“The mist has not disappeared completely,” he said once he was outside. He sniffed loudly, drawing mucus up his nose, and thought: “If I don’t buy myself some more cod liver oil soon, I will definitely catch a cold. But I keep forgetting. I used up the last of it a week ago. The deficiency makes itself known after about eight days.” Walking on, he wrung his arms around in his coat to force the sleeves of his jacket into place.
In the alleyway he paused for a moment in front of Bep Spanjaard’s house, and looked at the lighted windows before ringing the bell. He heard laughter and loud shouts of something, but could not make out what. The door was opened with great force and slammed against the wall of the stairwell.
“Frits,” he shouted. At the top of the stairs stood Jaap Elderer and a young man he did not know. “Oh yes,” Jaap yelled, “of course. If we were to say: bah, bah, here comes Frits, that would be unkind.” “Fine, thank you, and you?” he asked loudly, once Frits reached the landing, “this is Eduard.” Frits shook the stranger’s hand. The young man was stocky and wore spectacles with thick, dark frames. His black, bristly hair stood out stiffly at the back and sides. His face was round, without an angular spot to it. The eyes were small, the nose short, and his lips were broad and thin. “A person with his looks shouldn’t go wearing a bow tie,” Frits thought. He looked at the black tie, speckled with white, which hung crookedly at his collar. “What was the name again?” Frits asked. “Eduard Hoogkamp,” the young man said in a toneless whisper. “You are a real dolt,” Frits said to himself.
The three entered the room together. Bep and Joosje were seated on either side of the potbellied stove. Across from them were two empty chairs. Jaap and the young man who had introduced himself as Hoogkamp each picked up a chair and made room for Frits, who sat down between them on a little bench he took from the corner. “Five little Indians around the fire,” he said. He pulled out his wallet, removed a one-guilder note and held it out to Bep. “Here you are,” he said, “or was it more than that?” “There is no admission at the door here,” said Jaap, “but refreshments are mandatory.” Bep took the guilder without a word.
“What is the first thing someone will say?” Frits thought. “It’s impossible to guess, yet still there’s no harm in trying.” Everyone remained silent. “Bep hasn’t spoken, and Jaap hasn’t really either,” he thought. “Just a moment ago, right before I got here, someone said something and they’re all still thinking about it. That’s what it is.”
“Well, well, Mr van Egters,” Jaap said, “what is the weather like outside?” “Foggy, my liege, my lord,” Frits replied. “Aha,” Jaap said, looking around with an expression of triumph, “how lovely is the onset of spring, when everything starts growing again. I have already seen the coltsfoot in flower, now we must only wait for the Michaelmas daisy, then we’re finished with the whole thing. Yes, yes, allez, allez, oy oy oy, wise words and true, neighbour.” “Holy Christ,” Frits thought, “I’ve barely come in the door.” “Why don’t we actually talk about something?” he said. “If anyone knows of anything, let them speak.” “What’s wrong, don’t you like flowers?” Jaap asked, tilting his head and grinning. “You disappoint me; you disappoint me terribly.” “Oh, stop it, stop it,” Bep said, giggling. Hoogkamp cleared his throat. “And now I’m stuck here from nine to eleven,” Frits thought.
“The miracle of the flowers,” Jaap went on, waggling his head back and forth. “When you look closely, the way those stamens and pistils swell!” Lifting his head high he said, in a tone as though reading it aloud: “That is, in fact, a most wondrous thing. Then come the busy little bees…” Bep and Frits burst out laughing. “Oh yes, oh yes,” Jaap said, smacking his lips.
“Let’s see about a little coffee,” said Bep, filling the cups from a green enamelled pot that she took from the stove. “Not for me,” Frits said. “Me neither,” said Hoogkamp. “You must remember, he was ill only recently,” Jaap said. “The only thing to be done about it is to join in,” Frits thought.
“The atmosphere here this evening is exceeding stale,” he said. “Joosje and Bep are women, they may remain silent if they wish. But Mr Hoogkamp, it is time for you to tell us a story from the annals of life itself.” “Now we’ll get to hear what a dolt you really are,” he thought. “Well, nothing really comes to mind at the moment,” Hoogkamp said with a smile. “This is not getting us anywhere,” Frits thought. “You are quite right not to accept coffee,” he said, “I’m not taking any either.” “God help us,” he thought, “how awful. Now move on.” “Jaap, do tell me,” he said, “how things stand with your hair loss.” “Jesus,” Joosje said.
