Free Rituals by Cees Nooteboom Page A

I can't carry much on my back, because it is a six-hour trip."
    Inni nodded. Six hours! "How am I to imagine that?" he asked.
    Arnold Taads screwed up one eye into something that looked like an obscene wink which lasted for several minutes.
    "Like this," he said. "Stand beside me." (This was to become Inni's celebrated mime number on skis.) "We're going up, we're climbing. Sharp east wind. Unpleasant. Remember, you're carrying a rucksack on your back. It's heavy. There's fourteen days' food in it, for the dog as well. We have another four hours to go. Look at me."
    The eye was still screwed up.
    "You've still got your eye open. I can see with only one eye. The blind eye is closed now. Shut your right eye. That distorts the perspective, and it eliminates a good thirty per cent of normal vision. Look. Quite dangerous on a trip like this. Try it out."
    Part of the right half of the room was cut off.
    "If I go too fast, there is always a risk of something — a stone, a branch, an obstacle that I don't see."
    "And then?"
    Arnold Taads had sat down again. Inni found it difficult to imagine that the reopened, gleaming eye was really a hole which distorted the world so that the left eye had to fight a double battle to guard its owner against a fatal fall in the snow or on the ice.
    "Then I might fall and break my leg. In theory, but it is possible."
    The east wind blew through the room. The afternoon sun reflected the blinding light of the glacier in his one eye. No houses anywhere, no people. The world as it had always been, without interference. In the vast, white space lay a small figure, the skis jutting out crosswise like the first sticks of a campfire. A doll's leg twisted the wrong way round. "And what will you do then?"
    Freeze to death of course, he thought, but for the answer that came he was unprepared.
    "Then I give the Alpine distress signal." And without any warning his host bellowed "Hilfe!" raised his hand in adjuration as if to summon the same cruel silence to the room as reigned in that distant fateful valley, and then silently but with open mouth counted up to three and called out again "Hilfe!" one, two, three, "Hilfe!" His face turned purple in the process, and the glass eye looked as if it was about to pop out of its socket, through the terrible force of the shout.
    Inni looked at the contorted, distressed carnival mask in front of him. Never before had he seen such a defenceless face. He felt embarrassment and pity — the embarrassment that he would always feel in the presence of someone else's intimate actions and the pity for a man who has been lying with a broken leg in a deserted valley for years and has no one to tell it to.
    "I will keep on doing that, three times in a row, counting up to three each time until I have no strength left. Sound carries a long way in the mountains."
    "But if there is no one there to hear?"
    "Then the sound does not exist. Only I hear it. But it is not intended for me. If that sound does not reach the stranger for whom it is intended, it does not exist. And it won't take long before I shall not exist any more, either. You freeze, you become drowsy, you don't call out any more, you die."
    Of course the dog did not understand these words, but the decisive tone born out of future disaster could not fail to produce an effect. Athos got up, whimpered softly, and shook himself as if to throw something off.
    "By the time they start looking for me, Athos will already be dead," said Taads. "That is what troubles me most of all. My own death is a calculated risk, and there ought to be a way to safeguard Athos from that. But there isn't."
    It was the first time that someone had told Inni Wintrop the precise details of his death, even though it would be years before it occurred.
    *       *
    Opulence, not wealth, was the word to describe the interior of his aunt's spacious villa. Chesterfields, seventeenth-century cupboards, paintings of the Dutch school, a voluptuous Renaissance