Читать книгу In Babylon - Marcel Moring, Shaun Whiteside - Страница 11

WHEN I AWOKE, the fire had died down to a smouldering heap. I got up from my chair and began piling wood on top of the remains. There was still enough life left in the red embers at the bottom of the hearth. The chimney drew the glow through the new layer of wood, and five minutes later the room was lit red once more by a roaring fire. I did my best to keep it low, but the draw was so strong that the flames shot into the chimney on the least provocation. In the hall, the door was still rattling. I picked up a few large chips of wood and walked out of the library to go and secure it. On the threshold, I stopped. The library had been heavy with the twilight of closed shutters and drawn curtains, so I hadn’t realized how dark it was outside. Here, in the hall, the sky behind the windows above the door was blackish-grey. An ominous, dull rumble echoed. From this close it was as if the wind itself had fists and was pounding on the door, demanding to be let in. Without knowing why, I looked up, at the barricade. I didn’t expect to see anything, no translucent ghost, no wild apparition in tattered robes with streaming black hair, yet my gaze was drawn to the first floor. Then I heard a voice. It came from far away, muffled. It was a voice that no longer had the strength to cry out, yet cried out all the same. I shook off my hesitation, ran to the door, and turned the key.

A vortex of snow and cold flew in, wrenching the door handle out of my hand. I was pushed backwards. The freezing air tore at my clothes, flakes whirled around my head and I heard nothing but the howling, raging, whistling and wailing of the wind. Just when I had got my foot behind the door and was about to push it closed again, a dark figure blew inside.

Nina lay on the marble floor like a fallen bird. She wasn’t moving. Her lips had a bluish sheen and her face was nearly as white as the snow that caked her jacket and legs. She had no shoes on and her stockings hung in shreds around her ankles. I took her in my arms and carried her into the library, where I lowered her into the armchair in front of the hearth. Then I ran to the hunting room. There, in the big linen cupboard, I found the sleeping bag Uncle Herman sometimes wrapped around his legs when he felt like sitting outside on a chilly night. The thing smelled strongly of mothballs. Back in the library I peeled Nina out of her coat and slid her into the downy envelope. She didn’t move; she didn’t even shiver. I threw more wood on the fire, took a candle and went into the kitchen, where I pushed open the outside door, filled the percolator with snow, and put it on the back of the stove. As the water bubbled up, gurgling and sputtering, I stared out the window. Now and then there was a lull in the endless storm and I saw the garden glowing blue in the moonlight. But then the wind would scoop up some snow and hurl it towards the kitchen and the dark hole above the lawn would turn white. I leaned over the sink and peered into the darkness. The drifts under the window and against the garden house were at least three feet high by now.

The water in the percolator began to turn brown. I got out mugs, spoons, and sugar and went into the hunting room. In the cupboard, Uncle Herman’s old clothes lay in neat piles waiting for someone who was never going to come back. I chose a pair of corduroy trousers, a jacket, thick woollen socks, and a jumper. Then, the clothes under my arm and mugs of hot coffee in my hands, I returned to the library. In the cabinet where Uncle Herman kept his liquor, I found a bottle of Irish whiskey. I poured a generous swig into the coffee. Nina was sitting in the chair by the fire, the sleeping bag up to her chin. Her eyes were open and her teeth were chattering loudly. I held the mug to her lips and helped her sip.

I had barely had time to think since she blew in. Now the first questions started coming. How, why? How long had she been pounding at the door? Why had she left? And then returned? What would have happened if I hadn’t heard her? I put the mug down on the table next to my half-eaten meal and looked her over.

‘Cold. I. Thought. I. Was. Going. To die,’ she said.

I kneeled down in front of her, unzipped the sleeping bag and pulled her feet towards me. ‘These stockings will have to come off.’

Her head sagged jerkily downward in slow, stiff arcs. Her eyes were open wide, the pupils deep holes in the sparkling green of the iris.

I slipped my hands under her skirt and tugged so hard on the pantyhose that she nearly slid off the chair. She kicked feebly and wriggled her way back up.

‘Can you put these on yourself?’ I asked. I held up Uncle Herman’s clothes.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ She got to her feet, shakily, stepped into the trousers and pulled them up.

‘Better take off that skirt.’

She nodded.

‘That coat, too.’

When she had changed and was sitting in the chair with a fresh mug of coffee and whisky, I took hold of her feet. I slid her right foot under my jumper, next to my bare skin, and began rubbing the left one. It was like massaging a block of ice. The foot under my jumper was so cold, I could feel it burning against my skin. Nina dropped her head back and closed her eyes.

After a while I helped her out of the chair and sat down in her place. I pulled her onto my lap, laid the sleeping bag over us both, and clasped her tightly. She sat on my knee like a mannequin, cold and stiff. It wasn’t until she had warmed up and the whisky began to take effect that she relaxed.

Half an hour passed before the colour returned to her cheeks. Her forehead was beaded with sweat, her teeth had stopped chattering. The scent of her body rose from the sleeping bag. Her wet hair began to dry, the dark damp streaks grew lighter. I wriggled myself out from under her, tucked her back into the sleeping bag, and busied myself with the fire. It was a fire to be proud of, large pieces of wood that burned evenly and cast a fierce heat. In the library, black shadows danced against the orangey-red glow from the hearth.

‘What’s in this?’ she asked, after I had brought fresh coffee and sat down in the chair next to her.

‘Coffee in mine, coffee and whisky in yours.’

She smiled drowsily. Her cheeks were glowing now, her eyes were slightly moist, and they glittered. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll get drunk.’

I picked up the plate next to my chair and fixed her some crackers and cheese. She wolfed them down with the gusto of someone who hasn’t eaten for a very long time.

‘I thought you were going to rape me,’ she said with her mouth full.

I dug my cigarettes out of my jacket pocket and stuck one between my lips. ‘I always let my victims warm up first. I’m no necrophiliac.’

‘A cigarette. I must have a cigarette.’

Her voice was unsteady, the alcohol had set her adrift from the anchor of control. She leaned towards me and stared into my face. I lit her a cigarette, avoiding the piercing black pupils that were trying to bore their way into my eyes. She flopped back in the cracked leather and blew out smoke.

‘Why did you come back?’

At first she didn’t seem to understand my question. Then she raised her right hand and drew on her cigarette. She wrapped herself in a cloud of smoke and shook her head. A shiver ran through her. ‘I was nearly at the bottom of the Mountain. I drove into a snowbank.’

‘You walked back up? All the way to the top?’

She looked at her watch. ‘Eight o’clock?’

‘Sounds about right.’

‘I drove away and then … what d’you call it … walked right back. It can’t … be that late.’

‘It took you almost two and a half hours to get back here.’

