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

by Joost Zwagerman

  She laid her hands on the base of his spine and gently pressed.

  He spoke quickly. ‘My father was born in Navajo Nation but he didn’t grow up there. A government programme paid for him to go to a boarding school where the aim was to turn the Navajo into good citizens. At seventeen he joined the army.’ He looked off to one side, at his clothes hanging over a chair. ‘My father wanted to fly, to look out across the world and see what people were making of it.’

  The evening sky was grey with pink stripes and a pale crescent moon. He turned round and took her by the shoulders. He pushed her firmly onto her back and lay on top of her. His touch was no longer exploratory. He forced himself into her, screwed her for a long time, five minutes, ten minutes. She grew dizzy, felt the mattress move, grabbed the side of the bed. He went on like that until she couldn’t think about anything any more. Hold on to his upper arms, that was all.

  Afterwards he lay motionless beside her, like an exhausted animal. Outside it was dark. She pushed him away and wrapped the sheet around her, covering the loose skin of her belly that the children had left.

  He stood up and opened the balcony doors so that the cool of the evening could come in. His warm, hard body. She wanted to pull him back into the bed, to feel him against her, but she did nothing. With strangers you had no right to intimacy.

  He went into the bathroom.

  She rummaged in her bag for her phone and turned it on. No messages, not even from Hugo. Had he believed her excuses? Hugo wasn’t easily worried. His attitude was that you shouldn’t have to check on each other. Seeing it was almost twelve, she picked up her clothes from the carpet next to the bed. She buttoned her blouse, could smell her own sweat, the scent of arousal.

  ‘You’re leaving.’ He stood leaning against the doorframe.

  ‘Justin,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry … Yes, I have to go. And you?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘Stay. I’ve paid for the whole night. Tomorrow’s your last day here.’

  On the website she’d read that the Western Fair would be moving to Ermelo the next week. As an extra attraction a rodeo would be added to the programme there.

  Without speaking he got dressed and held the door open for her.

  As she walked down the stairs after him, she pictured the children, lying in their little beds, Nora on her back, stretched out, the blanket thrown off; Heintje with Mag the Rag.

  On the pavement outside they stood facing each other. ‘You look perfect,’ he said, as she pushed her tangled hair back behind her ears. The first time, the day before yesterday, the way he’d straightened her collar, the scrap of newspaper with his number, a note that was now ash, particles of soot in the sky over the city. Tomorrow she had to invigilate three exams. Orals.

  Fleeting kisses. Two. He turned and walked off in the direction of the river. Surely he wasn’t going to sleep on a bench at the quayside? He didn’t look back, crossed the road, a ghostly figure between the tall trees.

  She was standing directly under the lamps that lit the pavement in front of the hotel. She hesitated, unable to think clearly, then took a few steps to one side so she was out of the light. She had to get moving.

  Rain poured down the windows. To her right the bed was empty. Shit, the children, they needed porridge, clothes on, to the crèche. Almost seven thirty, the alarm clock said. Hugo had let her sleep in.

  She leaped out of bed and went to the kitchen. He was sitting at the kitchen table in a bathrobe reading the paper, the children playing at his feet. They were still in pyjamas. It didn’t look as if they’d eaten anything yet.

  ‘Mummy!’ Nora called out enthusiastically. She rubbed her knee for a moment and crawled away under her chair. Heintje briefly glanced up, seeming to look right through her. Then he carried on playing. He made his plastic elephant jump onto the pedal of the bin so that the lid rattled.

  Hugo looked up from his paper. ‘Hi, lazybones.’

  She went to sit at the kitchen table, needing to find the energy from somewhere to open the kitchen cupboards, warm the milk, get the whole show going.

  ‘How was the performance?’

  ‘Quite beautiful.’

  ‘Filthy weather, eh?’ Hugo nodded at the window. The sky was a flat grey expanse and the rain streamed down the glass as if it would never stop. ‘Quite a contrast to last night. We had a sunset here, really spectacular.’ Hugo picked up his camera from the table and waved it in the air. ‘I took some incredible photos.’