“It’s growing well,” Jaap said, running a hand over his hair. “No, that subject is bound to bog down,” Frits thought. “Still, go on with it.” “I should like to draw a distinction,” he said. “I would like to divide baldness into three categories: baldness due to an illness with an indirect effect on hair growth, typhoid fever for example—” “Don’t let me forget to tell you about that bet,” Jaap said. “Then,” Frits continued, “we have baldness as a result of a disease of the hair or the subcutaneous fat, and thirdly there is baldness due to old age. And if you ask me, I believe that yours is a case of number two: a hair disease.”
“Have you heard the one about the fellow who says to his friend: you’re not healthy, I bet you have anaemia?” Jaap asked. “So he says: I bet you have anaemia. No, come on, the other fellow says. Sure as sure can be, the first one says, would you like to bet? They bet twenty-five guilders on it and the second fellow goes to the doctor for a check-up. The first one waits outside. After a while his friend comes out of the office, skipping and dancing”—he spread his arms as though taking flight—“and he shouts: Ha! I won! I have stomach cancer!”
Bep and Frits laughed. Joosje curled her lips in a smile, but Hoogkamp’s expression remained unchanged. “When did I hear that one before?” Frits thought. “With another disease in it. It wasn’t that long ago. It’s all the same thing.” “Fine, you can tell us all that,” he said, “to divert attention from the crux of it, but in your case it is a hair disease.”
“Still, old people don’t necessarily go bald,” said Joosje. “My grandfather had a full head of hair, all the way up to the end.” “And yet, dead,” Frits said, “there is nothing to be done about it.” “My grandfather is still alive,” Hoogkamp said slowly. “He still has plenty of hair on his head too.” “Hair or no,” Frits said, “once they’re past sixty they should all be put down. Painlessly.” “Come on, stop it,” Joosje said.
“Yes, really,” Frits went on, “no misguided leniency. That is foolishness. Old people are a plague. As soon as they have trouble walking, or start to befoul themselves, or complain or make a mess at the table—off with them! A blow to the base of the skull with a length of sturdy pipe and then straight into the lime pit. Am I right, Bep?” “I’ve never had any problems with old people,” Bep said.
“Whether you like it or not,” Frits continued, “they are a burden. Mr Hoogkamp, you have not yet reached sixty, but I am sure you have a well-defined opinion on the matter; would you also be willing to say that you have never had any problems with those old encumbrances?”
“We had an elderly aunt who lived with us,” Hoogkamp said in an equable tone, as though he had spoken of his own accord and not in response to a question, “and she made sucking sounds when she read.” With a wave of the arm he seized a newspaper from the table behind him, spread it across his lap and, his eyes scanning the lines of print, made sucking noises as his lips spelt out the words. “What was that?” Joosje asked. “She did not,” Eduard said slowly, “actually read out loud, but she mumbled. Or actually, it wasn’t mumbling, it was a sort of…” He rested his chin in his hand and fell silent.
“And what did you do then, Eduard?” Jaap asked. “Me?” Eduard said. “Nothing. It was a real chore for her, that passing away. It went on for more than ten years. She took her own sweet time about it.”
“Ma
ybe you’re not such a bad fellow after all,” Frits thought. “No, old people, that is a lost cause,” he said. “My thoughts exactly,” Jaap said. “I went to my grandfather’s funeral today. That’s right, he’s off the twig.” “The old one, the stingy one?” Frits asked. “Why didn’t you say so before? I love funerals. Or are you pulling my leg? Did you actually go to a funeral today?”
“Of course,” Jaap said, “you need to understand that I tend not to direct much attention towards my own suffering. It is a sore loss for the family. It’s hard for me to talk about it. Leave me alone.” He raised his head, shook it briskly, pursed his lips and said: “That poor, poor man.”
“No, come on, are you kidding me?” Frits asked. “Was it that grandpa, the one you visited in the hospital a few times?” “Exactly,” Jaap answered. “You got the day off,” Frits said, “didn’t you?” “Of course,” Jaap said. “Relatives in the first remove, or isn’t that the first remove?” He produced a pouch of tobacco and began rolling a cigarette.
