Serpents and Stairways

Chapter 8* - Part 1

Here we have reached a certain threshold. Now, to continue the story of the man that calls himself Georg, we'd first need to learn about the boy whom mother had named Gabriel, and that summer night when he had met the serpent. And about the apples, of course.

It all started with a simple question, asked one evening in the presence of fresh, purifying waters.

Which is to say, until that question the day had gone well—even better than usual. The sunset found them by a river, where the boy sat at the edge of a rug, wearing a little sailor's suit, and the mother—Mrs Iren Bauer—was teaching her son to fold paper boats out of newspapers. The nanny wasn't accompanying them on that day—a fact that pleased Gabriel to no end, for the cleanness of his knees was of a much lower concern to his mother than the clarity of his gaze, while the nany's priorities were diametrically different. Perhaps, the nanny even presumed that a child's eyes ought to be at times blurred with a touch of tears, that it was only for the better, that all the softness and pity(ful weakness) must flow out of the child before their first social outing. The more one cries—the harder (drier) one gets, isn't that right?

"Ah, Gabi! Aren't you happy?" Iren asked suddenly, when they had walked onto the wooden moor to launch their fleet.

The child raised his eyes to look at her. To put it plainly, he didn't feel happy, but he didn't feel particularly unhappy either—but how to explain that?

"Yes, madame," he said, more out of desire to not upset his mother than any other, "and you?"

Sitting by the water, Iren lowered the first of the boats that she kept in a heap inside her picnic basket, and Gabriel thought their edges looked almost hazardously sharp.

"Here, now you do the rest!" she put the basket at the very edge of the moor. Then, leaving her son occupied with the armada, the woman laid the rug on the darkened planks and, with a silver knife, started peeling an apple—red, almost wax-like—watching more after the child, however, than after the blade by her fingertips.

"They stopped," Gabriel said, turning. He imagined that the moment he put the boat to water it would immediately sail—fast, like birds in the sky. But they only rocked on shallow waves, slowly floating away from the moor—as if standing in a listless line.

"Some things take a little bit of time," the sharp blade tore apple skin, "I wanted to tell you something, dear."

He turned—even in childhood one feels that if something insignificant was to be brought up, like brushing teeth, the blueness of sky, or the necessity to step away from the edge of the moor, no one would unsheath in advance their serious tone for serious conversations, warning that they had something to say. All these parenthetical needles were needed to put one in a certain state—to sooner pierce their skin and inject the medicine.

"Soon you're going to have a little brother, or a little sister," his mother told him, continuing to flay the apple in delicate, cautious strokes, "Are you glad, Gabi?"

The spiral of the skin stretched lower and lower.

Gabriel jumped up to his feet, smiled wide, and ran to the rug.

Was it the science of talking to father that taught him, or was it an innate predisposition, but he had always been good at guessing what others wanted from him, and had quite succeeded at meeting expectations of the grown-ups.

He would recognize the attitudes of others even when there was nothing he could do about them—for example, by the sound of his nanny's footsteps, who came to his room with a pitcher of water every morning, he could unmistakably determine whether the water in the pitcher would be cold or warm. If nanny walked straight, and the key entered the keyhole on her first attempt—the day was promising to go without much trouble. If her gait was, instead, shuffling, the key kept poking around like the needle-seeking thread in the hands of a gradually going blinder year by year seamstress, was accompanied with muttering, the water, as if straight from the bottom of an ice hole, would scald his skin with frost.