—Question? Holger asked.
—About Pascal and whether you might take him with you on one of your weekend camping jaunts.
—Oh, that, Holger said. I’m certain I shouldn’t.
—I’m certain you should. You asked Franklin and me to take him camping with us, back in August. He enjoyed that immensely.
—And made friends with Franklin, who has caught his imagination.
—In a lovely way, Hugo said. As improbable a friendship as one can be, but decidedly one dropped down from heaven. I watch it with a measure of disbelief, learning more from it than any course in education I’ve yawned and daydreamed through. Franklin, you understand, likes Pascal for himself, as I think you do. What popularity Pascal has had has always been for his brains, and maybe some for his sweet shyness, but I don’t think he’s ever had a real friend. And Pascal adores Franklin for his knuckly toughness. Genius and guttersnipe.
—I like your saying this, Holger said, because you understand my wanting Pascal to be happy, to have as many good things as he can. I’m as protective of him as I can be without drawing attention, which would make him vulnerable in another way.
—But for yourself, Hugo said, you must take him on one of your weekends, lots of your weekends.
—Just the two of us?
—Just the two of you.
28
—I did it! Mariana said. And I’m alive to tell it, and maybe even a bit proud of myself. What’s worse, I liked it!
—I who believe you can do anything, Hugo said comfortably from his chair, am not surprised.
Holger, sitting with his arms on his knees, books and magazines around his feet, scrambled up gentlemanly, startling himself in calling her Mariana.
—I may, mayn’t I? he asked.
—Lord, yes, she said, especially as I think I’ve called you Holger from the start. What Hugo calls people, I do too. Fru Eglund, you remember, introduced herself from her garden, and said I must come to tea. Well, I’ve been to tea with fru Eglund, telling myself that I’ve done braver things. She’s a sweet woman, you know? We talked flowers and curtains and rugs, and then she got me talking about the daycare center, and children, and then there was tea, which I didn’t spill, or rattle my cup in the saucer, and I really do believe, if I haven’t dreamed it, that we pecked each other affectionately on the cheek when I left.
—Wondrous and mysterious are the ways of God, Hugo said.
—And I didn’t pee my knickers when Eglund himself came in and shook my hand. Stabilizing he said you are, big Hugo. I swallowed my tongue and smiled like an idiot. He said you’re a stabilizing force at the school. And then he said a lot about your being a Christian in a bold and advanced way, and a solid classicist. Let’s see what else he said. I was fogging over as he went on. Athlete, scoutmaster. Sensitive, responsible. Handsome young chap. And fru Eglund, she says I’m to call her Clarissa, said in a wonderfully motherly voice, Edward dear, I really don’t think you need to commend doktor Tvemunding, doktor! to frøken Landarbejder. And he said, puffing on his pipe, my dear, everybody likes to hear good words about people they love, and I like to give people their just due. Clarissa said outside that I turned a sweet and becoming shade of pink. That’s when I gave her a peck on the cheek.
—To understand all this, Holger, Hugo said, you have to know that Mariana hates all women.
—I do, Mariana said, they’re cats. They have their heads up their behinds. I don’t believe my mother. I’ve never had any girl friends. I prefer men, all of them.
She made Holger flinch by kissing him on the forehead. She kissed Hugo on the forehead, for symmetry’s sake.
—Are Franklin and Pascal here? she asked. I need to hug them.
SICKLE SHEEN FLINTS
—Wolfgang Taute, Pascal said, says the Gravettian leaf points of eastern Europe, upper Paleolithic, got their tangs as they moved west, and became the willowleaf Swidry point. And probably were in touch with the Ahrensburgians.
—Tanged point technocomplex, Holger said. Reindeer people. The air blue with snow and ice splinters on long whistling winds that hit you like a plank. And in the summer, long marshes of yellow sedge.
AXIOM
All problems, if ignored, solve themselves.
31
—Having talked more openly with you than with anybody in my whole life, Holger said, I’m willing to go along with you in this baring of bosoms. I think you’re trying to show me that I need to be liberated from something in myself.
