Koos’s trumpet did a kind of inorganic penance by working perfectly. It put him in good spirits right away. ‘You should have that thing knocked off a chair more often,’ the other guys said in relief.
When they had symbolically fulfilled the terms of their settlement by performing two more numbers, the party was declared officially over. For a moment, they seemed to be heading for a serious dispute about remuneration, since the organizers wanted to dock them fifteen minutes’ pay. ‘I’ll pull down every damn thing on these walls,’ Tom threatened, picturing his wife’s upheld hand. But the whole thing was resolved amicably. In the end, no one knew exactly who deserved how much blame, or how much pay. They all wore uncertain smiles as they said their goodbyes.
A devoted friend of the blonde was waiting at the exit, a girl a head shorter but clearly determined to emulate her classmate’s fighting spirit. ‘I think that music you play is just horrendous,’ she said with a smile that brooked no rebuttal, possibly copied from one of her teachers. ‘There’s no accounting for bad taste,’ Tom replied, a classic line he reserved for special occasions like this one.
The band’s ‘strong and long-standing ties with the school’ had undoubtedly been severed. ‘That’s another regular job down the drain,’ they said to each other on the way home. In fact, they were likely to get the cold shoulder from schools throughout that region.
During the long, dark hours of their journey, Koos, with his long scratch burning, felt like a hero and penitent rolled into one, but he fell asleep quickly after the group sang a raunchy song accompanied by rhythmic clapping. The lyrics were hardly anything more than a string of childish synonyms for female body parts. The bandleader declined to participate, shaking his head sorrowfully. He wondered when in his life he would finally have the chance to work with adults. But he also smiled a little, because at least these were his own hand-picked boys.
By 3 a.m. they were all sound asleep, except for Armand, of course. The leader, who was fitfully dozing, waved to him to stop at a transport café for coffee.
At their next job, a party in a secondary school in the west of the country, Tom and Armand were friendly to the girls at the door – friendly in the polite sense, I mean. They met their every little demand without delay.
The musicians even considered bringing one or two of their wives along on the next trip – as a kind of superstitious penance, paid in advance. If they all squeezed in a little, there would be room. They might as well bring the ones who’d been whining about it the longest. What the hell, right?
‘You cats sure have some weird ideas these days,’ said the substitute bass player.
Translated by David McKay
14
Harry Mulisch
What Happened to Sergeant Massuro?
Wat gebeurde er met Sergeant Massuro?
BOZ OFFICIAL
Dept. A Room 3 Ministry of War
Wassenaar
Netherlands
It is a calm person who is writing to you, Gentlemen – the calm that reveals itself when all hope is gone.
I assume that you are familiar with this tone. I don’t know who you are or which Ministry you fall under or what the initials of your section mean. I have never heard of your Bureau. It wouldn’t surprise me if you also fall under a Ministry I have never heard of. Colonel Stratema, Commander of the 5th Battalion 124 Infantry Regiment, on New Guinea, gave me your address and told me I must inform you of what has happened to Sergeant Massuro ‘as if I were telling a friend’.
Right, so you are my friend, Gentlemen. You shall hear what I know about it. I know nothing about it. I just know that it happened and I was there. However, I have the impression that you have also received a report from the colonel and from Dr Mondriaan – and that they know nothing about your Bureau either, except that, I assume, you collect information about cases like that of Sergeant Massuro.
There are more such cases, Gentlemen? It doesn’t surprise me. Too many? Is that the reason I had to swear on the Bible to keep it secret? They happen in the Netherlands too? It wouldn’t surprise me. Once Dr Mondriaan had looked his fill at Massuro, he started interrogating me hollow-cheeked about our life in the interior.
‘Dear God, Lieutenant, of course it’s impossible to stand those inhuman conditions!’
I knew what he was thinking. He thought it was because of fear. Fear is capable of anything. It is a sorcerer like Apollonius of Tyana, a prophet like Isaiah, a political mass murderer and a greater lover than Don Juan. But what happened to Massuro can’t have had anything to do with fear.
