Pascal’s dressing gown, the first Franklin had ever worn, was plaid, Adam’s, soft with many launderings, Norwegian blue.
—A room to live in, Mariana said, work in, read in. books by family and size, all these maps, good chairs, sheep in a pasture so nicely matted and framed.
—That’s a Louisa Matthiasdottir, of an Icelandic meadow.
—Holger’s an Icelander, Hugo said. I admire the Klee, glyphs of fruit and vegetables yellow and lavender on that blue ground. Two pears nuzzling. Apples, pears, cherries, and would that be a fig?
—Good botanist, Klee, accurate with structure.
—Where’s Pascal’s room? Mariana asked brightly.
While Holger was saying really, I don’t think you should, she went out singing Pascal!
—Nosebleed would seem to have quit, Hugo said, but keep the ice under it a bit more, eh?
—Who cares? Franklin said.
—Enough out of you. And I don’t want to hear an antiphony of he started it. Fights are things that happen. Gorbachev and Reagan do it with intercontinental ballistic missiles, you and Adam do it with fists and feet.
—He bit me.
—And teeth. It’s ourselves we don’t like when we think we don’t like somebody. This unseemly fratch when you should have been doing your homework was Adam fighting Adam, Franklin fighting Franklin.
—He started it, Adam said.
Mariana came back peeping through her hands over her eyes.
—We’ll take Franklin home with us, and Pascal too, for company. No war if the troops are restricted to barracks. Jos is very beautiful when he blushes from forehead to toes and everywhere in between.
—Here I am, Pascal said. Musette bag, see? Toothbrush comb jammies slippers and whichwhat. Had a shower. Jos says I look like a newt wet, an oiled elver. Uliginous eel I called him, ha!
—Wait till my parents hear about this, Adam said.
—Oh boy, Franklin said, searching the ceiling.
—You’ll come over with us, Holger? Mariana asked.
—If I may. Let me set up a provisional government, with Jos in command, just in case this skirmish was the beginning of a revolution of sorts. Back in a sec.
—You look spiffy in Pascal’s dressing gown, Beavertooth. We must get you one.
—I like it, Franklin said, solemn doubt in his voice.
—It’s for the infirmary, Pascal said. You can have it.
Jos had followed Holger back, dressed in a towel knotted around his hips. A handsome smile for Mariana, a wink for Pascal, a sergeant’s glare at Adam, a scout’s salute for Hugo.
—Go on over, Hugo said, I’ll be along. I want to hear Adam’s side of this, just the two of us.
Adam said:
—We’re not supposed to let outsiders in the dorm after six. I know he’s a day student but that’s an outsider ’sfar’s the dorm is concerned. He gave me some sass, and, well, we got into it. I was following the rules. He doesn’t belong here, anyway. He had no right to hit me.
—I couldn’t agree more, Hugo said. And you were right to follow the rules. On the other hand, you knew perfectly well who Franklin is, and that he and Pascal are rather special friends. If I’d been in your place, I think I would have been less of a bufflehead, you know, and told Master Sigurjonsson (he was here) that Pascal had a visitor.
Stubborn silence, defiant eyes.
—So, Hugo said, this is really not my affair, it’s Master Sigurjonsson’s, and he’s a good man, wouldn’t you say? Jos is standing in for him for half an hour or so. Ho, Jos!
—Adsum!
He bounded down the hall and stood mother-naked at attention.
—All yours, lieutenant. I’m off. One wounded trooper here to cheer up.
With an easy hoist Jos heaved Adam butt up over his shoulder, about-faced with a military pivot and stomp, and strode along the hall.
—Node bleed! Adam squealed.
—What else? Hugo said. Carry on, corporal.
Mariana was making hot chocolate, Holger was looking the place over, holding his elbows, and Franklin was laying a fire, with a lecture for Pascal on how it’s done.
—So this, Holger said, is Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer. I know everything here from Pascal’s accounts. There’s Tom Agernkop. What talent as a painter you have, Hugo. And the Muybridge.
—I like a bathrobe, Franklin said. It’s like being in bed.
—World’s coziest place, Mariana said. If ever I meet the art teacher who converted this over-the-old-stables upstairs into a studio apartment of such friendly privacy and then skedaddled precisely in time for Hugo to move into it, I’ll give him a big hug and kiss.
—Continuous space, Holger said, and yet one can see that that’s bedroom, this sitting room, and that kitchen, differences that are really distinctions in a sense of space. Whereas my rooms have walls and doors.
