Featured Fiction: Brock Clarke
Brock Clarke’s books include the novels Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?, The Happiest People in the World, and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England; the short story collection The Price of the Haircut; and, most recently, the essay collection I, Grape; or The Case for Fiction. His tenth book—the short story collection Special Election—will be published in 2025. He lives in Portland, Maine, and is the A. LeRoy Greason Professor of English and Creative Writing at Bowdoin College.
An Introduction from John Fulton
Readers new to Brock Clarke are in for a treat and readers who already know his high-energy work, at once menacing and comic, will be thrilled to get this sneak peek into the opening pages of his latest, a novel in progress entitled — and this is classic Clarke — The Fantastic Freddie Oversteegen. I don’t think I’m ruining anything when I tell you that you’re about to take a plunge into the life of a Nazi resistance fighter, a teenage Dutch girl named Freddie who not only knows what it means to shoot and kill but also enjoys a good game of Scrabble. While we learn about Freddie’s family, her mother, sister, and alcoholic father, we also learn about another intriguing figure, the present-day Marlene Daggett, a writer who appears to be at work on a novel about Freddie Oversteegen, whom Marlene claims was an actual Nazi resistance fighter. (I used Google to find out that, in fact, Oversteegen existed, which means, of course, we can trust everything that Marlene says!) As she tells us about her novel in progress, Marlene also tells us about herself: the priest she lives with, her husband, and Fink. I won’t tell you who Fink is. You’ll need to read to find out. At this point, you may be wondering what Freddie, her family, and the Nazis have to do with Marlene Daggett. The simple answer is that, once again, you’ll need to read to find out. The more complex answer, and the one that the readers of Arrowsmith Journal can celebrate, is that both these figures and their fascinating families somehow exist side-by-side in the darkly comic, unprecedented, original, expansive, and always unpredictable imagination of Brock Clarke. Enjoy!
The Fantastic Freddie Oversteegen
I live in a priest’s house. No, I live in a room in the priest’s house. The priest lives in the rest of the house.
I don’t know what the priest is doing in the rest of the house. But I know what I’m doing in my room. I’m writing a book about Freddie Oversteegen.
A book thus far in the form of notes. Paragraphs mostly made of one or two or three short sentences.
Although hopefully longer paragraphs will also occasionally appear.
Who is Freddie Oversteegen? Well, yeah, you wouldn’t know. Which is why I’m writing the book.
The book will be made up. But Freddie herself is real.
Was real.
Freddie Oversteegen was a World War Two Dutch resistance fighter, saboteur, and assassin, and who once said, “I’ve shot a gun myself, and I’ve seen them fall. And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.”
Freddie was an old woman when she said that. She was a teenager when she was killing people and blowing things up.
My husband used to blow things up. When he was a boy. When he was a boy, he would stick M-80 firecrackers in the mouths of frogs and blow them up.
“I made it rain frog,” is how my husband described it.
My husband is sensitive now. But he likes to tell the story of how as a boy he’d blown up frogs to show that he wasn’t always so sensitive.
And by “my husband” I really mean “my ex-husband.”
And by “the priest” I really mean “the ex-priest.”
The room came furnished. Sparsely furnished. A twin mattress on a creaking metal frame. A dresser, painted white.
“You are a part of this house,” the ex-priest told me when I moved into my room. He meant for this to sound welcoming. But it didn’t. It sounded creepy. I wonder, as an ex-priest, and without his parishioners, if he’s forgotten how to talk to other people.
I wonder if most of us people, as people, have forgotten how to talk to other people.
I have forgotten how to talk to other people.
“You are a butt at life,” is what my sister said to me. Months ago. Or maybe it was yesterday.
Her name is Rachel. She works in the IT department at Flex Incorporated in Wichita, Kansas. Flex makes paycheck systems. Which apparently is different than making the paychecks themselves
Rachel is, as Rachel herself likes to say, “the normal one.”