She picked up the sleeping bag, which had slid onto the floor, and pulled it around her. ‘Less. First I tried to turn the car round. I revved the engine for at least half an hour, but I couldn’t get it out of the snow.’ She stared straight ahead. Her long hair glowed in the light of the flames. ‘First it moved, but then it got stuck. I sat in the car for a while, with the engine running. To keep warm. And then I got out and headed back. Kept on falling. The whole time. The wind was blowing so hard I had to hold on to the trees. I was scared that if I lost my way I’d freeze to death.’ She took her cigarette and breathed in the smoke as if it were pure oxygen. I could picture the trek over the snow-covered paths, the light slowly turning to dusk, the wall of trees on either side of the path and the icy whirl of the blizzard. If I had had to bet on the outcome of that journey, I would never have put my money on her.

‘And then I got here and practically beat down the door, but you didn’t open it!’

‘I was asleep.’

She shook her head. ‘Could I have another cigarette?’

I felt around in my jacket until I found them. ‘We’ll have to ration them. There are twenty left. That means we can smoke five a day.’

‘I don’t normally smoke, you know.’

‘Normally …’ I handed her a cigarette and lit it for her. We drank and stared into the fire.

‘Five. What do you mean, five? You think we’re going to be here for five days?’

I nodded. ‘Maybe. Three, at least. I heard it on the radio this afternoon. This isn’t just another snowstorm, this is a national disaster. Entire villages are cut off from the civilized world, people are stranded in their cars, in weekend cottages and service stations. The snowploughs won’t get up the Mountain until last. If they ever get here at all. No one knows we’re here. This house has been vacant for five years, more than five years. Why should they even be looking, and why here, of all places?’

‘So …’

‘So we have to improvise. And ration. And plot. And …’

She sighed.

‘As long as we’re here and it stays this cold, we’ll have to keep gathering wood and keep the fires burning.’ I stood up and threw another piece of Louis XV in the hearth. ‘This is going to be the opposite of a holiday.’

‘Why,’ said Nina, ‘do I get the feeling that you don’t mind?’

I shrugged my shoulders, picked up the bottle, and filled our glasses. The fire licked at a gleaming, dark brown chair leg, almost as if it were teasing me about this compulsory iconoclasm, the burning of Uncle Herman’s collection of ‘family heirlooms’. A soft hiss escaped from the fire and the wood began to burn.

‘Let’s make a deal,’ I said, my eyes glued to the dancing flames. ‘You tell me why you took off this afternoon and I’ll read you my version of Uncle Herman’s life.’

She was quiet.

‘Or we could always just not talk to each other for the next few days.’

‘You think I’m here for the fun of it?’

‘No, I don’t think you’re here for the fun of it. You’d much rather be somewhere else.’

I tried to tear my eyes away from the hearth, but couldn’t. At the centre of the flames, a hollow formed. The room around me turned red. A tunnel of black bored through the tinted glow. I peered down the tube and saw, way off in the distance, something glimmering, a fragment, no more than a speck. The walls of the tunnel began moving past me. The red faded, the walls moved faster and faster until they were streaking past and as I stared into the half-light at the end of the tunnel something began to take shape. I squinted and leaned slightly forward. I felt my body moving sideways, as if part of me wanted to fall and part of me didn’t.

When I finally looked up, Nina was staring into space. She sat as still as an alabaster statue. Total serenity, even her eyes had stopped gleaming. She blew out cigarette smoke with the clumsiness of a non-smoker.

‘Regret,’ Zeno had once said, ‘is the most destructive human emotion. You only feel regret when it’s too late. If something can be restored, there’s no question of regret. Remorse, perhaps, or guilt. But regret, what I mean by regret, is mourning for the irreversibility of things.’

I picked up my mug. As I drank, staring into the black mirror of the coffee, the image of the tunnel returned. I put down the mug and took a deep breath. The smell of coffee mingled with my fear of what lay at the end of that tunnel. I reached for the cigarettes and pulled one out of the pack. My hand shook as I brought the tiny match flame up to light it. Nina was watching me. When the match went out, I threw it in the hearth and lit another. I looked at Nina. No, not at her, at what she was.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If we want to stay alive, it’s time to gather wood. I’ll go and pull down part of that barricade.’

‘Bar –’ She remembered the pile of furniture at the top of the stairs. ‘I want to get out of here,’ she said.

I was already at the door. ‘You’ll have to wait until the storm clears, Nina, and the way it looks now that could take several days.’

She groaned softly. ‘There’s no phone, the car’s stuck. What do we have?’

‘Nothing. No water, no electricity. We never had gas to begin with. We’re Robinson Crusoe in the wintertime.’

She got up from her chair and started pulling on the socks that were still on the floor. ‘I lost my shoes.’

‘I’ll catch a goat tomorrow and make you a new pair.’

‘Very funny.’

I grinned. ‘Uncle Herman used to have a pair of those indestructible hiking boots. They’re around here somewhere. If you wear two pairs of socks, they should fit you. He didn’t have very big feet.’

‘There’s no light in the hall, is there? Are there any flashlights?’

‘None that I know of.’

‘Why exactly isn’t there any electricity?’

‘I had it disconnected, years ago.’

Nina shook her head. ‘If you’re not here and you don’t use anything, it doesn’t cost anything, either.’

I was silent. Suddenly I thought of the calor gas burner that I had seen in the cellar. It wouldn’t give much light, but certainly more than a candle. Nina could hold it up while I wrenched loose part of the barricade and threw it downstairs.

‘Was there a lamp fixture?’ she asked, when I had explained my plan. She got up from her chair and came walking towards me.

‘A what?’

‘You use that sort of burner when you go camping. If you attach a lamp fixture, you’ve got a lantern.’

‘I don’t know. Didn’t see any.’

Nina picked up a candelabra and followed me. There were four of us in the hall. To our left, against the staircase and the high white walls, huge, misshapen shadows walked along with us. I heard Nina shudder. ‘It really does look like a haunted house,’ she said. ‘All we need now are a couple of burning torches and some creepy organ music.’

‘Or a corpse in a closet.’

‘Hey! Would you stop that?’

‘You don’t have to be scared of the dead,’ I said. ‘The living are much worse.’

‘God. You really know how to put a person at ease, don’t you?’

In the box of gas canisters Nina found a wide glass tube and a burner with a kind of wick. ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘You attach it to the bottle and then …’

‘… there is light.’

She observed me for a while, then smiled.

At the foot of the stairs I attached the lamp to the gas canister. Nina held the candles and gave instructions. I put the canister down on the stairs, turned on the gas, and held up a match. The burner started raging and cast a blinding white light all around us. ‘Isn’t this cosy,’ I said. ‘I suddenly remember why I never liked camping.’ Nina blew out the candles, put the candelabra on the floor, and picked up the lantern we had made. I grabbed the tools, the axe and the sharpened hoe, and we walked upstairs. My shadow glided across the ceiling, the brightly lit staircase, the hole in the barricade. When Nina came and stood next to me, the black figure shot away to the side of the hall.

‘What’re you going to do?’ she asked.

‘I think we should go left.’

‘What’s left?’

