Right in front directly underneath the throne of the Old One prisoners are lined up. They are all Unwhite. Among them also an immigrant. He is easily as aged as the Old One, but he wears a big, awkward pair of glasses slipped down to the tip of his nose. His bony face — the head is a bone-riddle — has vaguely the same appearance as that of a pelican. He has only a few very long grey hairs left, combed flat over this domed head. His name is Mister Murphy. Mister Albert Murphy.
Apparently it was his case which was just now disposed of. Two hundred rands is the fine imposed. Upon hearing this Mister Murphy pulls himself up straight with umbrage and starts objecting with violent gestures. His face has taken on the purplish glow of a beet. “Two hundred rands!” he screeches. “Is an insult! At the very least it should have been twenty-one thousand. Who, who do you (seamheads) take me for? My name is Mister Murphy. Albert! I am the immigrant, a businessman, and I was in the war, dammit man!” At this he bends down and starts unscrewing his right leg. It is evident that the artificial limb was attached to a stump hardly twenty centimetres long. The stump, enclosed in a blue leather cap, now grotesquely jerks up and down like the severed tip of a tail of a farm hound. Mister Murphy waves the loose limb with the neatly polished shoe about him. Two court orderlies fray their way through the shackled Unwhites and Mister Murphy hands them the leg with the shoe. The defence’s exhibit A. The leg with its calf and knee of imitation flesh shines like a largish pink fish in the dusk-light of the court.
Next to him on the last bench right at the back of the hall someone was busy filling a sheet of paper with words and his attention is drawn to it now. The paper is nearly entirely covered with letters and squiggles. It looks like a poem. He can make out the first line: “No, Baba — don’t trust the chains on your ankles. . ” The rest is illegibly entwined in flowery letters and letter-like flowers. All of a dark blue colour. This drawing or description in fact becomes hazy lower down the page. It is only like a written page gradually inserted in water and the ink is dissolved. The lines and arabesques which have remained the longest in the liquid, fade the fastest. The water will become whole again.
Now at last the Old One has found his legs. The hubbub roused him from the swoon or the sleep in which, as is customary, he sank after pronouncing sentence. He lifts his two balled, vengeful firsts to heaven — flabby with age and the momentous weighing of pros and cons, being proposed to and disposing — and cries: “Holy! Holy! Did I not also fight in the war then?” He climbs down from the referee’s chair and plods with difficulty to the back of the hall.
Then he notices for the first time the hallstand behind them. And draped over the stand is something. . something like a birdrobe. It is another gown belonging to the Old One. Under the robe, this he can observe now that the Old One starts manipulating it, there is a hanger. The Old One brings the hanger to light. It is filled from end to end by a row of medals pinned to it. The badges are like ancient watches grown blind and useless. When picking them up and straightening them out, the row of medals on their faded ribbons jingle and quake. Look, the Old One demonstrates, these are for all the skirmishes and battles in which I took part. . The Great War with Delville Wood, Passchendaele, Papawerkop, Verdun, Festubert, Vimy, Somme, Etaples, Fort Douaumont, Bapaume, Thermopylae, Tin Hats. . and the line of words drooling from his mouth becomes ever longer, like jewels strung on a cord with clotsapphires in between. These names, these words, convey an old odour of musty blood and clods mixed with quicklime. . “And these here were for the Other War. This is for the relief of Berlin, and that one for the liberation of Paris afterwards.” It strikes him as strange that Paris should come after Berlin. He had always thought it the other way around.
“And this here,” and the Old One bends down to lift with both hands something which had been lying under the hat rack in the shadow-pool of the gown, “this I picked up more than twenty years ago on the beach of Paris.” In his hands he holds a roundish, pale object emitting a horrible rattling noise. It is, so the Old One explains, a bag or a ball made of skin and devoid of any colour — very likely the featherless skin of the older birds themselves — in which the gulls kept their chickens for security and protection when they went out looking for carrion. Indeed, he notices then the smooth, miniature skulls, bone-riddles without clues, and the wide-open beaks of the chickens protruding from the mouth of the purse, and among the other sounds he distinguishes again the cheeping and the hissing. At the bottom of the bag there are some more eggs or maybe even whitewashed pebbles — nobody has ever been in the position to verify — and with the trampling of the chickens (“look, thus”) these eggs or these things click against one another, the ball oscillates as anything with a rounded bottom will be wont to do, and this movement causes a noise fit to frighten off any predator or enemy. Suddenly it reeks of rotten eggs, of old-old iodine-saturated sea. And the hall is entirely filled with the ghastly chainlike clack-clack clack-clack.
“In this way there is no distinction between life and death,” he then also says.
The Oasis
Quien mucho abarco poco aprieta.
You insist. You wish me to tell you again that old tale about the horses. Why, nobody knows. And besides, it is such a long time ago that memory itself is covered with wrinkles and dust. But since it is what you desire.
It is an old town, the streets more or less depressed through the various quarters so that one is left with the impression that the houses are built on high banks. (The kind of town of which a Yevgeni Zamyatin could have written: “This conversation took place one quiet revolutionary evening, on a bench in Martha’s garden. A machinegun gently tick-tocked in the distant hills, calling its mate. A cow sighed bitterly in the shed behind the hedge. . ”) Wistaria thread a wealth of shadows over the stoops. Ceylon roses are planted in tins painted red. And trees, trees. Everywhere trees. There are so many trees in the town that the wind will never accomplish its tasks, will never dispose of enough time to go blow elsewhere also. The wind is breathless, without wind! There is day and there is night and all the pale mysterious hours between day and night, the thrashing of leaves. There is the eternal shiver as of countless hands waving green greetings. It is never still — silver blots before your eyes, the scales of the sky, a mobile catching the light and turning it over, turning it inside out and grasping. And always the ripples streaming through space as if a net filled with reflecting sound is dragged over the town. Wind nesting in the trees of the old professor’s courtyard. Wind rubbing a caress over the many trees around the dwelling of the neighbouring girl. Permit me the confession: that must be why I took an interest in horses. Up high from the loft day after day I could look down on the lass horsebacked under the trees — her sharp young body with its stretchand-hop, hopping and stretching with the trot, sit-sitting with the triple, the coat-tails flapping away from the round buttocks solidly outlined in the corduroy jodhpurs, her stick-straight back ending in curls, the horse’s hoofs flop and the leaves rustling their silver. And I am not allowed to go and play with her. It remains an unexplored secret.
I have two horses, two young foals. It’s true, there used to be an earlier, older nag in the family: Patanjali. But we hadn’t trained him all that well and we later did away with him, rather in the way one would get rid of an illegitimate child. Sometimes I see him moving through the streets with his little cart — we called him Easel for short, because of his long ears — and one may still observe in his movements traces of his education with us. When he wishes to evacuate the bowels he goes down on his haunches. The tan-coloured skin (like a jersey) drops in folds. He struggles with the forelegs, trying to transform his knees into elbows so that he may scratch with a bashful hoof behind the ears. The foldings are left behind in the street. But I take the necessary precautions not to be seen by his shiny eyes.