“Was it a fine funeral?” Frits asked. “This is the third time already,” said Joosje, “that I’m having to listen to this.” “Certainly,” Jaap said, “I realize, sweetheart, that it is an ordeal, but try to think of me.” Turning back to Frits, he said: “First we went to Voetstraat. A very proper funeral parlour. You come in and there’s a book waiting for you to sign. Nicely bound in black, very austere.” “Was it a second-class funeral?” Frits asked. “No, third class, but still quite lovely. We sat there for about half an hour, until everyone arrived, then this tall fellow came in”—he imitated the man’s walk by twisting his torso back and forth and rolling his eyes at the ceiling—“who said: My name is Horen, I am leading the service today. Will you accept my deepest condolences? Will those present please follow me to the chapel? Then you go in single file to the chapel, like a herd of silly sheep. The coffin is there, in a sort of alcove. Everyone sits down and they play a little tra-la-li-tra-lah-lah on the organ and then, with your hands clasped behind your back, you walk past. It’s an open coffin, covered in plate glass. You’re supposed to pause for a moment and say something. For example: his suffering is over. Or: He looks so natural. That’s always a good one. Although maybe not in this case, because his neck was puffed up even thicker than his head.”
“How old was your grandfather, then?” Frits asked. “He reached the blessed age of seventy-six,” Jaap replied. “With a crust on his scalp, this thick.” He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger a good inch apart. “That’s rather distasteful, Jaap,” Hoogkamp said. “A crust?” Frits asked. “What do you mean?” “Well,” Jaap said, “in the hospital they gave him blood transfusions all the time. The blood was lost as fast as it went in, otherwise he would have burst like a balloon; but it seemed to all clot up around his head. A neck almost as broad as his shoulders: this huge crop. And a thick crust on the top of his head, as though it had broken through his scalp and solidified.”
“What did the organ play?” Frits asked. “I’m not sure,” Jaap said, “you know, I’m not that well versed when it comes to music. When it was over, though, that fellow came back again. Pulls shut a curtain in front of the coffin. So they can drag him away on the other side. He reads a list of names for the cars in the procession. Outside they’re standing in two neat rows, hats held in front of their stomachs. I was in the last car and I looked back through the rear window. The doors were barely closed when those fellows ran over to a little Fiat and climbed in, all eight of them. It races off right away. If you didn’t know that and you got to the cemetery at Veldrust, you’d think: it’s a blooming miracle, the same fellows again, still with their hats in their hands. But they actually raced around the funeral procession at top speed, to get there first. Then you go to the chapel again, at the cemetery this time. Another organ plays and that fellow says: Slowly now… yes! Then they’ve got the coffin on their shoulders.”
“It’s amazing that no one else is saying anything,” Frits thought. “As though the two of us were here alone.” “Did the coffin go down with one of those wooden scaffolds, with a motor on it?” he asked. “Sort of like: bzzzzzz?” “Yes, that’s great, isn’t it?” Jaap said. “How did they do that in the olden days? Ropes, wasn’t it?” “Yes,” Frits said. “The trick was to lay the coffin down straight in the hole. Not on its side, and not vertically either. Otherwise it’s so nasty for the family. Down at the bottom are two little beams the coffin rests on, that makes it easier to pull up the ropes.”
“Don’t you think that’s a wonderful moment, when the coffin goes down?” Jaap asked. “Now someone else really has to say something,” Frits thought, “otherwise I won’t be able to stand it any more.” “At cheap funerals,” he said, “they must have tipped them over sometimes. So that they ended up on their side, or standing on their head.”
“Do you people know,” Hoogkamp asked suddenly, “that sometimes, when they dig people up, they find them in a different position from the one they were buried in? People who were only apparently dead?” “Is that true?” Jaap asked. “Yes, definitely,” Hoogkamp went on, “it’s less than one in a hundred, but it does happen.” “You’re no easy one to figure out,” Frits thought. He looked at Joosje and Bep, who had been sitting motionless for some time now, listening. “I can’t imagine,” he said, “that such a thing could still happen these days.” “It can occur when the victim has had a massive electrical shock,” Hoogkamp went on. “In such cases, there may be no more perceptible signs of life. Not even with a stethoscope. But if they respirate them artificially for five hours, sometimes the life comes back into them.” “I get it now,” Jaap said, “if they stop after four hours, for example, then he goes into the box before he’s dead. That sounds like fun to me, waking up down below. Where am I? Isn’t anybody home?”