‘Two bedrooms, two bathrooms. My bedroom and my bathroom.’ I stared at the heap of chairs and tables. ‘And this.’

‘Not much wood,’ she said.

‘No. I’m counting on the bedrooms. If we can reach even one of them and chop up a bed …’

‘Isn’t there any other way to get wood? There are such beautiful things here. Can’t we save any of it?’

I shook my head. ‘We’ve got to hurry. It’s much too cold here. We have to think of ourselves first. If we start lugging all those beautiful things downstairs, we’ll never keep the fire going. The only other choice is to burn up the library.’

Nina looked at me. ‘Uncle Herman’s library.’

‘And mine,’ I said. ‘And Zeno’s.’

Her face clouded.

I stepped forward and pulled a chair out of the pile that was blocking the way to the bedrooms. Nina came up behind me with the lantern. Shadows wheeled around us, patches of black leapt up between the chairs, cupboards, and other pieces of furniture, and disappeared once more. When she was standing beside me, I raised the chair, a fragile affair on slender legs, and threw it down. It crashed against the marble stairs, the sound of breaking wood ripped the darkness below us.

‘What’s that?’ whispered Nina.

In the distance was a faint rustling noise. ‘An echo,’ I said, ‘the echo of …’

The rustling came closer.

‘Who’s there?’

We both ducked. The lantern went clattering down the stairs. In the sudden darkness we heard the voice for the second time, a voice from the depths of something dark and far away.

‘Who?’

A rustling like the sea.

‘Nathan?’

My heart exploded in my head. I reeled and stepped into the emptiness above the stairs. As I began falling, my right hand felt for something to hold on to. My fingers groped about in the void, where once the sideboard had stood, but found nothing. Then I felt Nina’s hand. She grabbed hold of my sleeve and pulled me up.

‘Who’s there?’

I could smell Nina’s hair. Cinnamon, I thought.

‘Nathan, for God’s sake … What …’

‘Who?’

‘What?’ I cried.

‘Nathan?’

A rustling like the sound of the wind in your ears as you fall and …

I could feel Nina shivering beside me. ‘Zeno?’

‘Who’s there?’

I relaxed. I put my finger to my lips. ‘Listen,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘A tape,’ I said.

Rustling. ‘Nathan?’

‘A … God. A … tape. Zeno.’ Nina was breathing heavily, in and out. She let go of my jacket and leaned back, I heard the dull groan of wood.

‘Who’s there?’

I stood up and walked down the stairs. It was a while before I found the burner: I had to feel my way along the cold marble, listening to the escaping gas. I turned off the valve and inspected the lantern – the glass was cracked, the tank dented. I let out a thin stream of gas and lit a match. The white light shot up again. High above me I heard the distorted voice still intoning its fractured sentences. Who’s there. Who. Nathan.

When I got back to Nina, I saw the glistening snail’s trail of a tear along her nose. I reached out my hand, towards her arm, but she turned away. Her back was tall and straight. I put down the lantern and began furiously throwing down tables and chairs.

For half an hour, three quarters of an hour I was at it and all that time I heard the questions that Zeno kept asking me from the other world. If the voice hadn’t been drowned out every so often by the sound of shattering wood, I would have fled or, in a blind rage, seized my axe and leaped into the tangle of chair legs and armrests, chopping like a madman until I had found the tape recorder.

When we were back in the library – I had added more wood to the kitchen stove and the fire in the hunting room – we stood for a while in front of the hearth.

‘How long will that tape keep on playing?’

‘No idea,’ I said. ‘We’ll just have to wait until the batteries run out.’

‘N? What’s going on here?’

I stared into the flames and tried to remember whether she used to call me that in the past, when she was a child. N. All the members of my family did, had done, though I never knew why. No one had ever addressed Zoe or Zelda or Zeno as Z.

‘You tell me,’ I said.

She didn’t answer. Only the greenish-blue gleam of her eyes, the perfectly tranquil face and the red wreath around it.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t recognize this house at all anymore.’ I saw her gaze grow vague. ‘It’s as if I’ve woken up after being asleep for a hundred years and I look around me and there are things I recognize, but everything is different, just different enough to make me doubt what I thought I knew.’

There was a silence. Now and then a piece of wood snapped in the hearth, or part of the burning pile caved in with a sigh.

‘How did that tape get there?’

‘I really don’t know. What’s the matter? Do you think I planned all this? Nathan Hollander’s mystery weekend?’

‘A film,’ she said. She lowered her voice slightly: ‘He’s searching for the secret of his past, but the past doesn’t want to be found. Coming soon, to a cinema near you: Nathan Hollander, the movie.’

‘Starring …’

‘Dustin Hoffman, as Nathan Hollander.’

‘I’m twice his size.’

‘Okay, Jack Nicholson then.’

‘I don’t have those acrobatic eyebrows. Besides, then we’d need a love interest.’

She looked at me for a while. ‘I don’t know any red-haired actresses.’

‘Hordes,’ I said. ‘Nicole Kidman. Lucille Ball. There’s also this slightly whorish, but very charming redhead I once saw in the film version of Hotel New Hampshire. And there’s a beautiful Italian woman. The same hair as you, that fan of red curls. What was her name? Domenica … She played in that Tarkovsky film and at one point she begins to unbutton her dress and you see this magnificent alabaster breast. My God.’ I stared at the fire.

‘I think we’d better forget about that love interest. I haven’t got magnificent alabaster tits and your eyebrows can’t dance. Let’s do something.’

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘Don’t you have anything in mind?’

I shrugged.

We fell silent. ‘The fairy tale writer doesn’t know,’ said Nina. She sat down and stared into the fireplace. I smiled wrily. She drew her legs under her and settled back into the chair. Then, her face raised to me, like a sleepy cat, her eyes narrowed, she said: ‘I expected you to at least tell me a fairy tale about it.’

‘I thought you wanted to know why we were here.’

‘I don’t want to think about the snow. I don’t want to think about that tape. Or about the barricade. Or about all that food.’ She opened her eyes until they were so wide that it was impossible for me to miss the import of her words. ‘And I don’t want to talk about Zeno, either. Didn’t you say this was a great opportunity for you to read me Uncle Herman’s biography?’

‘Out loud? I thought I’d just hand you the manuscript. It’s a long story.’

She smiled.

‘And a tall one.’

She nodded.

‘It’s all about arrival and departure and Zeno …’

Nina’s gaze strayed to the fire.

‘… and the atomic bomb and …’

‘The what?’

‘The atomic bomb,’ I said, ‘I know everything there is to know about that.’

‘The atomic bomb … You say it the way most people would say: I know everything there is to know about cars. Or football. Books, even.’

I could feel the wine, and the glow of the hearth.

‘Are you going to keep avoiding this? I told you before: do your Decamerone, give me the Canterbury Tales, unexpurgated. You’ve promised me stories galore, but so far all I’ve had are coming attractions. Please begin. What is the beginning, anyway?’

