Rituals

by Cees Nooteboom

  "I know exactly at what moment I ceased to believe in God. I have always been a good skier. Before the war I was champion of the Netherlands a couple of times. That may not sound like much, but I was the best, nevertheless, and of course these championships were not won in the Netherlands but in the mountains. Have you ever seen mountains?"

  Inni shook his head.

  "Then you have not lived yet. Mountains are God's majesty on earth. At least, so I thought. A skier all alone, high up in the mountains, is different from other people. There are only two things, he and nature. He is on a par with the rest of the world, do you understand?"

  Inni nodded.

  "I have never cared much for people. Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other. Up there you are not bothered by any of that. Nature is pure, like the animals. I feel more love for this dog than for all people put together. Animals are straight, and good for them! When the war was over and we could at last see what exactly had been going on — treason, hunger, murder, and annihilation, all of it done by men — then I really did despise mankind. Not every individual, but the sort that crawls murdering, lying, and frightened towards his own death. Animals are straight, animals don't have slogans, they don't die for someone else, and they don't die for more than their due, either. In our modern society of weaklings the pecking order is a much maligned concept, but it always worked splendidly until man arrived on the evolutionary scene. So, I had had enough of it. I gave up my job as a notary, I burnt all my boats behind me, I broke with my wife — ah, wonderful, wonderful! — and I went to Canada. There I became a fire warden in the Rocky Mountains. For months on end I sat on a high mountaintop. Below me, a landscape of endless forests stretched out in all directions. I sat there peering at it. If I saw smoke, I had to raise the alarm. Provisions were brought to me by plane. Once a week they dropped a sack of food, newspapers, and mail on the patch of ground beside my cabin. For six months I stayed there alone with my dog and my friend the radio, not for the sake of the stupid honky-tonk rubbish you hear on it, but for the nightly conversations with other men at other posts. Two fingers of whisky I allowed myself, two a day" — he raised two joined fingers horizontally to Inni — "never more. If I had once taken more, I would have gone crazy. Then they would have had to haul a raving madman down the mountain. I wrote it all down."

  Inni had never been in the mountains, but that was no reason for not now having a vision of this man who was standing here before him — in a white, icy world. Four Swiss picture postcards enclosed the small log cabin. The man was wearing the same chamois jacket as now, the dog lay asleep at his feet, it was time for his whisky, and there was a gale howling around the cabin. The picture postcards were angry. From the radio came the crackles and groans of a distant, despised world. The man stood up, went to a cupboard, and took out the whisky bottle and a glass. (He had looked at a clock before doing so.) Then he held two fingers horizontally one above the other beside the glass on the table — no, a millimetre above the table because the thickness of the bottom of the glass had to be taken into account — and poured. Glug-glug. Not until some time later did he take a sip. A taste of smoke and hazelnut.

  "And one day I thought: a landscape which, let us say, by its objective majesty evokes the idea of God can, of course, equally well evoke his absence. God was created after the image and likeness of men. This is what everyone grasps in the end, except people who never grasp anything. But I despise people, including" — here was a slight raising of the tone, which gave the word a clipped independence, so that it hovered briefly, in isolation and pregnant with meaning, in the open space between them — "myself, of course. I detest myself. But however much I love dogs and mountains, I was nevertheless unable to imagine God in the shape of a dog or a mountain. And so the idea of God vanished from my life, like a skier going down a slope into the valley. Can you picture it? Seen from a distance the tiny human figure looks black. It writes itself like calligraphy on the white sheet of snow. A long, graceful movement, a mysterious, illegible letter being written, something that is there and is suddenly no longer there. It is lost from sight. It wrote itself and left nothing behind. For the first time I was alone in the world, but I would not miss Him. God sounds like an answer — that is what is most pernicious about the word. It has so often been used as an answer. He should have had a name that sounded like a question. I never asked to be alone in the world, but then, nobody does. Do you ever think about these things?"

