Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  RED FLAG AND BUST OF LENIN

  Windows onto warehouses and canal for commercial barges in front, onto alleys and brick rowhouses in back, Joris’ long room surprised me with its clean organization of space, its totems (Soviet Baroque plaster bust of Lenin against a large red flag, hammer and sickle and crossed wheatears making a diagonal with Lenin’s noble gaze), plain secondhand furniture, scraplumber bookcases, kitchentable desk, barbells, exercise board, neat military bed. Pan and Kouros on coffeetable. DSAP posters. To the left of the red flag a tall framed photograph of an inblijde and posthaliskos thirteen-year-old wearing a wristwatch and student cap, cornflower blue of eye and blond. On the other side of the flag a bulletin board collaged over with clippings of soccer players, swimmers, skateboarders, naked boys on beaches, handsome young faces, penises, backsides, underwear and bathing suit ads.

  PLUTARCH

  The concept of infinity eludes both understanding and language, even our sense of the sacred, but into all relations it brings a play of chance and accident (týche kai automátos).

  SLAAPMAAT

  Coffee, bread, butter, and jam up to Sander and Grietje, for the fun of it. Wolfgang, oho! asleep between them, in gilet, skinny arm across Sander’s throat, a leg over his thigh. It’s when this langpootmug climbed in with us, said Sander reaching for the coffee, that’s most interesting. We were working on the Blue-Eyed Nipper some more, beautifully, and here was a brown-eyed one, with curls, wanting, as he said, to see how it was done. Thought storks brought them in a nappy, safety pin and all. Good coffee. Sander, I said, you’re making this up. No, no: climbed right in and felt around, gawking. Grietje’s mind at the time was melted down, she couldn’t have cared less that a boy all legs and scrunchy curls was in bed with us. Good morning, O my, said Grietje with a sleepy and doubting look at Wolfgang. Yep, said Sander, still here. Elbows sharp as the corner of a table in the dark, lots of ribs, knees, and hipbones. Nice peter. If you slide the sleeve on it back and forth over the mushroom, it skeets watery goo in your eye and its owner tends to smile all disgusting dimples and milkteeth. Coffee, said Grietje, coffee. You’re hearing the unvarnished truth. Sander said he was practicing in case our Blue-Eyed Nipper arrives equipped with the instruments of male arrogance and female oppression. Whom, said Sander pressing Wolfgang’s eikel between forefinger and thumb, we will have to jack off, all of us, time about, until he’s coordinated enough to do it himself. Whereupon Wolfgang woke, and without transition from deep sleep to wide awake, sat up grinning like an elf. Jam, he said. Butter, too. To Grietje and Sander, touching each with a fist, he said, you fucked.

  WASHSTAND WITH TOWEL

  Canary yellow, white jug and basin, blue towel. Oval mirror on wall above, plain unpainted walnut frame. Grietje’s idea: a bit of the early century to relieve, as she says, some of the look of a barracks for reformed Calvinists.

  ONTBIJT

  Grietje in her fetching kimono (and nothing else), Sander in white bib overalls (and nothing else), I in corduroy jeans and pullover, Wolfgang in the nightshirt Grietje bought him at Buffy’s Kindermode, a light cotton short-sleeved shift, midshin length. It has an archaic air, vaguely biblical. Truly, says Sander, he must be drawn in it. Doesn’t impede access to Meester Rozeknop, our zoetelief here. No TV, says Wolfgang. Some of us, I say pointedly, can read the newspaper. Glup your kipper, Sander says, there’s heaps to be done today, but in the science of nipperology we’re going to see what to expect from the blue-eyed one, if male, by jiggeting the brown-eyed one off, off and on, on and off, happily, all day, a grand idea, wouldn’t you say? My dink? says Wolfje. Grietje and I look at the ceiling, each other, Sander. Whose drunken smile couldn’t have been jollier. Absolutely, says Sander, in between other things, like a reading lesson from Adriaan, and helping me on the painting, and going shopping with Grietje. Wolfgang eats with a will, his eyes think and give Sander silly looks. We’re very serious people, Sander says with a mouthful of kipper and toast, I’m a great painter, and people all over the world read Adriaan’s books, but we like lots of play in our seriousness. Whereupon Wolfgang hiked his biblical nightshirt up around his ribs, as if to ascertain that he has a dink, as he calls it, and to have Sander’s agreement that this particular is the one meant. It was, moreover, erect in a tight shallow upward curve, the hairless scrotum neatly seamed with a funiculus more vegetable than fleshly. That’s the spirit, says Sander.

