An Untouched House

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  Copyright © Erven Willem Frederik Hermans 1951

  Copyright © De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 1951

  English translation copyright © David Colmer, 2017

  Afterword copyright © Cees Nooteboom, 2005

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Originally published as Het behouden huis by De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 1951

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request.

  Cover art: René Magritte

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  The project has received funding through a grant from the Netherland-America Foundation.

  This book was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

  Ebook ISBN  9781590519707

  v5.3.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  An Untouched House

  Afterword: by Cees Nooteboom

  THE MAIN BOUGH, almost the whole crown was suddenly lying at the foot of the tree without my hearing the crack. It had been drowned out by the bang from the brief thicket of clods that sprang up nearby.

  More explosions followed but I didn’t see the effects. I didn’t look back. There was nobody in front of me. Maybe I was in the lead. There weren’t many trees and I must have been in plain sight, but they seemed to be firing blind. With each step my ankles turned on hard lumps of earth. The slope was long and steep. The German position was on the other side of the hill. I hoped they would advance to meet us. Look for cover somewhere, crawl off silently. I was so thirsty I could hardly go on. My canteen was empty. I looked back at the others. No one was close enough to ask for water.

  Then the sergeant blew his whistle. Regrouping on a sunken road, we slumped down to catch our breath. I held up my empty canteen, but those who noticed shook their heads. Hardly anyone was paying attention anyway. The sergeant closest to me had slid his helmet down over his face to block out the heat and the light and, with his hands clasped on his chest, seemed to have fallen asleep. The sun was glaring down; it hadn’t rained for days. The yellow ground was so dry the dust that had been thrown up by the exploding shells was still hanging in the air.

  I checked my watch. Two-thirty. A silence descended. All of the combatants seemed to be taking it easy as if the war was a large sick body that had just been given a shot of morphine. The only thing happening: a high altitude dogfight, two against one. I watched it, a blade of dry grass between my teeth. Like skywriters the fighter pilots were drawing a pattern of white loops on the blue background, as if for our entertainment and no other reason. Don’t try to read what they’re writing, it’ll drive you crazy. Coca-Cola. They need both hands, I thought, but maybe they keep rubber tubes in their mouths to suck up drinks. The bullets from their machine guns drilled into the nearby ground. It could happen now too, I thought, and I’m just sitting here, not doing anything, thirsty. I could get hit now too, as if sitting was punishable by death. But death comes for everyone, even without any wars. What difference does war make? – Imagine somebody who doesn’t have a memory, who can’t think of anything beyond what he sees, hears and feels…War doesn’t exist for him. He sees the hill, the sky, he feels the dry membranes of his throat shrinking, he hears the boom of…he’d need a memory to know what’s causing it. He hears a booming sound, he sees people sprawled out here and there, it’s warm, the sun is shining, three planes are practicing skywriting. Nothing going on. War doesn’t exist.

  I thought of a Spaniard who’d asked me for a match that morning. He knew a few words of French. Within our band of partisans, made up of Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians, and Romanians, there wasn’t a single person I could understand.

  How long had I been away from Holland now, I thought, in foreign countries the whole time, everywhere the same darkness at night in the cities until finally there was nobody left I could talk to? In Germany I could at least listen in on other people’s conversations. Now all I heard was noise: the drone of engines, explosions, the thrum of bullets, the shriek of animals, rustling, creaking, thudding, barking. People too only ever produced noise. Workers of the world unite! – But even the most basic exchanges were beyond them.

  Sometimes I didn’t even understand the orders. Not that the officers cared. Three days before, our platoon had been shelled by our own side. A special Russian detachment had also arrived, selected five men and taken them behind the barn we were bivouacked in to shoot them. One tried to run away. The next morning he was lying face-up on the road. Nobody dared move him out of the way. We marched over him, putting our feet down on top of him to keep in step. I was bringing up the rear of the column. By the time I reached him his head was already cracked and unrecognizable. I couldn’t tell who it was. I must have seen him every day for three months. But I wouldn’t have known his name.

  I thought, while one of the three fighters began to lose altitude, of the Spaniard who spoke French. I would have liked to talk to him now.

  The plane changed into a comet of soot and hit the ground somewhere behind me. The explosion was like the world making a swallowing sound but amplified a million times. There was satisfaction to it as if the planet had been following the fighter with its eyes like a toad following a fly. Then a dirty black cloud began to slowly obscure the view of the road. Suddenly I saw the Spaniard walking toward me bareheaded through the smoke. It was like the crashed plane had brought him here, as if he had emerged unharmed from the wreckage.

  I wanted to call out to him. I wanted to call out, I was just thinking of you! But I couldn’t formulate it quickly enough. Maybe I had forgotten how to talk altogether.

  That was why I didn’t even bother to raise my arm in greeting. But he seemed to recognize me anyway. He squatted down next to me, putting his helmet, which he had been swinging like a bucket, on his knee.

  “Where from?” he asked.

  “Holland! Already four years gone! November 1940!”

