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

by Joost Zwagerman

  Pension The Three Princes on Dam Street, a shabby dosshouse with junkies decoratively draped in adjoining doorways and giant grey rubbish bags, most likely tossed down from three floors above, nestled against the broken streetlights. Suspect B, flushed, stands at the desk to pay in advance. Both suspects take the stairs without exchanging a word, and upon reaching the fourth floor thread their way along the corridor. Suspect B breaks the – now nevertheless tense – silence with some inconsequential mumble about a dried-up ficus tree in an alcove. Suspects enter designated hotel room. Place of delict carries the number 406. Both suspects inspect hotel room. Suspect B smiles and closes door. Suspect A silently curses stubborn lump in throat. Suspect B takes initiative in commitment of crime. Warm hands under Suspect A’s white T-shirt. Muttered sweet nothings. Surprisingly uneasy sigh from Suspect A, who whispers wouldn’t it be better if … or, isn’t this crazy … Suspect B prevails over Suspect A by snuggling his head against her shoulder with a guileless but unequivocally pleading look in his eye; Suspect B is making himself small, helpless – in the trade we call this the ‘little-boy tactic’. Suspect A responds to the look by stroking his hair, nestling her hand in his neck. Suspect B tightens his grip on her. Suspects undress themselves and each other.

  It is 03:16 hours when the crime is committed on the bed that was changed that morning by an underpaid Dominican cleaner. A few details to note: the bedsprings sag, one of the two bedside lamps is broken, and the tap over the rusty sink drip-drip-dips – didn’t I tell you this was television? Most important detail: neither suspect makes a sound; the offence takes place in complete silence. This last has no – I repeat no – religious significance, it is merely the silence of pleasure alloyed with fear. After changing position three times, it is Suspect B who at 03:41 hours breaks the silence and with short, rather nasal bursts of breath announces his orgasm. As for Suspect A: the crime fails to bring about the culminating physical explosion in her. (Stop lying, arsehole, you’re neglecting to mention the shrill, high-pitched sob you heard just now; and didn’t you see her back arching, the way she started glowing all over, or the pinkish flush welling up in her neck and along her shoulder blades? Did this ever happen to her when she was still yours, all the blood in her body bottling up beneath the surface, turning her skin red?)

  I happen to know that many detectives train themselves to put on what they call ‘a steely expression’, and that they possess the same cold efficiency also encountered in politicians, TV presenters and certain local dignitaries. All in all I don’t think I acquitted myself very well in my brief stint as detective. May I please be taken off the case? May I please be excused? May I please be allowed to leave the Room 406 battle scene? Won’t some almighty supreme being, I don’t care which one, please return me to my own grotty little garden and make me be like everyone else on this earth – unaware, uninformed, oblivious? And could someone please tell me to whom and where to apply for membership in the Society for the Advancement of the End of the World? Those who would deprive me of the right to have such unfriendly thoughts or feelings can just go find themselves a self-made guardian angel of a more tolerant stripe. To those who decide to stick with me, I’ll confess that I was extremely gratified to know that Robert was feeling depressed and rather sad just now, consistent with post-coital law, and that, faithful to that same law, he fell asleep without putting up the least resistance … I mean, I don’t blame Winnie for leaving him sprawled on that pathetic three-quarter bed; nor for collecting her clothes and boots in the dark, splashing a handful of water on her forehead at the sink and sneaking out of there.

  Granted, as he lay there fast asleep Winnie did kiss him goodbye, she did kiss the corners of his mouth and – ever so gently – his left hand, which she then cautiously picked up and moved to his chest, so that our friend Robert now lies there like an operetta singer, eyes closed, clutching his heart. Now she’s even writing her phone number on a paper hankie she’s fished out of the back pocket of her jeans, and leaving it … on the pillow, or should she leave it on his clothes? Unable to decide, she stands there, paper and pen in hand, before slipping the tissue, folded and all, into one of his shoes, the right one. Love filters right down to the toes, did you know that?