—While keeping your privacy inviolable, Hugo said. I’m not prying. We’ve talked in abstractions. You were interested in Freud’s enigmatic statement that where it was, there must I begin to be. The oyster makes a pearl around an irritant grain of sand. Nature compensates. A tree blown over will put out a bracing root to draw itself upright again. Deaf Beethoven composed music more glorious than when he could hear. Stutterers write beautifully. That is, one source of strength seems to be weakness.
—Surely not, Holger said. That sounds like the suspect theory that genius is disease: Mann’s paradox. It’s romantic science, if science at all.
—No, no, Hugo said. Freud meant that a wound, healing, can command the organism’s whole attention, and thus becomes the beginning of a larger health.
—Wounds in the mind Freud would have meant.
—Yes.
—I think, then that I know what he means.
WILLIAM MORRIS IN THE FAROES
These wild strange hills and narrow sounds were his first sight of a really northern land. The islands’ central firth was like nothing he had ever seen. It was a place he had known in his imagination, mournfully empty and barren, remote and melancholy. In a terrible wall of rent and furrowed rocks, its height lost in a restless mist, he saw that the sublime can be hard and alien. There was no beach below the wall, no foam breaking at its feet. This gray land, without color or shadows, so fiercely defined as to mass of stone and harshness of detail, knew nothing of doubt, of the tentative, the gradual. Its geological decisions had been resolute. As his ship pitched and rolled toward the Icelandic coast, an eagle began to circle above them with plunges and rises of noble composure, wheeling wildly only when it was joined by a raven teasing and reproving. But both were free in the steep cold of a sky without barrier or restraint.
33
Outside his door, when Holger opened it, were Jos in a minim of sparely adequate briefs and Pascal gleefully piggyback.
—I’m delivering, Jos said, one gray-eyed toothy spadger, who has something to show you, and is about to explode.
—Holger! Pascal said, handing an envelope over Jos’s shoulder, read it!
The long envelope bore the return address of the Royal Danish Geological Society and was to Professor Pascal Raskvinge. Inside was a letter accepting for publication Professor Raskvinge’s paper comparing the geology of the Galapagos and Iceland.
—They don’t know! Jos said, swinging Pascal around in a leggy swirl. Isn’t it the damnedest, sweetest thing anybody’s ever heard of?
—Do we, Pascal asked, have to tell them? That I’m thirteen, I mean?
—You’re twelve, twerp, Jos said.
Holger signaled them in and sank into a chair to study the letter.
—I didn’t say I was a professor, Pascal said, honest I didn’t. I just sent the article, to see what they would say.
Holger leaned back in a robust fit of laughter.
—Rich, isn’t it? Jos said, closing the door with a long push of his leg. Hug the scamp.
He lifted Pascal onto Holger’s lap.
—Let’s not tell anybody, Pascal said, until it’s actually published, and even then I’ll be revoltingly cool about it.
—Style, Jos said. Pascal and I are the only ones around this dump with real style.
—Franklin I’ll tell, Pascal said, and that means Hugo and Mariana, too. Will you ask them not to tell, Holger?
—May I call you Holger, too? Jos asked. I’m not a prude and I don’t b
lab. Professor Raskvinge!
34
Skipping and bouncing sideways, hands deep in his jeans pockets, Jos was saying to Meg and Rutger striding along with arms around each other’s hips that he wished them a juicy tumble in the bracken. As for him, he had an hour’s workout in the gym, a look at Anders’s film now that some of it was spliced and edited, a half hour’s posing for Tvemunding, and that if Meg would give him a kiss, friendly like, he would have the rest of the day by the balls. Meg without breaking stride hugged him in for a supple-tongued kiss which Jos secured for three long steps.
—Golly, she said, dancing her eyes.
—Slut, Rutger said.
—One more, Jos pleaded, trashing Rutger’s hair. To give me a better excuse for the doltishly prolonged jacking off I’ve just added to my agenda.
Meg pushed her hands under his sweatshirt, playing a caress up his wide back and down to his lean hips.
—That’s gross, Rutger said. Never mind that you’re being studied by two nippers with big green eyes and their ears on backward. Hi, Franklin. Hi, Pascal. The embrace you’re gawking at is purest theater. Or was. Quit that!
