The prayer echoes on slowly. Suddenly the teacher opens one eye and looks straight at the boy. He feels himself reddening in fright and has the urge to close his eyes quickly, but, to his own amazement, he doesn’t. He keeps his gaze fixed on the man, hating. The raised eyelid closes again, the prayer is finished and, after the amen, the teacher remains hunched over for a moment. Then he straightens up and moves deliberately, sternly, with a threat in every step, towards the boy.
Translated by Sam Garrett
20
Maarten ’t Hart
Castle Muider
Het Muiderslot
When – the only passenger – I got out at a station without an accompanying village or town and gazed at the empty horizon, I could almost hear my father’s voice again: ‘The old pastor at the Christian Reformed Church didn’t write his sermons in advance, but on his way to the pulpit on a Sunday morning, he’d have the duty elder press a scrap of white paper that had been folded many times into his hand. He’d unfold the note as he mounted the pulpit. By the time he reached the top it would be open and he’d read out to the shivering churchgoers the text the elder had written. He’d improvise a sermon around the text, unprepared and off the top of his head. But once he unfolded the piece of paper and there was nothing on it.
‘ “Nothing,” he thundered through the church.
‘He turned the paper over and shouted out “nothing” once again before continuing with, “Nothing, nothing! God created the world from nothing.” Then he gave such a wonderful sermon that those who witnessed it still talk about it with tears in their eyes to this day.’
Yes, I thought, God created the world from nothing, and the first thing He built was the station building I’m walking towards now, and after that He created the horizon, and He filled the space in between with freshly ploughed fields, and, as frugal as a true Calvinist, He scattered a few scrawny trees around. And then, behind the clouds, He had the sun go up over the righteous and the wicked and brought me to this backwater to spend a whole day trailing a muskrat catcher. What’s more, He provided a radio journalist to record everything I and the rat catcher might say to one another, so that it could be broadcast at a later moment.
I had already spotted the small, rather hunched reporter heading towards me on the abandoned platform. He shook my hand and said, ‘Your train is fifteen minutes late.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘delays. Nowadays, there are always delays.’
‘Do you know why that is?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Because so many people throw themselves in front of the train,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a Belgian friend once said it was typically Dutch to throw yourself under a train. Doesn’t cost a thing.’
We traversed the consummate wasteland to his car. A while later we were driving through farmland. I was surprised there were even any roads. We drove towards the washed-out horizon. Beyond it lay the town and its station I’d just left behind. Crossing the town we drove towards the next horizon, the reporter saying, ‘We need to agree exactly what we’re going to do beforehand. We need to make a strict plan and think everything through to the best of our abilities.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because otherwise it’ll be chaos. Besides, we need to present the story to the listeners without giving them anything they can use to come to their own conclusions. We must show the rat catcher and his work as coolly and objectively as possible; we have to leave space for the listeners.’
‘It all depends what kind of person the trapper is.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t talk like that. If that’s your approach, you’ll get some superficial and maybe even some reasonable information, but that’ll be the extent of it. We’ll be staying on the surface and that’s exactly what we can’t do. We need to furnish them with an interpretation of reality.’
I looked at the moving horizon. If I’d known this, I’d have said no when he asked, I thought to myself.
Unexpectedly, we reached a village that seemed to be comprised of little more than a church. The reporter parked his car on the village green and we headed towards the hotel where we’d arranged to meet the muskrat catcher. Given I’d never even heard of this village before, crossing the green to the hotel was like walking into a vacuum, as if I couldn’t actually be there because the village didn’t exist. Neither was I surprised to find that the hotel was completely empty – how could a muskrat catcher ever be waiting there for us? It felt strange to go into that silent hotel so early in the morning. The grandfather clock next to the bar wasn’t ticking. From an unseen corridor came the clattering of buckets and when a door opened, we saw that the corridor was flooded and that in the water was a reflection of a window at the end of the corridor, through which a brief ray of sunshine fell. The water glistened. It looked just like a river was running right through the hotel. Then the door closed again and I suddenly noticed, above the bar, a collection of deer’s heads with big antlers. The dead deer were staring at me from under their antlers.
The door to the corridor opened again and a woman with a mop peered around a coat stand and asked, ‘Can I be of assistance, gentlemen?’
‘We’re meeting a muskrat catcher here,’ the reporter said. ‘He doesn’t seem to be here yet; we’d arranged to meet at half past eight and it’s now almost nine. Have you seen anybody?’
‘No, there hasn’t been anyone this morning.’
‘I simply don’t get it. Could you get us two coffees for the time being?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and carried on mopping.
We sat down at the only table that still had chairs around it.
‘I’m sure it was half past eight,’ the reporter said nervously.
I was about to say that the rat catcher was probably doing a preliminary tour of his traps to get rid of any unwanted animals but the reporter said, ‘Now, first of all, let’s agree on exactly what we’re going to do. I’m imagining the following: we’ll go around with the trapper as he does his work. You’ll walk next to him and I’ll walk behind you, and whenever you say anything particularly interesting to each other, I’ll poke a pair of microphones between your shoulders. The point is for you to have a proper argument. No trivia or funny anecdotes but a conversation that cuts to the core. Preferably something dramatic that you both entirely disagree on, but keep your distance too, don’t let yourself be drawn in – that’d be disastrous.’
