B007P4V3G4 EBOK (22 page)

The ground was still soft and everywhere hung the salty scent
of rot, of slimy organisms, seaweed, sea-snails, dead things. Millions
of little dead things. Of larger ones too? Cadavers of pets, of
people still? Children? Or had these already been salvaged? (Odd
word, really: salvaged.)

The ghosts kept open house. I walked in through open doors, roamed among the remains of their wild orgy: tipped-up rocking
chairs, cracked ceiling-cherubs, Christmas baubles, letters, piles of
cheque books, faded photographs, open the ghosts to read
telephones, broken adrift. All those certainties, all those
networks of people's manipulating, their threads to both the past and
the that stuff was lying here like organs that had been rent
apart. The sea has taken revenge, I thought, revenge for our arrogance.
There were gramophone records: The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde and
When the lights go out. Here, the lights had indeed gone out. It was as if I
was picking up the echoes of lives that had taken place here. In a greymuddied bath tub, lovers had embraced in an aromatic, scented
foambath. The muddied clothes were still hanging in the cupboard.
The dead had written in their cashbooks or played a Schubert sonata
on the piano. They had taken down the latest stockmarket figures and
had poured each other a glass of whisky. Praying, or dead drunk, they
had been washed from their houses by the tidal wave.

Somewhere, I happened upon a number of dolls, some of which
had the dimensions of a small child. They lay there, dumped down
head first, naked, bums up obscenely, or on their backs with
windswept hair and mud-soiled porcelain faces in which the glass
eyes stared up at the sky. Their degeneration rendered them
fearsomely alive, nymphomaniac smiles playing around their rosebud lips. All that was dead spoke a new language. What was
human was dehumanised and called to a different, ghostly life:
around me, a Salvador Dali landscape had turned into reality.

Suddenly I recognised the tiles of our own terrace; this was
where the camellias must have stood which, in winter, Fritz had
always carefully packed in straw against the chill sea wind. The
moss-covered terrace-lion was still standing. But of the house itself,
no trace; only the foundations still lay there like a huge, square
tombstone in the soil. I went and sat on the edge of the terrace
and looked at the little stone lion. It sucked my gaze in towards it.
Everything around that object became unimportant, shadowy, like
in a dream where an insignificant thing can suddenly assume other
proportions, as if it lights up from within and conveys a signal -
though you cannot translate its meaning, cannot unravel it. The
meaning remains just outside the border of your capacity to
comprehend, and you struggle and struggle to understand it, and
when you wake up nothing remains but a feeling of oppression.
That's what befell me with that lion. It was of vital importance that
I should understand something but I could not grasp it.

I stared at the scar on my would turn white, the
doctor had said; my skin would become perfect again; I would be
able to begin a new life. As if a new skin and a new life were one
and the same. And of course he had said that to all those washed
up who still had a breath of air in their lungs. What else could the
man do.

A question forced itself upon me, a question I'd still managed to
keep at a distance: now what? I could walk up the road, go
somewhere, in this dress I had borrowed from my sister. But how
could you escape from a house of air? A man without a face? For
that was the most horrific: that I could not bring Fritz's face to
mind; I always saw it before me without a mouth and without
eyes, and flattened so decadently into an egg-shape, like a head in
a nylon stocking.

I walked back into the woods. The sun was shining more
fiercely. It had to be afternoon already; my sister's dress stuck to
my back with sweat. Where the road veered off, I came across the
railway line. It was still lying there, intact, though the rails looked
very rusty and unused. The overhead wiring hadn't been repaired
yet. I could follow the railway line: you would always end up
somewhere, in that case.

Still, there were already signs of life in the woods, here and
there. People were sitting on steps in the first spring sunshine,
were scooping mud from their houses or running up a flag [we're
back]; a man tipped out a bucket of water near the only tree still
alive.

Suddenly standing there, an old woman in a dressing gown who
had come crawling up from a black hole. She stood there in front
of her subsided house with behind her that forest, bleached white,
full of splintered tree stumps, and she seemed to beckon me. I
heard her voice like a rarefied hum. She held a tin can in her hand
and in the other a paint brush with which she appeared to be
making signals.

'Have you come to help me?' she cried.

Paint dripped down her lower arm but she did not seem to
notice. She spoke monotonously without waiting for an answer,
just as if something was unfolding within her, a meagre musical
ditty.

'Have you come to help me? Everything hurts - that's because
of the damp in my bones. They took me somewhere, inside a big
store. They put me in a room on my own. I was so hot and again so cold, too, that I went and lay between two mattresses, 'cause
there were mattresses everywhere in that store - I set out on a
recce later on. The elevators were crammed full of people, but I
found some stairs down. I wanted to get back to my house. A
captain wants to go down with his ship...'

