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

by Joost Zwagerman

  Rumplala is falling through space. He fumbles for his cigarettes, but can’t find them. Now he notices that he’s lost his trousers. As long as he doesn’t run into another living soul. He starts weeping, because he is plummeting through the universe in his boxer shorts. That’s been going on for hours. Where is this headed, where will it all end up? Frits Rumplala thinks about his mother. Was he a good enough son to her? Hadn’t he offended her a little too often? Especially when it came to religion? Had he visited her regularly enough, there at the end? If life is an ordeal, then why does the ordeal have to go on after death too? Has he committed suicide for no good reason? He looks up with a start; there, in the distance, is a lighted gateway with angels flying around it. Please, spare me, Rumplala thinks.

  ‘Hey there,’ I hear someone say from out on the walkway. Can I help it that I write during the day and like to leave my window open?

  ‘Good Lord, I almost had a heart attack,’ I say. ‘What’s the idea, going around shouting “hey there”?’

  ‘I heard you typing,’ he says. It’s Loek, the neighbour.

  ‘I’m working on a pretty complicated story here,’ I say, ‘could we continue this conversation tomorrow?’

  ‘Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,’ Loek says. ‘There’s nothing to get all worked up about. You know what you should read sometime? The Famous Five. Man, I laughed till I about burst. How do you like Assoe’s new look?’

  Assoe is Loek’s dog, a gigantic black shepherd. Assoe scares the wits out of me. I stand up with a sigh, walk to the window and find myself looking straight into a cheerful, laughing muzzle. Massive canines. Brown eyes gleaming with pleasure in a black head like a bear’s. Huge paws on my window sill. ‘My God, what a dog,’ I mumble.

  ‘Assoe, bark for Daddy,’ Loek says. The barking that begins then is louder than anything I’ve ever heard. ‘Has this dog got a set of lungs, or what?’ Loek says proudly. ‘He’s going to obedience school these days, all I have to do is say boo and he’ll rip you to pieces!’ Loek steps up cheerfully to my window sill and leans on it. He’s like a bar-room regular waiting for me to tap him a beer. Tilting his head to one side, he peers at the sheet of paper in my typewriter. ‘What kind of a story is that?’ he says. ‘That’s not supposed to be somebody’s name, is it? Rumplala?’

  ‘I need to get back to work,’ I say. ‘Let’s continue this tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, Mr High and Mighty,’ Loek mumbles. ‘Doesn’t even have time for a little chat …’

  ‘No,’ I say irritatedly, ‘that’s right, I don’t, not right now.’

  ‘Hey, did you hear the joke about the Belgian taxi driver?’ Loek asks.

  ‘I really have to go on now,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, but this story is very important to me and you’re ruining my concentration.’

  Eva, who has been listening from the kitchen, comes into my study and says: ‘Can’t you be a little more civil to Loek? You’re being very rude.’

  ‘Oh, okay, I’m out of here,’ Loek says cheerfully, ‘before you two lovebirds get into a spat.’ He walks away brusquely, taking his dog with him. I close the window firmly.

  What is it that Frits sees up ahead? Could those be the pearly gates? It’s insane, all those angels floating around. And they actually have wings! Deep in his heart, he’d sort of like to go in. But he bears a massive grudge against all-powerful God, who has ruined everything for him. God created him and then placed him in a hell on earth. He doesn’t want anything to do with God, or with his angels either …

  Then my study is filled with the deafening thrum of an electric drill. A few minutes later, pieces of plaster and brick start falling to the floor. An unshaven man in a baseball cap walks into my room. ‘Yup, right around the corner,’ he says, ‘is that beautiful, or is that beautiful? Just pass the wire through here.’ Now there are two strangers standing in my study.

  The second one says: ‘Excuse us for just a minute.’ I go on typing imperturbably.

  Loathing, fear, guilt. Peter is standing in front of him now. ‘Listen, leave me out of this,’ Frits says, ‘I bet you want to take me to see God?’

  ‘Where’s the plug supposed to go?’ I hear a voice behind me say. I point to a spot on the wall.

