Steef's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Steef's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is presented as an enduring consequence of war that resurfaces in civilian life, shaping what Steef fears, where he can go, and how Rebecca organizes their life together. The novel connects his distress not only to his memories of Srebrenica but also to a later fatal mistake in Utrecht; against those experiences, his repeated appeal to enjoy life and his reliance on music become hard-won ways of enduring rather than signs that the past has passed.

War and the delayed return of danger

Steef tells Peter that he served in Srebrenica and never properly processed what he experienced there. His account is marked by the gap between immediate survival and later understanding: during fire he treated the scene almost like a game, ran past a nearby exploding shell without injury, and initially failed to recognize machine-gun fire for what it was. Only much later, he says, did he grasp how fortunate he was to have another chance at life, while thousands of Muslim men did not. The remembered danger therefore returns not as a settled episode but as something whose meaning arrives belatedly, bringing gratitude and horror together.

That history sits behind the fatal incident in Utrecht. When Peter asks whether he has ever killed anyone, Steef's jaw tightens before he answers. The previous year, he mistook a man he describes as a drug addict for an armed dealer, believed the man was drawing a weapon, and shot him; what he had taken for a weapon was a mobile phone. Steef says he then fell apart, that everything came out, and that he was unable to work for months. Rebecca strokes his back as he tells the story. The scene makes the burden of the act visible in his body and in the care offered by his partner, while showing how a mistaken perception of imminent danger could end in irreversible harm.

Fear in ordinary surroundings

The consequences extend beyond moments of recollection. During a trip to visit Rebecca's mother, Steef became so frightened that he could no longer sleep, watched his surroundings like a hunted animal, believed people were speaking about him behind his back, and suffered flashbacks to the situations he had endured as a Dutchbat soldier. After that experience, he would not travel outside the Netherlands again. The account gives no neat boundary between past and present: a visit away from home becomes a setting in which old danger appears to be happening again.

A later episode shows that conviction at close range. In a place that smells of urine, Steef insists that the people he identifies with a hostile ethnic slur are everywhere and still pursuing him. Peter begins to understand what is happening, draws in fresh air, and concentrates on becoming sober. He points out that he can see the door and that nobody has come out; there is no one pursuing Steef. The scene sets Steef's certainty against what Peter can observe. His fear is real, but the pursuit he perceives is not confirmed by the immediate surroundings.

Rebecca's care and the limits of home

Steef and Rebecca's choices are organized around preventing another crisis. Rebecca calls his condition a problem when explaining why they no longer holiday abroad. She would like to spend a week in the Caribbean or Ibiza, but says she cannot leave him alone: if he had a PTSD attack while she was away, she could not answer for what might happen. Peter and Eva offer to keep an eye on Steef, but Rebecca does not feel able to accept that arrangement. Her response is neither indifference nor a simple refusal of help; the passage shows that the responsibility she carries cannot easily be handed to friends.

Steef presents staying home as a preference rather than a restriction. He praises the Netherlands and its beaches as the finest in the world, valuing their space and freedom, and persuades Peter to abandon a motorcycle trip to southern France. For Peter and Eva, this means not having to join the stream of families heading to a campsite, and remaining close to Steef and Rebecca. The summer routine makes the compromise concrete: the neighborhood shimmers in thirty-five-degree heat, residents prepare their gardens and caravans, and the couples who will not go away remain nearby. Steef's confident praise of home sits alongside the fear that has made foreign travel unmanageable.

Survival, music, and the novel's framing

Steef turns his experience toward an urgent argument for staying alive. He tells Peter that death is hard, cold, and lonely, and urges him to live and enjoy each day. In invoking Srebrenica, he links that counsel to the difference between his own survival and the fate of the thousands who did not return. He grips Peter and the narrator by the wrists hard enough to hurt and urges them to break out of their self-made prisons. The physical gesture gives force to his appeal: survival, for him, is not an abstraction but a chance that can be lost.

Music is the other means of coping that Steef names directly. He calls it his rescue, recommends U2, and says it works better for him than therapy. He then goes to Peter's alphabetized CD collection and asks for U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind. Peter finds it, and Steef, no longer angry, searches for the disc cheerfully. The shift does not erase the earlier account of war, the shooting, or the limits placed on travel. Instead, it gives the episode a modest counterpoint: after recounting what he cannot leave behind, Steef seeks a sound that can hold his attention in the present. The novel thus presents his condition through both disruption and accommodation—fear returning in civilian settings, Rebecca's vigilance, and Steef's active insistence on life and music.