B007P4V3G4 EBOK (14 page)

Willem Brakman

At a time of day when it was very quiet in the village, two men
were approaching along the path that descended the rocks and ran
close past the shipwreck. By the shuffling of their feet through the
shale of the path and the listless dangling of their arms it was easy
to see that they were at their last gasp. The larger and elder of
them was dressed in a ravelly black suit too big for him on all
second thought, it was little more than a collection of
dumped, baggy rags. His was a bony figure; though his head, thin
and all-jaw, drooped in a tired manner, his prominent light-grey
eyes still stared brightly and distrustfully around him. The nose
was not the best part of his face: the nose of a progenitor, a robust
foundation, large, hooked and doggedly know-all. His companion
was a young man with a small head, his skull tapering a little at
the top, the nose full and fleshy, jaws broad and heavy, the mouth
large and thick-lipped. This was a primal head; the eyes of
indeterminate colour stood close together.

The two men sat down by the side of the path and looked at
the village: it simply seemed a quiet village yet there was something apparently bothering the old one. 'It's too quiet for my
liking,' he said after a while, 'and strange things happen in a village
that's too quiet.' While he was saying this, he took off his hat and
revealed a wealth of white, fluffy hair; the gesture was a solemn
one, but nevertheless his eyes, prepared for any eventuality,
roamed along the windows, along the red-grey roofs and on,
towards the sombre profile on top of the hill, probably a castle's or
otherwise that of a strongly fortified monastery.

Little sounds, like the ones an over-quiet village can transmit,
were reaching him now, after all: the unmistakable sound of a last
gasp, the muffled screeching of someone being smothered in a
pillow, soft hawking elsewhere again, the snap of a chicken's neck,
the agonized flutter of wings. These were the bitter sounds from a
quiet village, a chabot village.

'See to it that you get talking to them,' the old man said, 'but not in the street or in a doorway: inside, at a table, a kitchen table's
best, in the morning and with a woman. I once showed Moses the
word, beautifully carved and chiselled out. D'you like my word?' I
asked, and I held up the tablets, but he shook his head, for he was
as spoilt as he was large. 'Honestly not?' I asked, out of sorts; I
took him by the hand and led him into a cool cave. Not inside a
pretty cave either?' 'Not in a cave either,' said Moses, for he could
be as stubborn as a mule. Then I took him high up on to a plain;
the wind blew around us and I held up the word, causing a
dizzying rush, but his eyes were dark and his lower lip pouted.
'Well?' 'Not here either,' he jeered, and he stuck out his tongue.
'And with a pretty balloon?' I asked, and I showed him one, red
and gleaming and without a scratch on it. 'O-o-oh!' I cried, What a
pretty balloon!' But that pigheaded fool stamped his foot and cried:
'I'll chuck it on to the rocks, to smithereens,' and he ran off, down
below. No, No You have a thin neck and your ears
are on the large side and your eyes are dark and moist: this'll send
men up the wall, not women. Tell them at the kitchen table about
a splendid city, built alongside a lake of gold across which barques
are sailing in a setting sun, lute music everywhere and young men
who know all the finer points. If you can explain all that to them,
can show them what I have seen and describe the joys I have
partaken of ... They would no longer leave you alone but
embrace the very last word from your skinny neck.'

The lad looked at his broken-down, patent leather shoes burrowing
back and forth in the coal dust, and he said: 'I'm going to the village.'

'I wouldn't if I were you,' the old one said, 'but if you do, make
sure you nick some greasy bacon and brown: it makes
me fart some tobacco, too, if poss.'

The young man got up, laboriously.

