“The downstairs neighbours told us,” Walter went on, “about when they moved in up there in the winter of forty-four. They had twelve sacks of coal. That was enough, they reckoned, to keep two stoves burning the whole time.” Frits burst out laughing. “By January there was no coal left; all they could do was stay in bed, they got out only a few hours each week, whenever they had a coupon for sugar beets or something. But it didn’t kill them.” “Well then, things are starting to look up for you now,” said Albert.
“I’m afraid I must be going,” said Frits. “I have to stop by somewhere on my way home.” “Take one more cigarette, for the road,” said Walter, reaching out and placing one between his lips. The dog accompanied the two of them down the stairs, but halfway there Walter grabbed the animal by the scruff of the neck, placed his shoe on the tip of its tail and stepped on it hard. The dog gave a yelp, which turned into a long howl. Walter raised his foot and they continued down; the dog, still yelping, raced back up.
“Be sure to come by again, when you have the chance,” said Walter, when they got to the front door.
Frits picked his way down the front steps. The street lights were mirrored in the icy canal. He stamped his feet, closed his collar tightly and walked on with his head bowed. The hands of the clock on the front of a bank read eighteen minutes past nine.
When he got home he found his father lying on the divan, while his mother sat at the table, leafing through the day’s news. “You’re home early,” she said. “Yes,” he said, “I was planning to stop and see someone else on the way back, but they weren’t at home. Let’s see if there is anything on the radio.” “There was a nice play on, just now,” she said. “Oh,” he asked, “what was that about?” “Well,” she said, “it was about the olden days in England, no, in Ireland, about the lords and the landowners.”
The radio had warmed up. “Now, the Ramblers continue with ‘Sensation Number One’,” the announcer said. “Pa-rah-pa-pa-paw,” his mother said, when the song began, “hideous.”
“You should really try to follow jazz music,” Frits said. He was seated in a chair close to the set. “Can’t you turn off that noise?” his father asked, sitting up. “No,” said Frits, “you should try listening, then you would hear that it is not incoherent noise. The orchestra provides the rhythm, the saxophone plays the melody and the improvisations.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that loud,” the man said, turning down the volume. Then he lay back down. Frits took the knob between his fingers and turned it up slowly again, bit by bit, at those points where only a soft drumbeat could be heard.
“I’m going to bed,” his mother said suddenly, “I have no desire to stay up any longer.” She disappeared into the back room and closed the sliding doors with a loud bang. “It is not clear whether that bang was so loud by accident, or with intent,” Frits thought. His father stood up and walked back and forth before the bookcase, coughed, cupped his chin in one hand, opened his mouth, but said nothing.
The radio started in on a waltz. Frits turned it off, tiptoed out of the room and into the side room, where he lit the gas fire and sat down at the writing table. He heard his father pacing in the living room. It was ten o’clock. He unbuttoned his shirt, slid his hand under his singlet and ran his fingers across his chest. Pulling up both shirt and singlet, he looked at his belly, a crease in which was formed by his seated position, and poked the little finger of his right hand into the navel. He sniffed at the finger and wiped it on his handkerchief.
Shortly afterwards he heard from the other room the sounds of the sliding doors opening and the lamp being turned off. He went to the kitchen and was just about to start brushing his teeth when he heard voices from the bedroom. He went to the hall and stood beside the door. His mother was speaking in rapid, keening volleys of words. Whenever she stopped, Frits heard the grumble of his father’s voice. Then they fell silent again, only to go on the next minute. Suddenly it sounded to him as though his mother was sitting straight up in bed and holding back her weeping, for he could clearly hear her voice, louder than before. “Never,” she was saying, “never in your life have you thought about anyone but yourself, and you have never, ever considered whether—” Frits hurried back into the kitchen. “I hear nothing,” he said, closing his eyes, “I hear nothing. Nothing is what I hear.” He closed the door and brushed his teeth hastily. When the voices grew louder, he chanted to himself. “Boom, boom, boom, boom!” he sang, his head filled with a heavy buzzing.
