Amsterdam Stories Read online

  “There, now I can’t see them. You don’t know what an office job is like, Koekebakker, or you wouldn’t laugh. First you go to school till you’re eighteen. Do you know how many sheep there are in Australia or how deep the Suez Canal is? My point exactly. But I knew all that. Do you know what polarization is? Me neither, but I used to. I had to learn the strangest things: ‘Credited to the inventory account,’ translate that into French. Have a go at that. You have no idea, Koekebakker. And it goes on for years. Then your old man sticks you in an office. And you realize that the reason you learned all those things was so that you could wet slips of paper with a little brush. And it’s always the same old routine, be there nine o’clock sharp, sit there quietly for hours and hours. I realized I couldn’t do it. I was always late, I really tried to get there on time but it never happened, it had been going on too long. And so boring. They said I did everything wrong and I’m sure they were right about that. I wanted to but I couldn’t do it, I’m not the kind of person who is cut out for work. Then they said I was distracting the others. They were probably right about that too. When I complained that this was boring the hell out of me and asked if this was why I had learned all those strange facts at school, the old accountant said, ‘Yes, my boy, life’s no novel.’ I could tell a good joke, and they liked that, but it wasn’t enough for them. It didn’t take long before the old accountant had no idea what to do with me. When the boss wasn’t there I made animal noises or sang funny songs they’d never heard before. The boss’s son was a stuck-up little brat who came by the office now and then to get some money. Everything he said was horribly pretentious and he looked down on daddy’s employees with an absolutely insufferable, totally unfounded air of superiority. The guys laughed their heads off when I imitated the young gentleman. I ruined a typewriter there too, and misplaced a book. Then they sat me down at a machine they called ‘the guillotine.’ I had to cut samples. For days and days I sat there and guillotined. All the samples I cut were crooked. They must have known that that was going to happen, what else would they expect? They’d only put me there to prevent anything worse. They threw out the samples—the clients never saw them. But I’d still managed to put a letter in the wrong envelope somehow. It was pretty bad, of course: the man who got the letter wasn’t supposed to know that the boss was doing business with the man the letter was written to. The accountant practically had a stroke. That’s when I figured it would be better if I left. The boss held out his hand, and I was glad to be on my way too, I shook it heartily up and down. I said I was sorry but that there was nothing I could do about it. I think I meant it too. See, Koekebakker, that’s an office job. After that I interned in a stockbroker’s office once, looking through newspapers with a book to see if any of the clients’ bonds had been selected for redemption. Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. They had to get rid of me. I had to copy there too, but I don’t think they could ever figure out what I’d copied. I could see it wasn’t working out, I couldn’t stay focused.

  “My old man was at his wit’s end. Now he’s hoping that things have improved with time. I’m not so sure. Doesn’t look that way to me. I’m doing just fine. Did you know Bavink just made a pile of money with his latest painting? Ditch at Kortenhoef, with calf and haystack. Look at this.” He took out his wallet. “It’s bulging with cash, Koekebakker my boy, just bulging with cash. Cold hard cash. I’m going on a trip tomorrow.”

  “With Bavink?” I asked. “No,” Japi said, “not with Bavink. Alone. I’m going to Friesland.” “In the middle of winter?” Japi nodded. “To do what?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Do? Nothing. All you people are so pathetically sensible: everything needs a reason and a purpose. I’m going to Friesland, not to do anything, not for anything. No reason. Because I feel like it.”

  The next day I took him to the station to catch the 7 p.m. express. It was already dark. He was wearing a jacket with the buttons missing, much too big for him, and a hat with a brim that flopped down over his ears, and Appi’s new yellow shoes on his feet. In his hand was a paper cigar holder with an advertisement on it. “Wait a second,” he said, when we were already downstairs. “I forgot something.” He came right back down carrying a fishing pole.

  He wasn’t very talkative that evening. I couldn’t get out of him what he was planning to do with the fishing pole. On the way to the station, he smoked four cigars in half an hour with his paper cigar holder, and when I said goodbye to him at the gate he asked if I happened to have a little tobacco for him.

  Six weeks later he came back with six buttons on his jacket and a pair of red velvet slippers on his feet. He refused to give any explanations. Where was his fishing pole? Oh, that, he’d dropped it out of the train. One time he’d fallen in the water himself too, he said. Other than that his lips were sealed. He had obviously not had a shave the whole time, he looked the color of red brick and smelled like cow shit. He brought back two pounds of tobacco that no one else could smoke, he was addicted to it and didn’t ask for a cigar for two weeks. Then the two pounds were gone, plus a butt he had brought too. It turned out you couldn’t get that kind of tobacco anywhere in Amsterdam. He wrote to Friesland for some more but didn’t get an answer. He was inconsolable. After a few days, though, I saw him sitting at Bavink’s again with a cigar in his mouth after all, one of Bavink’s of course.

  VI

  The next summer, Japi disappeared again. Then I ran into him on Boulevard du Nord in Brussels. Monsieur Japi was clean-shaven and nattily dressed in a gray hat, a narrow gold-colored silk tie, checkered shirt, belt, white flannel jacket with thin blue pinstripes, white linen pants with impeccable cuffs, brown and white argyle socks, and flat shoes.

