The main thing to keep in mind in the situation I have just described is that nothing is gained by pretending not to care about the mud-brick article; on the contrary, any lapse in concentration may well result in falling off a ladder or stepping into a month-old mug of coffee. The search for the mud-brick article must simply be accepted as that part of the work that precedes reading what one has written yesterday and recognizing it as rubbish.
24 Not Rubbish
Nnvsnu the Tsrungh stayed with me, however. Poor bastard, I thought, stuck down there in the blughole of the universe, ceaselessly spinning his mind like a prayer wheel as he transmitted the mothercode. Late that night as I thought about it I realized that he himself was ignorant of that mothercode; he span his mind because the pressures of the ultimate deep forced him to do so, and through the centrifuge of his consciousness flung out, unknown to him, the numinosities and nexialities that were the frail but constant web of the universe.
Nabilca, his thing of darkness, his sender and receiver of messages to and from the deep, would he ever see her, would he ever touch her?
Not likely.
25 Longer than the Moment
So The Seeker from Nexo Vollma wasn’t rubbish and I was going to have a go with it. The next morning I was at my desk early and keen to begin.
It’s funny, though, how the odd detail will stick in the mind and give you no peace. I found myself remembering the morning when Melanie and I had first met at Hermes Soundways; she’d left a tape cassette with Istvan Fallok. I’d always wondered what was on that cassette. It was certainly none of my business but it was just one of those little things that I wanted to know about.
So I rang her up at home. No answer. Just then the post arrived and I went to get it. Among the bills and letters was a little padded brown envelope with a cassette inside. On the cassette was written:
Herman, this is from me.
M
I knew what it was before I played it but I played it anyhow.
‘Herman,’ said her voice, ‘I don’t want this to be just words on a piece of paper but I’m too much of a coward to look you in the eye and say what I’m going to say and the telephone is no good either.’
Hearing her voice like that without seeing her there in front of me I found her oddly more real to me than she had been. This was Melanie who was a mystery to me and, as everyone is, to herself, whose thoughts I didn’t know, whose being had its own spacetime and its own world line separate from mine. We had talked intimately, had been lovers briefly, yet her voice came to me as strange and distant as those many voices from far away reflected from the ionosphere and expressed digitally on my radio’s frequency counter.
‘Death is longer than life,’ she said, ‘and the death of each moment is longer than the moment. The goneness is what we’re left with, maybe some of us more than others. It’s very hard to have anything, isn’t it? Like our blue-black shining rainy night, when I call it to mind it’s the going-awayness of it, the goneness of it that I taste. I’ve always been a sort of phoney percy, you see - Persephone more than Eurydice, with my own little dark realm. Or I’m like Rilke’s Eurydike, so full of my large death that I understand nothing. I suppose that’s why I need, how shall I put it, more of a red-pyjama type than you are. I lied to you about General Sphincter’s mistress, I was with Sol that weekend and I was with him the other night when you rang up at three o’clock in the morning to tell him you wouldn’t do the Orpheus thing for Classique. So at least you don’t have to feel guilty about me, I did it to you before you did it to me. Goodbye, Herman. We’ll undoubtedly see each other here and there in the normal course of things and I don’t expect it’ll be awkward. I have a feeling that now you’ll be able to write again, better than before. And it was nice, that blue-black shining rainy night, it really was.’
26 Roughage
‘I like the texture of it, Herman,’ said Bill Novad. ‘It’s got the right polypeptides if you know what I mean.’
‘Amino acids?’
‘That’s it: primordial soup and all that. All your really deep comics have it, and if you can’t be deep you’ll never make it in comics. Nnvsnu the Tsrungh gets to me.’
‘I was hoping it would.’
‘How do you feel about the backs of cereal boxes?’
‘As noumenon or phenomenon?’
‘As an art form.’
‘They seem to have fallen into disuse; I remember when they had little stories on them.’
