Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

‘I don’t know. Messages, maybe.’

‘“By the rivers of Babylon,’” he said, ‘“there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.’”

‘Is that a message?’

‘It’s a psalm, Number 137.’

‘I know that. Do you remember Zion?’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

My mother had said that Zion was where it was a whole lot better than now and it was where you never get back to. The smell of oil and metal, cigarette smoke and Jack Daniel’s came back to me with the lamplight and shadows of my father’s workshop. Whatever he handled, whether a hammer or saw or a piece of wood, he handled in a way that made you feel good. He showed me how to use a screwdriver and a hammer and I tried to hold them the way he did. With an empty cotton spool, what they call a reel here, a washer, a rubber band and a wooden match he made me a spool tractor that crept along the basement floor until it was stopped by the skirting board. ‘I guess everybody does,’ I said. ‘There are all kinds of Zions.’ Thinking, as I said that, that the Zion I remembered had been Babylon to my mother.

‘There’s a lot of Babylon around here,’ he said, and went back to his colleagues. I made my way home slowly, seeing the spool tractor crash slowly into the skirting board.

Every month Burnside Auctioneers in Ealing send me a catalogue; I make a pot of Earl Grey and start circling the lot numbers that look promising. It’s a three- or four-cup job to get through it and budget my fantasies, cosy reading all the way. The viewings are on Tuesdays, the auctions on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Burnside is nothing grand like Sotheby’s or Christie’s; it’s small and cramped and not comfortably laid out. The viewings are always a hurly-burly with people jostling one another and idly curious non-buyers taking up space and standing in front of things I want to see. Last Tuesday I found nothing terribly exciting in my price range. There was Lot 186, ‘A GERMAN.800 ART NOUVEAU 13-PIECE FRUIT SET by P & S Bruckman, the handles decorated with figures from mythology, cased £120-£180’. I was willing to go to one-thirty-five on that. With commission I’d be paying one-sixty so I’d try to resell it at one-ninety and would take one-eighty if I had to. It was nothing that made my heart beat faster and obviously I wasn’t going to get rich on it.

There were various other lots I was prepared to bid on, mostly silver or silver plate which I’d been having some luck with. I’m always hoping for treasures that others have passed by and a cardboard box caught my eye: Lot 339 was ‘A collection of treen’. No estimate. It was a jumble of unimpressive wooden artefacts: carvings of Krishna, Lakshmi, and Ganesha from the duty-free at Bombay, some boxes that might have been Tunbridge ware but weren’t, a miniature shoe, and a higgledy-piggledy of other bits and pieces not likely to set the world on fire.

Among the bits and pieces, all the way at the bottom of the box, was a painted wooden hand pierced by a wooden spike that nailed it to a fragment of a cross. The hand had been broken off a little way up the wrist and the whole thing was, by my tape measure, three and seven-eighths inches long. The painted blood was almost worn away as was the flesh colour. Shocking, that hand — the authority of it. It was a right hand; the index and middle fingers were curved reflexively around the spike in an effort to support the weight of the sagging body. Death by crucifixion, I remembered having read, was caused by the collapse of the diaphragm, and all of that pain and sorrow were in those two fingers. The carving was remarkable in the delicacy of its realistic detail, the beauty of the fingers and fingernails and wounded palm and veins of the wrist of that man whose symbolic blood was still drunk by his worshippers.

I know some hallmarks and some of the provenances of the things I buy and sell but I have vast areas of ignorance and this was from one of those. It was obviously very old, but although it probably came from something valuable it wouldn’t be worth much as a fragment. I wasn’t thinking of resale; I wanted it because it had spoken to me and couldn’t be ignored. I put it back in the bottom of the box and covered it with the higgledy-piggledy as well as I could, hoping to make Lot 339 as uninteresting as possible.

The next day at the auction I got the German art nouveau fruit set for one-thirty-five and I did all right with my other selections but although this is something I do for a living I was in a completely non-commercial state of arousal when Max Burgess, the auctioneer, called out, ‘Lot three thirty-nine, a collection of treen, possibly treasures for the discerning.’ Max is a gingery man, large and broad; he was a Petticoat Lane barrow boy before becoming an auctioneer and his style has nothing of the introvert. ‘Do I hear thirty-five?’ he enquired. ‘You don’t want to pass this by and later think: If only!’

Nobody responded. I’ve learned to avoid early foot and I kept my hand down. I saw Stephen Faulkes there, a spiteful little man who loves to bid things up and always knows when to jump off and leave me to pay over the odds. It was a grey day, threatening rain, and I’m prone to acts of desperation on grey days.

‘All right,’ said Max. ‘It’s that kind of day — caution is uppermost. Will someone say twenty-five and help me to move on?’

Faces of stone met this heartfelt request.

‘I have no shame,’ said Max. ‘My mind isn’t strong. I feel rejected. Is there a kind soul here to say ten pounds?’

Stephen Faulkes’s hand went up.

‘Ship ahoy!’ cried Max. ‘Rescue is at hand! Where ten appears surely twelve cannot be far behind?’

Myra Kaufmann went to twelve. By two-pound increments Max got us up to thirty-seven. True to form, Stephen took us to forty and I upped it to forty-five and got Lot 339, breathing hard. I would have gone higher; when I stop feeling that way about things I’ll know I’m dead.

I have no wish to push myself forward in these pages. I have been invited to set down some of my thoughts so I do it as well as I can. Today I am thinking of two visits I have made to Autun, an old walled town in Burgundy founded by the Romans.

In my head — is this not so with everyone? — there live images of scenes I remember, places I have been, objects of significance. Sometimes one of these images pulls me back to the time of its first appearance; then there comes to me the place, the scene with its reality heightened, its colour and detail by the force of memory made vivid.

One such image is that of the figure of Christ on the tympanum of the west portal of the Cathedral of St Lazare at Autun. In the eleventh century St Lazare was the patron of lepers; the tomb at Autun was said to contain all or at least part of him, so for the lepers it was a place of pilgrimage. For me too it is such a place although no part of me has yet visibly rotted away.

That the unclean might worship apart from the clean, the bishop and chapter of Saint-Nazaire caused a new church to be built for the lepers at Autun. It is in this church, the Cathedral of St Lazare, that Gislebertus, that genius of the Romanesque, with chisel and mallet wrought his marvels from 1125 to 1135.

The first time I went there I was not alone. I was young and my companion was a beautiful girl called Solange Tessier. She was studying art at the Sorbonne and she wished to see what Gislebertus had done at St Lazare.

Solange’s interest was purely artistic; she was Jewish but did not practise that religion. ‘It takes no practice to be a Jew,’ she said. ‘Either you are or you aren’t; two sets of dishes mean nothing.’ Myself, I had been educated by Jesuits under the governance of a Father Toussaint. He laid great stress on obedience and enforced it with a flexible black paddle on the hands: the sinner was permitted to choose the time of punishment within a twenty-four-hour span. This method of instruction naturally encouraged atheism in those pupils who were that way leaning. Between God and me the divergence widened until I wholly rejected the deity served by Father Toussaint and his black paddle. So the carvings of Gislebertus at St Lazare, however profoundly pious, would be for me nothing more than pictures in stone.