Amsterdam Stories (20 page)

“So,” I think, “it looks like he's kept up his Latin.”

He keeps talking. “
Now
that all seems like nothing. You have to hike farther and farther to find anything that hasn't changed, that still resembles what you used to like. But if you're an ordinary person moving around through your own little world, you won't find much. It seemed pretty dreadful to me, for a while. I wondered if it wasn't up to us—to me, to you, to the people like us—whether the silent course of things could continue or not.

“God is often incomprehensible. His incomprehensibility is never far away. Just think about the snow that day when we ran into each other last week. And the neighborhood.”

His cigar has gone out. Slowly and laboriously he digs a match out of his vest pocket and an empty matchbox out of his jacket, re-lights the cigar, looks at the smoke, cautiously opens the stove by pulling on the knob with his hand in his handkerchief (a clean one), and tosses in the used match.

“Now I know better: God is here.” He points at his forehead and for the first time I really see the deep furrowed grooves, and that his eyebrows are black and long, the hairs wavy and dirty-colored and sad like his mustache. But he looks a lot less wretched now and I can't help thinking that for very little money a barber could make a whole new man of him. “God is here.” Where have I heard that before?

Again, Flip keeps talking.

“Why should people have to cross their bridge slower for my sake, or your sake? God is with those people too, he has to do something for them, they have to go about their business too. We have so much else.

“Someone like you or me,” Flip says, and he looks at me. While he was talking he was cleaning his pince-nez with a real (and clean) chamois cloth, and now he looks at me over the top of it, with his nearsighted eyes, the way he always did when his heart was full of feeling. Looks at me like a faithful dog.

“This world is too small for someone like you or me,” he says. “We have the world inside us, and in it we are God's envoy, Dikschei. And in it God is not incomprehensible. What is the pope, Dikschei, compared to us? The pope, tied down to everything? We are God's humble servant. And you wander around in that world in all modesty and you're happy and meanwhile you're nailing rubber soles onto your brother's old shoes and you sit there hammering and you yell, ‘Mie, you're burning the milk.'”

“You have milk again?”

His cigar has gone out.

“Yesterday morning we did,” he says. He deposits an absolutely miserable little stub of cigar in my stove and struggles to his feet.

As I help him into his old tweed coat, I ask, “Are you still looking for work?” He shrugs his shoulders again. “Do you still have that derby hat?” And we both have a short laugh. That derby hat from Kniepstra, who had a shop on Dapperstraat, who died of consumption forty years ago. “Back then we died of consumption, not tuberculosis. So, see you soon. You have to come by and see where I live, even though it's not very nice. Yes, that derby hat. It was so big it fell down over my ears.”

He looks thoughtfully down at the tips of his greased-leather shoes.

“I don't believe I was cut out to be a true gentleman, Dikschei.”

I am sitting in front of my stove again, thinking. Insula Dei. I have to think about that. Is it only a refuge for old men?

The thinking is not going so well. The gray sky is almost white and it looks like a soft rain is coming.

The room grows darker. Rain! And out of the past, a past from five weeks ago but so, so far away, the trees in Frankendael Park rise up out of the past, blue and red drops glisten on the branches, a white drop sparkles fiercely and trembles and suddenly is pale blue. The trees are bare, of course they're bare, it's January. Long ribbons of light glow on the branches and when I look up I see all the delicate twigs and the little buds against the faint blue sky. The treetops are already looking toward spring, in the distance, and down below the black trunks lead their own lives. A doe could stand there with raised head and childlike eyes, and why do I never get to see the dancing pixies? It is almost spring after all.
I
would catch a cold and rheumatism if I did but the stone maiden stands there with her naked breasts, so many stone maidens have
nothing
on and stand in gardens in January, the enviable things, and they stay healthy for a hundred and fifty years, two hundred years.

