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

by Joost Zwagerman

  So we studied the costume store, the camp-grounds, the scheduled outdoor readings, the tours …

  ‘Hi, I’m Raymond, by the way. From Rotterdam.’

  The giant next to me had set in motion, holding out a coal shovel and telling me that he had spent the weekend visiting all of the Napoleon-related monuments in Paris.

  ‘His tomb in Les Invalides.’ He put a hand on his heart. ‘Goosebumps.’

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s so immaculate, so clean. As if they only interred him there yesterday.’

  ‘Or like he’s been there for ever,’ I said. ‘As if he’s always been there and will always stay there.’

  ‘He’ll be there for ever, take it from me. Nobody’s going to move him.’

  I always loved things like that, his ‘take it from me’. I decided that I liked Raymond the way you can like a taxi driver – because you have nothing to do with him but are still putting your life in his hands. The bond was strengthened by Raymond’s wearing a shapeless, greyish-purple jumper with a geometric pattern that was just like the ones my favourite teacher at my Protestant primary school had worn. He had a large, bald head and cheeks like saddlebags, but a narrow, hard and pointy nose, pure cartilage – you could imagine sticking a nose like that into a lock and jiggling it open. The dark bags under his eyes looked like they’d been there for decades.

  ‘First time in Waterloo?’

  ‘First time I’m fighting. You?’

  ‘First time. Always wanted to give it a go. Now I’ve got the time.’ He slapped himself twice on the chest. ‘Lungs. No good.’

  I told him that my brother was in one of the buses a couple of hundred metres behind us; he’d booked later and, my God, the organizers were strict. Raymond laughed: the French weren’t leaving Waterloo to chance. His wife and two sons had already driven there with the collapsible caravan. His daughter preferred to stay at home because, yeah, you know, women and Waterloo, they just don’t go together.

  Out came the iPhone. Photos of monuments, selfies of him in front of monuments, selfies of him next to a blue plaque on the ground. ‘Marshal Ney, Prince of the Moskva, was shot here.’ That’s what happened, huh, he told me. When Ney saw that the battle was lost, he went in search of a heroic death, but though horse after horse was shot out from under him, he was saved – only to be executed by the new regime after Napoleon’s flight – heartless, Napoleon’s most faithful commander.

  ‘Le Brave des Braves,’ I said.

  ‘He gave the order to fire to his own firing squad. They don’t make ’em like that any more.’

  This firm sense of history triggered something in the men around us, as if it was a signal for them to join the conversation, and they presented their own nuggets of information about Ney and Murat and Talleyrand and Fouché – and why not? We were here because we had something in common, something in the distant past, out of reach. The more we talked about it, the more realistic it became, the less we felt we were on our way to do something embarrassing. I turned back to the window, the motorway and the green hills beyond.

  I died almost immediately, as one of the first.

  We were advancing up the hill in three lines of fifty men, towards the British artillery. Thirty metres to one side another three lines were advancing, next to them another three. We were the first wave. In complete accordance with the historical course of events, our charge would be followed by a much larger frontal assault with cavalry on the flanks; another two thousand French devotees were already in position. That morning we had collected our uniforms from a big barn. They came in two sizes: too big and too small. My trousers were so big and hung so low they looked like they’d been lifted straight from a Yo! MTV Raps video. Hugo’s hat slipped down over his eyes. The boots flapped with each step. You felt every pinecone, every branch through the soles. On the hills of Waterloo, Hugo’s boots produced a weird squeak, it sounded like he was breakdancing – that morning we’d almost split our sides over it, but we weren’t laughing now.

  Nobody spoke. Somewhere someone was playing a drum, a two-handed ruffle that seemed to be working very slowly towards a climax, the kind of sound that makes you march taller and stare ahead.

  We focused on the men two hundred metres in front of us. I tried not to think about them in too much detail. They too were wearing uniforms they had made themselves or hired here. The midday sun was burning our necks. The stiff, cheap material of my uniform chafed against my skin. The sky was as clear as blue ice and made the grass look greener than it already was.

