Authors: Karel van Loon
The coffin sinks slowly into a space below the room. Then the floor closes. And that’s that. I cry without stopping, without a sound, without tears. I shake hands.
‘My condolences.’
‘Thank you.’
‘My condolences.’
‘Thank you, too.’
‘My condolences.’
‘My condolences.’
‘My condolences.’
‘My condolences.’
Of all the shitty words in the language, there’s no shittier word than ‘condolences’.
O
n deck, out of the wind and in the sun, it’s warm enough for us to take off our jackets. We left the car at the harbour. Our backpacks are
between us on the hardwood bench. A dark-brown plume of smoke drifts over our heads towards the mainland. Gulls glide along with us, their wings motionless. A child gets a piece of bread from its
mother and holds it out for the birds at arm’s length. A huge herring gull swerves closer. Within a few inches of the child’s hand, it hangs in the air. Effortlessly. Its cold eye
assesses the situation. Then it strikes, fast as lightning. Immediately, a couple of other gulls start shrieking loudly and the chase begins.
The child starts crying.
Bo laughs and glances over at me. Our eyes meet. Nothing else is necessary.
Eider ducks are bobbing in the harbour at Nes, the young males half in beautiful white array, half in the sombre brown of the female of their species, as though they dressed in a hurry this
morning. We take the bus to Hollum, where we’ve rented a house, or rather part of a house, the old entrance hall of a renovated farm. It has two little bedrooms, one barely big enough for a
double bed, the other a single with a window looking out on a stone wall. Bo automatically puts his things in the little room.
‘Don’t you want to sleep in a nice big bed for once?’ I ask.
He hesitates for a moment.
‘Yeah,’ he says then. He picks up his backpack and tosses it in a graceful arc onto the double bed in the room across the little corridor. The pack bounces and Bo drops onto his back
beside it.
‘Not bad,’ he says.
I put my bag in the empty cabinet that’s been squeezed in between wall and bed in the little room, and test my own, narrow mattress.
‘Nice and hard,’ I shout.
He comes and stands in the doorway, a broad grin on his face.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘I could get used to this.’
I throw a pillow at his head. He ducks.
‘Coffee?’ he shouts from the kitchen.
Besides Amsterdam, the islands are the only place in Holland where I can truly be happy. The sea, the wind, the space, and above all the changelessness. From the bus I
didn’t see one building that hadn’t been there ten years ago, the last time Monika and I were here. They’ve built a new cycle path, or maybe just repaved the old one, but
that’s the only sign of progress. I hate ‘progress’ – it’s a worn-out excuse for ugliness. ‘You’re even more conservative than your old dad,’ Ellen
always says, and she’s right. My father could wax lyrical about the craftsmanship of a Louis XVI chair, but when he furnished his own kitchen he opted for plastic folding chairs from Ikea.
‘Easy to store, and easy to keep clean.’ I don’t have anything against Ikea, but why do they have to make bright-blue and hard-yellow stores that clash so loudly with the green
Dutch landscape? After all, even without those colours we’d know it’s a Swedish company, wouldn’t we? And besides, aren’t all the chairs and sofas, carpets and duvets piled
up inside in such staggering quantities mostly made by underpaid workers in tropical low-wage countries? But my father said you couldn’t shoulder the suffering of the whole world, that you
had to keep life simple. Fighting against progress, he said, was as senseless as complaining about the weather. He was right. But still. Dying is also a form of progress, and fighting against death
is also as futile as complaining about the weather, but does that mean we should welcome death with open arms? Next week I’ll have to clear out his house. The plastic chairs from Ikea, the
bed where he slept with my mother, the chair he died in. That he won’t be there to tell me how to lift things and how I should take the bookcase apart and which clothes should be got rid of
and which absolutely not – is that progress?
We drink the coffee Bo made – in the ugly white-and-grey speckled coffee machine on the equally ugly plastic counter – from Old Dutch cups with Old Dutch pictures of church steeples
and cantilever bridges, and we eat the shortbread biscuits I’d brought along for the crossing but which we never got to, in the spring sunshine on the calm waters of the Wadden Shallows, busy
as we were with the aerial acrobatics of the gulls.
