Rituals (6 page)

Once, and then for good, the spell had been broken. As the chalice was being lifted to where, high above the church, the sun would soon trace its course, the old man suddenly began to tremble. Inni would never forget the scream that followed, never. The raised hands let go of the chalice. The wine, the blood, poured all over his chasuble, and the cloth was torn from the altar in one haul by the monk's clawing hands, dragging candles, host, and paten with it. A scream as of a huge wounded animal bounced back from the stone walls. The man tugged at his chasuble as though he were trying to tear it asunder, and then, still screaming, he slowly began to fall. His head hit the chalice and started to bleed. When he was already dead, he still went on bleeding, red and red mingled on the islands of shiny silk amid the gold brocade, and it was no longer clear which was which — the wine had become blood, the blood wine.

The absent dog, the silence of the woods, the soundless footsteps of Old Shatterhand, and his own townish rustle were still waiting for an answer.

"I don't know. Perhaps I never did believe," he shouted ahead. The scornful laugh of a magpie replied. And suddenly the whole wood was full of Church fathers, inquisitors, martyrs, confessors, agnostics, heathens, philosophers, bleaters, and brayers. Theological arguments flew all around. Two finches were discussing the Council of Trent, a cuckoo underlined the Summa Theologica, a woodpecker endorsed the thirty-one articles, and sparrows condemned Hus to the stake once again. Spinoza the heron, Calvin the crow, the incomprehensible cooing of the Spanish mystics, the chirping, twittering, gurgling, and clucking birds of field and woodland celebrated the two bloody millennia of Church history, from the first swimming fishes scratched on the dark walls of the catacombs to the spirit that had singed Saint Paul in the guise of an inhabitant of Nagasaki, from the perplexity of the men of Emmaus to the infallible vicar occupying the See of the Fisherman. Oceans of that same human blood had been shed since then, and millions of times that same body had been consumed. Not an hour, not a day went by without this being done, at the North Pole, in Burma, Tokyo, and Namibia (oh, Zita), even at the moment when these two unbelievers were walking here under the lime trees, one with his head full of Sartre, the other with his head full of nothing.

They came to a clearing. Bumblebees buzzed in and out of the purple-brown flowers of the deadly nightshade. Everything quivered and rustled.

"Athos! Come here!"

The dog appeared out of nowhere and lay down at the feet of his master, who posted himself in the middle of the clearing like a field preacher, carrying the late sunlight on his chamois shoulders. Arnold Taads's voice filled the entire wood as if it were an element like water or fire.

"I know exactly at what moment I ceased to believe in God. I have always been a good skier. Before the war I was champion of the Netherlands a couple of times. That may not sound like much, but I was the best, nevertheless, and of course these championships were not won in the Netherlands but in the mountains. Have you ever seen mountains?"

Inni shook his head.

"Then you have not lived yet. Mountains are God's majesty on earth. At least, so I thought. A skier all alone, high up in the mountains, is different from other people. There are only two things, he and nature. He is on a par with the rest of the world, do you understand?"

Inni nodded.

"I have never cared much for people. Most of them are cowards, conformists, muddleheads, moneygrubbers, and they infect each other. Up there you are not bothered by any of that. Nature is pure, like the animals. I feel more love for this dog than for all people put together. Animals are straight, and good for them! When the war was over and we could at last see what exactly had been going on — treason, hunger, murder, and annihilation, all of it done by men — then I really did despise mankind. Not every individual, but the sort that crawls murdering, lying, and frightened towards his own death. Animals are straight, animals don't have slogans, they don't die for someone else, and they don't die for more than their due, either. In our modern society of weaklings the pecking order is a much maligned concept, but it always worked splendidly until man arrived on the evolutionary scene. So, I had had enough of it. I gave up my job as a notary, I burnt all my boats behind me, I broke with my wife — ah, wonderful, wonderful! — and I went to Canada. There I became a fire warden in the Rocky Mountains. For months on end I sat on a high mountaintop. Below me, a landscape of endless forests stretched out in all directions. I sat there peering at it. If I saw smoke, I had to raise the alarm. Provisions were brought to me by plane. Once a week they dropped a sack of food, newspapers, and mail on the patch of ground beside my cabin. For six months I stayed there alone with my dog and my friend the radio, not for the sake of the stupid honky-tonk rubbish you hear on it, but for the nightly conversations with other men at other posts. Two fingers of whisky I allowed myself, two a day" — he raised two joined fingers horizontally to Inni — "never more. If I had once taken more, I would have gone crazy. Then they would have had to haul a raving madman down the mountain. I wrote it all down."