‘Right. They’ve gone with our pre-atom-bomb innocence. We’re living in a time that cries out for the reaffirmation of traditional values. Used properly the back of a cereal box is to literature what Buddy Holly is to music: it’s got drive, it’s got soul, it’s got bebop. Look at this.’ He took a box of Holywell Corn Flakes out of a desk drawer and showed me first the front and then the back of it. They were both the same, with a picture of a bowl of corn flakes and the words CORN FLAKES. ‘Do you believe that?’ he said. ‘Two fronts, no back, you don’t know where you are with it, your whole day starts off funny. Put a comic on one side and that’s the back, you eat your corn flakes and you read it, you know where you are.’ He tapped one of the two fronts. ‘Can you see it right there, THE SEEKER FROM NEXO VOLLMA?’ He said it in capital letters.
‘I can see it,’ I said. I could too: the deeps were a strong purply-blue shading off to black. Nnvsnu the Tsrungh, obscure and amorphous, was a dim blue-green. I could see myself reading it at breakfast, could feel the peace and natural order of it. BONGGGGG, rang the great bell of the deep as Nabilca, responsive to the call of Nnvsnu, plunged down, down, down through green and sunlit waters.
‘And you will see it,’ he said. ‘Slithe & Tovey have just given me the Holywell breakfast line to do: that’s corn flakes, bran flakes, and muesli. I think bran is what we want for The Seeker.’
‘It’s more regular.’
‘It’s your Guardian-reader market. Do a good job on this and you can have the corn flakes as well.’
‘What about the muesli?’
‘No comics on the muesli, just recipes. Can you give me six episodes in a fortnight and six more two weeks later?’
‘What kind of money are we talking about?’
‘Five hundred up front for development, one hundred per episode. Flat fee, no royalties.’
‘Seventeen hundred isn’t much for what they’re getting.’
‘It is when you think of how many guys are trying to break into cereal boxes. Plus you’ll probably do the whole twelve in two nights or maybe even one night. Once you’ve got your original premise it’s a piece of cake.’
‘More like a load of bran. Holywell can have first cereal rights but the characters belong to me and if I do a book or a TV series or a line of toys they’ve got no part of it.’
‘You should be so lucky. I’ll talk to Slithe & Tovey and see what kind of a deal we can do and get back to you later. OK?’
The deeps were gone, the hiss and rush of traffic overran the moving of great waters and the darkness. I was standing by the bicycle shop that was under the offices of Novad Ventures in Gray’s Inn Road. It was like coming out of the cinema, I was blinking in the sunlight. The terror and the excitement slid back behind the screen of everyday and I walked slowly to the underground.
27 To Borrow the World
I’d no plans to go anywhere but home but when OXFORD CIRCUS appeared in the train windows I got out and walked over to Hermes Soundways.
Fallok was sitting in his electronic twilight holding a small terrestrial globe, a cheap tin one, badly dented, with no base. Through the closed door I could hear the Hermes music.
‘I never should have let him do it,’ he said as I came in.
‘Let whom do what?’
‘I never should have let Kraken get his head zapped.’
‘Kraken! Do you mean to tell me that Mr Deep Mind himself came to you with art trouble?’
‘How can you joke about it with the poor bastard dead?’
‘Dead! Of what?’
‘Heart attack. I think he may have had some trouble with the head of Orpheus.’
‘What happened?’
‘After our lunch at L’Escargot I was walking slowly back here when I heard a voice speaking to me from a dustbin in Wardour Street and it was the head. I didn’t want to stand there in the street talking to it so I wrapped it up in the Guardian and brought it here. I was surprised to see it on the loose and I rang you up but there was no answer.’
‘I must’ve been in hospital by then.’
‘Anything bad?’
‘Bit of angina. What happened with the head?’
‘I asked it what it wanted and it wouldn’t answer but it began to sing. I was recording the singing when Kraken dropped in and asked me why I had a microphone in front of a perfectly silent tin globe. So I told him about it and then he wanted to get his head done so he could see the head of Orpheus too. We had a session but he didn’t see the head and he asked if he could borrow the globe; I gave it to him and he left. He’d said he’d ring me up to let me know how he was getting on but after three or four days I heard from Hilary Forthryte that he was dead. He was found sitting in a chair with the globe in his lap.
