An Untouched House

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  I managed to escape, hoping to finally make it upstairs. But once again the staircase was packed. I got a rifle butt in the mouth. Some soldiers picked me up and tossed me out into the garden. I lay face down with my arms over my head while they kicked me in the sides. When they stopped I stood up and walked with a full mouth to the summer house, where I sat down on a bench. I spat my teeth out between my feet.

  Otherwise the partisans left me alone.

  I looked up at the windows of the room with the aquariums. There was nothing to see. The windows were as black as ever. The ladder I’d put under them the previous morning was still there. What could be easier than breaking windows, knocking over a ladder? Yet those of all things had not happened. It was as if there might still be some point to climbing the ladder and breaking open the window, as if only a trivial interruption had prevented me from doing so.

  Shots were being fired all over the neighborhood. I saw soldiers going in and out of the house. I heard singing and shouting. I vomited and lay there a while, half asleep.

  After it had grown dark, I stood up and stumbled back to the house. I could no longer see anyone moving, neither in the hall nor in the rooms. Striking match after match, I went inside. Big puddles of spilt sugar glittered like ice. The hallway was empty except for the two partisans who had remained motionless after the bannister broke. The doors to the rooms were closed. A radio was screeching in the drawing room, but I couldn’t hear any people.

  Water was running down the walls. My feet made a sopping sound. Then I saw the black tom licking the trampled food in a corner. I picked him up and said, “Now you know. Now you know what was in that room. Now you’ve been there.” His eyes looked like Chinese eyes, which give the impression they should never have opened. He squirmed. I threw the match away, then pressed the cat’s head against my cheek. But he hissed and scratched my hand with his hind leg. After I let him go, he returned to his corner and went back to slurping up the food.

  I began to climb the stairs, holding on to shreds of carpet to avoid slipping.

  The door of the fish room was wide open. I lit a match. All of the tanks were smashed, plants and broken glass mixed together on the floor. I couldn’t see any sign of the old man.

  Stumbling over unstable piles of books from the library that were blocking my path, I made my way to the bedroom. I stuck my hands into the sopping mountain of mattresses, pillows, blankets and sheets, but couldn’t find the woman’s body anywhere. The old man and the woman had both vanished into thin air, just as they had arrived out of nowhere, the way everything had happened of its own accord. I thought it possible, very possible.

  But on my way into the bathroom, where I could hear the tap running the whole time, I was overcome, upon seeing that the tub was full and overflowing, by a horrific explanation of the old man’s disappearance. I was already so infected by the partisans’ peculiar sense of humor that I fully expected to find him in the bath, drowned. They’d tied him up and chucked him in. If he loved fish so much, he should experience it for himself. I groped my way over and reached in up to my armpit, but only found filth, like everywhere.

  I turned off the taps so that I would have at least done something. The thread of one had been stripped and the water kept running.

  Then I went back to the garden and lay down on the bench in the summer house. The sun would be up soon. The wind was getting stronger and snow, fine as salt, was passing through the shrubs in horizontal flurries.

  At first light I got off the bench and walked around to the back of the summer house. The owner of the house was lying there on the wild grass and stinging nettles just as I’d left him, his mouth wide open, the half-burnt cigarette shot back into his throat, like a pistil in a flower. I sucked blood out of my toothless jaws and swallowed it. Squatting down, I detached his two cameras and hung them over my own shoulders. I also removed his gold wristwatch.

  * * *

  —

  AND WHEN THE PARTISANS were pulling out and I made it back to the lawn in front of the house, I saw what had happened to the old man. They had hung him from the plane tree with the instructions I had written out for him pinned to his belly: Deutschland kaputt. Jetzt kommen die Sovjets. Nie mehr Heil Hitler sagen. Sonst machen die Russen Sie tot und fressen sie Ihre Fische auf.

  Dangling from another polled branch was the colonel, with the woman’s naked corpse tied to his body. They had lynched him with a piano string that had cut through to his spinal column.

  I turned and stared at the house. It still looked perfectly intact, although here and there the lace curtains had been torn from the windows. I ran back up the steps and hurled a hand grenade into the hall.

  We were marching through the gate when the explosion sounded. The partisans saw this as the final joke and crowning glory. They started to tug on me and jostle me, asking if I was willing to swap the cameras for anything. I felt that I was going to become very popular.

  I looked back at the house for the last time. All of the windowpanes had been blown out of their frames. I saw bundles of dead raggedy reeds hanging down from the broken ceilings that had depicted heaven. I looked deep into the house’s diseased and dying maw.

  It was like it had been putting on an act the whole time and was only now showing itself as it, in reality, had always been: a hollow, drafty cavern, rancid and rotting at its core.

  AFTERWORD

  BY CEES NOOTEBOOM

  THE DUTCH ARE MEMBERS of a strange tribe that remains essentially unknown abroad. This is the kind of realization that sinks in when you attempt to explain the position and greatness of a writer like Willem Frederik Hermans, who died in 1995 at the age of seventy-three. It is only in their own country that writers grow organically along with their audience, by which I mean that domestic readers generally read a writer’s literary debut first, and only later, the books that follow it.

