Steef’s War-Trauma Symptoms

Steef’s War-Trauma Symptoms are presented as a recurring, embodied condition rooted in his military experience in Srebrenica and compounded by a fatal shooting in Utrecht. The symptoms surface not as a settled account of the past but as a sudden collapse of distance: amid a night out in Amsterdam, Steef hears imagined pursuers, relives the sensory world of a muddy trench, and admits that fear remains inside him even when he knows he is safe. His story also connects trauma to guilt, intimate dependence, and the precarious ways people try to manage what cannot simply be left behind.

Origins and the delayed return of violence

Steef tells Peter that he killed a man the previous year in Utrecht. He had taken a man he describes as an addict for an armed drug dealer and thought the man was drawing a weapon; it was a mobile phone. The mistake was fatal. Steef says he then broke down completely and was unable to work for months. The account links his current distress to an earlier moment when threat and perception became inseparable, while its description of the death leaves the moral weight of that error in view.

Rebecca adds that Steef served in Srebrenica and never properly processed what he experienced there. His own recollection gives that history its bodily and perceptual texture: a grenade exploded close beside him, yet he was unharmed; he ran on without recognizing the rattle of machine guns. At the time, the fighting seemed unreal, almost like a game. Only much later, he says, did he understand how fortunate he was to survive when thousands of Muslim men did not. The delayed recognition joins gratitude for his own life to awareness of the lives lost around him.

Steef turns that hard-won perspective into an urgent appeal to Peter and the narrator: he urges them to resist withdrawal and take what they can from life. Gripping both men by the wrists hard enough to hurt, he insists on breaking out of their self-made prisons, then pulls them toward the room and music. For him, U2 is a form of rescue, more effective in that moment than therapy. The gesture and the recommendation do not erase what happened; they show the force with which he tries to answer it by insisting on movement, pleasure, and survival.

The episode in Amsterdam

Later, while he and Peter are in a foul-smelling public toilet, Steef insists that hostile men are nearby and pursuing him. He hears them speaking and becomes convinced that they are still after him. Peter watches him sway, recognizes that something is wrong, and tries to orient himself toward sobriety. Although Peter can see the door and knows nobody has come out, reassurance does not immediately dislodge Steef’s belief that armed pursuers are present.

Peter wets his hands in the water and places them on the back of Steef’s neck. Steef startles, raises his head, and is visibly crying; sand covers one cheek. His fear is expressed in a voice Peter scarcely recognizes, suddenly thin and small. He asks what he can do and how he can make the experience stop. Peter suggests water and food, noting that they have eaten too little, and offers to call Rebecca or Eva to collect them. Steef’s body continues to shake. The scene makes the episode physical as well as psychological: fear appears in his trembling, tears, and need for another person’s help.

When Peter denies that the pursuers are there, Steef explains that he heard them behind him, shouting to one another in a language he could not understand. He nevertheless identifies them as former enemies. That sound is enough to switch him back into a muddy trench in his mind, where he can again smell sweat and excrement. Peter answers that the place they are actually in also smells foul, grounding the sensation in their immediate surroundings. Steef laughs, and Peter cautiously joins him; the brief easing of the moment does not mean the fear has disappeared.

Persistent vigilance and fragile coping

Steef describes his mind as damaged and the fear as something lodged in his heart and blood. He knows that he is in Amsterdam with Peter and has no reason to be afraid, and he points to his intense training as evidence of his strength. Yet neither knowledge nor physical discipline removes the terror. It sometimes sleeps, he says, but remains ready to spring. His account sets rational awareness against a bodily alarm that outlasts the danger that first produced it.

Peter suggests walking, and begins moving his legs; Steef gets up, brushes sand from his clothes, and keeps scanning his surroundings. Peter realizes that Steef does this habitually, looking around and over his shoulder as if expecting someone. The episode therefore reveals more than a single drug-related panic: even outside an acute crisis, vigilance has become part of Steef’s ordinary way of moving through the world. His hands shake too much to roll a cigarette, so he passes his tobacco to Peter, who rolls and lights it for him. They walk silently toward the street. Steef says a joint might calm him, while Peter replies that they have taken enough drugs for one evening and is relieved that the ecstasy is wearing off. Their differing responses expose the fragile, improvised character of their attempts to settle him.

Relationships, responsibility, and the limits of recovery

Steef’s distress is witnessed and managed through relationships. Rebecca strokes his back after he tells Peter about the killing, and later describes the conflict between her heart, which resists believing he could have committed another crime, and her mind, which fears that something in him might have snapped because of his syndrome. She emphasizes that he is her husband and that she loves him. Her fear does not settle the question of his responsibility; it shows how his condition complicates the way she confronts suspicion and attachment.

The trauma also enters Peter’s experience through the intimacy of shared danger and care. In the toilet, Peter feels an impulse to embrace and kiss Steef, then recognizes that the impulse unsettles him. He avoids meeting Steef’s eyes when Steef describes his terror, embarrassed by seeing him so vulnerable, yet he stays beside him, touches his shoulder, helps him wash, and walks with him. Elsewhere, during a shooting lesson, Peter recalls that Steef had coached Eva in the same way. Steef’s instructions turn the scene into an exercise in imagining an enemy and aiming between the eyes; Peter sees no enemy, only a target, and the shot goes high. The episode places Steef’s familiarity with weapons beside the vulnerability that his traumatic history has produced, without making the two equivalent.

The symptoms remain consequential beyond the panic episode. When Rebecca considers whether Steef could have been responsible for a later killing, she invokes his syndrome as a reason for fear, not as proof. Steef, for his part, later explains that he was not suspended because of the young man’s death but because photographs found at the man’s home made him, in the authorities’ view, vulnerable to blackmail. The distinction preserves the uncertainty surrounding the investigation while showing how suspicion, trauma, and institutional pressure converge around him. The novel presents no clean recovery: Steef can recognize that a terror is unreal, laugh briefly, accept help, and keep walking, while remaining alert to its return.