He answered the door himself and halted, standing silent in the doorway. 'I shall address you,' I said. 'A while ago we were on the dike and some less pleasant things took place,' I started off. 'It would not be profitable at this point to work out who's the guilty party,' I went on. 'But this afternoon we're having a tremendous club party at my place. Of course you understand that the assistant secretary cannot stay away: the entire committee must be there. It's going to be a splendid afternoon which will live in our memories for a long time to come. I shall also be making a stunning speech.'
After some persuasion he came with us. When we'd arrived back upstairs my mother brought tea and sugar frosted biscuits. After we had drunk tea a silence fell that seemed never to end. I stepped up to the window and looked at the sky. Unheeded I went downstairs to look for my brother. We're sitting upstairs and we haven't got a programme,' I said. Won't you play something on your mandolin?' 'No,' he said. 'But we haven't got a programme!' I said emphatically. 'No,' he repeated, 'I won't do it.' I continued to press him for a good while but he stuck to his refusal.
When I arrived back in the bedroom it turned out someone had opened the deep cupboard. I had locked it but had left the key in the door. I used the cupboard for two purposes: because it was so dark and quiet, I wielded my member there, or I kneaded little pots, jugs and ashtrays from modelling clay which were left there to dry. A bright light without a shade lit the small space so I could close the door behind me completely. (Most times I would lock it from the inside.)
They had all forced their way in and had brought out pots in order to look at them in daylight. We won't break them,' Werther said. He studied the base of an ashtray on which he had discovered the inscription T.A.P.F. 'What does that mean, Tapf?' he asked. It was an abbreviation of The Antiquity Pottery Factory, but I didn't dare to say this.
'They're just letters,' I replied. 'But I see the same ones each time,' he insisted, for he was having a look at the base of the other objects too.'Quite possible,' I said. 'But we'd better put everything away again.'
They were showing signs of putting the items back again when Werther dropped a little pot that fell to bits, unrecognisable, with lots of powder forming in the process. 'That's a pity,' he said and stood there looking at it. I began to pace to and fro, fretfully. When everything had been put back in its place again I locked the cupboard, put the key in my pocket and went and sat on the bed. Again a silence forced its way into the room.
We're going out again now,' I said and switched off the lights. We stomped down the stairs and sidled in silence to the front door. 'I've still got some homework to do,' I said dully. They halted just beyond the doorway. 'You'd better go away now,' I said, 'I'm staying here. You've got horrid habits.'
Dirk went off to his house but Werther and his sister continued to stand there. Without a word, I thumped him hard, which made him cry out; I then quickly jumped inside again and shut the door with a bang.
In the empty bedroom I stood at the window a long time. Needles rained down sparsely from the fir branches. 'The silence sails like a ship,' I thought.
It was raining next day. In the afternoon, after school, I found a note in the letter box that proved to be from Werther. The text ran: 'Elmer. Don't bother coming to my place any more. You thump because you're mean. The club's finished because I don't want to any more. Werther'. It had been written in pencil on half a sheet from an exercise book.
At once, I called Dirk to come outside and showed him the paper but moved it about and kept it exactly at a distance he would just not be able to read from. 'This's something secret that's just arrived,' I said. 'It's a letter. We must have a meeting at once.'
We made our way to the box room. Here I let him read the text. 'As a good member of the club you've understood, of course, what the matter is here,' I said. 'He's a frightful spy. He has stolen into the club to tell all to the enemy: that's how he wants to smash the club. He's been at it a while already. He has gone and opened a cupboard at the chairman's to chuck nice things to bits. That was to muck up the club. We have to bury the list of members in a secret place.'
Dirk continued to peer at the note but said nothing. While reading he picked with nonchalant motions at a scab on his knee.
'Did you know a club with two members is a very good thing?' I asked. 'It's really even better than three members.' Dirk dropped the note and felt along the ground until he had found an empty treacle tin; he tried to lift its lid with his nails. All of a sudden I began to hate him.
