Amsterdam Stories (19 page)

Other than that his story was like countless others. Laid off from his office, or “rationalized away” as the phrase went, with half a year's salary, eventually on public assistance, a few odd jobs here and there. “I would invite you out …” He fell silent, looked down at his milk pot. “I'm staying with my brother and his wife, also unemployed. Nothing fancy, it's no manor house with a garden.” Again he fell silent, it was a rather miserable attempt at a little joke. “You must live around here?” I said. “Take your milk pot home and come with
me.
” “You won't take me anywhere fancy?” “Stop whining and come along. We'll never have anything as nice as we used to anyway.” He raised his pince-nez to look at me. “You think we won't?” He tapped his forehead, the way the assistant director had, but slowly and thoughtfully. “
Here
you can have everything as nice as you want.” “All right then, drop off your milk and let's go.”

And so then we were sitting in De Poort van Muiden, with a view of the Colonial Museum and the vestiges of the Muiderbosch forest, and we kept our coats on since the heating wasn't the best, and the waiter stood at our table and looked down at the dingy shoulders of Flip's dingy coat. He stared a little too hard and too long, but
my
coat was still in good shape, three years old and barely worn and that made up for a lot.

And so then we were sitting across from each other again, he who'd been rationalized away and I who had done some rationalizing of my own until I'd collapsed under the absurdity of it all. And then we were drinking coffee together again, stubbornly ignoring that it was coffee substitute, and his drooping mustache hung over the rim of his coffee cup and a little coffee was left on his mustache and to get the conversation going I asked Flip if he remembered how the woman at the office used to attach his vest to his pants with a safety pin because his shirt always used to hang out in the front. And how the boss had suggested that maybe it was time to buy a new suit. “And while you're at it, buy a hat instead of that cap.” And how he'd bought a derby hat, after all a writer and do-gooder and reformer out to change the world is an office worker too, in the end, he can't get by without his salary, but he hadn't bought the suit, he couldn't afford it. Flip, stained blue because he could never figure out the typewriter, neither the ribbon nor the carbon paper, and so he smudged and smeared everything, his hands, his paper, his face.

He wiped his mustache with a napkin that wasn't entirely clean to begin with. He stood up and hung his fur cap on the coat rack, he was getting warm. His hair rose up on one side of his part, the same as it used to, but it was a color there is no name for. Not gray, or yellow, or dirty brown either, but with something of all of those, more or less. It was a head of hair both full and pathetic, the same as his mustache, the whole man was rather sad and resigned just then, rather gray and furrowed, rather too much of a piece with his dingy coat that the waiter had so objected to. He objected to the man himself, as a matter of fact, and he stood at the back of the café with a napkin draped over his arm, looking outside, and clearly not finding the whole situation very much to his taste.

Yes, Flip remembered it all very well. He smiled, but only weakly, and he still looked a little teary, but the tip of his nose wasn't as red anymore.

I summoned the waiter and ordered two rolls with butter and ham and had already calmly put the ration cards on the table before he could say anything. “And two more coffees.” I saw him take a look at my coat; he almost looked human. “Yes, sir, just a moment.” “Really,” Flip said. “I eat all day long,” I lied. He sat there resigned.

When the waiter came back, he was human. He had two plates, he looked at me for a moment then put one in front of Flip and one in front of me, and each of them had two thin slices of bread with ham, and Flip said “Oh,” and the coffee (not coffee substitute— there was no such thing), the coffee gave off curling wisps of steam and Flip sat there quietly and looked at me over his pince-nez again with his extremely nearsighted eyes and then he smiled, not pathetically anymore but the way you smile at someone who has done you a real favor. That was nice of Flip.

Then he turned his full attention to the food and drink and we didn't say anything for a while. His mustache kind of spoiled things, but was also kind of nice in its own way. And then I said, “That book of yours, remember?” The book that was finally published, and reviewed (a bit condescendingly), and not read, and forgotten almost twenty years ago. Flip just shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. At the time he had found it rather depressing. But it wasn't much of a book anyway, he knew that now.

“I've thought of you often, Dikschei, and envied you, because you will leave something good behind you. Good for you and for me and for a few other people, at least. I'm long past that. Not that I don't think it's very nice, what you wrote, for me and the few other people, but as for me … I've long since given up on immortality. Everything ends in …” He paused for a moment, looked sadly outside. “In snow and ice.” I fidgeted.

