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

by Joost Zwagerman

  With a clatter, he removes the horizontal aluminium racks.

  ‘I think you could take the cat in with you too. No, no kidding: you try it, Liesbeth. My lumbago’s giving me gip.’

  Blood, blood, he thinks, I’ll bring it about without spilling blood. The heavens regard me with favour. There’ll be no writing on the wall.

  ‘Well, all right then, ’cause it’s my birthday,’ Liesbeth says, laughing. ‘But it’s a strange experiment.’

  She sets her bottom down on the floor of the fridge, wraps her arms round her drawn-up knees and swivels herself inside.

  ‘Enduring the worst heat of August would be easier than sitting in this position, I think.’

  With a powerful sweep, Herbert throws the door shut. Then he puts the plug in the socket.

  I can hear her shouting but I can’t make out what she’s saying, he thinks.

  He walks to the living room, switches on the radio and sits down in the tub chair beside it. Circumspectly, he takes a cigar from the cigar case, licks the outer leaf and presses it down. He twiddles the radio until a nice little tune breezes into the room. From the blue banks of cloud that linger in the middle of the room, the temptations of a life of freedom drift towards him. They spin in the surf of his imagination. He gives them girls’ names and those of flowers.

  There’ll be ice flowers on her pupils; she’ll be sitting there, hunched up like the tree mummies of Central American Indians. I could have a hole made in the bottom of my car with a broad pipe through it, reaching down to the road. Then, one rainy day, I put her in the back. On the bumpy rural roads, I shove her down the pipe, head first, so that her hair rests on the cobbles. And then I drive about until there’s nothing left but the soles of her feet. I won’t take off her glasses. But I won’t even be able to straighten her out. She’ll have wriggled her way into the most impossible angles. She always did. I’ll avail myself of other means to get rid of her, as it happens. Now won’t I just, you white-shirts you?

  Walking over to the window, he addresses the seagulls diving down into the street, after bread being thrown from a window somewhere.

  ‘I’ll be spoiling you, lads! For the time being, your hungry beaks won’t be eating dry bread any more: they’ll be red with all the raw.’

  A grand moment, Herbert thinks, eye to eye with the deep-freeze princess. A fortnight past already: she’ll be feeling the cold.

  He pulls open the door of the fridge. With a jump, daylight takes possession of polar night. Liesbeth still sits there exactly the way he last saw her. Her hands rest calmly on her tummy, between the hillocks of her bosom and her thighs. Her glasses are covered in a thin, matt layer of ice as though, with its fragile wings, a butterfly seeks to protect her eyes from the cold. Icicles formed by the condensing water, with pointed fingers probe the hoar-frosted shrubbery of her hair. Her mouth hangs open. The pink tongue of land lies speechless, riveted down in the bitter ice of the inland sea of her oral cavity. An elegantly curved little rod of ice runs from her bottom lip to the remnants of food on her chest, as though her last thoughts had been of the fountains of Italy.

  Herbert bends forward and looks intently at the food remnants.

  Not such a peaceful death as first it had seemed from the resignedly folded hands on the stomach, he thinks. Perhaps that was a whim of the last death throes. Let’s take a peek at the eyes.

  Carefully, he grips the frame between the lenses. With his fingertips he stirs the cold marble of her forehead and the bridge of her nose. The cold spreads up to his wrists. He has to apply force for a moment in order to free the spectacles. Then he sees what the butterfly was trying to spare him. Her eyes have bulged out so far that, Herbert suspects, the lenses have prevented them from drooping even further. They hang down over the bottom eyelids like infertile, greenish owl’s eggs that have been cast out from the red and yellow veined nest of the eye sockets. In blind suspicion, the pupils stare down sideways into the remnants of food. When Herbert replaces the specs, those pupils stare through them like the eyes of a sea monster through the steamed-up pane of an aquarium. He staggers in front of the fridge.

  I’m overcome by the cold, he thinks. I must have a drink. I must raise my glass to this memorable fact.

  He goes to the living room; he pours himself a glass of genever, warms himself in front of the fire. The liquor warms him all the way down to his digestive tract.

  ‘Now what have we got?’ he mutters, taking a sip from the glass at each object he mentions. ‘A sharp little cleaver for between the joints, a saw for the bones, a razor-sharp knife for flesh and tendons, a chopping board, plastic sheeting, a nutmeg mill. And a glass for the eyes.’