  I had got up very early that morning. I had dreamed I was being pursued by a film crew and had to interrupt my flight for a piss, but was afraid they’d film it – and woke up with a nagging, swollen bladder. The taste of the rubber of my airbed was in my mouth, my brother was snoring quietly and rhythmically. His greying, wiry hair was stuck to his forehead, his mouth was so far open I could see the ridges in the roof of his mouth.

  Quietly I unzipped the tent flap and stepped out over the guy ropes of the surrounding dome tents. I could hear others snoring too, a reticent sun was just poking its head over the horizon, there were tents and caravans almost as far as the eye could see. I relished the quiet. It was nice to stand there awake, surrounded by all those sleeping people, as if the day was mine alone, as if I knew something they didn’t.

  My piss was rustling on the dry pine needles with a sound like crackling ice when suddenly I was startled by a horseman. Though he was already close by, I hadn’t heard the hoofsteps. A man in a French cavalry uniform on a grey horse, with a sabre and all, a cigarette in his mouth and a coffee in one hand.

  ‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ I said.

  He nodded (the slightest of gestures, gruff really, as if my presence disturbed him, perhaps he wanted the day to himself too), spurred his horse, and before he’d fully disappeared around the corner of the amenities building, at least another twenty cavalrymen had galloped past.

  James Salter wrote that the irresistible thing about being a fighter pilot was that everything revolved around you – the aircraft carrier put out to sea for you, the mechanics on board, the technicians, the radio operators, the cooks, the cleaners, they were all there so you could take off.

  I’ve had that very feeling my whole life: the family I grew up in definitely revolved around me, the schools and universities were there for me, the newspaper existed for me, the bookshops, the literary festivals – but the cavalry rode past and ignored me as if I was invisible. The ground shook, a horse snorted, they swished their tails, the riders sat straight but relaxed, they didn’t deign to look at me – but I stood there with the happiest grin on my face.

  The British frontline was now a hundred and twenty metres away. Just as I tried not to think about the British soldiers, I tried not to look at the spectators, who were a hundred and fifty metres away behind orange tape with their zooms and binoculars. I wondered if Raymond’s family was among them, I wondered just how bad his health really was, with his ‘Lungs, no good’. He was a few metres away from me, but I didn’t want to look at him.

  I was able to concentrate exceptionally well on the here and now, existence, my uniform, the way we were marching, the tension in my back, which I was holding so much straighter than usual. As if a wet rag had wiped the blackboard of my mind clean. That’s how much a part of the line I felt. It was almost physical, a tingling sensation rising from my spine into my brainstem. Gradually feeling myself dissolve into a dream.

  We were now marching downhill. The valley between us and the Brits was more difficult because you had to hold back to avoid going too fast and breaking formation. This was the moment the British opened fire. One thirty p.m., of course, just like one hundred and ninety-nine years earlier. Le baptême de feue, the baptism of fire.

  A cannon directly in front of me fired in my direction, as if someone was sneezing in my face, the sound already whooshing past before the white plume had emerged from the barrel. The crazy thing was that all
the time I had a sense of having experienced this before. The clouds of gunpowder smoke from the blanks merged until the entire British line was hidden from view and wouldn’t reappear until we were seventy metres away, and Marshal d’Erlon on his horse behind us blew a whistle and we knew it was our turn to attack.

  ‘Vive la France!’

  ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

  ‘Allez, soldats heureux!’

  Suddenly I realized I was about to die – we’d agreed in advance that at eighty metres we would speed up and come within the historic range of fire and that five soldiers would fall per ten metres. ‘Volunteers?’ our guide from the previous day had asked. I had raised my hand and only now did I understand why.

