The other man stood and left. “I trust you’ll keep me informed,” Frits said as he showed him out.
Once again he extinguished the gas fire, which he had lit for his visitor, and turned on the radio in the living room. A man was speaking about cultivating flower bulbs at home. On the other frequencies, too, he found nothing that appealed to him. He left the radio on an English channel, with the volume low. The whine of violin music was faintly audible. He spat into the stove and watched as each blob formed a brown blister on the coals for several seconds before evaporating. When puckering his cheeks produced no more saliva, he stood on his toes and passed water into the stove, but was startled by the loud plop and the cloud of fine ash that came rushing out of the hopper. He sat down on the divan and looked at his shoes. For ten minutes, he remained sitting like that. “That vapour in the room gives off a mean enough stench,” he thought.
Far away, in the distance, he heard the puffing of a train. “And so our hours pass,” he thought. He took the skin on the back of his right hand between his teeth and tugged on it. Then he went to the back room, where a mirror hung beside the corner cupboard.
“This is a reasonable mirror,” he said aloud. He combed his hair, first over his forehead, then straight back, and after that in two halves down the middle. Taking a copying pencil he drew a thin moustache on his upper lip. He whistled the French national anthem, stamped greasy fingerprints on the mirror with his right hand and went back to the radio; a Dutch station was airing the news. “You are listening to ‘The King Football March’,” the announcer said when the news was over.
“What I should do now,” he thought after turning off the set, “is bolt the door, roll around on the floor, shouting ‘oh! oh!’ the whole time, then take an iron bar and smash all the windows. When the upstairs and downstairs neighbours come and kick in the door, I’ll go into a swoon. And then I’ll be off to the institution.” “Cheerie-choop-choop-falderie,” he sang quietly, “cheerie-choop-choop-faldera.”
A woodlouse was making its way across the wallpaper. He took a match and struck it so close to the bug that he was able to press the match head against the insect at the moment of ignition. It shrivelled and fell to the floor.
“A painful yet swift execution,” he said aloud. “Pity is to be spurned. Still, it is a sin,” he continued, raising his index finger, “for I have killed a living creature.”
He heard someone entering the hall. “Is this the private torture chamber?” asked Louis Spanjaard as he entered. “Is this the department of spontaneous combustion? Or is that your own stench I smell?”
“I could say: it’s your own upper lip you’re smelling,” said Frits, “but I will tell you. I spilled some water into the stove.”
“My, my,” Louis said. He was wearing no overcoat, only a leather jacket. “What are you up to?” “I was poring over my sins,” said Frits. “Very good,” Louis said, “you certainly picked the right day for it.” “Has the thaw set in yet?” Frits asked. “Hardly,” Louis said.
“As a child,” Frits asked, “did you kill insects so cruelly as well?” Louis did not reply. “Do you know what I did? When I would see one of those big spiders, the ones with a little body and those incredibly long legs—daddy-long-legs, I believe they call them—I would cut off those legs to see what they would do then. Outside, I actually buried frogs alive. Did you do that too?” “I don’t recall,” Louis said.
“When a wasp entered the house,” Frits went on, “I would take a knife from the drawer and follow it until it landed on a window. Then I would sever the thorax from the abdomen, a delicate operation. In the part you have cut off, the stinger keeps bobbing up and down, a peculiar sight. And the front half can still fly a bit.” Louis was silent.
“You know,” he said, more quietly now, “I also caught little fish and kept them in an aquarium. I had a green spoon that I used to fish them out. I would lay them on a dry surface and watch carefully to see how those fish died, simply because I felt like it. I also burned a great many spiders.”
“Do say, do say, Mr Egters,” said Louis. “What am I going to talk about now?” Frits thought. “Weren’t we going to the pictures, Louis?” he asked, taking the newspaper with the cinema advertisements from the rack. “There’s a good one on at Princeps. What time is it? One thirty-five. There is a showing at a quarter to two and one at a quarter to four. A quarter to two, we won’t make that one, not any more. We could go together now, though, and get tickets for a quarter to four. The Seventh Veil, that can’t be too bad.”