—Our bedroll goes here, Pascal said. Franklin calls it a pallet. In front of the fireplace. Camping out indoors: that’s the fun of it.
—A bivouac of mice, Mariana said. Who wants marshmallows in their chocolate? Gerbils, maybe.
—No TV, but a radio, Franklin said.
A cork bulletin board to the right of the fireplace: a yellow-and-blue Cub Scout neckerchief, museau de loup and fleur de lys for insignia, a photograph of Pastor Tvemunding in a garden with Franklin polliwog naked by the hand, a map of NFS Grundtvig and its grounds, a dental appointment, a blue penny-weight badebukser, flimsy and nylon, lined housing of about a gill, a photograph of a frog and fieldmouse nose to nose, an embroidered shoulder patch for Wilderness Foraging (pine branch with cone), another for woodcraft (red hatchet on a buff ground), and one shoelace limp over a drawing pin.
—For having our chocolate on, Franklin said, lugging a sleeping bag from the closet, unrolling it along the hearth. I have Pascal’s bathrobe, so he doesn’t have one.
—Have Hugo’s, Mariana said, fetching it. Woolly warm, modish slate gray with red piping and a red belt, only four sizes too large.
—Oh wow.
—Get in it bare-assed, like me, Franklin said.
—End of the summer, month before last, Pascal explained to Holger, we all went nude, except Pastor Tvemunding, at Hugo’s cabin. I was embarrassed at first, but got used to it.
—In about fifteen seconds, Mariana said.
—Pastor Tvemunding was naked, too, I ought to say, when we had a dip in the ice-water pool of the ice-water forest stream. We bathed with him, and then Hugo and Mariana bathed, though we could bathe with them, too, and once we all had a bath in the pool together, as Pastor Tvemunding said water that cold made impure thoughts sheer folly.
—What in the world is this? Holger asked.
He had gotten up to walk around the room while Pascal stripped.
—A harmonium, Hugo said. For hymns.
He brought it over to the fire, explaining its workings, and put it in Mariana’s lap.
—Stanford in A, he said. OK, rats, sweet and high.
Mariana began an updown-updown dactylic ground, vibrant and rich.
—The Owl and the Pussycat, Franklin sang.
—Went to sea, Pascal joined.
And together:
—In a beautiful pea-green boat!
Holger stood in charmed surprise at the beauty of their voices.
—They took some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pun note.
Franklin, off key, signaled for a pause until the melody came round again.
—Somebody’s voice is changing, Hugo said in a deep bass.
—Go on! Holger pleaded. Go on!
—The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are!
—You are! Mariana sang.
—You are! Hugo joined.
In quartet:
—What a beautiful pussy you are!
Franklin, sipping
chocolate, slid his free hand up Pascal’s nape and mussed his hair with wriggling fingers, and began the second verse.
—Pussy said to the Owl, you elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married, too long have we tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?
Mariana and Hugo:
—They sailed away for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose.
Franklin:
—His nose!
Pascal:
—His nose!
Mariana, Hugo, Franklin, Pascal, and, hesitantly, Holger:
—With a ring at the end of his nose!
—Oh wonderful, Holger said.
Franklin’s trying for a saucy pursing of his lips while he ran a hand down Pascal’s back inside Hugo’s roomy bathrobe ended in a grimace.
—Poor split lip, Mariana said.
Franklin shrugged: heroes don’t complain.
—Instant retribution for wandering hands, Hugo said.
—Friendly hand, Pascal said.
Mariana, as if to change the subject, pranced a jig of chords on the harmonium, and began the third verse.
—Dear Pig! she sang. Are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring? Said the Piggy, I will.
Franklin and Pascal took over:
—So they took it away and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon.
Hugo and Mariana:
—And hand in hand on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon.
Pascal, wild mischief in his eyes:
—The moon!
All, with a sassy arpeggio from the harmonium:
—They danced by the light of the moon!
II
BLUE TENT IN A GROVE OF BIRCHES
Once, God Almighty came to visit Adam and Eve. They welcomed Him gladly and showed Him everything they had in their house, benches and table and bed, ample jugs for milk and wine, the loom and ax and saw and hammer, and they also showed Him their children, who all seemed to Him very promising. He asked Eve whether she had any other children besides the ones she was showing Him. She said no, but the truth of the matter was that Eve had not yet got around to washing some of her children, and was ashamed to let God see them, and had pushed them away somewhere out of sight. God knew this.
