Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  Our first stop was Holland. Waiting for us at the airport were my mother’s sister and her husband: Aunt Edith and Uncle Gerard. They took us to the north of the country, a long trip by car; my mother and I sat in the back seat, the two people in the front didn’t say a word. My mother was wearing her sunglasses and seemed used to this silence.

  ‘The two of you would have been better off flying to Hamburg,’ my aunt said at one point. ‘Or to Bremen.’

  ‘No planes fly there from Egypt,’ my uncle said.

  He spoke in a dialect unfamiliar to me. They lived in a rambling farmhouse beside a canal, not far from Bourtange, close to the German border. In Egypt I had seen the irrigation works maintained by farmers – canals, sluices, an increasingly intricate network of interlocking ditches, but never a canal like this one. Its straightness was intimidating.

  It was summer, a few times I heard my aunt sigh goodness, it’s so hot. The heat to which I was accustomed was exceptional here. A few days after we arrived, my mother said she was going away for a little while. The evening before she left she came and sat on the edge of my bed. As she spoke, her eyes remained fixed on a point just above my head, on the light blue cornflowers on the wallpaper.

  ‘I thought maybe we could be at home here,’ she said. ‘My family close by, your uncle and aunt, but I was wrong. I can’t live here. There are a couple of places I need to take a look at, I’ll try to come back as quickly as possible, okay, sweetheart? Will you be nice to Uncle Gerard and Aunt Edith?’

  And so I remained behind, for I don’t remember how long. Long, dry days flowed together endlessly. Motors pumped water out of the canal to quench the land. Teetering columns of dust above the flat fields bore up the azure-blue dome of sky.

  In the villages I saw, the houses were all built of red bricks. It oppressed me, the darkness of it, the square staunchness – there was no resemblance at all to the orderless festering of the city where I was born.

  At the kitchen table I tasted vanilla custard for the first time. Custard from the bottle, yellow and glutinous and almost as delicious as the pastries at Trianon. Uncle Gerard scrimped the last bits from the bottle with a thing he called a ‘bottle licker’. After meals Aunt Edith went to the kitchen and used a scraper to remove the final remains from the pans.

  Uncle Gerard took an old scooter out of the shed, pumped up the tires and showed me how the thing was used. He was good to me, Uncle Gerard, not as strict as Aunt Edith, who gave me the feeling that I even breathed wrong. The scooter expanded my world. My forays along the straight canal became longer, I would get as far as the locks where children sometimes swam and dove from the wall into the water. From the shade of the poplars, I watched them. I didn’t approach them, they left me alone. They belonged together, there was no room for outsiders. I looked at the shimmering curtains of water when they did cannonballs, one of the boys was the king of the ‘atom bomb’, the column of water that shot up then was higher than ever – and that was how I became invisible of my own accord, a pale spot off beneath the poplars, dreaming away the summer there – I watched, I drank deeply of paradise there and even though I didn’t take part it still seems to me a flaw in the fabric of creation that one day you stop cycling to the locks, stop doing cannonballs in a pair of floppy swimming trunks, stop wrestling with the others and swimming underwater, smoothly and fluidly as sea lions, to give the girls a dunking – that you grow out of that, become too old for that, is something which I have always seen as a sign that the soul exists, and that it can be ruined.

  And then, suddenly, the whole troupe comes to life, the disorderly pile of bikes is untangled, they take off.

  ‘Nice scooter you got there,’ one of them says in passing.

  That really makes them laugh, and impresses on me that I am too big for it, for this scooter, just as they will soon be too big for the locks, for bare feet on pedals, for the sand between their toes.

  At the table I say nothing about my daydreams. My face, my body exhale the light, the heat that my skin has breathed in during the day. I wonder whether Uncle Gerard, somewhere in one of his sheds, might have a bicycle that would fit me. I’ll ask him when she’s not around. I ask for more potatoes. Aunt Edith dishes two onto my plate.

  Not long after dinner I put on my pajamas and watch TV in the front room. Then it’s time for me to go upstairs. The runner on the stairs muffles my footsteps.

