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

by Joost Zwagerman

  Charlotte: ‘What do you want me to say? You can’t remember a thing about it.’

  Bertus (with great dignity, which makes irrelevant his bluntness, the helplessness of his slightly turned-in feet in those ridiculous tartan slippers): ‘I can’t remember any things that never happened and were never said.’

  My brother and sister are now leaning in towards each other, like conspirators, or more like children who share a secret but don’t trust each other, who’ll be the one to give it away, who’ll be the one to get punished? I can hear Charlotte breathing. Finally she utters a wail: ‘How dare you? How dare you?’

  Why do I suddenly remember the hallway at home, the antlers bagged by the men in my mother’s family on long-forgotten hunting trips, two lines of trophies opposite each other, from the widely spreading branches of the gnarled showpieces by the entrance to the small plaques with nubs of horn near the garden doors? The rooms are filled with the scent of Victorian complacency and prosperity. The house is a bastion of respectability. My mother, whom I never knew, left everything as it must have been in her childhood, before her wedding, apparently with my father’s consent. Their life made no impression on the surroundings; it is as though a generation has been skipped. That does not account for my parents, but it does determine half of why we are as we are, Bertus, Charlotte and I. Half: the rest remains vague, in the dark. Anyone who is troubled by what is missing can fill the gaps with profusion. What should have been there, but what is not, grows in dreams and desires to astounding proportions. Mother’s house doubled under its own power, becoming stately and solid enough for two. Beyond the horizon, past the point where all the straight lines converge, a fata Morgana emerged, strangely distorted by the shivering layers of air. The antlers, the conservatories full of plants, the mirrors and wooden panelling, the dark green carpets and curtains, the leaf designs on the wallpaper, conjured up avenues, ponds, lawns and copses out of nowhere, solidifying in the distance to form a country estate with a park and an orchard, a legendary ancestral home. No one will ever speak about it in so many words, no lies were told, but it must have been possible to draw conclusions from what was left unsaid, or from what was implied.

  Bertus and Charlotte seem to have forgotten that I am there. They have renounced their lifelong roles. Charlotte is no longer the compulsive asker of questions, Bertus no longer stubbornly unresponsive.

  Bertus: ‘I’ve always known it wasn’t true. I told you so, a long time ago; my memory’s that good at least.’

  In an unconsciously helpless gesture, Charlotte turns the palms of her hands towards him as if she wants to show him something in them.

  ‘He didn’t used to hit you,’ Bertus says quietly. ‘It was just that one time.’

  I am longing for my school, for those little, shining faces above the desks. If I can’t go back to work again, I shall go insane, and the images that sometimes insert themselves between me and the real world will prevail. More than memories, something different than dreams, no one can convince me otherwise. I have no name for them. What is it when the boundaries of one’s own consciousness fade, when my time, my age, dissipates like a thin cloud, becoming un-time, the omnipresent? There are no red welts on Charlotte’s palms now, Bertus is no longer screaming in the attic. When Father hit out, long ago, it was the start of his collaboration with the as yet unnameable force that would much later take shape, and the rooms on the first floor began to grow towards their enemy occupation. There had to be a connection between the runic symbols and the fata Morgana of the ‘estate’. I can see my dying father’s pale yellow head before me, that’s all part of it too, the death began long before he so harshly punished Bertus’s innocent truthfulness; the agony will continue until we, his children, have become aware of what exactly it was in our home, in the house our mother inherited, that was lacking, that was left unspoken.

  I take the portrait from the table and go to return it to its place beneath the paperweight on the mantelpiece. ‘For Evert,’ I say out loud, ‘for that snob.’

  Charlotte blanches, but does not protest. ‘I don’t know who they are,’ she confesses with a new humility.

  Now Bertus takes the portrait from my hand, holds it out to Charlotte, and points at the two children: ‘That’s you. That’s me.’

  Charlotte just stares.

