Amsterdam Stories Page 8

  The thing just wouldn’t stop pestering him. It was worthless, totally worthless garbage. He wanted me to tell him why anyone would paint. What’s the point? He didn’t know anything anymore. He stretched out his arm and waved it around. There, that’s where the things are. He hit his forehead with his fist. And here. They want to come out, but they don’t come out. It’s enough to drive you out of your mind.

  Almost a year later I saw him at Centraal Station, seeing someone off on the eight o’clock train to Paris, a hairy guy with long black curls and a huge beard, more hair than man, and a high forehead with nothing behind it. The setting sun shone big and red, it was at the edge of the glass and metal roof, there was a reddish light in the windowpanes and the varnish on the train cars. Bavink was drunk. The train pulled away, slid out from under the station roof and curved to the left. As it turned, the light flashed brightly on the cars.

  We strolled to the end of the platform. We came to a man with a signal lamp and I saw that as he passed us he looked at a conductor standing on another platform and made a drinking movement with his hand near his mouth. We stopped past the end of the roof and looked at the sun. “You see the sun, Koekebakker?” The sun was especially clear, right in front of us, close by, bigger and redder than I had ever seen it. It almost touched the rails, it didn’t flash brightly on things anymore, there was a dull glow only on the frosted windowpanes of the train shed to the right of the track.

  “You think I’m drunk?” I did indeed. “It doesn’t matter, Koekebakker, when I’m sober I don’t understand anything anyway.”

  “Do you understand what the sun wants from me? I have thirty-four setting suns leaning against the wall, one on top of the other, all facing the wall. But every evening it’s there again.”

  “Unless it’s cloudy,” I said. But he wouldn’t let himself be distracted.

  “Koekebakker, you’ve always been my best friend. I’ve known you since—how long has it been?”

  “About thirteen years, Bavink.”

  “Thirteen years. That’s a long time. You know what you need to do? Do me a favor. You have a hatbox?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Put it in a hatbox, Koekebakker. In a hatbox. I want to be left alone. Put it in a hatbox, a plain old hatbox. That’s all it’s worth.”

  Bavink blubbered drunkard’s tears. I looked around helplessly. A man in a uniform with a yellow stripe on his cap came up to us and spoke to me.

  “I think it would be better, sir, if you took the gentleman home.” I saluted and held out my arm for Bavink. He came willingly. He fell asleep in the taxi and woke up for a minute on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal when we drove over a pothole, and he wanted to start in on the hatbox again. But he fell right back asleep.

  One morning he sat staring blankly in front of his last sunset. I arrived at his place with Hoyer. He didn’t recognize us. He just looked at the sun, a big cold red sun setting behind the clouds.

  “It just looks at me, neither of us knows what to do with each other.” He didn’t say anything else.

  Now he’s in an institution. It’s very peaceful there and he’s calm. He just looks up at the sky, or gazes at the horizon, or sits staring into the sun until his eyes hurt. He’s not supposed to do that but they can’t get anywhere with him. They can’t get him to talk. His paintings fetch a high price nowadays.

  And old Koekebakker has turned into a sedate and sensible man. He just writes, receives his humble wages, and doesn’t cause trouble.

  God’s throne is still unshaken. His world just takes its course. Now and then God smiles for a moment about the important gentlemen who think they’re really something. A new batch of little Titans are still busy piling up little boulders so that they can topple him down off his heights and arrange the world the way they think it should be. He only laughs, and thinks: “That’s good, boys. You may be crazy but I still like you better than the proper, sensible gentlemen. I’m sorry you have to break your necks and I have to let the gentlemen thrive, but I’m only God.”

  And so everything takes its little course, and woe to those who ask: Why?

