Amberville (21 page)

T
hey lifted Eric out of the ravine.

Down from the sky came a chair in slow motion. It was an absurd experience, because they could neither see the arm of the crane nor the wires, only a large armchair slowly gliding down out of the gray-black night sky. They caught sight of it at roughly the same time. Soundlessly it landed a few meters from them.

“The bear will sit down,” said a gruff voice that echoed down to the bottom of the ravine.

Eric looked from one friend to the other, and they nodded. They had confidence in him. Even Snake looked hopeful.

“You’ll manage this,” said Tom-Tom, giving Eric a pat on the shoulder. “Damn it.”

Sam nodded in agreement, and Eric took the few steps over to the armchair and sat down. Immediately the chair began to be hoisted up, and with a tense hold on the arm of the chair Eric Bear vanished into the night.

His friends down on Left-hand Road could hear the tumult that broke out above them when the armchair finally became visible to those who were waiting. The snake,
the crow, and the gazelle stood completely still, listening to the sounds from the Garbage Dump’s animals as they departed with Eric. Then it became silent again.

Unpleasantly silent.

Sam looked at Snake, who slowly let the green tip of his tail sway back and forth.

“I’m not saying anything,” he said. “I’m not saying anything.”

Sam took a hoof-full of light-blue pills out of his pants pocket, generously offering some to his friends. The snake and the crow declined, the one with contempt and the other courteously and amiably, whereupon the gazelle—not without a certain amount of difficulty—swallowed the pills himself.

They carried Eric on
the armchair to the Garbage Town. His plan was to try to commit the route to memory so as to be able to make his way back on his own, and this demanded concentration. They carried him through tunnels and over a bridge. Back and forth, it felt like, across these mountains of refuse in a dark world which stank of putrefaction and where none of the contours were comprehensible to him.

Four stuffed animals carried the armchair on their shoulders. Eric perceived their strong odors and guessed that they were horses of various types, perhaps dromedaries or donkeys. Around them a dozen shadowy figures were moving in the night, and after a few minutes Eric identified Hyena Bataille as the group’s commander. He had heard about Bataille. Up to now the bear had succeeded in maintaining a certain composure, but now the feeling of displeasure became much too strong. He abandoned his ambition of memorizing the many right and left turns, and instead closed his eyes. Images of Teddy and Emma filled him. But despite the fact that he exerted himself to refrain, again and
again his thoughts slipped over to Bataille. Could everything he’d heard be true?

After perhaps a quarter of an hour, the surrounding sounds became louder and louder. Eric opened his eyes and understood that he was on the outskirts of the Garbage Town he’d heard talk of but never seen. In the moonlight—there surely remained a half hour before the full moon would become half again—hovels formed of refuse were outlined. Walls and roofs leaned at odd angles, or else the constructions were on their way to sinking down into the dump’s clay blanket of refuse. But the more compact the settlement became, Eric observed, the higher the walls rose.

When he saw Rat Ruth’s residence he realized that he had reached the center point of the Garbage Town. The queen’s residence consisted of a mass of free-standing, multi-angled hovels connected to each other by a network of winter garden–like passageways. Shards of glass of various colors had been pieced together in the passageways, and in the moonlight the mosaic sparkled to great effect.

The animals who led Eric to the residence handed him over to two bats. They led him along the multicolored glass corridors. The impression was kaleidoscopic; up was down and down was up, and several times the bear involuntarily stumbled where he was walking. It stank of muck and anxiety. The hyena had thankfully stayed outside, and from the howling crowd of animals that met Eric in the open area in front of the residence—and which reminded him of the angry mobs he’d read about in history books many years ago—not a sound was heard.

They passed through buildings that seemed to be empty and suspended in oblivion. In the glass corridors Eric was blinded by light; in the pitch-black hovels between them he couldn’t even see where he was setting his paws. The floor was uneven and sometimes crunched when he stepped on something. Here and there he believed he heard stuffed ani
mals whispering as he passed by, animals concealed by the solid darkness but who had become accustomed to it and therefore could see him without him seeing them.