'You have to be got rid of too,' I said. 'You've been put up to things as well; I can see that clear as anything. You, too, want the club to end. From now on you're suspended.' Dirk said nothing and went on messing with the tin. I got up.
'You've got to get out of the meeting,' I said. 'If you want to get into the club again - but that's very difficult - then you must send the chairman a letter and beg forgiveness. Would you do that?'
I left him no opportunity to reply but began to kick him, holding back. 'You just ruin everything,' I said. When he didn't get up, I drew him upright by his arms and pushed him outside. I watched him go as he trundled off in silence.
It wasn't raining any more but the atmosphere was damp; there was no wind though banks of mist slid past slowly above the houses. I went back into the box room. On a piece of cardboard I wrote: 'There are enemies of the club everywhere'. I buried it, folded up tiny, in a shallow spot which I marked with an elder branch I had picked.
I no longer spoke with Dirk and Werther for some time. Because the cold weather wouldn't go away, I no longer visited the box room but made my way frequently to the loft. Here I would sit on my own for long periods at a stretch. I called the space 'The Enchanted Castle' and nailed a cardboard sign to the door bearing those words drawn on it in crayon.
On a Wednesday afternoon I once let in a little grey cat that had been sitting in the rain on the roof, coughing. I locked the creature up in the drawer of a large cabin trunk and left it there for hours. When I opened the drawer again, the bottom, pasted with floral wallpaper, was soiled with sticky slime. I threw the animal back on to the roof across which, coughing in spasms, it disappeared from view. 'It has coughed and must therefore be tormented,' I said out loud, watching the cat go through one of the little windows I would often stand looking out at to think the while.
If I had nothing to do I would keep myself occupied in the loft shattering the soft plaster on the wall, hacking at it with an axe. I would become sad each time and, if I had my glass cutter on me, I would try to scratch my name into a little window pane but this failed most of the time; I would go outside again then.
In the street behind ours, in a house the back garden of which bordered ours, a boy called Maarten Scheepmaker had come to live. When he had been living there only a little while, I was busy making a fire one afternoon. He approached and asked whether I was allowed to. That was how we got to know one another. I could visit him at his home.
He was the same age as I, but smaller and stouter. He went about dressed very slovenly, and he didn't have his lank, greasy hair cut short enough. He already had a thin moustache as well. He bore a strong body odour which I ascribed to the fact that he went about as heavily dressed indoors as he did in the street and kept his scarf knotted round his neck too. I liked visiting him for he had strange, noteworthy habits.
In his little room facing the street crossbones hung from thin wires at shoulder height, and beneath a glass bell-jar, on a tuft of white cotton wool, lay the breasts struck off from a pink porcelain woman's statue: its ruined remains were lying in a box beside it. Around and above his bed, in the middle of the room, he had made a canopy from cloths and carpets and the walls were pasted with panoramas that had been cut out of magazines and picture postcards of sunsets above mountain landscapes.
Except for the bed and a single chair there was no furniture in the room because all the remaining space was taken up by junk one had to pick one's way through: he liked to tinker and build.<
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I regarded him as an inventor. At a time when I'd only recently known him, he told me one afternoon that it was possible to catch a lot of fish in the ring canal by causing an explosion under water. In my presence, he prepared a complicated machine consisting of an old cocoa tin in which two nails he had magnetised had been mounted; spanning the two tips was a chain of iron filings. An electric wire had been connected to each of the nails which, well insulated, left the tin in such a manner that there was no surrounding space remaining which water or air could penetrate. He had first poured a thick layer of a potassium chloride and sugar mixture on the bottom of the tin.
'That's one of the biggest exploders,' he said.
His intention, once he had submerged it in the water, was to transmit electricity from a battery which had to set the iron filings aglow after which the charge would ignite. We were ready with our preparations when his mother came in.
She was a small, ugly woman with a tired face and drab, shapeless hair. At first I had thought her dangerous but she was amiable. She had heard us talk of our plan and she expressed her concern over it. What am I to say at Elmer's when you have been hauled off?' she asked. D'you know a number of people have been shot for things like that7' She forbad the execution of the plan and left the room again.
