The Evenings E-Book und Hörbuch

Gerard Reve

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 466

Beschreibung

'A masterwork of comic pathos' Irish Times 'A masterpiece… What can I say that will put this book where it belongs, in readers' hands and minds?' Tim Parks A modern masterpiece, voted the greatest Dutch novel of all time Frits – office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes – finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad, and has terrible dreams of death and destruction. As Frits drinks, smokes, sees friends and aimlessly wanders the gloomy city streets, he tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him. Darkly funny and mesmerising, The Evenings takes the tiny, quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of everyday life and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe. Translated by Sam Garrett Gerard Reve (1923–2006) is considered one of the greatest post-war Dutch authors, and was also the first openly gay writer in the country's history. A complicated and controversial character, Reve is also hugely popular and critically acclaimed – his 1947 debut The Evenings was ranked the best Dutch novel of the twentieth century by the Society of Dutch literature. Childhood is also available from Pushkin Press.

Leseprobe

‘As funny as it is ultimately profound’

IRISH TIMES, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016

‘A canonical work of postwar European fiction… flares of pathos and despairing love light up the novel’s empty night time landscape’

WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘Fascinating, hilarious and page-turning’

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

‘It’s like BS Johnson and Kafka wandering the crepuscular streets of 1940s Amsterdam together—in a good way’

OBSERVER, BEST FICTION OF 2016

THE EVENINGS

A WINTER’S TALE

GERARD REVE

TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY SAM GARRETT

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

I wrote The Evenings because I was convinced I had to write it: that seems to me a good enough reason. I hoped that ten of my friends would accept a free copy, and that twenty people would buy the book out of pity and ten others by mistake. Things turned out differently. It’s not my fault it caused such an uproar.

gerard reve, 1948

Contents

Title PageEpigraphIIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXAbout the AuthorsAvailable and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press ClassicsCopyright

I

It was still dark, in the early morning hours of the twenty-second of December 1946, on the second floor of the house at Schilderskade 66 in our town, when the hero of this story, Frits van Egters, awoke. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch, hanging on its nail. “A quarter to six,” he mumbled, “it’s still night.” He rubbed his face. “What a horrible dream,” he thought. “What was it again?” Gradually it came back to him. He had dreamt that the living room was full of visitors. “It’s going to be a glorious weekend,” someone said. At that same moment a man in a bowler hat walked in. No one paid him any heed and no one greeted him, but Frits eyed him closely. Suddenly the visitor fell to the floor with a thud.

“Was that it?” he thought. “What happened after that? Nothing, I believe.” He fell asleep again. The dream went on where it had stopped. His bowler pressed down over his face, the man was now lying in a black coffin that had been placed on a low table in one corner of the room. “I don’t recognize that table,” Frits thought. “Did we borrow it from someone?” Then, peering into the coffin, he said loudly: “We’ll be stuck with this till Monday, in any event.” “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said a bald, red-faced man with spectacles. “Would you care to wager that I can arrange the funeral for this afternoon at two?”

Frits awoke once more. It was twenty minutes past six. “I’ve had enough sleep,” he said to himself, “that’s why I woke up so early. I still have more than an hour to go.”

He dozed off eventually, and entered the living room for the third time. There was no one there. He walked over to the coffin, looked into it and thought: “He’s dead, and starting to rot.” Suddenly the cadaver was covered in all kinds of carpenter’s tools, piled to the coffin’s rim: hammers, drills, saws, spirit levels, planes, pliers and little bags of nails. All that stuck out was the dead man’s right hand.

“There’s no one here,” he thought, “not a soul in the house; what am I going to do? Music, that always helps.” He leaned across the coffin to turn on the radio, but at that same moment saw the hand, bluish now and with long white nails, begin to stir. He recoiled in fear. “I mustn’t move,” he thought, “otherwise it will happen.” The hand sank back down.

Later he awoke, feeling anxious. “Ten to seven,” he mumbled, peering at the watch. “I always have such horrible dreams.” He rolled over and fell asleep again.

