The Evenings

by Gerard Reve

  “The whole point is that you are incapable of consorting with the other sex,” Frits said. “It seems to me less than wise after intercourse to kick the girl out of bed so forcefully that she becomes lame, or at least limps about, for two days afterwards.” Maurits laughed.

  “You talk just like that doctor,” he said, “in that French film, in… I can’t remember what it was called. But you have far too good a memory for the things I tell you. Do you go around blabbing about that to everyone?” “That depends,” Frits said.

  The newsreel began. When the lights went up again for a moment, Maurits said: “But honestly, how do I look?” “Oh,” said Frits, “you look normal; base as the next man. In any case, women don’t care about looks.”

  The lights went down slowly and the main feature began. “This is the real thing,” Frits thought when it had been going on for five minutes.

  After the show, the two of them walked slowly down the street together. “Just one seat left, sir,” Frits said in English, lifting a finger. “That was a good one, extraordinarily so.” “You have to turn left here too, don’t you?” Maurits asked. “We can walk up together.” “There’s no being shut of you,” Frits said, “I can tell that already.” Maurits was silent. “Do you know what occurred to me just now?” Frits continued. “That you’ll never benefit from those stereoscopic films. You’d simply see all those bits of colour thrown together.” “Let’s see how far I can go,” he thought. “It is a terrible thing,” he said, “having only one eye.”

  “The new kind of stereoscopic film, the one they’re working on now, can be watched without spectacles,” said Maurits. “Yes,” Frits said, “but you need two eyes to perceive depth. I feel that one should call things by their proper name. Or is that a sensitive point with you? Feel free to pour out your heart, I am prepared to hold your soul up to the light like a rotten egg. Tell the doctor everything. The soul’s deepest yearnings.” They crossed the bridge. “If you have only one eye, that makes you a sadist, of course. Tell us a bit about that.”

  “I never know whether you’re joshing me,” said Maurits. “You make a lot of fuss, but you’re digging for something. And I’m always stupid enough to talk.”

  “We are here at the microphone, dear listeners,” said Frits in a squawky voice, “in the study of Mr Maurits Duivenis, the celebrated blabbermouth. Mr Duivenis, could we ask you a few questions?” “Does this anger you?” he asked then, in a normal voice. They followed the ground-brick path along the riverside. There, where pools of black water had gathered on the ice, ducks huddled. “Who would you choose as your victim?” Frits asked. “Age, gender and nature of bodily harm: please, do tell.”

  “I’d like to strangle little boys in the woods,” Maurits said slowly, “simple as that.” “That’s too insipid,” Frits said, “and not particularly original. And perverse to boot.” He burst out laughing. “Did you hear the one about the man who went to the psychiatrist? Doctor, he says, I’m having an affair with a horse. Is it a mare or a stallion? the doctor asks. And the man says: Doctor, what do you think I am, abnormal!?” Maurits did not laugh.

  “Come, come,” Frits said, “you’re rather subdued this evening. How do you stand with regard to inflicting burns with a lit cigarette? That appeals to you, doesn’t it?” “What makes you think that?” asked Maurits. “I’m just trying to help out, that’s all,” Frits said, “and who would be your candidate of preference?”

  “We’ll be at your place in a minute,” Maurits said, “why don’t we stop at a café?” “Too late for me,” Frits said. They were silent for a few seconds. “Or is the blade more to your liking?” he asked. “Yes,” Maurits said quietly, “I need to see a little blood on each wound. Walk up with me.” Two streets before the canal on which Frits lived they turned right, then left and then right again, and climbed the steps above a butcher’s shop. “The old folks are asleep,” Maurits said, “so don’t make any noise.” He opened the outside door and climbed the darkened stairs ahead of Frits. At the third-floor landing he said: “Watch out for the tub of coal. Stay to the right.” He fumbled at a lock, then suddenly stumbled forward. “Damn,” he whispered, “I was standing there fiddling with it, and it was open the whole time.” In utter darkness he led Frits into a room, closed the door and turned on the light. “Now don’t go saying: the odour of human habitation,” he said. “That’s as old as the hills.”

