Rituals (15 page)

"My father despised me," said Philip Taads.

"He can hardly have known you."

"He did not want to know me. He couldn't bear the thought of leaving a trace behind him on earth. That I can understand, actually, but it was very unpleasant when I was a child. He never wanted to see me. He denied my existence. You were going to tell me how you knew him."

Inni told him.

"He looked after you better than he looked after me."

"It wasn't his own money. He didn't have to do anything for it."

"It sounds as if you liked him."

"I did."

Was this true? He had regarded Arnold Taads more as someone to whom such categories did not apply, as a natural phenomenon, as something that simply happens to be. It irritated him that he was now, in retrospect, forced to qualify his view. The present encounter was pointless. He had already had this experience before, or rather, someone else whom he had been very long ago had already had this experience and had told him about it. This Taads was crazy, too, and would come to a sad end, like his father.

"Have you spent much time in Asia?" Inni asked.

"Why?"

"It looks ... Japanese here."

"I have never been to Japan. Modern Japan is vulgar. It was made diseased by us. It would destroy my dream to go there."

His dream. Goodness! This Taads was not afraid of big words. But perhaps this was a dream. The setting suggested it. The room that could not exist the moment you opened your eyes, the words that trickled slowly from the lips of this monkish man, the dark eyes that remained fixed on him as if to stop him from tipping over.

Why did fathers make sons? With this son there were no curt, clipped sentences, no medals won by whizzing down snowy slopes, but rather the conversion of all that into slowness and emptiness. And yet, unmistakably, there was the same isolation, the same refusal.

"Shall I make tea?"

"Thank you."

When his host had vanished behind his screens like a silent shadow, Inni rose as if released, and walked, more or less on tiptoe, around the room, in which more and more objects loomed up. Or had these few books and picture postcards entered inaudibly and invisibly during the conversation, and had they, equally unheard and unseen, settled themselves on the floor against the skirting-board? It was a riddle to him, as strange as the pictures on one of the cards: a raked area of powdery gravel in which, just slightly off centre, three weathered stones of unequal size rested on an island of something that looked like moss. He remembered having seen such pictures before in books about Japan, but he had never seen a real one. Kneeling on the floor, he peered at the mysterious scene that, he did not know how, seemed to be reflected by this room, as if this bed, too, were not a thing you slept in but rather something akin to those stones, something that could express anything you cared to invest it with. Actually, thought Inni, this room, just like the gravel area with the three stones, would show to best advantage if there was nobody in it, not even the occupant, and no one to look at it. That area or garden or whatever you might call it could exist on its own, just like the universe, without inhabitants or spectators.

He shuddered and put the card back in its place, but this was not enough to release him from the room. The other cards represented real gardens with real shrubs, albeit trimmed into impossible Euclidean shapes that were eerie in their perfection, and lawns that looked as if they had been licked smooth by a tongue, and blood-red sculptured autumn trees. Autumn! Here at least was a word that ought to evoke some idea of time. But time was precisely the element that was wholly absent from these photographs. A day's journey further on, in another corner of the room, revealed a book with Japanese characters and the portrait of an old man on the cover. As he picked it up, his host returned.

"That is Kawabata," he said, "a Japanese writer."

"I see."

Inni studied the likeness of the old man. But was it an old man who was young or a young man who was old? From the uncommonly high forehead, silver-shiny hair swept back in a curve. The frail body was wrapped in dark, traditional dress.

Leafing through the book from back to front, he saw the same man again, full length this time, receiving what must have been the Nobel Prize, because he stood facing the old king of Sweden, who raised his thin, applauding old man's hands especially high and far forward in the manner of well-bred northerners wishing to indicate that their enthusiasm is genuine. Because the author was photographed in profile here, you could see clearly how incredibly small and delicate he was. He stood bowed, wearing white socks and curious-looking sandals, and held the object he had just received firmly in his hands. Over a long, green robe he wore a black cloak down to the knees. Inni was not sure whether it was a kimono. Again it struck him how high the hair swept up from the small, inward-looking face. On the broad faces of the princes and princesses before him and, due to the height of the podium, also partly below him, lay an expression that could best be described as an anxious form of bewilderment.

