Amsterdam Stories

by Nescio

  On Sundays he read the mail, anything so as not to have to think. When visitors dropped by, Coba would say, “I think from Shanghai. Shanghai, isn’t it, Eduard?” And Auntie could already see in her mind’s eye an announcement saying that “our esteemed colleague of many years is hereby, as of 1 January”—that was a bit quick—“as of 1 July, a member of our board of directors.”

  But it didn’t turn out that way.

  His father-in-law was dead. Dad had always wanted to live in the country and for four years he raised chickens and fed the peacock and planted fruit trees, which died. And he kept the accounts. Eggs cost six cents each in the village store while theirs cost them eight cents each, but when he walked into his kitchen with a half dozen eggs and wiped his feet on the mat, he felt that for twelve cents extra you do get something.

  And Mom went along with it, she shared his new life as much as she could and didn’t let anything show, just like good old-fashioned moms from the old days. At night, alone by the lamp, she gazed at the paper over her glasses and thought about Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam. She could never go to bed at nine. She used to see the streetcars moving across the square down by Mauritskade in the evening when she looked out from her upstairs apartment, see the lights gliding by. And the trees in the Muiderbosch, waving back and forth against the dark sky, bare of leaves, full of crows’ black nests. That’s when you really longed for summers in the country. And she thought about the shops on Saturday evening and the crowds shopping and how she herself used to walk down Van Swindenstraat with her shopping basket under her apron back when they weren’t doing so well.

  You could really talk to people back then. Yes, oh, and Dapperstraat market with the two rows of carts, produce and fish and cheese and cups and saucers, and smoky oil lamps and serene white gaslight from homemade gas in little globes. People jostling and hurrying everywhere. After they had been posh a long time she still went on Saturday evenings to buy smoked eels from the cart with the tall black poles sticking up with the jaunty copper knobs on top. Until a girl in a big multicolored skirt and short hair with no hat on said, “Jeezus, the millionaires’re out buyin’ eels.” A tramp like that, with brown shoes on.

  And then Mom began to drift off, in the whispering silence, and sat nodding off with her glasses in her right hand until she bent too far forward and woke herself up with a start. “Oh! I thought I heard the streetcar bell …”

  Meanwhile, up in her bedroom, Dora was writing a short story about “Him” in a ten-cent schoolbook and she told herself that He was someone she didn’t know, someone still to come. And the notebook was shoved away into the back of a drawer that no one could get to, and she blushed even though she was alone and no one knew anything about it.

  Em was engaged to a bookkeeper in Amsterdam and talked about her house, which they hadn’t found yet. She was thinking about having a baby. Weird, a boyfriend like that, who said “insofar as that is concerned” and “alternatively,” and stood with a sharp crease in his black worsted wool pants next to the henhouse, and always had something to say to Dad about “the Bovenkerks,” Mr. Bovenkerk the coal merchant and Mrs. Bovenkerk who summered in Zandvoort at the Mon Désir and Bovenkerk Junior who was about to take his final exams. And so on. Em got very angry when Dora once said, “Look, it’s the Bovenkerk.” She’d answered “Go make love to the IJsseldijk” and almost added “you old prune”— Dora was one year older—but luckily her upbringing kept the upper hand. Dora turned bright red but said nothing. “Could she have read one of my notebooks? But I never leave them lying around!” Yuck, what a brother-in-law. And when he wore that white sweater! And those eyes! A real gentleman, the kind who never looked at anything while he walked down the street except to see if someone he knew was coming in the other direction. And so spineless. How could Em stand a man like that! She would rather stand against a pine tree. No, Coba had done much better. A husband like an ocean! And suddenly she had a vision of white sand and sun and sea and surf and red and blue swimsuits and white dresses and white and red parasols. And of dunes with hollowed-out sides, with tufts of grass on top bowed down by the wind. And of a wave that knocked her down in the water. She could taste the salt.

  Now Dad was dead and they were moving. Mom was planning to live back on Linnaeusstraat, across from Oosterpark. Em was going to get married the following year and Dora had to get a job. Just helping around the house and staying with people here and there and not actually doing anything only makes you restless. First she was planning to go visit a friend in Berg en Dal for a few weeks, to recover a little from the unpleasantness of the past few weeks, and then she’d be ready to join her mother in Amsterdam.

  E. would bring her. It wasn’t easy to get another day off from the office but he would have to just do it.

  Dora looked at him—how strangely he was talking!

  In the train they were polite and obliging to each other but said very little. They rode over the IJssel and the Rhine and Dora looked out at the rivers with her big quiet eyes, sitting straight up in her black dress, hands in her lap, until she could no longer see them and still she sat there and looked out.

  And he glanced at her face now and then and then back out the window so as not to bother her. Then he tried to see if he could picture her in his mind, bit by bit at first, her forehead, and how her hair lay above it, slightly wavy, and her eyelids and her long dark lashes and then her black eyebrows up above, and then all that together with her eyes, especially her eyes, he saw them floating above the cornfields, and her nose just the least bit upturned, so delicate, and her mouth, the pursed red lips, and the little ears pink and translucent, visible through the hair hanging over them, and the stray hairs in front of them and her jaw, so noble and long, with a sharp little chin with a dimple in it. And then he couldn’t keep himself from looking back at the two little vertical ridges under her nose.

