Planus (18 page)

A taciturn and rather woebegone crowd, but making a din with their feet, as everyone was wearing clogs that clattered on the cobblestones, was milling about in the narrow streets, crowding round the small barrows of the fishmongers and costermongers and doing their Saturday evening shopping. Among them were many housewives who, far from being in their Sunday best on this eve of a holy festival, were slovenly dressed in flannel, without fichus, their hair mouldering in the drizzle, their skirts spattered with mud, their drenched stockings sagging round their ankles, their shopping baskets or string bags slung over their arms, purse in hand, queuing up, jostled by swarms of little brats, in front of the delicatessens which were especially well stocked for Christmas Eve, with displays of lavishly garnished sauerkraut, huge plates of truffled galantine and mountains of pate decorated with paper flowers, garlands and small flags, skeins of fat black puddings knotted with rosettes, festoons of succulent liver sausage, chains of red sausages, hanging from all the hooks in the blazingly lit shop; gleaming pyramids of plump hams reached up to the ceiling, electric light bulbs glared from the spaces between the labels on famous products, advertisements,
Good wishes for a Happy Xmas!
frosted in gold and silver, laughing piglets made of terracotta and slotted for use as moneyboxes, and the prices, drawn in coloured ink on elaborate shields, the prices which, no matter what the current price of pork, the desire and appetite of the client, always seem to be wildly out of proportion to one's purse, so that the shopkeeper has to adorn them and display them to advantage to make them seductive and attract customers. Oh, what subtle jugglery, what metaphysical conjuring with hard, prosaic reality! The poorer a district, the more beguiling and insidious is the advertising.

Groups of swaggering sailors loitered at street-corners, their hands thrust deep into their pockets, stretching the material of their trousers tightly across the buttocks and showing their outline, and in front of the bars stood fellows with caps pulled down over their inquisitive, prying eyes, framed in kiss-curls, or with bowler hats on the backs of their heads, revealing their faces which were shaved, scalded, porcine and pink, with heavy jaws clamped on a long cigar that bounced from one corner of the mouth to the other because of a nervous tic, a yellow silk cravat round the neck, their enormous hands embossed with rings, one or two gold teeth glinting when, after a long hawking of the throat, they spat straight ahead of them, surveying everyone, meanwhile, with an aggressive air. The cabarets and beer-saloons were filling up and we could see, through muddy windows that distorted the violently lit scene within, the toughs and the thugs of the port besieging the counters, alternately swallowing little glasses of eau-de-vie and great, foaming tankards, mingling with workmen in blue blouses, bargees in oilskins who ate and drank standing up, cramming their mouths full, gorging and swigging, while others, dreamily leaning against the smoky shutters of the beer-halls and taverns to escape the scrimmage of heavy drinkers of beer and
squidam,
and the masticatory fury of the insatiable guzzlers, lit their pipes amorously and sipped at them like Orientals, to savour and inhale the smoke.

'Let's have a drink,' I said to my companion. 'It's my round.'

'We haven't got time,' Peter replied. 'We mustn't miss the tram. It's a long way to my sister's, you know.'

And he shifted his bag again, stuffing it under his arm and supporting it on his hip.

It was raining.

The street emerged on to a wide canal, one of the numerous branches of the Meuse, and we turned the corner to walk along a quay swept by a wind that blew out the street-lamps and made the bare branches of a row of stunted trees clash together; the sudden gusts inflated the canvas of the fairground booths set up along the edge of the water. It was not yet time, the
kermesse
did not start until six o'clock. The canalside was gloomy. We had to lean forward to make any headway against the violent wind, which bowled along rotted leaves from the plane trees, newspapers, balls of straw and remnants of packing materials, sand from God knows where, and even fragments of shells and strands of seaweed. The rain lashed down in bucketfuls, scourging us, and tornadoes whirled away to the north. We would certainly set sail in a storm tonight, and, at first light, we would find ourselves caught in a hurricane out at sea. God alone knew what we were in for in the North Sea and on the Atlantic! We hurried on. The barges and canal-boats, which are virtually the water-borne caravans of the gipsies who set up fairs in Holland, land of canals, were tugging at their moorings, and the sails, tangled round the long boom, flapped in the wind. Through the portholes we could see the fairground people sitting at table in the stern of their boats, and, hanging from a beam, the acetylene- burner or paraffin lamp illuminating the whole family and swinging, swaying, tilting over the soup-tureen. The gangways grated against the quay. The water lapped loudly. The humped backs of the barges, and the pot-bellied mooring-buoys of the winter landing- stages in this sheltered angle of the canal, rolled heavily, and we could hear the dull booming and thudding of their massive hulks bumping together and grinding against the quay wall.