  ‘Right there, gentlemen, if at all possible.’

  So what about Rumplala’s defence? Should he start in on that right away? How would Dostoevsky have done it? No, let him tumble through the universe for another million years or so, that will make him see the light. I pick up the typewriter and carry it into the living room, so I can go on working.

  We have eight cats. A few of them are always sleeping somewhere, but two or three of them also spend all day chasing each other around the house, and then our dog Mikkie gets in on the act. Mikkie is a nice, handy-sized mutt, not too big and incredibly sweet, a good watcher too. He barks all the time.

  ‘Maarten, you haven’t forgotten that we’re having visitors later on, have you?’ Eva says. ‘How about peeling some potatoes?’ Meanwhile, the cats have knocked the pages I’ve typed onto the floor. The dog sits on them and starts scratching its fleas. As long as nothing gets ruined or lost, that’s the first thing that flashes through my mind. Within twenty-two minutes I have peeled the potatoes, then I take the machine and papers back to my study. The telephone has been installed, the men are gone.

  Rumplala is standing before God’s throne. So this is the joker who has made such a mess of his life. Joyful angels are peeing into ponds and singing cheerful songs. This place is really something. A sweet reward after a life gone to pot. Lovely chandeliers, ceilings of gold and azure, soft velvet curtains, crystal tabletops, heavenly beds with silken sheets. Uh-oh, there he goes, before he knows it he has called God a ‘prick and a scoundrel’, now they definitely won’t let him in any more. He hardens his heart and says: ‘To be honest, I don’t want to have anything to do with you.’

  God roars with laughter. ‘Not only does he commit suicide, but he’s got a smart mouth too!’

  Now, from the living room, I hear the sound of the piano tuner. He is just getting started. That’s a bit of a distraction. There is nothing I find as ridiculous, musically speaking, as the sounds a piano tuner makes. But we should just be glad he’s showed up …

  ‘If you don’t want to have anything to do with me, well then go back and play outside,’ God says. ‘And take your time about it, in utter darkness, without anyone you know, through the vacuum of the cosmos, racked by the consciousness of your own self, go on, try it, maybe you’ll come back. But it will be a few thousand years before I’ll let anyone in who’s insulted me like that.’

  Suddenly I find myself able to type twelve pages back-to-back. I portray Rumplala’s loneliness in space.

  Gradually, he starts longing for Heaven. An hour’s darkness can seem so long, to say nothing of a million years of falling and falling, with some stupid star flashing by every once in a while. He spends six months at his own house, but he can’t communicate with anyone there and no one sees him. Then he continues on his journey. He thinks about the office. How can it be that he never, not once in his life, was able to understand what he read in the papers, in the tabloids and ladies’ journals? He hopes that if he comes back, he’ll have a chance to speak up for himself. ‘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.” ’ Oh, Rumplala gets it now, if that happened the deputy-minister would discover what a mess things were at the hospital. ‘This cleansing cream penetrates deep into your pores, where it nourishes the skin.’ Those aren’t the kinds of things that would drive anyone else crazy, that would make them commit suicide, are they?

  Standing in the shop. ‘Sir, did you take a number? If you didn’t, then you either have to go to the back of the line or else wait here till hell freezes over.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Oh, he forgot to take a number and I told him
so, now he’s in front of you.’

  ‘Sir, it’s your turn now, time to wake up. And what was it you were wanting? Oh, right, that special aged cheese, wasn’t it? There’s been called in about that, am I right?’

  ‘There’s been a call about that, damn it, what’s with this “there’s been called in”? There’s been a call. And why all the numbers when there are only four people in the whole shop?’

  ‘Sir, I’m afraid you don’t understand, fifteen minutes from now there could be forty customers in line, and they might start arguing about who’s next.’ Life is unliveable …

  ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy …’ I hear the piano tuner singing along with a stupidly played ditty on the keyboard. You’re never going to write that story, I think to myself, because you know nothing about suicide. I sit staring vacantly at my typewriter for a full five minutes.