  IK BEN

  Being, the precious something in such extensive nothingness, is a system sturdily balanced in nonbeing, for the nonce, but with metabolic wear, such as the going away of the pterodactyls and the explosion of stars a hundred times larger than our sun. Metaphysical light is too brilliantly cold, even for those with eyes to see it. It is twin to dark. To know everything would be to know nothing again. Opposites meet, the circle closes. Nothing is charming but the road there. The mystery is that there are no mysteries, only ignorance and limits, our home. There is the moment, and the moment to remember the moment, or place and perspective. All else is waiting.

  SNAILS

  Everybody, says Hans, should see snails in love. They kiss with their feelers, and roll and dip their heads. A sweet tickle, I’ll bet, and the little heart ging van rikketik. He has come so far, so slow, to meet Mevrouw Slak, with his house on his back, his stomach for his foot, and it feels so good to jiggle his nose against hers.

  THISTLE

  It is wrong to think that time rings like a bell. Nature makes a thistle, or a child, with a patience no clock is fine enough to follow, and with a harmony in time of enzymes, proteins, cunning acids and capable alkalis, bonds of oxygen and hydrogen, of iron and nitrogen, on schedules that correlate the stars and the seas. It makes the kingly thistle’s seven heron’s-shin stalks bear bright mauve hispid discs as pannage for bees. Circled by artichoke leaves, these thistle blossoms of delayed purple (as Jan Parkinson says in his Paradisus Terrestris) seem to flourish in parking lots, untended yards, desperate soil in seams between a desert of asphalt and concrete, with majestic disdain for the tackiness of their surroundings. Wolfgang is such a thistle, oblivious of his nobility. We have put him in a garden. His stamina that throve on the main chance and hunger and meanness, will it go nerveless, soft of fiber, dull? Gardens of thistles: Fourier’s aching heart’s longing. All this in so many words over coffee with Grietje. Jan and Hans are garden stock, our wolfswelp a weed. Me, I like thistles.

  SILVER FANFARE WITH NIGHTINGALES

  Rights of conscience in these days

  All deserve our silent praise.

  Here we see what God has done

  By his servant Washington.

  Who with wisdom was a dove

  By an angel through a cloud

  And that gave him wisdom’s plan

  To secure the rights of man.

  THE RIPPLING WOBBLE OF SHEPHERD MOONS

  There are shepherd moons, Jan says with a flutter of hands around his head, inside Saturn’s rings that cause the bands of ice rubble through which they pass to swing and twist. The orbits of the solar system are the rings of the sun. Hansje makes a hash of his hair and spins on his heel.

  BRAIN

  Thinking is, as Valéry said, a by-product of sleep, though sleep is thought, as witness dreams, which go on all the time, at every moment of consciousness. This is the mind scanning its data. What we call a dream is this process seen with all the receptors off, but not off duty. Dreaming is more logically at the center, midbore, of the mind than under. It is inmost.

  PHALANX NFS GRUNDTVIG EN PARADE

  Color guard on three quaggas, a Séraphine from the Tiger Lily Band bearing in the center the flag of the phalanx, a triad of daisies on a yellow field, a scout from the North Wind Wing of the Fridtjof Nansen Horde bearing the Danish flag of protoharmonian times, a Jouvencelle of the Band Mère Ann Lee bearing the flag of the League, dove volant over a wheatsheaf.

  THE DRUMS

  Behind them, on foot, forty drummers of the Grand Hordes playing Lully’s Marc
h of the Turenne Regiment.

  ROITELET

  Alone on a zebra. Mongol dress: lilac shirt, kumquat britches, T’ang blue boots, Tabasco neckerchief.

  NOURRISSONS

  In goat carts and in the arms of Chérubins and Chérubines, some asleep, some crying, some astonished out of their minds.

  POUPONS

  On Alsatians, some in Peruvian dress, some in Chinese, some in Greek. Each has a Séraphin to prevent spills and to command the Alsatians.

