Amsterdam Stories Read online

  It’s clear I’m not up to it. It wouldn’t be enough for me. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.”* Do I want to be satisfied? Yes. And no. There is no answer.

  And suddenly I am at peace with it. There is no answer. That’s good too. In a month the crocuses will be in bloom again. It’s barely started thawing and already the women are looking around. There is still something to hold on to in this time of war: the thought of peace and the feeling for “that which is not of this earth.” That doesn’t sound bad, it even sounds a bit sublime.

  So then: Insula Dei?

  I give up and go eat a couple of slices of bread and butter. At the table I awaken in a clear, tangible world. It still feels strange for a moment. A plate, a knife, a fork, some leftover sauerkraut from the day before, it’s clear exactly what you have here: not quite enough.

  In the twilight that evening I walk past Frankendael again. The snow is still lying on the gardens in front of the manor house and it’s still light out. But the tall trees are there, to either side. They are silent, life cannot be more silent.

  I look slowly up past the trees. Down below the trunks rise up darkly out of the snow, it is a secretive, three-quarters-dark world where Dikscheis led astray by our dear Lord can frolic with nymphs like the ones you see in museums. But up above, the crowns of the trees against the last light of a pale sky look out into the distance. There is no sound, no wind. The trunks wait, they wait for an answer from the crowns. Are the herons returning? Is spring on its way?

  And then God does what he always does, thank God, time and time again, every day. In the end that’s why I could never make anything of myself in society. He shows me something that is not there: the blue lake next to the endless field with yellow daffodils, water and daffodils both waving in the breeze. Wordsworth’s “Daffodils.”

  Wednesday, July 9, 1941, 9:30 p.m. German daylight time. The sun is low in the sky. Near the end of an unbearably hot day. A narrow bike path between young birch trees. Behind me is Waalre, behind me too is the magic alley of birch trees in Waalre that leads to the train station. At this late hour it is full of shadows, all the shadows of this whole blazing hot day have gathered under these trees. But here and there the sun still golds its way in, a heavy wagon jolts slowly ahead under a heavy vault of branches and leaves, the sun glides along the wagon’s back, the driver walks alongside it, the low sun sparkles on a bicycle too, the eye doesn’t reach all the way to the end of this alley, the vault ends in deep shadow, this road must lead somewhere good and peaceful where a stately man and a willowy woman with elegant faces are waiting for me in a white house with a large front lawn and beeches and lindens all around and with the tea waiting on the tea light. The road leads to the Aalst-Waalre station and service along that line has been canceled.

  But the road is behind me, I have turned off to the left onto the bike path and am on my way to Eindhoven and I think about it only in passing.

  For me the day has not been unbearably hot. Temperatures like this are fine with me, and almost no clothes—shirt, pants, and shoes; jacket draped over the handlebars. As Zus Zwaardecroon, the neighbor girl, would say: “Like a fairy.”

  When I’m almost to Eindhoven, the countryside is wide open on both sides. Rye fields. The sun still burning, low and red. A stately row of Canadian poplars, a copse here and there. A striking emptiness and silence. The fields end somewhere but you can’t see where, lost in the distance against trees or bushes. And then there’s a fantastic golden cloud above the grain fields, climbing up out of the grain fields, shining and spreading up and to the right. The Judgment. I get off my bike, I await the Lord. The cloud drifts, drifts to the right and comes closer. And then something looms up out of the golden matter, at first it’s not clear what, but it’s not the Lord. And a moment later it’s a wagon piled high with hay, or rather, it’s hay that is slowly, listlessly, and almost inaudibly moving closer between the rows of grain, with a man sitting in front and a horse’s head enveloped in a drifting cloud of solid sunshine.

  But the Lord is in the great silence and emptiness and in this wondrous end to a monumental day. The day has become mine once more and mine the enchanted world. The sun stands still, there will be no night. Time stands still; pitiless eternity takes pity. God has taken transience from me and from this blossoming world. The heavens arch still and blue over the benevolent green, the grain stands perfectly still and there is a golden radiance above it and the land lies there like someone you love. This world will always be, nothing more can come after it.

  When my bicycle starts whirring again I suddenly hear a cuckoo. And all around, before and behind me and on either side, I hear its incomprehensible call. From where? Thirteen times this voice of God calls from beyond the bounds of understanding.

  I am very grateful. “Hallelujah, praise he who is without beginning.” I have wrested a beautiful day from eternity. The sun has almost set. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

  And so I walk home through the snow in the last light and the island of God is all around me. There’s another light frost.

  V

  Wilted is the word. It’s still thawing, the snow has wilted into a filthy sludge, the neighborhood is wilted, the house is wilted. There is a tin nameplate on the door with letters the same color: B. den Oever. On the upstairs neighbor’s door a patch is bare where the bad kids kick if the door isn’t opened fast enough. And there’s not much paint either on the doors and window frames.

