I’m the one putting it back on, that’s just about guaranteed,’ she says, with a hint of defensiveness but mainly with pride.
Duran’s ring finger is encased in a tight bandage stiffened with a strip of metal. In the car he takes his hand out of the sling that was secured around his neck in the hospital.
‘A ring finger is better than an index finger,’ he says, determined to get back to work that evening. ‘And I’m left-handed.’ He looks askance at his driver.
Strange, thinks Duran, that this man is the only person ever to have seen him unconscious. He didn’t leave him for one moment, not in the shop and not in casualty. He’s struck by how normal that seemed.
‘Thanks.’
Alphonse takes his eyes off the road and raises one corner of his mouth.
‘No, I mean it. Is there anything I can do to thank you?’
‘There is something, actually. Those little figures in the freezer—I’d like to take another look.’
Sometimes air can be displaced by a feeling. Suddenly the car is filled with embarrassment from floor to roof. Am I the only one who knows about the ice men? Alphonse wonders. ‘They’re beautiful. That’s why I’d like to see them again.’
‘It’s a strange hobby, but then all I do the rest of the time is work. I work really hard. Often fourteen hours a day. And I go to the gym, too.’
Alphonse doesn’t insist. He agrees to let Duran make him something to eat. He parks right in front of the shawarma shop. In this part of the country there’s never any shortage of parking spots.
With the good fingers of his injured hand, Duran moves a teabag up and down in a cup of hot water. ‘You can take a look,’ he says. ‘But over there if you don’t mind.’
‘Of course,’ says Alphonse. ‘Otherwise they’ll melt.’
They place two chairs next to the open freezer and bend down over the drawer.
‘They all look like you,’ says Alphonse, at the risk of rekindling Duran’s embarrassment.
‘That’s why they’re all called Duran,’ says Duran. ‘This is Duran Khan, dressed like Genghis Khan, and this is Ataduran.’
Apple tea steams on a low table close to Alphonse’s legs. The sweating pillars of meat have resumed their dervish dance and the floor is daubed with blood. Companionship comes in strange guises, he thinks merrily.
‘Here,’ says Duran. ‘If you can guess his name you can have him.’ He shows Alphonse a Duran dressed in straw and feathers, with a loincloth, a spear, and a shield.
‘Shaka Duran?’
‘Yes. So he’s yours. Never show him to anyone.’
At home Alphonse liberates the ice man from the freezer-block flat Duran has shut him into. He puts Shaka Duran in the smallest plastic box he can find and lays him to sleep between two packs of spinach in the freezer compartment at the top of the fridge. If Cat finds him, he’ll have to explain it was a well-intended gift.
-
28
On Sunday it rains. In the early morning the wind hurls hard drops at the windows. The salvos continue till Alphonse lifts his head from the pillow.
He sits on the edge of the bed and realizes that in his dream the sound of the rain was the stutter of automatic weapons, fired by uniformed men at naked figures up against a wall. He was not among them.
With his first sip of coffee he wants to hear Cat, who answers out of breath. She has no time now, she’s in the middle of a storm that broke just when all the mats, cushions, and blankets had been dragged deep into the woods. Now they’re fetching everything indoors again. The atmosphere has hit rock bottom. The guest lecturer is as much of a disappointment as the weather.
Alphonse says he misses her. She misses him too.
She once taught him a headstand. Sirsasana is said to rejuvenate the brain cells, optimize the metabolism, and combat both grey hair and varicose veins. Could he still do it? Aware that no impulse is ever risk-free, he takes a folded blanket from the sofa and lays it on the floor. He puts his elbows at the edge, shoulder-width apart, slides his fingers together and presses the crown of his head to the blanket, nestling the back of his skull in his hands. The trick is to keep your shoulders low, he recalls, to avoid straining the neck. He takes small steps toward his face, straightens his back and stretches his legs. He’s vertical. It’s improbably pleasant, until the desire to stand like this for a long time is replaced by an awareness that he doesn’t know how to stop without pain. When he bends his legs to begin the descent, it’s as if he’s about to snap, so he stretches them again.
Someone knocks on the front door, which only his neighbour, Willem, is in the habit of doing.
‘Door’s open!’
‘Don’t leave it open! This isn’t Brussels, but all the same!’ Willem shouts from the hall, and then, eye to eye with the sirsasana: ‘Oops, how did that happen?’
‘Could you just help me down?’
‘What do I do?’
‘Push back, that’s all. Support me.’
‘Hell’s bells, man. I’m almost eighty.’ With the seriousness of the elderly, Willem switches from a weightlifter’s stance to one in which he’s holding Alphonse’s legs like the arms of a wheelbarrow. After it’s all over he makes no attempt to conceal his pride: man in late seventies helps far younger person out of physical predicament. Successfully, too. He runs his fingers through his grey mop and flashes Alphonse a smile. Yes, he would like some coffee.
‘Cat not awake yet?’ he calls to the kitchen, where Alphonse is pouring him a cup.
‘It’s her yoga week.’
‘So you thought: how about standing on my head for a while? I’ve always said it’s dangerous. Cat ought to give it up as well. She’s far too thin. Marie-Jeanne said the same. She had an eye for these things, that’s why she baked all those cakes for you. To think I’ll never eat them again.’
While Marie-Jeanne was alive, Willem mainly went on about how irritating she was. Because her part in any conversation was usually confined to the question: ‘That’s not true, is it?’ Or because she was unable to enjoy dining out and always started looking for her keys even before they’d paid the bill, only to find them later, at home, in places where they could only ever be located after a protracted search. He often complained of her lack of interest in the Great War library he was compiling, an indifference that verged on hostility. ‘The First World War’s over!’ Alphonse heard Marie-Jeanne wail, distraught, a week before her death. She thought garages were for cars, not books, and conservatories for vegetables. Willem believed this had to do with a lack of schooling, a disparity that had driven a wedge between them on several occasions. But he thought such things about her only while she was still around. Her death had made the newspapers, as a consequence of the sequence of bad luck that led up to it. On the way to the fishmonger’s she’d fallen victim to some geraniums that threw themselves at her along with their terracotta tank. She was taken to hospital with a fractured shoulder
