Amberville (17 page)

Emma Rabbit looked into my eyes. She had no answers, but together with her I dared to formulate the questions.

There were no answers, and together with Emma I was secure enough to dare to admit that.

The first time Emma met Mother, we were treated to mushroom risotto with boiled viper’s grass and béarnaise sauce in the kitchen in Amberville. With it was served the pickled pumpkin preserve that was Mother’s specialty. That same afternoon Mother had baked a rich carrot bread and had time to season the fresh cheese with dill. Mother had exerted herself.

Father thought that the vanilla sauce with lime and confectioner’s sugar was a tad bitter when it was served with the rhubarb pie.

Emma thought there was a lot of food.

Eric was, as usual, not at home.

Many times I’ve tried to recall the conversation we carried on in the kitchen that evening, but I don’t recall a single word.

I recall that Emma was tense.

In her eyes it wasn’t my mother who, with an apron around her voluminous trunk, stirred the risotto, it was the legendary department head Rhinoceros Edda.

Several months later Emma hinted that she had expected something else. I can only speculate about what she meant. Perhaps candelabras and crystal chandeliers, servants and a political discussion. Politics had never been discussed in the little kitchen on Hillville Road. There we talked about cooking, sports, and everyday things.

Emma was not interested in politics. From that it followed that she was politically unaware. Did Emma say something foolish about politics that evening? Something Mother and Father found inappropriate? Was I ashamed in such a case? I hope that I wasn’t ashamed. The shame of being ashamed is heavy to bear.

I loved Emma Rabbit. You shouldn’t be ashamed of your beloved.

Love had come stealthily. Love had waited, lain in wait and attacked when I least suspected it.

I’d been defenseless.

The first days I didn’t dare say anything. We attended to our roles as usual. She asked how the night had been, I answered that it had been good. She asked if I wanted to have the window open or closed. I answered closed.

But I answered with a joy that I couldn’t rein in. Love made me strong and exhilarated. It didn’t take very long before I told her how I felt.

I was afraid of how she would react.

In the kitchen with Mother and Father, she was the one who was afraid. Why didn’t she let her eyes sparkle and reveal all their warmth and joy? When Mother asked about her ambitions and mentioned that I’d told her about her paintings, why didn’t she say anything?

At ten o’clock Emma went home.

It was as if she’d never been there.

Mother and I sat down in the living room. We heard Father upstairs. Often he would sit at the desk in their bedroom and work until far into the night. I needed times to talk alone with Mother. It was a need she’d implanted in me, just as physical as my need for food or sleep. The spiritual closeness I felt toward her was coupled with these conversations.

As usual, we’d each opened a bottle of mineral water and placed them in front of us on the coffee table.

“Teddy, she’s marvelous,” said Mother as we heard Father’s footsteps from upstairs.

Then an insight struck me. When I heard Mother praise Emma Rabbit, common sense forced its way up through
my amatory intoxication. For a moment I saw my beloved objectively. As Mother saw her.

I shut my eyes.

But a feeling of uncertainty remained. I understood that there was another way of looking at Emma Rabbit, in a different light than love’s rosy shimmer. I understood that the essence of my love was a loss of distance. This sort of absorption in one’s self and one’s own feelings was one of evil’s many temptations. Without distance, I felt myself pleasantly free from responsibility.

This made me afraid.

I consoled myself that this insight about the danger made it harmless. (Later I understood that this thought, too, was an attempt by evil to overthrow my mission in life.)

I tried to restrain myself. In the morning when Emma Rabbit came in I kept my eyes shut.

But it’s your deepest emotions that are the most difficult to conceal.

Emma Rabbit was like a drug. I could not refrain from the delight mixed with terror she infused into my heart.

One day we took a long walk on the shore in Hillevie. Emma had come to get me without advance notice.

We have something to celebrate, she said.

