The Book of Revelation (11 page)

Though he had flinched in the beginning, and though it still hurt when she bent down with the pen, drawing what felt like hundreds of short lines on him, it was almost a relief to have pain occurring in a different place. It took his attention away from the nightmare of the ring, it was something new to think about. . . . After a while, he found that he could hardly feel the scratching of the nib at all, and he would lift his head to see what, if anything, was happening. He would watch in a kind of stupor as the beads of blood welled up on to the surface of his skin, mingled with the ink, and then spilled sideways in quick, dark lines, reminding him of the way a girl’s mascara runs when she is crying. He could only stare as the woman etched a single word on to his body, a four-letter word, the most possessive pronoun that exists:

MIJN

•

Gertrude noticed the tattoo almost as soon as she stepped into the room that evening. It would have been hard not to. By that time, the skin around and underneath the letters was thoroughly inflamed; the whole area had lifted into a raw, red weal. For a moment she stood still. Then her head turned and she looked into his face. Her eyes glittered fiercely inside her hood.

“Who did this?”

Somehow, he didn’t feel like making things easy for her.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know?”

“You all look the same. How am I supposed to know which one of you it was?” He paused. “It could have been you for all I know.”

She bent down, both hands braced on her knees, her elbows jutting sideways into the air. She inspected the tattoo at close range, her face just inches from it, then she straightened quickly and walked out of the room.

When she returned a few minutes later she had the others with her. For the first time in days all three women were wearing their black cloaks, which he took to be an indication of how serious things were. He watched Gertrude take Maude by the upper arm and point at the tattoo. She wanted an explanation, but Maude leaned away from her, resisting her, the way a child might. Gertrude persisted with her questioning. When Maude finally spoke, he heard the word
ziekenhuis,
which he knew was Dutch for
hospital
. But no sooner had Maude used the word than she broke off in mid-sentence and lowered her head, as if chastened. Both the other women glanced sharply in his direction. Though this puzzled him, he didn’t ponder it for long. The injury to him didn’t seem sufficiently severe to warrant talk of hospitals—and anyway, he was more interested in the fact that there had been anger in Maude’s voice, something he couldn’t remember hearing before. She was standing up for herself for once.

At some deeper level, she was also standing up for him, of course. She had disapproved of what the others were doing to him, and the tattoo she had inflicted on him was testament to the strength of that disapproval. In tattooing him, she was attempting to reclaim him; she was saying that he belonged to her, only to her, because only she truly cared for him. He had always assumed that the women’s behaviour was governed by a code—at the very least, there had to be some kind of understanding—but this was his first real glimpse of it. Obviously, in this case, Maude had acted alone, without permission, and against the spirit of the group. As he lay there, listening to her being scolded, he realised that a crack had opened right in front of him. Why not try and drive a wedge into it?

Lifting his head, he said, “It’s all right. There’s no need to argue.”

He felt Gertrude turn and look at him.

“The tattoo,” he said, “it’s really not a problem. You don’t have to be angry with her.”

“This isn’t your business,” Gertrude said.

“I was the one who was tattooed,” he said. “Whose business is it, if it isn’t mine?”

Gertrude turned to Astrid and spoke to her rapidly in Dutch, then all three women left the room, with Gertrude still gripping Maude by the upper arm. When the door had closed, he lay back with a faint smile on his face.

•

It had always been Maude who had taken care of the menial tasks. The next morning, though, Gertrude and Astrid appeared in her place. He could only imagine that Maude was in disgrace, and that all access to him had been denied. Perhaps, like him, she had been confined to a room somewhere in the building, and was now lying on a single bed, her big round face turned sullenly towards the wall. When he asked Astrid where “her friend” was—he used the words deliberately, provocatively—Astrid refused to answer. He sensed that the two women had had just about enough of his impertinence. If he wasn’t careful, another punishment would come his way.