Inni had never been in the mountains, but that was no reason for not now having a vision of this man who was standing here before him — in a white, icy world. Four Swiss picture postcards enclosed the small log cabin. The man was wearing the same chamois jacket as now, the dog lay asleep at his feet, it was time for his whisky, and there was a gale howling around the cabin. The picture postcards were angry. From the radio came the crackles and groans of a distant, despised world. The man stood up, went to a cupboard, and took out the whisky bottle and a glass. (He had looked at a clock before doing so.) Then he held two fingers horizontally one above the other beside the glass on the table — no, a millimetre above the table because the thickness of the bottom of the glass had to be taken into account — and poured. Glug-glug. Not until some time later did he take a sip. A taste of smoke and hazelnut.

"And one day I thought: a landscape which, let us say, by its objective majesty evokes the idea of God can, of course, equally well evoke his absence. God was created after the image and likeness of men. This is what everyone grasps in the end, except people who never grasp anything. But I despise people, including" — here was a slight raising of the tone, which gave the word a clipped independence, so that it hovered briefly, in isolation and pregnant with meaning, in the open space between them — "myself, of course. I detest myself. But however much I love dogs and mountains, I was nevertheless unable to imagine God in the shape of a dog or a mountain. And so the idea of God vanished from my life, like a skier going down a slope into the valley. Can you picture it? Seen from a distance the tiny human figure looks black. It writes itself like calligraphy on the white sheet of snow. A long, graceful movement, a mysterious, illegible letter being written, something that is there and is suddenly no longer there. It is lost from sight. It wrote itself and left nothing behind. For the first time I was alone in the world, but I would not miss Him. God sounds like an answer — that is what is most pernicious about the word. It has so often been used as an answer. He should have had a name that sounded like a question. I never asked to be alone in the world, but then, nobody does. Do you ever think about these things?"

Inni knew already that the enquiring tone in which the sentence was uttered did not imply a question but a command. His dossier was being compiled, and he was being measured. Between him and this man deeds had to be drawn up. But what should he say? He felt a strange indifference. The warmth, the half-hidden colours of flowers, the gently swaying lime trees above him, all these things happening at once, the whole fabric of sensory perceptions, the dog stretching himself and hesitantly walking a little way further to a spot where there was still sun, this whole new life which had started only that afternoon but seemed to have lasted so long already, the hammering voice continuously talking about himself, the whisky he had been given to drink — all this gave him a feeling of not being. So much was happening, he could easily be dispensed with. He was the vessel that was filling up. If he were to speak now, all these new, precious sensations would pour out of him. He heard every word the man said, but what exactly was it all about? "Do you ever think about these things?" What is thinking? He had never seen God going down a slope like a skier. God was a wine stain on a chasuble, the blood of an old man on an icy-cold freestone altar step. But you did not say such things.

"No, never," he said.

"Why not?"

"It does not occupy me." I see.

He realized that a reply of a more cosmic aspect was being expected of him, but he did not have one.

"Do you know anything about existentialism?"

