Double-Barrel (6 page)

‘I think I can guarantee you some years without interruption.' I sincerely hoped that no municipal busybody really did have a road-widening project; it was perfectly possible.

Again the faint smile. ‘More than enough … I suppose that you have informed yourself about my circumstances?'

‘I have access to all information normally available to the Ministry,' sounding correctly prim. I thought I was doing this quite well.

‘Just so.'

‘Such details are necessarily incomplete.'

‘So you make a point of calling on people who may live – let's say along a road scheduled for rebuilding.'

‘When we can.'

‘That is conscientious. And courteous. My experience of officials from Ministries is that they frequently have both qualities, but that their function seems to prevent the free exercise of either.'

My turn for the faint smile. Really, this fellow was shrewd.

‘We do our best. It is painful to be criticized for what, to the uninformed eye, simply looks like turning defenceless people out of their homes.'

‘Painful, but the state functionary grows an extra skin. Perhaps they have to. I am very grateful that you should spare the time to call on me.'

‘We learn' – thinking I was being sly – ‘to make time our servant. The wheels of Ministries are slow.'

‘Ah,' reflective nod. ‘You have plenty of time. Most functionaries bustle, always in a hurry. You have a bird's-eye view – in a manner of speaking – of people as well as sites, streets, ciphers, statistics. Most interesting.'

‘Certainly.' I did not quite get the drift but admired the way he was cross-examining me – in a manner of speaking.

‘Perhaps my experience has been too one-sided. It is the lower echelon, is it not, that adopts that bustling air, that fiction that there is never time for anything, that determination to obliterate the individual. The tiny self-importance of the village postmaster; once he has a rubber stamp in his hand he imagines that he embodies all the dignity of the State. Whereas you are plainly a senior official.'

‘That is so.' I was being driven like a sheep, and interested enough not to care.

‘Since you are not in a hurry,' inexorably, ‘may I offer you a cup of coffee?'

‘That would be kind.'

‘I will ask Mrs Bakhuis – she generally brings me some…'

‘I am tempted to think,' coming back with deliberate steps – the trembling was noticeable, but not disconcerting, ‘that as a general rule policemen, perhaps, are fortunate among state servants, in having more obligatory contact with human beings. Even rather objectionable humans, who smell, who could do with delousing, are preferable to none.'

‘And yet, if I am to believe what I hear, you are not very fond of the human race.'

‘There have been times, you see, when I smelt and needed delousing. A thing quite inconceivable to a civil servant. The pressure upon functionaries to spend more and more
time shut away in little cells, monastically devoted to their in and out trays – it is hardly fair on them.'

I felt like saying straight out what I had come for. What was the point of fencing further? This man was not guilty of any little, dotty, pathetic crimes. But I had to play the scene out a little.

‘Aren't you tending towards special pleading? Every type of state servant has his particular problems. His questions of conscience, call it.'

He did not answer. He studied his guest with a placid look. I studied the surroundings. There were no pictures, but there were many home-made bookshelves. Lots of books, rows of cardboard files, doubtless containing his work, a shelf full of records. Tidy, for a man who lived alone. A shabby poverty, but not genteel, not ashamed. Those books were in all the major languages of Europe, and they all looked well handled.

Why were there no pictures? Did the man prefer things heard to things seen? … Mrs Thing came in with a pleasant smile and two cups of coffee. I have often wondered why the Dutch keep the coffee-pot in the kitchen, as though it were something to be ashamed of.

The door behind the housekeeper shut; we stirred the coffee. I offered him a cigarette, which he shook his head at slightly. I had a feeling we were coming to the point.

‘Functionaries,' I said, ‘good or bad, sensitive or not, one thing they all have in common is their professionalism. In the last analysis, they're getting paid for it.'

I had been expecting the reaction, but not that it would be so direct.

‘Are you by any chance a policeman?'

To that kind of question, one cannot hesitate or shuffle.

‘Yes.'

‘I have been visited by so many, you see,' politely.

‘That you penetrate me so easily shows that I can't be a new kind.'

‘The first to be frank.'

‘Perhaps I have started work with a different assumption. You don't fit my notions of this type of crime.'

