Death, Sleep & the Traveler (15 page)

“It is a familiar question. And a familiar condition as well.”

“Sooner or later,” I said, aware of Ursula’s fingers and seeing Ursula’s honey-colored eyes in the flickering shadows and noting the red silk pillow on which she was now propping her chin, “sooner or later the young child discovers that he cannot account for himself. As soon as he becomes
inexplicable he becomes unreal. Immediately everything else becomes unreal as one might expect. The rest is puzzlement. Or terror.”

Everything about our present condition-the cold house, the snow falling invisibly outside, the rugs and pillows and fire, the chorus of
blokfluiten
reminding me for some reason of the time when, as a child, I was taken on a trip to Breda—all of it was conducive to wandering ideas, to a slow and unmistakable drift toward sensuality. Peter was filling our glasses, his brow was aglow with perspiration, to me the musty animal smell of the old polar bear rug evoked images of faceless hunters stalking the ice floes in search of death. Ursula had abandoned my thick sock and was holding Peter’s ankle in a tight grip. In the faintest possible rhythm her backside was undulating now in the greasy heat of the fire.

“So, Peter,” I murmured, “you have no thoughts on my query?”

“If you insist, I can only say that you and I are too old for this conversation. Much too old.”

“But it’s quite true,” Ursula said slowly, drowsily, “Allert is not real.”

“On religious questions,” Peter said, with his scarred face long and dark and composed in the light of the fire, “I am afraid I cannot be of any help. No help at all.”

“But if I disagree with you,” I said quietly, “and if you are wrong, and if the problem is not religious but is in fact psychological, what then?”

“Please, my friend. It is not like you to become aggressive.”

“Allert aggressive! What a nice idea.”

“Ursula,” I murmured then, “perhaps you would like to take off your heavy sweater. For Peter and me.”

“You’d have me bare-breasted, is that it?”

“Yes. Play with your nipples, Ursula. For Peter and me.”

“You’re trying to arouse me, Allert! But I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait.”

“Jocular, philosophical, impatient,” Peter said. “What is the matter with you tonight, my friend?”

“Today on the skis,” I murmured and closed my eyes, raised my head, “I felt pleasantly athletic. But also that I did not exist.”

“And now,” Ursula said, clutching her red pillow with one hand and thrusting the other hand up the leg of Peter’s corduroy trousers, “now you are drinking too much.”

“But one thing is certain,” Peter said, laughing behind the leather mask of his elongated face, “and that is that Allert can always hold his schnapps.”

“Any way you drink it,” I whispered, “it is pure gold.”

I heard the drifting snow, the poignant harmonics of the baroque recorders, Peter moving about on his hands and knees. I heard the birds collecting in their white flocks, heard Ursula humming in the random suffusion of both her comfort and her discontent. I smiled and closed my eyes. Ursula’s doglike shadow was crouching above me among the beams of the ceiling. Peter was crouching at the hearth and smoking his pipe.

“But Peter,” Ursula said, as I opened my eyes, “what are you doing?”

“Peter,” I said in my deep and quiet voice, “are you
smearing body lotion on her underpants and not on the skin? A novel idea. I would not have thought of it.”

“But it’s sticky, Peter. It feels peculiar!”

Ursula laughed, Peter said nothing. Ursula made no attempt to defend herself against the handfuls of heavy lotion which Peter, as I could now clearly see, was smearing across the tight rounded surfaces of Ursula’s translucent underpants.

I knelt clumsily on my hands and knees, sat back on my heels, raised the half-drained glass to my teeth. I became the willing witness of Peter’s labors, since by now Ursula had returned her face to the crimson pillow while Peter, rising upward from his spread knees, had positioned himself directly in front of her, so that by leaning forward he could grip her buttocks in his two determined hands. Her eyes were closed, her head was lying beneath the apex of Peter’s crotch. In his own turn Peter was wreathing his head with the smoke from his pipe and kneading Ursula’s backside with his expert hands.

“It’s lovely, Peter,” Ursula whispered, with her eyes closed, “it feels so lovely. Like going into the bath with your panties on.”

She sighed, she laughed, Peter shifted his position, I shifted mine, Peter inched forward so that he was straddling the small of Ursula’s broad back.

“More,” Ursula whispered, “do it some more.”

One of the plastic containers lay spilled on the hearth, slowly I dropped my empty glass into the burnished depths of the water buffalo hide. The schnapps had done its night’s work, reminding me of the white chateau in the
village where I was born, and now I smelled the schnapps in my nose, the desert-blossom scent of the body lotion, the aromatic smell of Peter’s pipe, the ice in the eaves of the uninhabited house. And now I felt too large, too sick, too purposeless, too awakened, too much in need of the lavatory to sustain my presence in our triad sprawling in the luxury of blanket, pillows, rugs, in the smoky light of Peter’s fire.

The recorders faded. The darkness became to the coldness as light to the fire. Swaying, unsteady on my stocking feet, aware that my breathing was rhythmically focused not on the inhalation but the exhalation, slowly I groped my way down the frozen corridor toward the door not of the lavatory as I expected, but outside and into the night. My stocking feet made deep impressions in the dry snow, the flakes were settling, and all around me the winter night was invisible, a mere sensation of trees, decreasing temperature, falling snow. I stood still, I felt the snow on my head, I breathed in as much as I could of the winter night.