‘Poor Kraken. I doubt that he and the head would have got on very well.’
‘Actually he was a pretty boring guy,’ said Fallok, ‘but I liked his films.’
28 No More Klage
It was the fourth of December and the Geburtstag of Rainer Maria Rilke, said the girl from Tirana, and she went on to read ‘Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes’. I’m always forgetting what I read, so the same lines can be new to me many times, as now when I heard her enchanting voice say:
daβ eine Welt aus Klage ward, in der
that a world became out of lament, in which
alles noch einmal da war: Wald und Tal
everything existed once more: forest and valley
und Weg und Ortschaft, Feld und Fluβ und Tier;
and path and hamlet, field and river and animal;
und daβ um diese Klage-Welt, ganz so
and that around this lament-world, just as
wie um die andre Erde, eine Sonne
around the other earth, a sun
und ein gestirnter stiller Himmel ging,
and a starry quiet sky went,
ein Klage-Himmel mit entstellten Sternen
– : a lament-sky with disfigured stars – :
As once before, the words departed and I heard only that sweet and promising voice of Eurydice unfound and unlost.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘no more Klage,’ and when I looked up at the Vermeer girl it was Medusa I saw, flickering and friendly, trusting me with the idea of her.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Jonathan Gibbs for a music session with the
Fairlight computer; to Dr N. de M. Rudolf for his help
with electrophysiological technicalities; and to my wife
Gundula for translations from the German.
A Note on the Author
Russell Hoban (1925-2011) was the author of many extraordinary novels including Turtle Diary, Angelica Lost and Found and his masterpiece, Riddley Walker. He also wrote some classic books for children including The Mouse and his Child and the Frances books. Born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, USA, he lived in London from 1969 until his death.
By the Same Author
NOVELS
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
Kleinzeit
Turtle Diary
Riddley Walker
Pilgermann
The Medusa Frequency
Fremder
Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer
Angelica’s Grotto
Amaryllis Night and Day
The Bat Tattoo
Her Name Was Lola
Come Dance With Me
Linger Awhile
My Tango with Barbara Strozzi
Angelica Lost and Found
POETRY
The Pedalling Man
The Last of the Wallendas and Other Poems
COLLECTIONS
The Moment Under the moment
FOR CHILDREN
The Mouse and His Child
The Frances Books
The Trokeville Way
The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission
to reproduce lyrics from copyright material: Chappell Music Ltd for
‘My Happiness’ by Borney Bergantine and Betty Peterson (© 1948
Happiness-Music Corp,); Radio Music Britain Ltd for ‘Yessir I Can
Boogie’ by Rolf Soja and Frank Dostal (all rights reserved, international
copyright secured); Rondor Music Ltd and Four Knights Ltd for ‘Same Old
Story (Same Old Song)’ by Will Jennings.
First published 1987 by Jonathan Cape
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 1987 by Russell Hoban
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3DP
A CIP catalogue record for this
book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781408835685
Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
1 Art is a Tough Business
2 First Appearance of the Kraken
3 The Vermeer Girl
4 Hermes Soundways
5 The Head of Orpheus Begins Its Story
6 We’re not Talking about a Bloke with Winged Sandals
7 Nnngghh, Zurff, Kruljjj
8 Tower Hill and the Cheshire Cheese
9 The Thinking Man’s Cabbage
10 All Hallows by the Tower
11 The Big Rain
12 In the Morning
13 The Hague
14 No Balls
15 Life after Death?
16 Blvgsvo
17 Where Do We Go from Here?
18 Louisa, not Luise
19 Still Three O’Clock in the Morning
20 The Visit
21 The Seeker from Nexo Vollma
22 Questions
23 I Mention This
24 Not Rubbish
25 Longer than the Moment
26 Roughage
27 To Borrow the World
28 No More klage
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
eCopyright