  ‘With Grandfather and Grandmother, behind their house,’ says Bertus, more quietly still. I come closer. I didn’t even exist in 1915, and wouldn’t for some time, but this concerns me too. The albums, the boxes, the folders and baskets under dustsheets, which no one ever looked at but me, the dark depths of the cupboards under the slanting roof: ‘In the attic, it was in the attic,’ I say, but they don’t hear me.

  Slowly, Bertus sits back down. He hangs his head, so that Charlotte and I can’t see his face: ‘That was the last time. We didn’t go back there again afterwards. He took us. I could hear him talking to them, inside, in the kitchen. I had to play outside. Later I didn’t want to leave. While he waited, they took me aside. They told me that he’d always been the brightest boy in the school, always number one, that he’d come a long way and would go even further, I had to keep my wits about me, grow up to be a fine fellow, do my best, and then he’d be as proud of me as they were of him, parents see themselves rewarded in their children for their hard work and the care and the scrimping and for all the sacrifices, even the hardest ones, it’s a great privilege to be able to nurture your intelligence, to learn all those things and to understand, people like that can make the world a better place, I should never forget what I owed him, just as they were sure he would never forget … He did forget, though, I saw that he’d forgotten. And, with me, he got the reward he deserved …’ Bertus has long since stopped talking to us, and is talking to himself. ‘He couldn’t be proud of me. I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted him to forget that I was his son, too. And he always acted like he had. I thought …’ He bends even closer to the portrait on his knee. ‘I didn’t go to see him when he was dying. I didn’t give him the chance to show me he actually did remember after all,’ says Bertus, his voice hoarse and surprised.

  Translated by Laura Watkinson

  12

  W. F. Hermans

  Glass

  Glas

  I had been employed there for just two days, at that sanatorium where nobody could ever recover, when I had to deal with a dying patient. An unusual patient, because he had relatives. None of our other patients had friends or relatives who worried about them as they had all been mutilated beyond recognition; found like that after bombing raids or rescued from burning tanks or planes. Without arms or legs, invariably missing their lower jaws, deaf or blind, they couldn’t even say their own names. At the registry offices they were listed as dead, or at least missing. The world makes a fuss about its dead and wounded after a war, but not its missing. They end up in institutions like ours, whose existence governments keep as secret as possible out of humanitarianism. Because even if we organized regular viewing days for the public, like they do with other lost property, it would still be impossible for people to identify their relatives. More to the point: all too many would believe incorrectly that they had found their father or husband. The wards would become the scene of furious brawls like the ones that erupt regularly in foundling-hospitals. Our patients could, in other words, very well have relatives without being able to tell us about them and without the family being able to find out they were here. There would be no way of proving it.

  But this dying patient had been irrefutably recognized by his mother: the military surgeon had amputated his remaining arm just below the spot where he had once had his name tattooed.

  I sat by his bed all night, listening with my stethoscope to make sure he was still alive. His mother asked repeatedly if there wasn’t some way he could say goodbye to her, if he couldn’t give her some kind of sign, anything. But his eyes had been burnt out by phosphorus and had finally grown over (he was not dying from his wounds, which had long
since healed, but from a pre-existing heart condition), and his lower jaw and tongue had been ripped away. Now and then she would cry, ‘Günther, say something!’ I knew he was stone deaf, because his eardrums had been shattered by the force of the explosion, and he was unable to move the stump of his arm, the last remnant of his limbs. The only sign of life he was able to give was the beat of his failing heart. Now and then I passed the stethoscope to his mother, so that she could at least hear something from her son and wouldn’t have come entirely in vain. But she too was deaf. She took the tube out of her ear and peered into it, but couldn’t find the death-watch beetle she was looking for. She tried again and began screaming. There was no risk of her cries waking anyone in the ward, but Sister Elena came over to stand next to us, which calmed the mother somewhat. When I could no longer hear the heart, the superintendent was summoned from his bed. He led the mother away and I took Sister Elena in my arms. She was a blond Italian and her eyes were as blue as blue can only be when set against an abyss of brown. Like all the staff she wore nothing under her tight white tunic, and her body felt like a loaf of fresh warm bread, wrapped loosely in tissue paper. We sat like that for some time on the dead man’s bed, the only spot in the ward that was lit.