I thought to myself that I was in the midst of a dream that I could not remember, though my head was clear now and though off to the right I was able to see without difficulty the shape of Peter’s parked ear humped high with snow. For a moment I saw myself as a child traveling through a clear night in the straw in the back of a little blue sleigh drawn by a black and white pony and driven by a man in a muffler and heavy gloves. For a moment longer, there in the dry snow, I contemplated what I suddenly identified as my own benevolence. And then I turned and once more felt my way into Peter’s house and down the
cold corridor and into that vast dark room where Peter and Ursula knelt facing each other before the fire.

They had stripped off each other’s clothes and from top to bottom had smeared each other’s bodies with the glistening cream. They were wet and shining, they were kneeling with their knees apart and were kissing each other and laughing. Ursula’s underpants lay like a sodden handkerchief on the hearth. Their bodies were slick and moving and fire-lit as if in the emulsion of a photograph still hanging wet and glossy in the darkroom.

“Allert,” she called over her shoulder to where I stood dripping and smiling beyond the light and the heat of the fire, “we’ve been waiting for you. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and come here and take off your clothes.”

“The trouble with you Dutch,” Peter was saying, “is that for you even normality is a perversion.”

“You and I are fortunate indeed,” Peter was saying, “to be able to rely on Ursula’s sustaining sanity. She is never lost in the sacred wood as you and I sometimes are, my friend.”

His voice was urgent in the darkness of the night behind her cabin door, which was hooked ajar. And recognizing his young uncultured voice from the corridor through which I was passing on my way to the ship’s pool, and
hearing his angry supplications and pathetic argument, it was then that I understood that all was not well with the wireless operator. With uncustomary swiftness I proceeded then to the pool where I smoked five small Dutch cigars by the light of the cold constellations.

But how could I have remained unawakened by our descending anchors? How could I have allowed myself to sleep through the actuality of my own worst dream? After all, Ariane had forewarned me that we would be reaching the shores of the island in the darkest part of the night and would be dropping anchor. And it was indeed so because now the sun was rising in the lowest quadrant of my porthole like blood in a bottle, and I was wide-awake and nursing my premonitions. The ship was at anchor.

I climbed to my knees on the wet bed and opened the porthole. I saw that the sun was flooding the horizon but that the island was nowhere in sight. And kneeling with my head in the porthole and the sun in my eyes, I recalled how the night before I had refused Ariane’s invitation to go ashore on the island of nudists. And squinting into the ominous and bloody sun, once more I determined to prevent our exposure to the boredom and distaste of bodies bared merely for the sake of health or naturalness.

And yet with unaccustomed haste I dressed, seized my straw hat and went out on deck in search of my young friend. The ship was silent, the gulls were gone, the hot deck might have been embedded in concrete. I tapped insistently on the door to her cabin, I assured myself that no
one was enjoying the use of the pool, I understood that it would be several hours at least before juice and coffee and rolls were served in the dining saloon. The locked cabins, the empty bridge, the damp blankets heaped up in the peeling deck chairs, the silence—this, the death of the ship, was what I had always feared.

I crossed from the starboard side to the port and there against the rail were a half dozen passengers and, in the dreamlike distance beyond them, the low brown sandy island that so appealed to Ariane. I joined the passengers who did not intend to visit the island, I gathered, but who nonetheless were determined to look at those who did and, further, were hoping for a glimpse of the distant nudists. With them I stared across at the hazy island and down at the white motorboat now moored to the foot of the gangway lowered against the ship’s white side.

Except for Ariane and the wireless operator seated hip to hip in the forward portion of the white launch, and except for the young crewman slouching in the stern with a rope in his hand, the long white motor launch was empty, occupied as it was by only three persons instead of sixty. I decided to become the fourth.

I descended the gangway at precisely the moment the crewman was preparing to cast off. I took my seat behind my young friend as the motor began its muffled bubbling. I glanced up at the remaining passengers propped like wax figures against the rail and under the hot sun. There was no waving, in a half circle we moved away from the high side of the anchored ship.

“Allert,” she said, smiling, reaching out for my hand, “you’ve changed your mind.”

“Yes,” I said, “I too will visit your nudists.”

“Without you it would not be the same.”

“Well,” I said, accepting and squeezing her proffered hand, “Allert also can be a good sport, as my wife would say.”

We picked up speed, there was a dawn wind blowing, Ariane smiled and tilted back her head as if to take deep breaths of the burning sun. The wireless officer and I exchanged no greeting. Behind us lay the white ship, diminishing but stationary, while ahead of us lay the scorched island that was expanding minute by minute for our watchful eyes.

“I did not sleep well last night,” I said. “I had intolerable dreams.”

“Poor Allert. You will be able to sleep on the beach.”

The sea, on which there was not the smallest wave, was now changing from opaque blackness to a turquoise transparency. Twenty or thirty feet below us shelves of white sand were reflecting the light of the sun back up through the soundless medium of the clear sea. I was relieved to notice, over my shoulder, that no smoke was visible from the blue smokestacks of the anchored ship. Ariane’s hair was blowing in the wind, the long black sideburns of the wireless officer contradicted in some disturbing way the rakish angle of his white black-visored cap. My young friend in her blue jeans and a halter of orange silk, through which the shape of her small breasts was entirely visible, was an antidote to the wireless officer’s unusual mood of sullen reserve.