On the far side of the room he recognises a face from an even earlier period of his life. It’s a huge pink face like a clean-scrubbed piglet’s arse, with an equally intelligent expression. The man is leaning extravagantly backwards, arms spread wide, and in each arm a frail oriental woman. His posture radiates an immense desire for possession, the male pride that fifty-year-old men feel when they’ve got their claws into young flesh.
It’s the man who used to live behind his house, De Wit, a cattle trader who once came to visit Marcus’s mother. He had last met him a long time ago. That was in a dingy pub, where Marcus and Johan and Fred had ended up more or less by accident. No sooner were they inside than they met the cattle trader, his wife and some other people, crowding around the bar. De Wit had called loudly across to them and bought them beers and before Marcus had been able to warn his friends they had been drawn into the group. Marcus, who was already (what was he, about eighteen, something like that) considered strange enough to be able to afford antisocial behaviour, had walked over to the pinball machine and put in a guilder. As he stood playing he heard the loud laughter of pub fun rising up behind him. It made him fire the steel ball around with great fury, and he had the consolation of scoring points with much less difficulty than usual.
He had been playing there for a while when he felt a body pressing against him. It was Mrs De Wit. She was standing so close to him that he couldn’t just smell her heavy perfume, but also felt her curves rubbing against him.
‘So you aren’t a party animal, Marcus?’ she asked, flashing her little eyes.
‘Certainly not an animal,’ he had said, ‘and I don’t even want to talk about parties.’
He had pressed his pelvis against the box to get a ball free and when he looked round again he saw Mrs De Wit staring hard at his hips.
‘You’re very good at this…’
It had taken him a moment to work out that she was talking about pinball.
‘Not that great,’ he said coldly. ‘I usually play with Johan.’ And he had nodded in the direction of the bar, where Johan and Fred were standing rather uneasily among middle-aged men.
‘Teach me, too,’ said Mrs De Wit.
He could avoid talking about parties, and easily separate himself from society, but he couldn’t refuse the woman next door. A moment later she stood pressed tight against him by the pinball machine, pushing the buttons according to his instructions. She wriggled her body and when she scored a bonus she pinched his arm.
She was quite a small woman, certainly compared to him. Well rounded, the embodiment of the Dutch housewife in her dark-blue pleated skirt, dark-blue cardigan over a white blouse of which only the collar was visible. He had never seen her as anything but the woman who lived behind his mother’s house, but here, at the pintable, as she let her curves glide along his body and clearly enjoyed doing so, he suddenly saw her as a sexual being. It was a thought that both excited him and filled him with rage.
At the bar a new round was ordered and the laughter grew louder and more frequent.
‘I’m going,’ said Marcus, who could see Johan and Fred getting drunk in the distance.
‘Oh, take me home then, will you? I’ll just sit here on my own and the men will carry on. Wait a minute.’
She hurried to the bar, said something to her husband, who barely listened, literally waved her away, and came back.
He was on his bike and Mrs De Wit, who was sitting on the luggage rack, held both arms tight around his waist. She pressed herself against him as if she was frightened to death, back there on his luggage rack. He felt her cheek against his back, the firm pressure of her breasts and the soft clasp of her plump arms around his waist. They didn’t speak and Marcus pedalled furiously for a quarter of an hour, until they rode into the pitch-dark bungalow park. He braked on the path leading to the garage of her house.
‘You’re all hot from cycling,’ said Mrs De Wit. ‘Won’t you come in and have a drink?’
Marcus raised one eyebrow and looked at her. ‘To cool down?’ he said stonily.
In the glare of the outside lamp, which had come on automatically, he saw her looking up. The styled blonde hair, the blossoming apple cheeks. She looked as if she’d walked out of an advertisement for the Bavarian tourist office. Put a dirndl skirt on her, braid her hair and you could call her Ulla.
He had to blink to chase the image away.
‘You aren’t someone who goes to bed early?’ said Mrs De Wit.
He got off the bike and looked at her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m someone who goes to bed late.’ He turned his bike round, nodded to her and rode away.
