Amsterdam Stories (17 page)

She suddenly saw before her eyes, like a long-forgotten thing, a wide river rushing toward the sea. Its waves propelled the sunlight toward the sea but the water and the light were without end. A little tugboat pulled a long train of boats along a blue and gold trail. The boat was tiny and insignificant, its steam pipe barely reached the sky and its smoke was only just visible, its hoarse cry was lost in space. For hours and hours it moved through the water, between the fields, under an awe-inspiring sky.

And she saw a long road full of dust and sunlight and solitude. And then something else again: a meadow, endless, and an alley of autumn trees a bit farther down, there in the sun, from the side, and all of it full of living gold and of blue sky. And then: a river down in a valley, already dark in the east and the day was dying in the west, yellow at first, far sadness, pale green above that, a day that did not want to die, the darkness powerfully rising, it rose from the land into the eastern sky and hurtled west, and there was the river, red and crying, it wanted to hold on to the light, the light that wanted to stay. And so the river flowed, with the light, down to the ocean she couldn't see.

Then he said: “Penning keeps coming by because of you.” She was taken aback. It took a second before she understood what she had just heard him say.

“Listen, Dora. Accept him. He's going to ask you, I know he will. Accept him, marry him. Don't waste your life on art or anything to do with art.”

She sat the same way she had been sitting. The only difference was that she held her head up slightly higher. She looked at the window, which gleamed darkly with a few little dots of yellow light here and there, from the light of the streetlamp. One of the rare large snowflakes touched the pane and melted. She didn't understand.

He laid his hand on her folded hands, his fingers touching hers along their whole length. And a wild desire surged up out of her body into her head, carried there by her blood, so strong that all of the clothes on her body were unbearable to her. For an instant. But she stood up calmly, holding on to the back of the chair with one hand. “I'm not going to marry.” She said it as though she were telling someone that the accountant had quit. As though he hadn't said anything, he got up from the couch. “Here,” he said, “take this key? It's for the front door. Bonger will come by your apartment to get it around ten. He's staying here tonight. He had to move out of his old place today and can't move into his new place till tomorrow. I told him I wasn't sure if I'd be at home.”

“You're going back out tonight?” She was now completely calm. She felt around on the table for the matches and lit the gas lamp. You couldn't see a thing! “You're going back out tonight?” He shrugged. “Maybe.” She looked straight at him but there was nothing unusual in his face, he looked the same as he often had during the past few days, when he was reciting one of the good bits from
Genghis Khan
and she looked up from correcting the proofs for a moment.

He brought her to the stairs.

“'Night E., see you tomorrow night at Mom's.” He pressed her hand. “G'night Dora,
au revoir camarade
.” For an instant she heard something in his voice that was always there whenever he repeated something his aunt had said. Strange. “Okay, bye.” “Bye!” he called after her as though imitating a sixteen-year-old girl. Then the door slammed shut.

She walked fast and had to dodge around all the puddles. It had almost stopped snowing, the wet flakes that were still falling swirled slowly down, a few landing on her face, which felt good. In the light of a streetlamp she saw the fat buds on one of the chestnut trees along the canal, with little glints of light where the buds were thickest.

There was a straight yellow band of light on the trunk, from top to bottom.

What had happened, actually? Another puddle, how deep it looked with the reflection of the sky in it, a reflected star twinkling in a gap between the clouds. You could get dizzy from staring at puddles all the time while you walked. She knew a sentimental German song about the happiness that was “Behind the Stars.” Or maybe it was deep in a puddle like this, all the way at the bottom. Nonsense, there was probably not even half an inch of water.
Her
day would come too. She
wanted
. But what did she want? Could
she
want something?

It was lovely to walk in the evening alone like this and let your thoughts come and go and come again. And since she was a little poetess she quoted Jacques Perk to herself as she dodged again to avoid a puddle and almost stepped right into another one: “To feel yourself bound to yourself through yourself alone.”

