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

by Joost Zwagerman

  10

  Jacob Roggeveen returned to Middelburg empty-handed. It was his umpteenth return, but it was also no new beginning. True, he remained the same person he was – he had always had the impression of being at the start of something new – but his surroundings changed constantly so that he was like someone who always joined in a conversation too late: he understood the words exchanged, but could not figure out what was being discussed.

  Jan was overjoyed to see him again, and Jacob himself seemed contented. They talked about the Southern Continent, as this was their way of talking about their father. Jan remained convinced that his brother was going to discover it. How could Jacob explain that he was hoping for something quite different, something that didn’t exist, but which as soon as it did materialize would reveal everything in a different light?

  He lived for a year on money he had saved in the Indies, after which he had to return to work. He set himself up as a notary. How easy it all was: you called yourself a notary and that was what you were. In this way his life continued without effort. If things became too difficult he closed his eyes, and peace descended on him. The fortune seeker stretched out his empty hands. Closing his eyes, that was his favourite gesture.

  But his sense of guilt towards his father didn’t leave him. Like the fortune seeker, he might think that all this was his. But this thought was constantly contradicted by another, that his father hadn’t enjoyed it. Jacob cursed his father who had taken up his abode in him like a tapeworm devouring everything insatiably, so that nothing was left over for him.

  Nothing had changed; he saw everything in the same light, or else it was a grey light, which robbed everything of outline and colour. It was so long since he had cherished any thought of escaping that the whole notion of it seemed to belong to another life. One life was behind him and the other lay ahead and in no way did they resemble each other. He was not worried, however, unlike his brother who was very concerned and behaved as though he was his father’s representative on earth, admonishing Jacob time and again. Jacob in turn was happy to be rid of any responsibility and obediently did what his brother told him. He had to bring his father’s life to completion. Without him realizing it, it was the perfect escape: he was living someone else’s life. His own life was unlived; it was as empty as if it had never existed.

  Did that make him happy?

  No, he wasn’t happy.

  He was indifferent. Like a stone that is worn down by the life that passes it by.

  In the early evening after a day at the office, spent as usual in drawing up and dissolving contracts, he met God. Jacob hadn’t prayed to Him; yet suddenly there He was. He shook his head. He didn’t say anything. All he did was shake His head.

  Then everything became plain. What he was looking for didn’t exist. All his evasions were due to fear – fear of belonging and being something, which would have made it impossible for him to be everything else. He had behaved like the fortune seeker who had spread his arms out wide, not to take, but to show what he was able to take. But no matter how far he pointed, like the fortune seeker, he was no longer able to point to his father.

  When the West India Company at last approved of his – or rather his father’s – plans for the discovery of the Southern Continent, it no longer meant anything to him. He could picture his father after receiving this news standing on the waterfront, his gaze penetrating the distance, as though he could already see the Southern Continent waiting for him. For his father this would have been his great day; for him it meant nothing.

  He stood there on the waterfront and gazed into the distance. Very far off, across seas and continents, through the rain and mist, he could see a little dot: it was his own back.

  Urged on by his invalid brother, he equipped a small fleet. He named the flagship after his father. And on 1 August 1721 he set sail.

  He could just as well not have gone.

  Translated by Donald Gardner

  30

  Marcel Möring

  East Bergholt

  She asks how far it is now to East Bergholt. When he says they’ll be there by nightfall at the earliest, her face darkens.

  He looks straight ahead, at the non-existent traffic, on this road leading to the coast like a tired river that in the endless rain – it’s the third day of rain – seems wet enough to sail on.

  ‘Nightfall?’

  ‘Nightfall.’

  She wraps her hands more tightly around the wheel.

  Endless rain.

  No, no, she’d said, for her it wasn’t about the, let’s say, literary aspects of courtliness, the whole courtly system (she pronounced the word with a slight German accent, ‘Sustum’), but about any theological, religious implications that courtliness may conceivably have had for people’s lives.

  May conceivably have had.