Philip Taads had resumed his position on the floor, if
resumed
was the correct term for the strange way in which his body bent double and subsided in a silent, straight sliding movement. At the same time and without sound he put the lacquered tray with the two bowls of green tea on the rush mat. His host drank as Inni watched him through his eyelashes. Again the face was closed, but it was not the East that had drawn the curtains. He was faced here with someone who lived completely within himself. The idea of this man in this room seemed sinister. He wished he had not come.

They drank in silence.

"What do you do?" Inni asked finally, using the familiar form. When people are sitting face to face on floor cushions, there is no place for formality. Besides, they were the same age, he estimated.

"To earn money, you mean?" It sounded like a reproof.

"Yes."

"I work for a trading company. Foreign correspondence, three days a week. Letters in Spanish. They all think I am crazy, but they let me do as I like because I am good at it."

Spanish. Inni looked at his face but did not find what he was looking for. Javanese villagers had banished the memory of Arnold Taads, and this Philip had shorn his head like a monk, so that every contour of his face showed up twice as sharply. Someone who shaves his head takes away the modifying effect of the hair, so that nose, mouth, emotions, and everything else are exposed without mercy. But in the face of this Taads everything was under lock and key.

"Do you live alone?"

"Yes."

"And for the rest?"

"For the rest? Nothing. My part-time job pays enough to live on. And I live here."

"Are you always here?"

"Yes."

"Stahilitas loci."

"I don't understand."

"Stahilitas loci,
that is one of the principles of the contemplative orders. Where you enter, you stay."

"Hm. Not a bad idea. What made you think of that?"

"There is something monastic about this place."

"And do you think that is ridiculous?"

"No." Only creepy, he thought, but he did not say so.

"Outside" — the word was uttered with scorn — "there is nothing for me."

"And here there is?"

"Myself."

Inni groaned inaudibly. The Seventies. No sooner had they closed the door of the church behind them than they crawled like beggars to the bare feet of gurus and swamis. At last they were alone in a wonderful, empty universe that went zooming along on its home-made rails like a train without a driver, and they were shouting for help out of all the windows.

"I am preparing myself for something," said Philip Taads.

"For what?"

"For my deliverance." Not a moment's hesitation. "My dream. My deliverance." For the first time Inni asked himself whether the man opposite him was not simply stark staring mad. But the man looked as if it were perfectly natural for people to say such things, even though they had known each other for scarcely an hour, and maybe it was. He was, after all, a Taads, and Taadses used with the greatest ease — as Inni knew from experience — words that other people preferred to avoid. They lived one metre above the ground, at a level where those words had their natural domain. Perhaps they could even fly.

"Deliverance is a Catholic concept," said Inni.

"Not the way I mean it. The Catholics need someone else to deliver them. You can share in the deliverance. But that doesn't mean anything to me. I deliver myself."

"From what?"

"First of all from the world. That has proved easier than I thought. There's nothing to it. And then from myself."

"Why?"

"Life is a burden to me. It isn't necessary."

"Then you should commit suicide."

Taads did not reply for some time. Then he said softly, "I want to be rid of the thing I am."

"Thing?"

Inni took a sip of the tea, which had a deep, bitter taste. It was as if silence were being heaped up in the room.

"I detest the thing I am."

How long ago was it that Inni had heard this man's father say "I detest myself"? It was insufferable that a thought could travel from one man through a woman into another man. He wanted to get out of this room.

"I never talk about this with anyone," said Philip Taads. This was unmistakably a complaint, but the complainer was already out of the reach of any comforter. "Perhaps you'd rather I didn't bother you with it."

Such notions would never have occurred to Arnold Taads. So there was a difference after all.

