8
I sent his work back, with a hard-hitting letter in which I pointed out to him yet again that we firstly had no interest in his work, and secondly had no interest in his person; that we, more particularly, were not his friends or psychiatrists; that even if we were his friends we could not help him; that further submissions would go irrevocably into the waste-paper basket; and that finally we were considering taking legal action because of persistent harassment.
But – my God! – Minnema goes on. His letters can no longer be returned, as he no longer gives any address. To be precise he first writes some address or other at the bottom left on the envelope, then he crosses it out, in such a way that it is actually illegible.
As if to emphasize this state of affairs he also sends us a change-of-address slip filled in as follows:
Name and initials (Minnema)
Occupation (dash)
Further details (dash)
Previous address (dash)
Town (dash)
New address (I’ll go then. Shall I go then? But I’ll go.) Plus a dash through the rest.
He doesn’t need to give our address, as he stuffs all his letters personally into the letter box up to five times a day. At top right he draws stamps. Sometimes he rings the bell. I hear that Minnema has been at least twice removed by staff with a minimum of force.
Once he rings the bell when I am alone in the building. I do not open up. He looks in through the window. It is snowing that day. He gesticulates. I silently shake my head. He gives me a melancholy look, and makes a writing gesture with his hand. Again I shake my head. He casts an indescribable look at me, and disappears into the snow.
Just before Christmas he sends a bunch of flowers, which stand in the unheated editorial office while the publisher’s is closed.
Only now do I have the chance to look through his production of the last few days. With each letter the handwriting becomes more vigorous and less controlled. There is less and less on a page. The number of sides rises to sixteen. Through a fog of images I have the impression that Minnema is an adherent of Manicheism, the doctrine of continual conflict between two separate principles of good (light) and evil (darkness). Vague allusions indicate that I am the prince of darkness. The letters and envelopes are decorated with numerous suns (eyes?). In the poetry there is a door that remains closed, and a window. Some letters are signed with my name. There are indications that I am an executioner in Dachau (sketch of chimney with a plume of smoke). I suspect that Minnema is talking about me when he writes: ‘Like ash/ he will be/ in more fiery ovens/ like ash ash ash ash ash ash’ (across the whole width of the page). And about me, when he writes: ‘Press my fingers/ into you so/ drink you completely empty/ sharpen the knife.’ These furious pages alarmed me.
9
It is the first working day of the New Year. (There are two letters from Minnema.) I am busy all day catching up with a backlog of work. Post has piled up. I read items in an espresso bar. I have telephone conversations. (On Minnema’s letters are two real, not drawn stamps.) I send copy to the printer’s. I enquire about the rights for a translation. (As address of the sender Minnema gives our editorial address: ‘sorry’). Now and then I look outside. At this time of year, as is well-known, it gets dark quickly.
Reluctantly I finally open Minnema’s thinnest letter. To my surprise the official letterhead is of a firm of solicitors. What on earth was this? Very carefully typed. A number of sections divided by a space.
‘Useless for the useless.’
‘I’m washing my hands of it, with the result that you will be left with soulless material. Any further infringement will have direct results for you personally.’
‘He kept my voice for months. Now he is not home.’
‘If I appear in his work, everything will be automatically fixed. Fear the sun.’
A drawing of a head on a thread, and an opened pair of scissors.
‘Bye-ye.’
I study the letterhead, which strikes me as vaguely familiar. Those solicitors’ names, their address, nearby. I check in a file. Sure enough, it is our firm of solicitors. How did Minnema come by this paper? Is this coincidence or has he spun a net, comprehensible only to him, around me. It must be coincidence. It must be investigated. Outside dusk is now falling.