  Sometimes they also read the reviews, with which they agree or disagree, consider a subsequent book better than or inferior to the previous one, are pleased or disappointed, read everything or give up, approve when they hear that the writer has won an important prize or is being translated abroad – in short, they follow him or her closely, perhaps even rereading his or her books; he or she becomes an inalienable part of the literary landscape of their country. Willem Frederik Hermans was that kind of writer. It is impossible to imagine twentieth-century Dutch literature without him, but abroad he has – completely unjustly – remained largely unknown, a state of affairs to which he himself, with his peculiar, undeviating character, contributed in no small measure.

  A few years before his death, for instance, he refused to allow two books to be published in France because the translation was not fully completed on the exact date stipulated in the contract.

  When someone is only translated late in life, or, in this case, after his death, something strange generally happens. The organic balance is lost, the reader is introduced to the writer through whichever book the foreign publisher happens to have chosen to publish first. Usually people don’t settle on the author’s debut, but prefer a book that was a great success in the author’s own country, often something written at the peak of their career, which naturally disrupts the order in which their books were written.

  That is not necessarily a major problem. On the other hand, it is also the case that the writer, if dead, is obviously unable to travel to the country in question for book launches, interviews, or TV appearances. That makes them much less visible for a foreign audience. If the foreign critics notice the writer all the same, and readers find the book gripping, and if the publisher publishes a second book after that first one, and then another, the readers in that foreign country will ultimately be able to form an impression of the writer’s body of work. Here in the Netherlands, much of Calvino has been translated in this fashion and virtually the entire oeuvres of Borges and Nabokov are available in all kinds of languages. Still,
this course of events can sometimes have peculiar consequences, particularly if the writer is still alive. In 2005 I, for instance, had the experience of seeing my very first novel, which I had written fifty years earlier when I was only about twenty, translated for the first time in Italy and Russia, long after a number of my other books. That kind of thing makes a writer very curious: what do readers make of it, what is it like to read something by a twenty-year-old after you have already read the books of that same person at fifty or seventy?

  * * *

  WHAT KIND OF WRITER is Hermans? A Hungarian friend who read The Darkroom of Damocles in German found it of the same order as Céline. I can understand that, although with Hermans there’s no question of any kind of anti-semitism, which immediately negates an important part of that comparison. Céline’s name popped up regularly in the German reviews too, probably because Damocles – like An Untouched House and his other masterpiece, The Tears of the Acacias – took the war as its theme, with all its horrors. And although Hermans’s prose is not as breathless and ecstatic as Céline’s, his cool and at times almost forensic style cannot mask the pathos.

  The absurdity, cruelty, and pointlessness of war are ratcheted up in his books; it’s not just the main characters, readers too are unable to escape the vicelike pressure. Hermans went against the prevailing mood in the postwar Netherlands by precisely and compellingly describing not the heroic aspects of those days, but the folly of it all, the bungling, the pointless fumbling in what he called a sadistic universe, the chaos in which human lives are played out when the semblance of order called civilization has been breached.

  The phrase sadistic universe, which continued to echo through his entire oeuvre, was the title of a 1951 essay, which he reworked in 1961. This essay includes the following passage that shows very clearly the kind of author we are dealing with: “But even in a world without war and fascism, year after year millions of people come to a dismal end, without anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. The millions who are forced to continue living in a miserable fashion are mentioned at most with occasional generalities that are largely meaningless to those of us who remain better off than those unfortunates.” And in a 1952 short story, “An Attempted Landing on Newfoundland,” the nameless protagonist, who is on a ship and evidently charged with supervising the loading of a large quantity of timber: “In moments like this, a person gets the impression that only recklessness, the insane, totally futile, impossible undertakings, can provide dignity and that everything else that can happen in a life is mimicry and slavish routine.” Totally futile undertakings. It is no stretch of the imagination to say that Hermans probably included writing, too, in that category. But that also makes it one of the few things from which one can derive dignity. Because, despite his avowed belief in the pointlessness of everything, he produced an enormous body of work: poetry, essays, novellas, novels, plays, and endless polemics, and with the novels in particular, he continued to obsessively polish them with every reprint, even if the literary pathologists who bend over his work, anatomizing it down to the last full stop and comma, insist he wasn’t entirely consistent in this – something that would have agitated him immensely.

