Читать книгу Face-Off - Chris Karsten - Страница 16

“I . . . er . . . imagined you differently,” Ignaz Bouts said in the car on their way back from the station.

“Differently?”

“You know, without a beard.”

“I couldn’t shave, with all the wounds,” said Abel. “After the accident I told you about in my e-mail. They’ve healed now; only the scars remain. I’ll have to live with them. But I’ll shave the beard. I’m not used to it.”

“So, the accident that disfigured your face, they say it was your fault, is that what they say? And everything had been so carefully planned for your visit.”

“Yes, and I had to flee like a common thug. I didn’t want to go to prison, not in South Africa. You don’t know what South African prisons are like. Hellholes.”

Ignaz nodded. “I’ve had a run-in or two with the law in my time; I know how they can harass you . . . The police.”

Abel wondered about the run-ins. In the years of their cyber friendship Ignaz had never mentioned anything about altercations with the law.

Ignaz parked the car. “The house I found for you is just off Katelijne Street. A short alley, central but private. No one will disturb you, just as you asked. Reasonable rent, furnished – I hope you like it.”

Abel muttered his thanks and they got out.

With the bag containing his clothing in one hand, the violin case in the other, Abel fell into step beside Ignaz. They crossed Katelijne to the deli on the corner, turned into Stoofstraat, a small pedestrian alley, terraced houses on either side, two and three storeys high with old stepped gables.

Ignaz fumbled with the key and they stepped into the living room with old-fashioned wallpaper and worn floorboards. They creaked up the wooden staircase to a single bedroom and bathroom at the top. The curtains at the windows were muslin and lace. His mother would have approved.

“What do you think?” asked Ignaz.

“I’ll take it,” said Abel.

“You can put your personal stamp on it, decorate it yourself.”

“Can I see the stars from here at night?” In the house where he and his mother had lived, his ethnic masks had been the only adornment on the walls of his room.

“Away from the city is always better for stargazing,” said Ignaz.

The masks hadn’t been décor, but company. Abel could talk to the masks, listen to their stories while the sounds of the violin suffused the room and fed his spirit. They’d been a good team: Paganini, the masks and he. He could do the same here: he’d packed the Idia from Benin between his clothing. He would take it out and hang it on the wall, the Idia mask his mother had worn over her face.

Through the Idia he could talk to his mother, as the Punu did in their white masks – dancing round the fire, calling into being the spirit of an ancestor. He wasn’t planning on dancing, but he was planning to call upon his mother, the only familiar being in this strange new world.

“I want to buy a telescope. I’m unfamiliar with the stars and constellations of the northern skies.”

“You can take the bus to the Beisbroek Observatory,” said Ignaz. “I have to leave now. When you’ve unpacked, take a walk, explore the area. As you know, I’m in Dijverstraat, just a ten-minute walk from here. When you’re ready, bring your vellums. I can’t wait to see them. Should we speak English to each other? My English isn’t good, but if you find it hard to understand Flemish . . .”

“No, please carry on in Flemish and I’ll speak Afrikaans. We’ll understand each other.”

“Okay, but you’ll have to learn the language if you want to stay here and get Belgian citizenship. I’ll teach you.” They walked to the corner of Katelijne together. “Up Katelijne, across the canal, the big church on the right, that’s the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw, the Church of Our Lady. Just past it you turn right and you’re in Dijver,” Ignaz explained.

“Yes, yes, I understand. Past the church.” But Abel’s eyes were riveted on the plaque fixed to the wall of a building at the corner of his alley.

“Oh, you’re reading about your street.”

Abel nodded and carried on: The medieval bath houses, or stofen, did not always have a good reputation. By the late Middle Ages the taking of a bath had in many cases evolved from a health cure to a brothel visit.

A street of wicked women! He let it sink in, glanced at Ignaz and looked back at the plaque.

What would his mother have said? She who had warned him against women of that kind, that their craftiness could result in one’s death. The Bible is full of it – she had recited long excerpts from memory. Especially from Proverbs: “The lips of the adulterous woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil . . . Keep to a path far from her, do not go near the door of her house.” And from Thessalonians: “It is God’s will . . . that you should avoid sexual immorality.”