‘The beginning,’ I said. I went to the reading table, behind the chairs, and opened my bag. The packet of paper I had printed out the week before felt cool, almost as though it didn’t belong to me.

‘Should I get some more wine?’

I nodded. The beginning. I sat down, the manuscript on my lap, and stared into the flames.

Here I am, I thought, a fairy tale writer. A memory that stretches back to the seventeenth century, though I myself was born midway into the nineteen-thirties. Son of an inventor, who was the son of a physicist, who was the son of a clockmaker, whose forefathers had all been clockmakers, ever since the invention of the timepiece. Nephew of Herman Hollander, the Herman Hollander, nephew and sole heir. Brother of Zeno Hollander, the Zeno Hollander. Son of a failed painter – my mother – brother of two sisters, one of whom fluttered through life like falling cherry blossom and the other who was born with the soul of a nun and the body of a Jewish bombshell. I was the only normal one in my family and I’m the only one, except for Nina, who is still alive. When I die, no more Hollanders. What a relief that’ll be. Travelling for centuries and finally arriving. Nothing gained, but at least, oh Lord of the Universe, peace.

The end of the century, I thought, is this – the door handle in one hand, my other hand on the light switch. I look round and see the room. Soon I’ll turn out the light, shut the door behind me, walk into the hall, open the heavy front door, cross the threshold, and leave the house.

The beginning. What I’ve seen in the part of the century that I’ve lived through, and what I’ve heard about the part when my parents and my uncle were alive. Those who don’t know me will think that I’ve been everywhere a person has to be if he wants to say anything valuable about these last hundred years. But that isn’t true. No one has less knowledge of people, my kind of people, the country in which I lived and the world in which I grew up, than I do. This life is a mystery to me. I close my eyes and let the newsreel of my, our history, go by – images of departing steamers (why do I remember the ship, that distant past, in black and white?), flashing neon signs in the desert, the glow-in-the-dark hands of Mickey Mouse on an alarm clock, a house like the head of a giant and Gene Kelly in Broadway Melody, I close my eyes and see nothing that kindles even the tiniest spark of light in me. This century, this life, the history of my family, it has all passed me by and left me, like a mouse in the middle of Times Square, in total bewilderment.

The beginning. Uncle Chaim once said, ‘Beginning? No beginning. We’re clockmakers. One big family of clockmakers. People of time. Time has no beginning.’

If there’s one thing I do know about, it’s beginning. Although Uncle Herman didn’t share that opinion.

‘What’s this?’ he once asked me. He had taken down a book of mine and opened it. ‘This is a beginning? “Kei was in love with the miller’s daughter and the miller’s daughter loved him, but one day Kei’s love disappeared. He gazed, as always, at his young wife, but her hair was like straw, her eyes, dull grey pebbles, and her skin, unwashed linen. Kei knew this wasn’t so, but that was how he saw her. He decided to go in search of his love.” What sort of nonsense is this? In and out of love in a single line. Where’s the development?’

I had answered what I always answered (because the question was the same as the previous year and the year before that): ‘Why do I have to explain why love disappears between a man and a woman? Half of world literature is already about that. I’m concerned with the other phenomena.’

‘What phenomena?’

‘The obscure ones.’

‘What obscure ones?’

‘I don’t know, they’re too obscure.’

At that point Herman would always start tugging at his hair. (Once he pulled mine too, when I was about seventeen, but he was so sorry afterwards that he took me into town and treated me to as many books as I wanted.)

Uncle Herman didn’t like obscurity. He had worked all his life towards the clarification of things that were uncommonly vague and in the wake of that pursuit he regarded every form of art, even one as trivial as mine, as an ideal way of gaining insight. That insight wasn’t supposed to boil down to the fact that things were obscure.

But they are. Between ‘Once upon a time …’ and ‘They lived happily ever after …’ the fairy tale unfolds, and even though it may seem that the reader, or listener, is transported by the events between the first sentence and the last, it is these two sentences alone that do the trick. ‘Once upon a time …’ and ‘They lived happily ever after’ reflect the way in which we see the world: as an event with an obscure beginning and, for the time being, an obscure end. Between them is our story, and our limitation, and although every fairy tale tries to weave together various events in order to reach that magical moment when all will be revealed, we are always aware that what we have read, or seen, is that which was already visible or readable, the representation of something obscure.

I felt the weight of the manuscript on my lap. Uncle Herman’s story, the story of the entire family, the history of departure.

There’s a group portrait in my mind. Left, Uncle Herman: his white hair standing out on all sides, his eyes coal-black, glittering like mica. Herman is eighty-five years old. He’s naked, white as freshly cooked spaghetti, pubic hair glistening. (A detail I can’t seem to forget.) Then Emmanuel Hollander, my father: a cross between Walter Matthau and Billy Wilder. He’s wearing a straw Bing Crosby hat, a pair of trousers that are slightly too short, so you can see his white sports socks, and below that, ridiculous gym shoes. He hasn’t got his shirt tucked in. Manny, as he likes to be called, is seventy-one. A pencil-stub glimmers behind his right ear. It’s easy to spot, because there’s no hair poking out from under his hat. Manny was the only man in our family who went bald instead of grey. Next to him stands Uncle Chaim, our great-great-grand-uncle, although that title isn’t entirely accurate. He was born in 1603 and died of woe in 1648. Chaim has something in his hand, the right hand, but it’s hard to tell what. A small man dressed in a peculiar collection of clothes: battered boots, a pair of trousers badly in need of mending, a coat like an old dog. Magnus, Chaim’s nephew, is standing beside him. Straight-limbed, lean and alert, about twenty-five years old. He has a wooden chest strapped to his back. In that chest are his clockmaker’s tools and a small pendulum clock. Then there’s me, Nathan Hollander, who everyone, except Uncle Herman, calls N. Once I was a little boy with bristly black hair, all knees and elbows, small for my age, skinny, as only little boys can be. Here, in this portrait, I’m a sinewy man. Six feet tall. Sharp features, deep-set eyes, a face that, as time went by, grew weathered and creased. The long limbs, head bent slightly forward, always someone to lean towards and listen to. The hair, bristly and grey, an unruly tussock of rimed grass. Next to me, far right, Zeno. He’s Magnus’s age here: as old as he was the last time I spoke to him. His hair has the soft coppery sheen that I remember like nothing else in this life. The eyes, I can see them as if he were sitting here opposite me: large brown eyes with moss-green flecks that, when they catch the sunlight, shimmer like water plants beneath the surface of a murky pond. His skin has the soft gleam of wax, his lips are slightly tensed.

My group portrait.

