The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy

by Richard Huijing

  Lodewijk van Deyssel

  When, at the end of the eighteenth century, the great French monarchy sank, strange things, it is said, happened on the plain. Society turned topsy-turvy and one saw noisy, seditious riff-raff babbling and singing in hordes, screeching, gesturing and dancing stumbling dances in those gracious areas of the city where until then only the well-styled, finely-coloured promenaders had moved, and where the carriages, driven by coachmen who themselves were aristocrats, ran their elegant course.

  In the streets of Paris meanwhile, among all kinds of pedestrians, one had also seen many unfortunates and drab figures: hunchbacks, paralytics, squints and twisted-ones, purple noses, longlobes, dwarves, flatfooters, idiots with green-hued faces and folk with large sweatmarks on their backsides, creatures in drab-grey rags from whose nose and red-rimmed, cunning eyes ran sickly gin, and especially no mean number of ordinary, dull at the time when it was so bad the monarchy was being mocked in its own dwelling, one saw something extraordinary occur: on the squares which one overlooked from the windows of the Palace, monsters in human shape appeared in the open spaces, right out in the sun, unfortunates and ass-heads whose defects were so garish that, until then, they had never shown themselves outside of the alleys, slums and subterranean pits where only nightfall would see them, together with the mice and the spiders, creep timorously along the walls. So extraordinary were the humps, of such huge dimensions the flat feet, so far advanced the tumours at the back of the head, so wild the twists of the noses combined with the appearance of the eyes, that these catastrophically afflicted ones could not appear without at once attracting the most violent and nigh magnetic interest of all physicians, nurses, students of surgery, proprietors of circus booths, zoo-attendants, while at the same time drawing such unstoppable snorting and careering belly laughs, not just from street urchins, the pale and bored shop assistants in their doorways, the hearty travelling salesmen returning from a free lunch and even from posh professors and bankers, but no less from staff of the Salvation Army - anachronistically, astrally and prophetically present preachers, from zealots, from melancholy-minded ones, from the deeply griefstricken whose loved ones had just passed away, from the sick, from ones in a state of dead-faint, and from all the folk who, for humanitarian reasons, never laughed otherwise, be this out of principle or by nature.

  Now, confusion in society was so great, to such an extent did the whole world appear to be standing on its head, that everyone made common cause with these apparitions in the end. An illustrious marquess, noble of face and fine in mien, became familiar with a half-rotten dwarf-monster from a very remotely situated fire-andwater business: an enormously large, Jewish Easterbread-coloured, moth-eaten and bald head on a, because of a grave case of waterbelly and backswelling, egg-shaped short body, green, with innumerable glass bead-encrusted slippers below - and to this the marquess offered a pinch of snuff. A slim duchess in lace and satin, the truffle of a beauty-spot like an aroma of loveliness in the pale white of the face, spoke chummily to a woman-figure surrounded by an invisible cloud of acrid emanations who for thirty years had spent her only sober half hour each day lying about, sucking out the fishheads on the scrapheaps of public eating-houses, and who now stood listening and nodding with a downwardly sagging, purply-red nose from the pores of which greenish worms wriggled up, and from the nostrils of which, besides manifold warts and pink secondary ulcers, greasy spikes of hair pricked down on to the binshaped bottom lip - down which eyes like rancid hatpin tips with her mouth which, as regards teeth, sported but a lone fragment of black enamel.

  And in the end, the most eminent citizen in the land was surrounded too: he, who himself previously had chased the riff-raff from his marble floors with his own hands, with the knout and the whip for those beggars and thieves whom one does not tackle with sword or on his great king's head, on those hairs soft as silk, was placed an old fool's cap which housed two colonies of lice.

  Inez van Dullemen

  The sea was where she was meant to be again: behind the white coastline marked by groynes. The tide was low and the sea had withdrawn into herself, her water smooth as oil, perverse, sweetly smooth. I stared at her in disbelief, sitting on the collapsed dune, at my back the grey, defoliated land of doom.

