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

by Joost Zwagerman

  This is how it has been between us for three years now. Maybe I would be better off with a new cleaner, or, better yet, no cleaner at all. It would certainly save me some time to do the work myself, considering all my preparations, my adjustments after the fact, and the lost morning in between. But I have no reason to economize on time, thank you very much, I am drowning in it. The twenty-five guilders would be a better reason, the mental agony I would avoid a better one still. Even so, I spend half the week eating thin soup with stale bread so that I can pay this son of the desert his wages. It is my only source of pride. No one else can put that money to such good use. I know for certain that he will not turn over a single cent to profiteers and warmongers. As long as he has that money, no banker or taxman will ever see one bit of it. I envy him that freedom and feel privileged that I can help, in some small way, to make it possible. Best of all, thanks to him, I, one of the unemployed, have become an employer. The two of us form our own little economy.

  That is what makes it so excruciating that our dealings are bogged down in rules and habits. Rules make each day identical to the last. My whole life ebbs away into routine. My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and they come to an end for lack of thread. I leaf back through my diaries and notice that the order of events has slipped my memory. When did I find the broken-winged starling on my doorstep? It could have been this morning – but I have to go back five notebooks. Years ago. Nothing that happens to me has a history.

  I do take notes, very thorough ones, on this experiment in the laboratory of loneliness. Only people like me, who never experience anything, who are on the ash heap of history, as Trotsky once said, have the time to keep diaries. Mine are about encounters that never took place, missed opportunities, nostalgia for the daily trials of my time as a teacher (students I am only now beginning to see; a freight train passing through a railway crossing at a slow crawl, preceded by a man with a red flag; the condensed breath of the impatient cyclists; a view of Centraal Station from Kattenburg Island at seven in the morning, when it caught the first rays of sun and shone like Byzantium). I turn my memories into keepsakes, capturing them in the amber of my hardened love.

  A few of those notes are about Gamal. I have reproduced them here to melt off the amber and give these incidents a sequel, a history. Do not expect this tale to be resolved. I am writing it down in my search for a resolution, a reconciliation – or if necessary, a quarrel. The conclusion is on the far side of the silence after the final sentence. I will make sure that Gamal has the chance to read these pages. I will leave them on the table. The lure of his own name will be too much to resist. Then he will see himself through my eyes. I am your friend, Gamal! Earlier stories have merely described life; this story must change mine.

  This time he does not remove his jacket right away when he comes in. He reaches into his inner pocket and pulls out a letter, which – after quickly checking whether it’s still the same letter – he hands to me. I can see myself standing there for ever and ever, world without end, my eyes wide and happy, pointing at my chest. For me? Of course I would like nothing more than to correspond with him, if that is how he prefers to communicate.

  But he says, ‘Correct, please.’

  The letter, I learn, is addressed to a person named Dolly. I can instantly picture her from head to toe: long, bleached-blonde hair, a tight, faded T-shirt and tight, faded jeans. Her rear slides back and forth on a bicycle seat; the denim over her left buttock is adorned with a coarsely stitched, hot-pink heart. A Dolly and a prudish Arab – no good can come of that.

  ‘Isn’t this letter a little too personal to show to me?’

  ‘Correct, please.’ If only I would just do as he says.

  Two lined sheets of loose-leaf paper, covered with green ink from a felt pen. Ellipses and exclamation marks where words fail him. I promise to take the letter with me to the reading room and give it back to him at twenty past twelve.

  ‘Correct now, please.’

  I hold the sheets of paper some distance away so that my reluctance will not go unnoticed. The address ‘1 Souk el Selah St – Cairo’ hovers like a vague promise in the upper right-hand corner. He tells the Dolly that he still has both his ears and furthermore is a little older than six. ‘The bad ones’ have spread rumours about him. ‘To love a dummy brings many troubles,’ he sagely observes. The Dolly has resisted his advances. He brandishes his romantic feelings like a threat: ‘Love needs water … from two hands … one hand alone can almost never feed the plant …!’ He must have come up with that on his mattress, behind his curtain. She is his moonbeam in the sorrowful night. ‘Without you everything and Nihil become friends,’ he concludes. Gamal has a head for languages and likes to speak them all at once. The letter is signed ‘God’.

