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

by Joost Zwagerman

  It was as if he had crawled up out of a crack in the ground. He looked like that, too: pale and sallow, his face damp with perspiration and disfigured by the scars on his cheeks. He spoke in a high-pitched, frantic voice and I couldn’t tell if he had always done so, or if this too was a consequence of years of persecution. He was virtually incapable of simply saying something any more; he could only speak in speeches. I came upon him while he was talking to Elena and the superintendent and heard him say:

  ‘But they lie! They claim to believe in the equality of all mankind, but they too have a Führer! Here in their breast! They deny that he rules over them. That is why they are impotent and suffer pangs of guilt, why they forced the war upon him, why they silenced him. They said that we suppressed individual freedom, but they knew just as well as we do that the individual only wants the freedom to reproduce and care for his family. We provided that freedom, in abundance, and more importantly, the opportunity too, something our adversaries were much less keen on. They hate adventurers, artists and madmen as much as we do, but they kicked up a fuss when we castrated the insane. They raised a hue and cry because we gave adventurers the freedom to join the army and fight.

  ‘They say that our Führer ruined us. They are wrong. We emerged from the war stronger than ever, even though our Führer can no longer speak. But he still gives us orders! And we did what the Führer said! Yes, we were unfree, but we are free of remorse – because he was our conscience. Why was he our conscience? Because all the orders came from him! By doing what he said, we could not sin. He bore all our sins. But our enemies, despite knowing this full well, despite having mocked us for our subservience for years, hanged our generals after the war for having done what the Führer commanded. Our generals were free of sin, because they didn’t do anything of their own free will. Our enemies knew that full well, but accused our generals of cowardice when they pleaded loyalty to the Führer, and hanged them, probably because Jesus, who had taken their sins upon him, was out of their reach and couldn’t be hanged a second time.’

  Here I stepped forward and said, ‘It’s not true that the war criminals were punished for doing what the Führer ordered. In the concentration camps and occupied territories they enriched themselves by looting and plundering and tortured thousands to death without orders from Berlin.’

  Elena then said, ‘If that’s what they were punished for, it can only mean that they were punished in the name of our Führer. And then they’ve been punished in exactly the same way they would have been punished if he had been victorious.’

  I wrote that down on a piece of paper and said, ‘Fine, let’s ask him.’ At the bottom of the page I wrote, ‘When you agree with this, look down with your eye.’

  The charred patient read what was written on the piece of paper and looked down. Daumler now puffed his chest up even more and paid me even less attention. I stalked off in a fury. How could anyone know the Führer wasn’t lying again now, just as he had always lied as a matter of principle? And also, even if he had been the Führer, he could never assert himself as such again, even if the whole world were to call him back. I burst out laughing at the idea of him pursuing politics by winks alone. He would die the moment he left our clinic. He would never lead anyone again, incapable as he was of expressing anything beyond agreement or disapproval, and despite my skill there was no question of this ever changing. He was no longer a Führer, all he could communicate was yes or no, at the very most he could become that which he had always spat upon: a parliament.

  Two months later Daumler sent me one of his own, prestigious decorations and a letter in which he thanked me for the brilliant care I had given the Führer and offered me his apologies for not having asked to be introduced to me during his visit.

  The other officer who had helped rescue the Führer, Krantz, appeared before me one day in my office. He had a round head, bald in the middle and greying at the temples, and it was only out of anatomical necessity that his mouth was located in the place where mouths are usually found, otherwise it could just as well have been replaced with an inconspicuous split somewhere else on that roundness. He held out a hand and announced with studied resolve, ‘I know that you are a good Communist. I am, too. We can be plain with each other. You may not have known this but, despite being a high-ranking officer, I was a spy all through the war.’

  I nodded in agreement, without a trace of surprise on my face to suggest how horribly wrong he was to take me for a Communist.

  He said, ‘I know the Führer is here and still alive. I myself arranged for him to be brought here. It is of the utmost importance to us that he remains alive. You understand why, I am sure?’