  I had always felt on an easy footing with her. As a child I would walk into the water, up to my armpits, and would allow myself, touching the bottom on tiptoe, to be rocked lightly to and fro by her surf. I had never been frightened either, unlike the other children, of her unknown inhabitants; when I felt the touch along my legs of a slippery passer-by, I would pull up my knees and calmly let what was moving in the deep pass by. I caught crabs in shallow coves and played with them by tickling them underneath their armour with a little stick so that they would make big leaps with were the clowns in my circus. And the grey seafog, too, I loved, which so suddenly could come rolling up the coast so that it seemed as if the entire world was being rubbed out with a wet sponge.

  Now, I was sitting here on that gnawed lump of dune and looking at my hands, covered in red scars, resting on the sand. I had the feeling that a question needed to be answered, that there needed to be an exposition of views between us. For I was sitting here like something that had been released by her and cast back ashore, quite like all those splinters and ribs of boats and the twisted scrap-iron of Biloxi 's amusement park. Shards of china with golden rims or decorated with daisies glinted among the sand. The sea must have gulped down dozens, dozens of tea sets. Tea sets or people: it had made no difference to her.

  Already there were children back on the beach again, playing. A little girl ran towards the waves to draw some water with a tea kettle and pour it out over the head of one of those monstrously large fair-ground dogs in orange those that had stood in the booths of Biloxi - which had apparently been washed up. Its coat was drab with sand but it was still wearing its black plastic specs on its head, and with these it sat staring at that perversely smooth sea, like a tatty professor.

  Why had I gone back? You won't find anything, they'd said to me, you won't recognise a thing. But I wanted to gain a hold within that floating irreality; I wanted to see something confirmed, to assay the nightmare against reality. Even when I slept, I could still feel the surge of the water; I would retch, spit my lungs out, feel the black spiders running across my body until I woke up, bathed in sweat. Not recognise a thing. Those words had been repeated too often; my thoughts had run aground on them.

  You will not recognise him, they had said; they've only been able to recognise him by the ring on his finger: apart from that, he's black and bloated. There's nothing left of his face; he barely resembles a human being any more. But I did not believe them; I thought he would still have to look the way I had known him. I fought with them, I was hysterical. It took three of them, in the end, to press me down on to the bed and give me a jab of some sedative. Eight days after the hurricane, they had found him in the top of a tree with a mattress on top of only corpse still dressed, they said, for he was still wearing his Levis and his shoes. Together with the other mortal remains, he was brought to the cold stores of the meat factory, close to the airport, and he had already been put in his coffin and sent to Vancouver when I was discharged from hospital. His parents had claimed him for themselves - even the ring on his finger had not been mine but a signet ring engraved with the family coat of arms - and that's how he had been sent: like a dead, ringed, migrant bird, back to its place of origin.

  The entire morning the weather had been clear, without a breath of wind, the water in the Gulf melting-blue, and you could see the inlets lying there in the blindingly white sand; but gradually the sky discoloured to an opaque drab-grey, and sea and sky became one: a dirty-grey wall that rose up behind the blanched beach, motionless and still.

  We organised a storm party. For that's what you usually do here on the Gulf coast; you have to sit out the time, indoors, while the severe weather passes over. It was still hanging there, that thick, fish-coloured fog tha
t seemed to have been drawn up like a curtain; it was drizzling, but otherwise the weather was dull and windless. We danced and the water rose steadily and began to run across the terrace tiles. The needle of the barometer sank to its lowest point. Our eyes strayed towards it without us mentioning a thing.

  Suddenly, towards evening, the wind pounced and made the entire row of windows quake in their frames, and we saw how the mist was torn to shreds and began to whirl in front of the windows in long trails. We clambered up to the top floor and heard the roar with which the water burst into the house. Because it was a summer house, the walls were only thin; it wasn't that big either. Peering down over the bannisters, I saw how the chairs and the sofa rose up and began to spin. The electricity had failed but we had torches with us, for one who lives on the Gulf is always prepared for calamities. I felt how the whole house began to rock and suddenly a black star shot through the ceiling as chunks of plasterwork dropped down upon our heads.

  'I'm getting out,' I said to Fritz.

  He tried to prevent me. 'That's madness,' he said.