Parting a pair of thick green curtains, he entered the living room. The visitors had returned. The man with the red face came up to him, smiled and said: “It didn’t work out. It will have to be Monday morning, at ten. We can put the box in the study till then.” “Study?” Frits thought. “What study? Do we have a study? He means the side room, of course.” Six men lifted the coffin to their shoulders. He himself walked out in front, to open the door for them. “The key’s still in the lock,” he thought, “good thing, too.”

The coffin was extremely heavy; the bearers moved slowly, with measured strides. Suddenly he saw that the bottom of the box was beginning to sag and swell. “It’s going to burst,” he thought, “that’s hideous. The corpse is still intact on the outside, but inside it’s a thin, yellow mush. It will splatter all over the floor.”

By the time they were halfway down the hall, the bottom was sagging so badly that it had begun to crack. Slowly, out of that crack, appeared the same hand from which he had recoiled. Gradually the whole arm followed. The fingers groped about, then crept towards the throat of one of the bearers. “If I scream, the whole thing will fall to the floor,” Frits thought. He watched as the bottom sagged further and further and the hand drew closer and closer to the bearer’s throat. “There’s nothing I can do,” he thought. “I can’t do a thing.”

He awakened for the fourth time, and sat up in bed. It was seven thirty-five. The bedroom was cold. He sat there for five minutes, then stood up and, turning on the light, saw the windowpanes covered in flowers of frost. He shivered as he made his way to the toilet.

“I should start going out for a little walk in the evening, before bed,” he thought while washing himself at the kitchen sink. “It would make me sleep more soundly.” The soap slipped through his fingers, and he spent quite some time feeling around for it in the shadowy space beneath the counter. “We’re off to a roaring start,” he mumbled.

“But today’s Sunday,” he realized suddenly, “what a piece of luck.” Then he added to himself: “I’m up far too early, how stupid of me. But no, for once my day won’t be ruined by lying around till eleven.” While drying his face he started to hum, then went into his room, dressed, and combed his hair in the little mirror that hung beside the door, above one corner of the bed. “It’s ridiculously early,” he thought. “I can’t go in yet. The sliding doors are still open.”

He sat down at his little desk, picked up a white marble rabbit about the size of a matchbox and tapped it softly against the arm of the chair. Then he put it on top of the pile of papers from whence it came. Standing up with a shiver, he returned to the kitchen, opened the bread bin and took out two soft white rolls, the first of which he stuffed into his mouth in a few bites. The second he held clenched in his teeth as he went into the hallway for his coat.

“A brisk, invigorating walk in the morning air,” he murmured. As he crossed the landing and passed the downstairs neighbours’ door, a dog yapped. He pulled the street door closed behind him quietly and followed the frozen canal to the river, which was covered along both banks with a dark layer of ice. There was not much wind. The sun had barely risen, but the street lights were already out. The gutters of the houses were lined with rows of gulls. After kneading the last of his roll into a little ball, he tossed it onto the ice and scores of birds descended. The first gull that picked at it missed. The piece of bread slid, fell into a little hole in the ice and sank before another bird could peck at it.

Church bells rang once. “An early start, this will be a day well spent,” he thought, turning right along the riverbank. “It’s cold and early and no one’s out yet, but I am.”

Crossing the big bridge, he skirted the southern railway station and walked back beneath the viaduct. “It’s wonderful, taking a walk so early in the morning,” he said to himself. “You’ve been outside, you feel chipper and your spirits are high. This will be no wasted and profitless Sunday.”

As he came into the hallway again, the kettle was singing on the stove. In the living room he found his mother setting the table for breakfast. “You’re up bright and early,” he said. “Your father is in one of his moods,” she replied. “He wanted to get up early and make a day of it.” Frits looked at her closely. Her face was without expression.

His father came in from the kitchen in his vest and trousers; the braces dangled to the floor. His face was still wet.

“Good morning, Father,” Frits said. To speak these words, he felt as if he first had to clear his windpipe of a stone, which now fell at his feet. “Good morning, my boy,” his father replied. They sat down at the table.

“I must not let my attention flag,” he thought, “I must observe closely.” From the moment his father began to eat, he kept his eyes on him. “He chews without a sound,” he thought, “but the mouth opens and shuts each time.” He looked at the back of his father’s neck and felt rage rise up. “Seven warts,” he said to himself, “why hasn’t he had them removed? Why not get rid of them, at least?”

