Lanceheim (27 page)

He did not recognize any of the aides who were standing in reception, but they recognized him. He did not hear what they said, but he thought he could read on their lips that they said his name. From their body language he understood that they wanted to help.

“I'm looking for Buffalo Bill,” he said.

He hoped that his tone of voice was firm but friendly.

There was nodding and strutting, and finally an elderly heifer came and asked him to follow her. They went through the corridors, and to his surprise Reuben realized that he could find his way, despite the fact that it had been ten years since he was last here.

The heifer stopped outside the door, and gave him a questioning look.

“Thanks,” he said. “I think I'll manage from here.”

“He can be violent,” said the nurse.

“What'd you say?”

The heifer repeated loudly and clearly what she had just said, and Reuben nodded.

“I remember that,” he confirmed. “It comes and goes, doesn't it? I'll have to take the risk. There was an alarm by the electrical panel inside the door—is it still there?”

The heifer nodded.

“I'll buzz if things get crazy.”

Without asking for permission, Reuben then opened the door and stepped in.

 

Buffalo Bill was sitting
in front of the window in a bamboo armchair looking out at the rain that had just started to fall. The chair stood with its back toward the door, and Bill was accustomed to nurses coming and going. Therefore he didn't react. In peace and quiet Reuben could observe the room that for most of Bill's life had been his universe. The patient became uneasy when he had to leave it, and therefore he was allowed to stay there.

Reuben walked slowly up to the bookshelf, and ascertained that the few books were the same ones that had been there last time. The worn blue dressing gown hanging over a bedpost even seemed to be hanging just as crooked as it had when Reuben last left Bill in a fit of fury and impotence.

Time had stood still.

“Bill?”

He did not want to frighten him.

“Bill?”

And now he could see that the buffalo had heard. He slowly turned around. His lips were moving, even if Reuben did not hear what he said.

“Reuben?”

“What'd you say? Bill, I'm almost deaf. I hear almost
nothing. You have to speak loudly. And slowly. Can you do that? Talk loud and slowly?”

Buffalo Bill nodded, but turned his head back so that he was again looking out over the beach and the sea.

“Reuben? Did you bring any pictures with you?”

“Pictures?”

“I need pictures,” said Buffalo.

He spoke loudly, and he spoke slowly. Despite the fact that Reuben only saw his neck, he heard fine.

“Without pictures I can't write,” he said. “Have you brought pen and paper with you?”

“Write?” asked Reuben. “Do you want to write?”

“Not without pictures,” said Bill.

“I don't understand,” said Reuben. “What pictures?”

“I don't want to write anymore, Reuben. I can't. I will tell you what I have written. The opera
Sarcophagus
. A string quintet in G minor. Twenty-three opera arias for sopranos and tenors. Twelve symphonies. Five chamber pieces for tuba and—”

“I know what you've written, Bill,” said Reuben. “You are a genius.”

“And you've let Mollisan Town hear it,” said Bill. “You have let the stuffed animals hear what I've written, haven't you? Of course you've done that. But now I can't write anymore. Not without pictures.”

Reuben stood in the middle of the room and listened. He heard what Bill was saying, heard every word. He dared not move, dared not go up and position himself so that he could see the buffalo's face. They were talking with each other.

“Your unfinished symphony, Bill,” said Reuben. “Do you remember it? The one in A minor?”

“I need pictures,” said Bill.

“Bill, if I give you pictures, do you think you can complete the Symphony in A Minor then?”

“Do you intend to give me pictures, Reuben? Can you do that?”

“I can give you pictures, Bill. Can you…write again? Would you be able to?”

Buffalo sat silently.

“What'd you say?” asked Reuben.

But Buffalo sat silently.

Reuben stood completely still for several minutes, but at last he went up and around the chair. Buffalo Bill had fallen asleep.

“Bill?”

Reuben carefully shook his old friend. Bill opened his eyes.

“Reuben?”

“Bill, I—”

“Reuben? Is it you?”

“What'd you say?”

“I don't hear anything anymore, Reuben. I don't hear notes anymore. I can't help you anymore, Reuben. Don't be angry at me. Don't be angry.”

“And the pictures, Bill? If I can arrange…pictures?”

“Pictures?”

“You said something about pictures?”

“Pictures? I don't know anything about pictures, Reuben.”

“What'd you say?”

“I don't hear anything anymore, Reuben. Forgive me. You have to forgive me.”

W
itnesses say that when they unlocked the cell door and Maximilian crept out on aching joints, blinking his eyes at the blinding daylight, he said: “Hope does not die when the prayer is answered, hope only takes on a new form.” It sounds like something Maximilian may have said, and there is no reason to doubt it.