I call it ‘Travellers’. Because that was what we were. Each and every one of us. We came from the East, we travelled to the West. Uncle Chaim and his nephew Magnus, my most distant forefathers, lived in the region that now forms the border between Poland and Lithuania. There, in the dense primeval forest, where the bison still roamed and wolves and bears waylaid those who travelled from one village to the next, they made clocks. Whenever my grandfather, my Uncle Herman, or Emmanuel, my father, wished to explain or justify our presence in this place or that, they would say: ‘Clockmakers, every one of us. Travellers. Came from the East, on our way to the West.’ As if to say that the East was a sort of mythical birthplace, the womb of our … line, and the West, our Occident, the destiny towards which we, sometimes willingly, sometimes reluctantly, were headed. Travellers. Uncle Chaim journeyed through the kingdom of the night, from then to now, and later, in the company of his nephew. Magnus left the East, roamed for twenty-one years all over Europe, in search of Holland. Uncle Herman led us, my father and my mother and my sisters and I, out of the old Europe, into the New World, and never stopped travelling. Manny brought us from the east coast of America to the west, from the edge of history to its heart. I myself never had a home and Zeno, my young brother, removed himself from the face of the earth.

They’re all dead. And all of them, I have known and loved. Uncle Chaim and his hazy nephew Magnus, too, even though, by the time I was born, they had been history for nearly three centuries. They’re the only ones who are still with me.

I used to be awakened by voices in the night, cries that were so clear and sounded so close that they echoed in my head long after I had sat up in bed. ‘Nathan!’ My name, clear as day. ‘NATHAN!’ But no matter how often I was jolted awake, looked around, turned on the light, or didn’t, I never saw a thing. For a long time I thought it was God calling to me across the black waters of darkness and sleep. I’m the sort of person who bears such possibilities in mind.

It wasn’t until I was about ten years old that I discovered why I was hearing those nocturnal cries. We were living in the camp on the Hill, in New Mexico. In our cramped wooden house, I shared a room with Zeno, who had just turned one.

I was awakened by a creaking sound. When I looked up I saw an old man sitting at the foot of my bed. There was a full moon and its bluish light bounced off the hard desert ground, through the curtainless windows, into my room. One side of the old man’s body was sharply defined and I could see that he was wearing a shabby black suit. His back was slightly bent. Something glistened in his eye, a small, gleaming tube that was aimed at his lap.

‘Bah,’ he said. A shard of moonlight shot across his stubbled jaw as he turned his head to me. He grinned broadly and raised his eyebrows. The tube fell out of his eye, he caught it without looking. ‘Too dark. Can’t see your hand before your eyes. Nice clock you’ve got there.’ He shifted his gaze to my night table. I looked sideways, at the green fluorescent arms of Mickey Mouse.

I didn’t have to ask who he was. He didn’t have to tell me. Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim, no doubt about it.

‘How are you, my boy?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Magnus here yet?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen him.’

‘Young people …’ He winked. Because he smiled at the same time, his face turned into a bluish white wad of paper, a ball of creases and shadows.

There was a shuffling noise in the receding darkness and out of the wall came the ghost of a wanderer. He emerged from what seemed, for a moment, to be a forest path, and all at once he was standing in the middle of the room.

‘Speak of the devil …’ Uncle Chaim said.

Magnus looked around and scratched his head.

Uncle Chaim pursed his lips, shook his head, and gave me a meaningful glance. ‘Young people,’ he said again.

‘I’m young, too, you know,’ I said.

He stared at me, and then smiled. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are the eldest.’ He turned to Magnus and raised his head. ‘Have the two of you already met?’

Magnus, who was busy winding up the propeller of the biplane hanging under the lamp from a piece of fishline, jumped. ‘Nathan, isn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘Magnus Levi,’ he said, ‘Currently going by the name of Hollander.’

Uncle Chaim chuckled.

I was now sitting straight up in bed, my hair, a wild shock, my face pale with sleep.

‘What are you looking at?’ Uncle Chaim asked.

I turned around and saw that I was still sitting in the same place, but that at the same time, I was standing in the room looking at myself. ‘Is that me?’ I asked. I looked back at the bed and saw the little boy sitting there and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Zeno lay in his own bed against the opposite wall, sound asleep.

‘Happens from time to time,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘They’ll think up a name for it some day. No doubt that joker from Vienna could explain it.’

‘Calling Freud a joker is not only unfair, it disclaims the great strides he made in …’

‘Oh, Magnus, shut up.’

‘Sorry.’

Here I was, in my room, surrounded by the things that made up my universe, the airplane with the rubber-band wind-up motor that my father had built, the Mickey Mouse alarm clock with radioactive hands, two fossilized sea urchins, a cupboard full of books, and a map of the world on which I kept track of the Allies’ progress with tiny flags, here I was and I was twice myself and in the company of ancestors who had been dead for three centuries.

‘We can go about this in two ways,’ said Uncle Chaim. He was fiddling with the copper tube that had fallen from his eye. It rolled between his thumb and forefinger, from top to bottom and back to the top and when it was on top it spun round on its axis and rolled back down again. Warm yellow patches of light shot across its surface, liquid stars that seemed to float between his fingers. ‘We decide on what this is and you tell us what you think of it, or we forget the explanation and pretend this is all perfectly normal.’

‘Uncle,’ said Magnus, ‘I don’t want to interfere …’

‘Have you ever noticed, Nathan, that people who are about to interfere always begin by saying that they don’t want to interfere?’

‘… but perhaps it would be a good idea if we first told the boy how we got here to begin with.’

Uncle Chaim tilted his head to one side and looked at me expectantly.

I shrugged.

‘Do you think you’ve gone mad?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Do you think that other people will think this is normal?’

I shook my head.

‘Then that’s that,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Have you seen this?’

I stepped forward and saw, for the first time, what he had been working on when I awoke. In the palm of his left hand lay an open pocket watch. I came closer and looked at the jumble of cogs. A wisp of wire, fine as a hair, was sticking up through the spokes of a tiny slender wheel.

‘Overwound. Always the same. Scared to lose their grip on time, so they wind up their watches like they’re wringing out the laundry.’

Magnus bent over Uncle Chaim’s hand. ‘An anachronism,’ he said. ‘This is a waistcoat-pocket watch, late nineteenth century.’

Uncle Chaim turned to me and said, ‘Magnus is very particular about these things.’

‘Anachism …’

‘Anachronism,’ said Magnus. ‘That’s when something turns up in the wrong time …’

‘Like us,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘For example,’ said Magnus irritably, ‘if you read a story about the eighteenth century, and there’s a car in it.’

‘Anachronism,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ said Magnus. ‘And in a way, we are too, just as Uncle Chaim said.’

‘It all depends on how you look at it,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘Why are you here?’

Uncle Chaim snapped shut the hand holding the watch. He stretched his face into a broad grimace. ‘Well,’ he said.

‘To help,’ Magnus said.

‘Bah,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘To tell you how it all began and …’

‘Hm,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘We were there when Herman was a boy, too,’ said Magnus.

‘Herman,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Don’t talk to me about Herman.’

‘But Herman didn’t want us.’

‘Herman,’ said Uncle Chaim, ‘only believes that things exist if you can pinch them.’