‘What type of crime?'

‘You mean you don't know?'

‘I have never been told,' simply, ‘what it was that I was suspected of doing or being.'

‘Oh dear. I suppose that's typical. You were suspected of being the author of anonymous blackmailing letters.'

I was watching closely; a very strange expression passed rapidly over the strong facial muscles. I could not quite put a name to it. Relief from apprehension?

‘How stupid I am not to have guessed, after all the questioning.'

‘I am surprised you didn't.' I was, too; the man was intelligent; more than that, he used his mind.

‘I am an innocent fellow; it simply never occurred to me. Now, of course, I realize that I am an obvious suspect. Eccentric, probably mentally deranged, slightly sinister to village eyes – aha, now I see.'

‘Why do you call yourself sinister?'

‘In a village … A Jew, living behind a wall, avoiding people. I had understood that I would be suspect.'

‘But it bothered you, to be suspected?'

‘No, not really. Only peasant superstition.'

‘Quite so. Yet you were worried.'

‘Worried at the unceasing pressure of suspicion from officials. That is not superstition; it is, alas, a hard fact. Relays of policemen, always increasing in importance. The last were State Recherche. What would those gentlemen have to do with anonymous letters?'

‘Two people have died – and the matter has still not been cleared up. The authorities have taken this seriously. It is vague; obscure.'

‘I see. And you do not suspect me of anything still?'

I got up.

‘I try never to suspect anybody of anything. I try to wait until I know.'

‘I have grown over-sensitive.'

‘I can see that. But will it worry you if I come back?'

‘You do, then, suspect me of something.'

‘No. I just like talking.'

‘Come whenever you like. I am always here – but I am at a loss to see how that can profit you.'

‘Everything profits me. And I like unusual people. They force one to think about things.' I picked up my hat. I could see well enough that he preferred to be left alone, but I knew that he would not show me hostility, now that he knew who I was. Using this man as a sparring partner would lighten my days, here in Zwinderen. Too bad if he didn't like it.

The Mimosa Street, where I now lived, is a street exactly like ten thousand in Holland, and probably identical with a thousand Mimosa Streets. Tiny two-storied houses in two neat bricky rows, patterned into little parcels of six at a time. One saw through the huge windows to a further street, and through that again to infinity. Exactly like the Droste cocoa-tin. Painted on it is a nurse, holding another cocoa-tin, with a nurse on it …

Miniature balconies with iron railings, over the front door; miniature gardens with a few bulbs and a strip of grass. A grass verge between path and roadway. When I got home there were already four Volkswagens standing neatly parked. All the houses are identical; I wondered which was mine. The Mimosa Street is Holland.

I stopped for a gaze; Van der Valk's brooding, piercing, aquiline look; Michelangelo contemplating Saint Peter's.
I probably looked struck with amnesia, paralysis of the motor nerves, or perhaps just as though I had a rick in the back.

A child's scooter was flung against the verge; two families had not yet taken in their dustbins. A little girl had tied a string to a fence, and was holding the free end very solemnly and seriously, watching another little girl jumping over it in a complicated, important procession of steps. A bigger girl, in tartan trousers she had grown out of, was roller-skating with the sudden ducking lurch and widespread fingers of the beginner, watched with admiration by two tiny ones in woolly tights. Very pink cheeks and naughty eyes peeping out of the hoods of their windcheaters; moisture forming on curls in front; bright Norwegian mittens; one was rather bow-legged.

Others could gaze too; I felt the pressure of twenty pairs of unseen eyes going prickling over the skin on the back of my neck. I locked the car door, picked up the good briefcase and scampered for my door; crinkle glass badly set in flimsy softwood painted a depressing yellow.

The muslin glass-curtains of the house across the street flickered as I turned to shut the door. Those eyes were able to count the stitches that darned my left sock last week.

There was a good smell of pot-on-the-fire; celery, leeks, turnips, onions puttering gently. Arlette was gazing fascinated at German children's television; the film had been dubbed, and one had the charming effect of an English copper, pot hat and all, out in the midday sun but talking forthright Kölner German. She had bought a plant; a feathery little coco-palm fluttered in the draught and I shut the room door hastily.