  Triumphantly, he raises the glass aloft. Then he goes to the kitchen, spreads a sheet of plastic in front of the refrigerator and fetches the tools from the cabinet. He goes down on his knees in front of the fridge and tries to turn Liesbeth ninety degrees by her ankles, something he only succeeds in after a great deal of effort, for she is frozen to the sides of the fridge in some places. Then he drags her forward so her lower body ends up resting on the plastic.

  To be pruned as soon as possible, he thinks, flipping her shoes from her feet with the cleaver. I’ll try to get rid of a leg today.

  With an old-fashioned razor he draws a furrow in her right leg, exactly along the seam of her stocking, which he peals from her leg like bark. Then he cuts her clothes away at the hip, the imprint of them visible on her skin as if she is wrapped in thin tarlatan. The flesh is hard and cuts easily. Not without anatomical insight, he severs the leg from the torso at the hip joint, returns the body in the same position to the fridge and closes the door. Then he lets his knife sink deep into the fluvial landscape of her varicose veins and begins to cut off long strips of flesh. The knife makes a sound like skates on mirror-finish ice. When he has divested the thigh and shin bones of flesh, he strikes the foot off with his cleaver. He then begins to cut the long strips of flesh carefully into little cubes he tosses into a large, shallow tray.

  The feet are too complicated to bone for my liking. I can simply put them out by the dustbins tomorrow. Perhaps it would be better, however, if I was first to fit them with the antique lace-up bootees. Let’s chop things up as small as possible. They’re guzzlers; they’ll polish things off as they are, too.

  With a swing, he lets the cleaver come down on the bunions. The toes hop forward, away from the foot, like small, pale frogs. Purple splinters rain down on the plastic.

  I used to sit in the garden like this, Herbert thinks, wiping the sweat from his forehead. The purple flowers of the lilac dropping around me. In front of me in the loose sand were corks in a long row, wriggling insects pinned to them. I let down a woollen thread into a bottle of petrol and laid that across the caterpillars, beetles and locusts. Then I lit both ends. Once the flames met, the insects would be lying there with burnt-off legs and wings. Of some, the body had split open like a roast chestnut. Thick, white goo bulged out. You’re worse than Nero, my father said, and he raised blisters on my bottom. You’re just like your uncle Louis; he’s a bad’un too. Uncle Louis! When there was just a butt left of his cigar, he would walk out into the garden with it. He would stay and wait by the balsam at the back of the garden until a bumble bee came to fetch honey from a flower. Then he’d tap the ash from the butt, suck it so it got a fiery dome at the tip, and put it in the calyx. Can you hear him buzz, little Herbert? he would ask. D’you know what he’s saying? He’s saying the Lord’s Prayer. Soon, when Uncle Louis was staying with us, moist brown cigar butts would be sticking up from all the pink calyxes of the balsam, like arses just about to relieve themselves. Uncle Louis, a sensitive man, stimulating his conscience with the annihilation of little insects, Herbert thinks, touched.

  ‘I’ve become a big game hunter,’ he mutters.

  He roots with the cleaver in the splintered heel bone. Then he takes up the board and slides the shattered foot on top of the meat in the tray.

  That’ll do: they�
��ll devour the chaff with the wheat; they’ll make no bones about it.

  He takes the tray and walks with it to the hall. He sets it down there, takes out a stepladder and puts it underneath the hatch in the ceiling. He mounts the steps carefully, undoes the hooks and pushes the hatch open. Shrieking, seagulls fly up from the edge of the roof when suddenly his head appears above the antediluvian landscape of tar and shingle.

  No one can see a thing here, he thinks: there are no taller buildings in the vicinity.

  He goes down, takes the tray of meat and, holding it above his head, he climbs back up. Sliding it across the shingle, he shoves the tray a little further away from the hatch, out on to the roof.

  If the dead can still feel anything, she must assume she’ll share in the Kingdom of Heaven limb by limb. Come on then, lads, come on! Just you tuck in. Here lies the manna of twenty years’ unhappy married life.

  Herbert moves down a step, pulls the hatch up over the edge and, through a crack, he watches the seagulls who continue to sit motionless on the edge of the roof in the red light of the setting sun hanging between dark swordfish clouds above the grimy city.

  Herbert is sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Round slices of bone are lying around him on the plastic. The electric nutmeg mill whirs beside him.