  There are a couple of points that require clarification. I also ask him, casually, what the signature means. I am told it is ‘too difficult for Dutch’.

  ‘But how can I edit your letter if I don’t know what you mean to say?’

  ‘Correct, please.’

  I shift the words around a bit, replacing ‘dummy’ with ‘foolish woman’ and then changing it back to ‘dummy’.

  ‘Is it a marvellous letter, you think, Misser Job?’

  I assure him that it is a marvellous letter. He beams. His cheeks glow, his eyes go blind with happiness, and he emits a noiseless cry, revealing the gap where there once was a front tooth. For a moment, I see Gamal as a baby in his mother’s arms in that corner house in Souk el Selah Street. Gold coins jingle on her plump wrists, telling of a bright future.

  ‘I ask again later, Misser Job?’ Of course, the effendi would be delighted to do him a similar favour again in the future, free of charge. ‘You be so kind,’ he says, and pauses before resuming, ‘to say if I have in me – hmm, how do I say it?’ – (he rolls his eyes and twiddles his fingers) – ‘if I have in me, you think, to be her lover?’

  What a pedestal he has put me on! He seems sincere in his belief that my mere Dutch nationality gives me insight into the feelings of a Dolly I have never met. ‘I have no idea, Gamal,’ I reply honestly, to make it clear to him that in this and countless other respects there is no difference between us. He doesn’t care for that answer; his face falls like a flag without wind. I take a different approach, trying to be helpful. ‘Maybe you should flatter her a bit more. A moonbeam on a dark night – that probably doesn’t mean much to her. List all the things that make her beautiful in your eyes, and say why. Start from her toes, don’t leave out a thing, and she’ll know for certain you love her and no one else.’ I should have patted him on the shoulder, I realize, and wished him the best of luck with his conquest. He bows his head. ‘Thank you, Mr Job.’ The letter shrivels between his fingers.

  When I ask him the following Tuesday whether he managed to win Dolly’s heart, he tells me curtly that he never sent the letter. Why not? Because I corrected it in red pen. Red, he says, is the colour of hate. A strange superstition, all the stranger because his accusation is imaginary: I wrote in soft, easily erasable pencil. ‘I don’t hate you, Gamal!’ He also noticed, he continues, that I got in touch with Dolly and told her ‘things’ about him. How did you notice that, Gamal? Did a dove land on your shoulder and whisper it in your ear? He becomes confused, mumbles that he saw ‘signs next to her door’. And now he would prefer to start cleaning.

  After that, everything returns to the way it was.

  On a Tuesday in December, months later, after he leaves in defeated silence as usual, after the door swings open in his wake and my apartment briefly seems to teeter on the edge of the stairwell, I find another letter of his on the landing outside my door. This one (‘For me?’) is addressed to ‘Misser Job’. The letter is perched half over the edge of the uppermost step; he has dropped it accidentally-on-purpose, ‘despite myself’, as he says when he breaks a glass.

  ‘It is the third year that I work at your house. We are now at the doors of a new year. You have make some promise but you do n
ot satisfy … You gave me nothing back, you brought me nothing more. I have done my best, but sometimes the means are disabled to accomplish anything. This is a truth that the Dutch and you and the others cannot know it!

  ‘I love the Netherlands very much. Oh, what beautiful country with green and red and with water …! In the Dutch, the soul is big with love of goodness, but also there is the war of the soul and the greediness and then the greediness wins. Bananas for their owners! In Egypt the soul is small with poverty. I am shy of the Dutch, Misser Job. They have open my letters and use my thoughts. The Dutch hates me.

  ‘Sometimes the translation from inside comes wrong on the outside. And the only difference between the woods and the other human one is that the animals can not speak … Unlucky! Then some safety goes away in the understanding. (Black pen means nothing … it just happens!) You are what you understand.’