‘I know the interior better than you, Doctor. It could have happened just as well in Amsterdam, in an office, or on a warm summer’s evening while reading the paper at the open window, with the radio tuned to Hilversum.’
My panic was different from his, paler, more controlled, but no less intense. I told him that in my opinion it had scarcely anything to do with Massuro. That it could happen to anyone, to him, Mondriaan, as well as to me – at any moment.
‘Maybe it’s already at work in one of us, Doctor.’
I saw that he couldn’t accept it. He looked at Massuro’s remains in bewilderment. He wanted a reason – where was he otherwise? And the only thing that with lots of good (and occult) will could pass as a reason was fear. But there was no fear. Massuro didn’t have the slightest idea what fear was.
I knew Massuro a little. I’ll tell you about it as a friend, Gentlemen, though it’s a mystery to me what you will do with it. When he was posted to my section two years ago in Potapègo, I was just chatting to the village headman. The truck from Kaukenau arrived and out of the cab stepped a dark, heavily built fellow with a big head, round eyes and thick lips. I suddenly saw his name on the major’s letter in front of me.
‘Heintje Massuro!’
He came towards me grinning.
‘Afternoon, Lieutenant. Who’d have thought that one day you’d be bossing me about on the other side of the planet?’
I had met him first when I was eleven, in the changing rooms of the gym. He was in the sixth form, I was in the fifth. I’d come to get something I’d forgotten. Massuro was sitting alone in the sweaty atmosphere of the changing room, as immovable as a statue among the grubby heaps of clothes. From the gym came the sound of exercising and a commanding voice that kept counting to four.
‘Can’t you join in?’
‘I’m being punished.’
‘Why?’
He looked at me with his big brown eyes.
‘For nothing.’
He already had that heavy and at the same time sharply defined look. I felt he wasn’t lying. I would have liked to become friends with him, but that wasn’t really possible with someone who was a class higher or lower. Nowhere is there as much class consciousness as in schools; the Communists could be proud of that. Sometimes I talked to him, and once he came and looked at the moons of Jupiter through my telescope.
‘The universe is a great bag full of stones and light.’
Two years later we were in the same class at grammar school; he had to repeat a year. But by then it was too late, the time for becoming friends had passed. Things like that often come down to a month or a week; perhaps even a day or a minute. If I had met my wife a year later, ours would have been the happiest marriage in the world and I wouldn’t be here in Kaukenau in New Guinea now. We almost never talked to each other: some sort of shame had come between us. He had few interests: wide rivers of biology and history flowed through my head in those days. But if I learned one thing about him, it was that he was not afraid. Yet he wasn’t a swaggerer. I never heard him say: ‘Do you dare do this or that’ – before performing some exploit. Only boys who were actually too scared and above all too scared of being seen as scared. Massuro lacked that fear too. But when it was a matter of really doing something that needed courage, then we’d see Massuro do it, while we were peeing ourselves. (Like that time when we had to burgle the headmaster’s office to find out the project questio
ns.) But with him it wasn’t courage but the absence of fear, and it was as if that gave him a certain invulnerability. He was always punished for nothing.
Apart from that he was a perfectly normal boy: Heintje Massuro, ice-cold and cheeky as they come. Should it now appear otherwise, Gentlemen, that is because I am all too keen to refute Dr Mondriaan’s fear theory; and because despite myself I am also looking for a reason for what happened to him – which doesn’t exist.
Another two years later, shortly before the war, I lost sight of him. He left school and I heard that he had left for the Dutch East Indies with his parents.
‘Just in time to be thrown into a camp by the Japs,’ he told me in Potapègo, where we celebrated our reunion after fifteen years: I, a lieutenant, he a regular sergeant posted to my section. By then he had completed eight years in the tropics. From the camp he had immediately volunteered for military service; his parents had both died. He had been involved in the whole epic business: the mopping up of the Japanese, the police actions, punitive expeditions on Java and Sumatra … he seemed to have been involved with Westerling too. I didn’t ask any more questions. It was all fairly obscure and impenetrable. I expect you will have better channels to find out more.