Apart from a gang of young scamps who were lifting up the flapping canvas covers over the merry-go-rounds to admire the wooden horses trotting in the dark, ripping holes in the canvas of a booth that sold spiced bread and nougat or thrusting their arms through the rents in the lowered curtain of the shooting-gallery in the hopes of reaching some dubious delicacy or a handful of pipes, an,d the Turk's Head, erect on his scaffold where presently he would receive the stunning blows of the mallet but was, for the moment, the only one bravely facing the squalls, the quay seemed to be deserted. However, at each ground-floor window and in the embrasure of each doorway as we passed, a curtain stirred, a skirt swished, heads blonde or brunette appeared in the sash-windows, bodies lean or stout took a pace forward in the winking light of the street-lamps, women called to us, prostitutes off duty and yet still on the look-out, but it was not the peak-hour and ingenuously rouged faces drew back behind the curtains, women in dressing-gowns retired to the shadow of the doorways without insisting, and the girls, feeling cosy and at ease, picked up their knitting again, their arms fleshy or slender, their breasts exposed, their rumps thrust forward, their legs stretched out towards the hearth or straddled before the fire, if they were lucky enough to be sitting inside; the poor devils posted outside, on the contrary, crossed their arms, clamped their legs together and huddled up, for the passages were chilly and they shivered, naked, beneath their macintoshes or muffled themselves up comically, all young, all drab, strangely placid, and passive to an unbelievable degree, suggestive of sleepy and motherly delights, dolls' games rather than the feverish debauchery of Marseille, for example, or Alexandria, or Cristobal, where the whores screech like caged parrots, scratch with their claws, flirt with their eyes and their fans, carry a knife tucked into their chignons and shake their hips to a
cucaracha.
They are cross-breeds, stupid and unhealthy, but diabolical and as dangerous for a young sailor as yellow fever and
vomito negro.

There was a confectioner's at the end of the quay.

'May I?' I said to Peter. 'I'd like to buy something for your sister's children.'

'That's a good idea,' he said.

'What's your name?'

'Jantje.'

It was the eldest, a boy of nine or ten, who was holding his little brother on his knees and giving the bottle to this latest born, a one- year-old baby whose John Thomas was showing.

'And what's this little fellow's name?'

'Sjanke.'

'And yours?' I asked another.

'Fons.'

'And yours?'

'Peer.'

'And yours?'

'Flip,' replied a little scrap sitting on the floor in a pool of wee- wee and starting to cry.

'And this other boy, what's his name and how old is he?'

'That's Guust, he's two, and he's a scream,' said the eldest boy.

Indeed, the little one was watching me and laughing, his tender little teeth showing in his open mouth, and holding out chubby, dimpled fingers towards me. He was lying on his back in an old soap-box, wrapped in a tattered shawl, and had a dummy tied on a string round his neck.

'You know, you're a darling little rascal!' I said, making a face at him, which made him kick and wriggle with delight.

' Is it a girl?'

' Good gracious, no! It's another boy,' said the eldest.

'Tell me, Jantje, how many of you are there altogether? Wait, I'll count up on my fingers and see if I can remember all your names. You, Jantje, the eldest, that's one; Sjanke, the baby, makes two; three, Fons, the tough guy; four . . . Peer, who has a big head like his uncle the sailor, and will be a seaman like him; five . . .'

'Fons and Peer are twins,' cried Jantje teasingly, 'Uncle Peter is their godfather, but they don't want to go to sea, they say it's too dangerous!'

'Is that true?' I asked the twins.

But Fons and Peer glared at me and refused to answer.

'And what do you want to do later on, Jantje?'

'I don't know yet,' the boy declared, 'at any rate, I don't want to stay at home and be a skivvy and look after the babies!'

'Perhaps you would like to work on the railway with your father?'

'No, that's a mug's game and it's back-breaking! I want . . . I want...'

'What?'

'I don't know yet,' said the boy with a sly smile. 'We'll see . . .'

