There was the threshold of the house. At a table in the center the owner sat waiting for her, her eyes cheerful, ironic. A cat was eating from a dinner plate on the floor. And a shirt of Joseph’s, washed and ironed, hung over a chair. Lucie realized that this was the end of the glory of the Appaloosa outside under the trees, and that the animal had lived for nothing. She stood in the enormous kitchen. This is possible, she thought in amazement, and looked at the eyes of a woman who was determined to show her into the semidarkness of the side room — yes, there, go through there and look! — where her husband was lying asleep in the double bed. On his belly, one arm stretched out by his head, a dark haze over his cheek.
It was inevitable that a moment later she should be smashing everything to pieces in the kitchen and perhaps shouting as well. The cups broke, the tea caddies fell, the Delftware plates came down, the hanging lamp started swinging, the lid of a saucepan hit the tiles in a tumble that lasted forever, and finally the whip wound itself around an open tin of French polish that Christina Cruyse still had on her windowsill to keep away the flies: It thudded to the ground and the varnish leaped in dirty brown splashes onto Lucie’s breast and neck — an effect that brought Christina Cruyse, open-mouthed in the corner of the room, to the brink of a giggle.
They drove out of the gate one behind the other, Joseph at the front in the Buick and then Lucie in an old station wagon, and it’s certain that she didn’t look to the side or into her mirror for a moment, because the tiger horse no longer mattered. Joseph would shortly start trying to explain to her that the day before, when he’d turned off Brinkweg dog tired, Christina Cruyse, all smiles, had stopped him and mentioned her concern about a horse, her most recent purchase, which was sweating a lot, and guess, it’s not difficult, what was wrong with the animal? And Lucie would say, “You mean hemoglobinuria?” as she took his bag out of the trunk. And so you can see her walking ahead of him into the house, without a single thought, a Penelope reunited with her husband after a long absence, carrying his gear in one hand, and in the other a strange whip.
That whip. The fact that she grabbed it. Where did she get the crazy idea of doing that? You would almost have thought that she had received some good advice in secret. Nice, Lucie, always nice to get what you want with all your heart and soul, but think twice for a moment, because people are evil. She didn’t think twice, she just breathed in deeply. Without knowing it, did she suddenly breathe in the air of her old classrooms, school playgrounds, village streets, autumn light, damp, cold, incomprehensible mockery, betrayal? Can she, I think she can, in that one second before stepping into that shed, return for a moment to her ruined schoolgirl days? Evil can look so wonderful that you long to be part of it. Christina Cruyse was blond, thin, wore white socks, knew her nine-times table, had a rich father and a beautiful mother, and it was a little while before Lucie, although she had had her heels trodden on and been called names in a hissing voice, started to worry about that mocking laugh.
Now it’s September. Stubble fields or tall corn along the road, apples on the trees, there she goes, Lucie, and it doesn’t surprise me that she drives so slowly because though her head may be in a haze, her eyes and ears are well aware and understand that she is being lured. At the crossroads she slows down, first a cattle truck, then the tractor, she greets the farmer in the local sign language, finger raised above steering wheel, and goes on. The urge to reach Second Eden is very strong. A white blouse, a white face with copper eyebrows and the matching coppery hair bunched at the nape of her neck, I’m in a position to observe her delirium from the side. Have that pair been married for sixteen years? Lucie is in love with her husband, a love that has been fanned gently all summer and is now, what’s more, being redoubled by a horse. But it is not what you would call peacetime.
She shifts down a gear for the gate. Where is the Appaloosa, she is thinking, when she sees her husband’s car and parks.
Now she has the idea of stretching time. What you don’t see with your own eyes doesn’t happen. Where, then? Where and when? For the time being she walks with total concentration past an animal bred solely for markings and color. She is amazed by the patches. She follows the line of the mane to the base of the tail. It’s a very big horse. Obligingly she tries to appreciate fully the perfect arc where the withers are, and when I hear her sigh like that, I hope that she takes a little time, after all she’s crazy enough to do so, to inspect and admire the mare more thoroughly, Lucie, to call out softly, to estimate her age, analyze her build ... to dream up all the excuses that will allow this wonderful truth to be truth for a little longer before it turns into error. Lucie cranes her neck. She has noticed the light outlines of mouth, eyes, and genitals. As she turns to enter the house, she remembers that the American origin of this breed goes back to Spanish ancestors with Moorish blood.