  Then my wife comes back in. ‘The guests will be here soon,’ she says, ‘but the laundryman just showed up, could you come and talk to him?’ I like the laundryman; he always has the most wonderful anecdotes. I go to him in the living room and leave the story for what it is.

  At a certain point he says to me, while Eva is gathering the laundry: ‘The guilder just keeps deprecating, it’s bad news, we’re going to economical ruin, and then something else … my son is starting to go into pubilescence.’

  ‘Puberty,’ I correct him, like some kind of know-it-all.

  ‘What’s that, pubity?’ he asks.

  ‘That’s the phase when the nerve bundles develop between one’s reason and one’s sex drive,’ I say.

  ‘All right, whatever,’ the laundryman goes on, ‘so my son is in pubitescence and at night I can’t doze off any more because I lie there thinking about it. The doctor came by a couple of times with all kinds of yaddika-yaddika-yaddika, you know what I mean? The whole thing has kind of thrown me into a dizzy.’

  The doorbell rings, the guests have arrived. This is the shattering truth.

  There’s no way I can write about someone who commits suicide, because I myself am still alive.

  Translated by Sam Garrett

  19

  Bob den Uyl

  War is Fun

  Oorlog is leuk

  Listen, there’s a war on. What more could a ten-year-old boy want? At last, an escape from the rut of going to school each and every day. Never before has the total annihilation of the school, along with all its workbooks and textbooks, been such a clear and present possibility. May 1940: man, these are the days! The weather is fantastic, clear and hot, the air tingles with happy tension. Water mains have been shut off, the windows are covered in newspaper, the blackout curtains are rolled down at night. People are hoarding up supplies like mad all day long; the shelves are being stripped while, a few streets down, they’re fighting against paratroopers. Planes come diving down out of that clear blue sky all the time, lovely grey planes with bent gull wings – first they come in, flying in high formation, then they fan out like a song and come screaming down on the city, the bridges, the airfield, the warship moored at Antwerpse Hoofd, the radio is on all day with reports of attacks and counter-attacks, the announcers with their serious, sonorous voices, soldiers are hiding in porticos and shooting at saboteurs. And early each morning that same light again, another clear blue sky – a dream come true. Everyone could die any minute. The national anthem over and over, as though the Holland–Belgium match were kicking off three times a day. On the radio everyone is talking about an ordeal, about trusting in God – what are they talking about? Rumours: we are going to die of hunger and thirst, German paratroopers are being dropped in civilian clothes. British and French troops advancing from the south. Our brave soldiers against the damn Krauts, and then you’ve got the dirty turncoats. The boy feels like weeping in gratitude at being allowed to experience this, that God has so clearly chosen him.

  The fifth day, the last. Unconditional surrender is the demand. What a load of hooey, Holland is the bravest country in the world, isn’t it? The conquest of the Indies, the Zuiderzee causeway, our salvage tugs, that all counts for something, doesn’t it? So what if the Queen has fled to England, she wouldn’t know how to handle a gun anyway. No, it’s like everyone says, we will fight until the Krauts have been driven out of the country. Hundreds of thousands of them have been killed already. Dutch boys, no better lads in all the world when they’re fighting for their own soil. Hitler will sit up and take notice. Our army will hold its ground, they were ready for it, they stood firm and they will keep on standing firm, you’ll see. Rumours: when the marines on the bridges run out of bullets they attack the Krauts with knives, when they run out of knives they use their teeth. Take that. Soldiers whose legs have been shot off go on calmly priming the cannons. That’s the way we fight, and we’ll hold the line. Besides: whatever happens, simply going back to school seems so far away now, things will never be like that again. From now on no lessons in penmanship, but in hand-to-hand combat. At home, the boy insists that they whet the breadknife till it’s razor-sharp. Funny, though, that you never see any of our own planes, except for a few on that first day. Where are our G-1s? A public-service warning on the radio: boil water for five minutes before using.