Two young women, in the uniforms that randy men associate with French chambermaids, come tripping onto the little stage. They are wearing impossibly high heels and skirts so short that they don’t even have to lift them up to show their bottoms. Marcus shakes his head and wonders why it is that male fantasy always walks the same well-trodden paths: the French chambermaid, the nurse, the frigid librarian who only has to lose her glasses and her bun to become a sexual predator. Not that he escapes it himself. His non-adventure with Mrs De Wit followed the same clichéd pattern: sultry older woman next door seduces much younger boy next door.
What would have happened if he had done what she apparently expected of him? And why didn’t he?
In his masturbatory fantasy that same night, he had led her inside, thrown her over the arm of an overstuffed armchair and without much ceremony taken her from behind. In the days and weeks that followed, the fantasised act had permuted into more or less everything described in the Kama Sutra. A confusion of scenarios had passed by his randy inner eye, until Mrs De Wit had become a masochistic sex slave whose only desire was to be used in as many perverse ways as possible. He had made her crawl around in a black and red flower-patterned corset, with a gag in her mouth, her full white buttocks aloft by way of permanent invitation. He had tied her up and stroked her for hours with a peacock feather, beaten her with a whip, teased her and kneaded her. He had pumped his seed into all her bodily orifices and when he’d had enough of that, he fantasised about spurting it over her, her face, her breasts, her round white buttocks. Mrs De Wit, who probably didn’t want much more than quick sex with the boy next door (and perhaps not even that, perhaps she’d just wanted to be desired once more, like in the old days), Mrs De Wit had become an obsession for him, an obsession fed by a fury and bleakness that he didn’t understand.
The French chambermaids, now wearing nothing but the white aprons that covered their breasts and their laps, walk into the room and mime to a hit from about three years ago: Yes sir, I can boogie…all night long. Cattle trader De Wit sits, legs spread, between his oriental girls and grins along a substantial cigar as if he has decided to look as much like a caricature as possible. The chambermaids post themselves in front of him and turn their bottoms in his direction, whereupon De Wit leans forward and sticks twenty-five guilder notes between their buttocks.
‘If we hadn’t been open for such a short time, I’d say it was a tradition.’
Alessandro Caviar has drawn up again. He looks at the far side of the room and seems to have raised his left eyebrow slightly.
‘I know him,’ says Marcus.
‘So do we,’ says his host.
They grin at each other.
‘Tell me something, Mr Alessandro…How did you end up opening a nightclub in this town of all places?’
The man opposite him shakes a cigarette from a pack of Craven A, puts the cork filter between his lips and lights it with his flamboyant lighter. He inhales with the greed of someone who smokes little but with relish.
‘I’ll be honest,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t love. There are enough clubs in Amsterdam. Here there wasn’t one. Assen means nothing to me.’
‘Assen means nothing to anyone,’ says Marcus. ‘But on the other hand there aren’t that many people who call it an anus mundi. I even think there aren’t that many nightclub owners who know what that means.’
>
Alessandro Caviar sips from his champagne. He lets the drop of wine roll around his mouth and gently rocks his head back and forth. The sultry red light flashes bloodily over his face.
‘Not every nightclub owner is an idiot with two years of secondary school and an insatiable thirst for money and property.’
Marcus frowns.
‘But I admit,’ says the man opposite him, ‘it’s often best to give people what they ask for and given that everyone wants to feel better than the man who gives them pleasure and sinful fun it isn’t a good idea to have an academic as a nightclub owner.’
He smiles a very indulgent smile.
‘You see, Mr Kolpa, when I came to this country as a young man, in the sixties, I was an untrained worker who ended up in the textile industry, in the dye works. And I wasn’t the only one. Dozens came from my village alone, and a hundred or more from my island. We worked in the big textile factories in the east and when they closed, because they could produce cheaper in China and Taiwan, we swarmed out over the country. Lots went back, too, but many of us had got used to this country with its rain and its lukewarm summers, the tasteless food, the good houses and the stable political climate. It was an easy and not inhospitable country and it was easy for us to earn a decent crust. We opened a pizzeria in Enschede, where we had worked in textiles, and after a few years that went so well that we could all go our own way. Salvatore stayed in catering, Gianni started a plastering company, then there was Roberto, you might know him as a singer, he’s been on television a few times. I went and studied.’
He stubs out his cigarette and brings the champagne glass back to his mouth.
‘What did you study?’
‘Literature.’