He wiped his mouth again. Then he looked right at me through his pince-nez and said, “How do I seem to you, actually?” I said I had to think about it. “You can just say it. I know perfectly well how I am, and how I seem to you too. I seem pathetic.” I stayed silent a moment longer, looked down at the lenses of his pince-nez, and then nodded.

“I'm not pathetic. I am an island.”

“An island,” I said, as expressionlessly as I could. “Isn't everyone an island?”

“Maybe, I don't think much about everyone, but
I
am an island.”

Silence for a while. I stared at the ring of a coffee stain on the table. “It won't come out,” Flip said, wiping it with his semi-clean napkin. The waiter was standing a ways off, still waiting for customers who never came. He looked disapproving.

“Not just an island. I am a big island. There is everything on it. You remember the Dommel with its bends, its half-ruined little bridges, its half-ruined waterwheels, its meadows, its wheat fields, its willows and poplars. Do you remember Valkenswaard, Dommelen, Keersop, Breugel and Son?”

I nodded to each one.

“And the Moerdijk? And the Tongeren cathedral? And the chalk cliffs of Dover the way we saw them from Sangatte over the calm, rippled, blue sea? And the view of the IJssel and the Veluwe near Westervoort? Can you see the Gooi forests from here across the Loosdrecht lakes? Stand at the ferry landing and see Schoonhoven across the Lek in the half dark and hear the bell towers toll eight o'clock?”

I just nodded. I saw it all very clearly. Later I would return to every one of those places, more than once.

“No snow, no ice. Just whole rivers of flowing water. The Rhine, the Waal, the Maas, the Scheldt below Antwerp. I can't name them all. And cities: Middelburg, the way it used to be, Maastricht, Hattem, Lier, Saint-Omer, I can't name them all. All of the Netherlands, and Belgium, and a corner of France. I've carved out the worthless parts.”

“And not occupied?”

He looked up. Now
he
had to stop and think for a minute. He looked back down at the ring.

“The Occupation?” he said, musing. “I've never thought about that. No. How could someone occupy me? That has nothing to do with me. Being poor has nothing to do with me either. My island is a sanctuary, a monastery. Without walls, an enormous monastery. Dapperplein isn't there. And when I'm standing on Dapperplein I'm not there myself.”

We were silent. Then he asked: “What time is it? … Twelve thirty, then I have to go, they're waiting for me, my brother and his wife.” He didn't say: “go home.”

We left. I saw that he still had good shoes, greased leather with thick soles, big and unwieldy but strong and whole.

“Where do you live?”

I gave him my address. “You have to come see me,” I said. “I'm home almost every morning from ten thirty to noon in this weather. And evenings, when we're allowed to go out again.” He looked thoughtful. “All right. Yes, I'll come, I'll come by in the next couple of days. I feel like talking.”

I walked home, watching where I set my feet, and finally reached the canal ring and looked around. Everything there was white, I thought about the eventual death of all things, there were mounds of hard sticky snow on the ice, six half-dead gulls sat shivering between the piles of snow, you almost couldn't see them. This used to be my water, reflecting the houses lit by the sun and their reflections glittered with sunlight too. There was no water
anywhere
. Middenweg lay there dead and white, but in the distance black trees rose up from the white and waited. “How much longer?”

I kept walking, on a path of hard dirty-brown and white muck. The world was gone again, all that was left was the path and my galoshes.

Luckily it's thawing.

We're sitting, each on one side of my stove, in comfortable low chairs and each smoking a little cigar and the flames in the stove dance gently up and down.

Luckily it's thawing. You can see the sky through the windows again, a damp, mild, gray sky. The windows had been frosted over for a long time, while the stove burned, and the house was besieged by winter.

Luckily it's thawing. I've stretched out my legs and I lean back with my hands behind my head and look at Flip and Flip looks into the fire and smokes intently, the way you can only smoke in wartime when there are no more cigars.

Then he says: “Lucky that it's thawing. I already felt a drop on my skull from a house. On the way here.”

I look at Flip and listen and feel my youth, supposedly past, I see and hear my youth and I feel my freedom. I'm free, after forty years I'm free, and I can cut my hair whenever I feel like it and let it grow too if I want.

Insula Dei.