  We looked at one another. 'We're going to die,' I said, 'but then we may as well do-it-out there.'

  I climbed out of the window and clutched a divan cushion that came floating by on that upward surging mass of water. With the beam of my torch, which I was still holding in my hand, I looked for Fritz who was straddling the window sill. He hesitated. He could not swim. I heard him shout as he jumped: 'Help me.'

  Then he went under and did not come up again.

  I flailed about, searched for him. Now you could no longer see anything but black: black clouds scudding past and occasionally letting through a glimmer of light. I felt a wild, ice-cold rushing about me but my arms mowed through the water of their own accord; my body knew what it wanted: there was an animal in me, an animal captain who had assumed command; it was as if my spirit travelled along as a simply didn't have a say in the matter. Between the backs of waves I made out specks of light from other torches, and I heard voices crying out for help. I shouted back but in the tumult my voice was was also impossible to reach one another. One after the other, I saw the lights go out.

  All was movement, eddies, waterspouts, wind that cut off your breath. Furniture, driven insane, panicked into a stampede like animals, shattered everything that got in their way, smashing each other to pieces, to smithereens: all those possessions that had always stood, good as gold and ready to serve, in kitchen-diners or sitting rooms, now rampaged at us, random, in an annihilating attack of rage. We ended up trapped in between, our bodies ripped open like squishy melons. More people were done in by furniture than by the water, I should say. You had to fight cupboards, beds, trapdoors, chairs; all those consumer goods you had cherished now seemed to be out to crush your ribcage, to pile up on top of you and push you under water. I fought to stay on top of them, to keep my mount like on the backs of crazed horses. Uprooted trees gathered the floating household goods in their tops and pushed these out in front of them. I was in danger of getting caught up in the branches. I was continually pulling at something or climbing on top of something; my arms seemed about to be tom off. But I did not give up: within me was that animal that wanted to live. In the end, I managed to get hold of a door on which I could keep myself afloat; I kept the broken-off blade of an oar in front of my mouth to create a lee in which I could breathe. The cry of voices had fallen silent and I believed I had floated out into the Gulf, for nothing stuck out above the water any more, no tree tops or telegraph poles or roofs of houses. There was nothing other than a huge mass of water.

  A large dog came swimming towards my door, tried to climb on to it, almost made the whacking thing turn turtle. I kicked his head with my feet: off! You or me, one of us has to cop it: the law of the jungle. But when the wind began to abate a little, I floated to a standstill in the top of a tree; I still had to be over land, therefore. My door was wedged among the branches and I understood that I was safe. I was bleeding heavily. My leg was tom open from my knee down to my ankle and I ripped up my blouse to apply a tourniquet.

  Then the spiders came. They did the same as I had done: climb up, out above the water to dryness and few measly cells full of vital force and with claws to grip a hold. I flicked them off me but they were determined and ran with their hairy legs across my body: spiders wishing to reach Noah's ark. (Noye's Flood', a picture from my childhood, illustrated bible: naked men and women on a rocky outcrop above the water, a lioness with her cub in her mouth, and sucklings with round tummies, all with the same curves as the waves, everything very fleshly, outrageously sensual. A woman with streaming long hair hung by her fingertips from the outcrop.)

  I must have suffered bouts of unconsciousness. I saw the spiders with lifesized faces, climbing up towards me; their legs snapped, broke off or became entangled: they became one single, dancing mass, teeming above me in the sky. Occasionally, something would drop on to my face with a dry tap; then I would wake with a start. I saw the moon lying, scythe-shaped and thin, on her back in the paling sky. The shine would have to be that of dawn. I threw up the water from my lungs and saw corpses floating by: the miserable rag of a poodle, the corpse of a that fat boy from the Oyster Bar who had always looked so suggestively at my breasts while, tauntingly slowly, he set the cutlery, and who had such flabby hands, quite as flabby as his oysters. A settee floated by with a seagull on top of it for a did I dream that? A beam bobbed past with a man who had tied himself to it by his trouser-belt, but he was dead, with his skull half bashed away. As the water dropped ever further, I saw that beneath me in the tree a child's dress was hanging, red with yellow little flowers, the material billowing out a bit. There was still a little body inside it. It hung across a branch with its head in the water while its silky hair fanned out on to the pulsing waves.