“You found me a house in a street of whores?” he whispered.

“Those were the old days, Abel,” said Ignaz. “The town fathers keep a strict watch on our town’s morals. There are no longer any whores here.”

Abel looked back at the quiet alley, the window boxes at the front doors, a restaurant signboard further along. Bicycles propped up against the walls, lace curtains at the windows, an old woman with a bag of groceries from which a baguette was protruding.

He felt better. His mother would understand that he’d been on a long journey, not without hardship, and had to find his way around a strange country. Besides, the presence of whores was no longer strange to him. He’d encountered them, vulgar and shameless in dress and behaviour, while he’d convalesced at the Sleep Inn in Bez Valley.

He watched Ignaz walk away. Then he turned and went back up the alley to his rented house. He didn’t blame Ignaz. He was helpful, had done his best. And Ignaz was his only friend.

Abel unpacked his bag: his few items of clothing, the paisley tie, the mask of Idia, the cardboard cylinder with the tanned skins that Ignaz was so keen to see. And between his folded clothes, the taxidermy instruments he’d bought in Johannesburg.

He opened the black case and took out his father’s violin, the 1942 Van de Geest that had fostered Abel’s love of violin music. He studied the instrument, ran his fingers over the shiny lacquer of the top, the scrolls of the F-holes, like those in Paganini’s beloved Guarneri.

Abel inserted a sharp new blade into a scalpel and slowly, with the delicate precision of a surgeon, began to work loose the seams of the maple back. It was almost two hours before the fortune in dollar, pound and euro banknotes lay exposed in its hiding place. He stood on a kitchen chair and hung the Idia mask on the wall in the front room, opposite the old easy chair upholstered in silver-and-gold brocade, antimacassars protecting the back and the armrests. Then he sank deep into the cushions and admired the mask, satisfied that he could simply raise his eyes whenever he felt alone.

With the Idia on the wall, the house no longer felt quite so strange and empty; it was as if his mother were with him again. Hadn’t the mask been on her face quite recently, weren’t parts of her still clinging to the wood, her skin cells, her spirit embedded in the Idia’s atoms and molecules? He sat in the chair, purging his mind, cleansing his thoughts, preparing his spirit. Then he put the iPod’s earphones in his ears and closed his eyes. He rested his chin on his chest, barely rising and falling, as if in a trance.

The sound of a solo violin filled his ears and his mind, Paganini’s unmistakable little monsters, the first of the twenty-four Caprices, initiation rite for every violin virtuoso.

Abel surrendered himself to the sweet tonality of the chords Perlman’s bow was coaxing from the strings. They frolicked and soared through the air around him, through the house, out into the street of whores. He sat motionless, allowing his receptive spirit to absorb, digest and interpret the music, every individual note from every string. His mind was filled with the image of the violinist: the right hand holding the bow that jumped, slid, criss-crossed; the pizzicato of the left-hand fingers as they plucked and strummed and pressed over the entire length of the fingerboard. The ricochet bowings of the fifth, the tremolos of the sixth, the staccato passages and the many long, slurred scales and arpeggios of the seventh, the jumping dotted notes of the eleventh, the lyrical melody of the twentieth . . .

* * *

On the morning of the third day after his arrival Abel stood at the bathroom mirror, trimming his beard with a pair of scissors, then applying shaving cream over his stubble. He picked up the razor and ran it across his cheek, watching the blade expose his hidden face. With his fingertips he stroked the white scars on his cheeks, his forehead, his nose and his chin.

He gazed at the strange, misshapen face in the mirror, recognising only the arhythmical blinking of the lazy eye. Like his name, his face had changed since he’d met his first two donors, and before WO Neser had forced him to flee.

The so-called weekend facelift in Bujumbura had been the first change. That botched attempt, the caricature created by the quack, had cost Dr Lippens his own face.

Thankfully, Abel’s mission to recover the Idia mask, his only remaining connection to his mother, had been successful. He’d given WO Neser the slip yet again, but it had been by the skin of his teeth, almost catastrophically so – the new scars on his face bore witness to that fact. He’d relaxed his vigilance and underestimated the attractive detective, in his eagerness to harvest the soft skin on a blonde woman’s inner thigh. But it had taught him a lesson: no impulsive behaviour ever again, no matter how desirable he might find a donor or her tattoo.

