Amsterdam Stories Page 9

  2. On Retreat

  In late fall the following year, Bavink and Hoyer rented a little abandoned house in Schellingwoude on the Outer IJ dike. The plane tree in the garden behind Bekker’s office was down to its last leaves.

  It was quite an uncomfortable place they had found. In front, the water; behind, endless pale-green soggy fields with nothing in them and the stumpy Ransdorp tower in the distance with the shivering houses huddled around it.

  A couple of scrawny, windswept trees, black and bare, lived their poor little tree-lives on the outermost edge of the dike in front of their house.

  Everything looked like it was just waiting to be flooded, but the dike was strong. It only broke a few years later, and somewhere else. [1]

  The house was always drafty and they took turns sleeping with Hoyer’s overcoat on. And you couldn’t buy anything on credit in Schellingwoude.

  On Saturday afternoons, Bekker and I went out there, an hour and a half walk from Bekker’s office. We usually had to bring something, a box of cigars or a flask of liquor, or brushes or paint or something else you couldn’t get in Schellingwoude.

  Bekker always brought some book or another with him, and newspapers, but mostly the Schellingwoude doctor read them. Bavink and Hoyer took a glance but only cared about the pictures in Simplicissimus and Le Rire.

  For months they never left the village. Bavink, numb with cold, sat down by the sluice and painted; Hoyer, with mad idealism, walked for hours in the mist along the winding sea dike, to Uitdam and beyond, and never complained when there was nothing to drink, and loaned Bavink his light coat, and didn’t notice when his feet got soaking wet. In the morning he sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed the dried mud out of his socks and was content. Hoyer lived like a saint—a sketching, painting saint.

  For weeks he was blue with cold, whole days went by when he hardly spoke a word since there was no one to say anything to, Bavink painted or slept, and still Hoyer never complained, he didn’t long for Kalverstraat in the city, or his bar, or girls.

  Bekker was convinced it wouldn’t be much longer now before we astounded the world.

  It was over with Lien, she had moved up in the world. One time, on a sunny afternoon in February, she came over on the little ferry. A childlike February sun was shining. She had on expensive clothes and a hat with a yellow-gold feather that cost more money than Bavink had ever gotten for one of his “little things.” Bavink was sitting down on the dike, on the pilings, painting; the saint squatted next to him, right on the water, scrubbing the grease from a pan with a stone in the brackish water of the Outer IJ, they were not too particular.

  The moment they saw Lien they decided to take the afternoon off. Bavink had been wrestling with the Outer IJ for three months and had just about had enough. And there was Lien, sitting in the middle of the room on their only chair and looking first out the window on one side at the fields and then out the window on the other side at the scrawny trees and the light blue water, and in the sun like that the world really did look quite nice. And Bavink and Hoyer sat on the floor with their backs against the wall and smoked clay pipes and looked up, full of quiet contentment, at Lien and Lien said there was a draft.

  Hoyer said he’d never noticed anything—Hoyer, who used to never sit on a stone curb because it was too cold!

  Then Hoyer went out and took Lien’s purse and Bavink just looked and admired and continued to say nothing. Lien sat with one leg crossed over the other and she placed the tip of her umbrella in a crack between two boards on the bare floor and stretched out her arm and looked at the water and down from the water to the tips of her shoes and then up into Bavink’s eyes. Then Bavink looked into her eyes and took his pipe out of his mouth and said: “Lien, you sure look pretty. If I had it to do over again … and with those pretty clothes and everything, and that hat….”

  Lien turned bright red and poked him with her umbrella, which almost made her fall off her chair.

  Then Hoyer came back with a half dram of old jenever and a beer bottle full of eggnog for Lien.

  Everyone was in a good mood till four o’clock. “Hey, Lien,” Hoyer said, “do you know how to get the grease off a pan? I tried it with a pumice stone down on the dike but it didn’t work.”

  “You need hot water, dummy.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Bavink said. “It was taking too long, I knew something was wrong.”

