Hamlet (5 page)

She heard a voice behind her, a hoarse, light whisper. She thought she heard the word “flying.” She turned fast, ready to kick and bite if she had to.

It was Hamlet. He looked as wild and confused as she felt. He stared at her with huge eyes, as if he had expected to find someone else in the room. His mouth was open, he was gasping for breath, and his chest shook. Was he having an asthma attack? But asthma did not explain the state of his clothes. His jacket was open and his shirt half torn off. She saw his smooth brown skin and a dark nipple. His jeans were smeared with grass stains and his boots bruised with mud, black mud, almost purple in places.

“M-my lord . . .” she stammered. He snarled at her, showing his teeth. “What is it?” she said, afraid of her father. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Hamlet stood there, panting. He seemed to be calming down. He took a step closer. She did not back away. He studied her face with the greatest intentness. It was as though he wanted to memorize her appearance. He continued down her body, to her breasts. Now it was Ophelia’s turn to breathe hard. She felt a pressure there, then a warmth. She felt the pressure most strongly in her nipples, as if his hands were resting on them. She blushed and was almost relieved when his gaze moved farther down.

“My lord . . .” she murmured. She knew she should move, but she couldn’t. She wished he would say something but was scared at what he might say.

In the long, dark corridor that led to the basement, at the appointed time, Hamlet met Ophelia. She wore white, like a frail bride who could be borne away on a breeze. He wore black jeans and a black shirt. They quivered to see each other. Ophelia could have turned back, back through the door, back into the girls’ courtyard. The light from that place fell behind her, and the door was still closing.

Hamlet could have returned to the cellar where he had stored his toys, the relics of his past.

The thoughts flitted out of their minds again, like tiny, fast moths. They continued walking and met, and began an elaborate dance. Ophelia clasped her arms to her thin body and revolved around him. He turned with her as his arms moved in a dance of their own. She spoke first, her voice low and husky: “Are you all right? Why do you haunt these dark places?”

“Why not? There’s nothing above the ground. Is there?”

This was so much in accord with her own thoughts that it frightened her. She did not want her fears confirmed. “Is this all there is, then? I wanted more,” she said.

“It’s hard when you are a bird who lives underground.”

“Birds can’t live underground.”

“No, they can’t.”

She stood still then and so did he.

“Can we live? Can we live at all?” she asked. Her voice echoed, bouncing off the brick-lined walls.

“Yes, it comes down to that. And to what comes after.”

“To what?” She didn’t understand him.

“Why, whether we are to live or not to live. To dance or to die. To breathe the painful air, or to sleep.”

“To sleep?”

“To stand in the shallows with a sword to fight the surf, or to let the waves wash you away.” He took her by the elbow and leaned closer to her ear and whispered into it. “To be or not to be.”

She was frightened and pulled away and could not listen to him.

“To stay under here forever?” she asked. Her voice was tinny and thin, almost disdainful. Fear was corrupting her.

“It would be easy,” he said. For a moment he sounded almost bored. “So easy to do it. It’s what happens afterward, that’s the thing.”

She put her hands to her ears and tried to say “Stop it,” but could not.

“If it was my father, if he told the truth, if he twists in fire, if he the murdered one twists in fire, what’s there for the one who murders himself? No sleep for him, I think, no peace, not for a long time. Torment for him, I think.”

The tunnel felt colder and colder to Ophelia. She tried to concentrate on Hamlet’s twin thoughts, the references to his father, the references to death. His voice went on, soft, in the darkness.

“Why would anyone put up with it all? The cruelty, the injustice, the frustration, the pangs, and the pain. The love that’s not returned. After all, the ticket to that undiscovered country is cheap enough. A bare knife will get you there. Surely we’d all fly to it at once if we thought we could have perfect peace there, protected forever.”

Hamlet walked away a dozen paces and turned to face Ophelia again. Looking straight at her, he said, “It’s the same with everything. I don’t pick up the knife because I think about it too much and the thinking paralyzes my arm. Action is hot, and thought is cold. Action is courage, and reflection is cowardly. Picking up the knife has the colors of truth. As soon as I hesitate, the scene takes on a sickly hue.”

“My father told me to keep away from you. That you are not to be trusted.”

She wanted to see him hot. She wanted him to talk about her. What he felt. What he wanted. The future for them. An expression came to his face, but it went again before she could see what it was. The darkness made it difficult. The darkness and the distance and the dance.

Hamlet shrugged. “Why, then, you had better go. Do what your father tells you.”

“But I don’t want to.”

Suddenly with a great roar he ran toward her. She thought he was going to run her down. But he went straight past and, fifty meters down the corridor, turned left. She heard his boots clattering up the staircase, and then the noise was gone and the silence in the corridor became complete.