  My God, he’d answered (said – he didn’t speak to her, to anyone, he fixed his eyes on a vague spot on the brick wall in the foyer outside the lecture theatres), my God, he said, reception theory has made it all the way to theology.

  She blushed. That surprised him. He nodded slightly, as if trying to peer over his glasses (which he wasn’t), and took stock of her, this tall, long-legged, long-curly-haired theology student. Under his scrutiny she shifted her weight from her left leg to her right. The bluish strip-light shone in her glasses.

  Was he taking her seriously?

  Very seriously, he said. Very seriously.

  He’s as little understanding of maps as he has of church fathers; at six in the afternoon they drive into East Bergholt. Without saying a word, without a hint of triumph or disdain, she turns right, off the main road, into a cluster of pastel-coloured bungalows. In a long gentle bend, rain-flattened grain to the left, the inimitable English ugliness of the bungalows to the right, the village unfolds. He’s just about to ask where on earth they’re supposed to sleep when they plunge into a country lane.

  ‘That was the village,’ he says. He stretches and looks back.

  ‘There’s a hotel,’ she says.

  The car swings sharply to the right, onto a car park surfaced with gravel. He’s flung against the door.

  ‘Boom,’ he says, as the bumper gently nudges an oak.

  I know nothing at all about theology, he’d told her, and I’m not planning to learn anything either. My own field, he said, is hazy enough without any holy triumvirate and immaculate conception.

  Trinity, she said. Holy Trinity.

  Even if it was a duet, he said, I flatly refuse.

  But she’d talked, as they strode along corridor after corridor, right to the top of the building, where his room was, directly under the restored seventeenth-century roof, which in summer let in too much heat and in winter too much cold. She sat across from him, on the far side of the desk with its fishbone-patterned veneer, and argued endlessly, her eyes gleaming behind her glasses, her cheeks red.

  Young lady, he’d said. He’d already forgotten her name. Young lady, courtliness is something very different from what you suggest, it’s not some exalted, serene form of worship, it’s deferred sex.

  This time he didn’t look at her as she blushed. He unscrewed his fountain pen, took a piece of paper and asked for her name, address, phone number, previous education – everything he could get out of her, in other words. When he’d filled two pages with illegibly small handwriting, he made her blush for the third time.

  Greta, he said (Margaretha Theodora Maria van Groningen, he’d written on the first page), two things, before you can count on my support. The first, he lectured, was that the period she was talking about was typified by married priests, with or without a whole host of children, not serene piety. The second was that love takes many guises. And when I say love, he said, I’m talking about sexual love.

  As she coloured, he suggested a number of titles.

  Hadewijch wants to be fucked by God, he thought as she was walking away.

  Later he said in a teacherly voice that courtliness was a matt
er of structure, only rarely of morality.

  After four days of privation, the Hare and Hounds is an oasis of peace and refinement, especially culinary refinement. In the bay window of the mediaeval taproom they’re served splendid steaks on matt-brown plates. Beside the meat are a handful of bright green peas, fresh and plump, flanked by a creamy-white cabbage leaf. He cuts off a piece of steak with a sharp knife for the first time in ages. A crisp crust encloses beautiful pink flesh. He watches as she, careless, absent, slices the cabbage leaf in two and stabs it with her fork.

  Margaretha Theodora Maria van Groningen, he’d read at home. Twenty-eight years old, born in Harlingen, living in Amsterdam. Middle school, high school, university entrance, university (broken off), convent, university. A year and a half, that convent. I wasn’t ready for it, she’d told him. When will you be? he thinks. Her interest concerns the courtly aspects of mediaeval theology. Hadewijch? he asked. She shuddered. Not Hadewijch. That’s not theology, that’s mysticism. Her words. What is it, he’d asked, that makes you want to be a nun? She shook her head. Wanted, she said. Want, he said. Again that shake of the head. Want, he thought, leafing through his notes. Want. Hadewijch wants to fuck God.

