The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy

by Richard Huijing

  Brose, his little finger unchanged along the seam of his trousers, turned on his heels to continue facing the admiral. The admiral's hand rested on the doorknob.

  'I could not take any risks,' he said. 'Had I asked for volunteers, would you have come forward?'

  'Yes, Admiral.'

  'But I didn't.'

  'No, Sir.'

  'It's an order.'

  'Yes, Sir.'

  The admiral opened the door and offered his hand.

  'We'll meet again before long, Brose. You've been appointed a Sub-Lieutenant.'

  Brose took the hand and clicked his heels. It was cool and dry and pleasant. All of a sudden he hesitated.

  'Is it an order, Admiral?'

  'It's an order.'

  Brose felt the hand continue to grasp his.

  'When must it take place, Sir?'

  'The day after tomorrow. Tomorrow you can operate the craft and try it out. It's dead easy. She's just arrived. She's just being unloaded right now.' The admiral did not let go of Brose's hand, looked at his watch and said: 'At precisely this moment the Beast is boarding ship.'

  The Y253 from the fatherland was lying alongside the landing stage, a great creature covered in crawling parasites. In the distance lay the motionless ocean, turning a little pink. A piercing tone began to whistle through the vaulted space, a signal that dusk was falling outside and that the lights would be doused in ten minutes' time except for a series of feeble lamps screened off on their seaward side. Leaning motionless against the rock face, Brose watched the bustle of unloading. The craft was already ashore and being driven off to the workshop on a lorry. It resembled an aircraft more than a submarine. Nobody knows she's intended for me, Brose thought. All this fuss is because of me. This time, the day after tomorrow, I'll be dead.

  This was hardly a thought, however: it was a line in a foreign tongue, learned off by heart. In the past, every New Years Eve, awaiting midnight, his father would recite great chunks from the Odyssey in Greek; he and his brother and sisters listened, breathless and laughing by turns, to the incomprehensible white and yellow sounds spiralling up from his mouth like smoke. It had been exceptionally impressive, but it had also had something to do with a boundless desolation and with great effort he had learned the first two lines his father had written down for him phonetically, off by heart.

  Andra moi eneppe, M6esa, polutropon h6s mala p6lla Plknchte epei Troies hier6n ptolietron epersen.

  The day after tomorrow he would be dead - but he wasn't ready to think this yet, not by a long chalk. He had never been able to do his homework except at the very last moment. It would turn into a thought the moment he broke into the Beast's ship with his craft. In the instant of the explosion, language would surrender the secrets of its grammar.

  He could have eaten at the officers' table, but he went and sat in his old place; he was a bit quiet, listened to the radio and later that evening he lost a game of chess because he had never learned the opening moves. The others smoked and played cards, or they read. The morse from the radio rooms hovered in the walls, and down below, in the workshops, hammering and the whine of the torpedo lorry from the storage halls resounded. The entire rock was just a den of energy and destruction.

  A few men began to sing near the canteen. I'll never go to bed with a woman again, Brose thought - but it wasn't a thought. He drew on his cigarette and thought of his wife, riddled with bullets at a carriage window in a motionless train in the middle of the countryside. It was all of it nonsense. She had never existed. What existed was the sea, a dozen submarines and the Beast's convoys.

  He got up and began to walk through the ice-cold striplighting of the corridors. He wasn't a volunteer, but he would have been had the admiral asked for one. Like him, volunteers had to keep it a secret to the very last moment: who had been selected. Beneath the black vaulting, he saw a vessel disappear under water in the middle of the pond and slowly draw the trail of her periscope towards the sea. He had a feeling she wouldn't return. In his bunk, he thought: Why didn't he ask for volunteers? He must take no risks, he'd said, but was he actually taking any? There had always been at least ten, usually twenty volunteers for assignments without hope. He had always been among them and had never been selected. This had happened twelve times but, though the ones selected had never returned, the number of volunteers hadn't declined, not ever.

