by Gerard Reve
They sat down at a low table and drank tea from blue bowls. The woman took the child out of the playpen. “Here’s Joost,” she said, “that’s right, here you are!” She sat down and placed the baby boy on her lap. “The head is too large,” Frits thought. The way the child’s wispy hair hung in a wreath around its skull gave the impression of a bald spot in the middle, while the skin on its neck was wrinkled. The little face was wry and oldish. The child went on rocking back and forth in a pendular motion.
“Hello, Joost!” Frits called out a few times. “A year and a half and more,” he thought, “but he still doesn’t respond to his own name.” Lidia put the little boy down on the floor, on his feet, but he dropped immediately to hands and knees and began crawling slowly. Close to the window, the child tried to pull itself up on the cover of the divan. “Are you trying to get up there?” she asked, lifting him onto it. The child sat rocking the whole time without a sound, keeping his gaze fixed on a blossoming potted begonia on the sill. “So, now you’re sitting pretty!” Lidia cried. The child dropped to all fours, crept to the window and grabbed the red blossom, which broke off right away.
“Whoa!” Frits shouted. “Hey!” Lidia cried loudly and walked over to him.
The child dropped the flower and began to cry. Even after Lidia had picked him up, he went on bawling. Frits retrieved the flower and stuck it into a vase of tulips, so deeply that a tiny bit of stem touched water. “Time for bed, Joost,” Lidia said, and left with the child on her arm.
“Let’s retire to the other room,” Viktor said. “Herman is quiet this evening,” Frits said, once they were back in Viktor’s room. “You left the light on in here.”
“Yes, I always do that when I’m in the next room,” said Viktor, “it’s such a fuss, trying to find the plug and socket in the dark.”
“It’s taking on highly interesting forms, Herman’s boy’s palsy,” Frits said, “it’s wondrous to see, the way he shakes and shakes. Do you think he goes on shaking like that at night, while he is asleep? An aunt of mine—well, she’s not my aunt at all, we only call her that—has a white dog with the same thing. It fell into the water once, while it was recovering from distemper, and that has never gone away. Its forelegs shake all the time, it can’t walk straight on them.” Placing his hands on the floor, he gave a demonstration. “Only when the dog falls asleep does the shaking slow, and finally it stops completely.”
“I think it’s a phase he’s going through,” said Viktor, “he will grow out of it after a time.”
“Let us hope so,” said Frits, rolling another cigarette from Viktor’s tin, “but madness is never far away. One little defect in the construction, one screw loose and the whole mechanism grinds to a halt. God’s handiwork is great.” “Let’s hope not,” said Viktor, “for that is a terrible thing.”
“Have you ever seen one of them?” Frits asked. “I don’t mean a moron, with one of those skulls big enough for two and an idiotic gleam in his eye; no, I mean a cheerful lunatic, that’s a glorious thing. Haven’t you ever seen that man in a top hat who walks around in the city?” “No,” Viktor said.
“He sings, after his own fashion,” Frits went on. “Well, as a matter of fact, not a lot of sound comes out. People give him money, but that’s not why he does it. When they lean out of the window and throw it down to him, he leaves it lying in the street. It is truly a sight to behold. I had no idea at first that the man was insane. The children torment him no end. I was coming down Alkmaarsestraat one time and they were throwing potatoes at him. When I walked past he said: Sir, I am a famous singer, but they don’t appreciate you until they carry you out between six planks. That sounded very good, but maybe he taught himself that from some book, or maybe someone else said it to him. That would be a pity.”
“Or that idiot on Tessel,” he continued, “remind me to tell you about that later. Six or seven years ago, in our neighbourhood, there was a big, husky fellow who walked around all the time shouting moo! Children followed him and yelled at him, but always from a distance, because it was a frightening thing. You can imagine: I see him walking along the canal and he comes to an open window. A housemaid is getting ready to stick her arm out to shake a duster, and at that very moment that head appears and shouts: Moo! Very deep, bellowing, like a huge, dangerous cow. I’ve never seen anyone come unglued like that girl did.” He coughed with laughter. “You know how he got that way? The man was a concert violinist and he had already become a bit peculiar, a bit different. He was a good violinist too. And he thought he was world-famous. But he wasn’t. One day he imagined that he had received an invitation from America, for a concert tour there. He and his wife left by ship. During the crossing his wife jumped overboard, out of desperation, and drowned. When he came back, he was completely, stark-raving mad.”
