Amsterdam Stories Read online

  “‘You’re having a great time there, hmm? I’m glad. If only I could have some fun here too, it’s so dreary, I want so badly for it to just be over, it gets so boring, the same aches and pains every day. I’m sure you’ll have so much to tell me when you get back. Liesje is so sweet, she’s getting a lot of fresh air.’

  “‘I expected you to be back home all this week, actually, especially on Friday. At midnight I was still awake, wishing the whole time that you’d still come, but I was wrong. No, Liza, Papa’s having too much fun. Write me something? a postcard or two at least?’

  “She died the same year we went to Saint-Georges. It was beyond my understanding. I still can’t talk about it. When I try to think about it, even now, I still just see a big black chasm I have no words for.”

  Silence. God’s island floats solitary and abandoned. Now all there is is the pit and the tracks across the street.

  “There are so many things I did wrong,” he says. “Who hasn’t?” I ask.

  He props his elbows on his knees, props his head on his hands again, and looks at me like that. Then he shakes his head: “No, not just some things. I did everything wrong. And treated people badly. And why? For nothing, for a figment of the imagination.”

  “A figment of the imagination?” I say. “Is there anything else in life?”

  But he looks at the floor. The black chasm holds him fast.

  He seems old now, ravaged and bedraggled. God’s incomprehensibility is too much for him. I think about myself. Will it really all turn out to have been a mistake?

  He stares at the floor and I stand next to him and look down at the shiny, threadbare back of his jacket. “In a month the crocuses will be in bloom,” I say. He looks up at me. Then, suddenly, he’s standing up and sticking his head out into the hall. “Mie, you’re burning the milk again.”

  When I’m back outside I see, across the street, next to the fence, here in this slum, in the grimy slush, two German naval officers.

  February 7–12, 1942

  (CONTINUED)

  There is yet another section of “Insula Dei” that tells how Dikschei made love with Helena den Oever, Flip’s niece and the spitting image of her grandmother.

  But that section is absolutely not appropriate for publication. In any case, you can imagine it perfectly well for yourself without much difficulty if you care to remember how you yourself have made love. And if you’re a couple who still get along well, you will look at each other and she’ll lower her eyes and you won’t find your thoughts unpleasant or dishonorable in the least.

  You might well have also found it pleasant to read that section. But even so, I’d rather leave it out. I know these cultured, fine, up-standing men and women who would never let themselves go as far as bestial behavior, the ones who like to call themselves and each other Society. I know them. I can already hear what they’d say, already read the little articles they’d publish, if this lovemaking—the wild and tender human passion that drives us all, more than we even realize—went on sale one day in the bookstore, just like that.

  I thank you. So as not to think about the impervious entity called the State. Or a group of friends among themselves. Or the way my friend Bonnema would sputter and make faces if he read it.

  I will just have to wait until our civilization finally develops a noble frankness and candor once again.

  Which I say so that you’ll think I imagine I’ll live forever.

  February 13, 1942

  [1] Vereenigde Amsterdamsche Melkinrichtingen: Amsterdam United Dairy Federation. [Trans.]

  NOTES

  NESCIO published three books in his lifetime, barely. The stories generally recognized as his major works—“The Freeloader,” “Young Titans,” and “Little Poet”—were first published in book form, after a relatively long hunt for a publisher, in 1918 (“The Freeloader” and “Young Titans” had previously appeared in magazines). The book was not a commercial success, with a first printing of five hundred copies and a second edition coming only in 1933, from a different publisher, and a third in 1947. In 1942, Nescio assembled a manuscript of unpublished pieces dating back as far as 1913; five of those stories, plus a very short sixth piece from 1943, were published as his second book, Mene Tekel, in 1946 (later combined with the fourth edition of “The Freeloader,” “Young Titans,” and “Little Poet” in 1956). Finally, the book Boven het dal [Above the Valley] appeared in May 1961: an unusual compilation consisting of the 1942 manuscript, including the stories previously published in Mene Tekel, plus seven additional unpublished stories selected by an editorial committee. Nescio had little direct involvement in putting together the volume and died very soon after its publication, on July 25, 1961. Nescio’s Collected Works appeared in two substantial volumes in 1996, with the second volume containing the Nature Diary he kept of his frequent excursions in Holland from 1946 to 1955. The Nature Diary was a revelation to Dutch readers and the edition was a great success.

