They saw the scoutmaster on the far slope, and waved to him. Two scouts were bottling something, knee-deep in the lake. They secured themselves in their lifejackets, shoved the canoe into the water, and made off. Halfway across, the rain began, soft and swiveling.
—Rain on my peter, Pascal said. That’s a new experience.
—And that’s something Franklin would say.
—What if I turn into Franklin all the way? Like in science fiction, huh? He’s very smart, but hasn’t read a great deal, not yet.
—Has it occurred to you, small friend, that Franklin can just as well turn into Pascal, with the highest IQ at NFS Grundtvig, and be voraciously interested in the whole curriculum? I’ve heard Master Olsen say that he thinks you’re doing Jos’s algebra for him.
—A swap, Pascal said over his shoulder, looking around with flat wet hair. I do his algebra and he lets me see his magazines.
—I’m not asking what kind of magazines, not out in the middle of a lake, wet to the skin, with waves beginning to chop.
—You don’t want to know, friend Holger. Boys are nasty.
—That’s why I have to get away to the woods for a few days every month.
—And bring one boy with you. I hope it’s dry in the tent.
—There’s nothing cozier than a tent when it’s raining, as you’ll see in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Hop ashore and steady the prow.
They unrolled the sleeping bags to sit on, and Holger wrapped Pascal in a blanket from the car before he stripped and dried, put on an outing shirt and pyjama trousers.
—The scouts should be thoroughly soaked by this time, Pascal said.
—No wetter than us. Is your hair drying? You look like a baby bird in its nest, with only your face and frizzled hair outside the blanket. So much for going bare-assed all day.
—I’m naked in the blanket, if that makes any sense. Feels good, a rough blanket. I feel good, anyway. I’ll bet you didn’t see two scouts over to our left when we were crossing the pinewood, taking off each other’s pants.
—I did, as a matter of face. Mostly out of the corner of my eye, but an eyeful nevertheless.
—They had stiff peters, you mean.
Holger answered with a forgiving shrug.
—Our place, Pascal said. Our tent. We’re dry after being wet, warm after being cold, and we’re all by ourselves after uninvited pests.
The rain quit midafternoon. They explored the deep wood on their promontory, Pascal wearing a sweater and sneakers only. They found a wild-flower Holger could not identify, and a moss and fern of uncertain name. Pascal gathered leaves to press and learn. They peed together, mingling and crisscrossing streams. When Holger was laying the fire for supper, Pascal gave him a generous hug from behind.
—I’m being silly.
—I don’t think so, friend Pascal.
—I don’t even hug Franklin. We josh and grab each other.
—You’re lovely, you two.
Pascal puffed out his cheeks in bemused puzzlement.
—Hugo says we’re pukey, and Mariana, depraved.
—That’s affectionate teasing.
—I know that. But Pastor Tvemunding, Hugo’s papa, said like you that we’re lovely. Jonathan and David, he said we were. That set Hugo off. He and his papa talk about everything: it’s wonderful. They know the Bible off by heart, in Hebrew and Greek, and history and science. They make everything seem different. And they’re very funny. They can sit and read each other things out of the newspaper and books, and set each other laughing. Franklin says it’s some kind of code, and we’ve never figured out what they laugh about. Pastor Tvemunding says the Devil has no sense of humor whatsoever, and that you can always get his goat by laughing. Me, I asked him if he really believes there’s a Devil, and he cocked his head, cute old man that he is, and said that the Devil’s only claim to existence is our belief in him.
—What do you suppose he means by that?
—Hugo took over, and said that the Devil is precisely nothing.
—Soup in a cup, Holger said. And sandwiches of any of these, in any or all combinations.
—Sardines and cheese. Hard-boiled eggs. Franklin would love a sandwich of a chocolate bar and sardines. Soup’s good.
—I’ll light the lantern in a bit, and we can move into the homey tent, out of this damp. And snap the flaps closed, as I’d say it’s going to rain again.
—Terriff, Pascal said, his mouth full, and super. You got some sun, you know.
—I also know that neither of us has had a bath today.
