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

by Joost Zwagerman

  ‘But you just said they don’t collapse until they’ve been empty for two years.’

  ‘Yes, but not if a tractor drives over them.’

  ‘Then they do actually collapse?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Often?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  That was the moment the reporter swung into action. The microphones were held to our mouths again and he said, ‘Would you have that argument again, please?’

  ‘Sure,’ the catcher said, ‘like I said: there’s always a risk of collapse but the risk is larger when the holes have been empty for a long time.’

  ‘That’s undoubtedly true,’ I said and we walked further along the river that had burst its banks in some places so that we had to wade through the reflections of clouds and the reporter recorded the sound of our squishing feet –‘Nice to play at the beginning of our programme,’ he said, ‘sets the scene’ – and the melancholic January afternoon light that rises up from the earth when it’s not quite freezing. It grew chilly, my hands began to shake and my feet were blocks of ice, but it didn’t bother me because I was walking along still waters in which the reflections of pollard willows formed ghostly, silent silhouettes.

  When we reached a dyke on higher ground, the muskrat catcher said, ‘There was a danger of the dyke breaking here last summer. The rats had dug through so that when the river rose, water ran through it. The local water board had to use some pretty heavy machines to press the holes shut.’

  I listened carefully to what he was saying and thought: You see. Those holes are so well built they don’t collapse. They needed heavy machinery to press them shut. But I said nothing because the reporter, who didn’t seem to have ears to hear with, didn’t grant me the argument I might have had with the old trapper about it.

  We continued on our way past the willows, along the small river. I missed the black dots, but noticed a goldeneye at a bend, which, strangely enough, swam past on its own and dived under for a moment with that irresistibly supple ease that even a grebe can’t equal. We saw two little grebes not much further up. The trapper paused for a moment and pointed at them. I smiled and he said, ‘Two of them, though.’

  ‘Two of what?’ the reporter asked.

  ‘Two dabchicks,’ the trapper said.

  ‘What are they, then?’ the reporter asked.

  ‘Little grebes,’ the trapper said, ‘look, see them swimming there.’

  ‘Where?’ the reporter asked and the rat catcher pointed at the water. The little grebes dived under and the reporter said, ‘I can’t see anything.’

  We walked on. A dyke rose up ahead of us and behind it glittered a lake fringed with fields and a wood. Then the sky lit up briefly for the second time that day, even though it was almost dusk, because the sun unexpectedly broke through the clouds before disappearing again at once. As we climbed the dyke, I heard the lost cry of a curlew and a little later, I suddenly saw five fly up at the edge of the grey woods. They didn’t all fly up at the same time but one by one. While the first had already left the woods, the last one still had to stretch its wings.

  ‘Look,’ the old trapper said, ‘the dyke broke here a year or two ago because it was weakened by muskrat tunnels. It’s the only dam structure in the area that doesn’t fall under the local water board. When the dyke broke, they were here in a flash to repair it. And that’s where we’re heading, here in the Netherlands, and that’s why I’ve brought you here because it would be criminal not to show you this. Here, to thirty centimetres below and forty centimetres above the waterline, they’ve put in a stonework facing to stop the muskrats from digging again. I hope you’ll see for yourselves how ugly it is, and sooner or later, they’ll still break through. But before that happens, the civil servants on those boards and committees will discover that stone facings are effective in stopping them from digging and they’ll build stone banks everywhere, until long after the first rats have broken through, because before that gets through to those boards and committees, the rats will have multiplied thirty or so times and all of our richly vegetated, reedy riverbanks will have been sacrificed.’

  Then he stopped talking. He stared gloomily at the other side of the small lake that, at the bottom of the stone dyke, good-naturedly cast small waves again and again against the bluestone cladding. Further up, the water was as smooth as a mirror. It ran over almost imperceptibly into a meadow where thousands of black coots stood, all of them looking in our direction. As we descended the stony banks, they turned their heads then their black bodies forty-five degrees and began to walk off. It was something you’d never forget, all those white beaks that were suddenly no longer visible and all those black bodies that moved away from us so calmly and controlled, although it was unnecessary because, once we’d reached the waterline, we stopped to watch the slowly retreating coots that suddenly, all of them at the same time, looked back so that all those white beaks became visible again, and then stopped in their tracks, just like us. The sun broke through again, momentarily sweeping a ray of light over the coots, which lit up, shining, one by one, and then extinguished again as the ray moved on, brushing us briefly as it went.

