B007P4V3G4 EBOK (56 page)

Shortly after the gents had left, with the head of the saint in an
old sack, the storm had risen. For a moment, the Admiral rubbed
his hands with glee at those waddling bunglers who would only
find a hold on each other's flapping coattails - then he forgot
them, because his house had begun to creak ominously.

The peril his house was in notwithstanding, his neighbours came
to seek shelter with him. His house had two floors and seemed
almost impressive in the midst of the fishermen's hovels which
most closely resembled tents, what with their posts and their
canopies of sailcloth. But his house could not hold out against that
battering North-Westerly either, and he was forced to seek
refuge in the cellar. Here, there was only space for a few: the
others had to go outside again to find what shelter they could
under the oily sailcloth the storm tore at and the tempest hailed
down upon.

It was dark in the cellar and airless, and everyone sat bent down
because of the flotsam timber shifting and subsiding ominously
overhead. Buried in this grave, they had listened to the voices
borne along by the storm. No praying, just occasional cursing, for
everyone wished to hear those voices which were the voices of
the lost, roaming dead. They had heard them more often at sea
when the storm came from the North-West, from over yonder
where the world disappeared in mist and where heaven and earth seemed to touch. Now, too, they listened to the voices again
though they knew that these could not be understood.

In the end it had quietened down and shortly afterwards they
had heard the familiar shrieks of common terns.

Now the storm had abated it seemed as if everything that once
had been, had been taken away. The saint of storms had taken
away their dwellings and their ships, and he had taken away the
paths and made them roam in the wilderness. The fishermen wailed
and cursed, but the Admiral was only tired. He knew that this was
as it .was meant to be: one builds that which will be lost anyway -
and that it is useless to know this. He would erect his two-storey
house again, ridiculously puny with its thatched roof beneath the
gruesome expanse of heaven. He again would lead the fishermen
and they would believe themselves to be going somewhere because
they followed him - the way they all followed the Lord and did
not know that he was wrathful and had taken away the truth from
the world, only leaving hope behind.

They had been trudging along all the while, heads bent, bogbrained with tiredness, looking on without noticing how their feet
left imprints behind in the wet dune sand, feet meandering across
the smooth sand, fanning out, crossing and trampling each other
without discernible cause. The men walked heavily, as if they were
carrying something. There was something solemn about it, something rather ceremonial, the way they progressed in this stricken
dune landscape, something terrifying, too: the misshapen child out
in front like a messenger of doom. The bells of Maria-ter-Zee
still tolled in honour of the mystery of death and, seen from a distance, the little troupe resembled a funeral cortege, impressed by
something of which the meaning eluded them.

Down below, the sea allowed its waves to unroll listlessly on to
the bare coast.

Thus they went on, oppressed and introverted - and because of
this, they only saw the stranger when he was nigh upon them. He
resembled a monk, but if so, one from an unknown order. Around
his shoulders hung a drab blanket which was bound tight round his
middle with a frayed length of mooring rope. His head was bald,
the bald pate hard and smooth as brass. He did not speak nor did
he look them in the face. He pointed towards the sea. And then,
only then did they see what they might have seen a long time
ago, for it had been there all the while.

On the beach lay, fearfully large and alive, the Leviathan.

3

Jan van der Does, the young Lord of Noordwijk, unwillingly took his leave of his Leiden host and in the company of a number of literary friends he left for his seigneurial demesne. He would rather have stayed to let himself be admired a little more as the scholar and particularly as the poet Janus Dousa, renowned in the Republic of Letters for his elegant Epigrammata, but duty called - duty he had inherited and which he bore like Aeneas his father. He hoped to amuse himself with his companions on the way; the previous evening they had sat up late and had argufied over the question of whether the classics might ever be surpassed. But now he was trotting along muddy roads, he had no longer any desire to shine. Because of last night's storm he had not had a wink of sleep, and he was tired and ill-tempered.

Actually, he would have stayed in Leiden a few days more - some learned visitors from Leuven were expected - but his host had filled his head with worries. At first, he had wished to know nothing about them, but as time went by he had become worried nevertheless - now he was even in a hurry to get back home.

