‘Girls,’ Bekker said, ‘they’re not worth it … She had a spring in her step when she walked.’ He turned the lamp up a bit and turned the page in the book he was reading. ‘Where do you think she is now? Do you think she’s kissing someone?’ A little spark fell from his pipe onto the book. He put it out with his matchbox. ‘Damn, a hole, that was stupid.
‘It’s better this way, girls aren’t worth it, they don’t get you anywhere, they only distract you. They’re pretty at a distance, to write poems about.’
He read. After a short pause he looked up again … ‘You know what the strange thing is? When she caught up with me that afternoon she walked past me, right next to me. She only just missed me. There was, so to speak, nothing separating us, a little clothing on her and practically none on me.’ (Bekker went around summer and winter with only an over-shirt covering his bare chest.) ‘That’s not much, you know?’ I said it wasn’t much – there was a lot more between the Naarden tower and Bekker’s room, for example. ‘Between the Naarden tower and this moustache,’ Bekker said, ‘is much less, much less, than there was between her shoulder and mine that day. No comparison, Koekebakker.’ He turned another page, looked into the light, and said, ‘That’s how it is,’ and went on with his reading.
5
And so it was: God showed his face and then hid it again. You never got anywhere, especially if you only looked at the girls from a distance and let other men kiss their pretty faces, the important gentlemen they, as a rule, liked a whole lot more than us. They were so much more respectable and spoke so well. And we were bums.
There was nothing to hope for from God – who goes his own way and gives no explanations. If there was something we wanted we had to take care of it ourselves. But we realized that it was easy for Bavink and Hoyer to talk, they had talent, they could really accomplish something in the world, but we – Bekker and Kees and me – the only difference we’d ever make was as socialists and it did seem a bit weak, after sitting at God’s table, to address envelopes or join the Kastanjeplein Neighbourhood Association. And nothing came of life on the heath either, because even when Bekker did get a little money his shoes needed repairing. Maybe we could join Van Eeden’s commune, but when we walked out to Bussum one Sunday, four hours on foot, we saw a man strolling around in a peasant smock and expensive yellow shoes, eating sponge cakes out of a paper bag, hatless, in inner harmony with nature as people used to say back then, with crumbs in his beard. We couldn’t bring ourselves to keep going, we turned right around and walked back to Amsterdam, walked along the Naardern canal in single file, singing, and a farm girl said to a farm boy, ‘There wasn’t nothin’ about it in the paper, in’t that somethin’? D’you know about that?’
6
So we didn’t do anything. No, actually, that was when Bekker wrote his first poem.
I still remember it perfectly. It was on a Sunday, of course, because whenever anything happened it was on a Sunday. The other six days a week we spent dragging our chains around from nine to six.
I was out looking for a job in Hillegom, a job with a bulb dealer with fat red clean-shaven cheeks. The others decided right away to make a day of it. Bavink, Hoyer and Bekker had all said so many times that they wanted to go to the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, this was the day. Kees had to come too; he did whatever the others did. I was going to meet them in Leiden.
It was December. I stood at the back of the tram, all the way at the back. It drove through the country and stopped and started again, it took hours, the countryside was endless. And the sky got bluer and bluer and the sun shone until it seemed like flowers would have to start sprouting out of the country bumpkins. And the red roofs in the villages and the black trees and the fields, most of them covered with straw, had it nice and warm, and the dunes sat bare-headed in the sun. And the road lay there, white and smarting, it couldn’t bear the sunlight, and the glass panes of the village streetlamps flashed, they had trouble withstanding the glare too.
But I got colder and colder. And the tram ran as long as the sun shone. It’s a long ride from Hillegom to Leiden and the days are short in December. By the end, a block of ice was standing there on the tram staring into the big stupid cold sun that was flaming red as though the revolution was finally starting, as though offices were being blown up all over Amsterdam, but still it couldn’t bring a spark of life back to my cold feet and stiff legs. And it kept getting bigger and colder, the sun, and I got colder and stayed the same size, and the blue sky looked down very disapprovingly: What are you doing on that tram?
