Russell Hoban - Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

‘Plum blossoms,’ she whispered, ‘on a dry tree.’

‘Plum blossoms?’

‘On my kimono. The bird is the uguisu, the Japanese bush-warbler. “Uguisu no, nakuya achimuki, kochira muki”:

An uguisu is singing,

Turning this way,

Turning that way.’

‘You’re not a dry tree,’ I said, ‘you’re some kind of sorceress — the ordinary rules don’t apply to you.’ We were still standing just inside the front door and I was afraid to move, afraid I might disappear at any moment.

She kissed me again and led me into her flat. There was faint music, Ravel of course, the first-time-with-Serafina-trio again. Well, Katerina was a psychic, wasn’t she. I was going to ask her to switch it off when I changed my mind and tried to listen past Mr Rinyo-Clacton for what else was in the music, the voices and the colours of it.

We went through a book-lined hallway into a bedroom full of books. ‘Apart from the front room there’s only this one,’ she said. Other than the shelves, the only pieces of furniture were an old brass bed and a bedside table with an Anglepoise lamp. As well as the books there were several shelves of LPs. The turntable stood on the floor with the amplifier and the speakers. Beyond the circle of lamplight the room was shadowy like the music.

Katerina’s recording was a Deutsche Grammophon LP; the artists weren’t the ones who’d performed on the CD that Mr Rinyo-Clacton and I both owned; this lot had had no part in his synchronised buggery. The strings and the piano seemed to be engaged in a meandering colloquy in which sometimes reason and sometimes emotion prevailed; the mood overall was one of melancholy.

In the second movement, designated Pantoum (I’d looked it up once: it was the name of a kind of Malayan verse quatrain) the musical protagonist seemed to be trying to break free of something. Pantoum, I said to myself, Pantoum, liking the strange sound and the mystery of the word.

Katerina kept her kimono on when she got into bed; her shapely feet looked younger than her years. I undressed, removed the envelope from my leg, slid in beside her, and took her in my arms. A woman of seventy-something, for God’s sake! I thought I’d do no more than hold her but our kissing had moved on to something more serious than before and the music now seemed especially of this strange moment in which the ordinary rules were suspended. I didn’t have a condom.

‘It’s all right without,’ she said softly. ‘I know you’ve been with him again but this is how I want you. I’m not going to catch anything from you.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m psychic, remember?’

‘Strange woman, magic woman.’

‘Remember that when you wake up in the morning and find yourself lying beside a bundle of ancient papyrus.’ She switched off the Angle-poise and there were only the faint light from the hall and the little red beacon of the amplifier and the music.

Afterwards she said, “Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit / Und im Abgrund wohnt die Wahrheit” Only fullness leads to clarity / And in the abyss dwells the truth.’

‘Is that Schiller?’

‘Yes, “Sayings of Confucius”.’

‘What makes you quote those lines now?’

‘I don’t know — you mustn’t expect me to be rational all the time. One does something and perhaps has no idea what it was that was done. Then much later there comes suddenly the understanding — Aha! So that’s what it was. This that just happened with us, maybe we think it was only with the two of us here and now but nothing is separate from anything else: not people, not places, not times. The present is the fin you see cutting the water, and under it swims the shark that is the past and the future.’ She gripped my hand. ‘Jonathan, I know that you are in some kind of a life-and-death thing. Will you tell me what it is?’

I told her and the pillow rustled as she shook her head. ‘Mr Rinyo-Clacton was right,’ she said. ‘That was Death looking out of your eyes when he saw you in the tube station. It’s very strong in you now. Don’t you want to live?’

‘Sometimes I think yes and sometimes I think no. Sometimes I feel as if Samarra is everywhere and Death is looking at his watch and waiting for me.’

‘For you Death is a man.’

‘Definitely.’

‘What if you were to tell Mr Rinyo-Clacton you’ve changed your mind and you give back the money?’

‘Surely a modern no-bullshit psychic and clairvoyant can guess the answer to that one, Katerina?’

‘I know — he’s full of death also. You must understand when we talk about this: I can feel some of the big things but I don’t always get details. And even with the big things I’m not always clear; there are often cross-currents and contradictions in what comes to me.’

‘Well, one of the details is that even if I return the money he’s still going to require my death in one year.’

‘Do you think he’ll honour the agreement and give you the full year?’

‘I’m not at all sure he can be trusted.’

‘Oh God, what a thing you have got yourself into, Jonathan.’

‘Maybe in some way I needed to make this happen.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know — I can’t always join up the dots but I feel that if I’d been more of a man, if I’d liked myself better and liked women better, I wouldn’t have needed to get so many of them into bed; I’d have been too full of Serafina and what she was to me and things wouldn’t be as they are now.’

‘You’ve just been unfaithful to her again with this old woman lying next to you.’

‘This is different — she’s left me and she’s probably sleeping with someone else this very moment.’ I said that but I didn’t believe it.

‘Have you got anything he’s touched, this Rinyo-Clacton?’

‘Here I am — I’m something he’s touched.’

‘You’re too full of you; I need something with no output of its own.’

I took the envelope from the bedside table and put the banknotes in her hand. ‘This money,’ I said, ‘although it was sealed in plastic when he touched it.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ She held it in both hands, pressed it to her chest, and shut her eyes. Then her face changed — her lips drew back from her teeth in a long shuddering breath; she looked suddenly ancient and sibylline and altogether frightening. For the first time it came to me that I might be involved in something beyond my understanding.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What’s happening?’

Still with her eyes closed, she shook her head and put her finger to her lips for silence. After a time she opened her eyes and said, ‘It’s not good, too many words — the energy of the mind goes like water down the plughole. Some things I see again and again, years apart, and each time it means something else and I must think about it.’ With the index finger and thumb of her left hand she massaged her temples as if she had a headache. I listened to the ticking of her little bedside clock and waited for her to speak. After a few minutes she said, ‘One thing I tell you, though: there’s fear in him.’

‘Fear in him!’

‘Yes, in him.’

‘Fear of what?’

‘I don’t know. Could he be afraid of you?’

‘Of me!’

‘Sometimes you know what someone is to you but you don’t know what you are to them. The fear is definitely there.’

She gave me back the money. ‘Anyhow, he probably doesn’t come after you already tonight so maybe we can get a little sleep.’

‘It just occurred to me — would a photograph of him give you anything?’ As I said that I thought, what, is she your minder now? What a hero.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it only gets in the way. When the time is right, maybe his face comes to me.’