His mother poured tea. She slurped softly as she drank. His father raised the cup only halfway to his mouth, then stretched his neck, puckered his lips and drank loudly. “Have you had a look at the fire, dearest?” his father asked. “Yes,” Frits’s mother replied, “it’s sputtering away.”

When they were done his father went to the bedroom to finish dressing, then returned, book in hand, and sank into a chair by the fire with a deep sigh. Frits watched him as he sat down. “Why such an enormous sigh?” he thought. “Why act as though you’re a pair of bellows?” He looked at the head of black hair, combed back and drab in spots, the thick lips curled in a tired smile, and the brown hands with their short, thick fingers which, after some tentative fumbling, slowly turned a page.

Frits himself sat on the divan, close to the window. He leaned over to turn on the radio and dialled through the programmes. “Bach, a sonata,” he murmured, clasping his hands behind his head as he leaned back and listened. His father was sucking at his pipe, blowing out slow, thin jets of blue smoke.

“Frits,” his mother called from the kitchen, “what did you do with the attic keys?” “I never had them,” he said as she came into the room. “Who did, then?” she asked. “Not me, that’s for sure,” he said. “Weren’t you the one who fetched coal yesterday?” she continued. “It was you, wasn’t it?” “No,” he said, “not me. You probably went upstairs and left them lying on the table.” He got up and went into the kitchen. His mother followed. “Are you sure they’re not on the sill?” he asked, lifting the curtain and groping along the length of the windowsill.

“You’re the one who had them,” his mother said. “If you don’t bring them back, the fire will go out. You had the keys yesterday, you were the last one to fetch coal.”

He looked at her: the thin face, the grey hair, the slight growth of hair around mouth and chin, the arms that never stopped moving. “Help us,” he thought. “The voice is too loud; whither lieth succour?” His father came into the kitchen in stockinged feet. He was holding the book in one hand, his index finger stuck between the pages. “What is it now?” he asked. “Calm down, you two.” “Don’t you get yourself in a state,” Frits’s mother said. “Who’s the one making noise here?” “All that harping and carping,” his father said, “what on earth is it good for?” He turned around and disappeared into the hall, his head bowed.

“Go and see whether the key is still in the door,” his mother said. Frits climbed the stairs to the storage rooms that lined the attic floor, looked at the lock and saw the key, one of two on a little wire ring. He opened the door and picked up a paper sack of anthracite. Downstairs in the kitchen he tossed the keys onto the windowsill with a jingle. “I suppose now you didn’t bring any coal down with you,” said his mother, who had just come in from the living room. “Yes, in fact I did,” he said. “Here’s a whole sack full.” “That’s not the way you do it,” she said. “You have to empty the sack into the scuttle first, upstairs. Otherwise I get all that dust in here.”

As they came into the living room his father leaned over to the radio, which was playing a fugue for violin and harpsichord, and turned it off. “All that nagging,” he said, “can’t we have a little peace and quiet for once?” He dropped into his chair with a faint sigh, opened the book and read on. Frits looked at the clock on the mantel. It was twenty minutes past ten. “The morning rushes by,” he thought. “But on any other Sunday I’d still be in bed, so little time’s been wasted.” He went to his bedroom, pulled one book after another from the shelf, flipped through them and put them back where they belonged. “It’s too cold in here,” he mumbled. Returning to the living room he took a newspaper from the rack and sat down by the window. Outside he saw passers-by walking quickly, their faces stern and tense. The sky was a solid grey, with a dirty, yellow tint to it. From the divan he could see the street. In the two hours that he sat there, paper in hand, without reading a word, there passed in various directions: four soldiers; two women, each with a pram; a young couple, the husband carrying a child; a boy with a girl on the back of his bicycle; and a group of children herded along by two gentlemen. He watched as the neighbour tried to lure his dog, which was refusing to enter the house, with coaxing and with threats. “I just sit here and sit here and don’t do a thing,” he thought. “The day’s half over.” It was a quarter past twelve.

His parents put on their coats. “Be sure to answer the bell if it rings,” his mother said. “We’re going out for a little stroll.” She looked out of the window as she spoke. “We’ll have to be quick about it, though: you’d almost think it was going to snow. Come, Father, hurry up. See you in a little while. And don’t forget to lock the door behind you if you go out.”

