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

by Joost Zwagerman

  He stopped talking, rubbed his eyes for a moment and I heard the reporter whisper behind me, ‘No use to me, this.’ He turned off his recorder as the trapper ambled off, quietly muttering, ‘They don’t know how lucky they are here. I’ve seen them in Alaska and Canada, in the middle of the winter when it was bitterly cold and they could still survive because they have such great pelts, and even at minus forty, they manage to keep one bit of water open as a group, but they don’t need to do that at all here. They’re like pashas here, it’s the Promised Land, no otters or eagles or lynxes or minks.’

  ‘But don’t the polecats get them, then?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they don’t like getting their feet wet,’ the trapper said.

  ‘And foxes?’ I asked. ‘They’ve spread everywhere, haven’t they?’

  ‘You’re telling me, but foxes don’t like water either, although they do sometimes catch the odd young, foolhardy muskrat. But look: muskrats rarely venture onto land. There’s plenty of food in and along the edges of the ditches; they only have to tunnel in from the waterside to run into white beets and potatoes and beetroot or other crops and they can go from Vlissingen to Groningen without having to cross a single dyke. Hang on, there’s another trap here.’

  He climbed down and put his hand into the water. A muddy rat came up with the trap; the catcher quickly took it out and cut off its tail.

  ‘Ask him why he keeps cutting off the tails,’ the reporter whispered.

  ‘I don’t need to ask,’ I said, ‘I can just tell you. He does it to stop anyone who finds the rat cutting off its tail and giving it to him. He has to pay a bounty for each tail. It used to be five guilders, but I don’t know if that’s still the case.’

  ‘Yes,’ the rat catcher said, ‘the bounty’s still the same.’

  ‘Then it’s been five guilders for fifteen years,’ I said. ‘My father killed one in the graveyard in 1963 and got five guilders.’

  ‘During that harsh winter, I’ll bet? Yes? Must have been an old codger. Elderly males go wandering off on their own. Probably looking for a suitable place to rest its head for good.’

  ‘How odd the bounty hasn’t gone up,’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s not odd,’ the trapper said, ‘it’s about five times easier to catch a muskrat than it used to be and everything has got five times more expensive since they first came swimming down the Rhine.’ He threw the dead, mud-caked rat into a field. Black dots approached silently in the sky.

  ‘Maybe this is interesting for you. About three years ago, some unknown fellow was handing in between ten and fourteen tails a week to me. So it was costing me about fifty to seventy guilders a week. This went on for almost a year and I was amazed that I never saw that lad out in the fields and neither did I have any clue where he was catching those rats. But, well – it didn’t matter to me; I didn’t have to pay the bounty out of my own pocket. One day I was chatting to a colleague and he told me that each week some young whippersnapper was handing in ten to fifteen tails to him. “With one of those stick-on moustaches?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “And hair that looks like it’s had clay brushed into it and then combed out again?” “Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t describe it like that, but it looks a lot like Elvis Presley’s hair.” “Then it’s the same one,” I said. “I don’t get it, if he looks like that guy you just mentioned, why doesn’t he stand in front of a microphone and open his mouth? You can make a fortune doing that these days, especially if you don’t know a damned thing about singing and have a voice a market trader would be ashamed of.”

  ‘We got in touch with some other colleagues. It was the same story everywhere: a lad of about twenty handing in tails all over the place. So, reluctantly since I was against it, we got the police involved. After a good eighteen months – still rather quick, don’t you think? – it turned out that some poverty-stricken Count was living on a vast estate with a pond under each big tree. He’d released muskrats onto the estate and aside from that, he was rearing them in his empty stable block. Don’t ask me how, I wouldn’t have a clue. Every day he caught a few rats from his ponds and he cut the tails off some of the rats he’d bred in the stables (I still have to pay five guilders a tail, a rat’s a rat) and he sold their pelts to the fur industry because in Belgium they’re still very active in the muskrat fur trade, while here in the Netherlands it’s been banned, and he sold the contents of the pelts to seafood restaurants along the coast as water rabbit, and he sold the tails to that lad for fifty francs a piece. Since in Belgium you get absolutely zilch for a tail, the lad would smuggle a couple of saddlebags full of them over the border on his moped each week.’

