Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  They were snuffling and sighing. I got up, livened the fire with wood, said hello, and looked at the time: half past three. Jan detached and gave me a ruckled grin that hitched into a rictus of felt pleasure, eyes closing, and slid back onto Hansje. I pulled up his slipped sock.

  Tugged down Hans’ sweater that had ridden up his back. Patted each’s behind, twitted Jan’s ear, and was going back to bed, cock rising, when a whispered Ome Adriaan brought me back. Could they have, Hans said, cocoa or something? Where was it? He would get it and make it.

  Stay there, I signaled. I swung the kettle over the fire, fetched instant cocoa, mugs, and spoons, and a bottle of Perrier and cognac as well. They disconnected and, swapping a kiss, sat watching me open bottles. Their eyes were glad and tired, hair tangled and matted.

  Gave them each a mug of Perrier into which I tipped a smidgin of cognac, which would either put them to sleep or urge them on to more piggery. Brandy for strength, I said. Cocoa for a treat. To Badger Liberation, I toasted. Best uncle in the whole world, Hansje said.

  The Badgers’ best friend, said Jan. And nobody I know would ever believe I’m on an island way out in the sea making love with Hansje and sitting by a fire in the middle of the night drinking brandy and cocoa. It’s not real, it isn’t happening. But it is, said Hans.

  A hint of dawn in the cabin when I woke again. The fire had died down. I could just make the little bastards out. They were asleep, heads still between thighs, still hugging, breathing softly. Goose pimples on an arm showed me how cold they were, and curled toes and pink ears.

  I scooped Hansje up, who said something inarticulate in his sleep, and kissed the empty air. I put him in our bed, next to Sander, and fetched Jan, who woke briefly but was too sleepy to care what anyone was doing with him. I slid him in beside Hans, and got in with them.

  Sander woke, turned, and muttered that he seemed to be in bed with several more people than he’d thought. These buggers fell asleep by the fire, I whispered. Don’t wake them, they’ll start all over here between us. Keep them warm. Aren’t they lovely, Sander said.

  Quagga

  1 FRUCTIDOR

  A basket of summer fruit.

  Amos, He said, what do you see?

  And I said, a basket of summer fruit.

  Then de Heer said to me, the end is come upon my people.

  I will not again pass by them this way anymore.

  It sits rich and fragrant on altars and sills, this harvest hamper of mellow apples and speckled pears, red pomegranates, fat blue figs, clumps of olives and clusters of grapes on a bedding of emmer and spelt, the round white moon of Elul promising the rains of Tishri. Here, green and yellow in wicker, was earth’s plenty for table and manger and granary, bounty and blessing which nevertheless the wind spoke of to Amos the shepherd and dresser of sycamores midway the 208 furlongs from Hevron to Yerushlim as the sign of the end of all.

  Sycamore: shiqmah (Ficus sycomorus). Fig mulberry leaf hook. Shepherd’s hook, the hook with which we cannot draw out Leviathan. Fish leaf hook.

  There shall no signe be given,

  but the signe of the Prophet Ionas.

  And de Heer stood upon a wall

  with a plumbline in his hand.

  Hook leaf fish.

  No skateboards, no bicycles, Jan ticked off on his fingers the fun of the island for Sweetbrier, who was on the next bus after Hans’ and Jan’s, having been lost all over the Netherlands. No TV, though there’s a radio that gets England, France, the Federal Republic, and the DDR, sometimes Spain. Only half of Sweetbrier’s face was shaved: he realized in the middle of his toilet what time it was and barely caught the train from Amsterdam. His clothes don’t match, one shoe is different, and there’s a lens missing from his spectacles. This he has in his pocket, using it as a monocle to read with, which predicament, along with the eerily asymmetrical one-sided shave, the odd shoe, and his obviously very capable, good-natured intelligence, gives Hansje fits.

  Good lord! Sweetbrier cried after Sander had stuffed himself in and given his hand, you’re the painter? Alexander Floris. Sander did his I Am A Handsome Idiot act, speaking a Dutch so demotic that Hans slid his tongue across his upper lip and cut a glance at Jan out of the tails of his eyes. Sweetbrier had taken the wrong bus several times over. Only the kind guidance of a tulip farmer with a firm grasp of country busses got him to the Point at all. Accent Midlands, which Jan is picking up already. Hans too, though his English is that of a Chinese waiter.

  An island, is it, out there in that mist? Piet took us out in his motorlaunch.

