“No, of course not,” Louis said.
“So they call the police,” Frits continued. “Two plainclothesmen come, punch in a window, open the door and go inside, very carefully. Not a sound. Completely silent, not a sound. They walk across the thick, soft carpet. Then they get to the foot of the stairs. There, on the first step, is the old man’s head, staring at them. They’re scared stiff. They draw their revolvers, examine the head, then start climbing.” He paused for a moment. “Well, go on,” Louis said.
“Some ways up the stairs,” Frits went on, “they find an arm, and on the landing half of a foot. At two other locations they find more body parts. So they move on, step by step, and start searching the top floor. Finally, they hear this hideous shriek, as if people are slowly being torn to pieces. They find a little bedroom and go into it. On the floor, beside the bed, amid a bunch of torn bedclothes, they find the rest of what they needed to complete the picture. And in the corner is this big, black dog. How do you like that?”
“It’s incredible,” Louis said slowly, “really stupendous.” “The man had fallen ill,” Frits continued, “and I think his housekeeper had taken a week’s holiday. So he must have fallen ill right away. That’s what showed up in the investigation, the post-mortem. Once he was dead, the dog had nothing to eat, all the cupboards were closed. So what else could he do?”
“It’s an exquisite story,” Louis said. As he spoke he kept his pencil rotating across the table, first holding it upright, then letting it slide between two fingers and thumb, then tumble round. “It’s a real corker, it almost reminds me of the story about the doctor and those two children.” “How does that one go?” Frits asked.
“It’s perfect,” Louis said, “so completely realistic, nothing contrived about it. A father had this son, a little boy, and sometimes he picked him up by the head. So one time he does it again and—pop!—the neck breaks. Dead. They call the doctor, the doctor says: The child’s dead, how did it happen? I don’t know, the father says, we were horsing around. But something strange must have happened, the doctor says. No, not at all, says the father, all I did was pick him up—like this—and he picks up the little boy’s sister, his twin sister, by the head, to show how it went. Pop! Her neck broken too. So at least they knew how it happened. Good one, isn’t it?” They laughed.
“What does that studio look like, anyway?” Frits asked. “We must keep talking,” he thought, “conversation mustn’t lag.” They got up and went into the hall. Passing the kitchen, they entered the last door on the right and came into a room with canvases leaning against the walls on all sides. Five piles of portfolios lay on the floor in the middle of the room. “What’s that?” Frits wondered, walking over to view a little panel he’d seen on the mantelpiece. “That’s quite something,” he thought. The miniature showed an old woman sitting at a window, seen from the perspective of a sitting room. “Paralysis,” he murmured. The woman’s mouth sagged crookedly, her tongue and bottom lip stuck out slightly.
He examined the little triangular crack in one of the windowpanes. “How sharp, what craftsmanship,” he thought. “It’s amazing.”
“Are you coming?” Louis asked. He was holding the door by the knob. “Quickly,” he said, “otherwise one of them will sneak past you.” Further down the hall he opened another door. In a somewhat smaller room, four cats were sitting up straight on a table, their tails curled around their front legs. A shadeless table lamp was on above the fireplace. “Turn off the light for a moment, just to rattle them,” Frits requested. Louis flipped the switch. In the darkness, eight green eyes stared at them. Through the mica windows of the stove came a pale, red light. “There’s a fire going in here,” Frits said. “Of course,” Louis said, “otherwise they’d get cold.”
Once they were back in his room, Louis lowered the bed. “I’m going to grab some sleep,” he said. He undressed and climbed into bed in his underwear. Frits picked up a green vase from the windowsill, held the opening to his ear, ticked his nails against the glazing and sat down. He looked at his watch. Nine fifteen. “The evening is half-finished,” he thought.
After a few minutes of silence, Louis said: “It’s about time you were going.” “Excuse me,” Frits said. “We’ll be leaving now.” “Turn off the light on your way out, would you?” Louis said, holding out his hand. “Mr Egters, the pleasure was all mine.”
