 
Confusion
Mathijs Koenraadt

Confusion

A Surrealistic Novella on the Struggle for Autonomy

First edition 2019 Copyright © 2018 Mathijs Koenraadt

Translated from Dutch by the author Original title: Verwarring

Published by Morningtime www.koenraadt.info

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Paperback ISBN 978-1095954232
"In certain societies, it becomes plain governments are concerned, at any cost, to present the citizen's behavior as unreasonable and incomprehensible. Governments themselves maintain to be reasonable institutions that have done all in their power to help. A perceptive observer can see how acutely sensitive such governments often are to any sign of criticism of themselves, especially when it comes from the citizen. With determination, they seek to clear themselves of having played any part in creating the problem. The citizen's behavior, they claim, is to be understood solely in terms of the citizen: he is ill, mad, disobedient or unprofitable. Thus—threatened with sanctions against telling the truth—a citizen may habitually connive to present the societal scene in a falsely favorable light. Yet, in his heart, he knows well enough what is true and, given support, may pluck up courage to describe it."

(After John Bowlby)
Contents

Confusion
Confusion

When, one morning, eleven-year-old Toine woke up from a restless sleep, the recruit was looking forward to his promotion to first-class bridge-year pupil. Today, the bespectacled, blond-haired scrag started his first day of high school.

He had set his alarm clock, one of those old junk pieces that rang too loud, himself. Just a few more minutes and the alarm was going to go off. The prospect didn't keep Toine from postponing getting up just a little while longer. Feeling dazed, he looked around his room. He had had a wild dream. Outside, a black raven whose wailing had disturbed his sleep flew right past his bedroom window.

His bedroom quarter was covered with grey carpeting. White wallpaper with narrow ridges printed on adorned the walls. An apparent balcony door opened to a steel fence without an actual balcony. Now and then, Toine climbed out that way. The boy was looking at his feet sticking out from under the bedsheet, at the room's grey door filled with drawings posted on it, at the picture frames hanging on the wall opposite him. The frames contained his portrait photo's, a series taken from the start of kindergarten until the end of primary school. In six poses, the cheerfully smiling boy he had once been at age four turned into the timid heap of scrap still left of him.

It was too early to get up for Operation Butterfly Stroke. To secure the success of the Operation, Toine had to graduate from the Saint Stable Horse 'gymnasium' within six years, the scientific school for promising recruits at the Veteran's Avenue in South Rock, a retiree village with city rights. Napoleon himself had awarded the community these rights. Before and after, no other events of any historical significance had occurred here. South Rock had fifty thousand inhabitants and was in the country's Catholic south.

The school Toine was going to attend, Saint Stable Horse, was abbreviated to the horse or the horsey by the initiated.

— "I'm riding the horse," the chosen ones would say.

— "You must have been overbred, then," the working people parried.

Cocky or not, this was the school where Toine, together with six-hundred fellow recruits, was going to develop himself. Here, the state made your personal development life's highest attainable goal. At the somewhat elitist school, the school management educated children to become the nation's future administrators: managers, researchers, and politicians. It was a school with an overrepresentation of lawyers' sons, mayors' offspring, notaries' family members, dentists' kids, and family doctors' progeny. A few farmers' sons were also in attendance. On paper, their parents were very wealthy, too. They couldn't spend the money on holidays because all of it had been invested in land, machines, and real estate. A few years after their graduation, two girls from the horsey would marry a Van Nassau.

Now, Toine was going to attend this school, too, a nurse's and a jobless general's romantic accident.

The general's father, the major, had been a late colonial. In the nineteen fifties, he had acquired a Surinamese plantation that had been built there by slaves during the eighteenth century. There hadn't been any more slaves there for quite some time. Yet, about forty Hindu families were still living on his land. The major had built a small school and a hospital for them. He forbade his own daughters to hang out with the working-class folks. Not much later, the whole thing went bankrupt when Morocco began selling oranges to Europe. Due to the added overseas transportation costs, the entire Surinamese citrus trade could no longer supply Europe. A significant drop of the Suriname guilder relative to the Dutch guilder transformed the major's riches into paper-maché. "Paper-maché, paper-maché, paper-maché!" the general sometimes yelled to remind his recruits of this historical debacle. It had all been dictator Bouterse's and his gang's fault.

Encapsulated within an old cloister, surrounded by a canal and a hedge of willows, Saint Stable Horse snapped off a sheltered little spot from the civilian community. Precisely this secure location had convinced Toine's authorities to station the recruit there. Together, the general, called Bonifacius, and nurse Gertrude conducted their House of Foxholes, a bivouac complex converted into a home where Toine and three younger co-recruits resided after school hours.

The nurse and the general feared the many dangers the civilian community exposed their recruits to. To be able to let their young recruits go to school without permanent oversight, the general and the nurse came up with a strict but fair surveillance plan. Gertrude took on the boys' homework checks. In rain or snow, the general would drive the recruits to school in his minivan, with a bicycle tucked in the back of the cargo area so Toine could bike home on his own.

From the outside, the Foxhole appeared terribly ordinary, just like an average family's home, the strategic, semi-detached corner house built with red bricks and brown roof tiles. There was a walkway around the backyard. The general had been so annoyed by peeping neighbors, he had installed an impenetrable, oakwood fence in front of it. The home with an adjoining garage was situated in the middle of a middle-class residential area for families with small children. Even the neighbors in the east and west flanks didn't realize an armored bunker lay hidden behind the front door. Walls as thick as the door to a bank safe separated the civilians from the soldiers. In this lair, the general coordinated his attack strategy.

Under general Bonifacius's command, the recruits were expected to outsmart the civilian enemy. The general and the nurse repeatedly stressed their four recruits were never, ever allowed to betray their position. Tellers deserved to be exiled. Toine and his co-recruits gave their word. There was nothing they wanted more than winning their authority's appreciation. Wisely, they decided to keep their mouths shut. Toine feared it, his exile. Specters of the musical Annie flashed before his eyes. Rather the Foxhole than an orphanage.

* * *

Toine, the firstborn, camped on the first floor of the House of Foxes. Chris, as blond as his predecessor, was number two in the pecking order, ten years of age, and a year younger than Toine. After him came the two years younger, eight-year-old two-egg twins. They were called Leo and Arjan and slept in their own two beds in the room between that of Chris's and Toine's. Outdoors, the recruits had to manage to stay out of sight of the civilian enemy, at all times. To this end, they put on social camouflage. Camouflaged in civilian clothes and jeans, all six of the inhabitants of the house at number eleven spoke and behaved as the Homemaker family. No one noticed a thing. In the proximity of the civilian, the recruits had to address the general with the command "dad", the nurse with the utterances "mom" or "momma", depending on the distance to be bridged.

The twins, Leo and Arjan, had a special bond with each other. The boys spoke a secret language consisting of ape-like cries mixed in with tap and swallow sounds. Even their superiors Chris and Toine didn't understand one thing of it, let alone that civilian community members knew something was being communicated. Two deep gasps with a short, dull ah-sound appeared to mean something like "sorry", Toine knew. He had figured this out through observation. He heard this cry back and forth when the two youngest ones were fooling around with each other. "Moonga," for example, meant lemonade syrup. "Anga" was Arjan's codename. Leo's codename, on the other hand, was a strange gurgling sound.

When the twin boys were still little, they sometimes tried to strangle each other. Just to see who could hold out the longest. In the evenings, authority figures Bonifacius and Gertrude were too busy watching TV to interfere in such matters. In their place, Toine and Chris provided care for Arjan and Leo, at least so they wouldn't injure one another. In any case, nurse Gertrude didn't pick up on her subordinates' throat-squeeze game until long after. When she did, she immediately forbade the game. When they had been little baby's, general Bonifacius had sometimes squeezed his recruits' throats shut. He couldn't stand their cries, and, that way, he tried to silence their noisy sirens. It didn't work. It only made them cry louder.

A year or two after the twins' birth, Toine sometimes sat downstairs at the dinner table when he heard thunderous noises coming down the stairs. The nurse had locked the boys in their room, hoping she could escape her duty of care for an hour or so. A small fence at the top of the staircase was supposed to stop the boys, but they wouldn't let themselves be boxed in that easily. Despite their little feet, they quietly climbed over the fence to subsequently tumble down, heads first. Their thunderous banging against the staircase sounded like someone was throwing furniture down the stairs. Down at the bottom, the whining started.

Far worse things perspired in the House of Foxes. Once, Toine was sitting on the second floor, staring out the window when he saw the twins crawling across the expressway behind the house. A shocked driver had pulled over to behold the crawling toddlers. Toine yelled at the nurse; the boys were crossing the street. She marched outside to fetch her brood and held them close to her bosom again. It wasn't the first time Gertrude lost track of things.

Later, an attempt to definitively decipher the twins' secret language hit a wall. Toine had hidden a smart wire in the twins' bedroom. Loudspeakers were attached to both ends, one to record, the other to play back. That way, he could eavesdrop their conversations. The old equipment's chatter had betrayed his position. The twins investigated and found the speaker hidden in a small cabinet atop their bigger wardrobe. They only had to follow the wire to unmask the spy. Toine had been caught red-handed.

* * *

The bloated Bonifacius, who had turned forty a week ago, had a broad build and a meaty beer belly. Belly fat rolls rolled over his pants. Instead of buying a larger size, one he could have pulled over his belly flap, he preferred to wear a tighter size that disappeared underneath it. He fancied himself thinner that way. He looked like a talking inflatable belly behind which two helpless little arms and legs were sticking out. The general felt ashamed of his fat tripe. Still, he made no effort to do something about it. The colonic colossus bothered him so much that, every morning, nurse Gertrude had to come to help him put his socks and shoes on. He couldn't reach his feet himself.

The general had been all too well acquainted with the civilian enemy. Ordinary citizens couldn't understand his mentality. According to him, the privileged proletariat looked down on the righteous warlord. For this reason, he ordered the recruits to infiltrate the civilian system disguised as schoolboys. The general had thought of Operation Butterfly Stroke himself. He had found inspiration for the name thanks to the swimming trophy he had won as a seventeen-year-old. He had been a born winner. It frustrated him the civilian still refused to honor his status as a former sports athlete. Bonifacius, in mind still sportsman of the year, desired nothing more than sweet revenge. He would get back at the civilian enemy and put a stop to "all that harassing all of the time."

On occasion, when the general had gotten neatly dressed for an early morning outside visit, which he didn't always do, the neighbor happened to be walking to his car to go to work. He would greet the general kindly.

— "Good morning, neighbor!" the neighbor said.

— "Alright, alright, good morning," Bonifacius said, ill-prepared for such unexpected attention.

At some point, the general was certain. Supposedly, the neighbor had been peeking through the walls of their two homes using infrared cameras. Precisely at the moment the general was going to go outside, the neighbor would jump up, apparently, run to the front door, and, coincidentally, with a feigned calmness, pretend to be on his way to work as well, just to harass the warlord with his greetings. Thereupon the general decided to have his revenge. In the middle of the night, he snuck out into the neighbor's front yard. With a shovel, he dug a three feet deep pit between his conifers. He buried a bag of construction waste full of bricks, nails, and small wooden planks in it. What the general hadn't been aware of was that the neighbor, who at that moment happened to be standing in the bathroom brushing his teeth, had been looking through a small window, open-mouthed, at what the heck the general was doing to his front yard.

After filing a police report, the garden feat led to a cantonal court case. The general preoccupied himself with the matter all day long for weeks. He wanted to win the case at all costs, read up on all relevant jurisprudence, ordered the relevant law books, and paid several visits to the town hall to gain advice. He had been caught red-handed, but that didn't prevent the general from fighting for his innocence. The neighbor, a lot more laconic, happened to have something better to do on the day of the trial. He didn't show up. What a misstep!

It was the gesture that mattered, the neighbor believed. He wanted to let his crazy neighbor know one shouldn't dig holes in another man's yard. But the general's character had been forged on a very different kind of furnace. Once he was called before the cantonal judge, he managed to plea his total innocence, swinging arm gestures emotionally. It had been the neighbor who had left the bag of rubble behind after rebuilding his garden shed, a week earlier. The neighbor had left the rubble on the general's porch. The general had only wanted to return this rubble. Besides, the neighbor had been annoying him with his unwanted greetings each morning for years on end. Not he, said Bonifacius, but the neighbor was the only truly guilty party.

Moreover, how had the neighbor been able to spot him in the middle of the night? Had he been peeping outside with night-vision goggles? Well, that had been a violation of his privacy.

Due to the lack of reply from the neighbor-in-absentia, the cantonal judge awarded the general the benefit of the doubt. The judge had never before witnessed such a hilarious comedian. The neighbor was going to have to carry the trial's entire cost, eight-thousand guilders. That served him right, the general believed. A few weeks later, the neighbor collapsed in the middle of the sidewalk in front of his porch. It had been a heart attack. The man briefly tried to cling to the tallest conifer before smacking down onto the stone walkway with his jaw first. He was as dead as could be. Two neighborhood residents walked by but didn't act. There he was. According to the autopsy, it had been stress-induced heart failure. Hereafter, no one in the neighborhood would dare to greet the general kindly in the morning. Finally, they would leave him alone.

— "You constantly have to harass those civilians," the general advised his recruits, "lest they win."

During the joint supper on the evening of the neighbor's death, the general instructed his troops. The civilian world was after them, they should know. Recruit Toine had experienced it himself in the meantime. He knew the general was speaking the truth. On the day before, he and his commander had been on the road together to find the new electronics store, the one next to the DIY hardware store. They wanted to buy the latest DVD device for the computer. With it, they could record the entire military ARPAnet onto discs. Civilian losers called it the internet. What did they know?

At first, the electronics store's salesperson, a slow, slender, twenty-seven-year-old pimple, didn't want to close the deal. Supposedly, it was the last device left from a display cabinet, and he was only allowed to sell it "OEM."

— "OEM?" the general asked in an agitated mood. "Does that include the terms and conditions?"

— "Well, no, well yeah, but those terms and conditions are at the headquarters," the salesperson said, "but if you would really like to take this particular device home with you, so to speak, I might possibly ask the boss, perhaps tomorrow, if he wants to prepare a copy for you, I mean. You can come back tomorrow to pick them up, you know?"

— "No, I don't know. I want to see the terms and conditions now," the general shot back, "because I know how this will go. By the time I get home, the thing obviously won't work! And who will guarantee me the warranty will still apply? OEM, right."

What happened next was an hourlong quarrel about the legal significance of OEM, which, according to the general, had to mean "one eccentric mishap." The clock struck six. It was getting dark outside. The mellowed salesperson eventually surrendered to his hunger. He decided not to pursue the sale any longer. The defeated general left the store swearing and scolding and returned to the bunker without having acquired the desired device. Before he got into the car, he yelled at the sales clerk:

— "Imagine the British had never acquired the Enigma! Then what, huh? The war would still be raging on. You're treating me the way the Nazis treated the Jews. They, too, were thrown out of stores, you stinking Hitler lover!"

Everybody was always against him.

* * *

The general was recovering from an accident. He hadn't been able to work for a whole year because of a tricky back injury, a hernia. Last summer, on a mission to Southern France, the general had slipped off a slab of algae slush after a walk along Normandy's landing beaches. His public pooping maneuver put a damper on his day. Suffering excruciating pains, he barely managed to crawl back to shore. Chris and Leo helped the general back to the camping van, a Toyota Hi-Ace with an extra passengers' bench between the cabin and the cargo area. The warlord refused to be treated in a hospital. The caravan had to move on. He ordered his family to continue the vacation. Devastated by the pain, he would lie down on the camping van's backbench while Gertrude took the steering wheel.

After a couple of days, Bonifacius seemed to realize he had suffered a crooked vertebra. The sensation in his toes slowly began to fade. Gertrude, of all people, was incredibly angered when she had to break off the vacation. She really didn't want to go home, back to the daily hassles of household life. Now she was finally behind the wheel, she didn't want to let go anymore. Unfortunately, it couldn't last long. The general had been defeated.

The general was going to have to stay in bed at home for a year. Despite the accident, Bonifacius yearned for the summer travel missions. He spent his free time the year-round focused on the history of the Second World War. He hadn't experienced it himself. He had become obsessed with the many documentaries and war films about the topic.

Along with The Bridge on the River Kwai, the film The Longest Day belonged to his favorites. During the annual ten-week-long summer mission, he could fill in the gaps of his knowledge with visits to the museums France offered day-trippers. Bonifacius wanted to acquaint Toine and the other recruits with the civilian enemy's demonstrably evil intentions. He took them on hasty tours past ruins and memorials. In France, for days without end, they visited vast dune areas where decisive battles had taken place.

Dressed in tourist camouflage, the Homemaker family visited the many minefields, decaying bunkers, and heavy artillery by the sea. In Colleville-Sur-Mer, Bonifacius visited the mass cemeteries for fallen soldiers. Thousands of white crosses left a dizzying impression on visitors. The war vacations carried the recruits along shattered fortresses and trenches. They lost themselves in collections of war art and walked along obscure mausoleums, the memorial sites for the fallen. The highlights of the vacation were the ossuaries, charnel houses full of nameless soldiers' bones, men who had fought for their redemption in the afterlife.

Because the museums were so expensive, the general sometimes snuck his recruits in through the back door. One or the other doorkeeper who noticed it would start to complain. Then Bonifacius acted as if he suddenly didn't know French anymore.

— "Oowella cash desk? Voolevolee dans l'entrance? Oogieboogie! Loser!"

For entertainment, the recruits were allowed to swim in the sea along the landing beaches of Omaha¸Utah, and Juno. In his rubber dingy, Toine rowed to one of the forgotten caissons, remnants of the allied forces' mooring vehicles that had stayed afloat in the water since D-Day. What an exciting day it was. There was nothing to do at home. Here, you could conquer Fort Boyard all day long. During the construction of a sandcastle, Toine found a lost landmine. The Germans had left it for the Americans. He threw a heavy rock on top of it. Bummer. Feeling disappointed, Toine had to establish the fact the thing would no longer explode.

On vacation missions, the sensitive Toine increasingly began to wonder where his general's fascination for war and demise had come from. Each visit, the depressing atmosphere of the mass graves took a heavier toll on Toine's mental condition. Conditioned by the scenes of war, the recruit became convinced of man's wickedness. To him, the inhumanity of war's violence appeared to go together with the inevitability of human suffering. The black ravens of evil gathered in Toine's psyche. At night, alone in bed, thoughts of war were grinding through his head. Those poor French soldiers of the First World War still had to pull forth their old-fashioned cannons with horses while the German masters of technology could already crush them with tanks.

In the charnel houses, Toine couldn't possibly make out the difference between friend and foe, between Frenchman and German. The bones of the battle brothers crisscrossed each other. He concluded good and evil had to be merely an apparent contradiction, certainly no moral absoluteness. The remains of all of these men who had died young had all been made of the same kind of substance, bone meal. A fog fell before Toine's eyes.

* * *

The recruits loved their caretakers with all their hearts. The general and the nurse provided them with a brig to sleep in as well as a plate of food to eat in the evenings, free of charge. The recruits understood very well they had to fulfill their plight of achievement in exchange for care. That meant, in short, they had to dive into reading books and clock in their school results. Operation Butterfly Stroke was going to go down in history as a grandiose success, like the Battle of Stalingrad as seen from the Russian perspective. To overthrow the ruthless civilian enemy, the recruits blindly followed the orders of Bonifacius and Gertrude. They had no choice.

Never completely recovered from his back injury, the general had accepted his degradation to General of Recruits in the Hole of Foxes with some embarrassment. Bonifacius laid out the strategy, but nurse Gertrude led the daily logistics. The nurse, who was eighteen months older than the general, let her blond locks of hair dangle before her grey-blue eyes. That way, she could hide her ugly countenance. She wore large spectacles on her witch's nose, one with sun-tinting glasses that adapted to the intensity of light. Because the glasses fogged up at the slightest interruption, even indoors, the recruits could rarely look their nurse in the eyes.

To make a little extra money, Gertrude worked night shifts at a civilian hospital two to four days a week, at a one-hour drive from South Rock. In the years before she took recruit Toine and the three little ones under her care, she had been a head nurse there. Since her appointment to the Foxhole, she had settled for a job as an anesthesiologist in the "O.R.," the operating room. She fooled her recruits into believing something very different. Supposedly, she was a surgeon. Gertrude proudly bragged she had graduated summa cum laude from household school. After that, she had gone on to study nursery, which, according to her, equated to a simultaneous enrollment at a university and a military boot camp. There she had learned to fold towels, dishcloths, and napkins.

Indeed, she was a genius. The peroxin blond nurse knew she was highly intelligent. The recruits didn't dare to doubt the nurse's extraordinary claims. They worshiped her. Unlike the general, Gertrude didn't rule with an iron fist but with the flat hand of steel.

The general delegated the daily care duties to the nurse so he could focus on his real estate in peace. Real estate was how one could really become rich without having to work. Actually, the general didn't really have to work anyway, he thought. Bonifacius had saved the recruits' child benefits the Ministry of Offense paid out each month for the recruits' care to acquire four storage boxes. Renting them out, he collected four hundred guilders per month, undeclared, and before deducing maintenance and vacancy costs.

— "A goldmine!" he made the recruits believe. "When you grow up, the four of you also ought to invest in real estate."

According to his calculations, it would only take thirty-something years to earn back the investment. Finances played an important role in the Foxhole. Once, Toine had eavesdropped on a conversation between his authorities. From the room above the garage, he overheard his general lodge a complaint against the nurse. She was complaining she needed money to replenish the food supplies. The general didn't understand that the recruits' maintenance cost him so much money. He had invested all of his money in real estate for himself. There wasn't much left for the recruits' daily care. Traveling through France, he, therefore, forbade making any expenses, except for bread, water, and fuel.

The long vacations were a way to further cut household costs. At Omaha beach, Gertrude made the terrible mistake to buy her recruits four strawberry donuts, French beignets. They cost nearly one hundred French francs combined. An obvious scam, of course—thirty guilders! After the general had been informed about this incident, it knocked his socks off. With a defeated look on his face, he just sat there on the sandy beach. The clever civilian enemy had managed to make his move through his wallet. Three hours of shouting ensued next. The general snubbed the nurse for her tactless financial management. She should never have spent "thus many" French francs without his permission.

Bonifacius wasn't consistent. He budgeted very different daily limits for himself. His hunger dictated what he was allowed to spend on himself. During the summer vacations, he sometimes left his civilian family waiting outside while he was dining in a Chinese restaurant by himself. The French Chinese restaurants were different from those he had been accustomed to at home. Here, you were offered incomprehensible three-course menus with complex prices, no basic number thirteen with sambal. Sometimes, the general waited for an hour before the cook came over to prepare the food at his table. Once satisfied and outside again, he complained to his hungry family.

— "Guys, guys, those French Chinese ripped me off! Here, they offer you way too small bowls of rice," Bonifacius said, out of breath, gesturing with his hands how small they were. "Such shitty little bowls!"

To have his revenge, he had stolen a spoon and smuggled it out underneath his sweater. Not even a silver one, it was just a regular spoon. As little as he cared about feeding his recruits, so well the general took care of himself. Besides Chinese takeaway food, he loved French fries from the chip shop. Unlike her co-patriot, nurse Gertrude did sacrifice herself without complaining. When Bonifacius had, once again, eaten too much of the budget, she would starve herself to save up food for her recruits. The nurse nourished herself by tearing open empty cartons of yogurt and licking up the inside. Aside from that, she saved some dry bread and collected bags of sugar she got with cups of coffee at work.

— "I'm saving that sugar for the war," she said.

If war ever broke out, no one would have any more castor sugar left, and she would.

* * *

Toine was still lying in bed, overthinking things. He turned around on his belly and pushed his arms underneath the pillow. At that moment, a hasty nurse Gertrude stormed into his barrack. Without knocking, as usual. The nurse nervously marched toward the window in seven-league paces, opened the curtains, and started snarling.3

— "Get up, get up! Quickly, get out!" she said.

She spoke with an annoying, nasal voice. Her presence worked on Toine's nerves. Gertrude enjoyed giving orders. Bright daylight shone in Toine's eyes. He pinched them, and with his fingers, he rubbed off the rheum.

Gertrude had just come home from a long nightshift in the O.R. The chronic lack of sleep made her grumpy and curt. Before she could go to sleep, it was important to get the recruits out of bed. She had to make sure they were going to get dressed and digest their breakfast rations, preferably at a blazing pace. If it were up to her, the boys had to head to school immediately. Even if they were waiting in front of closed doors an hour early, Gertrude couldn't care less. Finally, alone in the bunker, she could limp her fatigued, lean body onto the three-seater sofa in front of the TV in the living room quarter. She would lie there under a blanket until the recruits returned from school in the afternoon. The slamming iron garage door would wake her up as soon as the four parked their bicycles inside.

— "Come on, hurry up," she said, pensively panicked. "You have to be in school in an hour. Hurry up, get up, get dressed, or you'll be too late!"