  In dressed stone and tilled field Amos found God and man working together, creating together, for de Heer will accept none but the common effort, wherein there is justice and the bond of hand with hand, heart with heart. And in the work between them of man and God shall the plowman overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes find himself hard upon the heels of the sower of the grape seed, and the hills melt under the weight of the harvest, and work shall be the rites, not a sign.

  And there it all is: the meaning of still life, the sign to return us to the rites. A sermon in gourds. The sanctuary was in the winnowing flail all along, in the winejar, in parched millet kneaded into mashed dates.

  To answer in somewise Denys Sweetbrier’s question, which was, with wide open laughing English eyes, why in Sam Hill I’m concerned, if only as a philosophical exercise, to redesign Fourier’s preposterously impossible utopia just when this awful century seems about to repeat its hellish world wars with an exchange of atomic missiles in total futility and consummate madness?

  When there was a Sweetbrier to ask the question, by our congenial fire. Over for the antinuke march in Amsterdam, he asked if we could get together, go over his paper on Fourier’s architecture, and have some jolly talks, what? Jan it was, looking more like a quattrocento Florentijns Johannes de Doper than ever, not Hansje about whose English we all know, who managed, first crack out of the box, Mijnheer Zveetbrier, I am delightful to meet you! Who replied (Britishly crinkled), Absolutely right, don’t you know. Delighted is the word for me. He wasn’t at the Point when Sander and I rowed over, only Hans and Jan, whose selfmade invitation was prior to Sweetbrier’s.

  Sander amused by all this, and his smiling sigh, followed by a lickerish whistle, meant that I would be sorry. The whistle was for Grietje. He could see, said Sander, this Brierpatch van Oxford rumpled and vague, demanding tea om bet uur. And with the Greater Amsterdam Vandaalvereniging in residence to boot, jandorie! They will take him apart, the boys, a matter of honor for them, and throw the remains to the gulls. He’d stay and watch, and help both me and them, except that Grietje would have his ears, and the big canvas was calling him home. So to the Point, Sander rowing, his mane awash in the wind, for stores, the mail, and Hans and Jan, who attacked as we climbed from the boat, walking up Sander until each bestrode a shoulder, and for Sweetbrier nowhere in sight. Zo? asked Sander from under Hansje’s student muts topped by Jan’s cricket cap, you’re surprised? The English get lost in their own houses. Or these two have assured him that he was in Sweden and sent him off again on the Paterswolde bus. Jawel! Jan agreed, de hond van de Baskerwillen glupped him, right over there. Ik denk van niet, said Hansje with a calm seriousness. It was een fliegende schotel skimmed down and juddered along the dock, gepiep gepiep and bimbam, with lights that hissed and blinked. Jan hissed and blinked, Sander hissed and blinked. It hovered and put down steps. A round kabouter with silver eyes waddled out, rolling his tail. Bak bek bik bok buk, he said. And your Engelsman, Ome Adriaan, had had it. In he went. Off they whizzed. I rather think Jan and I were the only ones to see. Truly, said Sander, cupping his hand over Hans’ crotch and kissing him recklessly smack on the mouth. The same for Jan.

  It was when Hans had monkeyed up Sander’s back and toppled him into the piled haversacks, and Jan had sprung from the front and was trying to squeeze Sander and Hans into the one comprehensive hug, and Sander, pinioned fore and aft and hollering that he was being
kissed to death, was nimbly unzippering all three of their flies, unbuckling belts and unsnapping buttons, grubbing inside, that Sweetbrier, shaved on one side of his face only, asked me if I were Adriaan van Hovendaal.

  The only mercy to descry in the death of Coubertin’s two-year-old son in 1898 is that, had he lived, he would have been twenty in 1916, and death would have found him, as it did all of Coubertin’s nephews, whom he loved, at Verdun or Dompierre. There walked unseen in his funeral procession Albert l’Ours in a yellow bowtie and waistcoat of Scotch plaid, Pierre Lapin in a scarlet coat and jockey cap, Madame Poupette-à-l’Épingle in her best apron and bonnet, Madame Hortense l’Éléphant, Monsieur Noisy Noisette, Madame Sophie Canetang with parasol and reticule, Thomas Tigre, who had come from Malaya in a balloon, Madame La Vache in a calico dress, la Famille Flopsaut with bouquets of dandelions, Georges l’Hippopotame, who came by train from Sénégal, Milord Chanticleer and Lady Pertelote, Herbert le Hérisson, and all the sheep and chickens and goats from the Jardin d’Acclimatation. They were conducted thither by Orfée himself, who did not mind, in among his herds and flocks, from time to time, a human child. And they all went to Heaven on the Caen Express, the locomotive’s bell and whistle playing calliope marches from the Cirque Médrano all the way.