‘Italian…’
‘No, Dutch literature. That no longer meant much towards the end of the sixties. People mostly talked about democracy and unisex, I can still remember that as if it was yesterday. But anyone who wanted to could learn something. And so, Mr Kolpa, I sated myself on the fundaments of your culture, if I may use that tortured metaphor.’
Marcus smiles thinly.
‘There was a woman involved, of course. I had, there in the east of the country, fallen in love with a teacher. You know the type: the kind of woman who likes nothing more than reading. And not just books. She read the whole world. I told her about the books of my youth, Dante, of course, but also Pirandello, who wrote so beautifully about my island, Calvino, who was just on the way up, Leopardi, Manzoni. And she introduced me to Elckerlyc, Karel en de Elegast, Multatuli, Van Eeden…Ah…’
‘And what…’
‘I was very impressed by your literature. Particularly by your Arthur van Schendel. A world-class writer who had the misfortune to be born in a small country where greatness is not a virtue.’
‘Hm…’
‘No, Mr Kolpa, if you will allow me this criticism of your fatherland: it isn’t generous towards what is great and different. Where I come from, a writer, regardless of his origins or his studies, is maestro or dottore. Here he is the object of disdain, mockery and even criticism because he is great or different. He is someone who always feels the dogs snapping at his heels.’
He shakes another Craven A out of his pack and briefly disappears behind a cloud of smoke.
‘But there we are,’ he says. ‘That time is far behind me. Now I’m the proud owner of the first nightclub in Assen.’
He laughs softly.
‘What happened between your studies and this evening? I assume that you didn’t see your Dutch language and literature studies as a preparation for this…activity?’
Alessandro Caviar rocks his head slightly.
‘In between there lay a whole life of laws and objections, Mr Kolpa. If you will excuse me now, I will return to the practical running of my empire. It has been a great pleasure. I take it I won’t be seeing you here very often?’
Marcus stands up and shakes the hand that his host has extended.
‘No,’ he says, almost with something like regret in his voice. ‘No, I’m afraid not. I live in Amsterdam and come to this town as little as possible. Or to put it more strongly: I am here with a purpose and as soon as that purpose is accomplished, I will disappear.’
‘Then I hope you find your Eurydice, or should I say: your Beatrice…’
They look at each other in silence. Then the nightclub owner gets up and dissolves in the smoke and the coloured light, as the stage is taken over by a magician and an assistant dressed in leather lingerie.
‘Well,’ says Johan van Gelder, slumping down next to him on the semicircular sofa. ‘That was love at first sight, I would say.’
Marcus shakes his head, as if to chase away the thoughts that have lingered in his head since his conversation with Alessandro Caviar.
‘You and Tedeschi.’
‘Who?’
‘Alessandro Tedeschi, who owns this place.’
Van Gelder closes his eyes.
The magician has asked a member of the audience up on stage, and is now locking him in a black-painted box. His assistant stands by the box, legs spread, with a long whip in her hand.
‘What do you know about him?’
Van Gelder rubs his eyes and sighs tormentedly.
The stage light goes off. A single spotlight remains, lighting the box like a monolith and turning the magician’s assistant into a sharp and threatening silhouette.
‘I think he was married to a Dutchwoman, a holiday marriage, and he stayed on afterwards. Born in Turin. No criminal record. Noah seems to have a weakness for him. Franzen, that guy I was talking to…Do you know him? Franzen decorated the club. The murals.’
On the stage a sharp lashing sound rings out. The assistant has raised her whip and crashed it against the black box. Magnesium light explodes in a bright blue-white ball, smoke fills the front of the stage, the first notes of Also sprach Zarathustra ring out.
‘Jesus,’ says Marcus.
He looks round and only now spots the murals that Van Gelder was talking about. They are rapidly airbrushed copies of glamour scenes that look as if they could have come from an advertisement, but with a vague reference to classic erotic prints. He recognises Manet’s Olympia, a rushed variation on a harem fantasy, and behind it, where it can barely be seen, something that makes him think of a painting by Alma-Tadema.
Applause sounds when the box on stage is opened and there seems to be no one inside, and again when the man who was conjured away comes out of it a little while later.
‘It’s time for me to go.’
‘Where to?’ says Van Gelder, as if he can’t imagine anyone being able to leave this place.
