Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  MUSK ROBIN AND HOLLAND RUSSET

  Grietje, who’d snuggled with Saartje and Jenny at Kaatje’s after taking them to the Rijksmuseum and tea, and said when she came home, a tight hug for Sander and me and Wolfje, that she was still having shuddery quivers, was into her whatevereth orgasm, knees wide and trembling, toes curled, both hands busy, when Sander knocked off work for quiet hour. Rascally girls, she said, they come and come with such sweet squeals and sighs. They’ve got me feeling thirteen again. Unfair, said Sander, giving me only a batting smile of eye, when I began, wholly out of the order of things, to undress him, raising his arms for jersey to be pulled off, hoisting and making an armload of Wolfje as I took off his sneakers and jeans. An oho! for a kiss on the cock through his briefs, and a breathed ja! for a kiss on the mouth, across Wolfje, whose clothes Sander was peeling away to smooch kisses on every newly bared part, and at long fucking sweet last! Naked Wolfje he hoisted across his shoulders, raising me for a crunching hug, both of us laughing hilariously. They’ve gone mad, Grietje said, as if talking in her sleep. An orgasm by Beethoven, and the Nipper’s daddies suit up as Napoleon. Inconsiderate. Undressed, Sander, having parked Wolfgang across Grietje, hindering with inept help, laughing fit to kill, returning my extravagant kiss root deep while I was still hobbled by my trousers shin and ankle. We piled together on the bed, Grietje saying Is it real? I think I believe what I’m seeing. Wolfgang: Jiminy goeie grutten! Sander, frantic with it all, eyes shining, disengaged, took Grietje, bellowed idiot! and withdrew. I took his place, Sander trying to hug us both. Came with an elemental, clear joy. Then Sander. O boy, said Wolfje, are things ever all mixing up together.

  NUBBLE-HORNED, FRISK-TAILED PAN

  Walk along the canal to the park, Wolfje on Sander’s shoulders. Grietje asks pointed questions about Strodekker, Olaf, Joris. Apropos de bosgod vay oh ell eff yay ay. That’s me! Wolfgang chirped, but not Bosgod, my name’s something else. His silence about which, Grietje says, is simply that he doesn’t know. He’s bright, is learning to read, shows promise as a painter, can make a bed, wash dishes, tie his own shoes, fetch and carry. Grietje has bravely satisfied herself that he understands it’s back to the streets, the reformatory, the orphanage, or us, and that he has opted for us. He goes blank when parents are mentioned. We’ll do it this way, Grietje says, pushing a finger on Wolfje’s nose. Amadeus here (Wolfje loves it that he and Mozart are namesakes) is to get his sugar where he wants to. Inside our outlaw family, with Sinaasappels and Keirinckxen only, however. Understood? I understand, Wolfje said, as if we were talking about brushed teeth and combed hair.

  AKVARELL

  Jan in his new white pants, a pale stain to the left of the crotch seam.

  TUSCAN FARM WITH GOATS AND PINES

  Child doesn’t know one painter from another! Sander whoofs. I thought I was ignorant of history, but this little bugger doesn’t know what century he’s in, or what country. A large map to teach Wolfgang the continents and oceans. Grietje begins a series of large cards with people and things on them, for what she calls stage-costume recognition: Roman senator, Greek soldier, Egyptian, Chinese, and so on. When I ran him through a batch, he identified Nefertiti as the Queen of England, George Washington as Julius Caesar, Picasso as Mijnheer Halvehout the grocer, Albert Schweitzer as God, and Van Gogh as Tutankhamen.

  BOY WITH FENNEC

  Sander, sitting to consider his painting, deigns to notice the lichtgeel dot on Hans’ white denim pants.

  ANIS DE FLAVIGNY

  Time and Eros, both wavilinear, both a medium in which all else is suspended, or benevolence would not come from a flower’s beauty, or time seem a gift rather than a burden.

