Amsterdam Stories (7 page)

I don't know anymore where he got that from. Kees couldn't read it. But Kees did contribute something, he made a shovel and Bekker managed to attach it to the wall pointing at the proverb. It wasn't clear at first what it was supposed to mean, but later it turned out that Bekker wanted to go live on the heath someday and work a little piece of land, and never have to go back to the office. Bavink thought that was a good idea but was afraid Lien wouldn't agree, and Hoyer preferred to hang around in bars.

Then we sat there and tore everything to pieces. Or almost everything. I remember that Zola and Jaap Maris came out more or less unscathed, maybe one or two others. Bekker read to us from Dante, he knew Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs and the Book of Job by heart. It was very impressive. Not much of the outside world made it into Kees's attic. The only window was almost shoulder-height off the floor; when you sat at the table, you couldn't see much more than a sliver of sky, the color slowly draining out of it, and a few stars when it was dark out.

Paint? Who still knew how to paint nowadays, to hear Bavink tell it! You could palm anything off on people today, literally anything. I should paint a picture myself—he was talking about me, Koekebakker. He would tell me what to do. “Paint two horizontal stripes, one on top of the other, same width, one blue and one gold, and then put a round gold bit in the middle of the blue stripe. We'll write in the catalog
#666
:
The Thought, oil on canvas
. And we'll submit it under my name: Johannes Bavink, Second Jan Steenstraat, number soand-so, and we'll price it at eight hundred guilders. Then you can just sit back and see everything they come up with. They'll discover all sorts of things in there that you didn't have the slightest idea of.”

Bavink was still very young back then. Later on, Lien came over too sometimes and made tea. One time, she scrubbed the floor and dusted everything off, but that was very unpleasant. It caused some embarrassment for Kees when she came over, because his old man had definite misgivings about the young lady, and Bavink was never the way we liked him when Lien was around. He was always giving her little squeezes and pinches. It was annoying.

Luckily he started to leave her at home before long, because he thought she was making eyes at me. Bekker said “Girls, they're not worth it” and puffed on his clay pipe with especial satisfaction the first time she didn't come. And that evening it was really nice too. We sat for hours in the dark. The lamp got fainter and fainter, then went out. We just stayed there sitting and smoking, for hours. Every once in a while someone said something. Bavink decided that painting was the dumbest thing anyone could do. Kees didn't understand anything, as usual. “You have to just sit quietly and stay like that,” Bavink said, and looked up at the sky. A big greenish star twinkled. “You have to just sit quietly and stay like that and long with all your might, without knowing what for.” He filled a fresh pipe.

It was a strange time. And when I think about it, I realize that that time must still be happening now, it will last as long as there are young men of nineteen or twenty running around. It's only for us that the time is long since past.

We were on top of the world and the world was on top of us, weighing down heavily. Far below us we saw the world full of activity and industry and we despised those people, especially the important gentlemen, the ones who were always so busy and so sure they'd gotten pretty far in the world.

But we were poor. Bekker and I had to spend most of our time at the office and do whatever those gentlemen said, and listen to their ridiculous opinions when they talked to each other, and put up with the fact that they thought they were much more clever and capable than we were. And when they thought it was cold then all the windows had to be shut and in winter the lights had to come on much too early and the curtains had to be pulled shut so we couldn't see the red sky and the twilight in the streets and we had no say in it at all.

And we had to live on streets that were too narrow, with a view of the oilcloth curtains across the street and the tasseled fringe and the potted aspidistra with an impossible flower on top.

Oh, we took our revenge, we learned languages they had never even heard of and we read books they couldn't even begin to understand, we experienced feelings they never knew existed. On Sundays we walked for hours on paths where they never went, and at the office we thought about the canals and the meadows we had seen and while they ordered us to do things that we didn't see the point of we thought about how the sun had set behind Abcoude on Sunday evening. And how we had thought our way through the whole universe, without words; and how God had filled our head, our heart, and our spine, and how stark raving mad they would look if we told them about it. And how, with all their money and their trips to Switzerland and Italy and God knows where else and with all their clever hard work, they could never feel such things.

