Amsterdam Stories (21 page)

A tall, thin woman in black opens the door. She has jutting cheekbones and sunken cheeks and stands very straight. As small and narrow as she is, she fills the whole cramped hallway. “Is Mr. Philip den Oever home?” Having looked at me, she turns around and opens a door with her left hand: “Flip, someone here for you.” Then, without saying another word, she walks off down the hall to what I guess is the kitchen. She leaves the door to the room open a crack and I stand there indecisively for a moment, then the door opens wider and Flip is standing in front of me. “Welllll, Dikschei, come in, come in.” He is wearing a very respectable old suit, blue serge, a little threadbare, and a very respectable shirt, dark blue stripes, with a matching collar, workingman's quality though, cheap cotton.

That room. Small, dark, two windows looking out at the railroad embankment with a big sign on it, MUIDERPOORT, and some snow still there, no longer white, and a tall rusty fence with pointed posts running along its base. Dull brown curtains make the room very dark, at least there are no screens. Someone is shuffling right past the windows outside, there are little bits of trash on the street. A large cylindrical heater fills the room but the room is chilly anyway. The little space left is taken up by a table and six chairs. A dull brown tablecloth makes the room even darker. The six chairs look like kitchen chairs that somehow managed to get ahead in the world at one point but have since fallen behind again. The wide wooden frames holding the wicker, with knobs on top, try in vain to recall their once-high position but all they do is remind you of the cheap furniture store in the Dapperplein area, filled to bursting, where they were bought.

The chairs, the chill, the years without work, on welfare. The cramped space and the half dark and the railroad running past.

This is not even the valley of obligations. This is a pit. I look up from below at the back of God's head. If I stayed here long it would seem like I'd never seen anything of God except the back of his head.

We sit at the table. Flip in his threadbare suit, with
Ideas
by Multatuli and an open composition book in front of him. Otherwise the table is empty. The whole room is grimly straightened up. There is a big framed photograph on the wall, under glass: Flip himself, his hairstyle, his eyebrows, the same features, the mustache, but a shirt with an old-fashioned wing collar and a thin black bowtie. And it's not Flip after all—it's someone ten years younger at least, with something in his nature that I can't quite put my finger on: someone who knows what's what. Flip sees me looking and turns partly around in his chair. “My father.” “Oh, yes, of course.” He reads my thoughts immediately and laughs: “You thought it was me? 1905. By now I'm probably old enough to be
his
father.” His smile gets broader, wider than I've seen it recently. “My father had a good business, lead- and tinsmith. Nowadays they'd call it an ‘enterprise,' like the Germans do, it sounds more distinguished to the hoi polloi. You never met him? No, you never came over to our house back then. I'll show you my mother.”

He disappears into the back of the house. The connecting door stays open a crack behind him and I can see into a dark alcove where a low bed is barely visible. When he comes back he leaves the door open a crack. There is a bit more light in the alcove, there must be another door open a crack on the other side.

A photograph, “cabinet format,” only slightly faded. A young woman from the 1880s,
en face
, her whole neck encased in a stiff collar with three little buttons in front and a narrow lace border sticking out of the top, a ruche that frames her face from below. High, noble forehead; big, lovely eyes. A miraculous rebirth of life in this pit of hopelessness. Nothing in Flip is like her except his eyes, his nearsighted eyes like a faithful dog's. I can't stop looking at the picture. Why isn't this woman here the way I see her before me? Why did she change, and then die, so long ago?

That forehead, those eyes: Insula Dei. There it is. While I'm looking Flip starts reading again with his forehead resting on his hands.
Ideas
by Multatuli, a cousin of the wing collar. But
she
is alive. Beneath that hairstyle and behind that pince-nez she lives on, in the peculiar external shape of a cocky lead- and tinsmith.