  GEMINI

  Foreplay, says Hans, thighs wide and unhampered, strutting a snooty erection, contentedly jacking it, a halfwitted grin of drunken glee for my wink as I came back from the kitchen with coffee. Working up a happy feeling. Heilig slagroom, does it ever throb with love! Bons bons! Ten volle! Talk about loving kindness. Give me a sip of your vile coffee, he said, and as he took the cup I sat crosslegged between his knees and courteously took over his warmhearted play. Sweet, he said, with an even sillier smile. Slow and tight’s the beat. A scrunchy scuddling in my balls, putting a pleasant enough look on my face to make Hans prod my nose with a toe and rub his heel in my hair. You’re funny, he said. How can you drink this boiled barge bilge? Papa says I don’t jack off nearly enough. Other day, when I’d got in from school, Jantje the stinker at his music lesson, and shucked my britches and whacked off some in Papa’s office and some in my room, and Saartje came in with ideas in her eyes and milked me again, and good, Papa put on his leg-pulling voice and called me a slacker and a baby. Said when he was my age he couldn’t remember leaving his dick unjacked for more than an hour. He was still at it when I met him some years later, I could witness. Anyway, said Hans with a puff for Bruno’s busy childhood and a three-noted whistle of praise for my dexterity, I bragged that I was only building up tone until Jan was free, and Papa said oho well then! and bet me een vijfje I couldn’t jack a steady rhythm without coming until Jan turned up, or went crosseyed for life, whichever happened first. Saartje, sweetie that she is, jollied me frisky again, a truly chummy stiff dick that felt friendly toward the whole world, and Papa the thug kept meddling by saying I should nip along at a faster trot. I kept at it, watching the clock, ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour, steady but slow. Everytime Papa looked in I crossed my eyes. Then the phone rang, Jan calling to say he was going to be late. The hero’s fate, said Papa, thumbs up. Don’t stop, don’t come. So I was a happy moron when Jan, who said he was the first person to play Bach’s Sheep May Safely while Their Shepherd three times over with a hard on all the way through, turned up.

  BACK AND FORTH GEESE

  Kafka on his uncle’s farm in Moravia, sunbathing naked by the pond, geese and goats under willows, cows and horses staring at the meadow fence. Walt Whitman in his head, the shores of New Jersey as wide and white as the one Crusoe paced with umbrella and blunderbuss, his parrot on his shoulder. His prose has the elemental substantiality of Rousseau’s painting, a primitive conciseness innocent of rhetoric. It was written at three in the morning. In it, for all its anguish, one can feel his noontimes on Heligoland, bright mornings on Czech farms, the blue sky at Riva.

  NAAPER

  Het kikkert je op, says a smiling Jan of Joris’ bronsgeel spermsodden briefs, sniffing.

  DE NAAKHEID VAN EROS

  Everything, in any case, Kaatje says, comes down to character. What happens to you depends on what you are. In making children a third sex because of their sexlessness, as he supposed, your Fourier was true to that peculiarly nasty Catholic assumption that all wickedness is au fond sexual. Such reasoning depends on the myth of the Fall, a shameful transition before an accuser from unknowing virginity to procreative impulses. Finding all sex an embarrassment, the proper middle class kept the facts of life from their young for as long as possible, as they do now. The middle class, on which, when in doubt, blame everything. Do they ever deserve it. The evil of moral emptiness comes to nothing upon innocence, as it comes to nothing on people who care, who are just and fair, who are reluctant to hurt. Evil is always basically disregard, carelessness, numbness. When Joris came over the time he took Hansje and Jan to the island, I sat him down and said: they are not ignorant, or in the world’s eyes innocent. They have a very imaginative and idiotically impractical idea of affection. I like what he said: that he was perfectly happy just to be in their company. And, he added, in yours.

  THE NEWS FROM DENMARK

  Card from Olaf, who’s planning a long film. Billy says tell me he has a new bicycle cap, telescope, star map, and long corduroy trousers, and that he’s reading (meaning we’re reading) The Little Prince.

  PHILOSOPHER

  Wittgenstein on the Irish coast, sparrows feeding from his hands.

  HANS WARREN

  In de spiegel week een deur open.

  Man zag daardoor een za
al, en daarin

  wegschrijdend de gestalte van een jongen.

  Even waren het glanzend haar,

  de schouderbladen in het strakke shirt

  en’t zomers dons over de lange benen

  vrijelijk zichtbaar. Even. Hij verdween

  snel en diep in de spiegel op een bladerrijk terras.

  Kaváfis, huiverend voor die nu lege zaal

  keek recht en zag zichself, een oude griek

  met beheerste open handen en met ogen

  mooi van verlangen en herinnering.

