B007P4V3G4 EBOK (40 page)

'Members of the jury, you are about to retire to consider your
verdict. A formality. I know your conclusion. In my youth I, like
anyone else, have consulted the oracle. When I learnt from the
jailor that all of you: prosecutor, judge and members of the jury,
belonged to the extremist women's group I kept Eurydice from, I
knew that I had met the Maenads who according to the prediction
will kill me. This is why I have made no attempt to make you well
disposed. Likewise, I shall not plead for mercy later on. Those who
serve justice cannot condemn me: to kill one dead is no crime. But
you do not serve Justice: you serve Fate. I am at peace with that
Fate. After all, Eurydice's place has not remained unfilled: now they
are the Furies of self-reproach who pursue me. It cannot be long
now or their hissing and shrieking will drown out my music. There
is but one place where they will leave me in peace. That place has
been given me by Hades, the All Providing One, to look forward
to. Far away in the nether sea lies the blessed isle of the Syrens,
the Muses of Death. There, those who have served the Muses of
Life repose for eternity. M'Lud, members of the jury: your verdict
and sentence is my letter of safe-conduct to Elysium.'

Gerard Reve

On a Wednesday afternoon in December, when the weather was
dark, I tried to wrench loose a downpipe at the rear of the house;
this didn't work, however. With a hammer, I then smashed a
number of thin branches of the red flowering currant on a post of
the garden fence. The weather remained dark.

I couldn't think of anything else to do and went on my way to
Dirk Heuvelberg. (As far as my memory went back, he had always
lived next door to us. At four years of age, he was still unable to
speak; until his third year he had gone on all fours. I also still recall
how, when we were little, he would come running up to our
kitchen door on outstretched arms and legs: his arrival he would
announce by screaming. If invited to do so, he would eat horse
turds off the street. Later on, he was still able to move quickly on
all fours and even then he didn't speak with ease. He was eager to
tell, with a certain pride, that his tongue was too long and was on
too loose a string: to corroborate this assertion he would make
loud clapping noises with it. On that autumn afternoon, too, in the
back room of his house, he still spoke with difficulty and indistinctly, in stumbling bursts of words. His stature had remained
small. I was eleven years old at the time.)

A yellowy-pale boy was visiting him whom I did not know. He
was standing in front of the window and he greeted me hesitantly
and timidly. 'He's Werther Nieland,' said Dirk. They were building
a hoisting machine from a meccano set, one they wanted to have
powered by a windmill, but this they hadn't started on at all yet.

'Better make the windmill first,' I said. 'That's much more
important. Once you know how much power there is, only then
can you work out how you must build the crane. And whether
you should take a large or a small wheel. For that matter,' I
continued, 'you have to choose someone who's boss during the
building. Best would be someone who lives in the house next to
the mill for instance, or close by.' I uttered this last sentence softly
so they couldn't hear it. A silence arose for a moment which filled the small dark room. (It had dark brown wallpaper, all the woodwork had been painted dark green and there were terra cotta
crocheted curtains hanging there.)

While the silence continued, I scrutinized the new boy. He was
skinny and gangly in appearance and a little taller than me. His
face wore an indifferent and bored expression; he made his thick,
moist lips protrude too far. He had deep-set, dark eyes and black
curly hair. His forehead was low. The skin of his face was uneven
and displayed flaky bits. I had the desire to torment him, one way
or another, or to injure him on the sly. 'Don't you think so too,
Werther, that we must make the windmill first?' I asked. 'Yes, that's
fine,' he replied indifferently, without looking me in the face. 'He's
an animal that likes to have a nibble,' I said inwardly, I know this.'
Both of us, while Dirk was busy screwing something down, looked
outside into the newly dug garden; an old washtub and a few
weathered planks were lying on the bare earth. A mist of moisture
and settling smoke hung between the roofs. I went and stood close
to Werther and, without either of them being able to see, I made
half-suppressed punching movements in his direction.

Though Dirk, too, did agree with my proposal concerning the
windmill, we didn't go and build it but continued to sit together
without doing a thing. 'You don't have to start making a windmill
if you don't want to,' I said. 'But that's very stupid, 'cause you can
learn a lot from it.' Dusk was falling. Werther, listen,' I said.
'D'you live in a house where a lot of wind comes past?' He did not
answer. 'Then I could come and help you,' I continued, 'then we'll
make a windmill you can run appliances off in the kitchen. I can do
that, easy, 'cause I've got time. And to promise a thing and then
not do it, that's something I don't do.' I was feverishly intent on
ways to visit him at home.

Werther took no notice of my words, perhaps because I didn't
speak loudly enough and because we were listening to vague
music from the wireless coming through to us from the front of
the house.

It was already late in the afternoon when we went outside and
ambled along, the three of us. The street lamps were already lit.
Werther declared he had to go home; we continued to accompany
him. He lived in a self-contained first-floor flat on a corner where
the development came to an end and which had a view on to the
wide parklands that stretched out as far as the dike.

'Sure enough,' I said, 'when it blows here, there's a lot of wind: I can tell even now. Do you have a veranda?' Werther did not allow
either of us to come along upstairs, however. When he was
already standing in the doorway, I went up close to him and
hurriedly asked, without Dirk being able to hear, when I could
come to make the windmill.

'I'm allowed to have boys visit me on Saturday afternoons,' he
said, and he closed the door.

When I got home, in order to ponder, I made my way into the
box room near the garden, where I kept secret documents. Here I
wrote in pencil on an old piece of wrapping paper: 'There is to be
a club. Important messages have already been despatched. If
there's anyone who wants to muck it up, he'll be punished.
Sunday, Werther becomes a member'. I hid this sheet under a
chest, where it joined other inscribed papers.

