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

by Joost Zwagerman

  He stared at a picture showing a group of oriental girls in bright-green work clothes. He tried to guess whether they were happy or sad.

  ‘I didn’t know you were so vain.’

  ‘It just happens, like in the evenings when you go over to the window to close the curtains and you see the room reflected in the glass, with you yourself drawing near.’

  ‘Not me; I don’t look.’

  ‘You mean you don’t take any notice, but neither do I, not deliberately anyway. I just see it, whether I like it or not.’

  The caption said the girls were Chinese workers at a factory producing ski and mountaineering wear in Bucharest.

  ‘From what you said just now it’s obvious that you do notice yourself. Which means that you’re vain.’

  ‘Oh.’ He read that the girls preferred working six days a week instead of five.

  ‘I don’t notice myself,’ she went on, ‘I just don’t see my reflection.’

  ‘Like a vampire.’

  ‘What was that? Vampire? I heard you all right. So now you’re comparing me to a vampire.’ She sniffed audibly, tightening the belt on her bathrobe.

  ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of those stories about vampires.’

  ‘What stories? What are you getting at?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Stuff about vampires not having reflections.’

  ‘How odd to discover after all these years that you’re vain. It explains a lot. People who are vain have eyes only for themselves. It also explains why you don’t see me.’

  ‘Why do you say that? Of course I see you, I’m talking to you.’

  ‘Not talking, really. We never talk; we just go through the motions. For a time I thought that we did talk, I thought you listened to what I had to say, but you always manage to twist things around so it’s all about you. Like now. You didn’t respond when I said I didn’t want to see myself in mirrors because it’ll make me think I’m old and ugly. You didn’t even register what I said. Either you agree about me being old and ugly or you’re not listening, but either way you don’t care. You want to rabbit on about mirrors and elevators, you won’t admit that you’re vain, you just want to score points. But I do listen to you, I smile, I’m supposed to be understanding and sympathetic about everything: the bad feelings at the office, or your latest craze, whether it be for green olives, a black car or a custom-made dress shirt.’

  ‘You shouldn’t exaggerate so.’

  ‘Your shiftiness. Your unfaithfulness. I think that’s what really gets me: that you were unfaithful.’

  He pressed his knees together, spread them again, said, ‘Don’t go down that road, please. We agreed that it wouldn’t happen again.’

  ‘I can’t help being reminded. Being unfaithful has to do with vanity, too. It was your own fault, it’s the way you behave.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my behaviour? I spend all day at work and then I come home again, like millions of other people.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t know what you mean,’ he said gruffly. ‘I thought we’d agreed that it was all nonsense and that we wouldn’t talk about it any more.’

  ‘It keeps coming back. I can’t help it.’

  ‘But it was ages ago – must be about a year, I think, and anyway, I wasn’t unfaithful to you.’

  ‘Hey, you left something out,’ she said, jerking her head up. ‘Normally you always say “not really, I wasn’t really unfaithful to you”.’

  ‘Stop it, Gemma.’ He stood up, took a bottle of water from the fridge. ‘Want some? Better than all that wine, anyway. How many glasses has it been? I gather there is no dinner in the works? Never mind, I’ll go out for some takeaway, you might feel like a tortilla, or pasta, or some of those corn rolls. Whatever.’

  ‘So how did it go, then? Tell me. That is, if you don’t want me ever to think of it again, ever to mention it again. It’s up to you. Help me to get it out of my mind for good.’

  ‘Why bring it up, then? Why be so hard on yourself?’

  ‘Tell me the truth. I don’t think you’ve been completely honest about it, or rather, I think you’ve been hiding things from me, for whatever reason, like not finding the right words or something. Why else would it keep coming back to me?’ She rapped her knuckles on the side of her forehead. ‘It’s horrible, and lately it’s been getting worse, goodness knows why. When you get home later than usual with some excuse I can’t bring myself to believe you, or when you suddenly go off in the middle of the weekend to pick something up from the office, least of all when you come back with a batch of papers. Just tell me once more what happened. Perhaps by now you can talk about it with a bit more detachment, and you’ll be able to find the right words. Then it’ll be clearer, something that’s over and done with, so I can at least let it rest. There are still a lot of blanks, and I can’t help filling them in, picturing you and her in that house, in all sorts of rooms I’ve never seen, in bed together. Perhaps I get too carried away by my imagination, but I can’t stop it … I’ll tell you what I know. She had some job in your office, she was a young widow, younger than me, and she had a child. I expect she pretended to be lonely, thinking she could reel you in with a sob story. You went over to her house to put up some shelving. Tell me why you had to fix those shelves and why it took such a long time, why you kept going back. All I know is what you’ve told me, and that isn’t much. That time you came home with a blue thumb, a big bruise where you’d smashed your thumb with a hammer – did you do that on purpose, to make it look like you’d really been doing carpentry? Because that’s what I suspect. I think those shelves had nothing to do with it. And I don’t want to think like that, I don’t want to get all tangled up. I want to get the story straight, I want to round it off, as something small and insignificant. I wish you’d help me do that.’