The road was barely passable, thick mud and deep puddles forcing him into the verge. At walking pace, occasionally at a trot, the riders went along, one behind the other, each sunk into his own thoughts.

Dousa was reminded of his return from Paris, when it had been autumn, too, and he had felt himself to be like Ovid on his way to Tomi, his place of banishment on the Black Sea. Longa via est: propera! Nobis habitabitur orbis ultimus, a terra terra remota mea'.
In his head these wondrously beautiful verses, yet around him, on the carts and the barges, Dousa heard the shameless jabber of merchants, soldiers and fat monks - and he felt nostalgia for his student days in Paris where such stupid folk quite simply did not exist and where everybody spoke about books as though they were their personal friends. It was in a Zeeland barge, squashed in between farmers with baskets full of vegetables and decapitated geese, that he had seized upon the plan that he, too, must write a Tristia, emulating the great Ovid.

But now, riding through the autumnal Rhineland, he recalled
anew why nothing had ever come of those Noordwijk lamentations: this bleak region, this orbis ultimus where the wind always
blew, this was not just any place on the edge of the world, this
was his land and he belonged here. Here he knew everything like
the back of his hand: the church spires of Noordwijk, Katwijk and
Rijnsburg, the flat countryside with its canals and ditches, the
dunes, the trees of 't Hout, the sea. What remained was the
melancholy that fate had put him here and not in
the fine, glittering life was there, but not for him. In books,
however, he found solace; words to him were more real than that
which he saw, and this was why he had memorised as many
poems as possible in the libraries of Paris, Leuven and Antwerpen,
so that he, no matter where he was, would only need to close his
eyes to float away on words to wherever he wanted. He knew
Ovid and Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Propertius and Tibullus - he
only regretted that they did not know him and did not know that
here he was, trudging through the mud on horseback in that noman's-land, well past the frontiers of the Roman Empire, lost in the
mists of time, but that he was doing this with their poetry in his
head nevertheless. Definitely.

Behind him trudged his travel companions, comparative dunces
who could not distinguish the Vulgate from classical Latin and
who spoke with hollow reverence of 'the language of God' while,
in their heart of hearts, they would like best of all to be covened
together inside their chambers of grand rhetoric, huddling around
those crooked little Dutch rhymes of theirs. They had come along
this time because they didn't mind staying at the country seat of a
real humanist for once. Dousa tolerated such folk because Noordwijk was remote and his great friends Giselinus and Silvius did not
come down that often. He had a need, from time to time, to
promenade in educated company amidst the surrounding countryside, conversing on the bonae literae. He was continually uncertain
about his own work, too, and hankered after judgements, opinions,
even if only those of a few dotty rhetoricians. Without them, he
would grow lonely, standing in vain on the look-out in the hope
that the postilion with his brass horn would bring a letter from
afar. Even Ovid, who had kept company with the best in happier
days, would write in the language of the Geti at times, because he,
in the midst of barbarians, would rather be the greatest poet of
Tomi than nothing at all.

Occasionally, however, Dousa would fear that his life was
founded upon a misunderstanding and that he had gone the wrong
way, irrevocably - like a midge at sea that flew on because it had
wings and noticed too late that this world was too large for it.

When they entered Noordwijk, riding across the wooden little
drawbridge, he ceased his cogitations. Here he was lord, and he
had to endure that his head would be taken up by others' lives
forcing themselves upon him with their obnoxious insignificance.
The villagers cheated him as regards their rents, tolls and excises;
they poached on his hunting grounds and stole from his winter
supplies - and still they were not ashamed to bother him about
one thing or another. He permitted it because things were easier
that way - he had a distaste for business and certainly for business
of base quality. His contempt for material life, among which he
also reckoned this illiterate clodhopperdom to be, was so great
that he preferred to hide it, which meant he passed for an amiable
man.

He wished to reach his manor faun as soon as possible. To
prevent his being addressed, he spurred his horse on with the
consequence that dogs jumped up, barking, and ran along bothersomely amidst the horses. The villagers came out of their houses
to see who was going with such haste along the Gooweg. On
seeing it was their lord, they waved and cried out after him. He
replied with mud splattering up from beneath the horses' hooves.