  Then Lien said they were hopeless and she took off her nice clothes, tied one of Bavink’s coats around her waist, and went into the kitchen like that, in her slip, and washed the pan. And then she saw a stack of about thirteen dirty plates and two half-plates. She washed them all and wanted to throw out the half-plates but they wouldn’t let her, why throw out a perfectly good half-plate?

  The pan had never been cleaned. They usually only cooked rice in it anyway.

  But at four o’clock the farm children got out of school and pressed their little farm noses against the windows so that all you could see were little white triangles all over and they wouldn’t leave. There were no curtains.

  And when Bavink and Hoyer took Lien back to her ferryboat, at four thirty, there were two men standing at the crossroads by the sluice, and they said “Well, well,” and then looked as though they hadn’t seen Lien at all.

  Not long after that, I ran into Bavink in the city. He had Hoyer’s overcoat on and smelled of bread. I thought that was strange. I asked if Lien had come back again and he shook his head no. He was resigned: “What can you expect when you’re broke. Hey, look at this.”

  He unbuttoned the top button of Hoyer’s expensive coat to let me peek inside. “Bread, a fresh loaf of bread. I got it on credit in De Pijp. Hoyer’s out too, I’m supposed to meet him at Muiderpoort at three.”

  In Schellingwoude they couldn’t even get bread anymore. Poor though I was myself, I gave them a cash advance on the Outer IJ. Oh, it would work out fine with the money, Bavink’s share of the world we were going to conquer was large enough. I was financing an empire. Empire? I was giving him an advance on a whole universe.

  Bavink shuffled down Kalverstraat with his collar up and a bulge under his coat and he was whistling the Marseillaise and he smelled of fresh bread.

  July 1914

  [1] A later addition.

  LITTLE POET

  The third year of the war.

  Bellum transit, amor manet.*

  I

  TWICE the God of the Netherlands shook his venerable head and twice his long venerable muttonchops slid back and forth across his vest.

  It didn’t add up. There must be a mistake somewhere. A poet with no hair, that was very strange. The God of the Netherlands hadn’t cared much for poets for thirty years. You could no longer tell what to make of them. Respectable or disrespectable? Impossible to say.

  “He said he was filled with me. That used to be a given.”

  God sighed. He’d have to talk it over with a real poet tomorrow. Maybe Potgieter. These days he had nothing but worries on his mind.

  A girl was walking down there, on Leidsestraat. God looked down upon her with fatherly satisfaction. The girl was like hundreds of other girls that summer, all in white, silk blouse and short knit skirt and white stockings, delicate little ankles and flat white shoes, and she had lovely eyes like hundreds of other girls in Amsterdam. Eyes that looked like they knew something very special. They didn’t like that. Our Dear Lord had never thought about it before. But now it bothered him. It had started with a line of poetry about “knowing eyes,” then one of them said that it was all a trick, a pious trick of God’s. That they didn’t know anything, they just looked as though they knew, they couldn’t help it. God had never thought about that before.

  Now they had gotten him thinking about everything. And just when it was so important to stay focused. The Kaiser himself had said it again, just recently: “Der Tüchtigkeit ist die Welt.”*

  But once you start puzzling over something it’s not so easy to stop. Now that he was
paying attention, he saw hundreds, thousands of those girls, each one different and every one the same. Sometimes he no longer knew if he had seen ten thousand girls or one girl ten thousand times. “God in Heaven, had he created all these girls? Or was it a trick of the devil, all those knowing eyes?”

  Look, there goes the little poet. A handsome young man, you have to admit: thin, with a nicely shaved boyish face except for a pair of flying buttresses in front of his ears, and so suntanned. He greets someone, tilting his straw hat a fraction above his close-cut hair.

  Bizarre—so little hair—but it definitely was a little poet because God couldn’t figure him out, or Potgieter either. And Professor Volmer wanted nothing to do with him.