"No," said Inni automatically. This was his first conversation with a thing, and he felt irreparably contaminated. He put down his bowl.

"I must go," he said.

The other did not reply but rose, again in one movement, the way a bamboo stem swishes up after being held down. He has perfect control over the thing he is, at any rate, thought Inni, not without envy, as he laboriously got up from the floor.

"What I meant to say is that I find it unbearable to need a body in order to exist," said Taads.

A Catholic after all, thought Inni. The unclean body, an obstacle on the road to salvation; but before he could say anything, Philip Taads asked suddenly, "What kind of person was my father?"

Someone who killed himself, Inni was about to say, but was that really true? Arnold Taads had gone to his chosen destiny by an obscured, roundabout route. There was no need to saddle the son, who was already burdened with an inheritance, with this knowledge. A surfeit and a lack of father. Psychology, yuck.

"He was an uncompromising man who went his own way. I think he was very lonely, but he would never have admitted it. He did a lot for me, but not out of altruism. He did not like people, or so he said."

"Then we have at least something in common," said Philip Taads. He sounded pleased.

They walked towards the door together, but before they reached it, Philip Taads opened a cupboard in the wall that so far had seemed solid, and took a Penguin paperback out of it.

"By Kawabata," he said. "You need to read only the second story, 'Thousand Cranes'. When you've finished it, you can send it back, or if you like, you can return it to me yourself. I am always at home on weekends and on Mondays and Tuesdays."

The door closed soundlessly behind Inni. Now to take a big leap and soar away over those cavernous stairs to get out of this prison in which a man was tormenting himself, even though he called it deliverance!

*       *

Outside, the day had adapted itself to Inni's changed mood. A haze hung about the streets, giving the city an air of sadness. The passersby were still in summer dress, but the light, no longer transparent, draped their summery figures in an element of melancholy. As always when a natural phenomenon appeared to be getting the better of the normal course of events, Inni felt as though the city had no right to exist at all. This haziness had nothing to do with cars and houses but ought to have joined directly onto the grasslands of the polders. This thought gave rise to a feeling of anxiety, because it implied the dislocation of reality. He did not like being forced to notice how fragile everything was. This Taads was bound to keep preying on his mind. He had twice introduced the thought of death into this sunny day by what he said and by recalling the memory of his father from the formless past.

"The Wintrops refuse to suffer," Arnold Taads had said, but this had not been sufficient. The Wintrop that Inni himself was, refused not only to suffer but also to be confronted with the suffering of others. He had made his life one of constant movement, knowing from experience that this was the best way to escape from others when the need arose, and ultimately from himself, too.

He walked in the direction of the Vijzelstraat. From behind the Mint Tower, which seemed to be rocking slightly in the heat that quivered in the shrouded sky, thunderclouds advanced like an army.

As he approached the Weteringplantsoen, he heard the sound of loud, rhythmic bells and whining, repetitive singing. A group of bald-pated members of the Hare Krishna sect came, in orange robes, bleating and bell-ringing across the pedestrian crossing. Swaying and with white, unshaven faces that refused to look at the bystanders, they were coming towards him. As always, he felt hate. People had no business to abandon themselves so shamelessly to a system. The thought he had had less than half an hour ago returned with renewed force: people were incapable of being alone in the world. No sooner had they buried the wretched god of the Jews and Christians than they had to go traipsing about the streets with red flags or in sloppy saffron sack dresses. Clearly, the Middle Ages would never end. He thought of Taads and how easy it was to imagine him, with his oriental face, walking among these people. But that was unfair. Philip Taads practised his one-man religion — if it was that — alone in his home-made monastery. An anchorite in the desert of the Pijp. Inni remembered visiting the Benedictine monastery in Oosterhout with his friend the writer. The writer, never very talkative, had looked around for hours and finally asked one of the monks whether he had ever wanted to get out. The question had not surprised the old man in the least, and the reply came instantly. "The last time I felt that way was in 1929, when the heating didn't work."