My name is Marlene. Marlene Daggett. You probably haven’t heard of me. But that’s fine. Because this book isn’t about me. It’s about Freddie Oversteegen. Who you probably also haven’t heard of.
The Fantastic Freddie Oversteegen, is the title of the book. Or will be. When I write it.
For the moment, I’m just taking notes.
Freddie Oversteegen was born in 1925, in Haarlem, Netherlands. She was named after a boy, a foster child whom Freddie’s parents had taken in and who died when he was five. Freddie, having been born, and named after the newly dead boy, then lived, for 92 years. She died the day before she would have turned 93.
Freddie had an older sister who was also a resistance fighter, and who survived the war, and became a well-regarded artist, and an outspoken peace and justice activist. Freddie was far less well known, far less willing to talk about what she had done during the war, or how it had affected her life after it. When asked, in a rare interview, about how she coped with memories of the terrible things she’d seen and done during the war, Freddie said, “By getting married and having babies.”
My ex-husband didn’t want to have babies. He couldn’t imagine bringing other human beings into a world that was dying.
You might know him. He’s a professor, op-ed writer, regular talking head on the cable news, famous among people who make it their life’s work to talk about the end of the world.
The DuPont Chemical Endowed Professor of Anthropocene Studies, is my ex-husband’s official title.
“You bet,” is what I’d told Roy when he asked me if I wanted children, after he told me that he didn’t want to have children because he couldn’t imagine bringing human beings into a world that was dying. “Lots of children.”
But actually, no, I probably didn’t want children. What I wanted was a reason for not having children that was less revoltingly high-minded than Roy’s reason.
Roy being the name of my ex-husband.
Truus being the name of Freddie Oversteegen’s older sister.
The family—Freddie’s parents, and her sister Truus—were poor. They lived in abandoned buildings and on horse wagons. I don’t know whether the wagons were attached to horses, and if not, whether they should be called “wagons” rather than “horse wagons.”
It is a question Freddie’s father would have no doubt considered. He was a great considerer, a great conversationalist, a great singer, a great womanizer. He was not a great provider, not a great worker. It was not that he couldn’t provide or work. It was that he didn’t really want to.
He was also a great drinker. He was committed to it, the way Freddie’s mother was committed to other, nobler things.
“Yes, we’re socialists,” Freddie’s mother once told her young daughters—proudly, defiantly—after they’d attended a protest in which counter protestors chanted, “String up the socialists!”
And where was Freddie’s father? He, too, had attended the protest, but then he had disappeared in the middle of it. He was a great disappearer, too. Later, they found him back home. At this point, the family was living on a houseboat on a canal. A very Dutch thing, to live on a houseboat on a canal. Especially in Haarlem, where all of this takes place. And what canal did they live on? My sources don’t say. Maybe it was the Haarlemmertrekvaart canal. Or the Bakenessergracht canal. There are plenty of canals to choose from. Haarlem is considered by some to be the dredging capital of Europe.
My sources are:
Seducing and Killing Nazis, written by Sophie Poldermans.
Three Ordinary Girls, written by Tim Brady.
Two Sisters in Resistance, directed by Manon Hornstra and Thijs Zeeman.
The internet.
None of my sources say that, when Freddie and her mother and her sister returned to the houseboat from the protest, they found Freddie’s father drunk, surrounded by empty wine bottles. But my sources don’t say they didn’t find him drunk, surrounded by empty wine bottles, either.
In any case, Freddie and her mother and sister left Freddie’s father on the houseboat, and that is where we will leave him, too.
As the family disembarks, Freddie’s father stands on the bow of the houseboat and sings them a sweet farewell song.
Much later in life, when interviewed by VICE Netherlands, Freddie told the interviewer she couldn’t talk for long, because she had another appointment. “I’m meeting some people to play Scrabble,” Freddie said. “I do that twice a week. You can’t let people down if you’ve agreed to join.”