'Just one thing more,' the old one said, 'a long time ago a young
man arrived at a monastery in a wild, deserted region, looking a
bit like that one there on the hill. He looked at the tremendous
wall turned to the world like a grumpy, sulking back, and deep
inside the stone he heard the grumbling of the monks against their
Lord. Those brothers were skinny as tally-sticks, only drank rain
water and they ate turnips straight from the soil. They raked and
dug all day long, preferably as bent over as possible, never looking
up, and at night they dragged themselves to their cells to mutter there, to wring their hands and give a kick against the door now
and then, or against the wall. This was all perfectly visible from the
outside, and so the man shivered when he knocked at the gate and
waited. Night was falling rapidly and on the horizon gleamed the
yellow light of bad weather in the offing.

The porter brought him to the guest's cell, chucked a bit of wet
peat on the fire there, put out water and bread, laid a blanket on
the wooden bed, and during all this to-ing and fro-ing he crossed
himself, repeatedly and bitterly. Then he lit a stubby bit of candle
and disappeared. The man bit into the piece of black bread but
instantly had a mouth full of beetles; he wanted to drink some
water but this turned out to be so slimy it would not let itself be
poured. He felt the straw on the bed, so wet it squelched, and the
blanket was hopping with nits.

Disgruntled by such inhospitality, he stepped into the corridor,
but everything was as silent and dark as the grave. In order to
wake the monks, he called out all kinds of biblical sayings, but the
echoes scattered so strangely back and forth through the corridors
that the oddest of commandments now startled the monastery:
'feed the dead, bury the naked, dress the thirsty.'

This, in the end, brought the abbot himself on to the scene; he
was accompanied by the porter who held up a mean little oil lamp
so that two chabot heads floated threateningly towards the traveller. The abbot's mouth was large and black, his skull small and
pointed, his nose large, coarse and heavy. 'In my nocturnal prayers,'
he said in a sonorous voice, 'I had just arrived at the cursing of the
children, the dancers, the lovers, the bards and the rich, of all who
just do as they please, gadding about; to these I shall now add the
traveller who simply comes and goes as he pleases, goes about
crowing and hollering as it suits him and plods about in sin. Seize
him, brothers, that harpy, and bundle him in clink; tomorrow we'll
nail him to the cross, with big fat nails and without a bum-rest.' At
that moment, some sturdy monks loomed out of the dark who
grabbed the man, knotted him down firmly and laid him in his cell
on the soggy straw, without saying a word.

Next day, when the weather was beginning to grow dark, they
fetched him from his bed, put a heavy cross on his neck and
pushed him up the hill.

'Why am I being crucified?' the man asked. 'Is it that you think
that my soul's bursting with song, like the robber's or the sailor's?'

'Why no,' said the brother going along beside him, and with his stick he gave a firm blow on the toiling one's knuckles, so hard
that the latter heard the pain scream throughout his entire body,
something that made him fear the worst about things at the top of
the hill.

'Or did I remind you of a soft bed with butter and sugar and
fine morning tea?' the man cried plaintively. 'Or of a serving
wench with thick hair, a springy middle and warm armpits?

'Not at all,' laughed the brother who did not stray from his side
but this time struck him a goodly wound in his neck with his
knout, so that the man reached the top, glowing in wondrous
splendour, feeling dizzy and confounded. There, a hole was quickly
dug, one the cross would come to stand in.

'One favour before I die,' cried the unfortunate.

'No delay,' said the abbot, I simply cannot bear to wait any
longer.'

They stripped the man, struck him on the mouth when he
wanted to say something, and nailed him down firmly. Then they
placed the cross upright in the hole and thoroughly firmed the soil
up around it. I remember it well: the man hung there against a
wine-red sky, all rolling muscles the way these develop on a cross,
the bulging rib-cage sharply defined by the glancing evening light,
the stomach nicely sunken, thighs well-formed, hobnails splendidly
lit, fingers gnarled round them like roots. The monks went and sat
down in a circle on the ground and looked on eagerly and
attentively. They pointed out details to one another and whispered
things in each other's ears causing smiles and rubbing of hands.

Some day, this,' cried the abbot. 'Oh, God's glorious Grace,' the
brothers joined him in support, 'and this is only nightfall; later,
when it has got dark, we will hide ourselves away but we'll
continue to watch, for then the dogs that gnaw the bones will
come and the birds that peck out the eyes, and that can take
hours.'

