Rituals by Cees Nooteboom Read Free Book Online Page B

Burning Bush and the wife of Lot, a God who, thought Inni, was surrounded by a cosmos of emptiness and fear and punishment for those who believed in him. What they were doing there, Father Romualdus and he, had to do with the Minotaur, with divine offerings and mysteries, with the Sibyls, with fate and destiny. It was a very small bullfight for two men, from which the bull was absent yet had a wound from which the blood was being drunk — a mystery accompanied by low whisperings in Latin.
    Once, and then for good, the spell had been broken. As the chalice was being lifted to where, high above the church, the sun would soon trace its course, the old man suddenly began to tremble. Inni would never forget the scream that followed, never. The raised hands let go of the chalice. The wine, the blood, poured all over his chasuble, and the cloth was torn from the altar in one haul by the monk's clawing hands, dragging candles, host, and paten with it. A scream as of a huge wounded animal bounced back from the stone walls. The man tugged at his chasuble as though he were trying to tear it asunder, and then, still screaming, he slowly began to fall. His head hit the chalice and started to bleed. When he was already dead, he still went on bleeding, red and red mingled on the islands of shiny silk amid the gold brocade, and it was no longer clear which was which — the wine had become blood, the blood wine.
    The absent dog, the silence of the woods, the soundless footsteps of Old Shatterhand, and his own townish rustle were still waiting for an answer.
    "I don't know. Perhaps I never did believe," he shouted ahead. The scornful laugh of a magpie replied. And suddenly the whole wood was full of Church fathers, inquisitors, martyrs, confessors, agnostics, heathens, philosophers, bleaters, and brayers. Theological arguments flew all around. Two finches were discussing the Council of Trent, a cuckoo underlined the Summa Theologica, a woodpecker endorsed the thirty-one articles, and sparrows condemned Hus to the stake once again. Spinoza the heron, Calvin the crow, the incomprehensible cooing of the Spanish mystics, the chirping, twittering, gurgling, and clucking birds of field and woodland celebrated the two bloody millennia of Church history, from the first swimming fishes scratched on the dark walls of the catacombs to the spirit that had singed Saint Paul in the guise of an inhabitant of Nagasaki, from the perplexity of the men of Emmaus to the infallible vicar occupying the See of the Fisherman. Oceans of that same human blood had been shed since then, and millions of times that same body had been consumed. Not an hour, not a day went by without this being done, at the North Pole, in Burma, Tokyo, and Namibia (oh, Zita), even at the moment when these two unbelievers were walking here under the lime trees, one with his head full of Sartre, the other with his head full of nothing.
    They came to a clearing. Bumblebees buzzed in and out of the purple-brown flowers of the deadly nightshade. Everything quivered and rustled.
    "Athos! Come here!"
    The dog appeared out of nowhere and lay down at the feet of his master, who posted himself in the middle of the clearing like a field preacher, carrying the late sunlight on his chamois shoulders. Arnold Taads's voice filled the entire wood as if it were an element like water or fire.
    "I know exactly at what moment I ceased to believe in God. I have always been a good skier. Before the war I was champion of the Netherlands a couple of times. That may not sound like much, but I was the best, nevertheless, and of course these championships were not won in the Netherlands but in the mountains. Have you ever seen mountains?"
    Inni shook his head.
    "Then you have not lived yet. Mountains are God's majesty on earth. At least, so I thought. A skier all alone, high up in the mountains, is different from other people. There are only two things, he and nature. He is on a par with the rest of the world, do you