‘No, Massuro, it’s not possible.’
‘I’m so tired.’
He closed his eyes, and his chest moved heavily up and down. The blotches on his face were clearer than in the afternoon, they came out all over from under his skin as if they were going to break through it. His hands were also full of them. To Kaukenau! To where there were people!
‘I can scarcely breathe any more,’ he groaned. ‘It’s like there’s a Roman sitting on my chest.’
A Roman!
God in heaven, I thought, help Massuro. He hasn’t done anything. He’s got so heavy a chair collapses under him. There’s a Roman sitting on his chest.
But what I should have liked to do was shoot him and bury him on the spot, as deep as I could. Persijn, Elsemoer, Steiger, Kranenburg, they would be as silent as the grave, that much is certain. They would have let him disappear from their thoughts, like a splinter from their flesh.
And now you wet your lips and shift about in your chairs, Gentlemen of Dept. A? Now will come the revelations, you think. Whispered sobbing in my ear! There were none. No confessions. No confession. Nothing. He just lay crying on the floor, growing heavier and heavier and not knowing what was happening to him. Nor did his spirit fly from him in a grandiose flight – far from it. What is the spirit? Sometimes a Napoleon, whose dream becomes reality and engulfs the whole of Europe, and as it slowly recedes leaves behind temporary signs over the whole continent: palaces, obelisks, triumphal arches, dead men, legislation, Holy Alliances and surnames. But mostly a hat that we wear on our heads against the draught; if we meet a woman we take it off politely.
Kranenburg came in shyly with some tins. Massuro still did not want to eat; I wouldn’t be able to either. I had them put in the jeep and called Persijn. When he appeared in the doorway and looked in my eyes, I knew that he would make sure that no one said anything if I had killed Massuro.
‘Help me with the sergeant, Persijn. Then we’ll go on.’
He stopped for a moment. Then he came. Neither of us are wimps, but this was too much. Lips trembling, Massuro looked at our faces as they went red. Groaning, breathless, we finally got him upright. Then the floor collapsed underneath him with an ear-shattering crash between the two of us. Somewhere around our knees he started screaming with a sound the jungle had never heard, smaller than a pygmy, with the splintered planks around his waist. A moment later Persijn brought the butt of his revolver on the crown of the screaming head. It was suddenly quiet; the head did not slump sideways.
I looked in bewilderment at Persijn. My God, Gentlemen! It was as if I had been on an endless journey through France, Burgundy, Trier, Cluny, for the few seconds that that screaming lasted. A vision, a fantastic vision that wasn’t connected with anything unless it was via God knows what underground connections. I saw a crowd stretching as far as the eye could see on the square at Reims at the foot of the cathedral, cheering at the execution of a tall blond man in a gold-embroidered cloak, while trumpeters with multicoloured emblems on their chests blew the azure sky endlessly high and empty. I saw a pope heading over the Alps to Germany in the middle of a small caravan, and in the north a king with his family stumbled towards him barefoot through the snow – and above the head of the pope the king’s voice floated and said, ‘You, Hildebrand, no longer pope but the false monk! I, Henry, king by the grace of God, with all my bishops I say unto you: Descend from the throne, descend from the throne, thou man accursed through all the ages!’ And in Loches I saw how a French king weeping and wringing his hands, had a wood cut down, where the news of his young son’s death had reached him. Kings, kings tapering streets full of the working of iron on iron, iron on copper, bronze on silver, the churches full of rotting and groaning beggars, trumpets, and in dense gold-brown crowds of common people there are knights on horseback with pieces of meat in their mouths. I saw that all those European lands looked different from now, more fairy-tale-like, warmer, olive green, with weird mouse-grey rocks that grew out of the ground between the houses, growing larger and shrivelling away; trees were slim and light-feathered, idols tumbled from their pedestals in arcs and sometimes an old man walked the same way three times, ten metres at a time, without seeing himself. The third time he met Jesus. I kept seeing cripples from behind, bent over their crutches disappearing behind a hill on their way to the town. And everything, everything, was built up; beyond an olive-green wood rose eight deserted skyscrapers. It was a different space, not just a different time in Massuro’s screaming – impossible to fathom. There were rocks that no longer exist, without there being a geological reason.