  ‘Good night,’ says my aunt in the doorway.

  The light worms its way in through the curtains, I toss off the sheet and walk to the window. It looks out on the canal, the poplars, on the farms and fields beyond. Uncle Gerard is watering the lawn in front of the house. When is my mother coming back? Since she left, no-one has said a word about her. I don’t know where she is; the thought that she won’t come back and that I will have to stay here forever carries me to the gates of panic. Shadows crawl over the road, nestle down between the trees and bushes, the water turns dark. She will come back, she would never leave me all alone. I’m in her thoughts the same way she is in mine, she will come to get me. I fall asleep only after I hear my uncle and aunt talking quietly on the landing, after I hear their bedroom door open, the discreet click of the key in the lock.

  *

  ‘A bicycle?’

  Uncle Gerard claws at the stubble on his chin.

  ‘No, boy, I don’t have one of those. Ours, but it’d be too big for you. Do you know how to ride a bike?’

  I figured I did, that was just something you could do, wasn’t it? The kids at the locks rode bikes as though they’d been born on them.

  ‘When’s my mother coming back?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Oh,’ Uncle Gerard says.

  He shrugs. I don’t receive an answer. In me that day rise up the first words that have to do with the great parting. The choral response to the requiems I will write for her down through the years. Oh beautiful mother, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . . the wreckage of prayers from the Alexandria Community Church becomes part of the lesser Office for the Dead. While I scoot furiously along the canal, the words well up, farewell Mother, don’t leave me alone, Aunt Edith is a bitch, come back, come back . . .

  One evening a taxi pulled up in front of the house, I had already put on my pajamas. The door flew open, I ran barefoot down the garden path, through the gate, and rushed into her arms.

  ‘Ludwig! You’ve gotten so much heavier!’

  At that moment I’m suddenly filled with poison and rage, it had all lay hidden behind the missing and the fear – she left me alone. She’ll do it again. Again and again. My embrace weakens. The kiss dies on my lips.

  ‘How was it, sweetheart? Did everything go well? Did you have a nice time?’

  She didn’t even call me once. If she had, she could have asked me all those things. Not once. Shivering, I sink into a pool of accusations. Later, at the table, my aunt says, ‘The way cats are too. Until they remember who puts the dish out for ’em.’

  She had traveled all over northwestern Europe. She was enthusiastic about darling little coastal towns in northern France but found Picardy depressing and decrepit. The Danes were friendly but so bourgeois, it was only in England that she thought there might be possibilities for us. She hadn’t found a house yet, she wanted to go looking along the east coast. In Alexandria she had known lots of English people with whom she got along well.

  ‘The English understand eccentricity,’ she said.

  The next day I pack my red suitcase and descend the noiseless stairs. I walk into the front room.

  ‘That’s the way we see it,’ my aunt was saying.

  My mother’s voice.

  ‘The beam in your own eye, Edith. You’ve overlooked that one again.’

  They catch sight of me too late to cover up the hardness in their voices. My mother says, ‘Then I think it would be better if we didn’t see each other again.’

  She grabs me by the arm and pushes me forward.

  ‘Say thank you to your uncle and
aunt, Ludwig.’

  I stand on tiptoes to kiss Aunt Edith; she doesn’t bend over far enough and so the kiss lands on the wattles under her chin. I kiss Uncle Gerard too, the uneasiness growling in his throat.

  ‘Goodbye, fella, it was fun.’

  We leave the room; in the hallway she seizes her suitcase, we walk out of the garden, onto the brick-paved road. The open sky, the raging sun overhead. She clamps my hand in hers, in the other she’s clenching the suitcase, its wheels rolling half over the bricks and half over the dusty verge. We’re heading towards the locks.

  ‘Hurry up a little, damn it.’

