Let's assume, let's believe the wind indeed returned to that garden and created a life from nothing, one which was lost again and yet is still there, even though it is not seen by Again, I tore myself from ponder that could serve no purpose: the longwinded and free translation of four glasses of wine and wild conversations ...
Right in front of me, the road seemed to break off all of a sudden; an edge shimmered there; cobbles, far apart, made way for a little wilderness of thistles and rubbish; there the cats would have to stalk through, there the windmill had stood or the burned down farm or what-you-will. And there too, probably, was the centre, the junction, the most lonely of all, where all the strands conspired; I had expected to get there and yet I could not reach it even though I was there now ... Again my thoughts grew confused.
The torch, my sword of Alexander, would have to find everything from now on, and free me of this confusion. For a few moments this distracted me: a round patch of light that becomes elliptical, stretches out an arm, embraces the night expansively and, hesitating, hovering, beating almost in time to the pulse, returns, half way, and then fragments itself in a pale rain of light on leaves and gravel, or feels along boards down which splinters, gnarls and heads of nails run towards it as though deranged. But then the house drew my attention again, the way it stood there so tall and remote. Long, straight walls, walls to walk along after a nocturnal conversation that asks no sorrow of us, only petrification ... In what way the gable had been decorated or overgrown, I could not make out at first. Soon, however, my torch discovered the capricious, lissome creepers which, struggling, bent upwards as though they were seeking a window or a hand - each branch, each leaf quickly provided with a Chinese shadow behind, which moved away a little, crept back again and instantly became more distinct. Stone frames, I made out, around the windows, in front of which the shutters had been closed. Still I let my cone of light rise and fall a few cycles, meanwhile already forming the intention to walk on and seek the road in accordance with my friend's instructions, when the shine attached itself to something above me, and me along with it, as though I was being directed by a power in, or attached to the house which had seized the torch. I looked more closely, there: a grave head of stone.
I was surprised. There was even a kind of hilarity that gripped me, a sequence of bouts of laughter somewhere in my body which, for that matter, were unable to penetrate my still half-inebriated consciousness. Be that as it may, I felt at once to be thrown together with the stone head as though with a chum in trouble: he, too, was lost, one might assume; he, too, - I now suddenly saw the creepers as vines - must be inebriated, lost, and cast out by life, though it would not be easy to ascertain whether he was all these things by day as well, when walls, plants and stone ornaments lead so different an existence than at night. No, little could be said about that. For example, did he like living in the light or was he a loner, a shaded one? He remained almost invisible by day, behind those tangled branches sprouting in all directions, like over-abundant antlers, from his skull. Thus he lived as though in a cool grotto. But now, at this nocturnal hour, my light seized him in the right place, unlocked his eyelids, flared his nostrils, and finally, when my hand had begun to tremble a little less, it showed his forehead lofted high above the broad shadows of the eyebrows climbing it like tired thoughts. Vague was the direction the eyes were looking in, though what they expressed spoke clearly of the satisfaction of knowing someone to be below who wished to shine on the forgotten one of this house! A quiet smile, a few lines in the comers of the eyes: and already I no longer felt any regret about my nocturnal jaunt. Firmly, I directed the torch to engender new life this way in one who, through the chill association with leaf and stem, could only still be accustomed to the colour of green mould, who for years now had no longer found any profile and who now tasted the light as though from behind vines. I had been drinking: he too must drink; I gave him plenty. The branches swiped back and forth in the wind but I didn't allow myself to be chased off, no matter how much they flailed and waved. I had found a confidant. Who was he7 Did this house have more of such heads? But no, this I didn't want to believe; and how could it be possible, for that matter, now that I had found him and wanted to stay with him till morning, not wanting to leave before all loneliness and deprivation had been shone from his face! ...