  How was it going? Dandy. What was he doing here? Strolling back and forth along the boulevards between Gare du Nord and Gare du Midi. Having a good time? Splendid. Residing? In Uccle. Freeloading upon? He laughed but didn’t answer. We had several glasses of strong beer at the Maastricht pub on Place de Brouckère. He loved the beer there. Actually he drank several pints and I had one pint I didn’t finish. He sat majestically straight in his chair and drank with dignity and great pleasure, held forth on the topics of asphalt, the Grote Markt, and the fine weather, then said he had to go and asked where I was staying. In that case he’d have to come pay me a visit sometime. After saying that, he paid for the beers and left me sitting there in amazement.

  He came back to Amsterdam at the beginning of August with a bandaged head. A mine worker in Marchienne-au-Pont had smashed a ceramic pot over his head. He looked more down-and-out than ever. His old man was keeping him on a terribly short leash. He wore his white pants, which hadn’t been white for a long time, deep into November. He was not his old self anymore—he talked less, smoked much less. When he came by Bavink’s place and Bavink put his cigars on the table, he collapsed into a chair, kept his jacket and hat on, picked up a cigar with difficulty, slowly bit the end off, had trouble finding his matches, hesitated before lighting it, smoked it slowly, and rarely had more than one a night. If he did light a second cigar he would throw most of it away, something he never used to do before. He used to smoke a cigar until the end was too small to hold and then stick a pin in it to smoke the rest. Before long it was burning crooked. One time he let Bavink’s stove go out.

  We gave up on him.

  Then, on a night with a hard frost, between Christmas and New Year’s, Hoyer appeared, after we hadn’t seen him in months. We chatted about this and that for a while and then he asked about Japi. And started to reminisce. Did we remember how last summer (about six months back at that point) he went rowing with us on the Amstel at night—he was supposed to sit in the bow and keep a lookout because the Perseverance was smashing little boats to pieces at the time, it had just sunk a tjalk at the Omval. Japi sat and looked at the reflection of the stars in the water, and held his right hand in the water, and didn’t notice any Perseverance, so that the Perseverance practically had to run aground in the bend to avoid us. They were furious and
one of them ran back to the aft deck and chewed us out for being stark raving morons, and threw a stone that plunged into the water in front of our bow. Then Bavink had said he knew something like this would happen and Japi said: “Close one.”

  “Apropos of which,” Hoyer suddenly said—Hoyer liked to throw around fancy phrases—“Apropos of which, I saw Japi in Veere with a French lady, a damned fine looker.” All night long the two of them had stood talking together on the stone jetty and looking out over the railing at the lit buoy and the revolving beam of the Schouwen lighthouse, and they’d listened to the waves, and “sucked face,” as Hoyer crudely put it. Bavink said again that he always knew something like that would happen, and I said, “What idiots we are, we should have known,” and then we couldn’t stop talking about Japi and how he wasn’t the freeloader we were used to anymore.

  It took another month before Japi surfaced. His old man had found him a job and he was supposed to start on March 1. He didn’t say that he thought it’d be miserable. He would wait and see what he could make of it. He’d be earning fifty guilders a month. That night there was another severe frost. The stars were bright and terrifyingly high. The stove was cold. The three of us sat with our coats on, collars up, hats on, the way we sat so many times when we were tougher than the capitalist spirit and had nothing to heat the stove with.

  Then Japi started talking and talking and wouldn’t stop. It was creepy. There you were, he said, hurtling on this earth through the icy blackness of space, where night never ends, the sun had disappeared never to rise again. The earth raced on through the darkness, the icy wind howling behind it. All these heavenly bodies hurtling desolately through space. If one of them hurtles into you then you’re lost, lost with all the other fifteen hundred million unlucky people. Japi sat shivering in his coat, it was freezing in the room.

  Then he started in again on a different tack. The sun could be so beautiful, shining in the Waal River. He’d seen the sun shining in the Waal near Zaltbommel the last time he’d ridden the train over the bridge. Between the bridge and the city, the sun made a big patch of light on the water. The water flowed by and the sun just shone on it, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times. Two thousand years ago the sun was already shining on it and the water was flowing by. God knows how long it’s been. The sun had risen more than 700,000 times since then, it had set more than 700,000 times, and all that time the water was flowing. The math made him feel sick. How many rainy days had there been in all that time? How many nights had it gotten as cold as tonight, or colder? How many people had seen that water flowing by and seen the sun shining in it and seen all the stars on the nights as cold as this? How many people who are dead now? And how many will still see the water flowing in the future? And two thousand years, that’s nothing, the earth has existed for thousands and thousands more years than that and will probably exist for thousands more. The water will probably flow for thousands of years more, without him seeing it. And even if the world did end, that still didn’t really mean anything. There would be so much more time afterwards, time would never end. And all that time, he would be dead.

  Japi’s teeth chattered. There was not a single sip of jenever left in the house and no way to get any on credit.