  The reporter came to stand behind us and wrangled two microphones between our shoulders, whispering, ‘Carry on,’ but the old man laid a finger to his lips and then allowed the same finger to tilt forwards until he was pointing at the coots with it.

  ‘Pay attention,’ he said so quietly that it felt like I’d gone deaf. I looked across the water at the coots, saw the dark clouds clearly and yet threateningly reflected in the smooth surface of the middle of the lake which rippled around the edge. Because I was just staring and staring at those deep clouds under water, it took me a while to notice, even though it had been going on for a while, that the coots in the middle of that gigantic flock of birds standing motionlessly were moving apart to allow through something that moved rather slowly and steadily towards us. When whatever it was that was approaching was halfway, I saw how calmly and almost nonchalantly the coots granted it brief passage, before closing up again. I had even stopped blinking, so keen was I not to miss a single moment. I looked intently at the moving hole through the flock of coots nearing the waterline. The reporter whispered behind me again, but I pushed away the mouse-grey microphones. The last coots moved apart, briefly revealing in the already dark, misty twilight a long, flat, black shape that inserted itself into the water and begin to splice the reflected clouds. It left behind ripples that became ever wider and flowed back towards the coots, as it reached the place where a small part of the already deep-red, but mainly obscured by clouds, sun was reflected in the water. It swam across the sun, turning the sun into ripples that ran to the left and right behind it and soon faded away, and in the meantime it was coming towards us. At the same time, it didn’t really seem to be moving; it was as though someone was pulling it through that silent, charcoal lake. When it reached the stony bank, around ten metres from where we were standing, it hesitated for a moment. Its head disappeared under water and it soon came up again about five metres further along, and there it climbed the bank, not even dripping or shaking itself out, before walking immeasurably slowly away from us across the shiny, stone-clad bank.

  ‘He does that every evening,’ the rat catcher whispered.

  ‘Louder please,’ the reporter said, ‘I won’t be able to record it otherwise.’

  ‘He’s here every evening,’ the rat catcher said, turning towards me to give me the opportunity to lip-read his silent words.

  ‘He always comes here around this time, when the curlews fly up and the last starlings seek out trees to roost in. I think he’s one of those lonely old chaps.’

  ‘What does he do here?’ I asked, as quietly as possible.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he inspects the bank to see whether there isn’t a place he can dig a hole just for himself, here where, for the time being at least, there’s no chance he’ll be disturbed by others.’

  ‘You’re not tempted
to catch him?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t bring myself to do it,’ he said, ‘he can’t do anyone any harm any more. He doesn’t impregnate any females; they don’t want to mate with a knackered old muskrat like him.’

  He stopped moving his soundless lips and just gazed at the large dark patch that was moving without any haste towards the point where the stony bank stopped and the lake ran into the ditch.

  ‘You can tell he’s approaching the end of his life,’ the rat catcher said, ‘he does everything slowly as though eternity were within hand’s reach.’

  The animal waddled slowly along, taking the time for each separate stone. I was sorry he was already so far away because now I couldn’t see much more than a vague black shape that wasn’t just walking away but also slowly dissolving into the increasingly nocturnal dusk.

  ‘No,’ the short, grey-haired man who’d been to Venezuela said, ‘no, I can’t and I won’t catch him. I come here every evening to see whether he’s still alive and every evening a jolt of happiness goes through me when I see he’s still there – and then I think the world can’t be such a bad place if coots still part for a lonely old man and if that fellow is still able to find a place to rest his head for the night.’