  My arm holding the suitcase is on fire. At the locks in the distance there are no children to be seen. Breaths of wind rustle in the poplars’ crowns, the world is keeping its head down in the motionless afternoon heat. Only when we get to the locks does she let go of my hand. We stop. There are plucks of sweaty hair at the back of her neck, transparent spots of perspiration shine through the body of her dress. There is little left of the stately rage with which she stamped out of the farmhouse. Melted. Now she is hopping on one foot, taking off a slip-on pump. Then the other one. She reaches around behind her and gropes until she finds the zipper. In one fluid motion she bares her back. It’s impossible to imagine deep red blood pulsing beneath that smooth, marble-white skin, to imagine her consisting of anything but gleaming skin. She gives a little shrug, the dress slips off. It’s as though she’s stepped out of the shadow. Snowy white underthings. She unhooks her bra. Across the skin on her back and shoulders a pattern of stripes. Crouching down a little she descends the sandy bank step by step, until the slope becomes too steep, then she straightens up and dives into the water. She re-emerges, she laughs, pushes the hair back out of her eyes.

  ‘It’s lovely! Come on in, Ludwig!’

  Not me. What if the children show up? She rolls onto her stomach and swims to the far side in a few strokes. A car is approaching in the distance, Uncle Gerard’s orange Opel. He stops at the locks. She swims back over and climbs up the bank. Uncle Gerard stands nailed to the spot, he forgets to reach out and give her a hand.

  ‘Hello, Gerard,’ she says.

  She stands in the road, tilts her head to one side and wrings the water out of her hair. His eyes follow the lines of her body like a hand that caresses. (Only much later, in the Uffizi, did I see what Uncle Gerard saw that day at the locks: Botticelli’s Venus, born of sea and foam, never in his life has he seen anything lovelier along that canal. I look at the poor man, his reddened face, his eyes flashing hunger and shame – so much and all at the same time, for the first time I catch sight of how complicated these things are.) She asks why he’s come. He tears his eyes off of her and looks back in the direction he came from.

  ‘Wanted to give you two a lift to the station.’

  My mother slips her arms through the straps of her bra and fastens it. She steps into her dress and turns her back on Uncle Gerard. Looking back over her shoulder she asks, ‘Would you?’

  He holds his arms out as though to keep her at a distance. His rough fingers pull up the zipper.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She takes off her wet panties and stuffs them into the suitcase. Uncle Gerard puts our suitcases in the trunk, we drive to Groningen in silence.

  ‘Where are you two headed?’ he asks before we get to the station.

  ‘To England,’ I say quickly from the backseat.

  My mother nods.

  ‘Too bad,’ she says, ‘it had to go like this.’

  ‘Yup,’ he says.

  She climbs out, he takes the suitcases from the trunk. He waves to us as we walk away. My mother doesn’t look back. But I do.

  It was winter and we were standing in a low-ceilinged living room. The living-room window looked out on the sea. On the horizon were ships that seemed to be standing still, but had advanced undeniably whenever you took another look.

  ‘The view, that’s the great plus,’ the owner was saying. ‘You live here, as it were, in your view.’

  Rabbits darted out from beneath the gorse, there was a whole maze of holes in there.

  ‘And of course it’s not winter all the time,’ he said.

  Hanging beside my ear was a mummified spider on a thread; whenever I moved it spun in the current of air. The man hadn’t done much to make the house presentable. We heard the murmur of the waves and something else, above our heads, quiet and persistent. An endless gnawing. My mother peered up at the dark beams.

  ‘Little holes,’ she said after a moment.

  The man looked as well, and said, ‘Woodworm.’

  He ran the flat of his hand over a sideboard.

  ‘They eat everything,’ he said. ‘Little bastards.’

  He dusted off his hands. Thousands of tiny jaws, grinding the woodwork to fine powder.

  ‘I’ll have to get around to treating the whole thing.’

  ‘It seems like a lovely house, for the two of us,’ my mother said.

  The man shook his head.

  ‘One problem,’ he said.

  We looked at him.

  ‘Erosion.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘The whole thing’s slowly sinking away.’

  He pointed outside, at the edge of the cliff.