“You know,” Viktor said, peering into the fire, “that I grew up in Haarlem before I moved here. Acquaintances of ours there have a son who is not completely retarded. But he’s slow and peculiar, and he’s also two metres six. Loony as he is, though, he’s also a mathematical genius. He’s been on the radio any number of times. He can calculate anything: multiplication, division, the most impossible figures. He works at an office, in the bookkeeping department. The bookkeepers get bored sometimes, and one day they decided just for fun to see if they could pick each other up. And then that boy lifted his boss—a bald little fellow—like a baby, with only one arm.” He poked at the fire. “What were you saying about Tessel?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Frits said. “Years ago I was camping on Tessel. In Oude Schild, I think it was, there was a man who ate paper.” Viktor barked with laughter. “He ate paper. He always had a wet ball of paper in his mouth. Whenever he found another scrap on the street, he would take that ball out of his gob, poke a hole in it with his finger, stuff the new piece into it and then tuck the whole wad back in his cheek. He sold weather trees. No, wait, I think that was someone else. Or maybe it was him after all.”
“What are those, weather trees?” Viktor asked. “Sort of like weather houses, with a little weatherman and weatherwoman, but then a tree. How should I know, I never bought one. It’s easy enough to tell for yourself what the weather is going to be like. I do know that we always asked him—but maybe that was some other simpleton—to give us a forecast. We would ask him: What’s the weather going to be like, Leen? And he would say: if the weather is warm, you won’t catch a chill. Then we’d moan and complain and he would say: Why don’t you buy a weather tree? Then you’d always know what the weather will be like. In this extremely weird, hoarse voice.” He fell silent for a moment, tapping his fingernails against his teeth.
“Go on, what else do you have for me?” Viktor asked.
“They say such bizarre things,” Frits continued. “A doctor once told me that they asked one of the loonies in the asylum: What are you going to do when you leave here? He says: Oh, maybe I’ll become an actor, I’ve always had a flair for that. Or else I’ll work for a newspaper, I did that too for a few years. But there’s always a chance that I’ll pick up my old calling; in actual fact, I’m a teapot.”
“God,” Viktor said, breathless with laughter, “you’re on a roll tonight.” “Shall I stop?” Frits asked. The little clock on the desk said a quarter to nine. “You’re slow, did you know that?” Frits asked. “It’s actually nine o’clock.” “Yes, I know,” Viktor said. “Why isn’t there a Christmas tree in the house?” asked Frits. “I thought about having one at first,” Viktor answered, “but then you need candles and all that other rubbish. There’s one at my parents’ house in Haarlem, I was there yesterday and the day before. Herman and Lidia thought about it too, but the baby is still too little to appreciate it and everything is still so hard to get. So finally they didn’t do it.”
“We never had one at home,” said Frits, “except for when we were very little. Not after that. They thought it was nonsense. But it’s not. It is a tree, and that tree is in the house. That in itself is something special, something
unusual. Then you have the candles. A candle is something you almost never see, except for in the cellar, or for when the lights go out, but there they are, in that tree, and they’re burning. Imagine that. Burning—”
“Frits, Frits,” Viktor said. He looked at Frits’s face, then added quickly: “No, by all means, go on. You’re absolutely right. I know very well what you mean.”
“Damn,” Frits said, “you think I’m jabbering. Well, all right. Perhaps I am.” He sighed. “What?” he said. “Is that coming from upstairs?” They heard a loud, steady knocking. “That’s Joost,” Viktor said. “He’s awake. He sleeps for a bit, then he’s awake for the rest of the night. He bumps his noggin against the headboard of his cot. A few hundred times, then he pauses for a bit, then starts in again.”
“It sounds as though the carpenters are working late,” said Frits. “Mark my words, that child is deranged. Completely deranged, that’s the long and the short of it. The St Vitus boogie-woogie, poltergeist syndrome, general feeble-mindedness.”
