Rituals

by Cees Nooteboom

  "Not a lot."

  "Good. Look, I'll show you the difference." He went away and returned with a large book.

  How many books have I seen today? thought Inni.

  "This is a famous print by Utamaro. Even if you aren't trained in looking at these things, you ought to feel something."

  It was a portrait of a woman. Riezenkamp's hand made a few sketching movements and then came to rest on the margin of the page.

  "When you look at it consciously for the first time, you won't find many points of contact. With the things you're accustomed to looking at, I mean."

  He was right. In the large, light-coloured area of her face, there were no shadows, no nuances. Sensuous it most certainly was, but far away, unapproachable. The tiny mouth stood slightly open, the eyes without lashes were also very small and seemed to express nothing, and the nose was a single curved line. Without any change in colour the area of the face ran down into the decollete, which with the most minimal of lines suggested the swell of the right breast, strangely in the lower left-hand corner of the print. The way in which the green kimono bulged forward and up at the left shoulder did not seem logical to Inni, but neither had that peculiar backward billow of the Sibyl's veil been logical, except that there it had looked clumsy and here it possessed an indefinable dramatic force.

  "What do those characters mean in the top left-hand corner?"

  "That is the courtesan's name, and the name of her brothel."

  He looked again. The only lewd thing about the print was that minimal breast line. The face remained abstract. There was no reason to touch her. Perhaps that was forbidden anyway. You weren't supposed to kiss Amsterdam whores either. But geishas weren't whores.

  "And down here?"

  "The editor's seal and the name of the artist."

  "If," said the voice which was now above him and had a curious upper-class quality — a sound that screened off a territory and therefore also seemed quite remote from everything oriental — "if you were to regard the colours merely as colours, you would notice how sophisticated the composition is. Look at this piled-up shiny black mass of hair, for instance. It all looks so simple, but of course it isn't. Your print..." the voice hesitated, "your print is very nice. It was an everyday product in those days, and it probably comes from some booklet or other, a guide to the red-light district shall we say, ha-ha. Actually, it's much more recent than this one, but to us it simply has the attraction of the exotic. Would you like a drink?"

  "Thank you."

  Inni rose from his stooping posture and looked straight into the eyes of the man who was still standing outside the display window.

  "An attentive observer," he said.

  "Very," said Riezenkamp. "And not only that. He knows all about it as well. With such a man as a customer I could live. But the true fanatics don't have any money. It may sound strange coming from me, but since art has become more and more a question of investment, it isn't so much fun any longer. The wrong people buy the good stuff. Or rather, they have it bought for them. By highly skilled servants who have first sold themselves."

  He waved, and the man outside nodded. "He'll be coming in presently. An odd fish if you don't know him, but I like him. And one day he'll buy something from me, something great. Not that it matters ..." The voice trailed away because at that instant two Japanese entered, together with the attentive stranger. Only now did Inni notice how very oriental the man looked. He distinguished himself from the Japanese in their smart suits and ties only by his clothes. White linen trousers, a white collarless shirt, bare feet in the simplest of sandals. The Japanese remained standing in the doorway and made a series of small bows. Riezenkamp's tall figure bowed in return, and he disappeared into his office with them. Without a sound, the man in white crossed the room and paused by a screen. Then he said suddenly, "I saw you were interested in the raku bowl."

  Inni turned towards him and said, "Only in the object as such. I know nothing about these things, and I have never seen anything like it before. It is as if it emits some kind of threat."

  "Threat?"

  "Yes, nonsense of course. I heard myself say it, but it wasn't what I meant. I really wanted to say power."

  "If that is what you wanted to say, you would have said it. You meant exactly what you said, of course. Threat."

  Together they walked in the direction of the window. The bowl was now below them, so that he could look into it, and it was as if he were looking into the depth of an eye, or into a deep black pool, infinitely scaled down. The bowl stared back, hollow, black-gleaming, the envoy of a universe in which the uninitiated had no business.

  "Kuroraku," said the man beside him. It sounded like a magic formula, as if by uttering these words, one could curb the bowl's mysterious power.

  Half an hour later, Inni knew more about raku pottery than he ever could, or would want to, remember, for as the soft, somewhat drawling voice encapsulated him in names of masters and bowls, thrusting dynasties of potters upon him as if they were the kings of lost mythical realms — Raku IX . . . Raku X — he knew at the same time that this art, not only the bowls but also the kakemonos, the Buddha statues, the netsukes, would always remain alien to him, because it stemmed from a culture and a tradition that were not his and could never become his. For the first time he had the feeling that he was too old for something. All this might be part of the world in which he lived, but each of these objects had a meaning for transcending its external beauty. As long as he only looked at it and could regard this looking as a purely aesthetic experience, it was all right, but he was repulsed by the realization that there was so much to be learned about each separate object. He would need another life for it, he would have to be born again, because his one and only birth had excluded him from this strange world by virtue of the moment and the place at which it had occurred. Beyond his will, a choice had been made, and he had to stick to it.

