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

by Joost Zwagerman

  ‘Feeling chipper?’ cheered Ferry.

  ‘Chipper than a chip,’ replied Tip.

  ‘Are you suffering from porky trotters?’ asked Melisande.

  ‘A diehard’s skinny little legs is what I call mine,’ Tip said solemnly.

  ‘Gorging your way through Cheddar Gorge?’ asked Miel.

  ‘My name is young Tip Jones, and I’m made of twigs and bones,’ Tip called out as cheerfully as he could.

  ‘My nose,’ screamed Ferry, ‘my nose is made of wood!’ and then he stepped back, and Tip crowded into the corner with five others, and Ferry squealed out:

  ‘Fattybum, who pinched the pig,

  He wasn’t clever but he …’

  and he was already starting to trot. ‘… sure was big!’ he roared, giving Tip a wallop that really hit home. And Tip merrily barrelled backwards, as required, and slapped his behind into the wall with such a resounding thump that a cry of delight went up in the pen with Ali 4 and the little piglets.

  ‘Record! Record!’ Tip heard Chervil shouting.

  The pigs in Tip’s pen also went wild when they heard such a big thump, and Planta shouted ‘Encore’ and Tip obediently walked back and began to squeeze his way in among the others. Now it was Planta’s turn to do the run-up.

  ‘Fattybum …’ he cried … ‘who pinched the pig …’ But he couldn’t go on because he was laughing too much, and he had such a fit of the giggles as he came stumbling up to Tip, that he could only give his body a barely noticeable nudge. But Tip was on a roll! He raced backwards even faster and blasted his buttocks into the wall, like a clap of thunder. It was so bad that he soon felt the blood rushing to his head, and, though he still heard his friends rejoicing, with once again Chervil’s cry of ‘Record! Record!’ loudest of all, he had to take some time to come to his senses. He didn’t notice when everything suddenly went quiet. The partition at the front had been removed and the farmer stepped into the pen and, pointing at Tip, he said to the man who was following him: ‘He’s going to bruise his behind. Come along, lad,’ he said then, taking Tip firmly by one ear.

  Now all Tip could hear was Mort who, angered by the commotion next door, was cursing away: ‘Bowel brushes, stubble stinkers,’ all in a filthy tone. Tip wanted to fight back, to scream, to get his ears torn off like Jaap, to stay put, to make a nuisance of himself, to bite, to squeal, to raise merry hell, to curse, to shit, to roll around. He wanted to do all of those things and he wanted to do them all at once. But he did nothing. Without looking back, he trotted out of the pen, into the barn, and through the door to the light. Faster even than Simon Artzt yesterday. Another man stood outside the door beside the lorry from ‘Export Meat, formerly Taat Brothers’.

  No one had ever seen a pig do that before, all in one go: run out of the barn, dash up the plank into the lorry, and lie down, flat as can be, on the planks, among the other pigs that were already inside. They were also the fattest ones, but from different pens.

  There was some confusion in Tip’s pen when the partition was safely back in place. No one spoke.

  ‘That Tip,’ Melisande said finally.

  ‘You could have fun with him,’ said Planta.

  ‘He never got angry. He never got angry one single time, even when he was the fattest,’ said Ferry.

  ‘My my, we had so much fun with that Tip,’ said Miel.

  Now that it was a little quieter, Mort, in the pen next door, began his game of sobbing and shrieking with great gusto.

  ‘Has Mr Tip gone?’ asked Chervil, who, to everyone’s surprise, was suddenly able to look over the partition today after all. But he could see that for himself, so no one replied.

  ‘Absolutely, my oh my, we had so much fun,’ cried Dolores.

  ‘Mr Tip has the record,’ said Chervil, but then he tipped over onto his back and into his own pen.

  ‘Who’s the fattest one now?’ asked Planta.

  ‘Ferry, I think,’ said Melisande.

  ‘Then we’re really going to have some fun,’ said Mr Medlar, and they all looked expectantly at Ferry, who was now the next in line.

