A Strange Country Page 9

  Naturally, his awkwardness and appearance were only the tip of the iceberg. What lay below the surface was a mind configured like no other, completely indifferent to the matters of mountains—perpetual rebirth, merging marvels, and so on. The morning of his first hundredth birthday he gazed glumly at the sparkle on the summits of jade-lacquered pine trees and thought that it would be impossible for him to live any longer in this sublime boredom. His usual sidekicks were there with him: a ravishing squirrel and a tall brown bear, full of the graceful, powerful vivacity Petrus utterly lacked—and, turning to them as they became lost in silent admiration of the landscape, he declared:

  “I can’t take it anymore, I have to get away.”

  “And where would you go?” asked the bear, tearing himself away from the splendor of the vista.

  “I’ll go to Katsura,” said Petrus.

  “You’ll get yourself killed ten minutes into the trip,” the other squirrel pointed out, “and if you survive your own bad luck, you’ll pick the wrong channel.”

  “It doesn’t matter where I go,” Petrus said obstinately. “I just don’t want to end up like some old pine tree on a peak that’s never seen the world.”

  “But the world is inside you,” said the bear, “in every pine tree, every peak, and every boulder you see.”

  Petrus sighed.

  “I’m bored,” he said, “so bored I could die. If I hear one more poem about twilight I’ll make a point of throwing my horse into the void of my own free will.”

  In the distance, they could hear the modulation of a voice as supple as bamboo, as crystal-clear as a stream, and saying something which, in the language of humans, meant roughly:

  Dark woods on the edge of mist

  My friend the pine

  Whispers to the twilight

  “Right,” said the bear, placing his paw on Petrus’s shoulder, who was holding his head in his hands and shaking it gloomily, “don’t torment yourself like this. For every problem, there’s a solution.”

  The solution was what Petrus had stated. He had to leave. Inside him rumbled a call which his hundredth birthday made irrepressible, and the very next day he left the Deep Woods in the company of his two sidekicks—without his mother knowing, because she would have tied him to a tree—and without the slightest idea of what he would do in Katsura.

  “We’ll go with you as far as the capital,” said his friends, “then we’ll come back here. We can’t reasonably set you loose on the world without an escort.”

  If ever there was an epic journey, this was it. There can be little doubt that without his guardian angels—whom you will recognize as the future Paulus and Marcus—Petrus would have gotten lost and killed a hundred times or more. His distraction and awkwardness were compounded by the fascination of the journey. Never had he breathed like this, never, since leaving the Deep Woods had they been so dear to him, and never had he understood their message so clearly. Distance was enlightening, as it clarified the scene he’d gazed upon all his life in vain, and gave it meaning through magic and nostalgia. Again, he saw Mount Hiei and its spire pointing toward the sky with a pang in his heart as delicious as it was wrenching, and he was astonished that it had taken this departure for him to feel the fullness of being in every rock and every pine needle, in a whispering friendship, touched by the mystery of the living. Four days after they had left the territory of the Deep Woods, he felt a moment of regret so sharp and painful that he came to a halt in the middle of the path, stunned at the sensation of ecstasy this wound had given him. They’d just reached the region of the Southern Marches, a short cold plain where the mist glided like seagulls above the shore. This was the last stage before the first channel, since they were reaching the edge of the earth and would soon have to call on the services of the boatman. They had already been circling the abysses of mist on which the mountains stood for a long time, but soon there would be no more path and they all thought excitedly about their first passage through the locks. They’d never left home, and Paulus and Marcus had to confess they were enjoying this adventure. Now, however, Petrus was standing stock-still in the middle of the path, overcome and radiant, and so oblivious to everything around him that he could have walked on the tongue of a dragon and never realized.

  The channel was one of the smallest in the mists, for the Southern Marches and the Deep Woods had the lowest population density in this world. However, when they came within sight of the estuary, the spectacle was phenomenal. The black earth stretched lazily between its bands of fog, then came up against a mountain of mist that rose toward a sky so high it never seemed to end; there were no more bearings, no sense of distance, only an intuition of infinity that split any scale of vision wide open.

  “Who knows what we’re looking at,” murmured Petrus, emerging from the abyss of his thoughts to dive into the abyss of the channel, no longer able to tell reality from madness.

  At the tip of the estuary they came upon others aspiring to cross, waiting and drinking tea at the way station. A little otter elf, not yet twenty years old, was serving the travelers. Petrus, who didn’t feel at all like drinking, collapsed on a chair and sat there without touching his cup—which was a great pity because the tea served at the estuary of the Southern Marches is prepared according to a very special method, with a view to ensuring the comfort of the voyage.

