The Evenings Page 5

  Frits was still standing beside him. He listened to the voice, saw the eyes in their startled motion and observed the awkward movements of the arms. He began shuffling cautiously backwards, turned slowly on his heel and sloped off. He almost collided with an already partly bald young man wearing a pince-nez. The man was tall and lanky of frame and sported a pair of thin little moustaches. “How are you?” Frits asked, “Kasper Sterringa, what a pleasure.” He waited, examining the man’s immaculate evening attire. “My, my,” the other said. Frits held out his hand. When the other man held out his, he shook it immediately. “We’re standing a bit in the way here,” Frits said. “Is that all I can come up with?” he thought; “wait, I can always tell him about that photograph.” “Weren’t you at that soirée at the Hermes Pavilion, back in May?” the pince-nez asked. “I thought I saw you there, but you didn’t see me.” “No, that can’t be,” answered Frits, “I wasn’t there.” “I know something I can ask him,” he thought. “Have you ever heard anything from Sal Jachthandelaar?” he asked.

  “No,” the pince-nez said. “He’s dead, of course,” Frits said. “No, no, what I meant was yes, I have,” the other corrected himself, “he made it to Switzerland and from there to England. His family is dead. He became a pilot over there.” “Well I never,” Frits said. “He was at the airfield in Valkenburg recently,” the other continued, “but I haven’t seen him since, not for a few months.”

  “I am extremely pleased to hear that,” Frits said. “Really, that gives me great pleasure.” “Another question,” he thought.

  “What are you doing at the moment?” asked the pince-nez. “I heard that you’re studying to become a notary,” Frits said. “Yes, I’m in my third year already,” the other said. “I still have to get my master’s, otherwise the work’s only half-done. What about you?” Frits took a deep breath, opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again and said then in a flat voice: “I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it.” He closed his mouth, squinted a bit through his left eye and looked at the floor.

  “You’re still the same madman you always were,” the other said with a smile. “I can never figure you out. Do you still tell those crazy stories? You always had something silly going on.” “Only that story about the photograph,” Frits said blandly. He counted the tiles in the floor. “What’s that?” the other asked. “Well,” Frits said, “at this school they were going to take a photograph of the whole class, but the little poor boy wasn’t allowed to be in it, he looked too ragged. The teacher told him: listen, Pete, when that picture has been taken, later they will say: that’s Wim, he’s a bank manager these days; his father was a manager before him. And that is Klaas, he’s a notary. His father was a notary too. And that is Eduard, he’s a doctor now. And that one there is Joop, he is a clergyman. So, Pete, when the photographer comes in I want you to go stand over there. Do you understand? All right, so the little poor boy does that and the picture is taken. A few days later the photographer sends them the picture. Who wants to order one? the teacher asks. Most of the children do. Pete too.” “It really is very old and corny,” he thought. “The teacher is surprised,” he went on. “She asks him: Pete, what do you want a picture for? You’re not even in it. I know, teacher, he says. So why would you want to have one? she asks. I’ll keep it, he says. Then later, when I’m grown up, I can say: this is Wim, he became a manager. And that’s Klaas, he’s a notary. And that is Eduard, he’s a doctor. And that’s our teacher, she started coughing up blood and died at an early age.”

  The pince-nez laughed loudly. When his mouth opened, Frits saw that threads of saliva had formed between his jaws. A lady gestured to him and he left, after quickly shaking hands with Frits, who turned and walked down the stairs to the less crowded hall below. “Jesus, that’s Tafelmaker over there,” he thought, “that’s all we need. Now we’ve had it.” A young man came walking over to him. He wore a dark-blue worsted suit. “A bit baggy,” thought Frits. The boy’s forehead was acned; the nose was thin and white, while the cheeks exhibited an unnatural blush, like a Californian apple. The brown hair was flattened and heavily pomaded in long, wavy rows. “Spaghetti head,” Frits thought. “Hey, old Frits!” said the boy, thumping him hard on the shoulder. “Well, well, old seal,” he said. “Here we go,” Frits thought. “Can you still give yourself a hump?” he asked. The other turned, bent over a little and, after moving his shoulder blades back and forth, succeeded in moving one of them into a position that caused a high, pointed hump to appear beneath his clothing. “Ha, Ba, Bariba,” he sang, tapping one foot loudly. “Ha, Ba, Bariba.” “That’s very good,” said Frits. The other suddenly hurried off. “An evening well spent,” Frits thought. “A profitable way to pass the hours.”