  Jan, with splendid manners, disengaged himself first from the seething wiggle, and fastening his jeans with one hand held out the other. I’m delightful to meet you, Mijnheer Zveetbrier. Unfazed Sander, penis out and all, shirt wrenched around his ribs, rose with Hans still grappled around him. Hi! he said with a silly smile. Hans, realizing at last that we had company, managed through some thrill of genius the Quakerly I am the better for seeing thee, friend. The Greater Amsterdam Erewhonian Society, I introduce us as. A collusive sparkle in Sweetbrier’s eyes, and mock scandal at Sander’s putting Hans’ clothes in order while he himself was indecent and dangling. The hordes, I said. Yes yes! said Sweetbrier, quite! But in public? O, they know us around here, I said, indicating three fishermen taking the sun in front of the store, complacently smoking their pipes and watching the most interesting sight they would see all week.

  2 FRUCTIDOR

  Sweetbrier will do as a guest. Affable chap. Knows boats, so he wasn’t a clunk (Jan’s approving observation) coming over. Teaches at a boys’ school in Oxford, which is not all the advantage it might be (his candid remark) in getting the hang of Hans and Jan. He admired their dispatch in stripping and remaking the bed with army corners, shucking and recasing pillow, fussing blankets flat and even of side, salutes inviting inspection, no wrinkles and no fuzz. Mijnheer Zveetbrier’s. We’re slaapzak, us together in this one, Adriaan in that one beside us.

  Supper on the hearth by a good fire. I’ve never felt so unreal, says Sweetbrier. He calls the cabin marvelously cozy, shipshape, Dutch. Everything done right, Hans explains as if to a Patagonian, racks up grace, like money in the bank. Do it wrong, or come up with a tacky excuse for getting out of it, and Ome Adriaan will remember in the stamp market. Actually, you can get away with anything out here on the island except being a biggetje.

  Jantje’s dignity in every movement is the same as Hansje’s animal grace: extremes that have met. Jan sits, Hans flops. Jan walks like a Red Indian, Hans clomps, skips, saunters. Jan puts his foot up to tie his laces, Hans leans over his shoe, kneeling. Jan gazes, Hans stares. Jan grins boredom, Hans yawns. And yet they’re constantly imitating one another.

  Conversation by the fire. Fourier’s series of harmonic attractions, a charming make-believe parallel to his uncle (as he would have you believe) Joseph Fourier’s mathematical series (Jan cocking his head in sharp interest), are a conscious structure exactly like the furtively harmonic and unconscious structures found by Lévi-Strauss in primitive cultures. Society as poetry rather than the newspaper prose of history. Practically all that’s tacit in civilization is concerned discourse in the primitive. Most twentieth-century art has longed to submerge significance inside structures, forgetting the otherness of art. When style becomes habit we become children. Jan asked to have this explained, with a nice turn of English probably not idiomatic: How is it that you mean? That, says Sweetbrier, our heritage is uncritically accepted. A child does not question that a chair is. It belongs to him in the same order as sun, trees, oxygen. The Japanese once faced the existence of chairs, Christian beds as the Chinese say, something they did not have but which the Chinese had adopted, and which, they knew, Europeans sat in. They considered, they rejected. The Erewhonians, Jan said softly, rejected machines.

  Kaatje, of Hans and Jan as Free Badgers: something new. Sounds exciting. Bruno likes Jan. They talk math together. She finds the prospect of our renovating and living in the Roseknop house more interesting by way of gossip, and urges me to take Sander up on his offer.

  Fourier’s architecture begins in the country house of the landed gentry, to be lived in and played in by the Harmonian phalanstery. That’s the beauty of his imagination. Shepherds, having folded the sheep, bathed and spiced themselves, come into the grand salon, curls oiled, leggings and smock exchanged for alpaca jacket, with decorations, and Turkish trousers. Here they mingle and chat with blacksmith, mathematician, turnip farmer, and historian. They sit on silk divans to read the evening paper. Fourier has moved the neighborhood brasserie into a Pare Monceau drawing room, exactly as Henri Rousseau would have done if he had painted a Citizen’s Ideal World.

