Amsterdam Stories (15 page)

And twenty-eight years farther on down the road to the grave he saw his father's gray head. He had always done well too and had not accomplished anything special either. He saw himself with exactly the same head having trudged along for another twenty-eight years and felt like he was his own father. And twenty-three years behind him trudged his daughter, still just a little girl. Bobi wouldn't get anywhere in the next twenty-three years either and yet she would walk the same road he was walking, the same and yet different. It was an absolutely meaningless procession, the little poet thought. It weighed on his soul.

But inside this harmless, proper, bourgeois young gentleman there still lived something that wasn't a gentleman but a person, someone who didn't want to just die, who wanted to build a tower of his own that reached up into the blue sky and would stand forever. And who was a wild animal too, who wanted to devour all the indifferent creatures, living and dead, who acted like he wasn't there, and wanted to keep devouring and devouring until it was all wolfed down and he was the only thing left with nothingness.

But he didn't know how to start, so nothing ever came of it. He never got any farther than having a poem accepted in a magazine now and then. The
Handelsblad
praised him, but they praise so many people; Professor Scharten, thank heavens, called him “very promising”; his friends, who had turned into serious men, said an appreciative word or two about it when they saw him, but they no longer got very worked up about anything. And slowly the issues of the magazines began to crumble away, just like the little poet's life, and other than that nothing happened. The people in the office didn't read any magazines but he wrote under a pen name anyway.

One time, on a pleasure cruise, he saw a young couple, fiancés, sitting and looking at the water—the boy had his right arm around the girl's shoulder and held her right wrist tight and she had put her left hand on his right hand and they sat like that, pressed close together. The little poet looked at them, it's so lovely to see a nice young couple like that. That these children are excited because they want more, that they are only getting each other worked up for what they can't do and don't dare to do, that they never know where to stop— no one ever notices that or thinks about that. It was very lovely, and maybe the truth was that they had just recently gotten engaged and were still satisfied with being madly in love with each other. Then they looked at each other and he said:

and he kissed her on the lips. She blushed: “That man is watching.”

That was the only time in his life that the little poet ever felt his own life being lived in someone else's head, and he was even more embarrassed than the girl and blushed too and gave a quarter to the man who came around collecting money for the musicians.

After that there was no one, among the dead or among the living, who showed that they had any idea of what the little poet felt in that poet's head he was dragging around with him to his inglorious grave.

The little poet had had enough. He had one good thing left:

But he threw it into the kitchen stove. There was no fire in the fireplace since it was summer.

And then he got so enraged at everything, living and dead, that he interrupted his endless eroticism and wrote a grim and bitter little book that made him famous right away. But that happened later, we'll get to that.

For the time being he only gritted his handsome teeth and then he said out loud, alone in his room, “To become a great poet and then to fall, dammit!” He had untied the laces of his shoes and he kicked one of them off with such violence that it startled the missus downstairs.

That was in the summer. By fall the little poet had gotten to the point that it was “impossible” to get away from the office. His aunt had reason to be pleased—her nephew was “terribly busy.” He spent three or four evenings a week at the office. He was supposed to spend a week with her, in Velp (she was living in retirement at the time, having sold the family business), but he couldn't get away, just like a real businessman.

On Sundays he read the mail, anything so as not to have to think. When visitors dropped by, Coba would say, “I think from Shanghai. Shanghai, isn't it, Eduard?” And Auntie could already see in her mind's eye an announcement saying that “our esteemed colleague of many years is hereby, as of 1 January”—that was a bit quick—“as of 1 July, a member of our board of directors.”

But it didn't turn out that way.

His father-in-law was dead. Dad had always wanted to live in the country and for four years he raised chickens and fed the peacock and planted fruit trees, which died. And he kept the accounts. Eggs cost six cents each in the village store while theirs cost them eight cents each, but when he walked into his kitchen with a half dozen eggs and wiped his feet on the mat, he felt that for twelve cents extra you
do
get something.

And Mom went along with it, she shared his new life as much as she could and didn't let anything show, just like good old-fashioned moms from the old days. At night, alone by the lamp, she gazed at the paper over her glasses and thought about Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam.
She
could never go to bed at nine. She used to see the streetcars moving across the square down by Mauritskade in the evening when she looked out from her upstairs apartment, see the lights gliding by. And the trees in the Muiderbosch, waving back and forth against the dark sky, bare of leaves, full of crows' black nests. That's when you really longed for summers in the country. And she thought about the shops on Saturday evening and the crowds shopping and how she herself used to walk down Van Swindenstraat with her shopping basket under her apron back when they weren't doing so well.

You could really talk to people back then. Yes, oh, and Dapperstraat market with the two rows of carts, produce and fish and cheese and cups and saucers, and smoky oil lamps and serene white gaslight from homemade gas in little globes. People jostling and hurrying everywhere. After they had been posh a long time she still went on Saturday evenings to buy smoked eels from the cart with the tall black poles sticking up with the jaunty copper knobs on top. Until a girl in a big multicolored skirt and short hair with no hat on said, “Jeezus, the millionaires're out buyin' eels.” A tramp like that, with brown shoes on.

And then Mom began to drift off, in the whispering silence, and sat nodding off with her glasses in her right hand until she bent too far forward and woke herself up with a start. “Oh! I thought I heard the streetcar bell …”

Meanwhile, up in her bedroom, Dora was writing a short story about “Him” in a ten-cent schoolbook and she told herself that He was someone she didn't know, someone still to come. And the notebook was shoved away into the back of a drawer that no one could get to, and she blushed even though she was alone and no one knew anything about it.