  Finished January 1914

  THE WRITING ON THE WALL

  AGAIN the longest day was past. The days were getting shorter—it was still barely noticeable but we knew it was happening, this summer too would pass. Again the day came to an end, again the bright red above the horizon grew pale, the water in the distance kept its color, but barely, darkness crept up everywhere, out of the earth, now the canal in the distance had vanished in the night. We were gloomy about all the things that had passed, and about our lives, which would end while all these things continued to exist. We would see the days get longer a few more times, then we wouldn’t be young anymore. And after that, when the chestnut trees had blossomed red or white a few more times, we would die, in the prime of our lives or maybe as old men, which would be even worse. And the sky would be red again and the canal would still be there too, most likely, gold in the twilight, and they wouldn’t notice any difference.

  Then Bavink said “I’m going to be famous” the way someone else would say “They overcharged me ten cents,” and we all felt we had gotten the short end of the stick, all three of us, Bavink and Bekker and me.

  Then Bavink told us about a visit he had received from a gentleman he’d never met, a short, well-fed man in a suit jacket. Bavink remembered his name and it turned out I knew him, we went to school together, back when he was still a scheming kid.

  He’d come on assignment from a magazine founded by another ambitious gentleman who had poured a ton of money into it and gone around collecting original opinions and slogans and ideas from all sorts of people and presented them as his own, and still didn’t get famous, and then later he gave up too.

  “So,” I said, “he came ‘on assignment’?” And all three of us had to laugh, we laughed our heads off, though Bekker was a little subdued because he sometimes wore a suit coat himself, and a top hat and white tie too not long ago, to help bury a client, and he had almost said a few words by the grave and had come home with a cold.

  “What was he really there for?” “To make my acquaintance.” “How did it go?” “It started well,” Bavink said, “but I think the guy couldn’t really make heads or tails of me.”

  Bavink had started by saying that he was incapable of talking seriously—a funny thing to say right off the bat to a man like that, who in the first place is a serious person and secondly is there on assignment. The man had done his best to laugh and then said, “You must be joking, Mister Bavink.”

  Then even Bekker had to laugh and call himself an idiot and say he was going to quit his job and sell his suit and smoke cigars with the money. Which of course he didn’t do.

  And Bavink had answered that he wasn’t joking and the man was completely flummoxed. He couldn’t sneer at Bavink because he had heard from well-known persons that Bavink “was doing remarkably fine work.”

  “So I presume,” he’d said, and paused for a second and peered at Bavink through his pince-nez and then said again, “So I presume that you put all of your seriousness into your work?”

  “What would you have done then, Koekebakker, if it was you there?” The fellow had spoken with so much respect that Bavink had thought “What an absolute ass he is” but didn’t dare to say anything.

  “You know what I would have done, Bavink? I would’ve asked if he wanted a smoke.” “That’s exactly what I did too, and he said, ‘No thank you, I don’t smoke.’”

  The fellow talked like he was reading out loud from a newspaper. He understood perfectly well that Bavink did not want to talk about himself, he himself felt the same way, it is always rather unpleasant, but you simply can’t always avoid it, you understand, life carries with it certain obligations and an artist (the guy really emphasized that word) more or less belongs among those who … Then Bavink thought that he might as well say something that sounded like it was straight out of a speech too, so he said: “Indubi
tably.” The guy was taken aback. He was happy to hear that Mister Bavink shared his opinion with respect to this point—guys like that always call these things “points”—and as a result he took the liberty of asking Mister Bavink in all candor whether it was true what certain newspapers (he called them “journals”) had printed, namely that he was, to a great degree, a great degree, indifferent to fame?

  “Jesus,” said Bavink, “there I was, I thought if Hoyer was here he’d know what to say to him.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I asked him: Is that what it said in the paper?”

  “Don’t you read the newspapers?” he said then, just like a normal person.

  “I’ll be damned,” Bekker said, “so he wasn’t going to leave empty-handed after all. Now he can write in his little rag that Johannes Bavink never reads the newspaper.”

  “That’s what I thought too,” Bavink said. “Now he’s got his hands on something, now I’ll never get rid of him. He was already starting in with his notebook.”