Magnus laughed. ‘Your Uncle Herman,’ he said, ‘believes what he thinks, but he doesn’t think what he believes.’

Uncle Chaim shook his head.

‘Isn’t that true?’ said Magnus.

‘What?’

‘That Herman only believes what he thinks but doesn’t think what he believes …’

Uncle Chaim opened his hand and looked at the watch. ‘I’m not so philosophical,’ he said. He turned to me, the ‘me’ that was standing before him, not the little boy on the bed who sat, his hands on the sheets, staring straight ahead. ‘We’re here because we’re here.’

‘Ah. Old Testament!’

Uncle Chaim spread his fingers. The watch leaked out in copper-coloured droplets. ‘What do you mean, Old Testament?’

‘That’s what God calls Himself: I’m here because I’m here.’

‘Magnus. Nephew. God calls Himself something very different – I am that I am. Which can also mean: I’m here because I’m here. Or: I am who I am.’

‘Yes, Magnus.’ He shook his hand. The last few drops of the melted watch splattered about.

‘Talk about anachronisms,’ Magnus said to me, nodding towards Uncle Chaim’s hand.

‘We’d better hurry, Nephew. It’s nearly daylight. Nathan?’

I looked at him with, I would say now, the candour of a child with an overactive imagination. Uncle Chaim smiled and laid his hand on my hair.

Magnus came closer. ‘What did you want to say, Nuncle?’

Uncle Chaim kept looking at me. I saw his eyes grow small, then large and gentle. He shook his head. ‘What a life,’ I heard him mumble, ‘what a world.’ Magnus stood beside him, nodding gravely. Uncle Chaim sighed and stared down at the floor. Just as I was about to follow his gaze to see what he saw there, he straightened up and his face turned into the crumpled wad that it had been before, all grins and wrinkles.

‘You know what we do with firstborn sons, don’t you?’

I frowned.

‘Firstborn sons belong to God, says the Torah. That you know. You’ve read it.’

I nodded.

‘But parents can keep their children by redeeming them. The father pays five shekels, five silver rijksdaalers. His debt is settled, he no longer has to part with his firstborn son.’

‘In our family,’ said Magnus, looking appropriately solemn, ‘that has never happened. In our family, it’s become traditional not to settle the debt to God.’

‘Probably,’ Uncle Chaim took his hand off my head and stared somewhere into the half-light of the room, ‘one of our forefathers was just too stingy, or he forgot, or, even more likely, he was too stubborn. A stubborn family, that’s what we are, Nathan. The sort of Jews that say: Yes, but …’

‘Whatever the case, we don’t do it,’ said Magnus, ‘and that means that we, firstborn sons of the house of Hollander …’

‘Levi, we’re Levites as well, priests …’

‘… that the firstborn sons of the house of Hollander belong neither to themselves nor to their family.’

‘They belong …’ Uncle Chaim hesitated. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at Magnus, then wriggled his eyebrows and leaned towards me. ‘They belong … to God.’

Magnus’s eyes rested on me expectantly. I looked around, at the little boy in bed. He looked like someone who wasn’t there.

‘Okay,’ I said.

Uncle Chaim placed both hands on my shoulders, then kneeled down heavily so his face was on a level with mine. ‘Nathan,’ he said, ‘Nathan. Don’t say “okay”. It’s not “okay”. It’s not nobility. Not a privilege. Highly dubious privilege, at best. You can go back. You can ask your father to redeem you. He won’t know what it means, but if you ask him he’ll do it for you. It’s possible, you’re allowed. Think about it.’ His face was a white-grey-yellow haze. I smelled his breath, a whiff of thyme.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, after a while.

Uncle Chaim shook his head.

Magnus shuffled closer. They were both standing so close now that it was as if I was lying under the blankets and sawheard-smelled nothing but the hollow I had made in the bed. Magnus was hay, fresh hay. ‘We’ll be back, if that’s what you decide,’ said Magnus.

‘We’ll be back,’ said Uncle Chaim.

They stood there all around me and I shut my eyes in the scent of thyme and hay and the heat of their bodies, the feathery touch of their hands on my shoulders and head and …

‘Nuncle,’ I said to Uncle Chaim.

‘Yes, child,’ he said.

‘Can you see the past?’

‘Yes.’

A cloud slid in front of the moon. It grew dark in the room and then light again, lighter than before. It was nearly morning.

‘And the future?’

There was a very long silence.

‘Yes,’ said Magnus, ‘we can see the future. But we don’t know if what we see is right.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay.’ The heat from their bodies was so intense that I felt myself gliding away in the paper boat of sleepiness.

‘God,’ said Uncle Chaim, ‘why this child?’

‘Shhh,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s okay. He’s right.’

Just before I reached the land of slumber and my body went limp, I heard Uncle Chaim sigh, ‘Oh, Magnus …’

Not that I had an image of God. Not that I even believed in such a thing as God. I was a child who read the Old Testament with the thirst of a desert traveller and the hunger of a fasting penitent. At night, when the Hill was swathed in velvet darkness, no wind, no voices, now and then the scuffling of a lizard on the roof, the crackling of stones in the desert, at night I lay in bed and looked at the green hands of Mickey Mouse, who kept the time in my alarm clock. And through my bedroom, in the space between Zeno’s bed and mine, the Old Testament caravans trekked from Mamre to Canaan. On the Indian rug that covered the wooden floor, Jacob fought with the angel and lay in his well, staring up at the starry night. I believed in stories. I was a believer of stories. The question of whether or not God existed didn’t interest me. God was the least of my worries.

A family of travellers, yet I never told anyone where I went each night with Uncle Chaim and Magnus. Life was confusing enough as it was. Manny worked day and night on something we knew nothing about and when he came home he fell asleep at the table. Sophie sat during the day with the other wives at Mr Feynman’s calculators, and my sisters, Zoe and Zelda, had reached the age when they were turning from girls into women and were practically unapproachable. And so I kept silent. I kept silent and I listened and as I listened I lost the distinction between then and now, here and there, reality and fantasy. That wasn’t so bad. Later, much later, I would make it my profession to be of another time, and as a child, in an environment where no one paid any attention to me, it wasn’t so bad to be considered a dreamer.

And so I became a fairy tale writer, all because of Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim and Cousin Magnus. Hand-in-hand, we travelled through the forest of stories. ‘The only way to understand the world,’ Magnus once said, ‘is by telling a story. Science,’ said Magnus, ‘only teaches you the way things work. Stories help you understand.’

The only person in the family who ever opposed my choice of career was Uncle Herman. I can vividly remember the moment when he first heard what I wanted to do with my life. That was in Holland.

I was about fifteen and Herman, who had come to visit, asked my mother, his sister-in-law, whether she had found a school for me yet.

‘He’s been at school since he was six,’ Sophie had answered.

‘University,’ said Uncle Herman. ‘Have you given any thought to what the boy should study?’

