I can still see in that spick-and-span front room our chairs with the addition of a few borrowed ones standing in three rows, I can see the glasses, the piles of cakes on the sideboard, and the winks that my sister directed from me to those cakes and then to her mother, to whom she paid more attention than usual at this critical moment. My father sat smoking his cigar in his shirtsleeves, to save his dress coat. Meanwhile it was unlikely that any of us would be shown to the visitors, unless there was a sudden fire. In the ball gown she was wearing Sophie looked beautiful and distinguished to me, and most of all happy. After all, all the ignominy caused her by non-greeting dignitaries would be erased! I can still see the white cloth she threw over her head during the final dusting; I can still smell the sausages in the kitchen, I can hear the sailing ship rattling in alarm at every hurried step, until my father picked it up and put it on the floor, revealing for the first time how old and dusty it had become under the jar. And then I heard that first ring at a quarter past eight, loud, triumphant, hungry – it was a lad who had come to settle a bill, for which my father had to go downstairs, to his office for a while – and suddenly I knew that no one would come, no one! It wasn’t a powerful and irrational premonition, not a mysteriously predicting voice; no, it could be deduced perfectly logically from our gleaming paraffin lamp, from my father’s shirtsleeves, from the discount the lad would be given, from the sand over the signature on the seal! I no longer dared look at anyone. I had identified so intensely with them that the strings had suddenly snapped; the uncertainty and the inferiority complex, which usually tormented them, now invaded me. I was overwhelmed by the groundless fear of the dependent child, who cannot intervene when its parents are threatened. A piercing pity for my sister was added to it, something I had never known before. Perhaps this was the moment when I freed myself from the context of youth and became an adult – if such a moment exists … But then everything was over again, as suddenly as it had begun – and I imagined as stubbornly how ‘To us with love our God looks down’ and the rest of Psalm 68:10 points to it, having sprung from the brain of Mr Balkom, would nevertheless ring though our rooms, and that when a second bell rang I was already prepared to make an obligatory bow to ‘the Hon. Miss Sticks’, who I saw come rustling in in a kind of dress with a train. This time it was a farmer’s wife who had come to buy three yards of corduroy at the last moment.
I prefer not to remember the half-hour that followed; for me it is laden with ominous tragedy, which far surpassed my own gloomy forebodings. Trivial things particularly, in my memory magnified into blows of fate, affected me deeply. It was almost gruesome to see my father creeping through the rooms in his dress coat, with which he hoped to control events, no further than two paces into the untouchable front room, and then to hear him mumble: ‘They’ll be here, child.’ Although I finished everything in advance, I had started on my schoolwork, already without pulling up my trouser-legs when I sat down, and my mother was dithering by the sausages. Not until my sister, who ran through the whole house like an animal at bay, as if they were all hiding somewhere, after pulling a cloak on hastily had gone to see a girlfriend who lived a few doors away from us and sang with the mezzo-sopranos, did we know where we were.
‘Oh, then it’s been postponed for a week,’ said my father soberly, when my sister had already gone upstairs, ‘if she didn’t know anything, then … it’s been postponed for a week,’ he continued to my mother, who had come in with the sausages and pushed a cake in my direction that tasted of sand. ‘Gerrit Barends’ Nel had got a notification.’
‘And Fietje hadn’t?!’
‘Must be a misunderstanding …’
The following morning, in the middle of a wild dream, in which my sister like the Little Mermaid from Andersen’s fairy tale swam under water to lay flowers on a row of church chairs, I was woken by my mother, who put her head round the door: ‘Be quiet now, Henk. Sophie’s not well.’
