The Balloonist (13 page)

Did Master and Lady find it good enough for their supper, this coarse fare that they ate themselves? Quite good enough, in fact luxurious. Did Master and Lady want more of something or anything? Nothing. What was provided was utterly sufficient. She would cause Timo (it
was
Timo, the strong young man with the flaxen hair) to bring an oil lamp, to see by. Unnecessary; the fire provided quite sufficient light. Thanks on all sides. A surplus of hospitality, but still with tremors. We are not spooks, old woman. Mortals like you, chilled by rain and warmed by fire, fond of cold mutton and cheese. The old woman was gone, but the boy lingered on for some reason. Finally he worked up his courage.

“Flyga
morgon?”

What?

“Soar again tomorrow?”

Well, perhaps not tomorrow, but we would soar again in the future.

“Take me with?”

It was an even draw which was harder work for him, his courage or his Swedish. One or the other, or both together, made the sweat stand on his brow and his eyes blink, but his dream of soaring held him rooted there before us, in spite of the peril of mysterious retributions he could only guess at. Good night, Finn boy, dream of soaring, bide your time, the air is full of hydrogen and all the worms in China are making silk as you sleep. He was gone. We were alone. The rain pattered constantly on the shingled roof.

Seated at the rustic table in the firelight, we ate the mutton and the cheese, drank the ale, and finished it off with elderberry preserves on coarse peasant bread. Luisa rose from her chair and wandered around the room, pausing finally before the fire. She held out her hands to the warmth. “Oh, I am wet. I am soaked to the skin.” She said this not as though reporting a physical discomfort but absently, dreamily, in the tone of one who says that she is sleepy, or that her tiredness is good. With the utmost simplicity she raised her arms to feel under the soft mass of hair behind her neck and unfasten certain snaps. Then, reaching lower along her back, she opened other fastenings. The traveling gown slipped down to reveal some expensive linen. As a gentleman I naturally looked the other way. I sat at the rustic table, turned up the ale mug and found it empty, and stared at the door. Presently I heard her voice inquiring where the trolls had put the bath towel. It was at the end of the table, neatly folded.

“Well, bring it here, foolish fellow.”

Amid a great silence I did as I was told. When I turned with the towel I saw with a certain surprise that the expensive linen, all of it as far as I could tell, had arranged itself over the chair by the fire. She was still facing
the fire with her back to me, one hand supporting herself on the back of the chair, a knee bent and resting on the chair seat. In the gloom of the half-lit room there was visible a slender back of a quite unbelievable paleness, the shadows of the vertebrae faintly visible along it. Petulantly she looked around to see if the towel was coming. The long brow was still calm (the hair had come down in some way, how the devil had that happened!) and the mouth was as usual held together with those two creases that signified, perhaps, the irritation of a will confronted with the intractability and rebelliousness of substance, its own included. The towel was put around her with a gesture like enfolding wings: holding the corners in my two hands I placed it onto the pale back and passed the corners around the shoulders to her waiting hands. But through a clumsy accident, a fumbling, these hands took not only the corners of the towel but my own fingers as well and drew them downward. The towel had escaped me and in place of it I felt two soft and warm prominences designed by a malicious ingenuity exactly to fit my hands, with something like two tiny fingers in the centres that stiffened to press against my own. For a second or two she remained motionless. Then, turning about so that the towel half fell from her, she pressed her forearms weakly against my chest to defend herself—herself! who was defending me?—while the pink spider mounted upward toward the pale shadow of her throat. “You … that is not what I meant … that is not what I meant you to do.” The flush continued over her face, her elbow dug into my chest, she really was angry or a part of her was. Yet all these struggles and twistings, these ostensible and ineffective efforts to escape that for all I know were quite sincere, were in evident conflict with another part of her being that she was powerless to influence. She was helpless against the thing and so was I.
That is not what I meant
…
that is not what I meant you to do
, she was whispering with her face close to mine.
You are … oh, dearest beloved, that is not what I meant you to do.
But her limbs seemed now to move quite for themselves, in ways she had not intended. Her last faint objection was muffled, crushed under the softness of her lips. When her mouth was freed again she had nothing to say. This femme savante, this reader of
Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen
had become phenomenally wordless, there was only the patter of raindrops on the shingles and the soft sputtering of the fire. Through some legerdemain we sank into a yielding abyss consisting of a bed
from the previous century with an enormous feather quilt, along with some fresh bed linen smelling of lilac. The mouth erstwhile held so firmly was now seeking and tremulous, a flower with pale edges. How had this transformation taken place? It was magic too that resistance and softness could mingle so ingeniously, that a point of coral so delicately gathered on the faintly pendulous hemisphere, almost too fragile to touch, was the key when brushed ever so lightly of the power that drew us together in a soft convulsion, downward and ever downward, while we swam feebly, the motions of our limbs only carrying us farther from the surface and deeper into this sea of warm and fantastic shapes until the deepest and most secret shadow parted and drew to itself, by some miracle, exactly that seeking part of me that yearned so heartfeltly to be enclosed in exactly those pulsating rings of hot honey that quickened and tightened about it, in a manner almost alarming, until at last it—she, I, everything, I am not sure exactly what—burst into its cataclysmic and astonishingly prolonged expostulation of surrender. The storm passed, we lay finally half-tangled in each other's limbs, knowing neither ourselves nor each other and having become a single oblivion. The fire went out, that Finnish cottage grew terribly cold, thank God for the featherbed.