  “Ah! Nothing! Me, eight years!” He slapped a horsefly on his cheek. “Eight years!” He held up eight fingers.

  There was no more firing anywhere. All we could hear was the crackling of the burning plane behind our backs.

  “Me spy,” I said. “Little…” With my hands I indicated the degree to which I had been a spy, thinking about the next sentence.

  “Captured by Germans. Prison. Sentenced. Three years. Hard labor. On way to different prison, escape. Captured again. Concentration camp. Strellwitz. You know Strellwitz? Six months. Escape again. Caught, close to Swiss border. Jump out of train in Saxony. Walk, keep walking east.” I looked at him without noticing anything. Now I couldn’t even say what color eyes he had. I looked at him the way you usually look at others: without really knowing anything about them and obliged by lack of evidence to assume they’re more or less the same as you. – Words are nothing but air currents in a hermetically sealed room, never changing anything essential, continuously reestablishing equilibria without ever disrupting them.

  �
�Me from Spain when civil war,” he said. “Me Communist. Captured by French. In camp. Then escape. On ship. Turkey. Russia.”

  Having got this far, he began to talk faster, using more and more Spanish words. It seemed that Russia had not lived up to expectations. That was why, for the first time since leaving the German sphere of influence, I said, “Me no Communist!”

  He laughed.

  “Merde! Tout ça, merde!”

  “Comrade! Give me a cigarette!” Talking had only made me thirstier. He didn’t even have a canteen.

  He broke his last cigarette in half and lay down, leaning on one elbow.

  “What you do?” he asked, making it clear that he wanted to know what I had done long ago, before the war.

  “School,” I said, “technical school.”

  “Yo yesero,” he answered, “moi yesero!” When I shrugged, he repeated the foreign word several times as if that would turn it into a new concept for me: something he simply was, the way a horse is a horse and not a tiger. Yesero! This must have been more or less where our conversation ended. I remember very clearly that we didn’t tell each other what our names were. When I thought about him later, I thought of him as “the yesero.” I’ve looked it up in a Spanish dictionary in the meantime and discovered it means gypsum burner. – A trade you would never have suspected of existing, whose practice is a complete mystery.

  One of our tanks was coming up the slope. We got up onto our feet and walked behind it to the crest of the hill with our rifles under our arms. From there I could see out over a small valley in which, on a river, there was a town like the ones they advertise on colored posters in railway station waiting rooms. It had never occurred to me that I might get to see one in such circumstances.

  The Germans were shooting at us from all directions. I had already lost track of the yesero.

  Slowly I made my way down the hill, cutting straight through an almost ripe vineyard. I crept and leapt past fallen soldiers. But there were still plenty of Germans left alive, despite three of our tanks having already reached the top of the hill. I didn’t know where all those bullets were coming from. There seemed to be nothing I could do about them. I knelt and crawled, holding tight to the trellis guide wires to avoid rolling downhill with my heavy kit. Attempting to fire back every now and then, too. Occasionally I forgot it all to stuff my mouth full of sour grapes.

  Late in the afternoon I was walking along a road close to the river. Shots came from a house in a bend next to the side of the valley. I dropped to my stomach, close to the water. My rifle resting on the asphalt of the road. The sergeant and two others crept into the undergrowth on the slope with the intention of working their way round until they were above the house. I waited. Nobody was on the road except me. There wasn’t anything unusual about the house. The Germans had stopped shooting because they couldn’t see me anymore. There was a large pipe painted on the side of the house. It stayed quiet everywhere. I wasn’t moving, but I was still experiencing things a hundred times faster than usual. Then I heard three bangs. The roof flew up like a swarm of black slate. Smoke started coiling out of the windows at a tempo that was very different from mine. A German emerged and ran for the road. I shot him. A second, as well. A third. A fourth. They bent double like butterflies being mounted. I stabbed them to death with a pin six hundred feet long. I didn’t manage to hit the fifth before he’d jumped in the river. I clicked a new magazine into my rifle and by the time I’d emptied it, I was certain the German’s head was no longer visible above water. I leapt up and raced forward with all kinds of things running through my mind. One of the Germans might not be dead. He could shoot me with his pistol. Or there might have been more of them in the house; there could still be a couple in there. Or they’d jumped out at the rear while I was trying to hit the swimmer and hidden in the bushes on the hillside. They couldn’t possibly miss as I passed by. But I didn’t know what else I could do except run. An end would come. Finally, an end. I threw my head back in terror and with my head back like that I jumped over the bodies on the road, not looking at them for a second longer than necessary to avoid stumbling. But nothing happened. Houses appeared between me and the river. My hobnails scratched over the round cobbles, the narrow road wound its way up to a square where our tank was already waiting.