  Men rushed over the grass, holding their jolting muskets with both hands as if they were oars they were using to propel themselves forward. We could see the Brits taking aim, our drums sounded much louder now, our rented boots were in even more danger of falling off, a British officer raised his sword, we reached fifty metres, our neat lines broke up, we reached forty-five metres and saw the sword coming down, the first loud bangs sounded, we saw the flashes of fire and plumes of smoke rising from the British muskets – and I let myself fall forwards at full tilt. I held my musket in front of my chest with both hands, my face hit the grass, my hat went flying, I tasted earth.

  I had offered to die because it felt like it was supposed to feel, as if I was making a sacrifice. The soldiers in the lines behind me stepped over me without a backward glance and again I felt a tingling through my whole body, it was something psychosomatic. I was lying there deliciously inert in the soft grass, I felt the pull of gravity, I felt the world turning and I felt hopelessly, infinitely alone. It was a pleasant, unmelancholy kind of loneliness, the sense of being in a crowd without being absorbed by it, and feeling more individual as a result. The further away from me the French soldiers ran, the happier I became. It was really like that: I could feel myself becoming truly happy, as if someone had injected me with a serum, I felt it passing through my body.

  France – this country had given me so much. It had been so long since I had experienced this. It was summer, it was France, the setting for the happiest weeks of my life. So uncomplicated. My brother’s being here heightened that feeling, as if I’d gone back in time. All those summer holidays. From our regular campsite to the nearest village was a five- or six-kilometre hike, a winding road up a mountain. There was almost no traffic, lavender grew in the verges, invisible crickets made their scratchy sound, you passed a small farm where you could buy jars of jam. The farmer was nowhere in sight, you had to leave a few francs, there was faith in human honesty. Almost every day I walked to the village in the blazing sun, mostly with a towel over my shoulders to keep them from burning.

  I told my parents I was going to play football with friends or going to the river, but I didn’t. I never had any purpose. I walked and wanted to do it by myself. I never took a Walkman with me. In the invariably sleepy village I bought a roll of Mentos at most and then walked back. I got so brown, so blond, I was so skinny. I wanted it all to myself: the country, the days, my life.

  At the weekly karaoke evening, I sang Blondie’s ‘The Tide Is High’ with Hugo, with friends I played six thousand games of round-the-table on a tilting concrete table-tennis table behind the toilets. During our first holiday I got to be a linesman for the annual football tournament, once I’d turned sixteen I was allowed to play in one of the teams. We listened to Phil Collins’s Greatest Hits, to the Rolling Stones’ London Years, the only CDs we had with us. We visited markets in nameless villages, bought bags of fresh herbs, sent two dozen postcards each. We never bought ice lollies, but stopped at supermarkets where we’d buy a tub of vanilla ice cream we’d eat with the disposable plastic spoons we’d brought with us for that purpose, shovelling it in so fast it gave us all brain freezes. I remembered summer holidays and how my father asked me if I wanted to go for a drive and how we’d cruise the provincial back roads without any destination at all, criss-crossing the countryside, passing tiny villages, drinking a Coke somewhere. My father drummed on the steering wheel, I stared out of the window.

  In the summer before my eighteenth birthday I lost my virginity to a French girl, although I never really liked the sound of that ‘lost’. I didn’t lose anything, I gained something. That’s how I saw it at the time, that’s how I see it now; she gave me a present and that present was her and I treated it with appropriate haste and awkwardness – just like immediately ripping the wrapping off a gift you’re very happy to receive – but cheerful, grinning. She grinned too and said that we just had to wait a little and try again. And that’s what we did, almost the whole afternoon, until her parents came home from doing the shopping.

  Afterwards we went to the small river that flowed past the campsite and floated on our backs hand in hand, letting the current carry us downstream. The blue sky, the sun, looking up through our lashes at the mountains on either side of the Gorges du Verdon. We went so far that we ended up having to walk back five or six kilometres in our bare feet, but we were together, just the two of us, and holding hands and when we got back it was already dinnertime. Doing the dishes, I shed a few silent tears, I remember, because the day was over, because I had let it slip through my fingers.