  Inni knew already that the enquiring tone in which the sentence was uttered did not imply a question but a command. His dossier was being compiled, and he was being measured. Between him and this man deeds had to be drawn up. But what should he say? He felt a strange indifference. The warmth, the half-hidden colours of flowers, the gently swaying lime trees above him, all these things happening at once, the whole fabric of sensory perceptions, the dog stretching himself and hesitantly walking a little way further to a spot where there was still sun, this whole new life which had started only that afternoon but seemed to have lasted so long already, the hammering voice continuously talking about himself, the whisky he had been given to drink — all this gave him a feeling of not being. So much was happening, he could easily be dispensed with. He was the vessel that was filling up. If he were to speak now, all these new, precious sensations would pour out of him. He heard every word the man said, but what exactly was it all about? "Do you ever think about these things?" What is thinking? He had never seen God going down a slope like a skier. God was a wine stain on a chasuble, the blood of an old man on an icy-cold freestone altar step. But you did not say such things.

  "No, never," he said.

  "Why not?"

  "It does not occupy me." I see.

  He realized that a reply of a more cosmic aspect was being expected of him, but he did not have one.

  "Do you know anything about existentialism?"

  You bet he did. Three debating evenings they had devoted to it, in his last year at boarding school. Sartre, free choice, Juliette Greco, candlelit cellars, black pullovers, boys who had been to Paris and had come home with Gauloises, which you could not get in the Netherlands, cold Camembert, and French bread, of which those same friends said it could not compare with real French bread because that was much crisper. Despair and nausea had had something to do with it, too. Man had been thrown into the world. It had always made him think of Icarus and those other great tumblers, Ixion, Phaeton, Tantalus — all those jumpers without parachutes from a world of gods and heroes who interested him far more than those strange abstractions of which he could form no visual image. A meaningless world into which you were thrown, an existence that signified nothing except by virtue of what you made it signify. It still smacked of church. It had a suspect, musty odour of martyrdom. Most of all, thought Inni, it found its expression in the taste and the smell of those Gauloises — strong, bitter, unlike anything else — a smell that had something dangerous about it, tobacco that clung to your tongue with small, bitter prickles, the crude billiard-chalk blue packet. You could smoke your fear away with them. But that was a word he would never utter to this man.

  "Not much."

  What use could this skiing champion have for philosophy? What did he want of the small, squinting scholar whose portrait appeared so regularly in newspapers and magazines these days? Thinking — what was that exactly, anyway? He read a lot, but what he read, and not just that but everything he saw, films and paintings, he translated into feeling. And this feeling, which could not immediately be expressed in words, not yet and maybe never, that formless mass of sentiments, impressions, observations — that was his way of thinking. You could circle around it with words, but there always remained far more that was not expressed than was. And later, too, a certain resentment would take possession of him, toward those people who demanded precise answers, or pretended to be able to give them. It was, on the contrary, the very mystery of everything that was so attractive. You
should not want to impose too much order on it. If you did, something would be lost irrevocably. That mysteries can become more mysterious if you think about them with precision and method, he did not yet know. He felt at home in his sentimental chaos. To chart it you had to be an adult, but then you were at once labelled, finished, and in effect already a little dead.

  "I don't mean Christian but atheist existentialism .. ."

  Get on your skis! Whiz down a slope in pursuit of your vanished God. Go and sit on a mountaintop. Keep watch for fires. Go away! Leave me alone!

  ". . . That goes too far for me, though. The ethical, humanist side of it doesn't appeal to me. It makes man somehow pathetic, a kind of clown groping around in the dark trying to find the exit. That's what I don't like about it. It isn't cruel enough. Do you understand?"

  Inni nodded. These were words he understood. Patches of haze, as ungraspable as the dancing flecks of light high up in the trees. How many shades of green were there?

  "When Sartre says man has been thrown into the world, he is alone, there is no God, we are responsible for what we are, what we do, I say yes!"

  The affirmative echoed around the woods. The dog pricked up his ears. This man has no one to talk to, thought Inni.

  "But when he then asks me to be responsible for the world as well, for others, I say no! No. Why should I be? 'When man chooses himself, he chooses all men.' Why? I have not asked for anything. I have nothing to do with the vermin I see around me. I live out my time because I have to, that is all."