Marcus gets to his feet. He taps his jacket pockets to make sure he’s got everything. He looks for the exit and lets his eye roam across the auditorium once more. The cattle trader on the other side of the room slumps half-asleep between his oriental girlfriends.
‘There is no “where to”,’ he says.
Van Gelder frowns.
‘There’s just a “why”.’
And then, wading like a heron through dark water, he stilt-walks his way between the tables, tries not to feel anyone’s eyes on his back and, gasping for breath, reaches the exit.
Outside the party is in full swing. Deep animal cries ring out. Thumping music comes from the direction of Koopmansplein. The smell of charred meat and exhaust fumes hangs in the air. The moon is invisible in the cloud-marbled sky.
…times of another entertainment, when the farmers’ lads after haymaking waited for the barrel that was driven to the field on a trailer, the dimming evening light above the coppice in the distance, the red cheeks of the haymakers and the bits of straw in their hair, the smell of mown grass, the haze of damp on the arms of the girls and the deep bloom at their throats, the songs that were sung when the beer arrived and how greedily everyone drank to rinse out their dusty gullets, the violin that played (‘Ripe, Ripe Barley’, and ‘The Last Sheaf in the Barn’), humming and wailing, ah, those day
s, fled so long ago…no, no innocence, not that, even then…yes…but the deep colours of evening as it fell over the harvested grain, the fragrant steam that rose from the evening-dewed earth, the bitter hops of the beer and the sweetness of the bread and the saltiness of the cheese and the head in the tall grass beside the field and through the green haze of the stalks the red cheeks and the cornflower-blue eyes and the straw-blonde hair of the milkmaid, her full upper arms, her bosom blossoming from her opened smock, so…then…yes…a long-ago then that is far away for Aleida Fuchs von Coeverden, who has come back from her bathroom after washing her soft pink hands for the umpteenth time, and not for reasons of hygiene, and has stationed herself, clean hands folded in front of her, behind the window of her flat, and looks out over the Brink and the car park below her house and the tent erected there to give shelter and entertainment to a thousand-strong crowd of young farmers’ sons in denim jackets and with strange little hats, bikers enclosed in leather and young women in clothes that must surely be too cold for the time of year, and all jigging about to music that communicates itself in the form of a muffled rhythmic thump to the spinster who stands behind her big rectangular window and lets her thoughts wander, lets herself be swallowed up by her memories, which mostly spring up when she doesn’t call them, like a badly trained hunting dog that dives into the coppice when it isn’t supposed to and sits by your feet when the pheasant tumbles out of the sky, an unruly dog, that’s what memory is, as she stares down at the bustle below and understands with a shock that she, clean-washed hands and all, is staring with her inner eye at the billowing breasts of a milkmaid from long, long ago, but as she tries to hold on to the image it flows away from her like the water that she held in the little bowls of her hands in the bathroom, just as Marcus Kolpa on the edge of his sober single bed lost his grip on other things when Antonia unbuttoned her leather biker’s jacket and two heaving melons sprang out, which he literally, word for word, God save me… really heard saying…no, they looked at him, they murmured: Grab us, Marcus, forget yourself and press your face into our soft warmth and forget yourself, let that tormented frown fade from your face, and although at that moment he thought it was her breasts speaking to him, it was Antonia who said something like that, Antonia, who stood there, hands at her sides, briefly aware of her power, her treasures unveiled, towering over Marcus, he on the edge of the narrow bed, staring at her still-covered breasts, the deep chasm of her cleavage, dark in the light blue of her T-shirt, which she would later pull down at the neck, she knew it before she did it, she would pull it down to below her breasts until they hung obscenely from the stretched opening, just as she knew that he would close his eyes then, because he always closed his eyes when he resisted something unthinking within him, something that fought within him, something he would punish her for, that was what he would do, she knew it, yes, and that he would say: You’re a slut, Antonia d’Albero, you’re Lilith, and that she would breathlessly answer: Oh, yes…and he: Come here, and I’ll punish you, and then she would go to him and lie across his lap, buttocks pleasurably in the air, and wait, shivering, wait, the inevitable wait, a void in time that Albert ‘Appie’ Manuhuttu, who runs the beer tent of the Moluccan football club, also feels as he sees a hand with wet sausage fingers coming down on the behind of Saar, one of his waitresses, and at the same moment hears someone shouting ‘Hey, darkie!’ to Chris Noya, art student with a billowing Afro, who is just setting a tray of pints down on one of the beer-drenched tables, a moment of sudden contemplation, a space of a few seconds in which time becomes a place, a kind of void in time, a moment when Appie Manuhuttu wonders if it was such a good idea, a beer tent to collect some money for the new clubhouse of the Moluccan football club, and he scratches his head and he knows that he can’t ask the question, because they aren’t just standing here for the new clubhouse and promotion to a higher division, no: he and Saar and Chris and Arnold and Noes and all the others are also here to make their parents happy, it’s an understanding that he’s never had before, but at this moment, the vulgarity of the beer-drinking bikers hangs tangibly in the tent, their slurring and babbling drowns out the heavy music, at this moment he knows for certain that they are all here to pay for the unhappiness of their parents, who came to this country full of expectations and were robbed of their hope and respect on the quay in Rotterdam when the men had to take their first steps on Dutch soil in single file, there and then, shivering in their thin clothes but standing proud, were discharged on the spot from the Dutch army, after which they were carried off to an ice-cold barracks where before them Dutch Nazis and even before that Jews on the way to the extermination camps had been locked up, for that misfortune they are here and they accept the clapping hands and boastful insults with what the customers would doubtless consider a mysterious oriental smile, but is nothing more than a thin veil of good manners that conceals the face of hatred, a hatred silent and black as deep water, hatred of the misfortune of their parents, who sit by their gas stoves, heated to boiling point, thinking of the tropics and the smell of clove trees and the village where they were happy, or unhappy…it makes no difference, home at any rate, and he takes a deep breath, he gets Saar to wash the glasses and he himself picks up a tray and starts taking beer around, all smiles and affability, and disperses the black fumes that have risen up within him, but not without feeling the great exhaustion that is not the exhaustion of hard work, the many days spent organising and the many short nights that have preceded this long night, no, what he feels tonight is the exhaustion of all Moluccans, the exhaustion of a stranger in a strange land, the exile who yearns and knows that his hunger will never be sated nor his thirst ever quenched, the exhaustion of someone who has been travelling for a long time and yearns for home, just like young Gerritsma as he stands, still in his mouse-grey suit, by a stainless-steel bier, opposite one Ernest Harms, dressed entirely in hospital blue on the other side of the bier, chatting about the extensively and miserably damaged corpse between them, something that sounds like ‘specially to coincide with the TT’ and ‘how are we going to sort this one out’, and the young Gerritsma mechanically rubs his hands together and is suddenly aware of how much like his father he has become, that eternal mea culpa, asking forgiveness for harm undone, and he wonders suddenly and for the first time in his life whether he might have ended up somewhere else, whether it might be fate that brought him here, and as Harms sorts things out in his usual indiscreet way, instructs two clumsy subordinates to prepare the corpse for the imminent autopsy and leaves the tiled room with him, the young undertaker suddenly remembers what he wanted to be and that someone from the back row in class was always calling out: ‘An archaeologist? Haha, you’re not supposed to dig things up, you’re supposed to bury them’, and they had laughed, all of them, and at break-time a few of them had called him names: ‘Gerritsma stinks of corpses like his dad’, and his motionless face and the pain when he decided at that moment to become what he is now, because he too understood that he wouldn’t escape his fate, he thinks about that, listening to van Harms’s dry remarks about this night full of violence and injuries, First Aid is full already and they can be glad if there’s only one corpse, things will be pretty wild tonight, and they walk down the long corridor on the garden side of the building and there, high above the bushes cut into big hemispheres that lie like enormous breasts on the lawn, he sees the moon emerging from the wreck of clouds that hangs over the town, the same moon that Bertus Huisman is looking at, legs on either side of his inevitable black bicycle, hands clamped around the dull chrome of his handlebars, knuckles white, mouth slightly open, there in the middle of the crowded Nassaulaan he has just fallen silent, just by the edge of the forest, and looks at the face of the moon that stares and peeps, then hides itself again in the dark-blue veils, and he wonders what it is that stirs inside him, what whirling unease shakes up his thoughts like a…no, he doesn’t know like a what and he involuntarily puts both hands to his head and when he does that he is suddenly back in th