Right after the Afternoon Rain on the twenty-fifth of December, a newly hired guard opened the little door in the great archway that was the main entry to King's Cross, and Maximilian could leave the prison. He wore the embroidered caftan he'd had on when they arrested him; the wide collars betrayed the years that had passed. The street he came out on was a deserted stretch of road to which the Highway Department seldom drives its garbage buses, and Maximilian walked slowly along a sidewalk of refuse: cigarette butts and broken bottles, old leeks and crumpled-up beer cans.

He had received permission to buy a pillowcase from the prison's impressive linen supply, and from this he had tied a cloth to put on his head. In a plastic bag he carried his
belongings: a pair of underwear and a small bamboo zebra that Conny Hippopotamus had carved as a going-away present.

I imagine that at no time during his lonely wandering back to Mollisan Town did Maximilian stop, either to observe something in particular or to ask himself where he was going. He was thirty-four years old, but it seems to me as though his life had not really begun. True, at my place there were shelves full of notes, partially written out lectures, and conclusions from the quantities of courses that we had held through the years, all based on the Book of Similes and the deeds Maximilian had performed. Yet when I thought about it, his life seemed incomplete. Therefore the goal of his wandering was understandable.

Maximilian was on his way home to Das Vorschutz.

 

He arrived home late
in the evening, after the Storm, to our glade in the forest. In the darkness it was hard to make out how the cherry trees had grown or that the beds where the roses bloomed were now full of scilla; the houses stood just as heavy and artless as always, and from the four chimneys each pillar of smoke testified to preparations for night. Possibly it is first here, just as Maximilian passes between Karl and Anders Beaver's house and purposefully crosses the round lawn on his way home, that he stops, turns his face up to the sky, sees the stars glittering in infinity, and senses the branches of the trees as dark shadows still swaying after the wild ravages of the Storm.

What does he see?

What is he thinking?

I do not know. I am the Recorder, I tell what there is, interesting or less interesting; what it is that slumbers in the womb of the future.

 

Maximilian knocked carefully on
the door to his parental home, and when his mother, Eva Whippoorwill, uneasily opened the door and saw him standing there on the stoop, tired and miserable after months in solitary, she began to weep. Like all the others, Eva had been told that Maximilian would be released two days later, and the surprise—in combination with joy and relief and terror at how he looked—overwhelmed her. She threw herself forward and embraced him, and they stood like that a long, long time. She felt the warmth from his body and the beating of his heart. He was alive.

They had the evening meal together; Eva set the table in the kitchen. After the time in solitary, Maximilian had contracted—his body was still full of surprises and transformations—and it was apparent that he needed food. Despite the fact that he maintained he was hungry and although the delicacies that Eva Whippoorwill set out in haste—vegetable timbale with cold sliced roast beef, baguettes and country pâté from lunch, and what was left of the garlic soufflé and red beet quiche from dinner—would have caused anyone's mouth to start watering, Maximilian managed almost nothing. He was not used to eating, and after a few bites he pushed it away.

The conversation was hesitant. Eva told him about the friends from before who still lived there, and what they were doing. Weasel Tukovsky, for example, one of my closest acquaintances when we were little, had just the year before become the first stuffed animal ever to run a marathon in less than three hours. Sven told about what had happened in the forest, and how he had fixed the drain and well last week.

After that, silence fell. It was neither unnatural nor un
comfortable. Sven and Eva were still shocked and happy at having Maximilian at home, but the almost ten years that had passed were like a deep, wide moat between parents and cub.

“Was it hard?” Eva asked at last.

Maximilian set aside his silverware and looked at his mother. In his gaze was something heavy, even unpleasant.

“You can tell us,” said Sven Beaver, “we're your family.”

Maximilian nodded, and there was a careful smile on his lips.

“You are my family,” he said thoughtfully. “Just as all stuffed animals in Mollisan Town are my family. You are my mother and my father and I am your cub, in the same way as all stuffed animals in Mollisan Town are my cubs, my mothers, and my fathers.”

Eva, at a loss, looked at her husband, who in turn looked down at his plate. What was the meaning of this? All her love, all her sacrifices, did they mean nothing?

“But,” she said, “you can't say that, Maximilian. I am your mother, I have taken care of you, your father and I brought you up and watched you mature, we're not…just anyone…”

“You are my family,” answered Maximilian, “you are a part of the whole, you are a part of all that is good and all that is less good in Mollisan Town, and I have come to lead you from the bad to the good. I love you.”

With these words he got up and climbed straight to the upper floor, to the room where he had not slept in almost twenty years. He undressed, lay down on the bed, and fell asleep within the course of a minute. His parents remained sitting in the kitchen. They dared not look each other in the eyes; they said nothing, but I believe they shared the same thought: The months in the claustrophobic solitary confinement cell must have made their son temporarily insane.

