PRAISE FOR MARTIN MICHAEL DRIESSEN’S RIVERS
“Driessen’s craftsmanship is a sheer delight: like a puppeteer, he makes his characters run in circles around each other, suspecting a bit too much and discovering too little, while showing his readers the big picture through ingenious shifts in perspective.”
—NRC Handelsblad (Netherlands)
“Driessen’s noteworthy collection displays humanity at its best and worst in relation to the waters his characters depend on for their lives, as we all are sustained by the earth’s rivers and streams.”
—Booklist
“The stories’ power comes from the restraint the writer uses as he seems to hold each and every word hostage until that word can prove its worth. As a result, the slow build of pressure seems more like a rising tide than water bursting from a dam. These stories will make you struggle with ideas as well as plot points. Fascinating work.”
—Historical Novel Society
“Those who acknowledge Georges Simenon’s greatness, and enjoy Pascal Garnier at his most bleakly playful, will take a grim delight in Rivers. Driessen is as hard, as uncompromising—and as entertaining—as they come.”
—John Banville, Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Sea, Mrs. Osmond, and Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir
“These extraordinary stories have little tinctures of Maupassant and Conrad but the main ingredient is the powerful talent of Driessen himself. These are classically realized works of art, of impressive force and beauty.”
—Sebastian Barry, author of Days Without End
ALSO BY MARTIN MICHAEL DRIESSEN
Rivers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Martin Michael Driessen
Translation copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Reeder
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as De Pelikaan by Uitgeverij Van Oorschot in the Netherlands in 2017. Translated from Dutch by Jonathan Reeder. First published in English by Amazon Crossing in 2019.
Published by Amazon Crossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542044875 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542044871 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542044868 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542044863 (paperback)
Cover design by Joan Wong
First edition
CONTENTS
START READING
PART 1
The town on…
PART 2
It was March…
PART 3
Andrej had resumed…
PART 4
It was not…
PART 5
They rode to…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
He who dies, dies as he was.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras
PART 1
The town on the Adriatic coast had once been part of the Ottoman and then the Habsburg Empire, and now belonged to Yugoslavia. Nothing much ever changed; indeed, if the postman Andrej had made his rounds a hundred years earlier, he would have done so in essentially the same town as now. Dilapidated houses had been replaced by others in a similar architectural style; only higher up the gray hills did one find modern housing tracts with concrete apartment buildings, but these were not on Andrej’s route, namely the old district, the labyrinth of alleys and lanes above the harbor boulevard, whose only appeal, in the sense of urban design, lay in the People’s Square and the former archducal residence.
The boulevard had been beautified with a long row of palm trees, planted long ago for an official visit by Tito. Seeing as there was little tourism to speak of, the parking ban was in fact entirely superfluous and consequently had been ignored for years.
The fishing harbor was picturesque, as was the azure coastline both to the north and to the south; there was a funicular railway, and the town could boast of a clock museum second to none. Yet despite these distinctive qualities, it was a wallflower of European history. Nothing happened here; the town had brought forth and buried one generation after another without a single one of its citizens leaving a mark on the world.
Perhaps the apparent attractions were in fact its fatal flaws: it was pretty, but too small and not attractive enough to compete with cities like Zadar and Dubrovnik. Praised in Baedekers for a hundred years, the town still never caught on as a tourist destination. And it had no industry, hardly any commerce, and the coastal region was, agriculturally speaking, of little consequence.
Aside from the clock museum, it was mostly the pelicans that lent the town its allure. Pink pelicans, which returned every year and occupied the boulevard—these improbable creatures, well-nigh messianic in appearance, fed off the town for a few months before returning to Africa.
The houses were high ceilinged, and the tall windows had heavy wooden shutters, the slats narrowly cracked open with a hook during the cool morning and evening hours. The stairwells were all narrow and airless. There was no sense of going to or coming from somewhere; one simply preferred to stay put. The electrical wiring was prehistoric; it was not only poorly insulated but haphazardly installed, and dated from so long ago that the townspeople regarded it as a sort of atavistic system of roots and thought it best to leave well enough alone. The same went for the water supply and the sewer system.
Additionally, the town had a hard-to-reach dog racetrack, located on a dusty field to the east of the salt ponds.
The funicular railway had been installed in 1892 by the same civil engineer who had built the famous Nerobergbahn in Wiesbaden. It was a technical wonder that conquered the difference in elevation between the lower station and the Orthodox church at the top of the hill entirely without motorized assistance, thanks to the patented principle of water ballast in the descending car, whose counterweight pulled a second car uphill. The ballast level was maintained with water drawn from a reservoir farther up in the mountains, so that the funicular operated at practically no cost. Although it was once popular as a tourist attraction, nowadays virtually no one visited the monument to the heroes of socialism that now stood at the spot once occupied by the church, destroyed in the war. Only Josip Tudjman, the funicular’s machinist and conductor, spent his lunch break there every afternoon.
