The Undecided Stroke

by Johan Huizinga, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

In the right-hand pocket of Durk Wiersma's jacket there were two blocks of wood, one painted white and one painted red, each about the size of a matchbox and worn smooth at the corners. He had carried them to the Sjûkelân in Franeker on the fifth Wednesday after the thirtieth of June for twenty-two years. That is how Franeker keeps its calendar for the PC. The rest of the Netherlands has a date. Franeker has a count of Wednesdays.

The blocks were not his. They belonged to the Permanente Commissie, which has organised the tournament since 1854 and owns, among other things, a good many small painted pieces of wood. But a referee grows attached to what he handles, and Durk had long ago stopped thinking of them as borrowed. When a kaatser returned the ball and the serving side stopped it on the field, neither over the back line nor dead, the stroke was undecided. It was a kaats, and the kaats had to be marked. The first was marked with the white block and the second with the red. The Frisians have always been exact about things that cannot yet be decided.

He had been a schoolmaster in Tzummarum for thirty-nine years. He taught arithmetic, Frisian and, when the headmaster was ill, history. He had once explained to a class of eleven-year-olds that a court of law was a field with a line round it, a judge was a man whose word held only inside the line, and a sentence was a kaats that could not be played out. One of the boys went home and told his father, who was on the parish council, and there had been a letter. Durk still thought the boy had understood it perfectly.

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It was hot in the way that makes the grass smell of hay before anyone has cut it. The stands along the long side were full by eleven. Beyond them the marquee sold coffee, sugar bread and small glasses of Beerenburg, which the older men drank standing, as if sitting down would have committed them to something. Sixteen teams of three had come in the morning. By half past four there were two left.

Durk was in charge of the final. He had not asked for it and would not have refused it. It was, the chairman had told him on the telephone in May, very probably his last. The chairman chose his words carefully and got most of them right.

The two teams were well known in the province and unknown anywhere else, which suited everyone. Rients Faber led one of them. He was thirty-four and had won the PC twice, and he served with a small lazy swing of the forearm, as if dropping the ball into a letterbox. The other was led by Hessel Bonnema, who was twenty-four and in his first final. He worked at the dairy laboratory in Leeuwarden, where he measured fat and protein in other people's milk.

Durk had watched Bonnema in the semi-final and in the round before it, and in both he had seen the same thing, which he had no name for, though he would have recognised it in a classroom at once. Between strokes the young man looked at the telegraaf, the big scoreboard at the end of the field where the numbers were hung by hand. He looked at it the way a man looks at a bank statement. He did not look at it the way a boy looks at a clock near the end of the day. He hit well and hard, and every stroke seemed to be paid for. When his two companions, Jelle Hoekstra and a quiet farmer's son called Sipke, made a good return, Bonnema nodded as if a debt had been reduced.

Durk knew a little about the father. Everyone in that corner of the province knew a little. Klaas Bonnema had kept sixty cows at Wjelsryp, and in March the milk buyer had cancelled his contract. The herd had gone at auction in April. It was not a catastrophe. The house was paid for, Klaas had work driving for the cooperative, and nobody was going hungry. It was an ordinary misfortune, the sort that fills the notices in the Leeuwarder Courant in a bad year. But the winners of the PC are each paid a sum of money these days, as well as a gold coin and a wreath. Durk suspected that somewhere between April and this afternoon the young man had come to believe he was playing for it.

Klaas Bonnema himself was in the third row of the stand, near the perk. He had a telephone held up in front of him in both hands, and he was filming.

---

The final went as good finals go, which is to say nobody could have written it in advance. Faber's team took the first two firsts. That is the Frisian word, earste, for what the English would call a game within the game: two, four, six, and then the first. Two firsts make a game, and six firsts win. Bonnema's team took the next three. The crowd, which had been leaning in Faber's direction out of habit, straightened up and began to lean the other way out of curiosity. After that the firsts went one to each side and one to each side again, like a pair of men sawing a log, until the telegraaf showed five and five.

Durk laid the white block eleven times in that final and the red block four times. He took, as he always did, rather long about it. He walked to the place where the ball had been stopped and looked at the grass. Then he looked at the player who had stopped it and at the line, and he knelt and pressed the block into the turf with the flat of his hand, as if he were putting a coin into a child's palm. There were referees who dropped the block from standing height. Durk thought them sound men in every other respect.

The last first went back and forth until Bonnema's side stood at six and Faber's at four. That put them one stroke from the PC, the wreath, the gold coin and the money. By the rules, at game point a single kaats is enough to send the sides changing ends, and the kaats is then played out.

Faber served. It was the letterbox swing, a little faster than before. Sipke took it in the perk and put it hard and low up the field. It did not reach the back line; it came down short, a few metres inside, where Faber's back man ran across and stopped it with the flat of his glove and fell over it. The ball lay still under his hip.

It was a kaats. The whole stand knew it and said so at once, in a sound that was not a word.

Durk walked up the field. He took his time. He looked at the grass, where the ball had flattened a small circle and the man's hip had made a larger one, and he looked at the back man, who was getting up and brushing his knees and did not look at anyone. He looked at the line. Then he knelt and laid the white block.

"Nee!"

