It Takes a Thief

by Niels Hammer

  “A salad, please, and a glass of white wine.”

  Italian. A quick nod and a quick smile. Speed and efficiency for three to five years before going back – to Calabria and a life worth living – to fish in the shade of a large tree with a bottle of Cirò while remembering sporadic verses of Leopardi or – far more likely – whole arias of Rigoletto. It’s O to meet an army man. O to be back in Italia where living was easy with fish jumping in deep shaded pools and mediaeval values forming the basic undercurrent – plainly visible in manners and architecture – so Carlo Petrini –

  “Heere you are!”

  “Grazie mille.”

  He gave him a bill and nodded. Spaniel-soft brown eyes – mother bound with a whiff of omertà. The salad was good with olives and tomatoes – the rye bread crisp – but of course the wine was a bit raw. If compared with Kirkwall the speed with which everything moved had greatly increased for the disease of being busy had spread like the Bubonic plague with the mechanical rats – street by street – hamlet by hamlet – town by town. Unfortunately the disease of being busy was not lethal – it just killed the soul – but the disease as such was clever in not killing its host organism – so that it could continue to spread and spread – but eventually – when there were no vestiges of soul left – the entire ghostly house of cards would come crumbling down to collapse in clouds of dry dust. The way of the world was the end of the world. Unaware of what fate had in store for them people were working hard to fulfil this historic development – feeling puffed up by purpose – finding meaning in advancement – in fulfilling ambitions – in competing with their neighbours and – for the slightly more sophisticated – even with themselves. Only when death closed in – at the instant when they would be relinquishing it all – if they belonged to the happy few who were conscious and not knocked out – mice – by sedatives – would they realise the mistake of their life – but mercifully their regret – their rage – their sorrow – would only last a moment before the all-conquering nothingness extinguished warmth – movement – sensation – life – in the brain cells and a little later in the cells of the body – to leave their corpses to be changed back into that from which they had come – the various organic and inorganic compounds – which in turn would form the constituents of the organisms of the future – bacteria.

  More keenly aware of the burden of character or of his neurotransmitter profile than usual he walked back to the hotel but could not escape the shop windows which displayed their glittering wounds like Alexandrian beggars soliciting alms – and when he had found refuge in his room at the hotel and made the papers ready he brushed his teeth and took the tape recorder – to follow his initial plan although without expecting to come any closer to pinpointing her dialect. So to be inspired by a bit of confidence and trust he opened one of the small Sauterne bottles with his pocket knife and poured the glass – fashioned for the water that was best – full before he sniffed at it – to merge with its fragrance – to be Sauterne – the honeyed sweetness – the fruity scent – the mellow smoothness. He had not so great a need of a personality – it was sometimes like premeditated desire – a millstone around his bare neck – a hindrance for immediate experience. He blew the air from the cavity of his mouth out through his nose and looked down into the common street below – the street on which he in a short while would stroll along to look for a woman – aged about thirty with a friendly face and open eyes – a woman who might help him find the woman he loved – or that he thought he loved – the woman – by whom he had become obsessed – for it might indeed turn out to be a mirage – but the caravan had to continue with jingling bells across the sand towards the violet image of the oasis in the distance before the shimmering vision began to dissolve in thin air – into thin air. There was no other option available. So fortified by this view of fate and necessity or by the purity of the Sauterne he went down the stairs and out under the heavy Sky to be inspired by a friendly face – a face that was not too heavily scarred by goals. Most were – however. Of course – at this time of the day many would be imprisoned in offices and factories – but in a city of two hundred thousand souls there would be a fair number of easy-going individuals. A middle aged woman ploughed her way through the pedestrians with a four-wheeled perambulator in which two infants sat chained to their seats. She was probably their grandmother and he felt an innate empathy for them both as she had a face of granite – rugged like the bare cliffs of the coast along which he had just come – so he jumped aside as for a charging Rhinoceros in one of his or her tunnels of Tiger Grass – but smiled to think about what she would say if he had told her about the associations she had evoked. Two schoolgirls came along gesticulating and laughing – to give him a breath of fresh air – but they were too young – fourteen or fifteen maybe. The melody was probably disappearing more quickly here than further North. But they were both sweet as only the young were sweet. A frail woman of the right age – about thirty – who looked worn out and haggard – would feel obliged to help him but it would cost her an effort – a too great expenditure of energy – and she needed all the energy she had to go on living. It had been easier in Inverness and Kirkwall. City lights! Guided by intuition or instinct he approached a woman – a shoe-fetichist probably – who had stopped to investigate the display in a window. Never mind – it took all sorts – and there were far graver sins and obsessions.