  * * *

  HERMANS WAS BORN in 1921 and experienced the war and the occupation of the Netherlands from beginning to end. He was an extremely keen observer and in his great novels of the war he would draw on many of the images he remembered. As the universities were closed during the occupation, he wasn’t able to conclude his studies in physical geography until after the war had ended, and it was during these empty years that he began writing. His first great books were real bombshells in the Netherlands. The country was not ready for this vision of the war; Hermans’s depiction of the resistance was diametrically opposed to the nation’s heroic dream of itself. The critics were scandalized; the work was considered pornographic, obscene, unpatriotic; he was fouling his own nest. At first, various publishers refused to publish it. When questions were later asked in the Dutch parliament about his supposed neglect of his duties as a lecturer at the University of Groningen and he once again rubbed the country the wrong way with his book about the Dutch colonial war in Indonesia (with the telling title I Am Always Right), he was left with a rankling bitterness toward the country that “was too small to mean anything,” a permanent fury that came out in grim polemics against everyone and everything and finally led to his voluntary banishment to Paris and, later, Brussels, from where he continued to harass his fatherland and especially the mandarins of Dutch literature with letters, diatribes, and polemics. He summed up his attitude to life or, if you like, his credo, with one potent sentence that couldn’t be clearer: “Creative nihilism, aggressive pity, total misanthropy.”

  In his archives, which the scholars are now studying, it is all preserved, thirty meters of coagulated anger, but thank God, more than just that. The pity, aggressive or not, concealed a kind of disappointed love, a word he himself would never have used. He also had a playful side, and in his magnificent apartment in Paris, those who managed to stay out of his bad books encountered a somewhat lonely Dutch gentleman who lived among his ever expanding archive and an enormous collection of typewriters. Despite his reputation as a bully, he could be extraordinarily charming; he loved strolling through the city and wrote about it with obvious pleasure; his publications included many curious bibliophile booklets; he was a talented amateur photographer and had, for some publications, adopted the elegant pseudonym Father Anastase Prudhomme S.J. In short, he amused himself, and that might be why his later books, with that same aura of absurdism, realism and surrealism, nonetheless grew milder.

  But the fatherland four hundred kilometers to the north, where he had become very famous in the meantime, continued to preoccupy him and, like a very Dutch headmaster, he kept a close watch over it, if only to give a rap on the knuckles to anyone who made a mistake in their French or dared to cast a shadow over some part of his hero Multatuli’s oeuvre, which Hermans seemed to know by heart. He was not going to forget the things he had felt as injustices against him and he definitely wasn’t going to forgive them. By that time he had already made eternal fools of his many adversaries in a self-published book of photomontage he called Mandarins in Sulfuric Acid, which in itself was the only form of immortality most of that human citrus would ever know.

  * * *

  THE NOVELLA An Untouched House was written in 1950, soon after the great novel The Tears of the Acacias. Here too the hero is nameless, here too war and chaos dominate. It is unclear where exactly the story is set. And although the city of Breslau is mentioned, what matters most is that it is a kind of no man’s land, a region between the fronts where lawlessness reigns, occupied in turn by Germans, Russians, and partisans. The main character and first-person narrator is part of that last group, and although there is talk of “the sergeant” and “a uniform,” any kind of clear command structure breaks down almost immediately in the chaos of aerial attacks, tanks, and Russians who execute partisans, with everyone trying to get through it alive. The narrator does not seem to have any particular ideology. Neither does he hate the enemy. Survival is all. Amid the grisly confusion, his faculties of observation continue to work with icy precision, and that turns the house where he takes refuge into the story’s second main character. The house has been abandoned and it is so large it takes him a long time to scout it out. The narrator wanders through its rooms, finds food and clothing and, despite the fact that one door remains locked to him, makes himself so thoroughly at home that he finds it easy to pose as the owner when the front moves again and Germans arrive to requisition rooms.

  Hermans now elevates the absurdism to a climactic pandemonium of folly, murder, and destruction, and never once does the reader feel that it could never have happened like this.

  About The Darkroom of Damocles I once wrote “riddles that remain unsolved, inescapable destinies, surreal intrigues, always coming back to helpless insignificant people, the vi
ctims of ‘malice and misunder-standing’ – another Hermans title – with never a catharsis in sight, this was the quintessence of his oeuvre,” and An Untouched House is no different, or rather, even worse, because this story ends in an apotheosis of random cruelty that is unparalleled in literature. At the end of all these horrors the hero is wearing his partisan’s uniform again and marching back to war. The house remains behind, burnt out and ruined, the German colonel hung with a piano string, the wife of the actual owner strangled and strung up next to him, naked – a situation that recalls the end of Mussolini – and next to them the almost hundred-year-old occupant of the locked room, with a note pinned to his corpse that the hero wrote in an attempt to save his life, three dead inhabitants of a sadistic universe where there is no possible escape from malice and misunderstanding, in any case, not in this book.

  * * *

  THE INTRODUCTION to the first part of the Collected Works of W.F. Hermans, which will consist of 24 volumes, includes the following lines: “In all of his work, from his moving first stories on, one can see that the writer was convinced that he was facing life alone.” That is definitely the case. But there was also a romantic Hermans, someone he never gave a real chance, simply because he didn’t believe in it. The sword could always fall, at any moment, there was no solace anywhere and it would always prove fatal. This is not a cheerful message, but as that same introduction said: “He saw it as his task to convince his readers of this. He lashed them with the truth.” His doing that in a number of magnificent books is the testament he left behind in a time when the delusions of evil and irrational terrorism have given the message of meaninglessness a bitter topicality.