  Translated by Laura Watkinson

  11

  Hella Haasse

  The Portrait

  Het portret

  I couldn’t remember ever having seen it before, and yet it seemed familiar. The nurse gave it to Charlotte, the day after Father died. She said it had been in his bedside cabinet throughout those last few months. He sometimes asked for it, held it for a while. By then he could barely see.

  ‘Not family, definitely not family,’ says Charlotte, and she should know, as she keeps a record of our genealogy. Several times a day, she takes the portrait out from under the paperweight and peers at it through her reading glasses: ‘Who could they be? A man with a cap on, in shirtsleeves, with braces, a woman in a hideous shiny black pinafore, and a couple of children. It must be one of Grandfather’s servants, maybe a gardener. Someone’s written “1915” on the back. Our place in the country was still there back then.’

  Bertus reacts with a shrug of the shoulders and an irritated sigh.

  ‘I want to know. I can’t bear it,’ says Charlotte over and over. ‘Why did Father have those people in his bedside cabinet? You know what he was like, never had any portraits around, not even of Mother or the grandchildren. Look, you can see some kind of little house in the background, a brick wall with a window, part of a fence. Was there a gardener’s house on Grandfather’s estate? You must be able to remember, Bertus, you used to stay there. You were six in 1915, no, seven.’

  When Charlotte starts talking like that, Bertus closes his eyes, as if he wants to hide away inside himself. Charlotte knows no mercy; as soon as she notices he doesn’t want to do something, or doesn’t want to talk about something, she bombards him with questions, rooting around in the protective layers he tries to put up around himself. It’s not a desire to torment, and it’s not pig-headedness. Bertus’s inability or unwillingness to answer often seems to open up chasms of insecurity in Charlotte, and then she requires reassurance. Usually it’s about some trivial matter. A frightened child can suddenly be seen inside that elderly woman with the grey hair and the firm gestures. I know how it feels, I’m familiar with that doubt. You don’t expect it from Charlotte, though.

  Of course, Bertus could not be persuaded to recall any childhood memories at first, a guaranteed means of setting Charlotte off. Then, as a result of her insistence, and with obvious reluctance, a few reminiscences finally struggled to the surface: ‘There was an old dog in a kennel. A brick path with dahlias on both sides. And a ditch full of duckweed, where you could catch frogs. Redcurrant bushes …’

  Charlotte, impatient, unsatisfied: ‘But don’t you remember anything about the property itself? I mean, the house and the park? There must have been an orchard. Father sometimes used to talk about them eating their own fruit. Of course there was a gardener.’

  Bertus glanced at her when she said that, with the look he seems to reserve especially for her, an expression of incredulity and pity. ‘Not as far as I know,’ he said.

  Charlotte wanted to show him the portrait for the hundredth time: ‘Here, look at it. Take a good look. Don’t you recognize anything? That privet hedge and those spindly dahlias must belong to the gardener’s cottage, but you can see tall trees behind the fence …’

  Bertus doesn’t lose his patience very easily, but on that occasion I saw him push Charlotte’s hand away in a flash of anger. ‘Why should you care, woman?’

  Charlotte became visibly more nervous; she spoke to me over Bertus’s head: ‘Well, do you understand, Elza, why Father wanted to keep this near? He never did anything without a reason. 1915. What was going on at the time? I was two. Wasn’t that when Father began expanding the business?’

  ‘You’re forgetting that I was born in 1930,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about what you and Bertus call “the old days”.’ I took the portrait from her hand to put it back under the paperweight, a chunk of glass,
polished into a hemisphere. I could see the man’s face, greatly magnified, and part of the little girl he was carrying in his arms. He looks as if he’s just said to the child: Watch the birdie! The smile in his eyes is for her alone, and for the chubby little hand she’s pressing to his left cheek. ‘A kind man,’ I said, but Charlotte was following her own train of thought: ‘Father may have had obligations we know nothing about.’

  Bertus muttered something behind his newspaper.

  ‘Is that such a strange thought?’ Charlotte snapped.

  ‘Not as far as anyone’s aware, so don’t get yourself all worked up. It’s not going to cost you a cent,’ Bertus said tersely, a bull’s-eye. Charlotte rubbed her handkerchief between the palms of her hands: ‘As if it’s myself I’m thinking of first and foremost! It’s the children I’m concerned about. It wouldn’t be the first time Father’s given us a nasty surprise.’

