‘Does he step out with girls at all?’
‘Girls? He’s just not interested!’
Osewoudt looked in the mirror and touched his cheeks, which were still soft, fleshy and smooth. At school he would glance about in case anyone was laughing at him, prick up his ears when his classmates huddled together, but they left him alone because they all knew he could wrestle any boy to the ground with ease, including the biggest. He was still a regular at the judo club. Doing judo was altering the shape of his feet, which were growing wide and very muscular in the arches so they resembled suction pads, on which he stood fast, unshiftable. Normal shoes no longer fitted him; he had to have special ones made to measure.
A diminutive freak, a toad reared upright.
His nose was more of a button than a nose. And his eyes, even when not focussing, seemed forever narrowed, as if he could only leer, not look normally. His mouth recalled the kind of orifice through which the lowest forms of life ingest their food, not a mouth that could also laugh and talk. And then there were his round cheeks, and the pale silky hair he kept cropped short in the vain hope that it would stick up.
‘What are you doing here? Why are you looking in the mirror?’
‘Oh, is that you? Nothing.’
Ria grasped his head, saying: ‘Got something in your eye then?’
‘No, just looking in the mirror.’
She gave him a kiss and thrust her groin against him. He now knew that she was too ugly to attract any other man, and also that she would otherwise have dumped him long ago. He also knew that she wouldn’t get pregnant, because there was no way she could.
There was not a single part of her body that was not hard and bony to the touch. Her hair was the colour of wrapping paper, her chin long and jutting, and her teeth were also too long. Her teeth were always on show, even when she wasn’t smiling, and she never smiled. They overlapped slightly, and rested permanently on her lower lip. Her teeth did not enhance her mouth, nor did they make it look fierce, they merely clamped it shut, rather like the clasp on a purse.
‘It’s definite now, isn’t it Papa, that they’re discharging Henri’s mother from the institution next month?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then Henri and I have something to tell you. We’re getting married!’
‘Married?’
‘Henri and I have decided to get married, Papa. Henri wants to carry on his father’s business. We’ll take his mother to live with us over the shop.’
‘But Henri! Have you suddenly changed your mind about university?’
Osewoudt said: ‘Suddenly? I gave up on the idea a long time ago. I don’t think I’m cut out for it. I’m eighteen years old and I want to stand on my own two feet. Who else will look after Mother?’
His voice was still high-pitched, like a child’s.
‘But Henri …’
Aunt Fie began to weep.
‘Ria!’ she sobbed. ‘You’re throwing your life away! You’re seven years older than him! And he’s your first cousin!’
‘Oh Mother, you can’t talk! You think I don’t know, don’t you?’
‘Don’t know what?’
‘That I was already two by the time you and Father got married! Took the pram with you to the registry office and left it with the porter!’
‘You don’t understand a thing, Ria. Your father was an idealist!’
‘Listen, Ria,’ said Uncle Bart. ‘At heart I’ve always been against rules and regulations. And I still am!’
‘Oh Father, leave off. Who cares what anyone is at heart? Rules or no rules, you got married all the same!’
‘And I’m telling you it’s not going to happen!’
Aunt Fie stood up and left the room.
Before the month was out she died from a heart attack.
Osewoudt and Ria were married on 25 August, 1939. Six days later the radio announced that Hitler had invaded Poland with aircraft and tanks.
The tobacco shop was refurbished and painted at Uncle Bart’s expense. An electric connection was installed in the door frame to make a bell tinkle each time the door was opened or shut. The sales area was so small that the counter, which was by no means large, left scarcely any room to spare. All the woodwork was painted dark brown. The sliding doors to the back room were fitted with leaded panels of frosted glass. As a finishing touch, Osewoudt screwed a small plaque saying HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ANYTHING? to the inside of the shop door, just above the handle.
They ate and sat in the back room. Upstairs were three small rooms, one for Ria and him, one for his mother, and the third for a student lodger. Moorlag had started out as a cabinetmaker in Nieuw-Buinen, but had felt so drawn to studying theology that he had taken a room in Voorschoten, from where he could commute to the university. He didn’t want to live in Leiden itself because he hadn’t yet matriculated, which disqualified him from sitting exams. Taking lodgings in the university town at this point seemed to him sacrilegious. He was over thirty, studied day and night, but had failed to matriculate three times.
Sometimes the three of them would go for an evening stroll, and once in a while Moorlag came along too. They went up the narrow high street, greeting the other shopkeepers left and right, stepping out of the way of the blue tram when it passed. When they reached the north end they sometimes went as far as the silver factory, but never further.
‘Mother, isn’t it rather tiring for you?’
‘What gave you that idea, my boy? I’m not an old woman.’
‘Of course not, but we’re all ready for bed,’ Moorlag would say.
Then she would give in.
Moorlag had a soothing influence on her. She sometimes got up in the middle of the night to wander around the house wrapped in a sheet, her face covered by a mask cut from an old newspaper. In a tone as if she were doing the dusting she would say: ‘There it is again, I’ll just chase it away.’
On such occasions Moorlag was able to get her back to bed again with a few words.
What was she chasing away? Osewoudt didn’t ask. He had never discovered how she had killed his father. She was an ordinary fifty-year-old woman with a girlish face covered in wrinkles and a mouth so thin it looked like just another wrinkle. She talked a lot about his father, and always quite matter-of-factly.
‘Then your father would say: you only get to kiss the queen if you use stamps costing five cents and over. Because the queen isn’t on the cheaper ones, he said. A kiss on the right, he said, because the left cheek’s on the front of the stamp. Always one for a laugh, your father.’
Her chortling reminded him of the squeak of chamois leather on a wet windowpane.
On Sundays he sometimes took Ria and his mother to Ypenburg airfield. In the evenings they would listen to the radio. No one had much to say. They didn’t speak during meals. Shifting around on his chair, Osewoudt lifted the food to his mouth. His mind was focussed on strange visions: across the room there were railway tracks on which he made long trains thunder by. He imagined aeroplanes with roaring engines waiting outside the shop, or enormous field guns with jolting barrels firing non-stop.
Osewoudt turned nineteen, and had the feeling that everything that needed doing had already been done. All the obstacles that would normally have stood in his way (other people spend a lifetime overcoming them) had already come down: his father, his aunt, both dead. Ria was a woman with whom he had done everything he could think of, including getting married.
He was turned down for military service: he was half a centimetre too short.
Once a week he spent an evening at his judo club in The Hague and another on drill practice with the Home Guard. He learned how to load an old rifle, he learned to drive a car, and on one occasion he got to fire an old revolver.