apparatus.
He couldn’t find a solution. He found – if the truth be told – nothing at all, nothing he could call his own, a new idea to point the way forward, even the army he had so painstakingly assembled was modelled on the enemy’s principles, on Alba’s, and consisted mostly of mercenaries, poor young men who harboured neither affection nor a sense of duty for the lands they would hopefully conquer one day – and could they focus their disparate emotions on something as passionate as a war of liberation?
Doubts gnawed at William.
But one day the solution came, it struck Dillenburg like a thunderbolt, a matter of four small sentences in a dispatch which on first reading seemed both trivial and incomprehensible, but which William’s “useless staff” immediately recognised as being perhaps the Prince’s only chance, the chance a great man must see and grasp without hesitation, for it will never return!<
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When the Spanish conquered the Netherlands, sections of the most rebellious Dutch citizens fled to sea and became pirates, known as the Sea Beggars: William himself had equipped them with Letters of Marque and Reprisal to help them survive in exile, and of course also to have them ready and waiting to keep them loyal to him.
Between raids, the Sea Beggars usually laid up in English harbours, but now the dispatch which arrived in Dillenburg reported that the English had had enough of this “pack of robbers” hugging their coastline and incurring the hostility of the Spanish, and had chased them out to sea again. This fragile armada sailed away from the British Isles, but was met by a terrible storm, and it was a much depleted fleet that drifted in towards the Dutch coast. There the squadron commander had the – to put it mildly – remarkable idea of ravaging the coast while they happened to be there, and pillaging. And they discovered to their surprise that the Spanish outpost was much weaker than they had imagined, and indeed that the occupational forces might possibly not be so superior and invincible as hitherto thought.
The Sea Beggars built a bridgehead by a small fishing village by the name of Brielle and managed to hold their position in the face of sporadic attacks, and, inspired by this success, revolts broke out in other towns, in Rotterdam and Vliessingen, by the seaward approach to Antwerp.
“Brielle could be your chance,” William’s staff said to the demoralised Prince as they wafted the dispatch in front of his nose. “Brielle or nothing. We’ll have to go to the town’s rescue!”
But William’s veins were hardened by five years of inactivity, the flesh hung loose around his hips and his brain had grown sluggish and hazy from birdsong and heavy wines and fruitless speculation. So, on their own initiative, his “useless staff” published a manifesto proclaiming him as the Stadholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht and Friesland. And slowly but surely he came to life. He sought advice from his brother, Louis of Nassau, who had a post in French government circles, and he put him in touch with the leader of the Huguenots, Admiral Coligny, who himself was an ardent supporter of the war against Philip II.