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

by Joost Zwagerman

  They went up to the kid with the knife. Dick had a bottle of genever. They stopped in front of him.

  ‘I’m Wessel,’ said Wessel. ‘And he’s Dick. I’m the host here. You’re a guest. So far so good. But what about you – what’s your name?’

  ‘Oscar,’ the kid said.

  ‘Dick,’ Wessel said, ‘ask Oscar what he’d like to drink.’

  ‘I don’t drink,’ the kid said. He scrutinized the sharp shining blade of his knife.

  ‘You’re just sussing out the scene, are you?’ Wessel said.

  ‘Not really,’ said the kid.

  ‘All you need is your knife,’ Dick said.

  ‘That’s about it,’ the kid said.

  ‘It’s a nice knife,’ said Wessel.

  The kid looked at it as if he was holding it for the first time.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said.

  ‘According to your friend Erik, you’re a really crazy kid, Oscar,’ Wessel said. ‘Is that right?’

  The kid shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘He feels flattered,’ Dick said. ‘But he won’t admit it.’ He put the bottle to his mouth and took a swig.

  ‘Do you always bring that knife with you?’ Wessel asked.

  The kid didn’t answer.

  ‘Do you know how to throw it?’

  The kid nodded.

  ‘Is your aim good?’

  ‘Yes,’ the kid said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘If we choose something for you, can you hit it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s what we’ll do, then. Come with us, Dick,’ said Wessel.

  ‘What are you planning?’ Dick asked.

  ‘Something brilliant. Where’s Bella? Have you seen Bella?’

  ‘There she is, dancing.’

  ‘Bella! Come here a moment!’

  ‘She’s a lioness,’ Dick said. ‘She’s only twenty and she has the face of a posh forty-year-old call girl.’

  ‘And her voice,’ Wessel said. ‘A fantastically husky sound. It sounds like the voice of an old drunken painter.’

  ‘It’s a great party, Wessel!’ Bella barked.

  ‘Are you very drunk, Bella?’ Wessel asked.

  ‘Drunk?! I’ve been drunk the whole far-out week. I’ve gone from one far-out party to another. It’s been a far-out week. I mean it.’

  ‘Do you see that boy sitting there on the couch? He’s a really crazy kid.’

  ‘A far-out kid.’

  ‘He’s got a knife, that kid.’

  ‘Hey, that’s far out!’

  ‘He’s got a perfect aim. Do you see that spot on the wallpaper? He can hit it if he likes.’

  ‘Okay then, far out. That’s a far-out story.’

  ‘His name’s Oscar. He doesn’t drink, that’s why he’s so good at throwing knives.’

  ‘That’s so far out, that kid with that knife, far out.’

  ‘Now he’d like to show us what a great knife-thrower he is, do you get me?’

  ‘Sure, of course. That’s far out.’

  ‘But we think it’s much more fun if he doesn’t throw it at dead objects. That’s not so exciting.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘That’s boring.’

  ‘That’s totally boring.’

  ‘We thought it would be more exciting if he threw it at you.’

  ‘At me? That’s far out.’

  ‘Yes, I mean not at you, but just next to you, at a spot we choose. Like in the circus.’

  ‘That’s such a far-out brilliant plan.’

  ‘But you’d have to be naked.’

  ‘Of course. It’s a far-out idea. That far-out kid with that knife.’

  ‘Far out,’ Wessel and Dick said in chorus. Together with Bella, they went over to the kid.

  ‘You have to aim it at her, like in the circus,’ Wessel said.

  The kid gave Bella a quick glance and blushed. Then he got up slowly, knife in hand.

  ‘It’s okay with me,’ he said.

  ‘He’s cool,’ Bella said. ‘He’s sooo cool.’

  ‘In the corridor,’ Wessel said. ‘There’s more room there.’

  The four of them headed for the corridor.

  ‘Stark naked?’ Bella asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wessel.

  ‘That’s fantastic. It’s so far out.’

  She started getting undressed.

  ‘Turn off the music,’ said the kid with the knife.

  Dick went into the living room and a minute later the music stopped and the others, their curiosity aroused, started streaming into the corridor.

  ‘Go and stand on the stairs, all of you,’ Wessel said. ‘And don’t forget, total silence. So you can hear a knife drop.’

