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

by Joost Zwagerman

  ‘Big Henk?’ asked Revd Kalmans, turning his lively blond face with the Van Dyck beard to Henk Evertsen, and briefly bouncing on his toes, which always made him look so young and sporty, without any ceremony, albeit slightly puppet-like. Henk Evertsen thought for less than a second:

  ‘Love, of course, Vicar!’

  ‘Good,’ said Revd Kalmans, and then slowly came towards me via a couple of boys from the trade school and Gerard Steierman. It was a long, bare room in which these questions were asked. Only a faded map of Palestine was visible on one of the walls, in the yellow gas light. On chairs that had undoubtedly borne the weight of many church council members before being considered just good enough for the catechism room, we sat in the usual comfortable disorder, which must not be called disorder here officially – but actually I was not sitting with them, although I knew precisely that I would not say ‘love’. I saw everything through a haze. I had not slept for two nights. What awaited me after this catechism class, I did not want to contemplate – but in any case that I should not say ‘love’ was the minimum requirement, the first step! If I had once practised on the grown-up, the boy would be no trouble. That is why I had wanted to wait until after the weekly religious instruction from Revd Kalmans, which was connected with the church choir and hence was partly responsible, to which Hugo Verwey had to come, according to my sister’s will, which for me was law, since I had sworn. Although I liked Revd Kalmans, for the time being I had focused all my hatred on him; I scarcely knew the Hon. Miss Sticks by sight, and she was in the nobility … But my sister was in bed, and my father was not sleeping well and kept asking what was going to happen about the choir, and twice a day I was summoned to the sickroom to be reminded of something … No, I’d be damned if I would say ‘love’.

  ‘Jard?’ asked Revd Kalmans in a popular tone. He had been held up slightly by the trade school boys with the black smudges over their faces, who got confused about definitions.

  ‘Love, Vicar.’

  The object was to give a description of God. These definitions were the nicest things in the catechism, because you could think for yourself and sometimes debate with Revd Kalmans, and that was why, in all my misery, it disappointed me that Gerard Steierman had not been able to think up a more original reply than ‘love’, which all the others had come out in favour of, down to the most stupid fisherman’s boy – and anyway was the fruit of the previous week’s instruction. I remember one evening when Gerard, almost despite himself, chose pantheism from theism, deism and pantheism, his main argument being that ‘if God was everywhere, he wasn’t actually anywhere’, and then in addition confused Revd Kalmans by asking whether pantheism had anything to do with the pagan god Pan – all in good faith, of course. Unfortunately, the vicar, even when most heatedly contradicted, always gave you the benefit of the doubt in some complicated way, without conceding that he was right, which in the long run was bound to have a paralysing effect, and after all I couldn’t blame Gerard Steierman because love inspired him less than pantheism …

  ‘Little Henk?’ asked Revd Kalmans.

  That was me. I waited for a moment, and then said slowly and bluntly:

  ‘Not love, at any rate.’

  Later I found out that Revd Kalmans had not even known about the Sophie affair, let alone been a party to it; since he was considered ‘liberal’, he was excluded from the obscurantist activities of the church choir. But although there was nothing in his face that indicated he was aware he had an adversary in front of him, for me the victory was complete. In my overexcited state he seemed to me stupid, superficial, smiling inanely, ready with conciliatory words, but he wouldn’t catch me! Surprised muttering had spread along the rows of chairs; Gerard Steierman’s safe round eyes focused on me, as if the penny had dropped and he had wanted to retract his reply. I was so cured of my sleepiness that I did not even think of Hugo Verwey …

  ‘Hmm …’ Revd Kalmans bounced on his toes, and tugged his silver-blond goatee. ‘So do you perhaps have another answer, Henk?’

  He had spoken calmly, happily and confidentially, as if the two of us were alone in that room. Instead of sticking to my negative answer until he had asked for an explanation, I began looking for something new, to crush him even more. So I fell into the trap and the attack on the God of salvation was no longer difficult to repulse.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, bouncing rather impatiently on his toes.

