IT WAS NEARLY noon by the time we were back at the top of the stairs, wondering where to go next. Across the hallway from my bedroom was another one just like it. I didn’t expect to find much in there. Uncle Herman had always used the room for guests, but even then there hadn’t been much more in it than a bed, a chest of drawers and a night table. Nina insisted on searching it anyway. ‘I’d rather waste half an hour than have to keep looking at that mess.’ She nodded her head to the right, to the still intact portion of the barricade, an enormous pile of junk that lay wedged between a secretaire and an old Dutch china cabinet. The other side of the hallway looked, even in the dim light, as if it were due for demolition. The wooden floor was scratched and dented and covered with splinters. The wallpaper was tattered and torn. The doorway of my room was a pockmarked wooden frame. There were nails bulging out of it, and shreds of wood. I shook my head, laid the axe over my shoulder, and walked to the room Nina wanted to check. We had already discovered, the night before, that the door was locked. Since my burglar’s trick had worked so well the first time, I didn’t expect much trouble now either. I was right. Ten minutes later, the key lay on the newspaper that Nina had slid under the door and we could go in.
When I tried to open the door, though, it was as if someone were holding it closed from the inside. I had to lean my whole body against it to gain even half an inch. I gave up. The door slammed shut. I was panting. Nina put her hands in her pockets and looked at me, her head to one side, eyebrows lowered. ‘If you push your back against the door,’ I said, ‘I’ll lean, and when the opening is wide enough, I’ll slip inside. Then I can get rid of that spring, or whatever it is.’ She raised her head. There was something alert in her gaze. We stood there for a few moments, looking at each other. Then I laid my hand on her cheek and smiled. ‘I’ll take the axe. I can always chop my way out.’ She nodded slowly.
The door banged shut behind me. I spun round, not breathing, my heart as big as my body. ‘Nina!’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. Just the door. Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was calm.
I took out my matches and struck one. The light shot up and when the tiny flame had settled down, I saw nothing but my hand. I held the bowl of my other hand behind it and tried to direct the light. A whisper of cold brushed past my perspiring forehead. The flame swayed gently. What have you got in store for me now, Zeno? I let my foot glide over the floor, boards, boards, boards, and peered into the light of the match. When the flame had nearly reached my fingers, I blew it out and lit a new one.
‘Nathan?’
I shouted back.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m trying to see something.’
‘Open the door.’
I reached out my arms and felt for the door handle. Pulling was harder than pushing. I hung down on the handle and Nina leaned hard against the door, but we couldn’t get it open more than an inch.
‘I’m going to try and work out why this damn thing won’t open. Hang on a minute, Nina.’
I ran my hands along the seam between door and doorway and then over the door itself. In the middle was a sort of wooden frame, and in the middle of that, a slat of wood, about two inches thick and bending from the strain. I followed the curve downward, until I came to a similar frame, only this one was on the floor. The tough, flexible slat must have been what was keeping the door closed. I knelt down to get a better look and realized that I was nodding in admiration. I got up, placed my foot on the wooden bow, drew it back slightly and kicked it, hard. Something shot past my feet across the floor. There was a powerful rush of air.
‘Nathan?’
‘What’s he doing in there?’
‘What’s he doing in there, what’s he doing in there? He’s building a cathedral out of matchsticks. He’s lying down!’
‘Why’s he lying down?’
‘People lie down. People stand. People sit. Some people, like you, have a head full of mush. Nathan?’
‘He’s not answering.’
‘Oh. Is that why he’s so quiet?’
‘I think he’s …’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No!’
‘Should we call Feynman?’
‘F … Why should we call Feynman?’
‘Because he’s not answering.’
‘Every time somebody doesn’t jump to their feet and start telling you a story, you want to call Feynman?’
‘Mr Feynman!’
‘Shut up, would you.’
‘MR FEYNMAN! Oh, Mr Feynman. He’s not responding.’
‘Oh?’
‘We keep calling his name, but he won’t answer.’
‘Is it the right name?’
‘What?’
‘His name.’
‘Yes! God … He’s moving.’
‘Yes.’
‘I can see he’s moving. It’s something people do.’
There was nothing but darkness. I was lying on my back and side. On two floors. I rolled over. I couldn’t roll onto my back. Not a floor. A wall.
When I sat up, I knew where I was.
I took the matches out of my pocket and lit one. My hand was an orange stain on the blackness. I held the flame just above the floor and searched. A few yards away I found a long stick and, a bit further on, part of the broken slat. I picked it up. The tip of the slat was splintered and probably wouldn’t be hard to light.
There I sat, in the middle of the floor, and it took me two matches to get the thing to burn, but finally it caught fire. I held the slat upside-down and let the flame creep upward. When I was certain it wouldn’t go out too quickly, I began exploring my surroundings.
