Rituals by Cees Nooteboom Read Free Book Online

wrapped, separate doses of emphasis. Not a single word, thought Inni, of what the man had said during the afternoon had yet vanished from the room. Like objects they were stacked away somewhere among the furniture. There was no escape any more.
    "Well, Therese, it is nearly five o'clock. My reading hour. Your nephew can stay for dinner here if he wants to. I'll see you on Saturday. Tell your chauffeur to be on time."
    She rushed out of the room. He saw her flying down the garden path and heard the car moving off fast. He wiped away the wetness her fleeting kiss had left on his cheek. Arnold Taads returned to the room. Somewhere in the house a clock struck five. He picked up a book and said: "I read until a quarter to six. Amuse yourself."
    An iron silence settled on the bungalow. Inni knew exactly what kind of silence it was, for he had heard it before, in a Trappist monastery. The knock on the door, the shuffling, the smothered rustle of heavy cloth in the corridors, the footsteps, soft as if in snow. Then the entrance into the chapel, the dry wooden tap starting a half hour of communal meditation. Spellbound, he had looked down from the visitors' gallery onto the white, immobile figures in the cold, tall choir stalls below. Old men, young men, chewing on some thought or other, forever inaccessible to him. On one occasion he had seen one of the men fall asleep, slowly toppling forward like a piece of wood. Another dry tap had sounded, stone on wood. The man, startled from his stupor, had scrambled to his feet and come forward on the black-and-white checkered stone floor between the rows of choir stalls, bowed, but bowed, broke in two before the abbot, who wordlessly, with a sign, dealt him his punishment — prostration. The long, white figure fell to the ground like a dead swan, his hands as far from his feet as possible, a flattened, humiliated being, stretched out full length. And not one of all those men had looked up. Only the tap of stone on wood, the abbot's ring, a few footsteps, the rustle of clothes had broken the silence.
    Now he was again in a monastery, the monastery of one man, his own monk and his own abbot.
    Inni needed to go to the bathroom, but dared not move. Or would the man, on the contrary, despise him if he sat here all the time like a dummy, without doing anything? Slowly and very quietly he got up, walked past the reading man, who did not look up - on the cover he saw existentialism . . . humanism — towards the piano — Schubert . . . impromptu — and from there out into the corridor. In the bathroom he found a copy of the Haagse Post, which he took back to the living room. He turned the loose pages as if they must not displace any air and read the anecdotes he would be reading all his life. After the Iranian rebellion Egypt was at the top of the list of sensitive trouble spots for the West. Pravda, in a long fierce article, attacked the Bermuda Conference, which President Eisenhower had convened to discuss whether one ought to talk with the Kremlin, as Sir Winston favoured, or stand firm, as President Eisenhower recommended. The French president Vincent Auriol had asked Paul Reynaud to form a new government. History.
    How many names would have to settle inside him, flow through him, until that whole, constantly self-destroying and self-regenerating tribe would at last leave him totally indifferent. They bore the faces of the fate of their day, which they were deluded enough to think they determined, but they themselves were at the same time the blind masks of a force that swept across the world. You should not take too much notice of them, that was all. But what was called "governing", the inadmissible desire to be the executor of fate, the temporary face of that most mysterious of all monsters, the state, seemed to him later, much later, despicable.
    At exactly a quarter to six the dog lifted its head and Arnold Taads put down his book.
    "Athos! Come for a walk!"
    They left the house and entered