  She sat as though transfixed, but in her green eyes he thought he could see the tears building up, and even a tangle of dark threads.

  ‘Stop tormenting yourself,’ he said calmly. ‘Nothing happened for you to worry about. I don’t feel like raking it all up again, I probably wouldn’t even remember everything exactly any more. I never even think about it. As far as I’m concerned it’s gone, faded into the background, like an evening out or a dinner with so-and-so.’

  Leaning against the sink, he gazed out of the window. The apartment block across the way had balconies of grey-blue glass. On the balcony directly across, a woman stood smoking a cigarette. Each block in the new suburb was based on a different concept; the architects had indulged themselves. A groundbreaking project, harmonious, idealistic, challenging: a waterside adventure. Successful, too: none of the flats was ever vacant for long.

  ‘I want to know. I must.’

  ‘All right then, if you think it’ll help. Just one last time … She had heard about me lending people a hand, like Arno and Peter, remember?’

  ‘Why don’t you just say her name?’ she broke in. ‘Her name’s Lucy. Go on, call her Lucy, I don’t mind.’

  ‘Lucy,’ he said, and he felt a flicker of something spreading through his body. ‘I can’t see why you want this, but if you think it’s necessary, so be it. She, Lucy, had a part-time job as a receptionist. She greeted visitors, answered the telephone, put people through. In her kind of position you get to know all the staff pretty quickly, and she was talkative by nature. One day she must have said something about needing a bookcase, and that it had to be made to fit, as she lived in an old house with uneven floors. She wanted the shelves to extend across the whole wall.’

  ‘So she had a lot of books, did she?’

  ‘I don’t know. She said she had boxes and boxes filled with books, which bothered her because it felt as if they were dead and buried.’

  ‘Trying to be funny, I suppose.’

  ‘She might have been serious.’

  ‘Serious type, was she?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what she was like.’

&n
bsp; ‘Did you help her put the books on the shelves?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘You never mentioned that before.’

  ‘I probably thought it wasn’t relevant.’

  ‘What kind of books did she have?’

  ‘What kind of books …? Most of them were her husband’s, I assume. Graham Greene, I remember, and a bunch of travel guides and photography books, including one about the First World War and one about pygmies. Rather interesting.’

  ‘You just said you didn’t know if she had a lot of books.’

  ‘I didn’t. I didn’t see them all. What difference does it make?’

  ‘You keep saying “she” and “her”. You’ve stopped saying her name. Not that I want to hear you say it again – the way you pronounce it, oh it makes me cringe.’

  The woman on the balcony flung away her cigarette and leaned over to follow its fall with her eyes, or she might have been looking down for the return of her husband, a balding man invariably dressed in black and to be seen on Saturdays carrying a sports bag with a tennis racket sticking out.

  ‘Tell me about the little boy.’

  ‘Gemma, please.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Gemma.’

  ‘Eight or nine, wasn’t he? So he’ll probably be ten by now. Nice kid, was he?’

  He took a sip of water and said: ‘I hardly saw him, so I wouldn’t know what he was like.’

  The flood of recriminations that was about to ensue would be too much to bear in the kitchen, or in the entire flat for that matter. He detached himself from the sink, took a step forward.

  ‘There you go, running away again. You always run away.’ Her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Do you know how I feel?’

  ‘You’re drunk,’ he said. ‘I’m not in the mood for this.’

  She refilled her glass. ‘And you’re vain. So how do you think I feel?’

  ‘I’ll go and have a bite to eat somewhere, leave you to it.’

