It Takes a Thief

by Niels Hammer

  “How long is the proboscis?”

  “About an inch.”

  “Male or female?

  He stepped a little back and knelt down to use the binoculars.

  “A female.”

  “How can you see that?”

  “The females are larger than the males, but the diagnostic sign is that the male has a special organ on the end of the abdomen with which he can cling to the female – ”

  “And the black, yellow, red and blue on the wings are magnificent. What a combination and what a pattern! That’s what it does, it looks just right, as if no other pattern could have been possible.”

  “No other pattern was possible for this species under the given circumstances.”

  But why and why and why? Vast stretches of utterly unknown territory.

  “I mean, you cannot improve on it, and I don’t think it would have been imaginable, say, if you had tried to arrange this colour pattern in an attempt to create a new species. You would never have been able to get it right.”

  “No, that’s what evolution does, it creates perfection though not invariably.”

  “It’s just like a humming-bird!”

  “The aerodynamics are comparable but not similar. This striking combination of black and yellow often denotes danger and the colour pattern is clearly aposematic; compare Wasps or Tigers, though the evolutionary processes were quite different of course, but in this case it denotes that the Swallowtail is poisonous as the larvae eat poisonous plants, such as Milk Parsley and Parsnip even, which contain furanocoumarins.”

  “What does that imply?”

  “The plants which had a tiny amount of poison tended to survive slightly better than plants with slightly lesser amounts of poison, and thus gradually the plants began to contain more and more poison as the poison protected them against all kinds of herbivores; but simultaneously, the Swallowtail larvae, if we can regard the butterfly there as a chronospecies, as there is no palaeozoological evidence left, co-evolved with the plants by being able to tolerate more and more poison and thus to gain a greater degree of protection.”

  The firm pressure of her hand told him that she felt grateful for the grace of seeing. She was resting in herself and could see the world as it was – as if for the first time – created anew – for they were alone and together here – exactly here – where the pens of crisp dragonflies – drumming bumblebees and hovering flies scratched the thick pane of silence to delineate their histories –

  “She’s flying up over the trees; but there’s a small blue butterfly on the leaf of the dog rose.”

  “A Holly Blue. Move very slowly over here and bend down, then you will catch the scintillating blue of the scales better.”

  “No jewel can be compared with this.”

  “Your aptitude for moving silently and slowly is important when watching animals whose eyesight has been evolved to register movements, especially sudden movements.”

  “No sapphire.”

  “Not even the Logan sapphire?.”

  “No, it’s rather inert in comparison with this though still beautiful in itself.”

  “The scales absorb all wavelengths except blue, but the blue wavelength changes according to the angle at which it is reflected; and a sapphire consists of aluminium oxide with various traces of other metals.”

  “There’s another richness here, and another depth; and then the butterfly is alive. It’s a different impression. It touches you in a different way. It’s warm. That’s what it is, warm.”

  “Do you see why I have to help you to steal a little of the wealth that has been stolen by acquisitive wraiths, and why I admire you for the pluck you have to adjust the balance of a sick and sickening society as much as you can?”

  “Yes, you think they have the wrong priorities. Here are the jewels they ought to care about; but you see, darling, they cannot own them, and they are merely interested in that which they can own, in what they can believe might belong to them. It boosts their vanity, their self-importance. They have no interest in that which does not magnify the image they have formed of themselves and they want to impress their neighbours, to feel that they are better off than they are. Behind power and money there is a vacuum no power and money can fulfil.”

  “Psychopathology is perhaps incomprehensible, the difference is too pronounced and there is a subconscious unwillingness to envisage such a pathological state; but regardless of all this pearls strike me as belonging to another category than precious stones, for pearls give a distinctly more organic and live impression than stones and metal, especially mother-of-pearl perhaps.”

  “Yes, but it’s always vanity and autism as opposed to empathy and insight, Come, it’s getting late, we have to arrange our marriage and find someone who can take my furniture – ”

  “What about your Cat?”

  “I’ve thought about it since yesterday. It’s best if the new owners will accept him as part of the household. He is attached to his territory and would find his way home sooner or later.”

