The Flying Dutchman

Chapter 6

3

A reflection lived in the tin bucket. It was jolly in the mornings, glum in the evenings, preoccupied – but with what? He preferred to wash in the morning reflection.

The stove was emitting make-believe smoke, like a sketch. The house lived its own life, too, breathed through the stove’s white brickwork, occasionally letting out a groan through its mighty painted boards.

A “Warrior-Liberator” mug, an egg, bread and butter spangled with glass sugar crystals… This was breakfast. The Sun pointed a ray at the modest fare and giggled.

But who cares? After breakfast he could sit at the khaki-coloured typewriter and begin hammering out ‘The Flying Dutchman. The Origin of the Plot.’ Actually, the familiar story hammers itself out, and the Flying Dutchman sails along the typed waves of the Rheine – well, the typewriter is called ‘Rheinmetall’!

Somebody is stomping around in the attic, sounds almost like a fight! Who else is up there? He goes to look, his feet playing the keys of the creaking staircase. The attic is empty, its windows cobwebbed over. Wait – not completely empty. There’s a chest in the corner. Ancient, dusty and heavy, it doesn’t let itself be opened, keeps itself to itself. There’s an axe downstairs, on the veranda…

And the lock is broken. A smell of tobacco. Thick, almost putrid. Who’s coughing? Nobody? My, how they’re coughing!

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Well, there was yo ho ho all right but no bottle of rum to be seen. A maritime spyglass, a flannel cloth with two flint stones, an extremely long, ancient pistol with a dull, encrusted mother-of-pearl handle and – a large, lacquered casket. It was opened without the aid of the axe. Inside he found an old-fashioned maritime cap and a heavy bronze key.

“But where are the piasters? How can there be a chest like this without any gold?”

The tragedy was that N. thought about money, but money never wasted a thought on him. Ever. Money lives its own life, has its own likes and dislikes, its favourites. But why did he need money here, anyway? He had enough for food, and there was nothing else to buy, anyway. Wonder about that key, though. There don’t seem to be any fitting keyholes in the house. But if there’s a key for a door, there should be a door for the key!

He closed the chest and went down into the garden. The paths were long since overgrown, the vegetable patch, too. But the apple trees were laden with fruit. What’s up there? The sun was wheeling overhead like a pancake in an oiled frying pan. He discovered a bench darkened by rain under one of the apple trees. N. sat down, pondering: what was a chest like that doing in the middle of nowhere, among the Valday Hills? What am I doing here in the middle of nowhere among the Valday Hills? Time hummed softly, seeping off somewhere between the trees into the ‘twixt-

trees.’

The house stood utterly unruffled, its pale, silent windows reflecting the grey-blue matt of the afternoon sky. A woman appeared at one of them. She was looking at him. N. shuddered – he had not been in that room yet.

He hurried back into the house, rushed up to the door, knocked, and went in. Empty. A double-bed with nickel-plated iron knobs at each corner, no mattress. A mahogany wardrobe. He opened the wardrobe door, as if expecting to see someone inside. No, the wardrobe was uninhabited but for the thick, sickly-sweet smell of lavender. N. recoiled, then peered inside again. Shawls were lying on one of the shelves, an ancient coat hung in the other side, nothing special, just a grubby orange throw-over raincoat.

Nobody.

He opened the transom, tucked a corner of the curtain into it to mark the window, and went back out into the garden. That wasn’t the window where he had seen the woman! He went into the next room. It was completely empty. He hung the curtain out of that window, too. It turned out to be on the other side of the window with the woman. There were no other rooms between the two. It was a window into nowhere, he realised. Or from nowhere.