  And he suffered terribly from those knowing eyes, more than any decent upstanding person would. The devil had him in his clutches. He was a weak little poet and they drove him insane. He was respectable out of weakness. Another strange thing that God had never thought about before—respectable was respectable, full stop. The little poet didn’t know which one he should fall in love with, no sooner had he looked into one pair of knowing eyes than he saw another. He was so weak, so wonderfully weak. But after he saw the twenty-fifth girl he felt something strange in his brain. He had already spitefully kicked over a chair on the sidewalk while walking past a café. Because he knew perfectly well that they didn’t know a thing, that they burst out in stupid giggles whenever he doffed his hat to them, or just stared at him, stinking of bourgeois-young-lady conceitedness. And still he couldn’t leave them alone. Then he had to flee somewhere where there were no women, and he raged against God and the devil too, and he said that he’d end up as a lunatic at this rate and sit slobbering for years with his mouth hanging open wearing a leather bib without even realizing it. But the next day he would look again, and think: “Mon âme prend son élan vers l’infini.”*

  Potgieter said that the guy was crazy and that back in Piet Hein’s day….

  The little poet took his course through the wastelands of Amsterdam, poetizing all the way. Nothing but Dutch people as far as the eye could see. Again he greeted someone, a gentleman in a top hat and tails straight out of an Eduard Verkade play. They spoke briefly, there on the square in front of Centraal Station.

  On the ground floor God came strolling by in his yellow Panama hat, with a silver-handled walking stick and a shabby coat of an indefinable brown color draped loosely across his back, dandruff on his collar, his trousers too wide and too long and bunched on the tops of his shoes. You could see his muttonchops from behind and when he slowly climbed the two steps up to the station hall, the evening sun, low in the sky, glowed in God’s polished left shoe.

  “Who was that gentleman?” asked the little poet. “God,” said the devil, and the knobby bumps on his forehead grew bigger. The little poet said nothing. “Your God, your boss’s God and your father-in-law’s God and your boss’s accountant’s God and the manager of the Nieuwe Karseboom’s God. Your aunt’s, the one who told you you had to doff your hat when you walked past your boss’s house in Delft or Oldenzaal, or wherever it was, even if no one was there, because you never knew if someone might see. Your aunt who always makes your sister knit: ‘An idle woman is the devil’s plaything.’ The God of all those people who say ‘I never expected that from you’ when you try to live a little, and who say ‘I thought so, that was bound to end badly’ when you end up in the poorhouse later. The God who resents that you have Saturday afternoons off, the God of Professor Volmer, lecturer in accounting and business, who thinks you spend too much time looking up at the sky. The God of everyone who has no other option besides work or boredom. The God of the Netherlands, of all of the Netherlands, from Surhuis moor down to Spekholz heath, the patron and benefactor of the League of Heads of Large Families and of the Association for the Reclamation of Fallen Women. They call it falling. I’m fallen too.”

  “It’s not a very accurate metaphor, you’re right,” the little poet said absently.

  He had been looking all this time at a lady who was standing there waiting. At the wonderful sharp edges of the tendons on her ankles, right above her flat white shoes. Of course she was wearing white flats with a short skirt and stockings with a terribly open weave so that her white legs shimmered through. “Now’s not a bad time to fall,” the little poet thought.

  “Mon âme prend son élan vers l’infini,” said the devil with an ironic smile, the way he had smiled for all eternity.

  Then the little poet saw the square in front of the station again, and saw the devil, and heard what he had said.

  “Devil,” he said, “don’t try to trick me.”

  The devil just shrugged his shoulders and looked at the station clock. Ten past seven. He held his hand over his mouth and yawned. Eternity wasn’t going anywhere. And the fact is, he knew all too many little poets already. Why bother giving such big speeches?

  The little poet set off for home and looked up at the wheel with little wings on it, on the railing of the high railroad bridge over the west passage, the wheel on a little iron post that wants to fly and never leaves its place and can be seen from the distant places it never reaches, even the Torensluis, looking up the Singel. The blue sky was still so hopelessly far above it. Even the lampposts at either end of the bridge hold their arc lights high above the little wheel. There’s not much you can do if you’re mounted on a little iron post on a railroad bridge. At best you can sit there and think, and that doesn’t get you anywhere. The little poet thought that it’s better to be a wheel on a post than a little poet. The wheel is made of iron, a little poet isn’t.