How often in summer I have looked at those same trees, full of leaves, looked at the light on the trees and the shadow, and the darkness under the crowns. Every day I went by and looked. There were shadows from the leaves on the grass; in between, the light was intensely golden. Then it was as if the trees had always been there, exactly the same, and always would be. Who, when he sees a friend, thinks that he will never see him again? Now the ground between the trees is brown and dingy, it's the leaves from back then, and not even all the leaves. I looked at them so many times and it didn't help them a bit, they fell anyway.

Insula Dei. I force my thoughts back to that.

Yes. And no. I think about these eventful times. You want to do something, make a difference. But these aren't the first eventful times I have lived through and if I'm granted even more years then with God's help I will most likely get to my third war. The silent course of things takes its silent, implacable course, the little man who is a hero today will tomorrow, when peace comes, be scolded in his stupid little job or maybe won't have a job at all and will turn back into the useless piece of clockwork he used to be. And if he has a little more to him, maybe he will read the first chapter of Ecclesiastes: “All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it.”

Eventful times. What remains from Italy's eventful times in the thirteenth century except Dante's
Inferno
?

Do. As if I haven't had enough pointless doing. Oh
they
have nothing else, they only are when they do. I want to be, and for me to do is: not to be.

It slips away from me again. I see the spring. Like the highest branches of the trees I see the spring from far away. God help me, what a winter we've had. Cold. And snow and everything jumbled together. A train has pulled into Amsterdam-Muiderpoort Station from Utrecht, going to Centraal Station, and the stationmaster is about to give the signal to proceed when he quickly asks the conductor hurrying onto the train, “Tell me, what train are you again?”

But now it's thawing, thank God. I think back to last year's crocuses in the parks in Groningen, in the gardens of the villas on the way to Haren, and farther. Spring was late last year. The crocuses
were in full bloom in mid-April. Yellow, purple, and white, the vanguard of spring. And the Paterswolde lake lay there in the distance, you are standing a little higher in the landscape but you barely see the meadows sloping down, there are low dikes with willow trees on them, the alder catkins are hanging down, here and there a farm-stead is surrounded by tall trees, there are even a few cows in a scrawny pasture. Over there too. I count seven. The lake is all dark blue beneath the April sky, in front of the Eelder woods that are the outer edge of the world, small from a distance but also large. And black. And at the same time blond. However I want to see them. In the middle is a large tree I recognize. And the next day the lake is pale blue and the day after that it's a delicate gray with a sail on it. A magnificent view, magnificent enough for me, my heart swells and the landscape swells with it, the sky is so high, it is as though I could live there like that, without friends, without the baker and milkman and butcher and grocer, without garbage cans and clothes and even without cigars if necessary and without a pipe, and that's saying a lot. Ach, I will have to live without tobacco and cigars all too soon anyway, but not on the side of the road to Haren and not beneath the trees in the Frankendael. But I'll never be rid of the baker and the rest of them. Although God knows, maybe them too. But then the side of the road to Haren will be a very different roadside, like the one you sometimes read about in the paper, where a dead body is found in the winter sometimes. And as for clothes, I can't do without them, unfortunately, and the police go after nudists whenever they occasionally do turn up. “The beauty of the human body” is written in respectable books but we ordinary folks have to go to museums for it, if we ever get to see any of it at all.

It's clear I'm not up to it. It wouldn't be enough for me. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.”
*
Do I
want
to be satisfied? Yes. And no. There is no answer.

And suddenly I am at peace with it. There is no answer. That's good too. In a month the crocuses will be in bloom again. It's barely started thawing and already the women are looking around. There is still something to hold on to in this time of war: the thought of peace and the feeling for “that which is not of this earth.” That doesn't sound bad, it even sounds a bit sublime.

So then: Insula Dei?

I give up and go eat a couple of slices of bread and butter. At the table I awaken in a clear, tangible world. It still feels strange for a moment. A plate, a knife, a fork, some leftover sauerkraut from the day before, it's clear exactly what you have here: not quite enough.

In the twilight that evening I walk past Frankendael again. The snow is still lying on the gardens in front of the manor house and it's still light out. But the tall trees are there, to either side. They are silent, life cannot be more silent.