  Liesbeth has no relatives any more, he thinks. Friends and acquaintances have stayed away for years already, driven away by the stale smell she spread. Which leaves the neighbours. When do I actually see the neighbours? Never, surely. Liesbeth hasn’t been out in months. Even the shopkeepers no longer ask after her. It’ll take years before anyone hits on the idea of asking me how she is. And I will have forgotten it myself by then; my mind’ll be a blank. Perhaps, should a seagull be flying over, I’ll point up above. And they will say: Oh, she’s passed away in peace, you mean. Yes, passed away in peace, I’ll then reply – in ice-cold peace.

  He presses the button on the side of the mill and so silences it. He removes its plastic lid and puts a disc of thigh bone inside. Then he pulls out the drawer at the bottom, throws the bone, ground to powder, in a pan and switches the mill back on. He picks up the pan, fetches a spoon from the drawer and walks to the living room. He puts a chair in front of the stove, sits down on it with the pan clamped between his thighs and he opens the little door of the stove. Slowly, Herbert stirs the bone meal, makes little mounds and draws Arabic characters in it. In the flickering firelight, it’s just as though there’s life in it, as if it’s a pan full of little, yellow spiders. Then, a spoonful at a time, he sprinkles the meal on to the fire.

  It’s a bit damp, he thinks. But I could hardly dry it first, now could I?

  It emanates sulphur-like fumes, with poisonous blue flames coursing through. He flings the little door shut. The peaceful scent of a village smithy settles in the room.

  Herbert wakes up in the morning with the smell of burnt horn in his nostrils.

  Ah yes, the bone, he thinks. I was busy till ever so late, yesterday. But I’m rid of the lot. Air the place first in a minute, and then take a peek at what the ash looks like.

  He raises his right leg so the cold air streaming in at the foot end wakes his body, and he looks at the bedside table.

  ‘Such a liberation,’ he says, yawning. ‘Only one glass with dentures.’

  Then, in a single sweep, he flings the blankets aside and jumps out of bed. He walks over to the window and draws back the curtains. It’s snowing. He stands there ill at ease in the marble light, looks up at the snowflakes floating down like grey ash, to be cleansed only in contrast with the houses opposite.

  The meat, he suddenly thinks with a shock, the meat has been snowed under.

  He walks quickly to the hall and climbs the steps. When his head emerges above the edge of the hatch, the light blinds him. On top of his head, he feels the chill kisses of the snowflakes. In front of him is the tray. Empty. There’s a thin layer of snow on the bottom, tinged pale pink by the blood that has stayed behind on the bottom as though it had stood beneath a flowering sweetbriar. It fills him with shame, shame without remorse. When he removes the tray, a reproachful dark square of tar and shingle remains like a freshly dug grave in the snow.

  In the kitchen, he puts the tray in the sink and rinses out the snow and blood with hot water. A few toenails stay behind on the grid above the plughole. The hungry birds have left no more than that.

  Let’s not get sentimental now, he thinks, picking up the nails and tossing them among the wet tea leaves in the enamel sink tidy. Raskolnikov was a worthless character. Precisely because of his weakness, his conscience. Or perhaps one is allowed to have a conscience but only regarding oneself … Is a conscience not the most covert of stimulants? The outside world, however, must notice nothing of it.

  Rubbing his wrists together, he walks over to the refrigerator and draws it open. He halts, rigid with fright. Liesbeth’s sitting just the way he set her down there yesterday, but her glasses no longer cover her eyes: she’s holding them in her right hand. In a panic, he runs to the door. It’s shut; it’s even bolted. Then he walks to the back room and tests the balcony doors.

  I must have done it myself, he thinks. I’ve been sleepwalking. But no, I surely would have known in that case. I always know, don’t I, when I’ve been up in the night and what I did then?

  But now he remembers it was Liesbeth who always told him.

  She would follow me with a wet floor cloth which she put in front of my feet. But I would always step over it. And she’d be picking it up and laying it down in front of me again. Just like a king being received in state. Where’s the cat: where’s Peter?

  Nervously he goes through the house, searches all the cupboards, but he cannot find the creature anywhere.