I immediately got out of bed and followed her down the hall to ask more questions. After putting her finger to her mouth, she disappeared into my sister’s bedroom. I noticed that I had a pounding headache. Before I went to school, my mother told me that at breakfast Sophie had read an explanatory letter from the Hon. Miss Sticks, but had then become unwell and could not stay up. She gave me details of vomiting and the rest in a tone of lament, as suited her plodding character. My father was not at home. Probably he had, with his carefree cheerful nature, fled the house, the new chilly arrangement of the rooms, which had all assumed something of the aspect of waiting rooms. But that I would be henceforth barred from the sickroom turned out to be a misapprehension. After breakfast my mother brought me a request from Sophie to come and see her, ‘to keep her company’. With a strange feeling of embarrassment I went upstairs on tiptoe and hesitated even after I had turned the doorknob. The smell in that girl’s room was like that around a deathbed; the doctor and the apothecary’s assistant had already been, and my mother sprinkled lavender water on such occasions. I had to walk right round and bump into something twice before I saw the face of the patient, which was not pale as I had expected but dark red, and possibly even more beautiful than the previous evening, about that embroidered nightdress closed up to the neck. Her frequent habit of stretching out her right hand with the thumb completely to one side, seemed to be more imperious now than beseeching, but there was also a theatrical note to it, of which I became vaguely aware, as I sat by her bedside.
‘Henk,’ she said in a loud voice, which made me look round involuntarily at the door, which had been left open, ‘you are the only one who must know. I’m not ill. It was all a sham. You are the only one who can help me. But first you must read this letter, Henk.’
As she said this, she pushed a large sheet of paper towards me, which felt thick; a vague water mark, furtive, constantly and randomly interrupted in an extremely distinguished way made a much greater impression on me than the far more obvious aristocratic coat of arms. I read in proud, spindly writing that hurt the eyes, and as I did I suddenly saw not the muscular Hon. Miss with the grated-cheese cheeks, but the Irish setter of her brother who did not greet:
Young Lady. We have heard from a reliable source that you have been seen a number of times in the evening around our town in the company of a scholar. Without wishing to embark upon a judgement of your behaviour in the present case, we find, after long consideration, that we cannot justify offering you a solo part in our Christmas cantata. On behalf of the committee, A. M. M. Strick van Landsweer.
I sat there speechless, with the paper in my hand. This document far exceeded my scanty experience of life. I wasn’t even sure I knew what a ‘scholar’ was, and I thought rather of one of our teachers than of a schoolboy. Meanwhile, the silence was becoming oppressive. Sophie took the letter back from me and hid it away. Finally I said gormlessly:
‘Is that the Hon. Miss Sticks?’
‘Who else?’ she burst out, pounding on the bedclothes and sliding powerfully forward with her whole sitting body. ‘Such an insult! But it’ll be the death of me; if you don’t help me, I shall drown myself!’
‘No, don’t do that,’ I stammered clumsily, very worried, but suddenly she took my hand and pulled me towards her, bursting into tears. I smelled hair, lavender; I felt a wet, warm cheek, and did not know what to do. I still remember very well that I was mainly moved by her token of trust and because she did not want to play on my sympathy by pretending to be sick. Luckily just then my mother’s voice came from downstairs. I jumped up and went to the door; behind me I heard Sophie’s whispering: ‘Say it’s doing me good!’
After communicating this to my mother, who called up that I must not tire Sophie out, I went back to my chair, wanting more light to be shed on all these mysteries. The light was as unexpected as it was appalling. Eyes open wide, turning round completely to face me, my sister asked:
‘Do you know Hugo Verwey?’