  “What a mess,” I said. “Mess? You have no idea. What was I supposed to do then? How could I get rid of him? The longer he sat there the more room he took up. I saw him growing and spreading, he filled my whole studio and the whole street was full of the little men, everyone the three of us, Hoyer too, have seen for all these years on the street, everywhere, they were standing out on the street and I knew they were standing there. My studio looked at me like it didn’t know me anymore, I wasn’t Bavink anymore, I felt like I was Bekker with some factory owner on the phone.” “Hey,” Bekker said. “That can happen,” I said. “You hear that, Bekker? I said that can happen. It’s a lousy feeling. You know I feel sorry for you.” “Hey,” Bekker said. We fell silent.

  “You know, Koekebakker, how at your last job you had to ask every evening before you could go home if the receipt was on the spindle?”

  “Sure.”

  “And how every time you asked that you felt like you had muttonchop sideburns?”

  “Definitely.” “So, it was like that. I thought about you and I felt like I was turning into a ‘fellow’ like that guy, just from him sitting there across from me. I thought, I’m about to start talking about intellectual currents, where are these words even coming from? It all happened in just the time it took for the guy to start up again and say, ‘Sir, you …’”

  Again we fell silent. In the long run, you can’t fight them, there are so many of them and they’re always right. They had a reason to exist. We were the ones with no reason to exist. That’s the way it had to be, it was God’s will. Bekker looked down at the ground, between his knees.

  “How did you get rid of him?” I asked. “I was furious,” Bavink said. “Goddammit, I can’t help it if I paint my pictures and I have to sell them. But I kept my wits about me. I interrupted and said: ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I am terribly sorry to have nothing to offer you, but there’s nothing in the house.’ I was talking as fancy as I could. ‘I regret to say that I don’t believe we understand one another.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Perhaps we might understand each other better in ten years, but today, we do not understand each other.’ I stood up and he stood up too. ‘I appreciate your good intentions …’”

  “I appreciate your good intentions!” Bekker said.

  “That’s what I said,” Bavink said. “Where did those words come from? ‘I appreciate your good intentions, but I’m afraid I don’t think we have one single intelligent word to say to each other. If there is anything else about me you’d like to know, may I suggest you pay a visit to Mister Hoyer …’”

  “What?!” both of us cried at the same time.

  “‘Pay a visit to Mister Hoyer,’ I said, ‘on Van Woustraat, he can tell you everything you need to know and he talks like a newspaper. 28 Van Woustraat.’”

  We sat there thunderstruck.

  The fellow had stayed perfectly polite, he wrote down the address with a fountain pen, thanked Mister Bavink, and said, “Don’t trouble yourself, I can find my way out, thank you.”

  “If the guy plays his cards right,” Bekker said—who owned his own business, and looked up with his head still in his hands—“he’ll get a nice little article out of that. It doesn’t matter about Hoyer, he deserves it.”

  And again we sat silent and thought about how we had no reason to exist.

  This was written many years ago, in a distant time, probably 1913 or 1914.

  OUT ALONG THE IJ

  1. Discovery

  BAVINK and Bekker walked up ahead, then came Kees on his own. They had stuck me with Hoyer. It was a November afternoon; the low sun was behind us, above the middle of the Zeeburgerdijk. Hoyer walked with his coat unbuttoned—the only overcoat between the five of us. It was an especially beautiful, mild day. Pastures spread out on the low ground to the right, pale green and sodden. In front of us, at the foot of the dike, the trees in the Jewish Cemetery stood tall and gnarled and cast a pale purple reflection. The sky above our heads was pale blue; when we turned around we saw the sun shining in the Spui canal and the sides of run-down wooden sheds that were usually just ugly gray boards, but they were shining in the light, the whole world all around us was shining in the light, the earth gave off light and the world was ours for as far as our eyes could see, and farther.

  We were walking out of the city, walking hard, the soles of Hoyer’s shoes (which were intact) clattered on the stones. Bavink brandished his walking stick above his head and I gave Hoyer a little shove. We were in high spirits, and excited about nothing, about the weather, the sunshine, the light all around us that we breathed and the sky above us that we saw. We were heading out to conquer the world, except for Hoyer, he was the only one who didn’t believe in that, all he knew was that he was out for a walk on Zeeburgerdijk, past the slaughterhouse.