“Lock the door behind you if you go out,” Frits echoed to himself a few times. As soon as his parents had picked their way down the stairs and he heard the street door close behind them, he turned on the radio. The announcer was reading the time: twelve twenty-four. Taking an oval, nickel-plated tobacco box from his pocket, Frits rolled a cigarette and ran through the luminescent scale of frequencies without finding anything to his liking. He turned off the set, walked down the hall to the side room, where papers and open books were strewn across the writing table, opened a wooden tobacco box and transferred a pinch to his own, which he slid into his pocket.

On his way to the living room he paused before the big mirror in the hall, twisted his mouth to the left and to the right, then lifted the upper lip and pulled down the lower, rolling them inside out. After that he viewed his face from the side, fetched the circular shaving mirror from the kitchen, held it up beside him and used both mirrors to examine his head from above, from behind, and then in full profile. Turning off the light in the hall, he opened the door to the side room. “As seen by daylight,” he said quietly. After having examined his head from every angle once more, he combed his hair and turned the light back on. “Let us assess the effect created by daylight in combination with an incandescent lamp,” he said to himself. “Very like a giant turnip,” he said out loud then, “yet with telltale signs of sagacity.”

He sighed, hung the shaving mirror back on its peg beside the kitchen window and went to the living room. It was almost one o’clock. He sat down on the divan. “We’re more than halfway,” he thought, “the afternoon started an hour ago. Valuable time, time irretrievable, have I squandered.” He turned on the radio, but even before it had warmed up he turned it off again, stood up, opened the sliding doors and entered the back room. Pushing aside the floor-length curtains, he pressed his face against the window. His forehead left a greasy spot on the pane. He pressed it to the glass once more and looked down.

In the garden of the house to the right, a little corgi dog was performing its duty beneath a rhododendron. Three coats were hanging out to dry on the line. On the concrete walkway of the house immediately below theirs, a white-haired man was chopping blocks of wood. Occasionally, a blow of the hatchet would cause a piece to catapult through the air.

Frits sank his canines into the wooden strip between the panes, touched his tongue to the glass, then turned and walked to the kitchen. There he took a handful of kindling from a paper bag in the corner, laid the pieces of wood on the kitchen table and opened the window soundlessly. Immediately after each blow of the hatchet, he tossed a piece of kindling far off into the garden, at various spots: on the gravel, onto the ornamental rocks, or against the plank fence: forcefully each time, with considerable noise. After retrieving the fourth piece of kindling, the man stopped and studied the wood quizzically. Frits threw one more piece, as far to the left of the walkway as he could, closed the window and sighed. “The empty hours,” he murmured, turning away.

As he entered the hallway he heard his parents on the stairs. “Have you been eating sweets again?” his mother asked as she came in. “Goodness gracious, here’s what I’ve been waiting for,” she continued, quickly draping her coat over the stand and rushing to the toilet. Breathing heavily, his father moved slowly to the living room door and opened it with a hard shove. It was one thirty.

“Shall we have a bite to eat?” his mother asked. “What will it be, coffee or tea?” “Makes no difference to me,” his father said. “It’s so cold out,” she went on, “there’s a real Middenweg wind blowing.” “East wind, you mean east wind,” Frits said. “Please don’t use terms unfamiliar to the uninitiated.” “What would you two like?” she asked again. “Tea or coffee? There’s still some coffee left.” “Tea, make it tea,” Frits said. “Coffee,” his father said at almost the same instant. “I’ll just make coffee, then. All right, Frits?” she decided. “You’ll have some anyway, won’t you?” “I’ll take mine with only hot water, no milk,” Frits said. “No,” she said, “I’ll be serving no black coffee in this house.”

By then she had set the table and cut the bread. “Who’d like a pickled herring?” she asked. “No, please, no,” Frits said. “And you, Father?” “Uh, no, I don’t really feel like it,” his father replied. “They’ve been lying on that plate in the kitchen for three days,” Frits said to himself, “they’ve turned green. Even the chopped onions have gone brown.”

“Then I suppose I’ll just have to throw away the fish again,” she said. “And you two will start whining about why I never buy pickled herring. So I’ll buy them and then they’ll just lie there, and the long and the short of it is that they’ll wind up in the bin again.”