  LUTINS

  In dog carts drawn by Saint Bernards with shoulder reins. A Gymnasien shepherd precedes them seated backwards on a yak, to keep them more or less in the same direction.

  BAMBINS ET BAMBINES

  Thrinters on tricycles, both sexes wearing bloomers and skirts, Norwegian student caps, and such merit badges as they have so far accumulated: shoulder rosettes for friendships, manners, rhythm band, coloring, singing, flower arranging, and ring dances.

  CHÉRUBINS ET CHÉRUBINES

  Divided into Hordes and Bands, both on Shetland ponies, the Hordes (two-thirds boys who prefer the companionship of boys, one-third tomboys) in drab Hun cavalry jackets and leggined trousers, with yellow waist sashes, the Bands (two-thirds girls and one-third boys who prefer the companionship of girls) in Saint-Simoniste smocks and ruffled pants. Many sport the violet ribbon for dyadic bonding, and wear the steel ring thereof, some the decoration for ambition (red ribbon, copper ring). The Band leads, the Horde rides behind.

  SÉRAPHINS ET SÉRAPHINES

  Bands on zebras, Hordes on quaggas. Like a field of tulips in March wind. Argot Porcupine Minor.

  HORDES ET BANDES

  Company after company to a trill of drums, the Grundtvig Harmonian Silver Cornet Marching Band, and the commands of sergeants each in the key of their quagga’s whinny, Lycéens et Lycéenes, Gymnasiens et Gymnasiennes, Jouvenceaux et Jouvencelles, Adolescents et Adolescentes, Formés et Formées, divided into Hordes and Bands, further divided into Vestales et Vestels, sashed in white, and Damoiselles et Damoiseaux in dyads, triads, and quartets of lovers wearing blue sashes.

  DAPPLES IN PAIRS

  On horses, the Grand Hordes and Bands of Athlétiques et Athlétiques, Virils et Viriles, Rafinés et Rafinées, respectively nude, dressed as Janissaries, and as nobles in the court dress of Louis XIV.

  THE ACHIEVED

  Preceded by a Band of Grammarians and Flower Police on bicycles in weaving formations, singing The Harmonian Hymn a capella, squadrons of Temperes et Temperées on Morgan horses, Prudents et Prudentes on Tennessee Walking horses, Révérends et Révérendes, Vénérables et Vénérables in carriages with guests and friends.

  VICTORIAS AND LANDAUS

  Patriarches et Patriarches. They are led by a color guard of the Little Bands bearing flags of all the orders and decorations of the Patriarchate: banners for prize custards and gravies, marches and waltzes, symphonies and string quartets, poetry and prose, histories and biographies, buildings and gardens, theology and philosophy, painting and printing, the lilac jack of friendship joined into circular iron, the azure jack of love divided into elliptical tin, the dandelion jack of paternal and maternal love subtracted into parabolic lead, the red jack of ambition multiplied into hyperbolic copper, the indigo jack of intrigue progressed into spiral silver, the green jack of alternating passions balanced in squared platinum, the orange jack of composite attractions calculated into logarithmic gold, and, borne by a spadger on a quagga front and center before the first rank of the Patriarchate, wearing on his frayed and bemucked vest the crocus of a Spartan Imp, the sugarcane tassel of a Cookie Master, the rosette of an Early Damoisel, the compasses of a Pioneer Geographer, and the sheep-hook of a Goblin Shepherd, the white jack of unity strengthened into cycloid mercury.

  OHIO

  Antéar carmacel volpur alvic orante finedis oblumen ravile ostramador molaine salamas tourmac talamalente affedice iperbouc altermadule udor.

  ROSE COMB BLACK SUMATRAN BANTAM

  Kokkos! Kokkoi! Kokkydzo!

  BEETHOVEN

  Grietje and Wolfgang in a ring of art books on the rug. He is happy, baffled, cooperative, lost. He’s in a new shirt and looks grand. They’d been shopping, the two of them. A yellow shirt, latest French mode. Yellow socks. Yellow underpants of fetching neatness and brevity, as I’m shown, with white trim. A russet wool sweater. O ja! says Grietje, for fashion plate and stunning dazzler, look no further than our Wolfje here. The salesgirl at Buffy’s on Prikkestraat was all adither. And now we’re learning paintings and drawings and sculpture. Wolfgang! Who painted this? He tucks his lips at the corners, ruins his hair, looking hard. Beethoven, he says.

