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

by Joost Zwagerman

  I wanted to go with them and they asked, ‘Family?’

  ‘No,’ I said and upon further consideration nothing else and after that they did let me come along as far as the hospital and then to a waiting room. A nurse came and wanted to know everything about Olive, her profession and religion and so on and I told them everything, making it sound as respectable as possible.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked.

  ‘We have to wait for the test results,’ the nurse said.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked. ‘I’d like to see her for a moment. I’ve got the feeling she’s conscious.’

  The nurse began her dutiful chit-chat about family and the whole sourpuss goddamed rest of it, but she was a young nurse, pretty too, and all of a sudden I could handle her and, what’s more, she was kind. I said grimly that Olive had neither kith nor kin and asked whether that was enough and she said, ‘Go on then, come with me.’

  Olive lay in a bathroom on a stretcher and wrestled herself into a half upright position when she saw me, groping about desperately. ‘Oliver,’ she cried and her eyes were as big as plates, ‘what are we doing here, for God’s sake, let’s get out of here at once.’ At that she vomited up a garland of blood clots, which she looked at hopelessly. Once I was inside, the nurse had closed the door after me, she definitely didn’t want to be found responsible, so I held one of those metal kidney dishes under Olive’s mouth and said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s all as right as rain.’ She vomited blood until I thought there was none left inside her and in the meantime I wiped her lovely hair from her eyes and kissed her forehead and her mouth with its black, crusted lining which I licked away and then two male medics came in, the oldest of whom asked, ‘Hello, what’s the meaning of this?’

  Again I wanted to say, this is my girlfriend, but I thought, Let me not be a coward for once in my life and not so arrogant either, let me rattle their conventions humbly, which is why I said, ‘She’s my girlfriend, Doctor, but that’s the same to me as if she were my husband and that’s why I’m here and the reason I want to stay here.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he said, ‘go to the waiting room then, please.’

  I saw the other one, the younger doctor, a thin blond man, glance at us. He said, ‘There’s not much we can say right now, but you’re welcome to wait.’ And for a moment I was able to take off my blinkers and see ourselves and everything more clearly, even if for just a moment, thank God. I saw Olive, lying back flabbergasted because she didn’t know what was happening to her. Her lovely black hair was dark grey and hung in greasy strands, her proud face was the pointy, shrunken skull of a witch. I had always considered her eyes to sparkle and mock, but now they were bulging and the irises swam in a jumble of red blood vessels and the places they had burst, in the corners of her eyes, were red and yellow. Her lips were flaccid and blue, they hung open, her cheeks hung too, covered in dirty pits and purple patches and the skin pulled taught across her excessively pointed chin fell in enormous ochre folds to her throat. Her hands, which she had laid across her belly, looked like the yellow horny claws of a dead wild duck.

  She hadn’t got like this because she was ill, she’d already been like this yesterday and the day before, when we ate crab sandwiches, she’d been like it the entire previous year, who knows how long she’d been like it.

  But I would never have admitted, not even to myself, that my beautiful Olive was no longer my beautiful Olive, because even under that grimy impasto of old age, she was still her. A Spanish duchess with a proud face, even though it was hidden beneath layers of yellow fat and purple algae.

  She was wheeled into a room and a bottle was attached to her, which slowly drained into her so that she could live a bit longer.

  She writhed and groaned but no longer responded to me.

  She conducted entire conversations with other people, in a different world, I thought, which is why I no longer felt excluded but stayed at her bedside, wetting her lips with cotton pads until they sent me away.

  The next morning, I was at her bedside again and the situation was unchanged, writhing, groaning and having mysterious conversations. Now she wasn’t attached to a red bottle but a white one and now I no longer had to contend only with the hundreds of strangers surrounding her, but with three very present people in the three other beds. Next to us was a strict woman with ivory paws reading a library book with a hard red cover; on the other side of the room two young creatures with angry, neurotic faces sat upright in bed listening to a portable radio turned on full blast and I, the only visitor from the outside world, was subject to constant hostility. It was like a wordless third degree, which didn’t stop until all kinds of males bearing flowers and dragging children streamed into the room. No wonder Olive remained caught up in her endless private conversations and appeared to find no rest.

  It wasn’t even a fit end for a horse.

  I plucked up my courage again and forced my way into the medical director’s office. He turned out to be the same arrogant, jovial man who had examined Olive in the bathroom.

  I said, ‘I think my girlfriend should be alone.’

  ‘As soon as a place is free, your … er … the lady will get her own room.’

  ‘Doctor, to me she’s like …’ I wanted to say ‘a husband’ again, but, God forgive me, I couldn’t get the words out. By now I’d gone along with the hypocritical mess for long enough and if they couldn’t understand using idiotic comparisons, they’d never understand, which is why I ended with a timid, ‘She’s everything I’ve got. And vice versa.’

  ‘We do understand that,’ he boomed amicably. ‘We’re doing our best. We’ll keep you informed.’

  But when Olive was moved to a room because she was keeping the others awake with her delirious ramblings, they didn’t warn me and when they gave her up as a hopeless case they didn’t warn me either. I wasn’t family and we weren’t married so they’d rather leave her to die like a dog alone.

