Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

‘Dry day?’ I said.

‘Every day is not the same,’ he replied in such a preacherly way that I almost said Hallelujah.

‘A lot of them are, though,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Anything today?’

‘Messages, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you expecting any?’ I asked him.

‘Not for me — for you.’

‘I wasn’t expecting any either.’

‘Sure you were.’

‘How can you tell?’ Under the umbrella and without the John Smith he seemed different from his previous self.

‘Takes one to know one.’

‘You just said you weren’t expecting any messages.’

‘Not any more; I’ve passed my Selby date.’

‘But there was a time when you were expecting messages.’

‘There was a time when I was expecting a lot of things.’

‘Did you get any of them?’

‘Some that I wanted and some that I didn’t.’

The rain was sometimes drumming on my hat, sometimes slanting across my face; Jesus was on his cross doing his job regardless of the weather and the fingers of the crucified right hand were touching the fingers of my left hand in my pocket; the traffic behind us was hissing and revving and changing gears; the trees were swaying and losing more leaves; Selby was standing there nodding his head as if agreeing emphatically with what he’d just said and I was waiting for him to continue.

‘The other day in The Times ,’ he said at length, ‘in my local dustbin, I saw that Maria Callas’s underwear was being sold at auction. I used to have a lot of her records. You look surprised.’

‘I thought you were going to say more about what you expected and what you got.’

‘Not today. Right now I’m thinking of God sitting up there in his office.’ He tilted his umbrella back to look up at where the rain was coming from; he was in preacher mode now. ‘Yes, brother, he’s sitting up there in his office …’

‘Hallelujah,’ I couldn’t help responding quietly.

Selby nodded several times. ‘Maybe he’s watching the world on closed-circuit TV. He’s looking at war and famine, fire and flood; he’s looking at rape and murder and unemployment and people sleeping rough …’

‘He sees it all,’ I affirmed.

‘Sees it all,’ Selby went on. ‘Sees it all and he’s smiling because it’s his world and he did it his way …’

‘That’s how he did it.’

‘Did it his way and there it is, all running smooth and easy. Then he sees Maria Callas’s underwear in that auction …’

‘His eye is on her knickers.’

‘His eye is on her knickers and he slaps his thigh and laughs and he says, “You got to hand it to me — I think of everything.”’

‘Tell it, brother.’

‘I just did.’

‘When you said he and his , were you doing it with a capital h or a small one?’

‘Small. Now I have to go home and think about this.’ Like a Punch-and-Judy man he packed up his little invisible church. ‘See you,’ he said, and walked away under his umbrella.

‘See you,’ I called through the rain, but I stayed where I was, looking at Jesus on his cross under that little roof that didn’t keep the rain off. ‘“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’” I asked him. I was trying to see his eyes but his face went completely blank. The next thing I knew I was out of the rain, sitting on a floor with my back against a wall. My hat was in a little puddle beside me, the crucified hand was still in my pocket, and the curate, Father John, was bending over me, looking concerned. Evidently I was in the church.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.

‘I’m not sure. What happened?’

‘A couple of passersby found you lying on the pavement just outside and brought you in here. Do you know how you came to be lying there?’

‘I guess I must have fainted.’

‘Has this happened before? Are you subject to blackouts, fits of any kinds? Are you on any medication?’

‘No, this was a first and I’m not on any medication.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Thank you, I appreciate your kindness but I think I’ll just go home now.’

‘First let’s see if you’re fully ambulatory.’

I stood up and took a few careful steps. ‘It seems I am. Thanks again.’ I put on my hat, we shook hands, and I walked slowly out to the North End Road but I didn’t go home. I needed time to think but I didn’t want to be alone just then so I went to Eustace Road. The rain had stopped for a while and the sky had a heroic look, as in a Dutch seventeenth-century marine painting with ships and small craft in heavy seas. I had by now made a fair number of visits to Dieter Scharf but Eustace Road, the inanimate houses of it, always looked at me with suspicion.

Scharf’s stern-looking housekeeper had turned out to be quite an amiable woman whose name was Martha. When she saw me she said, ‘You look all verschwiemelt . Go to Dieter in the workshop; I bring you black coffee and maybe some Marillenschnaps , yes?’

‘Yes, please. Vielen Dank! ’

As soon as I opened the basement door I got a whiff of the Dieter Scharf workshop smell: electrical wiring, oiled metal, solder, and cheap cigars. It wasn’t quite the same as my father’s workshop but it was close enough to make me feel cosy and comfortable. There in the darkness was the bright jumbly island of his work-bench under the green-metal-shaded bulb; and there was Dieter wreathed in vile blue smoke with his invisible charcoal-burner’s hut around him and a goblin-haunted forest in the shadows. He was sixty-three, so he wasn’t quite old enough to be my father and there was no Jack Daniel’s but I always felt safer in his workshop than in my own.

‘ Wie geht’s? ’ he said. He had begun little by little to bring simple German words and phrases into our conversation.

‘ Gut ,’ I replied, ‘ und dir? ’ Because we had quickly reached the familiar pronoun.

‘ Man lebt ,’ he said. ‘One lives, but from now until the new year I keep my head down and wait for the holidays to go away. I think perhaps there was a fourth wise man and he saw what was coming and stayed home.’

‘Do you do anything for Christmas?’

‘I drink very much and read Morgenstern until it’s over.’

‘Who’s Morgenstern?’

‘German poet, born 1871, died 1914. Good flavour, very sharp, very funny.’ From a shelf over the work-bench he took down a volume with a lot of mileage on it and let the book fall open where it would. ‘Listen to this — just take in the sound of it: “Der Werwolf: Ein Werwolf eines Nachts entwich von Weib und Kind und sich begab an eines Dorfschullehrers Grab und bat ihn: ‘Bitte, beuge mich!’” That’s only the beginning of the poem. This is about a werewolf who one night goes from his wife and children to the grave of a village schoolmaster and says to him, “Decline me!”’

‘Decline?’

‘Declension is what he wants. He wants to know the genitive and the dative and so on for Werwolf . The dead schoolmaster can only decline Werwolf in the singular but the werewolf wants the plural so his wife and children can be included. When the schoolmaster can’t do it the werewolf cries, he has tears running down. But he accepts this and he thanks the dead schoolmaster and goes home.’

At this point Martha came down the stairs with black coffee and Marillenschnaps for Dieter and me. ‘Get a glass and have one with us, Martha,’ he said.

‘ Nein, danke , I have still the shopping to do. If I drink now you don’t get your frog-in-the-ditch for supper.’

‘Toad-in-the-hole,’ said Dieter.