Duke of Egypt

by Margriet de Moor

  That was good. That was right, absolutely. Still, though the sun might go on rising and setting again in streaks of red, sooner or later Joseph would be pulled over. His papers would be examined testily between four fingers and at a moment like that I was definitely no longer a bluish landscape but was up to my ears in a compromising skin that I didn’t like one bit. “You can’t stay here. What’s your destination? Disperse, please, folks. Those are the regulations” — and then I felt ashamed to the depths of my soul and I knew that I must also be concerned with the friendly policeman who wanted to do everything by the book. But why did Joseph remain so good-natured when confronted with this gentleman? Did he know that the man’s ancestors had been drivers of the plague carts at the time when his own ancestors had been playing with young brown bears in the eastern Balkans? But no, amenability, polite looks, I don’t understand and perhaps I can’t understand. Your head may be hidden under a wiry copper bush of hair, and because of that you may have been pointed at by every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and especially teased by an angelic girl at elementary school, but that’s definitely not enough to understand what centuries of police checks do to your feeling of reality. To your daily repertoire, your eternal now that is sometimes nice and intimate, with kitchen utensils and eiderdowns, and at other times terrifyingly distant, with an ice-cold wind over plowed fields where birds circle overhead. I like the fresh air, but even more I like a solid table between a pair of brick walls.

  “That’s your gadjo soul,” says Joseph later to Lucie.

  3

  Gerard is angry. It started more than a year ago, quietly at first, when Joseph and Lucie decided to cut down the oak by the gate.

  “Why?” he had asked.

  “Search me,” said Lucie. You could see her thinking. “To give the trailer more room on the bend.”

  He got angry. “You two have gone nuts.”

  “No, not at all. We’re waiting till the rain’s over and then the hollow side branches will come off first.”

  Three days later it was still raining and from the kitchen window Gerard saw the stripped branches falling. Pitiful streams of water splashed from the holes and drenched the man hanging on to the trunk. Joseph, ghostly pale, filthy from the mud, had a chainsaw in his hands, which, as the morning progressed, started droning more and more unbearably.

  “Fool,” mumbled Gerard around noon. He turned to the sideboard, groped at random, poured himself a drink, gin, poured another, and stood there looking out, helplessly, with the glass in his hand. Helplessly, I say, not rage. You’d imagine he would have loved to get his hands on his son-in- law, the foreigner, the heathen husband sent by providence to drive his daughter crazy, the deserter, but you could see clearly that the old man was only hunting for words to have something to do while his brain stood still.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Lucie finally called. Johan of fifteen, Katharina of thirteen, and Jojo of almost eleven, had been hanging around the kitchen, eyes bright with hunger. Now they were served up a completely disastrous dish of peppers and garlic. “Just boil an egg for me,” said Gerard in irritation.

  They not only took down the tree. That same month they also sold Linda, Walton Beauty, and Viking and then forgot to book Experiment, that marvelous stud, to service Bellaheleen.

  One afternoon Gerard was walking home up the drive when he saw Lucie slaughtering a couple of geese by the drinking troughs. Of course he’d seen her dealing with chickens and rabbits often enough, always very deftly, but now he was amazed. One at a time she pushed the two swan geese, which were originally Asian, to the ground, put a broom handle over their necks, and stepped on either side of it. It was true that the breaking of the neck was very quick, but Gerard, who didn’t know the method, lost his temper, God knows why. He continued to sulk all afternoon, and at supper hunched forward a little to avoid looking at the face of Joseph. Joseph was playing around halfheartedly with his children, sitting smiling with the same dull eyes with which he’d come into the kitchen in the morning, no earlier than eight o’clock these days, in the rumpled clothes of a man who wonders why it’s morning again.