She didn’t say what it was. The daytime breeze picked up as we came down to the sea. Her ears bumped against her cheeks. She held on to me so as not to fall down. I held on to her. There was a scent of salty damp from the sea and of damp yarn around Emma. In a little more than a quarter of an hour the Afternoon Rain would be over Mollisan Town, while we were walking securely out here in Hillevie, watching the dark clouds passing over our heads.

“Teddy,” she said, “I’ve given notice.”

She was beaming with happiness. With happiness.

I was struck with panic. If she hadn’t been holding me under the arms I would have fallen flat onto the cold sand.

“Emma Rabbit,” I said, “will you marry me?”

I had thought about asking earlier. I had abstained. I’d been wise and strategic. I was through with so-called wisdom now. A seagull was screeching out over the sea.

“Emma Rabbit,” I repeated, “will you marry me?”

Later she would tease me about that. It was my need for control that caused me to get to the point, she would say. When I realized that I wouldn’t get to see her at work anymore.

She was so lovely on the shore at Hillevie. Happy as a cub at having finally made her decision and chosen art.

I put a damper on the mood with my proposal. I couldn’t let be.

“Emma Rabbit,” I said for a third time, “will you marry me?”

Her broad smile became even broader. She nodded and whispered, “Yes, thanks.” It was enchanting.

In the very next moment I knew that I could never carry out the marriage.

It had to do with Father.

Eric and I grew up with a powerful father figure. Boxer Bloom served not only as our role model; he was a role model for many. The stories about him were legion. The one I personally placed foremost, and which moved me most deeply, dealt with pride, dignity, and respect. It dealt with a stuffed animal’s attitude toward his place of employment.

When I started at Wolle & Wolle, it was unavoidable that I compared myself to my father.

Father had been trained as a schoolteacher. Immediately after his education, he started to work at the elementary school in Amberville, where he later remained. He taught chemistry and physics and made himself known for his unusually just treatment of the pupils. He became the school system’s living model, who proved that it was possible
to treat everyone alike: cats and chimpanzees, foxes and badgers.

Therefore it was peculiar that Rector Owl called on Father in that particular affair that would transform their lives.

This was at the time when Eric and I were not yet in school, because we were too little. One evening as Father sat correcting papers in his office, there was an unexpected knock at the door. Father stopped what he was doing and looked out through the window. The storm had swept in over the city. Father often worked late, because he could be in peace in the evenings. Now he asked the person who was knocking to come in. To Father’s astonishment, Bo Owl was standing outside the door.

“Bloom,” said Rector Owl, “do you have a minute?”

Of course Father had a minute for the venerable rector. Owl had already been serving at Amberville when Father had been a pupil at the school. Father pushed his papers aside and prepared to listen. It was the first time Owl had called on him after school hours.

“You do have Nathan in your physics class, don’t you?” said Bo Owl.

Nathan was Bo Owl’s cub, a beaver who’d been delivered to the rector and his wife late in life. Now Owl’s cub was in one of Father’s final-year classes, and he had major problems with physics.

Father nodded thoughtfully, and said, “With your help, Bo, I’m certain that Nathan is going to pass his examination.”

“Unfortunately that’s not good enough, Bloom,” sighed the owl. “Nathan wants to continue his studies at the art academy. So he has to have the highest grades in all of his subjects, even in physics. Just passing isn’t good enough.”

“Then he’s really going to have to work at it,” declared Father.

That Beaver Nathan would receive the highest grades in physics, Father considered to be more or less impossible.
Nathan had neither aptitude for nor understanding of the subject.

“We’re planning to work at it,” the rector assured him. “You can be quite certain that I as well as Nathan are going to do everything in our power to succeed.”

Father nodded.

“But what I would really appreciate,” continued the rector, “were if you, Bloom, also did everything you could.”

Father said that he always did his best. According to his opinion, most of the pupils responded well.

Father misunderstood the rector’s intentions. The idea of giving Beaver a grade that had nothing to do with his efforts was so preposterous that it didn’t occur to Father.