The mild wet wind blew all around her and she took a deep breath. “Easy for you to say.” And honestly, she almost bumped right into a couple standing under a streetlight, kissing. She suddenly felt like a lady: “What a vulgar pair!”
Der minnen vruchten ic u mildelijck gaf, Maer een ewich zuchten houde ic daer af—
“The fruits of love I graciously gave to you, But kept for myself only sighs that last forever.” The lady had vanished but still Dora blushed, all alone under the dark sky, at the “fruits” the woman in the poem had apparently given. And she suddenly remembered the feeling she had just had, my God, not ten minutes before: that all her clothes were absolutely unbearable on her body. She felt her cheeks burn. “It's not going to happen.” Just then she found herself standing on her front stoop. Half past seven.

“Hi Mom, I'll be right back down.”

But when she was up in her room and had thrown off her hat and coat, it became clear to her what had just happened. A powerful feeling of desolation and abandonment came over her, the sense that life was not worth living. She did not understand herself.

Why hadn't she taken his hand and said “I love you”? Why didn't she want to do what she wanted so badly to do? What could happen that would be worse than enduring this living death? Why was she here? Why must she die unkissed? Not just kissed,
really
kissed. She glowed, her whole body glowed, her heart swelled. She unbuttoned her clothes in front of the mirror and looked at her breasts, so white in her black dress, and held them in her hands.

She was pure and untouched. What a joke. And in her great confusion she begged God to defile her. “Am I going crazy?”

Her coat slipped off the bed and landed with a muffled bump. It was the key. A thought shot through her head like a burst of flame: He had said goodbye to her, something was wrong, she had to go back. She calmly splashed some water on her face and put her clothes back on. “I forgot something, I'll be back in half an hour.”

At eight o'clock she was standing in front of his door again and she rang the bell. No sound from inside. She rang the bell again and then resolutely opened the door with the key. No light anywhere. The empty, dark, silent house made her shudder, her heart was pounding, but she bravely went upstairs. The door to the front room stood open, the light from the streetlamp still shone on the ceiling and the red light from the stove still glowed on the floor. “E., where are you?” How horrible that sounded. She ran through the rooms, scared and brave. Then she went up the second flight of stairs. The bedroom door was open a crack, there was light coming from inside. She rushed to push the door open, afraid she would turn around and run away.

“E., what are you doing?” He sat in total silence on the edge of the bed, staring down between his knees at the rug on the floor. He stood up: “Dora.” There was everything in that one word and she heard it.

Then they fell together through the light into unfathomable deeps and they felt their bodies like singing suns.

But in the back of his mind was an ice-cold corner, and in that corner he thought: “It's revenge, she suffers to atone for the world” …

The Devil was sitting in Café De Kroon, in the middle of the room next to a pillar. He placed his thin gold watch on the table in front of him. The two bumps on his forehead were bigger than ever.

“Quarter past eight.
Consummatum est.
”
*

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. The God of heaven and earth was standing behind him. “
Consummatum est
, come see.”

At ten thirty Bonger and Graafland found him. Bonger had gotten the key from the mother-in-law.

He stood stark naked in the middle of the room. His left arm hung at his side, beside his body, fist clenched; his right arm was raised, finger pointing upward. There was a faint scent of lilies of the valley. A blue barrette lay on the floor. The bed was in chaos.

“Eduard!” they both cried at the same time.

“I am God,” he said. “I am greater than God. I am the Immovable, the Merciless. I know no good and evil. I do what I must do. What I do is good.”

Bonger picked up a sheet from the bed and stepped over to him.

“Go away,” he said and took a step back.

Bonger didn't move.

“Didn't I say I was God? I am the eternal life. I am procreation. God has sent me. Do not cover me.”

Again he stepped back.

“Do not cover me. I am procreation. Bring all the women here, all the young women. All of them I say. I know who you are. You're Bonger, the other one's Graafland. I know you all right. Put the sheet on the bed. She must lie on it. The first one, put her on it, naked. The others don't need to leave. They need to see. You can go, Bonger, you too Graafland.”

