The Darkroom of Damocles

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  He was still holding her elbow and could feel her arm trembling. She was short, even shorter than him; he actually found himself looking down into her face. Her big, bulbous blue eyes stared up at him, unblinking, as she said: ‘I was given your address in England.’

  ‘When were you in England then?’

  ‘I left the day before yesterday.’

  ‘By train, I bet,’ he muttered, letting her go. He thrust his hands in his pockets, his right hand seeking reassurance from the pistol.

  ‘I have proof, you can trust me!’

  He didn’t reply for the next few minutes; then, at the corner of Laan van Middenburg and Prinses Mariannelaan, he pushed her into a café. He made sure they took a table near the door. She said: ‘Why are you so pale? Your hands are shaking, it isn’t malnutrition, is it?’

  ‘No, things aren’t that bad yet. Is that what they’re saying in England? That people aren’t getting enough to eat?’

  ‘Yes, they say all sorts of things in England that aren’t true.’

  She couldn’t be older than eighteen.

  She now opened a bag that hung from a strap over her shoulder.

  ‘They told me to show you this.’

  Osewoudt almost gasped but took the photograph from her anyway. He had immediately seen what it was: a snowman wearing a Dutch army helmet and holding a rifle instead of a broom.

  ‘I don’t know what it means. They said it didn’t matter, they just told me to show it to you and you’d know I was safe!’

  ‘Who do you mean by “they”?’

  ‘You know, back in England.’

  He slipped the photo into his pocket.

  ‘How did you come to be in England?’

  ‘I was there already at the end of ’39. I was staying with a family to improve my English. My father and mother are in the East Indies.’

  ‘I didn’t catch your name when you phoned. Would you write it down for me?’

  Osewoudt took out the photo again and laid it face down before her. She fished about in her bag and brought out an unusual-looking writing tool. It resembled a propelling pencil, but the writing appeared to be in ink.

  ‘What have you got there?’ He snatched it from her. At the pointed tip he noticed a tiny ball.

  ‘It’s a ballpoint pen. What’s so special about that?’

  ‘We don’t have them here. Don’t ever use it again! The Germans haven’t got anything like that. Have you gone mad? What will they think if they see you with that?’

  ‘In England they never said I shouldn’t take it with me.’

  ‘Could you tell me a little more about the organisation that sent you?’

  ‘No. They told me not to.’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘In a dinghy.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘They put me ashore last night, at Scheveningen.’

  ‘So where did you spend the night?’

  She began to laugh.

  ‘You’re only asking because you want to check me out, naturally. You knew I’d phone, of course you did. You knew what was going on.’

  ‘I don’t know anything. Explain it to me.’

  ‘In England I was given an address, an address in Scheveningen. But the people weren’t living there any more. So I went to an aunt of mine, here in Voorburg.’

  ‘What did your aunt say?’

  ‘Not much. But I’ve got to find somewhere else. On no account am I to stay with relatives. It’s the rule.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘That’s for you to say.’

  ‘Is that why you phoned?’

  ‘No, that wasn’t the only reason. I wish you’d stop fussing! It was all arranged long ago!’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. The first time I heard your name was this afternoon.’

  ‘You don’t expect me to tell you my real name, do you?’

  ‘So it isn’t your real name?’

  ‘Are you saying you thought agents would ever use their real names? Are you having me on or is there something wrong with you?’

  ‘I think there’s something wrong with you, not me. You’re telling me you just arrived from England on a boat. Nobody’s allowed on the beach, it’s swarming with Germans, and you say you came in a dinghy, just like that? You expect me to believe you? Well, well. Next you show me a picture which is totally meaningless as far as I’m concerned. Where did you get it? In England? When was that?’

  She twisted her hands and lowered her eyes.

  ‘Yesterday!’ she said. ‘Just before I boarded the dinghy, which was at half past eight. I was taken across the Channel in a motor-torpedo boat, then they rowed me to the beach. They gave it to me just before I got into the dinghy.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Almost sure!’