You bet he did. Three debating evenings they had devoted to it, in his last year at boarding school. Sartre, free choice, Juliette Greco, candlelit cellars, black pullovers, boys who had been to Paris and had come home with Gauloises, which you could not get in the Netherlands, cold Camembert, and French bread, of which those same friends said it could not compare with real French bread because that was much crisper. Despair and nausea had had something to do with it, too. Man had been thrown into the world. It had always made him think of Icarus and those other great tumblers, Ixion, Phaeton, Tantalus — all those jumpers without parachutes from a world of gods and heroes who interested him far more than those strange abstractions of which he could form no visual image. A meaningless world into which you were thrown, an existence that signified nothing except by virtue of what you made it signify. It still smacked of church. It had a suspect, musty odour of martyrdom. Most of all, thought Inni, it found its expression in the taste and the smell of those Gauloises — strong, bitter, unlike anything else — a smell that had something dangerous about it, tobacco that clung to your tongue with small, bitter prickles, the crude billiard-chalk blue packet. You could smoke your fear away with them. But that was a word he would never utter to this man.

"Not much."

What use could this skiing champion have for philosophy? What did he want of the small, squinting scholar whose portrait appeared so regularly in newspapers and magazines these days? Thinking — what was that exactly, anyway? He read a lot, but what he read, and not just that but everything he saw, films and paintings, he translated into feeling. And this feeling, which could not immediately be expressed in words, not yet and maybe never, that formless mass of sentiments, impressions, observations — that was his way of thinking. You could circle around it with words, but there always remained far more that was not expressed than was. And later, too, a certain resentment would take possession of him, toward those people who demanded precise answers, or pretended to be able to give them. It was, on the contrary, the very mystery of everything that was so attractive. You should not want to impose too much order on it. If you did, something would be lost irrevocably. That mysteries can become more mysterious if you think about them with precision and method, he did not yet know. He felt at home in his sentimental chaos. To chart it you had to be an adult, but then you were at once labelled, finished, and in effect already a little dead.

"I don't mean Christian but atheist existentialism .. ."

Get on your skis! Whiz down a slope in pursuit of your vanished God. Go and sit on a mountaintop. Keep watch for fires. Go away! Leave me alone!

". . . That goes too far for me, though. The ethical, humanist side of it doesn't appeal to me. It makes man somehow pathetic, a kind of clown groping around in the dark trying to find the exit. That's what I don't like about it. It isn't cruel enough. Do you understand?"

Inni nodded. These were words he understood. Patches of haze, as ungraspable as the dancing flecks of light high up in the trees. How many shades of green were there?

"When Sartre says man has been thrown into the world, he is alone, there is no God, we are responsible for what we are, what we do, I say yes!"

The affirmative echoed around the woods. The dog pricked up his ears. This man has no one to talk to, thought Inni.

"But when he then asks me to be responsible for the world as well, for others, I say no! No. Why should I be? 'When man chooses himself, he chooses all men.' Why? I have not asked for anything. I have nothing to do with the vermin I see around me. I live out my time because I have to, that is all."

And as if to make an immediate start, he turned round in a furious pirouette and disappeared into the woods. The dog had already gone ahead.

*       *

Had he been set thinking after all? Then it was obviously infectious. As long as you did not do anything yourself, your life was determined by the people and the things that occurred in it. Their presence set into motion a slow stream of events you had to drag along with you: dead fathers, foreign mothers, boarding schools, guardians, and now also an aunt and a skiing champion. With a certain satisfaction he reflected that once again there had been no need for him to do anything himself. But how was it, then, that while he had the feeling that he had done nothing himself and that everything had only happened to him, his life seemed so long? He had already been here for thousands of years, and if he had studied zoology, it would have been millions. Small wonder, with such a past, that you could not remember everything, and yet at the same time it was surprising what you did remember. And stranger still was the equivalence of these recollections, in which the announcement of his father's death was on a par with all kinds of other annexed events, such as Thalassa Thalassa, the Crucifixion, and the burning of the Reichstag. All of it was you, in effect, for although you had not yourself experienced it all, it had woven itself into your life. Ultimately, it was your body that remembered these things for you. Strange chemical processes in your brain had seen to it that you were aware of the Paleozoic, which therefore, somehow or other, had become part of your experience, so that you yourself were connected with unimaginably distant times to which you would belong until you died, by virtue of that same mysterious mechanism. Consequently, your life was stretched out infinitely — that was not to be denied. He suddenly felt very old.