I can’t help but wonder whether Freddie was thinking about her father when she said that.
Do I have a father? Yes. But this book isn’t about him, either.
And do I have a mother? Yes. In fact, she is calling right now, as she every so often does, from the Delta Skyclub at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
“You have everything you need?” she wants to know.
“I need a new mind,” I tell her.
“I meant financially,” my mother says. Through the phone I can hear the slurp of the martini, the distant call of someone with a microphone saying that it’s time to board.
I don’t know why I just said I have a father. Had a father would be more accurate.
My father died two years ago. “Died” is one way of putting it. “Killed himself by swallowing a bottle of Prozac, tying a plastic bag over his head, and then hanging himself” is another.
The pills. The bag. The rope. This was a man who wanted to make sure.
My sources all say that the farewell song that Freddie’s father sang was a French farewell song. But none of them say whether the song was French in origin that he sang in Dutch, or whether it was a French song that he sang in French, or whether it was a Dutch song that he sang in French, or whether it was a farewell song that he just made up on the spot and sang in French. Which I guess would also make it a Dutch song that he sang in French.
Funny, the things that work their way into your mind and then stick there.
I live in a room in a priest’s house, is what I often think and think and think when I’m trying to go to sleep.
Although really what I should be thinking is I live in a room in an ex-priest’s house.
From now on I will think I live in a room in an ex-priest’s house when I’m trying to go to sleep.
Although what I really wish is that I could go to sleep without thinking about anything at all.
It would be nice to be able to go to sleep without first having to think about anything at all. And it would also be nice not to have to think at all, ever, or to be in this room at all, ever.
It’s a room you could easily lose your mind in.
Although when I got to the room, I’d already lost my mind. Or at least had already started losing it.
Earlier I said I don’t know what goes on in the rest of the house. I don’t know why I said that.
I of course do leave the room, occasionally. To go the bathroom. To the kitchen, to get myself something to eat or drink. I am allowed. After all, it was the ex-priest himself who told me that I was a part of the house. But yesterday, six in the morning, the ex-priest found me in his tiny kitchen, making coffee, and an alarmed look flashed on his face, like he’d caught me trying to steal his coffee maker. I thought he was going to call the police.
Do I go outside the house? No. It’s not safe out there. Or, it used to be unsafe. Now, it’s safe. Or safer. Reportedly.
But you don’t have to leave the house to learn things. For instance, earlier today I learned that there is a publication of some kind or other that goes by the name of Vice Netherlands.
Freddie was interviewed by Vice Netherlands in 2016. I am writing a book about her in 2022. But in the book itself it is 1934. The Oversteegen family, minus their father and husband, lives in a tiny flat in Haarlem. They have almost no money. Freddie and Truus share a bedroom and sleep on straw mattresses that their mother has made.
So, the flat is crowded; there isn’t room or money for anyone else. But even so, they begin taking in refugees—Jews, dissidents, Communists, homosexuals, undesirables of all kinds—fleeing Nazi Germany. Freddie gives up her bed, and sleeps with Truus in hers.
“The first thing I lost to the Nazis,” Freddie Oversteegen later said, “was my bed.”
It wasn’t all politics, though. Theirs was a musical family, and at a young age Freddie learned to play the ukulele, and the zither.
The zither!
I don’t know one person, adult or child, who plays the zither.
Such a fun instrument to say, and, presumably, also to play. What has happened to it? Where did it go?
I wonder if the world was a better place when it didn’t seem all that strange for a poor nine-year-old girl to be playing the zither.
I wonder if my marriage would have been a better marriage if one or both of us had played the zither.
Why did we get divorced? Oh, there are many reasons. For instance, my ex-husband threw a hardback copy of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction at my head. After I criticized his penis.
“Your penis is disgusting,” is what I said to him, specifically.
I don’t know why I said that. I wasn’t anywhere near his penis at the time.