  ‘Like this,’ she said, and promptly poured her wine glass over the front of her bathrobe, causing a stain shaped like a bleeding heart. ‘This is how I feel.’

  He stopped on the way to buy a couple of sandwiches. Caprese. Tuna with capers. With the two brown paper bags beside him he drove to the sea. He pulled up at the far end of the boulevard by the pier, switched off the headlights, left the radio on without listening to it, and downed his first sandwich. Wiping his mouth with the provided paper napkin, he realized that he hadn’t tasted anything. As though he were in a world of his own, as they say. But he wasn’t, it was more like being sucked into a void, cut off from all sensory perception.

  The moon hung like a small hook in the sky, and the sea was still lined with a thin stripe of red. Behind him, a little to the side, a man in a white apron was closing down a snack bar. It was the end of the season, most of the beach cafés had already been dismantled. A few parking spaces along stood a delivery van, grey or beige. On the boulevard he saw a walking couple and a man with two Labradors. The dashboard indicated 68.9 degrees inside, and 48.2 outside, which was one degree down from when he set off. As he took a bite of his second sandwich, registering the taste of fish and capers, he noticed someone running from the pier in his direction, waving his arms. The man tapped on the car window and put his face up to the glass. A dark, frizzy lock of hair hung over his forehead. Brown, round eyes, not unfriendly. Could you help? He wasn’t sure if he’d actually heard the man or if he’d read his lips.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he mouthed, with a questioning shrug.

  The man tapped harder on the glass, pointing to the beach with his other hand.

  He switched off the radio, lowered the window a hand’s breadth.

  ‘It’s my dog,’ said the man. ‘He was with me a moment ago, and then he suddenly took off. He’s very young, and I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘A Labrador?’

  ‘Labrador? No, much smaller than that, a Jack Russell, very frisky. If I head off in one direction I’m afraid he’s gone in the other, and vice versa. Could you possibly help me? Because I don’t think he can be far away. I’m at a complete loss. Do you have a dog yourself? Do you understand the position I’m in?’

  ‘No, I don’t have any pets, but I do understand how you feel.’

  ‘Some people would say don’t worry, it’s only an animal, but I’m not like that. And there’s my wife, too, and the kids … Christ, I can’t go home without him, you see.’

  ‘I haven’t got a coat with me, but I’ll drive along the boulevard to take a look.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  The man retraced his steps and waited twenty-odd metres away beneath a street lantern. He was lanky, but not thin. He wore a leather jacket, a black scarf and baggy jeans almost obscuring his white running shoes.

  ‘I really appreciate your help. If you knew what I was in for if I came home saying I’d lost him … She wouldn’t believe me, either. And then the children, they’ll all start bawling, I can already hear them now. Oh Bennie, Bennie. They’ll insist on coming out with me to hunt for him, with their coats on over their pyjamas.’

  ‘Your dog’s called Bennie?’

  ‘The dog? Yes, his name is Bennie. Didn’t you hear me call him just now? I’ve shouted myself hoarse. By the way, I’m John.’

  ‘Theo.’ He was used to introducing himself with his first name at work, but felt uncomfortable doing so now. He turned up the collar of his jacket, held the lapels together at the neck.

  ‘You’re a good sort, Theo.’

  It sounded too familiar somehow, almost embarrassingly so. He would avoid addressing the man as John.

  The man faced the sea, shouting, ‘Bennie! Bennie!’ He cupped his hand to his ear and shook his head. Slowly he walked on.

  ‘It’s very dark, though, isn’t it? Not much of a moon, I mean. You can hardly see a thing, except when the lighthouse bothers to flash its beam. Bennie!’ The man halted, pointing to the right. ‘Hey, I think I can see him.’

  He stared, saw nothing but the pale swirling of the surf. ‘In the water?’

  ‘No, Bennie’s mad about paddling in the sea in the summer, but it’s too chilly for him now. We’d better take a look down on the beach in case he’s still there, and can’t hear me calling him because of the waves.’ He unwound his wool scarf. ‘Here, take this, Theo, or you’ll catch cold.’

  They went down the path veering away from the bank of basalt blocks. He thought of the sand getting blisteringly hot on sunny days when he was a boy. All those times he had kicked off his sandals and put them on again on the way back, making sure there was no sand sticking to his bare feet. He was glad not to be going barefoot on the beach in this weather, but worried about sand getting into his shoes along the tops and the laces.