What had happened, I wasn’t quite sure, but after I had kicked through the slat, something had hit me and sent me flying against the door. My face and left shoulder hurt, but nothing was broken. I thrust the torch into the darkness. Against the door hung a bulging burlap sack. I wanted to get up and walk over to it, but I couldn’t. Somehow I just didn’t have the courage to push myself up and stand. Deep inside my chest I felt the distant flutter of rising panic. ‘Careful, Nathan,’ I whispered to myself. ‘Look around you. Think. What’s going on? What are the clues?’
The burlap sack looked as if it were filled with sand. By breaking the slat of wood I had freed the sack and it had come swinging down on its rope from one side of the room to the other and hit me full in the back. ‘Smashed me against the door,’ I whispered. ‘Knocked the wind out of me. Must have passed out. What else?’
A bigger room and I would have been dead. Longer trajectory, greater momentum.
The bird of fear began flapping its wings. I could feel it in my lungs.
‘Could be worse. There might have been rocks in the sack. Then you would have been dead.’
Something rose inside my head. As if I were slowly being filled with black water. The wall to my left began to glow. I leaned sideways and tried to support myself on my hands, but swayed like a top that was gradually winding down. ‘Think. Think!’ I opened my eyes as wide as I could. ‘Nathan.’
Me?
‘Stay awake, Nathan.’
God. The burning slat fell out of my hand and hit the floor several feet away from me. I saw the fire spreading along the planks. ‘I’ll stamp it out,’ said Magnus. He hurried forward and brought down an unpolished boot onto the flames. ‘Lie down, Nathan. You’re tired. What room is this? Didn’t Sophie sleep in here?’
My head drooped on my chest and I couldn’t lift it up.
No, don’t lie down. Stay awake.
I was still leaning on my arms, but it was such an effort that I could feel the pain creeping, inch by inch, through my hands, the muscles in my forearms, my upper arms, until it reached my shoulders. A dull ache.
‘I’m going to tell you something. Close your eyes.’
I closed them.
Like a bed of the finest down, that floor. To sleep, and never have to rise again.
‘Come. Long ago. Yes, long ago. That is the beginning. Long ago and far away.’
The soft hardness of the floor.
‘There once was a man who didn’t know what direction his life should take, so one morning, he rose up and went.
Listen. He went, like the shadow of a cloud over a cornfield. He was there and then he was gone.
For seven days he travelled. Seven nights. And when he looked up to see where he was, he saw that he was nowhere. And again: seven days, seven nights.
And after that: seven years.
Then he came to a plain that reached to the horizon and beyond. A scudding blanket of clouds hung low above the grass and cast rippling shadows on the ground. The wind came from the west and had been blowing forever. It was a wind that had laid bare the skeleton of the plain, a hot wall of air that scorched the skin and dried the eyes. He lay down in the sand and the scalding mountain glided over him. He felt the storm, just as the earth felt him, and the warmth of the earth rose up through his skin. His belly grew soft and he heard how the blood pumped slowly through his veins, squeezed its way into his head and, buzzing and rustling, sang him to sleep.
There was no direction in the raging of the storm. There was only heat, a continually replenished supply of diabolical heat. Heat with no source, no land of origin, no goal. If not for the wind, the plain would have boiled, the sand would have melted and gone churning away in slow, fiery streams, to the land beyond the horizon and the air would have been so hot that it burned his lips and scorched his throat. The air would have burned if not for the wind, geysers would spout liquid sand, not a creature would survive, and the sun would hang directly above the plain and permit no shadow, not even that of a raised, shielding hand, or a blanket stretched over a pair of sticks.
Days with no beginning and no end. The wind blew time away and drove the sun behind a grey curtain of flying sand and dust. Those were the days when he was happy.
At night he sought out the warm springs of an oasis and washed his dusty, chapped skin. He floated on his back in water he could barely feel. He looked up at the night, the white moon and her patches of shadow. He hovered over the border between water and air and if he gazed long enough at the moon he forgot the springs, forgot he was earthbound. He seemed to float up through space and disappear forever.
But there were also days when the wind combed the steppe like a sheet of steel, bearing rainstorms that lashed him so hard in the face that his forehead was beaded with blood. It froze day and night and the rainwater hardened into the sharp ripples that the wind blew across its surface.
They were long days, bathed in the light of a bluish sun. The cold, relentless wind pierced through the blanket he had wrapped around his body and penetrated the holes in his clothes. When it rained the water ran down his throat and froze on his chest, leaving scars on his skin, as if he had burned himself. They chafed against his clothes, those scars, opening up again and again. Some nights, by the flickering fire, which always seemed on the verge of going out, he had to crack the blood out of his shirt.
