Georg Letham (21 page)

My brother and sister were now sleeping quietly in the two rooms on either side of mine, but I was at the window, looking out. It must have just started to rain. Through the veil of rain, two animals could be seen, one on top of the other. The moisture made their fur slick, dark. The top rat seemed to be riding on the other. With its front claws it was squeezing the throat of the rat below. I cried out softly. The animal raised its
head, craned its neck upward, looked about. I was silent. Through the trickling of the rain I heard a soft wail like the meowing of a cat break from the throat of the conquered rat as the conquering rat calmly and deliberately hacked at the other's head. It bit through the easily cracked skull, gobbled the brain, then threw the carcass onto its side and went at the entrails. It worked among them with passion. The rain soon stopped entirely. The wind shook leaves from the lovely rain-wet plane trees into the pit. A perfumed surge of humid, almost tropically sultry, summer air came from the garden.

I fell asleep again–I might almost say I fell asleep against my will.

But the next day I witnessed something that had never been known to happen, two rats dwelling peaceably in the pit, a stronger one, a female, the animal from the night before, and a weaker one, a male, which had just let itself be tempted into jumping down, like so many before and after it. The male was shier, the female louder and bolder. Without fear of me or my father, it lifted its head and emitted high, unpleasant, vibrating notes–something like the whistling of an arrow through the air, that kind of sound. The female ran with short steps in circles around the male, or rather in semicircles, for the creature being courted was afraid and cowered in the corner. Romiette and Julio, my father said mockingly. The female did not slacken, sometimes getting up on its hind legs like a trained squirrel and dancing around the male, which came forward. I was not able to see the rest of the game (it was a ghastly and yet exhilarating sight to see, these horrible animals
playing
!). It was the day final grades were being given out at school.

My clever father's idea was that the animals would first be lured into the pit and then devour each other there, wipe themselves out. All against all. But now two mortal enemies were living, as it appeared, side
by side, amicably and companionably. The fact that
his
law of life did not apply in all cases was, despite all the love I had for him, perhaps I will not be believed, a consolation, a freeing thought. Perhaps the world was not as bad, nowhere near as ghastly, as he made it out to be. Did he make it bad, or was it bad? I would so much have liked to teach
him
, to disabuse him. But what response could I make to a cynic who told me that blessed stupidity could not be learned and that even meanness had to be inborn? That was all he knew. He thought it the greatest good fortune to be stupid, which he was not, and a natural advantage to be meaner than the rest.

My father noticed that I was resisting him, perhaps consciously for the first time. As always, he was excessively polite when he was gathering all his strength in order to achieve a goal. He yielded to me in everything. He never contradicted me. And yet he never lied. I knew him the way he knew me. He thought the world would have been better uncreated. I did not want to believe that unless I had to. I liked being alive so much. I was a child. I wanted to be one for once.

But he wanted something else. In the evening, or, to be more accurate, at night, he would grow serious. My father was toughening me. He wanted to bring me up to be a courageous person.

I only want to report the bare facts. He took me down to the rat pit and left me there to watch the dreadful animals' shameless and repeatedly performed sexual intercourse in the beam of his powerful pocket flashlight, as though the light from the lamps in the courtyard would not have been enough. I am unable to describe it. My revulsion was indescribable, and my voluptuous thrill equally so. There was just one other time when I experienced both at once. The reader knows when and where.

I want to try to describe what went on in me, and yet I know I can't. There must be some connection with the passing of my wife, for that too I have been unable to describe. What sensuality there was in me was at the same time revulsion. The two were a mad muddle. My father took my hand in his, and I clung to it. Almost the way I clung to my neighbor's hand on the dock in the southern city a few hours ago. He spoke kindly to me. “While your contemporaries are ignorant urchins, you are already a man. When they are men, you will be so far ahead of them that . . .” He left the sentence unfinished. He had to support me. I twisted as though in convulsions, I held my breath in my chest involuntarily, my face became heavy and hot, something was roused in me, and abruptly the warm, moist night air shot deep into my leaden, narrow breast with a whoosh, something loosened, and with the most terrible fright I realized that I was grinding my teeth . . . They were grinding just as my father's did. That was how he had ground through an expensive gold crown on one of his molars in half a year, and to his fury he had had to pay the high-priced dentist a second time. But a boy has strong, healthy teeth. I did back then.

