All spring and early summer I avoided Fascination avenue, but one day I suddenly missed Mr Methie, it had taken six months for all those bargain buys and super purchases to evaporate from my brain, so I turned into the avenue, not that I actually meant to, but like when a bucket is hauled by winch or chain from a well I was all wound round with the sweet threads of the violin playing into the whispering foliage that mercifully shrouded all the workshops and woodsheds and lean-tos, so I followed the melody that was neither Die Mühle im Schwarzwald, nor that typical intermezzo Silver Fern, but Fascination as it trickled through the leaves like water through one’s fingers or a drop net. And I stood at the gate and was struck once more by Mr Methie, who was standing, legs apart, in front of some instrument on three legs, and the instrument had its legs apart at exactly the same angle as Mr Methie and Mr Methie had one eye stuck in the instrument, watching a red-and-white stick, now, smiling, he took a few steps, moved the stick a bit further away and once more gazed with enormous delight through the theodolite, that instrument that he’d bought for a song along with a box of lenses, lenses to last to the end of time, and so to the end of the life, or the beginning of the death, of Mr Methie, who so desired to be called Mike. And again the strains of Fascination wafted from the gramophone and I heard a groan from the plot next door, the groan of a man injured not physically, but in his soul, an honest-to-goodness Slav cry of pain of one tormented by fate, though Mr Methie misinterpreted the lament of his neighbour, who was doubtless hearing Fascination for the thousandth time… Mr Methie pottered through the undergrowth to the overgrown fence and called into the leafage: “What is it? It’s Fascination! Played by Helmuth Zacharias himself!” And as he made his way back, I quickly pretended to be tying my shoelace so that Mr Methie wouldn’t see me, but he came affably towards me, and a little dog trotted up as well, and Mr Methie handed me his red pole and I carried it hither and thither because Mr Methie had taken it into his head to survey his entire plot in the forest, and as he did so, he explained enthusiastically about the slaughterhouse gun he’d just invented for killing twenty-four pigs at once, and the endless fishpond as a perpetuum mobile that meant that all the families on nearby plots could keep carp in the same water that kept circulating round and round, and as he told me all this, Mr Methie started to sing as well, cleared his throat and started singing, and then he explained the one thing I was afraid of: “I’ve borrowed a tape recorder and so as not to be idle of an evening, I sing, anything that enters my head, you can hear me, the very things I’m saying now I’m singing, what do you reckon, isn’t it a glorious thing?” And he sang and walked about the wood, fingering some flimsy little stems… “See, I’ve got a total of a hundred service trees planted here, in five years they’ll give me a yield of five thousand crowns a year… And you’re wondering what service trees these are — they’re not, they’re black currant, and they’ll yield another five thousand in five years…” I said: “But they shouldn’t get dripped on from above, and you’ve got them all under a canopy of pine trees.” And Mr Methie sang: “You want to offer advice to me, me, a professional planner? It’s all going to be lit with ultraviolet light rays to replace the sun, the sun…” “All right,” I said, “but what are you hoping to achieve with this theodolite? Mr Methie gave a wave of the hand and put on the second half of
Fascination, the violin section played by Helmuth Zacharias himself, and again it was as if he’d jabbed the needle into the brain of someone hidden behind the dense hedge, because as soon as the gramophone began to play, someone somewhere in the dense foliage groaned and squawked as if the gramophone needle were gouging a deep groove in his brain. Mr Methie took me by the shoulder and his eyes spouted a golden spray of rapture. He pointed to the area of five by five metres that he’d marked out with the theodolite and sang: “This is a dance-floor in the making… lanterns… subdued music… evening… can you hear it? Helmuth Zacharias!” I said: “Do you like dancing, Mr Mike?” And Mr Methie shook his head: “I’ve never danced, thing is, I’m creating this dance floor so as to prove to myself that I can do something, I’ve got this constant urge to create something of beauty, and can’t you just see it? And at the same time, watch, I send this ball through this pipe, teaching the dog to run this way and that along the pipe, I keep on training him because, if I keep myself in training, why shouldn’t I train a little stray dog? But that Zacharias fellow, he breaks my heart…,” he said with a little more gravity, then he crossed the few paces to the theodolite and looked into it theatrically, I could see the instrument had no lenses, but Mr Methie tightened the screws as if the lenses were in place, and I, as requested, went pointlessly through the trees with a beautiful red pole, which I placed wherever Mr Methie indicated with the palm of his hand, several times over I had to move it there and back, one step this way, one step that, before he was satisfied and jotted something down in his notebook with such enormous pride and beaming yet again like the sun appearing from behind some surprised clouds… And on his feet he had two left boots, the same kind he’d given me in the winter, but I couldn’t wear them, not because I didn’t want to, I did try, but because I look at the ground as I walk along and the boots made not only my left leg veer left but my right leg as well, and I began to find walking hard and I started falling over and crashing my legs into each other and tripping myself up. But Mr Methie wore them magnificently, as he did that bee-covered gold waistcoat with no buttons or button-holes, and for a belt he had a kind of gold cord, like the rope they pull in church before the start of mass. I went on holding the red pole, the ranging rod, and suddenly I realised that Mr Mike Methie was in reality a poor wretch who wished not to have to contemplate the pointlessness of not only his own life but of all life, and so like the summer leaves that mercifully conceal the little houses and sheds and confusion on the plot in the wood, Mr Methie used each and every bargain to conceal any view of himself, any glimpse of his own self, a sight that scares and horrifies each and every one of us. But that’s probably as it should be… Mr Methie! Mr Mike, do you think I’m any better off?