  Bernard was right. There were things one had to renounce, even if they were possible. Now that he had reached the age of forty, he would never become a pianist or learn Japanese, he was sure of it. And at the same time this certainty made him feel sad, as if life was at last beginning to make its limitations clear, and death was in sight. It was not true that all things were possible. Perhaps all things had been possible, but they were no longer. You were what you had, perhaps unintentionally, chosen to be, and he was a person who could read a Romanesque tympanum, who knew what symbols belonged to each of the Evangelists, who was able to recognize the allusions to Greek mythology in a Renaissance painting, and who knew which attribute went with each saint in Christian iconography. "Und" he sang inaudibly while the didactic voice beside him continued, "das ist meine Welt, und sonst gar nichts."

  Once, in the cathedral of Toledo, he had seen a group of Japanese tourists, guidebooks in hand, walking past the stations of the cross. At each station they crowded around their leader like a small herd. All that was missing was a sheep dog to bite them in the ankle if they lagged behind. But they did not lag behind; they listened attentively to the serious young woman giving a cooing, gurgling account of the strange events that had befallen this masochistic son of the cruel Western god. It had reminded him of his own visit to Chieng Mai, in northern Thailand, where he had wandered equally helplessly from temple to temple, book in hand. Books tell no lies, and he had let the facts, dates, and architectural styles trickle deeply into his brain. But at the same time, he kept that penetrating sense of impotence because he could not see why one building was so much older than another, because he could not read the signs, and in the last instance, because he had not been born a Thai.

  The nuances that gave those things their flavour would remain hidden from him because, quite simply, they were not his. Even in the colonial cathedral of Lima, where he was more at home, he had decided to let it pass before his eyes like a brilliant decor, no more. You did not have a thousand lives. You had only one.

  The voice by his side said that Raku IX was the adoptive
son of Raku VII and a far greater potter than his brother Raku VIII, but Inni had stopped listening. He saw Riezenkamp showing out the Japanese and watching them go from behind the closed net curtains in the door. The little group walked as far as the bridge, gesticulating in the bright sunlight like a set of shadow puppets. Then one of the puppets turned around and became human again, walking back towards the shop. Riezenkamp quickly returned to his office and did not emerge until long after the bell had rung. The conversation was shorter this time.

  The voice by Inni's side, which had just embarked on a discourse on the tea ceremony, halted, for the unmatched duo, art dealer and customer, giant and dwarf, were moving in the direction of the window where the bowl stood. Both had on their faces that expression Inni knew so well and which could mean only one thing: the two parties had come to an agreement about the same object, even though their intentions were totally different. Both would be receiving something — the Japanese the bowl, the dealer the money. Good breeding tempered any manifestation of the greed they were prey to. What followed next looked more like a sacred act than anything else. With a small key, Riezenkamp opened the display case as if it were a tabernacle. Something terrible is about to happen, though Inni. A bowl such as that will not allow itself to be removed with impunity. He noticed that the face of the man by his side had turned grey underneath the brown. The dark eyes followed the art dealer's large white hands closing around the bowl and lifting it out of the case. For a moment Inni thought the man was about to say something, but the wan, bloodless lips remained tightly closed in a face which itself looked like a Japanese mask. But what did it express? Hatred, certainly, but also weakness, caused by immense grief. Here was a man, thought Inni, who had long since lost the ability to feel grief over people and who had lodged all the grief he possessed in this black bowl.

  The Japanese took it from the dealer. How much more did those hands belong to it! He put it down carefully, bent over it, and quickly and with a hissing noise sucked some air into his mouth and said something with long, deep throaty sounds. Only then was Inni able to see the bowl properly. A streak of lighter, rough dots ran through the deep darkness of its black interior like a grey Milky Way. Who would dare drink from it? The spotlight straight overhead was reflected in the bottom, but it seemed as if the bowl was reluctant to return the light that was so generously sent to it, and kept it greedily inside the deep black earth of which it was made. For the second time that day Inni thought of the earth in which he had buried the pigeon, and now something sinister had come into this light day, something sinister connected with the motionless man by his side, with the fixed gaze of the Japanese buyer, and with all those silent, closed objects around him.

  "Well, Mr Taads," said the art dealer, suddenly, "I am sorry, but there it is. The rules of the game. Still, you know as well as I do that there are more raku bowls." With a move of his hand he invited the Japanese into his office. The buyer picked up the bowl and followed him slowly and gravely.

  "Taads," said Inni. "I once knew someone of that name. But he . . ." Inni checked himself. He couldn't very well say, "but he was a white man". This Taads gave him a long, silent look.

  "I have no relations," he said finally. "I don't know any other Taadses. The only one I knew was my father, and he is dead. He once wrote a book, about mountains. I have never read it."

  "Arnold Taads?"

  "Yes, he was my father. Not that it meant much to him. Did you know him? "

  "Yes."

  "Did he ever mention me? My name is Philip."

  "No, he never told me he had a son. I did know he had a wife."

  "Had had, exactly. He tormented my mother into the grave. He left her when I was very young, and we never heard from him again. I gather he was a hard, egocentric man. He had brought my mother home from the Indies. I don't suppose he ever told you about that? He returned home with my mother and his parong. His parong he kept."

  He turned away as if to indicate that as far as he was concerned, the subject was closed, and he peered at the empty space where the bowl had been.