  In the lift she reads what is scratched into the four walls: that Howard loves Jeanette and Chris loves Ineke; that Ajax is forever and God is a football team and even that ‘good old Killroy was here’. Behind the desk stand a young man and a no-longer-so-very-young woman Winnie hadn’t seen earlier that night. Neither deigns her a glance, since they assume Winnie is one of the hordes of semi-desirable lady guests who by reason of their profession come and go at dubious times of the night, ordered from an escort bureau by some randy hotel guest in a fit of boredom, preferably a married man from the sticks whose wife has temporarily kicked him out. But anyone paying the least bit of attention will notice, as I do, that Winnie is making her way to the exit with a skittishness that does not accord with what in the circles of those same married men is known as ‘a young lady of easy virtue’. Hastily, and with suppressed-panic stealth, she slips out of the hotel. It is long past midnight, the sun set so long ago that you’d almost forget it exists; less than a kilometre from my shack the oily, ink-black North Sea has for hours been the land’s fearsome bogeyman, and I, I am like the night whose presence not even Winnie can ward off. She finds herself gazing at the tacky, outdated neon signs over the storefronts, at the waiting-room-yellow street lighting in front of the hotel. And Winnie pretends to herself that there’s no rubbish piled against that streetlight over there and that the shivering drug addicts in the dark doorways aren’t junkies at all but sentinels disguised in rags; courtly, true-blue depressives with whom she might, perhaps, share her suddenly awoken angst.

  On the Dam the night-time traffic whooshes by; only a couple of taxis are required to revive Winnie’s car phobia. The aversion is so strong that all other feelings and emotions are clean forgotten. And as Winnie’s hatred of cars and drivers raises its ugly head even at this late hour, and she wishes a fatal traffic accident on every single cab driver in Amsterdam, an equally unpleasant dream-wish pops into my own head, one I’m rather ashamed of, granted, but which would be a convenient way to release me from my increasingly unbearable guardian-angelship.

  Because if Winnie does indeed harbour such intense and heart-stopping hatred for anything with an engine and four wheels, then surely there ought to be a stressed-out taxi driver somewhere, or some reckless undergrad with a brand-new driving licence in a shiny new Fiat, who could run her over, preferably with a fatal outcome? Couldn’t some double-seeing, blotto intellectual come chugging along in a Lada and mistake the Rokin’s zebra crossing for a poorly marked acceleration lane? Isn’t there some other miscreant out there with his foot on the gas who’ll notice Winnie just a fraction too late, so that she’s tossed in the air, hurled to the ground, crushed, maimed, mutilated? Is it really so despicable of me to conjure up a tragedy, to daydream about the ambulance, her parents’ despair, the brief paragraph in the paper, the obituaries, and finally the low-budget but lovingly produced docudrama about ‘Winnie the accident victim’, shown six months after her death on the hippest commercial TV channel? Is it, in short, so criminal of me here to confess that a fatal accident would come as a welcome relief? I mean, if the only thing that compares to my all-seeing gaze glued onto Winnie is a continual living death that’s driving me insane, can’t I be allowed, just this once, to indulge in the thought of Winnie in a deadly accident – my only possible salvation? Can’t Winnie and I be allowed to part, to be divorced from each other, I stone-dead in my stone-dead little garden, my nose buried in the crematorium-pink Poor Man’s Orchid, and she simply gone, wiped off the face of the earth?

  Allow me my brief rhapsodizing about her death. Allow me my morbid flirtation, allow me to wallow in my own shittiness, allow me my garden melodrama. If I’m making myself look clownish, pathetic, despicable, aren’t I also proving myself harmless? Because
in reality of course the cars stop in time – one by one, all in a tidy row. Wherever Winnie goes, she invites respect. Cars spontaneously bow before her. One vehicle reverently flashes its headlights at her, short–long–short, an SOS serving as an improvised headlamp aubade. Save Our Souls, Mistress Winnie … And as in her glorious oblivion she crosses the street longing for a cup of camomile tea, the newspaper and then a good sleep, even the morning brume appears to be moved. The way you can tell is that suddenly everything and everyone in the city is shrouded in mist, except Winnie. Winnie is striding purposely through the town, straight through the light and straight through my heart, and never before have I felt this certain that there is an innocence in all that she does, thinks, doesn’t do or doesn’t think, an innocence she will never lose. It must be the innocence of the world.

  Translated by Hester Velmans

  33

  Hafid Bouazza

  Ghost Town

  Spookstad

  ‘Sibawayh!’

  The silence shifted uneasily like a bashful woman in male company.

