B007P4V3G4 EBOK (3 page)

To mention each and every one of the thirty or more authors
whose work has been included in this collection would surely be
perverse: exploration of the unknown is half the fun, after all.
However, I cannot allow myself to conclude this bird's eye view of
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy without addressing a very
particular, special form of fantasy fiction: the tale in which all is
hidden, suggested, where the menace and brooding is implicit
rather than explicit, where the perspective slithers about and warps
and distorts while the readers not looking, as it were. To be able to
publish just one such tale would already be a pleasure, to be able
to include two, one an undisputed masterpiece of Dutch literature
as a whole, Werther Nieland by Gerard Reve, the other the debut of
a young writer of exceptional quality, P.F. Thomese's Leviathan, has
to be my own, personal highlight in presenting this volume.

Omissions from a collection such as this are inevitable and, alas,
unavoidable: space is not inexhaustible, rights cannot always be
agreed, demands from one quarter or another enter the realm of
fiction concerned and become quite fantastic. To have had to exclude anything for any such reason is as good a ground for
sadness as any I can think of. The only subjects absent by design
in this collection are clogs, windmills and tulips - cheese, however,
put up a tougher fight than I had bargained

Note

For a general discussion of Literary Fantasy, see the introduction
by Brian Stableford to The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy.

Arnold Aletrino

It has already been almost a fortnight that I have been perpetually
in the dark. My eye ailment does not heal. My spirit is becoming
ill through all the solitude.

Today, I got up, a painful pressure above my sick eye and a
head as heavy as lead, for I had not slept last night.

Now that, as I do every day, I have come into my dark
sitting room, I feel, right through the double curtains, that it is
cold, wet and miserable outside.

Again and again, the wind howls in gusts through the cracks in
the window frames and blows with melancholy tones down the
chimney and the flue. With each gust, the rain is driven against the
windows with a clatter.

I attempt to rouse my cat to a cheerfulness which I myself lack
and I lure her with a scrap of paper crunched into a ball on the end
of a string, but she crawls into her basket close to the fire. She is
cold and sad, like me.

Whether it is the fault of my irritability, I do not know, but it
seems to me as if the reading aloud of the newspaper is interrupted
more often than usual by domestic issues.

At last, the reading is finished and I do again what I have done
so frequently: I walk back and forth like a bear in his cage, from
the wall to the door and back again. Always the same: the wall,
the little table, the sofa, the door ... the door, the sofa, the little
table, the wall.

And during this monotonous progress, it is as if the clock ticks
clearly: una ex his, hora mortis, una ex his, hora mortis.

The portraits on the wall, bored, stare down at me wherever I
go: from the wall to the door, from the door to the wall. My own
portrait, which was made in my sixteenth year, in particular.

Dozing along to my regular tread, I see how matters will turn
out, later on, when my old folks are dead and the entire family has
dissolved. Then I will take the portrait and hang it in my study,
and when I am dead, it will be sold together with a house coat, a
few old books and an easy a Jew. A few days later, and it will take pride of place on the bridge with an old stove and a few flat-irons, a pillar of mahogany footwarmersr
and a few paintings by unknown masters, in sight of all and sundry and spattered with mud by passers-by. One rainy day, it will be sold for its frame, and my image, torn to shreds, blown into the canal and across the street.

Or, otherwise, a married brother or sister will keep it and hang
it in the living room, but when they, too, are dead, it will be
carried up to the loft, out of piety, by nephews and nieces who
still have a vague recollection of me. For a while it stands
peacefully among packing cases and dirty-linen baskets, next to a
rungless ladder and a basket full of old, mouldy shoes. One day, it
is soaked from its frame as this has to be used for something
else. Afterwards, it then gets lost in a large, dusty portfolio,
filled with old drawings, cardboard and papers of no value. One
Sunday afternoon, when children are visiting and they do not
know what to do any more, they go up to the loft to play, for
here there are heaps of old toys and there are airing rods which
they can use for gymnastics. When this, too, bores them, they
drag out the big portfolio from its quiet comer. I see myself
lying flat on the dusty floor. The little children's faces bend
over me and I hear them ask: Who's that?' And one of the
eldest answers: 'A great-uncle of father or mother, I believe,
when he was still very young.'

I continue to walk from the wall to the door, from the door to the
wall with an even, sleepy tread, for ages at a stretch.

Sometimes I sit staring in a book for a long time, nodding off.
When I look up, it surprises me that nothing has changed. Why
this should be, I do not know. All is still the same. The cat's toy
hangs, motionless as ever, against the leg of the chair, the lamp
shade is still as squiffy as ever, my portrait looks just as bored, and
the clock ticks the same, continually.