He picked up the cardboard cylinder containing the skins he intended to take along on his first visit to Ignaz Bouts. After many years of corresponding by e-mail on the subject of tanning skins and hides – Ignaz selflessly providing him with tips and advice, sharing his secret recipes for producing soft, delicate virgin parchment – Abel anticipated Ignaz’s astonishment when he unrolled his sheets of softly dressed vellum from the tissue paper, and revealed the contents of the cardboard cylinder. Ignaz would not be disappointed by the quality of the craftsmanship, and Ignaz had high standards. He was, after all, an expert on Jungfernpergament, or virgin parchment.

But the vellums in Abel’s cardboard cylinder were not from the soft belly skins of unborn calves or lambs, they had belonged to a hare and a dassie, a cat, a mole and a rat. Only one of each: the rest of his skins he had given to Jules Daagari in Bujumbura in payment for the African masks Jules had brought for Abel’s gallery of ethnic artefacts in Johannesburg.

Abel had patiently tanned and treated the hides of the small animals, adhering strictly to Ignaz’s centuries-old recipes, as recorded in ancient documents. The skins of the Bruges tanners, or huidenvetters, so Ignaz had assured him, were sought after all over Europe, even across the channel in England. Especially the tanned skins of cats and dogs, from which soft leather gloves were made for English lords and ladies, and the hides of larger animals – calves, goats, sheep, cattle, pigs – ended up as handmade shoes for Italian marquises and countesses, or calf-length boots for French barons and duchesses.

But Abel’s skins were not meant to be turned into gloves or shoes, and it wasn’t only his animal hides that Ignaz would appraise with a critical eye. It was the other two skins in Abel’s collection that filled him with eager anticipation as he walked out the front door into Stoofstraat, the precious cardboard cylinder in the crook of his arm.

Dijver was an open street, not squashed among others, a wide promenade along the riverbank, lined with umbrellas and souvenir kiosks. Abel stood beside the Dijver Canal and studied the buildings on the opposite side of the street. Between a café and a lace shop he saw the door he was looking for, the faded and peeling name on a second-floor window: De Boekbinderij Bouts, where Ignaz specialised in book conservation and leather covers.

Abel hammered on the brass knocker, then pushed open the door and entered.

Ignaz came down the stairs to meet him, his hands in white cotton gloves, a jeweller’s loupe above his left eyebrow, leaving Abel with the impression that Ignaz had two left eyes.

On the second storey, Ignaz took one of the sheets Abel had unrolled from beween layers of tissue paper, placed the vellum on a large glass-topped table and flicked a switch, turning on a diffused white light. He leant closer, adjusted the loupe and began to scrutinise the vellum – slowly, as if he were reading an ancient parchment.

“Excellent work,” said Ignaz from his position bent over the light table, the tip of his nose just millimetres from the table top.

Abel glowed with pleasure. Lit from below, his vellum looked almost transparent. He had himself used a loupe to search for impurities and hard patches, though he hadn’t had a light table at his disposal.

“Beautiful,” whispered Ignaz. “The vellum is so delicate, almost like the tissue paper you wrapped it in. Is it uterine calf?”

He turned the piece over and examined the back again.

“No, it’s not calf,” said Abel.

From the other side of the table, Ignaz raised his face to Abel, his eye large behind the lens of the loupe. “It’s so white on the flesh side, with just slight discolourations in the grain on the back. Maybe lamb foetus?”

“A young hare,” said Abel.

It was the skin of the hare he had shot in the overgrown vegetable patch behind his house in Dorado Park, shortly before harvesting the Lepus from the young woman’s chest.

“No!” said Ignaz. “A hare?”

Abel stood back, his hands folded behind his back, his belly distended, a blush of complacency on his rosy cheeks. The once loose jowls had been tightened during the unsuccessful cosmetic operation, his face later disfigured again by the sharp edge of a broken quartz angel during a life-and-death struggle.