Turning off the kitchen light, he moved noiselessly to his bedroom. “Now I’ve forgotten to put my shoes and socks behind the stove,” he thought, “tomorrow I’ll have to wear those clammy things again. Wait a minute, tomorrow is Christmas too.”
“Hearken unto the message of Christmas,” he said aloud. “The saviour is born unto us. He died upon Golgotha, racka-chacka-chack, ding-dong.” Crawling into bed and pulling up the covers, he thought: “The bells should really be rung at midnight, that would be glorious.” He felt his eyes grow moist, seized the sheet between his teeth and fell asleep.
He awoke at three o’clock with a heavy feeling in all his limbs and a pressing urge to pass water. After relieving himself, he fell asleep while rubbing his feet together.
He dreamt that he was on the first floor of a large department store. While wandering about he felt an increasingly powerful urge to urinate. He went to the Gents, but workers there were repairing the masonry. On the ground floor, the water closets were blocked off by a barrier of planks with a sign reading: “Out of order”. He took the lift to the second floor.
Here he was stopped at the door to the lavatory by a salesgirl, dressed all in white, who said: “You are not allowed to use this, you have to register first.”
On the third floor he could find no toilet at all. He trotted up the stairs to the fourth, the topmost floor, and raced to a corner of the store, but there he found only a grey door with a square, green sign reading: “Emergency exit. To be opened only upon alarm. Unauthorized breaking of the seal is punishable by law.” Beneath the sign, the word “Gents” had been crossed out with a diagonal daub of paint.
As he was hurrying down the stairs again, the loudspeakers suddenly shouted out: “The store is closed. Customers still on the premises must report to the management and pay a fine.” The floor he was on was empty, only members of the staff were still walking around. He was standing in the furnishings department, beside a table displaying vases. He picked up one of them, took it behind a partition, urinated in it until it was full and then put it back. The urge had not abated. Cautiously he filled vase upon vase, large and small, until all of them were full. When there was nothing left to fill, still he could not stop, and he had to pass water on the floor. So he sneaked, micturating as he went, from one department to the next and down the stairs.
As he descended the final flight, his path was suddenly blocked by a row of saleswomen, standing hand in hand, from banister to banister. “All is revealed, I must hide myself,” he thought and ran back up the stairs, just ahead of the screaming group in pursuit. On the third floor he crawled beneath a pile of carpets, but heard someone shout: “Don’t forget to look in the rug department.” Tossing his hiding place aside he raced to the top floor. The urinating had stopped. He made his way to the emergency exit, opened it and found himself on a balcony. There was no fire escape. “Be sure to look behind the fire door,” he heard, closer now. Below, straight beneath him, a train was passing. “We’ll jump for it,” he said, calculating distance and height, and leapt and crashed onto the roof of a railway carriage.
He succeeded in climbing into the train and took a seat in an empty compartment. The train began going in circles, at a terrifying speed. He felt himself grow nauseous, as on a wildly spinning ride at a carnival. Suddenly someone sat down across from him, someone who looked at him probingly and wore a black hat, with a brim at least two feet wide. “It’s a dog,” he thought. When the creature opened its coat, he saw that it was true. The sk
in of the belly was punctuated by a row of yellow buttons, as on a jacket. When he looked at the face, the dog’s head changed into that of a pig. “I know about it,” the monster said, “I am well informed. Don’t try to fool me.” As it spoke, the head grew a beak. The figure leaned towards him slowly. He awoke.
It was six thirty. Once again he felt a strong urge to pass water, but did not leave the bed. “Don’t doze off again,” he thought, “above all, not that.” He pulled the pillow away from under his head. “I need to find a position uncomfortable enough to keep me awake,” he said to himself.
“I know, let me think about all kinds of things,” he thought. A story came to mind that a schoolfellow once told him. How a ten-year-old boy had chopped off his father’s head while he was taking a nap on a bench in their garden. The case was described in a pedagogical textbook that belonged to his friend.
The boy’s action was prompted by curiosity. There was no hatred or murderous rage involved, said the book, which Frits remembered looking at, only the child’s curiosity at what it would be like with the head off.