—Do we have to?
—This is our weekend for doing what we want to. But we’ll wash up these supper things in the lake, and pick off some of the pine needles stuck to your behind and brush our teeth.
The tent by lantern light was snug. Fog had risen on the lake and a soft, meditative rain made a whispery rustle against the tent:
—In the buff all day, Pascal laughed, here I am putting on pyjamas to go to bed.
—Life’s like that.
—Wildly illogical.
—What a fine sound, the rain.
Holger with his jeans and sweater for a pillow, Pascal sitting cross-legged, they talked about the island, its geology and vegetation, the scouts across the lake, the freckles on Franklin’s nose, Paul Klee, Icelandic ponies and meadows, Holger’s briefs, the label of which Pascal held to the lantern to read, double stars, Kafka, toenails, zebras. Jos Sommerfeld’s symmetrical physique and asymmetrical mind, butterflies, the depth of the lake, Pascal’s mother, Hugo and Mariana, masturbation, causing Pascal to slide his hand into his pyjama pants with an impish look of greenest innocence, the fight between Adam and Franklin, irrational numbers, petals and sepals in crocuses, whether Iceland is the first part of the New World to be settled by Europeans or the westernmost country of Europe, what it means that friends are another self, as Pastor Tvemunding says, Hugo’s room over the old stables, its photographs and paintings and the organization of its space, and what make of microscope Pascal should inform his father to buy for him, as promised.
—And if we’re going to be up early tomorrow and explore the other side of the wood, or maybe go back to the island, we should douse the lantern and listen to the rain and get some sleep, wouldn’t you say? What are you doing, mite?
—Taking off my pyjama bottoms.
Holger, on his knees, extinguished the lantern.
—Now what are you doing?
—Getting into your sleeping bag with you.
IV
PAULUS’ BREV TIL EFESERNE VI.12
Thi den kamp, vi skal kæmpe, er ikke mod kød og blod, men mod magterne og myndighederne, mod verdensherskerne i dette mørke, mod ondskabens åndemagter i himmelrummet.
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—Liked having breakfast with you this morning, Jos said. All that neatness. You could run a hospital or a submarine. And Pascal neater than you. And the good talk. Is it awful I’m jealous, or envious do I mean? Napkins, real cloth napkins.
—Everybody’s to get a breakfast, Holger said. The vulnerable meal, but with built-in leaving time.
—With Pascal at all of them? You’re becoming Hugo for dash and facing down Eglund.
—I run before breakfast, Pascal, Hugo, Franklin and I. I write before breakfast. Plan classes. The things one learns on a morning run.
—You’re becoming me.
—Like now, lifting weights.
—You’re really going to the boathouse to lay a talk on the revolutionaries?
—Sexiest part of you, Jos, is the way your top lip makes a beveled wedge in the middle. And your back. Like your back.
—Conversation stopper if ever I heard one. No, I can return the serve. It never gets me anywhere to say something like that to you.
—Count.
—Sixteen more. Looking good. I’m making you and Pascal do the same routines, you with more iron.
—Turning into Pascal, too. An article on Carl Sauer accepted, American geographer.
>
—Good hollow scoops on the outsides of your butt; leg lifts and running to keep them that way. Wicker chairs, Cretan shawl, flowers in a vase, bowl of roses. Nicest room in all Grundtvig, you know. Thorvaldsen and Kierkegaard on the wall.
—They make a chord. Hugo opted for Georg Brandes and Kierkegaard. He says they solved for Denmark the social and psychological problem of inside and outside.
—There, sixteen. What the fuck is inside and outside?
—Inside is the privacy of the imagination, which the Bible calls the heart, where the fool has said there is no God and where one can be angry with one’s brother, secretly, and be a murderer, and lust after a deer-eyed woman and be an adulterer.
—Bullshit, Jos said. Hook your feet under the strap and do fifty sit-ups with your hands behind your head, knees well bent.
