Only Lucie stays and looks as she takes a couple of hesitant steps back.
The asphalt is dark as anthracite. The wind is coming from the west. Behind the bars of the fence, on either side of the entrance, are the outlines of a couple of big American and German jalopies. Their owners know distance, but also know what closeness is. Farewell, poor brother, they think at this moment, much luck in your irrevocable circumstances. We shall honor your soul until it’s old and it closes its eyes and ears with the last of us. But do us a favor and please keep your mulo under the floral tributes and wreaths. For Heaven’s sake don’t let your desperate double emerge to pursue us from under the mud here. We’re giving you over to the Eternal One, that’s all right, isn’t it? When we’ve dried our tears, we’ll discuss among ourselves what you most liked looking at and what you could sit and chatter about like no one else. What was your favorite food again? If you like, we’ll rediscover you in a leg of lamb covered with molasses and coriander and, if you like, with the help of anice bottle we’ll penetrate as far as we can into you, but let it stop at that!
She’s wearing a dark dress and dark stockings. Clutching her hair with both hands, she crosses the cemetery with that typical bolt-upright walk of hers. From time to time she turns around and stops. When you consider how often she let him go without batting an eyelid, it’s striking the amount of looking she does now. Close to the exit there is a stone shed for vases and small garden tools. I see that someone has turned the outside tap on.
But she doesn’t see it. She’s oblivious to the fact that the dark, foreign-looking funeral guests are all, without exception, holding their hands under the powerful jet of water. Farewell! May what has happened be over and stay that way! What makes you more restless than unfinished business? What keeps you awake more than a debt or a claim on you? The truth is that some things weigh more heavily than fifteen or twenty feet of earth. Let’s not ruin your death with regret and remorse! Don’t let us give you an overpowering need to come and console us a little!
She extends her arm to Jojo and walks in the wake of Katharina, Johan, and Gerard toward an imposing Cadillac. The right rear door is already open.
3
She regarded her house and her land as the whole earth. For three seasons its rotation brought her to a pitch of intoxicated clarity in which everything fit and the disturbing things weren’t so disturbing at all. For she who is left at home: There is snow on the branches of the trees, a half-rotten roof gutter collapses, one of the horses stands there black, asleep, still in the field, the dusk becomes icy . . . good, luckily, there’s Joseph, he’s walking from the path to the back of the house and kicks at the dogs that leap up around him. Autumn, winter, and spring she had the feeling that when Joseph wasn’t at home, he’d just stepped out for a while. Then the summer came and things were different. Then time stretched, then hours gone by freewheeled in the sun and in the work. People were harvesting everywhere. She got lots of work done. Sweating in cotton overalls she day dreamed in passing about a vagabond with a good line. Until an end came to the beautiful system. For whatever reason and in whatever way. Once there was that excruciating scene in the kitchen of Second Eden. To give yourself completely to someone and to nestle in a pair of arms with princely naiveté requires a certain sense of your own worth. The temptation of the Appaloosa. The dirty, dusty Buick. It’s certain she never understood that combination. She and Joseph drove home in convoy. And it’s certain that Joseph’s subsequent account, the main thrust of which was a horse that was sweating and wouldn’t eat, hadn’t explained a thing to either her head or her heart.
If only something absurd, something completely insignificant hadn’t forced you to wake up! And taught you things that were absolutely no good to you in this transient life!
After the funeral Lucie is nowhere to be found for a few days, not at home and not in the outbuildings or in the fields in the lashing rain. The wind is still blowing. It is Katharina and her brothers who look after the horses, and more than once the former stable boy can also be seen strolling along the muddy path to the paddock. But on Thursday she’s back. Then she walks past the side of the barn to the vegetable garden to push aside the wet branches of some bush or other and look at the ground. There is twittering in the tree above her. When she lifts up her head to see what kinds of birds are there, the light falls in her eyes.