I look slowly up past the trees. Down below the trunks rise up darkly out of the snow, it is a secretive, three-quarters-dark world where Dikscheis led astray by our dear Lord can frolic with nymphs like the ones you see in museums. But up above, the crowns of the trees against the last light of a pale sky look out into the distance. There is no sound, no wind. The trunks wait, they wait for an answer from the crowns. Are the herons returning? Is spring on its way?

And then God does what he always does, thank God, time and time again, every day. In the end that's why I could never make anything of myself in society. He shows me something that is not there: the blue lake next to the endless field with yellow daffodils, water and daffodils both waving in the breeze. Wordsworth's “Daffodils.”

Wednesday, July 9, 1941, 9:30 p.m. German daylight time. The sun is low in the sky. Near the end of an unbearably hot day. A narrow bike path between young birch trees. Behind me is Waalre, behind me too is the magic alley of birch trees in Waalre that leads to the train station. At this late hour it is full of shadows, all the shadows of this whole blazing hot day have gathered under these trees. But here and there the sun still golds its way in, a heavy wagon jolts slowly ahead under a heavy vault of branches and leaves, the sun glides along the wagon's back, the driver walks alongside it, the low sun sparkles on a bicycle too, the eye doesn't reach all the way to the end of this alley, the vault ends in deep shadow, this road must lead somewhere good and peaceful where a stately man and a willowy woman with elegant faces are waiting for me in a white house with a large front lawn and beeches and lindens all around and with the tea waiting on the tea light. The road leads to the Aalst-Waalre station and service along that line has been canceled.

But the road is behind me, I have turned off to the left onto the bike path and am on my way to Eindhoven and I think about it only in passing.

For me the day has not been unbearably hot. Temperatures like this are fine with me, and almost no clothes—shirt, pants, and shoes; jacket draped over the handlebars. As Zus Zwaardecroon, the neighbor girl, would say: “Like a fairy.”

When I'm almost to Eindhoven, the countryside is wide open on both sides. Rye fields. The sun still burning, low and red. A stately row of Canadian poplars, a copse here and there. A striking emptiness and silence. The fields end somewhere but you can't see where, lost in the distance against trees or bushes. And then there's a fantastic golden cloud above the grain fields, climbing up out of the grain fields, shining and spreading up and to the right. The Judgment. I get off my bike, I await the Lord. The cloud drifts, drifts to the right and comes closer. And then something looms up out of the golden matter, at first it's not clear what, but it's not the Lord. And a moment later it's a wagon piled high with hay, or rather, it's hay that is slowly, listlessly, and almost inaudibly moving closer between the rows of grain, with a man sitting in front and a horse's head enveloped in a drifting cloud of solid sunshine.

But the Lord is in the great silence and emptiness and in this wondrous end to a monumental day. The day has become mine once more and mine the enchanted world. The sun stands still, there will be no night. Time stands still; pitiless eternity takes pity. God has taken transience from me and from this blossoming world. The heavens arch still and blue over the benevolent green, the grain stands perfectly still and there is a golden radiance above it and the land lies there like someone you love. This world will always be, nothing more can come after it.

When my bicycle starts whirring again I suddenly hear a cuckoo. And all around, before and behind me and on either side, I hear its incomprehensible call. From where? Thirteen times this voice of God calls from beyond the bounds of understanding.

I am very grateful. “Hallelujah, praise he who is without beginning.” I have wrested a beautiful day from eternity. The sun has almost set. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

And so I walk home through the snow in the last light and the island of God is all around me. There's another light frost.

Wilted is the word. It's still thawing, the snow has wilted into a filthy sludge, the neighborhood is wilted, the house is wilted. There is a tin nameplate on the door with letters the same color: B. den Oever. On the upstairs neighbor's door a patch is bare where the bad kids kick if the door isn't opened fast enough. And there's not much paint either on the doors and window frames.