by Rein Raud
“He usually doesn’t dress like that,” she said, commenting on Brother’s elegant dark suit, his pale-striped shirt, and gleaming-blue tie. “He usually puts on whatever is closest at hand.”
Instead of his knee-high boots, Brother currently wore shoes made of pliable black leather, comfortable in spite of the fact that he was wearing them for the first time. But the woman was also worth the effort: her long mustard-yellow dress left her shoulders bare, while the heavy silk emphasized the flawless smoothness of her soft skin. As did the dense milky pearls around her neck.
“Even so, I don’t like that girl,” said Betty, at whose table they were seated.
“That’s not a girl,” said Jon the barman. “Have you never seen a girl before?”
The pair had bowls of creamy salmon soup set before them, the woman was saying something, the man listening without averting his gaze and wearing the faint hint of a smile.
“I don’t know why I don’t like her,” Betty said. “I just don’t. End of story.”
“You’re just jealous that you don’t have that kind of a guy, what else,” said Ell.
None of them saw how, while talking on and on, speaking in an almost hypnotizing monotone voice, the woman gingerly placed her long-fingered hand over the man’s own. He allowed it to lie there for a few moments. Then, the man spread his fingers wide so that his thumb and pinkie emerged from beneath the woman’s hand—one on the one side, the other on the other, then raised them up over the woman’s hand in turn and held it in place, barely noticeably squeezing it. His middle three fingers slowly surfaced between the woman’s, bending them ever so slightly.
Well, well, the woman thought, closing her eyes and inhaling long and audibly. Now just a little flush in my cheeks, and we’re in business.
At the same time, the man had placed the tip of his middle finger on the knuckle of her own, and lifted up the rest of his hand. And he pushed—gently, using only a fraction of his strength, with a message that no one could fail to recognize, gently, decisively, as if he was afraid of breaking it, gently, intolerant of objection, slowly—her hand away.
Nothing showed outwardly, but it was like an electric shock; like a first kiss; like a sudden shooting pain in your tooth; like waking up with spotlights aimed at your face; like your favorite music turned up to an unbearable volume; like free-fall. Annihilatingly bright, thrillingly painful. She opened her eyes and saw everything anew.
“And here’s the main course,” the man said cheerfully, as if it surprised him. The waitress placed stuffed partridge before her, while Brother was served veal strips in Marsala sauce. Both had sides of fresh spinach.
“No one’s ever wanted that before,” Betty said appreciatively a short time later, returning with the dessert order.
Indeed—the restaurant was certainly good enough that people didn’t dare to ask what the unfamiliar-named foods served to them comprised. They could hardly be aware that “L’embrassade du papillon” meant black plums simmered in ginger, honey, lime juice, and rum, and served with Portuguese vanilla pudding. In addition to that, the woman had ordered coffee au lait with brown sugar, and the man a straight Darjeeling tea. They drank the beverages in silence.
“If you walk barefoot on the seashore, right along the edge of the water,” the man spoke while standing up, “then sometimes, the sand is dense and firm, and it’s as if you’re walking along a hardened path. “But occasionally, when you return the next day, you can sink straight up to your ankles in the exact same place. Isn’t that right?”
“I don’t know,” said the woman.
“It has nothing to do with the water level, warmth, or the direction of the wind,” the man said.
“I don’t know,” said the woman.
“I realize, naturally, that it’s not the way it actually is,” the man continued. “But in an ideal world, such things would depend only upon who you yourself are at that very moment.”
They nodded a goodbye to Betty as they exited.
“Now that’s a true gourmet,” she complemented.
“That’s not a gourmet,” said Jon the barman. “Have you never seen a gourmet before?”
They left a hefty tip, in any case.
“My entire life,” the woman said, “I’ve thought that we select for ourselves what we remember. But that’s not how it is.”
“Fine,” the banker said. “What can you do. What do I owe you?”
“Forget it,” Dessa said. “You don’t have that much money.”
Her art was now over, but as everything ends sometime, she wasn’t really all that upset. And she knew that in reality, the world was now just a little more beautiful.
As the lawyer had set out a plethora of work assignments for rat-faced Willem to accomplish over the following days, which demanded extra hours at the expense of his own free time, it was initially impossible for him to continue his investigation. But after the bigger rush was over, he got down to it once more. Walking from Emma’s Pancake House to the Vital Statistics Bureau, he went over his previous deductions mentally, and couldn’t find a single weak link among them. The official with the long, dark ponytail and heavy glasses recognized him, and said a friendly hello. Over the course of the next four days, Willem made copies of the birth certificates of 39 boys whose fathers were registered as “unknown.” When he had finished, a faintly discernable wrinkle appeared on Willem’s otherwise perfectly smooth forehead. He hadn’t believed that family values had begun to deteriorate in society at such a rapid rate. Disorder.
From there on, the process was not so much complicated as it was time-consuming. Before taking the next step, he needed to check the city population registry to see how the ensuing lives of all those young male citizens who came into the world without both parents had gone. For the first time ever, Willem had reason to regret having shown exemplary care for his teeth—it would have been exceptionally convenient to coordinate the large number of upcoming trips to the city government with dentist appointments.