Bekker wrote his first poem that afternoon. When I got to Leiden, as they were lighting the gas lamps, and I found the immortals sitting in a row on a long bench in the third-class waiting room at the train station, near the stove, it was my turn to undergo the poem. It was beautiful. No title? Bekker shook his head. But Bavink and Hoyer shrieked that they’d seen something written at the top. A well-dressed gentleman said ‘Louts’ to the man who punched his ticket at the door. Bavink snatched the sheet of paper out of Bekker’s hands. What was written at the top? Was it even a question? ‘To her.’ Just what I would have guessed.
Bavink thought the stove could use more coal but he couldn’t find the scoop. They always take the scoop out of the waiting rooms, otherwise the public uses too much coal.
So Bavink tossed lumps of coal into the stove with his bare hands, and got into an argument with a guy in a white smock.
It was fun that night. Kees and Hoyer fell asleep on the train. Bavink chatted with a girl from The Hague and inhaled the smell of heliotropes given off by her dear little frame.
Then Bekker started talking about the heath again. How he wanted to live there in peace and wait and see what God had planned for him. And not have to do anything. He was deeply melancholy. I had an objection to the heath: it’s so dry out there. And I asked Bekker what exactly he planned to live on, office workers don’t usually do too well on the farm, except in America (we believed all kinds of lies about America). But he wasn’t worried about that. He didn’t need anything.
Now he knows better. Only God doesn’t need anything. That is precisely the fundamental difference between God and us.
So life on the heath came to nothing too.
7
Four of us sat in the fine white sand at the foot of the dunes in Zandvoort and looked out at the ocean. Kees wasn’t there. It was late July. The sun was still high above the ocean at seven o’clock and it made, again, I can’t help it, it’s God himself who keeps repeating himself, it again made a long golden stripe in the water and shone in our faces.
A tugboat was puffing on the horizon. It rose and sank; when it sank we could only see the steam pipe.
Bekker was going to Germany the next day. His knowledge of languages had got him a job as a clerk in a factory handling foreign correspondence. And Hoyer was off to Paris, to paint.
Bekker, in particular, was deeply melancholy again. He wished he had never taken that job. He couldn’t understand why he’d done it. He was in that miserable factory town for two hours, for the interview, and got sick, homesick. He fled back to the train station as fast as he could. The rails still lay there, luckily running straight to the horizon and beyond, back to Amsterdam. He had already bought his ticket, and on it was clearly printed, right there: ‘To Amsterdam.’ And the train came on time and carried him home along the rails, and when he got off at Centraal Station his heart was so full of emotion that he struck up a conversation with the engineer and gave him a cigar, an expensive cigar, and even stroked the locomotive with his hand and thought: Ah, nice locomotive. And then he took the job anyway. It brought in a lot more money than he was making here. Now he had to go away and not see the ring of dykes around the city again. All that time the rails would be lying there, but he would only be able to go stand on the platform and watch the trains pull out in the evening, and all day Sundays, many times a day.
The sun was lower now, and red, the golden stripe was gone. It was
a warm, still evening. The red water rippled a little, the waves rolled slowly in with a gentle hiss.
Bekker had a theory that he would save money and come back and live on the heath. But in his heart he didn’t believe it himself. We tried to believe it, even Hoyer tried, and we convinced ourselves that that’s what would happen, but we didn’t believe it. And it didn’t happen either. Bekker came back a year later, he had saved a couple of hundred guilders and he walked down Linnaeusstraat at half past eight every morning again with his sandwich in a bag from home. There’s a lot a person needs.