It must have risen from the depths of my spine. I felt as if I had died. New Guinea. From Persijn I looked at Massuro again. He was unconscious. Four of us pulled him out of the floor and carried him to the truck in silence. Fifty metres away the kapaukos were pressed together and were leaping and barking like monkeys. They must have heard the screaming – but perhaps something else had got into their heads, something for which they had a special organ that made them leap and bark in a different world.
Oh friend, we know as little about life as a new-born baby knows about a woman. If we turn round and get to see a little more, we are immediately brought to our knees.
That night I sat next to Massuro in the pitch-black truck, a rearing block of darkness in a world of roaring engines. I could have switched on a light, but something stopped me. (What stopped me? Paracelsus’s fur hat. The sun of Austerlitz.) Massuro became so heavy that he no longer flew in the air when we drove over a stone or through a pothole; I heard no more. I was squatting against the back of the cab and was flung from left to right. My eyes had slid out of their sockets and were hanging in every corner and themselves became darkness. Once Massuro said something, for the last time; perhaps he had been conscious for a long time.
‘Loonstijn? … Are you there? … Just lay me down in the bush, and then they can break their teeth on me.’
It was the darkness that spoke, with a voice like one down a phone line, without depth, one-dimensional. I didn’t answer. He was finished – and so was I. Or was it only now beginning? A new kind of human being … For the future: calm without hope, suspicious of everything. I was in the complete darkness of the truck; I thought of nothing; that night the darkness became my body.
The rest you know. The following morning when Dr Mondriaan tried to stick his lancet into Massuro for the post-mortem (on the ground, the table would not have supported his weight), the tip broke off. What was left over from his skin he scraped away, a dry, leathery membrane. Massuro had turned to stone. From head to toe, inside and outside. A kind of granite, from light grey to pink. With black specks and dashes like letters. He was sawn open in a native stone works; a piece of grit flew into my eye so that for hours the tears ran down my cheeks. Everyone, officers, doctors, clustered round the two halves of Massuro. Around the fresh cut there was a blue mirror effect. His intestines were preserved in the stone like rare fossils.
‘Atrocities?’ asked Dr Mondriaan with his dried-out lips.
How well I understood this man!
‘Not under my command.’
‘But earlier, perhaps. In forty-eight … on Celebes?’
‘Turned to stone from atrocities, Doctor? Who would still be made of flesh and blood in that case?’
‘Not from atrocities – from remorse. A kind of process, a remorse that has stayed below the threshold of consciousness. A particular discharge that was triggered, chemical inversions, a kind of petrifying secretion.’
‘Is that scientifically justified, Dr Mondriaan?’
It was as if he acquired a goatee beard and I could smell the plush.
‘Everything is possible! Science knows nothing about the area where mind and body communicate, nothing! No man’s land. An area as big as … the whole of New Guinea! We know nothing about it, nothing.’
But he was wrong. Two and two haven’t made four for a long time. The traffic rolls along the road. A woman finds her man at the win
dow with his chair collapsed under him, turned into a statue. In the cities the jungle becomes denser and denser and the sky is emptier than ever. There are occasional prints of human feet on the earth, but in the space above the wind blows.
I excused Steiger from his punishment.
Kaukenau, 26 July 1955, Lieutenant K. Loonstijn
New Guinea Sect. G III,
5th Battalion 124 Infantry Regiment
No. 121370
Translated by Paul Vincent
15
Jan Wolkers
Feathered Friends
Gevederde vrienden
Herbert stands in front of the steamed-up window of his apartment on the fifth, and top, floor. His hands in his dressing-gown pockets, he listens to the rushing in his ears.
I’m in a bit of a state, he thinks. I’m a doomed man, though it may take another ten years. Ten more years with Liesbeth. Horror! I’m perspiring as if I have a fever, yet I haven’t one.