“We can take the tram, can’t we?” Louis asked, reading aloud the title of the film. “Let’s walk there, and come back on the tram,” said Frits. “And then do that the same way later on, that’s more economical.”
“Might it be possible to eat with you and your family this evening?” Louis asked, as they were making their way into town. “Yes, of course,” said Frits.
There was a crowd at the cinema. Frits purchased two tickets for up front, the only row that wasn’t sold out. “At least that’s cheap,” he said, slipping them into his wallet. As soon as they turned their backs on the box office, they saw the tram approaching, ran to the stop just in time and quickly arrived back at the house.
Frits’s parents were at the front door when they got there. Once they were inside, his mother, after pacing back and forth between kitchen and living room for a few minutes, asked: “Frits, what did you do with the attic keys?” “I haven’t had them, not at all,” he replied. “Didn’t you bring down any coal while we were gone?” “No,” he said.
With Frits looking over her shoulder, she searched the windowsill in the kitchen, then the table and the counter, then she looked on the mantelpiece in the living room and in the bookcase. She sank down into a chair beside the stove, chin in hand. “No one leaves this room,” said Frits. Louis, who was sitting beside him on the divan, poked him in the ribs. His father was standing at the window, examining a book.
“I think I know,” she said suddenly, “I do believe I left them in the scuttle, on top of the coal. I believe so. That means they’re in the stove. Take a look, see whether they rolled to the bottom of the scuttle.”
Louis snorted loudly. Frits looked in the half-emptied scuttle. “Righteous be his name,” he said under his breath, “his arm is mighty.” “No,” he said more loudly, “they are not in there.”
“What now?” she asked. “Rye bread with treacle,” he replied, “then they’ll come out in a jiffy.”
“The stove will go out soon,” she said. “Go down to the Tintelers’ and ask whether we might borrow their box of keys to try.” He and Louis went out of the door, returning a little later with a round, blue tin. “Help yourself,” he said, placing it on the table. “We must be off.” They left. “The streets are getting slippery again,” said Louis, after they had walked for a bit. “To be sure,” said Frits. They did not speak again until reaching the cinema.
“Not even remotely what I had hoped,” said Frits as they shuffled out after the film. “It goes to show how little one should rely on the taste of others.” “Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” said Louis.
Seated in the tram was a man dressed in black, with big, grey boots. He wore a bowler and had all manner of things pinned to his chest: medals, tokens, leaden seals from butcher’s sausages, Belgian coins with a hole in the middle, a variety of chains. “The thaw has set in, people, people—the thaw is coming fast!” he shouted in a flat voice. “It is thawing to beat the band, people, listen to it thaw! It’s raining hot water out there, people, watch out!” Having said this, he laughed a loud, slobbering laugh. The passengers stopped talking and looked at him. “Yes, people, I could tell you a thing or two,” he shouted with a smile as Frits and Louis alighted.
When they got to Frits’s home, his mother said: “Not a single one of those keys fits the lock; I borrowed some coal from Hennie instead. We’ll have to wait till Friday before I can ask the housing association for another one. I’ll let the stov
e go out tonight.” “Those keys will be completely warped anyway, if they fell in there,” Frits said.
“What are you up to this evening?” Louis asked once they were seated at the table. “I think I shall go to see Walter Graafse,” Frits said. “You mean that fellow with the potato head? That fabulist, that pathological liar?” “Yes, that’s the one.” “Who is this about?” Frits’s father asked. “About someone else,” Frits replied.
After the meal, as they were walking down the street together, Louis said: “That was a fine dinner. I never have any complaints about the menu at your house.” Arriving at a large metal clock next to a junction, they said farewell.
Frits walked on for ten minutes through a busy area. Then, turning in a southerly direction, he passed through narrow streets and came at last to a canal lined with big trees. He climbed a set of high, steep steps with a set of iron banisters on both sides, and rang the bell. A dog barked, he heard a thumping on the stairs, and the door was opened at last by a short, plump young man dressed in brown. Brushing his hair back from his forehead, he said: “Sir Frits, do come in. Do come in.” Frits followed him.