“All right, bring them on,” Frits said. They sat down at the table. “It’s a wonder to behold,” his father said, “how poorly they clean fish these days.” “That’s right,” his mother said, “they know you’ll buy it anyway.” “Do you have a clean knife for me?” Frits asked after he had cut his herring into pieces and eaten it. “I’d like some jam.” “If it’s a clean knife you want, get one yourself,” his mother replied. “The day is two-thirds finished,” he thought, “and now I’ll have a filthy taste in my mouth for the rest of the afternoon.”

After eating, they remained seated for a while. “Time to relax and have a smoke,” Frits said. He had just started to roll a cigarette when his father pulled out his case and offered him a cigar. “That looks good,” he said, taking one.

“Make a cigarette for me, would you?” his mother asked. He rolled a thin one and handed it to her. She stuck the cigarette a fifth of the way into her mouth, right in the middle of her lips. Puffing shallowly, she pulled the cigarette out of her mouth each time, using thumb and forefinger, and exhaled even before the smoke could quite fill the oral cavity.

“The way you smoke is both incredibly clumsy and ridiculous,” Frits said. “First of all, one should always hold the very tip of the cigarette between the dry, outermost part of the lips. Secondly, you must then move it to one corner of your mouth, not take it out all the time. And if you do, then only between index and middle finger.” “Make it sound like I’m joking,” he thought, and went on in a shrill voice, creasing his face into a smile. “Like this,” he said, pulling the cigarette from her mouth. It remained glued to her upper lip.

“Ow,” she cried. “Ow!” “Come now, stop this,” his father said, suddenly blowing a huge cloud of smoke. “She has to learn sometime,” Frits said. His mother stubbed out the cigarette and laid it in a groove in the ashtray.

While she was clearing the table, his father went and lay on the divan, then sat up again to remove his shoes. He remained seated like that for a moment, staring into space, then stood up and walked to the bookcase. Just as he reached it, he slipped; his left leg shot out, but he regained his balance. “Goodness!” his mother cried, “oh mercy!” “It’s nothing,” Frits said. “Don’t start bawling right away.”

His father took a book from the shelf, went back and lay on the divan, running his free hand through his hair. “Oh heavens, the fire,” his mother said. She peered into the stove, then said: “It’s burning nicely now. Mind, you two, that you leave it exactly like this. With the kettle just a little in between.” She demonstrated how to balance the aluminium kettle against the top of the stove door, to keep it ajar. “Otherwise it will all burn up within the hour,” she said, going into the kitchen.

Frits looked at the clock. “All is lost,” he thought, “everything is ruined. It’s ten minutes past three. But the evening can still make up for a great deal.” His father was feeling around with his right hand between the divan and the wall. “What are you looking for?” Frits asked. “Mmm,” his father replied, “I’m looking for something.” “Did you drop it?” Frits asked. “My lighter,” his father replied. His mother came in. “Have you lost something?” she asked. “Yes,” his father said, “yes, I have.” “What has your father lost?” she asked Frits. “The lighter,” he replied, “it rolled back behind there.”

“Get your lazy bones off that divan,” his mother said, and once his father was standing she pulled the divan away from the wall. Something hard fell to the floor. Frits bent over, felt around, found the little copper contraption and handed it to his father, who was bent over the divan, ready to lie down again. “Move it back first,” his mother said. Frits pushed the seat straight against the wall. His father turned and sat on it, relit his cold cigar, and lay down.

Seating himself before the window, Frits watched the ducks waddling across the ice on the canal. He leafed through a railway timetable he’d found on the mantel. His mother sat beside the fire, knitting something in white wool. “Needles ticking like a fast clock,” he thought. Forty-five minutes passed in this way. He moved to another chair, beside the divan, in front of the radio, and looked at his father. “He’s asleep,” he said to himself, and turned on the set. Suddenly the kettle began singing in the kitchen. “Make that noise stop,” he thought, “for God’s sake, make it stop.” His mother hurried into the kitchen; a moment later the whistling stopped. She came back with tea. “And now, dear listeners, ‘La Favorite’ by Couperin,” the announcer said. When the music had begun, his mother said: “That’s not a violin, is it? But it’s not a piano either. It must be a harpsichord. Is that a harpsichord?” “A glorious instrument, isn’t it?” Frits said. “I forgot to turn off the gas,” she said quite suddenly. “Would you do it for me?” He went to the kitchen and turned off the burner. When he came back, the radio was silent. His father was sitting half-upright, leaning on one elbow. The clock said twelve minutes to four.