  He saw Joop and Ina coming down the stairs with their coats on, and stopped them. “Are you two leaving already?” he asked. “It’s only nine thirty.” “Yes,” Joop answered with a smile, “otherwise we won’t get to bed on time.” “Before you know it, you’ll be going to bed at eight,” Frits said. “It only gets worse when you give in to it.” “I need my ten hours of sleep,” Joop said, “here’s the programme.” They walked on and left the building.

  Intermission was over. He took the same seat and looked around as the auditorium filled. The programme resumed with a short concert in three parts. When that was over, it was ten minutes to ten. The next number was Schubert’s Impromptu. The fragile, plangent music got off to a slow start.

  “I am twenty-three now,” he thought. “Twenty-three years old. My first year, that was in thirty-seven, or was it thirty-six?” He gave his left earlobe a gentle pinch. “The second year,” he whispered. The pianist reached a slow passage, during which he fingered the keys carefully, with long pauses.

  “Right, then,” Frits said to himself, “on to the third.” He leaned over and put his face in his hands. “The fourth year, the fourth,” he thought, “what was that like? How was it? Can everything be understood? Why didn’t they send a letter right away?” He closed his eyes, which he had kept half-shut the whole time, all the way. The music arrived at a loud and rapid passage. “Still, I must be able to remember and know precisely why it went the way it did,” he said to himself. “Everything can be understood, when a body puts his mind to it.”

  The music ended. He stood up and walked out of the auditorium while the applause continued, threw on his coat, ran down the stairs and was outside. Standing still, he heard violins being tuned. He spat on the ground and strode home.

  He could see no lights in the windows. He looked at the house front. “No one knows what a human abode encompasses,” he said quietly. He climbed the stairs slowly and entered the hallway. All was dark. “They are at home,” he thought as he turned on a light and saw his parents’ coats on the coat stand. He brushed his teeth, went into his room and sat on the bed. Then he slid aside the curtain that hung before the lowest shelf of his bookcase and looked at a long row of books and blue, green, orange and grey notebooks. He remained staring at them for a long time.

  “I should get rid of this rubbish,” he said softly. “Out the door, gone completely. Not a trace left.” “Who would be mad enough, who is insane enough, to actually go to something like that?” he thought. “I am,” he said aloud. “I, Frits Egters.” He shivered. “How many hours of sleep does a person need?” he thought. “Eight hours at most. Six, in the long run, is insufficient, but enough in exceptional circumstances.”

  He pulled from the row a thin, flimsy book with a brown cover, opened it and read: “In compiling this syntax, I have adopted a mode of categorization less than common. I did so with an eye to the second book of translation exercises by Graning-Kok. In translation it is desirable that the student grow acquainted as quickly as possible with the accusativus cum infinitivo, the gerundium, the gerundivum and the ablativus absolutus. That is why, in seeking connection with the aforementioned book of translation exercises, these constructions
have been dealt with first. For the rest, I should note that I have attempted to be concise. Finally, in this foreword I must not neglect to mention the support received from—”

  Frits began tugging on the halves of the book, trying to tear it in two, but stopped. “Why is it that I don’t go on pulling?” he thought, bit down softly on the binding and placed the book back on the shelf.

  He twisted the desk lamp in such a fashion that the light spread across the ceiling, and viewed his hair in the mirror beside the door. Using his fingers, he parted it and regarded the pale scalp. Then he took a swig of cod liver oil from a bottle on his desk, undressed and promptly fell asleep.

  He thought he heard music, but as soon as the notes became almost distinct, the wind would rise up and blow away every sound. A little later he was walking beside the river.