  I answered that this was something I did not understand, that it did not actually make any difference at all whether he was what we called alive in our clinic or really dead, as public opinion generally assumed.

  Krantz took me by the arm and whispered, ‘But his condition can change. It could be of the greatest significance when we eventually announce that he is still alive and that he approves of all our enemies’ measures, as they are not doing anything other than continuing his regime by other means. At the moment there are countless prominent figures who could be irretrievably compromised by his declarations. Tell me, how much longer will it take before you’ve given him back his voice?’

  I answered that so far I had only worked on his eyes and that he was more or less able to see with one of them, but that I hadn’t done anything for his voice and doubted that anything could be done. I also said that I didn’t know if he was still able to think and could not exclude the possibility that he had lost his memory.

  The Führer’s condition continued to improve – in all ways. My own circumstances had also improved. One of the castle’s towers had been fully refurnished for me and connected to the steam heating system used in the hospital’s wards. I lived there with Elena and we always walked around naked. Naked, we looked out through the storm windows at the uninhabited surroundings buried in snow. We amused each other by painting our bodies. We never went outside. Her aversion to the park had become mine, too, just as I was free to call everything she possessed my own. The awareness of how extremely sinful we were being gave me a tremendous sense of freedom.

  In the confessional I informed the sanatorium priest of every minute detail of Daumler’s and Krantz’s intrigues, the fact that I hadn’t reported them to the police and what I was doing with Elena. But I didn’t do the penance he imposed. I noted it down for later, along with the number of times I had lied by telling him I had done penance as instructed.

  Due to all my efforts on the Führer’s behalf and the gulf in knowledge between me and the other surgeons, the mortality among the patients was extremely high. The superintendent intimated to me that, with such a reduction in patient numbers, there was a great likelihood of the sanatorium having to relocate to smaller premises. He hoped to move closer to civilization. But his dearest wish was to be in the middle of a large city, high up in a building on the main square. The noise wouldn’t bother the patients, who were deaf anyway, and the few whose eardrums hadn’t been destroyed had lost their tongues. There would be a stock exchange on the lower floors, men and women going out to theatres in the evening, taxis pulling into taxi ranks, streetwalkers looking for customers in the neon lights of the cinemas, all as if there had never been a war, yes, as if nobody could ever even lose blood. And us high above it all! Without anyone below knowing what kind of hearts beat in our beds!

  He declaimed it like an actor. He would have drawn just as much satisfaction from it as Elena and I enjoyed when looking out over the snow naked.

  Once this analogy had sunk in, I immediately grasped the system, the foundation on which both the pleasure the superintendent would find in a clinic on a busy square and my own pleasure at looking out over the snow was based. It was the seeming absence of a quality that was (on the contrary) of crucial importance. It was glass. The way glass looks like it does not exist yet protects us from
the cold as well as the thickest of walls; this was what made it so fascinating to stand naked behind it before a landscape that seemed full of hidden spies but was never visited by anyone who could observe what Elena and I were doing. In my case it would only take a shepherd to get lost there, in the superintendent’s imagined future it could be a postman looking for a bank who inadvertently stepped into our clinic and thought he recognized his father lying there without legs, without arms.

  But a susceptibility to this kind of excitement was even more strongly developed in the superintendent than it was in me. One day he grabbed the material of my sleeve between his thumb and his index finger and asked me to walk with him a little. He stuck out his tongue so far he could have used the bottom of it to feel whether he had shaved his chin smoothly enough and said, ‘Teuchert, I have to tell you something about your girlfriend Elena.’ Doctors, of course, have no qualms at all about discussing the most private of subjects with each other. ‘I have been told that at night, when you are occupied in the operating theatre, she loiters suspiciously in the wards. Her walking around naked is neither here nor there, we all do that on occasion and nobody’s the wiser. But her being so ruttish as to test to what degree the reproductive organs of the patients who are still lucky enough (he repeated the phrase lucky enough) to possess them are capable of signs of life is going too far.’