Bonger put his hand on his shoulder. “Stand still. Put your arm down.”

The arm dropped. Bonger threw the sheet around him. “Sit down on this chair.” He sat. Graafland gathered up his clothes, from the bed, from the chair, from the floor.

“Get dressed.”

He meekly, slowly put on all his clothes.

The little poet is dead now. The people in Delft or Oldenzaal were proven gloriously correct. He was definitely never quite right in the head.

His book is in its fourth printing and his collected poems have been published too, with an introduction by Professor Scharten or someone like that. The weasel who managed to become the financial editor of the
Provincial Arnhem and Gelderland Courant
tells anyone who will listen that they went to school together. And whenever he comes to Amsterdam, which is fairly often, he hurries up to Bonger and rattles on about the little poet and his work and acts important and always says that he sat next to him in school.

Coba is kindhearted and forgiving and unaffected, the way she always was. She has become devout, even without proverbs on the wall to help her, and she goes to the Dutch Reformed Church on Boezemsingel every Sunday, since she lives in Rotterdam now, as punishment for having flirted with someone once while she was married. Kindheartedly and forgivingly she thinks about how she too was walking right on the edge of the abyss.

Dora is an “unwed mother.” She works at an office in Rotterdam where her boss knows her story and doesn't look down on her for it, on the contrary. Which is very unusual for a Rotterdammer.

Thanks to that one man, it seems to me, that abomination of a city may be spared on the Day of Judgment. Which is too bad, actually.

She and her child live with Coba and Bobi and she moves through her life with her head held high, proud and silent. She plans to get her diploma and then, with the money from her father, who is dead, study law. Definitely not literature. She wants to work, not think. But I don't believe that she'll ever stifle her soul. Those dear to God's heart above all others have to bear that burden to the end.

June–July 1917

For those who would like to know more about how love works, I will relate that Little Poet's Dora originated as an idealized version of a young girl for whom I felt, from a distance, an old man's affection.

After she read the manuscript I told her that, and her response was: “But I never played diabolo.” She said it not out of coquetry or embarrassment, she had simply not understood a thing.

N
ESCIO
January 5, 1918

M
Y LIFE
is too short, I can't go any faster, my work is a cathedral and I need a long time, centuries. And how much longer do I have?

It was back when I was still planning to write the big thick book that I'll never write and that you have to have written to become famous, or so they say. A big novel made of reinforced concrete, two volumes if possible, and epic, really epic—the epic saga is the highest genre of literature, I read that somewhere too, more than once. Those people write whatever they feel like. They endlessly make art, dead literature and other dead works of art, and it doesn't seem to kill them either.

I was in love then too, I usually fell in love when all I had from my novel was the title. That's not good for an epic.

When it gets to that point you have to talk about it. You can't always keep quiet. So I talked, I said more in a few evenings than I had in the six months before.

I had met someone that summer, someone I went to school with eighteen years earlier, and right away we started talking and couldn't stop. That happens only once or twice in a lifetime. When one of us talked the other one sat there without thinking about what he was going to say when it was his turn, he listened, eloquently. We couldn't get enough of it.

We sat outside at the Tolhuis café one evening and looked out across the IJ at the city. The electric lights along the railroad embankment burned lavender up above, against a dark blue sky. There was heat lightning around the three sharp spires of the church on Haarlemmerstraat, a train engine was puffing under the glass and iron roof of Centraal Station, the streetcar drove grumbling across De Ruyterkade, the water rose and fell, desolate, cold blue, in nervous, short, paltry waves, made a weak noise against the stone edge of the seating area and smelled faintly of stagnant water. Nearby, in total silence, a fisherman's little boat lay on the water, its bare mast sticking scrawnily up against the dark city with its tip in a light patch of sky. I saw that the little boat looked tall from the front and short from the back and I liked just looking at it like that.