  Saturated with green impressions but borne along on the impetus of their shared endeavour they went back to the boat and began paddling down the rill.

  “It’s really getting hot now. Wait a minute.”

  As she took off her blouse he caressed her movements with his eyes.

  “Are you still keen to have a look at the house I told you about?”

  “Yes, on the way back I’ll get an electric motor and three batteries. Are you?”

  “As it very well may be my final night I would like to finish with a flourish so as to mark the end of one phase and the beginning of a completely new one.”

  All pervasive it had to be – like the background radiation – his due to her as a woman. Liberated from earthly gravity by the bubbles of the shared prospects of the future that – as if endless like the present – would carry them upwards together until something – unimaginable or trivial – would cause them to separate with equanimity or unite them in death – they carried everything up to the car in the glaring sunlight. The heat of the closed metal vehicle felt like an oven and the leather had an animal smell he did not like even when it became diluted by the fresh air that flowed in through the open windows. When he parked in front of her house she jumped out wanting to resolve the practical details as quickly as possible and while he replenished the food – grey and slimy – smelling of stale fish – for the Cat who – walking to and fro – arched his back in excitement – she tracked down a company that felt lean enough to come at once.

  “Luckily I don’t have all that much so they can just take it as it is, but I’ll have to tell them what they have to pack. In the meantime you should get the boat motor and go home. This will at least take four or five hours if not longer. You’ve got till five o’ clock before I come.”

  Doubting that he would be able to survive for more than five minutes alone he gave her a quick kiss to minimise the suffering of saying farewell and drove to Yarmouth with the sprightly touch of her tongue lingering on his lower lip. It was not as easy as he had thought – hardly anything was – but having shuttled to and fro between three yacht accessory suppliers he bought a rather small twelve volt electric outboard motor and three batteries. The choice of motors had not been as extensive as he had expected so there had only been one possibility – and while it was not powerful enough to be ideal it was nevertheless a reasonable compromise. He tested the motor by sailing to and fro – turning sharply and changing speed – but then there was nothing he could do but wait for he could find no peace of mind in her absence. Walking to and fro in the garden he looked simultaneously again and again at everything and again and again at nothing – but eventually – when the Sun almost was hidden behind the topmost leaves of the Elder Trees he heard the lorry and an instant later Caitlin – flushed with the joy of activity and change – came running up the driveway to
embrace him.

  “Have you been waiting?”

  “Yes, I didn’t imagine you had that many things to pack.”

  “Neither did I, but we had better tell them where to put the boxes and the furniture.”

  “You should just do what you want.”

  “All right, but I’ll not touch anything in your atelier.

  His kiss was an affirmation of the carte blanche he had already given her partly in order to shed the burden of all the practical considerations and partly to avoid the white noise of a reproach later in case she should prefer another solution than the one he had suggested to escape bothering any further about the matter – but she placed most of her things in the spare room beside the kitchen as it would take time before she knew enough about the house to know what she should keep and what she should give away. The cupboard with her clothes fitted into the niche on the landing and there was room enough in his wardrobe for her dresses – however – he had not even begun to envisage how much she would change his habits by her spontaneous insistence on all the pragmatic perfections she simply would not be able to live without.

  “I don’t think any of my kitchen utensils, plates, saucepans or anything else is worth keeping. You have plenty of that already, as well as plates and glasses. And we’ll see what we should do about the rest of the furniture later. While I waited for the lorry I spoke with the vicar and I promised to come with our passports. The banns will of course take three Sundays, so that’s another month. I had to make a quick decision and I thought a Saturday would be fine. So in another four weeks’ time we will be married. What about the motor?”

  “I have already tested it and I had time too to replenish our stores. I have packed what we need for to-morrow, apart from food. We can have a picnic somewhere on the brink.”

  “Fine, let’s take a bath and – ”

  “I’ve put a chicken in the oven so it will be ready at about eight.”

  While she undressed he filled the bath and climbed down into its ivory-enamelled canyon to relax and was already beginning to merge with the soft warm water from the Sky when she sat down to send green seas up over the gunwales.

  “How much do you weigh?”

  “A gentleman should not ask a woman about her weight.”

  “I’m not a gentleman, and you are rather my wife than a mere woman.”