  “Excuse me, madame, but may I make a recording of your accent. I come from the Faculty of Linguistic Research, Milwaukee University, and we are sampling accents all over Scotland. It will only take two or three minutes and it is of course anonymous?”

  The sound of the traffic here was a serious problem.

  “Weel, I cannae say nay, can I? But I was jist gaun tae buy a pair o shoes.”

  “So would you mind if I accompanied you into the shop as it is a bit noisy here on the street and that might spoil the recording?”

  “O nae, I dinna mind that.”

  He opened the door for her – a breath from fields covered with small pink-purplish flowers – and when he closed it the noise of the traffic subsided. There were several other customers – all women – preening their feathers – the basic occupation between the age of seven and seventy.

  “All right. First I must ask you if you speak any other language like Gaelic or French and then if you have lived here in Aberdeen all your life?”

  “I’ve only been tae Spain twice.”

  “All right, could you say Oh Heaven, Nae! a couple of times just as if you would to someone you know, but also as if you were annoyed, furious and angry?”

  He gave her the microphone.

  “Oh Heaven, nae! Oh Heaven nae!”

  “That was very fine and could you also count to eleven?”

  “Een twa three four five sax seven eight nine ten eleven.”

  It had some of the same swing as in Buckie but it was not as pronounced – somewhat moderated or evened out – but while that matched with the general impression he had gathered when he listened to the various accents there had to be considerable local and individual differences – so even relative certainty was unobtainable. It would require a very large number of samples.

  “Splendid.”

  A young woman with curly hair and freckles stood looking at them to see how well they could act. All the world and everywhere.

  “And may I in appreciation of your effort give you this little bottle of French wine, a Sauterne. It’s best if slightly chilled and it may suit a cake or fruits but not food such as fish or meat as it is sweet and fragrant.”

  “Thanks fae givin me that, an thanks tae ye.”

  “I hope you will succeed in finding exactly the shoes you’re looking for.”

  As she zoomed in on a pair of cream-coloured sandals and stood lost to the world in silent contemplation he went back to the hotel with the feeling that it would be useless to improve the results. It
might be impossible to pinpoint the locality of her accent any better than he had done already – but as he stretched himself out on the bed he remembered what he had forgotten and took the microphone to add ‘Aberdeen’ and ‘number twelve.’

  He woke quite late in the afternoon and went down to the restaurant to get a cup of tea and wait till he had to drive to the airport. That would probably take about twenty to twenty-five minutes. The tea was black and the chocolate muffin dry and too sweet. Sugar as substitute for flavour. Beside him three elderly women with steely hair styles were engaged in dissecting the behaviour of a mutual acquaintance – who apparently had not turned up yet – on the white table cloth between their cake-loaded plates – and middle-aged business men – dressed in dark suits that all had been cut for a composite figure – sat in scattered groups and chewed cud on their recent exploits. Greedy of gain – fresh from their wheeling and dealing – where they had tried to get an advantage of their business partners or conspired with them to take advantage of the consumers who voluntarily acted as their customers – they planned their next moves. Afternoon tea in a provincial hotel – an exhibition of that Monster custome and conventions – to which his species clung to escape the horror of the Lion roar of emptiness that waited behind everything – śūnyatā-simha-nādena trasitāḥ sarva-vādinaḥ – coming with a force of one hundred and fifteen decibels at fifty Hertz. Oh – a decent restaurant. Seymour needed it. Jessie could hardly bother to steam potatoes. Asking the receptionist to get a table at a place she could recommend and to book two rooms at the inn in Fochabers he went up to his room to lie down and escape the train of thoughts – looping the loop.

  At a quarter to seven with the Sesame phoneme of /ivv/ ringing in his ears he drove to the airport – down Queen’s Road to North Aberdeen Drive – while looking at the vanishing light of Nature and at its all too human substitutes – devoid of dignity and authenticity though devised on account of a plain practical need. So misanthropic by nature – maddened by lack of means wherewith to oppose the prevailing rush towards self-destruction – mourning the extinction of species and anxious to blow to smithereens the Golden Calf of the castles in Spain – he felt worn out by resignation in the public arena of wilful indifference – suddenly bereft of the basic humour that made survival possible – but the necessity of superficial activity saved him from too acute an attack of despair by removing his attention from the underlying patterns of society to the traffic which was brisk at this early hour of the evening. The energy wasted in driving was vast and continuing along Auchmill Road he turned West – the way he had come – towards Inverurie and then North to the airport. Even parking was now fraught with carefully designed obstacles. Every move was hampered by greed – so he fed the machine – the very image of its proprietor – according to its preprogrammed hunger – and went into the building to see if the flight was on time. It was – and he went over to the arrival gate in this modern version of Inferno where noise and disharmony prevailed. Seymour would have plenty of luggage – rods and waders so it would take some time. Still – it had turned out as he had hoped – but he never knew where disaster lay in wait – around the next crooked corner – but there he was – striding briskly forward – already seeing the river glittering with the scales of jumping fish in the eye of his mind.