Sophie had looked at him in amazement. ‘Herman,’ she said, ‘young people decide for themselves what they should study. Who they marry, too.’

At that last remark, Uncle Herman had gone slightly red in the face. He turned to me and asked what I had in mind. I said that I had nothing in mind.

‘You’re not the only one,’ he said. ‘But the question is: what do you want to be when you grow up?’

‘A fairy tale writer.’

We were sitting in the sun lounge. It was the middle of summer. The doors were open and from the garden came the sound of late birds who were letting other late birds know where they were.

‘Fairy tale writer,’ said Uncle Herman.

‘Fairy tale writer,’ I said.

‘Lord of the Universe,’ said Uncle Herman.

‘I’m good at writing fairy tales,’ I said.

‘Just how do you intend to do this?’

‘What?’

‘Become a fairy tale writer! What are we talking about here?’ The subject made him rather hot under the collar. He slammed his hand down on the armrest of the wicker chair in which he was sitting, his lips pressed firmly together.

I looked at my mother.

‘N,’ said Sophie, glancing worriedly at Uncle Herman, ‘I think what you’re supposed to do now is tell him what you’d like to study.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

Uncle Herman closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the chair. He took a deep, slow breath. After a long while he straightened up again and after another long while he opened his eyes and looked at me wearily. ‘All right,’ he said hoarsely. ‘What do you plan to study, Nathan? Are you going to university?’

‘To become a fairy tale writer? I don’t think that exists,’ I said.

‘No, of course it doesn’t exist!’ he shouted.

‘Herman,’ said Sophie. Her mouth had settled into a disapproving frown. ‘If you can’t behave yourself, go back to your big house so you can play lord of the manor.’

Uncle Herman bowed his head and nodded. There was a brief silence, and when he looked at me again it was as if he were seeing me for the first time. I turned around on Sophie’s painting stool and tried to look interested in a charcoal sketch on the easel. ‘Nathan,’ he said finally, ‘you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, but if you do something, then do it well. What I mean is that you shouldn’t just piddle around and see if it works. Think up your own course of study, your own training, so that you can choose from different skills and won’t be restricted by some accidental talent.’

‘Hold on,’ said Sophie, ‘talent is no small thing, I mean …’

‘Talent, Soph, is the curse of anyone who really wants to do something. Talent is the greatest handicap you can have. Why do you think you’re giving painting lessons to frustrated housewives instead of exhibiting at the Stedelijk? All you’ve got is talent.’

Sophie looked at him with an expression that gave new meaning to the word freeze-dry.

I didn’t understand what Uncle Herman was talking about. I wanted to be a fairy tale writer, because I had discovered that I could do it. What more did he want? That I should first be unable to do it so that I would want it all over again?

As I thought this, I slowly began to realize the significance of Uncle Herman’s words.

That was probably the most important day of my life. Not only did I learn that you had to mistrust talent if you truly wanted to discover anything, I also realized that I had stumbled upon an outlook on life which may or may not have been Uncle Herman’s, but which certainly seemed worth a try.

And so I wrote my fairy tales and the longer I wrote, the deeper Uncle Herman’s strange paradox sank in and the harder it got. By the time I was eighteen I couldn’t do a thing. If I had to make a shopping list – the household chores had been divided up and I was the cook – I spent an hour at the kitchen table mulling over the correct sequence of butter, cheese, and eggs. It was the year when we ate almost nothing but omelettes and pasta with red sauce. I had long since stopped writing fairy tales by then. I cooked, stared at the pans on my stove, the sauce bubbling, the eggs setting, the garlic browning and the blue steam rising from the slow-warming olive oil, while inside me, the words formed mile-long caravans that trekked through the desert of my authorship.

The fact that it turned out all right in the end, I owed to Uncle Chaim. One night I was sitting in my room, reading, when he stepped out of the bookcase and posted himself next to my chair.

‘Kabbala …’ he said after a while, breathless.

‘The Zohar,’ I said.

‘Forbidden,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Not until a man is forty.’

I rubbed my sandy eyes and bowed my head. ‘Nuncle,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you once tell me I was the eldest?’

He tore himself away from the book in my lap and looked at me. ‘A good memory,’ he said, ‘can be a blessing. And a curse.’

I closed my book and let my head sink down onto the back of my chair. ‘I know, Nuncle, I know. But it’s there and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘The head,’ he said. ‘Must be covered. With Kabbala, always covered. Always.’

I nodded.

Uncle Chaim waited while I stood up and got my yarmulke from the shelf of Jewish books.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘But now: why?’

‘Why Kabbala?’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m just looking for the path to enlightenment.’ I realized that I sounded somewhat bitter. Uncle Chaim had heard it, too.

‘Write, child. Don’t read. Write.’

There was a stumbling noise behind us. When we looked round, we saw Magnus standing by my bed.

‘You’re still awake,’ he said.

I spread my arms.

He walked towards us. When he was standing next to Uncle Chaim, he cast a quick glance at the book in my lap. He pursed his lips and looked at his uncle.

‘Write,’ said Chaim again. ‘A writer writes, he doesn’t read.’

‘Cooks eat, too,’ I said.

Uncle Chaim shook his head. ‘To keep from starving. To taste. To know. But not to while away an evening.’

‘He can’t write anymore,’ said Magnus. ‘He’s searching for True Writing.’

‘Isn’t any,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Just stories.’

Magnus drew himself up. ‘Flaubert said …’

‘Shah! That’s after your time, Magnus. And before his. Nathan only has to worry about himself. He has to do, not think. Listen. Two men are on their way from one town to another. Just happen to meet. One rich. One poor. Time for the evening prayer and one of them recites the Shemona Esrei, from memory. Long. Very long. The other man puts his hand over his eyes. Recites the alphabet. The first man laughs at his companion: “You call that praying, you ignorant fool?” The other man says: “I can’t pray, so I give God the letters and he makes a prayer out of them.” That night the first man falls gravely ill. As if his life is pouring out of him. Cries out to God: “What have I done to deserve this?” He hears a voice that says: “This is because you mocked my servant.” The sick man says: “But he couldn’t even pray!” The voice: “You’re mistaken. He could pray, for he did it with all his heart. You know the phrases and words, but you’re all mouth and no heart.”

He’s right, I thought. The motivation is important, too.

And so, by way of a detour through the Kabbala, which I read because there was nothing more I could do, I dug out my old stories and got back to work. Two years later my first collection of fairy tales was published.

The beginning.

There are so many beginnings.

Beginnings?

Beginnings.

Six. All six, somewhere else. All six, at a different moment. And for a clear understanding of our history I shall have to tell them all at the same time.