  Translated by Michele Hutchison

  21

  Helga Ruebsamen

  Olive

  Olijfje

  Olive and I moved into our last shabby attic room because we’d been kicked out of all the nice lodgings. We were old but high-spirited and we liked a tipple. To be honest, we no longer cared where we spent the winter. We’d gone from the bottom to the top and taken a fast train back down again. We’d seen it all. We’d misbehaved in Marlot Park and we’d been called hussies on the banks of the Zieken canal; we’d lived like fine ladies on Count Loeki’s loot until he’d breathed his last breath; we’d sailed Holland’s inland waterways and the Seven Seas in the seaworthy barge of retired Rear Admiral Hendrickx – with a ‘c, k, x’ – and we’d sold chips on a stall at VUC Den Haag’s football grounds, sleeping under the counter, all three of us, including Pimmy the dog. In short, we weren’t that fussy any more.

  Apart from saying that if there was a drink for the taking we’d be there, gossips said that Olive and I were an item. Maybe that was the case sometimes, but we had a lot of other stuff on our minds, for example, how, at our age, old but still too far from our pensions, we could get hold of some cash. We drew benefits, of course, picking up eighty guilders from the Beierse Bank every Monday morning, but that was a basic allowance and we couldn’t live in the manner we were accustomed to on it. We did a few cash-in-hand jobs now and again, but as few as possible because there was little satisfying work of that type to be had, and we scraped together ten guilders here and twenty-five there – which still added up even though it was peanuts compared to the free pickings of the past. We didn’t complain about it. Our needs had diminished too. It was no longer as important to dress up, to primp and preen. In my case, it was no longer worth it. It had never been much use anyway, as far as I was concerned.

  Olive had deliberately stopped dolling herself up, otherwise I’m sure she could have put on a good show, better than a lot of those young things, slender and chic as she was. But she’d had enough, she said. All of her previous earnings, which were not insignificant, had blown away like ashes in the breeze, so why would she go to more trouble than she needed to? Olive could have been rich and well-married, to an aristocrat if necessary, if she hadn’t been too kind for that – and too indifferent. Her motto had always been: It’s all Swings and Roundabouts. By this she meant that if, for example, she had married Count Loeki, she’d probably have been harassed to death by his relatives by now, and if she had looked after her money better, she’d have had a house, but no happy memories, only all the worries that come with ownership. That was the way Olive thought about things, and so did I, naturally.

  The people who called Olive a harlot were wrong. She was simply open to any suggestions and if it happened to pay, she wouldn’t say no. Rather than whorish, she was just curious – more than anyone I’ll ever meet again, alas. Where money was concerned, she always put her personal pleasure first and never did anything out of pure calculation. The way I got to know her was proof of that. Thirty years ago.

  I was going through a tough patch and was sitting in my attic room one miserable Sunday afternoon, complete with drizzle and pasty faces outside, struggling to keep body and soul together. That’s what you went to high school for, my mother would have said, but one of the reasons for my despair was the five years I’d had to spend there, steering a middle course through the dangerous rocks of that girls’ school, without mentioning some of the female teachers with their sultry gazes and not even thinking about my confusion when we attended parties with the boys from the boys’ school opposite. The only attractive thing about those boys was that they casually smuggled in bottles of booze and when I’d been allowed to take a few sips from them, my confusion would disappear and I would go and sit on the wooden bench with the wallflowers, where it was cosy and warm.

  On that Sunday afternoon, there was half a tin of sardines that I was going to share with the cat and not a drop to drink, apart from tap water. Little by little, it still turned five o’clock and I was lying stretched out on my bed, periodically going over to my record player to play my one record by Big Bill Broonzy and then I’d pace around and roll my forty-seventh ciggie and wonder why the hell I’d bothered to get dressed. The cat was sitting by the window counting raindrops, as happy as Larry, and I envied her, and I decided that she could keep all the kittens she was carrying so that I would be surrounded by beauty and insouciance and je m’en foutisme.

  Then my downstairs neighbour, a tomboyish girl who worked in an acrobatic group that performed in nightclubs, came upstairs and said, ‘Tell me, have you got the pip or something? You’re pacing backwards and forwards and that’s the sixteenth time in the last hour you’ve put that darky on. Isn’t there anything you want to do?’

  Nothing with her, I thought.

  ‘Do you fancy a beer?’ she asked.

  She was actually quite sweet, but back then I was still jealous of those kinds of girls who spoke so frankly and didn’t seem bothered by anything.

  ‘Come with me to Olive’s,’ she said. ‘These days she even has a good spread on Sundays.’