But my cone of light had slipped away, suddenly, because of an uncontrolled movement of my hand. Search now! High and low, left and right: of course he still had to be there ... There. I struck his face as though with a snow ball - he laughed. So young that face now looked, younger than a moment before, and the creepers branches now suited him better. And even though my hand trembled mercilessly, I wanted to carry on for as long as possible, for it seemed as though he changed in the beam of light, becoming ever more youthful under my hand, fresh and revived like a god of antiquity. Was I myself creating him from nothing? Was it possible to make statues of marble or stone assume any age by any kind of lighting? Whatever the case, I was the creator, no matter what; he owed everything to me, right down to the vines which, shimmering red, grew up contrastingly from within the green under the magic power of my circle of light. And, though the night wind was cooling down so that I shivered and had to button up my clothes more tightly, again and again I engrossed myself in the stone face that gleamed with inviolable youth.
Inviolable? Having reached a peak which did not seem easy to surpass any further, it was now as though he resisted something, as though he attempted to surmount something which my torch would have to assist him with. Carefully, I aimed the beam of light in such a way that branches cast as few shadows as possible, but there was always one which would not allow itself to be passed, a fat, hairy one: I could make it out clearly from below. Then, when I dropped the torch a little, he suddenly resembled someone drowned among seaweed and polyps, pallid and swollen, but how rapidly could that image not be dispelled! He lived and revived, time and again, feverish and inextinguishable; he drank my light, radiating it in all directions, though I was never able to chase away that high shadow running from his eyebrows across his forehead because I was standing too low down. Then I stepped back to try it from a greater distance: in an instant he had disappeared. No wonder, I thought, that he can only seldom be seen by day; what would he not give always to have such a life, the way it was now! From time to time it seemed again as though a smile was playing on his lips, but now it continued to be a smile of youth, self-evident and effortless: youth doesn't have enough wrinkles yet to smile truly; this was the natural smile of sleep and innocence I had conjured up there in the twinkling of an eye.
But the night strode on and with this a creeping change came over his face, one which had announced itself already a few moments earlier when shadows were playing across his features. Wrinkles returned, crystallised, first hiding themselves in the corners of his mouth and eyes, then shooting across cheeks and forehead; pitiable grooves waged war on one another, still cancelling each other out for a while, but then everything moved unstoppably towards old age. How to preserve him from this? I kept my hand as steady as possible; there was no film of moisture on the lens of the torch; no chill mist floated by. For a moment he stared at me as though reproaching me, then he sank even more deeply into his own destruction, assailed by fatal decay I had so gladly wished to hold at bay, for I felt that everything was at stake now, that in a few minutes' time he would be beyond Perfectly lonely it was, all around me: no dog barked, no light anywhere, the house seemed uninhabited. I had every chance ahead of me, if only my will would remain sufficient! Even now I hoped for him, indeed I believed, I demanded, that the cycle of mounting youthfulness would begin again; but it was not only ageing from which he now suffered: pain too, sorrow, despair, mortal terror ... Every expression of human woe I saw pass over stone that night, vague but unmistakable and not suited to any explanation other than of the woeful afflictions they evoked within myself ... Then again, it was as though he was on the verge of coming down to whisper his se
cret to me which would rob me of all peace; he pleaded, he prayed, his cheeks hollowed, beard stubble grew rampant, grizzling in the light; had he had a body, he would have knelt down or writhed about in agony, but his body was no longer there any more, surely: the house was his body, the ground upon which the house was built, the fields around it, the night ... And how old and far away and irretrievable the night And then, all of a sudden, I understood that he must be the one, doomed to restlessness, who controlled this landscape and who had lured me here in order to have me share in his misery. I was seized by impotence. I wished to get away but could not. Trails, fragments of my initial thoughts coursed through my mind, and behind them a fresh thought arose, not to be caught in words yet, a thought I was not yet ready for, as all my attention was being taken up ... My arm stiffened; with muscles growing more powerless all the time I trained the light on to the same spot. And his eyes just stared, stared - and slowly they sucked me towards him...