“Looking at this dispassionately,” Frits mused once he was outside, “one could say: we still have half the evening left. Yet that would be an unfounded representation of affairs. The evening has been wasted, nothing can alter that.”
When he arrived home, his father was sitting at the table, reading. “Any news?” he asked in English. “No, nothing,” Frits replied. The room reeked of pipe tobacco. His mother’s clothes were hanging over the arm of a chair beside the stove. “Ah,” he said to himself, “home again.” His father was staring silently into space. His right hand lay on a little book. Slowly he turned his gaze on Frits. “Please, don’t let him say anything,” Frits thought. From the back room came the occasional stifled gasp. “It’s both muted and unclear,” he said to himself, “it’s not loud enough for me to hear. I can’t hear it.” He pulled off his shoes and socks, placed them behind the stove and slipped out of the room. In the kitchen he brushed his teeth. He heard the sound of someone stumbling about in the living room; a moment later the light went out. He heard the reading light in the bedroom click on, then, thirty seconds later, click off again. “This is the earliest I’ve gone to bed in weeks,” he thought. “The Lord is my shepherd,” he said out loud, then burst out laughing and had to cough.
He examined his teeth in the shaving mirror, holding his breath to keep the glass from fogging. Then he went into his bedroom, saw that the window was open a crack and shut it, closed the curtains and undressed. He removed his underwear as well and, after taking the mirror down off the wall and placing it against a table leg, looked at himself naked. He changed the lighting by pulling the desk lamp all the way up and turning the shade to one side. After this examination he moved the mirror in such a way that, by taking a few steps back, he could view his entire person.
Mirror in hand, he went into the hall. He shivered. Careful not to make a sound, he flipped on the light switch and examined the latch on the front door. “Locked,” he mumbled, then lifted the heavy hall mirror from its nail and leaned it against the door. He stepped back and then forward again, each time arranging the mirror in a slightly different way. When his whole body came into view, he sucked in his stomach and held the little mirror in his left hand so that he could see himself fully, first from the side, then from the back. Hanging the big mirror back in place, he turned off the light and returned to his bedroom. “A loss,” he mumbled softly, “a dead loss. How can it be? A day squandered in its entirety. Hallelujah.” While uttering this final word, he studied the movement of his lips in the little mirror as he hung it back beside the door. He put on his underwear, climbed into bed and presently fell asleep.
He was walking down a road through a forest. “Stupid of me not to have put on my shoes before I left,” he said to the two ladies on either side of him. His feet were bare, and the twigs and sharp stones on the narrow wooded way forced him to proceed with caution. “Such a glorious summer,” one of the ladies said. “That’s exactly the point,” he replied. “In fact, there’s no way to be completely certain that it’s summer at all. Just look at that beech tree.” He pointed to a thick beech which, though all the trees around it bore green foliage, was itself decked in autumnal hues of brown and yellow. “How can that be?” he thought, “what possible reason could there be for that?”
A little later they found themselves in a busy neighbourhood, on their way up the stairs to a flat on an upper storey. At the top of the stairs they were met by a grey-haired lady dressed in black. As she was pouring them tea, he made the rounds, introducing himself to the others present. After having shaken hands with two old ladies, he arrived at a divan. Seated on
it were three young men, all leaning back. Two of them wore black evening attire; the third had on a pair of grey overalls. Frits approached them and saw that the heads of the two dressed in black were white as milk, as though made of plaster or gypsum; their faces were immobile, their eyes stared expressionlessly at the ceiling. Their hands, too, were of the same mineral composition, and left crumbly trails on the divan’s upholstery.
“There’s no getting around it,” he thought, and shook their hands, which they had slowly lifted to meet his. Each time the arm fell back like a block of wood. Their torsos never moved.
