‘Don’t you believe me?’ she said. ‘He spent those first few days standing up, like he was afraid of the furniture. It wasn’t his, you see, it was here when he bought the place. All he brought with him was a few chests of books and weapons. Every time I looked he was on his feet, at the window, against the wall, in the garden, which was a complete jungle by the way … What you see now is all thanks to Heinzi. We’re the ones who got Raeren running like a normal household. Leni, my mother always used to say, when a person has no routine he’s done for. All that’s left of him is a sad little heap of need and suffering. And right she was.’
Starting another circuit, I picked up the pace. The wind carried the peal of bells from a distant village. Somewhere people were being called on to button up their children’s cardigans and send them out into the world. But the chiming soon stopped and left me alone with my heartbeat. All those discouraging sounds from within: blood pumping, joints creaking, lungs heaving. Saddled with a complaining body as his sole companion, every athlete feels lonely. I was about to stop when the doors to the fencing hall flew open. There stood the maître in an instructor’s jacket, black leather so stiff it made a straight line of the contour of his torso. He wore it well, I’ll give him that. Not like Louis, whose natural slouch made him look like an upturned beetle, arms flailing from his carapace.
‘Keep running, stay on your toes. Arms stretched as high as you can. Higher. Faster. Come on. Now continue on your heels, knees up, stay relaxed.’
After every exercise he looked at his watch. Next I had to take up my weapon, make thirty step-lunges over the length of the terrace and counter every attack he threw at me. ‘Clumsy! You have another fifteen minutes in which to redeem yourself.’
He tapped my behind with his foil. A frivolous act; a hit on the backside has nothing to do with fencing. For a foil fencer, the target area begins under the chin and ends in the crotch. That is all he has to work with, the body of a carelessly excavated Greek god. I shook my forearm loose, jogged on the spot, adopted the on-guard position, inclined my weapon against the ball of my thumb, fixed my eyes on the point of his foil and met his gaze. If only he had worn a mask, I am sure I could have stood my ground.
‘Now do you understand why I asked you yesterday whether you could fence against yourself?’ he asked, as he knocked my weapon away with a lightning-quick counter-parry. ‘I know your next move before you’ve even decided on it.’
I didn’t see the point of training in front of the mirror. As if it were possible to catch yourself off guard. A reflection corrects itself in a fraction of a second, but take the mirror away and errors creep back in like thieves under cover of darkness. I’ve heard fencing likened to playing chess at high speed. The outward spectacle is nothing compared to the forces at work behind the mask. Throw it off to see more clearly and you realize it’s your mind and not the mesh that’s obscuring your vision, speeding up your footwork or slowing it down. One moment everything is still clear: your opponent is standing there, well within range, ready to raise his weapon and step forward. But won’t he get too close? How could he still land a hit at that distance? Where’s the logic? It would make more sense if he … Too late! Too much thinking. Von Bötticher insisted there was no point in trusting your eyes, in wasting time passing images to your brain. There was something stronger, something you couldn’t quite put your finger on. A vague, melancholy memory of long-lost forces that growled in the pit of your stomach and rushed to your nose … or what was left of it. In animals, smell took pride of place, but in us humans it had sunk to the bottom of the brain. That’s what walking upright did for you. First see, then grab, we’d been doing it for millions of years. But what fencer had not been ambushed by euphoria as his weapon, seemingly of its own accord and without the least resistance, hit his opponent’s body in less than the blink of an eye?
‘A dog bites the hand that feeds him before he has a chance to regret it,’ said von Bötticher. ‘Just as animals smell their prey, you can sense an attack hanging in the air. The only question is: whose attack? Let emotion drive your fencing, only then will you know what speed is. Instinctive motivation works too. The sense of reward or punishment is swift as an arrow. Fear, pleasure, hunger, thirst: they all take the shortest route. Do you even want to hit me? Do I frighten or please you?’
I feigned an attack on his scarred cheek and then caught him full between the ribs. He staggered, quickly resumed his train of thought, limping as he advanced. ‘Fine. Bravo. You were riled and you attacked. But beware. Fencing on intuition does not mean you can simply forget your technique. First the patterns have to work their way under your skin.’
With both hands, he pulled on an imaginary set of reins. ‘Have you ever ridden a horse?’
I nodded and shook my head at the same time. My grandmother had an old carthorse with the kind of fuzzy grey coat that makes old animals so endearing. It tolerated my legs dangling at its sides but had no intention of being spurred on by them. Few experiences were as calming as those journeys from farmyard to farmyard, borne by a mute creature that had been clopping along for far longer than I had been drawing breath.
‘I’ll ask Leni to lay out some riding clothes for you,’ said von Bötticher. ‘Breakfast is in half an hour, after that I want to see you ride. No need to be frightened. I’ll give you the most docile horse and put her on the longe. You’ll learn a lot from it. Everything I have told you today will fall into place. Now off you go.’
Five nights I had spent at Raeren. The maître had already dispensed with formalities and my life lay entirely in his hands. My bed was under his roof and he was the one who determined when I had to attend to my ‘personal hygiene’: thirty minutes before I put his food in my mouth. Obediently, I stood at the attic window with my feet in a basin. Heinz had fitted a screen and on the other side of the mesh a wood pigeon was nodding off. It opened a beady yellow eye when I poured the water. On waking up, I had gone to the washroom, filled a jug with water and left it standing in the sun. Leni was adamant I should wash downstairs with warm water from the boiler, but that made me feel uneasy. I would rather be up here being leered at by a pigeon. My moment of triumph was enough to keep me warm. A shivering heat flowed down from my navel as I thought of the tip of my foil making firm contact with von Bötticher’s jacket. An immaculately executed feint below his weapon. He had wanted to maintain appearances, feign indifference, but one half of his face had refused to cooperate.
How long does the triumph of the crippled war veteran last? Six months at most. By then his mutilation no longer inspires admiration but pity, and a surfeit of pity becomes an irritant. When I was younger, a blind Belgian used to beg on Market Square; both his legs had been amputated. He accepted money from passers-by without so much as a word and you immediately understood that, however much you gave, it would never be enough. Here was a debt that would remain unsettled. When it became clear that every contact would be rebuffed by his empty eyes and bare stumps, people began avoiding him. He became a war monument no one had asked for in a country tired of looking on from the sidelines. True, those few cents could never weigh up against the millions of guilders the Netherlands had demanded from Belgium after the war for housing its refugees, while handing Kaiser Wilhelm a castle for his trouble. But everyone was relieved when the veteran disappeared