I could not understand her pronouncement but, repeating the words to myself, I felt an oppressive gloom rising. I no longer desired the plan to go ahead. We'd better do something else,' I said. 'A club needs founding, for that matter, perhaps you know that too. That's very important. Then we'll stay here and found it at once.'
I spoke these sentences softly but hurriedly while looking Maarten cautiously in the face. 'The chairman has to be someone who's already made clubs before,' I said:'he'll appoint a maker at once. That's someone who's good at building things. He makes all kinds of things for the committee and the chairman, things they can keep. He must also make a lamp that can't go out.' (I believed it possible that such a thing existed.)
Maarten didn't appear to be listening. 'Perhaps you don't like a club,' I said knowingly, 'but that was just the same with me, too.' Without saying a word, Maarten inspected the tin. He declared he wanted the explosion to go ahead.
At dusk we went to the water's edge with all the necessaries. When he connected the power, nothing happened however. Hauling it up, only the electric wires surfaced: the tin with all the components had disappeared. I showed myself to be disappointed and put forth my conclusion that the assembly had been poor so that everything had worked loose before the power had been connected. Maarten, however, asserted enthusiastically that the explosion had most definitely occurred but had taken place at great depth so that the gasses had condensed and dissolved before they were able to reach the surface. He spattered as he spoke and wiped saliva from his chin for he was dribbling with excitement.
For a moment I began to doubt whether the machine had ignited or not; again, however, I reached the conclusion that this hadn't happened but I did not want to say it anew. I concerned myself with the question whether Maarten believed his own explanation. Whether or not this was the case I could not ascertain but I understood that in either case there would have to be misery.
We retraced our steps; Maarten asked me to come inside with him but I said goodbye. In the loft I began to draw up a document. At the top of the paper I wrote: 'The new club Maarten must join. He has to become a member'. I continued to sit there thinking but couldn't think of anything else to write down. I folded the paper up and put it in a flat cardboard box; I hid this under a roofing tile next to one of the roof lights.
On another occasion, a Saturday afternoon, Maarten presented me with the possibility of manufacturing a rocket. He still had a little aircraft bomb made of wood lying about somewhere; it had been painted silver and had four fins at the rear; it was a toy from way back.
He drilled a hollow in the rear part into which he hammered a tube. This he filled with the same mixture as had been used in the previous experiment; to prevent-it running out, he sealed it by sticking a paper disc to it through which he threaded cotton yam soaked in methylated spirit.
'Does it go at once with a bang or does it first begin to hiss?' I asked. 'Both,' he replied. 'It's bound to go some twenty-eight metres or so into the sky, or even more.'
In the garden we built a pedestal from a few bricks; it ended up on the paving behind the kitchen. He set the rocket down on its tail fins, nose in the air, and put a little ball of paper underneath which, with a serious face, he lit; then we stepped back circumspectly.
The flame reached the fuse and the charge, and fire began to shoot from the tube, hissing. The rocket tipped over, continued to hiss a moment and then fell silent. Some smoke spiralled up, dispersing rapidly. 'It's empty,' I said. Maarten picked it up. A grey-blue, white-edged scorch mark had appeared on the paving stones.
'There was just enough force to make it fall over,' I said, but Maarten didn't agree with this. 'It was caught on something,' he declared with certainty. He maintained, and stuck to it, that both when standing upright as well as when it had ended up lying down, the bomb had been held back by something which had prevented it from taking off. I did not believe this but I didn't wish to say so.
'Let's fill it up once more and then set it off again,' I said, but he rejected this proposal. 'I have to check everything properly first,' he said self-importantly.'Besides, it has to cool down too. Or did you think it didn't get hot inside?'
He had taken no precautions whatsoever to keep the experiment a secret so that his father who had come to the backroom window had seen everything. He didn't come outside however and didn't even make a single gesture. He was a fat, heavy man with puffy cheeks and bags under his eyes; he had short, bristly hair. I thought he resembled an old mouse from a story book I still possessed. He stared, dreamy and abstracted, into the gardens.