Joseph’s shirt. Hanging there exhibited in full view. Then that cat sitting wolfing meat off a dinner plate. Joseph is terrified of using the same plate as an animal, filthy, utterly indecent, didn’t he notice this impropriety? You can pollute yourself unbelievably just by eating from the wrong plate. Lucie feels the eyes of Christina Cruyse resting on her as she surveys the whole kitchen in a flash, and then when she looks back and sees the triumph, the fine, well-considered hatred — something irrevocable happens.
She’s never been suspicious, Lucie. She’s never asked herself what seductive creatures her husband may have been tempted by in the countries he visited or whether he kept faithful to his marriage. Now she looks up and at a stroke has had enough of her innate innocence. In fact, she no longer needs to go down that passage on the instructions of her fellow villager, banging her elbow against a door with a coat hook on it, clumsily, no longer ignorant, because — what I mean is, at the moment when Lucie glances at her husband on that bed, where she has never had any business, she is no longer herself.
“Unbelievable! Really, Joseph! You and that bitch, you and that rotten fucking bitch!”
Then of course he wakes up. He opens his eyes and sees immediately where he is and hears immediately who it is he’s hearing. Not far from here he could have counted on a reunion with warm tears or a lamb sausage rolled in puff pastry, now he’s somewhere else and obviously not alone. He throws his clothes on, the jacket goes over his bare chest because his shirt is gone. Then he’s ready and what is he to do? What is he to do when he appears in the kitchen doorway with a startled face covered by a mustache and stubbly beard? He sees that a pathetic Lucie is being observed from a corner with cold pleasure. Should he carry her off with him quickly and then see what happens? At that very moment she slams the polish off the windowsill. He sees a precise jet spurt up, branch out, and now he and the other person in the room see that her neck and breast are irrevocably covered with ridiculous brown patches. Lucie drops her arm. And as they look at each other, a silence falls that is not a silence but a vacuum. Because for the first time in all those years they feel the longing, Joseph as well as Lucie, to finish with each other for good. Without paying any more attention to the third person, they leave the premises of Second Eden. Their cars are under the trees.
A Buick and a station wagon glide after each other through the Twente countryside, which in the autumn heat is still full of butterflies.
5
Because she scarcely pays any attention to him, I might jD as well. After all, I am the same age as she is, was born in the same village, and sat at the same desk as the one at which she looked at the pictures with drowsy eyes, faded pictures of plowed fields, without immediately seeing the didactic connection with the words below: field, ripe, scythe. After school I hung above her head like a bird of prey, fields and embankments, not in pictures now but real, I saw her walking down the road and, although I’m much more intelligent than she is, I really couldn’t follow the twists and turns of her mind. Images and more images and between them just a pensive silence. How are you supposed to fathom someone like that? When she got to her house she went up the path. A dog c
ame to meet her. In the kitchen a maid with heavy milk-white forearms was pouring tea.
Now I am close to her again. Wander about the yard with her, pushing away the climbing rose that’s come loose with my arm, see her daughter Katharina, who’s just come in from school, walking along the fence and suddenly bending down in curiosity. The girl, who looks like her father, is very beautiful. I put out a transparent hand and stroke her lank hair. “They haven’t even got their cocoons yet,” I hear her say. She’s looking at the grubby chrysalises of a couple of yellow butterflies that have hung themselves from the branches.
“Are they still alive?”
“Oh yes,” says Lucie. “I think so. Later, in April, they’ll simply fly out again at the first touch of sun. How was school?”
