by Sjón
Er, yes, you could call it that. Marie-Sophie testified to the cook’s culinary work in the service of opera.
The two men continued: it had finally dawned on the woman that L— needed to relieve himself and was asking her to help him, but she told the man that he had a nerve: all she had been asked to do was sit with him for a little while; she had no intention of watching him do his business, he could perfectly well hold it in until that silly girl came back – yes, that’s what she called you – only then he managed to reach down to the chamber-pot under the bed…’
‘Look, dear, haven’t we had enough scatology in this story already?’
‘No, no, this is only the beginning…’
‘Marie-Sophie shuddered; she could hardly imagine that the invalid would do something as crude as the two men’s account seemed to imply. Anyway, L— had no sooner got his hands on the chamber-pot than he began to play on it and the woman thought her last hour had come; the man ran his fingers around the rim and tapped it on the side making alternate humming and clinking sounds, resulting in such a blasphony that the woman blushed to the roots of her hair, and when he raised his voice in a hypnotic drone she was powerless with shame; she’d never heard such a croaking before.
The two men paused in their tale and asked Marie-Sophie whether L— had ever sung to her. And if so, what?
The girl shook her head: what was going on? What did it matter if this man sang and played on his potty? Who was he, anyway?
They ignored her questions: the man had contrived with his playing to hypnotise the woman into a strange state in which the room had spun before her eyes for a good while and once that nonsense was over she says she imagined she was in a nursery; she was walking down the room with a milk jug in hand, but every cradle held a chamber-pot and in every chamber-pot was a turd, and every turd was bawling like a baby…’
‘You’re not right in the head.’
‘Come on, it’s all symbolic…’
‘I don’t think I care for symbolism of that sort.’
‘The cook’s adventures were making Marie-Sophie feel ill: what did the two men mean by this detailed recounting of her nonsense? The woman had clearly committed some dreadful misdemeanour and was trying to cover up for it with this ridiculous pack of lies. Once Marie-Sophie would have found it funny, but after what had happened to her that day she had no stomach for listening to other people’s cock-ups. She wanted to be alone with the invalid.
The girl sighed.
— The cook’s obviously had a peculiar experience, but I wouldn’t call it exactly life-threatening—
She got no further. The two men interrupted her simultaneously: the woman had been so disgusted at this sight that the trance had worn off, and when she had recovered her senses and screamed at him to behave or she’d pull the rug out from under his feet, he had rolled out of bed and on to the floor in a trice, and there he was lying, clinging to the rug for dear life when we arrived to warn you that he’s not safe here any longer.
The world went black before Marie-Sophie’s eyes: what were the men saying? Were they punishing her for going out? Were they going to take the invalid away from her? Then who could she tell the thing that she couldn’t tell anyone?
The two men prepared to leave: “We’ll come for him after closing time; he must be ready to leave by then.”
— Why?
She hid her face in her hands, peeping out at them through her fingers.
The men stared at her, saying they didn’t understand her; she’d seemed happy enough to get away from him at lunchtime. Was there something she wasn’t telling them about her relationship with L—?
Marie-Sophie sniffed and answered in a shaky voice:
— No, it’s just that I’m worried he won’t be able to cope with travelling, not in the state he’s in. Can’t he stay with me, with us here at the guesthouse, a tiny bit longer? I won’t leave him again.
The two men conferred in whispers before telling the girl that it appeared someone had informed on him. She asked who in the world would be interested in hunting down a scarecrow like him? They answered that although the man in the bed gave the impression of being a half-mad skeleton who’d wrapped himself in skin for the sake of appearances, there were people in certain circles who believed he held the outcome of the war in his hands; they themselves hadn’t a clue what it was that L— knew or was capable of, and though they were keen to find out, it was none of their business – their role was simply to ensure that he got out of the country alive, and that’s what they meant to do.
