by Tim Davys
“And you think I have problems,” said Eric.
“I’ve never said that,” I answered.
“No,” Eric quickly agreed. “No, Teddy, that’s right. You’ve never accused me of anything.”
And he smiled at me and took my paw over the table.
Then I wept. I couldn’t help it.
“Eric,” I said, “I’m not here to ask you for a favor.”
His gaze was sharp despite the alcohol.
“I’ve come to propose a businesslike agreement to you. Between brothers. Without papers and signatures. But no less binding for that.”
“An agreement?” asked Eric.
I nodded. Now I knew what I should say. It didn’t make the words easier to get out of me.
“I get something, and you get something in exchange,” I said.
“What do I get?” he wanted to know.
There was expectation in the air.
“Money,” I answered at last.
“You intend to pay me?” asked Eric.
“Yes I do,” I confirmed. “You’ll get paid.”
“I get paid at Casino Monokowski, too,” he said.
“You’re going to get more from me,” I said. “Lots more.”
“I don’t know if I want to hear the rest…”
“I have problems. With my life, Eric. It’s hard being good.”
This sounded pathetic. I couldn’t continue. But Eric understood me. He had always understood me. He nodded. I swallowed, collected myself, and continued.
“Being good and at the same time living an everyday life…it’s…I’m forced into situations that…where all the alternatives are equally impossible. And I cannot…Eric, I’m serious, I…”
Then I whispered.
“Either I die, Eric. Die now. Quickly. Before I fall for the temptations. Before I’m seduced by the sort of things that others regard as bagatelles. Little things. That’s how evil tries to lure me. With the little things. Or else…we find a way out.”
He remained sitting silently. I dried my tears. I cleared my throat and did my best to focus. What I had to say demanded a certain degree of dignity.
“Eric, the agreement I am proposing…I want you to take my place. When life forces me to make a decision…when life forces me to do things…that are not compatible with goodness.”
He met my gaze, and I looked down at the table.
Now it was said.
The silence that followed became a long one.
“Okay,” he said at last. “Okay, we’ll do it. Shall we go?”
And with that I left Casino Monokowski for the second, and final, time.
I couldn’t stay under the table.
As long I could see her brown boots with the suns on the calf I didn’t dare risk anything, but when they disappeared out of sight I assumed that she’d sat down with the dove and the gorillas. With a certain difficulty I wriggled myself back up onto the red seat. I didn’t want to risk Nick coming over to my booth and asking what I was doing. It would have been difficult to explain.
A single thought echoed in my head. I ought not to have been this close to Emma Rabbit. Not at Nick’s Café, right across the street from number 32 Uxbridge Street, that sober, brick-red street.
She had just arrived. I had to go.
I had to get out of there.
I evaluated my chances. Could I make my way from my booth and over to the door without Emma seeing me? It was likely that she was sitting on the outside of the booth behind mine. If she were seated facing in, the possibilities of succeeding were reasonable. But if she were seated facing the exit…
And if I remained sitting?
They were carrying on a conversation which I still could not hear, but Emma’s soft, clear voice went right into my heart. It was painful.
So near.
After a few minutes I’d had enough. I had to do something. It was impossible to remain sitting. I moved carefully along the table. I held on to the menu in order to conceal my face if that should be required.
It was required.
Suddenly the tone from the neighboring booth changed. Departure. Farewells. I ducked down behind the dessert menu. A few seconds later Emma Rabbit was standing right next to me. She stood with her back turned toward me. The dove placed himself alongside her. I peeked over the edge of my dessert menu. The dove and Emma were embracing each other. They were hugging. Thank goodness the dove closed his eyes as he hugged her, otherwise he would have seen me. I ducked down behind the menu again.
“Bye-bye, Papa,” said Emma Rabbit.
“Bye-bye, honey,” said the dove.
“And, Papa,” said Emma, “if you forget my birthday again this year I’ll never forgive you.”
The dove laughed a high-pitched laugh, and I heard how Emma turned and left the place.
I don’t know what I did then.
I remained sitting behind my menu until long after the dove and his gorillas had left the café.
I had just seen the fatherless Emma Rabbit’s father.
It was a lie. She was a lie. Thoughts raced through my head, like balloons bursting.
My Emma. Who was she really?
CHAPTER 21
They say that a stuffed animal can get used to anything, but each time he returned, Eric Bear found Yiala’s Arch just as repugnant. It had as much to do with the narrow alley, reeking of urine, as with Sam Gazelle’s claustrophobic apartment. Despite all that was at stake, Eric was forced to overcome the most intense revulsion each time he returned to Yok after having carried out an errand somewhere else in the city. When he passed Eastern Avenue and continued south, it was as though he were crossing a border. His identity was wiped out in a single stroke. In the rest of the city there was a surrounding world which reflected him as the sum of his actions. There animals understood how to interpret his ironic humility. In Yok he was nobody.
It was terrible.
And with heavy steps he turned into the grass-green alley and with bowed head went over to the entry to number 15. Eric Bear was so filled up with his dejection that he didn’t sense trouble. All his concentration was directed inward. Perhaps otherwise he would have noticed that someone had knocked over the large cactus—the one that bloomed with small red flowers—that stood in a cement planter right inside the entryway.