  In his hand he held a bouquet of flowers, wrapped in paper. Across the water, a large, white swan came swimming towards him. The animal climbed with difficulty, yet quickly enough for all that, up the steep embankment and waddled in his direction. It was a normal swan, of the kind one sees in parks. The feet, however, were stuck in a pair of ladies’ shoes, but this did not worry him.

  He tried to say something, but his voice was gone. Still, he felt no apprehension. The animal had now come quite near him, it stretched out its neck, picked and tore the paper from the bouquet and began snapping at the flowers. They were sturdy, white chrysanthemums. Each snap caused new damage. The white petals blew away into the river. Where they touched the water’s surface they formed a snowstorm.

  Sometimes the bird bit an entire flower off its stalk and spat it out. Soon the bouquet was bare. Frits tossed it on the ground.

  Then the bird’s head came closer and closer. First the head grew bigger, then only the eye. In a twinkling it was already as big as his own head. He looked into it and grew very calm. He knew that, should he offer no resistance, this would be his demise, but he had no desire to struggle against it. The animal would kill him, but the sight of the eye, now so large that he saw himself reflected in it, gave him a feeling of satisfaction: it made no difference to him.

  He awoke, rolled over and tried to recall the dream, but could not. He remembered only that there had been a swan in it, fell asleep once again and dreamt no more that night.

  III

  TUESDAY AT NOON, during the three quarters of an hour between morning and afternoon shifts, he left the office building, hurried down a few alleyways and, arriving at a large square, found the entrance to the warehouse known as “The Hornet’s Nest”. He had the lift take him to the second floor, sauntered through the book section, descended one floor and then climbed back up again. In the objets d’art department, he picked up a metal beaker. “This is not silver,” he thought, “but some cheap, stainless metal. Perhaps even copper with a coating of chrome.” He turned it over, the price was on the bottom: eighteen guilders and seventy-five cents. He viewed the handle. “This is clumsily tin-plated iron, simply soldered on,” he thought. When a salesgirl approached he returned the beaker to its spot and walked on.

  Atop a table lined with green velvet he saw a smaller beaker without a handle. “It’s almost a vase,” he thought, “for the brim sticks out too far. One wonders whether it is a drinking cup at all.” Picking it up in one hand he saw on the bottom that the price was nine and a half guilders. The metal was covered with spots. “Twenty minutes of my time gone already,” he thought, and left the shop quickly. The sun was peeking from behind the clouds; it was not cold.

  He crossed the square at an angle and made his way down a narrow street. Passing through a set of revolving doors he entered the large shop, located in its entirety on the ground floor, that was known as “The House of Gifts”. He worked his way hurriedly past the displays, from the household items to toys and from there to the fur department, and saw at last a host of glistening objects on a table bedecked with gracefully crinkled green felt. Here lay metal tea strainers, letter openers, teaspoons and beakers too. “They’re the same ones,” he murmured, picking one up. “The same handle too,” he thought. The price was eight-and-a-half guilders. Beside it was a taller, narrower beaker that cost eleven guilders. He had been inside for six minutes and slipped quickly out of the door. Cutting through two alleyways he arrived at a broad street and suddenly, in the window of a bicycle shop, he saw a pile of aluminium saucers and a stack of beakers of the same metal. The price of the former was one guilder and twenty cents, while the beakers cost one guilder and ten cents apiece. In the shop he asked to see one of each, and noted that the material was sturdy, well polished and of purest aluminium. He bought them and stuck them in his briefcase.

  He had ten minutes left. He ambled his way along a canal, entered a grubby street, turned into a sandwich shop and said to the assistant, who was standing before the display: “I’ll have three chocolate bars.” “The sixty-cent ones or the forty-cent ones?” the man asked. “Two sixties and one forty,” said Frits. The man looked around cautiously, opened a tin, took out what he had asked for and dropped them into Frits’s case.

