‘Peggy wants a story.’
Then I understood.
‘Bruder Mouse,’ she said. ‘“Bruder Mouse’s Beans”.’
You know the story. I knew it too. My dear maman read me the stories from the Badberg Edition with its beautiful pen drawings by Oloff Tromp. I knew the words by rote, but now I was being commanded to perform them for the most powerful produkter in Saarlim.
‘I’m not an actor,’ I said.
‘Sssh,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know.’
So I did my best, reading in a country style that I hoped was appropriate for the material.
As for the produkter, she was a perfect lady. She sat there with her hands folded in her lap, a slight frown on her face while I narrated the tale in which Bruder Mouse arrived (‘One mo nothing. Next mo there he was, solid as a miller’s wheel’) to fight off the Hairy Man with no other armaments but black beans and rice. Like so many of the Badberg stories this one derived its terror from drowning and its humour from flatulence, although in this case, of course, there is flatulence and fire, combined.
I was not auditioning, but I was, as I said, indebted to Mrs Kram, and I felt obliged to give everything to the task at hand. This was only prevented by my exhaustion, and from time to time the produkter found it necessary to wake me with a sharp little push in the ribs.
Even as she drifted into sleep herself, the Kram would not let me stop, but held me with her hand so she could jerk me if she found me sleeping. In this way we got through three or four of the longer fables — including the one where the Mouse persuaded Oncle Dog and his friends to save the city of Saarlim by walking on their hind legs with rifles on their shoulders and masks on their heads. The one that ends, ‘And so it was, the Bruders were free and Meneer Mouse sat down to eat cheese pudding.’
When I woke, it was morning. I knew straight away, even before I opened my eyes, that it was very late. The heavy drapes were partly drawn, and so the curtains which locked light out of the apartment like water from a bottle now permitted a thin slice of white sunlight to stream into the room. A yellow, artificial light also entered the room, this coming from an open bathroom door from which clouds of steam billowed, flowing prettily across the hard edges of bright light.
As I slowly woke I began to be aware that my hostess was walking back and forwards between bathroom and closet wearing no other clothes than those her God had given her. I never saw a naked woman before and I cannot imagine a more wonderful introduction to the phenomenon — set off by fragrant steam and morning sunshine.
I moved and yawned, to let her know I was awake.
She looked across at me.
‘Good morning, Bruder Mouse,’ she said.
I did not say anything.
‘One mo, there she was,’ she said.
She continued to parade up and down, to enter the bathroom, to come back to the closet. I could not, for the life of me, see what she was doing in any of these places. She did not take clothing from the closet. She did not perform any toilette in the bathroom. She walked before me as if I were nothing but a dog, and I watched her.
Was this exciting? Yes, damn it, yes it was. She was an attractive thirty-year-old woman with her clothes off. She was not tall, and she was a little thick in the waist, but she had big well-shaped breasts and a firm backside. She had a soft bush of blonde hair.
From the bathroom she called to me.
‘Bruder.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have thoughts?’
‘Thoughts about what?’ I said.
‘Do you have anything to have thoughts with?’
‘I have as good a brain as you,’ I said.
She came out from the bathroom, her hand holding her hair up, smiling. ‘It was not brain I meant,’ she said.
‘Oh.’
‘Does my hair look better up or down?’
‘Come here,’ I said, ‘so I can see.’
‘What about Madam Mouse?’ she said.
But she came a little closer. She had not dried herself quite properly. I could see beads of water on her little nest of hair.
‘Come here.’
She shook her head. She walked away. She walked to the window and pulled those drapes closed. She went to the bathroom and turned off the light.
The room was now pitch black: darkest, deepest, velvet night. Yet I could feel her come towards me. I could feel her warmth. I could smell her perfume, shampoo, soap, steam. I heard her small white feet upon her knotted folk rugs.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she said.
‘Tell you what?’
‘Don’t tell me anything, OK?’
She came into the bed. I held her, this woman who had no lovers. She held me hard between her breasts. You might imagine me inside my suit, locked in, smelling my own breath, distant from this stranger, able only to feel her desire as she moaned and dragged me between her legs, and you may, never having been in my position, be thinking of the humiliation and discomfort and forgetting, entirely, that Jacqui had given me a zipper and that I could, there in the fragrant dark, slowly ease my porpoise into her, and feel her soft pink muscles grip me.
‘Ohmygod,’ said Peggy Kram, her fingers holding on to my back, ‘Bruder Mouse.’ Lots more she said. She talked and sighed and laughed and begged me keep my secrets to myself. She squirmed and slid and exclaimed and made little bird noises high in her white woman’s throat and, what with the conversation and all, we hardly heard the banging on the door and Jacqui’s distant voice crying, ‘Tristan, if you’re there…’
‘No Tristan here,’ murmured Peggy Kram.
‘Tristan, we’ve got to go, now.’
‘You can stay right on my pillow,’ said Peggy Kram. ‘This is better than a man. I’m going to keep you.’
51
She would not let me go, Madam, Meneer. I know now, she was not well. It is obvious to you, of course. It was obvious to Wally. But for me the case was different. She wished to dress in front of me. I am a man. I was more than pleased to watch. She wished to play games in the dirty dark and put her mouth around my porpoise and call it names in French. Why would I think that she was disturbed?
Outside the door my nurse called and hammered, but Jacqui — no matter how I admired her weird and dangerous spirit — was there to get me out, away from Peggy Kram, out of the country, over the border, down long roads with high poplar trees standing on each side. All right, all right — she wished to save my life, and I, the monster, was like a dog licking its dick in the middle of the road.
Mrs Kram had other plans for me, and she could not let me go. This is what she told Jacqui, shouted at her, through the door.
‘He’s mine,’ she said. I did not think this strange. It is not alarming to be found, at last, desirable.
She opened the bedroom curtains and showed me Saarlim. She talked passionately about its former greatness, its present troubles. She pointed out the five Sirkus Domes she owned. She pointed out the roads the Mayor had sold to foreign speculators. There were tears in her eyes. I did not doubt her concern.
Was I simple? Was I an opportunist? Both, I suppose, but to charge that ‘[Tristan Smith did] wilfully, blasphemously, seditiously disguise his being and therefore lead others to believe he was Bruder Mouse and that all this was undertaken with the express purpose of defrauding the citizens of Saarlim and depriving them of liberties granted them by God’ — really, Madam, Meneer, you give me too much credit.
Yes, I came into your country with my secret rage. Yes, I lied to you and said I felt no rage. Yes, I acted as if my mother’s murder were not a personal matter between me and you. But is that not, in normal circumstances, polite?