The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Joost Zwagerman

  Three days or so later, for want of anything better to do, we had gathered at one of our ditches, just outside the town, Gerard Steierman, myself and the two Evertsen brothers: Henk, a good-natured tree of a fellow, and the slightly younger Boudewijn, who was much smaller and a little vicious. Gerard was just attempting the run-up, holding our only pole ahead of him, when I saw on the other side of the meadow opposite the same threateningly indifferent band from three days before. Waving their arms, legs wide apart like sailors on deck, they approached, with the limper in their midst, his loose jacket flapping around him in that unusual, almost birdlike way. My heart was beating fast. But Gerard too seemed to have smelled a mysterious rat: he slowed down, stopped just before the canal, and began poking the pole in the water, as if he wanted first to kill some deep-sea monsters, before venturing across. At the same moment he turned a stone whooshed between Henk Evertsen and me: the dancing arms of the limper had been looking for a target! Nothing had changed in the listlessly strolling limp, the faintly contemptuous smile appeared on the coppery face, and then another stone came towards us, which plunged into the water, and another, which almost hit Gerard Steierman’s right arm. ‘Stop it!’ shouted Henk Evertsen calmly. But I thought: Don’t shout. It’s not intended for you, that stone. It’s a gift from that boy to me …’ Because I had seen it: the movement of throwing, without any effort or design, almost as a component of the limping ritual, again expressed the same contempt; it was the movement with which one shoos away a dog, with which the French marquesses of the ancien régime threw mouldy bread to the rabble … I hadn’t for a moment noticed him pick up the stones; perhaps those with him handed them to him unobtrusively … ‘Come on, Jard,’ said Henk Evertsen abruptly and yet calmly. The attackers had stopped – but after all it was ridiculous to think of attackers here; it was simply unheard of with us, it wasn’t that kind of school! Blinking at the sky with his round eyes, Gerard also seemed to be engaged in this sum of experience, resulting in a theoretically absolutely guaranteed safety on the other side of the canal. Nevertheless he made his run-up slightly longer now, so that all three of us expected to see him swerve aside at the very last moment. A cry went up from the four of them, as he set off at a jog; the boy with the brown face limped forward, almost to the fringe of mud that separated the canal from the higher meadow, slipped on the edge and stopped there. The idea was that the jumper should land on the higher section. ‘Come on, Jard!’ Gerard Steierman, who really had turned back for the second time, nodded reassuringly, as if he now knew exactly how to tackle this ditch. Meanwhile, I could make out the face of the boy with the limp well; it was open to me as it were, although he wasn’t looking in my direction. The dark brown eyes were squeezed shut in concentration, at the corner of his mouth was the taunting smile, but the whole face, held backwards in anticipation, had something so tender and feminine about it, that one would have attributed the strange ginger-brown glow to nothing as much as shame. His shoes were almost entirely in the water. The other three, who kept at a distance, jeered in turn: ‘Who’s next?’ – and Henk Evertsen kept yelling back: ‘For goodness’ sake, stop it. Who’s done anything to you?’ – fairly senselessly, since no one was throwing any more, and the boy with the limp stood there as if he was going to catch sticklebacks with his bare hands. To loud cheers, Gerard, who had gone beetroot red at the cries of encouragement with which Henk Evertsen alternated his yells, took the long run-up for the third time. After entering the water at an angle, the pole seemed to settle deeper in the mud on the bottom than usual – too deep. Legs slightly thrashing Gerard floated against a steep, recalcitrant slope, but he had already passed the dead point and his own weight must now deposit him if not on the edge of the meadow then on the mud a few metres to the side of the newcomer. Suddenly the latter leaped up, leaned far forward, stretched his right arm out straight and grasped the pole between the two places where Gerard’s hands were gripping the thing. For a moment the arm bent a long way, then, trembling and tugging, it was stretched out again, vertically. The fist, compressed till it was white as a sheet, held the pole at an angle of forty-five degrees so firmly that the jumper’s only option was to slide down slowly into the muddy water. It was something for a philosopher. He wriggled to and fro like a monkey! I wasn’t able to see the attacker’s face properly again, but I am sure that it had not lost that mocking expression and that strangely feminine, slumbering in anticipation, and that glow of shame. Fortunately everything turned out better than one could have imagined. What we witnessed next was a tour de force. On the point of sinking helplessly into the water, Gerard was grabbed by two strong fists, swung in one go and deposited on the middle of the dry area of the fringe of mud; the pole was left trembling, and then leaned a little to the left. All of this was done so quickly and with such dexterity, that we could not help giving in to the impulse to join in with the cheers from the other side. Only Henk Evertsen swore under his breath and had one foot forward, as if he were going to help the victim with a free jump over the ditch. Not a hair on Gerard’s head had been harmed, though. Without a splash on his clothes he was able to scramble onto the meadow, where the other boy, after having wiped his hands on each other, had already preceded him. And there he was, hopping around, accompanied by the other, a strange brown insect in that flapping jacket. True, Desmet and Veenstra were still yelling mocking words at us, but their leader seemed not to want to spoil the effect of his intervention; they were also too far away for us to hear. Or had Boudewijn Evertsen caught something! As we went slowly home, talking things over – with the pole, which had been difficult to retrieve, as a nearly dishonoured trophy between us – he suddenly said to me, ‘Did you hear what they called out about your sister?’ I shook my head and saw his brother silence him with a dig in the ribs. Completely full of the spectacle on the canal bank, I didn’t give it any more thought: the well-known boy’s attitude of ignoring sisters outside the home was still very much mine; apart from which, I knew that Boudewijn was not averse to malicious inventions.