“Tinko!” she says when the dwarf billygoat comes up to her as she closes the garden gate. “Have you been drinking out of the ditch, by any chance?” She presses her hand against the swollen side of his stomach. Then she crosses the backyard and walks past the lopsided graying fence to the stable. Two in the afternoon. “For God’s sake let that fucking rain stop,” she says crudely. The stable is empty, the six horses are grazing in the meadow. Under the sloping side of the roof on the left next to the sink there are a number of iron tubs, tubs or troughs. She lifts one off the ground by its handles, gets a steel brush and begins scraping the bottom with small circular movements. There’s a draft. The wind is pounding against the skylight above her head. “Now, now,” she says. “It’s as though you’re trying to get in.” Instead of fixing it more firmly, she opens the whole window outward and pushes the lever up to the last hole. With her loose hair now as if it were possessed by something tempestuous, she continues her maintenance work. When she looks up, once, and laughs rather anxiously in her usual way, I think that she’s acting as if somebody has come and squatted down by her to see what she’s doing. Don’t ask me what.
Indefatigability, calm despite the blowing of the wind, and a chalk-white skin against the backdrop of the dark stable: her true face, which she shows to me freely now. It almost gives me the shivers. Something very personal, something that a human being instinctively hides, appears via the busy hands on the face above and makes something clear to me.
In the weeks before his death Joseph was sometimes very active again. Lying on the sofa which had been made so soft and springy with a piece of goatskin that the tumors under his ribs exerted scarcely any pressure, he could grab the telephone to buy a batch of jumps and stands and immediately sell them at a profit somewhere else. He also found a buyer for the eleven-year-old Zeta. Flashbacks of his fieriness, considerateness, pride. It’s over, all right, but still nice to get eight thousand for that lazy Zeta. On those occasions his voice sounded just as powerful as before. Later in the day he said a lot more softly to Lucie, “Carriage horses, Luce, don’t dither around for a little while. Now take that son of Highness, that Romanus. If I talk about a profit of twenty thousand, I’m still on the low side.”
“Well, I quite like the idea, you know.”
“Begin with two.”
“Must they be a pair?”
“Better if they are.”
“And train them separately.”
“Of course. With double shoes.”
“Double shoes? In competitions too?”
“Not then. Do you remember us going to the Northern Area Competition a couple of years ago? It was in Friesland. I remember that there must have been twenty newcomers that came trotting up onto the great green carpet of grass. They were nervous as hell. A brilliant blue sky, not a breath of wind, men with bowler hats and striped trousers were driving the single horses. I remember that I had no quarrel with the winner, a grandchild of Oregon. But you turned to me as you leaned against the fence and half closed your eyes in the sun. You said to me that you thought it was a bit coarse and had a bit of a ram’s head. A little later we watched the competition for the carriage and pair, which was won by two unregistered red grays from Beilen. Above us, in the sky a row of birds kept flying in the same circle.”
“Are you comfortable?”
“Fine. I can’t feel a thing.”
“Shall I make some coffee?”
“I don’t like the taste anymore.”
Some people say that you have to be the other person really to understand what that other person is like, or: Another person is unknowable. As if you understand yoursel
f! You observe yourself all day long, that’s undeniable, you irrefutably feel yourself, hear your heart beating, and taste yourself the livelong day. But how on earth can you know somebody when you’ve never looked into their eyes? Except if you catch them looking at themselves in the mirror. I look at Lucie who in turn is looking at the fine circles her hands are making as she cleans the dark yellow rings of a metal sink. She doesn’t know it, but her face betrays that this is a simple but precise way of observing yourself. Work is the counterpart of the mirror. The complicity between eyes and hands is the opposite of the silly piece of glass we call a mirror.
I’d really like to ask her in an intimate tone a couple of questions that cut to the core. How would she feel if I gave her certain insights? But she’s not someone to have a smoothly flowing conversation with. She, my sister, goes her own way. I really can’t follow her. I can only observe her and carefully note her movements. I. My hands are brimful of life. Sometimes I feel life leaping up from under my hands.