  “You’re a gentleman when it suits you and usually it suits you rather well, and while I’m your wife I’m also a woman, and there are some secrets a woman may want to keep to herself.”

  “I thought you were far beyond having such a petit bourgeois-like illusion.”

  “Perhaps I still cherish some common illusions; but you are free to make your own estimate.”

  Conditioned limitations – impossible to foresee and often impossible to explain – away.

  “I can only imagine a bed of roses. La vie en rose.”

  “There are no roses without thorns, at least no rose that has any smell, and you really like the smell, don’t you, so you’ll have to suffer the thorns?”

  Satisfied with the broadside she had delivered she began to wash herself so vigorously that the soap swirled around her like spray around a reef in a stiff flaught. He had to close his eyes and the violence of her movements precluded any attempts at contemplation – so he accepted the future changes with a long nostalgic sigh. There was nothing else to do and he began to realise – though he wondered why he had not really thought about it before – how much his quiet life would be turned upside down – now that he would be swept seaward on another and far more turbulent arm of the great river – at least insofar as she did not adapt herself to his way of life – but here he felt justified in entertaining some hope for she was uncommonly open and curious either because of him or perhaps because of the prospects he had suggested. Having finished her purifications she rose to anoint her skin with a creamy ablution that had a faint smell of Heather honey. Wavelets came tripping across the surface of the water as in a slanting sealight. She had been too engrossed in her august ritual to speak or even to notice his existence and when she had left him alone in the bathroom he closed his eyes to let all thoughts evaporate from the surface of his awareness together with the vapour of the water.

  “Come on!”

  He had not heard her open the door and looked up astonished to accept that he must have been half asleep. She was combing her hair in front of the mirror in which she caught the reflection of herself framed by his attention.

  “Is the chicken ready?”

  “Yes, I have taken it out of the oven.”

  Drying himself he went into the living room where the smell of the fried chicken gave the air a distinct twang though it was not so pronounced that it made him want to open the windows – just strong enough to stimulate his hunger. She was already imposing certain routines upon his spontaneous flow of impulses – so could any woman really refrain from becoming the Cross-spider in her own woven web at the nexus of the world like the fish-eyed Goddess in Madurai?

  “You got exactly what you wanted but also what you deserved and asked for, didn’t you?”

  Shaking water out of his left ear he tried in vain as well to shake the uncanny feeling of the acuteness of her sixth sense out of his right hemisphere.

  “More than that. Imagination, wishes and dreams come to dust when faced with that which is.”

  If projections exceeded reality in felt intensity the actual sense of reality was obscured by the premeditated weight of the projections. Menhirs crushing grass and flowers.

  “We don’t have to start as early to-morrow as we did to-day, do we?”

  “Four hours upstream, three hours downstream, an hour investigating the premises, another hour having lunch, and another hour for the unforeseeable. That’s ten hours all together.”

  “That means we should be back before nine, before it gets dark. If we start at half past ten we’ll just have to get up at nine. ”

  By ruffling her hair in front of the mirror in the hall she showed him his present bearings – so he followed her out in to the hearth of the house. Hunger had made her efficient and as she cut up the chicken and removed the pink-white meat from the bones he found a good bottle of Pomerol and two large glasses.

  “We’ll have bread, salad and tomatoes to-day as well. Do you mind?”

  “No, not at all. Here, this is really good.”

  She sniffed and she smiled. The bouquet was heavy and pungent.

  “I’ve never smelled anything like this before. It’s very rich – ”

  “It’s a Pomerol. Ninety percent Merlot and ten per cent Cabernet Franc. It’s hard to differentiate the components of such a complex fragrance, but I have associations to earth steaming from rain when the Sun comes out, fresh truffles, sweet cherries and black currants.”

  She drank a little and he watched the wine modulate her mood with its supple richness but of course also because of the lift of the ethanol – permeating the soft palate.

  “I could become addicted to this.”

  “No, I don’t think so. You are too much aware of yourself to risk becoming addicted to anything, as I have already said several times now.”

  “Apart from being addicted to you?”

  He took a small sip and kissed her.