  ‘With every storm we lose a little bit more. The politicians aren’t doing a thing, neither is the district council.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ my mother said.

  ‘Two or three meters a year. All my land, all gone.’

  ‘So don’t buy it, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Ah!’

  He raised his index finger and said we should follow him. We went outside. A surreal amount of rubbish was piled up around the house. Someone who couldn’t throw away a thing, who even saw an ice-cream truck in an old dairy van, with a few modifications here and there. That draughty dairy van, faded to old ivory, was the biggest of the objects that had ground to a halt there. For the rest it was cement mixers, rails, crossties, building materials. A hill of petrified sacks of cement and the overgrown remains of what looked like a crane.

  ‘It’s all going out,’ he said.

  He waved his hand casually, as though those tons of scrap iron could be carried off by a magician’s sleight of hand. Amid the thorns and the old iron was a kind of goat path which took us to the edge of the cliff. My mother’s mantilla caught in the thorns, the bushes were taller than I was. Then, before us, opened the panorama of sea and sky.

  ‘Look,’ the man said.

  My mother’s hand was resting on my shoulder; we peered over the edge, down where he was pointing.

  ‘I’m making a wall,’ he said. ‘To stop the sea.’

  In the distance, a low, dark barrier had been thrown up against the foot of the cliff.

  ‘What the sea washes away during a storm, I put back the next day. If I didn’t, we’d soon be standing in the water here.’

  He was talking to the horizon.

  ‘Not a meter of the cliff gets lost down there anymore. A soft seawall, made of building debris. A closed system.’

  ‘But . . .’ my mother said.

  She pointed to where his wall stopped, a few hundred meters to our right.

  ‘On its way,’ the man said. ‘By next winter, I’ll be here.’

  He pointed to the spot below our feet.

  ‘Once the foundation’s been laid, it’s just a matter of keeping it filled. Every year I lose thirty-five to fifty tons of material. On a good day I can have a thousand tons added. At a pace of forty to fifty truck-loads a day. In two years, once the wall’s reached the northern end of the cliff, all I’ll have to do is keep it up.’

  A utopian. It was seductive to listen to. We stepped back from the edge. The house was about fifteen meters from the cliff.

  ‘It’s lovely here,’ my mother said. ‘Does it all belong to you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And you really want to sell this?’

  ‘None of the children
are using it. An empty house is an unpleasant thing to look out on, that’s what the wife and I think.’

  His house was located back behind ours, further inland. It had white plastered walls and a pointed roof that stuck up above mountains of scrap and the wild growth of thorn bushes. The houses were thirty meters apart. He would be our neighbor. If he and his wife were nice, a path would be worn through the bushes; if they turned out to be bastards I knew my mother would start thinking about a fence. She was quite solitary, I had never seen her try her hardest to make contact with others. Vast towers of cloud parted, sunlight came gushing between them. We looked at the house.

  ‘Tudor,’ the man said.

  His name was Warren Feldman, and he had just sold us a house.

  *

  A few weeks later we were able to move into the house, which was being eaten from the inside by wood-boring insects and threatened from the outside by erosion. These factors were accounted for in the price. It was not an expensive house. The taxi took us there slowly, the driver swerving around the potholes in the road. Warren Feldman was just coming out the front door, in overalls, a paintbrush in one hand and a blue jerrycan in the other.

  ‘Well folks,’ he said.

  Then he fell to the ground. Boom, just like that. In the same taxi, we took him down to the doctor in Alburgh. Without ventilating the place, he had been slapping some poisonous substance on the beams to stop the woodworms and the long-horned beetles. He was sick for a week, and we couldn’t enter the house for a few days. We took a room at the Whaler.

  ‘At least he’s a man of his word,’ my mother said.

  The scrap metal around the house was gone, it had been moved to his own backyard. March came, the gorse blossomed, before long we were a raft in a sea of yellow flowers. They smelled overpoweringly of coconut. The days turned warm after a cold winter, we slept on bare mattresses, happy refugees in our own house.