Marie-Sophie smiled coldly: they talked to her as if she were an idiot; fine, she was perfectly capable of acting dumber than she really was.
— So you’re saying he’s supposed to change the course of world history with his potty-rattling?
But the two men saw nothing wrong with what the girl said. They nodded gravely: perhaps this peculiar music was the key to world peace – anything was worth a try.
— I’ll have to remember to pack his instrument when he leaves, then …
They agreed and left.
17.13. The invalid reaches out a hand and lays it on the back of the girl who is sitting beside him on the bed: he had listened to her conversation with the two men; she was on his side – that was good. The girl was funny; she’d given him the idea of fooling around with the chamber-pot when that woman was driving him crazy with her questions about their supposed love affair. Now the girl turned to him, but it was as if she didn’t see him.
Who did she see?
Marie-Sophie scrutinises the invalid’s face: was he looking at her? Where was the hand on her back heading? Perhaps he wasn’t as helpless as she had believed?
Karl’s image flickered over his face.
The girl tears his hand from her waist and spits out:
— You too!
The invalid wrinkles his brow: him too? Why was she yelling at him? What had happened to the amusing girl of that morning?
Marie-Sophie leaps up from the bed and moves as far into the corner by the door as she can get, pressing her face between the walls until the tip of her nose touches the innermost angle where they meet: God, what would she give for the walls to split ninety degrees, then she would be standing on a corner and could walk away, to somewhere far away.
But there, in the shadowy world of the corner, lurks Karl along with Herr Maus. Throwing out their arms, they mutter: “It’s no ordinary vermin problem you’ve got at Gasthof Vrieslander.”
The hallucination smacks Marie-Sophie’s cheek with the back of its hand and she recoils into the priest’s hole.
A strange sensation of weeping fills the invalid’s breast. Fumbling for the girl, he catches hold of her skirt: sympathy, it was a long time since he had wept for anyone but himself, yet now he wanted to cry for this girl and for all those who, like him, had been robbed of sympathy by their enslavement.
— Leave me alone!
Marie-Sophie snatches her dress from his hand: where could she go? Nowhere! Where were the people who loved her? Nowhere!
The invalid watches the girl snuff out the light and sit down at the dressing table.
She looks at herself in the mirror.
— That’s what you are: darkness in the darkness.
18.06. The invalid props himself up in bed, coughs and calls to the girl: “Come here…”
She doesn’t react.
He sighs heavily; the girl’s refusing herself sympathy, refusing to let him show her any sympathy …
18.57. Marie-Sophie listens to the invalid tossing and turning: when she first switched off the light, he had fumbled for her in the darkness; now he was asleep. She retches and weeps in turn.
19.43. The invalid opens his eyes a crack: the girl is still sitting at the mirror. The temperature’s rising in the priest’s hole and he realises that the moment is drawing near when he will be allowed to weep with her …
21.38. Marie-Sophie jumps to her feet. The heat in the compartment has beco
me unbearable. She strips off her cardigan.
— Have they gone mad in the kitchen? God, they’re burning the entire coal ration, they’re going to kill me! Burn me like a whore …
The invalid watches the girl fling open the door and swing it back and forth to cool herself, but it’s as if she’s blowing on embers; the temperature in the compartment rises and she breathes in gasps.
— Christ, it’s like a furnace; I’m sweating worse than a glassblower …
She disappears from the compartment. He hears a heavy blow and swearing, then she comes storming back in, growling like a caged lion.
— Would you believe it, the bloody proprietor’s only gone and nailed the window shut! I’m dying! This is killing me!
Marie-Sophie undoes the top button of her dress and wipes the sweat from her throat: the wallpaper creaks, the varnish on the furniture bubbles.
She gives the invalid a quick glance.
— You must be suffocating under those covers …
— I am.
The invalid answers the girl at normal pitch, but she doesn’t have time to wonder at this – she’s burning up – and she whips the boiling cover and eiderdown off him.