  It was only because I slinked past the hospital at night like a stray cat, having forced some Dutch courage into myself, and because the doorman turned out to be human and found me at the front door, my teeth chattering, and only because of random and trivial reasons, that I got to find out which room she was in.

  I found the room in a dark corridor, right next to a back exit which filled me with despair because there’s a reason they put you right next to the back exit, and just then a young neurologist skipped into her room, I accosted him and he cheerfully showed me to a waiting room with a defunct television, where a tiny green light glowed. Why a waiting room? I wondered. He didn’t go to the trouble of turning on other lights, he spread his hands and said, ‘Alas,’ in a professional tone of voice they probably had to take an exam in.

  He took me to her room and lifted up her wrinkled eyelids, which had tumbled down like crumpled, withered leaves; it was amazing that they didn’t crumble between his thumb and index finger.

  There was no sign of a reaction from her pupils and he said, very satisfied, ‘See for yourself.’

  In the days that followed, I began to think about death in my own inadequate way. But I didn’t get further than dead is dead and the end is the end and that’s why I was happy that Olive was in a coma and we’d been spared a ludicrous deathbed scene at least. I even began to worry she’d regain consciousness. Olive had been raised a Catholic and even though she’d long since abandoned her faith, you can’t predict how an attack like this is going to pan out. Severe illness often has the same effect as a fire, the strongest steel constructions can get contorted. I didn’t want my Olive to have a deathbed, ringed by conjurors and illusionists making the longed-for rabbits and coloured handkerchiefs appear from nowhere, I didn’t want her to lie there pitifully praying for the attention of a higher being. I loved her too much for that and I had too much respect for her.

  But it all turned out quite differently.

  ‘Well? Isn’t it wonderful your girlfriend can go home again? All of us here in the wing thought it was a miracle.�
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  This was that pretty, kind nurse from that terrible evening, who had also come to collect me at the door on a very differently tinged, but just as terrible afternoon, when I’d loitered and lingered in the hope that a miracle would take place.

  May God stick a hairy paw through the ceiling and drag me away from here, if necessary in agony, because I’m having sinful thoughts. If these aren’t sinful thoughts and if I’m not annihilated now, well then, put any hope of salvation out of your mind.

  Oh Olive, if only you’d been murdered.

  ‘Come on now, she’s been looking forward to seeing you for so long.’ The nurse pushed me through a labyrinth of corridors to the waiting room, the same one I’d cursed the neurologist in, with its defunct television and the little light, the same no man’s land I’d inhabited like a drowned person on the seabed amongst indescribable and incomprehensible plants and fishes called ‘convalescents’.

  No one recovers from life, some smooth-talker or other claimed, but be vigilant and stop believing what they tell you, you can recover from anything. Some of those creatures carried a new body part with them, a plastic bag into which their wounds could suppurate. It was welded onto them with a plastic tube and if they sat down to have a nice cup of tea, they would carefully hang their transparent anal toilets over the back of their chairs, the way women do with mink stoles. Olive, in a dressing gown at the time, was one of them and even further estranged from me than when she’d lain on her sickbed, whispering and laughing with her unknown friends.

  I said I was headed to hell at a gallop when I found her in her white kimono covered in blood clots on our couch. I don’t know how often since then I’ve muttered the words do not go gentle into that good night, it became a magic charm. But against what? Why?

  Now she was waiting for me, all jacked up for the outside world again.

  Do not go gentle, because why, for Christ’s sake, was she waiting for me? Couldn’t Count Loeki have risen from the dead and where was Herr Doktor Von So-and-So or any of the thousands of others?

  I didn’t even recognize her. Olive had left me on her sickbed, when she’d begun to talk to the other people.

  The jovial doctor came to take leave.

  ‘You know the deal, don’t you?’ he babbled, patting her on the shoulder. She didn’t even straighten her back but peered up at him, at me. She even covertly moved her head in my direction, a gesture of conspiracy between her and that arrogant old clodhopper.

  They’d put her thin, grey hair into a bun. And they’d reduced her black eyes to ashes.

  He took me aside. ‘If I were you,’ he said paternally, ‘I’d take things easy. It’ll be more comfortable for your girlfriend.’

  God forbid. Now that they were forcing on me this witchy, grim-faced creature with her bun and her toothless maw, she was suddenly my girlfriend.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked haughtily. It was my turn to be arrogant now, if they wouldn’t have it, they could keep her as far as I was concerned.

  ‘Go easy on the drink,’ he replied politely, as I stood there stinking like a vat of methanol.

  ‘As far as madam is concerned …’ aha, so he’d felt it, ‘she has to stick to her diet without exception. She’s got the list and she has to stick to it exactly. And not a drop to drink. Not a drop.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘A hepatic coma ain’t no joke,’ he said, suddenly coarse and sniffing slightly. In the old days it really would have got to me, now I didn’t give a damn.

  But what’s the point of raking these things up now? Because the long and short of it was that this unfamiliar woman and myself moved into the apartment, that last shabby attic room that Olive and I rented.

