Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Author:Joseph O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Psychological, Immigrants, New York (N.Y.), General, Literary, fiction, Sports
ISBN: 9780307377043
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 2008-03-14T10:00:00+00:00

It’s the case that a person’s premature death brings him into view. His tale has come to a sudden end and becomes intelligible—or, more accurately, invites special attention. Some years ago, word reached me that a former football teammate at HBS, a kid I’d played with in a succession of junior teams from ages eight to fifteen but whom I hadn’t given a thought to since, had suffered a fatal heart attack. He was thirty-two years old and died while watching television in his home in Dordrecht. His name was Hubert and the main fact about him was that he’d been a very small, gifted laatste man—last man, or sweeper—who skipped around tacklers with speedy twinkling steps. You couldn’t take the ball off him. He had a craggy smile and closely cut hair, and he liked to horse around in the showers with towels and shampoo. Hubert! Longing for information, I made a couple of calls to The Hague. I learned the following: he had gone on playing football at HBS, for a range of senior teams, until the age of twenty-seven, at which point he found a job in Dordrecht as an IT consultant. He stayed in touch with one or two fellows from the club but had not been seen around. He lived alone. At the time of his death he hadn’t been watching television but, to be exact, a video.

For months I was haunted by this summary. I still think of Hubert sometimes, and still find it unbearable that he died by himself; although for all I know he remained until the very last the same happy fellow he’d been in the days I knew him. Knowledge, here, is a relative matter. I never once ran into Hubert outside the bounds of sports. This circumscription applied to almost all of my football-playing friends, even though I knew their fathers and rode to matches in their fathers’ cars and received words of encouragement, even love, from their fathers, cries from the touchlines that I can still hear.

Goed zo, Hans! Goed zo, jongen!

My point, I suppose, is the self-evident one that Hubert came to preoccupy me in a way and to a degree he would not have if he’d lived. But with Hubert, all thoughts soon come to a stop—not only for lack of information but also for lack of weight. Not so with Chuck. He is, in memory, weighty. But what is the meaning of this weight? What am I supposed to do with it?

I can see him now, waiting for me on the wooden steps of his porch. He is wearing a cap from his collection of caps, and shorts from his collection of shiny athletic shorts, and a T-shirt from his collection of T-shirts. Chuck covered up his extreme industry with a wardrobe suggestive of extreme leisure.

“So,” he says, “what’s the story?”

“There is no story,” I say, sitting next to him.

He looks at me with a cocked head, as if I’ve thrown down a challenge. “There’s always a story,” he says.

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