The Bat Tattoo by Russell Hoban Read Free Book Online

books you can see his chisel marks on the faces of Christ and Mary and the saints.
    I opened my eyes and I was back in Dimes Place and the whisper of the rain with my hand still on the wood. If I used lime I was connecting myself to that man who was, you might say, the Johann Sebastian Bach of woodcarving. Probably in his whole life he never got the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds for a single commission.
    Stuart Duncan, one of the company directors of these ghostly forests, was in the office. I was half afraid that he’d ask me if I was qualified to use lime but when I told him what I wanted he said, ‘You can probably find what you need right out here.’ We went to the little room outsidethe office where there were remnants of various lengths and thicknesses. I found eight pieces that would give me more than I needed, all neat and smooth and blond.
    On the way home on the Piccadilly Line I could see my chisels and gouges and hear the slithery rasp as I sharpened them on the oilstone. I felt wide-awake and excited. Odd, I thought, that I had never done any woodcarving. Why hadn’t I? The hand, the eye, and the mind respond differently to different tools and materials. Once home, I put the wood on my work-bench and there it waited, whispering to itself.
    Before I began the actual carving I needed to know how the figures were going to be made to work so I browsed the small ads in
Model World
and found Dieter Scharf, I CAN MAKE IT WORK — SPECIAL APPLICATIONS TO ORDER. He was local, too. I got some sketches and notes down on paper then I rang him up and went to see him the next day.
    Scharf lived off the North End Road in Eustace Road, which today seemed somewhat sullen and withdrawn; the houses were looking at me the way the regulars look at you when you wander into the wrong pub. The sky was overcast, as it often is when I’m trying to find something. When I rang the bell the door was answered by a stern middle-aged woman in a flowered apron. She looked like a housekeeper in a horror film. ‘He’s in the basement,’ she said. The house was dark and cool, the furniture was dark and brown; the curtains were drawn, the kitchen was silent.
    Dieter Scharf’s workshop was dark and cosy; it smelled of electrical wiring, oiled metal, and cheap cigars. A light bulb in a green metal shade looked down on various little engines and skeletal articulations that littered his work-bench; some looked as if they were arrested in mid-crawl or mid-hop,others were not that far advanced. Tools hung in their painted outlines on the wall. From this moment on, I thought: What? You never know.
    Scharf didn’t look like an indoor type; he was a short sturdy man with a brown weathered face, sudden blue eyes, and big strong hands. He might have been a charcoal-burner in a haunted forest, and although his basement was in SW6 it felt far away and elsewhere. He watched me as I took in his workshop. There was a sampler on the wall in a carved rustic frame; the stitches were in faded orange, pink, and mauve:
    EGAL WIE MAN SICH DREHT,
DER ARSCH BLEIBT IMMER HINTEN
.
    ‘What does that say?’ I asked him.
    ‘“Whichever way you turn, your arse stays always behind.” My grandmother gave me that.’
    ‘Words to live by,’ I said.
    On a little box on the wall there was a small wooden figure of a horseman in medieval dress. About a foot to the right of the horseman was another little box with nothing on top of it. Between the two boxes and connected to them by wires was a pushbutton. ‘This is Eustace Road,’ said Scharf.
    ‘St Eustace?’ I said, pointing to the wooden horseman.
    ‘Right.’
    ‘But where’s the stag?’
    ‘Push the button.’
    When I did that, St Eustace sprang from his horse and fell to his knees; the lid of the other box slid aside as a stag reared up, a tiny Jesus popped out of its head with his arms outspread between the antlers, and Bing Crosby sang ‘White Christmas’.
    ‘The music’s a nice touch,’ I