She went on looking at me for some time, but, instinctively concerned to keep a s
ecret which under other circumstances and better prepared I would have been glad to share with her, I didn’t say a word. This precaution acted completely beyond the control of my consciousness. I had started to feel so completely empty and vacant, that for that very reason nothing noticeable can have shown in me. The name Hugo Verwey stripped something bare and paralysed something in me. With my mind empty of thoughts I stared straight ahead, without even making any connection between the name and the scholar with whom my sister had been seen around our town and who was responsible for the Hon. Miss Sticks’ letter. Sophie seemed to have assumed that I knew him, that at least I gradually began to understand. She now spoke very fast, and only afterwards was I able to establish a connection between the fragments I picked up. About two weeks ago Hugo Verwey had spoken to her in the street; since she felt pity for his physical handicap and deduced from his behaviour that he was not common, she had mellowed and had walked along with him; the fact that he was at the grammar school and maintained he knew me was yet another point of contact. Since then she had met him twice, always in the evening. He had not kept his age or his ‘scholarly’ status from her, although neither could constitute a particular recommendation for a girl of almost twenty. As far as I could judge, she had succumbed thoroughly to his charm; but obviously the period of their acquaintance was too short for what one might call more intimate contact; I now write this with certainty: at the time I did not even think of the possibility of such a thing. I was much more interested in who had seen them and betrayed them, a question Sophie was as unable to answer as I was, although I remembered Boudewijn Evertsen’s remark about what Veenstra or Desmet had called out about ‘my sister’. Only much later, knowing relations in our town, did I come to a conclusion based on assumption, which focused mainly on the animosity in the cloth guild. Just as my parents felt slighted by the mayor, squire or district judge, so the Jewish merchants in bombazine were hostile to my father, because he walked past them without greeting; in addition – and in this case this seems to me decisive – a Sara Polak was once voted down by the choir, who was supposedly a sister or cousin of Rusman! So the line from Rusman to Hugo Verwey, to whom he may have pointed out my beautiful sister, ran, after those three walks, back from Hugo Verwey to Rusman, to Sara, to Rebecca, from whoever you like to the Hon. Miss Acheron; that seems to me the diagram of that slander, but who then in heaven’s name was the ‘reliable source’? Oh, let us assume that the pair were noticed by others, let us assume it was the squire’s Irish setter.
When my sister thought I had understood everything, she looked at me with those same big eyes, as if she expected something from me, an outburst of rage, or a long story to comfort her or to justify the ‘behaviour’ of my ‘fellow pupil’. I had a vague feeling that our whole school was involved, the grammar school, which Sophie had until recently so haughtily ignored, but actually I did not do much except repeat to myself: Hugo Verwey, Hugo Verwey – half anaesthetized by that unforeseen fact: that someone else had spoken his name …
‘You must go to him,’ Sophie finally said decisively.
I started. At last everything dawned on me, although I understood nothing of the task with which she seemed to want to entrust me. Was it fear or happiness or embarrassment that made the blood rush to my cheeks? I was all a-tingle, not from a desire to help my sister, but because I was being offered the opportunity to come into contact with him! …
And yet I knew that I wouldn’t dare, I knew that I must not assume this burden, however much I wanted to, with one part of my being …
‘What must I do then?’ I stammered, inaudibly, to gain time. Her eyes flashed angrily over me; then, after a desperate raising of her eyebrows, her mouth and lower jaw set stubbornly and she started explaining patiently to me that her only chance of rehabilitation was for Hugo to go to the Hon. Miss Sticks or to one of the other committee members and make a personal declaration that would remove any suggestion of a dishonourable intention from those evening walks. To my question why did she not write to him or go to him herself, she replied that she did not know where he lived; after the last walk they had made no further assignation, and she did not wish to expose herself again. With a trembling voice, frightened that she would guess my true fear, I told her Hugo’s address, which I had heard of by chance; like a student he lived in rooms, in a side street not all that far from us, and I kept insisting that she should write to him at that address, and explain everything, then everything would be all right and she would be able to sing again! She nodded in agreement at those zealous words, but, whether it was because I said nothing about Hugo himself and acted as if I had never seen him before, or maybe it was because of the feeble way I dismissed her request, she seemed thoroughly disappointed in me. I had far from taken sides when I finally left the room, glad to be free of the conflict! Up to now my feelings for Sophie had been easily neutralized in that solution of rivalry, familiarity, selfishness and teasing: the usual binding and dividing medium between brothers and sisters. And it occurred to me even less to expunge the slur on her good name, since the insult came from people so unassailably far away and grown up, so venerable, and sympathetic too, like Revd Kalmans (whom I lumped together with the choir committee), so aristocratic like the Hon. Miss Sticks – while that other, vague insulter in the background was superior even to them in unassailability …