  Bertus: ‘Oh, so you’re going to bring that up again, are you?’

  Charlotte: ‘The boys were only small in 1945, but they could understand enough about what was going on. It’s twenty years ago, and thankfully people think differently now, but even so …’

  Sometimes being blind and deaf would be a blessing.

  The execution of Father’s will is in full swing. There’s little more than his house, the house where all three of us were born and raised. Charlotte keeps bringing it up, saying we should go and live there now. She thinks it’s important, ‘a legacy for the children’, her children. Bertus can at least express his discomfort through his usual dislike of change and commotion. He’s worked out what it would cost to make the house habitable again, after having been neglected for so long and left partially empty: renovation and repairs, installing an oil-fired heater, maintenance. ‘You’ll be more comfortable here in the flat with me, Charlotte, we’re not getting any younger …’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of myself, but the children.’ As always, that’s Charlotte’s strongest argument, she’s the only one of us to have married and had children, and therefore also the only one, or so she thinks, who understands life and is qualified to pass judgement. While she talks and talks, Bertus and I glance at each other now and then; summoned up by Charlotte’s strident female tones, the walls with their dark wooden panelling grow all around us again; the spiral of the staircase winds like a snake from the cellar to the stained-glass dome high on the roof; the symmetry of corridors and rooms, doors, balconies is as claustrophobic as ever, all the lines vanishing at a single point beyond the horizon; whatever is close and within reach is sharp, delineated, cold. In her mind, Charlotte has apparently reorganized everything, allocating a domain to each of the three of us; in the remaining rooms she envisages her elder son (in business) receiving clients, her grandson (later) throwing parties for his fellow students and for his graduation, her granddaughter (in an even more distant future) getting married, her second son (now in America doing laboratory research) with his wife and offspring on a European sabbatical.

  ‘My God,’ is all that Bertus says, and then Charlotte starts to get upset: ‘I know that means nothing at all to you as a bachelor, I don’t expect anything else, but maybe just for once in your life you could consider that, having become a widow at such a young age, I’ve had to deny the children so many things they were entitled to. I feel obliged to Sander’s memory …’

  As soon as I came of age, I left. What little self-respect I have is based on the fact that I succeeded in getting by without any support from my father and financed my own education. I don’t want to go back to those corridors with their long lines of antlers, which in the winter seem to continue in the branches of the trees along the avenue. There were too many locked doors in that house during the years after the war when I lived there on my own with Father. The fitted carpets that Charlotte’s already planning to install from cellar to attic will never be able to banish the shuffling echo of the old man’s feet, to say nothing of those other footsteps, before …

  The man in the portrait has bright eyes. His expression is happy yet tired, critical yet resigned. He’s holding the child close, he’s showing her to the photographer, to everyone who wants to see, and he’s telling her to look at what’s there in front of her. But there’s no awareness as yet to be seen on the round little doll’s face beneath the frills of the cap they’ve put on her, to protect her from the sun, no doubt. The little boy in the sailor suit is standing up straight and holding the woman’s hand. He does look aware, though, he seems to be tugging at the hand he’s holding, as if he’s just persuaded her to come and join them. There’s something defensive about her posture, she’s pressing her chin down, her brow is painfully furrowed, and not just because of the glaring light. The black satinette gleams over the curve of her chest, the tips of her boots are two shiny squares. When I look through the magnifying glass of the paperweight, I can see more: the rough skin of her large hands, the lines around the man’s eyes, the joints and nails in the weathered planks of the fence behind their heads.

  We did not take photographs and were not photographed. I never stopped to think about it when I was younger, but took it for granted. It was all part of the strange silence and emptiness of our life at home, and the character of my father, who also adhered to a number of other principles that were as inexplicable as they were rigid. When Charlotte brings up the subject of our old house – as she does repeatedly, in the hope of getting Bertus and me where she wants us – I feel a world without perspective moving towards me: with apparent depths and distances, like the stairwell, the corridors, the view through the series of rooms, the prospect behind the many windows, but in reality a flat surface, a trompe-l’oeil. Returning there would mean being forced to exist in a world with fewer dimensions than I need to survive.