  “There you are. Have you been waiting? I could not take the rods as hand baggage of course so we have to wait.”

  “It’s good to see you looking so keen and eager. Only a few minutes. Do you need a drink?”

  “No, I suppose the suitcases will come rather quickly. The flight was not full, luckily, and quicker than I thought.”

  “It’s the time it takes coming to the airport and leaving the airport. I’ve got a table at what should be a good restaurant.”

  “And I’m hungry. It has been a long day. I had a case of scurvy, would you believe it? An old man, a total fool, bigoted and ignorant.”

  “Some people are directly responsible for their own troubles.”

  “In the last analysis probably more than one can imagine.”

  “The doctor speaking. There, the suitcases are coming, now which one’s yours?”

  “There it is. I hope the rods are all right. The way they treat luggage now-a-days.”

  They fought their way through the crowds – towards the relatively splendid isolation of the car.

  “We’ll just leave your luggage at the hotel and take a cab to the restaurant.”

  “Yes, it’s better not to risk driving now. Greetings from Jessie, by the way.”

  He found at last an empty space large enough for their motor vehicle – but at the reception Seymour was duly attacked by the formalities of getting a roof over his head for the night.

  “Certain volatile trends in religious insanity have been aggravated and exploited by various administrative units to a degree of exaggeration that has given them a near-perfect pretext for frightening people out of their mother-wits so that they have relinquished all their remaining independence and self-determination, and that has of course facilitated the implementation of a total surveillance system at all levels of society.”

  “For any administration worth its salt the Romania of Ceauşescu is the political ideal. There’s nothing that corrupts like power. All power wants is more power – ad infinitum. Power, the only really dangerous drug, can never be satiated with what it has.”

  “Lord Acton’s observation, a vacuum instead of a soul and it’s a sickness you cannot cure.”

  “No, nobody can, except death of course, the Great Doctor.”

  Death would always for better or for worse be familiar to Seymour in a way he never would be able to understand. The seamy side a doctor saw. The raw red bones. The bloody truth of life.

  “We had better perhaps take all this upstairs?”

  When they had inspected the rods they found a cab waiting in the grimy street below.

  “Footdee, please.”

  “So what have you been up to? I’m dying to hear what you have to say.”

  “Let’s wait till we eat.”

  The roads were narrow – the houses crowding together – small and intimate – built by Humans for Humans.

  “Are you tired?”

  “Yes, it has been a long week, and I’m really looking forward to catch a salmon to-morrow.”

  When he had given the driver his due they were – in the chiaroscuro of the reception – met by a young neat woman whose smile was fashioned to kindle their appetites.

  “Good evening, I assume that there should be a table here for two persons reserved in the name of Drummond, Ralph Drummond.”

  “Just a minute, and I’ll see, yes, a table for two.”

  They walked behind her in the subdued light of the modish temple of nourishment – down between rows of white altars surrounded by discreetly eating Primates – to a little table in the corner where they themselves could allay the universal craving of their empty stomachs.

  “Now here’s the wine list. A Cantemerle, should we try that? Nine years, but it should be – ”

  “Venison, that’s what I would like, we’ll have plenty of fish Saturday and Sunday.”

  “Then let’s have two venisons, assorted vegetables al dente and pommes frites, but what about an avocado first, or would you like something else?”

  “No, that would be nice, but let’s get the wine right away.”

  “So two venisons with assorted vegetables, a Cantemerle, two avocados vinaigrette?”

  “Precisely, and we’re nearly dying of thirst.”

  “I won’t be a minute.”

  “Now, as for to-morrow, if we are at the hospital around nine, it should take us about six hours, and we can be at the river around four or four thirty. The search is limited to an area covering Moray, Aberdeenshire and Aberdeen. As the female to male ratio is three to four point twenty-four the
re should only be about thirty-nine cases.”