I resume my walk, and wait, and listen to every sounding bell as
a sign of someone in vain.

Gradually it becomes dead quiet in the house. Now and then, the silence is disturbed by the slamming of a door or the rattling
of a bucket in the kitchen.

The maid begins a melancholy, tremulous song about a seaman
or soldier, accompanying herself with the sound of chopping
vegetables, the strokes of which sound harsher and duller in
turn, according to whether the cleaver strikes the wood or the
vegetables.

I walk up and down all the while, listening to the mournful
singing and the ticking of the clock, and I wait.

Would no one come today7!

Dreaming because of my regular tread, my thoughts stray into
the future and I rebuild castles in the air from the past.

A large room with books, cloaked mysteriously in dusk, a stove
that crackles cosily and casts its shine on to the floor, a tea kettle
with soft-singing clouds, lulling a tabby cat to sleep who is
pondering a cabbalistic problem. The tea-service on the table, upon
which clear light-spots shimmer from the soft, subdued lamp light,
and over me, in the big circle of light from the lamp a black-locked
woman's head that busily bends over needlework but now and
again casts up the long-lashed eyelids to regard me with serious,
dark eyes.

It is as if suddenly the light of the lamp is intercepted by a
vague shadow and I see a bony hand, stripped of its flesh, descend
on that black hair. The head falls over backwards, the dark eyes,
devoid of sheen, dull, stare into space; the quiet, soft features are
wiped out, the colour disappears, the mouth is half opened. The
hand stretches out to me, too, and I hear the warning una ex his
sound more loudly.

I wake from my drowsing with a start; the maid has stopped
singing and chopping, the clock ticks more loudly.

Fora moment, I stand staring, devoid of thought, in front of a
picture on the wall, then for a moment after that in front of the
mirror and I walk on again, my identical walk, always awaiting
someone's coming.

Again my mind wanders and I see a summer's day, a bourn
sleeping quietly between tall reed curtains beneath a burning sun,
upon which yellow and white lilies form large islands with their
flat, pale-green leaves. A few tall trees on the banks, and in the
shade these provide, in the dense, soft grass, I see myself lying
down, playing with clover flowers which I try to thread into the
seam of her gown while she lies staring into the deep, clear blue of the sky where humming insects now hover motionless in the sun
and then swoop about at wild speed. All of this is a long time ago.

Suddenly, it is as if I have been transported to an anatomy
theatre where shapes, vague in outline, lie under dirty sheets on
black tables. With trembling hand I raise each sheet and, one by
one, I see the features, contorted and drab, of those who were with
me that one in particular, the one with the wax-pale
head bent over the edge at the back, and the long, black hair that
hangs down, lustreless, in a tangled mass. I feel that I myself am
one of those shapes, dead and cold, and I shudder-crumple because
of the warning una ex his.

I start because of the cheering and braying of the children in the
street who are coming from school. I see them with my mind's eye
as they run after their caps which the wind rolls along down the
muddy street and I hear the little girls scream in fun and fear when,
their skirts stuck flat to their legs, they are being propelled on
ahead by a powerful gust of wind.

It must be nigh on four o'clock now.

In my room it is already becoming night, the glimpse of light
beneath the curtain is turning from white into grey and from grey
into black. I can no longer see anything and I am tired.

The cat who has been lying in her basket all this time, does not
feel happy any longer in this nocturnal environment and she seeks
my proximity. I go and sit down on a comer of the sofa and listen
to the ticking of the clock, and to the wind, howling more
powerfully and more mournfully through the cracks in the window
frame. The rain drips continually against the window in a monotonous tic-toc. The cat jumps on to my lap, rolls herself into a ball,
begins to purr and, purring, spins me a yam about a strange
country, warm in colour and sun-glow, a country with strange
buildings and statues, silent and mysterious as Fate. She tells of
priests in long robes and tall hats, priests who sing strangesounding canticles in front of a white bull whose mournful
lowing is muffled by colourful tapestries embroidered in gold.

Of a river, a broad, great river, now foaming and wild, now
muddy and sluggish again like thick oil, a river rolling on between
banks covered in tall greenery where ibises thrust their curved
beaks into the grubby silt; of lakes where brilliant white flowers
softly bob up and down when the clear water is set in motion by a
pink-hued flamingo.

The purring grows more mysterious when it tells of a big city which is quiet and gloomy, and where, in dark caverns, stiff,
motionless mummies stare with painted gazes into unfathomable
darkness and are kept asleep by the rushing flutter of grey bats. It
tells of an idol with old eyes that, motionless in a corner, keeps
watch over the dimly visible objects and that remained motionless
even when she touched its round eye with her soft little paw.