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

by Joost Zwagerman

  We heard Herr Doktor Von So-and-So coming in and some pleasant chit-chat in German between him and Olive. He asked whether she’d had guests – well, that was a polite question – and whether she’d enjoyed herself. Olive said yes to everything and nodded her head and I couldn’t tell whether she was behaving differently from usual, but I was under the impression she was responding rather hastily and eagerly to his advances and when I peeked through the chink in the curtains, I saw that she was practically shoving him towards the massive sofa which was right in my line of sight.

  Doktor Von So-and-So danced an excited little jig, I repressed a giggle and Charmie pulled me away so that she could spy on them too. She was less good at repressing her giggles than I was and I had to push her back onto the window seat because she was making the curtains billow. But I couldn’t hold her back and she got up again to watch and I took a couple of nervous sips and looked too and choked on a spluttering laugh. In a short period of time, the doktor had stripped off completely, aside from his gold-framed glasses, and it was a pretty sight, this pear-shaped gentleman whom we’d seen pictures of in the newspaper, naked and pink with a few tufts of grey, spiky hair, like a dignitary transformed into a boar as punishment. He polished his glasses with a lilac cloth, put his glasses back on and carefully rubbed his pate, which was already shining like a mirror, with the same cloth. I had an excellent view of all of this because his head was facing our way on the canapé. Olive had stepped out of the black velvet gown and was undressing herself from the midriff down. She kept on the top half, her tucker waving like an SOS flag, her sleeves rolled-up, her fella clearly didn’t care. He was snorting like a pig, lying on his back, his hands folded atop his belly, which bulged out on either side. Charmie stood there as though she were at the races, on tiptoes, her neck outstretched. ‘What’s going to happen now?’ she whispered in her hoarse voice. ‘The doktor isn’t going to be able to perform, you can see that, can’t you?’

  Olive was clearly having a tough time of it, I saw her lingering next to the sofa and her shoulders were shaking. It looked like she was struggling not to laugh too. Both Charmie and I were now peering through the chink, pressed against each other, our glasses in our left hands. Then Olive mounted the sofa with determination, she squatted above the doktor’s face and he opened his mouth wide. Olive looked at us helplessly, hiccupping and grinning, and suddenly peed like a cart horse, over the shrieking little man, who raised his hands angrily and begged, ‘Bitte, bitte, tropfenweise.’ Please! A slow trickle.

  This was the last drop that maketh the cup flow over because although Charmie and I tried to keep each other in balance, we both toppled the wrong way. The curtains burst open and the two of us tumbled into the room: two colourful, drunken harlequins, tripping over each other’s feet and waving glasses. The duchess collapsed too, she wavered for a moment before, rendered helpless by urination, burying Herr Doktor Von So-and-So’s head beneath her buttocks. I later heard that his gold-framed glasses didn’t survive. We exited the room at a hop, step and a jump and hid somewhere else. Olive fetched us again, giggling, half an hour later. We’d already heard the front door slam.

  She left everything behind. Even the ruby-studded tortoiseshell comb lay trampled on the ground. Nevertheless, we did transport all the bottles to my attic room in a string bag.

  Back then already, Olive didn’t care about going from a down-filled four-poster to a damp mattress with broken springs overnight. She’d whistle as she made tea in the morning and beautify herself with my cheap rubbish in the steamed-up mirror above the sink. Herr Doktor got in touch and wanted to restore relations, but Olive said that after the incident she could no longer absolve him of his complexes in good faith and that was the end of it. By then she was already thirty plus, had neither kith nor kin and was afraid of nothing. Apart from one thing, which she confided to me in a rare moment of sombreness: she was never any good. Because whatever she did, she said, the eyes of the world would always look down on her.