  ‘I know, I saw it too,’ she said before he could thrust the camera under her nose.

  ‘You were in the theatre, weren’t you?’

  ‘It was a site-specific performance.’ She picked up the newspaper and attentively studied a special offer for new subscribers.

  Hugo was no longer listening. He was looking at the photos of twilight he’d taken from the balcony. Pinkish-red kitsch skies.

  ‘That nature has such colours in it,’ he said.

  ‘You sometimes see them on postcards from seaside resorts,’ she said.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Hey, something else,’ he said then. ‘Rob Beers has invited me for a project in Croatia. We’re going to train prison officers there, show them what we do here, how to handle inmates. It’s in an old monastery. When you get there you wonder where on earth you’ve landed up, Rob says, but it’s a really beautiful place, with all the modern facilities, even a wellness centre. It starts on 28 June and lasts for two weeks.’ He gave her a questioning look.

  ‘Seems to me you should do it,’ she said.

  ‘Great, fantastic,’ he stammered in surprise. ‘I’ll have to see straight away today whether I can still apply.’ He’d probably been expecting complaints, a cynical remark, after which he’d go anyhow. ‘Perhaps your mother can come.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps.’ She stood up to take a shower.

  As she passed he grabbed her shoulders and kissed her on her mouth. ‘My sweet,’ he said.

  She walked on to the bathroom. There she turned on the shower good and hot. She stretched, rinsed her armpits, the water dripping down her sides, over her belly, between her legs. Justin’s fingerprints – they were everywhere. Off in the distance she could hear Hugo urging the children to get a move on. She shut her eyes. Another fifteen years and she’d go travelling, for a long time, alone.

  ‘Where are their backpacks?’ Hugo’s voice blared through the bathroom. He was the one who’d fetched the children yesterday afternoon.

  ‘In the living room, somewhere near the sofa, I think.’

  The wall of the shower was a mosaic. Tiny tiles, all identical, all made by tiny fingers. Supposedly glued onto the wall one by one. Why had she found that attractive two years ago?

  ‘I can’t see them.’ Hugo’s voice, distant now.

  ‘I’m coming.’ She turned off the shower and grabbed a towel. The rain had stopped. Beams of sunlight were reflected in the mirror-clad block of flats opposite.

  Heintje laughed loudly, then came screeches of delight from Nora. They were doing something in the hallway, probably something that would damage the walls or their clothes.

  They’d be late, all of them.

  Suddenly Hugo stuck his head round the corner of the shower. ‘Found! You just relax, I’ll take the children myself.’

  ‘Okay.’ She nodded in surprise. A little later she stood waving at all three of them near the door to the lift. She went to sit on the sofa in a bathrobe, legs drawn up. On the coffee table was an ashtray they’d bought five years back in Andalucía, before they had children. Olives were painted on it. It fitted into her hand perfectly.

  Translated by Liz Waters

  36

  Joost de Vries

  A Room of My Own

  Een kamer voor mezelf

  Henry Kissinger had a small flabby mouth he was fond of using to make droll comments, like calling power the ultimate aphrodisiac, an aphorism he repeated so many times people started to believe it, encouraged by his own ten
dency to pose for the paparazzi at dinners and cocktail parties with a platinum-blonde socialite or an aspiring starlet on his arm. Looking at those photos now, you see a square tuxedo with a man stuffed into it. A bulging face, no neck to speak of, tiny eyes behind enormous glasses, classic wavy hair. And one of those Barbarella babes next to him in a delirious dress, her teeth bared by a smile so strained it looks like she’s putting her face through an aerobics workout.

  ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’ He was referring to those women, but didn’t think his theory through enough to realize it applied to him too. In the run-up to the presidential election of 1968 he’d called Richard Nixon ‘unfit to be president’, but when President Nixon called him three weeks after winning to make him National Security Advisor, he didn’t hesitate. He too felt his knees quiver and his heart pound when faced with the true power of the White House.

  ‘Will you be my National Security Advisor?’

  ‘Oh, I will, Richard. Yes, I will.’