  With the lull and the drop of the water level, a silence had arisen, simultaneously, one in which you only heard the lapping of the waves. I am the only one left, I thought.

  But later on, the enervating yackety-tack of a helicopter passed overhead and voices began to call out in the drowned landscape beneath me. It was the man from the post office in Biloxi who found me. He tried to carry me but he was of slight build and, moreover, so exhausted from wading through the water that after every ten paces he asked: mind if I take a rest for a moment? In the end, he found a floating piece of corrugated board and managed to lay me down on top of it so he could push me the rest of the way across the rapidly falling water and through all the rubbish.

  That's the only thing I can still remember.

  I now began to climb over the edge of the dune. I knew exactly where I was, for I could get my bearings from the lighthouse and what was left of the marina. The roads inland were covered in a thick, dried-up layer of mud, and barricaded in many places by crashed-down trees, boat hulls, and cars spread around at all angles. Beyond were the woods. But these had been thinned out, had become transparent, and the spring light beamed down sharply among the bare branches. A tree stood beckoning me slowly with a piece of grey net-curtain as if it was beckoning me in, to a landscape of ghosts; clothes dangled from the branches, sleeves without hands, waving.

  White sand covered the dead moss and all the wood had been corroded by the salt water; everything had a sheen of silver. You could see exactly how far the sea had run inland, for everywhere in her footsteps barnacles had stayed behind, and oysters, cloaked in their grey-ish lacework, and razor clams, still quite perfect. And, like a cuckoo fledgling in a strange nest, a barge sat grounded among the torn-down pine trees. I passed along underneath her red-leaded keel: I walked along the bottom of a submarine landscape.

  Skeletons of houses lurched askew in the ground, grinning with black window openings and fluttering with the last remains of a tattered awning. The bared beams of their attics resembled the bones of fish stripped of their flesh. On top of a roof sat a chubby armchair the springs of which dangled like entrails from the seat. This was all that remained of the little summer palaces
, those little temples of luxury. Plaster, glass, chipboard, everything crunched beneath the soles of my feet. Otherwise there wasn't a sound. But perhaps there was, after all: I heard something that was like the tapping of a stick. You could see a long way through that leafless forest and some hundred metres away from me I saw a strange, shady character with a bulky sack over his shoulder, who looked inside the empty window spaces and poked methodically among the objects spread across the ground. Someone's walking over my grave, my grandmother would always say when something gave her the creeps.

  I quickly walked the other way, looking round about for identifying marks. Hadn't this been the house of the preacher? In my head, the voice of the radio newscaster sounded: the preacher had been washed out of the window and had managed to keep himself afloat, but his wife and seven children had drowned. It was as if I saw him sitting like job on top of the remains of his house.

  The ground was still soft and everywhere hung the salty scent of rot, of slimy organisms, seaweed, sea-snails, dead things. Millions of little dead things. Of larger ones too? Cadavers of pets, of people still? Children? Or had these already been salvaged? (Odd word, really: salvaged.)

  The ghosts kept open house. I walked in through open doors, roamed among the remains of their wild orgy: tipped-up rocking chairs, cracked ceiling-cherubs, Christmas baubles, letters, piles of cheque books, faded photographs, open the ghosts to read telephones, broken adrift. All those certainties, all those networks of people's manipulating, their threads to both the past and the that stuff was lying here like organs that had been rent apart. The sea has taken revenge, I thought, revenge for our arrogance. There were gramophone records: The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde and When the lights go out. Here, the lights had indeed gone out. It was as if I was picking up the echoes of lives that had taken place here. In a greymuddied bath tub, lovers had embraced in an aromatic, scented foambath. The muddied clothes were still hanging in the cupboard. The dead had written in their cashbooks or played a Schubert sonata on the piano. They had taken down the latest stockmarket figures and had poured each other a glass of whisky. Praying, or dead drunk, they had been washed from their houses by the tidal wave.