  He’s got a certain reputation. One that has less to do with his work than with how he works. He’ll be remembered fifty years from now, if he’s remembered at all, as a man who behaved in this or that way, not as a man who taught this or that subject. As he realizes. He realizes he doesn’t represent academia but rather the manner in which certain academic knowledge is passed on. Why, he thought, did she come to him with her peculiar ambition? Was she, unconsciously, seeking form?

  They sleep in rooms of wood in a little house behind the inn: The Cottage. He couldn’t have come up with any other name for it. The building exudes the steady calm he so admires in the English. It’s the kind of environment where you immediately feel at home and where you know: whatever happens, it won’t happen here.

  When their hostess leaves them after exhaustive explanations and instructions (breakfast at nine thirty, fried eggs with bacon and tea for madam, French rolls with cheese and coffee for sir), they stand in the large room that will be hers. He goes to sit on the edge of the huge double bed and sinks almost up to his hips in the mattress. While she lays her suitcase on a small table and slowly begins to unpack, very orderly, very neat, he leans against the ornately carved foot of the bed and takes stock of the room.

  A polished wooden floor.

  Walls lined with wood panelling.

  Ancient beams in the ceiling.

  Two linen cupboards of gleaming cherry wood.

  At the window overlooking the inn, a small writing desk covered with a cloth embroidered with roses; beside it a straight wooden chair with floral upholstery. On the desk a French mantel clock of cracked walnut showing nine o’clock and a romantic lamp on a spherical ceramic foot.

  ‘What,’ he says, in the languid tone that so appeals to him in Waugh, ‘do you say to a short walk through the village?’

  She turns round, one of her navy-blue pleated skirts over one arm, lamplight in her flaring hair. She nods.

  She says so much when talking about Aquinas and Augustine and Ruusbroec yet so little during their extracurricular conversations.

  Once he awoke with a tepid, wet sensation on the skin of his abdomen. Thirty-five years old, he thought as he took a shower in the bathroom, and my first wet dream. Later, when he wiped the condensation from the mirror and saw the familiar splashed face that always stared back, he realized with shock what (or rather who) had given rise to the dream.

  He had walked with her through the long corridors of the old faculty building, to the narrow stairs that spiralled upwards in one corner of the complex. She went ahead and he watched her legs rising and falling, rising and falling. He followed the haughty curve upwards, long, long, long, all the way to the miraculous, incomparable roundness of her buttocks. He was directly behind her. His hand under her skirt, along the inside of one of those delicate legs, upwards. He felt the soft dampness of her vagina, while his thumb slid up along her thigh, into the cleft of her arse, and his forefinger stroked her clitoris. At the very top of the stairs she bent down, propped on her hands against the floor. He flung her long skirt up, a blue frame to her delightful backside, opened his trousers and slid into her. He fucked her, his hands resting on her hips. Oh God, she’d said.

  God wants to fuck Hadewijch.

  Young lady, he’d said (he called her that from time to time to get her attention), what do you do in the summer months?

  The story of her life. Bursary, therefore not much money, therefore summer jobs. A succession of them. The bulb fields, potato farming in Groningen, tour guide, clothing retail.

  And this summer?

  A shrug.

  He presented his proposal. His plan to mount a search for the source text of the Utrecht Baptismal Vow, a text originally written in Old English, based on a Latin sacramentary. The original, he’d said, eyes on the wooden ceiling, head back, hands on his crown, is in all probability Northumbrian. There is assumed to have been a Yorkshire version.

  So?

  Whether she, for a fee, would like to assist him.

  He twisted her objections (she’s studying theology, knows nothing of literature and …) into a series of suitable qualifications. Perfect for a theology student, with a knowledge of church archives and theological textual criticism, and wouldn’t she break the ice brilliantly and didn’t she have a driver’s licence?

  Yes.

  Well?

  When did he want to go?