  We weren’t together all the time but our paths often crossed and whenever Olive saw a chance to involve Oliver, as she’d started calling me, she did. And so I came to laze about in country houses and sailed the Seven Seas and saw in the Alhambra a colour photograph of Olive in the same kind of black velvet gown she’d had on in Scheveningen and with almost the same comb in her hair, probably one without rubies but you can’t see that from the photo, and I’ve seen Delos by moonlight and played ghosts there with Olive, to the outrage of our host, a cultured ship-owner – who cried out in desperation: ‘You’re trampling on history, girls!’ – and we rode in Count Loeki’s barouche, he was one of the last, one of the nicest, aristocratic alkies, and it was one of the last barouches in the country, pulled by four white horses through Amsterdam where we were cheered and booed because people thought we were royalty. But those kinds of bizarre memories are really no more valuable to me than the ones of our chip stand at the football ground, a stand that became a financial fiasco because of Olive’s inability to show hungry cats, children, dogs and vagrants the door. Until it was packed with free chips freeloaders, and when we started to sell beer as well, that was the end of it.

  I also remember one of our many nights as down-and-outs when Olive and I walked through the snow, feeling at every car door and finding an open Mercedes-Benz in Surinamestraat with a pile of plaid blankets on the back seat. It was such a long time since we’d had a good sleep that we awoke on the move and sat up screaming somewhere near Leiden where we promptly ran into a crash barrier because our driver was rather too abruptly confronted with his passengers. Luckily the damage was minimal and the driver, a neurologist, employed all kinds of ruses to ensure we stayed out of the firing line and out of prison. But we didn’t let him treat us.

  We spent some homeless summer nights in a small, pretty wooded park with a hexagonal gazebo built in the middle of a pond. It was cold waking up on the floor, but that would soon be forgotten because we’d see waterlilies opening up in the first rays of sun and, as we lay there slowly rousing, young ducks would swim around beneath us and it hardly seemed possible that we were in a stinking, screwed-up, office-block city. At least, that’s the way I think of it now. I picture the waterlilies opening like in a slow-motion film. I saw that then too, but I think the chances are I was mainly feeling cold and miserable. It’s only now, when I’m even colder, that the memory exudes warmth.

  One night when we were making our way to our gazebo in Arendsburgh Park, we saw a figure in the bushes. We froze at once. After a long time, we realized that the figure was probably doing the same. ‘He must be frightened too,’ Olive said and we hurried on and saw the figure running away from us like a great white stag. This piqued our curiosity and we ran after it and if he hadn’t stumbled, we would never have known that the person who was running away from us so valiantly was the invincible Hessel Pietersma, who claimed to be a descendant of Pier Gerlofs Donia, the great Frisian warrior.

  ‘Two old women out in the woods at night; you two should be ashamed of yourselves,’ he said in a thick accent, relieved to have recognized us. Then he removed the brown paper wrapping from an oil painting, for which the description ‘an oil’ was more than sufficient, to check whether the wares that were supporting him hadn’t suffered from his flight and fall. He repeated that two old women should be ashamed of themselves and testily withdrew.

  This occurred shortly after Count Loeki’s death and we can’t have been so terribly old, no more than in our late forties, but it got me thinking one way or another. And Olive perhaps too, although we never discussed such thoughts because, however you look at it, they make you feel glum. You ask yourself what’s wrong with you – you live in a civilized city like The Hague where at least half a million people live and work and have families and even gardens and clubs to spend their free time in, and you have to sleep in a park where, stupidly enough, you have to get off your bench before the cock crows because the early-morning walkers will be coming along with their d
ogs, and school children. It was like we were still children ourselves. But other women of our age would go to work in the mornings or into town and like us they’d have coffee at eleven but not in the railway station waiting room because the friendly waiters didn’t kick you out of there, however unsteady your step. At one o’clock they’d have lunch; they didn’t have a liquid lunch like us in a café in the hope that sympathetic acquaintances might be found there. At six o’clock they’d prepare a meal and weren’t tipsy like us and they didn’t stand next to a jukebox arguing, or cheat at cards to earn money. Their dogs got their own bowl of food every day and didn’t get, like our Pimmy, a meatball out of a vending machine. And that, I thought during those bouts of self-pity, was a shame for Olive who could have been a countess and fabulously rich in the bargain. After such thoughts, we’d spend our last cents hiring a room, without saying anything else about it. Then we’d start to feel like we were getting somewhere.