He digs his nails into the palms of his clammy hands. The only thing he sees through the foggy window is the Belisha beacon on the opposite side of the road. As if he’s standing on a tall mountain and an orange full moon, having just risen above the horizon, is being hidden from view, time and again, by fast-moving clouds. Like he has seen in films run at a higher speed. But the flickering, on–off, is too regular and disturbs the illusion. He takes his hand from his pocket and, fingers slightly apart, he draws long, parallel curves down the moist honeycomb, as though he’s caressing a woman’s long hair. The Belisha ends up on a post of Liquorice Allsorts; the traffic island with its yellow bollards, poisonous aniline-blue lights burning within, becomes visible. Of the trees in the park only the trunks can be seen. The tops have been devoured by the mist insects. The houses are wrapped in damp sheets. A neon advertising sign loses its purchasing power and acquires a lofty meaning. A red cross on waves of mist. Herbert puts his hand back in his pocket when the door opens behind him. Liesbeth shuffles into the room. She sighs and pokes the fire.
‘You’ve left the vent open too long,’ she says. ‘The stove’s got red cheeks.’
She’s now standing by the stove, bent over. Herbert thinks, I should walk up to her and give her squat bottom a shove. A wee taste of purgatory. But she’d scream the place down. I’m wearing my slippers. Before my shoes were on and I was out through the door, the neighbours would be here already.
‘Mind you don’t go drawing on the windows, Herbert. Once they’ve dried, I can barely get them clean again. You might wash them for me.’
‘I’m not washing anything. I just want to have enough of a view. Let the moisture evaporate: good for the plants.’
‘But it’s bad for the furniture; it makes them warp, Herbert. Just bear that in mind, would you? Peter, Peterkin! Come here, lad, come!’
That hairy predator approaches to comfort her after the defeat I’ve inflicted on her, he thinks.
He hears the cat’s paws tap the lino. It jumps up at her and climbs up her pinny. She croons over it as over a newborn babe.
Barren womb, yieldless acre, he thinks. Why didn’t your womb open itself up to me twenty years ago? Why were you like a pollarded willow that fails to sprout in spring? I would have had a daughter of twenty by now. The scent of young female flesh in the house. Tunes being hummed, the tripping of high heels, rouge to lend some colour still to my old age. Let’s think, now let’s think clearly.
Herbert leans his torso forward so his head rests against the cold, damp window.
Ah, that’s wonderful! I’m in Rome, sitting on a terrace: a hot summer’s afternoon. The tarmac’s billowing because of the heat. I order a glass of beer, icy cold. I press the glass to my forehead. The cold makes its way through my brain down to my backbone. What was it again I wanted to think about? Ah, yes: why do men always murder their wives in a rage while the balance of their minds is disturbed? Why not a trip to Austria? A hearty walk, a mountain trek? D’you hear that yodeller in the valley over there, Liesbeth? Look, there he is! If I go and stand on this rocky promontory, I can see him sitting there. Where, Herbert? I don’t see or hear him. Bend over a bit more! Look, he’s sitting there surrounded by columbine, further down the valley. Then a goodly poke with the walking stick and those two hundred pounds souring my existence tumble out of my life.
He suddenly gives a start because of the shrill squeal of tram brakes. It sounds like the screaming of a hare being jumped by a stoat. He looks down. The tram moves off slowly. Then, all of a sudden, there’s a woman lying on the traffic island. The parts of her lower legs dangling beyond the kerb are at an angle of almost ninety degrees to the parts on the traffic island. It is as if her instep reaches a tremendous way up, or her knee joint has slid down. Blood runs along the edge of the traffic island towards the rails. The tram halts, grindingly. A conductor runs to the motionless body, bends over it. He shouts something to the driver, steps on to the pavement and enters a shop.
He’s going to ring the paramedics, Herbert thinks. Perfectly pointless. Why not quietly leave her to bleed to death? Why must her husband drag out his twilight years behind a wheelchair?
People abandon cars, bicycles, prams, and hurry to the fateful spot. They surround the victim the way carrion beetles do the cadaver of a mole.
Didn’t I hear death-watch beetles in the bars of the bed this morning? So it was inescapable. Look: the windows are weeping.
Herbert follows the drops that jerkily draw vertical lines among the curves. Then he turns round.
