5
Before Miriam hung up to continue biking home, she exhorted me to lock the cat flap. I left it open. The ivy had rolled itself neatly up as it slumped to the ground, so there was no danger of it slipping any further. Nor was the golden rain a hazard anymore.
Back in June, I had caught Miriam up on the library ladder at six in the morning. She had propped it up against the tree in order to rescue Tygo, who was too scared to climb down, from a fork in the branches. A proper library ladder has a hinged mounting bracket which grasps the upper bookshelves perfectly for no-tip climbing. That bracket was now draped loosely over the rounded branch, and the ladder wiggled with it, ready to fling Miriam, her outstretched arm just about to grab the cat, to the ground. Alarmed by her cooing and calling, I got out of bed and went to the balcony, from where I looked down on her rescue efforts. I didn’t dare yell to her to come down this instant, for fear she’d get a fright and crash off anyway.
The ladder made a nearly 180-degree twist, but Miriam managed to scoop the hefty tomcat off the branch and bring the two of them to safety.
‘Minchen, never do that again, will you? That’s not what a library ladder’s for. I really can’t handle any more accidents. Let the damn cat sit up there for a couple of days and then call the fire brigade. You let your cat mania go too far sometimes.’
This incident proved once again that such a thing as a domestic quarrel was no longer possible. A petulant remark, the slightest raising of the voice, a sharp look — it all felt like a snub to Tonio.
6
I went back upstairs and out onto the bedroom balcony. On the roll of ivy, and among the undulating pleats of the remaining tapestry, skittered a dozen or more jays. I’m not an avid birdwatcher, but I do recognise a jay when I see one: his beige plumage, his black-and-white tail, the edge of his wings speckled like a Palestinian kaffiya. A few more sat on the fence between us and our neighbour Kluun.
I had read about it in the paper. Tens of thousands of Eurasian jays emigrated from Eastern Europe, where they had thrived, and settled in the Ardennes, only to spread their wings further to the Netherlands in search of acorns. The onslaught has only just begun: in the coming weeks, they expect a hundred thousand at least. Those few in our tumbledown backyard were perhaps just the reconnaissance team. I saw them yesterday for the first time. They skipped about, as though surprised and disoriented, over the ivy’s aerial roots, possibly wondering what had happened to the previous night’s lodgings. Jays have the reputation of being quite muddled, and are thus apt to forget where they have hidden their stash of beechnuts. This was the impression they gave me now: surely they’re here somewhere … there you go, we’ve covered them too meticulously again …
Tygo and Tasha emerged from their cat flap, and with their Norwegian gusto put paid to that Eurasian fumbling and fussing. The birds took flight over the backyards, and the cats in turn gazed confusedly into their newly formed wilderness. With cautious pawsteps, Tygo mounted the oversized roll, while Tasha sniffed around the splintered trunk of the golden rain.
‘See, Tasha?’ I said quietly, ‘You no longer need that tree to get to the birds.’ At once she turned her silver-white head in my direction and opened her jaw a few times in a soundless meow. Then she joined her brother on top of the hillock of ivy.
‘For God’s sake, let’s not get wound up over the ivy, too.’ Miriam’s voice behind me in the bedroom, panting from the stairs. Female heels clattering over the parquet. She stopped next to me and looked down into the abyss. ‘Yeah, I know … it’s a huge mess, but there’s nothing to be done. Worse things have happened.’
‘That’s just it, Minchen … we sat for nearly four months on those few square metres grieving over those worse things.’
I pointed to the wrought-iron skeleton of the small arched alcove, which had been bent completely out of shape by the force of the falling ivy. The white loveseat was half buried.
‘Tonio sat there with his model. Three days before he died. He photographed her there … If we hadn’t had that spot to cry our eyes out we’d never have survived the summer.’
The cats now sat side by side, looking up at us with their white chests puffed out.
‘Then that’s the how it was meant to be,’ Miriam said. ‘Summer’s passed …’
‘Um-hm. The season is finished. Night after night the same show, and now the sets are being dismantled, rolled up, taken away. For the continuation of the heartache, ladies and gentlemen, we offer you the living room.’
Miriam persisted in not caving in at the sight of what did, after all, amount to the destruction of her backyard, but in the end we both hung over the balcony railing in tears. That golden rain … when we moved in back in July ’92, Tonio was four, the slightest puff of breeze blew pale flakes off the little tree, but we didn’t realise these were withered blossoms. The following May, the golden rain brought forth small yellow cobs, no bigger than baby corn.
‘I’ll have them plant a new golden rain if you want,’ I said. ‘But what matters to me is that Tonio grew up with this one, and that he got to see it in bloom just before he died. That mess down there makes me feel like from now on, everything of ours is going to get dragged down … everything we thought we’d achieved, built up … everything that still bonds us with Tonio.’
‘Don’t think like that.’
‘I can’t help it. Murphy’s law, with its never-ending chain of discomforts, has something comical to it. I have the sensation that for the past few months we’ve been living under a law that’s only brought a never-ending chain of disasters. The one seems to bring about the next, without a logical connection. And the end is nowhere in sight.’
The cats now lay on their side atop the roll of ivy, paws intertwined — play-fighting, but only half-heartedly, giving one another the occasional random lick.
‘So now you understand,’ Miriam said, ‘why I freaked out this morning about Tygo and Tasha.’
BOOK II. The Golden Rain
CHAPTER ONE. The White Elephant
there is shopping to be done before darkness
asks the way, black candles for the basement
1
Whit Monday. In a daze, I ascended the stairs to my workroom: the seventeen treads that only yesterday morning separated me from my novel, and which the ringing of the doorbell rendered untakeable. On what I referred to as my sorting table lay the unfinished manuscript, and next to it a new work schedule. Today was to be the first day. Just look, there it was, in black and white: ‘Monday 24 May 2010/Day 1’. I looked around the workroom with something approaching curiosity. The maps spread out on the long table. The desks with three identical electric IBMs. The folders containing newspaper clippings about the murder.
Here is where it should have happened today.
Were it not for …
I went to the back balcony and opened the doors. Whit Monday promised to be just as fine a pre-summer day as the day before. The unperturbed hard blue sky. Early yesterday morning, Tonio might have seen, at most, a hint of colour fade into the sky. This was all the summer he would see this year, this life.
Once again I was taken aback by the awning above the balcony doors, which I had found retracted last Thursday after the photo shoot, knowing for sure I had left it open. I could no longer question Tonio about it. The girl on the Polaroid snaps, maybe she could clear it up. Where was she now? The capable young photographer who had immortalised her on film had, after this tour de force, set off permanently for a different place.