  But when we came to the end of the dike and saw the Zuiderzee before us, Hoyer fell silent too, as silent as the water, which was as white-blue as the sky above. To the north, behind the levee, the Outer IJ was chalk-white. A barge and a little tugboat were steaming in toward the city, from east to west; they were on the other side of the levee but their steam was reflected in the water on this side. And a tjalk was sailing there with a white sail, its clew listing to port. Farther past it was Durgerdam, with its houses on the dike and its two little towers and a few bare trees black between them, and along the quay a few very small ships with their puny masts reaching up into the sky. To the right, offshore, there was smoke from invisible steamships.

  God was good that afternoon, and merciful. His world came in through our eyes and lived in our heads, and our thoughts went wordlessly out across the world, far beyond the horizon they went. And so we and the world took turns flowing into and through each other: Bekker said he could feel his heart swell and when I shut my eyes tight it was as though my head was filled with golden light and blue water, and wonderful shivers ran up and down my spine. I felt the world that lay around me.

  We walked farther. Someone had turned the soil in a little garden next to a house and the wet black clumps of earth glowed dully. There was a low dog-rose hedge around it, the sun shone down on it. A man was spading the last corner. His smock was light blue with a dark square piece on the front. And just when the man straightened up to look at us the sun shone onto his face. Now little pink clouds were reflected in the sea.

  On the dike to Schellingwoude we ran into a Reformed-looking gentleman; his white face was clean-shaven, he was wearing a black tailcoat, but he had his hat in his hand and his overcoat draped over his arm and he was whistling. It was November 22. We liked him and wanted to shake his hand but were worried he wouldn’t understand us and his face was so terribly white.

  At four o’clock the sun was very low in the sky, big and red, and it sank cold and dull behind a shed on the Amsterdam harbor. Loneliness crept up out of the marshland past the dike, to the east; at the end of the dike lay a pool lined with brown reeds—abandonment itself.

  In the distance, on the
Outer IJ dike, was a baker’s wagon being pulled behind a white horse, and we thought about the raisin bread inside it, since it was Saturday. And in one lonely house a single tea light was burning on the table, right next to the window with little tulle curtains pulled back to both sides. The teapot sat on the tea light, and our hearts completely melted, we would conquer the world some other time, for now we were thinking more about having something to eat and drink, bread and coffee, because it was getting cold, and about the floor sprinkled with white sand and the stove in the little café in Schellingwoude.

  We sat quietly by the window in the café. I looked out to the east along the dike, at the couple of scrawny, windswept trees at the water’s edge, at the water, and the sky turning darker. And then Hoyer, sitting across from me, said, “Look at that sky.”

  To the southwest the whole sky was yellow. And I turned to sit sideways on my chair and look, and I saw that it was good, everything was good as it was and there was nothing left to conquer, and I was alive.

  When we walked along the dike between Schellingwoude and Nieuwendam with the IJ harbor on our left and the endless fields on our right, the water was blazing yellow all the way to the city; on the other side, the ditches ran off into the countryside and were tinged with pink, so lightly that at first I thought it must be from my eyes having looked into the sun so much.

  And at the end of the fields you could still just make out the Zuiderzee dike. The countryside was so melancholy in the November twilight, with the square Ransdorp church tower in the distance and the rows of tiny houses on either side taking leave of the day as reluctantly as if there would never be any light again after this twilight. It would be like that when we died, just a little while then everything would be over, and we were very sad. But Bavink said that he still had one or two things he wanted to do. The yellow in the water had turned to pink. A ways farther, there was a plot of farmland outside the dike, and down in front, on the dike, was a short row of trees, behind it the rich plowed soil, black and glimmering. And then we thought of the spring to come, after this winter, and we felt immortal again and not the least bit sad, not anymore.