“Do you feel like having a sandwich?” Viktor asked. The knocking continued. “That sounds good,” said Frits. “I thought, just a little while ago, that you were about to say something. About Rageman, or something.” “Hagelman,” Viktor said. “All right then, Hagelman,” said Frits, “who is that?” “You don’t know him,” said Viktor. “That was in Haarlem too. The man went crazy. He went to the doctor. The doctor wanted him to explain everything. He told him that a beast had entered his house, a mad beast.” “A colleague, as it were,” Frits said.
“He started chasing it,” Viktor continued. “Over highways and byways. Then suddenly, he told the doctor, sitting in the middle of the woods he saw a little devil. He picked it up and petted it and said: You’re a lovely little devil. And then, doctor, he said, then I knew that I had found it. Yes, the doctor said, but I have spoken to any number of people who have found it, and they had to take a rest for a long, long time. You need to take a rest as well. Come back on Thursday—that’s right, I think it was a Thursday—at one thirty.” “Wonderful,” Frits said. “Just listen to that pounding up there.”
“Wait, wait,” Viktor went on, “we’re not there yet. He came back that next Thursday at noon. The receptionist said the doctor wasn’t in. What, Mr Hagelman said, at the appointed hour the doctor is not in? This is the appointed hour! Of course, the receptionist said, but your appointment is at one thirty. In any case, amid all that commotion, Mr Hagelman claimed that one thirty was too late. All right, the nurse said, then you just come in at one. Ah, of course, Hagelman said, of course! One o’clock is the golden mean. I will return at the golden mean. He talked to the doctor till he turned blue, but the doctor couldn’t make head or tail of it. A few days later, Hagelman’s wife calls the doctor: Doctor, my husband is in such a bad way, I’m afraid something terrible will happen. The doctor goes there and sees the man—this was in the middle of the night—with a bucket, tossing water on the children in their bedroom. They needed to be baptized, he said. Those children, there were three of them, they thought it was all in fun. It was a warm night, by the way.”
The knocking above their heads stopped.
“Then the doctor knew,” he went on, “that things were completely out of hand, but it wasn’t that easy to get him into an institution. The fellow was still quite lucid in some ways. But he had a friend he listened to unconditionally. The doctor said: It truly would be the best thing, I will call Mr Perel—that was the friend—and you will see that he also thinks that would be best for your health. What? Hagelman says. Talk to Perel about the thread? We can’t do that, that’s out of the question. In any case, they finally convinced him. He’s home again now, that man, he seems to have recovered a bit.”
“Viktor and Frits, would you like to have a cup of coffee with us?” they heard Lidia call out. “If you insist,” Frits said. In Lidia and Herman’s parlour a gramophone was playing. “This is a damned good tango,” Viktor said, “listen carefully. In a few seconds he’s going to say: ‘highs in the low sixties’.” The four of them listened until the music halted and the singing voice spoke a few words quickly in Spanish. “You’re right, I heard it,” Frits said laughing. The doorbell rang.
“Who could that be?” Herman wondered aloud. He went into the hallway. They heard him shout down the speaking tube and open the door. Within a few moments a black-haired girl in a dark-red cloak came into the room in front of him, followed by a small, gaunt young man in a thick blue overcoat. “Good evening,” the young man said, panting. They placed their scarves, a handbag and gloves on the table. “I’ll come right to the point,” said the young man, without looking at the others around the table. “Could we stay here tonight?” A silence descended. They all lowered their eyes. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Herman said. “I have guests; they’ve already gone to bed. And Frits van Egters, you know him, don’t you”—“pleased to meet you,” said Frits; “pleased to meet you,” the visitor said—“he is spending the night as well, so there’s really no room.” Lidia pressed her heel down on Frits’s foot.
“You could stay in the alcove for fifteen minutes, Piet,” Viktor said. “Couldn’t he, Herman? Then we’ll just turn up the volume for a while.”
“I see,” said the young man, “that’s unfortunate. Come along, Irene.” He gathered their accoutrements hastily, his hands all atremble. Then they left without a farewell. “Good riddance,” Herman said after no one had spoken for a minute. “That’s been taken care of.”