The goateed antiquarian could never concentrate when he was worried. Coming down from upstairs, he would forget already halfway what he had intended to do. Organizing papers at his desk, he would oftentimes stand up to pace back and forth across the room, and when he sat back down, he could no longer remember what he was supposed to have been thinking about. The numerical calculations he made in these moments naturally always had to be double-checked, as one mistake or another had certainly slipped its way in. And he would be simultaneously cold and short of breath, so after every short while, he would either open a window or close it again, and on occasion he would even get up wanting to open an open window or to close a closed one.
Cream cakes, Laila already knew when she heard the antiquarian up on the top floor that day. And so it was.
“Laila,” the antiquarian called out, “could you be so kind as to pop out to the bakery across the street real quick? Three éclairs and two meringues should do it . . . no, you know what—get four of each.”
Four meringues? It must be serious.
When Laila returned, the entire shop was already filled with the enticing scent of coffee. She flipped the Open/Closed sign hanging on the door so that no one would come and disturb them, and ascended the stairs. The antiquarian had set the coffee table with two plates and a large copper coffee kettle between them.
“How was it in town?” Laila asked, taking a seat.
“They’re doing well,” the antiquarian said, absentmindedly gnawing on an éclair. “Little Karl has started taking piano lessons.”
“How nice,” Laila said.
The antiquarian took his coffee with milk and a heap of sugar; Laila preferred hers bitingly black. It seemed as if everything really was in its right place.
“Felix thinks I should sell the shop,” the antiquarian blurted out suddenly. “He wants me to move in with them in the city. I’ve accomplished enough already and can relax now, he says.”
Laila didn’t say anything in reply, only p
laced another meringue on her plate. She was well aware that the antiquarian wasn’t actually partial to them.
“It’d be easy for me to sell, of course,” the antiquarian continued glumly. “There’ve certainly been offers galore. But I know all too well what would happen then. They’d demolish the building and sell off all this clutter for nickels and dimes and build something plain and tall here in its place, open up a bar or a telephone store or a fast-food joint or something else temporary, and I’d have disappeared off the face of the Earth.”
He bit angrily into an éclair and chewed for a while in silence.
“Why is that?” he asked then, obviously not expecting Laila to know. “Why do we read in the biographies of great men that their narrow-minded parents forced them to study law at university, while all the while they needed poetry and art? I myself wanted Felix to study art history, not law or economics, because I could’ve personally explained to him the basics you need for maintaining a business. But no.”
“I suppose every person does have to be able to decide his fate on his own,” Laila said softly.
“True,” the antiquarian said, and nodded. “True.”
It took rat-faced Willem nearly two weeks to process the materials he had gathered with his characteristic meticulousness. It is, of course, relatively much simpler to find firm evidence for something that exists than for something that doesn’t. He mentally classified all of the fatherless boys he came across into three groups: impossible, doubtful, and probable. Those, whose life’s course was clearly traceable for a sufficient length of time ended up in the “impossible” stack. Out of the thirty-nine candidates, eleven had lived their entire lives in this town, and a further nine had left it relatively late in life—after graduating high school, in order to continue their college studies elsewhere. Although Willem did not rule out the possibility that Laila’s brother could have become aware of the circumstances surrounding his birth only in adulthood, he was nevertheless convinced that news of the Villa’s sale, which had stirred up quite a lot of gossip in the town, would still have reached him sooner if his mother had still been living here. Likewise, he didn’t believe that anyone could completely purge themselves of their circle of acquaintances from their younger days. Out of the remaining nineteen males, he was only able to immediately eliminate one, for whom the city government had set aside a tiny pension when he ended up in a wheelchair after an automobile accident; still, he hadn’t achieved enough clarity in the others’ cases on his first go.
Brother had taken a seat for a moment on the Mount of Venus, and if he hadn’t vowed one day long ago to start living better when he escaped with his life from an iceberg drifting off the coast of Norway, then he would have lit a pipe right now. The scorching sun was high in the sky, but he hadn’t done all that much work yet today. When he saw the girl approaching from the direction of the Villa, he hopped back into the ditch and picked up the shovel again. The girl was wearing a plain dress and sandals that laced high up her legs. He remembered the girl and her short-cut chestnut-brown hair well.
“Hello,” said the girl when she had reached him and taken a seat exactly where he had been sitting before. “I’m Dark,” she added after a brief pause.
“Hello, Dark.”
“That’s just the way my name is, my parents gave it to me.”
“That’s how I understood it,” he replied, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.
Dark was silent for a moment, only watching him.
“I know you,” she said after a short while. “You walked past the Villa’s patio that day, when sunshine just as bright as it is now turned into a raging thunderstorm in a split second.”
“And you were the first person here in this town to greet me,” Brother said, and nodded. “You raised a glass of champagne in honor of my arrival.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Of course,” Brother said. “But you see, that’s how it came across.”
“I guess it did,” Dark agreed.