But it wasn’t the pain that heightened his agony. It was the ceaseless polar wind that drove him back under his blanket. It was the endless storm that forced him down on the ground and made him sit for days at a time with his head between his knees.
Whenever he went looking for firewood he wrestled, hunched, with the knife of cold that screeched across the plain, until he was forced to yield, once again, and was pushed back to the smouldering pile of ashes that was his fire. The next morning he’d wake up with his face half-sunk in a freezing puddle, chilled to the bone. All day long he had the feeling that half his head was made of wood.
Some days he had better luck and the storm blew a few branches (but from what tree?) his way. Then he would kindle the fire again, under the blanket. Over the spluttering flames he hung the small blackened kettle in which he heated water, but the heat from the boiling water never lingered long in his body and the warmth of the fire never penetrated to his bones, so he would spend the whole day shivering under his clammy blanket, until night came and sleep helped him to forget the cold.
One morning, seven years later, after half a night of trekking and a few hours of sleep, he woke up and saw a tree in the distance. He didn’t know what sort of tree it was. His head whispered ‘acacia’, because that seemed an appropriate name for a tree in the middle of a plain, but somewhere in his breast a voice mumbled ‘oak’. He didn’t know.
It was a big tree, tall, with a huge crown that billowed out over the trunk and hung down at the edges like the cap of a giant fungus. The trunk was so thick, it would have taken him ten paces to walk all the way around it, if that were even possible, for the enormous roots had arched their backs above the ground and turned the earth around the tree into a choppy sea of wood, moss, and sand.
He had never seen the tree before. He didn’t know the boundaries of the plain, so he wasn’t sure he really knew the plain itself, but he was surprised that he had never noticed this tree. He sat down on the ground, about twenty yards away, and gazed. The wind rushed through the leaves, but the branches didn’t move. The tree stood motionless in the sand.
He realized that the moment had come when he knew the plain. This was the boundary, this was the point at which the plain lost itself in another plain, where yet another tree would stand, in the middle of nowhere, and that tree would form a new boundary, beyond which a new plain would begin. There was no end. He knew all this, now that he saw the tree. He could journey through steppe after steppe, without direction, as the emptiness grew, but every tree would evoke yet another tree and every plain another plain. Was this tree a boundary? He had found it, and seen it as a boundary, but he might also have seen a clump of grass or a fleeing fox and accepted that as a boundary. Wherever he saw a boundary, a landmark, an imaginary demarcation of the endlessness around him, the borders would expand. What he saw would continue to reproduce itself until he had acknowledged, and accepted, the chaos, the self-generating chaos, disorder that brought forth more disorder. The tree was a metaphor. He could make it his benchmark, he could live in it, but never would this tree become the centre of the world, nor would it be the end. He would always know that the tree was one in an unverifiable, incalculable series. The plain had lost all meaning.
He sank back and closed his eyes. The blood moved in thin waves over his eyelids. He had to make a decision, a choice. Should he stay here by the tree and accept his powerlessness, or travel on and reconcile himself with his longing for an end? As he lay there on the ground, he began to understand why medieval man regarded the world as a flat surface. The comfort of finiteness. He thought of the dreams he had dreamt as a child, how he had sailed through the universe, from galaxy to galaxy, unable to find a boundary, lost in space. He rolled over and pressed his face into the ground. If he were to accept the tree as an arbitrary home in an arbitrary land, he would always wonder whether there were more trees, more lands, and he knew that, against his better judgement, he would imagine that somewhere there had to be an end to this chaos. But if he were to embark on the journey through the emptiness that stretched out beyond the tree, he would never really know if there were such an end, one that would bring him to his knees and give him peace. He rolled over on his back again and looked up at the passing clouds. He searched for a point on which to rest his gaze, but found none. The sky began tilting and for a moment it felt as if he were falling off the earth. He closed his eyes and thought of the warm water of his nightly oasis.
Then he heard the voice of God. He opened his eyes and closed them again.
“Nathan,” said the voice.
He said nothing.
“Nathan!”
He hung his head between his knees and crossed his arms above his crown.
“NATHAN!”
At last he answered. “Lord?”
“Don’t lean against that tree. Some dog just pissed on it.”’
When I opened my eyes I could see, in full detail, the grain of the plank that my head was lying on: a sluggish river in a sunburnt landscape, a slow-flowing delta that split around the island of a gnarl, then came together again and flowed imperturbably on. The smell of dust and dry wood. Something trickled out of my mouth. I ran my finger over my cheek and tasted. Saliva.
I knew where I was and why. But how long?