  WE SHALL ALL HAVE TAILS

  Like Pan, like satyrs, like quagga colts. The tails of northern Europeans will hang in a jug-handle curve to the calves, with a blond tip like a watercolor brush, and will switch friskily. Oriental tails will be hairless, African tails will have a hyacinthine tuft.

  RIVER AND SKY

  Here the antiwhales will preach, here the odor roosters tread.

  AMOS

  Can two walk together, except they be agreed?

  ZWEM

  Thirty thousand atomic bombs. That, says Joris, is what the VSA has stockpiled, and poised to fly in their silos. Actually, the number is 29,200, but they are right now making 19,000 more. It is insane. This in the locker room at the gym, and without transition, he says, how medegevoeland can you be, Friend Adriaan? Try me, I say. One of those days, he says, when because I, the radical rationalist enemy of superstition and sentimentality, am wearing briefs that once belonged to a fellow name of Jaap. Which, off and slung between his thumbs for me to see, were dappled all the yellows from cream to lemon, and smelled of soaked straw. First glop on them was Jaap’s, he says, they’re his, were his, and night after night I’ve added my own. The mind of a monkey, ja?

  WARDEN PYE

  English warden, or garden, pears cooked with sugar, mace, nutmeg, saffron, prunes, ginger, and raisins, covered with a lattice crust rubbed with eggwhite and butter, is one of the first desserts to be served at Florishuis. The pear was brought to England by the Romans. Sander said that it was the best thing he’s ever eaten, or ever expects to eat. Which, said Grietje, was what he’d said about the chocolate cake last evening, and the Chinese compote the evening before, and the apple flan the evening before that. You’re beautiful, replied Sander.

  ROSALES

  Three families. The Rosaceae, comprising four subfamilies: seventeen genera of Spiraeoideae, thirty-four genera in two thousand species of Rosoideae, fourteen genera in six hundred species (Malus and Pyrus among them) of Maloideae, three genera in a hundred species of Prunoideae (Prunus and Amygdalus among them: apricot, cherry, almond). The Neuradaceae: three genera in ten species. The Chrysobalanaceae: twelve genera in three hundred species.

  AFTERNOON IN THE PARK

  Onverschilligheid. Jantje’s grey gym shorts, of such inkorting as to leave his lean brown legs bare from crotch to toe, are of a dubbelgebreide stof that gives and clings with equal deference to cleft, plane, and clump. His soccer jersey, striped mustard, white, and slate, he pulled over his head, fluffing his hair. Undermost, een minimaal schuilseksezak, Hermes stijl micro, which he proposed to wear in the park. Precies! he said to Hansje’s doubting squinch. lets van de nieuwe tijd, ja? My waarachtig zeg! got tolerant pity from Hans, whose formal response was to simplify his outfit to docked jeans and nothing else, to be shed once we were in the park. The anthropology of all this is taxing and encodes structuralist wonderments. Called Kaatje to report that a patrol of one philosopher and two all but naked urchins were off to sunbathe in Vondel Park for reasons apparent to the urchins but not to the philosopher, quite possibly inspired by the bosgod Pan. By, said Kaatje, the TV and newspaper pictures of tieners in the raw. It’s the manie nowadays. The police have given up. If you get a good offer to sell or rent the monsters, I get half. It’s foreplay, if you want to know, in jongetje’s Choctaw. There’ll be a wervelstorm i
n the bed here afterwards. Voorlijk!

  BORDEAUX

  Great whales stand in the sea and preach.