e padded isolation of the Light and Strength psychiatric hospital, stiffly swaddled in canvas and belts, head on the soft floor and a glittering stream of spit on the floor where it slowly dries…time passing so slowly that he counts the seconds like hours, and thoughts which at the same time (time…time…time…) go so quickly and outside his control, days, weeks, months, years, centuries spin round through his head and at the very same moment it’s here and now, a now like a slowly surging ocean, a vast black oily expanse of water, and a here of geological proportions, a here made of sharp protruding stones, and he thinks: NOW IS ALWAYS, HERE IS NOW, which doesn’t help and which doesn’t apply to the clock of St Joseph’s Church, cleanly chiming half past ten, and does in a certain sense to a room in Torenlaan, on the other side of the clock, where a man in his best Sunday suit lies on his bed, a handkerchief in his breast pocket, a cloth tied round his parchment face to keep his jaw, now that rigor mortis is setting in, from sagging and him from going into the coffin that stands ready for him with an expression of surprise that he was able to avoid throughout the whole of his life, it is eternally now in the room, the clock stopped at a few minutes to six, even if in the shifting light of the candles at the head and foot of the deathbed the hands look as if they’re moving, just as there seems to be life in the face of the woman sitting on an upright wooden chair pressed up against the wall, an optical illusion, because although she isn’t dead, like her husband, her face is at least as motionless, even her eyes don’t blink when they stare at the heavy velvet curtains behind which, she can’t see but everything in her knows, Gerritsma’s big black gleaming hearse sits like a larger-than-life insect on the moonlit bluish lawn, as black and silent and ominous as the little group of dark-suited men that has come together this evening, gathered in the hopeful presence of the spirit of the Lord, in a small sitting room on the Zuidersingel, where a bluish-grey cloud of cigar smoke floats above their heads as if the Lord, just as in biblical times, on this evening and in these confusing days, is making himself known to the faithful in the form of smoke, although he could be just as present in the tinkle of spoons against coffee cups and the untouched bowl of butter biscuits, the ashtrays that quickly fill with cones of cigar ash and certainly in the words of Siebold Sikkema, who addresses his six fellows so eloquently that the presence of the Almighty would not be a strange thought at all, certainly not when his fellow worshippers see him sitting there in all his musing, introverted contemplation, the almost meditative silence that is only interrupted when he begins to speak in his familiar hesitant manner and seems suddenly possessed by: The Word, the Alpha and Omega, the Word made Flesh, oh, it sometimes seems as if Sikkema is about to speak in tongues, much dreaded in these circles, and not seen and heard without suspicion, but he doesn’t, no, tonight Siebold Sikkema is like Moses before the Pharaoh of Egypt, he has put a pebble under his tongue and neither falters nor stammers, he has cast aside the fearfulness that is his own as an official in the local town clerk’s office and speaks as if he is full of the glories of the kingdom of the Lord, with the inspiration of a prophet, not that anyone in this town would expect or acknowledge a prophet, but still, that’s how he preaches, no, speaks, he speaks just as two men talking to each other on the telephone fall silent, one in his newly built apartment on one side of the forest, the other in his old house in the centre, one sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, a bottle of Jack Daniels between his spread legs, the other behind his desk, with half a bottle of ChablisChablasChablos and a finger-smudged glass between the sketches that lie over and under each other like ice floes, they fall silent and they get telephonically drunk, as the Malevich darkness plays with the windows, and then one says: You know…and the other replies:…that you love her too? Yes, I know…and then the silence rustles between them again like water, as it flows in another new district, behind the town forest, where a woman sits squatting in the corner of her shower, the pulsating jet from the shower head between her legs, and as the vibration of the jet does its job and her cheeks colour and her breasts swell and the water drips from her wet hair, the tears flow incessantly from her eyes, she sobs heart-rendingly, she sobs with shuddering shoulders, she sobs with a mouth that looks like something out of Guernica, and at the same time her lower body shakes with pleasure, as she is observed by the indifferent lavender-blue eyes of a Siamese cat sitting on the tiled floor, just outside the circle of drops that spatter down like rain, the rain that is beginning to fall slowly and sparsely outside, too, and which Aleida Fuchs von Coeverden hadn’t noticed when the window behind which she stands had slowly started crying, something that she hasn’t done for a long time now, not even when she, as she does now, as she has done all evening it seems, thinks back to days long gone, days without end, the days of sun and hay and the muffled oak leaves of the wooded bank on the horizon where she went with the foreman’s son (Tim? Wim? Harm?) to look for acorns for their peashooters, the white tympanum above the front door of The Big House nothing more than a faint flicker in the autumnal distance, and the