Amsterdam Stories (12 page)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

But they talked about his job in the other town and about her parents. And they said goodbye in front of her house and he gave her a kiss, all the way on the left side of her forehead. And she was
so
pleased, she had a boyfriend, and so handsome, what
would
Lou say. Too bad he lived out of town. So annoying, especially on Sunday afternoons when he didn't come see her so she had to stay at home.

The second evening he was allowed to come upstairs. Things had to move fast because he only had two days off.

His father had paid her father a visit and now he was allowed to come upstairs. Her father was sitting there, and his, and her mother and grandmother and an aunt. Her two little sisters had been sent to bed early. And then he got her, and the aunt said afterwards, “What a nice young man.”

The next Sunday afternoon, they went to his house, of course, and a hunchbacked woman happened to be there, a cousin, wearing trousers and a lorgnette and drinking beer. Coba was as sweet as can be to her future mother-in-law and her future mother-in-law was as sweet as can be to her.

“What a cute bag you have. Is it from City?” “No, from Liberty.” “I see a lot of those bags with the little pouch on the top these days.” “To tell you the truth I don't like that kind of bag very much.” “Yes, well, to each his own. Our Riek has one and I quite like it.” He sat there with them and didn't understand a thing. Was
he
the same person who had walked the streets at night and said that God had thrown open the gates of Heaven? Strange.

But she was very adorable and unaffected and lively and young and did
not
kiss him on the forehead but right on his lips and his neck, in the hall, before they went into the room. She had to stand on her tiptoes and put her hands on his shoulders to do it. And she began to love him very much and he loved her very much too and hugged her close.

The situation remained mysterious to him, though, and he didn't write any more poetry until after he was married.

And now they had been married for six years and had a child, an adorable five-year-old girl all the aunts liked to cuddle. She had a little money and he had a little money and he'd found a job in Amsterdam that he wasn't half bad at, in his opinion, and they were more or less happy.

But since he was a true little poet something
had
to be missing. What is anything that a little poet actually has
ever
worth to him? That he just has, day in and day out. All those days. And forever is a terribly long time to be married. And a very adorable, unaffected, and lively young woman who loves her husband and copies out his manuscripts in nice handwriting but has slept next to him for two thousand nights already and knows that he can't stand a drafty room and can't get out of bed in the morning and can't ever leave any jam uneaten in the jar—if he is a poet, a woman like that is truly something fit for the devil.

A great poet, and then to fall. But nothing ever came of that, because if you're a little poet the prettiest girls are always walking on the other side of the canal. And so his whole life turned into one long poem, and that can be tedious too.