When the doorbell rang, Frits went to open it. “Who’s there?” he shouted. There was no reply. “Who’s there, goddam it!” he bellowed. “Whoever it is, I feel like giving them a sound thumping,” he said out loud. A young man with black hair and glasses rounded the corner of the final landing. “Oh, it’s you. Hello,” Frits said with a smile, which vanished immediately. “See, things can get even worse,” he thought. The visitor was of slender build, his red, bony face dotted with pimples.

“Well, well, Mr van Egters,” he said, “how are you today?” “Fine, thank you, Mr van Egters,” Frits replied, “and you?” They entered the hallway together. “Is Ina coming too?” Frits’s mother asked after pecking him on the cheeks. “As chance would have it, Mother,” the young man said with a smile, “Ina isn’t feeling well. The only purpose of my visit is to say that we won’t be coming to dinner.” He shook his head. “He’s already grown a little balder,” Frits thought.

“Oh goodness,” his mother said. “Is she feeling poorly?” “Not well at all,” the young man said. “If you wait a moment, Joop, I’ll make something for you to take with you,” she said, going to the kitchen.

“How are things here?” Joop asked. “How do you think?” thought Frits. “How do you think?” he said. For a moment, no one spoke. “Since Joop has left home, Father” he went on in a jovial tone, “I find that I get along with him swimmingly.” Joop smiled. His father turned on the radio and found a waltz. He patted his right knee to the rhythm.

His mother poured them tea. “Have a macaroon,” she said to Joop. “We’ve had ours already.”

It was growing dark. Frits turned on the light, which caused a grinding noise to come out of the loudspeaker. “Ben Beender and his orchestra, with ‘On the Ice’,” the announcer said. His father clicked off the set.

“Our toilet’s frozen,” Joop said to Frits. “Christ,” Frits said, “is it frozen solid, or just blocked with ice? If it’s the latter, maybe something can be done about it.” “What do I care,” he thought, “what difference does it make to me?” “Well, that’s probably all it is,” Joop said. “Do you have something thin, something strong but flexible?” Frits went into the hallway and searched through the broom cupboard, until he found the top section of a fishing rod. “Will this do?” he asked, coming back into the room. “No,” Joop answered, “that would be a pity. It’s a good rod.” Frits put the piece back where he’d found it. “That was easy enough,” he said to himself. “Why do I think that way?” he thought then. “What right do I have to be so blasé?”

His mother came into the living room, carrying a pan. “Listen,” she said to Joop, “here’s some meat and gravy. There’s a little apple sauce in a jar, in there, between the endives and the potatoes. If I wrap it all in some newspaper and put it in here”—she held up a wicker shopping basket for him to see—“it won’t spill and it won’t get cold.” Joop put on his coat and coughed. “You’re going awfully bald,” Frits said. He eyed Joop’s scalp, the hairline already in full retreat along both sides of the forehead. “You say that with a certain glee, I note,” Joop said. He left, carefully balancing the pan in its bag. “Say hello, and give my love to all,” his mother called after him.

“At least that’s over with,” Frits said to himself. “All this coming and going, the doorbell never stops ringing.” His father crossed to the stove, seized the handle and opened the door with a clatter. “He’s going to make a mess,” Frits thought, “and all I can do is watch. Why can’t I stop watching?” His father rapped his pipe hard a few times against the metal sill: charred tobacco fell between door and stove to the floor. Then he slammed the door with a clang.

His mother set the table and brought in the food. “Some of the potatoes might be a little hard,” she said as they sat down, “but I can’t help it. If you know of a better place to eat, I won’t stop you.” “There isn’t a single glassy one in the bunch, as far as I can ascertain,” Frits said. “Careful with the gravy,” she said, “don’t drown your food in it. I can make more, but it will only be waterier.” “The gravy is exemplary,” Frits said, “it’s absolutely heavenly. In fact, you don’t even need much of it, it’s so nice and rich.” “The gravy is good,” he thought, “it really is excellent.” “Father, does it meet with your approval as well, if I may be so bold?” he asked with mock affectation, his head tilted to one side. “It tastes fine to me, I have to admit,” his father replied.

