Amsterdam Stories

by Nescio

  “No,” Japi said, “I am nothing and I do nothing. Actually I do much too much. I’m busy overcoming the body. The best thing is to just sit still; going places and thinking are only for stupid people. I don’t think either. It’s too bad I have to eat and sleep. I’d rather spend all day and all night just sitting.”

  This, Bavink started to think, was an interesting case. He nodded. Japi was holding his cap on his head with his right hand the whole time, his right arm propped up on the rail. The wind was blowing so hard that Bavink had to cover his nose with his hand to be able to breathe. Japi just sat there like he was sitting at home. Then Japi said that his plan was to stay in Veere for another few weeks, until his cash ran out.

  Painting seemed nice enough to him, if you could do it. He couldn’t do anything, so he didn’t do anything. And after all, you can’t express things the way you feel them. He had just one wish: to overcome the body, to no longer feel hunger or exhaustion, cold or rain. Those were the great enemies. You always had to eat and sleep, over and over again, you had to get out of the cold, you got wet and tired or miserable. Now look at that water. It has it good: it just ripples and reflects the clouds, it’s always changing and yet always stays the same too. Has no problems at all.

  All this time Bavink stood bracing himself with his walking stick, leaning into the wind, and nodding at Japi. He’s onto something there, Bavink thought. And he drily asked if Japi was also going on to Veere. So the conversation turned to Zierikzee, Middelburg, Arnemuiden, and all the places where they had both done plenty of walking and standing and sitting around. For Japi had in fact done quite a bit more in his life than just sit by the water in Veere. And Bavink realized before long that Japi could not only walk and stand and sit, he could see too. And talk about it for hours. And when they stepped onto land again at de Zijpe, Japi pointed southwest, at the wide tower of Zierikzee, dimly visible on the horizon, and said, “Fat Jan, patient old Fat Jan, he’s still standing. I thought so. Sure, he’s still standing.” And then Bavink asked if Japi was always in such a good mood and then Japi said “I am,” nothing more. And when they got to Zierikzee and stepped off the streetcar Japi flapped the soles of his shoes on the hot cobblestones of some unshaded little street that was just baking in the sun, and stretched, and said that life really was devilishly funny. And then he shook his walking stick threateningly at the sun and said, “Still, this sun! It shines but then it starts to go down, it doesn’t go back up again, when it’s after noon it has to set. It’ll be cool again tonight. Everyone’s eyes would pop out of their heads if it didn’t go down one day. Nice and warm, huh? My things are sticking to my body. The sea air is steaming out of my collar.”

  So clearly this “overcoming the body” stuff wasn’t meant quite as literally as all that.

  At the table, Japi was more than talkative. He talked enough for three, and ate enough for six. “The sea air digs a hole in you,” they say in Veere. He drank enough for six more and sang the whole shanty of the Nancy Brick. In short, he was bustling and boisterous and Bavink thought a guy like this is worth his weight in gold.

  That he was. In the afternoon he took Bavink to the canal ring and walked him three times around Zierikzee. His mouth never stopped moving and his walking stick kept pointing and when the Zierikzeers stopped and stared he walked up to them and called them “young man” and asked after their health and clapped them on the shoulder. Bavink doubled over from laughing so hard. Japi was good at getting even with those well-disposed cultured Dutchmen who have no patience for anyone who doesn’t look at least as stupid and tasteless as they do, and who scoff at you and say things about you to your face, in public, as though pastors and priests in even the tiniest villages hadn’t been trying to raise people properly for centuries. Japi was a workhorse and he could lay into people, if needed, with such skill and force that even the most brutish lout had to knuckle under. Things didn’t go that far in Zierikzee. People in Zee-land are actually pretty nice. Japi liked to say, “The one thing I’m sorry about is that there isn’t a brawl in Walcheren every now and then.”

