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

by Joost Zwagerman

  The streets narrowed and I sensed that we had entered the Jewish quarter. Ivied archways sent down fluttery tendrils like rabbis’ beards. A salvo of sensory stimuli: a cascade of flying vermin, the rank smell of the dungheap, a sudden braying, feathery whirrings, squawking, barking and howling. Hurried footsteps – an interrupted dalliance?

  We were nearing the end of the street. As I trailed my fingers along the walls, doors sank warily into the secure embrace of their ancient arms, which soon reopened to form a modest square. Our shadows flitted to the other side.

  We entered a gently sloping street. Other cobbles, other sounds. A final turning and we found ourselves in the main square, where the slave market was held by day in the cheer of the noontide sun. Beyond rose the mosque, from which a side alley to the north-east led to the hell of tanneries and abattoirs. Running off the square in a north-westerly direction was a back street where those in the know could locate a small brothel, low-entranced and lavishly creepered. A rain butt by the door stood on guard, lidless and wrinkly.

  Each time I touched the water in the butt before going in it would break out in a smile, believing my fingertips augured a shower. The old men in the mosque went through the same motions, with a different cistern.

  This was the brothel to which I had paid many a hooded visit in the course of a nonchalant, manicured stroll – always with young Sibawayh in attendance. At the other end of the courtyard, guarding the much-frequented latrine, stood another rain butt, and yet another in the corner. They seemed to have taken the place of watchdogs. Even the host (corpulent, immaculate, a rosary in his fastidious hands) had the size and girth of a rain butt.

  In my memory, images of this brothel glide by in a wheeling masquerade: the swish of clothing, gleaming buttocks, well-turned calves. My moist nose, my dry throat. A smeared crack. My rhythmic spasms in the swaying dark, the room draped with tapestries depicting a young doe eyeing the hunter across her shoulder, the hunter standing scissor-legged, with a relaxed proprietary air while aiming his spear, and then Sibawayh’s face crumpling up in a grimace of searing pain.

  Why did I always think it was raining when I was secluded in those dimly lit rooms? I even fancied I could hear the patter of raindrops – only to step outside under gold and azure.

  One day I took Sibawayh to a garden at some distance from the town. On a little stream in the sun-glanced shade he watched a duck with a downy flotilla in her wake, and she had splashed and plopped so madly that he had been afraid the poor thing was drowning. I can still see his eyes, in which the tears and the dragonflies and the sun had cut diamonds.

  Further off, outside the garden, in the hellish glare, a shepherd and his flock slept away the bleached, baking noon.

  Was midnight upon us already? We went past the mosque and after a while we approached the physician’s tall house. Behind it loomed the awesome mountain of Tawbad. It was on that mountain that a leprous fool, a self-professed prophet, had sought refuge from the world – no prophet without a mountain. The hostile populace had pelted him with stones, which had moved him to put a curse on the town before he fled, broken and bleeding profusely. His sole companion was a donkey. He had not returned since – a farcical ascension to heaven.

  We halted in front of the physician’s door. My repugnance was undiminished. A sense of tedium came over me. There was nothing left to be distracted by – my memory had come to rest, it was spent. What did it matter? What of my affliction and what of Sibawayh – above all Sibawayh? What was there to stop me from grinding everything underfoot and having done with it? When all is said and done the end is only a question of dignity.

  And at that moment, out of nowhere, a stick, glowing with malignant ardour, struck my brittle spine, and while the pain still throbbed in my head there came a second blow, this time to my shoulder. I had hardly the time to savour the ecstatic stiffening that pain can induce, for the blows came hard and fast, methodically aimed now at my left side and then my right. It all happened so quickly, there was no distinguishing between the pain in each limb. After a blow to my neck, the expert beating proceeded crown-wards. Eventually I surrendered to the unrelenting thwack-thwacking. For a split second of weightlessness (tumbling backwards off my saddle) the safety of the ground seemed dizzyingly far away. A leaden ball turned in my gut as I cowered on the ground trying to call out for Sibawayh, but my stiff tongue could not dislodge the words from the gush of vomit.