Towards the middle of the day Astrid stepped into the room. She was alone this time. She had replaced her black cloak with a brown suede jacket, jeans and a pair of brown leather boots with low heels. Though he was always apprehensive when she appeared on her own—understandably so, since it often preceded some new form of violation she had dreamed up—he discovered that he was smiling. So many Dutch girls dressed that way. It almost amounted to a uniform. He wondered if her face was also typical. Just for a moment he could see her on a bicycle, with short blonde hair, a wide mouth, and steady grey-blue eyes that looked bold or unimpressed.

Astrid seemed to consider his smile, then decide not to comment on it. Instead, she told him that he had a première in two days’ time. He would be required to dance in front of an invited audience.

He stared at her, nonplussed.

“I can’t dance,” he told her. “I’m out of condition. I haven’t trained for—” He did not even know how long it was since he had last trained.

“You will dance to the best of your ability,” she said.

“And what about this?” He held up the chain. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“That’s part of it. A test of your,” and she paused, “of your ingenuity.” She turned and walked a few paces, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Then she stopped and looked at him across one shoulder. “You’re a choreographer, aren’t you?”

He lay back, said nothing. Wind gusted across the roof, a full, low sound, like someone blowing across the top of an empty bottle.

“It will be worth your while,” he heard her say.

His laughter was bitter, sardonic. “Where have I heard that before?” He lifted his head again, watched her move smugly towards the door. “That hood with those clothes,” he said. “It looks ridiculous.”

She paused with one hand on the door-handle. “And you,” she said, “what do you look like?”

•

He leaned against the wall in the half-dark, the cold iron of the staple just to one side of his head. The number of times that he had tried to pull that staple out of the wall. . . . He had tugged and heaved and strained, but it hadn’t moved at all, not even minutely. He had examined the chain as well, to see if he could find a weak link. There were none. He had even thought about taking the chain in both hands and ripping the ring free of his foreskin—

But no, he couldn’t do it.

He couldn’t face that bright flash of agony as the flesh tore, and then the pain that would follow it, spreading outwards like a brilliant, unearthly colour until it enveloped him completely. And there was always a chance that he might seriously injure himself.

Perhaps he was just a coward. . . .

In any case, he had reached a point where he had begun to feel as if his fate was no more or less than he deserved. There was nothing random or accidental about what had happened to him. There was nothing
unlucky
about it. All those years of performing on stage—exhibiting himself. . . . What was dance if it was not exposure of the body? It was as though he had advertised himself. He pressed his forehead against the wall, but its coolness did not soothe him. He felt impotent and useless. He felt dull-witted too. Whether he deserved his fate or not, he still had no idea what that fate might be. His only vision of the future was a present that endured and did not alter. He stayed sitting by the wall in a kind of trance or dream-state. His whole mind seemed to be floating, as if there was no gravity inside his head.

He remembered Astrid’s proposal. Almost despite himself, he found that it appealed to him. Even if the performance was a travesty, at least he would be dancing. And it would occupy him, give him a sense of purpose. He returned to the rubber mat. Lying down on his side, with one hand under his cheek and his knees drawn up towards his chest, he tried to think of a ballet that might be appropriate. He quickly rejected his own works as being unequal to the occasion. After all, this was his chance to comment on what had happened to him, and for that he would need a classic, he felt, something that everybody knew and loved, something that was virtually a cliché. He wanted irony, a sense of paradox.

Sometime during the night he woke up knowing that his choice would be
Swan Lake
. He hadn’t danced classical ballet for at least ten years, but he had seen countless performances of
Swan Lake
while studying in London, and he knew it well enough. He was thinking particularly of Act Three, often referred to as “the black act.” During Act Two the Prince has met Odette, who has been turned into a white swan. She can only be freed by a man who loves nobody but her, and the Prince has sworn that he will be this man. In Act Three, however, he meets Odile. Odile bears a striking resemblance to Odette, the only difference being that she dresses in black. Assuming that they are one and the same person, the Prince falls for Odile and announces that he intends to marry her. In doing so, he betrays Odette, the woman he actually loves. What has been done cannot be undone, and the ballet ends tragically for both of them, with Odette condemned to remain a swan and the Prince drowning in the lake.

