Amsterdam Stories (11 page)

“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.

1
. Discovery

B
AVINK
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.

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.

T
WICE
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.