  The present volume contains all of Nescio’s major work and a representative selection of his other fiction, both published and unpublished during his lifetime. The stories appear in chronological order of their writing, not their publication. “The Writing on the Wall” and “Out Along the IJ” are from Mene Tekel; “The Valley of Obligations” and “Insula Dei” are from Above the Valley. For “From an Unfinished Novel” and “The End,” see the notes below.

  THE FREELOADER

  Dutch title: “De uitvreter,” sometimes translated as “The Mooch” or “The Sponger,” literally someone who eats up everything you’ve got. The narrator’s name, “Koekebakker,” literally “cookie baker,” means an inept or silly bungler; Grönloh wanted to use Koekebakker as his pseudonym, but De Gids (the magazine where “The Freeloader” was first published) may have objected—in any case he decided on Nescio. “Koekebakker” is pronounced roughly “Coo-cuh-bocker”; “Japi” is pronounced “Yoppy.”

  YOUNG TITANS

  Dutch title: “Titaantjes,” literally “Little Titans,” sometimes translated as “Little Giants” or “Young Turks.” The diminutive “-tje” is very widely used in Dutch (including in the title “Little Poet”) and thus has a wide range of connotations besides size: affection, condescension, camaraderie, nostalgia, sarcasm, and so on.

  “J’ai attendu le Seigneur avec une grande patience, enfin il s’est abaissé jusqu’ à moi”: “I waited patiently for the Lord, and he inclined unto me [and heard my cry],” the beginning of Psalm 40, quoted in French from Frederik van Eeden’s 1900 novel Van de koele meeren des doods (I thank Sam de Groot for the reference).

  “Per me si va nella città dolente” and “Per me si va tra la perduta gente”: “Through me you enter the city of woe … Through me you enter to join the lost.” Lines inscribed on the Gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, Canto III, lines 1 and 3.

  THE WRITING ON THE WALL

  Dutch title: “Mene Tekel.” “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Uparshin” are the words that appear on Belshazzar’s palace wall in the Book of Daniel (5:1–30): Daniel interprets “Mene” to mean “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end,” and “Tekel” to mean “You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.” This episode is the origin of the phrase “the writing on the wall” in English.

  OUT ALONG THE IJ

  Dutch title: “Buiten-IJ,” the geographical feature (literally “Outer IJ”) at the center of the story. The IJ, the river which widens into the harbor in Amsterdam—like “ij” any time it appears in Dutch—is pronounced roughly like “eye.”

  LITTLE POET

  Dutch title: “Dichtertje.” The story was written remarkably quickly for Nescio—in this case, the date he gave at the end, “June–July 1917,” was his entire period of composition.

  “Bellum transit, amor manet”: Latin: “War passes, love remains” (cf. “Tempus fugit, amor manet”).

  “Der Tüchtigkeit ist die Welt”: German: “Competence is everything.”

  “Mon â
me prend son élan vers l’infini”: French: “My soul takes flight toward infinity.”

  “C’est là, c’est là qu’il faut être. Là?”: French: “There, it has to be there. There?” A slightly altered quotation from the aria based on Goethe’s “Mignon’s Song” in the opera Mignon: “C’est là! c’est là que je voudrais vivre” [“There, there is where I want to live”].

  “Ins grosse Vaterland”: German: “[Leading] into the great fatherland.”

  “Consummatum est”: “It is finished.” Christ’s words as he was dying on the cross, in the Latin Vulgate.

  FROM AN UNFINISHED NOVEL

  After “Little Poet” (1917), Nescio wrote little that satisfied him until “Insula Dei” (1942). The selection here consists of some of the surviving drafts of what he apparently intended as a longer piece but abandoned—it should thus not be seen as an actual work by Nescio, and is included in this volume to give a sense of the style and content of his efforts during this long period. (The title is not Nescio’s.)