I said, “Your penis is disgusting,” in a low, strangled voice that didn’t sound at all like my own.
Freddie spoke in a high, high voice, which she hated and which caused people to ignore her all her life. “No one ever listens to me!” she said once, and probably more than once.
Meanwhile, her sister “was always a very extroverted, engaging fun person. Her level-headedness, self-mockery, and positive attitude toward life made her very popular. She was direct, spoke the unvarnished truth and told lots of jokes. She loved to bring her ideals forward and always kept resisting wars and fighting for their victims.”
Writes Sophie Poldermans, in her book about the sisters called Seducing and Killing Nazis.
And in that same book, there is a photo of the first page of Truus’s own book, a memoir entitled Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever. And on that page, Truus’s heartfelt inscription to Sophie Poldermans: “Sophie, you are the future to us, the bearer of the new ideal, no racism, a livable world! Thanks and love, Truus Menger.” And just below that, in much smaller handwriting, this message: “Lots of love, Freddie.”
Written by Freddie Oversteegen. In her sister’s book.
Even her inscription was written in a high, high voice that was easily not listened to.
“What kind of book is this, anyway?” my own sister Rachel asks, when I make the mistake of telling her on the phone that I’m writing another book, and then I compound the mistake by saying it’s an historical novel, and Rachel says, “I love historical novels!” and then, helpfully, names the many historical novels that she loves. Then she repeats the title of one of them, her very favorite.
“I’ll send you a copy,” she says.
“No thanks,” I say. I could also say, “Fat chance.” Because in order for Rachel to send me a copy of her favorite historical novel, she would have to know my address. She would have to know where I live.
Rachel doesn’t know where I live.
No one knows where I live.
Well, the ex-priest knows.
Freddie herself, in 1934, lived in a Haarlem neighborhood called Sclackhuisbuurt, which means “Slaughterhouse.”
“Oh, what neighborhood are you from?” might have been a question asked by a classmate, or a parent of a classmate, or a Nazi.
Except that the Nazis hadn’t arrived yet. And by “arrived” I mean “invaded.”
Although certainly there were already Dutch Nazis. Anton Mussert, for instance. Mussert was a prominent Dutch Nazi whose name keeps popping up in my sources.
“Slaughterhouse,” could have been very well how Freddie answered when Anton Mussert stopped her on the street, in 1934, and asked her what neighborhood she was from.
Although why would Anton Mussert, future so-called Leader of the Dutch People, be talking to a random nine-year-old girl on the streets of Haarlem?
Maybe because she was super cute. There is a photo of Freddie, around this time, with a page boy haircut and a lace collar and a smirk on her face and her left hand on her hip like she’s about to tell a sassy joke in her high high voice.
She was sassy, too. Around this time, the Oversteegens were on welfare. But people on the dole were not allowed to host political meetings. And by political meetings, the welfare office meant meetings involving communists.
The Oversteegens host meetings involving communists, and they are caught, and they are taken off welfare.
Freddie goes with Truus and their mother down to the welfare office. They have been existing on water and brown beans since they were taken off the dole. There is, by now, a constant rumble in her stomach, and in her head.
“My children go hungry just because you don’t like my politics!” Freddie’s mother yells. The people in the office just look at her as though to say, “Well, yeah.”
“I’m not leaving until I get money and food,” her mother says. Freddie looks at Truus. Truus is trying to appear tough. She doesn’t have to try too hard. Tough is her natural look. Her face is huge, and hard. She looks more like a cop than the cop summoned to evict them from the welfare office.
He’s a tall, sunken-cheeked young man. Not much older than Truus. He looks like he’d rather be anywhere else, doing anything else. Freddie is inclined to like him. She’d share her brown beans with him, but first she’d have to get some extra brown beans.
“Please,” the cop says to Freddie’s mother. “It’s time for you to go.”
He speaks gently enough. But when Freddie’s mother refuses to leave, the cop yanks her arm, hard, and her mother cries out.