  ‘Justice,’ I said grumpily, mentioning the first abstract concept that occurred to me. Only abstract concepts were valid, as we had decided that amongst ourselves: that God was a quality, a being, not a ‘person’, despite the majority of votes for theism in the past.

  ‘And how do you imagine that God of justice, Henk?’

  Long silence. The slim, black-clad figure moved urgently up and down, and the gold watch was produced, as it was almost eight o’clock, and it was necessary to expand on love; perhaps Revd Kalmans would otherwise have liked a comparative discussion on the God of the Old Covenant and that of the New Testament. With an amicably reproachful frown he glanced at the other end of the table where the mumbling wouldn’t stop. But I already saw no more of all this, and no words took shape in my feverish brain; I felt only the draught that crept coldly under the doors and seized my heart. It was the quiet, cool October evening that I felt around me in that oblong catechism room, the petty-minded town where the grown-ups displayed lack of understanding and hostile intentions – and in it that one street I had to go to after this hollow victory …

  ‘Well, boys, I believe that big Henk had the right end of the stick! God is of course so mighty and inexpressible, and open to different interpretations, and yet … love. The personal, intimate relationship with God … our God …’

  Outside I waved away the noisy questioners and hurried towards the street where we lived. The moon, almost full, was above the houses on my right, the fine mist, which at seven o’clock had still been swirling around, had lifted. I did not know what was more ominous: the shops that had already closed or the shops that were still open. From a direction impossible to identify came the sound of a foghorn. Above our dark shop more dark, and above it, at the top, the yellowish light of Sophie’s bedroom, where a paraffin lamp had been put. I thought of the sailing ship, which was still on the ground in the living room; perhaps it would stay there for the time being and only start clattering again when I had fulfilled my task and Sophie was better … Teeth chattering from the damp night air, I turned into the first side street I came to; the street I was making for, and which ran parallel to it, I could reach by a linking alley a few minutes away. The second street, which I walked through quickly, without realizing that my objective was now right in front of me, was narrower than I had thought, quite dark, and full of handcarts and coils of rope in front of shops. After about twenty paces I made out in the distance outside one of the houses under vague yellow light a group of two or three people; I also thought I caught the sound of their voices now and then. Not from fear, but because I wanted to be certain of the numbers, I turned round, and began right at the far end of the street, where number one was. Praying and pleading that that bunch would not be standing outside his door, I approached; I did not for a moment think of waiting till they had gone. I counted, mechanically, in a dream, every house, every workplace I passed, and would still have made a mistake, but I was already where I had to be, with right ahead of me the face of Jelte Veenstra, with sleepy, wide cow’s eyes in the darkness; I didn’t dare pay attention to the others. I immediately walked around them in an arc to be able to look upstairs unnoticed further on, where the light was coming from and where his room must be. There was gas, a couple of gold flames against dark wallpaper. Behind me the voices resumed their conversation, far away, businesslike, paying no regard to me. When I turned round, the voices fell silent. A hostile silence reigned, there, just six or seven paces from me. Next to Jelte Veenstra I made out not Charles Desmet or Rusman, but a boy from the sixth form called Lodijzer, an import to
o and the commonest sort: a puffy little fatty with bad teeth. The third person was Hugo Verwey, without a hat or cap; the light fell precisely on his dark-brown curly hair, which had a touch of red in it. I saw that he had crossed his legs, but there was nothing wrong or deformed about them, and the way in which he held his right hand with the bent wrist under his brown jacket lapel seemed to me distinguished and charming. As I knew Jelte Veenstra best of the other two, I turned to him:

  ‘Does Verwey live here?’

  Coming closer, I smelled the drink fumes from his mouth; he said something with a slur; the others said nothing. With repugnance I asked the vulgar Lodijzer:

  ‘Does Hugo Verwey live here?’