  The reporter hadn’t even gone to the trouble of switching on his tape recorder, but I asked, ‘Why is it illegal to sell muskrat fur here?’

  ‘Because a muskrat’s pelt isn’t worth the same all year round. It’s thickest in the autumn – getting ready for the winter. If you wanted to trade in them, obviously it would be in everyone’s best interests to only catch them in the autumn and leave them alone in the spring and summer. And what you get then is that not wanting to drive them away, but actually profiting from their presence. More rats, more fur. It’s a sensible measure. And now I just have to check a culvert here.’

  He stepped into a ditch and pulled a mesh trap out from under a small dam. There were two muskrats in the trap.

  ‘So, these are undamaged. They simply drowned. Mine, for tonight; there’s no tastier meat than that of the muskrat – full-flavoured, tender and spicy like the best game and yet not as dry; it’s even more delicate than yearling venison. I’m not surprised predators devour them so eagerly. It’s almost unbelievable they managed to escape from Czechoslovakia, where a prince who’d brought them with him from Alaska first released them into the wild. Yes, a wonder they managed to spread everywhere, while everything and everyone that can eat finds them tasty. They have to be excellent breeders. Offspring all year round!’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘so it sounds like a hopeless task ever getting rid of them.’

  I heard a click behind me. The silent grey microphones appeared between us again.

  ‘I never have to worry about being out of a job,’ the man said presently and then ambled further along the bank of the ditch. I walked behind him and the reporter walked in front of me and behind the catcher and held one microphone to his mouth and another to mine and I thought: How long is he going to keep this up? We were just walking along, the old man slowly, almost trudging, and the reporter wading through the ditch like a heron anticipating a catch, and I followed him and said nothing and saw, out of the corner of my eye, the black dots slowly flying through the sky.

  ‘You can start,’ the reporter said.

  I looked at him and thought: He’s just like a walking scarecrow with his arms spread out, and those black trousers and that black jacket. It’s as if a silhouette were walking along, actually it’s as if he wasn’t there but had sent his shadow, and again I heard him say, ‘You can start now.’

  ‘Steady on,’ the rat catcher said, ‘we’ve got the whole of eternity ahead of us.’

  We walked on further in the deadly silent, wintry desolation, along a ditch, along a second ditch, the catcher pointing out to me each time the holes or footprints of the muskrats, or the tiny red crowns of coltsfoot peeking through the mud. I marvelled at the fact that the catcher and I had understood each other without needing to say a single word. We simply walked, along ditches that continued to bend and from which side channels issued and the black dots followed us at a slow pace that kept them from catching up. The reporter turned off his tape recorder and said, ‘Well, now I have enough background noise.’

  We walked from one trap to the next and not a single trap was empty. The catcher kept on bringing up full traps from the culverts and I thought, If he always catches this much, the country must be swarming with muskrats. There were three common brown rats in one of the culverts, and one of the traps threw up a tailless animal (‘I’ll get that back
soon for five guilders,’ the catcher said). The morning passed and a fine, chilly drizzle descended as we walked back to the trapper’s car. We headed back to the hotel, its corridor was now dry, and ordered some sandwiches, sitting down at a table that looked as if it had been laid for dinner.