  I couldn’t see any Germans anywhere. Small groups of partisans were standing in front of a bar with bottles in their hands. I shouldered the rifle I had been keeping cocked the whole time and made to go in too. But the sergeant stepped forward and stopped me. He was bareheaded and looked at me like an enemy. “Booby trap!” he said. He said a lot of other things too, but I didn’t understand any of it. “Booby trap!” He shoved me away. He pointed further into town and gave me a slap on the shoulder that pushed me in the right direction. I was so angry I no longer felt any exhaustion. But the road kept rising. On a corner I squatted by an iron snake’s head that was spouting water. I put my whole head under it. Under my clothes the water ran down my back.

  It tasted of sulfur and was slightly fizzy. The route to the gutter it had followed for centuries was marked by a perfectly even deposit of light yellow. It obviously came from a natural spring; each corner was fitted with one of these permanently flowing taps. And then I suddenly realized: the town was a spa, a luxury resort. My suspicion was confirmed when, ascending out of the oldest streets, I spotted hotels surrounded by park-like gardens.

  Except for me there was nobody here. The inhabitants must have fled or been evacuated. Two dogs came towards me. I held out a hand, but they were chasing each other and took no notice. It made me feel like I was dead, as if I could see them, but they could not see me. I couldn’t shake the thought that they had run right through me instead of past me. All I heard was their panting and the click of claws on cobblestones. The abandoned houses were about to stir and gather round me, offering themselves to me like women in travel stories about Indochina.

  The war had never really taken place; as long as I wasn’t wounded, nothing had happened. There had never been any other people, not in my lifetime, nowhere in the whole world. I stopped and discarded my kit, only keeping my rifle, my helmet, my bayonet, ammunition, and hand grenades. Like that I walked past a stone parapet with behind it, far below, three red tennis courts. I no longer knew how tennis was played; I didn’t know what the net, the white lines, the tall white chair, that heavy roller in a corner meant. The sun was setting behind my back and reflecting off the large windows of a house to one side and ahead of me. With each step I took, one of the windows would be transformed into a large sheet of polished copper. And then all of the windows were a gleaming deep black. I was standing directly opposite.

  The house itself wasn’t that big, but all of its parts were. The windows were single sheets of reflective glass; the portal was as high as two floors; a balcony stretched across the entire façade.

  There was a sloping, dark green lawn with a large plane tree in the middle that had been pollarded so many times it now looked like a gallows with room for an entire family. The front door, made of glass and wrought iron, was well ajar.

  Look inside. I had plenty of time. I had been given an order; I had been sent somewhere. I didn’t know where, but I couldn’t go back to the sergeant just like that. I would interpret the order my own way…who knows what would be in it for me!

  After going into the front garden and making my way across the lawn to the steps, I realized that this would be the first time in a very long while that I had entered a real house, a genuine home. I had slept in prisons, in barracks, on straw in classrooms, once under a truck, in haystacks, in goods wagons. For three years I hadn’t once spent the night anywhere except shelters where people only worked, waited, or were held prisoner: police or railway stations, barns; a week in a hospital.

  I looked in through the front door: it wasn’t dark inside, the hall led through to the open air at the other end. My hands began to sweat as I stoo
d on the steps and looked back before entering. Imagine never having been anywhere other than here, or having conquered this house, this hill, as the solution to a riddle: this, of all that exists in the world. I was so awed by the thought I wiped my feet in the front hall. Only then did I use both hands to push the heavy door shut behind me, causing the air in the house to move and fill my nose. My mouth began to water and I licked my lips while making for the back door. Some doctors explain love at first sight as arising not from what you see but from what you smell. Humans are so sure they can’t trust others that things that are said or shown never convince. Smell – the weakest over a distance, able to be suppressed by perfume but never defeated – cannot dissemble because it is constantly being produced. Stench is everywhere, unavoidable. Only stench tells the truth.

  Draped over a sofa was a lady’s coat. It spoke like the objects in detective stories. It said: although I am expensive I am lying here carelessly bunched together. Someone who was about to put me on and step through the door dropped me here. She’d noticed that she’d forgotten something. She is still in the house. Be careful, you are not alone. – Two stag’s heads on the wall said nothing. Through the back doors I saw a small terrace with a marble balustrade that looked out over a long, rectangular French garden with a summer house at the rear. Holding my rifle at the ready and almost jogging, I began to search the house as quickly as I could. Leaving all the doors open behind me and not watching where I put my feet. Booby traps! This house wasn’t going to come crashing down on top of me. It didn’t smell like it. I was like a man who has found something and keeps touching it to impress upon himself that it really is in his possession. My search was nothing like an investigation. I just wanted to see it all; I wasn’t scared.

  I didn’t find anyone in the downstairs rooms. I even looked under the carpet draped over the large grand piano. Nothing. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there had been someone here until very recently. Chewing on a finger I stood in the middle of the drawing room and thought about it. The painted portraits on the walls gave no answer. There were half-burnt candles in the candelabras on the mantelpiece, ash in the ashtrays, and cigarettes in a crystal glass. No, those objects could have been there three months as easily as three hours. Suddenly I knew: there was no dust anywhere. As long as there is no dust in a house it is still alive, just as a body is not dead as long as it is perspiring.