“You jerk!” Truus says. This is how Truus talks: in blunt exclamatory sentences. She punches the cop in the chest, and when he tries to push her away, she bites his hand.
Meanwhile, Freddie, who is lower to the ground and always will be, kicks him in the shins, both of them, with both feet. She is righthanded, but in the moment discovers that she can kick just as well with her left foot as with her right.
They leave the office with food stamps. And with a sense of what must be done should something like this happen in the future. Which it definitely will.
Otherwise, the years between 1935 and 1940 are comparatively uneventful for the Oversteegens. Freddie did learn to sew, on a machine that looked like a barrel organ. Although what does a barrel organ look like?
When Freddie wasn’t sewing, she delivered copies of the banned leftist newspaper De Waarheid, or loosely translated into English, The Truth.
I can picture Freddie delivering the newspapers on her bicycle. Copies of the The Truth smacking against front doors as she pedals on.
When did children stop delivering newspapers while on bicycles?
One could answer: When newspapers stopped being delivered at all. When people stopped reading newspapers.
But no, the ex-priest gets his newspaper delivered, every morning. By a man wearing a gray sweatshirt with the hood always up. The man doesn’t ride a bike. He drives a faded red Honda Civic.
The ex-priest sometimes leaves the paper on the kitchen table and when he does I take a quick look at it. It’s easy to feel abused by the news. A little of it goes a long way. I just read the headlines, and the subheaders. Maybe the first paragraph. My favorite thing about the newspaper is a column called The Ethicist, written by The Ethicist. Who answers questions by people who are always Anonymous.
“I ran over my neighbor’s dog. What should I do next?” Anonymous asks the Ethicist in today’s paper.
I don’t know why I said earlier that De Waarheid was The Truth, loosely translated. It might have been tightly translated, for all I know.
“Loosely translated,” being the kind of phrase one uses when one doesn’t know any language except for the only language one knows.
“One” being the kind of word one uses when one stupidly and for no good reason is trying to avoid using the word “I.”
I only speak English. I have only ever spoken English.
I actually don’t know if that latter sentence is accurate. Maybe at one point, before coming to the ex-priest’s house, I also spoke another language.
What is certain is that I only speak English now.
Mostly, though, I don’t speak in any language to anyone.
Well, I talk to myself sometimes.
There are plenty of things I don’t remember about my life before coming to the ex-priest’s house. Mostly how I ended up in the ex-priest’s house.
I don’t remember arriving at the house. I don’t remember how I arrived at the house, whether by car or bus or train or donkey. I don’t remember learning, or knowing, that the ex-priest was looking for a tenant. I don’t remember the place where I was immediately before walking into the house. I don’t remember walking into the house. It was as though I had been asleep for a long time, and when I woke up I was in this room, sitting on this bed. On the floor was a suitcase, open, but not-yet unpacked. On the bed in front of me was a laptop computer, also open. On the laptop there was a document, and in the document someone had typed the sentences, “I’ve shot a gun myself, and I’ve seen them fall. And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.”
And under those sentences the name Freddie Oversteegen.
I don’t know why I said, “Someone had typed the sentences.” I assume it was me. I assume I was happy when I typed them.
Because I certainly was happy to wake up and read those sentences, and that name, on my computer.
And I was certain that I hadn’t felt that happy feeling in a very long time.
Someone cleared their throat. I jumped up. I don’t know why I wrote that. I did not jump up. I remained on the bed. But I did look up. There was the ex-priest, in the doorway. “I just wanted you to know that you’re not just a tenant. You are a part of this house,” he said. His eyes were kind behind his glasses. His voice, the calm voice of a professional consoler.
But fuck that, maybe I didn’t want to be consoled.
I didn’t lose my mind because my father killed himself, by the way. Although it certainly might be considered a contributing factor.
And my father didn’t kill himself because I wrote a novel called My Six Dads.