It was late in the afternoon and it was already getting dark. In vain I tried to stave off the sadness that was approaching.
Maarten inspected the rear of the bomb and picked at it. I longed to trip him up or to destroy something of his clothing: he would then, so I thought, begin to cry in an almost soundless manner.
With the announcement that I had to eat, I left and made my way to the loft where I continued to hack at the wall with as little noise as possible. I scraped the grit into a little mound; I began to hack away with a purpose and made a hole which I excavated with a piece of iron. Then I inscribed an old suitcase label with my name and date and I stuck it, rolled up, into the opening. Finally, I wanted to stuff the hole with an old newspaper. As I was tearing it to pieces I ran into a death notice, some lines of which I read mechanically. The final sentence, before the signatories, ran: 'He has accomplished his long pilgrimage'. I had to think about this a long time. Inwardly, I repeated the words slowly and began to sing the lines softly. I tore out the notice, chewed it up fine, and pushed the wad into the gap in the wall. Then I looked for the glass cutter but couldn't find it. While leaning my forehead against one of the little windows and stirring my member, I listened keenly to the sounds in the house. 'The day is full of signs,' I repeated continually, inwardly. I considered inviting Maarten up to the loft.
On another Saturday afternoon, we were sitting in his room. We hit on the plan to go and catch ducks in the park on the watercourse running alongside the cemetery. Few people went there in autumn and winter. Maarten turned out to have an air gun with which we could shoot darts or lead pellets but though they penetrated with ease a cardboard box we were firing at in practice, the weapon had no great reach. Maarten, however, was convinced that we could strike birds, other animals and even people with it, mortally so. 'You thought you couldn't shoot someone dead with this, did you?' he asked. 'It's not even that difficult. It just depends where you hit them.'
There were, he asserted, eight spots on the human body where a shot had a fatal outcome. I asked him which these were but he gave no answer to this. 'You can certainly aim a hundred metres off
,' he said, 'and then it still has force.' We went to shoot an apple; the darts and pellets didn't pass right through the fruit but disappeared, barely damaging the peel, into the core where they were hard to find. I doubted the power of the weapon.
To gain some idea of the gun's possibilities we then began to shoot at each other according to rules we had agreed. Each standing on opposite sides of the room, we would aim at one another beneath the canopy: thus it was impossible to hit each other in the face. We used darts. By drawing lots, it fell to Maarten to fire the first shot.
He hit me in the middle of my chest. The dart, having pierced my clothes undamaged, struck a small, perfectly round speck in my flesh. It hardly bled and barely hurt at all. It brought me to anger, but I hid this.
I myself took a long time to aim but I knew that the shot would fail. I struck Maarten on the right half of his chest but even his skin had not been touched. When I walked up to him to investigate the result, the little projectile turned out to have been arrested by a pack of papers in his inside pocket. It had pierced almost all the pages. I gained the desire to take these papers from him and make him plead for their return, for I believed they contained secrets. I didn't touch them however.
In the evening, after dinner time, when darkness had fallen, we went on our way. I was allowed to bear the gun and wore it next to my bare skin.
The park, which wasn't surrounded by fences, lay before us, deserted. Because it had only been laid out a few years previous nothing had grown tall yet: we had an overview of the clumps of shrubs and low trees. It was drizzling.
We left the cinder path and walked across the edge of grass so our footsteps became almost inaudible.
Soon we reached a spot where scores of ducks were sitting hunched together on the shore. I cocked the gun and shot into the gathering. A few ducks were startled by the sound and made a few steps in the direction of the water but nothing else happened. I loaded a second dart and gave the gun to Maarten. At his shot all the birds fled quacking into the air. We searched on but there wasn't another duck anywhere. In the end we roamed around a bit to see whether something of interest might be found anywhere in the park but we didn't run into a thing.
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy Page 30