‘I've been writing to the boys, telling them all the frightful things that are happening to us. And I bought some smoked eel. We're going to have a nice evening –
Così Fan Tutte
from the new theatre in Frankfurt.'

Which pleased me very much. I wasn't in a thinking mood.
Tomorrow, anyway, was only a boring trek round pastures a lot of oxen had nibbled pretty bare.

The next morning was bright and sunny. Even in westerly weather it is often so in Holland. It is a false promise, for already before midday a grey pall of cloud will have blanketed the sky, a cold little wind will be searching the bones at street corners, stirring up dust, and presently rain will turn the dust again to mud. But while it lasts, the sunshine cheers everybody. It has the thin, bright texture of morning, and accompanies a whole happy orchestra of morning noises. Loud crash of dustbins being emptied into the creeping garbage lorry, a strange animal that digests suburban refuse by standing on its head and then yawns toothily for more. The clattering three-wheeler of the milkman, seeming far too burdened for its very tiny, incredibly noisy motor. The milkman sits upon this poor beast wearing an extraordinary sort of Australian bush hat against the elements, and scribbles busily in his little book as he bumps over the uneven brick; total mystery how it can be legible even to him. Presently he will jump off, bang lustily on a bell that came off the Inchcape Rock, and pretend to be a Caribbean Steel Band, exactly as though he had come creepy-creepy on slippers and now wanted to give the housewives a start.

Building sites give whoops on their hooters, telling workmen who are already, probably, flat on their backs playing cards – strange how workmen seem the same all over the world; Tired Tim and Weary Willy – that they can have a coffee-break. There is an uproar from school playgrounds where the children – also the same everywhere – shriek in a thin, piercing tone that is also very much a morning noise.

In the falsely genial shopping street, I felt, in the Volkswagen, like a Mexican on his donkey. Housewives riding bikes, pushing bikes, lugging tiny children off the backs of bikes – all in the middle of the road and paying not the least attention either to me in a tiny blackbeetle auto or to Albert Heijn's lorry, which is ten feet tall and thirty long. They are busy with the shopping. They stand in the middle of the road, staring at the bargains-of-the-day, announced on bits of cardboard propped against a condensed-milk pyramid; shouting red, and mis-spelt. There are unheard-of, unrepeatable unique opportunities to get two pieces of soap and a toothbrush, all free if one just buys two of the new giant-pack boxes. Are housewives, I wondered, more naive than usual when the sun shines? There was a broad-beamed soul sticking well out into the road, a globular toddler with its eyes popping out clutched in her muscular armpit, forcing a cabbage into her bicycle-pannier. She glared rather, as though it were my fault that she couldn't get it in. Perhaps she would now try clutching the cabbage and stuffing the toddler.

This was Drente too, but I didn't think it was the real Drente. It looked identical with everywhere else in Holland, and could just as easily have been the Jan van Galenstraat in Amsterdam-West. Housewives with anonymous pieces of meat, neatly squeezed into a plastic pillow-case that makes any ragged old strip of trek-ox look succulent and as though it deserved to be so expensive. A quarter of liver-sausage and a quarter of soapy cheese, both cut very thin on the bacon-slicer, and a packet of smelly biscuits for this afternoon with the tea.

I got stuck behind another vast lorry, containing, to judge from huge curly letters written on it, nothing but several million jelly-babies. But at last I was at the top. I disregarded the one tree-shaded road in Zwinderen, where the houses of the managerial class are – interesting though this was – and went on past the railway station and the milk
factory next door. Here a road, broad and bare, brand new, had been driven into the soggy countryside. It had no pavements, but a wide, bricked bicycle-path on each side. This was the ‘Industry Terrain'. No houses here, but neat factories on both sides, prim, quiet and abandoned-looking. More lorries standing like oxen with their trailers behind them. A goods truck on a spur line standing by a loading platform, and two overalled characters languidly stacking cardboard crates. Through the fields behind ran the canal, and a faint noise reached me from where a suction line was unloading sand and gravel barges for the Readymixed Konkrete Co. (Shouldn't that be Ko.?)