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We were sitting a little below the flat crest of one of three hills which surrounded the basin and looked across one end of the basin at an overgrazed pasture. The road to the next village on the island ran along the other side of the pasture parallel to the reeds marking the edge of the bay.
The paved-over dirt road was fringed with bushy old ash trees, and their dark green leaves contrasted with the lighter tones of the meadow and the distant reeds.
I could see about a dozen rabbits in the depression below us and along the edge of the pasture. They had jumped for cover in the tall grass and in among the high stems of the mullein and watched us carefully.
But we crouched motionless beneath the hawthorn, so they came back out and began to feed again.
“Do you see the stone down there?” He pointed at a large boulder that a narrow footpath passed on its way between the two nearby hills.
I nodded. He spoke again, softly. “There are four burrows on that slope”. He pointed at the dark entrance holes to the rabbits’ burrows which showed up on the light yellow sand, a different color from the beach sand. “They are all about the same distance from that stone down below. It’s about thirty meters. Follow me slowly and take cover behind the stone. Clear?”
I nodded again and stood up. He nocked an arrow and stuck the second one in the top of his basketball sneaker. He held the bow low and went slowly down the slope until he reached a point halfway along the footpath. I stayed close behind him and we followed the path down to the stone in single file.
I stepped back behind the stone and looked at the slope. The burrows were about half way up the slope, and I understood what he meant. The rabbits had hopped up the slope through the deep grass and bushy stems, and they now sat in front of three of the four burrows, ready to take cover inside at a moment’s notice. Their ears twitched with a reddish glint as they stared in our direction with heads erect. He slowly raised the bow in the direction of one of them, sitting alone against the yellow sand.
As he drew the bow, the rabbit moved but at the same instant the string sang. I thought I heard the impact of the arrow as the yellow sand spurted up in front of the burrow. After a great deal of movement, everything was quiet. The white feathers on the arrow shaft whipped about in front of the dark hole and then were still.
He lowered the bow slowly and then turned to me.
“Well,” he said. “Just like Robin Hood.”
Slowly we climbed the slope. The rabbit lay in front of his burrow with his head in the hole, but the arrow which had passed through his neck had kept him from going any further. He pulled it out, wiped it clean on a fuzzy, broad mullein leaf, and stuck it in his shoe next to the other one. Then he picked up the rabbit by its hind legs and we went back to the hawthorn bush. The rabbit bled heavily from the neck wound, and he hung it up on a branch of the hawthorn to bleed out. We smoked a cigarette and watched the slope opposite. It wasn’t long before the other rabbits emerged from their burrows, hopped back to the meadow and began to feed again.
I lay in the grass and stared at the cloudless blue sky through the hawthorn’s thick foliage. While he was wrapping up the bow, I sat up. Only then did I notice that the aluminum arrows had a different head than the others which he used for shooting at the target. I picked up one of the arrows to look at it more closely. The massive, cone-shaped point which had the same diameter as the arrow shaft had been slit with a thin saw, and a thin steel blade in the shape of a long triangle had been inserted in the slot. The edges had been honed to the sharpness of a razor.
I wondered about his lack of concern, carrying such dangerous edges in his shoe, but he shrugged his shoulders when I asked him about it. Then he stuck the arrows back in their canvas sleeve.
The bundle was thicker as we walked back, for after putting the rabbit in a plastic bag, it too had been wrapped in the canvas sheet.
We walked back the same way. The perfume of thyme rose over the fields and the yellow stalks of the mullein shone bright against the dark meadow.
I watched while he cleaned the rabbit. He took it down into the cellar and invited me to supper for the next evening. I also stayed that evening. We drank beer and ate smoked flounder. The sky took on a reddish gray color over the gradually darkening woods, and the sinking sun burned holes through the gaps between the thick crowns of the pine woods. Swarms of June beetles hummed in the branches of the birch and provided a background to the clear chirping of the crickets.
I felt contented and wondered at the memory of the many previous evenings which I had spent in the smoke-filled bar. I was at peace with the world, and I felt that this vacation had been different from all the others.
8
The wind brought the sound of a dog barking angrily in the village and pulled me out of my reverie. My gaze fell on the open traveling bag next to the bed, and when I saw the bread I suddenly felt hungry. I put the teapot, cup, and can of milk on the floor and put the bread and cheese on the stool.