  ONSTUIMIG

  Wolfgang serenely applying paint beside Sander, cooperation itself. But Grietje tells me that Wolfje was impudent after breakfast and that she spanked him for it good and hard. He wept rather more bitterly than the tragedy warranted, causing Sander to pucker up, all heartbroken, and weep hot tears, a greater spate of them when Grietje offered to slap him if he tried to comfort Wolfje. Good God! she shouted, is this what men are! Tears skeeting in all directions because she had to whack an insolent butt? Fortunately Wolfgang, little devil, thought it hilarious that Sander was crying because he was crying, whereupon Sander spanked him, got bit, and got called a cocksucker. At this point Grietje left to discuss all this with Kaatje, expressing grave doubts about the charms of children. They agreed that they’d seen nothing like the worst of it: that if I’d been there, I would have wept to see Sander weeping. Bruno was consulted. He suggested, helpfully, that we’d brought it all on ourselves by taking in a gutter rat. This put Grietje on the defensive, damning all men as aliens, pigs, and bullies. When I got home, Grietje was still hot under the collar but relieved to find Sander and Wolfje happily at work on a painting, Sander on the lines, Wolfgang on the fill. Men, said Grietje.

  GIGUE

  Grietje, in from jogging cycling paths before breakfast, full of herself: O God the kinks in my shoulders and legs! Bragging by complaining. Coffee made, and she’d picked up rolls at the bakery. These panties, she said, showing me, ride my clit as I run, and between the exhilaration of lungs full of oxygen and the outrageous fun of a playing panty crotch I was as close to coming as you can get without hand or man. Whee, I’m slick! Did an extra kilometer to see if I could come running. Built up and built up, better and better, but no popped cork. Adriaan, your mouth is hanging open. Plucked her gym shorts down, and the cooperative panties, and sat, sweet creature, in the kitchen chair across from me, my newspaper and coffee, and with knees wide and eyes closed, gasping, clitoris nipped between two trembling fingers, she came. Oof! Sweet and sharp as a chime of bells, she said with a pleased, silly grin. Woke horny, sweetened matters with some zippy foreplay (Wolfje asleep on top of Sander, like a lionness on a limb in Kenya), suited up, had a splendid run, and a neat one-ring orgasm, all before breakfast. Bundled her into a hug around the hips before she put herself together, a petting kiss on the warm clump, a tongued one on the tummy, smooch for the navel. Whoopee love! she sang as she sprinted upstairs, returning with Wolfgang over her shoulder. Yawning Sander followed, fighting his way into a sweater, cock and a lobe of scrotum drooping free from his briefs. These Grietje poked back in, tidied the fit, and went to work on Wolfje’s curls with a comb while he swigged orange juice. Clever elves to know such knots. Kiss Adriaan. Wolfgang recited the rote of kissing: kiss everybody first thing in the morning, when they go out and come in, and at bedtime. Lot of kissing, do you ask me. He was in his Old Testament nightgown. The robe of Amos, Sander said, as Adriaan reads us about, except that Amos probably didn’t have sperm on his. Who’s Amos? Wolfje asked, giving me my kiss, orange-flavored, on the corner of the mouth. Grietje’s full lips, Sander’s on his ear. Sander, a long swallow of coffee down, lifted the scriptural shift and paid back the kiss on Wolfje’s lizardy penis. The Harmony! What, said Grietje handing around rolls buttered and bejammed, if the caseworker who noses out stray boys raids us someday, and Hans and Jan are in their ancient Greek position with legs at both ends, and Adriaan and I are making the Nipper, and Saartje and Jensje are rippling orgasms through each other and cooing like doves, and Sander is licking Wolfje all over and showing him how to jack off longer and oftener, never mind the bare-tailed population in the paintings all over the house? We’ll plead, said Sander, an accomplished talent for love and affection, and say that when any of us looks at any other of us, we start coming then and there, crotches overheat, cocks leap up stiff and bounce, and it doesn’t do us the least good to fuck each other crazy, because we’re so simple-minded that we see all over again how lovely we are, Grietje’s long trim legs with the brown crimpled crump of hair curving down and under, my handsome self and manly dick, Adriaan’s noble eyes, furry chest, and freehanded love, Wolfje’s curls and snipsnub nose, and we’re back at it. Would that make it clear? Placid smile from Wolfgang glossy with gooseberry jam. And then, said Grietje, the longnosed social snoop may arrive when Adriaan’s piled around with books in his private pipesmoke weather, writing, and Wolfgang’s lettering Africaland in South America on his big world map, and I’m reading Proust with Kaatje, and Hans and Jan have their zippers up and are talking ballbearings and skateboards, and Sander’s painting a still life with pumpkins and figs. You never know.