  I said, ‘It’s related to an experiment I’m carrying out.’

  ‘Then I didn’t say a word …’ He waited.

  I said, ‘Regarding ruttishness.’

  Him: ‘She has taken the testing rather far, to the extreme. There is one patient with whom she has managed that repeatedly, at a fairly high frequency … You know which one I mean?’

  ‘Have you seen that yourself?’

  He smiled and nodded.

  ‘She hasn’t mentioned it to me,’ I answered meekly, but coolly, ‘probably because she wants to keep it as a surprise, to demonstrate when she has absolute certainty.’

  ‘Surprise her in turn,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you.’

  We agreed that he would take my place in the operating theatre that evening and I would conceal myself in the manner that had allowed him to spy on Elena without being seen. The system again, but now in its simplest, classic variant: the ward would appear deserted, Elena would think I was manning the operating table, and meanwhile I would have a front-row view of the things she wanted to keep from me. Glass … Only through glass is it possible to see things so horrific no one can speak of them.

  My head pounded against the glass of the darkened sunroom adjoining the ward. I stared at the Führer’s bed. So he possessed a second faculty along with the one I had returned to him! And this second one would allow him to stay in a way no one had ever suspected! I waited half an hour but Elena didn’t appear. I thought about how silently I could make my rival disappear if I found his relationship with Elena unbearable – one minor slip during the next operation and he would be dead – but he was my most beautiful patient and for that reason alone I wouldn’t be able to do it. On the other hand, Elena would have as many opportunities to betray me with him as she wanted, as my duties made it impossible for me to keep a constant watch over her.

  But after three-quarters of an hour she still hadn’t appeared. I left the sunroom, entered the ward and walked over to the bed. It was empty.

  Then I began searching for Elena. I suddenly realized that the superintendent had been less well hidden than he had imagined and Elena’s suspicions had been aroused. She had arranged for the Führer to be moved somewhere else! But where? To our tower!

  I slipped into the entrance hall, pulled on a pair of snow boots and went outside. On all fours I crawled through the ravine next to the tower, then used the stones jutting out from the wall to climb up to my brightly-lit windows.

  Chilled to the bone, I held tight to the window ledge and peered in. There was no one in the room that belonged to this window, but looking through the open door to the room beyond it, I saw Elena’s naked legs and the trouser legs of a man lying on the ottoman. It was not difficult for me to slide the windows open and climb in. They didn’t hear me. I listened from behind the door. The man was Krantz.

  ‘Are you sure he’s a Communist?’

  ‘Darling, why would I tell you that if it wasn’t true?’

  ‘I’m not claiming you’re lying but there could be some doubt.’

  ‘I’m certain.’

  ‘Then you must know him very well.’

  ‘Silly. Just hearing the word Communist makes me feel sick. Why don’t you trust me? Why are you jealous?’

  The ottoman creaked. Krantz sat up and looked at the door I was standing behind, as if searching for a reason to be jealous. But he only saw the dark, low-ceilinged room. Emptiness … He thought he saw an emptiness. The room was almost empty, except for me. Exactly: except for me! Krantz lay down again and said, playful but banal, ‘If I’m jealous, you can only be flattered. If I wasn’t jealous, you could think I don’t love you enough.’ Kisses.

  I now understood why Krantz had claimed to be a Communist the sole time he had come to visit me. He had wanted to test me, to verify Elena’s accusation. Glass … I was as transparent as glass. Nobody could see what I really was.

  I no longer believed a word of the superintendent’s story about Elena cheating on me with the Führer. He had made a fool of me. It had been Krantz that he was referring to, Krantz.