“It’s time for me too,” said Frits. “But with all of this we still haven’t had our sandwich,” Viktor said quietly. “Forget it,” Frits said, “it doesn’t matter. It’s ten past ten.” “No,” Viktor said when they had arrived in the hall, “we’ll have a bite to eat.” Going to his room, he made a few cheese sandwiches. Frits ate two of them, pacing back and forth with his coat on. “What are you reading these days?” he asked, stopping by the writing table and picking up a little book with a grey cloth cover. “That’s one you should really read,” Viktor replied, “you would definitely enjoy it.”
“The Small-time Neurotic: A Handbook for Better Living,” Frits read. “You can borrow it,” said Viktor. Frits closed the book and stuck it in his coat pocket, took a deep breath and said goodbye.
On the street outside he looked at the paving stones, which were covered in delicate crystals of ice. The air felt moist, a light wind was blowing from the north.
“This could be the freezing point,” he thought, “it’s possible.”
Arriving home, he entered the house without a sound. His parents’ coats and headwear were hanging on the stand. There was no light from the living room. “The turtledoves have come home to roost,” he whispered. In the kitchen he found traces of a hot meal: a frying pan with a few fried potatoes and a pan of porridge. The gravy in the meat pan was still warmish. He dipped a slice of bread into it and ate it in four bites. Then he went to bed.
He fell asleep quickly and awoke at six in the morning. “I did not dream,” he thought. “This will be a workday.” After passing water he promptly fell asleep again. He found himself once more in Lidia and Herman’s big room. Lidia had laid her left leg over an armrest, so that her thigh was exposed. As he looked at it the skin grew drab and chapped, and blue veins arose all over it.
Lidia became aware of his gaze, but remained seated. “Take a look across the street,” she said.
He went to the window. “I don’t see anything,” he said. “Where is Herman?” he asked, turning around. Herman had disappeared. “Take a good look across the street,” Lidia said. He strained his eyes and suddenly it was afternoon outside. He saw that the river was only a few metres wide. Across the street, at the first-floor window of a large house, a boy dressed in a blue jersey and grey shorts was doing a handstand on the sill. The sashes had been removed from their tracks.
Again and again, the boy let himself fall from the window with a flourish, but caught himself each time at the last mom
ent, pulled himself up and started all over again. On the street below a girl stood, looking up and calling out to him over and over, but Frits could not make out the words.
“He does the same thing every day,” said Lidia, who had come to stand beside Frits, “can you imagine how it gets on our nerves?” “Yes, I can imagine,” said Frits, “it is a terrible thing to have to watch.”
He awoke, saw that it was five minutes to seven, and fell asleep once more.
VI
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON the clouds were so heavy that the office lights had to be turned on at a quarter past three. Frits gathered scraps of paper from his desk, blew away the cigarette ash, then leaned back in his chair. “Were it only Saturday already,” he thought, “then this weather would put me in the right mood.”
“At elementary school,” he said to himself, “the sky sometimes grew so dark on Saturday morning, an hour before the bell, that they had to light all four lamps, those globes. On Saturday, an hour before school was over. What made that so wonderful?” “Or the last day of school, before the summer holidays,” he thought, “when a downpour came, or thunder, just before the bell rang. There was no greater happiness. Why? Strange.”
He bit a corner off a piece of stationery, chewed on it and spit the wad onto the floor. “Now think,” he mumbled, “what was it I was going to do tonight? Of course, we’re going to the pictures, the divertissement of our century. The Lantern, two seats for the late-evening showing. We’ll take Viktor along. In fact, life is not all that complicated,” he thought. “Modern science is a boon to mankind.”
At twenty past four he packed his briefcase, hung his coat over the back of his chair and waited for five minutes. Then he arranged everything on his desk in careful order, put on his coat and shuffled quietly out of the door. In the corridor he picked up the pace, but without stepping loudly, and so arrived in the foyer, where with a push of a button he summoned the lift and made his descent. As he left the building he began to hum. There was barely a breath of wind. He cycled past the cinema to pick up the tickets, took an easterly detour on the way home and, at the bridge, rang the bell of the house with two towers.