Slowly Eric walked up the stairs. The memory of Snake Marek’s helpless cries caused him to stop on the first stairway landing.
Eric, Sam, and Tom-Tom had sneaked away across the Garbage Dump. Hyena Bataille had promised not to let himself down into the ravine before the three were out of sight and earshot. He had broken his promise. The memory of Snake’s desperate cries echoed in Eric’s head.
He sighed heavily and continued up the stairs. He was so occupied with his own pain that he didn’t perceive the smell of a cigar, or think about the fact that the door to Sam’s apartment was ajar.
After the night at the Garbage Dump Eric Bear had devoted Friday morning to a stop by his office. He didn’t recall when he’d last slept, but fatigue had become a constant condition which no longer worried him. At Wolle & Wolle people came and went more or less as they pleased. You were often working on projects, and right before the appointed deadline it was not unusual that you practically lived at the office. And the other way around: after the assignment was delivered, you gladly took a few days’ well-earned vacation. Over the years, a work environment had been created where no one bothered keeping track of anyone else’s working hours, and therefore no one made a big deal of the fact that Eric hadn’t set his foot at Place Great Hoch in almost three weeks.
A massive pile of documents and folders that he was expected to sign and authorize were waiting on his desk; there were so many papers, he didn’t even try to understand what he was signing. When after a little more than half an hour he was finished with the authorizations, his calendar awaited. In the neglected calendar that he and his secretary helped each other to update, the past weeks’ rescheduling and cancellation
s had created a chaos which the coming weeks’ rescheduling and cancellations would worsen. There was nothing, it appeared, that couldn’t be delayed or that someone else couldn’t take care of. Nevertheless, sooner or later most things seemed to return to his desk. In comparison to what he was up against, all these meetings were as paltry as the problems they aimed to solve. Yet he knew it was important to maintain the idea that life would go on as usual. Nothing was more valuable than hope; nothing else could give him the same strength.
One of Nicholas Dove’s two gorillas took hold of Eric Bear at the same moment as the bear stepped over the threshold to Sam’s apartment. The gorilla placed his massive hand on just that place that the bats some ten hours earlier had so carelessly mistreated, and Eric moaned with pain.
“Finally,” said Nicholas Dove, getting up from the chair and putting down his cigar right on the kitchen table’s laminated top, where it continued to glow.
The cigar would leave a large, black mark on the tabletop before the dove’s visit was over.
“We were just talking about you, and wondered if you were intending to come back or not,” said Dove.
Eric didn’t hear him. In the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of Sam Gazelle, thrown onto one of the mattresses on the floor by the terrace door. In the kitchen, with his back against the kitchen sink, sat Tom-Tom Crow on one of the wobbly kitchen chairs. He was tied with black insulation tape that had been wound around his wings and legs. They had even taped his beak. On the floor around the chair were piles of black feathers.
They had plucked him. The crow’s belly shone white. And on the diaphanous white cloth there were three or four burn marks that Eric immediately understood came from Dove’s cigar.
Tom-Tom’s gaze turned toward Eric. The humiliated entreaty, the pain and terror that shone in the crow’s otherwise friendly, peering eyes caused the bear to completely lose his head. With a growl he tore himself loose from the red gorilla that had been holding him and rushed across the room. At that moment he had the power to take on anyone whatsoever. He threw himself against the gorilla alongside Tom-Tom. The gorilla stumbled backwards a few steps, but his large ape body was caught by the sink, which kept him from falling. Then everything happened very quickly.
Eric managed to hit and roar and bellow a few more seconds. Then a massive gorilla hand took a firm grip on his neck and lifted him up into the air. Eric had forgotten the red ape on the other side of the room. Eric Bear was thrown through the air, over the kitchen table, striking against the hard metal of the refrigerator. He pulled himself up, dazed but not yet defeated. The gorilla who had thrown him was on him again before he regained his balance. He lifted him up again by the neck, then slammed him against the kitchen table. The table fell apart with a crash. One of the splinters was forced into the back side of the bear’s thigh and came out the front side.
The pain waited a few seconds before it reached his awareness.
Somewhere in the tumult Dove’s clear voice was heard, but Eric couldn’t make out any words. With a certain effort he got up, the adrenaline muting the pain in his thigh for the time being, and picked up a long, rough splinter of wood that he found on the floor. He staggered forward toward the nearest gorilla. The idea was to mercilessly drive the splinter right through the ape’s eye, but Eric was neither quick nor strong enough. The ape easily warded off the attack, and with the back of his hand struck Eric across the face so that the bear fell backwards down onto the floor and finally came to rest.
When Eric Bear awoke, he saw Nicholas Dove’s worried face looking down at him.
“Have you…” said Dove, but the bear heard no more before he disappeared back down into unconsciousness.
In the following moment—which wasn’t the following moment at all but rather a few minutes later—the dove’s head was replaced by a gorilla face that was grinning happily.
“He’s alive now,” said the ape.
After that the bear was out.
CHAPTER 22
But that’s ridiculous,” said Emma. “You must go to the doctor.”