But we weren’t thinking about reused bags that night. We were doing our best to believe that we would still manage to accomplish something, really something. We would shock the world, unimpressive as we were, sitting calmly there with our legs pulled up and our eight hands clasping our eight knees. Hoyer had decided to paint all kinds of ordinary things. He had read an article in a magazine about the social duty of the artist, and now he was all in favour. He started to argue with Bekker about the heath. It was a miracle of erudition. He tried to convince Bekker that it was a mistake to withdraw from the world and go off to the heath, which he would never do anyway. An artist belongs at the centre of modern life.
Hoyer wanted to hear what I thought. I just said I’d never thought about it. I didn’t know what Hoyer wanted either – he knew it already, why did he need to know what I thought too?
Bavink was the only one who didn’t say anything; he just sat with his chin on his knees and took the sun into his heart. The sun was as flat as a lozenge now, and dull red, almost gone.
Hoyer couldn’t sit still. He jumped up and took Bekker with him. They walked along the beach and from a distance we could hear Hoyer screaming, he was obviously worked up. Bavink and I stayed sitting there for a while, then sauntered slowly after them. It wasn’t very nice to have a worldview, it seemed to me. Hoyer was screaming so much.
Bavink and I stopped and looked down at the tips of our shoes and the waves rolling in over them. The sun was gone, the red shimmer on the water began to fade, a bluish darkness rose in the south. It smelled of mud. In the distance, near the village, the arc lamps suddenly came on along the beach.
‘You understand all that?’ Bavink asked. ‘About social duty?’
I shrugged. ‘What kind of guy d’you think wrote that article? Do you have a Sense of Responsibility, Koekebakker?’ Hoyer had talked about that too.
‘Hoyer sure talks nice,’ Bavink said. ‘Awfully nice. I don’t have a sense of responsibility. I can’t be bothered with that. I need to paint. It’s not a walk in the park. What was it he said again?’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘The guy in that book; what was it he said artists were?’
‘Privileged.’
‘You know what I think, Koekebakker? That that’s the same guy who wrote the train timetables. I’ve never understood how anyone could write those either. Privileged … God is everywhere, Koekebakker? Or isn’t he? They say that too, don’t they?’
I nodded. The darkness started to rise up everywhere from the water; the horizon to the north-west still glowed a yellowish green, the last light was leaving from over our heads. There were no clouds.
‘So, he is everywhere,’ Bavink said. ‘There, and there, and there.’ He pointed all around us with an outstretched arm. ‘And there, beyond the sea, in the land we can’t see. And over there, near Driehuis, where the arc lamps are. And on Kalverstraat. Go stand with your back to the water there and listen. Can you stay out of it?’
‘Out of what?’
‘Out of the ocean?’
I nodded yes, I certainly could.
‘I can’t, or just barely,’ Bavink said. ‘It’s so strange, having that melancholy sound behind you. It’s like the ocean wants something from me, that’s what it’s like. God is in there too. God is calling. It’s really not a walk in the park, he is everywhere, and everywhere he is he’s calling Bavink. You get sick of your own name when it’s called so much. And then Bavink has to paint. Has to get God onto canvas, with paint. Then it’s Bavink who’s calling, ‘God.’ So there they are, calling each other. It’s just a game to God; he is everywhere and without end. He just calls. But Bavink has only one stupid head and one stupid right hand and can only work on one stupid painting at a time. And when he thinks he has God, all he has is paint and canvas. It turns out God is everywhere except where Bavink wants him to be. And then some guy comes along and writes that Bavink is privileged and Hoyer memorizes it and goes around blathering it at Bekker. Privileged, right. You know what I wish? I wish I wrote timetables. God leaves people like that alone; they’re not worth the trouble.’
I offered Bavink a cigar and suggested we walk to Driehuis. I felt like a coffee. I didn’t think it was very nice of Bavink to put down a useful fellow like that who was just doing his job. Behind us, Hoyer and Bekker came walking back; they were still going at it.