It is the first working day of the year. The office has been closed for a week and a half. It has struck me a few times that Minnema, if he is clever, will come by today. It is dark now, there is nothing more to be seen. I, however, am clearly visible for anyone taking the trouble to bend down and look into the basement, between the volumes displayed in the window. I have finished. And in a cheerful mood; the story I am writing and from which only the ending is missing is making progress. I perform the ritual actions. I empty the ashtray, put the cover on the typewriter, lock a filing cabinet, put the outgoing post in a tray, push my chair under the table, move the stapler from the centre to the edge of the table, and put on my coat. I turn off the fluorescent lights. I am on the point of leaving. Something occurs to me at the last minute. Without putting the lights on again I go back to my desk. Feeling my way I dial the internal number of a higher floor. As I stand there by the desk, in the dark, with my coat on, I of course look at the only point where light is coming from: the window. I stand and listen to the ringing tone.
I stare, and suddenly someone is there outside on the edge of the pavement. Standing still. I cannot see the head. I keep the receiver pressed against my head. Outside someone comes closer, and studies the display window it seems, which is not lit. I still cannot see the head. Someone is studying the display window it seems and then brings his head very close to the window and looks inside. I stand motionless in the unlit basement. I have my coat on. I don’t move a muscle. I listen to the telephone. It has long since dawned on me that there is no one left in the building. I hold my breath and do not blink. My heart pounds. Outside is that head, of which I can see only the outline, against the glass. And here am I, a coat in a dark room, a telephone to my ear. My heartbeat is now irregular.
He is outside, I am inside. Neither of us moves. I shall stay inside for as long as Minnema is outside. I’m sweating and I’m cold. I coincide with my physical perceptions. I have been reduced to an immobile body, caught by Minnema’s look. If it is him. If it is Minnema that I can see.
I have the feeling that we shall never leave. It’s as if I’m dreaming. Where am I? Is anybody there? It is like the congealing of a pursuit dream into a single image, so frightening that the dreamer can only wake in order to realize slowly, slowly – sitting up, peering at a doorpost, the outline of a window, a chair over which his clothes are hanging – that he is at home, having escaped this time too, that they are his own clothes.
Translated by Paul Vincent
24
Frans Kellendonk
Foreign Service
Buitenlandse dienst
The only reason I don’t have a peephole is the large window of the office building just across the road. I can observe him in it at my leisure every Tuesday morning at twenty past eight as he stands waiting at my front door. Our arrangement is that he will come to my home at precisely half past the hour. Too impatient to stick to this agreement but not wanting to arrive early, he waits a while with his chin lifted gruffly, his arms crossed loosely over his stocky form. A long moment after eight twenty, too long for any clock to quantify, his arm rises, yearning and threatening like a snake extending towards the charmer’s flute, and presses the button so forcefully that the plastic cap falls off the bell in my front hall.
He has come to clean my house. By that time I have straightened my desk, picked dots of hair off the floor in the shower, scrubbed out the toilet with bleach, made my bed, rinsed off the previous night’s dishes so he won’t have to see the remains of my food – in short, expunged any trace of my bodily existence that could possibly arouse his disgust or hurt his pride, which is the size of an ostrich egg.
I push the cap back in pl
ace, rush downstairs and open the front door with a broad wave of welcome. Every week, he recoils. ‘Were you in the bed?’ Did I oversleep, he means. Then, ‘Are you on the holiday?’ And finally, ‘Are you ill of the flu?’
These are reminders – the kind you might receive for a bill paid long ago – of the three times when I was unavailable and he came to my door for nothing. Three times in the three years he has worked for me. Let me add right away that I cannot call him to cancel – he has no phone. He moves from squat to squat, so I’m told, commanding a territory the size of his mattress in one corner of a kitchen or landing, the border demarcated by an old curtain. His name is Gamal. What more is there to say? Even if I knew, I’d have to keep it to myself, because he’s here illegally. He comes from Egypt.
His country and mine: the open palms of two great continents, their fingers glittering with ports. Both are swampy deltas, dammed and dyked through endless drudgery. His forefathers, like mine, wrested every clod of earth from the water and belaboured it year after year down the centuries. And we are both exiles. That is where all similarity between us ends.
‘No, no,’ I say jovially, as if I cannot sense that he will bear his three grudges all the way to his Mohammedan hell. ‘Come on in.’
‘Not early?’