  The sleeping quarters were still empty. He looked at the bunk above and wondered what was bothering him. Suddenly he thought: There's been a mistake. He should have asked for volunteers. He's not allowed to give an order for something which is one hundred percent certain to result in death. And all of a sudden he had the feeling of preferring to top himself rather than follow the order. That was loopy. What did it matter whether he did it voluntarily or was following orders? But it seemed to. He sat up, leaned on his knees he had drawn up and tried to discover what this was.

  It was dead quiet. He was surrounded by stone on all sides and not a single sound from the workshops penetrated here. For an instant he saw himself sitting there, viewed from without, somewhere far away on the ocean: right inside a rock rising up from the sea.

  He couldn't discover what was bothering him and he went and lay down again. One thing was certain: the Beast must be killed and here was the opportunity to kill it, the Beast with his concentration camps. Perhaps these were no worse than those in his own country, but it would in any case mean the end to the war. The Beast never travelled by didn't like an air or missile attack on his ship was impossible because he knew how to defend himself more broadly and comprehensively than ever a ship had done before. Nothing (the craft excepted) could approach closely enough for his ship to even be on the horizon.

  Brose felt his eyelids drooping. If I could flee, I would do so, he thought, even if the Beast does remain the Beast and even if there is no weight in an order to do something one would have done voluntarily in any case. An order like that isn't an order, and the one who gave it is none other than my own will having turned admiral ... With a sense of satisfaction, he fell asleep.

  And yet, that night, Brose saw himself fleeing down endless, cool, striplighted corridors, walking on the sea in an admiral's uniform, and he saw his mother's house, half of it torn down but half still standing, his mother in the severed rooms, and a friend from his schooldays who had come to fetch him to go by car to the heath, but nothing had come of it.

  In the chart room he bent over a huge table and followed both the index fingers of the commodore, the one indicating the Beast's route, the other his own. At a spot, hundreds of kilometres out into the ocean, there was a red cross, marking where they would meet and the war would end. The admiral was standing next to him and had his eyes fixed abstractedly on quite a different spot on the map.

  When Brose looked up at the general officers on the opposite side of the table, he suddenly knew all the nonsense he'd been thinking last night. He wasn't the point, the Beast was. Whether he set sail voluntarily to destroy him or was obeying an order, and what subtle differences flowed forth from this perhaps, that was in no proportion whatsoever to the issue at stake: the end of the war which had already lasted nobody-knew-how-many years.

  Among the gold and the stars, he walked over to the wall where a sketch was hanging of the ship the Beast would be travelling on. She wasn't a cruiser or a battle ship, but something that could only be termed a steamer: an unarmed tub which no freight company would keep in service any more. This was one of the whims the Beast had to set against his inhumanity. It meant nothing. All depended on penetrating the tremendous cordon around him. In the afternoon he practised with the craft. She was back on the Y253; with a helmet down to his collar, in a leather suit full of belts and chronometers, he crawled inside, was fitted with an oxygen mask and everything was bolted down around him. He had just enough room to sit upright; his head protruded above the hull in a little dome of moulded quartz, and near his eyes there was a little periscope he could raise and retract. The men helping him l
ooked at him questioningly now and then but didn't ask -a thing.

  With all the officers on the landing stage, the Y253 let herself sink and he sank with her - soon he saw the surface of the water rise above him and disappear. Not for a second did he think of what it was all about, that tomorrow he would see the sky disappear above his head like that for the last time. He felt only the tension of the experiment.

  After a minute the water suddenly fumed pale green. They were out into open sea. Continuously, he checked the instruments in front of his eyes and spoke into the microphone that was in front of his mouth. Ten minutes later he was given his position and he fired the engine; he felt severe juddering, and with a broad smile round his mouth he noticed he was starting to move. He dived to a depth of a hundred and fifty feet where the light turns so incomprehensibly blue, like that of a dying flame, and then, navigating by his illuminated instruments, he hurtled through the sea along a precisely charted trajectory for a quarter of an hour. His heart was pounding and he laughed loudly into his oxygen mask. A little later he began to sing. Something that would have to be a fat fish slapped against the dome and was gone. Brose laughed and bounced up and down, singing. On all sides he felt the boundless mass of water slipping by as though it were stone, but he was outsmarting it! Never before had he felt so free.