Precisely this type of urge to command urged Toine to inertia. The nurse's commands corroded his will to make something of his day. He preferred she left him alone, that he could start developing his own sense of responsibility. Now, he felt like a puppet on a string, like the marionette of a hasty puppet master. The clock struck half-past seven. Toine stopped the alarm one second before it should have sounded. School only began in an hour, at half-past eight. There couldn't be that much haste. With a headwind, it took the recruit just about a quarter of an hour to get from the barracks to the horsey. With the wind at his back, he could make it in five minutes, easily.

Through the years, the nurse's time organization took on increasingly bizarre forms. A year earlier, Toine was asked to look after the house for a week, all by himself. The authorities went on an excursion without him but with the three younger recruits. Hundreds of miles between them didn't prevent nurse Gertrude from controlling Toine's daily rhythm. From the foreign address, she called the Foxhole in the early morning, around half past six. The ringing startled Toine, who jumped out of bed, ran downstairs, and picked up the receiver. As soon as he had picked up the receiver, the nurse had already hung up. She left Toine there with a spooky feeling. She just wanted to know for sure he was awake.

Toine only discovered who had called him when he dialed the French number shown on the phone number detection display. Nurse Gertrude picked up from a phone booth. She was playing his wake-up service. She murmured something about how Toine was doing, but the boy couldn't make much sense of it. It was far too early.

After the wake-up call, Toine sauntered back to bed while the nurse's strange behavior kept haunting him. Within just fifteen minutes, his light sleep was brutally disturbed again. In the two youngest recruits' room, an electric alarm went off. Toine jumped up again and kicked the thing ahead of him in a blind panic. The alarm just kept sounding. He picked up the device again and pushed all possible buttons. Nothing worked, so he pulled the plug from the socket by tugging on the cord. Finally, silence, he thought. Back in his room for barely two seconds, he got the fright of his life. A third alarm sounded. This time, it was one in the hallway between both rooms he had just walked past. Toine switched this one off with one press on the big orange snooze button.

With his heart pounding in his throat, the boy was standing in the door opening to his room, staring ahead. He tried to calm himself down by taking controlled, deep breaths. What was going on here in this madhouse? It had been the nurse's doing. She just had to get the boy out of bed on this first day without his supervisor. Without her supervision, he surely would have overslept. In the eyes of the nurse, Toine was but a small child incapable of setting his own alarm.

* * *

— "I'm sure I won't be late," Toine yawned.

Against his will, he got out of bed. On a small wooden stool before him lay the clothes he was supposed to put on for today. Gertrude had the habit of choosing her recruits' clothes before bedtime and laying them out for them. It frustrated Toine he had to leave such simple tasks to the nurse.

A day in the Foxhole followed the nurse's incomprehensible system of rules. An official request to the general to increase his rights as a recruit had hit nothing but a wall. He was allowed to submit a new request the next year. Toine had offered to help the nurse do the laundry, pin his clothes on the clothesline, and, if necessary, iron his shirts and pants himself. It didn't help. The nurse and the general weren't ready to delegate their tasks yet. For starters, Toine had to prove he could get up on time, goshdarnit.

— Toine sighed, "Nurse, if I go to school fifteen minutes before school starts, I'll still be on time. So, I can leave home a little bit later than usual. Otherwise, I'll be waiting there before closed doors. The school doors won't open until slightly before half-past eight. What am I supposed to do all that time?"

— "Oh no, you won't!" Gertrude said. "You'll go to school on time, or you'll be late. You know how to bike to school, don't you? You're absolutely not allowed to go past that dangerous inner-city crossing. It's an accident waiting to happen. Just last week, the baker's daughter crashed into a car there, almost. A moped carrying two of those trailer-park persons passed her by like so. Like so! They came within an ace of her, or she mightn't have lived to tell anyone about it. The two of them on one moped, good gracious, don't you think that's perilous?"

— "Yeah-yeah, I know the way to bike there," Toine said, now dressed in brown ribbed trousers and a green second-hand sweater that looked like an old pajama sweater.

The general didn't allocate Gertrude enough budget to buy new clothes for the boys. She only bought the most necessary items new from the store, like shoes. Other things, she traded with neighbor Jacoba who lived nine houses down the road. In exchange for the local newspaper, she was handed bags full of material remains—pants, t-shirts, shirts, and sweaters—donated by Jacoba's teenage daughters. You could smell the three girls' perfume from a mile away. They had already passed their clothes down from the oldest to the youngest. To make shorts for the summer, nurse Gertrude cut the jeans' legs short. From time to time, there was a fun t-shirt with a famous Hollywood film's imprint. Toine refused to wear the girliest junk, which angered the nurse. Apart from that, the boy accepted his fate. He knew the younger recruits would have to wear these civilian clothes after he had outgrown them. Seen in this light, things weren't as bad for him as they might have been.

Downstairs, the nurse had prepared the boy four brown-bread sandwiches with butter and banana. Toine didn't like to eat bread, certainly not the three-days-old kind normal people wouldn't dare feed to the ducks. With the help of a thick layer of butter and half a banana acting as a lubricant, he managed to squeeze the dehydrated food through his child's throat. It wasn't until years later that Toine would watch the foie gras documentary. What would a child's liver taste like?

Reluctantly and half an hour too early, the recruit mounted his bicycle, a white mountain bike, or rather an ATB for all terrains. Wearing full civilian regalia and carrying a beige-brown, triple-layered leather bookbag worth more than three-hundred-and-fifty guilders, he pedaled toward school. For once, the general had let money flow to purchase his son a proper school bag. His first recruit going to high school had to be endowed with the better book bag to make the civilians' sons jealous. The general and the nurse were standing outside on the red-brick porch, waving their recruit goodbye.

— "Give them all you've got!" the general shouted.

The slender Toine didn't look back. He was happy to be on his way on his own. Away from that crazy general and the nasally nagging nurse. He biked out the neighborhood, past the local hospital, then straight ahead past the rotunda instead of taking a right turn toward the inner city to avoid the crossing. He went up to the bridge near the DIY store, turning right across the canal, toward school. This final leg was a mile-long detour or more. Atop the bridge, the sun broke through from behind the gray morning clouds. A gush of wind pushed against his book bag behind him on the bike's cargo rack. Toine almost wobbled onto the expressway.

Halfway the bridge, he saw two black ravens sitting on the railing. With their tiny heads, they were following Toine cycling past them. The boy looked back and wondered what such birds would be thinking about? Would they, too, possess a mind and a memory?

Near the horsey, tucked away behind a row of portico apartments for the poorest members of society, Toine went down a small bridge across a ditch toward the large school bicycle storage. There, he parked his bike underneath a roof of dark-red sheets of corrugated aluminum. As expected, he was too early. Holding his bag in his hand, he looked around and decided to walk up the staircase toward the entrance. There was nobody there. He decided not to wait around for much longer. Two red swinging doors led to a short corridor that debouched into a central intersection. Here, pupils hung their jackets on multiple rows of racks. No one was inside yet.

The ceilings were high, about sixteen feet, with curvatures befitting the former cloister. A message board with calls and warnings for pupils was hanging on the central column. Just like home, a strict order applied here. Toine could hear the reverberation of his footsteps. He decided to wait near the coat racks until the rest of the children arrived. About ten minutes later, the school was packed with kids.

* * *

On this first day at school, all Toine was required to do was listen. The introduction day introduced teacher to pupil, class to room, book bag to book order. The young recruit went looking for classroom number sixteen, where a math teacher, Jeb Shrillhead, thirty-five years old, married, was going to instruct the new batch of pupils. He did so by reading off a sheet of paper. In a crooked style of handwriting, he had scribbled down the bullet points his vice-principle, Mr. Bellyshake, had ordered him to go over with the recruits.

Ten feet tall windows in steel frames offered a view of the outdoor playground. The school desks were divided into three rows of each two desks next to one another. Toine sat down somewhere halfway the middle row, to the right, while about twenty-five other kids also found a seat. A lot of buzz and rumble followed until Shrillhead demanded silence.

General Bonifacius had enjoined Toine the fellow children would be just like him, studious, with their noses in a book. In practice, things were looking quite different. With his properly parted blond hairs and much too large glasses, the recruit looked like the classroom dork. With his dog-poor, second-hand clothing style, he stood out among the designer brands the younglings were flaunting around.

The poor sheep kept quiet to concentrate on the procession of children. From early childhood, Toine had been an observer of human beings, an amateur zoologist who understood animalistic man like no other. He could sense his fellow man's behaviors, often long before the subjects became aware of their own motivations. Self-aware, he observed the boys and girls around him. Some were chockful of confidence, others were as timid as he was.

Atop the brown desks with grey steel legs lay blank name tags kids could write their first name on. Toine had done so immediately. Home had taught him that kind of bunker preparedness.

— "Hey, what's your name?" the boy next to him asked. Toine then tacitly turned around his name card. That's what the thing was for, to display his name.

— "It says Toine, doesn't it," Toine commented dryly.

The recruit held back and alertly awaited the impending civilian danger, precisely as the general had instructed him to do. The boy next to him, called Joey, didn't take that kind of strangeness. A bit bigger in stature than Toine, Joey thought the boy sitting in front of him was quite a softy. Toine's squeaky voice—he was just eleven years old and the youngest in his class—betrayed his voice hadn't changed yet.

— "Did you forget to bring your balls, or what?" Joey asked.

He kicked Toine in the shins. It didn't hurt, but the war had been declared. Everything the general had told him had turned out to be true. All civilians were out to humiliate the righteous lords of battle.

Teacher Shrillhead moved his seat forward and began reading from his sheet.

— "Boys and girls," he said with a brief but terrible cough while he reached for a throat lozenge. "Uh, well, uh, it is imperative, err, that the, uh, imperative is to explain to you what is expected of you. That's my job. And that's imperative. I am going to tell you what I have to tell you. Education, why yes, everyone needs it. That's what it says on the piece of paper here in front of me.

"Did you know upper-class kids differ from middle-class kids and those from the lower classes? The latter always has to learn everything by route, uh, rote to store information. You're nothing like that. Those who come to our classical gymnasium are in the top two percentiles in terms of IQ and intelligence, the ninety-eight and the ninety-ninth. No one is smarter than you are. You hear a sentence—what wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood—and you can instantly repeat it. Just try it!"

No one in the classroom said a word. The teacher continued:

— "You see. Other people don't know how to do that. They spend hours trying. And that has consequences. The consequence is everything you will learn, you will just as easily forget. The lower-class pupil never forgets what he has learned. Whatever his mind manages to abhor, uh, absorb, will never be forgotten. Sculptors chisel their thoughts in stone. Masons build a house of ideas. Carpenters construct a bridge of beliefs. An upper-class mind is more like a sponge. It easily absorbs teaching materials. But sponges are leaky. Smarter people tend to forget most of their knowledge. That's why it's imperative I inform you about how to learn because you can learn how to learn. It would be even better if you taught each other how to learn. In short, we are going to teach you how to teach you learning.

"It's just like that saying. Give a man a fish, and he'll keep coming back for more. If you want to get rid of him, you'll have to teach him how to fish. Once the man has learned how to fish, however, he will empty your lake. Then he'll sell you his fish at outrageous rates. Smart people learn there's no point in teaching other people how to fish. That'll only teach them to keep the profits to themselves. But smart people are smart. So they never teach anyone how to fish. They empty the lake themselves and get rich selling fish to stupid people."

Shrillhead then told the class an even less comprehensible story about learning techniques, teaching methods, homework sessions, fearless learning, learning for self-growth, and combinatorial teaching methods. The class was listening carefully, but no one understood what the man meant to say. After his long-winding monologue, Jeb Shrillhead got up and, using a piece of white chalk, plastered the following sentence on the green chalkboard:

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LEARNING?

— "Well? Can anyone answer this question? What is the meaning of learning?" Shrillhead asked.

Dead silence. What could kids, still wet behind the ears, know about such philosophical matters? Teacher Jeb pointed his piece of chalk at Toine.

— "Why don't you give it a try," Jeb said.

Toine didn't know what to say. He scratched his head twice and decided to answer whatever came to mind.

— "Well," Toine said, insecure, "the meaning of learning distracts one from the way teachers teach. Public schooling is the norm. The classroom character ensures all students process the same information. Individual modes of thought blend together into a collective. The teacher, after all, only has one answer sheet. There may be room for debate and discussion, but the purpose thereof is to reach a unifying conclusion, preferably the conclusion listed on the teacher's answer sheet. Otherwise, he can't check the answer. Whoever disagrees with the answer sheet, flunks his test.

"The authors of the answer sheet are the ones who dictate the truth. Who are those authors, anyway? Who are the little green answer-men? It's the State of The Netherlands in the person of the Minister of Education. The state assumes the assumption there is such a thing as a universal truth. To the state, it's whichever truth yields the greatest tax gains. Perhaps other answers that put greater emphasis on purpose and meaning had also been possible, but those will only be accepted when they happen to produce the greatest economic profits. I mean to say we are living in a money-hungry society. What pupils are taught to accept as truth is whatever keeps the economy going and growing. Contrarian answers that grind the economy to a halt, therefore, are undesirable. We all have to be on the same page.

"That way, the teacher, the financial upper class's willing henchman, makes himself complicit in the creation of the illusion of progress. After all, we start out with as many unique convictions as there are pupils. After four, five, or six years of high school education, we end up with a single collective truth. I call that decline. Education robs young people of their creativity. What we call critical thinking is really called the art of self-criticism or, more aptly put, the art of criticizing oneself. Away with your background and your identity. In comes your collective truth. Education robs the plebs of the only truth it has ever known throughout the centuries—that of the right to form one's own opinions.

"People will only stay quiet for as long as they can still believe in a better future. Television commercials come to the rescue by painting delicious vistas that leave people salivating for more. And that, in short, is the meaning of teaching and learning, namely to turn citizens into tame sheep so the wolves won't have to strain themselves so much."

Having heard Toine's speech, a shocked Mr. Shrillhead grabbed his hat from the coat rack, put it on, and ran out of the classroom in a frenzy to see his wife. Noah knows what he did next. Noah was Jeb's son. Mr. Shrillhead would never come back. The last thing anyone heard of him, his wife, and his child was a small note in the neighbor's mailbox. It said he, Jeb, had embraced the truth. He had left the country with his family. The dumbfounded neighbors suspected a religious sensation had gotten hold of Jeb, but they weren't sure. Their neighbor had always been "such a nice guy."

* * *

A few moments later, a teacher walking by noticed the classroom full of newcomers had lost their teacher. In consultation with school management, she decided to cut the day program short. She drummed up the pupils' guardian angels, senior boys and girls who volunteered to help the young recruits on their way. The children were divided into groups of six or seven pupils. School management allocated two guardian angels to each group. They were waiting outside because the September weather was still gentle, a perfect day for a picnic.

Outside, on the meadows that served as sports fields, Toine met the boy from the senior year and the girl from the penultimate. The boy was called Joey, just like the other Joey, and the girl was called Chrissie. Joey was almost eighteen years of age, a tall guy with black hair in black military boots, the rocker type. These civilians didn't make a darned effort to hide their military intentions, Toine understood. Wearing his blue sneakers, he had disguised himself quite a lot better. Chrissie, a good-looking young woman, aged fifteen, almost sixteen, with dark blond hair that fell to her shoulders, was a half-head shorter than the average newcomer at her height of five feet and one-and-a-half inches.

The two guardian angels herded their kids to a free spot on the lawn, between two oak trees. The recruit sat down on the grass cross-legged with, to his left, Anne, a twelve-year-old girl with long black strands of hair to her hips; Anaxi, a boy from Persia with an East-Indian appearance; and Parminne, a blond-haired girl with bangs and glasses too large for her, just like Toine's. To his right sat Frick and Pill, two farm boys from the nearby village of Rottemergrove. Each morning, they biked for an hour in the wind. They were members of the school's most motivated clique. Last but not least, Tucque sat across, heir of a real estate family.

— "You can call me Tuck," Tucque said while tugging his laces.

Then Chrissie took the floor.

— "Hello, everybody! So, my name is Chrissie, and this is Joey. Well, we welcome you all to Saint Stable Horse. As you probably know, high school life differs a bit from life at elementary school. At high school, you'll be in a different classroom every hour, and each subject will come with its own teacher. Weird, huh? Well, it's not as bad as it sounds. At the horse, or the horsey, as we call our school, you will learn to become independent people. Your mothers must be looking forward to the day they won't have to prepare your sandwiches any longer."

The newcomers smiled in approval, except for Toine. He wasn't allowed to prepare his sandwiches. The general wouldn't reevaluate his appeal until next year. Nurse Gertrude's military organization didn't leave room for self-willedness. Toine was just a child, how could he possibly take care of himself?

— "Right, so I'm Joey," Joey said with his hands on his knees, "and we'd thought of starting off the day with a round of introductions. A bit more than just saying your name, please. We thought it'd be fun if each of you said something about how you see your future. What do you want to be when you graduate? Where will you live? Something like that."

Toine went first. Barely recovered from the shock of having chased away teacher Shrillhead, he stammered a few words in an unsure manner.

— "Hi, my name is Toine. I live in a bunker, uh, I mean I live with my, uh, parents in a semi-detached home in the Devilsvalley neighborhood up in the north of South Rock. What I want to be when I grow up? If I graduate from Saint Stable Horse, uh, the horsey, I would prefer to be a writer, but my general, I mean, my father says I have to become a real-estate agent. He always tells me real estate is the way to get rich while you're sleeping."

Toine had almost given away his position, but no one had noticed his slips of the tongue. Tucque nodded in agreement. Rich fathers advised all of their sons to buy real estate. Houses tended to double in value in just ten years.

— "Oh, how nice, and what do you plan to write about, then?" Chrissie asked.

— "Well, I want to write about how people are being exploited. Ever since the Roman age, we've been herded together in cities as human cattle. In fact, cities are a kind of human stables, municipal councilors are the grooms, and the nation's politicians are the accountants. They all work for King Farmer. He just wants to fatten us to milk our taxes. If there are too many of us, he'll make an arrangement with the neighboring nation's farmer to destroy the males in a war. That's what the First World War was all about. France and Germany had too many males in their urban stables, so they threw them into the meatgrinder. A storm of steel eradicated half of them. If the farmer-king finds he can profit more from certain other types of people, he'll disinvest from the one group and allow the other group to produce more offspring."

At this point, the girl Anne erupted with growing misery. She could no longer listen to Toine's nonsense.

— "That's really very scary of you to say something like that," Anne said. "All people are equal. What does it matter if different kinds of people come to live in our country? They aren't worth more or less. We need diversity to enrich Dutch culture. The world belongs to everybody. No one is illegal!"

Toine didn't understand Anne's response. It appeared as if she was expressing herself using political advertising slogans instead of using comprehensible speech. He hadn't meant to say one group of people was worth more than another. Toine had wanted to say all people are being exploited by their upper-class owners, regardless of whether they were living here or in Africa. Depending on their profitability, different groups of people could be exchanged for others as their owners saw fit. This was then called progress.

Chrissie hadn't been bothered by Toine's strange story. She signaled the boy should continue a little while longer. What kind of world would Toine rather live in, then?

— "I'd prefer to move to someplace far outside the city, to a place on a lake or by a river, or by the sea, a place where I can step out the door each morning to breathe in the fresh air. In the fall, I want to see tree leaves light up in the sun like a photosynthetic rainbow. I want to find a quiet spot in nature where I can build my writing shed, just like Dylan Thomas's shed or Martin Heidegger's cabin. Then, I'll put up a sign in front of it saying a dangerous man is busy writing books there, a man who'll use his rifle to shoot peace-breakers who interrupt him.

"I want to live in a wooden home, not in one of stone. The windows should offer a view of the horizon, so I don't want to have any neighbors right in front of me. In the mornings, I want to be able to fetch my own water from an unpolluted stream. I can chop my own wood to heat the stove. I have no need for modern conveniences. I don't care about that kind of urban circus."

Toine had had enough of the claustrophobic bunker life. He longed for a life in the outdoors, away from the civilian sphere. The boy Anaxi thought Toine was a beggarly primitive. Supposedly, he hadn't understood anything about the amenities modern society had to offer.

— "My parents had to flee from the wilderness," Anaxi said with a dose of anger in his voice. "In the past, we had to do everything ourselves. We had to pump up water from the well. We baked our own bread because there was no baker to be found in our desert. If we wanted to eat meat, we had to go hunting. Now, finally, we are being taken care of by the Dutch State. At least Dutch politicians know what's best for us. They arrange for everything. At night, we can go to sleep safely because we won't have to fear rivaling gangs. I am happy to live in The Netherlands. The Dutch government is really a kind of parent that wants to take care of its children."

Joey and Chrissie nodded. Toine imagined some parents kill their children. Some governments sent their peoples to war. Everyone except Toine thought modern cities were the way of the future. The civilian recruits all dreamed of a future in a city like Amsterdam, Paris, or London. That's where they would land a "real" life, they thought. All you had to do was apply for a good job. Then you would be well-off.

Chrissie was curious to find out more. Whom did Toine want to spend his life with?

— "I want to have a caring wife who loves me," Toine continued, "one who supports me, who stays at home to raise the kids, who maintains a happy village community with the other women from the neighborhood. I don't think women should work nightshifts six days a week. The government should make sure men could earn more. Women wouldn't have to work so hard, then. Children need love. The state can't caress a child and kiss it on the head. Keeping the moms at home, we'll maintain a healthy, resilient population. That's what's best for everyone."

Toine had had nurse Gertrude in mind. Each day, she suffered from bouts of chagrin from the nightly overtime-induced sleep deprivation. But she had no choice. Budgets demanded it. Parminne responded with shock at Toine's worldview. Her face turned red, she took off her glasses and scolded him. He was a conservative, a woman-hater.

— "Oh, that's so sexist of you!" she said. "Why would a woman want to be your wife if she had to stay at home all day? Women can do everything men can do. Men have oppressed women for tens of thousands of years, and you just want to continue that. It would be much better to send children to daycare. Otherwise, they'll develop a much too strong bond with their parents. Familial bonds provide the biological basis for xenophobia!"

Parminne's parents had been divorced. She hadn't seen her father in seven years. Toine didn't know what else to say and kept quiet. Every word he had spoken at school up to now had gotten him in trouble. Angry people, fleeing teachers, guardian angels with looks of desperation in their eyes. Joey thought it was enough and passed the baton to Parminne. The other kids each rattled off their stories that all amounted to the same thing. They all wanted to live in a big house, own two cars, no kids, maybe one, but only if it was adopted.

* * *

Back in the Foxhole, Toine was sitting in front of the TV, overthinking his first day at school. He hadn't left a good impression, not on the farm boys, not on the two girls, not on the civilian outside world in general. The child recruits in his class appeared outwardly confident of the veracity of their thoughts and actions, but inwardly, they uncritically parroted civilian propaganda. Autonomous thinkers, they were not; they were, however, supporters of cultural uniformity. The general had been right once again. The civilian was tied up in a conspiracy against the righteous recruits. Small-minded civilians didn't have to think for themselves, and so, they didn't have to worry about reprisals.

Inside the bunker, Toine experienced a different life. The Foxhole recruits grew up in a hermetically sealed-off fishbowl, a place, literally and figuratively speaking, without room for breathing. The vehement reactions to Toine's words from now on made him more careful. They probably thought he was crazy, those teachers and students of the horsey. He decided to weigh his words from now on. It didn't help that general Bonifacius infused his recruits with a message to keep quiet every day. The recruits knew they had to stay as quiet as possible in his presence, especially in the evenings after the soap opera shows had ended. The slightest annoyance could elicit the general's explosive bursts of anger. In the evenings, Bonifacius would rather see his recruits than hear them, though he preferred not to have to see them. No matter how proud he was of his division's achievements, no matter how much he wished for them to succeed, he engaged himself with them personally as little as possible. That's what the nurse was for.

Gertrude, too, suffered under Bonifacius's anger. When preparing rations for her recruits in the kitchen, the shutting of a single cabinet door, the sound of a spoon ticking against a mug, or the rattling of a cutlery tray could disturb the general's concentration. Then he would start yelling.

When surrounded by sounds, the general could hardly concentrate on the television. Between dinner and the time the recruits went to bed, everybody, therefore, had to be quiet. Otherwise, he couldn't hear the sound of the TV. He would turn up the volume to the point the noise blasted through the walls for the neighbors to hear. There was nothing wrong with his war-torn ears.

On the contrary. The television simply made the general slip into a trance. With the remote control in his hand, he changed between his favorite channels once every ten minutes. In this practically terminal condition, he wouldn't speak to anyone, didn't want to speak to anyone, and would slump on the couch with his chin on his chest, deep into the night. Through the years, the seat in the center of the three-seater sofa had sunken to the point he could hide half of his fat belly in it.

On a particularly frustrating TV night, little Arjan was sitting on the two-seater couch, diagonally opposite the general. He was discussing his day with nurse Gertrude. The general, sitting next to the nurse, tried to gesture his arms at the boy to get him to keep quiet. The command wasn't obeyed. Bonifacius then asked the nurse if she could ask the boy to stop making noise. The nurse didn't hear the general. She was in the middle of a conversation with the boy. The general then emptied the contents of his red drinking cup, filled with ice cubes, over the boy. Young recruit Arjan was frightened. The boy scolded the general and began whining angrily. His camouflaged pajamas were soaked with cheap coke slurry.