After dinner his father went to sit by the stove, in the same spot where Frits’s mother had done her knitting that afternoon. Frits put on his coat and came into the room. “Where are you off to?” asked his mother, who was clearing the table. “Why not spend a nice, quiet evening at home?” “I’m fidgety,” Frits said, “I need to get out. I think I’ll go to see Jaap Elderer tonight, or else Louis.” Confirming the presence of tobacco and rolling papers in his box, he slid it into his coat pocket and left.

It was cold outside. A south-easterly wind was blowing hard. Not a single star could be seen on the firmament. At the river he turned left and followed the granite embankment. Crossing a bridge with heavy stone balustrades, he walked along the other bank, past a broad, busy street, turning at last onto a quay with warehouses at the start of it. At number seventy-one, having first climbed a flight of seven flagstone steps, he rang the bell beside a door with a wrought-iron grille before the glass. At the first pull of the bell handle he heard a dull rattle: only after a slight delay did the clapper sound two clear, penetrating notes. He waited thirty seconds, rang again, then went back down the steps. “The chances of this evening’s success have been significantly reduced,” he said quietly. “These are trying times.”

He took the same route for his return. Close to his own home he entered the portico of a tall, broad house by the riverfront and rang the bell. When the door swung open, he shouted up the stairs: “Egters, in the flesh.” High above him someone was leaning over the banister, peering down. “I reiterate: Egters, Van,” Frits shouted. “Well, all right then, why not?” the person upstairs shouted. “It’s probably better than nothing.” When Frits arrived upstairs he was met by an extremely tall young man with thin, blond hair slicked back. The young man wore no jacket, and had his sleeveless jumper on inside out, without a tie.

“I came by out of boredom,” Frits said. “A busy day, sometimes one needs to get away. Forgive me for imposing on your own hectic schedule, your studies, your labour of exploration. What are you working on at the moment?”

The windows in the room they entered were bare of curtains. It was, without actually being cramped, not a large room. An oversized paraffin heater was lit in one corner, yet the air was in no way stale. Along the wall to the left was a table, on the other side an upright fold-down bed, and between these two chairs.

“Photography,” said the young man, picking up a book from the table. Experiments with Film Sensitive to Colour, Frits read. “And are you making headway in this, Louis?” he asked. “Sometimes I believe I am,” the young man replied, flicking a breadcrumb against the wall. “Shoo, puss,” he said, giving a whack to the head of the black-and-white dappled cat that had jumped onto his lap. The animal leapt to the floor and crawled under the chair by the window where Frits had just seated himself. “They’re learning,” the young man said. “But Louis, I thought the cat you had here was black,” Frits said. “There are any number of them,” Louis said, “oh yes, any number indeed.” “How large a number might that be, pray tell?” “Five, I think,” Louis said. “And they have the run of the place?” Frits asked. “Doesn’t anyone else live here?”

“No,” Louis said. “When Kade is in his studio, his wife brings food for him and the cats. They have a room of their own. They’re not allowed to go into his studio any more, not since they shat on a pile of drawings.” “Ah, I see,” Frits said. “When you go into their room,” Louis went on, “they’re all sitting there on the table, pretty as you please.” “You should turn down the heater a bit,” Frits said. “I see it flaring up yellow.” As Louis was trimming the burner, Frits looked at the frost flowers on the windows, examining the ice crystals that had risen in twin sheaves, like a bird’s feathers. “Excuse me for just a moment,” Louis said, standing up and moving to the table. “I want to finish jotting this down; after that I am at your beck and call.”

“Fine,” Frits said, but it didn’t register. His eyes traced the outlines of the frost flowers and he poked his index finger against the ice again and again, leaving a little round hole each time where it melted. “That’s been a while,” he thought, looking over his shoulder at Louis, who was bent over his book. On his wrist he wore a large, flat watch with a broad grey strap. A pencil dangled from his lips.

