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

by Joost Zwagerman

  His father often talked about the sea, although he had never sailed himself. His tales of the wonders of Babylon and Egypt, of eternal snows and mountains of ice, of pearls and gold, of tropical countries where it was always summer and cold ones where night reigned eternal – he listened to them as prophecies of doom.

  The harbour, which he visited every week in the company of his father, felt like the gateway to hell. The warehouses were chambers of horrors, the ships dismal prisons. Above all, the ominous East India schooners, towering over the quays with their gallows-like masts, filled him with dread. Deep inside them, in the narrow passages where there was neither light nor air, in the crew’s foul cribs with their sweaty bedding and in the hold full of sour-smelling casks, musty crates and stinking small livestock he felt oppressed … He had to bite his lips at the thought that he would have to pass his whole life in a floating coffin imprisoned in the infinite emptiness of the ocean.

  His father had preordained him to be a captain with the East India Company. He had initially planned this profession for his other son, but the latter proved a sickly child, unfit for life at sea.

  How often had Jacob prayed to God to inflict him with a painless but incurable ailment? He kept his dread of the sea to himself, knowing that his father wouldn’t want to hear about it. In secret he invented excuses, but no matter what he conjured up, his future life loomed ahead of him like an ineluctable hazard. His only hope was that God would swiftly summon him to Himself, because dead children were enlisted as angels with trumpets in the Heavenly Hosts.

  He dreamed of a golden trumpet.

  Because the Lord had given him no sign of having heard him, he had asked his father if he could join the boys’ choir. Their singing made him think of heaven and he knew for sure that God listened to them on Sundays. At all events their hymns seemed a better way to Him than prayers, which were so silent he could not imagine them being heard. He would have preferred to declaim them out loud under the naked heavens, but for whatever reason, that wasn’t permitted.

  Did God in fact know that he existed? He was by no means sure of that – and he sometimes doubted whether he would be saved were God to pour a new Deluge over the land, providing an ark for the pious. He saw the parson and the boys’ choir already there, standing at the railing to welcome the animals: stallion and mare, bull and cow, billy and nanny goat, boar and sow, cock and hen, two of each animal, except for the fish because they could swim. And if he should humbly beg that a place be granted him too as he shuffled cautiously amidst the caterpillars, beetles and larvae, he would be refused one with the words, ‘The Lord knoweth you not.’ The preacher would pull the gangplank up from under him and the boys would launch into a hymn to the greater glory of their Lord as the waters rose visibly, with household goods and church pews washed down the streets and there would no longer be any escape for him anywhere.

  His father rejected his request to join the choir with a laugh: ‘My dear boy, if you were to sing, the sky would fall on our heads out of fright.’ Later on he had tried to persuade him to buy him a trumpet, but he didn’t comply with that request either. Permission to enter the ark was denied him for good. His fate was sealed: he was destined to be a ship’s captain, a prisoner on his own ship, and to sail to the end of the world, beyond the icebergs to the land of everlasting night.

  3

  His father regarded voyages of discovery as the crowning glory of creation. If yet another East Indiaman sailed into the harbour, he seized every occasion to look at it. He knew all their names: the Gilded Dragon, the Four Winds, the Great Voyage, as well as those of ships of former times. Their figureheads were familiar faces to him. As an assayer he had to inspect all their cargoes. But rather than descend into the hold, he preferred to stay on deck, where he pictured himself sailing forth sometime.

  He knew all the sea routes to the East, from the safe one along the coast of Africa to the wide arc across the ocean, blown onward by the trade winds. And the captains often asked him in astonishment if he wasn’t a sailor himself and he always answered, ‘Yes, of course,’ believing it as he spoke. Strolling from one deck to another, they went on to discuss distant coasts, because when seafaring was the subject, the talk was of land. They exchanged facts about climate, vegetation and commodities, and it was not uncommon for one of these captains to learn something new from him about the country he had just returned from.

  He always postponed his descent into the hold as long as possible. It was only when the captain invited him to view the cargo that he went meekly below deck. There was always a huge crush there, with seamen coming and going, harbour staff, East India Company officials and casual hands. The petty officers guided him neatly through the labyrinth, opening doors and hatches, going on ahead up stairways and down passages, and showing him the barrels and jars, the crates and sacks. For a moment he fancied himself a rich merchant as he fingered the linen or porcelain as it passed his inspection; it was then that the petty officer, whose sole wish was to return to shore as soon as possible, became impatient and coaxed him onward to view the spices.