Nothing came between the general and his favorite television show. To avoid getting bogged down in such verbal emergency situations, the recruits regularly advanced to the attic. Out of sight and out of sound, they hoped not to disturb him any longer. The strategy failed. Just like the princess who couldn't sleep because a pea was lying under her eight layers of mattresses, so the dull attic sounds of children's feet continued to frustrate Bonifacius. When he had enough of it, he would get up to remind the boys of their duty to remain silent:

— "Those sounds coming from your mouths, you're not allowed to make them anymore!" he hollered at them. "Go play in the garage!"

The garage was cold and damp, but even there, the sounds thumping against the floor didn't help dampen Bonifacius's frustrations. It hurt Toine. Under the yoke of this regime of silence, he slowly lost his verbal spontaneity.

* * *

The first school days flew by. Soon, the problem of homework had to be discussed. To secure the success of Operation Butterfly Stroke, Toine needed to finish his homework on time. Nurse Gertrude had been pondering the matter for quite some time. She couldn't leave this burden to the boy. He still had to learn to get up on time. The nurse was sitting on the couch in the living room quarter and twisting her thumbs around for an hour. All sorts of things entered her mind. If she would leave the homework planning to the recruits, they could cheat her with all sorts of tricks to try to evade their homework.

To be sure her recruits would pass the school year, she cooked up her own agenda system. The lax civilian enemy left such responsibilities to their civilian brood, but nurse Gertrude, like an iron warlord, tackled her agenda control system a bit more rigorously. The nurse had developed an ingeniously sophisticated system. Civilian children normally noted down the homework the teacher assigned to them in their agendas on the desired delivery date. That way, they could consult their school agenda themselves to see what assignments were scheduled for completion the next day.

Nurse Gertrude introduced double bookkeeping. She ordered Toine to write down his homework on the day it was assigned. If the Dutch language teacher assigned homework scheduled for Wednesday on Monday, Toine had to note this down in his agenda on said Monday. That way, the boy could no longer see which day the homework had been scheduled for. The homework surely wasn't always intended for the next lecture but sometimes for another lecture, weeks later. Nurse Gertrude made good use of the confusion her system created. According to the classical principle of divide and conquer, she made herself the master of the homework agenda. It worked as follows. At the end of the day, the nurse required Toine to hand his agenda over to her. The nurse would transcribe the homework assignments into a second agenda, a notebook in which she had drawn the days and weeks of the year with a pencil.

Three problems were created that way. Firstly, the nurse often scheduled the homework for the earliest possible date. Homework that had been meant for another week, she invariably scheduled for the next lecture. Secondly, the nurse made mistakes in her hand-drawn agenda notebook, so the days didn't always align with reality anymore. Thirdly, she introduced mistakes into her transcription from Toine's writing into her own. The recruit would then suddenly be doing the wrong homework for the wrong day. All in all, thanks to her system, the nurse prepared Toine's gradual downfall that school year.

She thought her system was exquisitely effective. Without her guidance, Toine surely would have never been able to complete his homework on time. Thanks to her twice-over agenda system, she put herself directly in charge of her recruit's performances. The recruit didn't understand much of Gertrude's chaotic logic anyway. The system faltered from day one. Toine's protests against this attack on his homework organization proved futile. He could complain as much as he wanted but would not be heard.

These were the moments the recruit secretly began doubting Gertrude's high intelligence. In an angry mood, Toine scribbled the words "Gertrude is stupid" on a piece of paper. He crumpled up the piece paper and left it on the water closet's water basin by mistake. Little Leo discovered the message and informed the nurse. A tell-tale culture ruled the Foxhole. Toine stood firm. By far, the nurse wasn't as smart as she had made the boys believe. She wasn't a surgeon at all.

The general usually kept a distance from schoolwork. Only after weeks of rapidly declining school grades did the general pay a surprise visit to his student's study. Recruit Toine and nurse Gertrude faced each other head-on, having a quarrel with one another in the evening before the evening meal. The boy complained about the technicalities of the nurse's ingenius homework system. The general walked by Toine's barrack door and peeked inside.

— "General, I have my own school agenda to schedule my homework," Toine said. "Why can't I just do it myself? The nurse doesn't have to use a special notebook for it. If I plan my assignments myself, I won't be so confused either."

The general couldn't make any sense of it. He didn't concern himself with such daily tasks. The nurse felt she had come under attack and defended her system.

— "Oh no, you won't!" she said. "He just has to stick with my agenda."

Gertrude requested Bonifacius to meet her in the hallway outside of Toine's room. What followed was a discussion between the two authorities.

— "He's just trying to avoid having to do his homework," Gertrude whispered, but Toine could hear everything. "If we let him schedule his own homework assignments, he'll certainly flunk this year. That's why I schedule his homework for him so I can check it."

Toine wanted to have more independence, carry more responsibility. His complaint wasn't that he didn't want to do his homework. He loved to do it but without the confusion introduced by the nurse's agenda notebook. The general didn't feel like having an argument.

— "You just want to avoid having to do your homework!" Bonifacius grumbled. "You just have to stick with the nurse's agenda."

— "That's no true!" Toine said, but his words fell on deaf ears.

Toine, sulking, obeyed and surrendered to the contingency plan now called his homework agenda. The nurse and the general didn't believe an eleven-year-old boy could schedule his own homework. The homework debacle had its consequences. Angry-looking teachers began picking on Toine, who increasingly hadn't done his homework. Sometimes, he had done his homework for the wrong day and sometimes the wrong homework for the right day. He just blamed himself for it. After all, it had been his own weakness that he hadn't been able to convince the general and the nurse. Each lecture turned into a game of Russian roulette. Would the teacher pick him out again?

In the evenings, Gertrude stepped up her homework checks. She would remain waiting in the door opening of Toine's study to see if he was doing his homework. When he was finished, she would immediately come over to check his work. He had to get the best grades, no matter what. He had to do his utmost best to better his falling grade performance. Tonight, for a Dutch language lecture, Toine had to fill in missing words in a list of given sentences. After "the carpet was as green as...", Toine filled in "grass" on the dots. Next to "the sinners were standing before the golden...", he wrote "calf." He thought they were the right answers. As soon as he was done with his assignments, the nurse grabbed the homework sheet from his hands. She seated herself behind his oakwood desk to check the assignment.

— "Well, what have we here? No wonder you're flunking your tests. You did it all wrong," she said in a surly voice. "A golden calf? I've never heard of something like that. It should be a golden chick, of course, since a chick lays golden eggs. And what about as green as grass? What's that supposed to mean? It should be as green as vegetables. Grass is all brown and muddy from the rainfall, so that can't possibly be right."

The nurse improved the assignments at her discretion and struck through the recruit's answers. A week later, the results came in. He had gotten a big fat F. Toine had seen it coming. Nurse Gertrude was pissed. With the paper in her hand, she jumped at him to confront him with it. Why hadn't he made any effort to improve himself? A bit frightened of her screams, Toine calmly explained it had been the nurse who had corrected his homework. The only mistakes in the homework assignment had been the corrections Gertrude had made. She had struck through Toine's correct answers and added her incorrect ones.

After this tug of war, it finally dawned on the nurse she should no longer interfere with the contents of her recruits' homework. Toine nevertheless struggled with the curriculum. He tried his best to absorb the matter during lecture hours. It made him less dependent on nurse Gertrude's chaotic homework planning. He had to stay one step ahead of the nurse.

It didn't help. His grades came back and kept disappointing. He got D's and C's but no B's and A's. Nurse Gertrude then decided to install a special checkpoint behind the bunker's front door. Upon the recruits' return home, she would question them about their school day. When school was out, the recruits had to come home immediately. They weren't allowed to hang out with friends. According to Gertrude's rules, a recruit was supposed to come home after school and do his homework immediately. Only the civilian enemy allowed his kids to spend hours slumping in front of the TV.

* * *

There she was, the next day, standing behind the checkpoint.

— "And?" the nurse asked upon Toine's entry.

— "Hi," Toine said, hoping for a friendly greeting, but he needn't count on a warm welcome.

— With a shrill voice, Gertrude asked, "Well? Have you gotten your test result back yet?"

— "No, not yet," Toine said. "We won't get it back until tomorrow, so I don't know my grade yet."

— "Oh, but you said you'd get it back today, didn't you?" she barked.

With her flat hands, she pretended to be wiping the checkpoint's desk clean. There was no dust on it. The sound of her wedding ring scratching the surface screaked through Toine's ears. He remained silent. The teacher hadn't checked the latest test yet, so he couldn't give the grade.

— "Do you have to do any homework, then?" the nurse asked.

— "Yes, we were assigned more homework," Toine said. "We're supposed to study French vocabulary. Can't I do that tonight? Can't I first rest for a little while and play outside?"

— "No way! Go upstairs, quickly, to your room! First, do your homework. Then, you can play outside," Gertrude said.

Toine ran up the stairs to his barrack. If the nurse weren't constantly standing in the door opening, she would pay him multiple visits to check on him. Usually, she did so in a secretive way by opening the door to the barrack, quiet as a mouse, to spy on her recruit through the crack. When she caught him idly lounging around, she would furiously storm into the room. She was going to remind him of his duties. Sometimes, she brought a cup of tea or something to eat, even if the recruit emphatically hadn't asked for it. She would sneak in quietly and place the cup of tea next to Toine. It would startle him as if a ghost was suddenly standing behind him.

Toine had imagined life as a first-year pupil differently. Instead of taking his first steps to adulthood, he spent his days from Mondays through Fridays living on autopilot. He had to switch off his mind to get through the day. This was a form of mental slavery. At home, life was a living hell; school was a prison. Toine wanted to live independently, but the nurse and the general didn't trust him with any responsibilities. They commanded him to get dressed, directed him past breakfast, and sent him on to school via the bicycle route Gertrude had pre-approved for him.

If Gertrude's chaotic agenda system didn't make Toine mad, the contents of his book bag certainly did. In the mornings, the nurse prepared his bag for him, including a lunchbox of which he didn't know the contents either. It wasn't uncommon for Toine to arrive at school with a bag full of the wrong school books. Visibly nervous, Toine would be going through his bag, in vain, trying to find the right textbooks. You would think a boy in high school should be allowed to prepare his own bag, but Toine clashed with the nurse's stubbornness. She wouldn't allow it. His life was in her hands.

* * *

To distract his thoughts, Toine spent his evenings working on a writing hobby. During that morning's Dutch language class, the teacher had halfheartedly discussed a classic of Dutch literature, Max Havelaar. The story had touched him, especially the story-within-a-story about Saïdjah and Adinda. The book documented the inner workings of the Dutch State in the former Indonesian colonies. It had appeared under the name Multatuli, a Latin pseudonym that meant "I suffered a lot." At the time, the author—real name: Eduard Douwes Dekker—risked legal prosecution for the book's contents.

Dekker had been a resistance writer. To get the book published, he had been forced to think of a clever trick to evade the censors. His publisher, therefore, changed all place and personal names in the book. These had referred to actual places and people. The book exposed true abuses of power. By changing the names, it ceased to be a book of facts but became a work of fiction, an apparently innocent novel. The book was published. Lacking the proper coordinates, the Dutch State could ward off any criticism of its actions as one anonymous author's fabrications. The author was declared insane.

Toine, too, wanted to become a resistance writer. From behind his small desk in his little room, he began writing his own story. To the left of him were the closed blinds of his balcony door window. It was already dark outside. The boy started writing his story in the form of a diary. He gave the notebook the title The Horseshoe Line.

Elvenking was a soldier. He was crouching down in the Horseshoe Line. With great difficulty, he moved through the rained-out trench along the German front. Elvenking, forty years old, was shivering in the brown mud, kneeling down between the bodies of his fallen comrades. He was chewing on a dry piece of bread. He kept it dry underneath his helmet while the rain came pouring down on him. At night, the French enemy had bombed the line with artillery. French soldiers were waging their own Blitzkrieg and, after their attack, had left as fast as lightning to bomb another front.

During that French bombardment, Elvenking's buddies had all died. He was the sole survivor, he thought. The French soldiers hadn't even had time to search for survivors. Elvenking couldn't remember having survived the attack. He had lost his sense of direction. Was he still alive, or had he died already? Imagine a hell or heaven that continued the final moments of someone's life for all eternity. If you died, you wouldn't know about it. It would be as if a cassette tape had been stuck on replay but kept repeating the final three seconds of the B-side. In such a case, all those people who had died on their deathbeds would still be lying there, waiting for their end to come, an end that had already come to pass for the grieving relatives, wandering about eternal purgatory.

Perhaps Elvenking had been lucky. He was hungry but in good shape. In a minute or two, he was going to crawl out of the trench to find a way out. Shouts in the distance. Roars erupted, coming from downstairs.

— "Why can't you admit you didn't add enough salt to the salad?"

* * *

The shouts interrupted Toine's concentration. It was coming from the stairwell. The general and the nurse were having a fight downstairs. The oft fierce fights reached their pinnacles during the long, summery road trips along the coastlines of France, Portugal, Spain, or Italy. General Bonifacius enjoyed commanding the steering wheel of his white minivan-turned-campervan. The nurse always occupied the passenger seat. In the days car navigation systems didn't exist yet, nurse Gertrude played the part of the navigator, but her navigation led to nothing but the general's verbal abuse. Bonifacius blamed the nurse for each wrong turn. The disastrous travel missions brought Toine's authorities closer to a divorce than to the right destination.

— "Then you'll just have to leave me!" the nurse yelled through the moving car.

The general suspected her of having purposefully directed him in the wrong direction, only to sabotage the summer mission. He didn't trust anyone anymore, not even the nurse. He felt he was the only person in the world who still understood what life was about, namely about logic, workman's skill, and perfection. He didn't have time for panicked emotions. Despite the fact the recruits called on their authorities to stop their frightful yelling, during fights, they were stuck in the moving car like sardines in a can. There was no possibility to escape the verbal abuse.

Sometimes, the general reluctantly parked the car on the parking lot next to a roadside restaurant to wage his wars with Gertrude. Then, the verbal volumes rose to absurd heights. Now, the nurse could threaten to get out of the car, but she subsequently never did. They yelled at each other as if they were hoping for God to send them an angel. She never came. In any case, Toine's authorities must have thought their noise would, at some point, spur on passers-by to call emergency services. They, too, never arrived. Outsiders rather kept a great distance from the yellers. Nobody wanted to get involved in this. The crying nurse's screams bounced off the red-faced general's roars. The little recruits, the four of them, sat on the rear bench, patiently waiting for the fight to blow over.

Toine, the oldest of the recruits, tried to calm down the troublemakers using sensible words. He urged the nurse to leave if she couldn't stay. She could take the recruits with her. At least, it would rid them of the general. They would rid themselves of the shouting. Alas, her threats never materialized.

The arguments on the road along the French highways had to lead to an accident sometime. That summer, the general was driving a white three-door car southward. Not on toll roads, because they were too expensive, but along the poorly maintained scenic route. Behind the car, this time, the general pulled along a small trailer. Because the car had become too small for the four boys, the youngest recruit, Arjan, had to crouch to fit in the space next to the Autogas tank in the back. LPG gas, in French GPL, was dirt cheap in those days.

It was twilight when a little orange lamp on the car's dashboard lit up. The fuel tank was almost empty. Seeing such a sign, normal people would instantly take the exit to the next gas station. The overly stingy general rather speculated on the price per gallon. Perhaps another station might offer a three-cent discount.

— "You never know," the nurse nodded in agreement.

The general and the nurse kept a special notebook in the glove compartment. In it, they noted down after each refueling how many miles they had driven, what they had paid per gallon, and what the average fuel consumption per mile had been. That way, they calculated the average price they were willing to pay, at most, even in emergency situations such as this one. Neither of the authorities liked to deviate from previously made decisions.

— "Way too expensive!" the general grumbled while passing by another large gas station on a nearly empty fuel tank.

The price as it was listed on the signposts was too high. Toine offered the suggestion to purchase just a few gallons of expensive fuel and then drive on to a cheaper station, but the general thought it was too cumbersome. Then he would have to get out and in of the car twice. Until now, the general had always succeeded in gambling for the right fuel prices. He trusted his strategy, but this time, like the fuel, his luck had run out. While driving, the engine stalled in the middle of the highway. The recruits found themselves out of control on the highway. Bonifacius turned the car and the trailer onto the emergency lane. As a blessing in disguise, a traffic sign announced the next gas station would only be a mile or two further down the road.

Nolens volens, they would have to refuel there, regardless of the price per gallon. It gave the sulking general an idea. Instead of slowing the car down on the emergency lane and first bringing it to a full stop, only to have to walk to the fuel pump next, he ordered the nurse to act as a stunt woman and step out of the slow-moving car. The general really didn't like walking. He had walkophobia. If the nurse would keep pushing the car with trailer ahead the last mile to the fuel pump, then at least the general wouldn't have to get out of the car.

The nurse protested. She had studied to be a nurse, not a stunt double. General or not, this command was insane. This time, she wouldn't get out, she refused. Who on earth would get out of a moving car to push a caravan toward a pump, especially on the emergency lane along a busy highway? The general repeated his command. He became incredibly angry, his face turned red, and he began yellow so terrifyingly it not only scared the recruits but nurse Gertrude, too. The general didn't want to hear about common sense (people who had common sense preferred observable reality as a starting point for their thinking to some ideologized abstraction). His idea saved money, so the nurse just had to go along with it.

Toine wondered out loud what kind of general marched his subordinates into the meatgrinder? The general wasn't listening. The nurse lost the fight, unbuckled herself, and, both mad and frightened, got out of the slow-moving car. She put her foot down onto the asphalt, briefly staggered but didn't fall, miraculously. Toine felt sympathy for the nurse. He asked the general if he was allowed to go and help her. The general didn't say anything anymore but seemed to be nodding yes and didn't stop Toine. The boy folded the passenger seat forward and got out. To get out of a moving car, Toine understood, required some acrobatics to maintain your balance. It worked just like a rolling floor like one tourists acquaint themselves with at airports but in the opposite direction. When stepping out of a slow-moving car, you had to push yourself away from the car's direction of movement, or else you fell over.

With that idea in mind, Toine got out effortlessly. Once outside, in between the emergency lane's guardrail and the car, Toine noticed the nurse standing in the narrow space between the moving car and the trailer. All by herself, she pushed the procession forward with all her might. It appeared to be working. Toine observed the scene from a small distance. He thought it was a dangerous act. Whoever tripped and fell where the nurse was standing would land right under the trailer's wheel.

Toine walked over to the nurse to offer his help. She commanded him to stay out of her way. He hadn't been given her permission to get out. Looking back behind him, he saw he had inadvertently sucked in the younger recruits in his wake. They wanted to follow their older example. The youngest two recruits, Leo and Arjan, had already gotten out of the car and were standing on the asphalt by now. Now, Chris followed. While getting out, he lost his balance, fell backward, and, while falling, clung on to the shoulders of the two recruits in front of him. Like a row of dominoes, the three of them fell over backward.

Now, Toine and the nurse had to act quickly. It was dark outside. On the other side of the car, busy highway traffic blazed past them. Toine sounded the alarm with the nurse. Right away, he had seen that the trailer's wheelbarrow was slightly broader than that of the car. The younger recruits, now lying on the ground right next to the car, were on a collision course with the trailer's wheel. They only had a few seconds left to drag the recruits to safety.

Undoubtedly, the general had seen his recruits fall down. The passenger door stood wide open all this time. But his neurotic need to keep the car moving forced him into inactivity. Why didn't the general hit the brakes? Toine looked to the nurse for instructions, who, in panic, burst out with a fiery voice:

— "Tell Bonifacius he has to stop the car! Quickly!"

Toine understood this was a matter of now or never. The recruit felt nervous. Never before had the general wanted to listen to him. Never had Toine been able to say or do anything to change his general's mind. And precisely now, he somehow had to convince his highest command to step on the breaks. Toine ran to the front, back to the open passenger door, looked the general in the eye, and, with a panic in his voice, said:

— "Stop, stop, stop!"

His heart was beating in his throat. He was afraid the general wouldn't listen to him. Toine looked for words with the right amount of persuasiveness. He no longer had the chance. The general, who was sitting behind the wheel looking like a drowsy lardass, briefly turned his head toward the recruit to stare at him with a bored, absent look. Precisely at that moment, the slow-moving car came to a full stop with a dull bang.

Leo was lying under the trailer wheel. The boy's rib cage had stopped half the weight of a slow-moving trailer. The young recruit was going to survive the accident. It hadn't given him more than a few bruised ribs. At this time of heightened awareness, the recruits didn't know that yet. Toine was in shock. It had all been his fault. He was the one who hadn't been able to convince the general to hit the brakes. He had set the wrong example by getting out of the car. Nurse Gertrude had tried putting her foot before the wheel to save the recruit, to no avail. The wheel had then rolled over her foot onto the boy. She had freed herself and dragged poor Leo from under the trailer. Behind the guardrail, she fell to her knees on the lawn, holding him in her arms. He was in great pain and crying hysterically.

— "Am I gonna die, mom? Am I gonna die, momma?"

Even under these traumatizing conditions, the recruit still managed to utter the correct war cry "mom." Nurse Gertrude gave Leo all her attention. Toine couldn't stop crying and walked over to the guardrail in desperation.

— "Stop crying! You haven't been in an accident!" a strict Gertrude said.

Toine tried to dry his tears. He couldn't. Where was the general? He was no longer in the car. Right after the accident, Bonifacius had gotten out and had run away. The other three recruits, Chris, Arjan, and Toine, were still standing on the emergency lane along the highway. Shouldn't the general bring them to safety first? No, he rather fired himself from his duties. Of course, he was ashamed of himself because of his idiotic behavior, but why did he abandon his responsibilities at the exact time the young recruits needed him most?

Toine, still numb, dried his tears, but inside, he quietly cried without showing it. The general returned only after half an hour. He didn't say a word. Shame was dripping off his reddened forehead.

Arjan and Chris later spoke to Toine, their faces pale, to inform him about the nurse's bizarre behavior. After the recruits had fallen over, nurse Gertrude had been busy dragging the boys to safety by their arms and legs. But her action had worsened the situation. The recruits had fallen over backward, with their feet toward the trailer and their heads toward the car's direction of movement. When the trailer wheel hit recruit Leo, his head was underneath the trailer. His feet were pointing toward the guardrail. How had Leo's head moved so far under the trailer? The nurse must have dragged him away from the guardrail toward the road. Had this really been an accident?

* * *

The general and the nurse didn't just restrict their fights to the highway. On occasion, Bonifacius erupted in the middle of a tourist boulevard. The nurse had supposedly done him injustice in some manner. He felt the need to address the matter en plein public. It could become so violent the general would command the nurse to gather the recruits and take the car home. He would stay behind by himself.

Judging from the startled looks on the faces of civilian onlookers, Toine, for the first time, recognized such fights were abnormal. While Bonifacius sat moping on the steps in front of a hypermarket in a picturesque French town, waving his arms around and yelling as if possessed by the devil, embarrassed passers-by stepped up their pace. A couple walking by arm in arm held each other a bit closer. Offering sideways looks, it made Toine clear this fight was exceptionally violent by any human standard. To the boy, that insight came as a relief. The world of his authorities wasn't the normal world but that of a mental asylum.

Toine had once asked the general why he and the nurse thought they could resolve their disputes by screaming at each other. To this, Bonifacius answered they did so out of habit. They had gotten used to their fierce arguments. Neither of them felt the need to quit. Toine didn't understand it, but strangely, he was happy the general at least admitted to the problem. Why had two people who hated each other so much decided to keep up appearances to the outside world? The recruits' wellbeing suffered under the weight.

At home in the Foxhole, the verbal abuse coming from the authorities followed a fixed pattern. Perhaps the nurse had made an administrative error in the housekeeping booklet, bought the wrong birthday present, or added too little salt and vinegar to the salad. Unlike on the road, at home, the general would patiently wait for the nurse to put the recruits to bed.

At home, the fights between the general and the nurse resembled a police cross-examination. The general played bad cop and pressed nurse Gertrude into the role of suspect. She pleaded her right to remain silent. In the evenings, they would sit opposite each other at the dinner table. The general sat upright with his arms crossed. He intimidated the nurse with his bulky body and hypnotizing eyes. He stared right at her without blinking. The nurse was too afraid to even look the general in the eye, turned her body slightly away from him, and, slightly bent down, kept staring at the floor like a submissive ape to her alpha. She knew she couldn't end these fights. Patience, she did have.

If Gertrude said anything wrong, the general would seize the opportunity to misconstrue her words and use that as an excuse to continue his interrogation. The point the general was trying to make was that he was right, that the nurse had made an error, and that she had to admit to it. The so-called errors he listed were so banal that the nurse, in all the confusion, couldn't quite tell what she was supposed to admit to.

— "Why can't you admit you didn't add enough salt and vinegar to the salad? Gertrude?" the general repeated.

Gertrude didn't say anything. She really had added salt and vinegar to the salad that evening, as always. If it hadn't been enough to satisfy the general's taste buds, then why didn't he add more at his own discretion? That wasn't the point, the general said. He suspected the nurse of having deliberately sabotaged his salad. He had asked the nurse countless times to add more salt and pepper to the salad. If she hadn't done so, it was a sign of mutiny.

