Amsterdam Stories Read online

  The little poet had had enough, of everything. His book was finished, he had murdered his never-ending poem, his position in society was a farce. Coba and Bobi had enough to live on without him. God would console them; time heals all wounds. That was a proverb on the wall of his aunt’s house in Velp.

  It was spring. It still looked like winter but it was spring. It still snowed here and there and it was a bit cold at night, with a frost sometimes, but that was just a little pleasantry, nothing to take too seriously.

  The days were growing longer, people turned on their lights at seven o’clock. At six thirty the gas lamps were lit along the canal, they hung there pale and astonished. The snow swirled around them, in little spring snowflakes and melted before it fell onto the street.

  And they both thought about the summer rains that would come, and their noses, the noses of incorrigible bohemians who couldn’t stifle their souls, smelled the fresh hay. He, grim as the title of his book, Genghis Khan, and as grim as the book itself, thinking that he would never smell that smell again, that this too he had forsaken in kingly abdication; she full of vague longings and so, so moved in her heart. She folded her hands on her skirt where it was stretched tight between her knees; she sat there like that, bent forward on her chair.

  The cows had already been out in the fields, he and she had seen them one sunny day. The land had recognized them right away and they stood trustingly on it and the sun was happy to see them too. After that the days had grown colder again and the cows had had to go back inside for a time. But in the end the hail couldn’t stop the spring.

  The birch trunks were silvery white, but prettier than silver. Language is poor, fatally poor. Anyone who knows the Father’s work knows that.

  The meadows looked less waterlogged, the farmers had spread manure, the sun rose higher and set more slowly. And Dora thought about how the sun had been big and red and cold in the sky in December, and low near the horizon at four o’clock, and had passed into a cold mist and vanished, weak and defenseless. But that was a long time ago. And she thought about how in winter people turned on their lights at four o’clock and hoped that daylight would eventually return. But now she knew for certain that the sun would come up the next morning. And after that, well, what then?

  Still they said not a word.

  He thought back to the time when he had worked, “worked hard” as people like to say. And how his family had said that he was starting to become more reasonable now. That he’d complained once about all the pressure he was under and about all sorts of things going wrong at the office, he’d said he was dreaming about them at night, and that his aunt had replied: “Yes, my boy, life is a serious business.” She would surely read his book, and expect to receive a signed copy, and wait to see if it would be included in the subscription library. She would want to be horrified by it, but wouldn’t dare since so many other people had praised it. He saw himself already circulating among the library subscribers in Velp and that really made everything worthwhile.

  “What now?” Dora thought. She had seen the snow melt once more and the buds grow bigger on the trees. Next the crowns of the tall trees would turn brown all over.

  It seemed to her that she had seen the same things a very long time ago, the same way, with her hands folded on her skirt, knees apart, bent forward on her chair.

  The sun was shining again, she saw the houses in the light and the trees and the golden glow on the pond. She saw the weeping willow turn yellow, its branches hung down and they reached for the water, they hung in deathly silent yellow adoration over the pond and they saw their own yellow light in the water. The woolly white clouds sailed in the pond, they skimmed across the blue sky but didn’t conceal it. And those were the weeping willows in the city in early spring, a material embodiment of God between the clog-like buildings, so tall, awakening a longing that is grace and misery at once. You turn the corner, a foul, disgusting corner next to a fish stall that stinks of marinated herring, and suddenly something blazes from your eyes into your heart, you see gold crash down like an ocean and you stand there and a little boy wipes his nose with the back of his hand and yells: “Fancypants!” That is Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, in early spring.

  It was almost night. The lumps of coal in the stove suddenly shifted with a thump and little flames shot up and their light filled the room.

  “Dora,” he said without warning, “what do you think of Penning?” Penning was another friend from his youth. He hadn’t seen him in years and knew only that he’d become an engineer. And now he’d run into him two weeks ago and he had dropped by a few times while they were busy with the proofs, and each time he stayed and chatted for an hour. He was a big fresh-faced young man, well on his way to a fine career but still youthful outside of work. He’d told them that in a few months he was off to South America for a year or so, to dredge something somewhere or build a pier or something like that. The little poet had also brought him to see his mother-in-law, and she was instantly taken with him. Em didn’t like him.

  “What do you think of Penning?” “He’s all right,” Dora said absently. Silence. In the light the streetlamp cast on the ceiling you could see the shadows of falling snowflakes. They were bigger now.

  “Em’s getting married next month.” She looked up. He was talking so strangely again, it was like Bovenkerk with Em. She didn’t answer.

  She suddenly saw before her eyes, like a long-forgotten thing, a wide river rushing toward the sea. Its waves propelled the sunlight toward the sea but the water and the light were without end. A little tugboat pulled a long train of boats along a blue and gold trail. The boat was tiny and insignificant, its steam pipe barely reached the sky and its smoke was only just visible, its hoarse cry was lost in space. For hours and hours it moved through the water, between the fields, under an awe-inspiring sky.