'Right,' I said, 'we'll see. Now, where was I? Five . . . five and six, crying Flip and laughing Guust. That's the lot, isn't it? Six of you?'

'No, there are seven! Caught you there, eh?' shouted the eldest, making fun of me.

'Seven?'

'There's still Tontje, the black viper!'

'But where is he?'

'Oh, him! He hid himself like a snake when you came in. He's a bad 'un, you know. You'll have to go and look for him, he's hiding among the firewood. Hey, you! ...'

I called Tontje and pulled him out from under the firewood. He was a little shrimp of five or six, but, whereas all his brothers were blond, almost ash-blond, had eyebrows like silk-floss and eyelids fringed with a silvery, flaxen down, and heliotrope-blue eyes set in their sockets like two humming-bird's eggs in a nest, Tontje was a swarthy boy with glowing eyes; he was slim, supple and loose- limbed, while his brothers, all cast in the same mould, were stocky, broad-shouldered, plump and short of stature, like their Uncle Peter, my pal, who only came up to my shoulder, an,d like their father, whom I had glimpsed on arrival, and perhaps that was what made Tontje ashamed, being unlike his brothers, and perhaps that was why he fought, yelled, kicked me in the shins with his clogs and bit my hand as I held him by the arm under the oil-lamp in the gloomy hovel where I had foun,d the seven brothers shut up, and where the older ones crouched round a smoking peat-fire on which a cauldron of water was heating. Monsieur Tontje did not like to show himself.

'Go in there,' Peter had said to me, 'you'll find the kids there. My brother-in-law tells me Hanna is lying in. We're out of luck. Here, take the bag and dole out the presents while I go and give my sister a kiss. I'll only be a minute, then we'll clear off.'

And, following his brother-in-law, the railwayman whom we had discovered sawing wood in the yard and who was now carrying an armful of it into the house, Peter disappeared into the little farmhouse, lost between dyke and polder, round which the storm raged furiously, unleashed now and charging like an express train into the tunnel of the night; storm-clouds fell from the sky, vapours rose from the rotting, waterlogged earth, and the hurricane, finding no other obstacle in the whole wilderness than this wretched, lonely farm, bayed with all its fury. It brought home to me the drama of the poor peasants of the Low Countries, who are obliged to live almost underground, to build nothing but molehills and sit tight there, between dyke and polder.

'Don't cry, Tontje,' I said to the bawling kid. 'Be quiet. Look, your uncle has brought you some lovely toys for Christmas. Come here, all of you, there's something for everybody. The red fire- engine with a big ladder, from New York . . . that's for you, Tontje . . . hush, now! . . . And here are frogs that can jump and croak . . . I'll give these to crying Flip and laughing Guust. . . . Look, these are African masks for Peer the Bighead; a bow and arrows for you, Fons, you are the tough guy, and you can put these little statues in the Christmas crib. . . . Don't you have a little sister, Jantje?'

'No, what for? We don't need a little sister!'

'Well, but I've still got some dolls, necklaces, rings, bracelets and glass beads. We'll give one doll to Sjanke and another to this little rascal, Guust, and you can give all these long coral pins and tortoise-shell combs to your mummy, she will be pleased with them. She can have this scarf and these embroidered handkerchiefs, too '

I set aside these tawdry knick-knacks for the mother, so that they would not get scattered and broken, then emptied the sack out on the floor, which was made of beaten earth. I lined up the fetishes from Oceania and Guinea, arranged the dolls in rows, wound up the little clockwork cars and set them in motion. The children were struck dumb, but Tontje still would not stop crying and he refused to look at anything.

'Look, all of you,' I said, 'look at these firebirds, they fly by night!'

I hung the Guatemalan birds from the oil-lamp, where they hovered and spun in the smoke. It was a magical sight. Never had this miserable hovel been illuminated by such fairy-tale enchantment.

'And here are the figures for the Nativity scene, men, women, animals, and the little Jesus, all from Mexico, let's give these to the twins, shall we? And I haven't forgotten you, Jantje; as you're a big boy, I expect you like building things, so here's a big box of

Meccano and a whole tool-set, adjustable spanner, wire-cutters, files, a hammer, everything. With this you can build bridges, cranes, railway stations, aeroplanes, anything you fancy. . . . And that's not all, children, I've brought you some good things to eat. Here, help yourselves! . . .'