And that sounds maternal enough, I would say, for a woman who for some time now has had the feeling that the world has gone off the rails, the chrysanthemums smell of sauerkraut, and drinking glasses simply shatter in her hands. I go into the house behind her, boots, wet clothes, and on the worktop there is a plucked chicken. When Joseph strolls in she has already stuffed and covered the bird with herbs and she is bending down to open the oven with a padded glove. “Hi,” she says. “How were things with the pedigree people? Sometimes I think, where is it all getting us? What do you want to drink?” It strikes me that she doesn’t turn around for a moment to look at her husband; of course she knows what he looks like, but even so.
A Gypsy. He has a throaty voice and nimble hands and often extends the right one formally, because he’s a great one for good manners. These days there’s something dull in his eyes that alarms me. At night I hear him sighing. I know that he sometimes wakes up with a feeling of thistles in his chest.
“Crossbreeding will always need new blood,” says Joseph, and by that he means that that afternoon he has been sitting arguing fiercely in the offices of the Royal Netherlands Crossbreed Society about the Gelderland mare which when crossed with a thoroughbred produces the best jumpers.
Now he is sitting at the table, elbows on the cloth, and under the lampshade is looking in the direction of the windows, which look back crackling with the icy drizzle. Shouldn’t his thoughts now really be with that other world, out there, where he also belongs? In this country the rule applies that if your parents lived in a caravan, you — however regrettable that may be in itself— are also given permission. On hard-surfaced sites in Best, Hoogeveen, Stein, Oldenzaal, Assen, the caravans stand next to each other in bays. Immovable wheels, toilet cabins, underground umbilical cords full of gas and light and water. Our wandering brother is enjoying pleasant living conditions. He’ll soon renounce his errant doctrine. Everyone knows there’s a mystery, but a bell and a nameplate belong in their fixed place. People who just turn up are such a pain. Merely for the harvest, to play the violin, or to cover the cathedral spire with lead, showing complete contempt for death: these heresies are best treated with kid gloves. A camp school is being built. Why should the spelling mistakes of the fathers be passed on to the children? Seated between the television and the icons that glow with a reddish light in the evenings, the Gypsy looks at the pen of the welfare worker. Forms, letters, permits, petitions, fines, bills, reports are properly filled out with care by Social Services. Species are threatened with extinction, what’s new about that? Apart from the language and a chaotic origin there is the anarchy of no fixed abode.
I don’t know why he stayed at home this past summer. When I think about it more deeply, I say: Not because of the argument with that woman last year, that was just one more thing. But it’s not good, and it’s not right either. An order has been abolished. When Joseph came into the stable early on winter mornings, Bellaheleen would turn her head to the side and growl softly. And somehow that made it clear to him that his idiotic system of leaving and coming back again was all right.
Now something is in decline. Bellaheleen is gone, so are the geese, and a yellow rose, old enough to smell intoxicatingly on June evenings, has come loose and hangs like barbed wire over the boxes that used to transport eggs. In that house a couple now sleep in too long and get up with sleepy faces. The children don’t notice. They receive their hugs and their sandwiches and on Saturday the eldest son goes into the village and Katharina and Jojo stay and watch television with their parents. Why should Jojo, cradled in an arm, worry about an angry granddad who an hour ago crossed the hallway muttering to himself? But Lucie is another story. She has cut a tart into slices and serves lemonade and coffee on a tray. What matters to her is the one deplorable moment when in the kitchen of Second Eden, in an atmosphere she couldn’t make head or tail of, she had to endure that incomprehensible attack on her honor that she’ll never ever be able to forgive.
She has tried, though.
“Would you like some more?” she asks one evening.
Katharina and Jojo nod and put out their hands without looking. Joseph does the same.
On television there is a film with lots of violence. Lucie has her knees together and feels anxious. She doesn’t know why, but her body, through which something evil is flowing, does. While on the screen a woman runs down a street at night in a tube skirt, she is suddenly reminded of a car under a port at Second Eden — expensive, brand new. The engine with the still gleaming bearings and pistons won’t be proof against a handful of sugar carefully poured into the gas tank with an icy heart.
“Where are you off to?” shouts Joseph when she grabs her keys.