  Riddles at every turn in this place. Cats disappear, women disappear, I walk the house at night, my arms stretched out in front of me like a blind man. Dangerous, too! Tonight I’ll tie myself down to the bed bars. No, I might have an unlucky fall in that case. Then, suddenly, a story from the Old Testament pops into his mind. One of ash sprinkled round the altar in which they found the footprints of the greedy priests next morning. I’ll sprinkle a thin layer of flour on the kitchen floor, he thinks. I mustn’t go imagining all kinds of things. It’s too ridiculous for words. Nobody can get in. And who would benefit by taking off Liesbeth’s glasses? Who’d want to open her eyes to what I have inflicted on her?

  Reassured, he walks to the refrigerator and places the glasses back in front of the half-abandoned eye sockets. Then he drags her round ninety degrees and cuts off her left leg.

  It’s becoming a routine job now, he thinks. The same actions as yesterday. The two arms tomorrow, the trunk in halves, across, the day after: only leaves the head for Saturday.

  Abstracted, he begins to cut into the leg.

  Just look what I’m doing, he thinks. Such elegant curves. Yesterday, I began to cut clumsily; as time went by I was cutting splendid, straight strips. Now I’m cutting capricious pieces. Just like in Art. Art, too, is refractory and clumsy at first. Then you get classical harmony, the straight strips of drab-pink flesh. I’m going through the Baroque now. Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll be cutting scrolls and elegant figures and I’ll be the Watteau of corpse desecration.

  I was at primary school, Herbert thinks, in the fourth form. I must have been ten at the time. I was ten years old when it started. Or much earlier on even: who knows? How is it possible for one to find one’s vocation so late? Across from me, at her desk, sat a girl with long, dark hair and spirited, brown eyes. Bent over my work, I turned my head sideways and looked at her profile. Then I looked at her tummy, going up and down like thick, boiling porridge in her tight dress. At night, in bed, I would think of her. I would take her to a lonely house where I tied her hands behind her back. A meat hook hung from an iron bar on the ceiling. I suspended her from it by the roof of her mouth. She sought to speak but I only heard her bottom teeth tap against the hook like a woodpecker hidden in the woods. She wanted to s
ay: You’re sweet to me even though you hurt me. I was lying on my belly. With my lower torso I slid back and forth on the sheet. I was covered in a gory membrane in which I threatened to suffocate. Like a child born with a caul. Wasn’t I born with a caul? Mother said that at my birth the placenta was stuck to my skull like a Russian fur hat.

  When Herbert opens the hatch, the sky, mottled drab and yellow, is stretched above the city like the soiled sheet of an incontinent child. An army of mediaeval knights pokes its helmeted, brick face, smoking, above the white hills of the roofs. Swans float like white islets on the dark pond in the park. Great black-backed gulls sit equidistant from each other on the edge of the roof. When Herbert lets the tray of meat down into the soft snow, they approach, hesitantly. Halting a few metres away from the tray, they stare at Herbert, soullessly, with their fierce, yellow, artificial eyes.

  ‘I’ll withdraw, lads,’ he says, ‘so you can dine in peace.’

  He pulls the hatch shut over his head and fixes the catches.

  Mind I don’t forget to lock everything properly and sprinkle flour in the kitchen before I go to bed. I must have an early night: these are tiring times.

  Above his head he hears the frightful shrieking and gorging of the hungry birds.

  In the depths of night, Herbert wakes from the cold. He is lying on top of the blankets. He sticks his feet up in the air and looks at the soles of his feet.

  ‘Gotcha,’ he says loudly. ‘I’ve caught myself out. Just as if I’ve got perspiring feet and they’ve been rubbed with talc.’

  He brushes them. The flour sticks to his fingers like dough. Startled, he jumps out of bed.

  My feet must have been wet before I stepped in the flour, he thinks.

  Quickly, he walks to the kitchen. There are his footprints. His eyes crowd with fear against the top of their sockets. Among his prints he sees a damp square, and another, and the floor cloth in front of the fridge. The cat’s prints run alongside his. Hurriedly he goes over to the refrigerator. The meat tray’s up against the wall, opposite Liesbeth. He looks at the hallway door. He sees by his prints that he has been back and forth through the door. He sees the cat’s tracks too, but just one way. He walks over to the hallway door and opens it. Freezing cold envelops his body. Herbert goes to the hatch; the steps are underneath. When he looks up, he sees the stars in the carbon-black sky. He clambers up and sticks his head into the east wind. Right in front of his eyes, in the snow, he sees the tracks of the cat.