Meg, all innocence, dived at Rutger, tickled him in the ribs without mercy, and marched him off, blowing a kiss to Jos over her shoulder.
—Give yourself a fit, she said.
Jos spun on his heel, stomping.
—She ran her hand down inside your pants, Franklin said.
—With a raunchy squeeze, Jos sighed. His eyes closed. Wiggled her fingers on it, and then squeezed.
PASCAL’S GRUNDTVIG CAP
Holger, climbing out of the gym pool, knocked water from first one ear and then the other, breathing through his mouth.
—What interested Montaigne, Hugo said, shaking water from his hair, was precision of emotion. The alert eye and attentive ear are cooperating with God and with the logic of creation.
—Precision of emotion, Holger said.
FIGURE AND GROUND
Franklin exchanged caps with Pascal, and Holger had better sense than to ask why.
—You know, Pascal said, you have an island, and in the island a lake, and in the lake an island.
—And, Franklin said, taking off his jacket, folding it, and laying it at his feet, in that island a pond, and in the pond an island.
Pascal took off his jacket, folded it, and laid it beside Franklin’s.
—On the island in the pond is a spring making a pool, with a big rock in the pool, a frog sitting on it.
—A frog named McTaggart.
—What you’re about to ask, Holger said, sitting, as their ramble around the park seemed to have become a milling about in one spot, with Franklin kneeling to untie a sneaker, is whether the earth is all an ocean with island continents, or is it all rock with ocean lakes?
—Yes, Franklin said, untying and prying off the other sneaker, but there are big lakes inside continents and big islands, like Greenland and England, in the oceans.
—The zebra problem, Holger said. And why are you unbuttoning your shirts?
—Who knows? Franklin said, I’m unbuttoning mine because Pascal’s unbuttoning his.
—Correct distance, Pascal said. Talk about neat. Hugo says that the primitive mind is fussy about anything’s being too far or too near, and that all our sense of distance is very old and basic. But what’s neat is that primitive people and kids have the same sense of distance, correct distance I mean, and Mariana says it figures, as they’re both cannibals. And then Hugo said correct distance is what civilization is all about, and that not having a sense of distance is feminine.
—There are two ways of doing this, Franklin said. Right now we can swap socks and shoes, and then shirts, until piece by piece we’re in each other’s clothes.
—While Hugo was talking, Mariana quietly tiptoed behind him and poured a glass of water over his head.
—Or we can skin ourselves to the knackers.
—Hugo didn’t even flinch, water dripping from his chin and ears.
—That’s from Lacan, Holger said, as well as from Lévi-Strauss. Women, as far as I know, have a more sensitive response to correct distance than men, in general, I would say.
Pascal, handing his shirt to Franklin, said that Hugo explained it wasn’t a matter of gender but of male and female patterns amongst a bunch of people, like savages and kids.
—Oh well, Franklin said, oh. Hugo can explain everything except Hugo. It takes Mariana for that, but only when she’s in her right mind.
PASCAL’S BLUE PINSTRIPE SHIRT
With white collar and glass buttons.
—Freedom from kinship, Hugo said, figures in all primitive ideas of paradise. A free choice of kinship, as in love or friendship, is a longing in us all. And this reshuffling of loyalties and attractions must be a finding, an invention. It’s one of Yeshua’s logia, also. Fate is, after all, a strategy.
WOLF LIGHT
—Griddle the Witch was making a stew. Into it, for stock, she had put some kelp, some hoptoads, some cockroaches, several birdsnests, some green scum from a pond, and bethought herself that a nasty juicy boy might be just the ingredient to round everything out.
—Me, probably, Franklin said, fluffing out his hair with his fingers.
—So, Mariana continued, she jumped onto her besom, taxied down the footlogs across the swamp, gave a neck-tickling cackle, and shot up into the middle air.
Pascal, Franklin knuckling his ribs, rolled backward and kicked over upright.
—What I want, Griddle said to herself, is a boy who has just stuffed himself with buttery hot cinnamon toast and drunk a mug of thick frothy hot chocolate, given him by his pretty big sister, who’s fool enough to love him, and it would be even better if this nasty boy full of toast and chocolate had a friend just as nasty and just as full of toast and chocolate. They will stew up nice, those two.