That same evening, in the kitchen, I discovered a broad flower
vase of clear glass without ridges or curves, one which really was a
round aquarium in fact; I was allowed to use it as such from then
on. Next day, I put the sticklebacks I had gone to catch immediately
after school inside it instead of throwing them into hedges or
down sewers or on to the street, as I was wont to do. I looked at
them through the glass which seemed to enlarge them slightly.
Soon they were boring me already. I scooped them out, one by
one, and with a paring knife I cut their heads off. 'These are the
executions,' I said softly, 'for you are the dangerous water kings.'
For this activity I had selected a sheltered part of the garden,
obscured from the eyes of possible spectators. I dug a little hole in
which I carefully buried the dead creatures in a row, their heads
joined up to them once more: before filling it in, I sprinkled it with
petals of old faded tulips from the living room.

Thereupon I went to the canal once more to fetch a second
catch. On the way back it seemed to threaten to rain; this failed to
materialise, however. When I had returned to the garden, I suddenly
thought the cutting off of heads a cumbersome and time consuming
job, so I began to construct a chopping implement from meccano
parts into which I wanted to screw down a razor blade; in doing
so, however, I had an accident.

While fixing it, my left hand slipped and the index finger was
driven with force along the blade: it was sliced open from the tip
to well past the middle; the wound was deep and bled profusely. I
became dizzy and nauseous and went inside.

My mother bandaged the wound. 'It was a razor blade,' I said in a plaintive tone of voice. 'I wasn't even playing about with it: I
wanted to make something from it.' I understood that the small
animals that told each other everything, after all, had caused me
the accident.

'You'd better be careful with that,' my mother said. 'Best not to
go walking outside with that if it's very cold. You know what
happened to Spaander.'

(He was an acquaintance who once had suffered a similar injury.
He lived in the Vrolikstraat and made a living sharpening people's
knives and scissors, going around town in a cart. This man, while
sharpening something, had happened to cut his thumb out on the
street. Bitter cold prevailed; the soaked bandage became hard and,
without him noticing, the thumb froze so that half of it had to be
amputated. Though it had nothing to do with it, my mother, when
relating this event at length, would tell me as an encore that his
son, in the one single room their dwelling fact
would be held up to me, time and time studying to be
a teacher without allowing himself to be distracted by chit-chat.
'You see: now that's what I call pluck,' she would then say. I knew
that, even if our house were made up of ten rooms, I would never
be able to learn anything. Each time the man came to us, I was
allowed to see the stump of thumb and feel it. He would always
come alone. 'He has a fool of a wife,' my mother would say
regularly. Over and over, she would tell how, through some
prolapse or other, this woman had got a very large paunch for
which a medical corset had been prescribed. Because she went out
to work daily and the corset impeded her, she had not worn the
corset for more than a day. When she's washing the floor, her
stomach hangs down to the ground,' my mother related. 'And
she's thirty-four years old. Isn't that dreadful?')

She impressed the accident with the thumb upon me once more
at length. 'You mustn't go about in the cold, not in any circumstance,' she repeated emphatically. When a mild frost set in, she
even wished me to stay inside all weekend, but a solution was
found in the end: from pale-blue flannel she made a little protective
cover for the bandage, with two ribbons tied round the wrist. I
would now go out into the garden again for hours.

I did not complete the chopping implement: the parts, wrapped
in newspaper, I put away in the box room. The water in the glass
vase had frozen: the fish were stuck, rigid, in the middle, close to
the surface inside the clump of ice: the vase itself had cracked. I studied the fish closely. 'They're magicians,' I said out loud,
"course I know that.' I buried the vase, with all that was inside it,
as deeply as possible. 'They can't come up any more,' I thought. It
had turned Saturday already.

In the afternoon I made my way to Werther's house. It was
freezing a little but there wasn't a breath of wind. Standing in the
porch, I didn't ring the bell immediately but studied the green
painted door. Above the little nameplate which read 'J. Nieland',
there was a circular enamel sign with a five-armed, green star
surrounded by the inscription Esperanto Parolata. I listened at the
letter box but heard nothing other than the rustle of silence. The
draught brushing my face conveyed a vague, indeterminate scent I
believed never to have smelled before; it reminded me of new
curtains, matting or upholstery, but with something unknown
mixed in. 'This scent is made by magic power and is kept in a
bottle,' I said inwardly. I rang the bell.

A large woman with a broad, pale face answered the door. She
remained standing at the top of the stairs without saying or asking
a thing. 'This afternoon's Saturday afternoon,' I called out, 'and I
could come. I've come for Werther.' The woman did not move but
merely nodded a moment. I ascended the stairs. When I arrived at
the top she still didn't say anything but only looked at me, searchingly.

She looked odd. Her wrinkled, oldish-looking face had a mouth
which apparently was unable to close completely: coarse, yellow
teeth remained visible. She had little eyes, like a chicken's or a
pigeon's; these stared deep from their sockets and moved almost
imperceptibly. The upper half of her head was surrounded by drab,
fluffy hair.

'I'm Werther's mother,' she said suddenly, smiled, and all of a
sudden she made a few tripping dance steps on the floor; I thought
for a moment she'd tripped up, but this couldn't be the case. The
landing was dusky, doors with yellow frosted glass opening out
on to it. For an instant I thought the scent was being generated to
stupefy me and lock me up in a chest.

'You've got a sore finger, I see,' she said. 'I'd better take off your
coat carefully.' While she was helping me, she again made those
strange steps. 'And who are you?' she asked. 'A friend of Werther's?'
She caught hold of me by the neck. 'I'm Elmer; I could come this
afternoon, Werther said so,' I said hoarsely. I couldn't go down any
longer as Werther's mother was standing in front of the stairwell.