To Jan Greshoff

Cheese

Willem Elsschot

Translated by Sander Berg

Alma books
3 Castle Yard
Richmond
Surrey TW10 6TF
United Kingdom
www.almabooks.com

Cheese first published in Dutch in 1933
This translation first published by Alma Books Ltd in 2017

Copyright © 1969 Erven Alfons Josef De Ridder. Original title: Kaas. Published with permission of Pelckmans uitgevers nv.
Translation © Sander Berg, 2017

Cover design: Jem Butcher

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

isbn: 978-1-84688-416-0
ebook isbn: 978-1-84688-419-1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

To Jan Greshoff

Names of Characters

Elements

Cheese

Postface

Notes

To Jan Greshoff

I listen to his hoarse voice pant,
I keep my mouth, I hear him rant,
While he confounds, in a minor key,
The people’s sheer banality.

I watch his crooked mouth, ajar,
A half-healed gash, an ugly scar,
Expressing in a single smile
The things he once with words reviled.

He has a wife and kids and friends
And heaps of lovers he intends
To thank for pleasures he has known,
And yet Jan Greshoff stands alone.

Night in, night out, he looks around,
And hopes and waits, then hears a sound;
He sits up straight and heaves a sigh:
He knows in Brussels he must die.

Come on, dear Jan, and get a grip,
Thrash those bastards, use your whip!
Obliterate that cattle, now,
As long as your good heart lasts out.

Names of Characters

Frans Laarmans, a clerk at the General Marine and Shipbuilding Company, then merchant, then clerk again.

Laarmans’s mother, senile and moribund.

Doctor Laarmans, Frans’s brother.

Mr Van Schoonbeke, a friend of the doctor’s and to blame for everything.

Hornstra, a cheese wholesaler from Amsterdam.

Fine, Laarmans’s wife.

Jan and Ida, their children.

Madame Peeters, a neighbour with gallstones.

Anna van der Tak, Tuil, Erfurt, Bartherotte, clerks at the General Marine and Shipbuilding Company.

Boorman, a counsellor for businessmen.

Old Piet, an engine driver at the General Marine and Shipbuilding Company.

Van der Zijpen Jr, who wants to be a silent partner.

Van Schoonbeke’s friends.

Elements

– Cheese: cheese dream, cheese film, cheese enterprise, cheese day, cheese campaign, cheese mine, cheese world, cheese ship, cheese trade, cheese profession, cheese novel, cheese eaters, cheese man, Edam cheese, cheese merchant, cheese trust, cheese dragon, cheese misery, cheese testament, cheese mania, cheese wall, cheese question, cheese cart, cheese ordeal, cheese tower, cheese wound.

– GAFPA, General Antwerp Feeding Products Association.

– A Cellar at the Blue Hat Warehouse.

– Laarmans’s Office, complete with telephone, pedestal desk and typewriter.

– A Backgammon Board.

– A Wicker Suitcase.

– A Large Cheese Shop.

– A Cemetery.

Cheese

I