  And she saw a long road full of dust and sunlight and solitude. And then something else again: a meadow, endless, and an alley of autumn trees a bit farther down, there in the sun, from the side, and all of it full of living gold and of blue sky. And then: a river down in a valley, already dark in the east and the day was dying in the west, yellow at first, far sadness, pale green above that, a day that did not want to die, the darkness powerfully rising, it rose from the land into the eastern sky and hurtled west, and there was the river, red and crying, it wanted to hold on to the light, the light that wanted to stay. And so the river flowed, with the light, down to the ocean she couldn’t see.

  Then he said: “Penning keeps coming by because of you.” She was taken aback. It took a second before she understood what she had just heard him say.

  “Listen, Dora. Accept him. He’s going to ask you, I know he will. Accept him, marry him. Don’t waste your life on art or anything to do with art.”

  She sat the same way she had been sitting. The only difference was that she held her head up slightly higher. She looked at the window, which gleamed darkly with a few little dots of yellow light here and there, from the light of the streetlamp. One of the rare large snowflakes touched the pane and melted. She didn’t understand.

  He laid his hand on her folded hands, his fingers touching hers along their whole length. And a wild desire surged up out of her body into her head, carried there by her blood, so strong that all of the clothes on her body were unbearable to her. For an instant. But she stood up calmly, holding on to the back of the chair with one hand. “I’m not going to marry.” She said it as though she were telling someone that the accountant had quit. As though he hadn’t said anything, he got up from the couch. “Here,” he said, “take this key? It’s for the front door. Bonger will come by your apartment to get it around ten. He’s staying here tonight. He had to move out of his old place today and can’t move into his new place till tomorrow. I told him I wasn’t sure if I’d be at home.”

  “You’re going back out tonight?” She was now completely calm. She felt around on the table for the matches and lit the gas lamp. You couldn�
��t see a thing! “You’re going back out tonight?” He shrugged. “Maybe.” She looked straight at him but there was nothing unusual in his face, he looked the same as he often had during the past few days, when he was reciting one of the good bits from Genghis Khan and she looked up from correcting the proofs for a moment.

  He brought her to the stairs.

  “’Night E., see you tomorrow night at Mom’s.” He pressed her hand. “G’night Dora, au revoir camarade.” For an instant she heard something in his voice that was always there whenever he repeated something his aunt had said. Strange. “Okay, bye.” “Bye!” he called after her as though imitating a sixteen-year-old girl. Then the door slammed shut.

  XI

  She walked fast and had to dodge around all the puddles. It had almost stopped snowing, the wet flakes that were still falling swirled slowly down, a few landing on her face, which felt good. In the light of a streetlamp she saw the fat buds on one of the chestnut trees along the canal, with little glints of light where the buds were thickest.

  There was a straight yellow band of light on the trunk, from top to bottom.

  What had happened, actually? Another puddle, how deep it looked with the reflection of the sky in it, a reflected star twinkling in a gap between the clouds. You could get dizzy from staring at puddles all the time while you walked. She knew a sentimental German song about the happiness that was “Behind the Stars.” Or maybe it was deep in a puddle like this, all the way at the bottom. Nonsense, there was probably not even half an inch of water. Her day would come too. She wanted. But what did she want? Could she want something?

  It was lovely to walk in the evening alone like this and let your thoughts come and go and come again. And since she was a little poetess she quoted Jacques Perk to herself as she dodged again to avoid a puddle and almost stepped right into another one: “To feel yourself bound to yourself through yourself alone.”

  The mild wet wind blew all around her and she took a deep breath. “Easy for you to say.” And honestly, she almost bumped right into a couple standing under a streetlight, kissing. She suddenly felt like a lady: “What a vulgar pair!” Der minnen vruchten ic u mildelijck gaf, Maer een ewich zuchten houde ic daer af—“The fruits of love I graciously gave to you, But kept for myself only sighs that last forever.” The lady had vanished but still Dora blushed, all alone under the dark sky, at the “fruits” the woman in the poem had apparently given. And she suddenly remembered the feeling she had just had, my God, not ten minutes before: that all her clothes were absolutely unbearable on her body. She felt her cheeks burn. “It’s not going to happen.” Just then she found herself standing on her front stoop. Half past seven.

  “Hi Mom, I’ll be right back down.”

  But when she was up in her room and had thrown off her hat and coat, it became clear to her what had just happened. A powerful feeling of desolation and abandonment came over her, the sense that life was not worth living. She did not understand herself.

  Why hadn’t she taken his hand and said “I love you”? Why didn’t she want to do what she wanted so badly to do? What could happen that would be worse than enduring this living death? Why was she here? Why must she die unkissed? Not just kissed, really kissed. She glowed, her whole body glowed, her heart swelled. She unbuttoned her clothes in front of the mirror and looked at her breasts, so white in her black dress, and held them in her hands.

  She was pure and untouched. What a joke. And in her great confusion she begged God to defile her. “Am I going crazy?”