She drives down the road. The headlights illuminate the familiar roadsides. I’m going to do it and I don’t care if they catch me, thinks Lucie, born under the sign of Scorpio with a deeply hidden impulse — if necessary — to sink her deadly tail into her own body. On the bend close to her destination she has to slow down. There is a red triangle, a car, and a fellow villager whom she vaguely knows on the road. “Could I borrow your jack for a minute?” he asks when she has stopped. Fifteen minutes later Lucie and the man have changed a tire and said goodbye after a bit of talk. Things don’t always go as you expect them to. She has to jockey her car forward and back a few times before she’s able to turn and return home down the narrow road.
One night, when Lucie has fallen asleep against her husband, she wakes up bathed in a cold sweat. She realizes that it’s not hers. You should go to the doctor, she says in the morning. He obeys and comes back with a referral form for an X-ray. We’ll go tomorrow right away, she says. No, he says, not tomorrow and not the day after. They finally go one Friday. The week they’ve been through has been a strange one, with a red December sun during the day. And at night rainsqualls rushed past with the sound of a very long express train.
When they got up each morning, they already felt lazy, full of unusual thoughts that unfortunately merged without a transition into something absurd, something disturbing: The dogs had run away, a tractor fell into the ditch, a pipe — which had been rumbling for ages — had burst behind a tiled wall. This Friday they get into the car and turn onto the road with a feeling of relief. After this unreal week, full of chores that were mainly so ghostly that wrenches and tools had wandered off on their own accord and were never in their usual place, after this week full of searching and surprises, they put the car radio on. Warmth, cigarette smoke, and after some squeaking a familiar radio program on Channel 3 that gives everything the necessary depth. Let there be no misunderstanding about this program: The eyes and ears of the two gradually become completely attuned to each other. At about eleven they say: It must be here. And: Let’s park. And: Have you got the letter? And when they go in through the revolving doors, they notice that they still have that calm, shared orderliness, and that it matches the white hall perfectly, with its counters and neon lights. Why don’t we ask here? Having been pointed in the right direction by an arm in a short white sleeve, they find the elevator and arrive, as if in a fairy tale where the rule of naturalness governs, in a room where Joseph lies down under a gleaming machine, which can slide upward and sideways without making a noi
se.
By evening they are home. Their children are in bed. While Joseph watches television, Lucie, having thought very thoroughly, has had the idea of doing something about the accounts. Now she’s sitting at the table with her notebooks.
“That hoof oil, Joseph, that was paid for long ago, wasn’t it?”
And when she looks at him, she does it so seriously, with such glazed eyes, that I have the impression that she wants to know what’s happened to their secret.
“I think so.”
What she really wants to say is that her whole life has had only a single rhythm: him, and the strolling gait with which year after year he turned on his heel, and later returned.
“And the concentrate?”
Why are they now sitting talking about mixed feed when they used to — and you know very well, Joseph, that when you were back in my kitchen, in unfamiliar clothes, we really had other things to talk about. Have I ever told you that your stories wrapped me completely in a cocoon and that I could see the details of almond trees, bonfires, hedgehogs, fishes, water courses, perfectly with my reproducing eyes? So why are we talking about fences now? And about roller girths that need repairing? Why do I ask, “Shouldn’t we order from Horseland?” And you say, “Why?”
“Because they’re going to move. They’re clearing everything out and I’ve heard that they’re giving sixty percent discounts.”
Go away again! Go away again and come back in the autumn when they’re busy plowing up the stubble fields. Let everything be normal again. Leave me in May, be restless, very taciturn, leave me in the stables and fill up your gas tank so that you can start squabbling at borders. Forget me on those journeys. I’m offering you the chance of not having to think for a moment of how I’m doing. Drink, shout, get emotional. Take the liberty of not remembering me before the hour when the sun begins to sink in the sky and quite in line with tradition you start thinking about winter quarters. Are you back, darling? I spread a gingham cloth over the table, put both my elbows on it. My eyes have grown huge with curiosity.
Duke of Egypt Page 4