  II

  For two days Bavink and Japi tromped around Veere and already they were thick as thieves. They sat together for hours on the roof of the Hospitaal and looked out over Walcheren and de Kreek and Veergat and the mouth of the Oosterschelde and the dunes on Schouwen. There was Fat Jan again, the Zierikzee tower, now to the north. And there was Goes, and Tall Jan, the Middelburg tower, the spire around which Walcheren turned, the heart of this world. And the tide came in and the tide went out; the water rose and fell. Every night the limping harbormaster came and first he lit the green light on Noorderhoofd, the breakwater, then he came back down and then he had to go around the whole harbor and then you saw him by the tower again and then he opened the wooden gate and climbed the wooden steps and lit the light in that tower too. And then Japi said “Another day, boss,” and the limping harbormaster said “Yes, sir, another day.” And then when you looked toward Schouwen, you saw the light blinking on and off as it turned. And an hour out to sea the buoy floated and its light shone and went out, shone and went out. And the water sloshed up and down and all through the night the sun that you couldn’t see slid past in the north and the last light of day that you could see slid past in the north along with it and turned into the first light of the new morning. One day touched the next, the way they always do in June.

  For the earth everything was simple enough. It just turned on its axis and followed its course around the sun and had nothing to worry about. But the people on it fretted out their days with troubles and cares and endless worries, as though without these troubles, these cares, and these worries, the day wouldn’t turn into night.

  Japi knew better. The sun went down into the ocean by the Walcheren dunes on its own. But Bavink was in a bad way sometimes.

  Bavink was someone who usually worked hard. People thought he was pretty good. He had a good laugh about that. He didn’t sell anything when he didn’t have to; he put aside his best work and never looked at it again, always dissatisfied. As long as he was working everything went fine, as soon as he stopped he suffered; sometimes he was half dead with fatigue. If people knew how he really saw things, how things gripped him, they would laugh at his bungling, his dismally botched attempts to reproduce that majesty. There were times when Bavink did nothing, just let himself go, neglected everything, looked lazily at everything and thought it was “nice” that things were “so damn beautiful,” as he put it. Times when he felt a pain in his skull thinking about all his futile efforts, his “admirable work.” Admirable work! It made him want to throw up just thinking about it. “Admirable work,” they said. They didn’t know the first thing about it. God obviously hadn’t kicked them around like Bavink.

  He wished he could just give up painting, but that wasn’t so simple either: what’s inside you wants to come out. And so the torture started up again: work, work, work day and night, paint all day and fret all night, stay with it, work through it, worry about whether you’ve really got hold of the things this time. He didn’t sleep or eat much; at the beginning he would smoke an enormous number of cigars, one after the other, but after the first day he stopped doing that too. He had moments of the greatest bliss, a joy that all his languid submersion in that “delicious beauty” couldn’t give him. And then they came to look, this person, that person, they stood behind him in twos and threes and fours and they looked and nodded and pointed. And suddenly it was over. Then he said “Dammit” and went and lay down on his cot and sent someone out for a flask of jenever and he was done. After a few days he put the canvas away with the rest. In the days that followed he was wretched, tired, miserable, numb, and sick, and he started “shuffling around” again, as he put it: doing nothing, loafing, walking around. If he needed money he dragged something out of his “garbage heap,” looked for a “scrap” that “somebody would give something for,” and sold it. Nobody could change his ways—that’s just how he was. His strengths an
d weaknesses were one. When he sold something, he stuffed the money into his pocket and clinked with guilders and rijksdollars and walked down Kalverstraat whistling a tune. He said a friendly hello and waved happily whenever you ran into him.

  Then he came up and stood next to you and slyly showed you all the “coppers” in his pocket, and laughed out loud, and said, “Can you believe those suckers?” He never accepted paper money: you can’t clink bills in your pocket. He had to have gold and silver, and when it was too much for him to carry he said he’d “come by to get the rest later.”

  That was Bavink. Clearly someone in a constant state of overcoming the body would be thoroughly interesting to him. He could learn something from a man like that. Someone who thought it was fine just to let the wind blow through his hair, let the cold, wet wind soak his clothes and his body, who ran his tongue over his lips because the taste of the ocean was so “goddamn delicious,” who sniffed his hands at night to smell the sea. Someone who thought it was enough to be alive and in good health, who went on his joyful way between God’s heaven and God’s earth and thought it was idiotic that people caused themselves so much trouble, and laughed out loud at them, and sat there eternally with his beatific smile, quietly enjoying the water and the sky and the clouds and the fields, and let the rain soak him through without noticing it and then said “I think I’m wet” and laughed. Someone who could eat an expensive meal and drink expensive jenever better than anyone in Holland and then, at other times, on his long walks (because he didn’t always sit around, every so often he spent days at a time on his feet), he’d eat dry rolls day in and day out and be moved to tears because out in the open “a piece of bread like this can taste so good.”