two of them, creeping like Indians through the low coppice and not noticing how the tough dry twigs scratched their bare legs and tore his shirt and her skirt, the red flash of a squirrel darting across the forest floor and vanishing into a tree, the soft cooing of wood pigeons and in the distance the clatter of milk churns on their way to the pasture, but in the midst of all that autumn softness, colour and smell and sound, early October, her hasty sneaking through dry ditches, a hand half-given at the suspicion of danger or deer or the White Man who haunts the place, stamping his feet and startling birds, unable to read nature as they, the Indians, can, and always at around midday, the pale sun far off and the sky light blue with high white blurs, a brief bivouac under a tree, sometimes even in the fork of the lowest branches, the canteen of cold water and thick white sandwiches, the soft listlessness that followed the meal eaten in silence, only interrupted when one of them nudged the other and the other stretched out a foot and at last they grimly rolled through the first autumn leaves, twigs and foliage in their clothes and hair, hot heads and pleasantly painful limbs and a look almost of shame when they lay panting against the embankment of a ditch, a half-understanding of something inappropriate, something that had changed when their legs became entangled as they wrestled, bare skin against bare skin and scratch against scratch, the heat of their glowing faces, a moment in which he was a boy and she a girl, all of that flowing through her now, emptying itself as if she has been affected by an acute incontinence of memory and she wonders, an old maid at her window, staring blankly out over the hubbub below the house, what kind of memories, incontinent or otherwise, they would have who are now wandering through the town, whether they will ever think back to their motorbikes and how they moved in a group through the country on their way to Assen to fight and drink there, as they are now doing by that tent, a quite different kind of fighting from the romps she knew from her youth, no boys and girls imagining themselves as Indians and rolling through the dry leaves, but…and she sees with vicarious pain the limp body of a young man being kicked into the side wall of the tent, and slumping into the stiff canvas that folds itself around him like two halves of a pod, should she call the police…no, other people are already coming to separate the brawlers, the injured man staggers to his feet, puts on the cap that someone has picked up for him and has a drink of beer from a plastic cup and sways and…will those be their memories, or has she been living in a bell jar where everything was peaceful and Arcadian, a pastoral dream, did she grow up under an Arcadian bell jar where time moved more slowly than elsewhere, she probably did, as she shuffles to her little kitchen to fetch a glass, look for the port and pour it in the slow, unsteady way that old people have, she was probably living in the aftermath of a great time, under a shadow that wasn’t yet as dark as the shadows that would later fall upon her and The Big House, yes, when she steps back up to the window and becomes The Watch on the Rhine once more and stares, eyes empty from thinking, at the now jigging crowd, she was p
robably the last of her kind, the Mohican that she so liked to play as a child, the dodo that doesn’t know how close it is to the end, a history that has turned on its head, because it can’t be denied that that was what happened, or else she wouldn’t be standing behind the window of this flat, a luxury flat, admittedly, but a flat nonetheless, rather than in an old brushed-leather armchair by a little fire, waiting until the silver tray with a glass of port was brought…all gone, all vanished, and if not vanished then prey to businessmen and managers, the riff-raff in the dark-blue banking suits that marched through the house in gangs of three after her father’s death, opened cash books and upturned shoeboxes of receipts onto the big mahogany table in the dining room, put their calculators on the writing desk and drew up long lists of wages and outgoings and costs and very short lists of income, to conclude after a fortnight of opening boxes and cupboards and calculating and questioning…‘that this was completely impossible’, that it had been sustaining losses for decades at least and was eating into the capital, that it could only go on existing because more and more property was being sold, and at too low a price, that the farms alone just cost money and brought nothing in and the woodland wasn’t enough to feed her own stove and…everything that was big and beautiful and whole was wiped away in an afternoon, not just by their calculations, but particularly through their planning: a safari park, a fairground with bumper cars, the Big House as a regional museum, and though she heard more scraps about it and then mostly by accident or at second hand, and meanwhile the fields were bare and the trees lost their leaves and it was as if it wasn’t just turning into winter in a meteorological sense, no: a figurative long, cold, lean winter was beginning, a winter that would force them even before the spring to leave everything behind, to