  Then Japi got sentimental. He started to talk about Jeanne, for no particular reason, and as though we already knew everything about her. That her hands were so soft, and so warm, and how her eyes could sparkle. She had dark eyes and black hair. We started getting uncomfortable. He told us the most horribly private things, about a white lace dress, about a lavender silk dress, about her little white feet, about all sorts of body parts you can’t write about in a story.

  By the end he was talking in French, we heard the words “chéri” and “chérie” several dozen times. (He pronounced the final “e” in “chérie.”) Then he was speaking Dutch again and got to the point. She was going to divorce her husband, a revolting old prune twenty years older than she was. We found it all rather banal. And on March 1 he had to show up at the office. Then he rubbed his face with his hands and said, “I’m leaving. Shake.” He stumbled down the stairs.

  He did not show up on March 1. It was April before he was in any shape to go to work again. His freeloading days were over.

  One evening a few months later, Bavink saw him sitting on the fourth floor of some office building. He was sitting in the window, working, and the place was brightly lit. Bavink went upstairs. Japi was alone and very busy. Bavink couldn’t get anything out of him— he just kept working and hardly said a thing. Bavink nosed around, took a book off the shelf here and there, flipped through it, and put it back, shook his head, said “Whoa” a few times, turned the handle on the mimeograph, looked down at the street, and opened all the windows for some fresh air.

  Outside a light snow was falling. Some snowflakes blew in. “Shut the windows, please,” Japi said, and kept writing. Then Bavink picked up a copy book, read a bit in it, shook his head again and again, and walked over to Japi, the copy book open in his hand.

  “Hey, did you write all this?” Japi barely looked up and just said, “Not all of it.” “You’re pretty damn smart after all,” Bavink said, “this business stuff isn’t easy.” Then Bavink left.

  VII

  Japi turned into a hard worker. Not long after Bavink’s visit they sent him to Africa. Within two years he was back: sick, half dead. No one heard anything from him until I saw him one November afternoon standing next to the stone wall of the Wijk bij Duurstede harbor. There he stood, staring at the mud. I had trouble recognizing him. He was dressed in a bulky gray coat, much too big for him, with a bulky gray cap down over his eyes and ears. He had on a pair of bulky wide square-toed brown shoes and there were several young men behind him. I thought: That looks like Japi, actually. And yes, it was him, a bit pale and thin and with no beard or mustache and with a strange staring look in his eyes, but definitely Japi.

  Japi didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “What are you doing here, how’s it going, what’s brought you here?” He stuck out his hand and said nothing, and was not surprised. “Just standing here staring,” he said.

  “I can see that,” I said. “Come have a drink?” “Good,” Japi said. The louts who were leaning against the stone wall a ways off, amusing themselves for some time with very loud, ill-mannered commentary, now made very respectful greetings, since I had been throwing around quite a bit of money in Wijk bij Duurstede and had even slapped the notary on the back that very Sunday.

  After a glass of jenever, some life came back into Japi. He had been working in Africa, tormented by the heat and the mosquitoes, had come down with a fever—spent more time suffering from fever than working or doing anything else. He’d come back that summer practically skin and bones.

  His française was living in Paris with a young Dutchman who’d been articled to an office for a monstrously long time. Had another boyfriend too, a colonel. Treated him to dinner in Paris and called him a “good beast” in her broken Dutch and laughed in his face. Fastened her garter belt while he was right there so that he’d seen her bare knee. Then sent him away. He had to laugh. He wasn’t in love anymore. She’d had a light blue silk slip on. One time he saw her having a drink with the colonel at an outdoor table. The colonel was acting very smug and looked savage and overbearing. She gave Japi the eye behind the colonel’s back. She had lung problems and her months were numbered. Still, lively as ever. But had a hard time walking.

  And what were Japi’s plans? Still a freeloader? He freeloaded on his office, he said; the last day of every month he went and got his money.

  Was he going to turn into such a ferocious worker again?

  Oh, no. He had driven himself too hard. He’d aged fifteen years in the last three or four.

  Then he lit a fresh cigar, one of mine, an expensive one with a band. I was doing well in those days. He took the band off.

  He had toiled away, seen his share of misery
. It started in Marchienne-au-Pont and Charleroi. He’d gone there for fun, with Jeanne. After three days she had had enough; he stayed. He showed me a little photograph: a grinning death’s-head, the daughter of a worker in a glass factory. Seven children, five dead, and the sixth died while he was boarding there, she was the one in the photo. There he had learned to look, had seen what work really is. He’d always known how to have a damned good time spending money while other people earned it. Now he let it get to him and drove himself hard. Thought about becoming a socialist. He’d worked for his bread, been hounded, hounded and oppressed by people and by necessity, just like everyone else. He’d worked nights; in Amsterdam he came home from the office at one or two in the morning, then sat up, brooded, scribbled, written whole novels and burned them.

  What could he do? What did they accomplish with all that? He let it get to him, dreamed up fiery speeches and ferocious articles while he sat in the office and worked on his boss’s business, worked hard, everyone was amazed at the quantities of work he could put away. The world was still turning, turning exactly the way it always had, and it would keep on turning without him. He let it get to him. Now he was more sensible. He washed his hands of it. There were enough salesmen and writers and talkers and people who let it get to them—more than enough.