  Translated by Ina Rilke

  34

  Arnon Grunberg

  Someone Else

  Iemand anders

  He’s considered a good catch, he’s got a job with status, he’s a psychiatrist, still fairly young (38), childless, never been married, he’s not bald; he has, he realizes as he stands at the mirror shaving in the morning, almost no physical defects, and he takes good care of himself. A nourishing cream here, a massage there. Aron Barshay has less reason for dissatisfaction than a lot of people.

  Aron Barshay doesn’t look like your typical psychiatrist. He doesn’t wear glasses and he doesn’t have a beard. At bars and restaurants, they often ask him whether he’s a yoga teacher, or else maybe a fitness trainer. He has resigned himself to looking like that, not like a psychiatrist, more like a yoga teacher.

  On rare occasions he speaks at conferences, but not as often as he used to. He once took part in a research project dealing with the connection between adolescent suicide and antidepressants. Barshay’s contribution was modest, but he knows that. He doesn’t try to make more out of that contribution than it really was, not to himself, not to others. More than anything else he is realistic, about his own life and those of his patients and colleagues. Vanity is a pastime he has abandoned.

  He’s an associate at a hospital where he is well-respected. It has been years since he felt the urge to try to become the director, to move up a notch, as they say.

  Barshay doesn’t allow himself to be driven by ambition, at least not any more. He takes time to play tennis, to go out, sometimes he flies to Paris or London for a three-day weekend. Or he visits his sister in Los Angeles; Barshay’s parents are no longer alive. Occasionally he’ll have a girlfriend, occasionally a friend will hint at the advantages of a stable relationship (‘when you get to a certain age, it’s embarrassing to be a bachelor any more’), occasionally Barshay considers such a serious, stable relationship, only to reject the idea. Occasionally Barshay goes out dancing and uses recreational drugs. The world is foundering in chaos, but Barshay is good at keeping chaos at bay.

  On the evening of Saturday, 6 November, Barshay and a friend go out to dinner at a Spanish restaurant in the Village. They have an eight-thirty reservation. Barshay puts on a red turtleneck, even though it’s actually too warm for a turtleneck, and a pair of black suit trousers. Even his nonchalance has been thought through. Barshay thinks about everything, without letting it cripple him. He thinks about things and draws a conclusion. Sometimes he modifies certain conclusions he has drawn in the past. It’s not like him to be melancholy about missed opportunities. Not that Barshay has never missed an opportunity, but he refuses to glamorize those opportunities. Some opportunities have to be missed. People, too, live according to the laws of statistics. There is no greater whole that masks the meaning of all the details. There are no big meanings, only little meanings. What’s more, the individual’s failure can be a blessing for the group. In melancholy, in other words, Barshay catches a whiff of the lethargy he detests.

  His friend teaches modern American history at an elite university, and publishes regularly in prominent magazines.

  They sit across from each other. They have both ordered paella. They haven’t seen each other for more than four months.

  Barshay tells him that he’s thinking about adopting a Chinese child. You can do that these days, even if you’re single. He’s already attended three information evenings at the adoption agency. Barshay was the only unmarried person there. After the first meeting, a couple took him aside. ‘We could introduce
you to someone,’ they whispered.

  They sounded concerned, worried almost. Barshay told them that wasn’t necessary, that he was perfectly capable of introducing himself on his own.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says the friend, who is divorced and has a five-year-old son. ‘An adopted child, that almost always generates problems, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Almost always,’ Barshay concurs. ‘But what are the alternatives? An orphanage in the Chinese countryside, do you have any idea what that’s like? And they’re almost all girls at those orphanages, because girls aren’t wanted.’

  ‘Why so sudden, then? Are you feeling lonely? You could buy a dog, couldn’t you?’