After traversing a long corridor, they climbed the stairs and came to a room that was heated by a gas fire. The room was full of cabinets, tables and racks, all littered with electrical material—lamps, cords, magnets, transformers, meters and coils. The only light came from a bare bulb on the ceiling.
Two people were seated beside the gas fire: a young man with a thin moustache, dressed in grey battledress that was unbuttoned at the top, as was his shirt, and a fat, black-haired girl. “This is Albert,” Walter said. “My darling sister, of course, requires no introduction.” He passed out cigarettes all around. When he opened a door, a dog leapt into the room. “Did that animal just hop out of a cupboard?” Frits thought. It was a black and white spotted dog of medium size. The animal tried to lick Walter’s face right away, but when he shouted “Down! Knock it off!” the dog raced under a table and lay down. “It’s a troublesome creature,” Walter said. “Not long ago we had seven slabs of gingerbread cooling on the windowsill, and he ate them all. So I held his paws against the gas fire, you should have heard him screech! But it taught him a lesson. Didn’t it, Foks?” He grabbed the animal’s front paws, but the dog began yelping loudly, struggled free and ran away.
“Come and see what I’ve bought,” Walter said then, leading Frits into one of the front rooms. The young man in uniform followed them. When Walter turned on the light, Frits saw in the middle of the room a piano of unusual format; like a baby grand, but with keys narrower and fewer than on a normal piano. He tried a few of them. The notes were sharp and penetrating, like the strings of a guitar. “It sounds like a clavichord, or whatever you call them,” Frits said. “Is that what it is?” “No,” said Walter. “It’s not a clavichord. That’s what they called it at the auction house, but it’s more like a spinet. I believe, in fact, that this is the intermediate form between the spinet and our modern piano.” “The sound is very pleasing,” said Frits, “what did you pay for it?” “A hundred and twenty-five guilders.” “Not bad,” Frits said.
The young man in uniform pulled a chair up to the instrument and leafed through a book of music that was standing ready. He used his index finger to count the keys, hummed a few notes and began to play. “Amazing, how lovely,” Frits whispered. “What was that?” he asked when the music was finished. He saw no title on the sheet. “A partita by Bach,” Albert replied. “I play it on guitar too, because there’s an arrangement for lute as well.”
“Use your heads, for God’s sake,” said Walter’s sister, bursting into the room. She took the music book and closed the lid on the instrument. “Wonderful, light-brown wood, that,” Frits thought. “Try to show a bit of sense,” she went on, “you know what’s going on upstairs.” “But she can breathe her last without our assistance, Klara,” Walter said.
They returned to their chairs by the fire. “What is going on upstairs?” Frits asked. “Klara limps when she walks,” he thought. “Our upstairs neighbour’s wife is dying,” the girl said. “I’ll go ask how she is, then I’ll tell them right away that the music was an oversight by one of our visitors. Otherwise it’s just too shameful.” She limped off and Frits heard her climb the stairs, rather hurriedly. “So what’s wrong with the woman upstairs?” he asked. “Completely finished: pneumonia and consumption,” Walter said. “But she’s in no hurry about it. Care for another smoke?” “No, thank you,” Frits said, stubbing out his cigarette. “And you, have you come up with any new and grand inventions?” Walter said nothing. “Do you remember telling me, in our last year at school, that you could fabricate a magnet in your room so powerful that the doors of passing cars would fly open? Do you know that I believed that back then?” “It was true, too,” said Walter.
“What was that fellow’s name, the one whose house we went to for that afternoon of chess, in Cementwijk?” Frits asked. “Hans Houting?” “Yes, I’ll be damned, that’s the one,” said Frits. “Do you remember that he had a length of inner tube filled with sand, like a kind of sausage? He took it with him when he went downstairs at night to pee, on his own, as a sort of club.” “I don’t remember that,” said Walter.
“I remember lots of things,” said Frits. “You always had an ashtray or a dish full of flies, which you had damaged, but that were not dead yet, they just lay there wriggling their legs.” “That was not only back then,” Albert said suddenly. But he fell silent again right away. “Have you ever heard from your parents?” Frits asked. “Damn it,” he thought, “what a thing to ask.” “No,” Walter said only, with a brief toss of his head.