Full of dismay, the traveller listened to all this. 'But why?' he
cried, writhing in despair.

'For our great sins and His redeeming Passion,' the abbot said
piously. 'To know of it is one thing, but to realise it is another, and
a good deal more too.'

'Beware of the women,' the old man cried rather inconsistently,
irately shaking a gnarled index finger, 'they're leech-lizards, particularly when you tell them stories.' Groaning softly, he settled himself down on the ground so that his torso was in the shade and
his legs in the sun.

'That's the sighed with cosy contentment and sought
his handkerchief. When he had finally managed to get it out, with
difficulty, his head sagged forwards in a sudden bout of sleepiness.
'Dear, dear,' he said to himself, worried, 'how my powers do wane
of late.'

Things were quiet around him; the tree casting its shadow over
him stood motionless; some birds rustled among the leaves and far
in the distance there was the sound of footsteps. That was the
young man walking with slow tread through the main street; he
held his small and peculiarly shaped head that from the side
resembled a tapir's muzzle, to one side and his big ears caught
every sound indeed, to the very smallest. Thus he heard how the
villagers got up, very carefully, to steal on tiptoe to the window
and stand behind the curtains to follow him with their gaze.
There's something up, here, they thought, he's come here to poke
his nose into other men's business, to steal chickens or to take little
girls with him, around the corner. This was why they followed the
stranger, with sullen eyes and with great acuity.

In the middle of a large square the man suddenly saw a dog -
where it came from all of a sudden he didn't know either, but there
it was, with drooping head and panting flanks from the heat. The
creature had a thin, miserable carcass and a tail gnawed bare by
fleas, crooked paws through abysmal feeding and bald patches
because of something else again. With a cocked, dozy head the
man absorbed this image of physical misery, the muzzle hanging
open, the dried-up tongue, and above the immense square he felt
the mercilessly empty and glinting sky. 'Blessed be the fly,' he
cried resonantly across the square, 'that drowns in wine, but woe
betide the one that sinks in honey or sticks to ointment, or the
arms and legs of which are torn off by a playing child and left,
forgotten, on the kitchen table. Blessed the dog that dies an easy
death, snuffed out with a gentle breath and in a single sigh.

'But woe betide the one that dies in a square, openly, dusted
with sand, scorched by the sun.' Saying this, he took out a bowl
from nowhere, poured it full of cool, clear water and placed it on
the stones.

Soft muttering behind hands went round the village, and the
windows of the houses on the square misted over with distrust.
The dog looked dully at the dish, whimpered and then trudged off across the cobbles. This was a timid and practised looker-round:
the back already arched for stick and stone, watchful down to the
last knobbly joint.

Looks don't deceive, the villagers said.

The man with the small and peculiar head crossed the square,
turned into a narrow street and there he entered one of the little
houses. It was cool and dusky there, for all the curtains had been
lowered because of the sun. In a comer of the room a woman was
sleeping, a heavy, pale woman, her large hands in her lap, palms
up, sagged open in sleep, the turnip-like head resting against the
back of the chair.

Carefully, the man went and sat at the table in order to stare out
ahead of him there, intently, but he stumbled about so clumsily
that the woman awoke with a start and believed for a moment to
be eye to eye with her murderer. Then she recovered herself,
roused herself painfully and, uneasily because of her large feet, she
waddled over to him. 'Is that you, my boy?' she said, embracing
him tenderly. 'How lovely, you looking in on us again; have
people been good to you?' Her hands felt the man's skinny back
for a moment, then she pressed his small, pointed head to her chest
and began to stare strangely into the room. Her eyes glazed over
and turned upwards too, which made a lot of the white of her eyes
visible, and things seemed to indicate strongly that the encounter
had all become too much for her. Her hands also had changed:
instead of heavy and thick, they were now suddenly long and thin,
with curled up banana-fingers.