The Foxes Come at Night

by Cees Nooteboom, Ina Rilke

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

Set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come At Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. In 'Paula', the narrator evokes the mysterious, brief life of a woman he once loved; in 'Paula II', the same woman is aware of the man thinking of her. No longer a body, she is slowly fading into the distance, remembering the time they spent together, and his fear of the black night when the foxes appear. And yet the tone of these stories is far from pessimistic: it seems that death is nothing to be afraid of. Nooteboom is a superb stylist who observes the world with a combination of melancholy and astonishment. These stories are textured with humour, pathos and vast knowledge, the hallmarks of this outstanding and highly respected European writer.

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 93

Sample

Gondolas are atavistic. Where he had read that he did not know, nor did he wish to think about it now for fear of losing the pathos of the moment. A low sun, the black, bird-like shape of a gondola on the misty lagoon, the squat mooring posts like a solitary phalanx of soldiers vanishing into the distance on a mission of death and destruction, and him standing motionless on the Riva degli Schiavoni holding a snapshot, yellowed and half-torn – how was that for pathos? It was roughly here that their gondola had arrived, and there, by those steps, or the next ones a bit closer to the half-submerged statue of the executed partisan woman, that they had disembarked. The weather had been much like this, you could still tell from the snapshot. They had been sitting on the steps when a young officer appeared, pointing to a sign and telling them the place was reserved for the water police. All he had to do now was locate the sign, which should not be too difficult.

And if I find it, what then? Then I’ll be standing on the very same spot where I stood forty years ago, and what of it? He shrugged, as though someone else were putting the question. So nothing. And that, he thought, was the whole point.

He had agreed to write a piece about the show at the Palazzo Grassi for the sole purpose of undertaking this curious pilgrimage. Where to? To a phantom, no, not even that, to an absence. He had found the very steps quite easily. They were still in use as a mooring place for the police. Eternal cities tend not to change too much, and the sign was still there, fixed to the brickwork on the side. Newly painted, though. He sat down on the top step. The youthful carabinieri from back then would have long since been pensioned off, but even if he had stayed young in the intervening forty years he would not have recognized the elderly man sitting there now. The snapshot had been taken by an unknown bystander, who had posted himself with his back to the lagoon some distance away. An angle of thirty degrees, so that the Doge’s Palace would be in the picture. Peering closely, he marvelled at its falsity. Not only could a photograph conjure up people who were dead, it could also confront you with a hopelessly outdated version of yourself, in this case a long-haired stranger whose appearance had once been so much of the period that it gave the scene the stale aroma of a long-buried past.

The mere fact of being in possession of the same body – that was the true marvel. But of course it was not the same body. The person in possession of the body still went by the same name, that was as much as you could say.

*

What that snapshot really conveyed, he reflected, more as a statement of fact than out of a sense of tragedy or self-pity, was that it was time he started thinking about his own exit. He had been sitting to her left. She had tilted her laughing face to the unknown photographer, tossed her red hair from her forehead and arched her back against the wall, half-obscuring the sign. He looked down at the greyish water eddying around the lower steps. How extraordinary that things should still be the same! The water, the cormorant-shaped gondolas, the marble step on which he sat. It is just us making our exit, he thought, we leave the décor of our lives behind. He ran his hand over the pitted stone surface beside him, as though trying to feel her absence. He was aware that every thought entering the mind under these circumstances would be a cliché, but these riddles had never been solved. By reality and perfection I mean the same thing – this time he knew the origin of the statement. Whether Hegel was alluding to a situation such as the present one was doubtful, and yet it seemed so apt. He felt strangely cheered by the notion that things just happened to be the way they were, that it was impossible to conceive of them rationally at all. Death was a natural given, but it was accompanied by such abysmal sorrow at times that you were almost ready to descend into the abyss yourself, and thereby surrender to the perfect reality of the riddle.

*

The beginning had been quite straightforward. A Greek island, a house belonging to friends of friends, lent to him out of pity on account of his recent divorce. Unused to being alone, hungry for female company. A paved walkway along the shore peopled by all those walking, strolling women whom he longed to accost but did not dare, in case they laughed and thought him an idiot. “Ankatzen” was what his friend Wintrop used to call “making a pass”. Nothing wrong with the expression, but he had never been good at it. What was that line from Lucebert’s poem again? Evenings spent wandering past womanly ships. That bit was true, at least. There and back, there and back, ambling, dawdling, looking. Hydra, fishing boats, white in the darkening night, bobbing gently in the light of tall sodium lamps on the quay. Swallows, cypresses – or was he imagining things? Did they have sodium lighting in those days? But why should his memory have to be accurate? Make it yellow lamplight, hear an owl, see the dark shapes of pine trees. The only certainty is the sea softly lapping the quayside. All the rest is replaceable, the arsenal of props whereby memories are furnished.

*

There had been no resemblance to a ship when she came past. Or perhaps there had: some super-light craft with a single sail, the kind that skims the surface. He must have looked ridiculous, leaping to his feet on the quay and raising his hand like a policeman stopping traffic. And that was in fact what he had said, STOP! Even now he felt a twinge of embarrassment, for all that they had joked about it later, in California, when everything was long over. She had been so startled that she stopped in her tracks. Curiously, he couldn’t remember whether she had gone with him that first evening. They had talked for a long time in a harbour café. She was American, her name Italian. Sixteen, eighteen? He had wanted to ask but had not dared. He had already noticed the black markings on her hands and arms, zodiac signs, not tattooed as they would have been today, but inked on her sun-tanned skin. When he asked her about them she said oh, but I’m a witch. That was another thing they had laughed about afterwards, but he still had her letters from those days, lengthy tirades about magic and sorcery, exalted ramblings he was unable to take seriously but found intriguing all the same. They were in tune with the times, but even more so with the red hair, the slate-grey eyes, the astonishingly deep, slightly hoarse tone of voice. In the days that followed she had slept at the big white house. But not with him. That was the deal. She suffered him to caress her, averting her face, and then dropped off to sleep with oblivious, animal abandon. He had felt a bit silly and de trop, but had found her trust touching. Better to have company than love, he had noted in his diary. Later on he had thrown the diary away, something he now regretted, but he could still remember jotting down those words. That had been a few days before everything changed. Perhaps he was only imagining it, but he seemed to remember her pointing to one of the strange markings on her body when she made that remark about the moment being auspicious. Something to do with planets being in alignment, the kind of thing he already dismissed as nonsense back then.

In her lovemaking she had been at once coy and childlike; those were the words he had come up with for want of anything better. “Coy” had never sounded quite right, there was something purposeful and possibly even calculating about it, but those were not the right terms either. He had been aroused by the hint of forbidden games in her affectations of innocence, as though she were challenging him for having underage sex, an experience quite new to him then and not repeated since.

*

He headed back to town. The Piero della Francesca exhibition had deeply affected him. Why he should see a parallel there with an affair several decades ago was unclear, maybe it was just that his mind was at once occupied with the artist and the recollection, or that there was some meaning to those paintings that was impossible to pinpoint, which could also be said of the short weeks they had been together. She could hardly be described as mysterious, her talk of sorcery was childish babble, but somehow the absence he now felt at his side reminded him of the hieratic figures in these paintings. You stood before them yearning to penetrate their world, but it was a world to which there was no access. He was at a loss how to write his article, and no less confounded by his feelings about the remembered episode.

*

They had taken a train, back then, right across Greece to Yugoslavia. He could summon little of the journey apart from shabby hotel rooms and a halo of red hair on a pillow. A night in . . .