  And so one evening we were sitting in a room on the Hobbemastraat, one of those filthy, cramped streets reeking of nasty business, in the midst of The Hague with all its greenery and fancy airs, and there we sat in a room with piss-coloured wallpaper and a grey-blue torn linoleum floor, one chair, one bed and one sink for thirty guilders a week and I said, ‘I’m going to enrol at a temping agency tomorrow as a typist.’

  ‘Me too,’ Olive said and despite the fact her talents lay in other areas, she had good intentions.

  ‘Let’s get an early night,’ we said and we’d already got undressed when the landlady banged on the door and asked whether the lady with the dog had left yet.

  ‘Left? What do you mean, left?’ shouted Olive, who could come across as very vulgar if she wanted. ‘The lady with the dog has rented the place.’

  The landlady opened the door, saw us standing there naked on the linoleum floor and Pimmy tucked up at the foot of the bed and screamed such a torrent of abuse that we’d got dressed, put the dog on the lead and were on our way down the stairs before she’d finished heaping burning coals on our heads.

  There we were, thirty guilders poorer and homeless again, and after that, you’re not going to work the next day. And then we’d sit somewhere, on that next day or one of the many other next days, in an East Indian café, for example, eating corncakes on tick. And on one of those days, a very yellow, jovial East Indian chappie joined us at our table and invited ‘me and my girlfriend’ – he’d addressed me to my utter astonishment – to go to his house and taste his home-made brandy. He lived in a spacious house in Segbroek and in his living room crammed with Djokja handicrafts, we gazed out over the dunes and drank arak from tiny porcelain eggcups. But the problem was he’d set his sights on me. I looked reasonable for my age, perhaps because I’d calmly frittered away all those years, my hair was still white blond and I still had the smooth face of a hungry young boy. Next to Olive’s indestructible, proud beauty I was nothing, and as long as we were together, I rarely had to fear male advances. Besides, once she noticed that I was in a predicament like that, she’d hurry to my aid and the assailants would invariably change their minds. This time her attempts were futile, Desiré – ‘call me Desi or Deetie, whichever you like, Roosmaryn’ – stubbornly continued to court me.

  He was sitting on the edge of my chair, playing pat-a-cake and after hearing Olive’s account of how we’d been drifting from hotel to hotel because we couldn’t find anywhere suitable to live, et cetera, et cetera, he’d offered us lodgings, ‘if necessary, for life’, beaming and winking at me. I kept shooting Olive pleading looks and she did her best when Desi asked, ‘Why, for the love of Mike, does your crazy friend call you Oliver, Roosmarynie?’ to which she responded with affected meaningful intonation, ‘Well, you know some women really hate women’s names. The ones who’ve always wanted to be a boy.’ Understanding nothing, he cried out, ‘Rubbish! Absolute twaddle! Stuff and nonsense. Roosmaryn is a lovely name and suits her perfectly.’ Olive gave up and it was true, we were in a worse than wretched state and I saw no other way out.

  It’s the only time she let me down, by the way, if you can call it letting me down. And actually, I let her down because I couldn’t manage it with Deetie. After all, Olive was my whole world and I don’t know whether you can call our relationship a relationship since she wasn’t like that, and I considered and still believe now that it didn’t matter to me if she was a woman or a man. I was the one who’d called her a marvel when I saw her for the first time. I loved her as a matter of course, I was convinced that everyone loved her and luckily they did too in general, apart from that time at Deetie’s, blinkered as he was. Of course, Olive with all her generosity couldn’t understand what torture it was for me. She was totally amazed, but very sweet when I climbed into bed with her in the early hours, crying and shaking, not under the bedclothes but on top of them because I’d just got out of Deetie’s disgustingly wet and dirty ones. ‘Blimey, Oliver,’ she muttered, kissing my neck and stroking away my tears, ‘the little monkey can’t have been that rough, can he?’