  CHARACTER

  Fourier equipped the utopian imagination with resources it had never had in such abundance or with such articulateness. He did not want us to think of the Harmony as a utopia but as human advantages being successful, after a history of confusion and defeat. The severity of the defeat keeps us from seeing what he meant. Character, for instance. Once the structure of classes was rescaled according to income, neither the poor nor the rich raised their young to have character. This maintains, except that the middle has been lost also, and character has become an eccentricity, a benign abnormality tolerated as a kind of weakmindedness. All consciences are outlaws to the state. In Spengler’s closing pages he argues that the decline of the West is inherent in the displacement of manners by money. The power to collect taxes and to invest them in weaponry (the fattest return of invested capital) can recognize no scruples in the taxpayer and no freedom that varies the sameness of a state’s citizens. Character is the ground of the Harmony, as it was for Shakers, Mennonites, and other pioneer harmonian communities. Hence the distribution of care to all events. Quaggas, tamed by imprinting, can only be ridden by their spadger mates, unlendable and unstealable. Duty and loyalties are structures inside affection.

  GAMME

  Goede morgen! sang Jantje britchesless in socks and jersey at the door, Wolfgang and I by as agreed to take Hans and Jan along to the gym for ten lengths of the pool before breakfast and for Wolfje’s swimming lesson. Jealous, Wolfje had remarked of their wanting to come with us. But I like them, he added. Ready in a jiffy, Jan said, at least I think so. He then kicked an imaginary soccer ball across the sunroom, over my head, took the crowd’s applause, stood like a swimmer poised to dive, tried for diffidence, asked if I wanted some coffee from the kitchen, and when I said no, sitting, onjantjelijk straddled my lap, a perplexed smile in his eyes. Wolfgang, thumb in mouth, came and stared at him. Tell all, I said. Well, Jan said, I think there’s going to be a Keirinckx Family Hearing in a few minutes. You’ll see. Fact is, we all sort of slept together last night, and things got out of hand, like we played too far, I think. Whereupon Kaatje came in, with Jenny, sexy sprite, in a crumpled nightgown. Followed by Bruno with Hans by the hand. Saartje (skimpy panties, glass of milk, worried look) straggled behind. What a sweetheart, said Bruno, rather out of the drift of the matter. Bruno, Kaatje said, they were at it all night according to what I’ve got out of Jenny and Saartje, an amateurish junior orgy of masturbation into fits, negenenzestig Hans with Saartje, Saartje with Jan, Hans with Jenny, Jenny with Saartje, Hans with Jan, Jan with Jenny, and plain everyday exogamous and incestuous fucking. Jenny wept, Jan looked like a Stan Laurel who’d wet his pants, Saartje hid in a hug from Kaatje, and Hans tried out a pleading glance on me. Four bare butts, said Bruno, and we’ll have a public execution. Witnessed for good measure by Adriaan and Mijnheer Wolfgang there. Jan took his five loud hard whacks with Spartan unconcern, though there were tears in his eyes when I gave him a wink of solidarity. Hans tried to emulate his courage, but yelped once. Jenny bit her lip, blubbering. Bruno spanked her as hard as he did the boys. Saartje wailed outright but got no mercy. Kaatje, impassive throughout, nipped away and brought back hand lotion which she smeared on red behinds while Bruno delivered his lecture. You wretches! You have extraordinary freedoms and the most broad-minded parents in all Amsterdam. The punishment applied to your backsides is for being sneaky and furtive, never mind irresponsible, rebellious, and dim-witted.

  BOUNCE

  Zwembad. Hans and Jan untalkative for the longest. Wolfgang more embarrassed than they. His improving scissors kick and sidestroke got him twice halfway across the pool. To Jan, sitting winded on the pool’s edge, I said that it was his feelings which hurt more than his butt. Ja, he sighed. Outside on the street, Hans said to nobody in particular that fucking is terrific, and Jan hugged him wonderfully, and hugged Wolfgang and some astonished citizen’s large dog that was passing.

  PHILOSOPHER AS HELDENTENOR

  What status, Grietje asks, Miss Pollywiggle Saartje on her lap, has Fourier’s philosophy among ideas that hope to save mankind from the mean fearful life it has evolved for itself? None, perhaps, except as critique. He argued that religion leaves our political life to us. Reddite ergo quæ sunt Cæsaris Cæsari, et quæ sunt Dei Deo. God has written how we are to live together in our passionate attractions, which Fourier understands to be unchanging. What’s encoded in the genes of a wasp that makes it a wasp is as well encoded in ours, making us human. Our culture has had to express itself through culture after culture in symbols supplied by our imagination, warped by fear, superstition, and pedantry, salvaged by reason, art, and manners. The way to the Harmony is open only through corridors not yet blocked by fear and meanness. Via Erewhon, or not at all. But who can still the dynamos, scatter the voltaic piles? Not this generation, says Grietje. Prize idiots and blob heads.