The bread was a firm, dark, whole grain bread, but it was fresh when I cut into it. I cut some strips of cheese and broke pieces from a thick slice of bread. The cheese was dry and crumbly, but very sharp. While I alternately ate pieces of bread and cheese, I knew that I would be thirsty again in an hour. But I wanted to wait before making tea again. I ate two thick slices of bread and the entire small package of cheese.
The warmth and the full feeling made me sluggish, but before I went to sleep, I wanted to do a thorough search of at least this upper room. I got up and pulled the curtains back from in front of the shelves, which were built against the wall between the slant of the roof and the floor. I pushed my traveling bag inside. Then, one after the other, I pulled back all the curtains and looked into all the drawers.
On the window side lay piles of underwear, tools in a wooden box, a small radio, a shoe box containing photographs, books, a couple of glasses, and some empty bottles.
The shelves against the wall on the other side, where the drawing table stood, held paints, pastel chalks, art supplies, an assortment of new brushes, and a lot of paper: separate sheets of watercolor board, which had become corrugated in the damp, along with flat, grayish-blue, coarse, wood pulp paper. There were four years of a technical journal for designers in another drawer. There were strips of paper as bookmarks in some of the issues.
When I looked at the places marked, I found articles on chairs and seating arrangements, sporting goods, and an essay on design methods. I put them all back on the shelf. In the drawer beneath there was a coffee-table sized book with a colored dust jacket. It had the title “Submersible Boats” and showed a bizarre yellow underwater vehicle with silver bubbles of air rising from it against a shining blue background. There was a strip of paper marking a place in this book as well. I pulled the book out and put it on the drawing table to read it a little before going to sleep. Beneath it I found a brochure on acrylic skylights. Along with color photos which showed interior shots of rooms with skylights, the brochure contained drawings with dimensions. One page with a halfround cupola was checked. With the pamphlet in my hand, I again had the feeling that this should remind me of something.
I leafed through it to the end and held it by its back and shook it, but nothing fell out. Slowly, I put it back.
The next thing that came into my hands was a stack of multicolored folders. One contained invoices and bills, the others patent descriptions. They were in his name and covered several different fields. They concerned interchangeable assembly elements, light fixtures, and a stackable chair that could be set up in rows by hooking the seats and backs together. There were also some foreign patent registrations from a number of countries among them.
A hard-cover binder held a series of typewritten poems. There must have been a good two dozen pages, mostly without titles, but each with a date at the upper right, in the same place as on a letter. The first and last pages covered a time span of eight months, but that was two years ago.
I found it unimaginable that he had bothered with poetry – at least we had never spoken of it. But he had surprised me just as much last year when he suddenly became interested in small sculptures, small terra-cotta figures which he formed on the beach from the blue-gray clumps of clay at the foot of the sea cliff and then baked in the retort furnace in the cellar. There were two shelves on the living room wall full of these hand-sized figurines.
I shoved the binder back on the shelf. Behind the next curtain lay two rolls of drawings wrapped in brown tubes. When I held up the first vertically, a roll of drawings on transparent tracing paper slid down into my hand. I laid the roll on the drawing table and shoved the books to one side. When I unrolled the brittle paper, I saw that the drawings were full-size curves of bow limbs. Two of them carried the names of well-known high-performance models made by an American and a Japanese company. Evidently, he had drawn them for comparison with his own designs. The others were drawings of his own models, which he had designated by the name “Arco” along with the model number.
There were four drawings, and I had been there when he drew one of them.
In different colors, the sheet showed the step-by-step deformation of the bow limb when gradually drawn back. Besides the direct technical value of the data represented, I found that the drawing had considerable aesthetic attraction. The deformation of the bow limb, which normally took place in a fraction of a second, was shown here in separate stages presenting a visual representation of the dynamics of the gradually straightening recurved bow limb.
At the time, we had taken the drawing board out to the yard and clamped the bow to the edge of the drawing board. At the midpoint of the bow, we had placed a thin board which had been provided with short pegs driven in at 5 cm intervals. Then with a spring scale, we pulled the bowstring back in steps, stopping at each peg.
After entering the strength of the pull at that point in a table, we traced along the inner curves of the limbs with a felt pen, until the sheet was covered with sweeping curves.
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