Before he had reached the little lane leading to his estate, he was
brought to a halt by the bailiff who tended his affairs during his
repeated absences and who appeared to have need to speak with
him urgently now. Pieter Woutersz was an insignificant man who
was in awe of the house of Van der Does, sworn vassals of the
Counts of Holland, with a coat of arms quartered: in the first and
fourth, nine diamonds gold on red; in the second and third, the
Noordwijk lion on silver. Dousa was irked by this servile creep
whose meticulousness made things boil down to the fact that
Dousa only needed to confirm whatever-it-was of concern at the
time, which meant that things happened the way Woutersz wanted
them to. The man had the irritating habit of speaking of 'we',
which gave Dousa the feeling of being involved in an unsavoury
tete-a-tete. He would likewise always refer to agreements which
Dousa could not recollect at all. In such cases, Dousa had the
tendency to put himself in the other's position thus forgetting his
own interests, in the end agreeing to something that was only to his disadvantage. Afterwards he would then ponder for a long
time still why he had said this and not that, and why he had not
put Woutersz in his place in particular.

As is more often the case with thinking people, a curious
phenomenon would occur with Dousa in that he made a rather
slow, even dunce-like impression while in reality his thoughts had
rushed a long way ahead of the conversation, which meant that
what he said already had nothing to do with that which he was
thinking at the time; the words, uttered casually and carelessly,
were to him but a small step in a dizzying train of thought, but to
a blunt soul such as Woutersz these were the only things that
mattered. It was like Zeno's paradox about the contest between
Achilles and the tortoise: once Achilles has caught up with the
tortoise the latter has already left again. Likewise, Woutersz kept
ahead of him all the time. The thinker's thoughts were faster than
reality yet they never caught up with it.

This time, however, that jobsworth did not know what to do
with himself, and it gave Dousa pleasure to continue at walking
pace, just ahead of the bailiff, so that the latter had to speak up
beyond his powers and could not be sure whether he was being
understood. The lane was narrow and no matter how Woutersz
manoeuvred on his big Gelder stallion, he remained uncomfortably
situated, half hidden behind Dousa, while the bare little twigs of
the trees lashed his face.

Quite soon, Dousa lost himself in thought and he forgot his
retinue. He remembered his plan to acquire land on the North side
so that his estate would reach to the Lijdweg and he would be able
to withdraw altogether within the seclusion of his domain. He
relished the trees, some of which were showing their bare skeletal
shapes and others were adorning their last days with a glow of
gold-leaf - and it annoyed him that he did not know the names of
the trees. He resolved to enquire into this and to make a study of
nature. One did, after all, first have to study things individually
before being able to fathom the whole. There was so much one
passed over unheeding, there was so much there without one
being aware of about it. Those trees just stood there and quite
simply begged to be understood by him. Suddenly, Dousa was
gripped by the impatient desire to know how they came into
being, how they grew and why there were trunks and branches
and all that leaf-cover that died and was reborn. And above him
the sky stretched out in incomprehensible blueness. He was in a hurry; he wished to lock himself away in his library as soon as
possible to delve into some books. Plodding along here, snail's
pace, in the company of useless souls, was wasted time: all time
not devoted to study was wasted time.

He had not noticed that the bailiff had overtaken him and he
was startled when his way turned out to be barred: Woutersz had
taken up position at right angles to the lane and he burst in
brutishly upon Dousa's thoughts. He spoke confusedly, probably
because he had been made to wait so long for his opportunity and
now he was standing in all his glory in front of his lord, he no
longer quite knew what it was he had been waiting for. His
sentences reached out for something that always remained unmentioned; they twisted and turned and became encrusted with words
they were unable to shake off. It pleased Dousa to let the
uneducated bailiff wrestle to such an extent with the language as
though it were a thing too large for him to grasp. But in due
course the confusion of his otherwise so punctual bailiff began to
worry him nevertheless, and when he was asked to accompany the
bailiff, he did not demur.