  I called again. It was always the same ritual, ever since the day he had exchanged his place on my cot for the stable down below. Perfidious Sibawayh. My impatience, his maddening sluggishness.

  ‘Sibawayh!’

  This time I tap-tap-tapped with my tremulous walking stick (silver-knobbed) hard on the floor.

  Silence.

  Some commotion, a cough, the a-metrical creak on the stairs and suddenly my gloom was filled with evil-smelling, swishing Sibawayh: he was undoubtedly adjusting his hurried clothing. Brusquely he helped me into my cloak.

  ‘What a stench … what a stench …’ I muttered, leaning on his low shoulder. He slipped ‘those-yes-yes-those’ babouches on to my feet and smoothed the hood of my cloak. ‘Now go and saddle the mule,’ I told him.

  There was a time when mule and harness were matters of grave concern to me. Like all men of rank I had a predilection for the female animal, preferably dappled, sleek, nib-eared, the mane and tail plaited, the croup drum-sized. As for the harness, the caparison had to be brocaded, or at least veined with the illusion of gold thread. Scrofulous beggars with watery eyes, hands ever cupped, would gape at the silk and gold of bridle and stirrup as at the splendours of after-worldly promise. Both legs had to rest over the left flank, swinging gently from the knee, the cloak arranged in even folds, the feet shod in velvet-covered slippers. It was quite an art to affect boredom while holding the reins between thumb and curved little finger, and not only to conduct one’s mount with delicacy but also (when accompanied by two servants) to keep the eyes fixed ahead, over the pitching gait of the slave holding the bridle, and never to allow idle thoughts of vanity to draw one’s gaze to the black sun-soaked parasol-bearer at one’s side.

  But now it was night and for various reasons I only visited my physician after sundown. Sibawayh returned to the stable. I stood in the room and waited, a quaky old man. Memories are unpredictable, except at moments of pitiful helplessness. A blind elder, a couple of centuries old, with shrunken untoothed jaws, is invariably both helpless and to be pitied.

  Sibawayh’s youthful sullenness had, as was entirely to be expected, worsened over the years. Yet life (and here the wheels of memory turned again) had so indulged this once hollow-backed, round-bellied, blinking, half-naked slip of a boy. From the far end of a cramped blundering darkness (Sibawayh swore as he stumbled down the stairs) a slanting sunbeam of memory flared in my mind’s eye: a prismatic burst of blinding sunshine and blazing colours, meandering multitudes, tumult, a grimace of sunny cruelty. The slave market: bare heads baking in the sun, vivid turbans and canopies, corrupt shadows. Beyond the slave market stood the great azure mosque, its back unaccountably turned to us. Slaves, both male and female, stood on display in a long gallery, running the gamut of pale and luminous to gleaming black; warm nipples, cool bellies. And there he stood, dazed, eyebrows knitted against the glare, a hint of orphan’s sorrow around the corners of the mouth, arms folded behind the back (weathered elbows), jutting shoulder blades. There stood Sibawayh, nakedly exposed, obedient to the hands of the deafening broker invoking the sun’s help in his exposition of the state of the four-foot-high young Sibawayh’s health: the imperfect teeth, the endearing little pouch, the promise (unkept) of muscular development in his tender arms.

  Mule-high, I gazed out over the multitude, my parasol-bearer at my side. I fell, forgive me, very nearly to the ground. Suddenly my precious dazzling white robes struck me as hopelessly cheap and unsuitable. By some miracle I managed to conclude the transaction without unseemly haste. Overcome with emotion, I yanked the reins and left the market. A servant followed behind with Sibawayh.

  And since that day, the day when (moneybag on my right hip lightened, loins weighted with ample promise of ecstasy) I first led him, Sibawayh, to my dwelling, where I bathed him (his sun-brined skin warm as sand) and then took him, naked except for a fine mousseline wrap, smelling of apple orchards, to my cool room – since that day he had been nothing but intractable, runty, all elbows. His body grew more slowly than the sores on my skin. Amid draperies patterned with hunting scenes, spent after my exertions for a shameful Venus, the stout goat of my loins lolled on my belly, soiled, reeking of Sibawayh’s puckered profundity. Propped up on his bleached elbows he lay silently weeping, the nape of his neck furrowed and a trough between his jutting shoulder blades. The cleft of his hillock was smeared with blood – and the goat resumed his grazing.