  I asked the rat catcher, ‘How did you end up in this job?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ he said, ‘but what it comes down to is that I tried pretty much everything a man can do before slowly realizing that, actually, the oldest profession a man has ever had still provides the most satisfaction, even though I practise it with traps and snares rather than a bow and arrow. But the difference isn’t that great and I soon found out there’s no better way to check whether previously clean ditches haven’t been taken over by rats than to ride up to them and study them on horseback. Today I took the car because you were coming, but usually I do everything on a horse, although the ministry I no longer fall under does find it odd that I’d rather have oats than petrol. I started off studying forestry in Wageningen but I didn’t finish my degree because I got the chance to go to Venezuela. I chopped wood with the natives for a few months. Every day I’d go into the jungle with forty of the fellows. They went barefoot and pretty much every day one of them would tread on one of these tiny moss-green snakes that would bite them. Within two minutes, the native would’ve contorted so much, his feet would reach his afro hair and we’d bend him straight again and hang him on a stick and two men would lay the ends of the stick across their shoulders and carry him. I kept on asking my boss for shoes for the natives. But he said it was pointless. So I saved up and bought forty pairs of shoes in one go. They were so happy! Forty black men wearing eighty shoes in the jungle and not a single death that day! But in the evening they started gambling – the shoes were the stakes! They played until one man had won all the shoes. The next day we go into the jungle again and one man had tied forty pairs of shoes together and hung them over his shoulder. Well, that day we had another contorted body. Then I came back to the Netherlands. I couldn’t find anything here that suited me. I worked in catering and even in construction for a while. I’ve done everything, but the thing I liked best was being a forester. So when the rats started to turn up here, I became a trapper right away. Since then I’ve been quite happy, particularly out here in the sticks where you don’t come across a soul. I have everything I need: a horse, a roof above my head, no women around, a bucket of oats, a bit of baccy when it suits, an old jerrycan to make coffee in, and varied outdoor work. But what do you do actually? I understand you work at the university and apart from that you write, the radio man told me?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve met a few writers in my life. Often they come up with all kinds of important reasons for writing. Ostensibly they can’t do anything else, they have to, it’s a compulsion, it’s a need, a necessity, and if they want to mystify you even more, they say they want to bring about change with their writing, but my impression is that they were unfortunate enough to be born liars. Every writer is a born liar and while you don’t get very far in this society, or in any other, as a trickster they make a virtue of necessity. But anyway! If you’re a writer, I’ve got a good story about muskrats for you. A bit more than six months ago, the owner of that castle, Huys Hooghgelegen, asked whether I’d like to drop in for a look because he suspected his estate was infested with muskrats. So I went there and we walked around his enormous estate together and he told me that increasing amounts of flowers were disappearing from his flowerbeds. At first he thought his children were picking the flowers, but since they kept denying having anything to do with it, he began to suspect that somebody else must be stealing his dahlias and sweet williams. He didn’t manage to catch anyone at it, even though flowers were disappearing on a daily basis. What he did notice was they were mainly being picked in the vicinity of his biggest pond. In the pond – yes, sometimes rich folks come up with crazy things to keep themselves entertained – he’d had built a scale model of Castle Muider, with a bridge and thick walls and towers and turrets and little canons mounted on the walls. He kept hearing noises in the castle. It seemed too small to house a real ghost and since he didn’t believe in dwarf ghosts, he surmised that rats or mice must be taking advantage of his hospitable lodgings and called in a regular rat catcher. But he couldn’t find any droppings or teeth marks or nests and this was why he ended up thinking that muskrats might have taken up residence in the Castle Muider. As we walked towards it, I could see from a distance that he was right. The pond around his hobby was full of waterlilies. But there wasn’t a flower or even a bud to be seen. If you know that muskrats love to fill their bellies with waterlily buds, you can guess that it was a cut and dried case for me: muskrats had moved into the castle. The only thing I found strange was that they’d chosen that Castle Muider. It didn’t look like suitable lodgings for muskrats at all. I came to the instant conclusion that a lone elderly rat had taken up residence; he’d cut himself off from the pack and gone a bit funny in the head. We inspected the castle in so far as that was possible. And bingo: you know muskrats bung everything up with humus. I soon saw that the old, invisible fellow had filled in the doors with humus bungs and closed off the windows with humus bungs and blocked off the gun turrets with humus bungs. Even the little canons had been loaded with humus bungs. I laid snares, not just under the castle bridge but also next to all the other holes I could find in the castle beneath the waterline. But I didn’t catch anything.

