"Shall I make tea?"
"Thank you."
When his host had vanished behind his screens like a silent shadow, Inni rose as if released, and walked, more or less on tiptoe, around the room, in which more and more objects loomed up. Or had these few books and picture postcards entered inaudibly and invisibly during the conversation, and had they, equally unheard and unseen, settled themselves on the floor against the skirting-board? It was a riddle to him, as strange as the pictures on one of the cards: a raked area of powdery gravel in which, just slightly off centre, three weathered stones of unequal size rested on an island of something that looked like moss. He remembered having seen such pictures before in books about Japan, but he had never seen a real one. Kneeling on the floor, he peered at the mysterious scene that, he did not know how, seemed to be reflected by this room, as if this bed, too, were not a thing you slept in but rather something akin to those stones, something that could express anything you cared to invest it with. Actually, thought Inni, this room, just like the gravel area with the three stones, would show to best advantage if there was nobody in it, not even the occupant, and no one to look at it. That area or garden or whatever you might call it could exist on its own, just like the universe, without inhabitants or spectators.
He shuddered and put the card back in its place, but this was not enough to release him from the room. The other cards represented real gardens with real shrubs, albeit trimmed into impossible Euclidean shapes that were eerie in their perfection, and lawns that looked as if they had been licked smooth by a tongue, and blood-red sculptured autumn trees. Autumn! Here at least was a word that ought to evoke some idea of time. But time was precisely the element that was wholly absent from these photographs. A day's journey further on, in another corner of the room, revealed a book with Japanese characters and the portrait of an old man on the cover. As he picked it up, his host returned.
"That is Kawabata," he said, "a Japanese writer."
"I see."
Inni studied the likeness of the old man. But was it an old man who was young or a young man who was old? From the uncommonly high forehead, silver-shiny hair swept back in a curve. The frail body was wrapped in dark, traditional dress.
Leafing through the book from back to front, he saw the same man again, full length this time, receiving what must have been the Nobel Prize, because he stood facing the old king of Sweden, who raised his thin, applauding old man's hands especially high and far forward in the manner of well-bred northerners wishing to indicate that their enthusiasm is genuine. Because the author was photographed in profile here, you could see clearly how incredibly small and delicate he was. He stood bowed, wearing white socks and curious-looking sandals, and held the object he had just received firmly in his hands. Over a long, green robe he wore a black cloak down to the knees. Inni was not sure whether it was a kimono. Again it struck him how high the hair swept up from the small, inward-looking face. On the broad faces of the princes and princesses before him and, due to the height of the podium, also partly below him, lay an expression that could best be described as an anxious form of bewilderment.
Philip Taads had resumed his position on the floor, if resumed was the correct term for the strange way in which his body bent double and subsided in a silent, straight sliding movement. At the same time and without sound he put the lacquered tray with the two bowls of green tea on the rush mat. His host drank as Inni watched him through his eyelashes. Again the face was closed, but it was not the East that had drawn the curtains. He was faced here with someone who lived completely within himself. The idea of this man in this room seemed sinister. He wished he had not come.
They drank in silence.
"What do you do?" Inni asked finally, using the familiar form. When people are sitting face to face on floor cushions, there is no place for formality. Besides, they were the same age, he estimated.
"To earn money, you mean?" It sounded like a reproof.
"Yes."
"I work for a trading company. Foreign correspondence, three days a week. Letters in Spanish. They all think I am crazy, but they let me do as I like because I am good at it."
Spanish. Inni looked at his face but did not find what he was looking for. Javanese villagers had banished the memory of Arnold Taads, and this Philip had shorn his head like a monk, so that every contour of his face showed up twice as sharply. Someone who shaves his head takes away the modifying effect of the hair, so that nose, mouth, emotions, and everything else are exposed without mercy. But in the face of this Taads everything was under lock and key.
"Do you live alone?"
"Yes."
"And for the rest?"
"For the rest? Nothing. My part-time job pays enough to live on. And I live here."
"Are you always here?"
"Yes."
"Stahilitas loci."
"I don't understand."
"Stahilitas loci, that is one of the principles of the contemplative orders. Where you enter, you stay."
"Hm. Not a bad idea. What made you think of that?"
"There is something monastic about this place."
"And do you think that is ridiculous?"
"No." Only creepy, he thought, but he did not say so.
"Outside" — the word was uttered with scorn — "there is nothing for me."
"And here there is?"
"Myself."
Inni groaned inaudibly. The Seventies. No sooner had they closed the door of the church behind them than they crawled like beggars to the bare feet of gurus and swamis. At last they were alone in a wonderful, empty universe that went zooming along on its home-made rails like a train without a driver, and they were shouting for help out of all the windows.
"I am preparing myself for something," said Philip Taads.
"For what?"
"For my deliverance." Not a moment's hesitation. "My dream. My deliverance." For the first time Inni asked himself whether the man opposite him was not simply stark staring mad. But the man looked as if it were perfectly natural for people to say such things, even though they had known each other for scarcely an hour, and maybe it was. He was, after all, a Taads, and Taadses used with the greatest ease — as Inni knew from experience — words that other people preferred to avoid. They lived one metre above the ground, at a level where those words had their natural domain. Perhaps they could even fly.