  It was even darker on the shore.

  ‘God, where can he be?’ said the man. ‘I’m sure I caught a glimpse of him just now.’

  ‘Shall we each go in opposite directions?’ he suggested, meaning to turn left himself so he would only have the short distance to the pier to go. He couldn’t wait to discard the itchy, matted scarf.

  ‘I’ve been there already. I think we need to go in the other direction. If we keep roughly to the middle, one of us can keep looking to the left and the other to the right, that way we can cover the ground together.’

  ‘I don’t have very much time.’

  ‘I suppose they’re waiting for you at home too?’

  ‘Yes, that too.’

  ‘Wait a minute … Bennie! I thought I heard him. Let’s stop a moment.’

  They halted. The man held his hand behind his ear again, then pointed to something in the dark that looked like a shed. Close to it there turned out to be a mound of stacked panels, windows and planks covered by a tarpaulin.

  ‘There, at the back, I can hear him whimpering, very softly, can you? He must be somewhere behind there. Bennie?’ The man vanished behind the tarpaulin. ‘Jesus! Look at this! I think they’ve tied him up.’ />
  Now he caught the sound of whimpering, too, and went round to the back.

  ‘Is it bad?’ he asked anxiously, leaning forward to peer over the leather shoulders of the man crouching down.

  ‘Depends …’ The man sprang up and jabbed both his elbows back.

  The searing pain in his belly made him double up. He gagged on the taste of fish and bile in his mouth, swallowed a soggy lump, gasped for air.

  ‘Depends on what you call bad,’ said the man, swinging for the next blow.

  The fist hit him on the jaw and neck, and the next thing he knew he was grabbed by his hair, forcing his head down.

  ‘Don’t move, Theo. I’ve got a knife.’

  He staggered, flailing his arms for support.

  ‘Hands off. I told you I had a knife, want to see it? Or do you want to feel it?’

  His contorted position sparked the old backache he thought he’d got rid of after all that physiotherapy last winter and spring. He sank to his knees.

  ‘That’s better. Now you can see Bennie for yourself. Drop your arms. Don’t move. The only one moving here is me. And Bennie, of course.’

  The man pulled his head towards him, he felt the denim against his forehead, the open zipper.

  ‘You’re going to give Bennie a good time. Here he is. Smell him? Feel him?’ Whimpering faintly like a puppy, the man brushed his cock along Theo’s cheek, his nose, his lips. ‘I told you he doesn’t like the cold. Bennie wants to go inside. Bennie’s mad about fucking and that’s what he’s going to do, yeah, he’s going to fuck you, but first he wants to be nice and warm and wet. He needs love, you gotta give him love, gotta give him a whole lotta love, you know why? Because you think I’m black.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I thought,’ he said.

  The man laughed. ‘Listen, honey, that’s what they all say, but they don’t mean it. And I am black, that’s to say, my father was black. My mother was blonde, blacks like them, though I’m not so keen on them myself. I prefer Latinos, so in that respect I’m not black but more like my mother, who fancied a bit of colour. Do you follow me? You’re not saying much, which is just as well, because Bennie isn’t one for chit-chat right under his nose, and he’s getting cold and wants to go in. Open your mouth. Bennie’s crazy about white guys, and he thinks you’re cute. Put your hands down, or keep them behind your back. I said open your mouth, you shit, if you don’t I’ll slice it right open for you … There, that’s better, that’s what Bennie likes. One two, one two … no spitting now, no messing around, just let Bennie get on with it, that’s all … What’s the matter with you? You won’t suffocate – nobody does, at least not in my experience. Bennie’s having a bit of fun, he’s swelling up with it, that’s what … Good, that’s good … one two, one two … And now you can use your hands to take your shoes off and drop your trousers. Just the shoes and the trousers, mind, go on then, you can start with the trousers so Bennie can see your pale little dick, maybe they’ll want to play together, no, that would be too cold for Bennie. Hurry up with those trousers. I bet you thought to yourself: Just let the black guy come in my mouth and that’ll be the end of it, but no way, Theo. Bennie wants the real McCoy, this was just a starter. Tonight I’m a big, strong black guy … One shoe off is enough. Down with the rest of your trousers, whitey. Turn around, I tell you, turn around, gimme that saggy white ass of yours.’