  Three days later school began. The first few weeks following this were so dominated by the figure of Hugo Verwey – that was his name – that I noticed hardly anything of the other things happening around me. It was said that he was the son of a senior army officer and must already be over eighteen. No one knew where he came from, but the cause of his deportation could not remain a secret. Drink, women, stealing: those were the three cardinal sins, besides the usual street and school violations, and in this case it was ‘women’ – girls. But who? Well, I don’t have to repeat all those stories; let it suffice to say that amid the most scabrous bluster of his comrades, a rude word never crossed his lips, and that may prove more than a whole list of peccadilloes. Those obsessed by women don’t talk about them. Anyway, at Hugo Verwey’s age all this is determined less by unsatisfied sensuality, that must be expressed at all costs, if necessary in words, than the urge to act, courage and enterprise, and that he possessed those, everyone could convince themselves with their own eyes.

  Our gymnastics teacher, a moustachioed ex-sergeant, would have gone through fire for him, and certainly not because his father was a former superior, because he didn’t give two hoots about that. Rather it was his exploits in the gym, up the double giant swing, to which his physical handicap gave a very special glory. With everything involving that one paralysed group of muscles, he of course dropped out: he was an excellent oarsman but could swim scarcely if at all. Our sergeant called him ‘a courageous sportsman with his arms, a crane, boys!’ – he said this in a hoarse and emotional tone. And then, if one was reluctant to be impressed by this, there was still the school: his behaviour in the fourth form, which could be admired at second hand by the lower forms. As far as I have been able to ascertain, his main speciality was teaching our teachers manners – our young, alert, good-natured teachers! Mr Ramacher, a short, fat chap who taught Dutch in a lively carefree way, was in the habit of sitting on the table in front of the class with his legs cros
sed. Since he had once thought of himself as a man of letters, he wore his hair long. He had small, insignificant, unseeing eyes, but that doesn’t explain why Hugo Verwey, sitting at his feet in the front row, was able to grab one of those long blond hairs from the fat thigh with impunity and, pulling a face, dropping it on the ground between his thumb and forefinger! No, the teacher had seen it, but didn’t dare stand up to his groomer: that was our explanation, and I still believe it was the right one.

  But here I must add that at the time such evidence of his impudence made scarcely any impression on me. I was satiated with impressions; I was satiated with Hugo Verwey himself, with his image. I dreamed of him not because of what he did, but what he was! It would actually have been more agreeable to me if he had not been at the centre of general attention: now I didn’t have him all to myself! He never paid attention to me any more, when he hobbled up and down before school in his brown sports jacket, with his small retinue milling around him, whose swaying bodies seemed to express as much dislike of the offensive chore to which this young prince was condemned, like the clearing of the throat and spitting out of curses, that one would never hear from him; for that matter he spoke so little that I can’t even remember his voice from that first period. Never again did I stare into those cold, alert eyes with the bags under them. But the more inaccessible he seemed, the more he filled me. It caused me a tantalizing fear to summon up that face disguised with freckles, which had been focused on me for a moment, as a challenge, an order, a condemnation. I pondered with great concentration, as if my thought had to bore through that strange, supercilious mask. Who was he? What had the boy been through? What did he feel and think? His eyes pursued me, mocking, searching, indicting, hiding and revealing secrets at the same time. Each meeting was a new surprise, became an anxious festive event, something that could only happen once – and yet it repeated itself. I abandoned myself to strange daydreams in which I found Hugo Verwey alone, on the seafront, and walked and talked with him, as I did with Gerard Steierman. No others there, no retinue! Because I realized vaguely that in that case the newcomer would be quite different, that he might tell me what had driven him to this town and why he wore such a mocking expression, so stiff and also listless, and why he despised me. Had thought he despised me – because there could of course be no question of contempt now! A friend? Yes, for the first time I longed for something of the kind – Gerard, the philosopher, had always been more of a pastime, an intellectual game on the surface, for which anyone is suitable. This exceptional Hugo Verwey, however, was intended for me alone, though he was two or three years older than me. I never set out to get to the bottom of this feeling, but I know now, I know, as if it is written in a book: it was love, it was precisely the same thing one can feel for women, just without the sensuality. The lack of focus that characterizes Eros at that age: I experienced it physically – no, not physically: in my mind.