  And as if to make an immediate start, he turned round in a furious pirouette and disappeared into the woods. The dog had already gone ahead.

  * *

  Had he been set thinking after all? Then it was obviously infectious. As long as you did not do anything yourself, your life was determined by the people and the things that occurred in it. Their presence set into motion a slow stream of events you had to drag along with you: dead fathers, foreign mothers, boarding schools, guardians, and now also an aunt and a skiing champion. With a certain satisfaction he reflected that once again there had been no need for him to do anything himself. But how was it, then, that while he had the feeling that he had done nothing himself and that everything had only happened to him, his life seemed so long? He had already been here for thousands of years, and if he had studied zoology, it would have been millions. Small wonder, with such a past, that you could not remember everything, and yet at the same time it was surprising what you did remember. And stranger still was the equivalence of these recollections, in which the announcement of his father's death was on a par with all kinds of other annexed events, such as Thalassa Thalassa, the Crucifixion, and the burning of the Reichstag. All of it was you, in effect, for although you had not yourself experienced it all, it had woven itself into your life. Ultimately, it was your body that remembered these things for you. Strange chemical processes in your brain had seen to it that you were aware of the Paleozoic, which therefore, somehow or other, had become part of your experience, so that you yourself were connected with unimaginably distant times to which you would belong until you died, by virtue of that same mysterious mechanism. Consequently, your life was stretched out infinitely — that was not to be denied. He suddenly felt very old.

  The silence of the man who had just spoken at such length became emphatic. Had he been tried and found wanting?

  The woods became sparser and lighter, the trees opened out, and through the last remaining, meagre battle formations, he saw a tall shield of light through which they would shortly walk and which veiled the purple heath in a dreamy, hazy glow, making everything seem very empty and very still.

  He would have liked to pause. Better still he would have liked to lie down, to press his face into those sharp, crumbly plants, his body against the ground, as he so often did when he was alone, because then he felt he could slowly merge with the earth, really get inside it with his knees, his chest, and his chin, with everything that was hard and bony about him. Thus he would not be like a cat lying on a cushion. No, he would be more like the half silted-up wreckage of a ship. But for that kind of love affair, there was no place on a woodland walk with Arnold Taads. He was convinced that if he slowed down, his name would boom across the heath as if he were a dog.

  Or had Taads already forgotten him? He did not look up or back and would probably have been able to walk the same route blindfolded, with the same rhythmic, mechanical movements. A wound-up toy soldier on the march. As they reached the house, the clock struck seven.

  * *

  Time, Inni learned that day, was the father of all things in Arnold Taads's life. He had divided the empty, dangerous expanse of the day into a number of precisely measured parts, and the boundary posts at the beginning and end of each part determined his day with unrelenting sternness. Had he been older, Inni would have known that the fear that dominated Arnold Taads demanded its tithes in hours, half hours, and quarter hours, randomly applied points of fracture in the invisible element through which we must wade as long as we live. It was as if, in an endless desert, someone had singled out a particular grain of sand and decided that only there could he eat and read. Each of these preappointed grains of sand called forth, with compelling force, its own complementary activity. A mere ten millimetres further and fate would strike. Someone arriving ten minutes early or late was not welcome. The maniacal second hand turned the first page, played the first note on the piano, or, as now, put a pan of goulash on the stove on the last stroke of seven.

  "I cook once a week," said Arnold Taads, "usually a stew. And soup. I make exactly enough, seven portions for myself and one for a guest. If no one comes, Athos gets it."

  Inni was pleased he would be eating the dog's portion. He did not care much for dogs, especially when they lived in such suffocating symbiosis with their masters. It struck quarter past seven, and they sat down at the table.