But still, they had us in their power, they confiscated the greater part of our time, they kept us out of the sunshine and away from the meadows and the seaside. They forced us to constantly fill our thoughts with their incomprehensible business. Even though that only went so far. They chewed us out; at the office we were totally insignificant. “Ah, Bekker,” they said to each other. The gentlemen had been well brought up; the woman on the third floor said “That harebrained idiot,” but the gentlemen were too well brought up for that. And they were bright, much brighter than the woman on the second floor, whose husband was a lamplighter, a good job that didn't need much education. My boss asked me if I wrote poetry by any chance. Bekker thought that a man like him shouldn't utter the word
poetry
, shouldn't be allowed to. “What did you tell him?” I hadn't said anything, I only looked at his face and saw what a thick skull he had and I thought: “He doesn't know who he has standing here in front of him, he hasn't got the brains.” And they paid us badly, the gentlemen did.

And we were in love. For months Bekker went out of his way to walk down Sarphatistraat every morning. He was in love with a school-girl of seventeen or so, and he walked fifty steps behind her or on the other side of the street and he looked at her. He never knew her name, never said a word to her. Over Christmas break he was unhappy. In February he took an afternoon off to wait for her when school got out. He stood there on the quiet canal-side street in the snow and a man rode by on a white horse wearing a blue smock and a straw hat. How odd, that on precisely that afternoon he had had to see something so ludicrous. But Bekker left at five minutes to four, he didn't dare stay. He walked slowly away, and on Weteringschans she caught up to him. She was laughing loudly with a friend, another girl. I don't think she ever knew Bekker existed.

Bekker wanted me to tell him where this was heading, it couldn't go on like this. And it didn't either. After summer vacation she never came back.

“Girls,” Bekker said, “they're not worth it…. She had a spring in her step when she walked.” He turned the lamp up a bit and turned the page in the book he was reading. “Where do you think she is now? Do you think she's kissing someone?” A little spark fell from his pipe onto the book. He put it out with his matchbox. “Damn, a hole, that was stupid.” “It's better this way, girls aren't worth it, they don't get you anywhere, they only distract you. They're pretty at a distance, to write poems about.”

He read. After a short pause he looked up again…. “You know what the strange thing is? When she caught up to me that afternoon she walked past me, right next to me. She only just missed me. There was so to speak nothing separating us, a little clothing on her and practically none on me.” (Bekker went around summer and winter with only an overshirt covering his bare chest.) “That's not much, you know?” I said it wasn't much—there was a lot more between the Naarden tower and Bekker's room, for example. “Between the Naarden tower and this mustache,” Bekker said, “is much less,
much
less, than there was between her shoulder and mine that day. No comparison, Koekebakker.” He turned another page, looked into the light, and said “That's how it is,” and went on with his reading.

And so it was: God showed his face and then hid it again. You never got anywhere, especially if you only looked at the girls from a distance and let other men kiss their pretty faces, the important gentlemen they as a rule liked a whole lot more than us. They were so much more respectable and spoke so well. And we were bums.

There was nothing to hope for from God—who goes his own way and gives no explanations. If there was something we wanted we had to take care of it ourselves. But we realized that it was easy for Bavink and Hoyer to talk, they had talent, they could really accomplish something in the world, but we—Bekker and Kees and me—the only difference we'd ever make was as socialists and it did seem a bit weak, after sitting at God's table, to address envelopes or join the Kastanjeplein Neighborhood Association. And nothing came of life on the heath either, because even when Bekker did get a little money his shoes needed repairing. Maybe we could join Van Eeden's commune, but when we walked out to Bussum one Sunday, four hours on foot, we saw a man strolling around in a peasant smock and expensive yellow shoes, eating sponge cakes out of a paper bag, hatless, in inner harmony with nature as people used to say back then, with crumbs in his beard. We couldn't bring ourselves to keep going, we turned right around and walked back to Amsterdam, walked along the Naarder canal in single file, singing, and a farm girl said to a farm boy, “There wasnt nothin about it in the paper, inn't that some-thin? D'you know about that?”