‘What are we going to do first?’ I ask Bo when we’ve finished our coffee. ‘Go to the beach, or out on to the mudflats?’
‘Is it low tide?’ he asks in turn.
Good question. That’s another reason why I love the islands: on the islands, nature is still important. Whether the tide is out or in. Whether the wind is pounding the water against the
dyke, or against the dunes. Whether the moon is bright enough to go looking for owls. Whether the lapwing is brooding. Whether the brent-geese have come back, or just left for their nesting grounds
in western Siberia.
We decide to go to the shallows. We’ll see what the tide’s doing. (When we arrived on the ferry it was low tide, but was the tide
already
low, or was it
still
low?
– stupid city slickers don’t notice details like that.) I take my binoculars along, and Bo has the old biscuit tin in which he puts the curios he somehow finds in the tall grass,
beneath dense shrubbery, in the nooks and crannies between brick or basalt blocks on every walk we take.
As we climb up onto the dyke, amid the sheep and the screeching lapwings (they’re brooding), I think about how easy it is here to forget about all the cares you had in the city. Here,
where nothing changes but the weather and the tides, it’s easy to go back in time. (Is that the only reason why I abhor progress, because I want to go back in time? I don’t dare answer
that.)
We’re in luck: the mudflats are empty and dry.
We stand beside each other on the dyke and look at the world at our feet. Above a shivering line of white light, we see the Frisian coast suspended on the horizon.
‘How far away is that, as the crow flies?’ Bo asks.
‘About ten kilometres.’
‘An eight-metre decline.’
‘Give or take a bit.’
‘A fata Morgana.’
‘Precisely.’ And we laugh and walk down the dyke and step onto the thick, greasy mud. A pair of oystercatchers fly up, protesting loudly.
We walk for a while in the direction of the Frisian mainland, saying nothing. I search for words to describe the smell of the shallows, but can’t find them. Then Bo says, ‘What I
don’t understand is why, when you’re in a polder, you never see half a church steeple. Or half a utility tower.’
‘What?’
‘I mean, when a yacht goes away from the coast, you see it slowly disappearing over the horizon, right? Until all you can see is the top of the mast – at least, that’s what
they say. But why does that only happen at sea? It has to apply to dry land too, doesn’t it? In Flevoland you can easily look all the way to the horizon, but I’ve never seen half a
utility tower sticking up. Why not?’
I look at him, astonished. I had never thought of that.
‘If you ask me, that’s an excellent question for your geography teacher.’
We walk on across the brown, muddy flats until we arrive at a channel where invisible fish are cutting V-patterns in the shallow water.
‘What do you think?’
‘Mullet?’
‘That’s what I think, too.’
We’ve caught them before, Bo and I, those fast, round fish. With a borrowed fly rod, using a green fly that was supposed to look like a piece of floating algae. Their fighting was
spectacular, they jumped out of the water, sprinted impressively. And they tasted good, too.
We stand there for a while, staring longingly at the movement just below the surface, until suddenly the silence around us is broken by shouts. From the west, five figures are approaching,
silhouetted against the pale spring sky. The wind blows in snatches of excited conversation. A high girlish laugh. A boy’s voice shouting ‘Coward’ or ‘Bastard’. As
though we’ve been caught doing something, Bo and I start walking at the same moment. The channel bends off in the direction of the five young people. Three girls. Two boys.
‘Hello,’ one of the boys says when we get near. ‘Have you seen any seals around these parts?’
‘No,’ I reply.
‘But you do have them around here, don’t you?’ one of the girls asks.
‘Sometimes,’ Bo says.
‘See?’ the girl says. ‘You just don’t know anything about nature!’ And she smiles at Bo and says, ‘Those black and white birds with the orange bills, those
are oystercatchers, right?’
‘That’s right,’ Bo says.
‘See? Thank you very much.’
And then they walk on, the boys a little quieter now, the girls a little louder.
Bo remains standing and digs the tip of his boot into the mud. I walk on a few paces, then turn around and wait for him. I see the girl who asked him about the oystercatchers glance back over
her shoulder. She’s wearing a black baseball cap, and her eyes glisten in the half-shadow of the visor.
‘She was flirting with you,’ I say.
But Bo doesn’t say a word. He pulls something shiny out of the mud and puts it in his tin.