 

The following morning Eva
Whippoorwill woke up with a start. She sat up in bed, and confirmed that Sven was sleeping beside her. The bedroom on the first floor was in a dense darkness, it was still night, but through the gaps in the shades she could sense that the first rays of the sun were making their way over the horizon. She did not remember what she had dreamed, but it was not the dream that woke her; it was something else. Without trying to put words to her feeling, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stuck her claws in a pair of slippers. Her dressing gown was hanging on the bedroom door, and she wrapped it around herself as she went out into the living room.

There was a presence outside the house that she clearly sensed without being able to explain how or why, in the same way as when you wake from someone watching you for a long enough time. Eva continued out into the hall, but as she put her wing against the outside door to open it and see who was out there, she suddenly hesitated. Was there reason to be afraid? Was she in danger? This was the first time she had ever had the feeling of a strange presence in their distant forest glade. Should she wake Sven?

But that would be ridiculous. It was only a feeling, the remnants of a dream that she no longer recalled. It would be best to go back to bed, and back to sleep.

Yet she didn't. Instead she opened the outside door and stepped out onto the stoop. What she saw was—surreal.

On the round lawn in front of the house, but also along the pathways between the neighbors' houses and the whole way up to the forest edge, there were stuffed animals. They stood completely quiet in the early morning, while veils from the damp chill of the night still lay like transparent clouds across the ground. The stuffed animals had gathered
in Das Vorschutz by the hundreds; perhaps there were a thousand: elephants and wasps, giraffes and dolphins, dogs and insects, reptiles and birds. Eva got the impression that they were lined up in defined formations, as if a choreographer had divided them into smaller and larger groups, but this was probably only a matter of trying to make room.

The whole thing was overwhelming. The stillness did its part: the fact that no one moved, no one said anything. The air in Das Vorschutz was full of suppressed expectation.

Eva Whippoorwill slowly backed into the house and soundlessly closed the door behind her. Her pulse was racing, but her breathing was calm. She no longer had a thought about Sven; much less did she recall that Maximilian was sleeping in his room for the first time in many, many years. Eva waited, hesitated, but then opened the door again. Perhaps she thought that the stuffed animals outside had vanished?

But they were still there.

We were still there.

The first daylight of the Morning Weather painted us in its yellowish light. We saw Eva Whippoorwill come out on the stoop a second time, and she behaved in the same way as before. Slowly she let her gaze sweep across us, as if she were counting us. Not even a hint of astonishment on her face. We stood motionless as cloth statues in this beautiful forest glade where I had grown up; we must have frightened her, even if she pretended that we hadn't.

 

I had stationed myself
at my parents' house together with a group of stuffed animals that had come from west Tourquai. I did not know any of them; that is how large the three Retinues were nowadays.

We had planned for Maximilian's release as long as we had known the date. We had prepared a demonstration that
would have dumbfounded Mollisan Town. We had counted on thousands of animals outside King's Cross. We had talked about how the church would react; we still knew nothing about Vincent Tortoise and his involvement. But we got no further than speculation; in reality we could not see how our Retinues could challenge anyone or anything; we were much too peaceful and introspective for that.

Then came the news that they had fooled us, that Maximilian had already been set free. Therefore we were now standing here, a decimated band, and our only spectators were the trees, the forest, and Eva Whippoorwill.

Eva still said nothing, and I realized that she did not intend to say anything either. We were the ones who encroached on her reverie; we were the ones who needed to explain ourselves. I was just about to take a step forward and make myself known when Adam Chaffinch broke free from a larger group of stuffed animals that had been standing in the middle of the round lawn.

The movement was, in the midst of the compact stillness, almost offensive.

“We have come to meet Maximilian.”

His tone was low, soft, full of veneration. Eva nodded. She turned around, but before she had even managed to enter the house, Maximilian came out. He wore the bed-sheet around him, a white cover that dragged behind him like a bridal veil. And he had brought the pillowcase to tie into a headcloth over his head and ears.

Not a word was spoken. Yet what followed happened as if we had rehearsed it.

Maximilian seemed just as surprised as his mother. He went past her without hesitating—without granting her a glance, which afterward I would have a hard time accepting—and down the few steps to the gravel path. The stuffed animals who had stood unmoving took a few steps forward, those who stood nearby and those who stood far
away; we all closed up. Who came up with the idea of raising Maximilian from the ground, I do not know. Perhaps it was Adam? In any event, up into the air he was lifted, and the stuffed animals not only formed a king's throne beneath him; we became his ground, his earth.

In this way we carried him out of there, in the same silence in which we came. I never turned around; I did not want to know how Eva Whippoorwill looked when we disappeared with her only son.