Death, Sleep & the Traveler: Novel (New Directions Books) Page 8

  “So,” I said, glancing into the approaching night, “tomorrow there will be no sign of where we have been today.”

  “That’s an oddly mordant remark, my friend,” Peter said. “Come, let’s enjoy some black rum and a roaring fire.”

  “Peter’s nice,” Ursula said then, with nothing but internal whim to justify her indulgent non sequitur. “Isn’t he nice, Allert?”

  “A little old,” I murmured, thinking of a white chateau, a dark field, a night of ice, “but an excellent friend.”

  “But Peter’s in his prime, Allert. That’s what I mean.”

  “Well, then, it sounds to me as if Peter deserves another one of your wet kisses.”

  “Exactly,” Peter said then, squeezing Ursula’s waist, “but in front of the fire. In front of the fire.”

  The animal skins were heaped before the hearth as usual and the fire was high. The jaws of the polar bear into which Ursula had flung a stein of beer one steaming night, the hide of the tiger that was worn and smooth like a map composed of dust and sand, the long dark silken hair of a water buffalo long dead and headless, there they lay, adorned as usual with small soft brightly colored pillows and the light of the fire. In the large room totally dark except for the fire, the skins and pillows were an island of sensuality in a cold sea, and as usual it was Ursula, rather than Peter or I, who became the waiting castaway on that floating island. She sank into the fur of the water buffalo, she yawned, on her stomach she propped her pelvis on the head of the bear, like a child she smiled into the light of the fire, she sat up in order to accept the thick glass from Peter.

  “Schnapps for Allert, rum for you and me,” she said. “But you forgot your wet kiss,” she said, and drew Peter’s mouth down to her own. And I, stretched out on the edge of the polar bear skin, took a few rapid sips from my glass and noted the rough texture of Peter’s amber-colored corduroy pants and the roll of warm flesh between the waistband of Ursula’s ski pants and the lower edge of her black turtleneck sweater. My stocking feet were crossed at the ankles, I wriggled my toes, I saw for a moment the little familiar plug of gold in Ursula’s left incisor when Peter pulled his mouth away in a simulated playful need for breath.

  “More schnapps, my friend? Please help yourself.”

  All around us the house was empty, filled with shadows and cold beds, drawn blinds, and from the dusty high-fidelity equipment in one of the darkened corners of the cold room in which we lay came the sound of half a dozen baroque recorders singing with the austerity of artificial birds. I heard the music, I tasted the cold night, I smelled the steam of our outdoor clothing and hairy socks. In the fireplace, which was extremely wide and constructed of stones hauled laboriously from a nearby field, the logs were as large as the bodies of young children and were burning as in the aftermath of some prehistoric fire. Ursula was smoking one of her infrequent cigarettes, the schnapps was strong. I heard Peter’s footsteps in the hallway, above our heads, behind me, and then Peter returned to us and dumped the soft Nordic blanket between Ursula and me and placed the several plastic containers of body lotion on the hearth to warm.

  “More schnapps, my friend? Please help yourself.”

  Gently Ursula freed herself from Peter’s hand and stood up between us and pulled off her ski pants. Our clothes were steaming. The snow was banking up on the darkened windows, the sprawling fire was casting its hot patina on the skin of Ursula’s bare legs between her woolen socks and the tightness of her scanty beige-colored translucent underpants.

  “Well,” Ursula said, tossing her half-smoked cigarette to the waiting flames, “now you see what you have done with your rum and fire.”

  She turned and pushed up the sleeves of her knitted sweater. In the shadows the fat crotch of her elasticized underpants looked as if it had just been roughly cupped in the wet grip of an anxious hand. And smiling, pushing up her sleeves, patting her broad stomach beneath the sweater, down Ursula sank to her elbows and knees, lowering her face to the touch of the buffalo hair and raising her wide tight buttocks to the glow of the fire. She was contracting and loosening the small of her back, thrusting high her shining rump, stretching her fingers, smiling and rubbing her face to and fro on the buffalo hair.