  ‘You haven’t just ended up here either,’ she whispered.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘How would I know that …? If you weren’t here for some reason, you wouldn’t be here.’ She kissed me with her whole mouth, or actually it was as if I curled up and became something small on her tongue. Love blew me up like a balloon. I wanted to escape the suffocating heat and asked her to go outside with me, into the park. The sanatorium, which as an institution pre-dated the war, had been evacuated after a bombing raid to this old castle high in the mountains, fifty kilometres from the nearest village. For the time being it would stay here.

  But she answered, ‘Into the park? It’s bound to be raining, and if it’s not, it soon will be.’ She slid off my knees onto the dead man’s bed, the bottom half of which was still free, and pulled me down on top of her. Because of his mother’s regular visits, this patient had been allocated a normal-sized bed. Smiling, she said, ‘This is something you have to experience, otherwise you’ll never adjust to things here.’ Her tunic had slipped open and I could see her body, which had taken on the peculiar beauty of a woman who has been had by hundreds of men, a woman who, although young and unscathed, possesses the mature smoothness of the boxwood handle of a burin, polished year in year out by the callused palm of a supple hand. ‘What are you looking at?’ she asked. ‘I’m no nun! A nun is just a woman who’s been shaved in the wrong place!’

  I asked, ‘Do you do this with every innocent newcomer?’

  ‘Innocents never come here …’

  She stood up – leaving her tunic on the bed – took me by the hand and said, ‘Now I will show you what you know. Just like me, you have come here to hide from the world, just like all of us. If you weren’t here, you’d be in prison or maybe already executed. To the outside world, it has to be like we no longer exist, like our patients. You know that, don’t you?’

  I broke out in a sweat, even though I was now naked and should have been able to cope more easily with the suffocating heat that was a constant here. The windows were never opened as most of the patients suffered unbearable agonies when so much as a sheet was laid on their flayed nerves. We didn’t have the resources to build tent-like structures around all of them. Many of them couldn’t even lie on their beds, but were suspended in ingenious rubber nets. Their exposed, invariably festering flesh blanched with pain when someone simply displaced the air by walking through the ward.

  At another full-length bed, she stopped and wrapped her arms around me again. She stroked my throat with her fingertips as if to help her words reach my brain.

  ‘We can’t see, we can’t hear, we can’t speak. We can only move in this building, between its walls, enclosed almost as tightly as a heart in a body. If you don’t know that, you’ve lost your memory. Kiss me, then I’ll breathe it back into you.’ I kissed her, but didn’t remember anything.

  Then she turned the light on over the bed. To my surprise there were blankets on it. She pulled them back. A man was lying there, at least, it must have been a man I was gazing at. It looked more like a hollow tree that had been struck by lightning.

  Virtually all of his flesh had been burned away and the scorched skin, as wrinkled as oak bark, was tight over his bones. A rubber mask covered the lower half of his face and his eyelids were closed over empty sockets.

  ‘You know who it is,’ Elena said, ‘even if you don’t recognize him. Wouldn’t it be terrible to have a body like that? Wouldn’t it be the worst thing that could ever happen to you? What else do we have to believe in, if not the body?

  ‘At seventeen I fought in Spain. I served on every front. Who can still genuinely believe that freedom is what people need? No one would know what to do with it. That’s why the Führer took away our pseudo-freedom and gave us a clear conscience instead. Our enemies have defeated us, but their bad conscience will bring them down. They opposed us on the pretext of being better than we were, but they knew they were lying, that they were exactly the same as us, their enemies. The Führer said that he would use lies as weapons and he used lies as weapons. But our enemies said they were fighting for the truth and they lied, because they knew just as well as we did that there is no truth but the body. We believe in the body with the body …’ She laughed, and at the same time made my body believe as much as it possibly could in hers.