  Numb and unthinking in my excitement, I returned to the window. Rage sharpened my senses and I completed the dangerous descent without once worrying about where to put my feet. I made it back to the main building where I took off the snow boots and ran to the lift. Where could the Führer be? For a moment I thought I might have been mistaken about the bed. That was why I went back to check the ward. Two nurses were busy tidying up. My error was confirmed when I reached the Führer’s bed. He was lying in it asleep. But there seemed to be something unnatural about that sleep. I listened with my stethoscope. His heart was beating half as fast as usual. I now pulled the blanket all the way down. His lower body was freshly bandaged and I immediately grasped what had happened. They had castrated him! The superintendent was the only one who could have done it. How had he managed it without protest from the head nurse who always assisted during my operations? I could imagine the head nurse accepting him replacing me that evening (whichever pretext he used). But that she, fully apprised of my plans as she was, would allow this surgery to go ahead was out of the question. I immediately called her in her room. ‘Oh, Doctor, are you back again?’ she asked after I said my name. It turned out that she, along with the three other nurses who always helped me with my work, had been given the evening off. The superintendent had arranged it all: luring me away with the story about Elena, giving the nurses the evening off and carrying out the castration with another team.

  Everyone had their own plans for the Führer, everyone except me, who had done nothing except cure him, without any ulterior motives. I went to the chapel, knelt and prayed for Elena, for the superintendent and for Krantz.

  In the course of the next week I learned that Krantz was not an occasional visitor to our sanatorium, but lived there. He only emerged when I was in theatre, disappearing before I returned. No matter how thoroughly I investigated the rooms in the tower, I could never find a trace of his presence. I wasn’t able to notice anything out of the ordinary in Elena’s behaviour either and I didn’t ask her any questions. I didn’t ask the superintendent why he had castrated the Führer and I had no idea if this was somehow related to Krantz’s presence. For his part, the superintendent refrained from asking me if I had discovered anything the night he sent me off to spy on Elena, though it was clear to me that his reasoning had been: I will put him on sentry duty at the Führer’s bed. He will stay there to see if Elena shows up. Elena will not show up. Then he will walk over to the bed and see that the Führer has disappeared. Who will he go in search of first? The Führer or Elena? Elena, of course. Not becaus
e she is his lover, but because he knows where to look. Or thinks he knows. The Führer could be anywhere; he will look for Elena in his rooms. When he arrives there, he will find her with Krantz. What will he do? Murder Krantz? Had the superintendent hoped that I would murder Krantz? Could I enlist the superintendent as an ally in my struggle with Krantz? I couldn’t rely on it, because if he had not wanted Krantz in his sanatorium, he could have come up with another way of getting rid of him. By adopting this strange strategy he had betrayed himself! I knew why he had done it! I could deduce it by mathematics alone! The superintendent too was a rival! By having me catch Elena with Krantz, he hoped to subject me to the suffering he had felt when he had caught her with me! Yes, he had caught Elena with me first, then with Krantz and perhaps with the Führer as well. Why else would he have castrated the Führer?

  These considerations allowed for only one conclusion: I could not find a single ally in the whole sanatorium. Not a single ally in a radius of fifty kilometres!

  That was why I took a holiday and set off into the mountains with my snowshoes and a tent. Three days later I reached a small village where I was able to catch a bus to Munich. In Munich I visited a café that was owned by someone I knew to be an acquaintance of the other officer, Daumler. But the café owner didn’t know me. Then I showed him the decoration and letter Daumler had sent me. This convinced him, but with the police still on his heels Daumler was not easy to find and the café owner wouldn’t tell me what I needed to do to reach him. I stayed with him for a week, unable to undertake a thing. Then one morning he turned out to have contacted Daumler after all. Without saying where we were going, he led me to the post office and told me to wait. He left, but bought a newspaper at the kiosk on the opposite corner and stood there reading to keep an eye on me. I waited twenty minutes. Then I heard someone whistling ‘The Song of Germany’ in a taxi that had pulled over to the kerb. The taxi was empty. The driver himself must have been the whistler. I went over and recognized Daumler. He gestured for me to get in the back and immediately drove off.