At that moment I heard the crunching of gravel: footsteps! Instinctively I cast down my torch. I expected a cry as though I had wounded him or had torn a bandage from his face. However, the first change evoked by those sounds now took place within myself. It was the thought of a minute ago which, in its full stature and accompanied by all the signs of sobering-up after my mild intoxication, stepped forward as though around a comer of my consciousness. In three seconds I knew everything again, in three seconds I had fallen back thirteen years, right through the night, right through time. Hurriedly, the thought let itself be viewed from all angles like a beggar showing his wounds, who fuses with the giver, who forces himself up against him and most of all would like to pass on all the diseases ploughing his skin, just to be sure of the compassion he's asking for ... Disease, death, a death bed? ...
Indeed, an entire night 1 -had watched over him, fighting sleep and boredom. A long night of emptiness, and one in which no thoughts of any importance could have touched my spirit. When morning approached, he called me to him, with his feeble voice, and then I saw that he had become young like the stone statue earlier on, smooth and untroubled before he would die, as though he wished to overtake a distant past chunk of his youth, and in doing so was not content with thinking and dreaming alone but had also adjusted his appearance. He was barely able to speak any more by then, and half an hour later it was all over. But who knows with what child's game he had been occupied with a few minutes prior to his death, in what childish difficulties he had still entangled himself? Who knows what toil it cost him to go so far back in his life that was already barely a life any more! How strange and not to be unriddled, this return into himself, this completion in which life, winding youth like an ultimate loop around deepest old age, ties itself in a knot which can never be unpicked ... And I? That I saw it and did not understand! That he was my father and yet someone else - an ordinary, untragic death bed without gestures, and which I had thought little of during those thirteen years - and that I only understood now it was too late, even - after this warning, this announcement - too late for the one who had provoked that memory ...
Noises ... Outside of myself again!
A door was opened, conversation: a woman's voice. At the same time, blinding white light flared up, drawing forth an unreal, hard garden, one I could not have expected to be there. Gruesomely rectilinear yew hedges, shaved bare, cut through the night, their leaves snappy and tightly packed together like little scalpels; each bit of gravel seemed to glint individually, without cohering with neighbouring ones. In front of me lay the beginning of the drive, a drive for machines: white, smooth and soulless. When I moved a little further to the left, I noticed the electric light above the door which was half open; an iron boot scraper lay on the step. A male figure moved along the drive in my direction, youthful and slim, but his gait was almost stumbling; behind him, slower, a much older woman, with grey hair the light gleamed through, silvery, who now called out a second time: a name I didn't But the young man had already reached me and grabbed my arm:
'He's dead and you could have saved him! Why didn't you come sooner! He's dead, he's dead ...'
His voice sounded hoarse and tremulous; I looked him straight in the face, which was still catching some reflected light, a crooked, confused face, deathly pale, with eyes like chasms; and all surrounded by long, black hair. With his unmoulded features from which the nose, lonely and helpless, appeared to detach itself, he seemed a boy of not yet twenty. Now the old woman joined us, my presence not getting through to her, apparently:
'Come, come back home now; you shouldn't ... That's the last thing, you're not at that stage yet, you can't go back yet. . .'
Half sternly, half soothingly, she put her hand on his shoulder. But again he turned to me:
'You could have saved him, you're too late, why didn't you persevere for longer, why ...7'
Full of hunger, all reproach, his eyes regarded me; his hands were folded as though he would pray to me, or only to give me strength even though it did seem too late for everything ...