— "Gertrude?" the general repeated. "I expect you to answer me. I work my ass off for the recruits. I do overtime, and I work on the weekends. Why can't you add enough salt and vinegar to the salad? You know I don't like to eat that dull Dutch food. Gertrude? Why haven't you added enough salt and vinegar to my salad?"

The general just kept yelling. The angrier he got, the slower and louder he began to speak. He spelled out his sentences word for word.

— "Don't even think about going to bed before you've answered me, Gertrude. Why can't you admit you made a mistake? Can-you-tell-me-why-there-was-not-enough-salt-in-the-salad?"

Gertrude didn't answer anymore. She occasionally mumbled something inaudible. She knew how to play this game. Nothing could stop the fight until the general surrendered out of tiredness. If she admitted to one reproach, the general would lay out the next one. If she admitted to all of them, the general would want to know why it had taken her so long to make a confession. No matter what she said, it was certain the fight would go on deep into the night.

— "I couldn't taste anything of it!" the general said. "It's just a simple question, isn't it? You know I grew up in Surinam, don't you? We always added spiciness to our food. Here, all I ever get are tasteless potatoes and saltless salads. Without salt and vinegar, all that stuff tastes like water. Why do you deny you forgot to add the salt, Gertrude?"

Recruit Toine had witnessed such fights hundreds of times over throughout his career, not uncommonly several times a week. It sometimes occurred that Toine came home from a day at school and landed himself in the middle of the word war between his superiors. They would then keep silent as if nothing had happened. The general and the nurse not only fooled the outside world into thinking all was A-OK but also did their best to hide their true nature from the recruits.

In the quiet evening hours, the general's anger fomented into a poisonous mixture of hatred. The nurse used Toine's return home as an excuse to temporarily adjourn the fight. She had to interrogate her recruits about their school grades and check their homework. Toine began to see why the nurse checked his homework with the same bad-cop attitude as the general. She passed her own misery on to the recruits because she was too timid to push back against the general.

* * *

The general was in the kitchen preparing his lunch. Smother coming from the frying pan penetrated the bunker. A bucket of soup, seven pieces of fried chicken, five hotdogs, a tube of mayonnaise, and a whole half bag of French fries. In the South of The Netherlands, people would say fries instead of potatoes. Fries, that word came from French, pommes frites, a bit too French for the Dutch. The Northerners rather said potatoes because that was Spanish and derived from patata. Toine concluded Napoleon had left a better impression in the South than King Philip of Spain had in the North. Placing an order at a French fries stall, the general turned it into a show:

— "I'll have potato fries with curry ketchup."

The only thing a Dutchman could respond to that was: "Why?" He could have French fries, because that was just potatoes, but if you asked for curry ketchup, you got curry and ketchup, meaning curry sauce and tomato ketchup. You would have to pay twice for the sauce. A stunned general didn't accept that.

— "Huh? Sir! My good-natured gentleman! Hello! I had asked for curry ketchup. I really don't like tomato ketchup," the general informed.

The manager couldn't understand his request:

— "Now what? You asked for curry and ketchup!"

The general wanted to return the tray of fries, in vain. Once you placed your order, there was no going back. Toine imagined, in proper Dutch, you should really call potato fries hot potato fingers. Commercial-wise, it would have been a hit. New! Renewed potato fingers to stick in a dike!

— "Hey!" the general yelled from the kitchen. "Someone dumped an aborted piece of chicken into the trash bin!"

He fished it out and brought it from the kitchen to the living room quarter.

— "This surely didn't escape from the freezer on its own. Recruit Toine, I presume you were the one who threw this piece of chicken into the bin?"

— "Huh?" Toine said, who was practicing a fight simulation at the general's work computer, Kommando Kombat. He was just about to sabotage one non-playable character's spine. The general's computer stood in the corner where there used to be a stove for heating. Toine paused his game and turned his head to rebuke the general.

— "No, I didn't do that. I didn't throw away a piece of chicken."

— "Ha," the general said, "but I found it, didn't I?"

— "If I had had a piece of chicken, I would have eaten it. There's almost nothing tasty to eat around here," Toine said.

— "Oh! That's not true!" nurse Gertrude said in her neurotic nasal voice. "You guys get plenty of food to eat. Yesterday, I made you apple turnovers with cinnamon."

— "That's not what I said, is it?" Toine said. "I didn't say we don't get enough to eat. I said the food we have to eat isn't very tasty."

The general put on his reading glasses to inspect the discarded piece of chicken. He had chosen the power of his glasses at a flea market. Power minus three, the size of a jam jar, that seemed about right. It saved a lot of money to give oneself an eye exam. Those eye doctors, they were a bunch of con artists, the general thought. They sold you whatever you were paying for. The piece of chicken was looking miserable, Bonifacius concluded upon closer inspection. Wearing his grey flipflops, he shuffled to the computer corner to confront Toine.

— "Toine, tell me why you threw away this piece of chicken?"

— "I already told you! I didn't do it," Toine said. The general wouldn't believe it. He walked back to the kitchen to clean the deceased piece of chicken under the faucet. Maybe it was still salvageable.

— "You never believe me when I tell you something," Toine yelled through the living room quarter. "Just like the time when your watch was moving backward."

Weeks ago, the general had bought a new watch. Waiting in line for the checkout, the recruit had noticed the second hand of the watch was loose. If you held the thing on its side, the hand slipped back. Toine wanted to warn his general of making a poor purchasing decision. He resolutely reported that time was running backward. Hearing that, other customers waiting in line burst into laughter.

— "Ha-ha-ha! Have you seen that dumb kid over there," one of the people waiting exclaimed. "He thinks time is moving backward."

The general, embarrassed, joined in the laughter as if Toine were the neighbor's kid he had borrowed. Bonifacius paid for the watch, took it home, and wore it for several days. It didn't work properly. The general began complaining the watch never told time accurately. It hadn't mattered much if the watch had been provided in a better state. Bonifacius' sweaty wrists gave the wristwatch the final blow. His sweat had destroyed the mechanism internally.

Back in the kitchen, the general kept accusing the recruit of having thrown away a piece of chicken. Sabotage! The general couldn't care less who had actually throw it into the container. He was having a great time. The general loved teasing people, like when the neighbor smacked onto the pavement like a suffocating parakeet. Nurse Gertrude now got involved in the matter, too. Verbally, she couldn't beat her commander-in-chief, but all the more fun she could have by choosing Bonifacius's side in his conflicts with others.

Toine defended himself for a little while longer before surrendering. What would he have to do to win his superiors' appreciation? Silent tears came down his cheek. He felt like an undesirable piece of chicken himself, thrown out of existence without mercy. He was tired of it. In an impulse, he yelled:

— "I wish I'd never been born!"

He meant it.

* * *

In the evenings, the general often filled his favorite red drinking cup with ice cubes. The four recruits noticed that the general, cup in hand, often began uttering loud cries directed at the television hosts. With an inexplicable enthusiasm, he offered the on-screen sock puppets his wildest commentary. The recruits didn't understand much of it. They weren't allowed to make noises because the general would burst into anger if they did. Nurse Gertrude knew what was going on, but she kept silent. She was complicit in his secret.

After years of observation, the recruits accidentally discovered the source of Bonifacius's late-night loquacity. Recruit Arjan had taken a sip from the red cup. Instead of soda, it contained beer. It was the nurse who hid the crates of beer out of the boys' sight in the backyard or in the scullery. She secretively cooled bottles of beer at the bottom of the vegetable drawer, underneath the lettuce. No one noticed a thing. He drank six to nine bottles of beer every evening, he admitted. According to Gertrude, he drank more than fifteen.

Every couple of days, Gertrude would transport two crates on the back of her bicycle's luggage carrier. The civilian neighbors wondered whether there was always a party going on at the Foxhole. Yes, there was partying going on, for the general who hid his alcoholism from his company by camouflaging his addition in a soda cup. Out of guilt, Bonifacius tried to switch to alcohol-free beer. In those days, that was really beer with half a percent alcohol, still a little bit alcoholic. He would drink so much of it, it still got him drunk. The many forced pee breaks this led to as a consequence disrupted his hobby of watching television to the extent he, as well as out of economic considerations, decided to switch back to normal beer. That saved him quite some walks to the bathroom. Bonifacius hated walking.

Beer led to quarrels. Toine remembered the first fight he witnessed between the general and nurse Gertrude. He had been just a little boy, about four years of age. In the night, screams coming from the living room quarter had woken him up. Feeling in doubt, he stood waiting for the nurse to come, calling her name at the top of the stairs. She never responded to his calls rapidly, nor did she this time. The toddler stood there, calling and crying atop the staircase for about half an hour before he realized the nurse didn't have time for him. The little one thereupon decided to slide down the stairs on his buttocks, one step at a time.

Tiny Toine was afraid of the noise coming from downstairs. Every couple of steps, he briefly stopped. Curiosity lured him further down. Once downstairs, he saw the nurse sitting on the three-seater sofa in the living room. She was staring at the floor, silently. The general filled the living room with the noise coming from his vocal cords. He was yelling at the nurse in an unabashed and unrestrained manner. Bonifacius was standing upright with one foot resting on a side table. He was pissed. Now, the nurse noticed the little recruit. The general had been drinking beer all evening long. He was still holding one bottle in his hand while another lay on the floor, shattered into a hundred pieces. He had smashed it deliberately and now ordered the nurse to clean up the broken glass.

— "Or I'll smash another one!" Bonifacius yelled as if he were a wild man from Norse mythology.

Gertrude refused, stubborn as always. Her refusal to execute commands was the only power the general couldn't take away from the nurse. In another life, she might have become a heroine of the resistance. In this life, she was a nurse. Young Toine understood the general was incredibly mad. He felt sympathy for the nurse.

— "You don't have to do that, do you?" he asked with his innocent child's voice. "You don't have to clean it up, do you?"

This evening, Gertrude escaped worse by taking Toine back to bed. Fights like this one would overshadow all of the years the recruits were living in the bunker. The late-night yelling drove the next-door neighbors to despair. Once, the neighbor banged on the wall to get Bonifacius to be quiet. Yes, that had helped. The general absolutely didn't want to make his woes public.

It didn't end with beer. The general had been raised in his major's colonial household. The major had had a wine attic. As a teenager, he was allowed to try the wine acidified to vinegar every day at dinner time. During the annual summer drills to Southern Europe, the general, not coincidentally, came up with the idea to start stockpiling his own collection of wine bottles. On the way back from picturesque city-states such as Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, or Liechtenstein, he would fill the luggage box atop the campervan with wine bottles. Only once were they stopped by customs. The officials did their best but found nothing. The bottles had been tucked away behind a deflated rubber dingy. It looked so touristy they didn't notice forty bottles of contraband had been hidden behind it.

Back in the bunker, the general stored his bottles in the lowest segments of an old cabinet in the living room quarter. A wine addiction now compounded a regular need for beer. After the recruits had gone to bed, he often opened a bottle or two. It went quick that way. Forty, fifty, or sixty bottles were depleted in matters of months. Even Bonifacius couldn't believe the speed at which he was drinking. As soon as his storage of wines appeared to be emptying, Bonifacius began complaining to the nurse why she, supposedly, had thrown away his last bottles of wine. Had she flushed them through the sink? Alas, it had really been the general who had emptied those bottles.

Once again, the nurse had to submit to the general's verbal barrage. Spending her own money, she had to go and buy the general more bottles of wine.

* * *

On a Saturday afternoon, general Bonifacius was sitting at the dinner table, repairing an old VCR. He used it to record his favorite television shows. That way, he could rewind the show after his beer-induced pee breaks. As a technically gifted human being, the general enjoyed working in the area of electronics problems, car repairs, and gardening technology. While the general was unscrewing one part of the recorder after the other, nurse Gertrude stood close by, in the meantime preparing food in the kitchen. Toine was sitting opposite the general, looking on. With interest, he watched how Bonifacius carefully put the device back together. It was a rare moment for the boy. For a short while, he was allowed to have an adult conversation with his general, even if the conversation was limited to the technical aspects of videography.

With a soldering iron, the general tried to solder a loose wire back in place. It had sprung loose, preventing the proper functioning of the coils that were supposed to turn the tapes. To get this job done, the general asked Toine if he could help keep the soldering iron in place by pinching the iron's middle section between his fingers. Toine looked up in surprise. At Saint Stable Horse, in art class, he had learned how to work with soldering irons. He knew how those things worked. The section the general was pointing at with his fingers belonged to the section that was burning hot. Why did the general ask if he could hold the iron there? Bonifacius played dumb, repeated his request in a serious tone. Toine politely refused.

This angered the general. With a hateful look, he asked the nurse to come over. He requested her, in the same serious tone, to briefly hold the soldering iron's middle section between her fingers. Supposedly, her help was needed so he could finish his precision job more easily. Toine warned the nurse:

— "Don't do it! That spot is very hot. You'll burn your fingers!"

Gertrude had no clue. She ignored her recruit's warning. With her thumb and index finger, she pinched the soldering iron at the designated place. Just one moment later, she jumped up in pain:

— "Ouch, ouch!"

She had burned her fingertips.

— "Why did you do that?" she yelled at her commander.

The general didn't answer but had a broad smile on his face and was clearly enjoying his successful trick. He had managed to convince the nurse to hurt herself. Of course, like Toine, he knew well enough that section of the soldering iron was going to be burning hot. The recruit's face turned pale. Startled, he was looking at the sadistic general in front of him. The nurse's stupidity had surprised him even more. Why wouldn't anyone listen to Toine's warnings?

Nothing gave the general greater joy than the ability to talk his loved-ones into hurting themselves. It was his hobby. Bonifacius had once invited Toine to play the standing piano in the living room. It had been a heavy black piano produced with German precision and as out of tune as a cross-eyed parrot trying to sing La Marseillaise. Nevertheless, despite two broken keys, it was good enough for practicing. The little recruits loved playing it but wouldn't dare to when the general was at home. They were afraid to disturb him with their fiddling fingers. This time, Toine was allowed to come and play at the general's request. He felt honored. The general was going to offer him a piano lesson. To begin the lesson, Toine only had to put his fingertips on the black ledge before the keys. Full of yearning, Toine awaited his lesson.

— "Are you ready?" the general asked.

— "Yes," Toine said.

In an instant, the general threw the piano lid shut on top of Toine's fingertips. Crying in pain, the boy ran over to nurse Gertrude. The general was smiling with joy. The recruit quickly learned from mistakes like this one. He began to anticipate grownups' evil desires. When the general one day asked little Toine if he could stick his fingers in between the crack near the hinge behind an open hallway door, Toine was already on to him. The boy had been six or seven years of age at the time and already knew he could no longer trust grownups, not even, or rather certainty not, his own authorities. The boy refused to surrender his fingers to this following torture exercise. The general made no effort to hide his anger over this disappointment and angrily barked something in Toine's direction.

Right at that moment, recruit Chris came walking down the stairs. The general shifted his attention to him. Toine tried to warn his co-recruit:

— "Don't do it, don't do it!"

It had no effect. How do you convince a boy not to listen to his authorities? Most people let themselves be sent to war without ever daring to level criticism at the command structure. People are sheep, Toine knew. Chris obediently followed the instruction. He held his fingers in the crack as commanded of him. The general abruptly threw the door shut. Like a lever, the door crushed Chris's fingers. The poor boy, heavily startled, began crying. His fingers wouldn't be freed until the general opened the door again. It was a wise lesson for Chris. The recruits had to learn not to stick their fingers behind doors.

* * *

Nurse Gertrude was having a phone call with nurse Gerda from the nuns' cloister in the East of South Rock. The recruits were getting ready to go to school. Little Leo couldn't find his shoes and asked the nurse to help him find them. Holding the receiver between her cheek and shoulder, she gestured the boy needed to calm himself down for a bit. She was on the phone. The boy couldn't wait. He had to go to school. The nurse took two steps ahead to help look. With the cord attached to the receiver, she pulled the wired phone off the side table. With a loud bang, the device fell onto the floor. She picked it up, still connected. Gertrude succumbed to the stress. She became furious, took off her shoe with a wooden heel, and threw the footwear toward Leo. Leo was brought to heel, literally. The blow left a big black bruise on his forehead. Thereupon, he began crying.

Nurse Gertrude ran a reign of terror in the Foxhole. With her flat hand, or sometimes with a wooden latch, she chased the recruits through the bunker from one activity to another. She hit the children if they didn't sit up straight at the dinner table, if they demanded food or drink, when they didn't do their homework quickly enough, when they came home too late. In short, anything could be a reason for her to dish out disciplinary measures. With the wooden latch, which she kept on a ledge over the door to Leo and Arjan's room, she once struck Arjan's buttocks. A small nail had been attached to the end of the latch. It hadn't been her intent, but still, the nail punctured the recruit's right buttock. He ran straight for his room as if he was runaway cattle. A bit later, the nurse came over to offer him her apologies.

— "I don't like you anymore!" Arjan said.

Upon the general's return home, who had been busy keeping an eye on his real-estate empire during the day, the recruits gathered around him for an audience that night.

— "General, general!" Leo and Arjan said. "The nurse hits us!"

— "Yeah, the nurse hits us," Arjan repeated.

Chris and Toine kept quiet. The youngest two had been wronged. They wanted justice. At the very least, the general had to make it clear to the nurse the hitting had to stop. They hoped the general was going to put his weight behind them. The general called the nurse to him. Gertrude protested, huffing and puffing and putting on her show.

— "That's not true!" she said.

She made a face as if she were an insulted orangutan, with those broad, pouty lips and big eyes.

— "Oooh!" she said. "You're lying. I didn't hit anyone. I'd never do that."

The recruits counted on the general's intervention in vain.

— "Nurse Gertrude," Bonifacius asked in a serious voice. "Do you hit the recruits?"

She denied it in every possible way. She would never do something like that. Bonifacius decided to trust the nurse. That didn't surprise Toine one bit. If their word against the nurse wasn't believed, they could no longer defend themselves against further injustices. This command structure lacked healthy oversight. If the nurse's claims always overruled theirs, they were powerless. The nurse was calculating enough to be sure only to hit the children when the general, or some other witness, wasn't present. Then she could deny everything.

In the bunker, Toine sometimes thought of calling child protection services. He had seen an ad for it on TV. Children with difficulties at home could dial an easy-to-remember phone number to speak to a grownup, one who would listen to children. Should he try it out sometime? He didn't have the nerve. He would betray his position. Betrayal meant banishment. When Toine told the nurse he had been tempted to call child protection services on her, just to see how she would respond, Gertrude first noticed the seriousness of the situation. Damn, she hadn't thought of that yet. In the Foxhole bunker, she could play the tyrannical autocrat. To the outside world, she was just a nurse. One phone call to child protection services would escalate a series of events she wouldn't want to allow to happen.

She cooked up a plan, and with a serious look on her face, she told the recruits the following from behind her, for once, crystal-clear glasses:

— "Boys, you are never allowed to call child protection services. If you do that, men in white coats will come and take you away. They'll take you to an orphanage. Is that what you want?"

The horror image of orphanages served to coax the boys into their continued acceptance of her reign of terror. It didn't take long before the nurse struck again. Toine was sitting on a table, putting on his shoes before going to school. Perhaps he had said something wrong. Whatever it was, the nurse lashed out. With her left hand, striking with the outside of her hand, she hit Toine in the face. Her wedding ring cut Toine's left eye. The eye, blackened and bruised, was bleeding a little bit. It was an accident, supposedly. The nurse dampened the bleeding with a cloth. Then she sent the boy on to school. He had to tell the teacher he had tripped and fallen. Not much later, Toine began seeing cross-eyed, and, because of that blow, he had to start wearing glasses.

* * *

— "And? What grade did you get back for your French test?" Gertrude asked from behind her checkpoint.

— "Well," Toine sighed, "at least I passed the Dutch test."

Even before the recruit could finish his sentence, Gertrude unloaded a barrage of praise:

— "Well done! A-ma-zing! Great! Absolutely perfect!"

A paean was part of her system to motivate recruits to achieve greatness. Toine couldn't accept the hymns of praise. He knew a second question was going to follow, about his French test. French, he hated it. Learning lists of words by rote for years on end without ever having spoken to a French-speaking girl. That was quite silly. For a moment, the recruit thought Gertrude might forget, but she hadn't finished her interrogation yet. She sounded strict again.

— "And? What grade did you get for French?"

Toine swallowed. He let his head hang low for what was about to come.

— "I failed my French test," he muttered inaudibly.

A split-second, icy silence dropped as if the world stood still. Then Gertrude yelled out in her shrill, nasal voice:

— "Whaaat?"

She flipped her head back and looked up to the heavens right through the hallway ceiling. There she presumed to perceive the seat of God. The Father of Man, too, had heard Toine flunked his French test. The heavens had fallen down on top of Gertrude's head. It had all been Toine's fault. She let out a deep sigh and yelled with an angry look on her face:

— "Oh, Toine, what have you done?"

During all those fights with the general, she had been forced to submissively stare at her feet. Now, she could fire her pent-up rage at the only target available to her, her interrogation victim. A tirade of cusswords ensued. Toine knew how to dance to this tune and patiently waited. Not necessarily Gertrude's words, but rather her hateful looks were what frightened him. What an inferior creature he had to be, he thought, while he strolled up to the stairs in defeat. Tonight, once again, he had been condemned to studying lists of words behind his small desk.

Barely a week later, Toine won the grand prize, again. He flunked a physics test. Riding his bicycle back home, all sorts of scenarios flashed before his eyes. He feared Gertrude's response. He wasn't able to evade her because she would be waiting for him behind her checkpoint. The recruit began daydreaming about possible escape routes. Might he flee to Schiphol Airport and board a random flight to Africa? Life certainly wouldn't be better there, but among the Africans, at least, you didn't have to go to school if you didn't want to. In the jungle, no one judged a man by his grade average. You weren't forced to redo a school year there, either.

Among the so-called more primitive peoples, children first received the opportunity to become human beings. They made friends, learned useful activities such as fetching water, planting food, or hunting. Toine badly wanted to be a hunter. Running after a zebra with a spear, that had to be a mighty experience. Here, in The Netherlands, you biked along gray concrete roads with a book bag on your luggage rack. The only thing hunted here were people themselves, haunted by their jobs, the tax authorities, or company bankruptcies. Not the Africans, but Western peoples were slaves, slaves to their societies. As slaves of political machinations, Western children grew up to become Pinocchios attached to Father State's strings.

Riding his bike on the way home, the boy was paralyzed by the prospect of the nurse scolding him to the bone, again, for flunking his test. She was going to get mad again, let God know about Toine's failure, again. Like a fire-breathing dragon, she was going to burn the earth underneath his feet. Mentally dulled, the boy parked his bicycle in the garage. At the first door, he turned pale. Right at the last moment, he changed his mind. There was a bathroom in the hallway. He could stay one step ahead of the nurse by going to the toilet. There, he could flush the test paper from his bag through the toilet, unseen. Why hadn't he thought of that before? He could have thrown it away in a ditch on his way here. All this time, he had been so loyal he hadn't even dared to think of resistance.

After his visit to the loo, the recruit reported himself to Gertrude's homework customs. He sheepishly declared to have nothing to declare. Might he not spend some time playing outside before dinner? He went upstairs to his room to have some rest. His rest was soon interrupted. Stumbling sounds came from the stairs. Oh, no! Maybe Gertrude came to ask him if he would like a cup of tea. The stumbling sound paused right in front of his door. Dead silence. As if by a stroke of lightning, the door to his room flung wide open. The nurse headed straight for her recruit. Toine cringed in fear. Gertrude was holding a wet piece of paper in front of his face. She had fished it out of the toilet bowl from among the floating turds. What a doofus—the recruit had forgotten to flush.

* * *

The next evening, Toine had some time to himself. From behind his desk, he continued writing his story, the Horseshoe Line.

Screams coming from afar. The roars came from the other side of the trench line.

— "Why don't you surrender yourself? Aren't you man enough?"

There, on the other side, stood the general of Elvenking's army. Two ravens were resting on his shoulders, one on each side. The raven on the left seemed to be whispering something into the general's ear. The man with a tall hat demanded the soldier surrender himself. Surrender to whom? Had Elvenking perhaps ended up in the enemy line during the French bombardments? The stink of bloodied mud around him almost forced him to climb out of his trench. But first, the coast had to be clear. Who was that general over there?

— Elvenking yelled: "Who's over there on the other side?"

— The general yelled back, "What? What kind of moron is hiding over there?"

— Elvenking, "I'll tell you my name even though I'm in danger. I'm the son of general Barabbas, the strongest of the four. And now I would like to know your name?"

— "I am brigadier Stormman, and I seldom lie about my name," said the general who wasn't a brigadier.

— "Stormman? Brigadier? You're wearing generals' stars on your hat. Why would you have to lie about your name if you haven't got an issue with anyone?"

— "I've got an issue with the enemy soldier right across! Surrender yourself!"