It was only when they came into the queen’s hall that Eric could make out the contours around him. He was led in through an opening in the farther wall. Directly across, on the other side of the room, was Ruth’s throne. He sensed how a mass of movements occurred at the same moment as he came in, and he glimpsed tails and hind legs hurrying out through the door openings on the room’s opposite side.

Ruth was slumped on her throne, apparently bored, and hardly looked up as they approached. Eric, who had become accustomed to seeing her at the meetings of A Helping Hand, was shocked at how she suddenly seemed to fit in. From being a suspect rat who through her mere presence transformed the individuals around the conference table to normalcy, here she was in her right element. She radiated a power that Eric had never even suspected, and—this impression he had the moment he stepped into the hall, and it was reinforced during their conversation—she possessed a kind of passive goodness that took him completely by surprise. She was nonetheless the Queen of the Garbage Dump.

“Ruth,” he said, “I’m sorry to have to…”

He didn’t know how he should continue.

The rat was surprised by the direct address, and she sharpened her gaze. When she recognized him she seemed to be surprised, and she signaled to the bats to take a step to the side so that the bear wasn’t standing pressed in between them.

“Eric Bear?”

He nodded. “I’m sorry to have to look you up like this in the middle of the night,” he said, “but I have a matter which I must speak with you about. And it cannot wait.”

Above all else this seemed to amuse the rat. She sat up in her throne, signaled to Eric to come closer, and leaned for
ward a little, as one did to listen to a little cub. When Eric took a few steps forward, the bats followed along. The bear did his best to pretend not to notice this.

“It concerns a…” and he looked around again, into the darkness along the walls of the hall, “it concerns a list.”

The rat looked uninterested.

“A list?” she repeated.

“A list,” Eric confirmed.

But when he didn’t see even the hint of understanding in her gaze, he made himself clear in a whisper: “The Death List.”

The rat’s eyes narrowed. She leaned back, as if the cub she’d taken him for had shown himself to be more naïve than she’d thought.

“Leave us alone,” she commanded.

Both of the bats turned around and disappeared before Eric even had time to react. Judging by all the commotion along the dark walls, there had been several animals in there. When the silence resumed, Ruth looked at him commandingly at the same time as she raised one eyebrow.

“And so?” she said, and in her small, dull, pearl eyes he saw nothing either confirming or denying.

There he stood, alone and defenseless, in the Garbage Town queen’s innermost hall. The rat reposed heavily in her overwhelming power where she sat, but still, Eric felt no fear. He remained tense, however, uncertain whether she was trying to lull him into a false sense of security.

“I know,” said Eric, “that you draw up the Death List.”

“How is that?”

The words fell with an indifference that caused Eric to tremble.

“It has come to my knowledge,” he repeated, “that it is you who are behind the Death List.”

Ruth continued staring at him, and then burst out in loud, surprising laughter. It sounded like a quick succession
of snorts and contained no joy whatsoever, but it was still a laugh.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard,” snorted the queen. “Would Magnus allow me to decree over life and death?”

“It’s not the idea that you’re putting on airs,” said Eric in a voice which he hoped sounded convincing. “I know what I know.”

“Nonsense,” snorted the rat.

“Noah Camel,” said Eric.

The rat stiffened. “Who?”

“Your courier has been gossiping. And you don’t need to concern yourself about punishing him, he’s already gotten his punishment.”

“I’ve never heard talk of any camel,” said the rat, but there was a hesitation in her voice that hadn’t been there before.

“This is my story,” said Eric Bear.

Then he told everything that had happened. He told about Emma, and about the passion he’d experienced during their years of being in love, a passion which made him tremble with excitement and shake with jealousy. Love, said Eric Bear to Rat Ruth, had caused his heart to become heavier than an anchor from sorrow and dejection, and at the same time it had caused him to feel as exhilarated as a helium balloon. He told how passion deepened and turned into unselfish love, and then: the self-sacrificing, lavish love that made him courageous, invincible, and beautiful. Finally he told about love as the deep commonality that withstood trials and temptations by quite simply making him blind. How could he be lured by someone else, when he didn’t see anyone else, filled to the brim as he was by his soul’s one and only, Emma Rabbit.

