Rituals Read Free Page B

there was nothing to be done about it. It would happen the way it happens in Namibia, without a sound, swiftly, and without a single crack in the crystal. She kissed him when he came in, said that she had something to wash off that funny silver with, helped him remove it, stood close against him, and took him into bed with her. Never had he loved her so much. He would have liked to push first his head and only then all the rest right inside her and stay there forever. But when it was all over and she was asleep like a newborn sister of Tutankhamun, so terrifyingly still as if she had not breathed for centuries, as if she had not only such a short while before been a frenzied, shouting maniac, he knew that he had discovered nothing about his fate.
    She was absent, as he had been all these years. He got up and took a sleeping tablet from his stock. But when he awoke in the early afternoon, she was still the same as in the morning, as last year and the year before — a marsh of perfection into which anyone who ventured too far for the first time would drown.
    The weeks passed. Zita saw her Italian, slept with him, let herself be photographed by him. And each time another photo was taken, another fleck of Inni dissolved into the air of Amsterdam. The new love was the crematorium of the old. So it happened that one day, as Inni was walking across the Koningsplein, a speck of ash floated into his eye which would not come out until Zita licked it away with the tip of her tongue and said he did not look well.
    *       *
    That was one Friday afternoon, and what was to happen next had little to do with Italians and with love, but rather with a subterranean, unwritten Namibian law mysteriously handed down through the ages — a law according to which accounts must be settled once every eight years, but then for good on a Friday afternoon. On such afternoons there must be men in that country who are doomed to die a terrible death. But as with so many ancient customs, the sharper edges had worn away in the diaspora. Inni would be banished, but that it would happen on this particular day he did not know. Zita had made her calculations and she no longer belonged to Inni. That day she would leave for Italy with her Italian, who like her had no money. What would happen there she did not know, and she somehow had a feeling that it did not concern her. It would happen, that was what mattered.
    After she had licked the speck from Inni's eye, he sat down at his desk. He had an hour and a half to hand in his horoscope at Het Parool forthe Saturday supplement. He leafed through Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Nova, and his books of stars. He copied something here, invented something there, and busied himself with the destinies of other people because they were going to read it. When he arrived at his own constellation, Leo, he had just read in Harper's that things would go well with him and in Elle that the outlook was gloomy. He put down his pen and said to Zita, who had lain down on the sofa by the window in order to look out over the Prinsengracht for the last time, "Why are you never allowed to write, Dear Cancer, you will get cancer, or Leo, something dreadful will happen to you today, your wife will leave you and you will commit suicide?" Zita knew he was now thinking of his aunt and of Arnold Taads, and the green of her eyes darkened, but he did not notice and chuckled. She turned her head towards him and looked at him. A total stranger was sitting at a desk, grinning. She laughed. Inni stood up and went towards her. He stroked her hair and wanted to lie down beside her.
    "No," she said, but this in itself meant nothing. It could be part of a game in which she had to, or wanted to, taunt him or in which he had to tell her a story.
    "This time you have to pay," she said. That was not new either. He felt a great desire rising in him.
    "How much?" he asked.
    "Five thousand guilders."
    He laughed. Five thousand guilders. He unbuttoned her