“Such a convivial evening,” Bep said. “He never talks about anything else,” said Joosje.
“There are many people,” Hoogkamp went on, “who ask to have a knife plunged into their heart, after they’re dead. That’s how afraid they are of being buried alive. Corpses have been exhumed that were all doubled up in their coffin. Or kneeling. Trying to push away the lid.”
“A losing battle,” Frits said. “Where is this headed?” he thought, “it’s much worse than I would have expected.” “Can they still see that, so many years later?” he asked. “After forty, fifty years, say?” “Twenty years,” Jaap said. “If it’s not a private grave, with a deed of sale, then they pull you up again after twenty years.” “But then your bones are already rotted away from the inside, aren’t they?” asked Frits.
“If there’s nothing special about the soil, yes,” Hoogkamp said. “But you have those strange churchyards in Friesland, and those crypts, where they don’t rot.” “They turn into mummies there,” Jaap said. “No, not always,” Hoogkamp continued, “you have two different situations. You have clay graves, which are airtight. Almost nothing happens to the corpse in those. At most a bit of fermentation. The crypts are something else again. The gases that arise during decomposition could escape, but there’s something in the atmosphere, some sort of natural gas, that prevents decay. The bodies dry out, but they don’t rot.”
They were all silent. “So do you have to go back to the chapel then?” Frits asked Jaap. “Or are you free to go wherever you like?” “No,” Jaap said, “everyone goes to the home of the deceased. That’s where the fighting starts.” “Were there fights?” Frits asked. “No, there was nothing to fight over,” Jaap replied. “No, this time there was no reason to fight. When my uncle died, last year, there wasn’t either. But they were ready for it. If there had been. We had an uncle, and everyone thought he was going to leave something behind. So it was: yes, uncle; hello, uncle and do come again, uncle. Until he died, and then there wasn’t enough left to bury him with. Only a few dirty, sucked-out briars. Goodbye uncle.”
“You two are certainly good company this evening,” Bep said. “What did he die of, your grandfather?” Frits asked. “In
ternal bleeding. His intestines had rotted away completely,” Jaap replied. “And that uncle of yours?” “My uncle? Diabetes.”
“Forward,” Frits thought, “through the fray.” “Oh, but that’s an interesting disease,” he said. “People who die of diabetes are completely swollen up and full of water. When they’re dead, the tissue bursts and it all runs out. That must produce an incredible stench. Someone told me a while ago about a lady—she had died of diabetes—who had to be carried down three flights of stairs. Very narrow stairs. And the coffin leaked. Sometimes they hoist them down too, I’ve been told, but that must look very strange.” “Messrs Plank & Shovel Ltd,” Jaap said, “for all your European removal needs.”
“Would you two please stop it,” Joosje said. “We could always have a smoke,” said Jaap. He pulled out his tobacco pouch and began rolling cigarettes. “Like one?” he asked Frits. “No,” he answered, “I have my own.” He took out his box. Jaap handed one to Joosje and Bep, and Frits rolled a cigarette for Hoogkamp.
“So now we’ve dealt with cancer and diabetes,” Frits said. “Elephantiasis, that’s a fine one too,” Jaap said. “Then you sit on your own balls, like a hassock. Truly something to behold.” Frits burst out in a high, screeching laugh, choked on the smoke in his lungs and hacked. “You know what we haven’t talked about yet, or at least only superficially?” he asked, looking at Bep and Joosje, who had not laughed along with them, “the galloping consumption.” “Maybe I’m going too far now,” he thought. “Too far. It’s almost nine thirty.”
Jaap gestured to him, pointed at Hoogkamp without the young man seeing it, and shook his head. He spelled out a few words with his lips. “Ill,” Frits made out one of them to be. “Ill,” he thought, “ill. I need to do something, say something. It needs to be erased.” “It is not the dangerous illnesses, but the distasteful ones that are hardest for one’s surroundings,” he went on. “Don’t you agree? The head cheese left by diphtheria in the oral cavity.” “Stop it, now,” Joosje said, “you two are not funny.” “Do you know what’s also terrible?” Jaap said, rubbing his hands together. “Ocular genabbi.” “Genabbi?” Frits asked. “Can you imagine, I’ve never heard of that?” “That,” said Jaap, “is when your eyes keep popping open and closed, accompanied by a very fine spray of blood.” “Oh,” Frits said, laughing, “is that what you call it?”