Normally he operated the funicular on his own, which meant taking the steep path from the lower station up to the car parked above in order to fill it with water ballast, and then returning down to man the booth. The original operating regulations required a machinist to be on each car, but these days, the passengerless car could travel unmanned.
Josip lived a stone’s throw from the lower station and could just as well go home for his midday meal, but he was unhappily married, and preferred to close the booth for an hour and take one of the mahogany cars up to the monument to spend that time on his own.
In fact, Josip was a real-life example of the larger-than-life, rousing bronze heroes of the fatherland who, bayonets thrust forward, appeared poised to charge off the pedestal on which he unpacked his lunch box; for he was a war veteran, decorated with the Order of the People’s Army, which was also the reason he had been given this job.
As he sat atop the gray hill, chewing his sa
lami and gazing out over the unrippled sea and the town at his feet and the straight double tracks of his funicular, his head was clear. This was Josip’s preferred state of mind, because, he knew, contemplation only led to worry: about his child, and about how the woman who was its mother could further torment him. If nothing happened, then at least nothing bad happened. He removed his cap and leaned against the bronze boot of a socialist hero.
At precisely two o’clock, he filled the reservoir of the waiting car, set it in motion, and made his way downhill to reopen the booth. Sometimes he descended on foot, to save himself another trip back up. In addition to running the funicular, he was licensed to sell state lottery tickets, and in front of the kiosk was a metal magazine carousel, which did not bring in much, but nor did it cost him anything. The only one who purchased anything except the local newspaper was the postman Andrej; he would not only buy a lotto ticket every week but would take anything with a color photo, preferably one of Princess Diana.
In his younger years, Andrej had been a first-string player on the local soccer team, initially as a striker and, later, as goalkeeper. He was very tall; this, however, did not give him much of an advantage as a goalkeeper, as he was clumsy and basically unathletic. He had always regarded his above-average height as something special until it became clear to him that this, along with his extremely large nose and his oversized feet, tended to be the subject of ridicule. He never forgave mankind for that.
Every day he needed about five hours to sort and deliver the mail. He preferred to make his rounds at midday rather than in the morning coolness, for nearly everyone slept in the afternoon behind the closed shutters, and aside from a few cats he had the town to himself. His bicycle had a high frame, a double crossbar, a crate for packages above the front wheel, and two rubberized saddlebags, one on either side of the rear fork. Andrej saw himself as the link between the town and the outside world. He pushed his heavy bicycle, its bags usually nearly empty, through the steepest alleys, carried it up stairs where necessary, and at the end of his route he coasted along the paved Nikole Zrinskog back down to the harbor, where he lived. Only then would he remove his black cap and lock the bike, which after all was the property of the postal service, to the bars in front of the window of his semi-basement apartment.
He had started opening people’s mail early in his career. He liked to imagine that Marshal Tito would have decorated him for his vigilance, and for thwarting potential capitalist plots. He steamed open the envelopes in his kitchenette, and after having inspected the contents on the Formica tabletop, he carefully glued them back shut. Even though he never discovered anything significant, the skillful application of his pursuit gave him great satisfaction. But Tito was dead, and Princess Grace of Monaco, too, and since then the world had not been the same.
Andrej went to the beach in search of a new woman in his life. It was a promisingly blue September day, and she would have to be a foreigner, because he invariably struck out with the local women and girls. He wore swimming trunks and a short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned halfway. He put on sunglasses he had found long ago on a bench on the boulevard, but they were so dark and scratched that he hardly saw anything through them. For a brief moment he thought his dream just might become reality. On the boulders at the waterline in front of the Hotel Esplanade, a young woman in a bikini lay sunning herself, alone. She lay on her back, one white leg bent at the knee.
Andrej approached cautiously, if only because he saw nearly nothing through the sunglasses. He bent over every now and then, pretending to gather seashells.
If she had noticed him, she did not let on. Her legs were spread wide apart on the beach towel, so that from close by and without the sunglasses, he could see the curve of her vulva under the fabric of her bikini bottom. He couldn’t tell yet if she was pretty, or whether they might have a future together, but it was worth a try.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m Andrej.”
She did not reply. Next to her on the beach towel sat a hotel key on an enormous brass ball, and a bottle of Piz Buin suntan lotion.
“Can I offer you an ice cream? Esplanade has really good sorbets.”
If she was an American, as he hoped, she wouldn’t understand him, of course. But she answered in Croatian: “Great. Lemon.”
