And it's still raining. Not that hard yet, but it gets you wet even so.
The doctor, who remains a medical man in all circumstances and who keeps watch on health matters, says in a fatherly manner: 'The gentlemen had better go inside. This weather's nasty. Bouts of flu on top of all this and we'd be in an even greater pickle.'
He addresses the old gentleman in the tree once more.
'You're not some stroppy brat, Mr Koopman, are you? The fire brigade will be arriving soon and then you'll be taken from the tree like a naughty child. Mrs Wolf doesn't mean what she says, honest. You're still most welcome in the home. Why not come down quietly. See, you can step on to my shoulder just like so. Then you can't fall and injure yourself.'
For a good while now, Mr Koopman has had a chestnut, still in its shell, in his hand. He looks at it intently. As if that chestnut is connected with problems you can solve by taking a good look at them on a Sunday morning while you're sitting in a tree. From time to time, he casts furtive glances at the doctor as if he, too, is involved in the problem. He seems to have quietened down a bit, the way he's sitting there with that chestnut. Maybe he's got hungry and the prospect of a tasty breakfast tempts him a little more now than when he had just got out of bed.
Moreover, it can no longer be pleasant there in that tree. It's beginning to rain harder and harder. What, in that tree, looks a bit like a monkey's coat is, in the end, a pair of common-or-garden pyjamas. Mr Koopman must be soaked through.
What's to become of you if you fall i117 You'll have to stay in bed all day then, won't you? People of your age just are susceptible. There are certain things you can't do.' The doctor has crouched: too late.
Perhaps it was the case that the problem connected with the chestnut had begun to bore Mr Koopman. And does it not speak of wisdom when we cast problems for which we do not know the solution far away from us? Perhaps, too, the old man in the tree was fed up to the back teeth with the doctor's continual chatter. In any case, he has thrown the chestnut with remarkable force. The doctor has been struck full in the face.
Well now: we are and continue to be human beings. And this applies likewise, to a great degree even, to people who have completed medical school.
Moreover, it hurts when you get one of those green chestnuts with those prickly spines in your face. And that's why it's obvious that the doctor has become a little angry. He's quite pale with rage and his calm control has gone. Quite gone. To top it all, Mr Koopman has burst into peals of laughter again. And the old gentlemen, too, are enjoying themselves visibly. The capacity for Schadenfreude is one mankind retains to a very great age.
The angry doctor has picked up the same stone Mr Willems had wanted to throw up in to the branches earlier on.
'You rotten little pipsqueak. You bloody well think you can do anything you please.'
Scientifically directed no great span, and the stone with which the doctor had wished to repay Mr Koopman in his own coin fails even to reach the bottom branch of the tree.
And Mr Koopman does nothing but laugh. It surely is clear that he's just needling them all and taking the mickey out of the lot of them on a grand scale. Yet, the doctor's deed has not been without its effect.
The old codgers who have so little already, for that matter, are quite prepared to add some splendour in their own way to this festive, first September morning. There's no one to stop them, as it happens, for the doctor has angrily left the patch of lawn, and the good old orderly, who never forgets her duty, is in the kitchen making a lunchtime pot of tea.
And so the gentlemen go in search of stones and anything else that can be thrown. The stoning of Mr Koopman commences.
An end comes to this (in fact unworthy) performance when the doctor re-appears on the patch of grass. He's in the company of an older gentleman with a briefcase and spectacles with golden frames. He's a government official who has come to take a look at what actually is going on and what might be done. 'So one of your elderly folk is in that tree,' the official says. 'And how, in fact, did he get into that tree? Using a ladder, I bet.'
The doctor has little taste for providing a detailed report. 'It's irrelevant how Mr Koopman got into that tree. The only thing is to make him come out of it again as soon as possible. You do understand me, I hope. It's really a matter of a human life here. The man could catch a cold and this is frequently fatal at that age. Have you come all on your own?'