When after three or four days, on which I saw Hugo Verwey before and after school limping past like a dangerous young god without taking any notice of me, nothing had changed in Sophie’s condition, I realized I wasn’t free of her yet. Because our parents had to be kept out of it, she had determined to stay ill until her honour was restored; that was indeed the best course of action for her, and our old, good-hearted family doctor, who had brought us all into the world, including my mother, was in on the plot. I did not go into the sickroom much any more, but on the fifth day after the tragically failed evening, the bomb burst. Sophie’s face was now very pale and taut, her hand strayed plucking across the covers, like that of a typhus patient, she swallowed a few times, and then handed me another letter, a thin, casually folded sheet this time, which smelled of cigarettes. The manuscript was just as casual, but equally sharp and precise, and in it I read the following:
Dear Miss –. I regret that it is impossible for me to fulfil your request. Apart from the fact that I do not know and do not wish to know the Honourable Lady you mention, I absolutely refuse to defend my behaviour against such unfounded accusations (or accusations founded on prejudice). In that way one is acknowledging the rights of petit-bourgeois thinking. Moreover, my reputation is such that the Honourable Lady would probably not believe a word of my explanations. I can only hope that you will regard this incident with the same contempt as me. Sunt pueri pueri, pueri puerilia tractant. Finally I give you my assurance that I retain the most pleasant memories of our evening walks. With regards, your humble servant Hugo Verwey.
It was a perfidious act by the young god. But of course I did not see through him, for me he remained where he was: on his pedestal. The unspoken accusation of petit-bourgeois standards against my sister too, the cowardly withdrawal, the genial allusion to the evening walks, as if talking to a shop girl, which now collectively constitute one of my bitterest memories, were completely lost on me; I was simply impressed by the cool, clear language, the unheard-of turns of phrase, the supercilious Latin – and mainly frightened of what would follow.
Still pale and taut, Sophie whispered to me that I might as well tear up the letter. As I was putting it away, I resolved to read it five times over. I was still not thinking of taking sides.
‘You must go to him, Henk,’ I heard her cajoling.
Head bowed, I remained looking at my shoes and gradually felt able to take my mind off the letter. I knew how stubborn she was. I also knew that she had every right to appeal to me. Moreover, I had seen all this coming, for days. Before I realized I had agreed, but not from joyful self-sacrificing chivalry! It was a sentence pronounced ag
ainst me, I was in the power of an avenging goddess, with no will of my own, despairing like King Gunther, when he was ordered to kill Siegfried. It surprised me that Sophie could not read my assent in my face. Why, I thought, does she keep bending forward, does she wring her hands so theatrically, when she has complete control of me anyway? Why does she start talking about the water again now? It relieved me inexpressibly, when those twitching movements, which I could not really bear to look at, finally stopped:
‘So you’ll do it, Henk?’
‘Yes,’ I said dully.
‘Promise me?’
‘Yes.’
‘You mustn’t ask if he is going to see the Hon. Miss Sticks, but the vicar. I hate her too much.’
‘And if he doesn’t want to?’
‘Then …’ She stopped for a moment, drew me to her with a grand gesture, so that I was standing over her against the edge of the bed like a horse over the trough, and finished her sentence with a blush: ‘Then you must avenge me. Do you promise me that? Do you swear?’
The words tickled my ear as if I had all kinds of tiny hairs there. The word ‘avenge’, which I knew only from books of cowboys and Indians, meant absolutely nothing to me. But ‘swear’ was already more comprehensible and probably I would have let her have her way if she had talked Greek to me: to be finished with it, no longer to feel the hard wood against my knees, and perhaps because of so many other things. For however oppressive and uncomfortable I was in that embrace, in which I finally ‘swore’, now I look back on it, I know that the whole situation bore the stamp of a sensual encounter, that must have affected me deeply. Unawakened as I was, my soul carried with it nevertheless the almost-awakened state, the should-have-been-awakened state, down to today, and the imagination makes up for what reality was not ready for. I see my sister, long since dead, before me again, as a girl with her black, glowing eyes, her blushing cheeks and firm chin, who hugs me to her and traps me in the scents of her bed, as unconscious as I was of all this … But whatever the case: I had sworn.
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 12