  The inspector took a bushel of everything. Before stuffing each sample in his bags, he crushed a little and held it between his fingers to sniff. With that, he hastily packed up his samples. Back in his harbour office, sitting at his desk of polished teak, he subjected the spices to a meticulous inspection. Most of the smells and tastes were strong, so that it was a while before he was restored to his former state without flavour or odour. He carried out the work of smelling and tasting in turns: first he bit into a coffee bean from Java, after which he sniffed a clove from Ambon. But there too there had to be an interlude, because it was impossible to separate smell and taste. The art of tasting required one to summon up old sensations. As he was letting the coffee grains roll over his tongue and past his palate, he tried to think of other experiences – preferably unpleasant ones, because these were much more distinct and meant such an onslaught on his sensitivity. What was pleasant gave him a feeling of harmony with his surroundings and was thus hard to distinguish: a feeling of bliss was always a generalized pleasure and the role of taste in it was not always plain. His tongue drove the coffee round the inside of his mouth as long as was necessary for him to detect the qualities of bad coffee – too bitter or else an insipid, sandy flavour. Then he rinsed his mouth with water and decided on its quality, noting it in his register. To test the smell of something, he took a handful of the spice, pressed his nose cautiously in his palm and breathed slowly in and out. He must not sniff because that meant it might hit his throat, ruining the pure sensation. After smelling something he sucked in the fresh air in order to rid himself of the smell. Some items had to be smelled and tasted: pepper and nutmeg from Ternate. He always kept the pepper till last because it made his nose smart.

  He loved testing spices. It was beautiful work, calling for great precision. He was fond of everything that required precision, because that implied that he was a master craftsman. He was master of an invisible world: even if he were blind, he would know the way – a blind captain who could smell his route over the seas of the world and who could tell from the scents carried on the wind whether he was approaching a country and if so which one.

  Afterwards he felt a little sad: those smells and tastes that he recorded so meticulously when he was testing them left him with a bittersweet longing after they had vanished. For a moment they had transported him to their land of origin. It was as if after assaying them he had returned from a long voyage.

  In the study in his silent house he spent long hours perusing the atlas he had compiled himself, with dozens of maps, executed in watercolour and ink. Leafing through it, he always made the same voyage: west-south-west to the Azores, south-south-west across the Equator, south to Brazil, then along the coast past the dreaded forty-degree latitude where Cape Horn lay, and finally west, west, west into the Great Ocean en route to the final map, still empty, but soon to be filled with the contours of the undiscovered Southern Con
tinent.

  There were maps of the Southern Continent. The oldest was by Claudius Ptolemy, depicting a huge image of Terra Australis Incognita. These maps, however, were not reliable – some geographers, for instance, had not hesitated to draw palm trees in spheres enveloped in eternal frost. A modern cartographer did not work with his fantasy, but with the navigation of the sextant and with mathematic calculations. He sometimes felt that this was a shame, and he envied the voyagers of old who had boldly set course for the void, with nothing but the dream of a paradise lying beyond the deserts of Africa and Asia. Their little craft often bobbed up and down on the infinite ocean, becalmed because they did not yet know about the swift trade wind route; or else they searched for harbours along strange, hostile coasts, scanning the night sky in search of familiar constellations and relying by day on sun and hourglass. Today all people had to do was to follow the familiar shipping lanes and the coasts of the Orient were well explored by merchants and soldiers.

  Only a few people had as yet set their course across the western hemisphere. The Spanish shuttled to and fro between Peru and the Philippines and buccaneers had explored the South Pacific but no one had as yet ventured to reach the coasts of the Southern Continent. All his love went to that unknown land on the far side of the globe, the final void. To sail there – that would be to make the glorious era of the great seafarers live again. To sail in that great emptiness, with only that dream in their thoughts: that one day the unknown coast would loom up, capricious as a chimera, the continent of our opposites, the undiscovered Southern Continent.

  He knew the travel diaries of his predecessors, Drake, Quiros, van Noort, van Spilbergen, Schouten and Tasman, and had noticed that none of these voyagers to the Southern Continent had set their course below the fortieth latitude, except Tasman. He, however, had stuck too close to the Indian archipelago.

  Arend Roggeveen was sure of his route and couldn’t wait to set sail.

  Up till now his voyage of discovery, however, had only taken him past the numerous institutions that the Dutch Republic vaunted: from the Estates of Zeeland to those of the province of Holland, from the Estates General to the West India Company and from there back again to all these Estates. On each occasion his request was referred to someone else, so that he gradually began to feel like Vasco da Gama on a tow barge. The West India Company seemed to be the chief obstacle. This irritated him beyond measure: the Company did not even have a monopoly and what had it ever done for seafarers? All it did was to live off former glories. Expeditions were no longer equipped; all the Company did was to maintain a cargo service – black slaves were sent over there, sugar was brought back.

  And yet Arend Roggeveen did get his charter. In exchange he had to promise the Company the riches of the Southern Continent. What was left over would be his, but that was of no concern, as fame was worth more to him than riches. It proved impossible, however, to get merchant companies and bankers interested in the enterprise, and the attitude of the West India Company was that it did not intend to participate directly except for taking its share of the profits. Once again the prospective explorer felt obliged to travel by barge round the towns of the province of Holland. He wrote a fund-raising brochure in which he guaranteed that he would in any case discover ‘some land’, although he felt unable to promise any ‘precious jewels’. He returned from his mission a disappointed man. He cursed the fact that he had almost reached the end of his life without having realized his dreams. He persuaded himself that his sons would have to carry on his work: if he couldn’t complete it himself, at least there would be one Roggeveen on the roll-call of famous discoverers.