— There, that should make a difference …
But Marie-Sophie says no more, her impatience drains away when her gaze falls on the man: the invalid is as grotesque as a Romanesque statue of Christ, minus a cross and wearing a nappy instead of a loincloth.
She goes to the door, takes hold of the glowing handle and shuts it: “I was raped…”
A tear springs from the corner of her eye and she raises a finger to her eyelid.
Her fingernail gives off a spark.
The compartment burns up.’
16
My substance was not hid from thee,
when I was made in secret,
and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
Thine eyes did see my substance,
yet being unperfect …
Psalms, 139:15–16
‘Marie-Sophie rises from the ash heap by the door: the temperature in the priest’s hole has dropped but the smoke from her body still hangs in the air after the burning.
She opens the false window and the veil of smoke is sucked out into the cool Parisian night of the painting: on the further bank of the Seine a young man is leaning against a lamppost, struggling to light a cigarette.
It’s Karl.
She scratches his face off, scraping away the paint with the nail of her index finger until there’s nothing left but brown canvas.
The clock in reception struck eleven, the sound of merrymaking rose from the dining room: the owner had returned and was jovially drinking toasts with his companions, who thanked him for the drink in a manly chorus.
Marie-Sophie roamed around the priest’s hole, wringing her hands.
— What am I to do?
The invalid lay naked under a layer of ash, snoring. She sat down beside him and brushed the ash from his face and hands.
— I’m clean, it felt good to burn with you, but they’re going to take you away from me, take you away, just when I want you with me for ever, even if you do snore like a pig – even though I once promised myself I’d never live with a man who snored.
She dusted the invalid’s lips and he woke up. Her mouth turned down.
— Don’t go? Where can you go? Do you have to go?
The invalid quietly hushed the girl but she couldn’t control herself.
— If you are going, tell me everything: what are you running away from, will you come back? Tell me everything, I must know everything!
He sat up in bed, slung his thin bird’s legs to the floor and she helped him on to his feet. He addressed her in a suffering voice.
— Where’s my suitcase? There’s a robe in my case, can I have it? I had a box too …
The girl opened the suitcase and found what he wanted, a midnight-blue robe dotted with silver stars, and he put it on carefully, sliding his arms slowly into the sleeves like a man who has recovered his dignity but isn’t sure if he cares for it any longer.
— I’ll show you all there is to see. The box, didn’t you have it somewhere?
— It’s here.
Marie-Sophie laid the box on the bed. It was a battered oval, an ornate pink hatbox, the lid marked: Dodgson & Tenniel – Hatters of England. He contemplated it fondly for a moment.
— Could you put it on the table over there?
The invalid gave a low sigh and pointed behind him to the dressing table. The girl moved the box to the table.
— Here?
— And would you please hang a cloth of some sort over the mirror? Thank you.
Marie-Sophie didn’t really know how to behave: what had come over her invalid? He was an invalid no longer, no, he had the air of a surgeon in an operating theatre or a master of the dark arts in his laboratory, directing his acolytes around him. Yet it was only a few hours since they had burned together, melted into one being, in the scorching room. She huffed.
— Well, if that’s the way he wants it, if he’s going to pretend nothing’s happened between us, then he’s welcome; I’ll expect no good from men from now on.
She covered the mirror with a towel, watching the invalid, or whatever he was, from out of the corner of her eye as he undid the white band that held the lid on the box. Muttering to himself in a language she didn’t understand, he lifted off the lid. He cheered up the moment he saw the contents of the box, then bent and lifted out what appeared to Marie-Sophie to be a petticoat of salmon-pink silk. He called to her softly.
— Come here!
She came closer; he laid the silk cloth on the table beside the box and drew out another like it. The girl didn’t like the look of this: was it underwear? Was he an unscrupulous black-marketeer? That would be a fine thing, to have nursed someone of that sort! She stood on tiptoe to get a better view over the man’s shoulder. He unwrapped one silk cloth after another until a red lump the size of her forearm was revealed. She looked from the invalid – the man, the guest, or whatever she should call him now that he had changed – to that thing in the box and back again. His eyes shone with joy and after a brief silence he whispered over his shoulder in a choked voice.