  We recognized him from some thirty metres, maybe more. He was walking towards us from the Louvre. A small, elderly man with a walking stick, flanked by three much younger men who were obviously security. On our right, the Seine. Left, the Jardin des Tuileries, the Orangerie, the Rue de Rivoli with its palatial hotels and Armani stores. Behind us, the Place de la Concorde with Napoleon’s enormous Obelisk and, further in that direction, the Grand Palais, the Champs-Elysées with the Arc de Triomphe, which even Hitler marched around, rather than through, out of respect for the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We were surrounded by echoes of the past.

  It had to be one of the most touristy spots in all of France. Close to the museum’s inverted glass pyramid, one hundred and fifty metres away from the undocumented Liberians and Senegalese trying to flog Eiffel Tower keyrings to indifferent tourists. If you had two hours to kill in Paris, this was the place to go and that was why we were here – one and a half hours before we were due to report at the Gare du Nord – but the tourists rarely left the main route through the former palace gardens, so you could still stroll peacefully along paths of fine gravel of the kind that is undoubtedly very good for playing boules.

  Look, could it possibly, surely not, is that, could that really be, we said to each other, but there was no doubt in our minds. It had been some four decades since he’d held a cabinet post, and more than not being able to remember the last time we’d seen him on TV, we couldn’t remember ever having seen him on TV apart from archival footage.

  He was walking slowly and we too slowed our pace. We wanted to delay that moment, the moment our paths would cross and we’d be able to look him in the eye. Ten metres, six metres, three metres and then – to my surprise – my brother stepped over to him.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Kissinger, could we please take a picture?’ Immediately adding, ‘I am such a big fan of your book, Diplomacy.’

  The security men held back for a moment. ‘Ah well, ah well,’ mumbled the former Secretary of State, who didn’t come up to my brother’s shoulder. He seemed to be amused. My brother put on his big, fake, photo grin, while one of Kissinger’s assistants smiled professionally and said firmly, ‘Please, just one picture.’

  Their faces were next to each other on the screen of my iPhone. I knew Hugo’s all too well, but Kissinger’s was a feast for the eyes. His facial skin was leathery and crumpled and angular, like an old leather travelling bag. Gravity had taken hold of his eyelids and not let go; they were watery and drooping. The same for his lower lip. Once so strong, his face had collapsed. It was past it, but his eyes were clear and icy blue and burning through the lenses of the square glasses that rested on his potato nose like twin television sets.

  In that moment I thought about all the things you could know about him. In the thirties he’d fled Germany with his family to escape the Nazis, he’d become a brilliant academic at Harvard, joined Nixon’s government in the late sixties, successfully pursued detente with China and the Soviet Union, let the Vietnam War escalate (squandering tens of thousands of lives) so he could de-escalate it later on his own terms and win a Nobel Peace Prize for it.

  The peace negotiations had been held here in Paris. Anyone who might see him walking here in the Tuileries knew that. History personified – war and peace. This old man supported fascist regimes in Latin America, probably had Salvador Allende murdered, delayed informing the president so he wouldn’t mediate in the Yom Kippur War, deliberately left thousands to starve to death in Bangladesh. And here he was.

  Click, said my camera.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ said Kissinger. ‘Good day, good day.’

  ‘Great meeting you, sir,’ we said.

  We didn’t walk on, but watched him walk away with his support staff. They left the gardens a little further along, heading out to the road where a car was undoubtedly waiting. We didn’t say anything. I could imagine that he’d done some shopping, that he had his regular addresses on the Rue Saint Honoré, the Place Vendôme.

  ‘Wow. Henry Kissinger,’ Hugo said at last.

  ‘Yes, smashing,’ I said.

  ‘Super.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  We looked at each other once again.

  ‘He should have been chucked in prison years ago.’

  ‘On bread and water, the bastard.’

  We laughed, of course.