Then he remembered a newspaper report from a few weeks back, telling of how a little boy had crawled into a cream centrifuge at a dairy plant and how a friend of his had turned on the machine, resulting in sudden death. “It was the centrifugal force,” he thought, “it causes the blood to curdle.” He examined the shapes that the light from the street lamps in front of the house threw across his bedroom ceiling.
The text of a news story he had read the summer before was one he still knew almost by heart. A farmer had asked his hired man to toss him a pitchfork from the other side of the wagon. When the farmhand did not do this quickly enough, the farmer climbed onto the edge of the wagon and peered over the top of the load, at the very moment the fork came flying. The tines penetrated his eyes and he fell off the wagon, dead.
The clock on the wall ticked loudly. “The strangest accidents happen down south,” he thought. His mother had been shocked when he read aloud to her the account of a mishap, which had taken place in a farmyard. Two children were playing with an axe and a chopping block. “Put your hand down on the block,” said the one, and the other did just that. “He’ll pull it away,” thought the boy holding the axe. “He won’t really chop with it,” thought the other. They were both wrong. The hand was still connected only by a thread, and had to be amputated.
He almost dozed off, but shook his head forcefully a few times back and forth. “As long as we don’t fall asleep again,” he thought, “or that beast will come back.”
He recalled how his brother, when he was nine years old, had awoken three nights in a row, screaming, after a recurring dream. A monkey was chasing him and trying to crush him against the kerb. It resulted in a wild pursuit around a block of houses. Just as he had gained a bit of a lead, a wolf came from the other direction. There the dream ended. After the third night his mother asked the doctor for advice. He recommended that, as soon as Joop awoke, they plunge his head into cold water. When he awoke the next night screaming again, his father held his head down in a bucket of water. The dream never came back.
By the time he was finished reflecting on this, it was ten past seven. Each time he almost dozed off, he raised his head again with a start. That went on until seven twenty-two. “It should be fairly safe now,” he thought, “if anything happens, it will be light when I wake up.” He fell asleep and dreamt no more.
V
AT NINE O’CLOCK, by full daylight, he awoke. “The second day of Christmastide has broken,” he thought. “It goes almost without saying,” he said aloud, having viewed the sky above the rooftops, “that the day will be clear and cold. I am not going to lie around too long.” At twenty past nine he got up.
As he was washing at the tap, his father came into the kitchen, fully dressed, to keep an eye on the kettle already under a head of steam. “Good morning, my boy,” he replied to Frits’s “morning”. He laid three eggs in an empty saucepan, put the pan on the fire and poured into it the boiling water from the kettle. “What are you doing, for heaven’s sake?” asked Frits’s mother, entering in her pink nightgown, “are you boiling eggs? You do that by putting them in the water, once it has come to a boil. This isn’t cooking eggs. Now the water is off the boil and you have to wait for a few minutes for it to heat up again. This way you never know when they’re ready.” “You won’t forget to put on your white woollen singlet, will you, Frits?” she asked. Then she walked on to the water closet.
At the start of breakfast, no one spoke a word. “Things are off to a roaring start,” Frits thought. His father sighed each time he took a slice of bread. “As though raising and retracting the arm were a form of heavy labour,” thought Frits. His mother kept her eyes on her plate and poured some tea. “What kind of weather do you think we’ll have, Father?” asked Frits. “Not too bad,” the man answered, glancing out of the window.
As Frits watched how his father slowly distributed the peeled egg over his bread and then, not knowing what to do with the shells still in the palm of his hand, made clumsy, helpless gestures, he thought: “I have to do something.” “What are you waiting for?” his mother asked.
He stuffed his own, unpeeled egg into his mouth, closed his lips around it and began to make clucking noises through his nose, louder and faster all the time. Wide-eyed, he looked back and forth from his father to his mother, then let the egg fall to his plate. His mother smiled, but his father looked startled, wrinkling his face like someone squinting into bright sunlight.