I stepped back to the side of the house. I clenched my fists. With my left hand I beat against the wall like a lunatic, with my right I struck out at the rain barrel.

My father stood next to me, having again switched off his pocket flashlight for reasons of economy. I had put my hands over my eyes, but my father removed them gently (how he could caress, with his beautiful, thin, but not hard, hands, marred only by an oval scar from an old dog bite) and said to me: “You shouldn't try not to look. And if
you inherit nothing from me but the education I have given you, you will certainly become a great and successful man. You may be hated sometimes, but you'll never be laughed at. What else is there? You can laugh at them! If my father had brought me up as I have you, my expedition would have been successful, and I would have been one of the greatest explorers of my time. So: open your eyes and see! You believe in the omnipotence of feeling. I believe in the omnipotence of greed. Love makes the world go round–or does money make the world go round? Shall we make a bet? I'll put down a thousand ducats, like a king in a fairy tale, and you only need to put down the dried-out sandwich that you're carrying around in your satchel.”

This was correct. As on every school morning, I had brought my two breakfast rolls, made into sandwiches and wrapped up in paper. Grades had been ceremoniously handed out, but there had been no lessons. I took the rolls out of my satchel and gave them to him. “That's your stake. I'm good for mine, I don't have that much on me.” Good! He switched his pocket flashlight back on, swung one of the rolls in the air, and pitched it into the pit.

The animals were still coupled in their way, the way rats couple even as they wage the battle of the sexes. Their hatred for each other was nothing new to me. For I had studied it. The other thing, their brute love, was new. A few minutes before, I had understood for the first time what the “ignorant urchins” whispered about in the schoolyard or in the bathrooms and what, in my silly pride, I had always turned away from despite all my craving for knowledge. Nor had I wanted to be enlightened about human love. But what these “loving hearts” were doing was now borne in upon me, in a horrific, revolting, scientifically naked,
and brutal fashion. Not Romeo and Juliet, but he-rat and she-rat. No matter, borne in upon me it was. I had grasped it. But, being a pathetic stupid boy, I was unable to grasp what happened next, the struggle of the (even now) “loving hearts” over the wretched dried-out morsel of bread. The rending of the “loving hearts” by the cruel imperative of the struggle for existence. This struggle was waged between the strong female and the gentler male with a fury, rapidity, and brutality that surpassed anything I had seen.

I will not describe it. Be grateful that I am drawing the veil over this scene as I did over that of my wife's death. A little gift! Enough of the horrors of the world, as my father said. That'll do.

The female won. It bolted the filthy roll in one bite and glared with its sharp, glittering little eyes toward the top, where my father was still holding the second roll. Most horrifying of all, the male of the two had not even been killed by its love-antagonist. The poor beast was bleeding, lying on its side, and was unable to protect itself against its beloved. Time passed. I was breathing heavily, my throat became constricted. My father breathed calmly. The female down below was quiet too. Finally, just as I was thinking that everything was over, there was a sound, soft and yet so bloodcurdling that I–I don't know, I don't remember what happened then. I saw nothing and heard nothing. I think my father took me in his arms later, carried me to the library, and waited until I awakened fresh as a daisy. When I opened my eyes, he was holding the big Andree atlas in his hand and, as he often did, was using the tip of the nail of his little finger to trace the route through the northern seas (on the “Polar Region–Arctic” map) that he had taken on his voyage so long ago. I stood up, bade him good night, and he answered: Good night. I did not spend a sleepless night. I slept like a corpse.