  For the time being everything was calm. They could hear the cries of birds, they admired the fast-moving mist, the black earth, the pilgrimage trails. Seated at right angles to infinity, the travelers conversed placidly among themselves. The elves’ osmotic life and their immersion in the cosmological dimension of the world have made them a species that is unfamiliar with solemnity. Humans only resort to solemnity because in everyday life they are small, but under certain circumstances are called upon to raise themselves up to an unaccustomed level of the soul. But elves, as a rule, are tall, since in their hearts they respect the presence of wholeness, and they have no need to raise themselves up or to let themselves go. And so, while they were waiting until it was time for the channel to open, everyone sipped phlegmatically on their tea, at the foot of immoderation. The paneless windows in the way station looked out onto large sections of lagoon and sky, mingled like so many charming pictures—however, since the weather was mild on that late autumn afternoon, everyone stayed out on the veranda to make the most of these nuptials of earth and sky.

  The channel of the Marches opened twice a day, at daybreak and again at roughly five o’clock in the afternoon, in order to serve Hanase,3 the main town in the province of the Ashes, in what was, give or take, a slow four-hour crossing. From Hanase there was another lock to pass through before they reached Katsura. Shortly before five o’clock, the voyagers saw the father of the little otter come in, for he was also the boatman. His equine incarnation, with its robe flecked with shimmering light from the water, was transformed into an otter with an impressive build. His human features seemed to have changed in substance: while preserving their shape, they had become liquid, illuminated by that tremulous light one finds beneath the surface of the water. Was it from living in these desolate Southern Marches, where the earth had become the shore, and the sky had turned into the sea? His physiognomy represented some essential immersion, the original wave through which we are no longer objects, but flow—who knows what we are looking at, thought Petrus again, ruminating on a failure to merge with the flow of mist which left him, frustrated and unhappy, on the banks of the river where his fellow creatures were frolicking.

  “Well, damn,” he murmured.

  Now the channel opened. It’s crucial to remember that everything was ordained through Nanzen, and in Nanzen, by the pavilion, and in the pavilion, through the agreement between the guardian and his mists. In those days, the guardian was a wild boar elf who was about to begin his four hundredth year of service, and who was intimately acquainted with the currents of his world. Thus, everything unfo
lded at a pace that was unequalled in harmony; the channel opened, the mist which had hitherto risen to the heavens now coiled inward and dissolved into a liquid carpet where barges appeared, moored to a wooden pier; finally, everything became stable and everyone, connecting to the mist, set off at a march behind the boatman. Petrus, absorbed by his metaphysical ruminations, morosely afflicted by his sentiment of exclusion from the great brotherhood of elves, only half paid attention as he followed along behind. Moreover, for him to understand the boarding maneuvers, he should have drunk the tea at the way station. But because he hadn’t, and was ignorant of the instructions the others had received, he did everything all wrong: instead of staying in the middle of the pier with his eyes down and walking in a straight line to board his barge, he veered off slightly to the left and, still in a glum mood, cast a sullen look at the mist.

  A fleeting sensation of dizziness suddenly tipped him over the edge of the pier. There was a hellish splash which caused everyone to turn around, while the boatman gasped with disbelief, but before Paulus and Marcus could say a word the elf, ordering them to stay still, called out into the mist for help.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said to them.

  A moment passed in total silence. The voyagers, trying not to feel dizzy, concentrated their gaze on the spot where the unfortunate elf had disappeared. After a long while, there were ripples on the surface of the passage, and Petrus slowly rose above the mist, imprisoned in a net held in the mouths of four silvery dolphins. The contrast between the squirrel’s distraught expression—his tail stuck in the fine mesh of the net, thus preventing him from transforming himself—and the smiling grace of the large dolphins was so striking that Paulus and Marcus, after an initial effort, were no longer able to contain their laughter. The squirrel’s face was also painfully squeezed by the net, and was dripping pitifully. His fur was drenched, and he looked like a poor hairless critter set to dry by the fire. The dolphins pulled the sides of the net together so that he could be hoisted up onto the solid wooden pier and, exhausted and dying of shame, there he collapsed, wheezing like a turbine.

  “In the five hundred years I’ve been doing this job, I’ve never seen such a thing,” said the boatman, his otter face still wearing the same flabbergasted expression as his human face had the moment Petrus fell.

  “But you do have nets,” Marcus pointed out.

  “For baggage,” he replied, “in case they get knocked over or there’s wind. But for an elf!”

  Petrus continued to blow like a whale.

  “Thank you, my friends,” he croaked to the dolphins, breathing heavily.

  One of them swam up to him and, raising his silver snout, let out a shrill arpeggio, before going back where he had come from.

  “Mist dolphins,” murmured Paulus. “I’d heard of them, but actually seeing them is something else entirely.”

  “There is a great population in the mist,” said the boatman, “and my best friends are there.”

  Then, to Petrus:

  “Perhaps you too are fated to have strange friendships.”

  Petrus would have liked to answer him, but he’d gotten his paw stuck between two planks on the pier and was trying to work it loose as discreetly as possible, which in fact led to frenetic wiggling that revived Paulus and Marcus’s laughter. Finally, he achieved his aim and, springing up, took with him a centuries-old slat of wood as he did.

  The boatman looked at him with stupefaction.

  “Good,” he said after a moment, “let’s go now.”