  November came. Snow fell early. In the third week the grain-storage barn collapsed and on the Friday afterward Gerard discovered a leak in the stable that could be repaired only a week later by a flu-ridden Joseph. Little by little Gerard, who felt that there was something in the air about which no living soul would inform him — something illegal? something hostile? something to do with betrayal? — became furious, carried along by something terribly depressing that for lack of any tangible cause followed a course of its own. Gerard began to be irritated by Joseph, by his oriental eyes, by his hooked nose, by his Balkan mustache, by his Slav signet rings, by his Bavarian jacket, by his black cigarettes, and by the barbaric zeal. That zeal with which one Sunday in February he completely demolished the rickety chicken run on wheels, once meant to be moved from stubble field to stubble field along with a hundred and twenty Barneveld chickens and a beautiful cockerel.

  Finally Gerard became irritated by the way Joseph strolled into the chicory house at about eleven in the morning for a chat with his father-in-law.

  “Hello, how are things?” he says, pushing aside the rubber curtain behind the door.

  The other man greets him with a nod.

  “Give it to me.” Joseph walks toward the old man in the semidarkness.

  “No.” Gerard, busy fetching a load of roots from the cold store, doesn’t turn around. “I can manage.”

  Joseph has already grabbed the crate out of his hands and put it down on the workbench. “Nice stuff,” he says. “Where did you get these from?”

  The light is gray, dimmed by the curtain. Chicory originally grows underground, which is why it’s always dark and warm in their greenhouse.

  “From the Noordoostpolder,” says Gerard, and something spins in his head that makes him think: Why don’t you just go, for all I care? Why don’t you get into that great big fat car of yours and drive away past the chestnut trees? If you’re so fond of leaving? He glances to the side. He no longer needs to examine the face. He knows that those features, now empty and exhausted, sometimes suddenly assume the form of a fabulous friendship of more than forty years ago.

  Before the war Gerard was a young newlywed, and jannosch Franz, alias Jan Andrias and alias a few other things, was only a couple of years younger and already the father of numerous children. The first sign that horse dealers had descended on the woods was always the two-wheeled carts in which they set out to tour the district. The Gypsies went to the farms and bought the horses on the basis of incomprehensible criteria. When Jannosch Franz drove into Gerard’s yard late one August morning in a shiny painted two-wheeled carriage, he was making his first visit in person. But he knew the farm and its location through his family, whose trail went back via the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Russia to Germany. At the end of the previous century they had bought German passports in the name of Franz, Schmidt, Otten, and so on.

  Jannosch jumped down from the box. He pushed his hat back and greeted Gerard with formal politeness. Fifteen minutes later the two men shook hands on the deal. Jannosch had bought a chestnut gelding with a lame foreleg from Gerard for the tidy sum of a hundred and twenty guilders.

  They sat down in the shadow of the linden tree and sealed the bargain with a gin or two. Gerard had already hinted that he found it really infuriating that the August market in Delden fell in the middle of the rye and oat harvest. The following day swarthy men and a battered troop of women and children appeared on his land. They hitched the horses to the mower in threes, they picked up the sheaves and put them into stacks, and the following morning they came back to talk about fair payment. After reaching agreement, they lifted the sheaves one by one with pitchforks and tossed them into the barn at top speed before a storm broke. On Friday Gerard was sitting in the café when the horse market had finished. Successful business was being celebrated with noisy exuberance by the uncles and aunts, brothers and si
sters, nephews and nieces of Jannosch Franz, who — on the windowsill with a child on his lap — was now being called tjawo by everyone.

  They saw each other again the following spring, and how! Gerard certainly found it strange, but Jannosch shrugged his shoulders about it afterward: This time the entry of the Gypsies into the village was accompanied by the state gendarmerie. Four caravans rattled down Brinkstraat at three in the afternoon. The Gypsy women who walked alongside laughing inappropriately and the host of children and the men leading their horses by their halters found themselves surrounded by authority and couldn’t go anywhere except directly out of the village again. Gerard thought it was idiotic and also rather embarrassing because, guarded like this between loaded police pistols, his friends did indeed look distinctly criminal.