I had now become the person who could do what I have done and what has brought me onto this convicts' ship. I no longer dreamed. My father had awakened me, like Hamlet. Is not Hamlet a murderer too? He “only” kills Polonius, he kills his beloved's meddlesome father as though it were a lark, skewers him like a rat that is old and smart but still not smart and experienced enough, behind a curtain, to hear him squeal. And yet he is Hamlet!

Our war against the rats was progressing well.

One day the animals roused themselves to action. They had finally come to a decision. They no longer accepted the terms of the experiment, but left their home, the courtyard, the garden, the house. They must have gone to the river at night and launched themselves onward in a horde. Rat hordes were supposed to have turned up far downstream; whether these were “ours” is very much open to question, for traveling is just what rats like to do. Among other things they like to do.

There is no way of knowing how many of our rats had killed each other. We started to count, but soon tired of it. The remains of the animals were shoveled out day after day until suddenly there were no more. These mortal remains went into a hole dug for this purpose not far from the fountain, and they produced very good fertilizer. For flowers of a splendor, abundance, and beauty never before seen in the otherwise parched and excessively shady garden sprouted on this excavation the following spring.

My father took special pride in this miracle flower bed when he showed it to the buyer of our house. Now that the property was free of rats, its value had, of course, increased markedly, and my father thought it extravagant to have such a huge, valuable house for only four people (him, my brother, my sister, and me). He sold it for three times what
he had paid for it. “Wasn't it worth the side of bacon?” he said, alluding to the lovely side of bacon from which he had cut a piece as big as two fists with his own hands. “I won my bet, by the way. Didn't I, my big, dear, foolish boy?” he asked, running his thin, dry, scar-adorned hand through my hair, which was brittle or soft depending on the weather . . . Yes, “my boy”! I was no longer a boy.

He reused the tiles from the pit, incidentally. They were cleaned with soap and soda, and with the gardener's help he reconstructed the heating stove in what had been my mother's bedroom. Only it was a little smaller than before, because a few of the tiles, the broken ones, could not be used again. The old stove had had a built-in oven in which apples and chestnuts could be roasted. This could not be done in the new one . . .

But the new owner of the house had no children.

If I am to explain how, because of my father, I became the person I am, I must begin with the story of my father, with the man who had a determining influence on my youth. He too once found himself on a long sea voyage that was full of privations, and, as I will soon relate, ultimately unsuccessful. This great journey, which entirely appeased his wanderlust, led him, not southward to the equatorial region, but northward. To the pole.

He was slender, muscular, with great endurance, had as a young man undertaken the most difficult and dangerous climbing expeditions, had reached summits never before scaled. He was scientifically well prepared, an outstanding geologist and a great botanist who, with other scholars, had helped lay the groundwork for the at that time new science of geobotany. Physical geography was his special interest, but he had written a doctoral dissertation on the terrestrial magnetic pole and the relationship between geomagnetism and variable air currents, proving himself a fertile meteorologist. All this before the age of thirty. Could anyone have believed that this versatile, promising
scholar and naturalist would one day become an administrative official in the Ministry of Agriculture and the “left hand” of successive ministers? And the one to bring up such a promising son as I? Government support enabled him, in his thirty-first year, to equip a large three-masted sailing ship, taking account of the most recent experiences of northern travelers, and to choose the necessary collaborators–geographers, navigators, meteorologists, zoologists, botanists, linguists, and ethnographers. Where possible, a scholar was to have a command of several disciplines. An academy in miniature. In addition a select crew and a small dog, Ruru.

As the leader of the expedition, he had his name in the headlines at the time he set sail. People had faith in him. They believed in his star. The officially supported science otherwise known to habitually resist any true advance lent its assistance. He had himself blessed, along with his companions, before setting out. He was as handsome as he was intelligent, an appealing person. He knew how to command, all were happy to follow him.