  ‘Not absolutely sure?’

  ‘No, not absolutely sure. There was such a lot to remember, I didn’t think I was expected to remember when I got the picture. Stupid perhaps, but not unreasonable for someone who thinks others share their ideals. That’s my biggest weakness.’

  ‘Keep your voice down. Do you want the whole café to hear?’

  ‘You make me want to scream, going on like that. You’re making excuses because you’re scared.’

  Osewoudt jumped up, walked to the bar, paid and left the café without a backward glance.

  But she went after him, still clutching the rolled-up newspaper.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘Best would have been for you to stay right there at that table. But it would be pretty naïve of me to think you’d leave me alone.’

  ‘Leave you alone?’

  ‘Yes! Leave me alone! Did you think I’d let you draw me out? What is it you want from me? Why did you phone?’

  ‘I’d have told you straightaway if I thought I could trust you.’

  ‘So why don’t you?’

  They were walking down Laan van Middenburg, in the direction of Rijswijkse Weg.

  ‘I’ll tell you why I don’t trust you. You’ve got a shady look about you. That pale face of yours, the pale hair and smooth cheeks. And then that high squeaky voice. It’s not that I’m scared, mind you. You can guess what I think you are. But if I tried to run away you’d get out your pistol and shoot me. Go on then, take me to the police – I’ve had it. I’ve been set up.’

  A tram with blacked-out headlamps rolled towards them, whistling persistently.

  ‘If you’re so sure I’m from the Gestapo,’ said Osewoudt when the tram had gone, ‘you might just as well tell me now why you left England to come here. Save yourself some torture later on.’

  ‘No, I’m not talking. I’d rather be dead.’

  ‘That would be a shame. You’re a nice girl, although you seem to have taken a dislike to me.’ He put his arm around her and whispered: ‘I’ll tell you exactly what I think of you. When I saw that weird pen you’ve got in your bag I thought: where did she get that from? Must have been in England. But the picture, you understand – no, it’s got nothing to do with me.’

  ‘So you don’t believe I got it in England?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? If it’s nothing to do with you, if you’ve never seen it before, why won’t you believe I got it in England?’

  Another two paces and she in turn put her arm around him.

  But Osewoudt drew back.

  ‘I can’t help you! I must get home! You’ll have to fend for yourself!’

  He turned his back on her.

  ‘Don’t go!’ she cried. ‘You just gave yourself away! You must have seen that picture before, or you wouldn’t care whether I got it in England or not.’

  When they boarded the tram together he had yet to make up his mind where he would take her. Amsterdam would be the best place for her to stay. But with whom?

  He looked her up and down, then glanced around in the gloom of the tram car, which was lit only by a few bulbs largely covered in black paint. Was she weari
ng anything that might stand out? Wasn’t her white raincoat rather unusual, and what about that bag with the shoulder strap?

  When the conductor came she opened the bag and handed him a silver guilder for the fare.

  The conductor held the coin between thumb and forefinger and said: ‘Is this a real one?’

  ‘No!’ said Osewoudt. ‘You can keep it if you like, but here’s a paper one. A silly mistake, you understand, a mistake.’

  The conductor held on to the coin for a moment longer, then accepted the note instead.

  Osewoudt gave Elly a nudge.

  ‘Didn’t you say you were saving it to have it made into a pendant?’ he said, a little too loudly.

  ‘All right for some,’ said the conductor.

  Osewoudt gave him a zinc ten-cent coin as a tip. The conductor moved away.

  ‘What was wrong with that guilder?’ she asked.

  ‘Where did you get that thing? Everyone handed in their silver guilders ages ago.’

  ‘I got it in England.’

  ‘They might just as well have sent you here with a label on your back saying MADE IN ENGLAND. How many of those guilders do you have?’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Don’t ever spend one again!’

  As they went into the railway station in The Hague, he said: ‘Wait there, by the ticket window.’ He ducked into a telephone box, dialled his own number and waited with pinched nostrils in readiness, his pulse pounding in his forehead.