  At the very end of the break he walked into the office and sat down at his desk. “Pim, look at the bargains I’ve found,” he said to a woman of about thirty, seated at a desk by the window, “good material, too.” He showed her the beaker and saucer and mentioned the price. “It’s for the little son of a friend of mine,” he said. “I didn’t know you were so practical,” she replied. “He’s celebrating his first birthday,” said Frits, “what better present could you give? And I’ll put two chocolate bars upright in the beaker. I’ll wrap it nicely in pretty, thin paper with a coloured ribbon round it. And I brought this for you.” He placed the forty-cent chocolate bar on her desk. “That’s awfully kind of you,” she said. “It’s very expensive chocolate,” Frits said. “They had the cheaper kind as well, but I thought: it’s for Pim, so the best is only barely good enough.” “That’s terribly kind of you,” she said.

  When he arrived home that afternoon, he found the house deserted. After eating a few biscuits from a tin he found in the sideboard, he took a spoonful of jam, a lump of butter from the pot with the same spoon, and shook some chocolate sprinkles onto his hand. Having eaten this, he turned on the radio. “The four- and five-year-old, in other words,” a woman’s voice said. He turned off the set, went into the kitchen, put the pan of meat on the gas and waited until the layer of fat had melted. Then he took a few slices of brown bread and ate them, after first dipping them into the steaming gravy, one by one. He replaced the lid and slid the pan back to where it had been, at the back of the range.

  Shortly afterwards, at five thirty, his mother came home and put their dinner on the stove. “God only knows where that man has got to,” she said to Frits. “He went into town at nine thirty this morning without saying a word.” “He will show up,” said Frits, “let’s not bother about him and just eat at the usual time.”

  At six o’clock his mother put dinner on the table. His father arrived in the nick of time. They ate pea soup, meat, potatoes and kohlrabi. Just as they had all filled their plates, the lights went out. “Where are the matches?” his mother asked. “I have matches,” said his father, and lit one. He remained seated, staring at the flame, and when it was burned out he placed the matchstick on the edge of his plate. It was dark again. “If you keep sitting there like that, the light will come on quickly enough,” Frits’s mother said. “The pixies will see to that.” “What do I have to do?” his father asked, rising from his chair. “Give me a token.” “Not a gas token, it’s not a gas lamp,” she said. “You need an electricity token, a guilder.” Turning her chair around she took, by the light of his father’s second match, a large, shiny token from a box atop the sideboard and handed it to him. When the second match went out, his father, picking his way in utter darkness, stumbled into the hallway. They heard him entering the side room, but no further sound reached them. Frits kept his eyes closed and clasped his hands between his legs.

 
; His father returned. “I found the meter,” he said, “but where does the token go?” “The top right—you have to lift the little iron latch and after you’ve put it in, you turn the knob on the right,” said Frits. His father left once more, colliding with the living room door, which he had left ajar. At last they heard the click of the mechanism and the fall of the token. The light came on. “And that is what they call an intellectual,” his mother said.

  Once they had eaten their pudding, Frits said: “Today I bought something at a most reasonable price for Jaap’s little Hans, whose birthday it is today; he is one year old.” He stood up and produced the saucer and beaker from his bag.

  “Where did you get the chocolate bars?” his mother asked. “I bought them,” he replied. “They’re awfully nice,” she said, picking up both objects. “And not at all expensive,” Frits said, mentioning the price. “I’ll have to scour the spots and the dirt off them first,” he said. “You mustn’t scour them,” said his mother, “you’ll only ruin them that way, not make them any nicer. Give them to me later, I’ll put them in the dishwater, you’ll see how pretty they become.”

  “Nice, is it not?” he said to his father. “A beaker and a plate for Jaap’s little Hans, today is his first birthday.”

  “That’s an awfully little plate,” his father answered, “who is it for?” “For Hans, Jaap’s little one!” his mother shouted. “You must speak a little louder,” she told Frits, “that man is deaf as a doorpost.” “Is he turning one already?” his father said. “Goodness.”

  “I’ll wrap it first,” Frits said, going to the kitchen cupboard to fetch some gift wrap. He returned with a large piece of yellow paper. “But I think I need to scour it a bit before I do that,” he said. “Just listen to me,” his mother replied, “give it here, I’ll put it in the dishwater.”