  Lodijzer looked over my shoulder towards the end of the street, then slowly, very slowly, took out from one of his trouser pockets a wooden pipe, with the stem of which he pointed to the third man, who even now I didn’t dare look at. Then he put the pipe in his mouth and sucked air through it, smacking his lips.

  At that moment something happened that distracted my attention completely. Jelte Veenstra’s slurred mumblings had turned into guttural song: one line of a text I didn’t know, which he kept stupidly repeating:

  ‘What a gor-geous wo-man’s body!’

  He sang it seriously and with a certain devotion. But the words seemed to me so abject, with its grotesque emphases (where the tune, of a popular street song of the time, jumped up and down again in a lively way), that I felt the ground giving way under my feet. While Lodijzer started laughing with the pipe between his teeth, Hugo Verwey took a step forward:

  ‘What have you come about?’

  ‘I wanted a word with you,’ I replied shyly, with my eyes fixed on the ground; now I was not looking at him, he seemed to me made of granite, broad-shouldered, and infinitely bigger than me, although in reality he came just above the shoulder of the tall Jelte Veenstra.

  ‘But I don’t even know you.’

  Of course he knew I was Sophie’s brother. Besides which, hadn’t he said to her at the time that he knew me? It would have made everything much simpler for me if I had pointed out that contradiction to him; then I would immediately have introduced Sophie, as it were in passing, what had seemed the most difficult thing from the very beginning, and then like that with that bunch standing there. But in order to think up such things, I would have had to be much less in awe of his voice, which I had never yet heard properly, and which for all its softness and musicality, was easily audible above the continuing bluster of Jelte Veenstra. Holding on to that unexpected voice, I looked at him pleadingly and was then borne up still more by the absence of the usual taunting trait round the corners of his mouth. There was no contempt in the narrow, mobile face, whose features seemed carved from a fine-flecked raw material with a metallic sheen. It was a face composed of ginger ribbed shells, which ran together, the eyelids, the bags, the flat nose – a seaworthy face, fine and at the same time weathered, repulsive and at the same time of an indescribable charm there in the dark, under that yellow light from his room.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ he repeated calmly.

  ‘Can I speak to you alone?’ I asked in a trembling voice, doing my very best not to listen to that disgusting song or to Lodijzer’s giggling, and to concentrate solely on him. He threw his head back a little and crossed his arms over his chest.

  ‘If it’s about that letter, no.’

  At that point Lodijzer involved himself in the conversation:

  ‘Now you’re in for it, Hugo, she’s sending …’

  ‘You understand that I won’t be forced, Mannoury,’ said Hugo Verwey, without paying attention to the other boy, and in a much louder voice than at first. ‘If I make someone’s acquaintance, I don’t want to be punished by being sent to some Honourable Lady.’

  ‘But there’s no need for that,’ I stuttered zealously, putting out my hand to him, ‘preferably not, in fact … If you’ll just go along to Reverend Kalmans and say …’

  The other two seemed to have been waiting for this. Jelte Veenstra interrupted his song about the woman’s body and started laughing deeply like a drain, gently waggling his vast trunk, while Lodijzer raised his pipe in the air and went on shouting: ‘That’s a good one! Reverend Kalmans. Reverend – what did he say? – Kalmans! Ho, ho, ho, ho!’ They danced and swayed, to the right behind me I saw their great, cowardly shadows moving back and forth. But despite that I held on to the idea of an audience! Just a momentary upsurge that resembled anger, and again I was hanging on the lips of Hugo Verwey. After all he had not laughed, he didn’t look sarcastic, rather there was a hint of pity on his ginger face.

  ‘That makes no difference to me,’ he said.

  ‘So you don’t want to?’ I asked subserviently, on the point of turning round, away from that terrible din behind me.