—The invisible heart has always been a hard place for moralists. The church has always tried to monitor and censor it. So has psychiatry, and fru Grundy, parents, and other busybodies. Hence our search for new kinfolks. We find them most of all, Hugo says, in people who can make their inside outside, that is, artists and poets, sculptors and composers, who moreover have the ability to show us our own insides, our imagination.
—Don’t jerk when you lift. Make one clean deliberate movement. If you made a movie of my imagination, you couldn’t show it even in Denmark. Germany, maybe, but they wouldn’t appreciate it, being nerds.
—All meaning is narrative. Hugo, again. So we Danes decided, following Kierkegaard and Brandes and others, that we could tolerate everybody’s inside difference provided we all respected that difference, and made the respect an outside sameness. That’s why you can roller-skate around the parkering and the peripheral road with your dick out through the fly of your jeans.
—Heard about that, have you? Have to keep them on their toes, you know.
—Franklin told it at supper, admiringly.
ENTEN ELLER
—All systems, like Kierkegaard’s thought that anhelates toward the paradox of the unthinkable, Jos said, have hiccups of chaos in them, as turbulence is new information and a specific against entropy. Do I, or don’t I, sound like Pascal?
—Very Pascal, Pascal said.
—More like Pascal, Holger said, than Pascal.
—So these wide-eyed revolutionaries with their den over the boathouse who treat Sebastian as an ichneumon.
—Catechumen, Pascal said.
—Whatever. I took him, high-handedly, as you can’t go without a comrade. High-handedly, as I’m not a member myself.
—With your and Sebastian’s jeans and underpants rolled under your arm.
—Very Gray Brothers. Kim was in stitches.
—Franklin is right, Holger said. Sebastian would find Hugo’s wolfcubs more exciting.
—It’s the principle of the thing, Jos said. How was I to know that Anders was going to read a paper on the architecture of grebes’ nests? Made of sticks on the water. At least Sebastian thought that was neat, and has been talking grebes ever since. They run on the water, grebes, like Jesus in a hurry.
—Go back to your being pantsless.
—Grand success. Everybody followed suit, once we’d heard about grebe sticks. Tom then gave the news from around the world on what Fascist government has passed what laws against who can hug and kiss whom, and where. Lard butts with terminal halitosis in Washington who are willing to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet with napalm, poison gas, and hydrogen bombs, write laws against taking your dick out even to piss. So I joined them then and there, Sebastian too, contraband as he is. I don’t even like Sebastian, much less love him. That’s when Tom had a laughing fit, as it turns out that Sebastian had already joined, twice before, in fact, once with Franklin as his bonded mate, and once with Pascal, ditto.
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The wooded knoll above the bend in the river, a Chekhovian place, wicker beehives just beyond the hawthorns, a tinge of honey in the light. Franklin, nothing shy, at least offered authority for his presumption.
—Pascal said.
He had grabbed and fought his arms into the sleeves of a hooded jacket as soon as Holger had said he needed a ramble.
—Me too, Franklin had said, causing Hugo to look at the ceiling.
—New style, holding hands. Jos said it’s sissy, and then he held hands with me across the quad. He’d also just put down kissing as perverted, and then smooched Sebastian on the mouth. Butterscotch and foreskin he said it tasted like.
—What happened to Sebastian’s hair? Holger asked.
—Well, Franklin said, I cut it. Looks good, wouldn’t you say?
—Franklin, it looks awful.
—Never cut anybody’s hair before. There was general opinion at the clubhouse that he had too much of it, and that he would look less like a girl with about half of it scissored off. Guess I got more than half, didn’t I? Pascal cut a pair of his jeans off good and short for him. Now the pockets show.
—Could you find Sebastian, do you think, when we get back?
—Sure. What for?
—To take him to the barber. And, friend Franklin, if I sent you and Pascal to Jorgensen’s on the bus, would you get Sebastian a pair, two pairs, of niggling britches with a snide fit, like yours?
Franklin made his face a rabbit’s by rucking his upper lip, catching the nether under his wedgy teeth, rounding his eyes, and wrinkling his nose.
—We could, you know, get him some tough sneakers, too, and ballsy socks.
—Better and better.