The mopping woman interrupted her work and came over with two cups of coffee. When I tasted the liquid I wondered whether she hadn’t simply squeezed out her mop into my cup, but I thought: She’s not wrong, coffee is disgusting, why not just serve up the used hot water?
As I sipped cautiously, a little old man appeared in the doorway. He came towards me, his hand held out. He didn’t smile but around his dark eyes, hundreds of wrinkles appeared that all pointed towards the stubbly, grey hair that was closely cropped to his skull. He shook the reporter’s hand too and took off his coat. Then he sat down opposite me and immediately started up about muskrats. He kept on screwing up his eyes, and, from time to time, a gloomy expression would cross his face. He got out a pipe and calmly began to fill it.
‘So,’ he said, ‘I’m to tell you a bit about my work and you’ll come out with me for a day. Well, that’s fine. But before we go out, I want to give you some background information. Listen, rat catchers are still employed on a regional level, and as a consequence, different provinces pay different salaries. This causes jealousy, of course. It all should have been nationalized long ago, but that’s another issue. Until now, the trappers have fallen under the Ministry of Traffic and Water Management, just like the muskrat itself, but it’s long been apparent that muskrats are more damaging to agriculture than to the waterways. So now they don’t know where we belong – ach, well, that’s always the problem with animals.’
‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘the stickleback doesn’t fall under any
one.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘How do you know?’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I once wanted to make a film about sticklebacks so I called the film fund at the Ministry of Culture and asked whether I could apply for a subsidy. Yes, they said, but the stickleback falls under the Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing. You’ll have to apply to them, and they gave me a number to call. So I called. I got a man on the line who asked, “What kind of fish is it? Fresh water or sea?” “Well,” I said, “in the breeding season it lives in fresh water and outside of that, in the sea.” “Oh, then it falls under sea fishing,” the man said and gave me a number. I called the number and told my story. “Is it an edible fish or not?” the man asked. “Sir,” I said, “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a stickleback, but if you had, you’d know it wasn’t edible.” “Oh,” he said, ‘ “then it’s not our department.” As a result, the stickleback doesn’t fall under anyone, it isn’t a freshwater fish because it swims to the sea in the autumn and it isn’t a sea fish because you can’t eat it. But that’s not really relevant here. We’re talking about muskrats.’
‘Yes,’ the trapper said, ‘apart from it not being clear which department it belongs to, there’s another problem. Catching muskrats isn’t an official profession. Anyone can do it. You don’t need any qualifications. That’s why it’s so poorly paid, even though it’s a hard job that actually requires an enormous amount of expertise. Otherwise it all goes belly up because you get too much bycatch.’
‘Bycatch?’ the reporter asked. ‘What’s that?’
‘Well, other animals than muskrats in your snares and traps. Common brown rats or water voles or ducks.’
‘Or little grebes,’ I added casually.
‘Yes,’ he said, all of his wrinkles vanishing in a flash and a certain vigilance appearing in his dark deep-set eyes. ‘Yes, our biggest problem, grebes. They dive deep for a long time and go far – they like to go through the culverts under the roads. There isn’t a single other animal, besides the muskrat, that does that. Well, the otter does it too, but where do you still find those?’
He lit up his pipe and said, as he shrouded himself in blue-white smoke, ‘We had a scandal here once. Five grebes in a single snare.’ He drew on his pipe and commented, ‘But now we’ve got better traps and the snares are extra protected by a latch that only the muskrat can open, so that problem’s in the past. The rats come swimming along at such a rate of knots we’ve been able to adapt our catching methods to their speed. Shall we get going?’
He got up calmly, put on his coat and left the hotel before the reporter had time to gather all of his equipment.
‘Interesting,’ I said, ‘this promises to be fun. Have you recorded anything yet?’
‘No,’ he said impatiently, ‘we’d agreed to do the recording outside, walking along, hadn’t we?’
‘But why not now? It’s pretty fascinating those rats not falling under anyone, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, what does that matter? Those are facts. What can facts tell us? It’s about the interpretation of facts. We need to carefully select the facts. We can’t just go recording willy-nilly. It’d all get mired down in mundane chitchat.’
‘Yes, you can say that again,’ I said. ‘I once had a student, a sociology major who wanted to do an ethology minor and was going to observe stickleback behaviour. He turned up on the first day, sat down in front of a fish tank and his test case was startled and darted behind a plant. My student waited a while but when the stickleback still hadn’t reappeared after ten minutes, he went away. The next day he came again and his test case darted behind a plant for the second time. The same thing happened all week long because a stickleback stays shy unless you sit in front of it for days at a time. During the second week, the student said to me, “I’m struggling to do any observation but that doesn’t matter since it’s really about the ideas, insights and their synthesis. Maybe you can just carry out the observation for me and I’ll take care of the ideas.” ’
‘Quite right too,’ the reporter said, ‘he’d understood how it works. Did you do the observations for him, then?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Why not?’ the reporter asked in astonishment.