He glanced down at the chain, ten feet of dimly glinting metal coiled on the floor beside him. His smile was thin-lipped, mirthless. He would have to improvise, of course. Many of the steps would be impossible, given the restrictions he would be working under. In fact, during the next twenty-four hours, he would have to choreograph the sequence all over again. But that, in itself, would be a challenge.

What an unusual
Swan Lake
it was going to be—a version that had never been seen before, and would never be seen again.

A special performance, one night only.

Swan Lake In Chains.

•

The following morning, as he rehearsed, ideas came quickly to him. The strange thing was, Astrid was proved right. She had said the chain would be a test of his ingenuity, and that was exactly what it turned out to be. Obviously, there were certain jumps, such as the
double tour en l’air,
that he would be unable to attempt, but that, in itself, was a kind of provocation. It allowed him to alter one of the most famous set-pieces in classical ballet. Even Nureyev, who had re-choreographed
Swan Lake
for his performance with Fonteyn in 1966, even Nureyev would not have tampered with the four pirouettes that end the Prince’s solo in Act Three. Ironically, then, the chain gave him freedom. It not only prompted him to change the actual steps, it was also a metaphor around which he could construct his own personal vision of the ballet. It became a way of reinterpreting the story. The solo that the Prince dances after meeting Odile, the black swan, is supposed to communicate his euphoria at having found the love of his life, but if the Prince dances the solo as a man in chains, then his euphoria is undermined, and he begins to look deluded, almost laughable. The real beauty of this new
Swan Lake,
then, was its sub-text: he would be using the ballet both to expose and to ridicule the whole idea of the women’s love for him, which was not a tribute or a celebration, whatever they might say, but an entirely destructive force.

It was Gertrude who brought him lunch that day. “So,” she said as she set the tray down beside him, “you have decided to dance for us.”

He nodded. “I’m going to perform
Swan Lake
. Well, part of it, anyway.”

“A wonderful choice. I think our audience will enjoy that very much.”

“Of course, I’ve had to alter it a bit.” Smiling brightly, he held the chain up in the air between them.

“Yes,” she said in a slightly puzzled voice. “Of course.”

It was a conversation she was having trouble with, and she seemed relieved when, turning to more practical matters, he told her that if they wanted him to dance
Swan Lake
for them he would need to be able to listen to the music.

During the afternoon Astrid appeared with a sound system and a CD of
Swan Lake
that had been recorded in the sixties, with von Karajan conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Once she had connected the CD player and the speakers she stood back with her arms folded and stared at him. As usual, he seemed to arouse a mass of different feelings in her—hostility, wariness, triumph—and these mingled uneasily, making it difficult for him to bring her into any kind of focus. The way she would fall still in front of him sometimes reminded him of a humming-bird’s wings: it wasn’t stillness at all, in fact, but the illusion of stillness, created by rapid movement, agitation.

In her opinion, she said, he should not have been provided with the equipment, and if he used it for anything other than listening to music, the consequences would be severe. He nodded, to signal that he had understood. Then, with hardly an alteration in her tone of voice, she told him how much they were looking forward to his performance the following evening, and how they were sure it was going to be a great success. He nodded again, wishing she would leave the room. She stared at him for a moment longer, then she turned away.

As soon as she had closed the door behind her, he put on the CD. Turning the volume up almost as high as it would go, he sat down by the wall and waited.

The music began.

For days, if not for weeks, he had been held in virtual silence, with only the creaks of the building to listen to, or the rattle of the skylight, or the whisper of the women’s cloaks across the floor. Music had been denied to him; he had almost forgotten such a thing existed. The power of it, though. The power and the sweetness. Even though it was
Swan Lake,
a piece that had never had any great significance for him. He listened to the whole ballet, from beginning to end. He could not move. Usually, if music was playing, it had an immediate physical effect on him—he would walk around, he might even dance—but on that afternoon he remained in the same position for an hour and a half, with his legs stretched out in front of him and his back against the wall, and, once or twice, to his surprise, to his bewilderment, he reached up, touched his face and found that it was wet.