He knows very well he is too early, even if he doesn’t wear a watch. As for me, I know he knows because he is always ten minutes early – on the dot. ‘Oh, no, not at all.’
If my collar is up, if I have a dollop of shaving cream next to my ear or if the look in my eyes is a bit morose, as it can be on occasional mornings, then he takes another shirking step back, moving his flat hand back and forth to ward me off like a devil or the immigration police. ‘No! I wait! One quarter hour.’ He will not budge an inch, no matter how much I plead. In the large window across the street, I see his mirror image waiting by the door again, in his old sports jacket, faithful to his post, come hail or pouring rain. The reason he has not yet deemed our dismal climate worthy of a coat is, I suspect, that he wishes to see the Netherlands as a temporary matter; and if, under these circumstances, one quarter hour lasts no more than seven minutes, that too I can understand completely.
As soon as he’s in the house, he hangs his jacket – and, in the winter, his jumper – over the back of a chair. He pulls his shirt out of his trousers, takes off his shoes and socks, sets his glasses on the table and wobbles into the cold kitchen on laggard feet. Anything else I have to say will go unheard. Time for me to go now.
He doesn’t like to be seen at work. Does he drink the coffee I keep warm for him? I don’t know. The first time he came I left a sausage roll in the oven for him, only to find it in the rubbish bin that evening. The piece of mocha cream cake I left him for my birthday – ‘Look, Gamal, a piece of mocha cake. For you.’ – same story. ‘You please to go now.’
Every Tuesday morning, I leave my flat as if an angel with a flaming sword is in hot pursuit. It is no small task for me to spend a whole half-day away from home. I am fiercely attached to my little walk-up flat, which has become a part of me, all the more intimate because I share it with no one. It is a second body.
There among my furniture, books and tropical fish, I am a model member of the unemployed. Every night I sleep exactly seven hours and thirty-five minutes, without fail. My health has never been so good. Like the pale idiot in the asylum, the dowager wearing her life away in her straight-backed chair, I stand a decent chance of reaching one hundred. And all my love goes to my things, my books, my prints, an old ashtray and a box of wine corks not excepted, mute things that do not strain my affection, caught in their prisons of hardened emotion like amber.
I used to be a teacher. It’s not a time I recall with pleasure, to be sure, but I did exist, then. These days I am a person whose letters and filled-in forms lie for weeks in a corner of a bureaucrat’s desk until they finally glide off unnoticed and I vanish. I ultimately exist only for myself. This is not normally unbearable, but sometimes I feel like one of the living dead. I occasionally toy with the idea of plotting a graph of my good days and my bad days, to ascertain statistically whether growing old is what I have come to suspect it may be. But every time, I decide it’s wiser to remain ignorant. I dutifully try to make a life out of my good days. From time to time, my bad days show the undeniable tendency to recur at shorter intervals. Then I spend a week with my sister in the countryside. When I return home, my little life again seems not unbearable.
In short, I can certainly leave the house for more than half a day if required, but I would prefer it not to be Gamal who does the requiring. Whenever he cleans my house, I feel anaesthetized, sick with a pain I cannot feel, as if I am being cut and poked inside. If you’d like to know how a soul looks without a body, you should follow me some day on my Tuesday-morning wanderings through the city. I first spend an hour in a coffee house, bowed over the morning paper. Newspapers, especially morning papers, cause a guaranteed dip in the graph of my days, but on Tuesdays I read the morning paper anyway, because what else can you do in a coffee house before 10 a.m.? Half-dozing, I read of the triumph of my way of life, the percentages rising month on month, the million mark coming ever closer. In just a few years, the unemployed will outnumber the women. In the foreseeable future, my way of life will be the most common human condition. Yet my fellow outcasts and I have yet to adjust to this new reality. As we stand waiting at the entrance to the public reading room, a few minutes before ten, we all do our best to look gainfully employed. I always make sure to have a folder with me, filled with papers. Others bring two pairs of glasses or fill their breast pockets with colourful rows of ballpoint pens. As soon as the doors open, we all rush for the magazines, each of us intent on the same glossy paper, the same full-page colour photos that admit us to the gardens of Schönbrunn and Sissinghurst, the temples of Tikal, the treasure houses along the ancient trade routes. Or did you think we have no need to travel?