But I didn’t reply, I walked out of the hotel and joined the trapper who was pulling on a pair of tall boots. After he’d done that, he pulled another pair of boots for me out of his car boot. After that, he got behind the wheel. The reporter got into the back and suddenly, as the trapper started up the engine, thrust two microphones between our shoulders.
‘Ready, you can start now,’ he said.
‘Mild for the time of the year,’ I said to the trapper.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘almost seems like spring. The winter jasmine is already in bloom.’
‘Do you think we’ll get any sun today?’ I asked.
‘It’s not impossible,’ he said, ‘this morning they predicted breaks in the cloud and the occasional shower.’
The grey microphones disappeared and I heard the click of a tape recorder being switched off behind me.
‘Now you need to take a good look in the ditches,’ the trapper said. ‘I’ll drive slowly. Then you can see for yourself. The farmers have to plough a metre and a half from the sides of the ditch; if they don’t, their tractors sink into the holes running into the earth all along the ditches. Can you see?’
‘Yes,’ I said, as I studied the black holes visible on and above the waterline. ‘If the water levels weren’t so changeable, you’d have fewer holes,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ the trapper said, ‘they always dig on the waterline. If the water rises, they dig higher, if it sinks, they move down with it.’
‘Might it be possible to come up with a drainage system that maintains the same water levels so you only get one horizontal set of tunnels?’
‘How would you like to organize that?’
‘It must be possible,’ I said.
Behind us I heard that distinct click again. The mouse-grey microphones appeared between us like a pair of dormant little chinchillas.
‘Carry on,’ the reporter said, ‘this is good.’
I looked at the omnipresent horizon and said nothing.
The old trapper said, ‘They always start in a corner and colonize the entire ditch from there.’
‘They’ve found the perfect spot here,’ I said, ‘the Netherlands is made for muskrats.’
‘You can say that again,’ he said, ‘water everywhere and agriculture too and all kinds of regulations they just don’t fall under, and they’ve not even spread to Zuid-Holland and Noord-Holland where they’d have it made. If they got there …’
The rat catcher paused to avoid a muck cart.
‘Then what?’ I asked.
‘It’d be end of story,’ he said, ‘they’d sink the whole ship. The dams and dykes are terribly vulnerable. Yes, there’d be just one solution.’
‘Which is?’
‘Squatting houseboats,’ he said.
The microphones disappeared and it was as though the trapper had been waiting for this because he braked sharply. He got out immediately and climbed down the bank of a ditch. He turned up the cuffs of his waders and stepped into the water. With a casual gesture that betrayed that he already knew what he’d bring up, he lifted up a trap. It contained a young rust-coloured muskrat with a pale grey belly. The rat catcher opened the trap, threw the young animal at my feet, cocked the trap and put it back. Then he got out of the ditch, grabbed the rat and cut off its tail with a knife. After that, he threw the dead animal onto the ploughed field that extended from the other side of the ditch to the brightening horizon.
‘Ask him something then,’ the reporter hissed behind me.
Was I, an unpaid interviewer, supposed to dance to the tune of this reporter? I wondered. I didn’t want to think up any more questions and waited calmly for the trapper to move along. But he pointed out a reddish plant to me and said, ‘Coltsfoot. Coming up already.’
Then he straightened up and stared at the horizon.
‘Shame it isn’t less misty,’ he said, ‘it’ll probably take them a while to discover I’m here.’
We looked at the charcoal sky, which was turning a lighter grey to the south.
‘Yes, there they are,’ he said.
I saw a couple of black dots approaching fast from the sky to the south-east; they gradually began to look more like birds, birds which approached with large wing beats until suddenly they were circling the field where the rat lay.
‘Two buzzards,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they find them as delicious as I do, they’re at their tastiest at this time of year – we share them out equally; if I catch six in a day, we have two each.’
The buzzards slowly circled the dead animal that lay on the farmland like a rusty stain.
‘They won’t dive until we’ve gone,’ the old catcher said, ‘and they’ll gulp him down in the blink of an eye. They usually follow me all day, tidying up everything I catch. Well, reincarnation! When I return from death, I hope I’ll come back as a buzzard. No one hates them or envies them or needs them. They’re never distressed or in danger, and as long as they eat carrion, they don’t need to kill anyone to stay alive. And you can bet on it becoming a paradise for them here. The muskrat will keep submerging the Netherlands until there are no human descendants left of those folks who once invaded the place on wooden floats. Then it’ll be exactly like it always was here. Muskrats will flourish in this brackish delta, as will the buzzards that’ll save them from having to bury their dead. And then the otters might come back. Did you know there’s no pet more faithful than an otter? If their owners die, they die too. In the Middle Ages, poor people who couldn’t afford to keep a dog kept otters and they were lucky to have them too, they’re the most affectionate animals under the sun. I witnessed that in America.’
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 35