  It must have been in 1937 or 1938 that the commissioner of the National Border Guard was given something more to send back than a handful of Gypsies. And yet for a good ten years all kinds of work had been done. Letters, ideas, plans, perhaps unnoticed by a farmer like Gerard, but which had struck many Dutch people as a matter of public order and state authority. They argued that mayors should simply stop issuing permits, that consuls should no longer grant visas, that district commanders should, where possible, pursue this race of nomads. A competition had begun between Belgium and the Netherlands, the point of which was for each to palm their Gypsies off on the other as deftly as possible. A serious plan was proposed by the gendarmerie to deport these offensive tribes to some distant country or, better still, to an island. Things did not improve when with his own eyes the commissioner saw four women begging in Parliament Square in The Hague at Christmastime.

  Earning a living. You can open a shop, but some businesses need a little more space than others. How are you supposed to allow your twenty salable horses to graze despite Article 4? How are you supposed to do business in Woerden when you’ve been tied down in Leiden? How are you supposed to sell your fancy goods in Strijbeek when the police commander has taken public offense at your low-cut dresses in the local weekly paper?

  Behind the caravans in the wood they are sleeping quite calmly on the ground under quilts. Among the bushes are the gendarmes. In long overcoats, sabers at their sides, they’re putting in some late overtime. Gerard has read the following headline in the Benckelo News: GYPSY BAND SIGHTED. SHOPKEEPERS BEWARE. He talks it over with his wife. Within the hour he bicycles to the encampment in the woods and invites the whole group onto his meadow fringed with hawthorn and maple. I think he was angry and simply had the urge to do something, but I don’t think he understood yet what it would be like to be wild game with the hunters after you. When he did, five years later, he and Jannosch Franz were in the same boat and were both arrested on the same night.

  He makes a melancholy sound. With his hands on the workbench he looks at the chicory roots that have to go into water that afternoon.

  “If we want, we can get this lot in in an hour, can’t we?” he hears.

  He knows that inspired tone. “Yes, yes, I know.”

  He sees Joseph starting to walk around a bit, starting to look at the shelves where the chicory is growing. He’s merely a dark silhouette amid the bubbling and flowing of the water which is kept moving continuously through the PVC tubes. Gerard’s eyes follow him hesitantly, do their best to understand that they’ve been in the greenhouse together so often. Naturally Joseph never had a very high opinion of old-fashioned soil tilling. None of them did, did they? Travel along, use what you need, and on you go! Yet immediately he had taken to this practice of tricking nature into growing something in three months that normally took a year and a half.

  “I think it’s fantastic, Gerard. What would a crop like that fetch? Five thousand? We’ll start tomorrow.”

  For weeks he’d helped to get the whole system going with great skill. As he worked, he talked to himself a bit, involuntarily, in his own special language. Gerard wasn’t annoyed then. Not at all. Actually, he was quite touched by those hoarse, muffled words. It was as if he understood that a human being is generally even stranger than an elephant imported from overseas and that you can’t help feeling sorry for its legs and the eye that peers down at you with such a lost look.

  So I wonder what’s up with him at the moment. It may be just senility.

  In some corner of their memory old men often harbor some grievance that has been lying like a dog on a chain, waiting to leap up blindly. Suddenly there’s that trigger, and that slight spasm in the head begins. There’s something not right, they don’t know what and get angry. Their movements are no longer so steady. Now they’ve got two heads. One doesn’t understand what the other is thinking. In that way sensibilities get confused. Does the law of reversal now apply? Beautiful becomes ugly, nice becomes insufferable. How can everything that you once appreciated suddenly look so vile? A feeling of guilt, even older than yourself, turns to blind rage.

  “I don’t want to nag,” says Joseph. He pulls out a plastic loop with his fingers and looks at Gerard. “But like this the whole hose is going to the dogs. Are those pliers still there?”

