Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

As she waits for them to die we hear the tango singer and his ensemble again and read the subtitles:

Oh, how could you turn

all my sweet dreams

into idle fancies?

The song continues and we see Iris again at her job in the match factory as the police come for her. Having stopped the tanks, she goes with them quietly.

When you give everything

only to be disappointed

the burden of memories

gets too hard to bear.

Why have I got so many videos that I watch more than once-made-up people acting out made-up stories? The people and the stories aren’t real but the ideas are: the ideas of true love and happiness, of lost love and sadness, life and death. We get such a little bit of time and it’s so hard to find a life-story that works for us. Why have I given the story of The Match Factory Girl and taken up all this space to do it in? I’m not sure. Iris’s story is nothing like mine but there’s something about it that won’t let go of me. Those tango songs!

Truly, it is not that I am simply a wealthy sybarite. (Are there poor sybarites?) No, to me there is more than that. I do not flaunt myself as a doer of good works but in that sphere I am not idle, not unknown. I have given thousands of millions of francs to all the major charities and some that are minor, even unknown. Why do I mention this? Life is a fast-flowing river of moments; to step into this river is to find it each time never the same. Last night I had a dream in which … No, I won’t talk about it just now. Everyone has dreams.

All the same, every morning is different, is it not? I wake up with Victoria warm beside me smiling in her sleep; last night was good; life is good. Certainly the dead don’t have much fun. It seems I am given to reflection today. I ponder long the Crash Test toy that aroused my interest in Roswell Clark.

I do not look back over what I have written here before this and I do not want to; I speak from the ever-changing moment. I think I have a few words said on the metaphor of this toy, the profundity of it. These thoughts remain with me. We forward go at speed; we are stopped, WHAM! You, I, the world. ‘Even the sea dies,’ said Lorca in his Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías long before anyone knew about pollution or global warming. Even the sea dies.

I have given to many of the Holocaust and Holocaust-Survivor charities. Naturally nothing goes away. This, I think, is the first law of the remembering animal: nothing goes away. Gottfried von Peng, my father, has gone away but not as far as Genghis Khan, for example. He died full of years and billions. Death as a Friend is the title of a drawing by Rethel in which Gevatter Tod in hooded garb and sporting the scallop shell of the Santiago pilgrim tolls the bell for the old man who in his church tower has come to the end of his journey. Death of course can afford to be friendly — no one comes with a scythe to cut off his life.

The dream: Victoria and I were naked in the Rolls-Royce; Jean-Louis was driving us around the Périphérique … No, I don’t want to be telling this, it’s bad luck.

I want something from Roswell Clark. What it is I do not know. Certainly I have with this money primed the pump. What will he make? Of himself. What will he of himself make?

No word from Delarue since the letter in which he wanted to know what my talent was dreaming of, the letter in which he said he must not apply pressure. Pressure, of course, was exactly what I was now feeling. He’d been very generous in his three commissions and I’d taken his money; now he was expecting something of me. What? I felt it heavy on my back and clinging like a giant squid.

What was my patron doing now? Enjoying himself probably, without a care in the world as he waited for the mouse of me to bring forth some kind of mountain. My workroom is on the top floor of my house, with a north-facing skylight and large windows. The daylight in that room has a cool objectivity that is sometimes a little more than I can handle; a bad drawing looks worse in that light; a clumsy carving looks clumsier. My saws and my chisels and gouges, my rasps and rifflers hang in their proper places on the wall. If I were to die today they would still be there, saying, ‘What has he accomplished with us? What did his work amount to?’ Sometimes I feel as if the world is closed to me and I’m walking around and around it looking for a door.

There were scraps of lime in the bin where I keep leftover bits. These neat blond pieces of wood had once been parts of trees with leaves that stirred in the wind. Trees are living things; they have souls, they have significances; Odin, hanging on his tree through days and nights, acquired wisdom; Absalom was caught in a tree by his hair and was killed; Christ was crucified on the tree of his cross. Walk into a wood and you can feel the trees listening.

This bat tattoo, that’s a laugh. Did I think it was going to get me off the ground, make me fly? And now I feel as if the bat is expecting something from me along with Delarue.

I looked at the china nutcracker on my work-bench; he wouldn’t let expectations get him down, he’d crunch them: chomp, chomp. Of course he has the jaws for it. I mostly have music going when I’m working and I thought it might help to get me started now. I went through my CDs and selected a compilation of Argentine tango bands, and when it reached Carlos Gardel doing ‘El Carretero ’ I began to feel a little more comfortable. I understood only a few of the words but I thought a carretero might be a man with a cart and a donkey. The song has an evening sound; I saw the carter making his way through dimly lit streets past low houses and I had the feeling of having already done a day’s work. It was still morning, however, and I hadn’t done anything at all, hadn’t earned the evening feeling, so I stopped the music and went out. ‘Take me somewhere,’ I said to my feet, and they headed for the North End Road.

In a few minutes I found myself at the Church of St John, standing in front of the fibreglass Jesus and thinking about wood and Tilman Riemenschneider. He did crucifixions and lamentations, he did annunciations and assumptions and he was never extravagant with facial expressions; he only went so far and he let the wood do the rest: Mary’s face when she receives the news of the Immaculate Conception and her face when she looks at the dead Christ, the face of Jesus living and dead and the faces of the mourning women — all of these listen with the ghosts of trees and now there is fibreglass. ‘Surf’s up,’ I said.

‘You talking to Jesus?’ said a deep voice behind me.

I turned. It was a member of the low-budget drinking community. I’d seen him the last time I was at the church: a black man, tall and burly, wearing jeans and a red T-shirt and holding a can of John Smith. He had the face of the black policeman in one of those buddy movies where the partner is white. His manner was discursive rather than aggressive. ‘Fibreglass is OK for surfboards,’ I said, ‘but Jesus deserves wood.’

He sipped his beer and thought about this for a while. I wondered where he stood on aesthetics.

‘Did you come here to pray?’ he said.

‘No. Did you?’

‘Prayers are for children.’ He pointed to the brass plaque in memory of the Fulham and Chelsea Battalion of the Church Lads’ Brigade. ‘Were their prayers answered?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘So you’re not praying. What do you want from Jesus?’

‘Nothing as far as I know.’

‘You wouldn’t be standing here,’ he said like a patient tutor, ‘if you weren’t looking for something from him.’