  I grab my coat from the hook and rush outside. He is wrong to say that speaking can only lead to misunderstandings. I am touched by his confession, although a shadow passed over my tender heart when I saw that this letter, too, was signed ‘God’. But I will drive away that shadow. It’s probably a worn-down compliment addressed to the Most Gracious, Most Merciful One. Allahu Akbar, God is great, both East and West belong to Him – it must be that sort of thing. No need to be concerned. If I hurry, I may catch up with Gamal. I think I know where he’s squatting. I must speak to him now. We have much more in common than I always thought. I, too, am a stranger in this beautiful country, am I not? I may have a home of my own, but society has cast me out. I cannot stand all the indifference around me, any more than he can, and so I too console myself with the illusion that I am hated. His sorrow is my sorrow’s twin, I am what I understand. Isn’t it possible that our solitudes could bring us together?

  Poor Gamal! If he thinks the Dutch hate him, he overestimates them. The Dutch cannot hate, any more than they can love – all they can do is threaten him with their sluggish indifference. You are the one who hates, Gamal! I too feel hate. The Dutch are so indifferent because democracy has turned them into slow-witted slaves. The politicians call it ‘the least of all evils’. They call that an ideology. They dare to call it a credo! In the Greek polis, the citizens knew each other. That was a place where you could make decisions together. But how do we go about that in this country? Here we are governed by the anonymous power of numbers. The majority rules, but the majority is no one, and no one can hold it accountable. Its delusional decisions are natural disasters against which there is no defence. I’ll take a despot any day of the week – then at least assassination would be an option. The majority declares the Dutch to be enemies of the Russians, but no one feels they are our enemies. The majority threatens total annihilation. If I did that, I would be a misguided fantasist, a madman. The majority has decided that I may no longer practise my profession, while every Dutch person I talk to says it’s a crying shame. Look at all those books I have at home. I’ve read them all, some of them three or four times. I know long passages of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by heart. The wisdom of the ages! Declared null and void by the majority. Democracy is a disaster. Madness has taken power; the state is the greatest threat to the citizen.

  Have you ever met the couple who live upstairs, those two inflated torsos with small, superfluous heads, arms and legs? Those two are unemployed like me. They stopped talking about it years ago. They open their mouths only to shovel food into them. Before long they are likely to come crashing through the floor. Each day the thud of their footsteps grows duller; each day the boards over my head creak more menacingly. They are dutiful people. They take the money the state holds out to them and dutifully convert it into shit. Two digestive tracts, that’s what they are, two tubes connecting the authorities to the sewers. In times of heavy rain, the plumbing can’t handle their excrement – that’s how much effort they put into it. Then the turds float downstairs, through the entranceway, over the doorstep, and into the gutter.

  Two men from the city sanitation department come by with long bamboo poles, which they screw together. One of the men uses them to poke around in the sewer. ‘Is the sludge coming out yet?’ he asks the other one, who is staring down into the next hole over. He keeps poking and prodding until the sludge comes out and the money can start pouring in again.

  The two of us, Gamal, have an economy on a human scale. The problems of the other economy are easy to solve. We’ll abolish supply and demand. Away with the unreliable consumer. We’ll hook up the factories directly to the destruction centres. Right in the middle we’ll install a taxation system, and we’ll turn the whole thing up as high as we please. Our sado-masochism has a friendly face!

  When I arrived, bubbling over with joy, at the corner where his squat should have been, I found a sandpit, fenced off with wire. Of the lives that had been lived in that house, a cross-section remained, projected onto the side of the adjoining building: here and there a patch of wall tiles, a washbasin at an unattainable height, the outline of a stairway zigzagging upwards, and a square of wallpaper, now more than ever purely decorative, against which a lamp cord was whipping in the wind.

  The Gamal I see the following Tuesday, climbing the staircase ahead of me, does not wish to have written that letter. He splays his legs into a broad, ridiculous pose. He stamps his feet. With every step, he puffs mechanically through his nose. He puts on a parody of the wage slave’s walk. He sniggers to himself. ‘Look at me walk!’ I translate. ‘Step-stomp, step-stomp, like an ambling old horse, with my master trailing behind me. What a pitiful fool I am! But I laugh at myself. I think Gamal’s a riot, Misser Job!’ At the top of the stairs, when I look him in the face, the merriment leaks out of his eyes and he turns away like a schoolgirl, his face slightly red.