“You have a wonderful talent, Abel. You could be a sought-after huidenvetter.”

Unused to compliments, it being the first he had received in his fifty years, Abel shuffled uneasily. His mother had once called him a good boy, but it was on the night he’d had to take leave of her. On that frightful night he’d heard her voice from behind the Idia mask as she lay on the marble slab in her room. Before then, she’d never had a kind word for him. No one had. He had lived with scorn and derision his entire life.

His lazy eye blinking twice, he said: “I hope you’ll like the others too. I went to a lot of trouble, and followed your recipe to the letter.”

Ignaz nodded. “A recipe that has withstood the test of time. Specifically meant for parchment, not leather. As early as the 1400s Van Gavere and Van der Lende experimented with it. My family and I just refined it.”

“The Bouts technique,” Abel said respectfully.

“The Bouts technique,” Ignaz confirmed. “Hand me the others.”

He studied each one slowly and thoroughly. The skins of dassie, cat, mole and rat. Finally he straightened up and pushed the loupe back up over his eyebrow.

“Wait,” said Abel. “I have two more.” He unwrapped the last tissue papers, watched as Ignaz wiped the light table with a soft dust-cloth before his gloved hands laid the last two sheets of soft vellum on the illuminated glass surface. Then he bent forward again, adjusting the loupe in front of his eye.

“Ah, a peacock! So perfectly preserved. Just look at the glowing blue-green pigments on the head and breast, the chestnut-orange on the back, the bronze-green eyes on the tail feathers. Such deep saturation of all the colours.”

How Abel had curried and cherished that soft, supple skin between his fingers. And Ignaz was right: it was perfect, especially the symbolism of the peacock, dedicated to Juno, goddess of the skies and stars, symbol of the constellation Pavo.

“It’s for the cover of my Cosmic Travels, Volume I,” said Abel.

“The colours on this vellum remind me of our own Flemish Primitives,” said Ignaz.

“Primitives?” said Abel.

Ignaz must have heard the disappointment in his voice. “Of course, you’re not familiar with the Flemish Primitives. And your interest lies in the cosmos, not the fine arts.” He straightened up. “Primitive, as derived from the Latin word ‘primus’, meaning first. If you want to stay on in Bruges, Abel, you should become familiar with them – Bruges is the birthplace of the Flemish Primitives. Consider it a compliment, not a criticism. The Italian masters of the Florentine Quattrocento dominated the art world in the fifteenth century with their tempera paintings, their works exuding harmony and idealised beauty. Then Jan van Eyck came along and replaced tempera with a new technique. He experimented with an oily glaze, and with a new style of realism: a natural, sensual portrayal of people and their surroundings. After the formal perfection of the late Middle Ages, Van Eyck and the Flemish school took painting in a new direction and became the predecessors of the Renaissance artists. The Flemish Primitives were the first, Abel. Primus.”

“And the peacock made you think of them? The peacock is primus?”

“Not just the peacock, the entire piece. Light seems to radiate through it and through the peacock’s colours. It’s what the Primitives attained in their paintings: an almost translucent, oily glaze, and deep, saturated colours. The rest of the vellum is equally delicate, almost an ivory off-white.”

“Cosmic latte,” said Abel. “That’s what the colour is called. Just a hint of cream.”

“But the sky, I thought, was blue?”

“The typical colour of the universe is cosmic latte.”

Ignaz’s focus was back on the skins. “Even this one, the hare. Despite this tattoo being executed only in black ink, it seems to have been embedded in the vellum during the tanning process.”

“It’s for the cover of my Cosmic Travels, Volume II.”

“But these two vellums are strange to me. I’ve never seen this particular colour and texture before. The grain is so light and delicate, hardly noticeable without the lightbox and loupe. Is it virgin parchment? And when were the tattoos applied? The skins had to be living when they were tattooed, for the paint pigment to be so embedded in the dermis. The texture and final effect would be different if the tattoos had been applied afterwards, on dead skin.”

“Is that so?” said Abel.

“In these skins the natural healing of the needle pricks happened a long time ago. The ink and shading were absorbed in the pores and oils of the skin, fixed in the keratin in a natural process while blood and live cells were still present.”