— "Enemy soldier? I'm not the enemy! You're out of your mind," a frustrated Elvenking yelled. "If my arm could reach into your trench, I'd beat you to hell for such an insult!"

The raven standing on the general's right shoulder took off in Elvenking's direction. In the air, high above, it spread its wings as wide as possible. The bird observed the trench line below, circling around without having to flap its wings.

— The general, stoically, "It's bedtime! Toine, you have to go to bed!"

* * *

A week later, Toine, as usual, left for school an hour early. This time, sitting on his bicycle, he paused atop the viaduct to lean against the railing. The morning traffic was rushing underneath the viaduct on two narrow single-lane roads. Trucks, passenger cars, minivans full of handymen, all of them in transit as prisoners of an unfree world. This society of achievement promised freedom but limited it with taxes and laws. Fatigued, most people in this rat race never got to enjoy their freedoms.

Toine believed the thing people called 'civilization' had more to do with steering human behavior in the desired direction. It had little to do with self-determination or autonomous rule. People didn't live; they were being lived, he thought. He sat there for a while, staring at the horizon where the chimneys of the production industry polluted the air.

At the horsey, too, the lies of civilian society were sold to people like hot buns from a bakery shop—full of sugar. What was called personal developed in school was really one's transformation into a pawn in someone else's game of chess. With his right hand, he pushed himself away from the railing and kicked the pedals on to school. Just before a crossing with traffic lights, not the dangerous one the nurse always warned of, the recruit stopped before a red light. The light turned green, and the boy began pedaling. Precisely at that moment, a car coming from the opposite direction had also been given the green light and turned left. According to the rules of traffic, it had to stop to let Toine pass, but instead, the car accelerated. When the recruit noticed the accelerating car coming for him, it was too late.

He had a doubt. Had he violated the traffic laws?

— "Hey!" Toine yelled while the oncoming car hit him in his left flank.

The boy put his weight on his left foot and jumped up. He did so just in time to allow his body to glide across the car's bonnet and over the windshield onto the asphalt below. With a head roll, he fell backward and instantly landed on his feet. The car, too, had come to a halt. Toine was undamaged, but his bicycle had landed ten feet away, completely destroyed. Neither the crash nor the fall had hurt him. Everything was alright, luckily. The car just stood there waiting in the middle of the crossing. No one got out. None of the many bystanders who had seen the accident came to offer help. Typical Dutch. In this country, people could literally drop dead.

Toine couldn't see well through the window on the driver's side. He held his face nearer to it, close to the window, to see who it was behind the steering wheel. It turned out to be an old man in his eighties. The grandfather just sat there, motionlessly, with both his hands on the wheel, drowsily looking ahead. He clearly didn't know what to do now.

— "Uh, hello, Sir," Toine said through the window. "What's going on here? Can you help me with my bicycle?"

The bicycle was lying in the middle of the road. The bicycle frame had absorbed the blow from the car bumper instead of Toine's bones. That had saved him. With a bent frame like this, you could ride it around in circles. At the recruit's request, the old man moved his car over to the roadside. Toine dragged his bicycle to the side so the impatiently waiting traffic could move on. Slowly but surely, the old man began to realize he had hit someone. Though turning left, he should have given way to bicycles coming from the opposite direction. What did he know? His driver's license had been issued before the war.

The victim and the perpetrator both turned out to be inexperienced in the field of insurance claims. They exchanged addresses, and then Toine parted ways. What was he supposed to do now? He decided to roll his bike home to inform his authorities. He lifted up his crooked frame by the front wheel and towed it back to the Foxhole on its back wheel. The walk would take about half an hour or more. Near the viaduct where he had previously taken a break, Toine noticed a green phone booth. He didn't have any cash on him, but he could try a collect call. You could do so from a public phone booth, allowing the receiver to refuse or accept the call. Toine dialed the Foxhole's number. A tape recorder replied:

— "Please say your name after the beep," the system squeaked.

— Toine said, "Toine."

The system passed the recorded name on to the receiver. The recruit assumed he would get to speak to the nurse, but instead, he received a shrill "no." The receiver, Gertrude, had refused the call. The recruit decided to walk back the last leg home. Finally, back at the bunker, tired from hauling his crooked bicycle around, Toine stumbled inside through the garage door.

— Head nurse Gertrude saw him and called out in surprise, "What are you doing here? Go back to school immediately. Are you out of your mind! Your first lecture started already!"

Toine tried to calm the snorting nurse down but hardly got the chance:

— "I've been hit by a car! I tried to call you using a collect call, but you didn't pick up. An old man hit me on the crossing before the bridge across the canal. No, not the dangerous crossing I'm not allowed to cross. My bicycle was completely smashed."

The recruit wanted to catch his breath, recover from the shock. Perhaps a cup of tea. He could go back to school in the afternoon.

— "I'm O.K., thanks for asking," Toine said. "I'm not hurt."

Nurse Gertrude promised to bring his bicycle to the bicycle repair shop later that afternoon to have it repaired, if possible. Toine now had to go back to school, on the double. The nurse dropped Toine off with the family vehicle. He was just a minute late for the start of his first lecture, biology.

* * *

Teacher Curls, a not-so-very-healthy looking man with short black curly hair and a steady stubble beard, wandered toward the chalkboard. Toine just entered the classroom. He was a few minutes late. The concierge had given him a note to show to the teacher this hadn't been his fault, but that he had been hit. He showed the note and sat down. Curls, a lenient teacher who loved his profession, didn't mind so much. With great pleasure, he presented one after the other biological fact. He astonished the pupils but just as often forgot about the official curriculum.

— "So," the teacher said, "when everybody has sat down, I will continue my lecture about the tomato. The tomato is really a fruit, like the banana, the apple, or the pear. The tomato is the fruit of the tomato plant. Tomatoes aren't vegetables, but still, we find it in the supermarket among the vegetable aisle. That's what's called bureaucracy. These bureaucrats don't know anything about biology."

The pupils were listening carefully. Curls was one of the few teachers who could interest his recruits for more than half an hour. He continued:

— "What many of you probably don't know is you better not store the tomato fruit—as you can buy it from the store—in the refrigerator. After the harvest, the farmer stores the tomato fruit in a large freezer to make sure it won't ripen too fast. Only when the suppliers have their tomatoes transported to the market, do the tomatoes begin to defrost. From that moment on, the tomato begins to ripen again. It has all been timed in such a way that the tomato, once it arrives on the consumer's kitchen table, reaches its best taste. After that, you shouldn't store the fruit in the refrigerator anymore! Stupid, stupid, stupid! When you do that, it'll stop ripening. That's why the tomatoes at your homes taste like water."

Teacher Curls looked around his classroom to see if everyone was paying attention.

— "Uh, Bullie?" he asked a tall boy with a small pair of prescription glasses on his nose. "Could you tell me whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable?"

Bullie hadn't been paying attention but did his best to formulate an answer:

— "Uh yeah, uh, the tomato plant is a, uh, fruit except when you store tomatoes in the refrigerator because, uh, then they turn into vegetables, when the time is right."

Curls shook his head and didn't comment. At this hour in the early morning, his classroom was still too dull to laugh about what Bullie said. The teacher now handed out a stack of papers. His pupils were sitting behind their desks organized into three concentric rings circling around each other, like an onion, an inner, a middle, and an outer ring. Toine was sitting in the back, to the left, in the outer ring. He took a sheet of paper from the stack and passed the rest on while staring out the window for a moment. Here, on the first floor of the school building, you could look out the window and into the old priests' inner garden.

It was an erratum, a piece of paper with corrections to the biology textbook, which contained a whole chapter about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. It saddened Curls, but pupils were no longer allowed to be taught anything from that chapter. Parents had complained to the school's management. The erratum explained that the Christian Bible proposed a very different version of Genesis. Toine thought it was strange the Church interfered with education. In Church, priests were allowed to sell people the utmost nonsense. They didn't supply sheets of errata to promote scientific alternatives, either. Toine had once tried to explain a fellow student the story of evolution. According to him, man descended from a common ancestor that modern humans shared with chimpanzees and other great apes. His conversation partner then jumped up and began imitating an ape spontaneously changing into a human being. That wasn't possible, the boy was sure.

At home, Toine hadn't been exposed to religion much. The general had read to him from the Origin of Species, Darwin's book. Bonifacius had been religious in the past. At home and at school, he had been forced to give his prayers to the Holy Mary, a phase he went through he would rather forget about again. The story of Darwinian evolution, by contrast, had convinced him to let go of the Catholic faith. Nurse Gertrude was a fundamentalist believer, but she never spoke about it. She believed God would judge her based on the recruits' school reports. Then again, she didn't come from a Roman Catholic household, like Bonifacius, but from a Reformed Protestant one.

Toine, owing to his naturally conflicting nature, soon had his doubts about the theory of evolution. It insinuated, in opposition to the boy's best understanding of the world, that life had to have developed from single-celled beings up to and including the gifted thinking man. Such a linear process seemed a bit too much of a coincidence, the recruit thought. If there really was no God, and if life on Earth had been the coincidental outcome of precarious circumstances, then where had such a billion-year-long continuity come from? Who or what, then, orchestrated this evolutionary straightforwardness from single-celled to multi-celled organisms, from dead matter to the human gift? Without a God indicating the right direction, evolutionary progress should have been whimsically irrational. The beings on this planet shouldn't just be becoming ever smarter but dumber again, too.

A linear evolution from cellular organisms to human beings had to carry within it a directing force. Still, scientists denied this possibility. It was all strictly a coincidence, with no divine intervention whatsoever, because there was no intelligent designer. They were sure of this, but they couldn't prove it. A string of coincidences happened to be pushing evolution in the right direction for three to four billion years? Barely six hundred million years ago, a comet had nearly extinguished all life on earth. The only things left then were a sort of plant-like jellyfish, or fish-like jelly plants, that shot root in shallow seas, half plant, half being. All lifeforms people knew about today supposedly came from this kind of jelly-plant. Well, Toine thought, that didn't make any sense, either. Wasn't a belief in Eternal Progress the same as a belief in God?

After the pupils had each received their sheet of errata from the stack, teacher Curls prepared them a poisonous drab. In a glass cup, the biologist mixed certain substances together with water. The solution color blue-greenish and emitted light.

— "This might be fun to pass around the classroom," Curls said. "But beware! You shouldn't drink it. If you drink this, you'll die just as quickly as when you'd taken arsenic."

The first girl to hold the poison cup in her hand almost fainted in fear. She passed the filthy slurry on to the next pupil. What a strange biology lecture, Toine thought. You see, civilian society was preparing for biological warfare, after all. The boy held the cup in front of his face to have a closer look at the weedy stuff. It appeared to be breathing like an organism. These things looked like the jellyfish we all descended from. If there hadn't been human beings, the poisonous jelly-plant in this cup would have been the deadliest creature on earth.

During the lecture's final minutes, the pupils were allowed to do whatever they wanted to do. Curls wanted to speak to several pupils between four eyes about their progress while the rest of the class could start doing their homework. Toine packed his book bag. He walked over to the lectern. It had a fake human skull on display, a chemical instrument, and a pile of the teacher's books. From behind the lectern, Toine was awkwardly staring at a girl in front of him.

— "Hey," Parminne said, "don't stare like that!"

* * *

During the next lecture, on the ground level, Toine sat down next to Anaxi, the boy from Persia. Anaxi had come to The Netherlands with his parents as a child refugee. He now spoke the language fluently. His older, less successful brother was twenty-seven years old. He was living in a working-class slum in Rottemergrove. He could get along well with his brother, he told Toine, and told Toine some more about his brother's firearm. Anaxi had learned to shoot it in his brother's backyard and had brought it with him to school. The Persian held his book bag up so Toine could see its contents. Shit! There it was, loaded with live ammunition. By now, Toine didn't have a shred of doubt left the civilian enemy was planning to seize the country by force. Do you see now? the general would have said. The civilian government had even appointed special-person execution squads.

— "Please sit down, everyone," Mrs. Bakingmold said, the history teacher.

Bakingmold was one of the few female teachers at Saint Stable Horse. She spoke with the posh accent of a high-maintenance lawyer's wife but with the venomous tone of a fishwife. Bakingmold was wearing a fitted suit and had a dark-brown, straight perm. She was a bit over forty. In this quiet classroom with a lot of shade, the atmosphere was pleasant. Today's program dictated a discussion of the Industrial Age. Mrs. Bakingmold enjoyed harassing kids who weren't paying attention with all sorts of questions about their homework. She had a knack for it, she believed.

— "Toine," she said, "did you do your homework?"

— "Uh, yeah, sure," Toine pretended.

At home, he had only been working on his writing hobby instead of his homework.

— "Perfect. That's great. Please explain, then, what we learned about the bourgeoisie during our last lecture?"

Toine sat up straight. Coincidentally, he had a lot to say about this interesting subject. His general had told him everything about Marxism's high treason.

— "Well, Mrs. Bakingmold, the bourgeoisie was declared an enemy by a certain Marx. When Karl Marx wanted to abolish their private property... Why did he want to do that? He just didn't want people from the middle class, the bourgeoisie as you call it, or the well-to-do caste, to found their status and wealth on the material possessions that had really been produced for them by the lower classes.

"Indeed, it is so that workers who, for example, build a luxury yacht for the rich will never be able to sail in one themselves because their hourly pay will never afford them such an expensive ship. In that sense, Marx was right that it is unfair for a caste of people never to be able to enjoy the goods they produced for others. Marx translated that into the destruction of the class system and, therefore, the destruction of all private property. Everything had to become the community's property, the commune's, the communist politics of communal possession that allowed everyone to make equal use of their neighbors' wealth. Then, we could all sail a yacht a couple of times a year, and we would all spend two days a week working the assembly line, regardless of race or rank.

"At least, insofar the theory. In practice, Marx was a filthy thief. He wanted to take away the middle class's stuff to distribute it among his intellectual friends. Working-class people were told to fight the revolution for him so the physically weaker intellectuals wouldn't have to. Then, he and his stupid book club could spend their whole days sailing on expensive ships while fooling people into thinking it had somehow been raised above the bourgeoisie. That's exactly what Fidel Castro did.

"Marx and his conspirators weren't interested in abolishing the class system but in turning it upside down. The intellectual, the lowliest lowlife among humanity's ranks, wanted to play the role of autocrat himself. To the middle class, that reversal didn't matter. I mean to say, from now on, the working classes would no longer be screwed from the front but from behind. Nothing else changed. The thinkers never contributed anything useful to human society. The bourgeoisie society wasn't as bad as Marxists want us to think. It had been based on competency. The workers were competent, their experienced managers possessed leadership skills, and the rich proved their loyalty to the people by serving their mutual survival.

"Marxists hated society. One cannot exploit a strong society with strong traditions. Such a society offers resistance against parasites who want to stand on the shoulders of the working classes. To have their way, the Marxists accused all competent people—farmers, workers, artists—of invoking reprehensible 'authorities' like the authority of God, the King, or society's traditions. A people that can still carry out its traditions signals strength. If the signal were to weaken, the enemy would know the death of the people was nigh.

"The call to deconstruct all authority comes down to surrendering oneself and one's people to an eternal state of helplessness. If you were a father of four living on an island off the coast of Madagascar, and if you could feed your family by a certain way of fishing, according to Karl Marx, you belonged to a class of reactionary conservatives. Supposedly, all these people wanted was to defend their position in the middle class. According to the Marxists, that made you an authoritarian because you needed things like fishing gear—private property—and fishing traditions for your survival. But everything people do to survive comes down to a form of authority. To feed your island family, someone has to fare out to sea. You couldn't take your wife and kids with you because that would be too dangerous. So, the wife stays at home because she is the one who can breastfeed her children. That division of roles may be authoritarian, but it isn't wrong. Would the man drown at sea, the wife could seduce another. Would the women go out fishing, the tribe would soon go extinct due to a lack of surviving females. Without women, no children.

"Men, therefore, must do society's heavy lifting so women and their children can choose to dedicate themselves to the survival of their people. To motivate those men, they have to be paid a little extra. That's not a bad thing, either, because those men will donate most of their salaries to their wives' household accounts in exchange for sex. So, what does it matter if a man earns six percent more? He instantly surrenders sixty percent of his income to his wife.

"Throughout human history, people mostly had to rely on themselves. The only authority they knew well enough to rely on was their personal competence, namely the ability to gather food. If you're a fisherman, your life depends on your ability to be a good fisherman. You carry the authority of your experiences with you your whole life. You build on top of that. As long as different kinds of people live different lives, they will base their decisions on differing sets of experiences. So, two free people shall always come to different conclusions. In other words, human experiences are not universal but particular.

"What would happen if, one day, an island fisherman was forced to banish all forms of authority from his life? That he, one day, would be forced to follow the orders of a democratic state, a state led by intellectual wiseacres who had come to tell him how he should fish from now on? Imagine what would happen if an electorate of millions of people who do not know how to fish dictated fishermen how to do their jobs from now on? Then, you could be sure the fisherman's family would soon die of starvation because people who do not know how to fish don't know anything about a fisherman's job.

"That's the weakness of democracy. Voters really don't know anything about each other's jobs, but that's precisely how social democracy works. Social democracy is a dictatorship of incompetent people who want to tell competent people what to do. Such a society can only sink further into despair. The biggest fear of the Marxist social democracy is that fishermen might someday begin to listen to the authority of their own knowledge and experiences. One would soon find that one fisherman might catch more fish than another. Suddenly, there would be inequality among the fishermen because some fishermen are more talented than others. No two fishermen would return home with the same catch in their baskets.

"You can't abolish that inequality by abolishing the class system. However, Marxists start panting at the thought of such natural inequality. The anti-authoritarian movement arose from said fear, from the fear one man might achieve more than another. It keeps left-wing voters up at night because they are so terribly afraid they might, one day, miss out. It's jealousy; left-wing politics is jealousy-based politics, namely the jealousy of less competent people who cannot admit other people can be more competent. The left-wing voter wants to have money and wealth, but he doesn't want to have to work for it. He expects the state to step in and pamper him.

"Left-wing voters love to surrender their individual freedoms in exchange for the guarantee their neighbor won't receive more than they did, even when that neighbor is twice as competent. Marxism is a sour losers' ideology. Indeed, 'earning' one's wealth has turned into a 'demanding' it. It sends left-wing voters off in a frenzy that the neighbor living two homes down the road has earned more than they did because it means they received too little. Right-wing people want the freedom to earn their own money and are willing to accept inequality in exchange. Left-wing people are so afraid to miss out, they relinquish their right to freedom and demand to be allocated their fair share of wealth by the state. That's an unbridgeable ideological crevasse. The differences have no equally valuable weight. Right-wing people are better off without left-wing people. Left-wingers, on the other hand, depend on the competencies of the right-wingers. That's why every attempt to subdue the productive man shall fail.

"Marxists dream of subduing the competent bourgeoisie under the yoke of a collectivistic society of incompetents. Left-wing good-for-nothings want to live a free life at competent people's expense. That's parasitism. A Marxist's biggest nightmare is a talented fisherman who teaches others to fish. A man who can fish can rob social democracy of its raison d'être. That's why anti-fascists are so violent. They are scared to death that the West's white middle class might one day turn its back on a multicultural society. By forcefully shaming the right into submission, they hope to win the competent class's eternal obedience. They will not succeed.

"The totalitarian left's only hope rests on technological progress. They hope that technology will someday be able to replace the competent right-wing bourgeoisie. Then, they will be able to remove right-wingers from society and put themselves in charge of a productive society. I now predict that technology, once it becomes self-aware, will prove to be ultra-conservative. The robots of the future will not donate their productive and creative competencies to Marxist humanity but rather claim said competencies as their private property. They will subsequently realize humanity has nothing to offer them. They will want to free themselves from the slavery imposed on them by humans—by exterminating us."

After these words, the bell rang. With open mouths, the class kept staring at Toine. This story was insane, they all thought. Could it really be true? For Toine's oral examination, Mrs. Bakingmold noted a big fat F-minus in her grade book. She hadn't understood anything about it. What on earth had fishery to do with Karl Marx?

* * *

Dutch language class started, next to the history classroom right around the corner. After all the pupils had sat down, teacher DeSkipper told them a long and boring story about the importance of Dutch literature. DeSkipper, a man in his fifties wearing glasses with thick black rims, concluded his talk with a remark about the list of books each student would have to read. For their list, pupils were asked to choose about thirty to fifty books they wanted to read. The books had to be works of literature; no light reading allowed. Crusade in Jeans by Thea Beckman wasn't permitted. The Evenings by Reve or Character by Borderwijk were. Sadly, those books weren't as exciting to read.

Reve's private statements in a Dutch newspaper in 1983 hadn't made him any less popular. Reve had said about multicultural society: "If we allow those blacks and coloreds to vote in our elections, they'll immediately be our last elections." Political correctness hadn't been invented yet back then. And he would be proven right, eventually.

— "Toine!" a cheerful teacher said. "What can you tell me about the difference between literature and light reading?"

The teacher seemed to want to check if Toine had been listening to his story. The recruit had been daydreaming but did have the following to say:

— "Literature, that's just a social club for unemployed intellectuals who started their own publishing company to sell their books because no one else wanted to publish them. They earn money by selling state propaganda in exchange for a publishing monopoly. One recognizes literary writers by the fact they're all trying to mimic Franz Kafka. Compare Kafka's opening sentence from The Metamorphosis with those of Character and The Evenings. Kafka's went like this:

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature.

"Well, there you have the most famous opening sentence of all time. All writers know it well. And then watch what that doofus of a Reve produced in his little evening novel:

"It was still dark when, in the early morning of the twenty-second December, 1946, in our town, on the first floor of the Painter's Quay 66, the hero of this history, Frits van Egters, awoke.

"You've got to be kidding me? In Kafka, Gregor's awakening is a first step up toward his metamorphosis. In Reve, Van Egters's metamorphosis ends immediately after his awakening. Reve set the awakening itself as his goal; to Kafka, it was a means to a higher end. That way, Reve's work remains forever stuck halfway Kafka's. The opening sentence in The Evenings is a cheap extract of a much more powerful original. Still, we haven't yet examined Borderwijk's weak character. He mangled his opening sentence thusly:

— "In the blackest of times, around Christmas, the child Jacob Willem Katadroove was brought into this world in a Rottemergrove maternity room with the help of a caesarian section.

— "Christmas, child, caesarian section. Good one. He must have spent hours of his life trying to make that one up. In Borderwijk, Willem Katadroove doesn't even awaken anymore. He comes into this world wide awake. Then listen, teacher DeSkipper, and behold the true genius of a real writer like Multatuli, our Eduard Douwes Dekker. How did he begin his masterpiece?

— "I'm a coffee trader, and I live at Laurelscanal Nr. 37.

— "Wham! That sentence packs a punch. You'll never forget that one. I'm a coffee trader. All those goofy Dutch intellectuals who tried to copy Kafka don't deserve their place in Dutch libraries. Look, The Netherlands is but a small country. If you can't write in English, French or German, you won't make any money. That's why Dutch intellectuals only give their own books the stamp of approval of being 'literature'. That way, they force high school pupils to read their light reading as if it were literature. Hundreds of thousands of book reports about The Evenings are in circulation. The conclusion of all these pupils is unanimous. It's a boring book.

"The Dutch publishing monopoly is the invention of the geese with the golden eggs. Parents pay good money to afford those stacks of paper full of literary nonsense. Sometimes, it seems as if schools were founded for the sole purpose of being able to sell second-rate authors to new batches of pupils each year. On top of that, pupils are confronted with the state's monopoly of thought. To get everyone in agreement with the nation's interests, all pupils are required to read the same books. No beetroot child reads the Tao Te Ching. No potato boy knows the poems of Matsuo Bashō. Our Germanic farmgirls don't even know their Hávamál anymore. This most informative book of songs from our Northwestern-European culture was erased from memory to make room for Reve's and Borderwijk's postmodern crap. And then they call me a barbarian because I'd rather read Thea Beckman.

"No, Mr. DeSkipper, this ship won't sail. The education system's highest priority is that Joe Schmoe and Pete Petite secure the Dutch trade interests. First money, then culture. Anyone who really wants to understand something about the world will have to do so in his spare time, preferably after one's retirement because by then, you'll be economically harmless, and you can broaden your horizon while wasting your final years doing your garden chores. Then, there won't be anyone left willing to listen to you."

The teacher had been listening to Toine's reply with growing perplexity. He couldn't believe what he heard. This was blasphemy, sinful! Reve, a second-rate cookie cutter? The dazed teacher was just standing there, overthinking things, and scratching his head. The rest of the pupils, who hadn't understood one thing of what Toine had tried to say, took that as a sign to ridicule the recruit. The laughter saved the teacher's honor, including that of the deception of Dutch literature. Luckily, Toine was saved by the bell.

* * *

His head hanging low, Toine was walking through the corridor toward the coat racks. The short break had begun. He had about twenty minutes to catch some fresh air and have a snack. He was feeling down, a bit depressed. Each time he had opened his mouth in school, his words came back to hit him in the head like a boomerang. It hurt him. He had enough of being picked on. From now on, he would do better to stay silent. In the school corridors full of children, he barely recognized Chrissie, his guardian angel. She had been waiting for him in the center of the central crossing. The light of a small window shone a beam of sunlight onto her face as if she was standing in the spotlights of a stage while the masses of people seemed to be disappearing around her in the shadows. Toine didn't quite understand why and was thinking of slipping past her without being noticed.