I wait until Flip looks up. “What's that notebook, are you writing again?” He blushes. By God, the sixty-year-old cocky lead- and tin-smith blushes. “I'm doing something totally crazy.” He hesitates and I don't press him. “I got the idea after we met.” I wait. He studies my face, I think he wants to know if I'm really the kind of person he thinks I am. “I'm making a list of all the cafés we went to in those twenty years, and all the hotels where we stayed.” And sure enough, he blushes again. “It's a great thing to do, everything comes back to you. The whole geography of the Netherlands, Belgium, northern France, the German Lower Rhine.

I hold out my hand but he shakes his head. “Not yet. I'll show you something else.”

He has brought out another photograph. “Liza.” His wife. A child's eyes, a lively, delicate nose, a sweet mouth. And another: two small children, between two and three years old maybe, standing next to a chair, each with a little hand on the seat, in truth I see only their foreheads and surprised eyes. They have their grandmother's forehead and eyes. Insula Dei.

I wait. “Dead,” he says, “all dead. TB. She died in '35. Even in '34 I didn't realize how bad it was. A person can really be stupid, when God decides that he shouldn't be worried about something. I thought she was over it for good. She was complaining about tiredness again, and sometimes the smallest thing made her burst into tears, but I had no idea that anything would go wrong, much less for good. We had a wonderful time together that year in Saint-Georges.”

“Saint-Georges?”

“Saint-Georges-les-Bains, Département de l'Ardèche, le Vivarais, right by the Rhône, right bank, about ten miles from Valence. Population three hundred, a ‘spa' in a tiny little river. Almost no one there. No real hotels, just three bars, with climbing vines, nice places to have a drink but you can't stay there. Everything a bit dirty, except for the ‘Château.' The Salvation Army had set up a children's summer camp there and they let a few guests stay there in the off-season, by special arrangement. At least they did
then
. My wife had a friend who worked for the Salvation Army in Paris, that's how we ended up there. Cheap, decent, not the most private. We lived like kings, high up, a few miles from the Rhône, with a magnificent view over the broad valley with mountains rising up again in the distance. A large house, a spacious regal ‘perron' with a stone balustrade, old-style French columns, and two stone staircases, a large terrace in front with trees and benches and a balustrade of its own, a semicircle at the edge of the cliff. Almost regal steps zigzag down the mountain from the Château to the gardens. It's like the view from the Westerbouwing but everything is bigger, and instead of Nijmegen with its little hills you have the start of the Alps, far away, mostly hazy. And the Rhône in the landscape, and lots of trees, lots of pointed poplars, fields in many different shades of green, and little houses, grand but at the same time flowery and charming, now and then a train in the distance. Reminiscent of Montferland sometimes, of the view from the hotel there, the Cleve towers could have been on the mountains opposite. The river was the life in it. A landscape without water is a blind landscape; water is like an eye.”

While he is talking he has put his elbows back on the table and rested his forehead in his hands and he looks at the table. And so, in that godforsaken pit, he keeps talking, in a monotone, talking to himself. And the sun is shining on a vast, warm landscape and God's warm smile lies over everything.

The voice keeps talking.

“She came back to life. Every day I could see her reviving. We took walks if it wasn't too hot, it was in June, but mostly she just liked to look, she got to know the fields, the trees, the houses, the mountain-tops in the distance. It was warm, on June 18 they started mowing the hay. The real South starts sixty miles farther, where there are olive trees, but there were figs there already, on the trees, and not just trees in fenced-in orchards but out in the fields, just here and there.

“And flowers. Camellias, honeysuckle, jasmine. Linden blossom. Everything saturated with fantastic smells. And crickets, and frogs. Little lizards everywhere. And there was a cuckoo there too, one cuckoo,
our
cuckoo. There was so much. The river wound downhill in the valley, between trees and shrubs. More of a creek, actually. The Turzon. From above you could only see the trees and shrubs.

“She recovered completely. The journey there was exhausting but she recovered completely. Her cheeks were rosy like a child's again. And she was so grateful, and loved the countryside so much. The fields, the trees, the flowers, the houses, the Rhône, our cuckoo— they were her friends. She said good morning to them every day and good night every evening.