  ‘Osewoudt tobacconists,’ he heard Ria say. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘This is …’

  His eye fell on an advertisement on the cover of the telephone directory. Mijnhardt’s Tablets. He said: ‘This is Mijnhardt speaking, could I speak to Mr Moorlag?’ He kept pinching his nostrils.

  ‘Meinarends, did you say? One moment please, I’ll see if Mr Moorlag is in.’

  He heard her lay down the receiver. Then came Moorlag’s voice: ‘Hello Meinarends, hello!’

  ‘Moorlag! This isn’t Meinarends. Don’t say anything yet, don’t give me away. I’ll speak as softly as possible, I’m afraid Ria may be listening. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I won’t be coming home tonight, I have to go to Amsterdam, I’ll be back tomorrow. I couldn’t tell Ria myself, you’ve got to help me. Stop her from getting upset when I don’t come home. I’ll be back, though, at least I hope I will. I have to find somebody a place to stay. She says she arrived here from England yesterday, identified herself with a photo that was still in my hands a week ago. So I don’t believe the photo came from England. But I can’t leave her in the lurch either. Wait for me at the station in The Hague tomorrow morning at quarter to twelve. If I’m not there, take my Leica and all the papers and hide them as quickly as you can. Do your best, Moorlag, help me!’

  He did not wait for a reply but dashed out of the telephone box: their train, the last to Amsterdam, was leaving in two minutes.

  ‘Did you get the tickets?’

  ‘No, I thought you said I wasn’t to spend any money.’

  He dragged her through the barrier; the stationmaster blew his whistle as they entered the carriage.

  ‘Don’t you have any paper money at all?’

  ‘Yes I do, but it’s all new. You’ve got me worried now. The notes could be fakes, maybe poor ones. There’s something else, too, which I probably shouldn’t tell you because it’ll only make you more suspicious, but it wouldn’t be fair not to, so I will. Back in England they gave me an ID card, obviously, but the people I stayed with last night said it was no good. I don’t know about these things myself, but apparently ID cards have a watermark, a lion I think, and the lion in the thing they gave me is far too small.’

  Osewoudt laid his hand on her thigh and squeezed it hard, as if this might encourage her to keep quiet.

  ‘Let’s not talk too much here. People will think: what are those two whispering about?’

  She put her arm around him and brushed his chin with the back of her hand.

  Osewoudt looked at Elly, and drew her towards him.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re over twenty.’

  ‘I’m eighteen.’

  ‘You can’t stay with me.’

  ‘Well, perhaps I could do something for you in return, in spite of my money and my ID card being no good. Surely there’s something you’re short of?’

  She turned her hand over and stroked his cheek with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘Not razor blades though,’ she said. ‘No shortage there, obviously.’

  ‘Razor blades! Who needs razor blades?’

  ‘I’ve never met a man with a closer shave.’

  Osewoudt let go of her, almost groaning. But he took control of himself and said, with his lips close to her ear: ‘There’s no stubble because I don’t have a beard. I never shave – don’t need to. Feel.’

  He pursed his lips and rubbed his chin along her ear.

  The train stopped in Leiden.

  ‘Don’t you mind my not having a beard?’

  She smiled, dimples appeared in her round, white cheeks, and her wide-eyed look became veiled, as if he had made some strange, sophisticated proposition and she was considering whether it appealed to her.

  ‘Well in that case,’ he went on, ‘tell me, have you ever met someone called Dorbeck?’

  ‘I told you before, I’ve met nobody. I just went to the address I’d been given, and when it turned out to be useless I went to my aunt’s.’

  ‘So you didn’t meet a man who looked very much like me – same sort of face, same height, but with dark hair?’

  ‘I do wish you’d stop banging on.’

  ‘I’m not. The thing is, you could have come across this person under an alias.’

  ‘You still don’t trust me. Is that what you’re getting at?’

  ‘It’s not a matter of trust. It’s just that I’d like to know if you’ve been in contact with a man who looks very much like me except that he’s dark-haired, the same as me but dark.’

  ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘Strange. You arrived in Holland only yesterday. Not much has happened since, so little that you ought to be able to remember all of it without any trouble.’

  The ticket inspector arrived, Osewoudt explained that they had to dash to catch the train, the inspector didn’t mind and wrote out two tickets, without adding a fine. Osewoudt paid for them.

  When the inspector had left, Elly said: ‘This is the first time in my life I’ve been on a Dutch train.’

  ‘You mean you’ve never been in Holland before?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Soon I’ll be seeing Amsterdam for the first time, too.’

  The railway station was dark. So was Prins Hendrikkade, which they crossed, looking out for the occasional car with blacked-out headlamps like glowing rivets.

  But the white sign saying FÜR WEHRMACHTSANGEHÖRIGE VERBOTEN at the approach to Oudezijds Achterburgwal was as visible as ever.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means,’ said Osewoudt, ‘that this part of town is unsafe for Germans, which makes it all the safer for us.’

  Uncle Bart answered the door himself.

  ‘What, no housemaid these days?’ Osewoudt asked.

  ‘No, there’s no one left,’ said Uncle Bart. ‘What did you expect? That I’d just carry on, sell all my feathers to the Germans? My feathers on every German whore’s hat? I’d rather starve.’

  ‘So who does the cleaning?’

  ‘No one. I’ve shut all the rooms. I’ve moved my bed into the office. I have everything to hand, stove, table, bed. What more does an old man need? Come on in.’

  They sat down in the narrow little office on the first floor. Uncle Bart had grown a moustache and his breath was so vile you could smell it even when he wasn’t speaking, or maybe you smelled it constantly because he didn’t keep his mouth shut for more than a second.

  ‘So you’ve done a runner with a girlfriend, Henri. Doesn’t surpris
e me in the least. I know exactly what you’ll say: that you’ve had it up to here with Ria, she’s so much older than you … Didn’t I tell you? I always said you shouldn’t get married. Yes indeed, your old uncle here has done a fair bit of reading and studying in his day. Didn’t waste his time in the cinema, the way young folk do nowadays. The laws of natural selection can’t be broken with impunity! Darwin knew that back then. What am I saying? Schopenhauer! What’s the age difference between you and Ria again? Never had proper relations with her, I shouldn’t wonder! Don’t look at me as if you think your old Uncle Bart’s lost his mind! I know full well no other father-in-law would dream of saying such things to his philandering son-in-law! But that’s because most people don’t use their brains, because they refuse to think about nature! Me – I don’t care whether I’m your uncle or your father-in-law, all my life I’ve tried to observe the world with the unprejudiced eye of the naturalist! That has always been my goal!’

  He leaned forward and gave Osewoudt two hard slaps on the knee.

  ‘She seems a nice enough girl to me,’ he went on. ‘Indeed, a nice girl!’

  He shifted on his chair to get a better view of Elly.

  They climbed the dark spiral staircase.

  ‘Is he an uncle of yours?’

  ‘I call him Uncle, don’t I?’

  ‘But is he your wife’s father?’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘He’s very broad-minded. Or is that because of the war? In England they say the war’s brought down the moral standards of the Dutch.’

  ‘He was like that before the war. He’s in a world of his own. If he had any idea of what’s going on he’d be the strictest moralist of them all. Falling standards has nothing to do with it in his case. In my case, it might.’

  He pressed himself to her back and put his arms around her. His hands were on her breasts. She thrust the back of her head against his face. As one, they climbed the last two steps, then stood still for a moment in the dark, by the door to his old bedroom.

  ‘In my case there does seem to have been a loss of moral standards,’ Osewoudt repeated. ‘I would never have gone in for any of this in the old days.’

  He felt her nipples harden between the tips of his fingers; he pushed her against the door of his room, which was not properly shut and so swung wide open. They stumbled and fell across the bed, on which lay two flat cardboard boxes that gave way under their weight with soft plopping noises and a smell of mould, dust, and stale herbs.