YELLOW VOLKSWAGEN
Holger Sigurjonsson liked to spend a night or two on weekends camping out alone, for the quiet, the peace of mind and soul, the integration of himself. He had said to Hugo that he was never busier than on these excursions, with nothing that had to be done except eating and sleeping. There was a keen excitement to the strategies of it all: packing precisely what was needed, choosing books to take along, discipline balanced to a nicety with freedom. He returned a much better person. I understand perfectly, Hugo said, and wish I had such talents. His camping out was with his scouts, or with Mariana and Franklin. Unity is at minimum two, and when Pascal had gone on an outing with Hugo and Franklin he came back radiant, less random in his conversation, which was famous in the school for moving without warning from the layered territories of a rain forest to the color theory implicit in choosing red socks to wear with a gray sweater. Hugo and Franklin, he reported, were friends of ever so interesting a psychology, for they were big brother and little brother without being kin, uncle and nephew, father and son (Pascal ticked these relationships off on his fingers), host and guest, and then there was something else which had to do with Franklin’s being Mariana’s brother.
4
Iceland is situated just south of the Arctic circle and considerably nearer Greenland than Europe, yet its plants and animals are almost wholly European. The only indigenous land mammalia are the Arctic fox (Canis lagopus) and the polar bear as an occasional visitor, with a mouse (Mus islandicus), said to be of a peculiar species. Four species of seals visit its shores. Ninety-five species of birds have been observed; but many of these are stragglers. There are twenty-three land, and seventy-two aquatic birds and waders. Four or five are peculiar species, though very closely related to others inhabiting Scandinavia or Greenland. Only two or three species are more related to Greenland birds than to those of Northern Europe, so that the Palaearctic character of the fauna is unmistakable. The Great Auk is now extinct.
ICELAND
Dingy sheep in a meadow. Tall sky, banked clouds, through which shafts of glare. A yellow house.
JUCK! SAID THE PARTRIDGE
Everything, Jos was saying to Pascal, Sebastian, and Franklin, can be done well. The art of eating an orange, watch. We want all the juice, jo? The long blade of your pocketknife, whetted truly sharp, with which we make a triangle of three neat jabs in the navel of this big golden orange picked by a Spanish girl with one breast jundying the other. Lift out the tetrahedral plug so sculpted. Suck. Mash carefully and suck again. Now we slice the orange into quarters, sawing sweetly with the blade, so there’s no bleeding of juice. Like so, O puppy tails. One for each of us. Nibble and pull: a mouthful of tangy cool fleshy toothsome orange. And Sebastian has squirted his all down his jammies, the world being as yet imperfect. Eat a bit of the peel along with the pulp: not as great as tangerine peel, as preferred by God and several of the archangels, but still one of the best tastes in the world. Seeds and the stringier gristle into the trash basket. Swallow the seeds and they’ll grow an orange tree out of your ear. People who don’t know how to eat an orange, like people who don’t have the patience and cunning to pick all the meat out of a walnut, who don’t eat peaches and apples skin and all, do not have immortal souls.
HARRAT EL’AUEYRID
We removed again, and when we encamped I looked round from a rising ground, and numbered forty crater hills within our horizon; I went out to visit the highest of them. To go a mile’s way is weariness, over the sharp lava fields and beds of wild vulcanic blocks and stones. I passed in haste, before any friendly persons could recall me; so I came to a cone and crater of the smallest here seen, 300 feet in height, of erupted matter, pumice, and light rusty cinders, with many sharp ledges of lava. The hillside was guttered down by the few yearly showers in long ages. I climbed and entered the crater. Within were sharp walls of slaggy lava, the further part broken down—that was before the bore of outflowing lavas—and encrusted by the fiery blast of the eruption. Upon the flanks of that hill I found a block of red granite, cast up from the head of some Plutonic vein in the deep of the mountain.
8
—Oh, I take him everywhere with me, Holger had said to Hugo. I can be brave enough to say that. Is that what you mean by imagination?
—No, Hugo said, that’s love. Imagination’s how you see him when he’s with you. Because the Pascal you see isn’t there, you know. That is, where Holger and Pascal maintain, you create in your imagination first a Holger, then a Pascal. That’s why you’re nuts about him: you like the imaginary Holger the imaginary Pascal brings into being.
—Is this something you’re making up to be clever, Holger had asked, or could it be the reality of the matter?
—The reality, Hugo had said, is what you build on, a sprite of a boy with big intelligent gray eyes, crowded butterteeth, all that. No need to stammer and blush.
PASCAL STUDYING HIS TOES
The hornbeam explains its leaves. Lays them out flat to the sun. Human honesty should do no less.