Uncle Chaim’s beginning began in the spring of 1648, that of his nephew, Magnus, in the autumn of that same year. My father began in 1929, midsummer night. Uncle Herman’s beginning, I’d place in 1945, in the springtime. Zeno began when he ended, in 1968, and I myself have only just begun, this morning. Out of the plane, blinding snow everywhere, the pier a white catafalque, and the travellers shuffling, groping their way inch by inch through the wind-driven curtains. This is Holland, but the wind is Siberian and the snow, from distant polar regions. Cold, my children, cold as a terrible dream about explorers lost in the wilderness. Roald Amundsen travelling on foot to the South Pole. Nobile, stranded with his dirigible. Scott and his starving, frozen men, waiting to die. We lean into the wind, our coats held closed at the throat, and struggle through the snowstorm. Come. Come, we’re off. To the beginning.

‘I don’t know what sort of bottle this is,’ said Nina, ‘but it looks intriguing.’

It was as if my chair had suddenly shot forward, like someone sitting in the car of a roller coaster, the long-drawn moment of motionlessness at the top of the rails and then, bang! down he goes. A tremor coursed through my body, so violent that Nina ran to my side. The manuscript lay around my feet like a landscape of ice floes.

‘N?’ She laid her hands on my shoulders and bent forward, her face close to mine. ‘What is it? Everything all right?’

‘Huh.’ I couldn’t speak. The breath sank in my chest and I leaned my head on the back of the chair. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was lost in thought. I …’

‘For a moment I thought you were sleeping.’ She put the bottle on the table between our two chairs and crouched down in front of me. ‘You were sitting here, completely limp,’ sliding the papers together, ‘but I could see you had your eyes open, so …’

‘I was far away.’ Uncle Chaim, Magnus, Herman, Zeno – they echoed in my mind, they were like wisps of smoke, slowly dissolving. ‘Very. Very far away.’ I shut my eyes and breathed deeply. ‘I’m back now,’ I said, when I had opened them again.

‘N?’ She left the manuscript for a moment and put her hands on my thighs. She looked at me closely. ‘Have you ever had this before?’

‘I’m a fairy tale writer,’ I said. ‘It’s my business to be far away.’

Nina jumped to her feet. ‘Why the hell can’t you Hollanders ever give a straight answer?’

‘Yes. You’re right.’ I reached for the pile of paper and began putting the pages in order. When I turned round Nina was sitting cross-legged, her arms folded, in her chair. ‘I’m sorry. Yes, I’ve had it before. Many times. But it’s got worse. Has its advantages, though.’ I picked up the bottle she had brought in and looked at the label.

‘What kind of advantages?’

‘Sometimes I get lost in a story.’

‘What kind of story?’

‘A fairy tale.’

She looked at me with the expression of a lab technician who can’t quite believe that this just came out of the test tube. ‘Are you telling me that you … that you drift off and then dream a fairy tale?’

‘Daydream.’

‘Daydream.’

I nodded.

‘I’ve always wondered where you got them from. Good thing you’re not married.’

‘What?’

‘Married, you know? To a woman?’

‘You mean that I wouldn’t make a very companionable husband.’

‘Companionable …’ she said. ‘No, I mean you’re just unconscious half the time.’

‘Where did you find this?’ I held up the bottle.

‘In the cellar. I spent a long time poking around. It was somewhere down at the bottom.’

The bottle was grey with dust, but I recognized it immediately. It was the red Aloxe Corton I had once given Uncle Herman for his birthday.

‘The corkscrew is still in the kitchen.’

‘I’ll go and get it.’

She was already at the door, when I called to her. ‘Aren’t you afraid, all by yourself?’

‘Of course I am, but there’s not much point in thinking about it. And I’ve just spent about half an hour alone in that cellar. I’ve already stood the test.’

I had thought that she had been gone for five minutes. Half an hour. I had lost half an hour of my consciousness. As if someone had thrown a switch and I had disappeared from ‘now’ and sunk away into my family’s past. The line between the world of the living and the dead, I thought, is growing thinner all the time.

When Nina returned with the corkscrew I cut the seal off the bottle and said, ‘This wine is nearly twenty years old. It might be past its best by now. The white …’ I began twisting the metal spiral into the neck. ‘… the white is renowned. One of the greatest …’ The cork was wedged in tightly. ‘… white wines. Charles the Fifth used to drink it, I’ve been told.’ It came out in one piece. Because the bottle had been lying in the rack for so long there was some deposit on the cork, but I saw no crystals. I picked up a glass and poured, the light of a candle behind the bottleneck. The wine was deep red in colour, not a trace of cloudiness. As I turned the glass around and looked at the liquid, I felt Nina’s gaze. I leaned over and sniffed. Then I took a careful sip. Somewhere in the distance a forest loomed up, with plenty of wood for chopping. I immediately thought of a story, ‘Blueberries’, by Tolstoy. Deep in the slow whirling of flavours and aromas I could clearly taste them: blueberries.

‘There is a God,’ I said.

‘N,’ she said, ‘you’re whining.’

Uncle Herman had good taste, completely unlike his brother, though I could certainly appreciate Manny’s preference for corned beef sandwiches with mustard and dill chips and a large glass of Budweiser. The difference was, I thought, as I drank my wine, that one sense of taste had a deeper richness, and the other, a more superficial one. When you got right down to it, I thought, that was probably the difference between America and Europe. We were accustomed to the struggle to reach the depths and, once there, to seek the things we were searching for. The Americans had brought that depth to the top and created a surface that was far richer and more complex than ours. For a moment I wondered what that meant for me, a product of both these cultures.

‘The tape is still running.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Should I throw more wood on the fire?’

‘Please. But be careful.’

She got a few bits and pieces and added them to the blazing pile in the hearth.

‘Now,’ she said, when she was sitting down again. ‘The story.’

‘What would you like to hear? Everything, from the very beginning, or would you rather I choose something?’

‘Something about yourself, then. Don’t you think that would be appropriate?’

‘I don’t really play a part in the story of my family. I was there, that’s all. That’s my second talent: I’m always there.’

‘Then tell me where you’ve been.’

‘The atom bomb, for instance.’

She looked at me, and when our eyes met I saw that a trace of fearful doubt had crept into her gaze.

‘I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was there at the first test explosion.’

‘In Japan?’

‘No, that wasn’t the first. In the desert, near Alamogordo, New Mexico.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Supposing … no, I believe you, but … would you please begin at the beginning?’

‘The problem is, you never quite know where the beginning is, in this family …’

‘Somewhere,’ she said, louder now. ‘Begin somewhere, anywhere, and work your way forward. Chronologically. All this jumping back and forth is driving me mad.’

I drank my wine and tried to forget Tolstoy’s blueberries. Nina sat curled up in her chair, head bowed, the heavy red hair like a hood around her face and over her shoulders. I filled our glasses, we drained them. We smoked another cigarette. Outside, the wind grabbed hold of the shutters and ran its hands along the house looking for chinks, holes, some way to get in. It wailed and moaned like a restless spirit. Around us the darkness bowed over the glow of the flames and it was as if we were sitting in a cave: the storyteller and the last member of his tribe, waiting until the fire, and finally they, too, turned to ashes.