  A tall, thin woman in black opens the door. She has jutting cheekbones and sunken cheeks and stands very straight. As small and narrow as she is, she fills the whole cramped hallway. “Is Mr. Philip den Oever home?” Having looked at me, she turns around and opens a door with her left hand: “Flip, someone here for you.” Then, without saying another word, she walks off down the hall to what I guess is the kitchen. She leaves the door to the room open a crack and I stand there indecisively for a moment, then the door opens wider and Flip is standing in front of me. “Welllll, Dikschei, come in, come in.” He is wearing a very respectable old suit, blue serge, a little threadbare, and a very respectable shirt, dark blue stripes, with a matching collar, workingman’s quality though, cheap cotton.

  That room. Small, dark, two windows looking out at the railroad embankment with a big sign on it, MUIDERPOORT, and some snow still there, no longer white, and a tall rusty fence with pointed posts running along its base. Dull brown curtains make the room very dark, at least there are no screens. Someone is shuffling right past the windows outside, there are little bits of trash on the street. A large cylindrical heater fills the room but the room is chilly anyway. The little space left is taken up by a table and six chairs. A dull brown tablecloth makes the room even darker. The six chairs look like kitchen chairs that somehow managed to get ahead in the world at one point but have since fallen behind again. The wide wooden frames holding the wicker, with knobs on top, try in vain to recall their once-high position but all they do is remind you of the cheap furniture store in the Dapperplein area, filled to bursting, where they were bought.

  The chairs, the chill, the years without work, on welfare. The cramped space and the half dark and the railroad running past.

  This is not even the valley of obligations. This is a pit. I look up from below at the back of God’s head. If I stayed here long it would seem like I’d never seen anything of God except the back of his head.

  We sit at the table. Flip in his threadbare suit, with Ideas by Multatuli and an open composition book in front of him. Otherwise the table is empty. The whole room is grimly straightened up. There is a big framed photograph on the wall, under glass: Flip himself, his hairstyle, his eyebrows, the same features, the mustache, but a shirt with an old-fashioned wing collar and a thin black bowtie. And it’s not Flip after all—it’s someone ten years younger at least, with something in his nature that I can’t quite put my finger on: someone who knows what’s what. Flip sees me looking and turns partly around in
his chair. “My father.” “Oh, yes, of course.” He reads my thoughts immediately and laughs: “You thought it was me? 1905. By now I’m probably old enough to be his father.” His smile gets broader, wider than I’ve seen it recently. “My father had a good business, lead- and tinsmith. Nowadays they’d call it an ‘enterprise,’ like the Germans do, it sounds more distinguished to the hoi polloi. You never met him? No, you never came over to our house back then. I’ll show you my mother.”

  He disappears into the back of the house. The connecting door stays open a crack behind him and I can see into a dark alcove where a low bed is barely visible. When he comes back he leaves the door open a crack. There is a bit more light in the alcove, there must be another door open a crack on the other side.

  A photograph, “cabinet format,” only slightly faded. A young woman from the 1880s, en face, her whole neck encased in a stiff collar with three little buttons in front and a narrow lace border sticking out of the top, a ruche that frames her face from below. High, noble forehead; big, lovely eyes. A miraculous rebirth of life in this pit of hopelessness. Nothing in Flip is like her except his eyes, his nearsighted eyes like a faithful dog’s. I can’t stop looking at the picture. Why isn’t this woman here the way I see her before me? Why did she change, and then die, so long ago?

  That forehead, those eyes: Insula Dei. There it is. While I’m looking Flip starts reading again with his forehead resting on his hands. Ideas by Multatuli, a cousin of the wing collar. But she is alive. Beneath that hairstyle and behind that pince-nez she lives on, in the peculiar external shape of a cocky lead- and tinsmith.

  I wait until Flip looks up. “What’s that notebook, are you writing again?” He blushes. By God, the sixty-year-old cocky lead- and tin-smith blushes. “I’m doing something totally crazy.” He hesitates and I don’t press him. “I got the idea after we met.” I wait. He studies my face, I think he wants to know if I’m really the kind of person he thinks I am. “I’m making a list of all the cafés we went to in those twenty years, and all the hotels where we stayed.” And sure enough, he blushes again. “It’s a great thing to do, everything comes back to you. The whole geography of the Netherlands, Belgium, northern France, the German Lower Rhine.

  I hold out my hand but he shakes his head. “Not yet. I’ll show you something else.”

  He has brought out another photograph. “Liza.” His wife. A child’s eyes, a lively, delicate nose, a sweet mouth. And another: two small children, between two and three years old maybe, standing next to a chair, each with a little hand on the seat, in truth I see only their foreheads and surprised eyes. They have their grandmother’s forehead and eyes. Insula Dei.