pay off the debts, and with their fat titles and their important names crawl into a bungalow where her mother spent her time growing sullenly demented and her sister threw herself at a shipbuilder from Rotterdam, and she was tormented year in year out, at primary school, at middle school, at university, where she unenthusiastically studied art history, until she turned in on herself so much that she finally became the image that people apparently had of her and her kind and became unsuited for life, for love, for children and slowly assumed the habits that made her an old lady even at an early age, the kind who washes her hands too often and at fixed times of day, a woman who drinks a glass of port at nine o’clock, plays a little game of bridge and spends long lonely winter evenings in front of the television looking at art treasures or a German ballet and wonders what it would have been like to feel buttocks like that, the softness of such curves in her pelvis when at night…she’s become that kind of woman, who on that kind of evening, when she sees the figure skaters leaping, feels a deep black reservoir of many unwept tears stirring within her, and then leaves the bottle of port on the table next to the chair and pours another and then another, until the evening sinks away into a pit of melancholy and pointless yearning, everything gone and everything lost, at the wrong moment in the wrong time and in the wrong place and the wrong love to boot, because if there was one thing you couldn’t be, not in her circles, not in the clique of impoverished rural nobility far away in the deepest provinces, if there was one thing that one couldn’t be it was oneself and certainly a self so different that even she couldn’t recognise it, and only when the truth imposed itself upon her–the dreams, the fantasies, even nightmares!–was she finally to accept what her milieu would not accept, and by then it was too late and pointless in every respect and for that matter she wouldn’t even know how to do such a thing, after which her life became even emptier, even colder and even more quiet and the narrow steel bed emptier and colder and more quiet, the evenings slow and the days in the museum library a sequence of activities, tasks and projects and, as she turns round and walks to the little table where the glass of port stands waiting, sips, tastes and then downs the whole glass in one go and with a feeling of guilt and shame licks her sweet lips, the image of the milkmaid suddenly floats back to the surface, beside her in the tall grass along the mown field, on her side, her left hand supporting her cheek, her full throat rich and creamy and Brueghelian from her unbuttoned blouse and in the V-shaped opening the fullness of her creamy breasts and her desire, her childlike and at the same time fraternal desire to bury her face between those breasts, to be received into the muchness, the warmth of that body, to be embraced and cherished, to feel the soft creaminess of those breasts, no, more than that: to melt into that body, to disappear into it completely, and she wonders, back at the window now, arms wrapped round herself as if it’s cold here, which it isn’t, whether that was when it all began, whether that was the germ or perhaps just the acknowledgement, the thing for which she has no name, or which at any rate she can’t give a name, but her desire, that is clear, her longing for the fullness of a woman, a woman’s body, a love that long since ceased to exist between the two people sitting opposite one another in their painstakingly designed house, in a part of town where the gleaming future has assumed the form of something that must once have resembled a rustic French village, but has turned into a collection of quasi-organically formed little squares with greyish-white houses standing around them with carports, populated by middle-class vehicles striving for more, there in the swelling surf of alcohol a man sits opposite his wife, and she watches him chase away the day’s demons with a retsina that pollutes the four cubic metres around them with the stench of petrol, while over on the motorway behind the house, hidden by the noise barrier, the motorbikes head in close ranks towards the town, where before a single evening is through everyone will be as drunk as he is, and here she sits as she does every night, first for the tirade against the world and the idiots and the simpleminded or the rich, it doesn’t make much difference…and then the silence that steams up, lasts as long as the first half of the second bottle and is only then, no: always broken when the second half of the second bottle dictates, but then there’s no language any more, not as we know it, no: the wail of old pain now, groaning over healed wounds, howling at a moon that shone long ago and that now, another moon, a later moon, becomes visible, another moon at any rate, a moon that stands above Assen and shines upon the people, drunk and sober, dead and alive, on the road or at home, a moon that looks into the watch glass of the town and sees the bustle and the turmoil, the Alpha and Omega, the whole goddamned panta rhei of strife and life and which would think, if the moon could think: everything is nothing, here is now.
In a Dark Wood Page 22