What was I to reply? I sensed nothing uncommon in what he said. I was too late, I knew. Again I thought of the stone face; the transition had taken place too soon for me to have been able already to banish him from my thoughts. And, quick as lightning, his question continued in my mind in a different form: why had I not shone on to him for longer, why had I allowed myself to be distracted? And particularly as regards the memory of that deathbed of thirteen years ago that popped up again, more threatening than a moment ago, I felt all too clearly how sorely I had failed, now and in the past already, too. For only now did I realise why my father had become more youthful in his death throes. It was to spare me, not to burden my shoulders with what everybody who feels guilty and tortured by remorse when he sees his father die, must bear anyway, even when there has never been any real cause for such things. Through the alteration to his appearance, everything had transpired unnoticeably and more soothingly, through the support of that curiously rejuvenated face, though in reality he was even older than one could ever become in this life. But bridging time, that other, real deathbed for which he had judged me not worthy, had travelled along with me now to reveal itself fiercely all of sudden - fiercely like a reproach, fiercer still than self-reproach and yet akin to self-reproach. For I could have stopped him, the way I had done with the stone face! Even if it had only been five seconds more: I could have let him who knows, death might have beat a retreat, demoralised, frightened off already by that short-lived resistance. No, no, it was not to spare me even so: it had been a chance he had given me which I had not managed to take advantage of! Not for me had he rejuvenated himself, but for my help which he hoped for! Who knows the fluctuations of the heart beat, or the life force of a dying brain? I should have spoken with him, not stand there with a hand on my chin and thoughts of the nuisance of a funeral in my head; I should have pursued that miraculous rejuvenation, laughingly, cheeringly, and bringing all our shared self-confidence to bear, I should have pointed old portraits out to him, memories that are eternal, a childhood that returns, time and again, the tremendous life force that exceeds everything, death included, the ...
The reality of the staring boy's face made me come to my senses once again. A question forced its way to the forefront, gained power over me: I had to utter it. I made a step closer to him so we were standing eye to eye.
'Is it your father who has died?' I asked softly.
He recoiled, but no reply came from his lips. He now leant sideways, up against the woman who might be a nurse or a mother, and who had kept her arms stretched out as though to receive him. His face fascinated me like a mirror. What was it that strange smile wanted? I no longer expected a reply. Behind them, I saw the hard, white garden shrink far back, become hazy, die away ... It was as though his face came very close to mine, closer still ... But how long had this been going on for? ... Years? ...
How dark it now was. Dark as though nothing had happened and nothing would ever happen again. Could I still hear footst
eps? The light had gone out all too suddenly, and the night wind with its whisperings had taken possession of me again so irresistibly that I wasn't able to make out whether the young man walked back to the house along that gravelly drive, or whether he disappeared a different way. Blinded by that rapid transition from light to darkness, anaesthetized by emotions without a name, I only felt capable of making a step forwards after a number of minutes, the way a sick man does when setting his feet on the ground for the first time.
I didn't search for the stone face. I knew I could no longer get in contact with him nor could he with me. Till morning, I roamed that inhospitable landscape without equal on any map. Poplars whispered by my side, endless fences fled ahead of me in despair; they curved and seemed about to return to the same spot again; constellations I did not recognise gleamed in the sky above. Never did I see that house again nor have I ever known what might be true of all this - and whether indeed a father died that night.
Jan Wolkers
Herbert stands in front of the steamed-up window of his apartment on the fifth, and top, floor. His hands in his dressing gown pockets, he listens to the rushing in his ears.
I'm in a bit of a state, he thinks, I'm a doomed man, though it may take another ten years. Ten more years with Liesbeth. Horror! I'm perspiring as if I have a fever, yet I haven't one.
He digs his nails into the palms of his clammy hands. The only thing he sees through the foggy window is the Belisha beacon on the opposite side of the road. As if he's standing on a tall mountain and an orange full moon, having just risen above the horizon, is being hidden from view, time and again, by fast moving clouds. Like he has seen in films run at a higher speed. But the flickering, on-off, is too regular and disturbs the illusion. He takes his hand from his pocket and, fingers slightly apart, he draws long, parallel curves down the moist honeycomb, as though he's caressing a woman's long hair. The Belisha ends up on a post of licorice allsorts; the traffic island with its yellow bollards, poisonous aniline blue lights burning within, becomes visible. Of the trees in the park only the trunks can be seen. The tops have been devoured by the mist insects. The houses are wrapped in damp sheets. A neon adyertising sign loses its purchasing power and acquires a lofty meaning. A red cross on waves of mist. Herbert puts his hand back in his pocket when the door opens behind him. Liesbeth shuffles into the room. She sighs and pokes the fire.
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