A COPPERISH YELLOW ROSE
In the summer of 1925, Mikhail Maikhailovich Bakhtin, the theorist of narrative, attended a lecture by A. A. Uxtomskii on the chronotope in biology. In the lecture questions of aesthetics were also touched upon.
CHICORY AND RED VALERIAN
The flowers Pascal had brought from the edge of fru Eglund’s garden had b
een forgotten during the scuffle in the hall, and when Holger was leaving Hugo’s, Pascal reminded him that the marmalade jar was to be washed and the flowers inserted.
—Put them, Franklin added, where they can eat some sunlight.
—A peculiar domestic event, Hugo said, cut flowers in a vase. Plutarch mentions the custom. A bouquet in among the dishes at dinner, and the diners wore garlands. I wonder if in a Greek house there were arrangements of flowers, on Plutarch’s desk, for instance?
—Of course there were, Mariana said.
CORAL COMB DOMINICKER ROOSTER
The soldierly carriage Holger had seen in Pascal of late he could trace to Franklin Landarbejder, whose spine at port arms and calves braced well back of a plumbline from knee to toe, square shoulders and high chin, parallel feet boxed in gym shoes of outsized sturdiness and socks thick as blankets, were the scoutly model. Trousers once chastely kneelength were now cockily short.
13
Hugo says that liking is not to be nattered at, Pascal said as he and Holger were walking in the long wood between the grounds and the river. He says there are two civilizations, one of the human in us, table manners, science, and such, and one of the animal in us. He says none of us is as good a human being as a dog is a dog, and this is because we’re not good animals. He says Franklin and I like each other as animals like each other, two friendly dogs, say, and that he and Mariana like, he said love I think, each other as male and female animals, and she kicked him for saying this, but so that it was funny, you know. Franklin laughed, and Mariana said she’d always been able to see Franklin’s long ears and tail and another word I didn’t understand. But Hugo meant, he said, that we live in lots of ways at once, as animals and humans, and whatever our work is. Also, as doors that open onto things. A math teacher is a door opening onto math, a Christian is a door opening onto God. Something for others, and when he said this he made horns of his fingers above his ears and wiggled them at Franklin. But he wasn’t talking to anybody in particular, that’s what I like about him. Hugo just talks, to everybody or anybody.
SAMOVAR WITH LEMON
The tall windows of the lecture room where Bakhtin heard Uxtomskii on the chronotope suffused a drab light upon rows of academic benches, the yellow oilcloth on rollers for diagrams and unfamiliar words, the lectern with kerosene lamp, water pitcher, and glass. One eye of Marx’s bust was a pallid coin of light, the other a scoop of shadow. Holger was reading Bakhtin because he didn’t understand narrative. Hugo had said that some French thinker held all understanding, especially self-knowledge, to be narrative in essence. A surprise, but there you were. A chronotope is the distinctive conflation of time and place fixing the Cartesian coordinates of an event or condition. Edward Ullman would have been interested, and Carl Sauer. The philosopher Samuel Alexander taught that finished time becomes a place. So every where needs a when in an account of it, and every event has a narrative past. Tvemunding, for all his dash, was up on everything, and Holger prided himself on following up. And here was a chronotope from ancient biology cropping up in a Russian book about narrative. The examples tended to be from Rabelais and Sterne, authors Holger had not read. Unlike the Russian lecture room remote in time and space, begrimed by poverty, political desperation, tedious idealism, his rooms at NFS Grundtvig were congenial and modern. The protocol was for the boys to knock and be invited in, or not, except for Pascal, who could enter when he pleased, always backing in with a double turn to close the door, a maneuver that maintained even if the door were open. One narrative might be to recall how it happened that Pascal fell into the habit of going with Holger on bed check, to ascertain room by room that everybody was in and accounted for. Pascal had once worn pyjamas on these rounds, as if to establish that he was ready for the evening, and Holger was sometimes in a dressing gown, sometimes in slacks, slippers, and tieless shirt. And as Pascal became accepted as Holger’s familiar, as a teacher’s pet whose transparent candor and chuckleheaded ignorance of privilege threatened no one, he began to imitate everybody else in the house by wearing briefs only, or a shirt only, for student by student God knew from day to day what, if anything, they would be wearing. Hugo was always in the know, and could answer why one style of undress had replaced another, or hairstyle, color of socks, brevity of underpants, snugness of jeans, the iconography of walls. Pascal’s answers were unilluminating but current. Black socks were in, he would report. How did he know? Well, they just are. Papa’s secretary is sending me some. So Mama will send me money for some. They duplicate everything.
The Death of Picasso Page 36