  And when Bavink was working, Japi sat nearby on the grass or back-to-front on a chair inside, smoking. When they were both inside, Japi kept another chair nearby with a little glass of liquor on it, and reached out his hand for it every now and then. And he kept Bavink on track. Bavink had never spoken a word to anyone when he was working but he talked with Japi.

  “The hell with it,” Japi said, “what does it matter if it’s good or not! You do what you can, you’re just a poor bastard like everyone else. You have to paint. You can’t stop, can you? The things don’t care if you don’t get them down exactly how you see them. And other people don’t understand anything anyway, not the things and not your work and not you. As for me, I could spend my time in a lot more interesting ways than sitting here boozing and eyeballing that mess of paint. You think I’d be any worse off?

  “No, that’s all wrong,” he said then, “much too blue—don’t you remember what we talked about yesterday? Much too blue. Please. You think it would have grabbed you the way it did if it was that weird blue color?”

  Japi was worth his weight in gold to Bavink. Bavink brought him along everywhere. It was Bavink who made Japi what he was when Bavink turned up with him in Amsterdam.

  In no time Japi was worse than low on funds. Bavink wouldn’t let him go for all the money in the world. Japi’s only job was to look through the “garbage heap,” and he got the hang of it in no time— never before had “the dump” turned such a profit. Since then, Bavink paid for everything, or almost everything. Now and then Japi got a little money from home. But that didn’t make any difference since sometimes they lived it up like tycoons—when they were in the mood they went to Amsterdam for a few days, to Brussels, Paris, Luxembourg, they spent two weeks in Normandy. Japi usually brought along a few things from the scrap heap, “a chip off the old scrap heap” he called it. In France and Belgium he went up to people on the street, rang doorbells. There was no one else in the world Bavink would have let do any of this. But no one else understood the art of keeping Bavink alive, as Bavink said. His conversation was inexhaustible. And he had a memory for landscapes that bordered on the miraculous. He knew everything along the railroad line from Middelburg to Amsterdam: every field, every ditch, every house, every road, every stand of trees, every patch of heather in Brabant, every switch in the tracks. If you had been traveling for hours in the dark and Japi was stretched out asleep on the seats the whole time and you woke him up and asked “Japi, where are we?” you would just have to wait until he fully woke up and all he had to do was listen to the sound of the train on the tracks and then he’d say, “I think we’re in Etten-Leur.” And he’d be right. He could tell you precisely how, on such-and-such a day, the shadow of such-and-such a tree in Zaltbommel fell on such-and-such a road, and which ships were sailing down Kuilenburg into the Lek at the moment when you and Japi were crossing a given railroad bridge. And then he’d sit attentively at the window: “Now this is coming, now that is coming.” For hours. And he’d nod and laugh whenever he saw something he knew especially well. Or else he would say, “Look, the tree is gone,” or “Hey, there are new apples on it now, I didn’t see any last time.” Or: “Two weeks ago the sun was right behind the crown of that tree, now it’s a little to the left, and lower, it’s because we’ve gone two more weeks, and we’re also running ten minutes late.”

  III

  And so when winter came to Amsterdam they came too, and Japi sat in my room one night and smoked the cigars sitting on my table for the taking, one after another. My cigars.

  That was the night Hoyer was over. He had just drifted back from Paris again and now he sat there, tall and lanky, wearing a straw hat, in November, and a salmon-colored jacket, and griping about his work, and about girls. He was in the middle of an incomprehensible story about a young lady and a hired coachman and a basket of eels when we heard the stomp of footsteps coming up the stairs. It was in a working-class neighborhood so you could usually just come on up, most of the front doors were left open.