I wrote a novel called My Six Dads.
I know that my father didn’t kill himself because I wrote a novel called My Six Dads because my father never read the novel.
One dad refused to be defined by his disability. One dad spent 99.999% of his time responding to allegations. One dad used to be a mom. One dad had quite the temper. One dad refused to say where all his money came from. And one dad was a writer for a television show called “My Six Dads.”
Oh, and Freddie’s brother Robbie was born, in 1933. Here we are, almost in 1940, and I have forgotten to mention that Freddie had a brother.
Although it’s possible he was only a half-brother.
Freddie’s mother was rumored to have had sex with one of the men she was hiding, and that that act produced Freddie’s half-brother, Robbie.
There is another rumor that Freddie’s mother had sex with Freddie’s father after she’d divorced him, and that that act had produced Freddie’s half-brother, Robbie.
Which would of course make him Freddie’s full brother, Robbie.
Although Freddie, on the same subject, said, “A bit later we got a brother, from a different father.”
“My brother from another mother,” is what Roy used to call one of his favorite fellow terminally-degreed press secretaries for the Anthropocene.
Boy, Roy did not like it when I accused him of being a press secretary for the Anthropocene.
And he did not like it when I pointed out that no matter how thickly he lacquered the expression “my brother from another mother” in irony, he was still using the expression “my brother from another mother.”
He and his brother from another mother loved Bob Seger. But that was another thing they could not admit to without ironizing it.
You know Bob Seger. He’s the one who wants you to just give him some old-time rock n’ roll.
“The Poet Seger” is what they called him.
Anyway, it is 1940. But before that it is early 1933. Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward.
Freddie is in the family apartment in Slaughterhouse, standing outside the bathroom door. Coming from the bathroom are hushed noises, whispers, some rhythmic thumping.
The bathroom is where her mother and the man who is Robbie’s father are having sex. It is the only room with a door in the entire apartment.
Freddie’s eyes are wide. She’s thinking, Well, I’ve certainly never heard anything like this before!
She even thinks in a high, high voice.
Why does young Freddie, lurking outside the bathroom, seem less like an initiate into the complicated world of adults and more like a perv on training wheels?
Maybe I’ll just write Robbie out of the story. That happens. People get written out of stories all the time.
Some people write themselves out of stories. That also happens all the time.
Earlier, I wrote that my father never read my novel My Six Dads. What I should have written was that no one ever read my novel My Six Dads.
Well, three people read it.
There’s me of course.
And there’s my graduate thesis director, who read the book when it was also my thesis and said, “I fear you’re a fundamentally unserious person with a fundamentally undisciplined mind.”
A barrel organ, by the way, looks like a small ornate jukebox, on wheels, and is apparently operated by an old white man who has a bushy mustache and wears either a black top hat or a white straw boater.
And finally there’s my agent, Link.
“The book is great, but it’s probably unsellable, and other agents will tell you they can sell it, but I’m here to tell you the truth, which is my job, and my pleasure, and part of my skill set, and so if you choose me to represent the book, you shouldn’t think that that means I’ll be able to sell it, because I probably won’t, but then again, maybe I will, because the premise is terrific, it’s unique, it definitely fills a niche, and it also scratches an itch, although maybe it scratches too hard, or not hard enough, and is it an itch that really needs scratching, I’m not so sure, I have some concerns, not just about My Six Dads but also about the world of book publishing, and its future as a creative enterprise, and as a viable financial concern, but you shouldn’t get discouraged, because I can also be surprisingly hopeful, depending on the day, and this is one of the days.”
There were no other agents interested in selling the book. Link was the only one. A fact I didn’t mention to Link.
Well, I suppose some of the nineteen editors to whom he sent the book must have also read it, or at least part of it.
“We’ll sell the next one!” Link told me. That was twenty-two years ago. We’ve not spoken since. I’ve not written since. Until now.