  I wanted to put on my one smart skirt instead of my corduroy trousers but the girl said, ‘You needn’t bother for Olive. Just come along quickly because once her gentleman arrives, we’ll have to leave.’

  I didn’t see much point in a visit like that, but as the tram rode through a posh Scheveningen neighbourhood, the girl told me that Herr Doktor Von So-and-So, Consul General, had been keeping Olive for the past few months. She’d got to know him through his driver, Gentle Willem; the girl knew Olive in turn through the nightclub circuit where Olive would turn up after the regular bars had shut and was always extremely generous and open-hearted. Von So-and-So was a dignified, shy gentleman with a bald pate, gold-framed glasses and teary eyes and Olive always felt sorry for everyone and everything, which was why she was perpetually surrounded by stray dogs and cats and tramps and other unfortunates, of which this gentleman was one, Olive had said, because he was weighed down by many complexes. Olive, who rarely went into indiscreet details, had told her that she absolved him of his complexes and, in exchange, he absolved her of her material concerns.

  After hearing this story, I became more interested, but when we found ourselves in front of a fin-de-siècle mansion, I wanted to go back because we weren’t dressed for the occasion. The rain had made the hair of the acrobat, an athletic negress, expand into a feather duster of a million frizzy curls framing her impudent face. Her leotard, decorated with pink and pale blue flowers, clung to her body so that you could see she wasn’t wearing anything underneath, not even a pair of knickers. In the tram, she’d kept her bright red raincoat over it, but now she was strolling insouciantly, and as they say, w
orse than naked, up the manicured garden path. I was dressed, albeit in a pair of stained corduroys and a dirty blouse, but that was as far as it went. Half of my hair was white blond, its original colour, and half chestnut brown and it hung in slithers around my face, which looked like an old-fashioned drawing of Oliver Twist. What’s more, my hands and lips were trembling.

  But Charmie said that Olive would welcome us with open arms.

  She did too and I was astonished. She looked like a Spanish donna, her ink-black hair piled high, and she was wearing a long, black velvet gown with a white lace tucker and cuffs and she had on dangly earrings and ruby and diamond rings. She had stuck a tortoiseshell comb into her hair, also studded with rubies. If she hadn’t rushed up to us with such immediate enthusiasm, I really would have curtsied.

  ‘How nice that you’ve come to cheer me up, Charmie. This weather makes me need a drink and it’s a Sunday and I can’t drink alone, you know.’

  She shook my hand and said, ‘Is this your girlfriend? Who is she, your little Oliver Twist?’ That’s what I’d thought just before, and now she was saying it, and then I hoped – well, what exactly? – it’s hard to reconstruct after thirty years, perhaps I hoped, even then, that I would never lose sight of that marvel Olive, not for the rest of my days, even if I could only observe her from a distance.

  Once we were inside a great many bottles and crystal glasses appeared on the table and Olive said we could eat whatever we wanted, but for the time being we didn’t want food, I almost didn’t even need a drink because the cheerful Charmie and the shining Olive made it seem like the sun had risen in this ostentatious room. Charmie and Olive launched into a pyrotechnic show of stories and I limited myself to laughing, which I could at least do here heartily, and everything was going wonderfully well. Although, drinking more slowly than the enraptured women, I noticed that Olive’s stately appearance was slowly beginning to show fine cracks. Her hair came loose, the tortoiseshell comb hung somewhere between her ear and her shoulder and she’d unbuttoned the tucker and rolled up her sleeves. The black velvet gown was covered in cigarette ash and wine stains, but she had a flush to her olive-coloured cheeks and her eyes sparkled. When you drink you lose track of time and it must have been seven o’clock in the evening when a civilized bell tinkled. ‘Holy mother of God, it’s him!’ Olive cried, not frightened or startled, but simply like a person who’d forgotten they had a date. ‘He’ll let himself in with his key. Well, don’t worry, Charmie, grab the bottle and your glasses and sit in the window seat. I’ll hurry things along.’ She took us to a large, deep window seat, set down some bottles and glasses, threw us a couple of cushions and closed the curtains. We found ourselves in a tiny recess, closed off with velvet and glass. Olive stuck her pretty face through the curtains again for a moment and put her finger to her lips.