  Bavink came in first and said, “How’s it going, boys? It’s me. Ha, if it isn’t Hoyer! How are you, Hoyer? Still griping? Well heartiest greetings to you. To you too, Koekebakker, may you long be with us.” Japi stood in the door. They smelled of salt water and grass. “Come in, man, come in!” Bavink invited him in—into my apartment.

  “For Chrissake,” Hoyer said, “would you please be so kind as to shut the door?” “Koekebakker,” Bavink said, “this is Japi, a guy who knows how to have a good time. Hoyer’s polite as ever, I see. Have a seat, Japi,” Bavink said, flopping down into the one free chair, “just pull up that trunk.” A gallows-colored sea chest was sitting there, which contained one clean shirt and my sister’s letters. “Wait, I’ll help,” I said. Then we slid the trunk over to the table, Japi and I, and then Japi saw an empty crate of Hoffmann’s starch with a picture of a cat on it. I had put soil in it but nothing would grow. “How about that instead,” Japi said, “otherwise I’m so low.” “I’ll take one of these,” Bavink said, lighting up one of my cigars. “You too, Japi?” That suited Japi just fine. “What’s that you’ve got there?” Bavink said. Le Lys dans la vallée by Balzac was lying on the table. “Ah, good old Balzac. He’s no young whippersnapper. Dead, right? Dead a long time. Of course. Where’d you blow in from, Hoyer? What a beautiful coat you have on. Stand up. Too short, man, much too short.” Bavink was in an expansive mood. “Geez, I know,” Hoyer said. “Why don’t you tell us where you’ve been hiding out, and who’s this gentleman?”

  Then came the story, accompanied by nods and grins from Japi. And now and then his hand would reach out toward my table, and Hoyer was smoking like a chimney too, I had stopped smoking. “Wait a minute,” Bavink said. “Here, I have some special cigars. Kamper Middelburgs, from Bessem & Hoogenkamp by Lange Delft.” “I know them,” I said.

  “My boy,” Japi said, taking a look around my attic room, “it looks cozy here. By God, it’s cozy here.” He stood up and walked over to the wall. “Ah, Breitner. Very good. And what have we here? It’s a bit dark in here. So, good old Anton Mauve. And there we have the city hall, by God.” It was a sketch of the Veere city hall. “Bavink,” Japi said, “I do believe you’re familiar with this. I’ll go look for a job right now if that isn’t a little something
of yours.”

  “You’re in luck,” Bavink said. “I thought so,” Japi said, and he sat back down. “No, really, I’ll definitely be coming back here again. I like it here.”

  Just then the gramophone belonging to the diamond cutter across the street started up. “Clap,” Japi said. And we clapped. The four of us stood at the open window and applauded our hearts out. You could hear porch doors opening everywhere, people came outside, some applauded with us, a child started crying, a dog howled as though the whole block would be dead within a month. The diamond cutter never flinched—he was magnificent. A young woman across the street shouted, “Buncha idiots!” A little girl shrieked a few times: “It’s Papus! It’s Zeppelin!” A kid started playing his harmon-ica. “It’s about time we left,” Hoyer said.

  So we stomped downstairs. On the fourth and third floors there were loud discussions going on inside. “About us,” Japi said. On the second floor there was no one home. “Say, Japi,” Bavink said on the street, “you need to get this round.” “Sure,” Japi said, “let’s go.” So I got to see what Japi was like that same night. Hoyer’s theory was that beer never did any harm, so we drank a very respectable amount of it. Japi didn’t have a penny. Hoyer flat-out refused, Bavink was drunk and staring vacantly into space and insisting that “This guy is a damn good fellow and he’s getting this round”—he meant Japi— ”and the waiter is a damn good fellow too.” I had nineteen cents; Hoyer slipped out. I decided to put “the situation” on my tab, the waiter knew me, and at one o’clock the three of us were crossing Frederiksplein, yodeling happily. I got the money back from Bavink later; he absolutely insisted I take it. Japi found it all splendid and three days later he was sitting on the edge of my bed, swinging his legs back and forth; he said it was stupid of Bavink to get so plastered, but “everything worked out.” When he left, he had Le Lys dans la vallée in his hand.