  ‘Is something wrong, Gamal?’

  ‘No, no, is fine,’ he splutters, ‘is fine.’ His Egyptian blush has a hint of orange. He must be embarrassed. To reassure him, I tell him his letter touched me, touched and disturbed me. ‘No, no, is fine,’ he says, and he giggles. ‘It’s just a Molièrism.’ Beg your pardon? A Molièrism, that’s right. My own part in the conversation seems just as bewildering to me when – after a hard-won victory over my more passive self – I go ahead and pour out my heart to him. My sincerity disconcerts him. He nods and agrees with everything I say before I’ve said it. He studies the sole of his shoe, a sole full of holes. It feels almost as if I’m scolding him. His hair is in short tufts pointing every which way, like a chick newly hatched. It has just been cut. Somebody must have done that for him; he’s too clumsy to have managed it himself. I see him in the chair as the hand snips away, his eyes narrowing with contentment. I bring my rambling to an end. If he has someone to cut his hair for him, what use could he have for me?

  The giggling becomes a habit of his, and I notice it is not always entirely cheerful. Under his glasses, his cheeks are sometimes wet. Over the past three years, has he become a little alienated? His stooped, wordless existence here, the bestial burden of poverty stunting his soul, the huge portions of tedium we Westerners cram ourselves with – it must gradually have become too much for him, and some of the safety in his understanding has slipped away.

  There is also a ‘Mrs Liesje’, the friend who put me in touch with Gamal. We have tried all sorts of things to persuade him to drop the ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’, but he clings firmly to them, and to be honest, we don’t even mind, it sounds respectful, grateful, and makes us feel somehow noble. Liesje has a busy medical practice and a labour-intensive household, with three whippets and a husband. He goes there twice a week. I call her and ask if she’s ever noticed anything odd about Gamal. Her voice sounds comfortable, she’s in the mood for a nice chat on the phone, and although nothing springs to mind immediately, she takes her time to reflect on what she might find odd about Gamal. He occasionally breaks a plate. He breaks a plate almost every week. He once scrubbed her carpet, and she had to put the whole thing in the wash. A month or two ago, he locked himself out of her ho
use in the morning, and when she came home that evening at six, she found him on her doorstep, barefoot. ‘Why?’ she asks.

  I read her his New Year’s letter. How could I ever have thought it was the outcry of a kindred spirit? The ravings of a maniac with a persecution complex, that’s what it is, there’s no mistaking it. Unfortunately, that’s no defence against his accusations. I cannot refute them, precisely because they are figments of his imagination. Non liquet. I tell Liesje about his romantic obsession. She clicks her tongue pityingly and does her best to recall other incidents. Oh, yes, he once consulted her about stomach ache. Apparently most of his diet consists of candy. There were also sexual problems, which he didn’t care to explain in any detail. And has she ever noticed his colour fetishes? Why, now that I mention it, she has a red sofa cushion that’s always missing after he comes by. She finds it in the strangest places – under her bed, or in the meter cupboard.

  We are now a majority of two, Liesje and I. We chuckle about him in voices filtered by telephone wires, and then one of us, I forget who, says let him go. Only as an impossibility: ‘And a fellow like him … of course it would be wrong to just let him go.’ One of us must have said something of that nature. And once these words have been spoken, Gamal’s fate hangs by a thread, like a yo-yo in my hands, as I sit by the phone. Up and down goes his fate as we contemplate the pros and cons. Wouldn’t it be in his best interest if we let him go and he had to return to Egypt? He has no future here. He would have to spend the rest of his life here cleaning houses and shuffling from squat to squat with his mattress and old curtain, his back bent with scrubbing, not a tooth left in his mouth from all the chocolate he eats. Liesje points out that trouble awaits him in his homeland. She vaguely recalls something about a pregnant girl he left behind – the neighbour’s daughter? During our first conversation, long ago, he mentioned that his opinions were considered subversive in Cairo. Hadn’t he been expelled from his university? We wrap him up and box him in with our gossip. Although all we have done is speculate, he is practically ready for shipment by the time I hang up.