Once again I followed the line of the wood grain and rested my gaze on the gnarl. It was as if all meaning were contained within that one spot, as if my why and how and where all met there, as if the currents all gathered around that knot and, babbling, gurgling, murmuring, exchanged stories of along-the-way. And I drifted with those currents, from one to the next, motionless, but in motion. Just as I began to wonder how it was that I could see in the dark, I heard the hissing of the burner and noticed the light streaked across the floor. I lifted my head, just a bit, an inch or two.
‘Nathan. What the hell …’ Nina’s voice. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’ Her hand on my left shoulder.
I closed my eyes and let my head drop, rolled over on my stomach and sat up. Only then did I open my eyes again. Nina was sitting in front of me, kneeling. She reached out and grabbed me by the arms. ‘Nathan …’
‘How long?’
‘How long have you been lying here? About five minutes. Are you in pain?’
I thought about pain. I shook my head. ‘No pain. Bit fuzzy. Nothing broken.’
‘Can you stand up?’
I could stand up. I got to my feet like a child showing off a new trick.
‘Come on. Let’s go downstairs.’
‘Wait. I have to know what happened, how it works.’
She looked at me for a while, then shook her head.
Leaning on her shoulder as she turned the gas lamp to the four points of the compass, I took in my surroundings.
In the white light of the lantern the room looked like a torture chamber. The sack hung against the door from rope half an inch thick, a U-shaped frame, which had held the slat of wood, had been nailed to the floor. In the left-hand wall, about two feet above the ground, was a gaping, squarish hole, just wide enough for an adult to squeeze through. Behind it I could see chair legs and pieces of beam. Against the right-hand wall, in a neat pile, was the complete store of logs that had once lain outside, under the lean-to. The pile was nearly up to my shoulders, enough firewood to keep us warm for weeks. Leaning against the pile was a ladder. It had probably been used to screw the hooks into the hall ceiling and to attach the ring, or whatever it was holding up the sandbag, to the frame at the top of the door.
‘Lord of the Universe,’ I said.
I noticed how calm I was, and thought: It’s finally come to this – I accept my fate.
Nina moved her head towards the jagged opening in the opposite wall.
‘That’s how he got out of the room. You can only block the door from the inside, with a piece of wood like that. And besides, he still had to rig up that sandbag.’
The rope from which the sack was hanging had been attached to the ceiling by a hook, exactly above the middle of the door. Then the sack had been pulled back and pushed against the wall with a stick. The stick had rested in the frame on the floor, checked by the bent slat of wood. By kicking through the wood I had set the trap in motion. Without the slat to hold it back, the stick had popped out and the sack had come sailing down. It hadn’t been that great a sweep, but enough to smack me against the wall.
‘I’m getting very cold. Let’s take as much wood as we can and go down to the library. Is the fire still burning?’
‘I haven’t been in there. I was in your bedroom. I was trying to find something to get the door open.’
We made three trips back and forth. I found the burlap sack in which we kept our tools, Nina filled it with wood, and I carried it downstairs, while she followed behind me with another armload. After we had distributed a considerable supply over the library, hunting room, and kitchen, we sat down to eat.
Nina had made a plateful of sandwiches and a pot of tea and I breathed new life into the dying fire. We polished off the late lunch in silence.
‘I think we’ve had the worst of it,’ said Nina.
I shook my head. ‘That’s because the last bad thing always seems worse than all the other bad things that came before it. Have you forgotten that hike of yours through the snow?’
She shivered. Then she said, ‘Why did that bastard have to be my father?’
‘I’m going to tell you something.’
‘A fairy tale.’
I laughed. ‘No. Maybe. The last chapter of Uncle Herman’s biography.’
‘The last one?’ She looked at the pile of paper lying between us on the table. ‘But there’s a lot more, isn’t there?’
‘Yes. But this chapter isn’t quite finished. And chronologically, it should have come much earlier.’
‘You’ve never really been the chronological type.’
‘Far from it. Chronology is for sequence, chaos is for comprehension.’
She raised her eyebrows, then shook her head. ‘Okay. Tell me your fairy tale.’
I reached for the cigarettes, lit two, and handed one to Nina. She brought it to her lips and drew on the short filter. Without exhaling, she let the smoke escape from her mouth. The blue-grey cloud rose up and glided around her face, hiding it briefly. Then she breathed out and the smoke dissolved. I love her, I thought, and I would spend my whole life with her, whatever is left of it, if it weren’t so wrong.
‘Tea?’
I nodded. Nina got up and filled our mugs. I looked at the fire and let the story come. It took a while, but then it rose like dough.
Nina sat down in her chair, curled her right leg under her, and turned her face to me.
‘Speak, Nathan.’