  Gerard leaves the barn without answering. He walks past the earth bank and takes the path to the apple trees, which are now bare. His watch says half past eleven. What will he do for a change? He thinks of the coffeepot in the kitchen, but in the end he feels more like simply standing by the gate for a while. There are toadstools with luminous edges growing on the stump of the oak. Without thinking, he looks at the other side of the road where the construction of a barn has been suspended since the autumn. Without thinking, yes, because the plastic, the rust, cement spots, and the rotting wood need not the slightest detour to deepen his foul mood.

  Christ Almighty!

  Morose he sure is, the old man. Furious expression, eyes screwed up under a cap. It’s strange, too. Because this summer of all summers hasn’t his son-in-law stayed at home like a model husband? Doing odd jobs for his wife? Spending time with Jojo and Katharina and Johan? Stopped traveling for God knows what reason.

  4

  The bust-up with that woman? I don’t know. I don’t know what it really meant. At any rate, there came a moment when Lucie started lashing out with a riding whip in a strange house while Joseph, just roused from sleep, looked on.

  Last year September arrived suddenly. Lucie hadn’t had her mind on things all summer. Joseph had been wandering through Europe as always and she had resolved to tell him when he got back that she had started dreaming. Dreaming very seriously about an Appaloosa mare. Lucie had been longing for a purebred, American, whose breeding had produced a pattern of dark patches that overlay the light base coat all over its body. It was impractical, made no business sense at all, it was a childlike variation on what she understood by love. She made inquiries in the area. She asked fellow dealers to keep a lookout for her in the markets in Bremen and Antwerp and she gave a voucher for a considerable sum to Tattersalls’ auction. One Friday after three o’clock as she sat in the sun imagining the patches of the tiger horse, she suddenly thought: Gosh, it’s September. And from one moment to the next, restlessness took hold of her. It lasted for two days. On Sunday night she sensed that Joseph was close by, in her immediate vicinity, and wondered where he was. In the morning the telephone rang. It was a woman called Christina Crnyse.

  “Hi, Lucie.” No-nonsense voice.

  “Hi.”

  A voice she had known and defied since childhood. And God knows why she wanted to talk to her today.

  “How are you getting on with this drought?” A preamble, a game. “We’ve been spraying at full power for the last week.”

  Lucie didn’t reply, but did see the huge jets of water above the sixty acres of fields and meadows of the firm of Koopman and Cruyse. To the left of the house was the gateway of Second Eden, where since the death of her husband Christina Cruyse had run a profitable Frisian horse-breeding business, set up with her own money. The planted fields were managed by her brother.

  “Listen, Lucie.
”

  The voice was sharper now, almost snapping.

  “Yes?”

  “You were looking for an Appaloosa.”

  “What makes you think that...” she started slowly, and couldn’t help her heart being swept along. She closed her eyes tight in disbelief.

  “Well,” replied Christina Cruyse. “There’s one here. Please come before nine.”

  Lucie walked into the kitchen. Next to the clock lay her car keys and next to the coffee machine her cigarettes. The smell of the smoke distracted her for a moment from the chaos in her head. Absentmindedly she saw that the apples on the worktop were the variety she used on winter evenings to make a dish of stewed apples and potatoes. Then she left the house, stroked the two dogs in the shadow of the linden tree, and on the way to the car passed the tool shed, the door of which was open. As she walked along muttering aloud, “What day is it today?” and “This is a disaster,” her eye caught the saddles, halters, bits, ropes, whips, she took a step to the side, just one, and then selected a very old whip, a trophy with a silver-plated handle and organdy ribbons between the cords, won once by one of her forebears at a trotting competition.

  It was quiet on the road. Sunlight hung motionless over the cornfields and over the farmhouses with bedding hanging out of the windows. Well before she drove through the gateway she had seen two things in the yard of Second Eden. The tiger-patterned horse. Her husband’s Buick. An Appaloosa, Christ, yes, she thought after she had parked her car next to her husband’s, and she looked at the majestic creature with almost peaceful light gray eyes and the ridiculous whip like a joke in her hand.