—And some underpants that don’t sag or come up over his belly button.
—You’re being brilliant, friend Franklin. And how will he take all this? Will it hurt his feelings?
—Might, at that, come to mention it. Pascal can say he’s sorry he ruined his jeans. He’ll think of something, too, for the sneakers and socks and nappies.
—Just what is going on with Sebastian?
—Like at the clubhouse? He hasn’t a clue what the meetings are about, making two of us, as I don’t either, when it’s my turn to go with him. I mean, book reports! An old fart from England bleating about what’s against the law in Germany or Belgium. In engelsk, to boot. He wanted to interview, he called it, Sebastian, who he’d been staring at all along, maybe because of his haircut but probably, wouldn’t you say, because he looks as if he’s escaped from his babysitter. Didn’t Pascal say you were coming some Wednesday soon?
—How does anybody get around Pascal?
—You don’t.
—You’ll be fun, like the loony Dutchman we all peeled to the knackers for, and who kissed us, hilarious, and grew a bone. I’ll find out what they did after they threw me and Sebastian out. Tom and Kim, the two I’ve asked, answered with a shitty smile.
—Pascal wants me to talk about time and territory.
—Sounds as sexy as matron in hair curlers.
—The body as a territory and as an organism in time. The body as narrative and event. As figure against a ground, against history. Wittgenstein in an intriguing Zettel comments on the surface temperatures of the body, without particulars. Cold elbows, warm armpits.
—Hugo hollers about Mariana’s cold feet.
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—Really should have brought Barnabas, Franklin said. But Mariana would have had to come along too, for him to drink from. And if Mariana, Hugo, to fuck Barnabas a little sister. Find one thing wrong with this tent, Sperm Breath, and we’ll see my footprint on your butt for the next two days.
—Right back peg’s not in line, Pascal said. I’ll mention it before Holger does. Oof!
—Warned you.
—Boys, Holger said.
—The last weekend that can be called summer, Pascal said, by any stretch of the imagination. You’ll like the foul-weather times, friend Franklin. We’ve even been crazy enough to go over to the island with rain coming at us sideways by the bucketload, and inside the tent is wonderful when there’s a nasty drizzle.
—Which is what
we’ll get when and if we talk Holger into bringing us out with Alexandra, some Friday, returning on Sunday afternoon to collect the limp bodies, eyes rolled back in our heads, sweet idiots.
—There’s got to be a weekend, Holger, when you’ve had it with Pascal, can’t stand the sight of him, and will be all for hauling us out here. Won’t need to provide anything but transportation and tent. We won’t eat.
—The contingency, Holger said, will have to be something else, such as my generosity, or simply because I can’t say no to Pascal.
—Hugo and Mariana are always saying they’ll sell me to the Gypsies, first offer. Sometimes it’s give me to the Gypsies. But it would take Israeli Commandos to pry Holger loose from Pascal.
—Aren’t you sort of forgetting, Holger said, that you and Pascal can, without a word or sign, get each other’s britches off? When was it, last Tuesday, I was grading papers, Pascal was typing at the desk, his back to Franklin, who was lettering in his map assignment on the floor.
—Good afternoon, Pascal said. Grace abounding.
—Agreed, but Franklin sat up, watercolor brush in teeth, unbuttoned his jeans, and went back to making the Balkans green and yellow. Then Pascal, between shifts of the carriage, undid his belt and when he could spare a hand, kept edging his zipper down. The a of Bulgaria finished to his satisfaction, Franklin stretched prettily in the afternoon sun, with a sunny smile for me, serious thoughts in his eyes, which I took to be about the geography of the Balkans.
—Holger, Pascal said. You were supposed to crook your finger, and get climbed all over.
—Well I, at least, was thinking geography. So Pascal quit typing, slid out of his chair as casually as you please, and without so much as a half glance over his shoulder, walked backward until his butt was against the back of Franklin’s head. I saw all this with my own eyes. Then the two of you had your jeans and underpants off in something under three milliseconds, and in three more were wrapped around each other on the floor.
The Death of Picasso Page 44