Rituals by Cees Nooteboom Page A

friend who lived in the same lodging house had taken him to the surgeon, who was to perform the operation at his home. It was a bright winter afternoon. He was a small Jewish doctor with, most appropriately, a thick German accent and a very Germanic nurse inside whom, thought Inni, the surgeon could easily be tucked away for the night.
    The little man told him to undress, peered at him, and said, "A mere trifle. Sister, can ve haf zee injection, ja?"
    Suddenly he was lying on a table, and everyone knows that from that position the world looks different. The giantess, who suddenly had no legs and was sailing beside him as if she were sitting in a boat, said, "You will only have a local anaesthetic."
    Local! He wanted to lift his head to see what was going to happen.
    "Lie still."
    Bare winter branches with hoar frost. White, shiny, knobby bones in front of the window. And on the wall Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson — but his patient was already dead. So were Professor Tulp and his painter. Not this Tulp, though. He was standing in a corner, busy with something big and curved that looked like scissors.
    "I vas a frient of your poet Schlauerhof." He did not pronounce the second f of Schlauerhoff. Hofe. "A very remarkable man, but unhappy, very unhappy. Alvayss trouble vith vomen, alvayss arguments. And sick, very sick."
    The needle with which the nurse suddenly came sailing along out of the void was big enough to knock out a calf.
    "Ho, ho, we'd like to crawl away, would we?" said the nurse good-humouredly and grabbed his fleeing organ. Shot on the wing, he had time to think, but then he saw the needle take a plunge, and he felt the flaming pain of the jab going through the puny victim that lay in her large German hand like a dead mouse.
    "Poor Schlauerhof. So many years dead already."
    Then they left him lying for a time. The ballet dancer in the reproduction danced on one leg through his tears. Now I can never fuck again, he thought. Never again.
    A thin, hairy wrist lifted a gold watch to a pair of dark, gleaming eyes. So.
    Now there came scissors, a bandage, and a bowl. He could not see properly until the mouse was lifted by the scruff with thumb and forefinger and stared at him from the horizon. The points of the scissors were semicurved, a crooked nickel bird's beak resolutely pecking at his skin. He felt the snips as if something that resisted were being nibbled at. He felt no pain, but there was something else, something he could never explain, not even later. He just felt the sound of the snipping, at the same time soft and crunchy. The smaller hand raised up a bloody rag of skin in the air.
    "A mere trifle. As I said. Sew it up, nurse."
    Needle and thread — someone was about to darn a sock — sewed him up, sewed up the mouse for good. A mouse sausage. Never again!
    He no longer looked. Somewhere in the numb flesh threads were being pulled in and out, in and out. Until there came a movement that had something definitive about it, then nothing more.
    "Nurse!" Irritation. "Nurse! A hundred times I have told you to tie ze knot like zeess, not like zat. It is ugly."
    "Shall I do it again, Doctor?"
    "No, don't bozzer. It vas no Praxiteles anyway."
    Then there was a lot of messing about down there, but he had said good-bye to it and was living in a small universe of grief. Something had been taken away from him. He heard isolated words, "bismuth . . . plaster . . . plenty, plenty", but he did not want to have anything to do with it any more. He felt only this strange sadness. Sadness and humiliation.
    "Zere. Stand up." Slowly he let himself slide down from the table.
    "Careful!"
    Suddenly everybody was walking again. The room had regained its lower half, in which he, too, was standing up, between his legs a proboscis of gauze held together by sticking plaster, in which there burned yellow patches ("bismuth").
    "You don't have any nerves, at least."
    That's what you think, you sod, you butcher. But I would have bitten off my