  He switched off the engine, made the craft rise and raised his periscope. He was exactly at the calculated spot in front of the cave, and slowly he sailed inside. The Y253 was lying alongside the landing stage again. He came to the surface by her side. Laughing, he stepped ashore a moment later and shook the gravely extended hands of the general officers. Wide-eyed, the admiral looked out to sea.

  The departure was at six o'clock that evening. For the third time, the craft was atop the Y253 and the crew were already on board. Brose sat on his bunk in the sleeping quarters and put the photographs of his wife and family in his pocket. Moments later he brought them out again and tore them up. His eyebrows raised, he looked at the shreds of paper between his feet. He looked at them and thought nothing. There was a gleaming sky, blown quite clear of everything, in his head. When he looked up, somebody was standing in front of him and said that he was to take him to the admiral.

  Brose followed him along the plastered corridors; it was as though they had become just as long as in his dream. He was astonished that they made it to the admiral's room. The admiral was sitting at his desk.

  'Take a seat, Brose.'

  Brose sat down and he marvelled, one way or another, at his own presence in the air, on earth. The admiral was silent for more than a minute and looked at Brose's throat incessantly.

  'In a few days' time,' he then began, 'the war'll be finished. Others have discovered that the Beast was going to travel, what route he would take and which ship. Staking their lives, scores of agents have been at it for months for this. Their work's unthinkable without the totality of our intelligence apparatus, which in its turn is unthinkable without state government. When it comes down to it, the death of the Beast will be the doing of our entire wretched nation. But the central role, Brose, is the one you play:

  No, thought Brose, the order I was given does that. He managed to think: but that's my own will - and went on listening.

  'One of those agents,' the admiral said, 'met his death, but this death was not an important one. He could also have got away with his life. He played a game. We all play a game - except for you. You are the only one who knows in advance that he will die, irrevocably.'

  I do? thought Brose.

  'And this is why you die a different kind of death; not a hero's death, for you're not doing it voluntarily, but a death with the force of a law of nature.' The admiral dug his monocle under a nail, and continued: 'In a few weeks' time we'll all be back home again. Except for you. Most of us still have a relative somewhere, or a friend. All of my own family are still alive; I'm a rich man: they didn't have to die like dogs in the cities, like yours did. But the one who has nobody any more, he too will find a wife, soon enough, and have children. Don't get me wrong, Brose. In a few years' time, probably even sooner, all of us will really have forgotten the war. This rock will change into a fairy-tale holiday resort for millionaires. I drew up the plans for this myself and they have been approved. Further things have been approved. All over the world, plans are being laid for the next war, and when it breaks out, about twenty years hence, this one will have become completely pointless: our victory too, the death of the Beast as well. And in the meantime, we'll all be lying in bed with women again, have parties, be drunk, earn money, buy cars and go on holiday.'

  The admiral looked him in the face and narrowed his eyes a little.

  'But when we think of you, Brose - and very seldom this will be - it'll be to us as though we're looking into a different world, and shivers will run down our spines. We will see you, all of iron, standing in immeasurable space, for ever. In you, I will have immortalised war, for your soul is unable to go anywhere. And then we'll put our beautiful cars by the side of the road and for minutes on end we'll be incapable of driving on. We'll see the tarmac shimmering and smell the woods - but somewhere you will exist, made of iron, part of all possible scents, of the wind, beyond all forests...'