  I wait. “Dead,” he says, “all dead. TB. She died in ’35. Even in ’34 I didn’t realize how bad it was. A person can really be stupid, when God decides that he shouldn’t be worried about something. I thought she was over it for good. She was complaining about tiredness again, and sometimes the smallest thing made her burst into tears, but I had no idea that anything would go wrong, much less for good. We had a wonderful time together that year in Saint-Georges.”

  “Saint-Georges?”

  “Saint-Georges-les-Bains, Département de l’Ardèche, le Vivarais, right by the Rhône, right bank, about ten miles from Valence. Population three hundred, a ‘spa’ in a tiny little river. Almost no one there. No real hotels, just three bars, with climbing vines, nice places to have a drink but you can’t stay there. Everything a bit dirty, except for the ‘Château.’ The Salvation Army had set up a children’s summer camp there and they let a few guests stay there in the off-season, by special arrangement. At least they did then. My wife had a friend who worked for the Salvation Army in Paris, that’s how we ended up there. Cheap, decent, not the most private. We lived like kings, high up, a few miles from the Rhône, with a magnificent view over the broad valley with mountains rising up again in the distance. A large house, a spacious regal ‘perron’ with a stone balustrade, old-style French columns, and two stone staircases, a large terrace in front with trees and benches and a balustrade of its own, a semicircle at the edge of the cliff. Almost regal steps zigzag down the mountain from the Château to the gardens. It’s like the view from the Westerbouwing but everything is bigger, and instead of Nijmegen with its little hills you have the start of the Alps, far away, mostly hazy. And the Rhône in the landscape, and lots of trees, lots of pointed poplars, fields in many different shades of green, and little houses, grand but at the same time flowery and charming, now and then a train in the distance. Reminiscent of Montferland sometimes, of the view from the hotel there, the Cleve towers could have been on the mountains opposite. The river was the life in it. A landscape without water is a blind landscape; water is like an eye.”

  While he is talking he has put his elbows back on the table and rested his forehead in his hands and he looks at the table. And so, in that godforsaken pit, he keeps talking, in a monotone, talking to himself. And the sun is shining on a vast, warm landscape and God’s warm smile lies over everything.

  The voice keeps talking.

  “She came back to life. Every day I could see her reviving. We took walks if it wasn’t too hot, it was in June, but mostly she just liked to look, she got to know the fields, the trees, the houses, the mountain-tops in the distance. It was warm, on June 18 they started mowing the hay. The real South starts sixty miles farther, where there are olive trees, but there were figs there already, on the trees, and not just trees in fenced-in orchards but out in the fields, just here and there.

  “And flowers. Camellias, honeysuckle, jasmine. Linden blossom. Everything saturated with fantastic smells. And crickets, and frogs. Little lizards everywhere. And there was a cuckoo there too, one cuckoo, our cuckoo. There was so much. The river wound downhill in the valley, between trees and shrubs. More of a creek, actually. The Turzon. From above you could only see the trees and shrubs.

  “She recovered completely. The journey there was exhausting but she recovered completely. Her cheeks were rosy like a child’s again. And she was so grateful, and loved the countryside so much. The fields, the trees, the flowers, the houses, the Rhône, our cuckoo— they were her friends. She said good morning to them every day and good night every evening.

  “Where else have I ever stayed in a place like that? Other than in Veere, 1908 and 1910, at De Campveerse Toren. On one side, the Château borders nothing, it’s surrounded in back by the woods, a little path connects it to the road so there’s no traffic, and even the road isn’t busy. So high up that you’re closer to our dear Lord. In a place with no noise, no billboards, no attractions, no radio. Just think about all the miserable guesthouses and furnished vacation rentals in the world and the abject horror of needing to leave such places and then return to them, with all the miserable human stuff there that makes you ashamed before our dear Lord.”

  Typical Flip. He thinks about his wife and sees a landscape. It really is absurd that he never wrote anything after that one book, which in truth was nothing exceptional; it wasn’t personal enough, him enough, it was too much in the style of the time. After so many years he sits mumbling in his pit with his slightly disgusting hair-style and he gushes like a fountain, a whole landscape shoots up into the air and a whole countryside is conjured up in front of you.

  He is sitting half turned toward me again, a little slumped to the left on the arm of his chair, toward the table.

  “When we came home she was dead tired again and six weeks later we knew that something was really wrong. I’ve often thought that I shouldn’t have let her take that trip. But that’s how it always was: I got it into my head that I wanted to get away, I had to try somewhere else. Two weeks before her second child was due I was in Veere. Always the same. I couldn’t be any other way. Now I know that I was always looking for that damned island. God knows what I’ve selfishly trampled on all these years, always searching, always looking up at the clouds.

  “And she never held me back. She herself sent me away when she
couldn’t come along: ‘Go see how it is there, then come tell me.’ And the letters she wrote me. I still know a couple of them by heart.