Russell Hoban: Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

‘It is now.’

‘Maybe before now also. It’s a natural state, melancholy — like fear. Both belong to the human condition. Now I am going to tell you something that I’m wondering about: apart from this session we’re going to have now I have a feeling that some kind of connection exists or is going to exist between you and me, a link of some sort, a Verbindung. Strange, yes? Do you feel that?’

‘I don’t know — when the handbill was given to me I felt as if I’d been waiting for it.’

She moved behind me. ‘I’m just going to put my hand on the back of your neck,’ she said. Her touch was light, her hand cool and dry. ‘Now, come and sit down. We talk about this.’

We sat at the table facing each other. She was wearing silver earrings, little owls. It was getting dark outside and the two of us in the lamplight were reflected in the window. The room behind us was lost in shadow. The glass bell-flower shade of the lamp was a delicate blue; the light through it seemed to come from a time when all kinds of questions had better answers than they do now. At the base of the lamp was a graceful little woman, bronze not spelter, whose figure was more revealed than concealed by the clinging drapery loosely belted at her hips. She had a quill pen in her right hand and her left held one end of a scroll that was balanced on her thigh. Her bare right foot was forward; her left rested lightly on a book. Her hair was loosely pinned up at the back and she wore a wreath in it — laurel, I thought. Her eyes were downcast, her sweet face pensive. I put my hand around her and ran my thumb over her belly and down her thigh. The room grew darker beyond the circle of the lamplight.

Katerina was looking towards the street and absently rubbing her left arm. The sleeve of the cardigan slid up and I saw numbers on her wrist. She offered me a cigarette; I shook my head. Did I mind if she smoked, she asked, and when I said no she lit up, took a deep drag, and coughed for a while. ‘I thought I am already dying from so many cigarettes,’ she said, ‘but no, still I am here. Many times I have foreseen my death and many times it has not happened. Some psychic I am. Give me your hands. May I call you Jonathan?’

‘Please do.’

‘Jonathan, do you know why I put my hand on the back of your neck?’

‘I think so.’

‘Shall I say what I am feeling? I think it will not be a big surprise for you.’

‘Yes, say it.’

‘Death is following you.’

‘I’m not sure whether it’s following me or I’m following it.’

‘I can feel your uncertainty and I feel the closeness of death but I don’t know what this is all about.’

‘I’d rather not explain just yet; first I’d like to know what you’re getting from me because I don’t quite know where I am with what’s happening.’

‘OK — I try to feel what goes on in you where the words are not. Two, I get: death times two. Here I am confused with these two deaths.’ She let go of my hands and brought her own together on her chest with their knuckles touching. ‘One is real, it threatens from the outside; the other is in the mind and it threatens with the mind, yes?’

‘I hope it’s only in the mind. I’ve got three months ahead of me before I can be HIV-tested.’

‘You have been with a man?’

‘Once only, last night.’

‘No protection?’

‘No protection.’

She was quiet for a few moments. Upstairs the murmurous sea-changes of Pelléas, still in Act One, stopped and the Ravel trio for piano, violin and cello, the one featured in the film Un Cœur en Hiver, began. Serafina and I had listened to that trio in my flat the first time we made love; I remembered her undressing for me, the poignancy of her body in the lamplight, the pearliness and the shadows.

‘So,’ said Katerina, ‘you have played arsehole roulette and now you are afraid. I have several clients who have come to me like this. Sometimes, not always, I can see what other people cannot but I have never been able to see into the future and I can’t say what will be three months from now.’

She took my hands again. ‘In each of us lives the little animal of the self: nothing to do with the mind, it goes its own way; there is no talking to it. Sometimes it wants to live; sometimes it wants to die. Maybe you are in hospital for surgery, and while you are anaesthetised the little animal of the self makes up its mind. “OK,” it says, “this time I don’t die.” Or it says, “That’s it — I have had enough and it’s time to pack it in.” So now I listen for what the little animal of you is saying and it says yes and also it says no. It’s a little confused, I think.’

‘So am I.’ Upstairs, Ravel was cut off halfway through the first movement and Berlioz came on with Symphonie Fantastique.

‘What is it with this Mr Perez?’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘His thoughts are sad; he has many regrets. Talk to me about yourself. Have you now become a convert to love between men?’

‘No, it’s just that I seem to have come unglued since Serafina left me.’ Then of course I had to tell her all about Serafina.

‘Jonathan,’ said Katerina, ‘this that you have told me about you and Serafina is of course a big thing in your life but it is not — how shall I say it? — too much off the beaten track. Left to yourselves, the two of you would either find a way of getting past this together or going ahead separately. What I think is the big priority here is this death business. Something comes into my mind now and I say it; perhaps it is stupid but I say it anyhow. Have you ever read a book by the American writer John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra?’

‘No.’

‘In the front of it, for an epigraph, there is a tiny little story, only a paragraph it is, by Somerset Maugham: a merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the market and there the servant is jostled by a woman whom he recognises as Death. She makes what he thinks is a threatening gesture so he hurries home and says to his master, “Please lend me your horse. I saw Death in the market and she threatened me, so I want to ride to Samarra to get away from her.” The merchant lends him the horse and then he goes to the market and accosts Death. “Why did you threaten my servant?” he says. “That was not a threatening gesture,” says Death. “It was one of surprise. I was startled to see that man in Baghdad today because I have an appointment with him this evening in Samarra.”’ She blew out a big cloud of smoke. ‘Tell me your thoughts about this story.’

‘My first thought is that in this story Death is a woman. Until now, whenever I’ve read of Death as a person or seen it pictured it’s been male. Somerset Maugham was homosexual; maybe for him Death was a woman. Of course there’s a feminine element in every man.’

‘In you?’

‘In every man.’

‘What do you think it wants, your feminine element?’

‘Katerina, I thought you were a clairvoyant, not a shrink.’

‘Have you ever watched Oprah Winfrey? These days everybody is a shrink. Don’t answer me if you don’t want to.’

‘I don’t know what my feminine element wants but I think my masculine element is tired and full of uncertainty.’

Katerina held up her right index finger and made it go from side to side like a windscreen wiper. ‘So — which way is the needle pointing now?’

‘You mean, towards male or female?’

‘What you like — maybe life or death, I don’t know.’

‘Death, I guess.’

‘Mr Rinyo-Clacton, what in your mind does he represent?’

‘Death, I guess. But he’s no one I’m attracted to.’

‘Don’t worry about it, every kind of thing goes on in the mind all the time. Say more about the story.’