  "When we visit your Aunt Therese next week," said Taads, "you will find it a complete madhouse. Most of the Wintrops have a screw loose, but when it comes to choosing a mate, total lunacy takes over. Mostly they tend to pick someone who is quite normal, and then they drive him insane in the shortest possible time, or else they take someone they don't have to spend any effort on because he is soft in the head already. After I had given your aunt the push, she married an absolute imbecile, with money of course, and she became very unhappy as a result, as you have been able to observe for yourself. A number one neurotic. I am glad I got out in time. She was a beautiful woman in the old days, very attractive, but with a kind of impetuous possessiveness that frightened me. Your whole family frightened me, actually. They have two faults: they never know where to draw the line, and they refuse to suffer. By that I mean this: they deny everything that borders on the unpleasant. They turn away from it. They know sentimentality but not loyalty. When things get tough, they are off. Your aunt finds it amusing to dump you here on my doorstep, but she should have known better than to pick an ex-notary. We shall concoct a tidy little settlement out of this for you. Why I bother, God knows. Probably out of spite. But you seem to have a certain talent, although I wouldn't know what for."

  He ate in the same way that he walked — fast, with mechanical movements. A feeding automaton. If for whatever reason, thought Inni, he suddenly looked sideways, that independent arm, driven by a different authority, would poke the fork into his cheek. Half past seven, clearing the table and making coffee. Quarter to eight, coffee and "my fourth cigarette. The fifth I smoke before I go to bed."

  The heavy scent of a Black Beauty wafted through the room.

  "What is it like," asked Arnold Taads, "not to have a father?"

  This man asked only questions to which there were no answers. So Inni did not reply. Not to have a father was not to have something. So there was nothing to say about it.

  "Did you ever miss him?"

  "No."

  "Did you know him?"

  "Until I was ten."

  "What do you remember of him
?"

  He thought about his father, but because it was virtually the first time he had ever done so deliberately, he found it difficult. His father used to say "so long" when leaving the house, and once he had hit his mother in Inni's presence, and, as Inni had gathered, on other occasions too, when he was not present. And one night when, woken by the air raid siren, he had rushed down the stairs in a panic, he had surprised his father on the sofa with the nursemaid. From that, in retrospect, somewhat uncomfortable position, he had ordered Inni back to his bedroom. Later his father had married the nursemaid, his mother having disappeared as a result of one of those mysterious manoeuvres with which grown-ups bend the world to their will. Inni had stayed with his father and the girl, but in the hunger winter he had been sent to his mother, who lived somewhere in Gelderland. At the end of that winter his father had been killed during the bombing of The Hague. The news had filled Inni with pride. Now he, too, was really part of the war.

  He had never seen his father's grave, and when he had begun to take an interest in it, it was no longer there. It had been cleared, someone told him — a very special variant of "cleared away" — and so he had remembered this: his father had been cleared away. In yellowy war photographs he would see a balding man with sharp features, a sombre clerk from the late Middle Ages, although his mother had told him he used to dance on bar tables, to gypsy music. These were the memories he had of his father, and there was only one conclusion: his father was well and truly dead.

  "I don't remember much."

  Then Taads again, this time in the disguise of a professor. "Sartre says that if you have no father, you are not burdened with a super-ego. No father on your back, no bullying regulating factor in your life. Nothing to rebel against or to hate or to measure your conduct against."

  I don't know about that, thought Inni. If it meant that he was alone in the world, it was correct. That was just what he felt, too, and it suited him splendidly. Other people, like the man facing him now, had to be kept at a distance. And they should not talk too much about him either. So long as they talked about themselves, or about his relations, none of whom he knew anyway, it was fine. He had twice been expelled from boarding school because he "did not fit in with the other boys", he "did not join in", he "had a perfidious influence on the other students". They hated him — that would have been a more accurate way of putting it. They had put litanies of hatred in his bed ("Sour lemon, pray for us"), but it had left him strangely unmoved. Those boys were different. On visiting days they were surrounded by families, fathers in brown suits and mothers in floral-print dresses. He had nothing to do with them, any more than with this man here who had come straying into his life. He refused to allow them in, that was what it boiled down to. It was just as if everything happened in a film. He might be sitting in the audience following the action attentively, certainly if the actors were as fascinating as this one, but really to be part of it was impossible. He remained, even when he felt sympathy for the actor, an onlooker. If you kept silent, the stories would come all by themselves.