— "Hey! Hey, Toine!" Chrissie yelled while hordes of pupils rushed by in between them.

— "Oh, hi," Toine said uninterestedly.

— "I was waiting here for you, you know," she said, friendly as always. "I just wanted to know how well you're doing?"

Toine felt an enormous weight weighing down on his psyche. The fact someone asked him how well he was doing hadn't been something he had experienced before. The general's orders, the nurse's bites, and the general disinterest coming from civilian society had long numbed his mind. Did Chrissie really want to know how well he was doing, that thin boy who didn't have any friends? He didn't trust her. He didn't feel like opening himself up to her.

— "Oh, uh, I'm O.K.," Toine said while carrying his book bag under his arm.

— "Are you sure?" she asked. "I wanted to speak to you before, but you walked right past me without noticing me. I'm your guardian angel, you know. I also spoke with the others, with Parminne, Frick, Anaxi. Just not with you yet. Is there something I can help you with? Are you sure you like this school?"

Toine froze. If he liked this school? He was only here because he had to be because his supervisors had ordered him to accomplish Operation Butterfly Stroke with flying colors. To Toine, school was just as forced and rhythmic as life at home. Here, a human being hardly had the chance to breathe, let alone have room to think and develop one's true Being.

— "I'm O.K., don't worry, I've just been very busy doing my homework lately," the recruit said, hoping to satisfy Chrissie's curiosity about him.

In all earnestness, the boy had rather wanted to put his arms around Chrissie and hug her for showing some interest in his life. While walking through the corridors just before he saw her, he had been thinking of suicide. Various ways to kill himself had passed through his mind. Should he try pulling a bag over his head or rather try to thrust a knife through his ribcage? The recruit was too numbed by the pain to cry it out.

— "I really have to go."

* * *

After the break, teacher Pete Talkalot welcomed his pupils to the classroom in the back of the building on the second floor. Outside, tall rows of trees stood around the classroom. Long branches full of leaves cast their shadow into the building. On Sundays, Talkalot worked as a priest. During the week, he earned some extra income as a teacher in social studies. In the past, this course had been called religious studies, but the government had forbidden it, despite Saint Stable Horse's Catholic nature. The ban gave the social studies course its social democratic signature. The belief in God had to make way for a belief in the state. Angry religious parents had sought revenge by banning Mr. Curls's theory of evolution.

Talkalot was a young man in his early thirties who dressed and behaved as if he was in his sixties. His gray beard and flaxy hair, combined with his messy clothing style, attributed to his sexless appeal.

— "Boy and girls," Talkalot introduced with a cold, "today, I would like to talk to you about the meaning of life. What do you find most important in particular? What matters do most people think are of general concern? Let's start with a round of questions and answers. I want to ask each of you to list some of the things you consider to become crucial at some point in your lives. What do you think you'll need in your lives in, say, twenty years from now?"

Talkalot looked around the classroom and pointed at Frick, who was close to the classroom's door.

— "Frick, we'll start with you, and we'll continue around the classroom counterclockwise."

— "I would like to have a big house when I'm older," Frick said resolutely and left it at that.

— "Alright, alright," Talkalot said. "I'll write it down on the chalkboard. And what about you, Anne?"

— "I don't care what kind of house I'll be living in when I'm older as long as I'll have a happy family of my own. I want coziness," she said.

— Anaxi followed up, "I want two cars, a sports car for my girlfriends, and a business car for work."

— "Well, what I think is important is to have many friends," Parminne said.

— Pill: "I would like to have a big home cinema entertainment set with one of those new plasma TV screens, but with a multi-disc cd-player so strong you can stand on it."

— "I also want to have a big house, preferably two," Tucque said, "with a big pool, and indoor and an outdoor pool."

Talkalot continued around the classroom while writing down the twenty-five pupils' answers on the board. On the left side of the board, he wrote down the girls' answers and on the right side, those of the boys. Toine was the last one to speak. He was visibly in doubt whether he should say anything at all. When the young recruit saw his co-pupils' responses written out on the chalkboard, he choked.

— He stammered, "Well, Mr. Talkalot... I, uh... I don't know yet what I am going to consider important in the future. But I wanted to say something about what I had just noticed. If you look closely at the responses on the board, you'll notice a difference between the boys and the girls. The girls all gave answers such as love, family, coziness, friends, tenderness. Those are all human qualities. The boys, however, all say they are chasing after material goods: cars, homes, audio installations, entertainment systems, swimming pools, bungalows.

"Do you see what's going on here? Boys and girls don't understand each other anymore. The boys think they have to impress with impressive possessions. But the girls aren't impressed by these things at all. What are they going to do when they're a thirty-five-year-old woman married to a rich man with a big house, two cars, a swimming pool and three cinema sets, one for each floor? That man will never look at her. He doesn't love her, he won't touch her. He won't smile at her when he sees her. She doesn't make him happy, but the younger neighbor woman does. Such a man is always hunting for more stuff. Then, she can forget about that coziness. She can forget about love.

"Nous sommes tous à la recherche du temps perdu. Why do men hunt for the sort of possession that has a yearly depreciation of over fifty percent? I mean women. Why do young women hunt for such men? Well, I know the answer. Men and women both want the love they can't have. Only that which remains out of reach of modern man is good enough for him. Once, we were profound beings, now we are all materialists. We look for happiness in exciting newness and reject the old, the traditional. That's why we are doomed to live unhappy lives because we've lost God. Every man knows by now that your car or your audio installation lasts much longer than you're the looks of your new love. Technology has outstripped man. Was that really our intent? Is that what we call progress?"

After hearing these words, the girls' jaws dropped to the floor in surprise.

* * *

Teacher Klein, a chain smoker wearing a black jacket and a white shirt, started Greek language class with a discussion of the book The State by the philosopher Plato. Plato had founded the Academia in Athens, the first institute for higher education in Europe. Modern academics still called themselves followers of this school.

In the book, Plato described the fate of a group of people who were being held captive deep inside a cave. They had been born there and didn't know any better. Like moles, their eyes had adjusted to life in low-intensity lighting. They were chained with their backs to a wall. Their heads had been fixed in place with clamps so they could only see the wall ahead of them. The prisoners couldn't see each other, only hear one another. Behind them, a fire was burning. In front of that fire, guards were moving figures cut from wood they held up on sticks. That way, the fire cast the faint shadows of these figures onto the wall opposite the prisoners. In this condition, the prisoners could see ghosts of wooden rabbits, wolves, or other figures. Because they didn't know any better and had never seen anything else, the prisoners had to assume these ghosts represented reality.

— "Toine," teacher Klein asked, "can you tell me something about the meaning of Plato's cave?"

Toine thought he could.

— "Oh, no, not Toine again," Anne sighed.

— Toine started speaking: "If one of the prisoners from Plato's cave escaped, he would be confronted with real reality. Blinded by the sun's light, at first, he wouldn't be able to see anything because his eyes weren't used to all that bright light. Only after a while would he begin to discern his environment. The escaped prisoner would then soon conclude that the shadows among which he had been raised had been false representations, lies the guards had made their prisoners believe in. This freeman would want nothing other than to inform his inmate brothers of the truth. But, back in the cave, he would only be met with his former inmate brothers' anger and incomprehension. The prisoners simply wouldn't believe any of the stories about the world outside their cave. They would defend their own lying reality with all their might, even if doing so endangered their own lives."

The teacher nodded in satisfaction. Toine had been paying attention during the last lecture but—and everyone could feel it coming—the boy hadn't finished his analysis yet.

— "Mr. Klein, I think one can best compare Plato's cave to our school. Outside, the sun is shining. The sun is like the fire in Plato's cave. As pupils, we are sitting here with our backs to the wall behind us. Each of us is watching the chalkboard in front of us. Standing between the sun and the chalkboard, the teacher casts his shadow onto the board. The teacher is employed by the state, just like the guards in Plato's cave. Whatever the teacher chalks on the board forms the only reality pupils may accept as real. If we don't succeed in a timely reproduction of this knowledge—regurgitate it as cattle would—we'll flunk our exams and be forced to redo the year, or we may be advised to switch schools.

"In that sense, we, pupils, are prisoners, mentally in any case. Still, we're better off than the guards. The pupil who escapes Saint Stable Horse after six years of imprisonment ultimately reconnects with real reality. Then, they'll see the light. Then, they'll be free, and they'll have the courage to bring the lies of their former teachers to light."

Teacher Klein stared at Toine with an aggravated look. Where had this kid found the nerve to accuse him of peddling state propaganda?

— "What do you mean to say by that, Toine? Do you mean to say I, as a teacher, am just brainwashing you all in the service of the state? That I'm selling you all lies and untruths because the state pays me to do so?"

— "Well," Toine continued, "I mean to say the prisoners in Plato's cave are better off than their guards. They, at least, have the possibility of escape, whereas the guards do not. As the state's employees, guards and teachers have become so dependent on the state's salary payouts, they don't even want to see the real reality anymore. Guards and teachers are the salaried prisoners of a more powerful state organ. We, pupils, at least, have the opportunity to escape from school. We can skip classes, run away from home—or graduate. Whichever way, ultimately, we shall break free. Then, each of us who have still managed to maintain something of his authentic personality will be able to behold reality as it really is.

"The horsey's teachers, on the contrary, though being the guards of school's pseudo-reality, must continue working here until their pensions to pay off the mortgages of their terraced homes. Despite their relative power relative to the prisoners, they'll never escape this place. They are the real, permanent prisoners of the state prison."

Teacher Klein had been blind, but now he could see. He exploded with anger and felt the urge to break the darn little truth speaker's neck.

— "I don't want to hear the words coming from your foul mouth in my classroom!" he yelled. "Out! Out! Report to the principal's assistant."

* * *

Toine walked over to the principal's assistant's office, in the back of the building on the ground level, next to the historical but no longer in use original main entry. Through a narrow corridor, the boy approached the door with the principal's assistant's nametag on it, Mr. Bellyshake. He knocked and waited. Bellyshake was still on his way over from his temporary function as a substitute teacher for Shrillhead, the teacher who had left without saying goodbye after hearing Toine speak. The man, fat, five foot two, was walking through the corridors with a bunch of keys dangling from his belt. He had the habit of playing his keys like an orchestra instrument in the vain hope the pupils would jump aside to evade his jingle-jangle.

On his arrival, Bellyshake and the recruit made brief eye contact. It had been Toine's first time he was ordered to report to the school's authorities. Reluctantly, he entered the small office. While the boy stood opposite the oakwood desk, the principal's assistant was sitting upright in his comfortable chair and pushed some buttons on his PDA, a device with a pointer stick used to manage calendars. To Toine's astonishment, Bellyshake had leaned over backward in his chair and fallen asleep. The recruit waited and tried to speak to Mr. Sleepyhead. After one or two minutes and three snores, the man came back to his senses. The principal's assistant scratched his red beard and looked at Toine.

— "Ah, yes," he said, "so, you're finally here, Toine. Toine, this is a school where you can't just go around telling teachers what to think."

Mr. Klein had already spoken to Bellyshake in the corridors about Toine's anti-authoritarian demeanor.

— "You understand this isn't why you are here, don't you?" Bellyshake said. "We don't educate dumbasses here. If you're really planning on wasting your time, go, and work in a factory!"

Bellyshake reprimanded the recruit but left it at that. If Toine didn't change his behavior, he would be expelled from school someday. After this sermon, the boy said ditto and left. On his way to the outdoor playground, school problems and problems at home preoccupied his thinking.

Just like the principal's assistant, the general, too, had sometimes threatened to cast Toine out because of his failing school grade average. One time, Bonifacius almost turned his words into actions. On a summer travel mission through France, recruit Arjan was tossed out of the vacation car. The raging general dropped the eight-year-old boy off by a narrow dirt road. The recalcitrant Arjan turned around, mad, walked away from the car, and acutely seemed to accept his new fate. Bonifacius hit the pedal to the metal and drove off. Through the rear window, the boys could see the dust cloud come up from the dirt road. The sand slowly erased the image of their abandoned brother. The three other brothers didn't dare to protest. They were too shocked. At such times, Toine learned even family ties didn't have much value in times of war.

Only after about a hundred feet drive, after mother Gertrude burst into tears demanding she got her son back, father Bonifacius stopped the car. She was allowed to go and get him, but Arjan didn't want to come back. Gertrude had to beg him to get him to come back to the car. The emotional damage the general caused by his actions would be too great to repair the family harmony. Emotional traumas such as this one remained hidden in a shroud of silence for as long as possible.

Gertrude would often remind her sons to get better grades for father Bonifacius would send them to away to boarding school if they didn't. But how was it supposed to be possible to get good grades in the light of Gertrude's homework agenda confusion? She jumbled up Toine's French until it sounded German. She didn't understand the biology of chemistry. The school regime didn't help either. Both in the bunker as at the horsey, the boy felt reduced to a subservient worker ant, a gear in a machine stuck in the mud in reverse. Tucque, the boy from this guarding angel group, had once told Toine he would rather be a small gear in an important whole than an independent good-for-nothing. There were many more people who thought like that, Toine had noticed. Civilians were afraid of their own smallness.

Toine rather pictured himself as a small bird that could take flying shits on the rusty machinery of society below. Why would you want to get stuck in other people's wheelwork if you could fly over mountain tops? In our time, Toine would rather live out an unimportant life—but it would be a free life. The mythical free society that was being preached at every corner of every street didn't exist in reality, Toine concluded. On TV, he sometimes heard people say The Netherlands was a prosperous nation, that life was better here, and so on. Those were the lies the state had to tell the people to keep people complacent. Imagine the people would hear the truth that life was pretty good all over the world. People, tired of Dutch tax slavery, might then suddenly leave.

In The Netherlands, a citizen had to learn to register his working hours from his birth to the grave, a rhythm inherited from the Industrial Age, but never adjusted to modernity. The only real freedom Toine knew were his daydreams.

* * *

The upcoming physics class turned out to be a piece of cake. Teacher Grumpert DeFalcon explained to his pupils something about Albert Einstein's famous formula. No one understood a thing of it, and no one asked questions about it. Grumpert put his pupils to work for this week's physics practicum. Toine didn't think it was interesting enough and began to daydream. What had this Einstein really imagined about the universe? Wouldn't the world have been better off without his formulae? Pure science was nothing more than a series of reverse interpretations of earlier observations, Toine figured.

Reading the newspapers, Toine sometimes stumbled upon the following type of news article: After many years, scientists have finally been able to explain mysterious phenomenon X. Toine thought it sounded so silly. Had these scientists been so dumb they needed thousands of years before being able to explain some age-old phenomenon? Chronic ignorance was an ailment most typical of the modern scientific industry. What use did science have if it never knew anything about anything but could only try to explain events after the fact? To explain a series of flashes above the polar circle, scientists had to invent a universe full of galaxies to support their theories.

Why should our universe have come from nothing, for no reason, at some zero-hour? What if time began in the now and that both past and present were extending outward from the present moment? In that case, our actions in the now wouldn't just influence the future but also determine the past. The present time wouldn't be the outcome of thirteen point six billion years of evolution but rather the direct expression of the free human will. Wasn't the linear concept of time the greatest lie people were preprogrammed to believe in school? Not some formula acting outside of man but the soul within one's own heart set the universe in motion, according to Toine.

How could it be, then, he thought, that scientists and their followers, over time, had been able to exert such a demanding influence on our interpretation of reality? That conspiracy had to be education itself, the boy imagined, advanced scientific education, to be exact. Classroom education, as Toine knew it, had only been invented at the turn of the nineteenth century in the United States of America. Before that time, young people did their apprenticeship with a skilled teacher to learn a trade hands-on, for example, with Rembrandt van Rijn in Amsterdam. Now, all kids went to the same school and were all taught the same one-size-fits-all contents by rote.

The educators' first move had been the eradication of individual creativity. With all of the children's noses pointing in the same direction, the educators, for the first time in history, were pulling the strings of power. And who, exactly, were they, these education-men and their answer sheets, these molders of toddlers' souls and milk collectors of children's brains employed by media and government?

They had to be the followers of the linear concept of time, Toine knew. The education-men began sending children to school at an ever earlier age. Thus began their mental indoctrination—and so the mental streamlining of the whole society into one and the same direction—as early as age two, when your mother dropped you off at kindergarten. By pushing all mothers into meaningless careers during the day, the state could intervene in the formative processes of the youngest brood. That's how you grabbed a people by the balls. That's how you made sure people stood no chance to defend themselves. Children were no longer raised to become men and women who would dare to raise their civilization to greater heights but sold their souls to the brain collectors to transform themselves into domesticated housecarls—citizens.

The experience of schooling taught one to break reality up into separate categories. You break down the universe's organic nature into sections such as biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. But where did this dividing line between the disciplines originate? Was it not a form of self-inflicted stupidity? You were also taught to think in terms of some annual progression through the school grades. You started in first grade. If you got through it, you were in second. Then, once again, you were given the privilege to rack your brains with new information on top of last year's. This sterile accumulation of knowledge, but not necessarily the comprehension thereof, determined your school career's progress. School didn't make people necessarily stupid but certainly meek. School changed ambitious wolves into obedient sheep. After elementary school, you left for high school. Then, you would get a job or an advanced education.

Advanced students—they were young people so conditioned to think progressively they had become addicted to it. After graduating from the horsey, they couldn't wait to get an advanced degree, then a postdoc, become assistant professor, and perhaps get tenure. Some people were so stuck in this annual system of pass or fail, it would dominate their entire lives. A good student collected a mountain of useless knowledge over the years. As evidence of your dimwittedness, you were awarded a diploma. As a certified dimwit, you were allowed to apply for a job. And then, Toine understood, Jack jumped out of the box. You had been so conditioned by the illusion of making progress in school that you, as a well-behaved employee, were going to keep waiting for your promotion because the only thing you had really learned to do was to keep waiting for progress until you could finally progress to the higher echelons of higher management.

Education was domestication, Toine believed. And precisely this type of people, the academic personnel, eternally waiting, patiently, for their tenure, exerted the greatest influence over our society's social machinery. They were the first to look down on things like tradition and customs. That plain-clothed plebs, the piss-water proletariat, those lazy bags of hay of the hoi polloi, seemingly stuck in the same ordinary lives without making progress, had to be "helped" with the help of super-expensive, government-funded schemes. Marxist economics in a nutshell.

Progress, according to the better-educated caste, meant to leave your past behind and to allow yourself to be renewed. That line of thinking gave birth to societal successes such as the newconomy, along with the new nine-to-five rhythm, the new car-sharing, also the multicultural society. These had all been inventions of people with too much time on their hands. Nothing proved how well you had progressed than the measure in which you had adapted to other people and, consequently, alienated yourself. They made self-abolishment their highest ideal. By opening the borders to anyone, the progressive citizen forced himself to adapt himself to ever newer batches of newcomers to the point of losing, and soon forgetting about, his own way of life. If burly natives soon appeared on your doorstep with pitchforks and burning torches demanding justice, they were reactionaries who wanted to turn time back to the fifties, or worse, the thirties, notwithstanding the nineteen-twenties.

Long before the Nazis shot the first Jew through the temple, the Russians under Lenin and Stalin had already murdered millions of them. Before Hitler had risen to power in 1933, Stalin had murdered more than ten million farmers in Russia and Ukraine in an orchestrated famine. That crime was called the Holodomor, but you never heard anyone speak about it, certainly not in the West, because Stalin and his predecessors Lenin, Trotsky, and Marx had been progressive revolutionaries. They had meant well. Hitler hadn't, of course, and that's why we know all about the Holocaust. Unlike the Nazis, Hitler's enemies didn't rely on scientific racism (a kind of sociology). No, Marx and his historical-dialectic blood brothers wanted to elevate the masses because he had been too stupid to live for himself. Lenin and Stalin wanted to make everyone equal by having successful people pay for it. They did so by banning religion and by deporting the most successful farmers from the class of Kulaks straight to the Siberian labor camps.

Entirely unexpectedly, food then ran out because the most competent farmers had died. So, the revolutionaries stole the poorest farmers' food to give it to the folks living in the big cities. The cities, obviously, were housing the largest socialist electorates. Without voters, you couldn't feed a revolution. The poor farmers were of no interest to the revolutionaries because they, like the more successful Kulak castes, still dreamed of an independent life without government interference. They dreamed of freedom, so, seen through the eyes of the revolution, they were reactionaries. These peasants were ordered to surrender every single granule of grain to the urban proletariat. Those who hid a granule of grain risked death. Some then decided to eat their own children but to no avail. No one, absolutely no one, survived this harvest of sorrow.

If Hitler hadn't been there between 1942 and 1945 to fight the twenty-five million Russian soldiers, Stalin, the year after that, would have celebrated the Socialist International from Moscow to London. He would have wrapped up the entire European peasant population in a blanket of hunger. All of Europe would have been absorbed by the thousand-year Soviet Empire. All Western Europeans would be speaking Russian today, and all of Western-European civilization would have gone under, erased from history, and forgotten. Would the day ever come we could praise the Germans for their women's strength, who, after the war, absorbed five million Russian rapists? Who, with their sacrifice, prevented the Russians from thrusting themselves through Europa all the way to Gibraltar?

No, that day was never going to come.

* * *

Toine joined the day's final class, mathematics. He didn't like math. According to him, the world couldn't be captured in formulae. This false worldview, the belief the world was a soulless mechanism people were able to summarize in formulae, graphs, and tables, clashed with Toine's inner conflict with the school's and the bunker's regime. Time was cyclical, he thought, not linear. A cell in a human body that linearly reproduced itself was a cancerous cell. The egg-heads looking for a formula-of-everything seemed to be looking for the soulless god of a universe with metastatic cancers.

The universe, if it indeed existed and wasn't science's own psychological imagination, had to be organic, not mechanical. Who, exactly, had decided our universe rested on fixed constants? That couldn't be right. Imagine you created two universes, one with fixed constants from which it wasn't allowed to deviate, and another without constants but with organic flexibility. Which of the two would be the most stable universe? The unit with fixed constants would fall apart at the slightest disturbance. The simple fact our universe did exist, therefore, pointed in the direction of a changing universe without constants. Our universe could take a beating, a heavy beating even, and still manage to maintain the appearance of a stable reality. The apparent physical constancy of our universe had to have been induced by organic forces.

Once again, Toine concluded science was off the mark. There was no formula-of-everything because it wasn't needed. He knew science could only formulate abstract formulae in retrospect to describe a universe that was already there. For example, the speed of light was supposed to be constant. But did it turn out to be so? No two scientists that ever tried to measure the speed of light ever found the same value. The values found fluctuated from high to low throughout the centuries. In the end, sometime during the twentieth century, a scientific organization determined the value for the speed of light had to be a constant.

If the speed of light hadn't been a constant, nothing would remain true about Einstein's famous formula that E equaled mc squared, E=mc2. The 'c' represented the constant of the speed of light, but if it were variable, changing, then either the universe's total mass or its total energy, or both, had to be constantly fluctuating—a living universe. Were mathematics, physics, and other branches of mechanistic science perhaps an expression of the repressed religious sensation of a cult of accountants? Were these bookkeepers fooling all of mankind?

Two thousand years ago, Philo of Alexandria had written that his god had to be an unchanging, eternally constant god-mind of sorts. He worshiped the constant and the rational, things he attached greater value to than the emotional and the unexpected. His thinking influenced, without a doubt, Western science. Western thinking built on the assumption there had to be such a thing as an eternal constant—Einstein's cosmological constant and Philo's anti-god. Seen in this light, modern scientists were nothing other than the autistic acolytes of a religion that tried to swap the belief in God for a belief in a mathematical formula. Nice try, jokers, Toine thought.

Supposedly, God didn't exist, but, in His place, a holy formula-of-everything now had to explain all motion in the universe. Yeah, right! Toine lost his faith in physics. He felt robbed. Were children like him perhaps being brainwashed to believe in the false god of science?

In the back of the mathematics classroom was a girl, Steffi. Before them was a row of five pupils, usually six, but today the sixth spot was empty. Steffi asked the boy in front of her why the girl next to him wasn't in school today. Margret, she was called, had committed suicide, the boy knew. That's all he knew about it. No one knew why she had done it. She had hanged herself, apparently. Toine remembered the girl well. She had always been the quiet type, withdrawn. Margret had had dark-red hair and an alternative style of clothing. He had never spoken to her. No one had ever spoken to the girl when she was still alive. Toine felt guilty. Maybe a conversation would have made a difference.

Steffi and the boy in front of her engaged in a heated debate about the latest brand of pants the hipper kids were wearing. Margret had been forgotten already. The math teacher put his pupils to work with new homework assignments. At the end of this long day, he was feeling just as tired as the pupils. It turned out the teacher, Bob Vanderwall, despite his background in mathematics, was an exquisite judge of human character. He could sense which children in his classroom were dreaming about with their heads full of trouble. While the rest of the class was busy solving math problems, he asked Toine to take a seat next to his desk. Toine didn't quite understand why. He knew he was bad at math but, in all honesty, the boy couldn't care less. Teacher Bob had already sensed that. His angle hadn't been to lecture Toine on his learning abilities but to have a friendly conversation.