After that no one spoke. They listened to the muffled footsteps on the floor above and heard Klara pick her way down the stairs. “They didn’t hear the music, fortunately,” she said, sliding her chair up closer to the fire, “they were at the back of the house.” “How old is that woman?” Frits asked. “Fifty-six,” Klara said. “She’s still quite aware of the things around her. She speaks very quietly, though. They gave me a cup of tea, and suddenly her daughter said: She’s saying something. They went over to the bed and put their heads down close to her mouth. She said: The doorbell is ringing. She was right. But no one else had heard it.”
“That’s right,” Frits said, “the dying have very sharp ears, right up to the end. During the death struggle one must be very careful what one says, because they can hear everything. I read that somewhere. It is important to make the agony—that is what it is called, it has its own nomenclature, like any disease—as bearable as possible for the patient. To open the windows for fresh air and to stay close to the deathbed. What is wrong with your foot, anyway, Klara?” “I fell down the front steps outside,” she said, fingering her left ankle, “it’s still swollen, but the pain is almost over, as long as I’m careful.”
“In any case, they’re in no hurry upstairs,” Walter said. “This has been going on for three days already, I’ve stopping believing that it’s ever going to come.” “It sounds almost as though you can’t wait,” said Albert.
“I want to move in up there,” Walter said. “The rooms are much lighter than down here. The landlord thinks it’s fine.” “Why didn’t I stay at home tonight?” Frits thought. He sat up straight: “It is, in fact, a good moment to die,” he said. “I for one would make sure I was in the ground before the thaw came, otherwise the churchyard is so sodden. Time waits for no man.” “But still, not before one’s time has come,” said Albert. “I believe there is some truth in that,” Klara said, starting to comb her hair.
“I was walking down Riembaan yesterday,” Albert said. “A man tried to jump onto the tram, onto the rear platform. That is so stupid. He missed and fell under it. You know how it goes, women screaming, a throng of people gathered. But it turned out well enough. The tram had stopped quickly, it wasn’t going at full speed yet. They pulled him out from in front of the wheels; his clothes were torn and dirty and his spectacles were broken. Th
e frames were crumpled, the lenses had fallen out. A very strange sight, because his face was untouched, only a few bumps. He was still all in one piece and he just stood there, white as a sheet, and said nothing. Then I saw the conductor walk up to him. So the conductor stops in front of him and says: Well, well, what did you think you were doing, will you tell me? And he slaps that man twice across the face, one slap on each cheek. And then that fellow suddenly starts weeping and cries out in a very peculiar voice: I wanted to get on the trolley!” He imitated it in a high, whiny voice. All four of them laughed. “I wanted to get on the trolley!” Albert cried out again.
“I always hop on and off the tram too,” Walter said. “It’s a matter of luck. Fools and babies, you know. Do you remember Wim Barneveld? The one with that massive head of hair?” “No,” said Frits. “You don’t? Oh, I thought differently. He’s completely bald these days, did you know that?” “How could I?” Frits asked. “Oh yes, it’s absolutely true. I ran into him about four months ago, he’s a pilot. I hadn’t seen him for six years. We went somewhere for a beer and I kept thinking: there is something about his face. Then he took off his aviator cap and his whole head was bald, so completely that you didn’t even realize right away that there was not a single hair on it. No eyebrows, no lashes either. A hair disease. I had noticed something strange already, while he was still wearing that cap, but I didn’t know what it was.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” asked Klara. “We were talking about being reckless, weren’t we?” Walter said. “Well, this Barneveld fellow was stationed at Soesterberg for a while. They used to go out barnstorming over the Veluwe, he told me. Flying very low in the valleys and then pulling up at the last moment before each hill. He said that sometimes you came back with pine branches on your struts. They flew under the bridge at Nijmegen too.”
“It’s five past nine, in any case,” Frits thought. Upstairs, something fell to the floor. “They drop things all the time up there,” said Walter, “they’re rather dull folk.” “They are very decent people,” Klara said.