At eleven o’clock that night we were back on the beach. The wind had picked up, the waves hissed. A little something to drink had driven off the gloominess and melancholy. A new age was about to dawn. Bekker, in the solitude of his German boarding house, would translate Dante as he had never been translated before. Bavink had a great painting in his head, A View of Rhenen, he had been there once and could see it all clearly in his mind. And Hoyer was going to go and work on his social duty – he would show them. And I tried to believe it all.
The cool wind blew around us. The ocean made a complaining sound, the ocean that complains and doesn’t know why. The ocean washed woefully up onto the shore. My thoughts are an ocean; they wash woefully up against their limits.
A new age would dawn; we could still do great things. I did my best to believe it, my very, very best.
8
I stood in the twilight in Rhenen, on the bridge over the railroad tracks, and looked north. Far below me were the rails, running out to the horizon, with the hill rising up steep on either side, overgrown with light green grass and dark green gorse covered in yellow flowers. I looked at how the slope of the hill got lower and lower until, far away, it became the flat plain.
Again the darkness started creeping stealthily up out of the ground, the way I had seen it do so many times before. The last light of day rested on the mountaintop, nervous and afraid, while the valley was full of darkness, and a red light came on on a post by the tracks. The sky was coated in grey and looked colourlessly down on the beaten, defeated day.
I had been away for six years and now I was standing there, just back in Holland, in the place I had thought about so often, which they had described in almost every letter they wrote to me (every year Bavink wrote to me at least twice, Bekker a bit more often). Back at the hill that Bavink had sent me seven drawings of over the years and Bekker had written two very short poems about.
I had come back to Holland to suffer poverty and write articles and stories in the neighbourhood where I had lived for so long. And I wanted to go through my last two rijks dollars in the city that for a while, in my absence, had been the centre of the world.
In the north the darkness was gulping down the light, the mountain was nearly swallowed up, the day’s last escort fled to the north-west and I stood on the little bridge on the edge of nothingness, enveloped in infinity.
I leaned my elbow on the railing and propped my chin in my hand and looked into the darkness and thought about the flat red sun that had set long ago into the green waves of the Atlantic – waves that rose up with sharp edges and scooped out sides and fell and rose and were rising and falling even now. About the yellow lights in the shops in the poorer neighbourhoods of Amsterdam, which I would shortly see again, which had shone every night while the ocean never stopped moving.
And the vague expectations from back then rose within me again, and the longing, without knowing what for.
But I also had a feeling I hadn’t known before. All those days had passed and many more days would pass as well, and on every one of them my ex
pectations would remain unfulfilled and my longings unsatisfied. Bavink had worked for years, on and off, on his View of Rhenen – on the river, the mountain, the Cunera tower, the blossoming apple trees, the red roofs of the city, the chestnut trees with their red and white flowers and the brown beeches between the houses in the distance, and the little windmill somewhere up on the mountain. For years Bekker had spent every Sunday in the cabin on the mountain that Bavink rented, translating Dante and writing little poems now and then, for years I had drifted around the world. And what did it all mean? For the world, for God, or even for us?
I stood on the Rhenen tower and looked into the distance, and my heart went out into the distance, to the red sky in the west. But even if I could have flown off the top of the tower into that distance, I would have found only the distance nearby, and my heart would have gone out to the distance once more. And what good did it do me – the wisdom that taught me that nothing would ever change, it would be like this for ever?
Every day we longed for something, without knowing what. It got monotonous. Sunrise and sunset and sunlight on the water and behind the drifting white clouds – monotonous – and the darker skies too, the leaves turning brown and yellow, the bare treetops and poor soggy fields in the winter – all the things I had seen so many times and thought about so many times while I was gone and would see again so many more times, as long as I didn’t die. Who can spend his life watching all these things that constantly repeat themselves, who can keep longing for nothing? Trusting in a God who isn’t there?
And now the gorse was blooming again, and the lilacs and apple trees and chestnuts, and the sun was blazing down on all of it. Full of emotion, I had seen it all again. And while I was thinking about it, my vague longings and expectations faded away.
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 6