  Suddenly this was stopped (it turned out to be coming only from Lodijzer; Jelte Veenstra had choked and was hiccupping at intervals) and Lodijzer came forward. Orating with his pipe he explained:

  ‘If she’ll marry you, Hugo, I’ll testify that she …’ And he concluded with an obscenity, which I have by no means forgotten, but which I have excluded from these pages. I turned round and kicked him with all my might in the groin, so that he shot back howling and stood there bent double, with his hands over his stomach. I had not said or shouted anything. But, despite the lightning speed with which all this happened, the feeling of humility towards Hugo Verwey had not yet had time to disappear: it was not a transition that took place in me, it was two halves into which I fell, and even in that fleeting moment a rational link must have been established between the two spheres: anger and slavish adherence. Because I can still clearly remember that I felt I was fighting not for my sister, who was being insulted here, but for him, and not to show him my courage or strongly developed sense of honour, but to defend him, heaven knows from what …

  Just as Jelte Veenstra, who was leaning against a bollard, began his song about the body again, between two hiccups, the sickly, deadly feeling in the belly of the cringer – I knew it from experience – began rising in my own belly. A hand was laid on my shoulder, I looked into a contorted face, heard the words muttered almost with a sob: ‘I’ll teach you, you wretch.’ I received two or three blows on my cheeks, with the flat of the hand, not very hard; two fists bent me slightly forwards and a sharp but sustained kick up my backside took me one house further on, on my knees in front of a different doorstep. He must have done it with his left leg, the non-crippled one. I stayed there for almost half a minute, expecting more. When I got up, the tears were running down my cheeks, but the door was already shut, the street empty. High above me, from his room, where the curtains hung down, there was the sound of muffled voices. Each time the voices grew a little louder, I cringed, but I stayed there, not knowing where to go! Sleeping on the same floor as Sophie was out of the question. The conversation with him still had to take place, there was nothing to be done about that; that was why I had come, and that’s why I was staying, since I now remembered only the disturbance created by Jelte Veenstra and Lodijzer, and his refusal scarcely at all. I went across the street and hid in the entrance to an alley, from where I could keep an eye on the house. As soon as the other two had gone, I would ring the bell and again ask to speak to him.

  The moon had already climbed so high that the glow on the alley walls that were very close together was tangible, when after some stumbling on the stairs the door was flung open. In the darkness of the street two figures came out, first Jelte Veenstra, very much sobered up to judge by his gait, and then Lodijzer, who seemed to be limping, then after a slightly longer interval, a third figure. I now realized that the second figure must be the limping Hugo Verwey, who was going with the others; Lodijzer, who had closed the door behind him, was walking normally again and was not even being supported. When they were ten houses away, I crept from my hiding place in order to follow them at a steady distance. From quite close by a church tower struck nine o’clock. At first sle
epy and chilled from standing against the wall for a long time, I gradually brightened up from this new movement, the changing aspect of the streets. To be sure that they were still walking there, I bent right forward from time to time, enabling me to see their heads outlined against the row of houses on the other side, which were more clearly illuminated by the moon, where the street, close to ours, made a turn with strikingly white gables. But this background too glided past, and now they were almost about to enter our street. Hugo was limping in the middle, as if between his seconds. He was not wearing a cap or overcoat; it had become noticeably close once the mist had lifted. Stationed behind a handcart, I saw them dawdling on the corner; hands were shaken, I caught the sounds of farewell, and Jelte Veenstra disappeared, recognizable from his size, off to the right, while the other two turned left. I immediately ran on tiptoe to the corner on the left, to make sure that they did not elude me in some side street, but the impulse was more attributable to the joy of shortly meeting Hugo Verwey alone, without an escort. It was clear enough: he was going to take Lodijzer, who was either still or no longer in pain, home – in any case it was the obvious thing to do to take someone like that home, after an incident like that. Under the trees of our street I saw them continuing unhurriedly, constantly lit by the street lights. Again I passed my house with the yellow lamplight at the top, the house that banished me until I had kept my promise. But now I had hope again; it was only a matter of minutes, I knew where Lodijzer lived, and yes, they turned into the street that gives the shortest route to the high street. Lodijzer lived not far from Rusman.