Then Eric told about his twin brother Teddy, and about the life that Teddy was living which just as easily might have been Eric’s. And vice versa. And how the closeness
and tenderness that ached in him became harder and harder to endure with every year since their teens. The same pain, Eric admitted to Rat Ruth, was in Teddy, the same closeness, although with other indications, and it had always been like that. They were each other’s fate, they could not be separated and therefore it must be so, that if Magnus took one of them, he must also take the other. If only one of them remained, an asymmetry would arise which wasn’t possible, like east without west.

At the start Rat Ruth shook her head at Eric Bear’s swarm of words, and she yawned to show how bored she was. More than once she raised her paw to silence him, but he didn’t let himself be silenced. And slowly but surely he won her interest. Word by word, sentence by sentence, and minute by minute he pulled her into his emotional life and stuck her solidly between love and desperation. He could see that what he was saying actually meant something to her, that deep within the rat’s soul was a little rat who recognized itself.

And when he fell silent after having for the first time dared to formulate all the pain he’d closed up inside himself since last Tuesday up at the Environmental Ministry, the rat sat silently for a long time on her throne, staring at him.

Then she made her decision.

She waved him up to the throne, and showed with a gesture that he could take a place on one of the stair steps right next to her right back leg. It was only then that Eric noticed that Rat lacked a right claw, and it demanded a real exertion of will not to stare at the clawless leg.

The bear sat where he’d been shown, and Ruth spoke to him in a kind of hissing sound that could not possibly be heard by anyone else.

“It’s not me,” said Rat Ruth. “I have it here, it’s true, and I send it on. With the camel or with someone else, and that’s true as well. But I’m not the one who makes the list.”

A confession.

Eric was amazed.

The confession came directly, without awkwardness or pride. It was too simple, thought the bear. Why did she confess? So thoughtlessly? How could she be sure that Noah Camel really had squealed; perhaps she’d already spoken with Noah in the evening and knew that the game was up? Had the Queen of the Garbage Dump been seriously moved by Eric Bear’s sentimental stories?

“I don’t know who does it, and even if I did know,” said Ruth, “I wouldn’t tell. And, believe me, there is nothing you or your friends can do to force me.”

She had to lie. The list must be hers. She was, after all, the Queen Over the Decay of Everything. Eric Bear refused to accept what he was hearing.

“Thereby,” said Ruth, “I believe that your business is—”

“It’s not over,” he interrupted.

“What?”

“After the Chauffeurs come. It’s not over, it’s just the beginning of something new.”

Rat shrugged her shoulders.

“I’m not getting involved in that,” she said.

“And everything you can do for me now,” he said, “will be counted in your favor then. In the next life.”

“You’re out of your mind,” hissed Ruth, but there was an amused look in her eyes. If nothing else he had lured her into extending the conversation.

“It’s not about wisdom,” he said.

“You’re a lunatic,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Just by the fact that you believe it’s possible to remove two names from the list.”

His pulse beat faster. Was he about to talk her into a new, and greater, admission?

“I’ve heard the stories too,” he said. “Many of them. It’s possible to remove one name…”

“Possible? I wouldn’t call removing a name from the Death List possible,” hissed Rat Ruth, still with a degree of exhilarated scorn in her voice.

“…but two names are impossible,” concluded Eric.

“Let me put it like this,” said Ruth, “and I’m not the one who thought of it, I’m only repeating something someone said to me a long time ago. ‘One removal is for the divine, more is for the unborn.’ I don’t know what that means, but it sounds as though you’re up against the impossible.”

It was Eric’s turn to shrug his shoulders.

“Madness,” repeated Ruth.

After that she raised her voice and shouted, “Guards!”

The bear got up with a jerk. He was standing only a few decimeters from the rat and realized that he was exactly the same height as she. But before he had time to consider his options, the bats were again at his side.