Open Grave

Fourteen

If he let go of the tabletop he would fall. He ought to open his eyes, that would alleviate it, but it was as if such a simple thing, raising two eyelids, was associated with a kind of uncertainty, perhaps fear. There was a pressure over his body, his legs felt like poles, his head was heavy as lead, and fear was coiling like snakes around his body.

I’ll have to stand here until the end of time, he thought. Once he had seen a petrified human. The man’s joints were stiff, the face immobile as a wooden mask, and the body cold and shiny like the belly of an oribi, the fish that played in the river below his house every spring. The man’s wife said that at night he talked in words that no one understood. A strange language had crept into him and that was what frightened the villagers most. She left the village shortly after and went to live with one of her brothers. She did not want to be infected, and that was an argument that most understood and accepted. The man died after a few months. Later he became a story that made its way through the valley, in which his nighttime talk took on a different meaning, that it was God who was speaking through him. His wife was depicted as an evil woman who had abandoned her husband in a difficult time.

So fall or become petrified? That was his choice. He chose to fall. He let go and collapsed like a high-rise that had been primed with dynamite and then exploded.

A wave of relief washed away the fear. His one shoulder took a blow when it hit the floor but it did not hurt especially. Maybe the pain would come later. But the fear was gone, that was the main thing.

He dragged himself up onto all fours. He was thoroughly intoxicated, as drunk as he had been in decades. Yet his thoughts came to him as clear as crystal. He thought about how the associate professor had scolded him, and what shame he felt. He had abused the hospitality by trying to make himself important. A dreadful failure.

He tipped over and remained sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him. All in all, I’m a failed character, he thought, and at the same moment he became angry at himself for his self-pity.

He tried to think about the planting he had to complete. A few white azaleas were not to be found so late in the season, so instead he would have to be content with the rhododendron, three Cunningham’s White, which he got for half price. But it was a vain attempt. The thoughts of Ohler constantly returned.

He wanted to throw one more stone, and another. His joking mention of a catapult was not just loose talk. He wanted to besiege the big house, drive the professor out into the light, exposed, ridiculed.

“Get up!”

The words were intended to be forceful but were heard mostly as an exhausted sigh, and he sneered.

He had seen the professor on the TV news and that had triggered the reaction to mix a toddy, something he seldom did. Unaccustomed as he was, a few glasses of the rum he had bought during his most recent visit in Germany had been enough to get him thoroughly intoxicated.

I’ll kill the bastard, was his last thought before he tipped over and remained lying there.