"Deliverance is a Catholic concept," said Inni.
"Not the way I mean it. The Catholics need someone else to deliver them. You can share in the deliverance. But that doesn't mean anything to me. I deliver myself."
"From what?"
"First of all from the world. That has proved easier than I thought. There's nothing to it. And then from myself."
"Why?"
"Life is a burden to me. It isn't necessary."
"Then you should commit suicide."
Taads did not reply for some time. Then he said softly, "I want to be rid of the thing I am."
"Thing?"
Inni took a sip of the tea, which had a deep, bitter taste. It was as if silence were being heaped up in the room.
"I detest the thing I am."
How long ago was it that Inni had heard this man's father say "I detest myself"? It was insufferable that a thought could travel from one man through a woman into another man. He wanted to get out of this room.
"I never talk about this with anyone," said Philip Taads. This was unmistakably a complaint, but the complainer was already out of the reach of any comforter. "Perhaps you'd rather I didn't bother you with it."
Such notions would never have occurred to Arnold Taads. So there was a difference after all.
"No," said Inni automatically. This was his first conversation with a thing, and he felt irreparably contaminated. He put down his bowl.
"I must go," he said.
The other did not reply but rose, again in one movement, the way a bamboo stem swishes up after being held down. He has perfect control over the thing he is, at any rate, thought I
nni, not without envy, as he laboriously got up from the floor.
"What I meant to say is that I find it unbearable to need a body in order to exist," said Taads.
A Catholic after all, thought Inni. The unclean body, an obstacle on the road to salvation; but before he could say anything, Philip Taads asked suddenly, "What kind of person was my father?"
Someone who killed himself, Inni was about to say, but was that really true? Arnold Taads had gone to his chosen destiny by an obscured, roundabout route. There was no need to saddle the son, who was already burdened with an inheritance, with this knowledge. A surfeit and a lack of father. Psychology, yuck.
"He was an uncompromising man who went his own way. I think he was very lonely, but he would never have admitted it. He did a lot for me, but not out of altruism. He did not like people, or so he said."
"Then we have at least something in common," said Philip Taads. He sounded pleased.
They walked towards the door together, but before they reached it, Philip Taads opened a cupboard in the wall that so far had seemed solid, and took a Penguin paperback out of it.
"By Kawabata," he said. "You need to read only the second story, 'Thousand Cranes'. When you've finished it, you can send it back, or if you like, you can return it to me yourself. I am always at home on weekends and on Mondays and Tuesdays."
The door closed soundlessly behind Inni. Now to take a big leap and soar away over those cavernous stairs to get out of this prison in which a man was tormenting himself, even though he called it deliverance!
* *
Outside, the day had adapted itself to Inni's changed mood. A haze hung about the streets, giving the city an air of sadness. The passersby were still in summer dress, but the light, no longer transparent, draped their summery figures in an element of melancholy. As always when a natural phenomenon appeared to be getting the better of the normal course of events, Inni felt as though the city had no right to exist at all. This haziness had nothing to do with cars and houses but ought to have joined directly onto the grasslands of the polders. This thought gave rise to a feeling of anxiety, because it implied the dislocation of reality. He did not like being forced to notice how fragile everything was. This Taads was bound to keep preying on his mind. He had twice introduced the thought of death into this sunny day by what he said and by recalling the memory of his father from the formless past.
"The Wintrops refuse to suffer," Arnold Taads had said, but this had not been sufficient. The Wintrop that Inni himself was, refused not only to suffer but also to be confronted with the suffering of others. He had made his life one of constant movement, knowing from experience that this was the best way to escape from others when the need arose, and ultimately from himself, too.
He walked in the direction of the Vijzelstraat. From behind the Mint Tower, which seemed to be rocking slightly in the heat that quivered in the shrouded sky, thunderclouds advanced like an army.
As he approached the Weteringplantsoen, he heard the sound of loud, rhythmic bells and whining, repetitive singing. A group of bald-pated members of the Hare Krishna sect came, in orange robes, bleating and bell-ringing across the pedestrian crossing. Swaying and with white, unshaven faces that refused to look at the bystanders, they were coming towards him. As always, he felt hate. People had no business to abandon themselves so shamelessly to a system. The thought he had had less than half an hour ago returned with renewed force: people were incapable of being alone in the world. No sooner had they buried the wretched god of the Jews and Christians than they had to go traipsing about the streets with red flags or in sloppy saffron sack dresses. Clearly, the Middle Ages would never end. He thought of Taads and how easy it was to imagine him, with his oriental face, walking among these people. But that was unfair. Philip Taads practised his one-man religion — if it was that — alone in his home-made monastery. An anchorite in the desert of the Pijp. Inni remembered visiting the Benedictine monastery in Oosterhout with his friend the writer. The writer, never very talkative, had looked around for hours and finally asked one of the monks whether he had ever wanted to get out. The question had not surprised the old man in the least, and the reply came instantly. "The last time I felt that way was in 1929, when the heating didn't work."
They had laughed heartily at that, but then the monk had asked the writer: "And what about you? I don't suppose this is the first time you have visited a monastery? Have you never wanted to get in?"