—Door! Pascal said.
—Hugo, Franklin said, waffling the flat of his hand.
—Hugo and Holger, Mariana said.
—Britches, Pascal said. Where are my britches?
—Why? Franklin said. Holger’ll blush anyway. Hugo won’t notice.
—What a day, Hugo said, swiveling rain from the east, sleet from the west, wind straight down, with wild snow to make the mixture thoroughly idiotic. Spring, it calls itself. Here’s Holger with me. What’s going on here?
—Mud, Mariana said. Soccer practice got as far as mud from thatch to toes, and rats rolled up who turned out to be Pascal and Franklin under the muck once I’d peeled them and stuck them in the shower. No dry clothes for Pascal, so they snuggled in the bedroll and had what they call a nap.
—Nap, Hugo said, giving Mariana a kiss. When Franklin looks that radiantly innocent, he has been diddling the system one way or another. Hello, Pascal.
—Hello, Hugo, Hello, Holger, Pascal said. Mariana made us stand side by side on a newspaper while she undressed us. Franklin said Jos would like it, so I liked it. Everything’s different over here. Then she put us in the shower together.
—Here Pascal, Franklin said, one of Hugo’s T-shirts. Says Boy Scouts on it, and will come down to your knees. Fun. Me, I like
—Showing off, Mariana finished his sentence. And your dick and ballocks.
Hugo gave Franklin a kiss, and, to be fair, Pascal too.
—No favorites, he said.
—Thank you, Pascal said.
TABLETALK
There are no greater and lesser works of God. Creation is all one work, in a single style, from electron to star, we think, as a dog might suppose that the world extends from the orchard to the river.
PASCAL’S UNDERSHIRT
Narrow shoulder straps piped with a hairline of blue cunningly stitched.
Holger, his blue tent trig, its neat spare interior warm with congenial afternoon light under brailed flaps, pondered the moment, light as a function of time, the vibrant clarity of his pleasure in being alone in an expanse of wood and lake and sky, at peace with himself. The s
tillness was resonant and alive. Barefoot, he kept to his habitual decorum, however wildly unlikely it was that any other might intrude. By parachute? Pascal would ask.
No, that was Franklin.
Wildly unlikely, his own phrasing, was what Pascal would say. With an edged smile, he took off his jeans and the rakish briefs he’d bought because Hugo wore a pair like them, and Pascal had said with approval that everybody admired Hugo’s racy underpants, and savored the freedom of his comfortably frayed and creased soft cotton shirt as his only garment. He felt both ascetic and immodest.
Sweet and
crazy, Franklin would say.
Comfortable, Pascal.
But, my dear Icelandic
Lutheran Reformed Evangelical Holger, he could hear Hugo saying with breezy candor, have the lucidity to see that you’re emulating handsome Jos, who roves about the dorm in a ratty pullover, his Eagle Scout dick wigwagging as he treads.
A precise memory charged with redundant
imagination:
Jos in Rutger and Anders’s room arguing an assignment in trigonometry, his briefs rolled down in a ropy twist across his thighs, trifling fingers tugging his thickening penis as complacently as if petting a dog. Holger never entered a room, door open or closed, without knocking. Rutger’s door was open.
—Don’t mind Jos, Rutger said, our resident savage, probably noble.
—Whichwhat and since when? Jos said. Mind what?
And when Holger was back in his rooms, a smart rap on the door announced Jos, decent but with the bunt of his briefs strained forward.
—Honest, he said, I wasn’t being cheeky just now. Awful to have to admit it, but I really wasn’t aware I was monkeying with my dick. Anders says you’ll think I was being impudent.
—Apology unnecessary, Jos. I should apologize to you for thinking it charming.
Jos, mouth opening little by little, gawked.
—You did? I know Tvemunding would, but he’s crazy. You don’t love me or anything like that, do you, hr. Sigurjonsson?
—Nope, Holger had said with grinning confidence, astonished that Jos’s question had not upset him. What I find charming is my subjective prerogative, isn’t it, and I thought you asked to call me Holger when you brought Pascal in to tell me his article was accepted?
The Death of Picasso Page 38