  The phalanstery is a whole village in a building as big as the Louvre: Corbusier’s inspiration for his Marseilles apartment house. A Shaker Louvre full of practical things like looms, printing presses, kitchens, pantries, libraries, artists’ studios, sacks of wool, conversation rooms, lecture halls, ballrooms, concert chambers, cozy rooms for lovers.

  Sweetbrier agrees, wrily, that no phalanstery anything like Fourier’s is possible without an Erewhonian revolution, canceling machines. To return movement to walking, horseback riding, and the true dance. To return music to the instrument and occasion. To return the casual to the deliberate, the planned, the expected. To return reading to daylight and the lamp. To return love to passion as it arises. To return work to communal duty, to the sense of usefulness. To have the beginning and end of everything kept in sight and in the discourse of the whole phalanstery. To take happiness from money and restore it to the harmony of work and its reward, ambition and its achievement. To put mind and hand in concert. To reorganize society after its disastrous dispersal by train, automobile, airplane.

  Butler’s insight was that the machine enslaved us, changing all work to drudgery. All work became pandering to the reproduction of the machines.

  To return the body to its beauty, the mind to tranquillity.

  Impossibly idealistic! Sweetbrier cries. But you’re right, you know.

  3 FRUCTIDOR

  The three hundred thousand who carried their banners in Amsterdam to protest de bom set out in an Ohio that never was.

  If, I say to Sweetbrier, we need to define our studies in a phrase, the phrase must be: to locate in the geography of the imagination, and go back to, the Ohio of Fourier’s vision.

  These protesters against megadeath set out from the phalansteries of the Susquehanna, from Mennonite communities, from the round barns and angelic symmetry of the Shakers, from the Schwarzwald of the Wandervögel, from the Olympic flags of Athens in 1896, from Danish classrooms in which the ideas of Holberg, Grundtvig, and the brothers Brandes were heard.

  And you were in the march, too? Sweetbrier said. O I say, how jolly. It was so worth coming over for.

  O ja! said Jan. I was on the shoulders of a man I more or less climbed onto without really asking, in the Jeugd en Jongere Groepje of the coc, which my folks weren’t raving happy about. I rather bullyragged them about it afterwards. They, and my sister Jenny, were with the Ethical Society. Oof! Which did have, I’ll admit, scarier doodshoofd masks than ours. But I saw the Free Badger folk and nipped over. They were just behind the Voor het Kind people. Hansje got to ride on Max Keirinckx’s sh
oulders, his granddaddy, and Saartje was on Grietje’s. Yes, Hans said, but we were in with a Lutheran Sunday School from Brabant, bunch of hicks singing Jesus music, and a wimpy Neighborhood Association. Wild, I’ll tell you! Grootpapa Max called the Rus Head Rabbit and the Amerikaans Head Rabbit senile old farts. Who, Sweetbrier said, I was with I couldn’t say, I assure you, but we were hundreds strong, and we had a papier-mâché nuke missile with the President Reagan’s pompadoured face on it, don’t you know, and another with Brezhnev on it, with those eyebrows, don’t you know, and those sliding-away corners of the mouth.

  For the Renaissance to complete its dream of antiquity it had to recover the athlete who as symbol and presence is the opposite of the chivalric horseman plated with armor, trussed in silk and taffeta, shuttled between honor and shame, more skilled in manners than in fighting. From the grocer’s son Gambetta, the republic, and from his twelve-year-old admirer Coubertin, the soccer fields and swimming pools and bicycle races without which we cannot imagine modern Europe. Both their revolutions were so successful as to be seen inevitable.

  Both revolutions were against guile, stupidity, superciliousness, arrogant privilege. The French for all their republican passion are still suspicious of democracy, but no one can remember a world without football, bicycles, or swimming. That is, without the age’s daimon.

  The zebra has the figure and grace of the horse, joined to the swiftness of the stag. He is about seven feet long, from the point of the muzzle to the origin of the tail, and about four feet high. The color of his skin is beautiful and uniform, consisting of alternate parallel rings of black and white disposed in a most regular manner. He is generally less than the horse and larger than the ass. The zebra is found nowhere but in the eastern and southern provinces of Africa, from Ethiopia to the Cape of Good Hope, and from the Cape of Good Hope to the Congo. The Dutch have been at great pains to tame and use them for domestic purposes, but with little success. He is hard-mouthed and kicks when any person attempts to touch or come near him. He is restless and obstinate as a mule: but perhaps the wild horse is as untractable as the zebra. For it is probable, if he were early accustomed to obedience and a domestic life, he would become as docile as the horse.