  The fifth day, the last. The bombardment has been rolling out across the city for an hour already. An unparalleled attraction. At first the boy has to stay inside, the bomb shelter in the park across the street can’t be trusted. Concrete slabs leaning against each other, covered with sods, a wooden door, the place smells of piss. The planes perform a cheery, graceful dance in the air, climbing, circling, diving. Tiny cartridges drop from their fuselages, tumble down and disappear in the smoke. A raging thunderstorm. The tension as a plane flies over the house; if he tosses a bomb now, it will land right on top of us! He doesn’t, though: barrelling along like a black horse, he flies past the critical point and disappears above the centre of town, amid the smoke and swarm of other planes. What’s lighting a little fire down by the Noorder Canal compared to this? The city bellows and cracks, this can’t go on much longer. Most of the planes have already flown away. Then a Messerschmitt comes cruising slowly across the northern city, like an exhausted warrior; the boy looks, the bay doors open and the cartridges fall. He runs to the stairwell, where all the tenants are lined up in accordance with the radio instructions: the stairwell is the safest part of the house. The ground starts to quake, people are crying – no reason for it, the bombs are falling all the way at the other end of the street, and against a dark sky filled with greasy smoke the houses begin to collapse and burn. Minor panic breaks out, the families start running as one for the bomb shelter after all, but it’s already full to the brim. Here too weeping women, a man shouts furiously that it’s about time we surrendered, before everyone is done for. That’s strange, why wouldn’t you survive this?

  One hour later, the bombardment is over. A powerful southerly wind blows the roiling smoke over the house. The sun has vanished behind the cauliflower cloud, ash floats down on the dusky street. Everyone is silent now; the boy stands at the window and looks at the refugees from downtown, pushing overflowing handcarts and carrying mattresses on their backs, looking for safety. The blaze further up in the street throws strange colours against the shadowy sky. ‘Some fire, isn’t it?’ the boy says to his father, who is standing beside him, and gets his head smacked right away. Gradually, he starts to suspect that something terrible may have happened. A man with a head wound is stumbling down the grubby, yellow street. The stench from the fire seeps in through the closed windows. The neighbour lady says this has taken thousands and thousands of lives. The boy thinks about it; of course, lots of people get killed during something like this, how could it be otherwise? An entire city turned to rubble, just think of it. And then a thought rises to the surface, offering new prospects of a better future. Did the teacher survive? He lives somewhere downtown, doesn’t he? A war like this, what a blessing. It’s hard to believe that a whole war, the whole bombar
dment, could be happening just to do him a favour, but that’s what it’s starting to look like. He’s dead, he has to be! A fancy funeral, the whole class behind their beloved teacher’s bier, it makes tears come to his eyes. There really still is something like justice in the world. He keeps his joy in check. A smiling face could get him into trouble.

  A time of uncertainty follows. The boy wanders the neighbourhood aimlessly; he’s not allowed to go into town, not yet. Then the day comes at last; in some obscure way his parents must sense that school is starting. There he goes, brimming over with expectation, the miracle will come to pass. Off to that damnable School of the Bible with its walls painted all grubby green, learning psalms by heart and chanting them out loud with the whole group, listening to those worn-out stories over and over again about the Lord Jesus and his disciples, but it will be bearable now that that bastard is dead, dead and buried. Well, buried: maybe he was burned to a crisp inside his house, anything is possible in times like these. The boys standing in front of the school are wound up, telling stories, one wilder than the next, but the boy cuts in line outside the gate. When the concierge opens it, he is the first to run across the playground. Inside the school building itself he reduces his speed, years of conditioning make him do that.

  When he comes into the classroom he finds the teacher standing in front of the desks, an erect figure in a brown suit, the broad, disdainful mouth, dark hair combed back in a wave. The boy sits down at his desk and looks despondently at the man in front of him. The other children trickle in slowly, the teacher goes to the door, looks up and down the hallway, then closes it. Silence, silence, silence. He turns to face the desks, folds his hand, looks up at the ceiling and then closes his eyes. The children do the same. The boy folds his hands too but he keeps looking and sees the froggy mouth open and close, ‘Our Father in Heaven, in these trying times we place our faith in You … help us to do this and that … forgive us for such and so … that we may not approach our enemies in hatred …’