  They were standing in a small, square room with dark paper on the walls. There was a folding bed, two chairs and, across one corner, a writing table. The walls were hung with printed poems and a mask of papier mâché. “Sit down,” Maurits said. Neither of them spoke. “What, in fact, is the purpose of this seance?” Frits thought. Maurits connected a few extension cords, turned on a standing lamp with a red linen shade and turned off the ceiling light. “Do you still have that overcoat in stock?” Frits asked. “It has been converted into currency,” Maurits replied. “Unfortunately I cannot offer you a cigarette.” “Is there somewhere I can take a piss?” asked Frits. “Be a bit quiet,” Maurits said. “No, you can’t go down the hall. That makes too much noise.”

  He took the chair from the writing table and slid it quietly into the middle of the room, across from Frits. They spoke in subdued voices. “Let’s not make this session too long,” Frits said. “It is almost midnight.”

  “Do you know the Knip boy?” Maurits asked. Frits nodded. “With those long nails and that hair that is too long? I’d like to get him sometime.”

  “What are your objections to his person?” Frits asked. “At school I always found him to be a normal, innocuous nothing. Do you see him often?” “He borrows notes from me, from time to time,” said Maurits, “he lives close by, on Boomstraat.” “I know. But what detriment has he caused you?” “Nothing, friend, nothing at all,” Maurits replied. “Is that a problem?” He grinned. “He annoys me.”

  “Now we must enter into specifics,” Frits said, “and describe the desired actions with clarity and insight. Imagine: he has been taken prisoner. What then? I am the doctor.”

  “Bound on a table, naked,” Maurits said, pursing his lips. “On his back or on his stomach?” Frits asked. “You have to tell me, it’s for your own good.” “On his… on his… back of course,” Maurits said slowly, peering at Frits. “Is that all right?”

  “Excellent,” Frits said, rubbing his hands. “It’s really very chilly in here. Go on. You are applying the knife. What will it be, gagged or not? I mean: imagine it were in a cellar, where no one else can hear.” “Let him scream,” Maurits said, “yes, let him scream.” He sank into a reflective pose.

  “Fine,” Frits said, “and then what?”

  “It needs to be a short knife, like a woodworker’s,” Maurits said; “a long handle and a very short, but very thin… uh…” “Shank,” Frits supplied. “Yes, half a centimetre is more than enough. First the point against the skin, push gently and then, not too deep, start carving.”

  “Quite impressive,” said Frits. “Where do you cut, and how? Do you want to leave flaps of skin, truly lay it to waste, or only clean, normal cuts, not too deep and not too long?” “Just that,” Maurits said, his eyes on the floor. “Where do you cut him?” “On the arms, legs and in the face.” “Good,” Frits said, “not mutilate a given body part?” Maurits slid his chair forward. “What do you mean?” he asked, bringing his face up close to Frits’s. He was panting. “I’ve gone too far,” Frits thought. He looked tensely at Maurits, at the way he was leaning into him. “Your breath is almost not repellent,” he said. “Do I stink?” asked Maurits. “You should try eating orange peels,” said Frits, “that’s the thing.”

  Somewhere in the house a clock struck once. “We are not finished yet,” said Frits. “Imagine that no one would ever find out. How would you kill him then? Strangulation? Or beat him to death? You are going to kill him, aren’t you?” “Of course,” Maurits said, sticking the fingers of his right hand almost completely in his mouth. “First a beating. A fe
w hours at a stretch. Let him come to, from time to time. Then strangle him. With my hands.”

  He leapt up, came and stood right before Frits, leaning over him for a moment. “Indeed,” he thought, “I have gone too far.” He did not move. “When I was about three,” he said to himself, “I would hold my hands in front of my face when I was afraid, and shout: I’m not here. That, at least, is what my mother always says. I need to remain seated. Show no signs of fear.”

  “What do you think?” asked Maurits, sitting down again. “Am I normal?”

  “It is always risky to inform the ill of their condition,” Frits said, “it is not proper to tell someone: you have the galloping consumption. Bye-bye!” Maurits twisted his face into a smile. “Your soul is in anguish,” Frits continued, “but you are not mad. It is a form of sadism, but healthy and harmless. A very different thing from that merchant on Market Square. A stick with a rag.”