Em was engaged to a bookkeeper in Amsterdam and talked about her house, which they hadn't found yet. She was thinking about having a baby. Weird, a boyfriend like that, who said “insofar as that is concerned” and “alternatively,” and stood with a sharp crease in his black worsted wool pants next to the henhouse, and always had something to say to Dad about “the Bovenkerks,” Mr. Bovenkerk the coal merchant and Mrs. Bovenkerk who summered in Zandvoort at the Mon Désir and Bovenkerk Junior who was about to take his final exams. And so on. Em got very angry when Dora once said, “Look, it's the Bovenkerk.” She'd answered “Go make love to the IJsseldijk” and almost added “you old prune”— Dora was one year older—but luckily her upbringing kept the upper hand. Dora turned bright red but said nothing. “Could she have read one of my notebooks? But I never leave them lying around!” Yuck, what a brother-in-law. And when he wore that white sweater! And those eyes! A real gentleman, the kind who never looked at anything while he walked down the street except to see if someone he knew was coming in the other direction. And so spineless. How could Em stand a man like that!
She
would rather stand against a pine tree. No, Coba had done much better. A husband like an ocean! And suddenly she had a vision of white sand and sun and sea and surf and red and blue swimsuits and white dresses and white and red parasols. And of dunes with hollowed-out sides, with tufts of grass on top bowed down by the wind. And of a wave that knocked her down in the water. She could taste the salt.

Now Dad was dead and they were moving. Mom was planning to live back on Linnaeusstraat, across from Oosterpark. Em was going to get married the following year and Dora had to get a job. Just helping around the house and staying with people here and there and not actually doing anything only makes you restless. First she was planning to go visit a friend in Berg en Dal for a few weeks, to recover a little from the unpleasantness of the past few weeks, and then she'd be ready to join her mother in Amsterdam.

E. would bring her. It wasn't easy to get another day off from the office but he would have to just do it.

Dora looked at him—how strangely he was talking!

In the train they were polite and obliging to each other but said very little. They rode over the IJssel and the Rhine and Dora looked out at the rivers with her big quiet eyes, sitting straight up in her black dress, hands in her lap, until she could no longer see them and still she sat there and looked out.

And he glanced at her face now and then and then back out the window so as not to bother her. Then he tried to see if he could picture her in his mind, bit by bit at first, her forehead, and how her hair lay above it, slightly wavy, and her eyelids and her long dark lashes and then her black eyebrows up above, and then all that together with her eyes, especially her eyes, he saw them floating above the cornfields, and her nose just the least bit upturned, so delicate, and her mouth, the pursed red lips, and the little ears pink and translucent, visible through the hair hanging over them, and the stray hairs in front of them and her jaw, so noble and long, with a sharp little chin with a dimple in it. And then he couldn't keep himself from looking back at the two little vertical ridges under her nose.

He shut his eyes for a moment and saw her whole face clearly, her tan cheeks too now. And it was also visible perfectly clearly outside, in front of the row of poplars, which had only a very few leaves left on them. Since it was October already. He had to laugh at the people who thought he was a respectable, upstanding gentleman.

“Say, is it true you stay late at the office every day now?” He nodded. “Do you have to?” He shrugged. “Why do it then?” He laughed again. “To get ahead in the world. You don't get it for free.” Didn't sound like much fun to her. “What do you want to do, then?”

“Look at things … and think … and write …” she said, with the slightest hint of a blush …” at least if you can.”

He gave a nastily knowing smile. “Impossible, Dora. That won't get you anywhere. The dumb animals are better off. Don't you think Bovenkerk is a happy man?”

Her big eyes opened wide with quiet shock. “Oh, but to write what you think is so amazing—whoosh, whoosh, you don't even know how you're doing it and suddenly there it is, exactly the way it has to be. And when you read it later you're right back in your own earlier life again and yet you don't know if you're yourself or someone else.” Her eyes sparkled, there were tears in them. She wasn't blushing self-consciously anymore. She sat there with her head on her right hand and her elbow on the little shelf in front of the window and gazed out. And the little poet thought: “She's the real thing,” and: “Now they think I'm a respectable, upstanding gentleman.”

But he stayed bitter and knowing. “God carries us up to the heights only to hurl us back down again. The path over the summit is short but the valleys are long. Anyone who has been to the mountaintop spends the rest of his days in misery.”

She shook her girlish head slowly, so sweetly, and at the same time so thoughtfully. “I'll
always
live on the mountaintop.”

He wanted to say “Good!” but said nothing. She looked out at the Waal River. “Beautiful, huh?” And suddenly she stood up, took her hat off the rack, pinned it quickly in place, and, holding it with both hands, feet wide apart for balance, suddenly laughed a reckless laugh like a mischievous girl, her eyes locked with his: “No Bovenkerks for me!” Then she leaned her upper body out the window and looked toward Nijmegen spread across the hills along the river, so un-Dutch, so wanly romantic, house upon house and tree upon tree, and she sang into the wind and the clattering of the train over the bridge.

To be a great poet and then to fall. In the fullness of time.

It was
certainly
a day to forget about 36" white shirts and colored satin for a while.

There was no one there to pick them up. The friend couldn't leave the house since her mother was bedridden and they didn't have a maid. A maid is a sister, not yours or mine but a typesetter's or a mailman's, who crawls around rooms on her hands and knees wiping the floor and takes out the trash and breaks the teacups.

So Dora and the little poet had a cup of coffee in Lent, overlooking the river and with a view of the city and the hills. It had turned into a still, sunny autumn afternoon. The chestnut trees were already bare, their yellow five-fingered leaves with thick gummy stems lay on the ground and dry golden leaves lay everywhere. There was a smell of decaying leaves, which always made the little poet's heart flutter as if he was about to die and awaken, immortal, in just such a
still blue and gold autumn day that would never end. He wiped a thread of gossamer from his forehead. The sky was so blue and cloudless and it looked down at itself in the water and the sun shone golden.