  He shut his eyes for a moment and saw her whole face clearly, her tan cheeks too now. And it was also visible perfectly clearly outside, in front of the row of poplars, which had only a very few leaves left on them. Since it was October already. He had to laugh at the people who thought he was a respectable, upstanding gentleman.

  “Say, is it true you stay late at the office every day now?” He nodded. “Do you have to?” He shrugged. “Why do it then?” He laughed again. “To get ahead in the world. You don’t get it for free.” Didn’t sound like much fun to her. “What do you want to do, then?”

  “Look at things … and think … and write …” she said, with the slightest hint of a blush …” at least if you can.”

  He gave a nastily knowing smile. “Impossible, Dora. That won’t get you anywhere. The dumb animals are better off. Don’t you think Bovenkerk is a happy man?”

  Her big eyes opened wide with quiet shock. “Oh, but to write what you think is so amazing—whoosh, whoosh, you don’t even know how you’re doing it and suddenly there it is, exactly the way it has to be. And when you read it later you’re right back in your own earlier life again and yet you don’t know if you’re yourself or someone else.” Her eyes sparkled, there were tears in them. She wasn’t blushing self-consciously anymore. She sat there with her head on her right hand and her elbow on the little shelf in front of the window and gazed out. And the little poet thought: “She’s the real thing,” and: “Now they think I’m a respectable, upstanding gentleman.”

  But he stayed bitter and knowing. “God carries us up to the heights only to hurl us back down again. The path over the summit is short but the valleys are long. Anyone who has been to the mountaintop spends the rest of his days in misery.”

  She shook her girlish head slowly, so sweetly, and at the same time so thoughtfully. “I’ll always live on the mountaintop.”

  He wanted to say “Good!” but said nothing. She looked out at the Waal River. “Beautiful, huh?” And suddenly she stood up, took her hat off the rack, pinned it quickly in place, and, holding it with both hands, feet wide apart for balance, suddenly laug
hed a reckless laugh like a mischievous girl, her eyes locked with his: “No Bovenkerks for me!” Then she leaned her upper body out the window and looked toward Nijmegen spread across the hills along the river, so un-Dutch, so wanly romantic, house upon house and tree upon tree, and she sang into the wind and the clattering of the train over the bridge.

  IX

  To be a great poet and then to fall. In the fullness of time.

  It was certainly a day to forget about 36" white shirts and colored satin for a while.

  There was no one there to pick them up. The friend couldn’t leave the house since her mother was bedridden and they didn’t have a maid. A maid is a sister, not yours or mine but a typesetter’s or a mailman’s, who crawls around rooms on her hands and knees wiping the floor and takes out the trash and breaks the teacups.

  So Dora and the little poet had a cup of coffee in Lent, overlooking the river and with a view of the city and the hills. It had turned into a still, sunny autumn afternoon. The chestnut trees were already bare, their yellow five-fingered leaves with thick gummy stems lay on the ground and dry golden leaves lay everywhere. There was a smell of decaying leaves, which always made the little poet’s heart flutter as if he was about to die and awaken, immortal, in just such a still blue and gold autumn day that would never end. He wiped a thread of gossamer from his forehead. The sky was so blue and cloudless and it looked down at itself in the water and the sun shone golden.

  The city rose up out of the water into the blue sky, quay and houses and then more houses farther up, half visible or all visible above the houses lower down, with red roofs everywhere and over there an enormous church like a sign by which God could recognize his city. It had two sharp spires, tall and powerless, reaching up even higher. The way a little poet reaches up, powerful and powerless, from the raging river of his poethood toward God, who never does come out from behind the blue sky and show himself. The little poet had to laugh at the miracle before his eyes, the eyes that saw a monument to God’s majesty where actually there was nothing but shacks full of measly small-town life, not even in civilized Holland but out east.

  They looked straight down a street that ran steeply uphill from the quay. Shadows were starting to appear on the right side. And up on the hill was a terrace with an iron fence around the edge and over there, on another terrace, a washtub, and someone more than halfway from the river to God opened a window that fiercely reflected the bright sun for an instant.

  To the left of the city was a low ridge of green hills in a straight line “ins grosse Vaterland.”*

  A golden alley cut gently up across the slope. The golden letters of the French boarding school, “Notre Dame aux anges,” shone far above in the distance, on a tall building at the foot of the hills, where the grassy plain ended. “Notre Dame aux anges,” innocent naked little angels and innocent fully clothed students. The God of the Netherlands is right after all, you can never tell with poets. Are they respectable or disrespectable, decent or indecent?

  Then the little poet recaptured the wan romance of the whole situation. God didn’t mean anything by it. He was only playing around, only getting everything ready for a new production of The Sorrows of Young Werther if the little poet was up for it.

  So they chatted and played with words and thoughts and flights of fancy and looked at the sparkling in each other’s eyes whenever a new flash of inspiration struck. Then they stood up and crossed the river. She wanted him to have a nice present to take home to Coba that night, so they went to go buy it together. She hung on his arm, her left arm through his right and her little hands clasping each other tight in their black kid gloves.