  ‘The count telephoned me again recently, to tell me he’d managed to catch the animal at last. One night he’d heard noises coming from his swimming pool, which was empty in the winter, and following the noise, he’d discovered a muskrat that had fallen in and could no longer get out. And this will demonstrate how frightened people are of muskrats because he poured petrol over the creature, lit a newspaper and threw it at it. Horrible!’

  ‘Why are people so frightened of muskrats?’ I asked.

  ‘Because they’re big and they come at you.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘They do that?’

  ‘Yes, if you’re in a field with one, he’ll calmly come walking up to you. They’re not at all afraid and if you don’t go away they’ll try to bite you. People are scared to death of them. But now I’m going to leave you for a minute and then we’ll go and look at a dyke and you can see what kind of damage they do.’

  He wandered off and the reporter whispered, ‘We really have to go about this differently, otherwise it’ll be worthless.’

  ‘Didn’t you record that nice story about the Castle Muider?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said irritably, ‘silly anecdotalism. It can’t be true. Gun turrets. You get those in airplanes, not castles. What’s the point of stories like that? We need insights, we need to confront the listeners with ideas about muskrats and a discussion about both your ideas. An exchange has to come out of it; the muskrats are just a means – the aim is to use this phenomenon to gain an insight into the structure of our society. It’s about a clash between the interpretation of yours and his realities, in which the rat is the catalyst. What can we learn from all that information? All those facts? All those silly stories? The point is the ideas, the syntheses, the summaries!’

  ‘You’ve said that,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we need to make a programme that appears to be about muskrats but actually penetrates deeper. The muskrat has to be as big as the world.’

  ‘A mammoth muskrat?’ I asked guilelessly.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘from now on stop asking questions and start discussing, don’t go after the man’s experiences but his opinions, otherwise it will keep being superficial and anecdotal!’

  The rat catcher returned. We got up, paid, and soon were driving along in the greyish January afternoon haze. The microphone popped up next to me again, but I didn’t ask any questions and I didn’t speak. I simply looked at the ditches along the road, recognizing the signs of their pre
sence. From now on – I’d almost spoken into the microphone but kept it to myself just in time – I’d always be able to recognize these spores, even though up to today I’d failed to notice them. It was as though I could hear somebody else, who’d temporarily taken over my thoughts, remarking: And that’s the hardest thing, being a good observer. It’s something only a child, not yet corrupted by having ideas, can do. Because everything you think is a kind of tax on sensory perception, paid for by your reason, because your brains have to function somehow. What it comes down to is not the functioning of the brain and the perpetually and necessarily incorrect falsifying and superficial philosophy they issue, but the ability to process all that excess ballast, that material in your brains produced by thought, and to replace it with a unique, always one-off receptivity to one-off sensory impressions, because in your entire life there is nothing that is completely identical, so that each moment has its own value, and that value is registered through your senses and so that, actually, there isn’t even any time left to think.

  We stopped and walked along a small river, not for half an hour or an hour, but the entire afternoon. I suspected the rat catcher had deliberately taken us on a long walk, yes, that he was trying to test our powers of endurance. He walked tirelessly ahead of us, despite his advanced years, and most of the time the reporter walked between him and me, inserting his microphone into position from time to time, to no good effect. Sure, the catcher and I sometimes chatted, and once an argument even threatened to develop because the trapper casually said that the muskrat’s holes don’t collapse until they’ve been unused for two years and I said, ‘Obviously. It’s not in their interest for their holes to collapse when they’re still living in them, so they won’t collapse unless the rats are caught and can’t keep their holes in good condition.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘they dig so much and so deep, there’s always a risk of collapse.’