  For that one minute I was willing to assume that what she said was true. Then I said, ‘But I really don’t know who this is. I thought the man who died tonight was the only one with a confirmed identity.’

  ‘You’re playing dumb. Fine, I’ll tell you.’ She put the blankets back in place and turned off the light over the bed.

  ‘It’s the Führer, our Führer. When he tried to kill himself after everything collapsed, the pistol shot wasn’t fatal; he wasn’t burned to death with the petrol they poured over him either. Nobody has ever seen his ashes – and with good reason – because there are no ashes. He was still alive when the fire went out. In fact, he was probably pulled out of the flames beforehand.

  ‘He lived and that’s hardly surprising, especially not to you. After all, you’re the one who came up with that new ointment for burns. You burned three hundred Jews alive experimenting on it, before developing a therapy that could even save people who didn’t have a single centimetre of skin left intact.

  ‘Yes, this is our Führer. He can’t see, hear or talk. He can’t move, but he’s alive!’

  I had appraised the patient briefly the previous day, during my first round. It wasn’t true that I had burned three hundred Jews alive and developed a new therapy for burns. I didn’t know a thing about it, and hadn’t noticed anything special about this one patient. Still, I didn’t reply, I just looked at her, which she misinterpreted.

  ‘Yes, he’s alive, just as he lives in all of us, without any of us being able to talk about it any more, because we have been defeated.’

  I said, ‘He doesn’t live in me, I believe in Jesus Christ.’

  She laughed. ‘A Christian! The only people who still talk seriously about Jesus are those whose opinions are completely irrelevant. I’d like to hear the views of a professional criminal, yes, a murdering robber who was sentenced to twenty years and pardoned after fifteen, only to be picked up again a year later and dumped in a concentration camp without so much as a court order, simply because he was a born criminal, then stayed alive in the concentration camp for ten years, starved and half beaten to death, until in 1943 he was given the task of pulling gold teeth out of the mouths of gassed Jews. He got an extra ration of butter, cigarettes and brandy, but after he’d been doing that work for half a year they ensured secrecy by putting him down with a rifle shot from the distance. The shot didn’t kill him immediately. He lay there dying for, shall we say, te
n minutes. I’d like to know if that man thought about Jesus.’

  I answered, ‘I have always tried to be a good Christian, even if that might not be so very important for someone like me who doesn’t have much opportunity to commit evil or suffer it from others.’

  ‘All doctors and nurses are saints in white,’ Elena said, putting her tunic back on. ‘But what would be even better would be to find out what our patients think of Jesus. Too bad they’re no more able to talk about it than the dead about the hereafter.’

  I walked back to the charred patient’s bed. He was encased in a thick layer of carbonized flesh that had cracked open where his chest moved to breathe.

  ‘There is nothing to show that he’s the Führer. If you’d pointed out someone else, I’d have believed it just as much or just as little.’ I am not in the habit of telling women exactly what I do or don’t believe.

  Nothing Elena had said about my past and the experiments I was supposed to have carried out in a concentration camp was true. But I am a highly skilled surgeon and, to dispel my boredom, I began experimenting on the patient she claimed to be the Führer. It seemed to me that one of his eyes might be salvageable and, after three months’ work, I was able to flatter myself with the hope that he could see out of it again. He could even move it in its socket. I held up a piece of paper on which I had written, ‘If you can read this, look up once and then back down.’ He did as requested. So he could see again. But what was there for him to see? What did he want to see? We had no way of finding out. There was also no point in communicating anything to him, because he couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

  In the meantime, I had discovered how they knew that this burnt organism had been the Führer. Two former officers who, even now, five years after the end of the war, were still on the run and being sought by the victors’ police, had delivered him to the clinic. They were well-known, high-ranking figures, whose portraits had been in the newspapers weekly before the defeat. Shortly after I had completed the operations on the eye, one of them, Daumler by name, appeared in the clinic.