It came from the third row. Klaas Bonnema was standing with the telephone held out at the full length of his arms, pointing it at the field and then turning it towards the stand, as if the stand might be persuaded.

"A metre! It's a metre further back! Look! Sjoch!"

There was a moment in which nothing happened, and in the Sjûkelân that is a long moment, because on that day something is always happening. The men with the Beerenburg stopped with their glasses halfway. A child somewhere laughed at the wrong time, the way children do in church.

Durk did not look round. He knew what the telephone would show. It would show, from the third row and at an angle and through the heat, a small figure falling on a ball. It would show the ball perhaps a metre from where the block now lay, and perhaps not. Perhaps it would show nothing at all, because the man's hip had been over it. He did not doubt that there were people in Leeuwarden and Amsterdam with larger screens who could have told him to the centimetre. But he was not in Leeuwarden or Amsterdam. He was on his knees in a field in Franeker, where for the length of a match the only eye that counted was the one the Commissie had appointed and put on the field. He had seen the ball stopped. The block was where he had seen it.

He stood up. His knee made a noise that he felt was unnecessary.

Jelle Hoekstra had come halfway up the field, with his glove still on, towards Durk. Durk had known him since he was twelve. The young man's face had the look that precedes a speech. Sipke stood behind him and looked at the grass.

Hessel Bonnema had not moved. He was standing near the serving box with his bare right hand hanging at his side, and he was looking at the stand. He was looking not at the telegraaf but at his father, and at the telephone, which was still held out towards the field.

Durk waited. It is permitted to dispute a kaats. The rules allow it, and the referee decides. There is a form for it, and a tone for it, and Durk had heard a great many disputes in twenty-two years. He had once been called a word by a man from Wommels that he had not heard since the army. He knew what came next. The young man would walk over and say, quite reasonably, that his father had it on film, and could they not at least look. It would be quite reasonable, and it would be the end of something, although Durk could not have said in words what.

Bonnema turned from the stand and looked at the white block in the grass. He was far enough away that he could only just have made it out, a pale speck in all that green. Then he looked at Durk.

"Dêr leit er," he said. That's where it lies.

He said it loudly, not to Durk but past him, to Hoekstra, who stopped. Then something happened to his face that Durk had not seen on it all afternoon: he laughed. It was not a large laugh. It was the laugh of a man who has put down a sack he did not know he was carrying and is surprised to find his shoulders where he left them.

In the third row Klaas Bonnema slowly lowered the telephone. He stood a little longer. Then he sat down, and the man beside him, whom he did not know, patted him twice on the knee.

---

The sides changed. That takes a minute or two, and the stand used it to talk about what it had seen. Some said the father was right, some said the father was a disgrace, and most said the father had lost sixty cows and could be forgiven, and then went on arguing about whether he was right. Durk walked to his place at the side. He did not look at the block. He knew where it was.

The kaats would be played for now. Faber's side had the perk, and they had to drive the ball past the line of the white block. If it was stopped short of the line, the kaats went to Bonnema's side, and the first with it, and the game, and the PC. If it got past, the kaats went the other way, the last first stayed open, and they would play on. Nobody on the Sjûkelân, not the chairman, not Durk, not the man from Wommels if he was there, could have said which it would be.

Bonnema served. It was a new serve. The swing was longer, looser, and less careful, and the ball went into the perk with a sound like a door closing in another house. Faber's back man took it and hit it up the field, low and hard along the grass, towards the white block. Hoekstra ran across to cut it off, gloved hand down, and did not reach it. For perhaps two seconds the whole field was a single held breath with a few thousand people inside it.

The ball ran, and slowed. It stopped a hand's breadth past the block.

There was a groan in one half of the stand and a shout in the other. The two sounds met in the middle and turned into a noise that belonged to neither. Hoekstra put both hands on his head. Sipke sat down on the grass. Bonnema stood where he had served from and looked at the ball and the block, a hand apart, and then he laughed again. That time it was not small, and Faber, walking past him, laughed too and struck him on the shoulder with an open hand.

Durk walked out, took up the white block, and put it back in his pocket, because a kaats that has been played for is no longer anybody's business. They played on. The last first lasted another quarter of an hour, which is a long time for a first, and there is nothing to be said about that quarter of an hour except that it was very good. Afterwards the old men in the marquee agreed that it had been better than the two hours before it. Bonnema served as well as Durk had seen anyone serve at the PC, and Faber's side took the first, and the game, and the PC. Faber was made king for the third time and was given the silver ball, which the Commissie has handed to its kings since 1883. The carriages came round for the procession, the anthem was sung by those who knew the words and hummed by those who did not, and the wreaths of flowers were hung on the winners, where they looked, as they always do, both ridiculous and exactly right.

Durk did not stay for the carriages. He had one thing left to do, which nobody else would think of.

He walked out onto the empty field in the long evening light, past the perk and the serving box, to the place where the white block had lain. He knelt, with less complaint from the knee this time, and put his hand in his pocket and felt the two blocks there, the white and the red, worn smooth at the corners.

In the grass there was a small square of pressed turf, paler than the grass around it, with sharp corners. It would stand up again by the morning.

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Johan Huizinga, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Octōbrēs (30 September 2026), ā Iohanne Huizingā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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