  ‘I could,’ Barshay says. ‘But there are so many children no one wants, and I have a big apartment. Someone else will just have to take care of the dogs no one wants. And it’s not all that sudden. I’ve been toying with the idea for years. I’ve always felt an urge to care for the unwanted. I suspect that’s why I wanted to become a psychiatrist in the first place. Back when I still thought that psychiatrists cared for the unwanted.’

  The friend sighs. His divorce cost him a bundle. Getting married was expensive, but a divorce even more so. He had to start all over again. Financially speaking, that is. Sometimes he wonders aloud whether the investment was really worth the trouble. How much is one’s freedom actually worth? In fact, the freedom is a disappointment too, now that he can enjoy it so boundlessly. Unlike Barshay, the friend does not have an athletic build. No one ever mistakes him for a yoga teacher. They see him for what he is: a university professor.

  The friend stretches, he’s finished eating. He looks at Barshay, they’ve know each other for twenty years already. Barshay was a witness at his wedding.

  Aron Barshay goes on eating calmly, but with relish. When his plate is empty, he says: ‘They’ve been to my house already, the adoption agency, to see whether I can be trusted. So far, apparently, I can be trusted.’

  They both laugh. The friend laughs perhaps a bit too loudly, as though he has to convince himself that this is funny, even though he doesn’t think so. Barshay with a Chinese baby.

  After they’ve called for the check, and split it, Barshay proposes that they go somewhere else, the way they used to. His friend hesitates but, when he sees that it has started drizzling outside, he decides quickly. ‘There’s an article I still have to work on,’ he says. ‘Some other time.’

  They say goodbye out on the street.

  ‘Let me know how it goes with the adoption,’ the historian says with something like a laugh, although not a mocking one. His misgivings seem to have vanished. Perhaps he sees adopting a Chinese baby as something like a divorce, troublesome and costly but not without certain advantages. ‘Maybe you should find a wife first, and then go for the adoption. That’s the way it’s usually done, Aron. Why should you be any different? Why do you have to act like you know better?’ He turns and leaves quickly, he doesn’t wait for an answer. The historian is not dressed for walking in the rain.

  Later that friend will think back on this evening, the way people think about evenings when they’ve seen and heard something without knowing exactly what. And the more they think about it, the more they wonder ‘what did I see, what did I hear, for God’s sake?’, the less chance they have of ever finding out.

  Aron Barshay is wearing a raincoat with a hood. He puts up the hood and starts walking. He wants to go out dancing, but he doesn’t know where. It’s Saturday night. Standing in line for half an hour first, he doesn’t feel like that. At a deli he buys a pack of Marlboro Lights. Barshay tells the man behind the counter: ‘And a box of matches, please.’ He’s an occasional smoker, he doesn’t carry a lighter.

  Under the awning of a closed restaurant, he smokes a cigarette. He feels satisfied, it was good to see his friend again, the food was nice, the conversation lively, lively enough in any case for a Saturday evening in November.

  Barshay lacks for nothing.

  Maybe he should go home, read the newspapers, lie in bed with a book, watch a DVD. He wonders which film he should rent, but then he remembers the Soho Grand. It’s been a long time since he was there, an evening two summers ago. A fine evening.

  On Saturday night there is always something going on there, and it’s not far.

  He tosses away the cigarette and starts walking. Calmly at first, then faster and faster. Excitedly.

  Around midnight, Barshay arrives at the Soho Grand. The lounge is packed, just like he’d expected. There’s nowhere to sit, but he doesn’t mind standing. He manoeuvres his way to the bar, orders a glass of wine, then withdraws to a corner. Across the room he thinks he recognizes a former patient, but when he takes a better look he sees that it is a former colleague.

  Barshay has been reading a book about angels. He can’t seem to finish it; on reflection, he doesn’t have much of a feeling for angels. He looks at his former colleague and he is reminded of that book. Apparently there’s something about that former colleague that reminds him of an angel. The glassy gaze, perhaps, the pale skin, the flaxen hair. Barshay knows that the former colleague has seen him too, but they both pretend they haven’t.