Rector Owl was forced to become explicit to the point of vulgarity. The conversation ended with Owl openly threatening Father. If Beaver Nathan wasn’t guaranteed the highest grade in physics, Father would lose his job.

Father left school that evening crushed. When he came home, at first he didn’t want to tell Mother what had happened. That an animal he had long admired could behave in this way made him deeply distressed.

He did not consider giving in to the threat.

Toward midnight he told how things stood. Mother’s reaction was practical.

“But we’ll never be able to afford living here,” she said.

Mother understood immediately that Father didn’t intend to accommodate Owl. He would thereby lose his job. The monthly payments for the mortgage on the house in Amberville were still high and Mother’s career had not yet taken off.

“No, no, there’s no danger,” said our naïve father. “It’s clear that Rector Owl is going to come to his senses.”

Father was convinced that the rector would feel regret.

Father was convinced that the rector would call on him the very next day and apologize. The apology would be ac
cepted, Boxer explained to Mother that night; we all react instinctively sometimes.

Naturally Bo Owl didn’t make an apology.

On the contrary.

When Owl realized that Boxer Bloom had no intention of doing what he wanted, Owl committed a serious mistake. What drove him to it? No one knows. Perhaps it was as Father believed, an overdeveloped protective instinct that went along with the fact that Owl got Nathan so late in life.

Bo Owl paid some baboons to threaten Father.

The baboons broke the windows at our house, wrote dirty words on our door, and subjected Father’s pupils to harassment. This treatment didn’t work. Father didn’t get scared. Instead Father’s empathy with Rector Owl deepened. For obvious reasons, this further provoked the rector.

Finally the apes threatened us.

They threatened Mother and me and Eric.

Then Father had had enough. Rage and terror caused him to make an unwise decision. He challenged the baboons to a duel. I don’t know how it went, how he managed to contact them, but so it was. Mother fled the field and took us cubs home to Grandmother.

When the apes came, there were more than twenty of them. I can see them walking abreast in two columns along Hillville Road. I can even imagine the lonely silhouette that stood in the middle of the street outside our house and waited for them. Desperate and furious. Broad and heavy, there he stands, watching them come.

When less than a hundred meters separates them, Father shouts, “Now it’s over! This is going to be the last thing you do!”

The apes slow their pace somewhat.

A sense of uncertainty appears in their ranks. There stands a single dog and seems convinced that he can get the better of them. This scene is one of the clearest memories my brother and I carry with us throughout life. Despite the fact that we weren’t even there.

The baboons suspect an ambush.

Amberville is not a district that they know, and one of them gets the idea that Bloom has mobilized the entire neighborhood. The rumor spreads in the ranks of the apes. Stuffed animals are sitting in the houses, waiting for Boxer’s signal. At any moment they’re going to come storming out onto the street and support him. Otherwise he would be crazy to challenge them alone.

When one of the apes in the forward rank stops, they all stop. The uncertainty increases. There is scarcely fifty meters between father and the baboons.

Father lets out a battle cry.

“Now I’m going to get you!”

With these words he starts running toward them.

The apes stand as though petrified. The scene is absurd; they can’t believe it. The most cowardly of them turns around and flees. Within a few seconds Father has the moral advantage. He increases his speed and screams at the top of his voice, “Now I’m coming to get you!”

Reality exceeds imagination. One by one the apes turn and follow close on the heels of the first deserter. Father imperceptibly reduces his speed so as not to catch up with the bravest.

The slowest.

He stops when he reaches the spot where the apes began their retreat. He looks far after them, knowing that they are never going to make problems for him again. The apes are going to feel ashamed. They are never going to tell the story as it was. Rector Owl is defeated and cub Nathan will
get his rightful grade. Regardless of what that is and what it leads to.

“Now I’m going to get you, said Father.”

Eric and I made those words legendary. We told the story over and over again. We repeated it so many times that the reality became a fairy tale. A story of right and wrong. Of integrity and honor. Of decline and corruption.

A few days after Father had defeated the apes, Jason Horse phoned from the Ministry of Culture.