When the weather is fine, I forgo the reading room and stroll around the marketplace instead, buying one bargain after another so I feel I have money to burn. I indulge myself shamelessly. I have fifteen bars of soap in my cupboard at home, enough razor blades and shoelaces for years, piles of underwear in pristine packaging, all because of my intense self-pity on Tuesday mornings. I stop by the house at some point (I live in the city centre) to deposit my carrier bag full of purchases at the bottom of the staircase. Then I linger there for a moment, listening, in the hope of hearing the soothing roar of my vacuum cleaner. There are times when I hear nothing – no industrious footsteps, no dull thud of a bucket or stepladder being moved. A breathless silence reigns, despite the thin walls of my home, the silence that surrounds a person in hiding. I’ve never had the heart to take a look upstairs. Once or twice I’ve called my own number because I’d forgotten to tell Gamal I was expecting a package. He did not answer. With every ring of the phone, I sensed his hunched shoulders like a physical presence in front of me.
At twelve twenty, I am allowed to re-enter my home. I suspect Gamal insists on that time because he has to pray at the stroke of noon. I usually find him seated, waiting motionlessly, his hands crossed over his belly and his nose turned up obstinately, as it is whenever he is not cleaning. As I enter the room, he springs to his feet and does not respond to my greeting. Once in a while he is still at work, singing in a high, throaty voice, and it takes a moment before he notices my presence. Then he mutters some kind of apology and finishes his work in silence, at breakneck speed. Meanwhile, I light a cigarette and pretend to read my letters. ‘I’m not looking, see!’ my whole averted form calls out to him. When he is done, he washes his hands and feet, gets dressed, and assumes a standing position in front of the same chair where he normally sits, without a sound – not even the faintest warning cough. He will not let even his gaze brush up against me.
The moment when I pay is easily the most awkward in the whole Tuesday-morning routine. I have tried to dodge it by leaving the money on the table in advance,
but he painstakingly dusts around it, unwilling to lay so much as a finger on it. Nor am I permitted simply to hand him his twenty-five-guilder bill. I am supposed to place it on the edge of the table and then make it clear that I have forgotten all about it. Only then, while my attention is supposedly elsewhere, does he deign to pick it up. Pinching it between his thumb and index finger, apparently worried that if he slipped it into his pocket it might make a cashy crackle, he hurries off without a word of farewell, his head hanging in defeat. I have a fearful suspicion that he utters a curse every week as he passes over my threshold. When he pulls the downstairs door to the street shut behind him, the door to my apartment swings open on its own. He has pulled down the handle with such hidden force that it takes three days for it to right itself. ‘Who’s there?’ my neighbours hear me shouting for days, because until Friday, the slightest draught in the stairwell can make my door fly open.
When I turn around to face my agitated interior, it’s as if nothing will ever be the same again, as if I had gone to the station that morning to bid a final farewell to someone I love dearly. On the floorboards, damp spots dwindle. My prints seem shaken. My dusted knick-knacks have, with gross insensitivity, been put back in the wrong places, and in the aquarium, the guppies cower behind the rocks. The electric clock on my desk is running a quarter of an hour behind, the quarter of an hour that he used the socket for the vacuum cleaner. By adjusting and restoring it all, I reclaim my personal domain. My second body regains consciousness and immediately falls into a post-narcotic depression. In the kitchen, I survey what Gamal put away incorrectly after he did the washing-up, and I separate the ceramics from the glass, the flat plates from the deep dishes, the knives from the forks from the spoons. He has declared one kitchen cupboard off-limits. Whatever came out of there, he will not put back. It holds a few cups, bowls, serving dishes, nothing special, but he avoids it as if it were a tabernacle, my holy of holies, simply to show me his unrelenting discretion.
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 43