  ‘Far out,’ Bella growled. She’d taken off all her clothes.

  Wessel positioned her against the door leading to the kitchen.

  ‘You decide on the distance,’ he said to the kid.

  ‘For God’s sake, what’s going on?’ Erik asked. He was standing on the stairs with the others.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘She should be blindfolded,’ said Dick. He pulled out his handkerchief and tied it round Bella’s eyes.

  The kid took up position at a distance of twenty paces. He held the knife by the tip of the blade.

  ‘What’s the target?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Wessel.

  ‘Have you gone quite crazy?’ Erik shouted, having finally realized what was happening.

  ‘That’s right, quite crazy,’ Bella shouted back. ‘It’s a far-out idea.’

  Wessel went up to Bella.

  ‘You should spread your legs a bit,’ he said.

  He pointed to a spot high up between her thighs.

  ‘That’s your target,’ he said to the kid. ‘As high as possible.’ He scratched a mark in the paint of the door with his fingernail.

  ‘You’re tickling me like crazy,’ Bella said.

  ‘Stay quite still,’ Wessel said. ‘Don’t move.’ He stepped aside a little. ‘Don’t move,’ he repeated. ‘Okay, Oscar, when you’re ready throw your knife.’ Everyone held their breath.

  The kid lifted his arm. His face was tense with concentration, but his body was relaxed. Then, with a barely perceptible movement of his arm, he released the knife.

  It leaped from his hand almost gaily, did a dazzling somersault in the air, like a fish with intent, slammed into the wood between Bella’s thighs and stuck there quivering.

  Nobody said a thing. Only when the knife had stopped moving, did they all suddenly start talking.

  ‘Was that it?’ Bella asked.

  ‘Don’t move!’ Wessel shouted. ‘Otherwise you’ll cut yourself.’ He pulled the knife out of the wood and gave it back to the kid.

  ‘Far out,’ Bella said, taking off her blindfold.

  ‘It’s a pity he didn’t have his camera, then he could have taken some photos,’ Wessel heard Dick say.

  ‘It’s a far-out feeling,’ Bella said. ‘It’s like someone blew on you. Just like someone blowing on you. That’s some crazy kid.’ She went up to him, threw her arms round his neck, snuggled up to him and kissed him on his mouth.

  Afterwards she said admiringly: ‘He’s totally cool. He just doesn’t care. It doesn’t make a scrap of difference to him.’

  The kid blushed again. Smiling shyly, he laid his left hand cautiously on Bella’s bare shoulder; he kept his other hand with the knife in it awkwardly behind his back, anxious not to scratch her with it.

  Translated by Donald Gardner

  18

  J. M. A. Biesheuvel

  The Shattering Truth

  De verpletterende werkelijkheid

  I have set myself up in my room and think I know exactly what I want to write.

  It’s a story about a man who commits suicide and drifts around the universe for a long time before arriving in Heaven. He doesn’t believe in God at all, so when God actually put
s in an appearance the man says: ‘Look, I don’t want anything to do with this.’

  ‘Well then, you can just go back into space for another million years,’ God says. ‘Go on, float around and eat your heart out, and after that you can try again.’

  What happens next almost defies description. Desperate loneliness, grinding misery, here and there a little star. No one around for a million years. Fretting until it makes your bones ache. Finally, he gets back to Heaven and appears before God, Elijah, Moses and Malachi.

  ‘You do know you’re not supposed to commit suicide, don’t you?’ God asks. ‘You know that life on earth is an ordeal, and that you’re not allowed to end it prematurely, right? If everyone did that, we’d have a real administrative mess on our hands. To be honest, I can’t really admit suicides into Heaven.’

  ‘Not unless the accused can present a reasonable defence,’ Elijah mumbles.

  So the story is going to be called ‘Rumplala’s Defence’.

  The man’s name is Rumplala. He starts in on an account of his tribulations and disappointments. In the end, God, Elijah, Moses and Malachi are all sitting around weeping.