“Where else have I ever stayed in a place like that? Other than in Veere, 1908 and 1910, at De Campveerse Toren. On one side, the Château borders nothing, it's surrounded in back by the woods, a little path connects it to the road so there's no traffic, and even the road isn't busy. So high up that you're closer to our dear Lord. In a place with no noise, no billboards, no attractions, no radio. Just think about all the miserable guesthouses and furnished vacation rentals in the world and the abject horror of needing to leave such places and then return to them, with all the miserable human stuff there that makes you ashamed before our dear Lord.”

Typical Flip. He thinks about his wife and sees a landscape. It really is absurd that he never wrote anything after that one book, which in truth was nothing exceptional; it wasn't personal enough,
him
enough, it was too much in the style of the time. After so many years he sits mumbling in his pit with his slightly disgusting hair-style and he gushes like a fountain, a whole landscape shoots up into the air and a whole countryside is conjured up in front of you.

He is sitting half turned toward me again, a little slumped to the left on the arm of his chair, toward the table.

“When we came home she was dead tired again and six weeks later we knew that something was really wrong. I've often thought that I shouldn't have let her take that trip. But that's how it always was: I got it into my head that I wanted to get away, I had to try somewhere else. Two weeks before her second child was due I was in Veere. Always the same. I couldn't be any other way. Now I know that I was always looking for that damned island. God knows what I've selfishly trampled on all these years, always searching, always looking up at the clouds.

“And she never held me back. She herself sent me away when she couldn't come along: ‘Go see how it is there, then come tell me.' And the letters she wrote me. I still know a couple of them by heart.

“‘You're having a great time there, hmm? I'm glad. If only I could have some fun here too, it's so dreary, I want so badly for it to just be over, it gets so boring, the same aches and pains every day. I'm sure you'll have so much to tell me when you get back. Liesje is so sweet, she's getting a lot of fresh air.'

“‘I expected you to be back home all this week, actually, especially on Friday. At midnight I was still awake, wishing the whole time that you'd still come, but I was wrong. No, Liza, Papa's having too much fun. Write me something? a postcard or two at least?'

“She died the same year we went to Saint-Georges. It was beyond my understanding. I still can't talk about it. When I try to think about it, even
now
, I still just see a big black chasm I have no words for.”

Silence. God's island floats solitary and abandoned. Now all there is is the pit and the tracks across the street.

“There are so many things I did wrong,” he says. “Who hasn't?” I ask.

He props his elbows on his knees, props his head on his hands again, and looks at me like that. Then he shakes his head: “No, not just some things. I did everything wrong. And treated people badly. And why? For nothing, for a figment of the imagination.”

“A figment of the imagination?” I say. “Is there anything else in life?”

But he looks at the floor. The black chasm holds him fast.

He seems old now, ravaged and bedraggled. God's incomprehensibility is too much for him. I think about myself. Will it really all turn out to have been a mistake?

He stares at the floor and I stand next to him and look down at the shiny, threadbare back of his jacket. “In a month the crocuses will be in bloom,” I say. He looks up at me. Then, suddenly, he's standing up and sticking his head out into the hall. “Mie, you're burning the milk again.”

When I'm back outside I see, across the street, next to the fence, here in this slum, in the grimy slush, two German naval officers.

February 7–12, 1942

(
CONTINUED
)

There is yet
another
section of “Insula Dei” that tells how Dikschei made love with Helena den Oever, Flip's niece and the spitting image of her grandmother.

But that section is absolutely not appropriate for publication. In any case, you can imagine it perfectly well for yourself without much difficulty if you care to remember how you yourself have made love. And if you're a couple who still get along well, you will look at each other and she'll lower her eyes and you won't find your thoughts unpleasant or dishonorable in the least.

You might well have also found it pleasant to read that section. But even so, I'd rather leave it out. I know these cultured, fine, up-standing men and women who would never let themselves go as far as bestial behavior, the ones who like to call themselves and each other Society. I know them. I can already hear what they'd say, already read the little articles they'd publish, if this lovemaking—the wild and tender human passion that drives us all, more than we even realize—went on sale one day in the bookstore, just like that.