“The peacock and hare are from donors,” said Abel. “They were prepared to donate a piece of their skin for my Cosmic Travels.”

Ignaz looked up sharply. “You mean . . . human skin? From living people?”

Abel nodded.

Ignaz stared at him and then lowered his eyes back to the light table. “What a wonderful donation. No wonder it’s so soft, so supple.”

Now the big question, the all-important one. “Er . . . could you use it as a book cover, Ignaz? Two books, perhaps with gilt edges and the title stamped in gold?”

“Like the patterned border on the cover of Hakluyt’s Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries of the English Nation. That photograph I sent you?” Ignaz nodded, his eyes on the tattooed vellum. “Yes, I think they would make exceptional bindings. Do you want to dye them? Make them slightly darker, perhaps, holstein . . .”

“No!” said Abel. “The latte stays. No contamination of the colour. Natural and sensual realism – isn’t that how you described the style of the Flemish Primitives?”

“All right. And the format, octavo? No bigger – these skins are just the right size for an octavo binding. For the back of the peacock cover we could use one of these animal skins, perhaps the cat, also soft and off-white.”

“And the hare for the back of Lepus: an emblem of a hare on the front cover, the skin of the hare at the back. For my next volumes I’ll ask the donors for a bigger piece of skin, big enough for the entire binding. What do you think?”

“For the entire binding?” said Ignaz. “That’s big. I don’t know whether any donor would be prepared to part with such a big piece of skin.”

“I’ll find a donor and ask her,” said Abel. “I plan to have ten volumes.”

Ignaz raised his eyebrows. “Another eight donors? But yes, octavo would work. You’ll be in good company if you use octavo for your Cosmic Travels. Teobaldo Mannucci of Venice – in printers’ circles better known as Aldus Manutius – liked the format. Pocketbooks, he called them, so that readers could carry them around comfortably. As early as 1501 he bound Virgilius’s Opera in octavo format.”

“Yes,” said Abel eagerly, “I’d like to carry them around with me.”

“Manutius published classical Greek works and bound them in vellum: five volumes of Aristotle, nine of Aristophanes’ comedies, Sophocles’ tragedies, Herodotus, Euripides. And of course classic Latin and Italian texts: the collected works of Poliziano, Dante’s Divina Commedia, the letters of Pliny the Younger, even Erasmus’s Adagia . . .”

“Octavo sounds right, Ignaz.”

“And you want only one copy of each volume, handbound in vellum?”

“Only one of each. For my own use and pleasure. It’s personal. I’m not looking for fame. I plan to leave them to the Ulughbek madrasa in Samarkand one day. An exclusive legacy, supplying new insights into the cosmos. I don’t know Virgil and Aristophanes, nor Poliziano and Pliny, but I do know the work of Ulugh Beg. Do you know the Ziy-i-Sultani?”

Ignaz shook his head. Abel rolled his parchments between the layers of tissue paper and put them back into the cardboard cylinder.

“Are you still happy with your lodgings?”

Actually he wasn’t, but Abel didn’t want to hurt Ignaz’s feelings. “I like to listen to the bells pealing from the two church towers.” He had already decided to find new lodgings as soon as possible, also unobtrusive, but not in an old whores’ street.

“They’re the two oldest churches in Bruges, St Salvator and Onze-Lieve-Vrouw, full of treasures and mystery. But I’m not a regular churchgoer,” said Ignaz.

“My mother could recite long sections from the Bible.” Abel thought for a moment, and then said: “I’ve always wondered, Ignaz, are you married?”

Ignaz made no reply, and Abel wondered whether he’d heard him. When the answer came, it was in a whispered stuttering. “Not any more . . . She died, my wife . . . years ago.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Ignaz looked up. “But I have a daughter. I’ll introduce her to you. We’ll take you out for dinner. How does that sound?”

Abel hesitated. “To a restaurant?”

“You must get acquainted with your new surroundings.” Ignaz saw him out. At the front door, he asked: “Your donors, are they women?”

“Yes,” said Abel. He put the hat with the floppy brim on his head, adjusted his amber-lensed glasses and walked away.