Of course, you can look in that direction, but you won’t find anything. That is, anything that is directly connected with what happened. I don’t know … perhaps there are such things as ‘hidden connections’ – quite possibly; but then far underground, around the back, underneath, untraceable. Over the whole planet something indescribable is going on, a kind of process … The sun shines differently than it did before the war. I don’t know how to express it more clearly. Countless new, elusive forces are active; a new kind of people … In Singapore, Prague, Amsterdam, Alamogordo, Jakarta (and Wassenaar) a whole new breed of gentlemen is sitting around tables in cafés and government buildings: they are the ones with power. Two tables or rooms further on no one knows who they are. It no longer has anything to do with politics. A group of gentlemen drive through Borneo in a column of cars? What language are they talking? No one understands it. But it’s relevant. Over Ceream a small, unmarked grey aircraft is shot down by an Indonesian battery. It is empty. No cameras on board. Only radio equipment for remote control – or is it itself a living being? Everything is connected. No one yet understands how it fits together, everything that’s going on, what is possible, where it’s going – and anyone who thinks that it’s different at home in Holland is living in a world that no longer exists and is dreadfully wrong.
But Massuro was not scared. He had played his part in that unnameable process – undoubtedly a small part, but a part that could not bear the light of day, a part played with the curtains closed in a play no one knows and with an empty prompter’s box. I noticed that he regarded his service with me as a kind of holiday. He was right, it was. It was. I wonder if it still is, after what happened to him.
In any case, there was less reason for fear with me than anywhere in the archipelago. I am responsible for law and order in an area approximately the size of London. But the forces ranged against us are not entrenched in the mountains or in the jungles. The poor Papuans … they wave our flag and build bungalows for us, they haven’t a clue. New Guinea is far away in the Pleistocene, 100,000 years BC. If one of my men shoots a cassowary or a cockatoo, shots are fired, but apart from that – never. Sometimes we discover among the creepers or by a stinking swamp Dutch subjects 1.40 metres tall who have never seen a white man. We name such a village Emmercompascuum, or we give it a name derived from the metabolism: Prickpantsshit, Screwsville. We go through the motions. As long as everything is quiet.
Wherever we go, though, we put an end to quiet; there is shouting and swearing in Dutch, shooting and beating if I don’t watch out. We drive around in jeeps and a truck full of provisions, petrol and ammunition. Often we travel round for weeks, in radio contact with Kaukenau. It was right up Massuro’s street; he was crazy about hunting and shot the monkeys out of the trees as he drove along. Of course I was more involved with him than with the other seven, and yet at the same time less. Something of the shame that we felt at grammar school because of our missed friendship persisted. I talked to him about different things than the others, about Holland, about nothing. Once he told me that he had four children, two on Java, one on Celebes and one on Halmahera.
When he had guard duty at night, he hummed between the tents or on the verandas of the log cabins that we had had the Papuans build for us here and there. He liked guard duty: he often let the person due to relieve him go on sleeping and took on his shift too. He was resting from something. His music was a big, shiny, trembling globe floating through the night between the tents. He hummed for hours with a throat like an organ and gazed at the mountains or the black jungle, where everything rustled and muttered and shrieked. Sometimes the Stone Age squatted at a respectful distance from him and listened intently.
For two years all went well.
The day that it went wrong we were in Poopjohn Knoll, a hamlet of twenty huts full of dwarves. That was last Sunday, 19 July 1955. We discovered it in May. It was on the edge of the jungle on the bank of the Titimoeka; we hadn’t been able to make ourselves understood there.