  Meanwhile God sat by himself in a first-class compartment on the train to Delft and stared out the window and saw nothing. He had never been much for sightseeing. He held a report in his hand and files lay next to him on the seat.

  The God of the Netherlands thought. These were strange times. God started reading again:

  “Man’s fate is to feel regret when he fails to reach his goal and to feel regret when he succeeds.

  “There is no consolation in virtue and no consolation in sin.

  “Therefore, cheerfully renounce all expectations. Place your hope in eternity: there is no awakening from this dream.”

  These were truly strange times. It couldn’t end well. And now he’d gone and said that a new age had dawned. The age of Ironic Dilettantism was over, a new age of Trailblazing Optimism and Dynamic Vigor had begun. That’s what he’d gone and said. And then, with a sigh, God turned back to the manuscript of a thick book about Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management and started reading.

  II

  The little poet had never fallen.

  To be a great poet, and then to fall: When the little poet thought about what he actually wanted most of all, it was that. To astound the world, just once, and to have just once an affair with a poetess. He thought this thought again and again, for years, he was so naïve.

  The little poet was respectably married to an adorable, unaffected, lively young woman. Of course he had fallen in love right away, as soon as he started to see the world. Mornings he saw her while he was walking to the office and she to school; afternoons at a quarter past one, during “market hour” when the stock market was in session and he was allowed out of the office and she was coming out of the dairy where she ate her sandwiches with a glass of milk and sometimes a cream puff or a piece of apple pie with whipped cream. Her sandwiches.

  And she was so mad at him for always standing there like that, he was simply ridiculous. The other girls called him “Mr. Right” because he wore a cape and had such beautiful black hair (he didn’t wear it cut short back then), and they looked at him as they walked past, three of them arm in arm, just looked for a second and then giggled at each other, the two outer girls with their heads bent in toward the middle girl, who looked at the ground, giggling too. But she walked grandly past and never looked and told Mien Bus that he had come for her, for Mien, and then they all laughed because they knew better.
She stamped her little seventeen-year-old schoolgirl foot on the ground. “For me? That creep?” and she threw back her head.

  And he was unhappy. He counted the hours. At eleven at night he looked up at the sky. It was exactly halfway from one thirty in the afternoon to eight thirty in the morning. And he wrote poetry.

  He composed poems imitating Heine, in Dutch and German, poems after Hélène Swarth and Kloos and Van Eeden.

  THE HOURS

  How heavily tread the hours with pond’rous gait.

  THE CRUSADERS

  (this one in German)

  Down below, the Holy City

  Lay outspread in all its glory.

  That was her. Unfortunately the gates were shut tight. He wondered why he should go on living. And he rebelled against God.

  My God, will my torments never find an end?

  He couldn’t bear to look at the people in his office; as soon as he arrived at a quarter past nine he felt like hitting someone. And then he would suddenly be transformed from gloomy to ecstatic. And he wrote more poems.

  My sacred love …

  Now is the world an endless land of summer …

  God throws open the gates of Heaven,

  My love sits there on a throne of gold.

  This went on for eleven months or so. Then came three months when he had a job in a provincial town where they still today talk about what a crazy guy that was.

  Then he got her. He was nineteen years old. He wrote her a letter saying that he would be in Amsterdam for two days and he would very much like to speak with her. They knew each other’s names, Amsterdam really is just a village. She had missed him a lot in those hundred days and she came. Her mother didn’t object: “as long as he’s nice with a good job and she likes him … but no fooling around!” She came to Muiderpoort one evening and he could see that she definitely knew what he wanted to ask her. It was so strange, so ordinary, he was utterly unable to poetize. And of course she said she didn’t understand, but they walked together up Sarphatistraat anyway. The conversation was halting, what did they have to say to each other, they hardly knew each other yet. He had imagined that he would speak wonders, that the words would hurtle out of him like the broad Waal River rushing past the boats on the pontoon jetty at Nijmegen.