  “I don’t know about you, my friend,” Peter said in a low voice with his eyes on Ursula and his head tilted toward the sound of the recorders, “but I find this scene extremely attractive.”

  “And I too, Peter. But Ursula should be surrounded by golden tumbling cubs, should she not?”

  “You are always jocular, my friend. Always so jocular when it comes to the life of the sexual being.”

  “It is true. You have your psychiatric patients, I have Ursula and my sense of humor.”

  “But Allert has never been possessive,” Ursula said, filling our pause with the sound of her throaty words and the sight of her backside rotating closer and closer to the heat of the fire, “that at least can be said for him.”

  “Tell me,” I said then, changing the subject and feeling Ursula’s strong fingers picking tufts of hair from my right-hand sock, “what is your professional opinion on the inability to believe in the reality of the human self?”

  “It is a familiar question. And a familiar condition as well.”

  “Sooner or later,” I said, aware of Ursula’s fingers and seeing Ursula’s honey-colored eyes in the flickering shadows and noting the red silk pillow on which she was now propping her chin, “sooner or later the young child discovers that he cannot account for himself. As soon as he becomes inexplicable he becomes unreal. Immediately everything else becomes unreal as one might expect. The rest is puzzlement. Or terror.”

  Everything about our present condition-the cold house, the snow falling invisibly outside, the rugs and pillows and fire, the chorus of blokfluiten reminding me for some reason of the time when, as a child, I was taken on a trip to Breda—all of it was conducive to wandering ideas, to a slow and unmistakable drift toward sensuality. Peter was filling our glasses, his brow was aglow with perspiration, to me the musty animal smell of the old polar bear rug evoked images of faceless hunters stalking the ice floes in search of death. Ursula had abandoned my thick sock and was holding Peter’s ankle in a tight grip. In the faintest possible rhythm her backside was undulating now in the greasy heat of the fire.

  “So, Peter,” I murmured, “you have no thoughts on my query?”

  “If you insist, I can only say that you and I are too old for this conversation. Much too old.”

  “But it’s quite true,” Ursula said slowly, drowsily, “Allert is not real.”

  “On religious questions,” Peter said, with his scarred face long and dark and composed in the light of the fire, “I am afraid I cannot be of any help. No help at all.”

  “But if I disagree with you,” I said quietly, “and if you are wrong, and if the problem is not religious but is in fact psychological, what then?”

  “Please, my friend. It is not like you to become aggressive.”

  “Allert aggressive! What a nice idea.”

  “Ursula,” I murmured then, “perhaps you would like to take off your heavy sweater. For Peter and me.”

  “You’d have me bare-breasted, is that it?”

  “Yes. Play with your nipples, Ursula. For Peter and me.”

  “You’re trying to arouse me, Allert! But I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait.”

  “Jocular, philosophical, impatient,” Peter said. “What is the matter with you tonight, my friend?”

  “Today on the skis,” I murmured and closed my eyes, raised my head, “I felt pleasantly athletic. But also that I did not exist.”

  “And now,” Ursula said, clutching her red pillow with one hand and thrusting the other hand up the leg of Peter’s corduroy trousers, “now you are drinking too much.”

  “But one thing is certain,” Peter said, laughing behind the leather mask of his elongated face, “and that is that Allert can always hold his schnapps.”

  “Any way you drin
k it,” I whispered, “it is pure gold.”

  I heard the drifting snow, the poignant harmonics of the baroque recorders, Peter moving about on his hands and knees. I heard the birds collecting in their white flocks, heard Ursula humming in the random suffusion of both her comfort and her discontent. I smiled and closed my eyes. Ursula’s doglike shadow was crouching above me among the beams of the ceiling. Peter was crouching at the hearth and smoking his pipe.

  “But Peter,” Ursula said, as I opened my eyes, “what are you doing?”

  “Peter,” I said in my deep and quiet voice, “are you smearing body lotion on her underpants and not on the skin? A novel idea. I would not have thought of it.”

  “But it’s sticky, Peter. It feels peculiar!”

  Ursula laughed, Peter said nothing. Ursula made no attempt to defend herself against the handfuls of heavy lotion which Peter, as I could now clearly see, was smearing across the tight rounded surfaces of Ursula’s translucent underpants.