He is dressed well. A dark black suit with narrow gray pinstripes, a bright white collar, a blue tie with little white polka dots. A suit left over from his better days, saved and cared for, probably six or eight years, a suit to apply for jobs in, at least if he's kept that illusion. Illusion! The knees are a bit shiny, maybe some other patches too. But he's come to see me in a hat with no visor, a beret, and a drop of water fell on it and he felt it through the hat.

Flip holds his cigar under his nose and smells it intently. We are in the time when the cigar shops have empty boxes in their display cases and a sign hanging on the door: “Sold Out. Please do not ring unnecessarily.” I know that I have sixty-five cigars left, after these two, and I don't think any farther ahead than that.

“I still had a few genuine Havanas,” Flip says. “Last year, when I was staying with my brother in Eindhoven, I always used to light one up after a meal, in secret.” He smiled. “In secret?” “Yes, I didn't want to share them with him. One-and-a-half-guilder cigars.” I say “Insula Dei” and he just shrugs his shoulders and spreads his hands wide. Just like Flip. I wonder how many of those cigars he might have had back then.

For now, we sit there pleasantly relaxed, it's warm and we're smoking and spring is coming. While we sit there we're getting closer and closer to spring and both of us know it.

We already know how each other's life has gone. We don't need to talk about the war: we've looked each other in the eye a couple of times. We only need to sit quietly and the past rises up between us and spreads out all around us, we see the faces, we hear the voices, we see the endless meadows, we see the house fronts and the rivers and streams, the water splashes, if we listen closely we can hear the creeks too, “burble burble,” a cow is standing in the creek, we see the leaves on the trees. We sit out in front of the little cafés on the market squares and we wait on the ferry causeways, hands on our bicycles.

“A lot has changed,” Flip says. “They've cut down the elms near the Kortenhoef church.” “A long time ago,” I say. “They reached to the top of the spire, it completely changed the landscape. Remember when Ko shaved his beard off? It was like that.” I nod. “Another cigar?” At first he wants to say no, but the occasion is
too
pleasant. I light myself another one too. Only sixty-three left. “And our trees on the dike across from Rhenen. A stand of trees such as our dear Lord gives us here and there. And tall too, hmm,
they
were tall trees. And they went with Rhenen. Had to strengthen the dike. So they chopped down our trees. Who were
we
that they shouldn't chop them down because of us? It would have cost money to do it differently. Then Rhenen was like an abbey without a gatehouse.” He is quiet for a while. “And now Rhenen must be lying in ruins.”

“And the Muiderweg,” I begin. “I can see myself biking between Naarden and the Hakkelaar bridge. June 1904. June 1904, just think back to that, if you can. I was coming from the Gooi, on a Saturday, near evening. The sun was low in the sky, the water in the canal was totally still and reflected the reeds. The grass was growing between the stones.”

While I tell it the thirty-seven or thirty-eight years disappear, they never were, they are still to come. My bicycle whirs over the bricks. Other than that, silence. I get off my bike and suddenly it is even more silent, the bicycle is no longer whirring, I hear my clock tick in my vest.

“Just think back to that, if you can, Flip.”

We smoke. “And just think of the hell of cars only twenty years later.”

“Yes,” Flip says, “now they've put a big highway next to the bike path, over the canal, and the grass grows between the stones there too. A long time ago too.”

“1904. Do you feel old?” he suddenly asks.

I think about it, thoroughly think it over, but it just takes a moment. “No. And you?”

“I used to.” His left arm went up, bent, and he made a gesture with his hand as though waving away smoke. “I used to feel that way. You think they're destroying your world. At first you barely notice, you don't realize what's happening. Everything you've mastered with such difficulty disappears or changes beyond recognition. They don't ask, they just do it. Paths and waterways, bridges, houses, villages and cities. People too. After twenty years I went back to Castricum and The Resting Hunter was still there but I couldn't see it at first, it was so surrounded by everything. The main street looked like a bad haircut and then those ‘darling little apartments' everywhere, dear God. Where can you still find a nice slender bridge? They need to be wide, for the traffic, much too wide for such short bridges. Abominations. And then ‘artistic' too sometimes. I ask you. As long as they can drive fast. What do they know of God's slenderness? The double drawbridge from Ouderkerk is high and dry in an open-air museum on the heath near Arnhem,
incredibile dictu.
”