The Book of Everything (7 page)

Thomas had never seen her so beautiful. He looked at Father, to see if he'd noticed. Father did notice. His face became as red as the flowers on Aunt Magda's dress.

“Has everyone got coffee?” asked Mother.

Then the chattering broke out again. Thomas could not imagine there ever being silence again in the reading-aloud club.

T
hey had all finished their cakes. Coffee cups and lemonade glasses were empty. Aunt Bea treated Father to a cigar and lit one herself. And then the great moment arrived.

The program began.

Item one: Thomas Klopper recites a poem by Annie M. G. Schmidt.

Thomas stood up. He started with Master Sweet who washed his feet in the aquarium. He knew the whole poem by heart.

When he had finished, there was loud applause.

The old lady with the teeth asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up, Thomas?”

And Thomas said, “Happy. I want to be happy.”

Everyone thought that was a good idea.

But then, suddenly, Father said, “Give a proper answer, Thomas. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I wanted to be happy, and nothing else,” Thomas wrote in
The Book of Everything
. “I searched my brain for a proper answer, but I didn't find anything.”

“Only good-for-nothings and weaklings are happy,” said Father. “Life is a struggle.”

All the aunts and all Mrs. van Amersfoort's friends stared at him as if he had farted. And Mother nervously twisted a strand of her hair.

Thomas sat down and looked at his shoes. Eliza put her good hand over his.

“Have you faced many struggles in your life?” the lady with the teeth asked Father. “Were you in the Resistance? Are you a brave man? Do you protect your wife and children against the evil world? Do you stand up for the weak? Are animals in good hands with you?”

Bewildered, Father stared at her teeth. “Well …” he began.

“Item two on the program,” called Mrs. van Amersfoort. “Music from the portable gramophone.”

She turned the handle. “One of Eliza's records,” she announced.

Music rushed into the room such as Thomas had never heard. A whole lot of instruments were hooting all at once and there was a banging of drums. At first he couldn't make heads or tails of it. But then a bright trumpet gained the upper hand over the others. The trumpet sang and giggled like a skipping angel. It was hard to keep your legs still, because they wanted to skip along.

“Louis Armstrong,” Aunt Bea called out, flashing her gold tooth.

“Oo-ooh!” shouted Aunt Magda. She raised her hands in
the air and shook her upper body. The flowers on her dress bobbed like small boats on choppy water.

Mrs. van Amersfoort got up and handed Thomas the cover of the record. It showed a black man with a shiny trumpet at his mouth.

“That is a black man,” said Thomas, amazed. Because he thought that black people lived on the small coins the children took to school every week for the Missions. And not on trumpets. “I have never seen a black person for real,” he said.

“There are so many things in the world we have not seen,” said Eliza. “For instance, I have never seen a Rolls-Royce for real.”

“Isn't it fantastic music!” Aunt Pie shouted. There was some whipped cream on her upper lip. “It gives me the shivers.”

“Where? Where?” called the old ladies.

“All over,” laughed Aunt Pie. She ran her hands over her blouse and her slacks.

When the music stopped, Father got up. “I've still got a lot of work to do,” he said. He squeezed between a couple of chairs to the door. Thomas hoped he would go to the side room without saying anything. But when he got to the door he turned. “And anyway, I have no desire to listen to heathenish black music,” he said. “And to poems that sound like empty vessels.”

“Tiddlyum, tiddlyum, tiddlyum-tum-tum,” sang Margot.

Father looked at her.

Margot stopped singing. She looked back. She did not look angry, she did not look friendly, she just looked. There was nothing to be read in her eyes.

Then Thomas saw that her eyes started to shine like mirrors. Father looked into those mirrors and saw himself. Nobody saw what he saw, because he was the only one who could look straight into her eyes. He had to face it all alone.

“Margot was no longer afraid,” Thomas wrote in
The Book of Everything
. “And I saw her become a witch before my very eyes.”

The aunts and the old ladies started talking away happily as if it were a perfectly normal thing to happen. Nobody took any more notice of Father.

