Marcel Moring - In Babylon

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.’