Asleep. One eighth awake. Half awake. Then asleep again, yet awake enough to be aware that I was sleeping so that I could feel the white slithering of the linen along my limbs as I turned, now and then the contact of a warm and columnar softness against my knee. I am aware finally that I am not in Stresa but in another part of the world. An embracing silence, no sound but the faint creaking of the ropes that hold the silk to the gondola, as though the Prinzess herself were stirring in her sleep. In my half-waking state I feel an odd dread, a premonition of some watchful and waiting thing that is hostile in a diffuse and unclear way and yet a thing that is most deeply craved. If this thing is awake, I tell myself, it is better for me to be awake too. I crawl out of the sleeping sack of reindeer skin (perdition take the contraption, it leaves hairs all over you just as I expected) and fasten the hood of my coat tighter around the neck against the cold. As soon as I rise to my feet I am struck by the beauty of the scene. The sky is barred with stripes of thin clouds through which the sun, almost on the horizon now, shines weakly and
indistinctly, its outline soft as though melted. The sea is an immensely hard and reflecting pewter. Because the sun has sunk into the cloud bank and can no longer warm the balloon even slightly, it has descended until the guide ropes touch the surface of the water. Still the sun is there, now whitish, now greyish, picking its way along the horizon sideways and beginning already to curve imperceptibly back into the heavens again. It was no doubt this white unsleeping sun, at two o'clock in the morning, that filled me with that odd premonition of something not as it should be, of a watchful presence. That and the sinking of the Prinzess so that the three guide ropes, dropping below now in a shallow curve, touch the pewter surface and carve onto it three arrow-shaped marks, not plashing and lacy like the wake of a ship, but as hard as the surface of the sea itself. In some way I had sensed this closer presence of the sea, perhaps because the guide ropes, even though they made no sound detectable by the outward ear, had spoken in some mysterious way to a sense in my inner self. Or perhaps the very slightly greater heaviness of the air itself, as we sank lower, had wakened me. If there are liquids which can detect the coming of a distant storm, shrinking and trying to hide in their tubes of glass, then perhaps in some infinitely tinier capillaries of the body the fluids may respond in a similar way to the lower altitude, imperceptibly, but enough to stir the consciousness already on the needle point of waking. When the föhn sweeps over central Europe the suicide rate triples; the soul is sensitive to the minutest changes in the air around it. The question is not to invent new detectors for the messages of nature, it is to learn to listen to the detectors that are already with us. Well, bother! enough of this philosophising. I should have been a schoolmaster; I rap with my ruler and tell those in the back row to wake up. “Tell us more facts!” they cry out. You are already breathing facts; they pass into your blood and pulse in the hair tubes of the brain, demanding only that you awaken to listen to them. Perdition take it! they would have driven me to an asylum in a week, those inky-fingered boys with their smell of porridge. Which direction are we going? The wind is south again. So much the better. We are headed keenly and willy-nilly toward our destination, that mathematical point where a lot of invisible and quite arbitrary lines converge.