  ‘If only you knew what he did,’ I began, stopping because I realized that with all the experience she had, it’d be old hat to her. She seemed to understand because she said sweetly, ‘Yes, the things they get into their calcified brains,’ and then she comforted me at length, even though I pushed her away at first because I didn’t want her going into the places the monkey had left traces, but she said, ‘No, no, we’ll share everything and I’ll get rid of all of the stains and you’ll be just plain Oliver again.’

  Deetie came across us during the comforting, all of a sudden there he was in the doorway and light slowly dawned in the east. ‘Tiens, tiens,’ he said, ‘c’est la vie. La vie est belle, le ciel est bleu.’ And then he jumped on top of us and nestled against me. ‘Continue, continue, ma chérie.’ If Olive hadn’t burst out laughing, I’d have whacked him and hard too. She danced up and down on the bed. ‘La vie Parisienne,’ she cried. ‘Fancy that. A Paris à Paris sur un petit cheval gris. Listen to the horny traveller amongst us. We’ll make him the mayor, Oliver. Monsieur le Maire de Paris.’ Rocking cheerfully, she threw back the covers, revealed my miserable genitals and began her industrious handiwork, while I noted to my astonishment that the monkey was taking pleasure in this, panting blissfully, and no longer showing any interest in me. Well, Olive said later, men are like that, Oliver, as meek as little lambs, babes at that. But I had my own thoughts about it.

  I can dig up memories for hours. I remember everything that happened to us. Even those things that happened during dark, drunken moments well up from my unconscious but not, as they used to on occasion, like poisonous gases from a swamp. I can call them to mind very calmly and pretty much pick and choose, the way a miser takes out precious coins he’s been saving for years in a big chest. He hasn’t looked at them for years, he no longer knows what the long-outdated coins look like and as he feels his end approaching, he opens the chest and studies them one by one. That’s what I’m doing because I’ve got nothing else left; I can find nothing from the years before Olive, it’s a compact tin of years, that’s all. I can’t say I can feel my end nearing, unless I put an end to things myself and I’m too cowardly for that and God knows what I’m to do with my life now that Olive has gone.

  I found Olive in a pool of blood, no, not a pool, there were thick, fleshly globs on her white kimono, as she lay on the couch and the television blared out and a blue-lit comedian with rabbit’s teeth looked into the dark room – he look grinning at Olive and she looked with one eye back and the other one was turned away. At first I thought she was no longer breathing but then there was a noise like something from a subterranean vault and it continued for five, six seconds and after that, deathly silence. And after half a minute the noise came again.

  After that it was to hell at a quickstep. We didn’t have a telephone. Our landlady didn’t want us to use her telephone, besides, she’d already let us know she was against ‘unnatural friendships’ and she hated Olive because, old as she mig
ht be, she wound the landlady’s much younger man around her little finger, so I didn’t even knock. I walked down the street to a phone box, there was a listless young man in it, after waiting a long time I finally opened the door and said, ‘My friend’s dying.’ I wanted to say more but he replied, ‘Then there’s no hurry,’ and pulled the door shut again.

  I went into a café, ordered a beer and asked whether I could use the phone. I could. I called the local health authority and they said someone would come but it might take a while. I called the Zuidwal hospital and there too they said someone would come, only they didn’t know when exactly. I called the GP whose name was on our health insurance card and his wife said her husband would come as soon as he returned home. I’d begun every cry for help with ‘my girlfriend’ and then I got what we all get sometimes – the feeling that they keep our type hanging on because they don’t care for us, so I picked up my beer, called the health authority again and said in a broken voice that my husband had had a terrible accident and had dragged himself home bleeding, I gave the address again and they said they’d come and when I arrived home at a run, an ambulance was just drawing up and that must have been a lucky coincidence. They asked for Mr X, Olive’s surname, the landlady had already opened her hateful mouth, but now they were there, I could deal with it, I herded them upstairs and they took my Olive away.