E
llen rolls onto her side and pulls the duvet up over her bare breasts. The smell of sex hangs over us like a reassurance. Her feet are stroking
mine. For the first time in weeks, the glass wall that’s separated us since we heard the test results has vanished. For the first time, when I came I didn’t think: how senseless!
I don’t know whether it’s ever been the object of study (can’t imagine it hasn’t), but I believe that people who have just been to a funeral have a much greater need for
sex than usual. Death as aphrodisiac. Sex as a way to thumb your nose at the Grim Reaper: look at us celebrating life, you can’t keep us down!
‘What are you thinking about?’ Ellen asks.
‘About that other time, after another funeral.’
‘Do you still regret that?’
‘No . . . no, not regret. But.’
‘But what?’
‘But this time it wasn’t just the two of us, either.’
‘There were three of us.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you think about her, too?’
‘Yeah.
We’re both silent. Her hand strokes my side, my chest. I close my eyes and think about Monika. Ten years – and still not dead and buried. I feel a tear running down my cheek, hanging
on my chin for a moment, hesitating, then dripping onto my chest. Ellen kisses my forehead, my eyes, my nose, my cheeks, my mouth. I pull her up close.
‘Go ahead and cry,’ she says. ‘Just cry.’
And I push my face into her hair. I kiss her neck. I kiss my own tears off her breast. I lay my head on her belly, which is moist and sticky.
‘Dear Armin, poor, dear Armin.’
‘Kiss me, just kiss me.’
And she kisses me and strokes me. She embraces me. She squeezes me. And then her heart breaks. Then the dykes break behind which she’s been hiding her sorrow for weeks. I feel her body
bucking beneath the violent stream of emotions. I hold her tight. I stroke her hair, her back, I press her against me with all the strength I have in my body.
‘Go ahead and cry,’ I say. ‘Just cry.’
And she cries and cries and cries, and this time I can comfort her. At least I’ve achieved that much in the space of ten years: that I don’t kick her away from me, like a cornered
animal.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed. Naked and sweaty and stunned.
‘Out of here!’ I screamed. ‘Go! Go! Go! Goddamn it, what are you doing here!?’ I picked her clothes off the floor and threw them in her face. ‘Get
dressed!’
I hopped into my jeans, pulled a sweater over my head. She stayed on the edge of the bed, as though she was drugged.
‘Get dressed!’ I screamed again. I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her to her feet. And she awoke from her state of shock and pushed me aside with gentle force and got
dressed. Calmly and efficiently.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at the door; then she turned and left. I tore the sheets off the bed and stuffed them into the washing machine. In the hall I found an earring that must
have fallen in among the sheets and I picked it up and went into the bedroom and opened the window and threw the earring away. Then I undressed and had a shower and scrubbed myself with soap and
water so hot I could barely stand it. Very gradually, I grew calmer, and after I’d dried off I put on Monika’s bathrobe and sat on the sofa and rang my mother and asked,
‘How’s Bo doing?’
‘He’s asleep. How are you doing?’
‘Good. Bad.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want to sleep over here?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
But I didn’t dare to go back into the bedroom again that night. I stayed on the sofa and buried my face in the folds of the bathrobe that still smelled of Monika, who we had buried that
morning.
I’d bought ten bunches of white roses at the market on the Albert Cuypstraat. And Bo and I had cut the blossoms from the stems and put them in the little plastic bucket Bo played with
wherever there was sand.
‘These flowers are for Mama.’
‘When do I give them to her?’
‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.’
And that morning, at the side of the freshly dug grave into which the undertaker’s men had just lowered the coffin, I said to Bo, ‘Shall we give her the flowers now?’
‘Okay.’
Bo had dipped his little hand into the bucket, and when the first rosebuds landed with a soft thud on the lid of the coffin I heard Monika’s mother burst into tears behind us, but we
didn’t pay any attention and we went on tossing the flowers in until the bucket was empty and Bo took a step forward and said, ‘Bye, Mama.’ And I took him by the hand and together
we walked back to the auditorium, to the coffee and the cake and the condolences. Monika’s parents accepted condolences, but condoled with no one themselves. All they did was pick up Bo for a
moment. They almost squeezed him flat. Then they left without saying goodbye.