Then he was standing in front of the third. “He’s the size of a child of eight or nine,” he thought, “but why does his head look so horrible?” The head was almost as big as the torso, and perfectly flat on top. It was white as well, made of the same chalk-like substance. “That neck, terrible,” Frits thought. The head began rocking back and forth on a neck thin as the hose of a vacuum cleaner. The eyes, thick and bulging, moved independently of each other in separate directions. When Frits held out his hand, the creature raised its right arm. It did not end in a hand, but in a black pincer. “Help,” Frits thought, “where can I find help? What must I do?” He awoke in a sweat. “Did I hear something go bump?” he thought. “No, it’s nothing,” he said to himself. He arose and went to the kitchen for water. It was one thirty. He remained standing for a moment, listening to the silence, then crawled quickly under the covers. A few moments later he was asleep once more.
II
AT FOUR THIRTY in the afternoon of the next day, he cycled home from the office where he worked. The weather had taken a turn for the worse: banks of cloud crossed the sky at a steady pace; a few drops of rain were falling; a moderate, mild wind blew from the south. Head tilted slightly to one side, he cycled slowly through the heavy traffic.
“If the driver of one of these cars makes a mistake,” he thought, “and I am killed, the news will produce sorrow at home, a great outcry. Imagine there are no parents, then it will be sad tidings for the family at large. But what if there is no family either, who will worry their head about it then? Who?” He felt a pang in his chest and tears came to his eyes. He glanced over his shoulder. “The tail light is working,” he said to himself. Dusk settled in.
“When I get home later, my father is going to ask whether anything new and interesting happened today,” he thought. By then he was on the broad street of shops close to his house. Along the pavements, strings of pedestrians hurried by.
“They are on their way home, just like me,” he thought. “Up in the morning, back again in the evening. One morning they should all just stay at home. Have their family call in, say they have the flu.” “No,” he thought then, “not everyone can have the flu, that might seem suspicious. Four types of illness, divided up a bit cunningly, not that everyone calls in with the same excuse. They can stay at home, wear a dressing gown and read by the fire. Eat shrimp at lunchtime. Meat, potatoes and salad greens for dinner; rice pudding with berry syrup for dessert. It’s been three days since Mother asked why I don’t join an athletic club,” he said to himself. “That is exceptional.”
On the canal in front of his house, a group of children were busy testing the ice. A girl on the bank was holding the hand of a little boy, who stamped on the ice with both feet. At last she let go of him and he took several steps towards the middle. Frits, who had dismounted, walked over to them, holding the handlebars in one hand. The boy clambered quickly onto the bank. “You’d better not do that,” Frits said, “it’s thawing fast.” “But that never happens so quickly,” the girl said. “She answers me, because one must reply to even the stupidest of remarks,” he thought. The boy hopped back onto the ice.
Frits opened the door, humped his bicycle up the stairs and rested it on its back wheel in the storage cupboard. At that moment the door to the side room opened and his father, wearing a black woollen dressing gown, entered the hallway. “Good afternoon,” Frits said. “Well,” his father asked, “anything new and interesting to report?” His face was creased in a smile. “No, nothing like that,” Frits answered. “What was that?” the man asked, sticking his head out, the better to hear him. “Business as usual,” Frits said. “What?” his father asked. “The same as always,” Frits said, loudly now, almost shouting. His father, silent, crossed the hall in front of him. Frits hurried into the side room and turned off the gas fire, then followed his father into the living room.
His mother was at the table, darning socks. He greeted her, sat down on the divan and turned on the radio. A tango was playing.
“Did you remember to turn off the fire?” she asked. “No, I don’t believe I did,” his father answered, rising slowly to his feet. Frits felt as though he had a handful of dry flour in his throat that was keeping him from swallowing. “I’ve already done it,” he said, the first words coming out hoarsely. “No task too great, no job too small. We are at your service. House calls by appointment.” He crinkled his face into an expression of good cheer. A silence descended.
“I don’t know if it’s the weather,” he went on, “but today I feel extremely fit.” “When are you going to join an athletic club?” his mother asked. “I’ve written to them and signed up already,” he answered. His father stood and shuffled out of the room on his slippers.