  By a trick of fate his invalid son turned out to be a passionate connoisseur of geography and astronomy; on many occasions Jan had even rescued his father from a perilous calculation. The absent-minded Jacob was more of a thinker than a future naval hero and under a happier star his father would certainly have designated him for a career in letters. But due to his brother’s illness, Jacob was doomed to leave everything behind and sail to somewhere he didn’t want to go.

  To familiarize him with seamanship, his father brought him time and again to the harbour and instructed him in navigation, geography and astronomy. To his father’s exasperation he proved to have only an average talent for these subjects. He asked the wrong questions every time. After completing a classical education at school, he was sent to Leiden University to study law. The history of patents had taught his father that the admirals in the Dutch Republic were no longer those who had sailed the seas from childhood, but rather those who were adepts of inkpot and goose quills.

  4

  And so the young Jacob Roggeveen set out from home. It was his first journey and he left with great expectations – above all, of escaping his father’s pressure and embarking on a new life. He took letters of recommendation with him so that he would be hospitably received on his way and in Leiden by family members he did not know and scholars with unfamiliar names. He was also expected to deliver his father’s brochure to a number of addresses, as his father hadn’t yet abandoned all hope. This bag full of letters and quarto notebooks gave the son the sense of being a person of weight – he had a task to fulfil. He had no difficulty in forgetting that all this was intended as preparation for becoming a voyager, because he had an excellent gift for seeing only what he wanted to see.

  Travelling across the waters of Zeeland had suddenly made life on board ship seem eminently bearable. The waters were calm and the seascapes were restful on the eye, framed as they were by views of the coast. He took pleasure in the clearly outlined surfaces of land, sky and water and decided that ships were a fine invention after all: they turned an obstacle into a convenience – the seas and rivers had become the squares and streets of a metropolis of God. The meaningless flow of the waters and the senseless blowing of the winds had acquired a purpose – namely the progress of mankind. It did not occur to him that his reconciliation with the sea was purely temporary – a gathering sou’wester would have blown it away at once and without ado.

  In the horse-drawn barge on his way to Delft he couldn’t believe his eyes as he gazed at the landscape of South Holland. The water in the canals was high, sometimes higher than the surrounding countryside – it was a dyke of water surrounding the subsided peat moors. He saw barges gliding across the landscape on these dykes of water. Everything here had to do with water – the people, the cattle and the crops. When he saw the windmills with their sails, his admiration was complete. Everything here shifted and glided and revolved without any effort. Only the nag on the towpath had to do any work. It was as though God’s plan had been revealed, creation as a perpetuum mobile.

  On arriving in Leiden he talked to his uncle non-stop about his experiences on his way. He ended his hymn to technology by expressing his desire to be an engineer. Building bridges, digging canals! His uncle patted him on the shoulder, ‘Young man, wasn’t it law that you came here to study?’

  The study of law bewildered him, however. Man-made laws were complicated and numerous. Privileges, institutions, family connections and inheritance, renting and leasing, excise and tolls, punishments – there were more punishments than there were crimes. He learned that nothing was the same and that there were terms to describe all these differences. He toiled through folios full of verdicts and treaties. They were the account books of human activity; everything was recorded, but the sum total was lacking. His mind could not cope with this branch of study. What he missed was a governing principle. He found one in the Bible instead. God’s laws were marvellous in their simplicity. Put your trust in God: all you have to do is submit to His will. Compare that with the meaningless toil of humanity, of which the study of law was so faithful a reflection!

  He noticed, however, that he could not fill his days with resignation. So he started reading zealously about God because everything else paled into insignificance. Nowhere did he find the severe simplicity of Ecclesiastes or the true faith of the Evangelists, except i
n Spinoza’s Ethics. He did not understand everything about the latter’s geometrical reasoning – to be honest he understood only one thing – that God’s existence could be proved even by earthly reasoning. Without letting his father know, he began to study theology. But this study also didn’t bring him what he had expected. His professor dictated so many rules and regulations that God, if He had indeed decreed them, would probably never have got round to creating the earth. Two years later he returned to Walcheren. He had found his guiding principle, but as yet it hadn’t led him anywhere.

  5

  He envied his sick brother, who went on living without having to go anywhere. From time to time Jan’s illness deprived his lungs of oxygen to such a degree that he seemed to be choking. He breathed in with great gasps then, his chest heaving like a pair of bellows, but it didn’t help: his air pipes were blocked. After a while he turned red, the veins in his neck and cheeks swelled, his eyes bulged in their sockets, his tongue lolled from his mouth and his arms swung helplessly: every part of his body that wasn’t affected by his disease seemed to want to escape it.

  Sometimes Jacob thought his brother was playing a superior game, because the blockage that stopped him breathing vanished every time miraculously. But even if the illness was real – which he did end up accepting – it still felt enviable, as it brought so many advantages with it, despite the temporary bouts of asphyxiation. Jan’s illness absolved him of all the duties that made life unbearable. He was not obliged to earn a living, nor did he have to fulfil any expectations. He could opt out of unwanted meetings and bring any irksome conversation to an end: all he had to do was to start coughing. And yet, should he need it, everyone rushed to help him.