“Item three on the program!” called Mrs. van Amersfoort. “Thomas recites another poem by Annie M. G. Schmidt.”

And Father just stood there. He stared helplessly into Margot's eyes. Thomas saw that he loved her. And him. And Mother. He saw that Father wanted to stay in the room, but wanted to get away at the same time.

Father was afraid of laughter and joy. He was particularly afraid of ridicule. He was afraid that someone would say that humans are descended from apes. Or that the earth is much older than four thousand years. Or that someone would ask
where Noah got his polar bears from. Or that someone would swear. Father was terrified.

Mother looked back at him.
Come on, love,
she gestured.
Come and join us.

He could not. He did not dare belong with people. He turned and locked himself in the side room.

Thomas saw things other people could not see. He did not know why this was, but it had always been like that. He saw Father clean through the wall. Behind his desk. Alone. Thomas had an awful feeling in his stomach. At first he thought he had swallowed a rhinoceros, but a moment later he understood that he was feeling sorry for his father.

He recited his poem and received his applause, but his mind was not there.

At eight o'clock he had to go to bed, because the following day was a school day. Downstairs, music and laughter went on for a long time. He tried to think about Eliza, and not about Father in the side room. That was difficult.

“I was hoping he was sitting in front of the window so he could think,” he wrote in
The Book of Everything
. “And not on his knees with his eyes closed.” But he knew better.

It had been a wonderful evening all the same. The door had been open and anyone could come in. They had listened to exciting music and amusing poems.

“Come on, love. Come and join us,” Thomas whispered.

“What did you say?” asked a familiar voice.

Thomas couldn't keep his eyes open, he was so sleepy.

“I said, ‘Come on, love, come and join us,'” he murmured.

“Okay,” said Jesus. The Lord sat down on the edge of Thomas's bed.

“It was a great evening,” said Thomas.

“I'm glad to hear it,” said Jesus.

Then they were silent for a while. Downstairs, Louis Armstrong played his trumpet.

“Jesus?” asked Thomas.

“Yes, Thomas?”

“Can you help Papa?”

“I am afraid not.”

It was a pity, but Thomas understood that some people are hard to redeem.

You couldn't ask the Lord Jesus for the impossible.

“Do you think Eliza will wait for me?”

“I would think so,” said Jesus.

“Is it scary when she takes her leather leg off?”

“Of course not,” said Jesus. “You've faced worse things.”

That was true. In his young life, he had already seen quite a few scary things. A Bottombiter, Granddad's artificial teeth, a wooden spoon, a swollen nose, a carving knife, and a woman with outboard teeth. And even so he was going to be happy later.

“Because I am going to marry her, you see,” said Thomas.

The Lord Jesus put a hand on his head and said, “You have my blessing.”

Then Thomas fell asleep and Jesus ascended into Heaven.

The angels were waiting for Him anxiously, heaving deep sighs.

“How are things with Thomas?” one of them asked.

“Yes, how is he?” at least a hundred others asked in unison. They were all hopelessly in love with him, you know.

“He will be all right,” said Jesus.

“Are You going to call him to You soon?” asked a pitch-black angel. “I would so much like to play trumpet for him.”

“No,” said the Lord Jesus. He smiled. “Anyway, none of you would have the slightest chance with Thomas.”

“Why not?” the angels asked, appalled.

“None of you has a leather leg that creaks when you walk,” He said.

That was too much for them. Every single one of them was extraordinarily beautiful, but none had a leather leg. You can't have everything.

Guus Kuijer is one of the Netherlands' best-known and best-beloved writers, with published work spanning short-story collections, novels for children and adults, stage plays, and television scripts.
The Book of Everything
won the Flemish Golden Owl Award, and his
Polleke
series has been made into a feature film. Guus lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

John Nieuwenhuizen's translation of
The Baboon King
by Anton Quintana won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for outstanding literature in translation in 1999.
The Guardian
praised his translation of
In the Shadow of the Ark
by Anne Provoost, describing it as “stately, plain, and elegant.” Born in the Netherlands, John now lives near Melbourne, Australia.