  What else could I have done? Left her next to a bin on the way home?

  We lived together the way my mother and I had lived together once. She didn’t want me to bring in sick cats off the street. She searched the cupboard under the sink and threw away my bottles of booze. She chewed each bite of our meals a hundred times, meals I prepared with an almost hostile feeling of love and she complained and complained. Too salty, too greasy, too bland, disgusting, cold, inedible, am I allowed to eat that, I’m not allowed to eat that.

  She didn’t listen to what I said because she was busy complaining and nit-picking and complaining. And if one of my comments did happen to sink in, she’d suddenly double over and start making vomiting noises. ‘A bleed, another bleed, I’m done for,’ she’d groan. That kind of trick stops working after the thousandth time and sometimes I’d pray, ‘Lord, please give her one and make it good and proper.’

  I wasn’t allowed out without her and she inched along step by step as if she were heavily disabled, giving a running account of the passers-by in the voice of a deaf commentator.

  There was nowhere to go; everywhere we went the smoke got into her lungs, even in cinemas where you weren’t officially allowed to smoke. She forbade me to smoke and held my packets of tobacco under the tap. She kept tabs on me, even when I went to the toilet three flights down, an alarm clock in her hand. If I’d popped to the kitchen to fetch something she’d ordered – whatever it was could never be found – she’d sniff my mouth when I returned and turn away in disgust. In the evenings we tried to watch television and she’d zap from one channel to the next, still complaining to herself and not taking me into account at all, making it impossible to follow any show properly. One day she let me go out shopping on my own and when I returned she’d smashed the screen with a hammer and she said innocently that one of the cats had run into it. ‘But what does it matter?’ she said. ‘We talk so little to each other, now we can.’

  If only that had been the case. Night after night she did nothing but stare into space and when I finally managed to read something, in that atmosphere you could cut with a knife, I’d realize that she was staring at me.

  What did it matter? She’d been critically ill and I’d let her down by staying healthy, so I did understand her thought process and I may have grown accustomed to this new life in time and become satisfied with it, because we’d known each other for a long time and even a relationship like ours, I thought, was for better and for worse.

  But for yesterday.

  I cleaned and dusted the living room, every nook and cranny, because she’d claimed I was keeping her in unhygienic conditions and slowly murdering her with dust bunnies and cat hair. I paused while dusting the book shelf to look at the portrait of the duchess in the Alhambra. The colour photo, which I’d taken of that heaven-sent beauty, was now being sent back through hell.

  As truthfully as I’m writing this and as old as I am now, tears appeared in my eyes and that was a sensation I’d long forgotten.

  ‘What are you secretly up to there?’ she screeched from the couch.

  I couldn’t reply because I had a lump in my throat so I gave her the photograph.

  She looked at it and then asked, with something strange in her voice, cunning I think now, but I don’t know, ‘Well, what do you think of that, then?’

  I shook my head because I still couldn’t say anything.

  ‘Good-looking woman, wasn’t I?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You liked that, didn’t you?’

  From that moment, I let her words flow over me, at least I hoped they’d flow over me like all her other malice, but in reality, it would have been better if, from her couch, she’d thrown a number of knives into my back.

  ‘I’ve always know you were a wrong ’un, you know. Even though you were too lily-livered to openly admit it.

  ‘The very first time I saw you, I thought, There’s one of those stupid dykes.

  ‘You were a cheap date to drag along, though, you were used to not having much, you didn’t have a stale crust to eat. And it paid off, I looked good next to you, admit it. It always worked well too because it didn’t do you any harm, did it? It’s quite a sensation, a real woman next to a dyke.’

  She looked at the photo again. ‘But well,’
she said dreamily, ‘it was having to make do. If only I’d been able to get myself a Moorish slave girl.’

  Translated by Michele Hutchison

  22

  Mensje van Keulen

  Sand

  De spiegel

  He raised the blinds, and his wife turned her back to the late sun slanting into the room. He paused a moment, registering the ginger hair partially hidden beneath the collar of the bathrobe, the hand elegantly holding the glass of red wine, the bottle in the middle of the table. He sat down across from her and picked up the newspaper.

  ‘I think I wouldn’t mind having a mirror in the elevator,’ he said.

  She lifted her eyebrows. ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘You often see them in elevators. A mirror makes it seem less cramped and oppressive inside, because there’s the illusion of a window. Besides, it lessens the feeling of being at the mercy of technology.’

  ‘We’re at the mercy of technology all day long. Doesn’t bother me, I can’t imagine how else we’d manage.’

  He spread out the newspaper. ‘It’s even more oppressive with other people in the elevator. Sometimes I just don’t know where to look.’

  ‘I don’t want to see myself in mirrors all the time. How old I look, I’ll think whenever I take the elevator – my face has gone all weird.’

  ‘But there’s the mirror in the bathroom, and the one by the hallstand – you see yourself in those, don’t you? You can even see yourself in the toaster.’

  ‘What makes you think I would look in the toaster? Is that what you do, Theo? Look at yourself in the toaster?’

  ‘It’s an automatic thing. It’s shiny, that’s all. Like catching your reflection in a window when it’s dark outside.’