  It was going to be a real Dostoevsky story. About him not fitting in at his place of employment. About him tearing up all the incoming correspondence. Failing to understand his colleagues. Not being cut out for his work. Stealing money. Going to prostitutes and so compounding his misery. About his guilt complex with regard to his wife. The fears he suffered underneath, all his life, unspecified fears that devour the soul. Finally, the dismissal and the poverty. Then, the Christmas celebration. His wife tries to get him to church at least once. Rumplala goes along with her and sees cripples and invalids, mental cases and little old women. An old man sitting in a wheelchair stares ecstatically at the preacher and at the brightly lit Christmas tree in one corner of the church. There’s a frankfurter sausage hanging out of the man’s pants. The pastor slurs his words during the sermon. Rumplala gets angry and shouts: ‘Bullshit.’ Then he runs out of the church. Angst, whoring, his failure at work, his hopeless attempts at making a career, his unhappiness, the rattled nerves, everything one big failure, including the singing, the paintings, the short stories he writes. His friends try to tell him he’s not such a bad writer. But the doctor at the health insurance company he reports to every two weeks has never even heard of him. ‘Can you recall the titles of the books you’ve written?’ he keeps asking, after Rumplala has spent hours in a stuffy waiting room along with hundreds of sad-eyed workers who mope and sniffle and read old back copies of hokey magazines like Margriet and Panorama, mumbling to themselves the whole time, or simply staring at a spot on the floor or ceiling. And so he runs through the titles one more time: ‘Storm in a Teacup, Murder on the Queen Mary, The Devil’s Lamppost …’

  ‘Sounds like a pretty complicated oeuvre,’ the doctor says. Backyard with Skyscape. ‘And have these books ever actually been published?’ the doctor asks. ‘Yes,’ Rumplala says, ‘you’ll find them in any bookstore, but I don’t really make any money from it, at least not enough to keep my head above water, my wife … the panic attacks … getting sacked … the time I’ve wasted … the sense of failure … my nerves … Did I tell you that I went to the whores downtown once too?’

  ‘Tch, tch,’ the doctor mumbles, ‘oh my, that’s really terrible, especially seeing as you’re too sick to go to work. How were you able to afford that? What about your nervous state? Are you on any particular medication?’

  ‘You bet your ass I am!’ Rumplala shouts, and he pulls out all his little vials and boxes and tosses them in the doctor’s face and against the front of his lab coat, one by one. ‘I’m taking Trilafon and Dalmadorm and Valium and Nozinan and Serenase and Trofanil!’ The doctor just sits there, covered in pills. ‘The best thing would be for you to get a little rest. Hopefully you’ll find another pleasant job.’