A pertinent question indeed. Though the official has a large briefcase on him, it doesn't really look like he's sufficiently equipped to bring Mr Koopman back into the home where he belongs. The official takes a step forward and now he's able to take a really good-look-in the tree.
I thought this was about an elderly gentleman. But it's about a monkey. That's a monkey sitting in that tree there. An elderly gentleman hasn't got a tail.'
The doctor, who has regained some of his calm, is really somewhat at a loss with the case.
'Mr Koopman does indeed look a bit upset today, but a monkey? Honestly, Sir. He's no monkey. He's Mr Koopman. I know my own people,
The official, too, is in a bad mood. He, too, would have liked to have spent this Sunday morning in a more congenial manner. Though, in general, officials have much respect for people who have studied, the doctor now found little understanding and no patient ear at all.
'That's a monkey. It stays a monkey. That's the way I'll have it in my report.'
The doctor makes one more feeble attempt. He says in a confidential tone: 'Mr Koopman's condition has indeed deteriorated somewhat of late. And we will keep a closer eye on him from now on. But don't call him a monkey, please. The elderly find little understanding as it is. We must try to understand, with a little love.'
But the official with the briefcase has become angry. Hardly a flexible man. That much is quite clear. He says: 'You can't fool me. Even if you are a doctor a hundred times over. If you want to keep monkeys that's your business but don't bother the authorities with it and certainly not on a Sunday. If that's Mr Koopman sitting there in that tree then, whatever the case, he belongs in the jungle of Africa, or otherwise in Artis zoo. I can't set the fire brigade on to this. They don't come out for such murky little affairs. Good day to you, Mr-doctor-sir.'
And with his briefcase pressed very stiffly to his side, he leaves the lawn. The old codgers, too, have left, one by one. And so the doctor is standing under the tree again now, alone. And it rains and rains. It's pouring.
By and by, the doctor is beginning to feel ridiculous out here in this garden. It's already one o'clock, for that matter, and his wife is waiting with lunch. In the end, he goes into the house. The old folk are sitting in the sunlounge there, guzzling the bread fingers with sugar comfits which the good old orderly has prepared with loving hand. She encourages them to eat.
'Come on, Mr Willems, have another bite.'
But she isn't cheerful at all. She's on the verge of tears, if anything.
'It's perhaps better if we simply left Mr Koopman sitting in that tree, Mrs Wolf,' the doctor says. 'We're doing no good by continuing to concern ourselves with him. He's abusing the attention he's getting a bit. It's often the same with the elderly as with children. You shouldn't hold it against them, for it isn't done consciously. But you shouldn't encourage them in it either.'
'He's not coming back here, all the same,' the good old orderly shouts, quite thrown back into a tizzy again.
But the doctor has disappeared in the meantime.
'I won't have the old sod back here any more,' she says, just like that, to no one in particular. Yet, she walks over to the sunlounge door the doctor has closed behind him. She opens it ajar. Why? Because she's all at sixes and sevens. Then you do things and you don't even know you're doing them. For that matter, she hasn't even cleared away the festive breakfast though she never leaves food standing about normally.
And Mr Koopman on his branch in the chestnut tree? Often you can't really tell with the elderly. Frequently they're just like chickens cluck
ing because they've laid an egg. Only their emotional life is so much richer. They go through more. Disappointments impress their effects more deeply. Mr Koopman sighs. He sighs in a way that has some human quality about it once more. He sits there so sorrily. It's raining so wet. And he's so alone. And it's just as if his brown pyjamas are no longer hairy. They're turning blue again and they no longer give any warmth. And it's only wise for him to come out of the tree at last. He doesn't seem so agile any more either. He only just manages to come down via the trunk. Now he's standing on the patch of grass. An elderly gent in blue pyjamas, in the pouring rain. Walking with difficulty and with his head bowed like a wrongdoer, he enters the sunlounge. The good old orderly sees him alright, but she's busy with one of the other gentlemen. She really hasn't the time right now.
