‘Everything.’
‘No you aren’t, you came to the river and you said, “Yes, I will.’”
‘I don’t know why I said that.’
‘Tell me your name.’
‘Herman Orff.’
‘Is that really your name?’
‘Yes, it really is.’
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘No. Who are you?’
‘I’m the head of Orpheus.’
‘How do you do.’
‘You sound as if you don’t believe me.’
‘Why aren’t you speaking Greek?’
‘The words that I’m speaking are what I find in your mind. Is there any Greek there?’
‘No.’
‘That’s why I’m not speaking Greek.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘You still don’t believe me. Do you want me to sing for you?’
‘All right, sing for me.’
The head opened its mouth, its lips and tongue moved, I félt it vibrate in my hands but I heard nothing. After a long time the vibration stopped. ‘Well?’ said the head.
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
The head began to weep, it shook in my hands with great wild racking sobs. After a while it quieted down.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s all right, I believe you without the singing.’
‘You don’t believe me the way I want you to believe me, I can hear it in your voice — you don’t believe I’m the real head of Orpheus.’
‘In the first place I do believe you, and in the second place how much difference does it make if you aren’t the real head of Orpheus? I’m not sure I’m the real head of Herman Orff but I get up every morning and get on with it. You’re what you are and I’m what I am and let’s leave it at that.’
‘All right, you believe that I’m the head of Orpheus. But do you believe that I’m real?’
‘Real how?’
‘Like the river, like the stones and the mud.’
‘I believe you’re real in your way.’
‘What way is that?’
‘You’re real in my mind; you’re a hallucination.’
‘Do you think I’ll go away if you stop thinking me?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And what if I stop thinking you?’
‘I think I’ll still be here.’
‘Let’s try it,’ said the head, and was gone; in my hands I held a slime-covered stone. There was a greyness all around me, a tightness across my chest, a heaviness coming to a point on each side of the base of my throat, the veins and arteries of my arms seemed filled with lead. The pain grew harder and heavier; I thought I was going to collapse there in the mud by the river. Then the head was back in my hands, the greyness and the pain receded.
‘That’s what happens if I stop thinking you,’ said the head of Orpheus. ‘Do you know what I am to you?’
‘Probably not.’
‘I am the first of your line. I am the first singer, the one who invented the lyre, the one to whom Hermes brought Eurydice and perpetual guilt. I am your progenitor, I am the endlessly voyaging sorrow that is always in you, I am that astonishment from which you write in those brief moments when you can write.’
‘Endlessly voyaging sorrow and astonishment. Yes, I have those from you, I know that. Perpetual guilt, you said.’
‘In the stories they always say I turned around to look at her too soon but that isn’t how it was: I turned away too soon, turned away before I’d ever looked long enough, before I’d ever fully perceived her.’
With those words there came into my mind Luise. Once when we were living together I was on a 22 bus and I saw her unexpectedly in Sloane Street. The bus was moving slowly north in heavy traffic and she was walking south. She was wearing a long black coat and as she approached she was smiling to herself and walking slowly, lingeringly, as if lost in thought. Then the bus passed her and I turned and saw her going away. After that I sometimes imagined her seen from a distance walking away slowly, lingeringly, not coming back.
‘Does anyone ever fully perceive anyone else?’ I said. I began to cry.
‘Cry on my face,’ said the head, ‘maybe my eyes will grow back.’
‘Is there healing in my tears?’
‘I don’t know, I’ll try anything.’
‘Maybe you ought to stop trying. You’re old, you’re blind and rotten, you can’t sing any more. Why don’t you just pack it in?’
‘I haven’t that choice, there’s no way for me to cease to be. I’m manifesting myself to you as a rotting head but there’s no picture for what I am: I am that which sings the world, I am the response that never dies. Fidelity is what’s wanted.’
‘Fidelity. I got my head zapped looking for a novel and here I am listening to homilies from a rotting head.’
‘You don’t know what you’re looking for,’ said the head. ‘Alone and blind and endlessly voyaging I think constantly of fidelity. Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart. In love or in terror or in loathing one responds to them with the true self; fidelity is not an act of the wilclass="underline" the soul is compelled by recognitions. Anyone who loves, anyone who perceives the other person fully can only be faithful, can never be unfaithful to the sea and the mountains and the death in that person, so pitiful and heroic is it to be a human being.’
Again I felt the pain across my chest and down my left arm. ‘If you’re going to take a high moral tone you’d better find someone else to talk to,’ I said, ‘I’m not up to it.’
‘Do you think about fidelity sometimes?’ said the head.
‘Sometimes.’ Years after Luise had gone I found inside a copy of Rilke’s Neue Gedichte her recipe for bread; I’d never seen her use a written-down recipe but there it was in her writing on a folded-up feint-ruled notebook page marking ‘Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes’:
1·5 kg granary flour
2 dessertsp oil
1 ” salt
1 tblesp caraway seeds
2 ” dried yeast
1½ pts water, bloodwarm
1 teasp sugar
Put flour in a bowl, add oil & caraway seeds. Put sugar & yeast in a jug, add a little of the warm water. Leave for 10–15 mins in a warm place to froth, add salt to warm water. When yeast dissolved, add to the flour and water. Stir, then turn on to a floured board & knead 10–15 mins until it is elastic. Put back in bowl, cover, leave to rise in warm place. When doubled in size, take out, divide into 2, knead & thump, shape into loaves and put in greased tins. Cover, leave for 10 mins in a warm place, then put in oven & bake at 220° for 40-5 mins.
The smell of the brown loaves was like fidelity.
Luise had an accordion and she liked to play hymns on it. Her favourite was ‘Aus Tiefer Not’, ‘From Deep Distress’:
Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir,
Herr Gott, erhör mein Rufen.
From deep distress cry I to thee,
Lord God, hear thou my calling.
This is Psalm 130, ‘De profundis’, and the Book of Common Prayer renders it:
Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord:
Lord, hear my voice.
She sang it in German of course, in a deep and distant Thirty Years’ War soprano while the accordion marched on in a minor key like a troop of pikemen with dinted helmets. Luise’s mother had bought her the accordion and paid for the lessons; her father had died in the Ardennes in 1944.
She farted like a woman who carries a spear and drives a chariot. ‘What kind of piety is that?’ I said. ‘With your upper part you’re singing hymns and with your lower part you’re making Götterdämmerung. You’re making tiefe Not for the rest of the world.’