  Lying on the grass I felt the drone of the horses’ hooves, which must have been similar to the sound of a small earthquake. I heard shouting, but it didn’t get through to me – I wasn’t lying there in my role because my role felt more real than anything else. I was in the past, completely, just not the past that was being fought out here, but something much smaller, a much less distant past.

  France – this country had given me so much. That was what I was thinking as I lay there, until I realized I wasn’t in France at all: Waterloo was in Belgium, a country whose history was somehow profoundly forgettable, a country where I had never done anything I really enjoyed. But I was lying there in a French uniform, fallen for the glory of the French empire.

  The agreement was that you had to stay where you fell; medical orderlies would come to kiss you back to life as it were. The re-enactors were then allowed to return to the starting positions and take part in a subsequent charge. Let them take their time, I thought, let me lie here as long as possible.

  Out of the corner of my eye I coud see other casualties on the ground, metres away. I could have tried to see if there were any familiar faces among them, but I closed my eyes. A helicopter flew overhead, quite low. I assumed a foetal position and concentrated very contentedly on my own death.

  Translated by David Colmer

  Author Biographies

  A proponent of Dutch Naturalism, Marcellus Emants (1848–1923) was influenced by Émile Zola and Ivan Turgenev, with whom he corresponded. He wrote in a sober style, expressing a dark and pessimistic view of life. After the First World War he left the Netherlands for Switzerland, where he died. His most well-known work is A Posthumous Confession, published in 1894 and translated into English by J. M. Coetzee.

  Louis Couperus (1863–1923) was catapulted to prominence in 1889 with Eline Vere, a psychological masterpiece inspired by Flaubert and Tolstoy. It depicts upper-class life in The Hague, where the author was born, though his work also contains impressions of Indonesia (where he lived in his younger days) and Italy, Africa and China – fruits of his extensive travelling. Writing in a rich and sensitive style, Couperus was the greatest novelist of his generation. His oeuvre also contains novellas, short stories, poetry, travel stories, fairy tales, feuilletons and sketches.

  Arthur van Schendel (1874–1946) was born in the Dutch East Indies and moved to the Netherlands when he was young. He wrote twenty novels in all, as well as stories and essays. The Johanna Maria is one of his best known books, along with The Water Man (1933) and The House in Haarlem (1934). In 1947 van Schendel was posthumously honoured with the P. C. Hooft Prize, the most prestigious award for Dutch literature.

  For many years, Nescio (J. H. F. Grö
nloh, 1882–1961) was a one-book author with only a collection of three world-weary, poetic stories (1918) to his name. Nobody knew who Nescio was until fifteen years later, when the author revealed himself only because his work was falsely attributed to someone else. His output may have been small, but his name is legendary and in recent years, Nescio has been translated into many languages, English included (Amsterdam Stories).

  A lawyer by profession, Ferdinand Bordewijk (1884–1965) made his prose debut in an unusual genre uncommon for the Netherlands – three compilations of Fantastic Narratives. Three subsequent short and futuristic novels secured his reputation as an author of highly original prose, with short sentences and an abrasive style. A frightening father and son story set in the legal world, Character (1938), is another highlight in his oeuvre, the film being awarded an Academy Award in 1998.

  Maria Dermoût (1888–1962) was born on a sugar plantation in the Dutch East Indies and educated in Holland. She then returned to the Indies with her husband and spent thirty years living in, as she later wrote, ‘every town and wilderness of the islands of Java, Celebes, and the Moluccas’. Only in 1951, at the age of sixty-three, did Dermoût publish her first book, a memoir called Yesterday. Her celebrated novel The Ten Thousand Things was published in 1955.

  Born in the small Frisian town of Harlingen, Simon Vestdijk (1898–1971) studied medicine in Amsterdam, but turned to literature after a few years as a doctor. As legend has it, Vestdijk could write faster than even God could read: he published more than two hundred books (no less than fifty-two of them being novels). A classic is the Anton Wachter series, a eight-volume set of novels about an obsessive youth love. Apart from prose and poetry he was also a foremost essayist with important publications on religion, art and music.