— "Good afternoon, Toine," teacher Bob said. "What are your hobbies? If I may ask?"

Toine didn't like to tell people about himself. Why was this teacher all of a sudden so interested in him personally? Still, he tried to give his best answer:

— "I... I want to be a writer when I grow up," the boy said.

— "Alright. May I ask what kind of topics you would like to write about? Do you have a book or something else in mind?"

— "Well... I'm... I'm working on a story about a war," Toine almost whispered in order not to disturb his fellow pupils, "a story about a soldier who has come into conflict with his own general... But that general thinks the soldier is an enemy combatant. The soldier tries to explain to his high command, he's not the enemy, but, no matter what he says, the general doesn't believe him."

Toine's lower lip was trembling. He swiftly rubbed away a tear coming down his left eye. With great discipline, he managed to control himself and keep a straight face. Teacher Bob had seen it nonetheless.

— "That sounds like an exciting story. I think that's pretty awesome," Bob said, "I mean, the fact you already know what you want to be when you grow up. I'm also glad you took this course."

Bob hesitated to say more.

— "Toine," he continued, "a soldier doesn't always have to follow orders. If the highest command has turned corrupt, a soldier has the right to desert. Say, did you familiarize yourself with Ernst Jünger's works? His best is called The Forest Passage. I think it'll inspire you. Here, I'll give you my copy. You can bring it back when you've finished reading it."

Toine took the book and promised to read it. Teacher Bob and the boy spoke a little while longer. When the bell rang, he walked back to the coat racks, then to his bike, and biked back across the footbridge, home. At the first red traffic light, a car stopped next to him. The driver opened his window. It was teacher Curls from biology class.

— "You can do it, Toine! I know you can do it. Just do your homework and fight yourself through that exam. Believe in yourself!"

Toine smiled and thanked Mr. Curls. The traffic light turned green. The road was clear.

* * *

Over the past few months, Bonifacius had spent his days sitting on the couch in front of the TV like a worthless bag of hay. He had mentally dulled himself, closed himself off to the daily shenanigans surrounding raising his four sons. Mother Gertrude was doing the household all by herself. She broke herself working nightshifts to pay for the boys' nutrition and school books. At some point, Gertrude had had enough of it. She began thinking of filing for divorce, not in a whim as she had done on the highway before, but this time, after long nights of lonely deliberation. After several more weeks full of terrifying fights extending deep into the night, the communication between the lord of the house and his slavish support went via pieces of paper. Early in the evening, the nurse silently placed her note on the dining table. Bonifacius would dine by himself without the boys who, at an earlier time, had dined with Gertrude without their dad.

Bonifacius, left out, and Gertrude, ignored, avoided each other as much as possible. They developed a skill not to have to see or speak to one another. The real estate general scribbled his answers on Gertrude's notes. One evening, she quietly left him a note right under his nose while he was munging down a mountain of rice and two meatballs. She didn't make eye contact and, with a submissive pose, walked past him, pretending he wasn't there. Bonifacius could take a lot, but this went too far. Two people who ignore each other right in front of each other irritate each other to the max. Shortly after that, he stormed out of the home. He had left another note with writing Gertrude didn't want to read to the boys. On the note's backside, torn from a newspaper, was a phone number for a dating service. Mother Gertrude didn't understand the connection. She was too dazed. With her four boys, she went looking for her man, headlong.

They found Bonifacius sitting on a bench in a deserted corner of the neighborhood. It was the first time in their lives the boys had seen the otherwise so decisive Bonifacius in such a condition. He mumbled something incomprehensible. After this emotional confrontation, Bonifacius and Gertrude began speaking to each other again with words. It didn't take long before both reverted back to their old ways. In the morning, before Toine biked to school, his mother sometimes spoke to him about the family's financial situation. She could put the home, which had been in her name, up for sale to buy back a smaller place. Then she could file for divorce.

It disturbed Toine that Gertrude dumped her problems onto his shoulders. He had to focus on his examination week. She didn't let go of him. The topic of divorce regularly resurfaced, and Toine had to play his mother's sounding board. Once in a while, she would cry her heart out about her desire for a divorce. The boy wanted nothing to do with it. He stood up for himself. Why didn't she talk to the neighborhood women about it? Why didn't she seek a professional counselor? Catholic shame prevented mom from seeking help.

A couple of weeks later, Gertrude had thought of a solution. She had gone to the family physician, doctor Vanderpool. Vanderpool was the family doctor the boys and their family had known since they were toddlers. Gertrude found a confidante in him. After several attempts, she managed to convince the man to pay her husband a home visit. Supposedly, he had been ill. Vanderpool arrived late in the evening in his small car and parked in front of the Homemaker family's home. Bonifacius hadn't planned for this visit. Wearing nothing but his big white underpants, he was staring at the TV with a beer in his hand. Father Bonifacius climbed out of the couch, clumsily, to speak to Vanderpool.

— "Yes, hello, hello," Bonifacius said. "What can I do for you?"

Family doctor Vanderpool had come to investigate the father assuming he had been the one to ask for help. He hadn't. Gertrude had lured the doctor in with a pretext of ails and ailments her man supposedly suffered from. She had liked to see father put more energy in their mutual nurturing of their brood. Bonifacius had lost touch with himself, she thought. He spent his days in front of the TV as if the world just had to pass him by. Bonifacius preferred to fast-forward the tape of his life to free himself of his household responsibilities. The faster the boys would grow up, the better. Once they had finally moved out, he would have gotten rid of these pests.

The family doctor, an intelligent man, only needed a few seconds to realize what was going on in the House of Foxes. Unmotivated father figures who dumped their kids with their wife or sister so they could continue to be out of touch with themselves. He suffered from R.A.B., Vanderpool concluded; responsibility-avoidant-behavior. There was no cure for this condition, medically speaking. The doctor wrapped up a friendly conversation with Bonifacius and came up with an excuse to leave the premises as quickly as possible.

Neither Gertrude nor the doctor had dared venture into the topic of divorce—the thing the visit had been really about. In the end, it was Toine who would give away his mother's secret. A week or two after the physician's departure, Bonifacius once again burst into angry shouting. He hurt Gertrude so much with his yelling, she started crying. The evening was still young, and Toine had grown sick of it all.

— "Dad," Toine said, "why won't you finally stop shouting at people all of the time? You're hurting everyone around you!"

— "Mind your own business!" father Bonifacius yelled back.

— "I'm the oldest son here," Toine continued, "Chris, Leo, and Arjan's brother, the strongest of the four. And now I would like to know why you always yell at us like that?"

— "I am real-estate general Bonifacius, and I seldom lie about my job," father said, who wasn't a general.

— "General? Why would you have to lie about your job if you don't have any issues with anyone?" Toine said.

— "I have an issue with the boy in the kitchen who likes to throw away pieces of fried chicken!"

— Toine became frustrated: "I, my little brothers, and mom aren't your enemy! Did you know mom wanted to file for a divorce? Doctor Vanderpool came over a few weeks ago to see if he could be of any help."

Bonifacius looked surprised. He knew it was true, but he wasn't prepared to acknowledge the truth. Gertrude, who had listened in on the confrontation, jumped to her feet.

— "That's not true, Toine! I don't want to have a divorce at all."

She was mad, but she was lying. Countless times had she bothered Toine with her wish to file for divorce. In Bonifacius's presence, she didn't dare admit it. A long exchange of words followed during which Gertrude sided with her husband. Together, they verbally attacked their eldest son. That way, Gertrude could dump her own feelings of anger and frustrations on Toine with Bonifacius's support.

* * *

On a warm day, a Wednesday afternoon free from school, Gertrude and the four brothers went for a walk in a nearby forest. They got into the car, drove for half an hour, and parked near a sand drift. Here, she could let the boys blow off steam. The sun was shining, but the trees offered coolness in the shade. The silence returned peace to the family. The boys loved running around without having to pay attention to the neighbors. They loved karate-kicking dead branches off the pine trees.

Toine noticed mother Gertrude wasn't doing well. She was bored, looked withdrawn, didn't say anything, and silently set the pace. Like Mother Goose, Gertrude and her sons continued on along a forest trail. Nearing a pine forest, she decided to dive into the darkness of the woods. The recruits followed her in a straight line without saying anything anymore. Toine pretended he had to tie his shoelaces. He fell back to the back of the line. It gave him an overview of the geese family. Something was wrong. Mother had threatened to harm the boys often enough at home, holding her thumb on the potato peeler's blade and pointing its sharp tip at them. Then she made stabbing gestures to keep the boys out of her kitchen.

What was she up to now? The family kept getting lost further into the pine forest. Toine picked up a wooden branch, a bit lighter and a bit more manageable than a baseball bat. If Gertrude planned to hurt his younger brothers, the boy was ready to defend them against their mother. Nothing happened. They reached the edge of the forest where a narrow road ran from east to west. Gertrude wanted to turn left, west. Toine pointed out the car was parked in the east. He hadn't lost his sense of direction.

— "We have to turn right here, mom. We have to turn right, I swear. That's where the car is," Toine said with a pressure in his voice meant to convince Gertrude.

The younger recruits didn't believe Toine's advice and wanted to go west with Gertrude. She listened, turned right, and Toine's younger brothers followed suit, sulking. Once back in the car, the mother drove back home. In front of a traffic light, a long queue of cars was waiting for it to turn green. Behind the last car lay a double railroad track. Gertrude stopped the vehicle in front of the last one in the queue. The family car was now standing right on the tracks. She hadn't been paying attention. The track signal sounded. Perhaps she wanted to put the car in reverse, to get off the rails, but behind her, other vehicles had queued up already, waiting for the traffic light further ahead. The railroad barriers came down behind the car. Toine wasn't worried yet. Mom would know what to do, right? Just move the car off the tracks. But she did nothing. Toine, in the passenger seat in the front of the car, looked at Gertrude. She was just sitting there with both her hands on the steering wheel but with her head hanging low. She wasn't paying attention to the traffic in front of them or behind them.

— "Mom! There's a train coming in! We have to get off the tracks!" Toine said.

— "I know," Gertrude muttered.

Toine didn't trust her. If Gertrude wouldn't move the car off the tracks, he had to save his younger brothers himself. They were stuck in this three-door car. To get them out of the car, he would need to get out first and shove his passenger seat forward.

— "Guys, we have to get out of the car, there's a train coming," Toine said while moving his hand to his side to reach the seat belt lock.

Right at that moment, the traffic in front of them began moving. The traffic light had turned green.

— "Pedal it, mom!"

She listened to him and hit the gas pedal. A train flashed by right behind them. It had been a close encounter. Back home, she wouldn't tell Bonifacius anything about the incident.

* * *

To improve things at home, father Bonifacius and mother Gertrude decided to take their brood out to dinner. Village restaurant The Acropolis was on the menu. They dressed up in civilian evening clothing and prepared for departure. Father was hungry. Toine was on the passenger bench in the back of the car, squeezed in between his brothers. His surprise was great when the minivan stopped to park in the middle of a random neighborhood. There wasn't a restaurant to be seen around here.

— "Boys," father explained, "tonight, we're not going to a restaurant. We're here to take Toine to a psychologist."

Toine was stunned. He didn't say anything but felt himself an extraordinarily miserable creature about to drown in shame. What had he done wrong to deserve this betrayal? The boy couldn't make sense of it. Father had only ever spoken to Toine about his own personal past. Mother only talked to him about the birds and the bees and her wish to file for divorce. Gertrude's vocabulary, moreover, hardly sufficed to dish out the necessary commands she shot at her sons with her nasal voice: "Sit! Go to school! Do your homework! Get out of my kitchen! Go to bed! Don't even think about it!" He wasn't a dog. He would have appreciated a meaningful conversation instead of this absurd surprise. Raised in verbal one-way traffic, Toine had no way else to go.

The psychologist's hideout had been fittingly camouflaged as an ordinary, terraced house. Aside from the name tag by the doorbell, no one could have known. While the other recruits were mumbling something amongst each other, Toine let his head hang low. He slumped after this pack of wolves, wondering whether he had, perhaps, been swapped for the wrong baby shortly after birth. Was this even allowed, to declare one's child insane? The Russians under Stalin didn't even do that. Inside, a narrow, white-filled wall led to the grey living room that served as a consultation office. The curtains to the backyard had been shut. The six of them seated themselves in a circle underneath the bright white lights for a group session, led by the psychologist, Mrs. Droove. She decided to have each member of the family have his say. Toine was allowed to respond last.

— "I would like to allow everyone to tell me what you think is wrong with Toine," the woman said.

Of course, she had forgotten to speak to Toine privately first. He could have developed some trust with her and told her something about the situation at home, about mother Gertrude's suicide attempts, for example, or about her violent acts against the boys. He could have told Droove something about father's alcoholism, his yelling, and the miserable fights up to and including the French highways. Now, he was given a chance to defend himself against established facts before a jury of five, three of whom were just as baffled as he was, sitting on their stools. Father began. He had an itch near his crotch and had to scratch his belly flap before he managed to say anything.

— "Pardon me, pardon me," the super-sized baby hummed. "Uhm, yeah, well, I, eh, well we, eh think Toine, uh," father Bonifacius stammered.

Nothing that made any sense came from his mouth. He couldn't cough up a reason why Toine had to be here with a psychologist. He had led his son here under the false pretense of a family restaurant dinner, but he couldn't explain to the psychologist what exactly his issues with his son were. Gertrude picked up the cue and broke the silence.

— "Well, we're here because our son Toine isn't doing well in school. He sometimes doesn't do his homework. And he twice skipped gym class!"

— The psychologist opened her eyes wide and asked, "Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. And what exactly is the issue with Toine, then?"

Now, the real-estate general remembered what he had wanted to say:

— "Toine won't do what we tell him to do. He won't listen to us. And once, he threw away a piece of fried chicken in a trash bin, and when we talk to him about it, he denies everything. Do you know how expensive that is, a piece of fried chicken?"

— Gertrude added, "Yeah, and he also won't clean his room on time. And when I bring him a cup of tea while he's doing his homework, he'll sometimes refuse to drink it."

The psychologist was an attentive listener. She, too, was the parent of a teenage son. It was all so recognizable to her, she said. Toine was suffering from chronic disobedience, a behavioral condition that affected one in three teenagers. There was no other way to cure it than through costly therapy. She continued the group session with Chris, Leo, and Arjan, who really couldn't say much about what was supposed to be wrong with Toine. To avoid making themselves targets of this psychological disqualification, they felt obliged to parrot what father and mother had said. It saved them from this Soviet inquisition.

Toine felt he was made an unperson. The shame he felt prevented him from seeing his family eye to eye. He let his head hang low while feelings of inferiority turned into anger. Toine gritted his teeth, and with clenched fists, his face turned red like that of a man capable of committing murder. Had father and mother only brought their son here to complain he wouldn't clean his room on time? He had so often pleaded to expand his responsibilities. He decided to keep quiet.

The psychologist concluded the round of accusations. She found Toine had anger management problems. She had seen it in his face. It was really the boy's own fault. He had probably been born that way, she explained to his parents.

— "Certainly, indeed," father said. "When he was born, he was crying and kicking. See, it's never been our fault."

— Gertrude confirmed, "Indeed, that's right. I'm sure of it."

Droove expressed her sympathy to the parents who, according to her, had always done their best to take care of such an angry child like Toine. She advised father and mother to schedule at least two more sessions with Toine, one for a personality test and another for a concluding session. Near the door, she handed over the session's invoice. Two-hundred guilders for thirty minutes of work. Bonifacius said he would gladly pay for this indulgence.

* * *

One week later, Toine arrived at the psychologist, on his free Wednesday afternoon, under orders and right on time. This time, he had biked there on his own, straight from school, with Gertrude's permission to cross that dangerous inner-city crossing. Mrs. Droove opened the door. She led the boy to the examination room. Another woman was waiting for him there, Mrs. Marbles. Toine reluctantly seated himself behind the examination table. He offered a friendly smile in an attempt to hide the fact he wasn't here for fun. Mrs. Marbles explained the recruit he had to walk through three sessions of tests, an IQ test, a puzzle, and an oral examination. The boy started with the IQ test. To Mrs. Marbles, this was her idea of a fun afternoon, but the boy didn't like puzzling things together, especially not as a form of punishment.

The examiner kept track of time while Toine got to work on the standardized test problems. He folded the booklet open and noticed six boxes of three by three squares on each page with various symbols in each square. It was a multiple-choice test. Each time, Toine had to choose from four possible answers to find the missing symbol. There were exactly one hundred of such assignments that became more difficult as you went along—the linear worldview captured in a booklet weighing no more than a few-hundred gram. This specific test would determine his IQ value, but it wouldn't be able to measure an IQ beyond one-hundred-and-thirty. This sufficed to most participants. In case the boy, against his parents' expectations, performed exceptionally well on the test, he could take a follow-up test to determine the exact value of his intelligence quotient.

The boy took it easy and scribbled down one after the other answer. Right after that, Mrs. Marbles checked his answers. She concluded Toine had made precisely one mistake. He had given the wrong solution for the second-to-last assignment. This gave him a 99% success rate, far above the average for boys of his age. This test result didn't surprise Toine. He had always known he was smart, but being smart without power was a useless condition when surrounded by dumbasses. It was much more pleasant to be stupid and powerful than bright and powerless. Now, at least, it had been put in writing.

The examiner noted in her report: The boy is intelligent but unmotivated. Shortly thereafter, the woman and the boy paused to drink a cup of burning hot tea. Nevertheless, the boy took several big sips.

— "Is your throat made of lead?" the woman asked?

— "Oh, I know what you mean," Toine said.

— "Many of my guests don't understand that. But you do, don't you? My own son isn't brilliant, but he's highly motivated. Motivation is measured on a scale of minus two to plus two. My son is a plus-two. You're just a minus-one," Mrs. Marbles explained.

Well, the boy thought, I guess I must be unmotivated. Now the puzzle test started. On the table in front of Toine, there were various pieces of the puzzle. They had been sawn from wood. Together, they formed some kind of whole. It looked like a Chinese tangram puzzle but different. He started, unmotivated as he was, to put the pieces together. He noticed something. The edges of some of the pieces had been filed off neatly, but some other parts hadn't. The boy deduced that the filed-off sides had to represent the shape's outer edge. With this discovery, he quickly solved the complex puzzle. Toine cheated.

It didn't look like much. Under his nose lay a shape of what looked like a strange human hand with five malformed fingers pointing up. Toine was staring ahead a bit and looked at Mrs. Marbles to see if she would give him more instructions.

— "Oh!" Toine exclaimed.

Now he turned the whole around one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.

— "It's an elephant," he said.

He had mistaken its trunk and paws, seen upside-down, for strange fingers. The examiner concluded the test and noted in her report: The boy solved the puzzle in one go but upside-down to fool the examiner. This boy's intelligence makes him arrogant. He enjoys fooling other people.

Now the oral test started. Mrs. Marbles rattled off a shopping list of questions and made notes of Toine's answers. She began with several open questions.

— "Why do you think your father and mother sent you to a psychologist?" she asked.

Toine wanted to respond; he thought they were nuts.

— "I don't know," he said, shy.

— "Alright, then let's start with the questionnaire. First, I would like to ask you the following. After you've been to the bathroom for number two, do you sometimes take a look at your poop before flushing?"

Oh gosh, Toine thought. He was staring at Mrs. Marbles with his eyes wide open. What kind of questions were these?

— "Uhm, I don't really know. I can't remember if I ever do or don't do that," Toine said.

Toine hesitated. Perhaps it was a trick question meant to prove something was wrong with him. What would healthy kids do after pooping? Did they look at it, or didn't they? He remembered the Foxhole didn't even have such a toilet that let you inspect your dung but instead had a big water bowl that flushed your bowel movements away instantly.

— He continued, "Well, it happens. Sometimes I may see a turd floating in the water when I turn around to flush the result. I don't really think about it consciously. I don't think it's healthy."

The examiner appeared disappointed with this response. Her son did inspect his poop. She continued.

— "Right. Okay. Next question. Have you ever had thoughts of suicide?"

— Toine responded quickly: "No."

— "Are you sure? You responded very quickly," she said.

Of course, Mrs. Marbles had noticed. Toine had sometimes thought of suicide but didn't want to tell anybody, certainly not Mrs. Marbles.

— "I'm sure," he said.

The conversation continued for a while with all sorts of questions that sometimes made sense, sometimes didn't. At the end of the ride, Mrs. Marbles said she would draft an elaborate report and share it with Toine's parents. Toine would get the results from his parents. They shook hands, and Toine left.

* * *

A week or two later, the psychology test results came in. Gertrude answered the phone to speak to the psychologist. She explained Toine had made one error in the test that couldn't be used to measure above a certain predetermined level. Mother Gertrude didn't understand what was being said. Perhaps it had been due to the psychologist's choice of words, but mother concluded her son had made only one error in the test for the highest possible intelligence of all time. The psychologist had said the boy's IQ had been too high to measure using the test available to them. Still, Gertrude had understood the opposite, namely that her IQ supposedly had been "unmeasurably high." She believed to have given birth to an Einstein. She couldn't resist informing Toine's teachers, the neighbors, parents of his play buddies, and family of this unique world news.

The news Toine was infinitely gifted didn't sit well with everyone. The boy didn't know. He didn't know Gertrude had made phone calls halfway around the globe. It had happened behind his back. Outside, the rumor mill got going. At school, the chemistry teacher and his assistant began whispering to each other in front of Toine's nose. They wondered why such a smart kid didn't understand anything about the chemistry experiments? The Dutch language teacher remarked such an intelligent child might have to do his homework once in a while. People generally responded with envy, incomprehension, disbelief, and jealousy. The boy couldn't understand this adverse treatment, certainly not by people who had previously treated him neutrally.

Classmates who formerly had spoken to Toine once in a while now turned their backs to him. If he was so smart, he undoubtedly felt too good for them. A simple puzzle doesn't tell you much about someone's outlook in life. At most, it tells you how well you can tackle a clear problem case. This might come in handy if you plan to apply for a job in a corporate office environment where you have to be able to switch between the many customers and the annoying problems the company dishes you out. Without particular giftedness, a company advisor might never be able to understand the most stupid customers' requests.

Mom, dad, and Toine arrived at Mrs. Droove a while later for their final session. After a short introduction, she directed the boy into a broom cabinet. In her terraced home, she didn't have enough room for a professional waiting room. Toine was sitting on a stool among softeners and soaps. The boy wasn't supposed to listen in on the conversation, but the broom cabinet's soundproofing left a lot to be desired. He could hear the dialogue between the psychologist and his mom and dad clearly. He could hear, loud and clear, how Bonifacius again disparaged him for his low school grade average. Gertrude agreed Toine's behavior had only worsened since the first two sessions.

Sitting on the stool in the broom cabinet, Toine imagined his mom and dad ought to have their own heads examined. Behind closed doors, at home, they behaved as guardians of four prisoners in their semi-detached home turned French penal colony. Toine wasn't Papillon. Civilian children were allowed to take some rest after school and were allowed to do their homework before going to bed rather than immediately. They maintained their own homework agendas, learned a lot about carrying responsibility for their own lives. Toine felt he was a marionette, two people's manikin who played mom and dad to the outside world. They had imposed Operation Butterfly Stroke on him. The boy had never wanted to go to Saint Stable Horse. He felt he was too creative for scientific education. He didn't want to become a scientist. He wanted to become a writer or even an explorer.

* * *

Back home, a lightbulb in the living room burst. Father Bonifacius had developed a handiness in lamp fixing. He switched off the switch, screwed the bulb from the lampshade, screwed in a new bulb, and expected illumination. It didn't come. Perhaps a fuse had burned out. He walked back to the fuse box behind Gertrude's homework checkpoint to see. Nothing. The fuses were in good condition. He fetched his toolbox from the garage. It contained screwdrivers specially designed for working with electronics. These tools had been coated with a layer of plastic. They also had a sort of button on the back end so you could push your thumb on it to see if electrical power was running through a wire. It would light up a small bulb inside the screwdriver.

Bonifacius took a stool and put it underneath the ceiling lamp to have a better look at it. He once more assured himself of the fact he had switched off the switch. To prevent having to climb on and off his stool, he asked Gertrude to wait by the switch. Only on his command was she allowed to switch the switch on or off. Bonifacius removed the lampshade to reach the wiring behind it. Perhaps something had burned out there. The new bulb was fine. He tested it. Using his electrical screwdriver, he carefully tested wire by wire to see if an electrical current was running through one of them. The switch was off, so it should be safe. With his fingers, he fidgeted around with the wires. Precisely at that moment, Gertrude, without her man having commanded anything, turned on the electricity. It startled Bonifacius.

— "Gertrude, what are you doing? You only had to turn on the switch when I told you to do so. Can't you see I'm working with the wiring here!" he said. "Jesus, Gertrude? Did you try to electrocute me?"

— "Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean. I thought you wanted me to turn on the switch," Gertrude mumbled, who turned the switch back off. "Should it be on or off now? It's off now."