  Her coat slipped off the bed and landed with a muffled bump. It was the key. A thought shot through her head like a burst of flame: He had said goodbye to her, something was wrong, she had to go back. She calmly splashed some water on her face and put her clothes back on. “I forgot something, I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  At eight o’clock she was standing in front of his door again and she rang the bell. No sound from inside. She rang the bell again and then resolutely opened the door with the key. No light anywhere. The empty, dark, silent house made her shudder, her heart was pounding, but she bravely went upstairs. The door to the front room stood open, the light from the streetlamp still shone on the ceiling and the red light from the stove still glowed on the floor. “E., where are you?” How horrible that sounded. She ran through the rooms, scared and brave. Then she went up the second flight of stairs. The bedroom door was open a crack, there was light coming from inside. She rushed to push the door open, afraid she would turn around and run away.

  “E., what are you doing?” He sat in total silence on the edge of the bed, staring down between his knees at the rug on the floor. He stood up: “Dora.” There was everything in that one word and she heard it.

  Then they fell together through the light into unfathomable deeps and they felt their bodies like singing suns.

  But in the back of his mind was an ice-cold corner, and in that corner he thought: “It’s revenge, she suffers to atone for the world” …

  The Devil was sitting in Café De Kroon, in the middle of the room next to a pillar. He placed his thin gold watch on the table in front of him. The two bumps on his forehead were bigger than ever.

  “Quarter past eight. Consummatum est.”*

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder. The God of heaven and earth was standing behind him. “Consummatum est, come see.”

  XII

  At ten thirty Bonger and Graafland found him. Bonger had gotten the key from the mother-in-law.

  He stood stark naked in the middle of the room. His left arm hung at his side, beside his body, fist clenched; his right arm was raised, finger pointing upward. There was a faint scent of lilies of the valley. A blue barrette lay on the floor. The bed was in chaos.

  “Eduard!” they both cried at the same time.

  “I am God,” he said. “I am greater than God. I am the Immovable, the Merciless. I know no good and evil. I do what I must do. What I do is good.”

  Bonger picked up a sheet from the bed and stepped over to him.

  “Go away,” he said and took a step back.

  Bonger didn’t move.

  “Didn’t I say I was God? I am the eternal life. I am procreation. God has sent me. Do not cover me.”

  Again he stepped back.

  “Do not cover me. I am procreation. Bring all the women here, all the young women. All of them I say. I know who you are. You’re Bonger, the other one’s Graafland. I know you all right. Put the sheet on the bed. She must lie on it. The first one, put her on it, naked. The others don’t need to leave. They need to see. You can go, Bonger, you too Graafland.”

  Bonger put his hand on his shoulder. “Stand still. Put your arm down.”

  The arm dropped. Bonger threw the sheet around him. “Sit down on this chair.” He sat. Graafland gathered up his clothes, from the bed, from the chair, from the floor.

  “Get dressed.”

  He meekly, slowly put on all his clothes.

  The little poet is dead now. The people in Delft or Oldenzaal were proven gloriously correct. He was definitely never quite right in the head.

  His book is in its fourth printing and his collected poems have been published too, with an introduction by Professor Scharten or someone like that. The weasel who managed to become the financial editor of the Provincial Arnhem and Gelderland Courant tells anyone who will listen that they went to school together. And whenever he comes to Amsterdam, which is fairly often, he hurries up to Bonger and rattles on about the little poet and his work and acts important and always says that he sat next to him in school.

  Coba is kindhearted and forgiving and unaffected, the way she always was. She has become devout, even without proverbs on the wall to help her, and she goes to the Dutch Reformed Church on Boezemsingel every Sunday, since she lives in Rotterdam now, as punishment for having flirted with someone once while she was married. Kindheartedly and forgivingly she thinks about how she too was walking right on the edge of the abyss.

  Dora is an “unw
ed mother.” She works at an office in Rotterdam where her boss knows her story and doesn’t look down on her for it, on the contrary. Which is very unusual for a Rotterdammer.

  Thanks to that one man, it seems to me, that abomination of a city may be spared on the Day of Judgment. Which is too bad, actually.

  She and her child live with Coba and Bobi and she moves through her life with her head held high, proud and silent. She plans to get her diploma and then, with the money from her father, who is dead, study law. Definitely not literature. She wants to work, not think. But I don’t believe that she’ll ever stifle her soul. Those dear to God’s heart above all others have to bear that burden to the end.

  June–July 1917

  A POSTSCRIPT

  For those who would like to know more about how love works, I will relate that Little Poet’s Dora originated as an idealized version of a young girl for whom I felt, from a distance, an old man’s affection.

  After she read the manuscript I told her that, and her response was: “But I never played diabolo.” She said it not out of coquetry or embarrassment, she had simply not understood a thing.

  NESCIO

  January 5, 1918

  FROM AN UNFINISHED NOVEL[1]

  MY LIFE is too short, I can’t go any faster, my work is a cathedral and I need a long time, centuries. And how much longer do I have?

  It was back when I was still planning to write the big thick book that I’ll never write and that you have to have written to become famous, or so they say. A big novel made of reinforced concrete, two volumes if possible, and epic, really epic—the epic saga is the highest genre of literature, I read that somewhere too, more than once. Those people write whatever they feel like. They endlessly make art, dead literature and other dead works of art, and it doesn’t seem to kill them either.

  I was in love then too, I usually fell in love when all I had from my novel was the title. That’s not good for an epic.