  ‘I’ve never had a pleasant job,’ Rumplala says. He thinks back in disgust on the way he shilly-shallied around at the office. Is there anything in life that doesn’t drive him mad? The drivel in the student papers, in the newspapers. Always the same thing: ‘Professor Beiderheide says farewell.’ Then you read some ridiculous, cliché-ridden article that talks about gratitude, attentive students, outstanding colleagues, a pleasant atmosphere, happy days, wonderful prospects, yes, there is even something looming on the horizon. Next to it a photo of a man laughing sheepishly as a pair of nurses or students hand him a box of cigars and a book. Rumplala works at the hospital and has been charged with writing a handbook, an intake folder for patients. Anyone in their right mind would have finished it within a week. He has already read hundreds of books and interviewed dozens of people, but he isn’t one step closer to being finished. He knows a bit about insurance cover and premiums, all out, all in, doctor out, peignoir, bathrobe or duster with you when you come in, toothbrush, sewing kit and shaving things. If you want a telephone it costs this much more. The lights go out at nine thirty, that’s better for you and better for us. It is the patient’s responsibility to pay his bills or have his insurer do so. He also has the right to information. He can refuse a given treatment, and if student interns come to his bedside just to goggle at him, he has the right to send them away. Rumplala has been working on this for six months already and so far he’s only spinning his wheels. He can’t do it. He’s already got his first two sentences, though: ‘Welcome, dear patient. You’ve gone through such an incredible amount of crap in your life and now you’ve ended up in the hospital.’ His boss thinks those sentences are hilarious. ‘This folder is not going to happen,’ his boss mumbles. Meanwhile, Rumplala spends all day thinking about the folder, he dreams about it at night. About what he mustn’t forget to include in it. How do you spell ‘peignoir’, anyway? One afternoon he tried out everything he could think of: ‘penuar’, ‘painwar’, ‘pignoir’, ‘peignoir’. He has mumbled the word under his breath so often that he doesn’t even know what it means any more. Coffee breaks are a disaster. He hears his colleagues conversing, but he has no idea what they’re talking about. ‘I told Zwatser that it will take twenty years before the new wing can be implemented, that’s the government standpoint.’ ‘So what did Barrestorg say to that?’ ‘He laughed and said: “We can always use Plan 2A to keep them sidetracked, as long as the deputy-minister doesn’t come down with something.” There’s no milk or sugar on his table. The canteen is too small. The others don’t pass him the things he needs, they talk and while they talk they read Margriet and Panorama. Life is a catastrophe. This cleansing cream penetrates deep into your pores, where it nourishes the skin and does its curative work. The next time your boyfriend kisses you he’ll say: ‘Your skin is as soft as a peach.’ A catastrophe, that’s what life is. Subscribe to the Winkler Prins Encyclopedia, your children can use it to do their homework: a lifelong asset. A welcome addition to your room and your bookcase. For only two thousand guilders. Revulsion. Her Majesty wanted to know all about that one particular kiss, the tabloids said, so you know what that’s about. No, what is that all about? Rumplala thinks. What’s this preacher blabbering on about? What kind of rubbish are my colleagues spouting? I mustn’t forget to put this in the handbook too, but it’s almost too much for me to bear: patients also have access to psychiatric counselling. Social workers can come to your bedside. Disgusting, what a horror, the whole thing, to say nothing of all the pain you have to go through. ‘Chin up, Mr Pinters,’ says the nurse, a young thing who has never had cancer herself. That is what work at the office is like. Rumplala can’t get to the milk and sugar. The room is too small. They never pass it to him. He doesn’t dare to ask for it. He can’t really go crawling over his colleagues to get to the milk and sugar, can he? Why are they talking and reading at the same time? They’re not reading out loud, they’re talking about work.

  Now he gets up and races out of the church, his wife runs after him but can’t catch up. ‘Frits!’ she yells. ‘What are you doing, for heaven’s sake?’ He runs up the fire escap
e of a high-rise apartment building.

  That’s where the story begins, in fact. Rumplala has almost reached the roof. He’s going to jump, and that will be the start of a never-ending story. His wife is standing down below, he’s causing her a lot of pain, but he can do no other …

  Just then the dog starts to bark. My wife is lying in bed. She knows that I’m in here writing. A little boy out on the walkway peers through my window. Hesitantly, by way of greeting, he raises his hand. ‘Did you call first?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, Eva said I could play at your house if my mother wasn’t home,’ the boy says. Mik, the dog, is now barking to beat the band. My wife comes into my room.

  ‘Why don’t you let Maaikeltje in?’ she asks. A little later I hear things being knocked over in the living room. Maaikeltje has tossed a tear-gas grenade and two stink bombs into the room, by way of contemporary playthings. He’s a natural-born disrupter. The door to my room flies open and a few cats come running in.

  ‘Maaikeltje, don’t tease the cats. Maaikeltje.’

  Go jump in a lake with your, ‘Maaikeltje, Maaikeltje!’ I think. Can’t you tell I’m trying to write a story here?

  Rumplala falls to his death, right at his wife’s feet. She believes he’s dead. And he is, he’s dead as a doornail. To his disgruntlement, though, he has a soul that can survey the whole mess. What a lot of blood, all over the place. Then begins the fall, or the ascension, through the cosmos. The compass he always carries with him has fallen out of his trouser pocket and is floating along beside him, a couple of feet away, the prayer book too. The box of matches, he can’t get to it, otherwise he would light up a cigarette right there. Do they expect him to believe that there actually is a hereafter? As long as there’s no God. Rumplala hopes he’ll finally get around to dying. Things can’t go on like this for ever, can they?

  How is a body supposed to write like this? It’s impossible. ‘Have you found the hole over there yet?’ I hear a strange voice say. Strangers have forced their way into my home. I know what this is about, though. They’re here to install the second phone line. ‘Be careful, hey, with the pipes and wires,’ I hear him say, ‘before you know it you’ll blow up the whole place.’