  “A tendency to stimulate innate neurotransmitter systems cannot be diagnosed as addiction, quite the contrary. It’s health epitomised.”

  “But neurotransmitter systems can certainly also cause addiction for when the septal area of rats is stimulated either by a very weak electrical current or by tiny drops of acetylcholine the poor rats keep on pressing the lever that releases the electrical current or the drops until they die. That’s natural addiction to orgasm.”

  “Unnatural rather, because the process has been short-circuited by artificial means.”

  “What about gamb
ling then, it activates the dopamine system and it’s non-invasive?”

  John Montagu – dead set on continuing – although apocryphal –

  “That’s right, so I have to find a better explanation.”

  “You don’t have to do that now, you know.”

  They sat down to eat and eat slowly – to let each slice of Poppy red tomato – each crust of golden bread – each fresh green salad leaf and each tender piece of chicken – be fulfilling. Whatever she did she did it whole-heartedly. Within without – without within. Their eyes met.

  “You’re thinking about me?”

  “Yes, about how absolute you are. I mean, whatever you do, you do it thoroughly.”

  “The deeper I can absorb myself in what I do the more rewarding it becomes, the more facets there are to explore. It’s that simple.”

  They cleared the table and took their glasses upstairs where the bed like a square white raft lay ready to carry them away on the ocean of existence – or like a carpet of white silk which would lift them up toward the infinity of the starry Sky outside.

  “Let’s open the other window too to let the night come in.”

  “We could also sleep on your boat and only come here to change clothes, eat and wash.”

  “If you’re not just saying it for my sake I would love to live with you as much as possible on the boat and only come here when we have to cook our dinner or if it rains too much.”

  “No, what we heard and saw to-day made me keen on this kind of freedom. I felt naked with you beneath the sky. It was simple and profound, without too many words, direct and sincere; the world of childhood, the stance of Zen.”

  They lay listening to the night sounds – the Nightingale in the distance – the dṛṛṛṛṛṛṛṛṛṛṛṛṛṛṛ of a Nightjar just outside the window and to each other’s heartbeats and breath rhythms. Holding his head in her hands she kissed him and lifted her knees. As when a drop slowly drips down a drip tip – a leaf trembles in the night wind – a flower spreads its petals out to the early morning light – he fell forward – without premonitions – thoughts or predetermined desires – in an inner stillness – to join the wave pattern of the universe. Their interaction was beyond alternatives – too spontaneous for conscious reflections – and her long slow sigh of relief – the bell of Vesper in the distance on an endless golden Summer afternoon. Black-light in her Wood Sage green eyes – space-darkness pervaded by a luminous flow – that which ex-isted as soul. She shaped him with her hands – running up and down over his back – to feel him as he was – to get his presence to unfold within her mind. He licked her lips liquid – he licked her teeth clean of all taste but a taste for his licking. Tiger-tongued he lapped her up from top to toe as she exposed herself in new-moon nakedness and rubbed her thighs up and down his waist – like a grasshopper singing the high of Summer in. Feeling the texture – the heat and the exact shape of the vibrations between her lips small tears trickled out of the outer corners of her eyes. He licked them away and kindled her to laugh. Her laughter rippled around him – Sunrise and Sunset – purple waves of increasing and decreasing scend. If he closed in she flexed her muscles to make him use his strength and if he withdrew she held on to him to strengthen their interanimation – looping the loop of loving. With thirsty eyes they absorbed each other’s growing joy. Though interspersed with longer or shorter lulls the mutual impulses that formed a closed circuit were slowly escalating till the dynamics set in motion became all-encompassing and the conclusion as given as the Black Grouse dance of the constellations outside the open windows – for the interaction of their affections had been synchronised by prior psychophysical adjustments. Character traits and ontological differences did not vanish but they were superseded by underlying innate and common urges. They grew more and more alike as their basic states became more and more pronounced. Sharply defined sensations of physical extensions in space dissolved – the sense of individuality diminished – till they smiled in unison and their breathing quickened. Splintering honeylight – expansion – abandonment – and the luminous blackness in which they had their true being beyond the little world of this or that – left them drowsy and satisfied enough to round off their common day with a tight embrace in sleep.