  A light-purple silk shawl with a knotted fringe—that’s what he should buy, oh yes, Coba would be so happy with that. Come on, be a nice brother-in-law. She looked into his eyes and pressed his arm, for her sister. There was no duplicity in her head, there was blood rushing in her head but no duplicity. “Look, it’s so pretty.” They were standing in the valley and looking up at the hill, and the arch of the bridge up there that led to the Belvédère framed a little picture: a stretch of gravel road, deserted, climbing gently, with the blue ribbon of a footpath on either side, and trees with blazing orange-yellow crowns, the branches clearly visible through the leaves, and a pair of streetlamps far apart with frosted glass globes, bright white— like a tinted engraving just waiting for someone to write “October 5” underneath.

  There was no duplicity in her thoughts when she suddenly fell silent, the engraving having derailed their conversation. Even though she felt it herself. But she didn’t understand it, just as Adam and Eve didn’t understand their nakedness, or the “anges” of Notre Dame their angelic state, or the boarding-school students their fully-clothedness. My God, what is a woman who understands herself.

  But he understood himself all right, it was horribly clear to him, and that is why nothing happened. He looked at her and the poet in him worshipped her and raised her up to the throne alongside the God of heaven and earth and he didn’t dare touch her.

  And at the same time, deep inside the little poet, the wild animal crouched, ready to pounce and devour all the things that taunted him, everything that stood around him and walked past him and didn’t notice him. First of all, her—the beautiful, the beloved, first—so that there would be no reason not to devour everything else. To lift her up as high as the stars in the winter night and do his worst with her and then let her fall down into the unfathomable deeps. To avenge upon her, in his pleasure, the whole world’s taunting indifference. And besides, what would a little poetess want more than to fall like that?

  Those were his thoughts while a little sparrow flew from a piece of horse dung on the gravel road up into one of the orange trees. But he said, “Do you know a nice shop around here?”

  They bought a very beautiful shawl, elegant and fine. Too bad she was wearing black. She tried the same shawl on herself, but in black, to see how it looked, and her upper body bent the tiniest bit back as she tried it on. But the purple one, that was gorgeous. Coba would definitely squeal with pleasure.

  And so on that day she was simultaneously and alternately sister and wife and little poetess and courtesan and she did not know her divided nature and did not understand any of it.

  But what a day to end all days it was.

  She sang out loud on the road to Beek, which was also deserted, and she skipped as she went, she couldn’t help it, she could move mountains around for fun and snatch the sun from the sky with one hand and toss it over her shoulder into the Waal just to hear it hiss.

  The electric tram gathered them up and trailed a long stream of dry yellow leaves whirling and shuffling and rustling behind it, a little joke of God’s, one he could easily permit himself on a day like this.

  From Beek they climbed to Berg en Dal, winding through the hills. And the hills were not nearly high or steep enough, how could you tire yourself out on those? And she had to tire herself out or else she would burst apart with power, shatter into fragments of little poetess and wife and sister and courtesan. At the summit they looked down into a little valley with black and yellow and green rectangular fields sloping up and down the hills, stands of pine and copses of oak between them. And past that, down on the plains, hours and hours away with no distinguishing features except a straight stretch of wide river that ran off until losing itself in a bend. There, very small, the red roofs of a brickyard and its chimneys, tall but still lost in the distance.

  There they stood, and then they realized that there was nothing to do now except go back.

  But that night in bed she couldn’t sleep, the brilliant clarity in her head just would not go away. She relived the whole day over and over again and saw everything again, perfectly clear. And all at once it was like the sun itself was inside her skull: “I love him. I can’t help it. I want to. God be with me.” She got out of bed and drank down her whole carafe of water.

  The next morning she sat in her nightie on the edge of the bed and lo
oked down at her ankles and pondered. “That’s the way it is, I guess.” But the brilliant clarity was gone.

  He didn’t want to think. As a proper, respectable gentleman he sat quiet and aloof on Line Two on his way to the office.

  “Mornin’, ladies and gentlemen.” And he grimly went to his desk and started sorting his mail.

  X

  It was the end of March when the fullness of time arrived.

  All day long they had corrected proofs, Dora and he. They were all business. Coba was with Bobi in The Hague visiting a rich cousin from the Indies. They had both taken a few days off from the office.

  At five o’clock she had gone home to eat and afterwards she came back to finish their work. When twilight fell they were done, the stack of paper lay on the table with the letter to the publisher next to it, all it needed now was stamps.

  It was in a room upstairs in the city but on the edge of the city— the canal in front of the house had an open field on the other side. Dora sat on a chair by the stove, in a coat and hat, and looked into the fire and thought about the fullness of time, a fullness that lay a long way off for her. He lay flat on the couch between the window and the stove, so flat that she could hardly see him in the dark room, and he looked at the yellow light of the streetlamps on the ceiling and the red glow from the stove on the floor.

  Behind the house was the city, lamps lit in many of the windows, but they didn’t see them because they were sitting at the front of the house. When Dora looked up she saw the countryside where the high sky was losing its last light and darkness already lay across the earth.