  After a second glass of wine, Barshay feels the urge to smoke. He goes down the stairs and outside, beneath the canopy, he pulls the cigarettes from the pocket of his raincoat. The hotel doorman runs to a taxi with his umbrella, to keep some guests from getting wet. Life is wonderful.

  Barshay can’t find his matches, so he turns to a girl who is standing beside him, smoking. She pulls out her lighter without a word and hands it to him. The lighter goes out three times in a row. Barshay has to hold open his raincoat to win the fight with the wind.

  He inhales, while she puts the lighter away. He looks at her and asks: ‘Do you feel like dancing?’ She takes the cigarette out of her mouth, but says nothing. She looks at the hotel, as though checking to make sure where she is.

  ‘Or are you here with someone?’ Barshay enquires. This is Aron Barshay at his best: energetic, prepared to go far to make the best of things, unconventional but never threatening, the driver of a glorious coach who makes his horses gallop as though it counts, as though he has someone important in his coach, a VIP.

  She looks back at the hotel one more time.

  ‘Not really,’ she says.

  ‘Then let’s go somewhere and dance.’ Barshay smiles. A smile you can trust. In the end, that’s what it’s all about: generating trust, in both patients and women.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘let’s.’

  They run through the rain to a taxi, and Barshay puts his left shoe down in a puddle. The water splashes up high.

  Only when they are in the cab does it occur to Barshay that they haven’t decided where to go yet. He leaves it up to her. She’s bound to have a better idea about that. It’s been a long time since he went dancing.

  ‘Let’s go to the Meatpacking District,’ she says, ‘we’ll find something there.’

  Barshay thinks that’s a good choice. The taxi pulls away from the kerb.

  ‘Do you want to know my name?’ he asks.

  ‘What you mean is that you want to know my name.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Barshay says. ‘That’s what I mean.’

  She tells him her first name: Madison. He had a patient once called Madison, a long time ago, one of his first patients.

  Barshay tells her his first name. Last names are for later, maybe for never.

  The left leg of Barshay’s trousers is soaking wet.

  ‘Why aren’t you wearing a coat?’ he asks.

  ‘This is my coat.’

  Barshay looks at the piece of cloth, that seems to him like something in between the jacket of a tracksuit and a cut-off piece of bathrobe.

  The nightclub they go to is one Barshay’s never been to before. The club is new, maybe hip as well. Barshay is sceptical about hipness, he is sceptical about all the things people tell themselves.

  They dance for half an hour. Madison dances well, wit
h abandon, rhythmically. She dances differently from the way she talks. More youthfully. Bolder. Effortlessly.

  Then they go to the bar for a drink. They both slip through the crowd like professionals, like people used to noise, used to sweat, used to physical contact.

  ‘So tell me about yourself,’ Madison says once they’ve reached the bar and ordered their drinks.

  He wipes the sweat from his forehead. What is there to tell about himself? What does he want to say about himself? That he looks like a yoga teacher, but that appearances are deceiving?

  ‘I’m in the process of adopting a Chinese baby.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A little girl. From China.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I like children, and I have enough time. And money. It seemed to me like the right thing to do.’

  It sounds a little formal; he wishes he could talk about the adoption a little more ironically.

  Madison grins. He hadn’t meant it that way, but he grins along with her.

  ‘I’m adopted too,’ she says. ‘I don’t usually tell people that, but I can tell you, because I’ll never see you again.’

  Now it’s Barshay who starts grinning.

  He says nothing for a few seconds, then asks: ‘Have you ever met your real parents?’

  ‘My biological parents? No, never.’

  ‘Do you know anything about them?’

  ‘My mother was young when she had me. Fifteen. Barely fifteen. She kept it to herself for eight months.’

  ‘That’s young,’ Barshay says. ‘And your biological father?’

  ‘He was older.’

  The music is so loud they have to shout.