  “Who’s that?” Maurits asked. “The fellow has a stand selling pickled goods,” Frits said. “He is an epileptic. When the spirit enters him, he always bites his tongue and injures himself. So he has a wooden stick with rags tied around it. When he feels a seizure coming on, he says: Uh! argh! grrr! Then he takes that stick between his teeth and falls over backwards.” His voice was hoarse with laughter. Maurits grinned along with him. “Wait a minute!” Frits shouted, “hand me that stick, would you please? I’ll be with you in just a moment, madam.”

  “I must be going,” he said. Maurits showed him out, leaving the door to the room and the stairs open until Frits had finished his descent.

  “The sky has gone clear and high,” he thought once he was outside. The stars gave off a penetrating, blue light. He stamped his feet and, after passing water against a tree, walked quickly in the direction of home.

  While hanging his coat on the stand and trying to stuff his scarf into the pocket, he felt something large and hard. “It’s Viktor’s book,” he murmured, pulling it out. He went into his room, dropped on his back onto the bed and began leafing through it.

  “Our Inner Animal Kingdom” was the title of a section on page one hundred and ten. “I know a woman, said Dr Janet,” he read, “in whom the words she hears outside herself are repeated on the inside. Echoed. Mimicked. As though she had a monkey inside. I know another, in whom the inner voice, unrequested and to the point of distraction, speaks the names of all the things the eyes see. That is a stone. That is a tree. That is horse manure. Just like a little boy who, out walking with his father, keeps reporting his perceptions. Stone, Daddy. Tree, Daddy.”

  He leafed on. “Janet: the gentlemen will surely remember,” he read, “the case of the lady Oem, whose cat had died. I can, to my great satisfaction, report that her recovery is complete. Thanks to a remarkable course of treatment which I, in this case, applied. My treatment of Miss Oem consisted of giving her a new cat.”

  He sighed, tossed the volume onto the desk and paced quietly back and forth. Then he took the mirror from the wall, sat down on the bed and examined his reflection. “Frits van Egters,” he said, “I have seen you looking better.” He sat down at his desk and inspected his teeth, fingered two steel crowns in the upper jaw and said: “White gold.” Then he opened Viktor’s book at page two hundred and sixty-two and read: “There is a story about a man who was walking at night down a long, dark corridor by the light of a candlestick in his hand. He thought in fright of how ghastly it would be were his light to go out, and in his fright at the thought of actually seeing that light disappear and finding himself in utter darkness, he began panting heavily and blew the candle out.”

  He closed the book and remained sitting with it in his hand for some time. At last he laid it atop the bookcase, undressed, placed the mirror on the floor and looked at his naked form in it, as though in a pool of water. “I am a cone, or a funnel, if you will,” he said. Then he climbed into bed.

  It took more than half an hour for him to calm his thoughts. The bed began to move. “That’s annoying,” he thought. “Knock off the nasty jokes,” he said, “or I’ll give you a thumping, indeed I will, that’s what I’ll do.” Soon enough, however, he realized that he was in a car, moving at a clip down a muddy road full of puddles. “I mustn’t doze off in broad daylight,” he thought. Suddenly he realized that he himself was the driver and that no one else was in the vehicle. “How far have I driven already in my sleep?” he thought, struggling grimly with the wheel. The car swerved alarmingly. He tried to reduce speed, but found only pedals that made him go faster.

  “It’s going well at the moment,” he thought, “but the end of the road is coming up.” Having roared through a bend, the vehicle suddenly hit a hole and flipped, yet he crawled out of it unharmed. Before him on the road, two large omnibuses were lying on their sides. Everywhere he heard the screams of the injured. Coming closer he saw that people were trapped beneath one of the buses: at various spots, their intestines had been squeezed from their bodies. Their eyes bulged so far from their sockets that they hung down over their cheeks. He felt nauseous.

  “How many people have been killed?” he asked a driver in a blue uniform. “No one has died,” the man replied, “only two are badly injured, we need to clean them off well, so we can see what is wrong.” “And what about them?” Frits asked, pointing at the crushed bodies, “why isn’t anything being done about that?” “Do you really think that’s necessary?” the man said with a smile. Suddenly he vanished.