  By now, Charlotte is pulling out all the stops. During the last discussion her attacks and recriminations became personal: ‘… I’m simply very different from the two of you. Bertus lives like some little bourgeois fellow, I mean, good gracious, just look at those slippers, as long as you can huddle by the fire with your pipe and your newspaper, you don’t have an ounce of style, and there is, after all, still such a thing as tradition, and Father’s house …’

  ‘Mother’s, actually,’ Bertus said calmly. As usual, Charlotte ignored this remark. She seems to find it shameful that Father moved in with his in-laws after his marriage.

  ‘… is, after all, family property, and there’s something about it that’s …’

  ‘Feudal,’ I said, completing her sentence, but irony is lost on Charlotte.

  ‘And I don’t understand you at all, Elza. You had it the easiest of the three of us, you were the baby of the family, you were allowed to do whatever you wanted. No, don’t pull that face; you clearly don’t understand just how spoiled you were, compared to Bertus and me. But no, you want the other extreme, you have to go to the slums, rough it, for whatever reason. Your foolish dislike of property, your fear of a normal life, not to mention your illness and your other misfortunes … If Bertus and I hadn’t taken pity on you …’

  Mother died of thrombosis soon after my birth. Charlotte was already a married woman with children, and Bertus had grown up and left home, when I was still at primary school. At that time, Father was always engrossed by his business affairs, indulgent out of a lack of interest, generous out of a sense of guilt. But he lives on in my brother and sister’s memories as the unrelentingly strict enforcer of authority. The changes that came after the war could not erase that image of him. They rarely returned home, barely knew the solitary figure mumbling away at his desk, the grey-haired old man shuffling from room to room. I don’t want to hate my father. I know no name for the shame, the painful compassion I feel whenever I think of him: a man who worked ambitiously and ruthlessly to build his business, and who lost everything that was of value to him, his possessions, his prestige, even for a time his civil rights, because, as he put it, he had ‘bet on the wrong horse’.

  ‘I don’t want to live there
, Charlotte,’ I said.

  ‘You and Bertus are hand in glove. He’s slack, and you’re too highly strung. Such a beautiful house. People like us have obligations. If Grandpapa and Grandmama’s house hadn’t burned down …’

  Bertus coughed.

  ‘Well, or been expropriated, demolished, you don’t know any more than I do. Come to think of it, what do you know?’

  Charlotte took the portrait back out from beneath the paperweight. ‘Something tells me this photograph must have been taken on Grandfather’s estate. Bertus, make an effort, will you? Don’t you remember now …?’

  Bertus, irritable, rustling his newspaper: ‘What do you want me to say? What am I supposed to remember? I’ve already told you everything I know.’

  ‘And all you can remember is trivial things that are of no use to us. A ditch with duckweed, dahlias, redcurrants, it could have been anywhere.’

  Evening sunlight on the dark panelling. I pass a bowl of redcurrants across the table to Father. Slowly, he helps himself, finds an intact bunch among the loose fruits, turns it around in his fingers, mutters more to himself than to me (usually we ate in complete silence) something about redcurrant bushes behind his childhood home, about the cobwebs that tore when you picked the fruit, about stripping the currants all together. I interrupted Charlotte, repeated my father’s rare remark. He never spoke about his youth. Bertus looked at Charlotte: ‘Redcurrant bushes, that’s what I said. Behind the shed. Where I was allowed to help saw and chop wood for the fire.’

  Charlotte: ‘The gardener, of course, so you must be able to recognize him.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about any gardener,’ said Bertus gruffly. ‘You and your gardener.’

  As he disappeared behind his newspaper again, Charlotte angrily tugged at her embroidery beneath the lamp, a vast tablecloth with an openwork design for her daughter-in-law, to be used in the future at dinners to impress the clients. ‘You certainly were a most peculiar boy. I can still remember a great deal from when I was six. If I could have gone to Grandpapa and Grandmama’s when I was that age … but they were already dead by then, and the house had been sold …’