When he returned she sat up and he saw that she did indeed have breasts, which he had doubted at first when he saw her lying flat on her back; they were quite small, and they appeared to be rather far apart, just like her eyes. She ate the ice cream and glanced at him now and then. It was unbelievably intimate.
“I could go for another one,” she said.
“Me, too!” Andrej said, nearly shouting, and he raced up the wooden steps to the Esplanade’s ice cream stand.
They appeared to be kindred spirits. Within half an hour he had told her everything about himself, and she said that her favorite color was purple.
“What incredible luck that we’ve met,” he said. “If I’d been on duty, then we would have missed each other.”
“What kind of work do you do?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you in a sec,” he answered, his smile carrying a whiff of mystery, and he got up, as agile as a camel.
When he returned with yet another round of sorbets, she was sitting in the sand, and cigarette smoke hovered above her head. This put him off; he disapproved of women smoking, certainly outside the home. They would have to have a word about this. But what ensued was even worse. A squid had washed ashore; she held it between her thighs and was busy tying its tentacles into knots.
“You can’t do that!” he shouted, horrified.
“Oh no?” she replied, the filter cigarette clenched between her teeth. “Why not? Just look at this stupid, ugly creature.” She tugged at the ends of the helplessly wriggling tentacles.
“Leave him be!”
“What, can’t you take it?” she mocked, and her cigarette hissed as she stubbed it out on the squid’s body.
“You’re cruel!”
“And you’re a loser,” she laughed back.
As he turned, he could hear the splash of the creature being tossed back into the sea.
He was out of sorts for three weeks after that incident. There was no goddess like Princess Grace anymore. Diana was good-looking, but not really regal enough, and Sophia Loren was not his type.
If the world was such a callous place, he pondered as he put on the kettle, you might as well go with the flow. He had taken an envelope from today’s mail and steamed it open. This one was interesting, because it was addressed to a box number.
A letter addressed to a newspaper box number was almost always in response to a personal ad: man seeking woman or woman seeking man. This was simply human nature.
He recognized the handwriting on the envelope at once. If you want to stay anonymous, he thought, then at least take the trouble of writing in block letters. What a loser, that Josip Tudjman. He saw this handwriting every week on the receipts for the magazines he delivered to the kiosk. What was Josip Tudjman up to? he wondered.
It was a letter to a lady in Zagreb, who had sought contact with “a kindly, charming gentleman, age not important.” He suggested planning their first rendezvous at his funicular, or, if she preferred, at a café in Zagreb. The letter was formal but clumsy; he, Andrej, would have formulated it more elegantly. Tudjman did not give his address, which was entirely understandable, considering his wife’s pathological jealousy, but had offered the telephone number of the funicular station, which was rather clever of him.
Andrej decided to photograph the letter. He laid it in the stripe of sunlight that shone through the bars of his semi-basement window onto the Formica tabletop, and got out his Kodak. He set the f-stop to a small aperture, as he had done for the photos of the butterflies on the cherry blossoms, which had been used as postcard motifs. He used a tripod to facilitate a long shutter time. He had no enlarger himself, although his apartment was in fact the ideal place for a darkroom. And he couldn’t hav
e this roll of film developed in town, for old Schmitz, who had also printed his butterfly pictures, inspected every negative meticulously. He would have to get the film processed elsewhere.
The opportunity presented itself when his former soccer club went to Rijeka for an away game, and he could travel with them on the team bus. Before halftime he left the stadium and walked into town; eventually his eye fell upon a small photography shop on the boulevard, near a hotel. They probably developed tourist snapshots there every day, he thought, and would not pay much attention to the pictures themselves. The prints would be ready the next day, which meant either not returning home on the team bus or making another trip to Rijeka. It was too risky, of course, to leave an address with the photo shop. He got back to the field in time to see his team lose 8–0 and made a drastic decision: he would stay in Rijeka overnight. He told the coach, who was heaving sports bags into the hold of the bus as though they were cadavers in body bags, that he wanted to stay and see the city’s sights.
“Suit yourself,” he said.
And so it happened that Andrej stayed overnight in a hotel for the first time in his life. Everything about it was off-putting; even the musty-smelling bed did nothing to reassure him. A continuous stream of cars drove past, and the flimsy curtains in his room did little to block out the light. But it was worth the trouble, for at eleven o’clock the next morning he paid eight dinars and was given a slender manila envelope with his photos, the negatives tucked into a separate, narrower pocket.
The five photos of Tudjman’s letter were practically identical. They could be deciphered with a magnifying glass, although after all, Tudjman knew full well what he had written.
Andrej was exhilarated. He was privy to a secret known to no one else. As he pushed his bicycle up the steep alleyways and caught sight of the funicular rising above the town’s rooftops toward the crest of the hill with the monument to the heroes, he thought, I could bring those cars to a standstill if I wanted.
The Pelican Page 1