The breakfast looks very withered by now. The slice of ham, already gone off as it was, has now got a very nasty colour indeed. The slices of cheese have dried out and there are unappetising beads of perspiration on them. The bread, too, is in no state to stir the appetite. And there are two of those suspect little curly hairs on the butter.
But Mr Koopman is once again the same greedy gourmand as ever. He doesn't even sit down. He grabs what's there as it comes. Stuffs bread, cheese and spice cake inside, just like that. Licks the jam pot clean. Cleans out the butter pot with his finger. Only the egg. He doesn't eat the egg. He picks it up like a thief does a stolen half-crown. His frozen fingers close around it. He walks over to his bed. Slowly. With a bit of a shuffling gait. And that's how he crawls under the blankets in his soaked through pyjamas. But lying under the blankets, head and all, he presses that egg against his belly. He will hatch it into a new conception. The truth for a new life, the lies of which he has learned to get the measure of in his old one.
Maarten Asscher
There are islands which, in the course of their history, are continually being disputed over by neighbouring states. First they belong to one country and have its language and governance imposed upon them, and later, after a battle won or the decline of a dynasty, they end up under the hegemony of the other state. Thus they are shoved back and forth like the small change of history. In time, after so many twists of fortune, such an island begins to develop its own, hybrid culture, a bastard tongue sprouted from the languages of its conquerors, an impure style of architecture combining the influence of both. One might think of Greek-Turkish Samos or of Pantelleria with its Moorish as well as Sicilian characteristics.
Italian-French Argentera is such an island, tossed to and fro for centuries between two Mediterranean cultures. Situated in the westernmost part of the Gulf of Genoa, it lies almost exactly on the French-Italian border were one to continue this as an imaginary line from the land out to sea. There is, however, one particular difference between Argentera and other islands that have fallen to rival states by turns. For centuries, Argentera was held to be an island of doom, and neither France nor Italy wished to number it among its territories. France, even now, considers it to be foreign soil and since 1919 refers to it consistently by its Italian name. Italy, in its turn, maintains never to have signed the relevant treaty so that this little speck is invariably indicated as Argentere on Italian maps.
Thus has been the fate of this rocky little island, from the late Middle Ages onwards: an abandoned child between haughty powers. There was a short period of prosperity in the sixteenth century, when Argentere was colonised by the Genoese in the expectation of there being silver to be mined on the island. On the basis of obscure maps and speculative indications, much money was invested at the time in the sinking of mineshafts but a powerful earth-tremor put an end to these attempts - and to more than a hundred and fifty human lives. Argentera is still worth a footnote in Napoleonic literature, for at first there was a plan to banish Bonaparte there. But, as is well known, having learned from the escape from Elba, the choice fell on Saint Helena.
All of this was as yet unknown to me when I first caught sight of the island of Argentera. I was aboard the ship from Marseille to Livorno and sharing an inside cabin, a piece of French bread and a bag of tomatoes with a not very talkative fellow traveller. Neither in the booking office in the French port nor on the ticket had I seen any mention of a port-of-call, so I got up, hesitant and curious, when the ship suddenly could be heard and felt to be about to berth though we couldn't possibly be at our destination yet. Upon my question as to the reason for our delay, my travelling companion growled something unintelligible and so I decided to investigate. Having arrived on the upper deck, I saw that loading and unloading was already in full swing: crates of vegetables, wooden chests, small livestock and even a patient on a stretcher. In the midst of all the activity and the frantic shouting from the ship's railing to the edge of the dock and back, someone managed to tell me that this was the weekly call at Argentera. All other days, the scheduled service between Marseille and Livorno sails past, non-stop, but once a week, in both directions, the ferry calls at the island.