  Two of the injured were being rinsed off in a ditch beside the road. When all the dirt had been removed, they proved to be unscathed. “Now pull those folks out from under there,” Frits said, but no one listened. He reasoned for hours with various people in the crowd, to convince them that help was needed. Darkness began to fall. Finally, he found fifteen men who were willing to help. “Now I have no strength left,” he thought. He could barely bend over. While one group was lifting the bus, others pulled the victims away. Intestines and eyes withdrew slowly back into the bodies. “It’s not the kind of weather for an outing, anyway,” said the driver in the blue uniform.

  He awoke; it was four o’clock. “I need to empty my mind entirely,” he thought and, with a few deep breaths, his body relaxed and he fell asleep again.

  VII

  WHEN HE ARRIVED HOME at two thirty that Saturday afternoon, the fire was out. On the table lay a note that read: “Dear Frits. I don’t know where Father is. I have gone to Annetje’s. I will be home around eleven. There is pea soup, and you can take a piece of meat if you like. Just fry some potatoes along with the onions. Until then. Mother.”

  “Excellent,” he said, “sweet restfulness.” He stood for a few minutes, listening to the silence of the house. A break had appeared in the clouds: pale sunlight fell over the rooftops and onto the mat in front of the stove. “This afternoon is perhaps worse than others,” he thought. “I have four hours to go till evening.”

  He entered the back room and began searching through the drawers of a tall, antique cupboard. In the topmost, between some books, he found a little block of pinewood covered in erratic, twisted grooves. “Joop brought this home with him,” he thought, “it is an animal that has gnawed its way through all those little tunnels.” He looked at it closely, sniffed it, tapped it against the back of his head and put it down. Still searching, he found an abacus and a pair of tiny brown baby shoes, which he placed side by side on the palm of his hand.

  “It is cold,” he thought, tossing the objects back from where they came and closing the drawer. In the next one he found some old letters. On a light-green postcard he recognized his own hand. “Dear Mother,” was written on it in pencil, “I have arrived safely. The weather is dry. This afternoon we are all going to the beach. There is a man here who has a duck decoy. He has a dog that can sit up, with a pipe in its mouth and a cap on. Very amusing. When you stand atop the dune in the middle, you can see the sea in front and behind you. We have already gathered straw for beneath the canvas tent. I don’t know what else to write. Goodby
e! Frits.”

  The date was written at the top: 15th July, with no year. “East Vlieland,” he read on the postmark. “That was in nineteen thirty-six,” he thought, began to crumple up the card, but thought better of it and put it back among the letters. He unrolled a paper scroll, bound with a red ribbon. “List of Gifts Frits wants from St Nicholas” was printed across the top in big, clumsy block letters. Beneath that was a summary: “a pea-shooter”; “a thing that buzzes through the air, that goes up”; “a real saw (not a toy saw)”; “all kinds of sweets” and “a book like the one Frans has, about the black bears”.

  “That buzzes through the air,” he thought. “Yes, I remember.” “A kind of toy,” he said to himself, “a little propeller with four blades of tin that one can make fly with a twist of two fingers and the thumb. Well put.”

  He rolled up the page into a thin stick, held both hands ready to snap it in two, but instead put it back, after retying the ribbon, and closed the drawer with a slam. When he went into the front room, the sunlight had left the floor. He lit the fire without using newspaper, by sprinkling the tinder with paraffin oil, and laid a hand on the stove now and then to monitor the rise in temperature. Then he rolled a cigarette and straddled a chair, the backrest between his knees.

  “It was night-time,” he said, “the pitch blackness of night.” “I could of course turn on the radio,” he thought, “but whether or not it is wise is open to question.” He turned on the set.

  “You are listening to Schumann’s Romance number two,” the female announcer said. Frits waited and let the cigarette smoke drift through his fingers. “Listen, listen,” he thought when the music had started. He put the cigarette down on the flue cover, pinched the bridge of his nose between ring finger and thumb and breathed in with wide-open mouth. “So is it,” he whispered.