When the meal was over, his father got up and went to the hall. Frits heard him take his coat from the stand, walk into the side room and rustle through his papers. Then he heard him come back into the hall, carefully open the door to the stairs and close it behind him quietly. “He is gone,” he said. “Let him have his fun in Utrecht,” said his mother, “why should I care?” As she spoke the last two words, her voice broke. “I am certainly not planning to spend the whole day here on my own,” she said, suddenly weeping, “I am going to The Hague.”
“No one is stopping you,” said Frits, “The Lord shall be a lamp unto thy feet. You’re right.”
She gulped, coughed, removed her spectacles, wiped her eyes and put the spectacles back on. Then she cleared the table and put on her coat. “Does this coat look funny with this hat?” she asked. “God preserve us,” Frits thought, “what a combination.” “Cheerful, simple attire,” he said, “it suits you well. Muted and in no way extravagant.” Picking up her leather handbag, she walked into the hall. “When do you expect to be home?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she replied hoarsely, without looking back.
“What are we going to do now?” he said aloud, after she had closed the door behind her and disappeared around the corner. “Let us make of it a day well spent. We will let ourselves be discouraged by nothing. Rather, adversities, both large and small, shall ennoble us.” He stood with his back to the wall and drew a line in pencil on the wallpaper above his head. “One metre seventy, at the very least,” he said. “It is getting awfully cold in here,” he thought, peering into the stove. There was no fire to be seen and the metal was cold enough to place his hand on the grill. “We’ll just have to empty it,” he said. He fetched the dustpan from the kitchen and began scraping the contents onto it with his hands. After he had progressed a bit, the ash and embers became too hot for him to continue. “Still, it all has to go,” he said. He fetched a milk can full of water and emptied it into the stove slowly, through a hole in the cap. Whenever the cloud of steam became too dense, he waited for the hissing to stop, then went on. A sourish smell filled the room. He dug out the steaming, black chunks of coal and found at the bottom, just above the grate, two crossed keys; the bits were misshapen and the shanks had fused together. The outermost coat of metal peeled away like a dry scab. He put his find in a little cardboard box and placed it on the table. Then he built a new fire and looked into the flames through the opened slits in the loading door. Little tufts of smo
ke blurred and spread through the room. “It looks,” he said quietly, turning on the radio and stepping up to the window, “as though the sun is coming through.” “You are listening to Bach’s cantata for the Second Day of Christmas,” the announcer said.
Frits tuned the radio to the clearest frequency, ran into his bedroom, came back with his tin of tobacco and, seated on the divan, rolled a cigarette so quickly that he was able to light it at the very moment the erratic noise of tuning instruments had ceased and he heard the tapping of the conductor’s baton. “Now I am happy,” he said aloud and grinned.
The concert commenced with a prelude for violin and trumpet. “As long as no one rings the bell now,” he thought, leaning forward and peering through the mica pane at the sparks and flames.
After the cantata came three arrangements for soprano, violin and organ. When these were over, the announcer said: “Until a quarter to twelve you will hear The Luna Ensemble.” Quiet, slow waltz music began. He turned off the set, closed part way the vent at the bottom of the stove and stretched. “I’ll go out for a little walk,” he said.
Outside the sunlight had palled to a grey glare. He took a deep breath, sucked in his stomach and followed the river in the direction of the city. After a while he turned down a broad street and walked slowly, glancing at each shop window he passed. “I won’t take the tram,” he thought, “that is a saving. Besides, I’m not going anywhere.” Turning right, he came to a broad square. He was getting ready to cross it when a young man came up, paused beside him and said: “Van Egters.” “Well, well,” Frits said with a smile, “so you are still with us.” Neither of them moved to pull a hand from a pocket.
The fellow was somewhat shorter than Frits, and his left eye socket was covered by a black, oval patch held in place by a dark cord around his head. His nose was pointed, his mouth marked by thin, stubby lips and his facial complexion by an unsavoury pallor. Curly yellow hair grew sparsely on the top of his head. The grey overcoat he had on was too short and too widely tailored.