Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a recurring reality in Steef’s life, linking his service in Srebrenica to a fatal mistake in Utrecht and to the fear that follows him into ordinary settings. The novel presents it not simply as a diagnosis but as a force that alters work, friendship, travel, and the meaning of safety. Steef can insist that he is fine, yet his memories return in bodily distress, suspicion, and a life increasingly organized around avoiding another episode.

Two Sources of Trauma

Steef’s account joins two different encounters with violence. He served in Srebrenica as part of Dutchbat, where a shell exploded close beside him without injuring him. Under fire, he ran on without recognizing that the rattling sound around him came from machine guns. The experience did not become fully legible to him in the moment; only much later did he grasp how close he had been to death and how fortunate he was to have survived when thousands of Muslim men did not. His account makes survival itself a burden of recognition: he speaks of gratitude, but also of the lives that were not spared.

A later police shooting gives that history a new, personal consequence. In Utrecht, Steef mistook a man he regarded as an armed drug dealer for someone drawing a weapon. The object was a mobile phone. Steef killed him, and afterward, as he tells Peter, he fell apart; for months he could not work. The mistake is not interchangeable with his wartime experience: here, he is not only a survivor of danger but the person whose perception led to another man’s death. The narrative places the two experiences beside each other without treating them as the same, allowing fear, responsibility, and the aftermath of violence to remain entangled.

Work, Therapy, and Masculine Silence

The shooting had consequences for Steef’s employment and treatment. After a problem at work in Utrecht, the police chief wanted him to enter therapy. Steef says he tried, but that the sessions made him feel so awful that he stopped. He rejects the idea that the problem lies with him, blaming the police system instead, and describes his changed work as riding a motorcycle to issue traffic fines. He also says he no longer works in narcotics. The change marks a retreat from the work he had done, but the account does not suggest that changing duties resolved what happened to him.

His response to therapy becomes part of an understated bond with Peter. When Peter admits that he too has quit talking about his feelings, Steef says he has also stopped. Neither presses the other for an explanation. Their friendship is sealed, in the narrator’s understanding, through a silence that lets each man avoid being exposed as weak. This mutual reserve offers companionship, but it also leaves painful experiences largely unspoken. Steef’s account of the shooting emerges only when Peter asks directly whether he has ever killed anyone.

Safety as a Restricted Life

Steef’s trauma shapes the geography of his life with Rebecca. After a visit to her mother, he became intensely afraid: he stopped sleeping, looked around like a hunted animal, believed people were talking about him behind his back, and experienced flashbacks to frightening situations from Srebrenica. He does not want to undergo that again. Rebecca calls the condition his problem, but her account makes clear that its effects are shared. She would like to take a week-long trip to the Caribbean or Ibiza, yet fears leaving him alone in case he has a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder episode and she is not there to manage what follows.

The couple’s decisions about holidays show how the condition narrows possibility without requiring a fresh crisis. Steef presents the Netherlands as the finest country and its beach as the finest beach; he values the space and freedom he says he can find there. He persuades Peter to abandon a motorcycle trip to the south of France, deriding the crowded route and the destination. Staying nearby means that Rebecca and Steef do not travel abroad, and that Peter and the narrator also remain in the neighborhood. The hot summer continues around them—at thirty-five degrees, with smog warnings and families preparing for holidays—while the friends’ plans are shaped by a danger that is not visible to the rest of the suburb.

Episodes and the Return of the Past

In a later episode, Steef says he hears men from the former Yugoslavia and believes they are still after him, even in the place where he is hiding. The narrator begins to understand that Steef’s fear has overtaken the immediate evidence. He checks what can be checked: from where he stands, he can see the exit, and nobody has come out. He tells Steef that nobody is pursuing him, while also trying to become sober enough to respond clearly. The scene brings the war into the present not as a narrated recollection but as a conviction that the past threat remains active.

Steef’s account of Srebrenica also makes him an advocate for living. He urges Peter and the narrator to resist the self-made prisons they have built for themselves, insisting that survival should lead to enjoyment of life rather than surrender to death. He grabs them by the wrists hard enough to hurt, turning an argument about mortality into physical contact. Then he pulls them toward the music and calls music his rescue, preferring U2 to what he regards as futile therapy. His certainty is not evidence that his trauma has passed; it is a response he has fashioned against the death and fear that remain present to him.

Effects Beyond Steef

The novel traces how trauma can travel through relationships without making the people around Steef interchangeable with him. Rebecca’s touch on his back follows his disclosure of the Utrecht shooting; her later reluctance to leave him alone reflects the practical vigilance that his episodes require. Peter and the narrator receive both his confession and his forceful lesson about survival. Elsewhere, Peter remembers Steef’s instruction at the shooting range, including the lesson to focus on an enemy and shoot. That remembered instruction carries a different charge in Peter’s mind: the act of teaching marksmanship can be recalled as a possible route to violence. The episode does not make Peter’s fear equivalent to Steef’s condition, but it shows how the language and practice of violence can persist between them.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder therefore appears through delayed understanding, recurrence, and consequence rather than through a single explanatory scene. Steef survives shellfire, later kills a man through a mistaken perception, leaves one kind of police work, quits therapy, and lives within travel restrictions shaped by fear. At the same time, he reaches for friendship, music, and an insistence on making use of the life he still has. The contrast matters: his conviction that people should enjoy life coexists with an experience that repeatedly makes the world feel dangerous.