  I knelt clumsily on my hands and knees, sat back on my heels, raised the half-drained glass to my teeth. I became the willing witness of Peter’s labors, since by now Ursula had returned her face to the crimson pillow while Peter, rising upward from his spread knees, had positioned himself directly in front of her, so that by leaning forward he could grip her buttocks in his two determined hands. Her eyes were closed, her head was lying beneath the apex of Peter’s crotch. In his own turn Peter was wreathing his head with the smoke from his pipe and kneading Ursula’s backside with his expert hands.

  “It’s lovely, Peter,” Ursula whispered, with her eyes closed, “it feels so lovely. Like going into the bath with your panties on.”

  She sighed, she laughed, Peter shifted his position, I shifted mine, Peter inched forward so that he was straddling the small of Ursula’s broad back.

  “More,” Ursula whispered, “do it some more.”

  One of the plastic containers lay spilled on the hearth, slowly I dropped my empty glass into the burnished depths of the water buffalo hide. The schnapps had done its night’s work, reminding me of the white chateau in the village where I was born, and now I smelled the schnapps in my nose, the desert-blossom scent of the body lotion, the aromatic smell of Peter’s pipe, the ice in the eaves of the uninhabited house. And now I felt too large, too sick, too purposeless, too awakened, too much in need of the lavatory to sustain my presence in our triad sprawling in the luxury of blanket, pillows, rugs, in the smoky light of Peter’s fire.

  The recorders faded. The darkness became to the coldness as light to the fire. Swaying, unsteady on my stocking feet, aware that my breathing was rhythmically focused not on the inhalation but the exhalation, slowly I groped my way down the frozen corridor toward the door not of the lavatory as I expected, but outside and into the night. My stocking feet made deep impressions in the dry snow, the flakes were settling, and all around me the winter night was invisible, a mere sensation of trees, decreasing temperature, falling snow. I stood still, I felt the snow on my head, I breathed in as much as I could of the winter night.

  I thought to myself that I was in the midst of a dream that I could not remember, though my head was clear now and though off to the right I was able to see without difficulty the shape of Peter’s parked ear humped high with snow. For a moment I saw myself as a child traveling through a clear night in the straw in the back of a little blue sleigh drawn by a black and white pony and driven by a man in a muffler and heavy gloves. For a moment longer, there in the dry snow, I contemplated what I suddenly identified as my own benevolence. And then I turned and once more felt my way into Peter’s house and down the cold corridor and into that vast dark room where Peter and Ursula knelt facing each other before the fire.

  They had stripped off each other’s clothes and from top to bottom had smeared each other’s bodies with the glistening cream. They were wet and shining, they were kneeling with their knees apart and were kissing each other and laughing. Ursula’s underpants lay like a sodden handkerchief on the hearth. Their bodies were slick and moving and fire-lit as if in the emulsion of a photograph still hanging wet and glossy in the darkroom.

  “Allert,” she called over her shoulder to where I stood dripping and smiling beyond the light and the heat of the fire, “we’ve been waiting for you. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and come here and take off your clothes.”

  “The trouble with you Dutch,” Peter was saying, “is that for you even normality is a perversion.”

  “You and I are fortunate indeed,” Peter was saying, “to be able to rely on Ursula’s sustaining sanity. She is never lost in the sacred wood as you and I sometimes are, my friend.”

  His voice was urgent in the darkness of the night behind her cabin door, which was hooked ajar. And recognizing his young uncultured voice from the corridor through which I was passing on my way to the ship’s pool, and hearing his angry supplications and pathetic argument, it was then that I understood that all was not well with the wireless operator. With uncustomary swiftness I proceeded then to the pool where I smoked five small Dutch cigars by the light of the cold constellations.

  But how could I have remained unawakened by our descending anchors? How could I have allowed myself to sleep through the actuality of my own worst dream? After all, Ariane had forewarned me that we would be reaching the shores of the island in the darkest part of the night and would be dropping anchor. And it was indeed so because now the sun was rising in the lowest quadrant of my porthole like blood in a bottle, and I was wide-awake and nursing my premonitions. The ship was at anchor.