Eric Bear had made an attempt to go over to the kitchen island to get the red wine he’d uncorked shortly before, but he didn’t manage more than a few steps. The pain in his thigh prevented him from moving freely, and in shame he had to limp back to the chair and sit down.
“It’s not so bad,” he assured her again.
He’d maintained that it was a strained muscle he got when he tried to run a race with Teddy on the beach.
“Idiocy,” Emma had snorted. “Fifty-year-old bears shouldn’t run at all.”
Eric had been away from home for almost three weeks; he told Emma that there were only a few days left. A truth with an ominous import: it was still Friday when he granted himself this short leave in order to have dinner with Emma Rabbit.
On Sunday the Chauffeurs would pick up Teddy Bear and Nicholas Dove if Eric didn’t succeed in preventing it.
“I’ve never understood who you think you impress with your suffering,” said Emma, letting all the city’s males be summarized in this “you.”
Eric threw out his hands.
“There’s nothing to do. I’ll take some painkillers and rest, then it’ll get better.”
Eric had taken Tom-Tom with him to Dr. Thompson when Dove had finally gone away and the bear and crow had recovered consciousness. The doctor had sewed a few stitches in the bear’s thigh, and then Eric exited the doctor’s office leaving the crow, who needed more extensive bandaging, behind. But instead of returning to Yok, Eric drove home.
Emma Rabbit carried the plates of vitello tonnato over to the table. Then she put out the salad, wine, and bread and lit the candles in the large candelabra they’d bought at an auction a year or two ago, one of A Helping Hand’s many events. She dimmed the ceiling light and sat down.
“I want you to come home,” she said with a tender smile, “because I’ll soon get tired of waiting.”
And then she lifted her wineglass in a toast. Feelings of melancholy caused Eric Bear to shiver, leaving behind a clump of anxiety in his throat. It grew so quickly that it closed up his esophagus before he’d even managed to bring the wineglass to his mouth. He wanted what she wanted. He, too, wanted to come home, more than anything else: home to her embrace, where time stood still and all there was, was the scent of her fur and the beating of her heart against his chest.
She fixed her eyes on him. Pretended to look stern. And he wanted so much to laugh at her little play-acting but instead felt how the tears were burning inside his eyelids and he knew that he couldn’t cry, couldn’t expose himself: he loved her and would never be able to lose her.
It was that simple.
“I don’t know exactly who is writing the list,” said Bataille, “but I know how she gets the information.”
The large propeller was slowly set in motion as the light breeze picked up, but the horizon was still hidden by night. Eric sat rigid as a stick in his corduroy armchair, trying to control his facial features, the nervous twitches of his whiskers, and the indulgent smile that he knew made him weak. Across from him sat the fear-inducing hyena. True, it appeared unlikely that this whispering conversation they were carrying on would end with him getting up and torturing the bear to death. But nothing was impossible.
Eric Bear’s senses were on tenterhooks. At the Garbage Dump he saw not only the outlines of a discarded frying pan, a wheel-less baby buggy, and the prow of an old rowboat sticking up out of the gray-black mass of rubbish; in addition he could make out the odor of decaying coffee grounds from the stinking entirety, heard two horses neighing in the distance, and perceived the structure in the armchair’s fabric, as if it were braille.
It was clear that Bataille had overheard the conversation Eric had recently had with Rat Ruth. Perhaps the hyena had been sitting in the darkness along one of the walls and listened; it didn’t need to be any stranger than that.
“It wasn’t the idea that I should know,” hissed Bataille.
“She doesn’t know that I know.”
The hyena was proud of his cunning and that he’d figured out how the one thing was connected to the other. The used clothes that the well-situated residents of the city donated to the church were gathered together and driven out to the dump once a month. Sometimes the deliveries were so extensive that a burly funeral director came with a whole truckload of clothes. Other months all you got was a package of coats that had been wrapped in brown wrapping paper and placed on a wheelbarrow that was pushed by a creaky old doorman or some former cantor with rheumatism.
The clothes came to good use, the hyena assured him, fingering the short, worn leather jacket he himself was wearing. All the animals at the Garbage Dump had clothes that came from the church’s donations; there weren’t any others. And sometimes, when the shipments were especially large, Rat sold back some of them to the stores in the city that dealt in used goods.
“It took a while before I noticed it,” said Hyena. “But whether it was a delivery truck or a wheelbarrow, it was always the queen herself who took in the delivery.”
The breeze that had caused the large propeller to whirl like a mighty windmill presaged the arrival of dawn. If Hyena’s story had been disturbed earlier by creaking from the blades of the propeller, for a while now the sound had been a constant whine. Eric pushed the armchair closer to the table and leaned forward as well, whereupon he came so close that he could perceive the hyena’s musty breath. There was a burnt smell from the predator’s mouth. The dark of the night would remain dense for a while yet, but the starlight caused the hyena’s eyes to flash as he twisted around and stared out toward the dump. It was an ice-cold radiance.
“I already knew that we were involved with the Death List,” said Bataille. “When I came here I didn’t believe in the list, but…but even when I knew…I didn’t know more than that.”