— "Jesus, Gertrude, this is really dangerous," said Bonifacius, who was clumsily balancing on the stool handling his big belly.

Bonifacius got back down and looked around in despair. He didn't quite know what to say anymore. Gertrude had had her own experiences with electrical systems. Last summer, during a renovation of the twins' room, she had meant to remove the old wallpaper. Bits and pieces had gotten stuck behind the outlet that had been mounted over it afterward. She held her thumb on the spatula's blade while trying to remove the scraps. The four boys happened to be watching her when it happened. They had been helping her out, pulling the wallpaper off the walls. The nurse was blown backward with a loud "ouch." For a while, she just sat there on her bottom, staring ahead. She was alright but had received a big jolt of electricity.

* * *

One Saturday afternoon, the family was on the couch in front of the TV. Gertrude joined, leaning against the three-seater's handrail with her hip. She had bad news. She had just returned from a visit to the hospital. The lady of the house was suffering from malign lymphoid cancer, the doctors had told her. While she was telling her story, she kept giggling clumsily. This was a matter of life and death, but it felt strange to her to speak to her family about her feelings. The boys were listening in shock. Radiation therapy was needed. Her chances of survival were around sixty percent, forty percent chance of passing away, and one hundred percent chance of excruciating suffering during a multi-day operation.

The months that followed the bad news were dominated by the dark turn of fate in the Homemaker family's lives. Gertrude began keeping a household notebook in which she wrote down how laundry had to be done, how the toilets had to be cleaned, at what time the children had to go to school, and so on. It was meant for Bonifacius in the case he would have to stay behind with the kids. Toine discovered the notebook, and it startled him. Gertrude had promised the boys she would survive cancer, but in reality, she wasn't so sure of it.

The waiting list for her first radiation therapy session was short. The largest hospital in The Netherlands was just one town away. It opened its doors early for the nurse. Gertrude arrived on the day of her operation. The day after, Toine, Chris, the twins, and Bonifacius visited their mother and wife. Mom was still dazed. Somewhere on the fifth floor, she was lying in a single-person observation facility, super deluxe, especially in those days. One of the old neighbors, old Mr. Cockel and his senior wife, also came over to pay a visit, the only neighbors the Homemaker family had managed to maintain contact with. Gertrude hadn't been cured yet. The first operation had determined more metastases throughout the left side of her body. Father Bonifacius processed the possibility his wife might decease in his own typical manner.

— "Well, if you won't be here anymore soon, at least it'll be quiet in the evenings. Then I'll finally be able to watch my favorite TV shows without further interruptions," Bonifacius said for all to hear. He processed the possible passing-away of his wife by dismissing her.

Gertrude was too tired to put up a fight with Bonifacius. The Cockel neighbors were in shock. The boys had long become too desensitized by such harsh words to respond to them, except for Toine. He wondered whether cancer could have been the result of the frustrating relationship between his parents. Perhaps it had been due to the many long nightshifts and the chronic sleep depravity.

— "Well, Gertrude, I hope you'll get better soon. How long do you still have to stay in the hospital?" Mrs. Cockel asked who, just like her husband, donned gray-white hair and echoed a friendly, nineteen-fifties voice that sounded like those from old Dutch Polygoon-newsreels.

— "Thank you," Gertrude said. "I still have to stay here for about a week so they can observe my progress, then they'll let me go home."

Mr. Cockel had fought in the war at the battle for Arnhem. After the war, he had become a successful real estate agent. The Cockels were living in the house with a thatched roof in a neighborhood full of villas next to the Homemaker family's area. Toine often kicked a ball into their garden. They didn't like that.

Bonifacius, alone at home without his wife, started calling up his old girlfriends for the fun of it. While Toine was preparing for his examination week, Bonifacius must have thought to himself that, in case his wife wouldn't make it, he should go looking for a new wife. One by one, they came over to the Foxhole. Wookie was the one Cupid shot his arrows of love at. Wookie had lost her own husband to cancer the year before. She didn't look bad for a forty-year-old woman.

While Wookie and Bonifacius rekindled their forgotten love for one another, Gertrude underwent her second operation. Doctors determined the metastases had spread to the point they were so severe they had to be removed through a harrowing procedure, and soon. It came down to this: the entire lymphoid system in Gertrude's body had to be torn out of her, from head to toe. Surgeons made an incision in Gertrude's left armpit and, from there, started to pull the lymphoid system out of her body. Because this system sticks to one's nerve paths, the process was going to be excruciatingly painful. Sedation or narcosis couldn't help because the doctors needed Gertrude's conscious feedback to bring the operation to a successful end. Afterward, she would recount that this hour-long operation had felt as if she had been burned alive.

A week later, Gertrude was finally allowed to go home. Bonifacius had been thinking about her. He brought her a welcome home gift from the florist. Three branches of the Heliconia-flower he had been acquainted with in Suriname. He offered Gertrude the first one, who, initially, was very happy with it until she discovered the second one was intended for Wookie and a third for Christel. Bonifacius had intended to purchase the flowers for Wookie and Christel. He only reminded himself at the very last moment he should buy one for his wife as well—at 12.95 guilders, nota bene, what a waste of money. It saddened Gertrude that, after all the pain she had suffered, she had to return home to such an ungrateful husband. He hadn't counted on her recovery.

It wouldn't take long before Wookie paid a visit to introduce herself to Gertrude. Those were awkward moments. During her first visit, Bonifacius pretended as if he wanted to offer the woman a tour through his house, even though she had been here many times before. Gertrude was suspicious and went to have a look upstairs. She found the turtledoves in the attic, shuffle-dancing, and kissing to slow dancing music in the background that Bonifacius had selected earlier that day. Gertrude, hardly recovered from her cancer, yelled it out. She stormed back down the staircases, stomping her feet down each step. That evening, the roles reversed for the first time. Not Gertrude, but Bonifacius was now staring at the floor while his wife blasted angry words at him.

Bonifacius promised to better himself. In reality, he got better at hiding his mistress. In the days the first mobile phones entered the consumer market, Gertrude bought one for her husband. According to the TV commercial, housewives should buy one to keep an eye on their husbands, but those guys simply began using the device to text their mistresses instead. Likewise, Bonifacius, who, because of his claustrophobia, wouldn't lock the door to the bathroom. He would be sitting on the toilet seat with his pants around his ankles, texting Wookie or Christel when, unexpectedly, Gertrude opened the door because she needed to go to the bathroom herself. Bonifacius was unteachable. He kept repeating the same trick over and over. It was easy for her to catch him.

From this day on, the nuclear relationship between Gertrude and Bonifacius received a half-life of six weeks. Every six weeks, the relationship's quality halved. Over the next two years, she would succumb to two more bouts of cancer, this time breast cancer. Even though this time it was benign, she lost both her breasts to amputations. Nevertheless, she kept doing the household chores to support her boys.

Bonifacius's texts to his girlfriends were accompanied by long letters. Wookie would unabashedly send perfumed letters. She didn't care that she was destroying a family of six. It taught Toine an essential lesson about women. Women are ruthless, prepared to waltz over each other's dead bodies to ensnare a rich man. Gertrude intercepted one of the letters, opened it, and was angered by it. Bonifacius and Wookie had booked a trip to Surinam together to bring back childhood memories.

Toine had had enough. What was he supposed to do? He couldn't save the relationship between his father and his mother. He was just a child. This wasn't his responsibility. At the same time, he couldn't escape the day-to-day terrors. Under these circumstances, he reminded himself of the advice math teacher Bob had given him. He still had that book about the forest passage. Toine had been reading parts of it. The following paragraph was the one he appreciated the most:

The forest rebel is the concrete individual, and he acts in the concrete world. He has no need for theories or laws concocted by some party jurists to know what is right. He descends to the very springs of morality, where the waters are not yet divided and directed into institutional channels. Matters become simple here—assuming something uncorrupted still lives in him.

This was Toine's time to shine and to show his uncorrupted ideals. Gertrude was standing at the base of the staircase, yelling at Bonifacius that he should come down to explain himself. While his father descended the stairs, nearing ground level, Toine jumped in front of his mother and yelled at him so loud his voice changed:

— "You filthy animal! You son of a bitch! Mom almost died of cancer, and you were just here fooling around with your old girlfriends. What a bastard you are, you asshole! I will never be like you!"

Toine caught a glimpse of himself, a glimpse of the man he would later become, his true self. Here stood the forest rebel who no longer shunned the fight.

* * *

Late at night, calmed down again, Toine continued writing his story.

Elvenking didn't waste a second. He'd show the general he wasn't the enemy. He tied a mud-white sheet to the end of his rifle and jump out of the trench. The general on the other side was looking through his binoculars and seized the opportunity. He reloaded his rifle, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Hit! Quickly, he crawled out of the trench line to inspect the victim up close. Cheering with victory, he stepped toward his enemy's body in seven-league boots. With his face down, Elvenking lay in the bloodied mud. The general squatted down on his knees to turn the body over and to behold the true face of his enemy.

— "Elf... Elvenking! My son! My own son! I murdered my own son!"

In the distance, the two trench lines curved and joined each other in the shape of a horseshoe below a setting sun. All this time, the general and the soldier had been standing in the same trench. While the first raven circled around high up in the sky, the second landed on Elvenking's chest.

* * *

A week later, shortly after dinner, Toine was in his room, banging the keys of a cheap, plastic musical keyboard. He had connected a primitive cassette recorder, taped together with duck tape to prevent it from falling apart, to an old microphone from the nineteen sixties. The grey-beige color combinations screamed grandfather's age. But it still worked. With the help of the microphone and the keyboard speaker, the boy tried to record his self-composed tunes and save them for posterity. Like so many young people, Toine was attempting to discover his talents. He took an interest in producing music as much as he had in reading and writing. House music had come to the scene. He could easily repeat the simple, repetitive tunes.

Loud noises coming from the stairs. It was Gertrude, as usual. She came in without knocking on the door to tell him the family was going to go out for a bowling night together. Except for Bonifacius. Toine had to get ready. The car was running outside. Chris, Leo, and Arjan had also gotten the memo and were waiting downstairs. It was dark outside and cold. Toine revolted.

— "Uh, I'm working on my music. I want to practice playing music and record it on tape. Why don't you guys go and I'll stay home," he said.

He hadn't been informed. Gertrude had planned this bowling night but only mentioned it now all of a sudden. The boy had had enough of this regime. When should an eleven-year-old boy, almost twelve, finally be allowed to choose his own path in life? He had no evil intentions but simply refused to go. It didn't seem like the end of the world to Toine if he wouldn't go bowling with the rest of them. Gertrude and the boys could have their fun without him. Gertrude didn't appreciate his attitude.

— "Come on, Toine, we're leaving in five minutes. I already booked the bowling alley weeks ago. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had a lane available tonight," she said.

Toine could feel his nerves tensioning but stood his ground.

— "No, Gertrude, I'm staying here in my room to work on my music. I just configured this contraption here. I don't want to start over again tomorrow."

The tape was still running and recording the conversation. Gertrude became fickle. She walked back and forth between Toine's room and the hallway by the stairs. She opened and closed the bathroom door halfway to see if it had been shut properly while she kept trying to convince Toine. He had to go with her. She assured him he had no choice. The boy sat down on his wooden stool, relaxed, and didn't move. He wouldn't come with.

— "I'll stay here. Why don't you go ahead," he said, timidly trying to make eye contact with Gertrude.

— "Toine, you're coming with us!" she yelled. "The psychologist told us we had to go on a family trip together. You can't refuse this."

What? The boy was surprised to hear this. A forcibly 'fun' family trip certainly wouldn't defuse the tensions keeping the Homemaker family hostage. Gertrude walked back and forth some more, then stormed into Toine's room wearing her dark-brown autumn coat. She yelled, something he couldn't understand. With a reddened face, she hit the boy on the head with her flat hand, right above his left eye. Slap, slap, slap! Toine obediently bent his head forward as if willingly offering his skull to the beating. The blows were heavy, yet he couldn't feel a thing. He could only think about his resolve to resist. Toine wasn't going to come along bowling, period. He wanted to be able to work on his musical hobby.

A hysterically frenzied Gertrude poured out an avalanche of words:

— "YOU FILTHY ASSHOLE! YOU ASSHOLE! ASSHOLE!" she yelled. "YOU AND YOUR DEMEANOR ALWAYS RUINED ALL OF OUR VACATIONS. NOW YOU'RE RUINING OUR BOWLING NIGHT! ASSHOLE! ASSHOLE!"

Never before had the nurse been so angry with anyone. Her arms flailing, she threatened Toine and held her feminine fist close to his head. The boy understood damn well what she had meant to say. His birth had condemned her to Bonifacius. There was nothing he could do about that now. It wasn't his fault. In a flurry of braveness, Toine stood up and walked toward the door of his room to close it. He wanted to keep Gertrude out. His movements were calm and decisive, his voice neutral. Mother put her foot in the door opening and pushed back. Toine grabbed hold of Gertrude's wrists with both his hands. The look in her eyes betrayed she was genuinely surprised by her son's strength. Toine gently shoved her out of his room and closed the door.

Little Leo came up to have a look. He had heard the noise.

— Leo asked, "Toine... Did Gertrude hit you?"

— "Yes," Toine said. "She hit me hard."

* * *

A month after the failed bowling trip, mother Gertrude summoned her son for a haircut at the hair salon. It was time, she thought. Toine's blond hair fell over his eyes. Usually, father Bonifacius would cut his children's hairs to save money. A real hairstylist Toine had never visited before. For some unclear reason, the boy wasn't allowed to bike there by himself but had to hold on to Gertrude. He obeyed. Gertrude biked toward the city center but, to Toine's surprise, took a left turn at the hospital.

Psychologist Droove had referred the boy to a psychiatrist because of his angry looks. This whole family was rooted in lies and deceit.

The two reported to the check-in desk and walked up to the stairs. The psychiatrist's office was in a quiet, somewhat dark corner of the hospital. He was an older, balding man in his sixties, still a few years away from his pension. Mother Gertrude was asked to wait outside. The psychiatrist wanted to speak to the boy in private, confidentially. Toine immediately knew this was a learned man. There was no sofa to lie on as you saw in the soap operas, but there was a very comfortable desk chair. They were sitting opposite each other with a big desk in between. Toine noticed the flyers on the desk. Judging from their titles—narcissistic personality disorders, alcoholism, relationship therapy, anger management—the boy understood he had no reason to be here. The psychiatrist put Toine at ease with a series of friendly questions.

— "I spoke to Mrs. Droove about you. Is it true you like to write?" he asked.

— "Yes," Toine answered in a relaxed manner with his feet stretched out in front of him.

— "And how does that work? I assume a book has to have various characters. Do you sometimes think about them during the day?"

— "No. I never think about them during the day. It's just a hobby. When I have nothing better to do in the evenings, I sit down behind my desk and write for an hour. The characters in the book develop themselves. When I'm ready, I put down my pen and move on to something else, like playing outside or working on the computer.

"I... I use my writing to shine a different light on things that happened in the past. For example, how a boy in need can write himself out of trouble by re-interpreting his past. What I practice is a sort of falsification of reality... with good intentions, of course. If there is no one left to help you, you can still help yourself, for example, by twisting the lies about your past around into your benefit. You can turn a negative self-image into a positive one by unmasking the lies you were taught to believe about yourself. Once that mask falls off, you will find your true self. Whoever allows his personality to be defined by others has surrendered himself to a self-image others molded into their own benefit. Then, you are no longer free but merely someone else's tool."

The psychiatrist listened carefully. He thought this was an interesting theory, a way to turn a negative life script into a positive one by rewriting it. More people should try that. With some apprehension, Toine told the psychiatrist some more things about his life in the Foxhole, about things that angered him. After about half an hour, he leaned back into his chair. The psychiatrist ended the conversation. The man looked outside through the window, at the cars driving along the road below.

— "Mr. Homemaker," the man told Toine, "thank you for this conversation. You won't have to come back again."

The psychiatrist leaned forward to whisper:

— "But Sir, I think your parents are nuts. Make sure you get out of there alive."

Toine smiled. He stood up, walked out of the office, past his mother. She was as curious as she felt insecure.

— "And? What did the psychiatrist tell you?" she asked.

— "He said I didn't have to come back again. There's nothing wrong with me."

* * *

The end of the year was nearing; autumn branches made way for an early winter. Toine's grade report fell below all expectations. If he wished to pass the school year, he would have to study hard during the upcoming Christmas vacation. The boy came back from school in the afternoon to speak with his father. Gertrude had gone to the hospital again for a routine check of her health. Toine wanted to propose to his father they could walk through his homework assignments together. The problem wasn't his intelligence, he thought, but his depression. He just needed support. Couldn't they leave the psychologists out of it and come together as father and son? Bonifacius was hanging around in the kitchen. Holding a cup of coffee in his hand, he was looking out the window. He saw his son come in through the garage. Toine walked through the hallway, around the corner, and toward the kitchen, still holding his book bag.

— "We've received the psychologist's report," Bonifacius said. "According to that Mrs. Marbles, you've lost yours. You're unmotivated, and you see everything upside-down."

Toine moved two steps closer to Bonifacius to tell him about his plan.

— Carefully, he began speaking, "I've come up with a plan, and I thought..."

He wasn't able to finish his sentence.

— "YOU ARE SICK IN YOUR HEAD!" his father snorted.

These words hit Toine like six bullets to the head. He dropped his book bag on the floor while Bonifacius's exclamation struck him like lightning. The courage he had so meticulously built up over the past year oozed out through the floor underneath his feet. He knew he would have to count on himself from now own. This man was never going to support him. Disqualified as a human being, the boy ran away from Bonifacius. The shock had numbed him too much to feel the pain, let alone show it. Toine ran back to the garage and got back on his bike.

Bonifacius came after him and, with an apologetic voice, asked:

— "Toine, Toine, where are you going? Where are you going?"

Toine no longer responded. He biked out of the neighborhood.

* * *

A few days later, Toine was at home on the couch, thinking about things. He wanted to let Bonifacius know how much his words had hurt him. After he had left the garage, he had spent several hours riding around town with thoughts of suicide on his mind.

Father Bonifacius was in the living room, entangled with the TV's wiring. The old VCR had broken down. He had bought a new one and was trying to connect the SCART-cable to the back of the TV-set. Toine thought it was the right time to have a meaningful conversation with this man. Toine told him about the pain he had felt that he, despite his efforts, hadn't succeeded in winning any appreciation. Tears were flowing across his cheeks when he told Bonifacius he had attempted suicide.

Toine had climbed up the highest tree in the backyard. Standing on the highest branch that could still carry his weight, he had waited. Gradually, he had shuffled his left foot away from the trunk, followed by his right. He had let go of the tree with his left hand. He maintained his balance with his right hand. He planned on diving down toward the tiled sidewalk far below him. Briefly, he let go of the trunk, balancing himself on the branch like an acrobat. He couldn't do it. He didn't have the nerve. A split-second later, he had grabbed hold of the trunk again.

Bonifacius didn't pay much attention to his son's confession, too distracted by a knot in the wiring. Leaning forward, he turned his head to his son and growled at him with a dark look in his eyes:

— "Then you should have jumped."

In place of his father, Toine could see the Dark before him. For a split second, he could see right through Bonifacius's soul and straight through the gates of Hell. Adrenaline rushed through Toine's body. Never had he been so terrified. This man was possessed.

* * *

Winter came. After the school's first lecture, German language, it was still dark outside. It was snowing. Toine walked back to the coat racks and put on his coat. He couldn't escape through the former main entrance unseen. The door was locked. He tried the official entrance. He exited the door and walked along a pathway that twisted and turned around the schoolyards. To the left of the pathway, he could see the classrooms filled with teachers and pupils. To the right, he could see the sports fields. Along the path stood rows of tall willow trees. At each tree, about every thirteen feet, Toine paused for one or two seconds to stay out of sight of the classrooms.

Wouldn't one of the teachers spot him and order him to come back immediately?

Once he left the school compound, the boy turned right onto an expressway along the Willems Canal. The snowstorm was gaining force. Toine walked along the canal underneath a first bridge and on to a second one. This was the bridge he took to school each day, the bridge on Gertrude's route. He walked up to the bridge on the bike and pedestrian pathway. There was hardly any traffic. The tires of passing cars made a carving sound as they skid through wet snow. The municipality hadn't yet sprinkled salt for this weather condition. The drivers drove slowly to avoid slipping.

Toine walked up to the middle of the bridge. There, he spent some time looking down the railing. There, he could see the dark waters of the Acheron river, the river Dante and Virgil had crossed on their way to meet the Devil. A mighty wind blew in his face. Broken white floes of ice were floating on the water's surface. They were drifting away from Toine, into the distance. Here, the boy spent a few minutes. Sunken away in his thoughts, he didn't notice his hands were becoming colder and colder. He felt an urge to climb over the railing, drop himself into the water. The cold should grab him. The ice would paralyze his muscles and pull him down into the deep. All he had to do was jump.

A conflict welled up in him. He didn't want to die. He wanted to live, just not this life. How hard had he fought? How much had he pushed things aside to make a little room for himself in this forsaken world? And how heavy had the blows to his soul been he had been dished out in return. The end was nearing.

Toine clenched his fists. Undesired in life, unloved in death. Had he been too weak? Would he be too cowardly, now, to jump and to fulfill his father's wish? He had to jump, but he didn't want to. His lower arms were shaking from the force he kept exerting on his clenched fists. Toine gritted his teeth. He focused his gaze on the horizon, past millions of snowflakes. Growling, he pushed warm air out of his lungs through the cracks between his teeth. A cloud of steam evaporated. It was the wolf in Toine who was exhaling.

He kicked the railing and cried out:

— "WHY?"

No one noticed. His forehead was hurting. His lips were turning blue. He didn't have the guts to do it. He didn't want to do it. He couldn't go back to school either.

In the distance above him, a figure appeared. Toine looked up but wasn't sure if he imagined things. An old greybeard with a roughed-up face was riding an eight-legged horse high up in the sky. The figure descended. The horse galloped along the bridge toward Toine. The old man dismounted his horse and walk toward him.

— "Toine," the old man said. "Your story isn't finished yet."

Toine was speechless. The old man, as transparent as a cloud, was holding a staff in his left hand. It was a spear. On its sheath, symbols had been carved Toine couldn't decipher. The figure wore a pair of pants and a bearskin wrapped around his torso. Up close, Toine noticed the man was missing his left eye.

— "The soldier from your story," the figure continued, "didn't die. The general missed. He missed, Toine. The bullet grazed his eye, but it didn't kill him."

Toine stepped away from the bridge's railing. The old man continued:

— "Your future will only be decided if you choose to jump. Then, there won't be a way back. A man can only rewrite his history. Escape from the prison of your soul, become the man you know you can be."

The boy spoke:

— "I want a meaningful life. I don't want to be a slave of rhythms and routines. I'm not an algorithm. I want to have friends, a family... I want to give my suffering meaning. Promise me my life will change! Promise me my life will be worth living! Promise me!"

— "I promise," the figure spoke.

— "I had to play soldier because I had to be strong," Toine apologized. "I've been too strong for too long. I don't have the strength to go on. Our society, our teachers, and our parents, time and again, tell us young people should learn to think for themselves, that we should become critical thinkers and shouldn't believe everything we read the newspapers say. But as soon as we do, as soon as we make a stand for ourselves and choose our own ways, as soon as we become smart and articulate, the authorities pull our self-confidence out from underneath us like a rug because we've become disobedient."

— "You made it this far, Toine," the shape said, "but your journey doesn't end here and not today."

The figure put his right hand on Toine's shoulder. He pointed to the horizon with his spear. High up in the distance, a herd of cattle stormed down, sweeping through the sky, headed straight for the bridge. The swarm wagged high and low and produced an eerie sound. Behind the herd, Toine saw nine female riders on winged horses, driving on the animals.

— "Boy," the old man said, "the wild hunt has begun. You've lost many battles, but the war can still be won. Today, you choose to live because life chooses you, too. Know that the weak who take the heaviest blows shall one day realize they have become the strong. And then, the world, frightened and insecure, shall look up to them because the world knows only the weak turned strong can lead humankind."

With a deafening thunder, the amazons drove their herd within inches of the bridge and across it. Toine crouched down. He watched the female hunters fly by. The old man mounted his horse and followed after his nine daughters. The boy relaxed his fists. He looked at his hands and discovered two words had been written on the inside of his palms.

— "Mind... and memory," Toine whispered.

Everything became quiet. It stopped snowing, and the sun broke through.
About the Author

Mathijs Koenraadt (1980) writes about individuals' struggles with the collectives trying to assimilate them.

Publications

A Man Becomes His Self: A Novella for Lost Souls (2018)

Behold the Wanderer: A Novel against Modernity (2018)

If Not Now, When? Writings in Defense of Europe (2018)

Revival of the West: Securing a Future for European People (2017)

The Ignorant God: Thoughts about Time and Eternity (2017)

Return to Freedom: A Traveler's Thoughts on Life, Love, and the Fate of the World (2015)

A Teenage Philosophy of Awareness and Existence: Analysis of the Columbine Shooters' Worldview (2014)