His reply had been of an equally devastating simplicity, and Inni had always remembered it. "The world is my monastery," the writer had replied, and the monk had laughed in his turn and said he understood.
"The world is my monastery." But Taads had turned himself into a monk for the sole purpose, by his own account, of meditating himself to death. Surely that could not be based on any oriental doctrine. As soon as sacrifices were made, you were back at Golgotha, and clearly, Philip Taads could find no deliverance without slaughtering someone, even if it was himself.
"Nonsense, mere bravado," Inni muttered. "People who say they'll do it, won't." But even that seemed to be no longer true these days.
As though pulled by a string, he turned into a side street leading towards the Spiegelgracht. When he got there, he realized why. He had left his print at Riezenkamp's. For the second time that day, he entered the hallowed silence of the shop. None of the Buddhas had stirred. Nothing and no one had disturbed their everlasting meditation.
"Aha, Mr Wintrop," said the art dealer. "I was about to phone our friend Roozenboom, but now you are here yourself. I didn't know you knew Mr Taads."
"I knew his father."
"Ah, did you?" And after a moment's well-bred hesitation, "Someone from Indonesia?"
"No, from Twente."
"Ah, the mother, then. Hm, a strange man, a strange man. I have a standing agreement with him, that I will let him know whenever I have an important chawan."
"A chawan? "
"A tea bowl. Of a particular kind, that is. Only raku. No shino, no orige, even though you do get beautiful specimens among those, too. No, it has to be raku and nothing else, and preferably a Sonyu, that is, Raku VI. You know, the great masters, whether they are potters or kabuki actors, operate, if you can call it that, in dynasties."
"Mr Taads gave me a lecture on it."
"Did he indeed? The difficulty is that the great bowls of these true masters are all known by name. Look" — he leafed through a book that was still lying in front of him — "there are still a few famous bowls by this Sonyu that have survived . . . komeki, the tortoise, that is black raku . . . and then you have kuruma, the cartwheel ... a beauty, red raku . . . personally I like that one best . . . shigure, spring rain . . . also red . . . but all of them priceless, if they ever come up for sale at all. The only thing I can really hope for as far as Mr Taads is concerned is a less well-known bowl by one of these gentlemen, but, well, the times are against him. The connoisseurs and the passionate collectors are being squeezed out by the investors. I offered him deferred terms, because I trust him implicitly. But he refused. 'That does not fit in with my plans.' So I imagine it will take some time. I shouldn't think he has a very high income, would you?"
"No idea. How did you get to know him?"
"Don't laugh. From yoga."
Yoga. It was difficult indeed to picture this tall, fleshy body in a yoga position.
"There was a rather curious ad in the paper, and both of us replied to it. Taads was already much into Zen at the time and knew much more about these things than I did. I was thinking more in purely plebeian terms — body exercise, relaxation, et cetera. No mumbo jumbo. But it took a grip on me. The teacher seemed to me, Dutch Calvinist that I am, quite as odd a customer as Taads — a South American Jew with a dash of Red Indian blood in him. A very compelling person."
It was as though Riezenkamp were having to suppress a slight shudder at this point. A shadow moved across his face and no doubt spread right down the white body underneath the worsted pinstripes.
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"Yoga, proper yoga, should not be underestimated. This man, thank God, did not spin us any metaphysical yarn. He just sat there, a sort of latter-day saint, always dressed in black, and talked to us very slowly. He made us tighten and relax separate parts of the body and taught us how to forget them, not to feel them any more. Then they were simply no longer there. At first I thought it was wonderful. It gave me a tremendous feeling of well-being. But on Taads it had quite a different effect. After one of those sessions he had a terrible crying fit, as if he were about to throw up his whole inside, so violent. And another time he couldn't get his hands out of a cramp. Perhaps I ought not to tell you this, but it frightened the wits out of me. If that is the effect it has on him, I thought, what is it doing to me?
"Do you know, after a while you begin to realize that you cannot detach all these things from the rest of your life. If you were to go on with it, you would have to change your life, become a different person, if that were possible. I mean, you don't have to have a philosophy yourself or believe in anything, but it gradually alters your personality. At least that was how I felt about it. You change, you develop a different outlook on life — it isn't just a bit of gymnastics — well, and then, your outlook on life, on the world, that is, what you are. And this is very true in my case. Being an art dealer, a much-scorned species, I do, after all, have to function in the world. I began to wonder whether it wasn't going to do me more harm than good. I was quite used to myself as I was. For instance, I was beginning to find my glass of beer at Hoppe 's rather vulgar, to mention something trivial. Let's put it this way: it called for more than I had, or than I was prepared to give, and in the end I stopped going." He rubbed his eyes briefly and continued. "I am surrounded by the sublime all day, even though I have a fairly perverse relationship with it. To put it bluntly, I hadn't the guts to go on. I explained this to the teacher and he understood. He told me he had twice given it up himself because he was afraid of losing himself. That was how he put it. He probably didn't mean the same thing as I did. Obviously, it's very far-reaching if you do that sort of thing professionally" — again that shudder — "but anyhow, he said he understood.
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