So we didn't do anything. No, actually, that was when Bekker wrote his first poem.

I still remember it perfectly, it was on a Sunday, of course, because whenever anything happened it was on a Sunday. The other six days a week we spent dragging our chains around from nine to six.

I was out looking for a job in Hillegom, a job with a bulb dealer with fat red clean-shaven cheeks. The others decided right away to make a day of it. Bavink, Hoyer, and Bekker had all said so many times that they wanted to go to the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, this was the day. Kees had to come too, he did whatever the others did. I was going to meet them in Leiden.

It was in December. I stood in the back of the tram, all the way in the back. It drove through the country and stopped and started again, it took hours, the countryside was endless. And the sky got bluer and bluer and the sun shone until it seemed like flowers would have to start sprouting out of the country bumpkins. And the red roofs in the villages and the black trees and the fields, most of them covered with straw, had it nice and warm, and the dunes sat bare-headed in the sun. And the road lay there, white and smarting, it couldn't bear the sunlight, and the glass panes of the village streetlamps flashed, they had trouble withstanding the glare too.

But
I
got colder and colder. And the tram ran as long as the sun shone. It's a long ride from Hillegom to Leiden and the days are short in December. By the end, a block of ice was standing there on the tram staring into the big stupid cold sun that was flaming red as though the revolution was finally starting, as though offices were being blown up all over Amsterdam, but still it couldn't bring a spark of life back to my cold feet and stiff legs. And it kept getting bigger and colder, the sun, and I got colder and stayed the same size, and the blue sky looked down very disapprovingly: What are you doing on that tram?

Bekker wrote his first poem that afternoon. When I got to Leiden, as they were lighting the gas lamps, and I found the immortals sitting in a row on a long bench in the third-class waiting room at the train station, near the stove, it was my turn to undergo the poem. It was beautiful. No title? Bekker shook his head. But Bavink and Hoyer shrieked that they'd seen something written at the top. A well-dressed gentleman said “Louts” to the man who punched his ticket at the door. Bavink snatched the sheet of paper out of Bekker's hands. What was written at the top? Was it even a question? “To her.” Just what I would have guessed.

Bavink thought the stove could use more coal but he couldn't find the scoop. They always take the scoop out of the waiting rooms, otherwise the public uses too much coal.

So Bavink tossed lumps of coal into the stove with his bare hands, and got into an argument with a guy in a white smock.

It was fun that night. Kees and Hoyer fell asleep on the train. Bavink chatted with a girl from The Hague and inhaled the smell of heliotropes given off by her dear little frame.

Then Bekker started talking about the heath again. How he wanted to live there in peace and wait and see what God had planned for him. And not have to
do
anything. He was deeply melancholy. I had an objection to the heath: it's so dry out there. And I asked Bekker what exactly he planned to live on, office workers don't usually do too well on the farm, except in America (we believed all kinds of lies about America). But he wasn't worried about that. He didn't need anything.

Now he knows better. Only God doesn't need anything. That is precisely the fundamental difference between God and us.

So life on the heath came to nothing too.

Four of us sat in the fine white sand at the foot of the dunes in Zandvoort and looked out at the ocean. Kees wasn't there. It was late July. The sun was still high above the ocean at seven o'clock and it made, again, I can't help it, it's God himself who keeps repeating himself, it again made a long golden stripe in the water and shone in our faces.

A tugboat was puffing on the horizon. It rose and sank; when it sank we could only see the steam pipe.

Bekker was going to Germany the next day. His knowledge of languages had gotten him a job as a clerk in a factory handling foreign correspondence. And Hoyer was off to Paris, to paint.