  My spacious and tastefully appointed suite, from the steamy kitchens to the awninged gate, put him in good cheer. Daubs of light and shade had free play with him when he ran about in the courtyard during the siesta (the only time he was permitted to leave my side). Only rarely did he slide an anxious, inquisitive glance into the gold-dusted stable. He never wore the pretty pampooties I had given him, and would weep when forced to put them on. No doubt he still felt the stony plains of his fatherland under the soles of his feet.

  In my blind state this period of my life is a playground of sunny reminiscences, a pool of light in my greedy memory. In my private darkness Sibawayh eluded me, like a mouse too swift to be seen. He existed only in so far as he breathed, moved about or spoke, which he did less and less in my presence and more and more (in that same order), alas, in the stable, that nether world where he made his belated rediscovery of youth.

  I heard him curse the mule. I heard him shuffle about. I heard a door open and then shut. I heard a heavy key drop on the flagstone with a clear high clink. I heard his step-step-step on the stairs.

  I held out my hand for him to guide me and leaned on him as we proceeded through the corridor and down the naked stairway past empty rooms. Along the gallery, across the roofless courtyard, past the defunct fountain into the vestibule and then down the steps to the main gate: a cautious progress through a languishing house, as smooth and perfect as a womb.

  At the gate I heard the jingle-bells on the old mule’s bridle. He guided my feet into the stirrups and hoisted me effortlessly on to the saddle, whereupon I shifted from one buttock to the other with a lamentable lack of grace, while keeping both legs over the left flank: a shrivelled fruitlet of life.

  The house of our renowned Jewish physician was a few streets eastward, beyond the great mosque. He had subjected me to various treatments, all to no avail; salves and ointments redolent of summery lavender – a physician’s cunning sense of poetry. And all the while my skin continued to break out in suppurating sores while Sibawayh felt smoother than ever to my infrequent touch. I knew what he was doing on the pallet in the stable; I knew how he lured ungodly maidens and beggars’ daughters to celebrate his long-dormant lust. Each thrust wounded me. Indifferent to my heartache, he kept thrusting to the hilt.

  My days of noble pursuits are over, my pride is awash in threadbare purple, the fool has vanquished the king, my writing quivers, I live in a portable darkness, my bowel movements give cause for concern. My prose resembles the spectres of my memory:
empty vessels, truncated epithets drifting soulless in a ghost town where even my language is dead.

  ‘To the physician,’ I said.

  He took hold of the reins and we set off at a slow pace. The mule shook its head and evaporated in a thousand tinkles. I turned back the edge of my hood. I laid my right hand open-palmed on my lap and crossed the heel of one foot over the instep of the other.

  An inexplicable repugnance stirred in me. Suddenly the road dipped and my stomach lurched. This must be the alley frequented in the daytime by beggars trailed by ragged broods, their souls bared in a bowl or cupped palm. Some of them – legless, sightless, or in some other way disorderly – spent the night huddled in doorways and nooks. Some, too, persisted sleepless in their labour.

  We would soon pass the door that had been painted a livid green to signal the resident’s pilgrim status, to summon the mumbled blessings of beggars. The pilgrim himself had recently died a dishonourable death, leaving his reprobate sons to care for their aged mother, who had previously lost her first husband, likewise a pilgrim, and who would survive her two sons as well.

  The night was a veritable poem of sounds, from Sibawayh’s footfall to my hoofs: a lullaby to the pounding in my old temples. To my right sounded the far-off clamour of a demon’s wake – travesties of the sense of hearing. There was a cave on the mountain of Tawbad, which backed the town, where a spring slumbered and monsters and prophets were born.

  ‘A pittance, lord!’

  The road had suddenly acquired a voice and hands, and began to tug at my cloak.

  ‘Alms,’ the hand begged, ‘a pittance for a man in need!’

  I am repelled by beggars, particularly beggars whose rags belie their rhetorical skills. Here was a true poet of the wayside, a master if you will of mendicant eloquence who, glutted with inspiration, awaited with hungrily bated breath the passing of audible riches. He was also desperate, and hung on to my precious slippers for dear life. The scuffle did not last long. Sibawayh came to my rescue and the ghost made off with my babouches. Both of us barefoot now, we proceeded on our way.