— How do you like it?
Marie-Sophie was speechless: How do you like it? Like what? That red block of wood? That meat loaf? What did the man mean? After all they had shared he showed her a blood-red lump and wanted to know what she thought of the object. Either the man was making fun of her or he was insane. Oh well, whichever it was, she’d better answer him as he was no longer her invalid but a guest, and it went with the job that you had to treat guests as paying customers, as the Inhaberin called them, even when they were barking mad.
— How do you like it?
— Er, I don’t know.
She tried to look stupid. He stepped aside, put a hand on her shoulder and gave her an affectionate push towards the table.
— Touch it.
He took her hand to guide it towards the lump but she wrenched it back.
— What’s the matter? You gave me back what they’d taken away from me: love. In return I want to share with you the only thing I own … You needn’t be afraid …
— Oh, it’s just that I prefer to make my own decisions, not just about how I dress, what I think and eat, but everything else as well, including how I stick out my finger to poke something.
— Not poke, touch gently.
Marie-Sophie lightly tapped the tip of her right forefinger on the lump, which was cold and moist to the touch.
— It’s some kind of clay, isn’t it?
The guest, the man, the invalid nodded.
— What are you doing with a lump of clay in a hatbox, behaving as if it’s your heart and soul? People might say that you, well, once I reckon it would have been considered a bit odd to show your sweetheart – if I may be so bold – a lump of clay in confidence like this.
— Just wait.
He twisted a signet ring from his little finger, gripped it by the band and pressed the seal into the clay. The girl looked at him enquiringly.
— Touch it now.
Marie-Sophie hesitated: he’d said he loved her, hadn’t he? Wouldn’t it be best to do as he asked, did it matter that he was mad after all? It would be a pity if they parted on bad terms; it had felt so good to sit with him and talk a lot of nonsense while he dozed, blushing when he woke up and looked at her, and it had felt good to burn with him. She couldn’t prevent him from leaving or them from taking him – well, what was she supposed to do? Pounce on them like a lynx and gobble them up, fasten her fangs into them and tear them limb from limb? Others would probably come in their place and she wouldn’t have room in her stomach to devour all those she killed. She wanted to fight for him but in the circumstances she would have to make do with playing this absurd game with him. That way he would be happy and she perplexed when they parted, which aren’t such bad emotions at such a time.
— Touch it now.
She stroked the tip of her finger lightly over the surface of the lump: God! It twitched like a maggot and vibrated slightly. What on earth was it? A sea cucumber? The girl had never seen a sea cucumber but had a clear picture of one in her head; a sea cucumber looked pretty much like this, yes, as thick as an arm, tapering at the end where the mouth was. The creatures did have mouths, didn’t they? Marie-Sophie looked up from the prodigy.
— Does it bite?
The man shook his head and rubbed the imprint of the seal off the lump of clay, which squirmed under his touch, then lay as motionless as a block of wood. The girl looked enquiringly at the man she loved: what alchemy was this? What magic?
He drew the chair from the desk and offered her a seat with a swivel of his right hand. She sat down and waited for him to explain. Taking a deep breath he put his hands together as if in prayer, closed his eyes a moment, lowered his head and raised his hands to his face so the fingertips rested under his nose. The atmosphere in the room grew charged: darkness gathered around the thinking man and the darkness was so deep that the girl had the feeling that the wall had disappeared and she could see into another room behind it. A glow illuminated a golden wall, glimmering from seven candles in a man-high candelabra. The candles smoked, the smoke flickering from the flames in ever-changing symbols or letters in a language she could make no sense of. A second later this eternity was over and he straightened up, his face wide-awake.