  The fascination, for him as opposed to his colleagues, is not the significance an old text may have for the archaeology of language. To him it’s all about the poetry, the fragmentary nature of found documents, the incomplete, often simple language. He savours a good description: folio seventeen recto tattered, scorch marks and water damage, lines four through fifteen partly illegible, preamble in red ink. Give him a textual reconstruction with lots of square and round brackets and alternative readings and he’ll savour it like a Haut-Brion 1974.

  The Baptismal Vow. What he so enjoys in the short text is the sing-song responsory.

  Forsachistu diobolae end allum diobolgelde end allum dioboles uuerkum …

  Ec forsacho diobolae end ec forsacho allum diobolgeldae …

  Golbistu in halogan gast

  Ec gelobo in halogan gast.

  Halogan gast, holy ghost, which he wants to read as holy guest.

  He’s looked out of the window and seen the inn. It gleamed like a tombstone in the rain. Now the rain has stopped. They lock the door to the cottage and walk down the garden path, past the inn, onto the street. Street? Road. One car wide, man-high hedges on either side. They walk in single file, he in front, she behind, towards the village.

  It’s a beautiful road, more so than it seemed on arrival. It twists around an enormous beech that leaks rainwater into their hair. After the bend the roadway is spanned by power cables. The air is so damp there are sparks between the wires.

  Nothing is said.

  What is his life? An endless trudge along beaten paths. Mindlessly rumbling onward to the rhythm of a train to the horizon. No friends, no wife, no direction. Mahler, Sweelinck, Orlando Gibbons, James Brown, The Cure, Guns N’ Roses, Beckett, Gogol, Salinger, Auden, Pushkin, burgundy, vodka, a few fragments of faith, here and there a little thermodynamics, liberal left, Malevich, Kiefer, Heda, Vermeer, the Flemish primitives, Richter. The tablets of stone, that’s what he is, but after Moses has smashed them. A pile of rubble, a disorderly grab bag of information. His life, he, is like the texts he researches: folio seventeen recto tattered, scorch marks and water damage, lines four through fifteen partly illegible, preamble in red ink.

  He’s the one to blame for the fact they’re in Essex, instead of Northumberland. Blame in this case in the literal sense. He deliberately booked the boat to Harwich. But just as she discovered only on looking at the map what a long drive i
t was to York, he discovered only in East Bergholt that the purpose of his ruse (to see the place where Constable painted) concealed a deeper desire.

  Now they’re standing in front of Constable’s house, a grand country seat with a garden open to visitors in daytime. He looks at moonlit patches of the garden and listens to the bickering in his head.

  ‘Well?’ she says.

  ‘Constable lived here. In the garden he painted the river.’ His point: the central importance of the River Stour in the life of the early Impressionist Constable.

  He hears himself speak. He wonders how tiresome a man can be before he makes himself sick.

  The strange thing, he’d thought, is that she doesn’t give off anything that seems directly erotic. On the contrary, she looks quite respectable: blue woollen sweaters with the white collars of blouses, long pleated skirts, penny loafers and tights. All the same, the clouds of long hair, the dark eyes, the hint, under all those modest clothes, of a magnificent body. Despite never having seen more than her wrists and throat, he knows for certain that all that wool covers a body that steals out of bed at night like a predator.

  One time, in his office, he crouched beside her, to point something out. As he inhaled the fragrance that rose from her clothes and sensed the warmth radiating from her, he felt his balls grow and his sex sluggishly stiffen. He talked and talked and the craving for her body boiled in his breast. When she looked at him for a moment and he saw her face as if under magnification, he felt a drop trickle out of his penis.

  She doesn’t speak, not at all. He, not exactly a waterfall himself, doesn’t know what to say, can no longer say anything. In this silence every word takes on a thousand meanings.

  He walks ahead of her, half stumbling as those eyes jab into his back. Twice he contemplates turning round, grabbing her shoulders and saying: I love you, I want to push you up against that tree, right here, and I want to feel the breasts under that woollen sweater and I want to pull up your skirt and fuck you until you bite my neck and say you’ll stay with me, for ever, here, my wife, my love, my heart, my yearning heart, quenched and fed.