‘Can you see, Liesbeth, what’s on that piece of paper in the milkman’s window? Your eyes are better than mine. Might even be a special offer.’
Liesbeth sets the cat down on the chair and totters over to the window. Herbert walks to the stove and holds his hands above it in the rising warmth.
Wonderful, those hot water springs in Iceland, he thinks. Would the winter be a severe one? The signs are favourable. Would it be suspect to buy a refrigerator at the beginning of winter? Wouldn’t it rouse suspicion? Shucks: there are people who buy a camping tent in January. Didn’t I myself once stand beside a girl buying a bathing costume when it was twenty degrees below? But there are indoor swimming pools, of course. And aren’t there any houses where the heat’s tropical in winter? I can’t hear anything by the window yet. Might the mortal … ehm, might the remaining mother (in-law, grand and great-grand) have been carted off already? That’d be a pity. Haven’t heard the siren yet, for that matter. Or are there so many people standing around now that it’s as though someone is offering something for sale, just like that, right out in the street?
I must keep a grip on myself, Liesbeth thinks, and with both hands she presses her stomach. There isn’t even a piece of paper in the window: he spares me nothing. The blood! She must be draining dry.
She feels the contents of her stomach rise. Quickly, she walks to the door.
‘And could you read what was there?’ Herbert asks.
He hears the toilet seat being raised with a bang.
A coarse brain but an oversensitive stomach, he thinks.
A siren sounds outside. He walks to the window. A cream-coloured car stops at the traffic island. Hurriedly, two men jump out, pull a stretcher from the back of the car and set it down beside the body. Then they pick it up and put it on the stretcher. The left foot, bobbing up and down, perpendicular in its stocking, ends up next to the stretcher. One of the men shoves it back on with his foot.
Liesbeth comes in again.
‘It’s busy in the street,’ Herbert says.
‘That’s what I saw too, just now. There seems to have been an accident. I couldn’t see.’
‘Best thing, too,’ Herbert replies as he draws a little landscape with a windmill in the top corner of the window. ‘You’ve got enough of a weak stomach as it is. You’d be upset for days. Assuming it was an accident, then it was caused by the tram. Not a pretty sight at all. Those iron wheels shear the lot off, clean. I once … Hey, why are you leaving the room in such
a hurry?’
Retching, Liesbeth runs to the toilet.
Dinner-for-one this evening, Herbert thinks, rubbing his hands. I’ll put the newspaper behind my plate, up against the condiment set. A feast!
When Herbert has reached the top of the stairs, the door to his apartment opens. Liesbeth steps out into the hall.
‘Oh, you shouldn’t have, Herbert,’ she says, ticking him off.
‘What shouldn’t I have?’ Herbert asks, leering with screwed-up eyes at the red face.
‘Such a big one, far too much space for a small family.’
‘Oh, the fridge – has the fridge arrived? I thought it’d take them hours. Hoisting it up and so on.’
‘No, they managed it the ordinary way, up the stairs. But such a big one, Herbert; it really is too much.’
‘What rot – this is no ordinary birthday: you turned fifty today. Half a century.’
Too many, he adds in his mind, half a century too many.
‘Come on, show me,’ he says cheerfully.
He follows her to the kitchen.
‘It’s a whopper indeed,’ he says, once he’s standing in the kitchen in front of the gleaming white enamel. ‘It looked much smaller in the shop.’
What a magnificent sight, he thinks, the polar ice cap seen from a stratospheric aircraft. It gleams and glistens in the polar light. Now for an axe, and we can start on conservation.
‘You would have done better to wait till summer, Herbert; it’s cold enough here now.’
‘That’s just why it’s so practical now. You won’t have to turn down the heating in the evening any more ’cause otherwise your food’ll go off. And no waiting for hours in the morning until it’s warmed up a bit here. Just take a look,’ he says cheerfully, pulling the door of the fridge wide open. ‘Just you take a look: the space! I bet you could go and sit in it in summer, when it’s hot.’
‘Now you really are exaggerating, Herbert,’ Liesbeth says, estimating its volume by eye.
‘Exaggerate? I never exaggerate.’
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 29