Then she’s had enough of it. She springs up as though she is being told to hurry and hoists the iron tub on top of the pile of others. As she does so her nylon jacket catches and reveals the line of her hips, sturdy. In front of the entrance to the stables she looks for a moment to see what the rain is like. The sky is already a lot paler against the barns and woods. She’s not sure if the old man is in the chicory house but nevertheless goes in the direction of the outbuilding. As she climbs the three steps, both dogs come charging toward her. They force their way ahead of her through the heavy rubber curtain with which the door is shielded to keep out all daylight when necessary: Chicory grows in the dark. Gerard is sitting chewing on his pipe among his racks with the neon light on.
“I think that I’m going to pop over and see Plaisier tomorrow,” she begins.
He looks deafly at the dogs snuffling his boots.
“I said I’m going to Adorp.”
She has sat down on a stool and looks calmly, longingly at the half-bald skull of the old man with the impression of the cap remaining on his forehead and in the back. Now she sees the corners of his mouth trembling.
“To do what?”
She is shocked. He’s yelled at her. She is alarmed for a moment, because involuntarily she still relies on Daddy, not the old man on whom some dark force is at work, abusing the memories in his head so badly that they start biting and clawing.
“I’m going to get a couple of young stallions that I can train myself on the wagon every morning,” she says.
She looks in rapture at the face with the heavy eyebrows and the pipe pointing at her which flicks up and down.
“I’ll get a couple with soft mouths because you can do more with them than with the ones with leathery mouths.” She is silent for a moment, listens absentmindedly to the wind in the distance.
“They must be green and completely unbroken,” she says next, “and they must be” — Gerard gets up to button his coat — “four-square on their legs.”
Her arms imitate a trotting movement.
When he goes to the fuse box to get his soaking-wet cap from the hook, she says, “I’ve heard that at the Plaisier Stable they breed for carriage-worthiness.”
“That’s nice!” He stations himself in front of her with his head tucked in, bent down, almost hunchbacked, but still taller than she is. “A pair. So we’re going back to before the war. Two identical blazes, brown with white feet. God, what a job it was finding them!”
His mouth has closed as tight as possible.
“I object!”
She sees the pupils contract to the size of a pinhead.
Come and have supper, Daddy.”
The dogs, stirred up by the wind, leap toward her when she walks past the garbage shed and the chicken run. She’s already stopped thinking about Gerard. He’ll come in a moment and feed his bad temper, don’t you worry. She goes past the creaking roof beams of the barn into the house where everything speaks of Joseph and will go on speaking to her for as long as she doesn’t think of taking his hat and coat off the hat peg. On the workbench lie his tools, which in the course of time fit better and better in your hand.
She goes on Monday. And it’s Monday that I hear his voice again for the first time. Lucie has driven to Adorp after explaining on the telephone what she’s coming for. The foreman, wearing a service cap, shows her around the place. It’s eleven in the morning, sunny, windless.
She asks something.
The man in the service cap nods. “Young horses,” he says. “Scarcely used to the bit yet.”
Now they are standing near a paddock behind the far left building of the complex. Lucie hangs over the fence and with her eyes judges the youth and exuberance of the one- and two-year-old stallions. In front of her is a very distant landscape with fences and a few trees. The foreman, with his eyes on the animals, describes what they are able to do and what they will be able to do.
“Those two,” a familiar voice cuts right across him.
She shows no surprise at all. The voice is powerful, at most a little hoarse.
“You mean those two?” She laughs with her face averted and points.
“Yes,” comes the voice. “What do you think?”
“I like them fine.”
“Right, then the question is what that guy wants for them.”
“Let me go and sit down at the table with him.”
“Ask for the papers first.”