When I was about eighteen, Gentlemen – in the war – I wanted to be a magician. I held my breath, tried to tie my legs in knots, concentrated on the mark left by a mosquito squashed on the wall, looked at the base of people’s noses and read books on ‘Personal Magnetism’ and ‘The Power of Thought’. From them I learned the exercise of recalling the previous day before going to sleep and rerunning it in quick tempo from the moment I woke up. That has become a habit of mine since. If I’m not too tired, I see the smallest finesses again, and even those that had escaped me during the day. In a certain sense I live twice, and the second time more acutely.
Not once, Gentlemen of Wassenaar, but at least ten times did I run that day in Poopjohn Knoll and the way there past me. I remember every branch we drove under, every stone in the foaming Titimoeka, every cry of the black gnomes. I know that that day, apart from an irregularity with Private Steiger, nothing special happened, nothing that differed from the other days, and in any case nothing to do with Massuro.
Because it was pouring with rain, we had left the hamlet of Oemigapa quite late that morning. It was a shower from the mountains; when it stopped it was splendid weather again for half an hour and at twelve o’clock the sun was pounding down on our heads once more. The troop were rather sluggish. We had been on patrol for two weeks and I had promised that Poopjohn Knoll would be our last port of call. Then it would be four days or so before we were back in Kaukenau. I was sitting in the second jeep next to Private Elsemoer: Massuro was slumped across the back seat with his carbine between his legs staring at the tops of the trees. We didn’t talk much. I know what we said word for word, but it was of no importance. At about two o’clock I had Elsemoer leave the column for a moment to drive into the fields and have a chat with two kapaukos, who were dragging a dead kangaroo towards the swamps. At four o’clock we reached the Titimoeka and drove upstream along the shady strip between the jungle and the water, half overcome by the smell of rotting plants and leaves. Corporal Persijn in the first jeep discovered footprints in the mud and five of us headed into the pitch-black jungle, but in vain. It was as dense and impenetrable as a city.
Apart from that, nothing happened. As we bumped along, Massuro quickly turned onto his stomach and sent a crocodile to the bottom. At six thirty we drove into Poopjohn Knoll.
The councillor stood waiting for us at the head of the whole tribe. He was the village headman, a naked little chap three blocks of peat tall with a civilized fringe of beard and wild eyes; he had a splendid, yellow, pointed modesty gourd, which stood erect up to his nipples. At his temples he was growing bald in an intellectual way; I had told my men that the Germans called them ‘councillor’s corners’ and from then on that was his name. I suspect him of leading a bunch of cannibals. ‘Manowe
?’ I had asked him the last time. ‘Manowe?’ He began beaming all over his face; it turned out to be the only word he understood. At any rate with us he had to content himself with corned beef. With two other village bosses he tucked into the welcome meal; on our side it was Massuro and me. The others were busy with the bivouac, while the village looked on reflectively.
During that meal nothing out of the ordinary happened.
After the meal a couple of us crept under our mosquito nets, while I made contact with Kaukenau and reported. Later we lay down outside our tent and smoked and listened to the radio. Jakarta had a lecture on Malay poetry, but Sydney was playing dance music. Behind us on the other side of the splashing river everything grew higher and higher and the darkness changed into millions of crickets. When it had become almost completely dark, we put the lamps on and saw that we were surrounded by dwarves squatting motionless listening to the music. Persijn yelled at them, but they didn’t go away. When he fired a brief burst from his Sten gun they scampered into the darkness in all directions.
And from now on I’ll do it verbatim, Gentlemen, then you can judge for yourselves.
‘Where’s Steiger?’ I asked Massuro. During the meal I had seen him smile and making eyes at a girl of about sixteen, with pretty breasts and a perfect round belly.
‘He’s in love.’
‘Has he gone off?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was your duty to tell me, for Christ’s sake. Call him.’
‘Steiger!’ roared Massuro.
After a few seconds he answered from somewhere behind the vehicles.
‘Stick it in your stinking trousers and come here! At once!’ Excuse the language, Gentlemen, but that was how he said it, and that’s how I’d tell a friend. He did yell in a fairly good-natured way, though. He was on vacation.
I got very worried. A little later Steiger stood before me sweating.
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 27