  To lay everything at his feet, to make myself his slave for all eternity, this burning desire took my thoughts to bolder heights than atomic theories! The image of Hugo Verwey gave my life at the time a breadth only apparently belied by the poignant, sharp-pointed nature that characterized that image. It was as if a narcotic fluid that blurred everything entered me though a sharp hypodermic needle. When I looked at him I had the definite sensation in my mind of itching or mild pain, very localized, on the right or left. But when I thought about him in solitude, everything became wide open and happy, with an indescribably ethereal tingle, which one feels when one is about to undertake a journey or is contemplating a huge turnaround in one’s life.

  The very fact that I was not ashamed and kept my condition secret so as not to have to trouble anyone with riddles, proves my complete lack of awareness of the abysses that this obsession contained within it. I would not have been able to explain it, and I did not even consider ‘love’ as a possibility. If someone had carefully described to me what I was feeling, I would have been grateful to him, even though he would immediately know everything. After about a month I suddenly thought that my sister knew, because she was so cheerful, but perhaps she had caught that cheerfulness from me, so I thought, and it came as quite a surprise when she said: ‘What a long face you’re pulling’ … After that I adopted a forced exuberance for twelve hours, without, though, being able to compete with her in any way. She sang as if she wanted to crack the walls; she went round the whole time with urgent messages, which did not yet exist, or still had to be formulated; her bustle was equalled only by her fury if one cast doubt on the point of it. Cause: the soprano part, which she had been assigned in the Christmas cantata for the first time, an idiosyncratic composition consisting of psalm texts set by the singing teacher Balkom to his ‘own’ music! Was she not now the equal in edification of Revd Kalmans himself, and of ‘the Hon. Miss Sticks’, the president of the small Protestant church choir, and in weightiness of stiff admonitions? That’s what she herself thought (I found out later that not even this was true: it was just the reflection of our teasing, which shaped the receptive nineteen-year-old from outside); but when she came dashing into the room feverish with joie de vivre, she looked more like a Maenad with her hair up, and my mother had to raise her hand, and my father looked at the sailing ship, which stood rattling in its case like an oracular genie from the Arabian Nights in its jar. And although I saw little of her, because I saw only the other person, her dark-red cheeks and moistly glistening eyes sometimes bored their way through everything, and what else could I do but complete the triumphantly booming line: ‘To us with love our God looks down’, with the loudly bleated: ‘And Sophie in the tub will drown’ – whereupon she would chase me through the whole house, until the shop assistant came upstairs to say that the children mustn’t play in the shop any more as a roll of twill had fallen over.

  She surprised me most when, one long October evening, she started talking about the grammar school; that had never happened before. The two of us were sitting at the living-room table, I with my schoolwork. She stretched out her open hand and said sarcastically: ‘How learned you’re going to be, Henk. Professor Mannoury!’

  ‘Hasn’t that got a ring to it? Oh, but Gerard is much more learned; he thinks up things about physics, doesn’t he, and about atoms! We never even had that subject at school.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to be an officer?’

  ‘An officer?!’

  ‘Then you can ride back and forth to Breda, or can’t you do that? Or a naval officer – oh no, you hate the sea, and on land you’re not happy either …’ Cheerful and excited, she started going on in her usual way, then she stretched out her arms so that the material of one of our finest silk blouses stretched across her bosom (she had never worn silk before, I suddenly saw it and thought of the cantata), breathed deeply and seemed to be listening. I heard a step in the shop, a few words were exchanged with the assistant, who had the evening off and was about to leave, and then there was the same step on the stairs.

  ‘There’s Mother!’ cried Sophie with delight. She leaped towards the door singing and was gone. A little later her voice sounded from the kitchen, alternating with my mother’s calming sound. In the falling dusk, which turned my paper blue in the gloomy frame of the worn plush, in which there were still a few crumbs sticking, I went on working. The tobacco smell of my father’s snorting pipe was something static, something dead, but softly and insistently the sailing ship rattled on the wardrobe, carried in waves that rose from the kitchen. I couldn’t get Sophie’s unfortunate allusion out of my mind and more than ever I was aware of the sea surrounding all this. Perhaps I was scared of the sea; if I could not row and swim so well, I would have been predestined to drown, or to taste death by drowning to its extremes, like that fisherman on the Gravel Bank covered by the sea at high tide, who pulled off his boots under water and started seeing all kinds of lovely flowers and himself as a boy. Then they stumbled upstairs again; the door was flung wide open, and a clarion call dispelled the dreams:

  ‘Ca
kes! Cakes, Henk!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Cakes! Next week! You mustn’t eat anything in the afternoon …’

  Not until a day later did I find out that the next rehearsal of the choir was to be held at our house. There weren’t enough funds to keep renting rooms and our front room was spacious and high-ceilinged. As she not only presided, but also actually joined the altos, ‘the Hon. Miss Sticks’ was also coming. Distinguished visitors, then. Various changes were made to our collective wardrobe; a first pair of long trousers for me, for it was of course quite possible that this person or that would bump into me, although my part was confined to the cakes. I vaguely understood that Sophie, instead of informing me immediately, so exposing herself to my mockery, had first wanted to express her enthusiasm in a different way, and I was strengthened in this opinion by her further behaviour: Mr Balkom and the Honourable Miss Acheron were now the trump cards, in regard to me too; there was no more talk of the officer and the naval officer.