  Filled with people, explosives, soundings and messages, the Y253 made its way at a depth of fifteen feet through the ocean to the area the Beast would travel through. Though no one knew of his promotion, Brose had eaten with the officers. No last repast: the usual fare. With the exception of one single officer from the base, all the faces were unfamiliar to him - incomprehensible, reticent faces from the fatherland. Little was said. Sailors everywhere stood with their faces to the walls and checked the instruments among the pipes and wiring, the nerves and bloodvessels of the vibrating ship.

  At nine o'clock he was given a cup of coffee; he slumped forwards on to the table and fell asleep. The doctor checked his pulse and had him taken to his bunk.

  From one direction, the convoy of the Beast approached, from another, at rectangles to it, Brose, in unfathomably deep sleep, five metres below water, surrounded in iron.

  He woke at four in the morning. The officer from the base was standing in front of his bunk.

  Surprised, Brose sat up. He existed. His leather suit hung over a chair. While he dressed, the officer sat on the bunk, his head in his hands.

  Brose stepped into the trousers and didn't believe a jot of it that he existed. It had to be his imagination. A few times in his life he had thought about it and had doubted. Now he was sure. The others were the ones who existed; he did not. Even in the days when his father was still reciting from the Odyssey, when the firecrackers and Japanese thunderclaps were lying ready, he had felt that he didn't exist: that somewhere there must be a world where he belonged and where he could exist, but that he had lost it, that losing his way, he had roamed beyond it, and that now he only existed as an intermediate form, a transition, a thing of the imagination in between two He went along with the officer to the commander, a stranger from the fatherland. On a map, he was shown the spot where they were in the ocean, the supposed position of the Beast and, one more time, the route he was to follow when the time had come. Until nine o'clock in the morning, the Y253 would still be transporting him in the craft, but then she would be in range of the outermost cordons and would no longer be able to surface. Not a word was spoken that was not relevant. While the sailors were helping him get into his straps and instruments, the vessel began to rise. Brose looked at the commander. He was standing there smoking a cigarette, watching a dial. He was a component of the submarine. When the iron ladder slid into view, he saluted, touching his cap, and turned his back.

  Silently, the Y253 slipped through the night, on top of the water, in the warm wind. The darkness lapped softly against the hull. Five, six sailors ran forwards across the dripping deck and opened the craft. Hurriedly, they helped him in and fitted the oxygen hose, but before they were able to close the dome, the officer from the base, who had come up al
ong with them, began to shake Brose's hands and to pant incomprehensible words and sentences, almost invisible in the night, allowing his head to droop, then tossing it back, mumbling, panting, weeping. And Brose nodded back, weeping, open-mouthed, all

  When the fog in his head dispersed, everything was empty; the dome was over his head and behind him the steel creature was twisting down its manhole cover. All of a sudden, he felt the boundless night around him, the world in which he didn't exist. And as everything began to rise, left and right, and the water lapped his dome a moment and then rose above him - in that silence Brose suddenly knew that man is an animal in space, dividing gods and joined in battle with them, his mind turning into machines. With his head in the dome, deep under water already, his teeth began to chatter in the face of the immensity of the miracle he suddenly saw.

  He saw man drop in across the silent earth, full of restlessness, thoughts and words. In a flash, he saw him live among the animals, erecting mysterious signs and fires to heaven, and then gradually he saw the words step forth from his head, phantoms slowly becoming visible in all the plains and vales as machines, vast factories, power stations - cryptic, unfathomable extensions to his body: his legs that thought themselves into being wheels, his arms into ships, aircraft and cannons, his skin into helmets and bunkers, his heart into electricity, and his ears and eyes into radar and telescopes. A smoking, swirling, sparking human body of steel, stretched out over the earth, in it, under water and tumbling through the air, his own words like bombs and raining down fire upon

  Open-mouthed, gliding deep through the black water, Brose looked at the decorated man: standing, legs wide apart, his face turned to the East, on top of a decomposing monster with wolf's eyes and Christ-hands, a space for his eyes and a map beneath the roof of his skull, grown invisible beneath the weapons and tools of his deep faith, a roaring tree of light, a fire-god of the stake.