  NAUTILUS SHELL, ARYBALLOS, ACORNS

  Flowery nightgowned Saartje sipping orange juice at breakfast, smug, Grietje combing her hair. Wolfgang, shy minor prophet, looks at her with suspicion. Yawns all around, Sander tremendously, with an unbelieving stare at Wolfje. Where (to me) did he go to? In with me and Saartje, says Grietje. We put him to bed after crackers and milk, Sander says, Adriaan and I, and we were having Greekish friendship when here the imp was, in with us, rooting around. He’s queer for all the hair on Adriaan. Needs a bear to sleep with. Abandoned us. I was expecting him, says Grietje.

  THE SILENCE OF TIME

  Duke Amadeo d’Aosta on his bronze horse in the Giardino Publico of Turin, most metaphysical of cities, and Duke Ferdinand of Genoa, on his fallen horse in the Piazza Micca, and Vincente Gioberti, philosopher, before the Museum of Natural History, and Duke Victor Amadeus near the Dioscuri at the Palazzo Reale, and Massimo d’Azeglio, statesman and poet, in the Piazza Carlo Felice, and Marochetti’s General Emmanuel Filiberto in the Piazza San Carlo, all with their long late-summer shadows. Between the clock on the turret of the railway station and Nietzsche’s large silver pocket watch the disagreement was negligible compared to other differences. Nietzsche’s watch was in July, the railway clock in September. As when Apollinaire later asked to be remembered because he lived in the sad silent time of the fall of kingdoms, a time of tripled courage and threefold grief, and described a fine September in Paris, every evening a vineyard whose musty light ripened at dawn into a red vintage of stars plundered by the silly finches of his delight, and a walk in Auteuil along melancholy docks, hearing a song go silent, to be taken up by other voices bright as bells up and down the Seine, so Nietzsche knew that this clean Torinese light upon the statues in the garden was the last light that Europe would ever see.

  STERRENREGEN

  Angels of the Rainer Maria Rilkeluchtvaartlijn refueling in midair.

  A PEAR TREE IN THEOPHRASTOS

  Jenny, demure as a girl by Whistler, improbably the daughter of Hilda Sinaasappel, at Kaatje’s when I dropped by, sitting on the sunroom lounge in dancing-school togs. Hate dancing school, she said, wimps the lot of them, but Mummy’s all for it, says I’ll see the good of it later. Jantje’s cool, goes through the motions with his mind a thousand kilometers away. Even in the Pestalozzi the sweet devil behaved perfectly, attentive to everything, but I knew by the look in his eyes he wasn’t even there. He was at the museum with Daddy, or at the beach, or walking around a blue lake in Sweden, naming trees and birds. Hansje, though, is always where he is. His imagination lives on
what he’s doing. For God’s sake, explain, said Kaatje. Yes, do, said I. I can’t, she said. I could never explain anything.

  LA SALINE D’ARC ET SENANS

  Erewhonian time must flow backward that Harmonian time go forward. Back before the apple, to advance upon the pear. Time, the medium of redemption, will be of no matter in the Harmony. Day will round with day, season with season.

  A WALK WITH JORIS

  Canalside, edgewise between trees and cyclists, Mohican file through old folk on benches, hopscotch games, nimbly out of the way of cars. Capitalism invented the state, because it is an organization that must be financed by banks and because it can, through taxes, enlist millions of citizens in its massive and unpayable debt. The capitalist banker then has perpetual and compounding interest, which he lives on grandly by doing no more than tightening his shoelaces as his day’s work. War is the state’s most profitable business, war being a consumer in constant need. The Soviet Union is just another capitalist monolithic state that has enslaved rather than beguiled its citizens. The twentieth century has betrayed every ideal of the nineteenth. The machine, inhuman by definition, has been given a fate opposite to that planned for it. These fucking automobiles, for instance. They are wasting rather than supplementing human life. The people in them were much better off grubbing potatoes in Dutch mud.