“I suppose there are guests in the house again?” Brother inquired.
“The family’s son is here, yes—they’ve organized a little party again.”
“And you’re with them, too?”
“Well, not exactly,” Dark explained. “I perform for them. Otherwise, I teach music here at the school and do a few private lessons as well—piano and recorder. At first, the Villa’s owners just didn’t want their big white grand piano to be standing there collecting dust, so I initially tried to teach the lady of the house how to play a little, but she was completely hopeless; the boy would’ve even had talent, but he’s got entirely different interests. In the end, he got so annoying that I quit giving him lessons, but when there are a lot of people here and I’m invited to come play, I always do.”
“Ah,” Brother said.
“Am I different now, in your opinion?” Dark asked a little teasingly. “Now that you know I’m not sullied by the opportunity to let time go pointlessly by.”
“Time never goes by pointlessly,” Brother answered. “Time piles up. We collect it in ourselves, no matter what kind of time it is.”
“That’s possible,” Dark concurred, staring at her hand. “I definitely believe that everything that’s been flows together with the blood in my veins, but if my heart is beating, then only the present moment is always ever at hand.”
“Even when you spend a long time looking down into a valley from a high hilltop, or from a coastline cliff out to sea?” Brother asked.
“Especially then,” Dark replied. “Only that in that case, the moment has no beginning or end. Nor do I myself, sometimes.”
She said it just as casually as if she were giving a stranger directions, and she was.
It was already late in the evening, and the setting sun cast light through the narrow window of Dark’s attic-floor apartment. They were lying side-by-side, their heads on a single pillow, their fingers interlaced, and the passionate flush hadn’t yet sunk back into the ordinary features of Dark’s face.
“As soon as I saw you,” Dark said, “I knew that this was how it would go. At that very moment.”
Brother said nothing.
“Don’t misinterpret me,” Dark continued. “And don’t think that I just am this fast: no one in this town has known me like that. Even so, it’s not what people call love at first sight, or what they use all kinds of other beautiful words to describe. I didn’t even know if I liked you at all yet—I hadn’t gotten a good look at you, in fact. It was more like a knowing that dawned on me the same moment you appeared before my eyes—your casual gait, your frozen look, and your sharp stare: that’s how it’d go.”
“I believe I understand what you mean,” Brother said. “Really, I do.”
“You’re mocking me,” she said. “You think I’m ridiculous.”
“No,” Brother said. “I don’t.”
“No doubt it’s sort of like how it is for brides who only see their future husbands the day of the wedding,” Dark said. “You know, in far-away lands.”
“No doubt it is.”
“I came to you like a lamb to slaughter. Or, no. Like a moth drawn to flame. Not unwillingly, but with a will that’s completely conquered. Me, who always does only what I please, whenever I can. Why do you look like you’ve already heard all of this before?”
“I have,” Brother said. “But I don’t delight in it like I would have if you’d felt unrestrained.”
Dark was silent for a while. They were still warm, in spite of everything.
“Does nothing restrain you, then?” Dark asked.
Now, it was Brother’s turn to be silent.
“Not anymore,” he said at last. “Of course, I’ve still got questions that I’m very capable of answering, but I don’t want to. Is superhuman simultaneously inhuman? Is it right that we measure everything we believe in; that we measure it with an eternal, unchanging, and cold truth that none of us has ever known? Why is it that the more
genuine and authentic the act, the greater the likelihood of regret? And so forth.”
Dark stayed silent, since there had to be more.
“But still, there’s been more,” Brother continued. “There are things I’ve known all too well: what it means to wave goodbye to someone dear to you who doesn’t even look back; or to run into a burning house to rescue your teddy bear—or your tiny son. For a very long time, I was gripped by memories, all kinds of memories, my own and others’, real and imagined. They filled me up so completely that I no longer had room for my own anymore. And they were all painful—it felt as if everything beautiful and great had passed through me without leaving even the slightest trace, but I’d kept everything agonizing for myself; as if I’d watered my dark moments like a potted plant; had cared for them like bedridden patients until they’d started to command me, to order my every step, to inform me how I had to see. Until I shook myself loose of them. For instance: for many years, I wasn’t able to walk with any composure down the streets of the town where my wife once fell ill; so unfortunately ill that it cost us the life of our unborn first child—up to a point, the splendid buildings there all felt like harbingers of death, and an accomplice to murder materialized in every one of its cheery inhabitants, in my eyes. But now . . . Now, those things have lost any kind of meaning to me.
“So, you have a family?” Dark asked.
“I did,” Brother replied. “But what’s there to say. I’ve been traveling without suitcases for a long time already, and mostly for the reason that I’d be left indifferent by what would become of them if I did have them; not that I don’t appreciate comfort—on the contrary, I’m so comfortable that I’m unable to sacrifice anything for it; not a single second of calm or an unnecessary movement. The need to make good on promises I gave out of foolishness is the only thing that still holds me down at all, but since everything that I do in the name of those promises generally pleases me, I don’t regret them all that much. You actually wouldn’t want to know more, even if you asked.”