“I must have been twelve or thirteen,” Frits thought. “We were on the balcony. Who else was there? Louis, Frans, Jaap, Bep and a couple of the others, I can’t remember their names.” He closed his eyes. “I can still see it,” he thought. “They were walking back and forth, on the fourth floor, balancing on the rail. It wasn’t much broader than my hand. And the others just laughed and laughed. How could they laugh?” He opened his eyes, looked at Louis, and closed them again. “To have such courage,” he thought, “what a blessing. Or did they simply fail to see how dangerous it was? Perhaps that was it. I felt nauseous, and there was this pain behind my eyes; that was me. And a sort of tickling at the base of my spine. Afraid I was, afraid I have remained. So is it.” He sighed. “If only I were Louis, or Frans, that’s what I used to think,” he said to himself. “And merely watching, and being discontented.”

“I need to find an envelope,” he heard Louis say. Rummaging through folders and piles of paper, the young man then seemed to find something that caught his eye, for he started reading it attentively.

“Yes,” Frits thought. “And that business with the flowerpots. Dropping them on someone from the fourth floor and then, at the last moment, yelling: look out! So they could jump aside just in time. It’s a miracle no one ever got hurt. I can’t explain it.” He listened to the silence, in which he heard his own watch ticking. “Or that time on the footpath,” he said to himself. “The four of us picked a fight with six others, they were all just as strong as we were. But they ran away. We caught one of them, took him along, tied him to that pole and left him there, and it was already growing dark. Louis didn’t care.”

Suddenly he heard the rustling of paper. Louis had finished, turned his chair to him and said: “Well well, Mr Egters.” “Allow me, if you would, to inquire as to the state of your well-being,” Frits said. “As per usual,” Louis replied, “as per usual.” “By now, of course, it has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Frits said, “that you do not inhabit a sound body. One suspects a family with a great many haematological disorders. Describe, if you would, the symptoms anew.” “How can I say things like this?” he thought, “why can’t I make it stop?” “They are known to you by now,” Louis said. “Does the headache give you no respite?” Frits asked. “No,” Louis said, “I’m sorry to have to disappoint you on that score.” “As soon as you work, or read, or write, it returns in force, isn’t that correct?” Frits asked. “Even at this very moment?” “Certainly, even at this very moment,” Louis said.

“So are we to conclude that you are headed for your demise, that it is all going steadily downhill?” Frits asked. “And that you are waiting patiently for your final repose?”

“Well, in the long run it does get a bit annoying, I must say,” Louis answered, slowly wrinkling his brow. “When it goes on for years, never changing, then at a given point”—here his voice suddenly took on something airy—“you start thinking that the end might not really be so terrible after all. In the long run, you see, one starts to have doubts.”

Frits looked at Louis, at the eyes glistening colourless in his head. “It’s like they’ve been steeping in hot water for ages,” he thought. The room had grown hot again. For the second time that evening the cat sprang onto Louis’s lap, and again he smacked it. “He acts like it’s a casual slap,” Frits thought, “but this time it was a calculated movement. The knuckles of the right hand precisely against the beast’s head.” The animal did not jump away immediately. Louis drew his arm back a bit further and this time administered a more powerful blow. The cat sprang away with a cry. “It sounded just like: ‘mama’,” Frits said. They laughed.

“Do you like cats?” Louis asked. “Do you?” Frits asked.

“I asked you first.” “No,” Frits said, “in fact, I consider them creatures without a soul.” “For the love of me,” Louis said, “I can’t understand why anyone would keep such animals in their home.”

The chastened beast was hunched up beneath the fold-down bed by the door. Its tail and a few whiskers were the only things sticking out from under the curtain. “Render kindness unto animals, and consider the birds of the air,” Louis said with a grin. “A dog, though,” he went on then, “I can almost imagine that.” “One with big, faithful eyes,” Frits said, twisting his face into a grin that produced a yawn.

“Have I ever told you that crazy story about the dog in Bloemendaal?” “No,” Louis said, leaning forward. “A house in Bloemendaal,” Frits said. “A big old house, a mansion. This old man lives there, alone. All alone. One day the neighbours say: we haven’t seen him for ages. You know how that goes, one story leads to the next. They start poking around outside the house. Not a sound. Everything’s locked, they can’t get in.”

“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.