“Today that man threw away one guilder and sixty cents’ worth of postage stamps,” his mother said. “How did that happen?” Frits asked. “God knows,” she said. “I found five ten-cent ones in the rubbish bin. It’s like he’s started to lose his senses. I think he threw them in the wastepaper basket first.” She got up and went to the kitchen.
Frits turned off the radio, which was now airing a lecture, and rolled a cigarette. Flicking his lighter, he realized it was empty; he went to replenish it in the kitchen. While he was busy filling it, his mother said: “Have you noticed how he’s wearing that new suit to rags? There’s not a crease left in it; I believe he wipes his hands on his trouser legs.”
“Tom ta tom tom, tom ta tom,” Frits sang to himself, “nothing’s good, but everything’s fine.” He screwed the top back on the lighter, blew on it to dry the wick of dripping petrol and went to the living room. His father, who had returned by then, unscrewed the stem of his pipe and cleaned the metal bore with scraps of newspaper, which he then crumpled and tossed into the coal scuttle. He viewed his handiwork, then wiped the stem on the sleeve of his suit. “Why, if he has to wipe things off on his clothing, doesn’t he use his jumper?” Frits thought, “his jumper is dark anyway.” He looked at the blue woollen sleeve sticking out from under his father’s jacket.
When the table was set, his mother came in with a platter of cod. “There might still be a bone in it here and there,” she said, “but I got most of them out.” There were potatoes, grated raw celery root, boiled endives and pink custard. After dinner Frits washed his hands and face and ate a bit of toothpaste. “The proven remedy for dried cod,” he mumbled. It was a quarter past six.
“What is the weather like?” his mother asked. “Normal,” Frits said, “not so very cold.” “When it’s cold like this,” she said, “I don’t much feel like leaving the house; Father and I were planning to go out this evening, to Annetje in Haarlem.” “That’s true,” Frits said, “you told me this morning.” “What’s it like outside now?” she asked, “is the wind very cold?” “It’s blowing, but it’s not a cold wind,” Frits said. “But what do you call cold?” she asked, “is it that humid cold?” “The air is moist,” Frits said, “but the wind is actually quite sultry.”
“Let’s go anyway,” his father said.
“Then I’ll be sure to wrap a scarf around my head,” she said, “and if it’s too cold for me, if it makes my head hurt, we’ll come back. We may be back by ten thirty, eleven o’clock.” His father fetched the coats.
When they had left he remained standing before the bookcase and rummaged through a pile of newspapers. He listened to the ticking of the clock and the sounds in t
he flat above. Suddenly his eyes focused on the masthead of a newspaper and he read the date. “Of course,” he murmured, “that is today.”
After checking his watch against the clock on the wall, he went to change. “A blue shirt goes well with this suit,” he said, tying his necktie before the mirror. “We must take care not to neglect our appearance.” In the living room he laid a note on the table; written on it in red pencil were the words: “The gymnasium is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. I’m going, just for fun.” “We shrink from nothing,” he said out loud. “It would be childish not to go. One must face one’s torments head-on. I’ll drop by Joop’s first.”
When he stepped outside the same soft, tepid wind was blowing. He first followed the route he had taken the night before, turned left after five minutes and walked along a stretch of public garden to a canal, which was crossed by a little wooden drawbridge. Here he rang the bell of a lopsided house, the old double door of which bore a layer of peeling paint. A sash was thrown open on the second floor and Joop’s head appeared. “A fine thing to behold,” Frits called out, “you would do better to place that head on the sill, better than a geranium any day.” “Catch!” Joop shouted. Frits caught a ring of keys, unlocked the upper door, turned the latch of the lower one, then made his way up a set of steep, twisting stairs. Joop led him into the living room.
The room was a commodious one, with three very large sash windows. The curtains were too narrow to cover them entirely. The ceiling rested upon heavy beams painted grey. There were posters on the walls, a miniature lime tree in a wooden tub in one corner and seats at each window. On the mantelpiece Frits noticed a bucket, directly beneath a dark spot on the ceiling.