  Marcus and Paulus escorted their waterlogged friend, and everyone was able to board. There were six of them in each barge, and four boats in all. The boatman had taken his seat in the boat with the three friends, joined by a pair of deer elves. The mist was lapping faintly at the side of the boats and Petrus, who’d ended up in the bow, was catching his breath. After his fall, in the seconds before the arrival of the rescuers, he hadn’t felt any real fear. The mists in the channel had the texture of air and water combined, the resistance of a liquid in which he could breathe, and this aqueous, gaseous weave aroused in him the awareness of a time when the living dwelled equally on earth and in the sea, in an airy existence made of oxygen, sunshine, and water.

  “We dwell in the atmosphere,” he thought, as the boatman closed his eyes and the crossing began.

  He gave a sigh and hoped for a well-deserved rest. It would have been magnanimous, indeed, if he could have stayed with his thoughts about strange friendships and cosmological fluidities. The mist was rising with streaks of gray iridescence, as if composed by a painter with a delicate touch, using here a light brushstroke, spreading there a wash in successive layers of dark ink. There were moments when the flows of mist rose all at once toward the sky, and clustered together in a tasseled cloud. Then everything grew lighter, and in the clarity after the storm, as if a brush had divided the world in two, one could make out the perfect line of the horizon. As a rule, Petrus enjoyed these demonstrations of cosmic painting, for he appreciated the beauty of the universe, and his gaze differed from that of his peers: he felt that this beauty was calling for something else, whereas his fellows wanted nothing more than the beauty itself, but he had no idea what that something else could be. Often, when in his Woods he gazed at the summits dotted with their ineffable pine trees, he could sense an undulation trying to emerge, vibrating lightly in the air with each twilit poem, but then it dissolved, for lack of whatever it was that was missing and which, he could tell, was missing in him, too. And while in the poetry there was some of this mysterious restlessness, the manner in which the lines agreed with an outside world from which he felt irrevocably separate left him dissatisfied, deprived of the instrument that would at last have enabled him to experience his moments of ecstasy.

  So, he had believed that the crossing would provide a respite for him, give him time to become himself again, and the early moments had seemed to keep that promise. But for a while, now, the barge seemed to him to be rocking a great deal; above all, he could feel the stirrings of nausea, and that did not bode well.

  “Do you feel sick, too?” he whispered to Paulus.

  “No,” replied the elf, astonished.

  Then, with consternation:

  “You don’t feel mist-sick, I hope?”

  “Feel what?” asked Petrus, alarmed.

  Paulus looked at him with trepidation.

  “Mist-sick. Travel-sick. Did you drink the tea at the way station? Normally, you shouldn’t feel like this.”

  “No, I didn’t drink it,” said Petrus, now frankly worried. “I wasn’t in the mood to sit drinking tea.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Marcus, coming closer, “Why are you whispering like conspirators?”

  “He didn’t drink his tea,” said Paulus wearily. “He wasn’t in the mood.”

  Marcus looked at Petrus.

  “I cannot believe it,” he said, finally.

  And, divided between exasperation and pity:

  “How do you feel?”

  “Horrible,” said Petrus, who didn’t know which tormented him more, nausea, or the prospect it could get worse.

  To make things worse indeed, a few hours earlier, on leaving his pine forests, now more beloved than ever, he had stuffed himself with herb pâté (something he adored) and some of those sweet little red berries that can be found at the edge of the Southern Marches (and which he was mad about). Subsequently he had felt terribly sleepy, which had made the last leg of the journey quite difficult. Now there could no longer be any question of sleeping, because the pâté, the berries, and a few older remains of cranberry compote were fighting for the honor of coming out first, while Petrus, looking all around him in horror, saw nowhere that he might reasonably dispose of them.

  “You’re not about to throw up now, are you?” whispered Marcus in a hiss of irritation.

  “Do you honestly think,” ga
sped Petrus, “that I have any choice in the matter?”

  His fur had taken on an interesting greenish tinge.

  “Not in the barge, please,” said Paulus.

  “Above all, not in the mist,” said Marcus.

  He sighed with pity and weariness.

  “Take off your clothes,” he said, “and do what you have to do in them.”

  “My clothes?” said Petrus indignantly.

  “Stay a squirrel or a horse, whichever you prefer, but take off your clothes and be as quiet as possible,” answered Marcus.

  Petrus wanted to answer back, but he seemed to suddenly think better of it, and his companions understood that the dreaded moment had arrived. Once he’d changed into a man, he turned modestly to one side and removed his clothes, baring his pretty little round white buttocks, which were sprinkled with freckles. Then he changed into a squirrel. What is about to follow will remain forever in the annals of the mists, for no one had ever seen such a thing and, above all, heard such a thing. Vomiting is very rare among elves, for they do not indulge in excesses harmful to the smooth workings of the organism, and so the event was shocking in and of itself. But you must know that of all the animals, squirrels get it over with most indelicately. Consequently the other three elves turned away with horror the moment they heard the first rumblings of release.