  "First they squandered them, and now they are taking them away again." He said it with bitterness, and for a moment the drawl had gone from his voice. "Let's get out of here."

  "Did you want to buy that bowl?"

  "Yes, but I haven't any money. I would need to save up for years for this bowl."

  The new Taads who had come into his life walked out of the shop. Inni followed him. Now I am walking behind a Taads once again, he thought. Not until later did he remember that he had forgotten to say good-bye to the art dealer and had left his print behind. Transient life.

  "Would you care for a drink?" he asked.

  "I hate bars." And after a few moments, "Tell me, how did you know my father?"

  "That is a long story."

  "If you like, come and tell me about it at my home. I live in the Pijp. It's not far."

  "Thank you."

  They walked past the Rijksmuseum, which lay gleaming under its tall roofs like a treasure box of brick, and then alongside the swaying, shimmering water of the Ruysdaelkade. Ducks and gulls, quacking and squawking.

  * *

  Philip Taads's universe was quite as idiosyncratic as that of his father. Nothing that led to it made you suspect where you would end up, and the contrast with the dilapidation that even in those years — as a forerunner of the disfigurement that was to afflict the whole city later — was eating its way through the nineteenth-century streets like a rapacious fungus, literally took your breath away. Behind the small man who, again like his father, looked neither up nor back, Inni threaded his way among the half-rotted wrecks of cars, evil-gleaming garbage bags, and double-parked delivery vans to a forlorn, peeling door behind which were steep, dark stairs whose top could not be seen from below. Inni felt as if he had set out on a pilgrimage, a penance that had everything to do with Arnold Taads and with his own past and not in any way with this thin, silent Oriental with his introspective monk's face.

  The room they entered was very light and seemed at first sight completely empty. Everything in it was white. Here you were, far from the world, in a rarefied, cold mountain landscape, or rather in a monastery high in the mountains. At any rate, you were most certainly not in the Netherlands. Slowly Inni began to distinguish objects in the emptiness — a few white screens suspended from the ceiling and behind which nothing was visible, a low wooden bed, almost a plank, covered with a sheet and therefore more like a bier. It was clear that this Taads, too, lived on his own. There was not even a dog here to disturb the space and the silence. A faint smell of incense hung in the air. Philip Taads pointed to a cushion in the middle of the floor and sat down, in oriental posture, on a similar cushion opposite the first. Inni lowered himself uneasily and tried also to assume some sort of oriental pose, but ended up half-recumbent with one hand under his chin, a pasha-like attitude which, as he was later to find to his satisfaction, the Enlightened One himself had assumed on occasion. This Taads also had a stern appearance, but Inni had grown too old to be intimidated by Taadses, dead or alive.

  Fathers and sons. As Philip Taads did not speak but seemed to be rocking back and forth slightly to the rhythm of a repetitive interior prayer, Inni was able to give free rein to his thoughts. In one respect the son seemed to be unlike his father, for the striking of a clock brought no perceptible change in the situation. Time, then, played no role here. Inni asked himself what he was feeling at this moment. A kind of tedious distaste was the best way to describe it. There are things that ought not to be repeated, and this meditating Easterner ought not to have come drifting like a cloud in front of his father's memory. How strange, thought Inni, that memories are your only certainty. Anyone tampering with them is seen as an intruder. He was being forced to descend into the past, God knows, maybe to reconsider it. His aunt, Petra, the dog — all kinds of doors were being opened that would have been better left closed. What lay behind them had been properly filed, and that sufficed. One
aspect of growing older is the refusal to admit new memories.

  "My father despised me," said Philip Taads.

  "He can hardly have known you."

  "He did not want to know me. He couldn't bear the thought of leaving a trace behind him on earth. That I can understand, actually, but it was very unpleasant when I was a child. He never wanted to see me. He denied my existence. You were going to tell me how you knew him."

  Inni told him.

  "He looked after you better than he looked after me."

  "It wasn't his own money. He didn't have to do anything for it."

  "It sounds as if you liked him."

  "I did."

  Was this true? He had regarded Arnold Taads more as someone to whom such categories did not apply, as a natural phenomenon, as something that simply happens to be. It irritated him that he was now, in retrospect, forced to qualify his view. The present encounter was pointless. He had already had this experience before, or rather, someone else whom he had been very long ago had already had this experience and had told him about it. This Taads was crazy, too, and would come to a sad end, like his father.

  "Have you spent much time in Asia?" Inni asked.

  "Why?"

  "It looks ... Japanese here."

  "I have never been to Japan. Modern Japan is vulgar. It was made diseased by us. It would destroy my dream to go there."

  His dream. Goodness! This Taads was not afraid of big words. But perhaps this was a dream. The setting suggested it. The room that could not exist the moment you opened your eyes, the words that trickled slowly from the lips of this monkish man, the dark eyes that remained fixed on him as if to stop him from tipping over.

  Why did fathers make sons? With this son there were no curt, clipped sentences, no medals won by whizzing down snowy slopes, but rather the conversion of all that into slowness and emptiness. And yet, unmistakably, there was the same isolation, the same refusal.