  I climbed to my knees on the wet bed and opened the porthole. I saw that the sun was flooding the horizon but that the island was nowhere in sight. And kneeling with my head in the porthole and the sun in my eyes, I recalled how the night before I had refused Ariane’s invitation to go ashore on the island of nudists. And squinting into the ominous and bloody sun, once more I determined to prevent our exposure to the boredom and distaste of bodies bared merely for the sake of health or naturalness.

  And yet with unaccustomed haste I dressed, seized my straw hat and went out on deck in search of my young friend. The ship was silent, the gulls were gone, the hot deck might have been embedded in concrete. I tapped insistently on the door to her cabin, I assured myself that no one was enjoying the use of the pool, I understood that it would be several hours at least before juice and coffee and rolls were served in the dining saloon. The locked cabins, the empty bridge, the damp blankets heaped up in the peeling deck chairs, the silence—this, the death of the ship, was what I had always feared.

  I crossed from the starboard side to the port and there against the rail were a half dozen passengers and, in the dreamlike distance beyond them, the low brown sandy island that so appealed to Ariane. I joined the passengers who did not intend to visit the island, I gathered, but who nonetheless were determined to look at those who did and, further, were hoping for a glimpse of the distant nudists. With them I stared across at the hazy island and down at the white motorboat now moored to the foot of the gangway lowered against the ship’s white side.

  Except for Ariane and the wireless operator seated hip to hip in the forward portion of the white launch, and except for the young crewman slouching in the stern with a rope in his hand, the long white motor launch was empty, occupied as it was by only three persons instead of sixty. I decided to become the fourth.

  I descended the gangway at precisely the moment the crewman was preparing to cast off. I took my seat behind my young friend as the motor began its muffled bubbling. I glanced up at the remaining passengers propped like wax figures against the rail and under the hot sun. There was no waving, in a half circle we moved away from the high side of the anchored ship.

  “Allert,” she said, smiling, reaching out for my hand, “you’ve changed your mind.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I too will visit your nudists.”

  “Without you it would not be the same.”

  “Well,” I said, ac
cepting and squeezing her proffered hand, “Allert also can be a good sport, as my wife would say.”

  We picked up speed, there was a dawn wind blowing, Ariane smiled and tilted back her head as if to take deep breaths of the burning sun. The wireless officer and I exchanged no greeting. Behind us lay the white ship, diminishing but stationary, while ahead of us lay the scorched island that was expanding minute by minute for our watchful eyes.

  “I did not sleep well last night,” I said. “I had intolerable dreams.”

  “Poor Allert. You will be able to sleep on the beach.”

  The sea, on which there was not the smallest wave, was now changing from opaque blackness to a turquoise transparency. Twenty or thirty feet below us shelves of white sand were reflecting the light of the sun back up through the soundless medium of the clear sea. I was relieved to notice, over my shoulder, that no smoke was visible from the blue smokestacks of the anchored ship. Ariane’s hair was blowing in the wind, the long black sideburns of the wireless officer contradicted in some disturbing way the rakish angle of his white black-visored cap. My young friend in her blue jeans and a halter of orange silk, through which the shape of her small breasts was entirely visible, was an antidote to the wireless officer’s unusual mood of sullen reserve.

  “Your island appears to be uninhabited,” I said, clutching the brim of my straw hat against the wind, “since there is not even one nudist to greet the eye.”

  “Allert,” she said, “don’t be skeptical. Please. There is a village on the other side of the island. The beach is momentarily concealed from our view inside its protective cove. The village and beach are connected by a dirt road which is excellent for bicycling. You must remember, Allert, that I have been here before.”

  I touched her cool arm and again I saw over my shoulder that our diminishing white ship lay unchanged, unmoving. I disliked the way the wireless operator sat with one foot on the gunwhale and his tunic thrown open to display the unwashed undershirt, the cross on a chain. Also I disliked his sideburns, his bad complexion, the angle of his white cap, the hand he was hiding in the pocket of the white tunic.