She stirred her can of paint.

'You've got to speak up,' she said, 'I've gone deaf with the
water.'

She was treating the teetering door post, blobs of dried paint
lying on the ground.

A ga-ga old woman wielding a brush, one who was tackling
chaos with a brush and wanted to bring the entire apocalyptic
world back to life with thick strokes of hard-green paint. The shards
of existence had dropped to earth in a muddle: dead lovers
embraced in a muddied bath tub, a barge was grounded in the
middle of some woods, my house had walls of added
up even remotely any more.

'This house was once my grandmother's,' she said. 'I used to
come here when I was still a child. Sometimes we'd go along the
railway track, collecting seeds which we put in a little can.' She
pointed at hers.

The spring sunshine, the minute paint splatters on her grey skin
between the glistening hairs on her chin, a tatty sunhat on the
straggly strands of white one for a photo in Life
International, it suddenly coursed through me in a flash.

'When I've lots of courage I put on my boots,' she said, 'and I
go and take a look at the seedlings. Yes, there are those that come
back, that take a chance, the bulbs living in the lowlands. They,
too - they've got the courage, too.'

On her pyjama legs, and cloaked in her mucky dressing gown,
hanging open, she was walking out ahead of me when one of her
slippers got stuck in the mud.

'That dirt's only good for breeding snails and worms to fish with,'
she said, disdainfully. She bent down to pick up her slipper. And as
she straightened herself, groaning, a hand pressed to her side, she
cast up her eyes at me. For the first time she seemed to see me,
consciously. Her errant gaze focused on my face and she nodded her
head several times, as if she saw something confirmed to herself.

'Yes, I know,' she said, 'you'd rather be dead. But as long as
you've still got this,' - and she tapped against her skull with the
handle of the brush - 'all's not yet lost.'

Then she shoved her brush and tin can into my hands and went
and sat herself down in a broken armchair standing in the mudstained garden. A moment later I heard her snore.

Jacob Israel de Haan

Dedicated to Georges Eekhoud: there is nothing in the world more
inhuman than to be a burgher and of all burgherdom that of
Holland is the most inhuman possible. It would quite definitely sell
itself were it not so unrespectable and were a bidder only to come
forward. However, as I have grown progressively stronger in
human living and the business of Art, I have hated this country as
purely as can be. My solace is this, that these respectable little
burgher-folk surely will go to their doom prematurely because of
Christianity,

Schiedam gin and Marxism. One of my sorrows is that I am a
Dutch artist. Master Eekhoud, let us not be two burghers.

1

When the Devil did visit me last, he said, before the restless departure:
'Helenus, do not forget this: think of me often, for I love you, and think
so strongly of me until you have the feeling that your body is black,
without communion with the outside world. Wherever I may be, I shall
then know that you do not forget me and know where you reside, and
what your condition is. Will you do this?'

'Yes,' I had said, trembling, I shall think of you always ... I
cannot live without you.'

2

It was upon a late afternoon and I was sitting beside a bordered
lawn, all red roses, in the sun and the scent, while I thought of myself. Then a boy in white came from the house bringing me a
letter from France. Oh, it was from the Devil. I recognised this
immediately by the finely formed manuscriptum and by the pentagram that sealed the letter red. The Devil wrote:

'Dear boy, for a considerable time I have not become aware that
you have thought strongly of me, perhaps perchance on occasion,
yes, but such thoughts do not reach me. I do so regret this, for
now I do not know how you are and where you live. In Amsterdam,
I hope, and that you will receive this letter in good order. I must
call upon your friendship, for I have made a wager with one of my
enemies - alas, one only needs to be the Devil to have many of
those - a wager that, with loving words, it would not be possible
to lead my best friend among men astray from me. I should dearly
wish to win that wager, more for the intimate pleasure of it than
for the gain. I have indicated you as being my best friend. Should
you accept this indication, then write to me to that effect immediately and come, tomorrow if possible, to the Bradford Hotel, 17,
Rue d'Arcade. Ask for the Viscount of Chelsea, the name I am
travelling under. In that hotel you will also find the enemy to
whose loving temptation you will be exposed. Be warned and do
not trust in your loyalty to me, and do not think lightly of the
enemy. He is someone of middling, easy capacities and therefore
has great influence on people. You shall have to be strong and
steadfast in order to withstand him. Do not pain me to my soul by
succumbing, for I love you so dearly.