At my feet
my two companions are humped furry rectangles, indistinct in the grey light. Their heads are totally hidden. One of the shapes stirs slightly, a foot flexes and extends in the bag of hide. It is not Waldemer but the other; I can recognize the slenderer form even though the sleeping sacks are identical. Detecting in some way that I am watching, perhaps by a capillary intuition analogous to that by which I detected only a little while before that the sun was watching me, this form stirs, rolls over, and finally a head protrudes from the opening of the sack. Theodor emerges, in absolute silence puts on his cap and winds a woolen scarf around it and over his ears, and then stands up to look at the pewter sea. He is cold. He shifts from one foot to the other and his elbows press against his sides. We converse in low tones in order not to awake our companion.

With the scarf around his head he resembles a bedouin, an effect enhanced by his dark Persian eyes and his paleness. “I dislike that sun,” he remarks calmly.

“Because it ought to go away at night?”

“Not for that exactly. Because in staying up at night, it tries to fool us by looking like the moon. That milkiness.”

“You don't like milk?”

“I detest milkiness and snow, everything white. It suggests things clammy to the touch. Corpses, winding sheets.”

“In that case I'm afraid you are taking your vacation in the wrong direction. Ahead of us everything is white, the sea as well.”

“I'm not on my vacation.” Stiffly. “It isn't a complaint. I am simply remarking my preferences.”

The well-concealed but unmistakable feminine trace in this temperament comes out now and then in these intuitions, these preferences for one landscape over another. In making it clear he is not complaining, however, he is at his most manly. Theodor is more complicated than he seems, or than he would like to reveal. Bands of India rubber stretch through him on the inside, their tension creating the perfect symmetry of his exterior. I refrain from reminding him that on the Aletschhorn, only a few months ago, he told me he liked white things; but that was in another existence, in another universe, it happened to other persons.

“Ahead,” I
point out, “you can see iceblink.” It is faintly visible on the northern horizon, a band of white against the iron grey of the clouds. “The white sky is caused by reflection of light from the ice beneath it, which is also white. On the ice white animals prey on each other.”

“And their blood when it is shed is white also?”

“No, it is red just like ours. Their eyes too are various colours, such as black or cobalt. There are exceptions to the whiteness, but in general the region we are approaching is white.”

“We don't seem to be approaching it very fast.”

“We are, as a matter of fact. We would go even a little faster if we rose a bit, since there is no need for the guide ropes to be in the sea now that the wind is from the south.”

Together, fumbling a little in our mittens, we work to release ballast. Theodor manipulates the ballast cord with precision and makes no mistakes. A quantity of lead shot, stretching out in a long and indistinct line, falls in absolute silence into the sea. The Prinzess stirs, a little unwillingly (she is sleepy too), and at last lifts her guide ropes out of the water, trails them down to touch it once again briefly, and begins a slow climb. When the sun warms the gas again it will expand, and we will have to release a little of it. In this the balance between these globules of lead and the infinitely finer molecules of hydrogen—our lives lie cupped like moths in a boy's hand. If we could hide under the fog bank ahead it would protect us from the sun and thus from the loss of more hydrogen, but we will have to climb over the fog bank, otherwise it would be impossible to take observations.