  For the first sixteen days of June it rained as if God was trying to wash a stain from the earth, but on the seventeenth the clouds parted and a forgiving sun shone down on the hills between France and Belgium. Summer revealed itself, a promise fulfilled. There were faster ways to get from Amsterdam to Waterloo, but we had signed up to a regiment – ‘regiment’ was completely the wrong word, but that was what we called it – with lots of British re-enactors, who gathered at Gare du Nord, where the train from London arrived and a small fleet of coaches were waiting to take us to our encampment in Belgium.

  There were people who spent their first hour on the bus completely preoccupied with the lights and vents over their seat. There were men (and there were only men) who immediately grabbed fat historical works and started to read or pored endlessly over maps, but most of the passengers immediately leaned forward against the back of the seat in front of them, instant male bonding. There were conversations about what we could expect, planned events, everything that had been announced on the various web forums of the official Waterloo Day, beginning tomorrow.

  For those who wonder what kind of man travels to Waterloo to re-enact what once happened there, what kind of men were sitting in the bus, I can only say: correct men, men who haven’t forgotten how their parents raised them, men who know life’s rules, who have arranged their pension and their fire insurance, who probably have a letter in a drawer somewhere that’s been there since their fortieth and contains instructions for their funeral ‘in the event of’, men who buy the same pair of shoes every year. Some of them had brought their sons with them, timid boys who still spent Saturday night at home in front of the TV. They were the kind of men who are very easy to mock, with their Gore-Tex boots and their zip-off trousers, their fleece jackets and their bum bags – but that’s doing them an injustice. They were probably men who spent hours in their attics making trees out of foam paper, papier mâché and ice-lolly sticks, constructing miniature chateaux and inns, creating entire landscapes for the tiny tin soldiers they had painted under a magnifying glass. Toys that are not toys, but meant for reliving history. These men put hundreds of hours and thousands of euros into it. In short, men I am jealous of in a very fundamental sense, because every man should have a room of his own where he can shuck off work and family, and play and be happy in a way that is usually reserved for boys alone.

  ‘Bonjour, tout le monde. Bonjours, soldats heureux.’

  The voice coming over the speakers was unusually slow for a Frenchman’s, enunciating each syllable.

  ‘Welcome, everybody.’

  It was coming from the first row where a man had stood up. Holding onto th
e luggage rack with one hand, he raised a microphone to his mouth with the other. Tall and elegantly slim, he was wearing a jacket that came down almost to his knees, a kind of doctor’s coat. While speaking he looked down shyly at his shoes, which had a certain charm, given that he must have been at least sixty and had such striking, rugged features that he could have been a colonel in the Foreign Legion.

  ‘Welcome to the Battle of Waterloo.’

  He was going to explain to us where we had to register for the camp-ground, where we could pick up our uniforms, what time tomorrow we had to report. But first he wanted to give us a special word of welcome, considering that we, British and Dutch, were being so chivalrous as to fight on the side of Napoleon’s France. Smiling, he raised a fist in the air, ‘Vive l’Empereur! Vive Napoleon!’

  ‘Vive l’Empereur! Vive Napoleon!’ we cried in reply.

  Of course, he continued in his irresistible camembert English, afterwards we would all be hanged as traitors. Aff curz, afzerwarts, ol of you shell be hang-ed as tray-tors.

  We all laughed loudly and our guide took that as a sign of an excellent esprit de corps and passed around a box of booklets with the programme for tomorrow’s battle.

  Nobody on the bus hesitated before plunging into his booklet, which meant an immediate end to the moment of easy-going solidarity; the excursion had become an object of study again. Next year it would be a real celebration. 18 June 1815–18 June 2015. The French army had already promised several cavalry regiments, the president would be coming, maybe even the British queen, the Dutch king in any case. Stands to accommodate tens of thousands of visitors would be erected. All over Europe grown men were already taking riding lessons in their free time because they had been lucky enough to be assigned official roles by lot – not as Napoleon or Blücher, whole casting agencies had been deployed for those, celebrities were being flown in, Benedict Cumberbatch had apparently already committed to playing Wellington, but as minor colonels and captains who had made it into the history books with their name and rank by falling horse and all on the day itself. But that didn’t make us any less serious today.