Odd Jobs (115 page)

The trouble is, the well remains fathomless; the events pile up but don’t add up. Zeynel’s adventures, as he becomes involved with a street urchin called Dursun Kemal, and Selim’s, as he nurses the mad idea of
assassinating a magnate and land-developer called Halim Bey Vezirǒglu, diverge rather than converge, and the narrative becomes delirious and disconnected, like yards of randomly shot film hastily spliced together in a cutting room, or like one of those spoofs cooked up by a cocktail-sipping committee of Long Island writers, each one contributing a separate chapter. Where Mr. Mulisch’s story keeps cinching tighter around its opening incident of violence, rendering it ever more intelligible, Mr. Kemal’s expands so that things make less and less sense. Is Zeynel a vicious, addled tough or a poor lad we are supposed to pity? His erratic actions permit no empathy. By the time, more than halfway through the novel, the reason emerges for his shooting of Ihsan—Ihsan, a gangster, murdered the owner of a golden eagle who had supernatural significance for the boy—we are numbed by the intervening plethora of slaughter and impulsive behavior. Fisher Selim’s relations with the evil Vezirǒglu are inscrutable: Vezirǒglu has some land Selim wants and has planted olive trees upon; Selim goes intending to gun him down, and Vezirǒglu abruptly gives him the land; Selim no longer cares about the land but wants some other land; he buys this land with some ill-gotten gains and builds a lavish house, which he then totally neglects, still wanting, out of some belatedly acquired revolutionary instincts, to kill Vezirǒglu, who by now has become indistinguishable from Aristotle Onassis (“They are both of Anatolian stock, these two, Halim Bey Vezirǒglu and Onassis. Both playing mischief with the world”).

Guns flicker in and out of this verbal turmoil like mystical signs, and murder seems to be the only outcome that the characters and the author can think of. Violence in
The Star-Crossed Fisherman
is recurrent, rhythmic, and unreal; all intentions and consequences are alike mired in a bloody glue, a paralysis of coagulated rage. By the time Zeynel and Selim have their final encounter, whatever personalities and psychologies were originally constructed for them have been quite dissolved in the pervasive paranoia. Any sense of distinct human psyches moving in a tightening pattern is overwhelmed by the narrator’s indiscriminate appetite for the marvellous and for rhetoric of a wild-eyed kind. “Stop, Fisher Selim, stop! The crowd is closing in, trampling over the black-clad men, pressing them like grapes. Furiously, the people crush and pound. And suddenly they draw back and there is not a trace of the black-clad men. Only a few scattered, broken machine-guns …” What has happened, in a circumstantial way? Nothing. The prose has entertained a vision. The prose remembers its novelistic duty to show, to make us see and feel the
texture of things, only now and then, as when Zeynel, eluding a police hunt dreamlike in its inefficiency, patronizes a
çöp kebap
—vendor. And what is a
çöp kebap?
The prose tells us, and something of present-day, real-life Istanbul springs into being:

And that is how we make a
çöp kebap
.

L
AST
C
ALL
, by Harry Mulisch, translated from the Dutch by Adrienne Dixon. 288 pp. Viking, 1989.

The Dutch writer Harry Mulisch is best known in the United States as the author of a small, perfect novel,
The Assault
, about a brutal incident in World War II and its continuing reverberations. A surprisingly excellent movie was made from the book and won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1987. The book was a detective story, a case history of repression, and a study in the workings of time, as the postwar decades gradually transform the physical settings and remove the living witnesses of the war. This last aspect, conveyed by visual images of a changing, modern Holland, came through even more powerfully in the movie than in the book, stunning the viewer with a sudden sensation of the abyss of the past, itself unchanging yet productive of ever fresh installments of emotion.

Mulisch’s new novel,
Last Call
, in its best and clearest moments evokes this same awesome dimension of reality, as experienced by the seventy-eight-year-old hero, Willem “Uli” Bouwmeester, a long-retired cabaret performer—the ignominious last of a distinguished Dutch theatrical family—who is unexpectedly cast as the star of a contemporary play,
Hurricane
, to be performed by a modernist playwrights’ collective that occupies the Kosmos Theatre in Amsterdam. The drama, which concerns a turn-of-the-century performance of Shakespeare’s
Tempest
, has levels and levels, and so does the novel; still, like
The Assault
, it is rooted in a wartime incident—in this case, Uli’s discreditable but not extraordinary collaboration with the Germans. The facts are set forth early, as if casually but with Mulisch’s typical circumstantial precision:

In the fall of 1982, then, while living out a moldering senescence with his sister, Berta, in a housing estate in a recently reclaimed polder, he is called back by
Hurricane
to the stage and to the excitements of life; his triumph is spoiled by a television interview in which the young interviewer, whom Uli in too expansive an interview mood calls a “Jewboy,” revives the buried wartime facts. A commotion ensues. A fellow actor attacks the interviewer: “You bastard, taking on a man of eighty! Who do you think you are, coming here to act the judge?” The answer is simple: “I’m not having myself called a Jewboy by someone who has entertained the SS.”