4
The young horses are delivered, radiant with promise. Lucie puts them in the loose house and subjects them daily to the lunge, the whip, and her voice. Shortly afterward she takes in two lodgers for payment, the pedigree mare Batoon and her pitch-black foal, a filly less than a month old. April is coming to an end, the birch is in bloom, from the hedge next to the house a whole swarm of lemon butterflies rises. Everywhere in our area the houses are being cleanedup. If you look down the road you can see them whitewashing the walls left and right and painting the woodwork in the coach-green color that is still favorite here. Lucie’s lost a bit of weight, but apart from that is the same as always: ginger coloring, a pallor that asks questions and doesn’t answer a single one. At the Wednesday market the women buy curtain material and linen at this time of year. Lucie buys a duvet one morning. I get too hot in my sleep, she explains to the stall holder, I sweat, I think that I’ll just take a silk duvet. That night I hear them talking together again.
She: What do you think?
He: Could certainly do with a coat of paint.
She: But I can’t do everything, this year I’ll just do a bit.
He: The front of the house? The window frames and doors at the front?
She: I think I’ll start with the fascia —
He: That’s so high.
She: — because it’s been in the wind.
He: It’s too damn high, Lucie!
She: What difference does it make? You know perfectly well that I’ve a good head for heights.
He: That’s true.
I can hear from their drawling voices they’ve been lying there talking like that for a good while. They lie and talk quietly under the duvet, and their familiarity takes them to the edge of sleep and beyond.
Perhaps a week later an enervating incident takes place. It’s halfway through the morning. Lucie is standing at the countertop making up a shopping list when she hears a horse whinnying from behind the house.
“My God,” she says. “That must be Batoon.”
In the fraction of a second it takes her to leap to the door at the back of the house, her gray mood, her daily increasing sadness that she’s still alive, has changed to a kind of fatal shock: This horse’s bellowing is something she’s heard only once before in her life, at the age of eleven, when Koops’s barn burned down in the middle of the night on the other side of the road. On reaching the field, she sees the mare rearing and understands the panicked screams of the animal. The black foal is gone. It must have slipped away under the rails of the fence.
&
nbsp; Foals are often born out in the field at night. If there are other mares around, they will accept the newcomer tenderly and cheerfully. But they find an unknown foal very spooky. Mares can be thrown completely by a strange youngster simply because it is unfamiliar. At this moment Lucie jumps over the electrified wire of the paddock. And you can see her running through the sand where the black foal is being chased by two or three mares that are completely entranced by its frightening innocence. The animal breaks through the fence, with the mares in pursuit. They will try to chase it and then run it down at a furious pace.
“Whoa there! Come here a minute!”
Twice in succession her hands fail to get a grip on its coat, which is smooth and soft. But when the black ghost shoots around the back of the house, Lucie manages to take advantage of the position of the coach doors to anticipate the arc of the foal across the barn, and with a tight throat and her arms spread wide to prepare herself for its run. All this is taking place right next to the dung heap. And it is indeed on the dung heap, on top of it, that the foal comes to a halt and abandons itself to the mercy of Lucie, who has leaped on its back. Paying no attention to anything else, she takes the head in a hold and spreads herself out completely over the thrashing legs and body.
She lies like that, not moving, letting her heart calm down. She can smell the dung and feel the animal’s body and hear the mares still running around. Suddenly inconsolable, she calls everyone in the house one by one, and falls exhausted.
Help arrives like magic. It has misleadingly begun before she realizes it. At a certain moment Lucie lifts her head up and from under her elbow sees one of the mares being grabbed by a halter by a man. She hears the whip cracking among the horses and then, before her head has completely cleared, a voice.
“Come on, then, you bastards! Damn it, calm down!”
Shortly afterward Joseph and Lucie are taking the mares to the patch of meadow that about eighty yards farther on comes to a point at the willow wood. Then they put Batoon and her foal in the stables. They check that the foal is unharmed, rub it down, and give the mother some extra food. When the job is finished, they sit down on a fodder box between a couple of young red-blossomed chestnut trees that stand like parasols at the edge of the cornfield. It’s going to get warm today. Under a cloudless sky that stretches far beyond the last visible properties, Lucie turns her head to have a good look at him at last.
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