Hamlet’s mental map had changed year by year. As he and Horatio had reached ten, eleven, twelve, the map increased in size, at the same time as it incorporated new landmarks. Now it extended to the farmlands, the forest, the villages. And within the castle it was no longer defined by his mother’s suite of rooms, or the corner of the kitchen where the kind cook kept biscuits, or the sheltered courtyard where his nurse had taken him to play.

When he moved bedrooms at fourteen, the tower room became the center of his map, and three important lines ran from it. One went down the staircase with the shiny handrail, which he slid down every day, then down a narrow, darker set of steps that led to a small back door. This gave the quickest exit from the castle.

The second line wound its way to the southern wing, where old Polonius lived with his faithful son, Laertes, and his feckless daughter, Ophelia.

The third was the line of routine, the daily route of breakfast room, schoolroom, dueling hall, dining hall, art room, a route that most days the young prince followed with little thought.

There was a fourth line too, a secret line, that Hamlet lied to himself about. Were the map ever to be drawn, this route might appear as a series of faint dots, like an unmade road, or a horse trail across the mountains. Much of the time it was invisible, though it was more likely to be seen at night. It started in the tower room, like the others, and like them it went down the stairs. From there it led onto the roof and across the ridges and valleys, pausing near Ophelia’s window, where the girl could sometimes be seen, by the light of the one mean candle her father allowed her.

Oh yes, she could be seen all right, seen as the white slip slid down her body, seen stretching, arms above her head, as she danced the pale nightgown down her body. Could be seen bending to the candle, her face glowing in its sweet light, her swollen lips open to blow the room into darkness. Even after the darkness she could be seen, in Hamlet’s fevered mind, the swelling breasts and the smooth legs, the soft crack: he saw all but the pink light between her legs.

From there Hamlet would creep on past the servants’ wing, watching for the assistant cook with the huge prick, the oafish nineteen-year-old stroking himself on his palliasse, in the dimness of the candle his cock casting a giant shadow on the wall. Hamlet stared at the shadow as much as he did at the cock, wondering and wishing, excited by the awful sight.

Down to a small window, in the shape of a slice of bread, where he would make his exit into the kitchen gardens, but before that he passed the room of one of the scullery maids. Forty or more years old, breasts like bags filled with water, genitals lost in her giant thighs, the triangle of hair spreading high up toward her navel, standing every night in the galvanized iron tub, obsessed with cleanliness, washing herself with dreamy concentration. The boy felt a deep hunger as he gazed at her. He could never feed at those breasts, could never satisfy her with his little thing. She, always in the room; he, always outside it. Always in the past, never in the future.

Then through the window to the staircase, down the stone steps, through the green door, and into the squares of carrots and peas, potatoes and pumpkins, beets and squash. Some squares weeded and neat, others unkempt or barren. Around the perimeters, a hundred meters away in any direction, the pens of chickens, ducks, geese, the sheds of pigs, the huts where tools were kept.

In this strange land, in this tiny kingdom of pigs and turkeys, of beans and berries, the grotesque was not unknown. In this controlled world of moon at night and sun by day, of rain and snow and frost and summer warmth, Garath — always first to emerge from his hovel, Garath, the man charged with the care of the kitchen gardens — occasionally found hens strangled and sows stabbed, vines ripped down and soft fruit plucked and trampled.

The garden boys learned not to speak of this, not to speculate, just to obey Garath’s grim orders: “Strip the birds and scorch the sows, bury the fruit and restore the vines.”

Garath sent the meat to the kitchen, but he did not eat it himself.

This is where the fourth line of Hamlet finished.

And so time strode onward, and Hamlet became older, filling into the body and shape of a young man, no longer an adolescent. Yet still he did nothing. Horatio was called away to do his first phase of army duty. Bernardo’s father inherited a bigger farm, near Olsbrook, and the family moved there. The young man had not visited his cousin in Elsinore for a long time, and his memories of the night with Hamlet and Horatio and the spirit were becoming uncertain.

Laertes finished university in France and went to England to study military tactics.

Hamlet and Ophelia were the only constants. They never went away. Within the walls of the great gray castle, they had no one but each other. Ophelia lived and breathed Hamlet. She disappeared into Hamlet. She gave herself to him in every way but the one she wanted. If Hamlet smiled and spoke to her, she was happy. If he frowned or appeared not to notice her, she did not want to live. There was nothing to do in the castle, no new people, an angry king and a fretful queen, grumbling mumbling muttering servants, tired old men and boring young ones. Hamlet was the salmon in the river, the balloon on the breeze, the new moon silvering the sky. He was quickness and light, a shadow on a wall, an illusion, a dream, a fancy. He was a glimpse, nothing solid. How could she anchor her boat to a wave? Yet that was what she wanted.

Hamlet’s behavior was becoming more and more odd. Even the soldiers whispered about it. He was so beautiful that no one wanted to notice. Illness of that kind was for others, not for the beautiful or the rich or the royal. It seemed impossible. Yet he spoke in a way that often made no sense: if he entered a conversation, his words jumped and skipped and went backward, or a year forward.