What with all the running about on board I was barely given the opportunity, during our already short stop, to take in the island properly. Thinking back to that first impression, what I particularly see again are those steep, narrow little streets, the yellow-brown houses, the pebbly beach at the beginning of the concrete berthing pier, all of this in the waning light of the Mediterranean evening sun. Perhaps fifty or a hundred houses could be seen; beyond that, Argentera seemed on first acquaintance to be a forgotten, parochial island with more rocks and trees than houses and people. I would therefore never have called this flash visit to mind with special attention or have got to know anything at all about the island, let alone that I would ever have set foot there, had not an unfortunate incident taken place during the hasty loading of goods that had to join us for the trip from Argentera to Livorno.
Our crew were being rushed to such a pitch by the captain, who sought to shorten the delay as much as possible, that on taking in a sack with items of mail, part of the contents fluttered down like white birds on to the water. The command to take in the two gangways had already sounded through the megaphone and the ship's engines were already making the extra revolutions necessary for departure, so there could be no question of suffering further delay for a few letters. The unfortunate mail was taken up mercilessly in the maelstrom of our propeller, while the ship loosed itself from the little port. Among the people getting smaller on the pier there was an older man in a sand-coloured suit who was beside himself with excitement about the slight mishap with the consignment of mail. He had to be calmed down by three others and, by the look of it, they were barely able to prevent him from jumping into the water, fully dressed, in order to rescue the papers, indeed, to prevent the ship from leaving, or so his wild gestures seemed to suggest.
The ship's turning obscured this tableau from my view and I returned to my cabin to continue my evening meal there. Passing the mezzanine deck I stepped aside a moment as a member of the crew wished hurriedly to pass, and the moment I walked on, I saw a letter jammed in the metal mount of a life buoy. The chic white envelope was addressed to the Libreria Maccari in Livorno. During the slipping open of the mailbag this letter must have got stuck halfway through its fall. Doubtless, I would have quite properly handed it in to the crew, or posted it in Livorno myself, were it not that I was intrigued by its sender's name. Pre-printed in splendid, dark-blue little letters, bottom-left, on the cream-white cover, it read: Bibliotheca Sarrazina, Dr R. Sarrazin. What, for heaven's sake, did such an island as this want with a scholarly library? This was a question I dearly wished to investigate myself, instead of immediately handing over the possible answer to others.
Alas, the lights were out already in my cabin and, presumably, the food was finished. From the upper bunk, satisfied snoring rang out, in any case. Feeling my way, I rolled on to the bottom berth and, before falling asleep, I felt a moment for the letter in my inner pocket.
As soon as we had gone ashore in the port of Livorno, in the early light, walking
along the quayside, I tore open the envelope. At first sight, the contents disappointed me a little and I felt regret that I had been unable to restrain my curiosity. In refined, oldfashioned handwriting endorsed by a flamboyant signature, Dr Raoul Sarrazin was ordering a dozen geological studies and reference books from Maccari and Company. Except for author's names and the titles of the desired works, the letter contained nothing other than polite phrases, references to terms upon which previous orders had been fulfilled and, finally, a word of thanks in advance for rapid despatch. The remarkable thing, however, was that there were three books among them written by Dr R. Sarrazin himself, and on re-reading the titles I did rediscover my curiosity of the previous day: Recherches mineralogiques dans la region nord-ouest de la Mediterranee, L'isola di Argentere e in sua importanza nella letteratura Napoleonica and - especially - Description de la vie quotidienne en Argentera. Tome XXXVI. I had never heard of the remaining authors, nor of their just as picturesquely entitled works.
Sitting on a bench in the light of the sun that was getting warmer, I wondered what kind of backwater that minute island would have to be, what with that academic Bibliotheca Sarrazina. Was there a librarian sitting there, day in, day out, working on historical studies of his island in the Napoleonic era? And, in the meantime, did he take down the daily events in the village as well? And how, from this badly accessible clump of rock, could he undertake mineralogical research in what he called la region nordouest de la Mediterranee? In short: I really had become curious now, and counted myself lucky that I had opened the letter and, moreover, that I had the opportunity to sort out this affair right to the bottom.
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy Page 4