The jacket copy of
Last Call
tells us merely that Mulisch was born in 1927 and is “regarded as Holland’s foremost author,” whereas that of
The Assault
revealed Mulisch to have been “born in 1927 to a Jewish mother whose family died in the concentration camps, and a father who was jailed for collaborating with the Nazis.” A heritage of intensely conflicted feelings forms part of his artistic capital.
The Assault
extends sympathy not only to the son of parents killed by the German occupiers of Holland but to the son of the collaborationist policeman slain by the resistance. The page-by-page fascination and eventually excessive muddle of
Last Call
stem from the author’s rich sense of moral ambiguity, his search for categories less simple than those of good and evil. We become thoroughly immersed in the consciousness of Uli Bouwmeester somewhat against our better judgment; there is much about him that is unpleasant, from his casual anti-Semitism to an impulsive ruthlessness, a “something malicious” that destroyed his modest postwar career as a director of working-class amateur theatricals. While a performance that he had purposely misdirected was collapsing onstage, a “suppressed fit of laughter finally burst out of Uli Bouwmeester, as an almost physical hurt, a thing that somehow no longer had anything to do with the show.” His behavior both past and present has a self-defeating streak, a scornful recklessness. He takes a young actress, Stella, to dinner at a restaurant without telling her he has insufficient money and, indeed, refuses her repeated offer to pay; faced at last with the bill, he leaves in hock to the restaurateur a precious silver-plated wristwatch that is the only memento he has of his father. He then arrogantly comes to redeem it after the appointed time and finds that the restaurant has moved. Later, in a string of surreal nocturnal adventures, he loses an elegant art book he has just been given and, more crucially, loses a good night’s sleep on the eve of his play’s dress rehearsal. Meanwhile, the author mislays the issue of Uli’s wartime collaboration: the television interview’s threat to the success of the production and to continued state sponsorship of the theatre dissolves in life’s own theatre of the absurd, as the geriatric actor is slowly exhausted and emptied by a welter of bizarre events and vivid memories. The graspable, suspenseful question of war guilt and its consequences gives way to an ambitious, all-but-chaotic attempt to find, in a barrage of images from every point of Uli’s life and consciousness, an objective correlative for the experience of dying.

The attempt is magisterial, and equips itself from the full armory of modernism. As in
Ulysses
, many threads and characters are cunningly interwoven, and a perfect memory is demanded of the reader: a dog’s death at the end is explained by a kick casually given on page 27. The
novel is arranged in five so-called acts, some scenes are described like stage scenes, and the reader is not infrequently addressed directly: “Honoured spectators! Let us enter. The die is cast.” Artifice is open and as complexly folded as a piece of origami; the skeptical and playful moods of Pirandello, Nabokov, and Calvino take on a certain Dutch solidity. The play within the novel, with its play within the play, has been thoroughly thought out, and its verse speeches are amply quoted, along with Shakespeare’s. The double role Uli plays—Shakespeare’s Prospero being acted by the turn-of-the-century thespian Pierre de Vries—possesses and annihilates him, and Pierre de Vries becomes the hero of a chapter of
Last Call
, the play within the novel popping up to the level of the novelistic reality. In what we take to be Uli’s dying delirium, a lengthy allusion to Poe’s
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
plunges Uli and an imaginary child called Pim together into the cosmic whirlpool. All this, and lots of information about Nō drama and downtown Amsterdam, too. It is too much, and there is even more, I don’t doubt, than met my eye. The basic emotional action—an old, failed man is called back into life and crushed by the stimuli—seems itself crushed under the sheer multiplicity of arresting, studied effects. There are too many hallucinatory scenes, too many artistic characters, too many pointed hints that “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” as Prospero too famously says.
The Tempest
is an adventurous text for a European writer to elaborate upon, but in English its best-known speeches border on the hackneyed. It, and the world of theatrical illusion, and Amsterdam’s civic carnival of freedom all seem too lush, too quick to yield symbolic fruit. The sum of
Last Call
seems less than its parts.

But what parts they are! Uli’s memories of his life, preponderantly his sexual life, have a mythic size and savagery. As he remembers his first copulation, with a cabaret dancer: “The headboard falls on top of them, but they notice nothing, nor hear the furious shouting of the neighbours below,” and when it is done “he is wet all over, including his hair, as if he had just come out of the sea, even the panes in the skylight are misted.” A homosexual encounter, in an air-raid shelter in wartime Germany, leaves his hand “wet, as if he had dipped it into a bucket of wallpaper paste.” Sweating and shaking, Uli escapes the shelter:

Mulisch has said, “It isn’t so much that I went through the Second World War; I
am
the Second World War.” He was a teen-ager in the years 1940–45, and his reconstructions of those dreadful times have the glow of nostalgia, of reëntry into a hellish paradise. Just as the hero of
The Assault
is piecemeal led by the accidents of his postwar life back into the primal furnace of that winter assassination and conflagration, so Uli Bouwmeester is led, by a monstrous encounter with a transvestite whose male genitals have been surgically transformed into “something terrible, something not of this world,” to recall the scene, which he witnessed as a three-year-old child hidden behind costumes and props in a dressing room, of his mother’s death in childbirth: “with both hands she tries to hold something back that is coming out of her, a large thing that splits her apart in the crotch far too wide.” The visceral, psychological core of
Last Call
splits apart, as it were, the folds of its stagecraft, its ultimately arid postmodern self-reflexiveness. Mulisch is a rarity for these times—an instinctively psychological novelist. He knows our psyches are spun of blood, and builds his plots with a dense and slippery architecture. The persistence of trauma, the rapacity of eros, the fragility of our orderly schemes, the something monstrous at the heart of being alive: “Whereof one cannot speak,” his novel concludes, “thereof one sings.”