To the Dog Biscuit Factory

I stand outside the job centre, stalling. The entrance is next to the small police station, which I know from the inside. A hollow space with wooden cupboards and sliding doors, behind which I would be locked up as a child if I stole one more apple from the greengrocer’s cart. Now I take the job centre entrance and walk up to a man collecting dandruff. In the background, a pair of nylon stockings rustle. They come to bring him coffee, just for him of course. He asks if I’m the Van Zijderveld who ran away from home last year. The nylon stockings linger to hear my answer. I say yes to clerk Dorknoper and his eavesdropping coffee assistant, because only one person in Zwijndrecht has my name and besides, my photo had been in all the papers. I look over the shoulder of Dorknoper at the hanging files full of addresses of labyrinths you could disappear into. Offices and factories, I expect nothing from them, my imagination falls short. Well, I know the pickling factory near us that always reeked of vinegar, where the fat director cruised around swaying in an American saloon car with a cigar, and where every summer strawberries were preserved by common girls with shrill voices, peddling coarse talk while showing their wellington-booted legs with flushed bare knees to the drivers, and sometimes a thigh. Dorknoper hands me a slip of paper with the address of a dog biscuit factory in Dordrecht and mentions the laughably small sum I’ll be earning. I work out that he could easily have been on the wrong side during the war.

The labour camp turns out to be an old building by the harbour in Dordrecht. I always walk past it on my way to the Beatcentrum, where usually they just put on records, but it’s the only place where bands play and girls come who smoke filter cigarettes. I do my stiff little dance and try to make eye contact with one of those girls. How, nobody ever tells you.

In complete isolation I stand on a bare attic floor, shovelling cartloads of dog biscuits into a deep funnel. The man I’m replacing made a run for it the moment I arrived, presumably to go home and hang himself. I think that somewhere below, at the bottom of the funnel, some kind of packaging process is taking place, but for all I know all those biscuits just come straight back up to me again. My transistor radio belches out Dutch singalongs on a programme called Work Vitamins. If they play one more song like that, I’m jumping into that funnel myself, spiralling down forever to accordion music.

The walls of the dog biscuit attic are all blind, except for a narrow slit. Through it I can see the silhouette of the Grote Kerk. And then, at the end of the programme, they play For Your Love by The Yardbirds. Black crows circle the tower.

After a week of spiritual deadwater, it turns out I have a supervisor. He takes me aside in his little office. It smells of dog biscuits and cigars, behind him hangs a curling poster of a waterfall. He tells me I’m unsuitable for the work. He drops the word overqualified.

I leave his office in good spirits.