In Babylon

‘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.