  The only part of the selection here that Nescio published was paragraphs six and seven (“We sat outside …” through “… reflections in the IJ”), which he extracted in 1942 and included among the fragments that would eventually be published in Above the Valley in 1961. There it is prefaced with the following note:

  And I include this piece, since it would please me greatly to think that you too can’t get enough of Amsterdam. It is from 1918. Untitled.

  The first section of “From an Unfinished Novel,” until the break, is Nescio’s first draft. The minor corrections Nescio made in 1942 to paragraphs six and seven are incorporated. The last five paragraphs contain new material from his final known revision (before the 1942 reclamation), which Nescio dated October 13, 1918, and titled “De Profundis” (Latin for “From the depths,” from Psalm 130: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord”).

  THE VALLEY OF OBLIGATIONS

  Dutch title: “Het dal der plichten.” This is the first story from the 1961 collection Above the Valley, used as a quasi–title story and preface (it is followed by Nescio’s “Introduction” to the volume).

  All the manuscript copies up to a certain stage have an additional sentence in the first paragraph, after “Some of them look up every once in a while and then they scream”: “Those are the lucky ones.” It is not clear whether Nescio omitted the sentence intentionally or accidentally; the Dutch edition gives it in a note, not in the text itself.

  THE END

  Dutch title: “Het Einde.” A fragment unpublished in Nescio’s lifetime, written December 14, 1937 (he retired at the end of December, 1937). He wrote a somewhat separate Part II of “The End,” dated almost two weeks later (December 27, 1937), which is not translated here.

  The editor of the Dutch Collected Works, Lieneke Frerichs, argues that Nescio’s rereading of “The End,” to decide whether to include it in his 1942 manuscript, inspired both the content and structure of “Insula Dei”: the opening conversation between two men; the “five things worth bothering about” as underlying the five sections of the later story (with the continuation section possibly added to include more of the erotic element, the one least emphasized in the story); several passages included directly in the later story.

  INSULA DEI

  The only long work Nescio completed after his first three major stories. Clearly the writing of the story was an unexpected, greatly welcome side effect of compiling the 1942 manuscript that eventually served as the basis for Above the Valley: the “Introduction” to Above the Valley, dated “January 29–February 1, 1942,” ends with Nescio saying that “he has hereby put his papers in order, as though he were in fact already dead”—but is then followed by a short Part II dated February 12, 1942, beginning: “And then just like that here is another story. It turned out rather different than I’d thought.” The story itself is dated precisely to the six days February 7–12, 1942 (continuation on February 13).

  “Insula Dei” is Latin for “Island of God” and a term sometimes used to refer to monasteries or abbeys.

  “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing”: Ecclesiastes 1:8.

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Damion Searls would like to thank the Netherland-America Foundation for their generous financial support; the PEN America Translation Fund Grant; the Dutch Foundation for Literature/Nederlands Letterenfonds (www.letterenfonds.nl); the Nescio estate and Lieneke Frerichs; Edwin Frank, for his encouragement and patience; Tommy Wieringa for first telling me about Nescio, and Het beschrijf, in particular Piet Joostens and Alexandra Cool, for the Passa Porta writer’s residency in Belgium where I met him; and especially Sam Garrett, for his generosity with a fellow translator’s project, hard work on it, and many wonderful editorial suggestions.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the Dutch Foundation for Literature for its support of this volume.

  Copyright © 1933 by the J. H. F. Grönloh Estate, Amsterdam, Nijgh & Van Ditmar

  Translation and notes copyright © 2012 by Damion Searls

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Joseph O’Neill

  All rights reserved.

  The selections “From an Unfinished Novel,” “The Valley of Obligations,” “The End,” and “Insula Dei” appear here by arrangement with Uitgeverij Van Oorschot, Amsterdam.

  Cover photograph: George Hendrik Breitner, Oudezijds Achterburgwal, Amsterdam, c. 1890–1900; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Nescio, 1882–1961.

  Amsterdam stories / by Nescio ; introduction by Joseph O’Neill ; translated by Damion Searls.

  p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-492-0 (alk. paper)

  I. Searls, Damion. II. Title.

  PT5838.G74A2 2012 839.3'1164—dc23

  2011043827

  eISBN 978-1-59017-507-1

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

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