The sky outside turned from gray to blue to a bruised black, and Anneke lit a cluster of fat candles on the small table, the tulips in a bowl in the center, and began serving dinner. With the light coming only from the one source, all the gestures magnified into shadows around the room. The little area of warmth in the candles’ pool of light was the energy center, the drama of plates and cups and moving hands and cold, bearded beer was carried on in this nucleus, and from that hot center everything graded off, fell away into the blue, deep corners of the room. Well, Richard was saying, it’s as though Americans still believed (more ham) in the perfectibility of humanity, and Europeans (please pass the bread; tomorrow we’re going to visit Anne Frank’s house) know that it’s not possible. That’s what gives Americans this optimism and this terrible energy. They’re just now learning (they?) that the story doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending, Cinderella murders her sisters and sets fire to department stores, and the bears really do rape Goldilocks. The bubbles in the beer rose and burst themselves upon the surface of the air. Smells of cabbage and potato and hot sausage; a real Dutch meal. Richard stretched his mouth and puffed out the place where his belly would be in a few years. He patted Anneke’s round bottom in a show of jocularity. The perfect burgher, this Jewish boy from Brooklyn and Harvard.
Jess was talking, her mouth full, her face glazed in the wavering glow. Light in some paintings is the equivalent, at least the analogue, of love. God’s gaze on the world. Graham’s face muscles began to ache with the effort of maintaining the creased smile. Richard and Jess were still at it, talking and talking, society, civilisation, the arts, war and revolution. Graham let himself sink into the silence from which Anneke watched the show. Her hair was very blonde, lighter in tone even than her skin, her ears slightly protruding, her face shiny. The mild Dutch face. She seemed several years younger than Richard and the rest of them. The talking and eating continued. The pregnant girl moved back and forth from the table to the kitchen, in and out of the light, blooming, unconcerned for the categories and fine distinctions being established. She moved slowly, weightily, pushing her full front before her. Watching her carrying the heavy, steaming dishes Graham, a little drunk, found himself flooded with a clear and sudden, irrelevant desire. He felt he could almost hear, through their common thick silence, the beating of the baby’s heart, as though the instant love had created a stethoscope of spirit between him and the blind small creature in its waters.
Their mouths filled over and over with the eating and drinking. The level of their glasses and plates rose and fell until it seemed a function of nature, and flushed with food and beer and his new love Graham followed Anneke into the kitchen. He stood in the doorway watching her wash plates, cut bread with her deep, slow, underwater movements. Her cheeks red, her short nose red and shining, she filled the platters again. He moved towards her and bent to kiss her. Later, reviewing this, he was amazed at his gaucheness. The potatoes and beer and the stiff, quick pair waiting for them at the table, he would not have blamed her, this fat, fair love, if she had screamed and pushed him away amidst pieces of broken crockery. But her reaction was, wonderfully, not that. Simply, she accepted his embrace and stood, holding his head to her full breast, he standing stooped, pressed against the plate of cabbage which she still held in her other hand. The fragrant gray steam rose, enveloping them both.
Returning to the table Graham felt the tightness of the other two, trespass rank in the air, hell to pay. The reckoning would come later. For the moment, insulated from them, he was fed and full and they were only shadows on his eye. Fantasies in that pure, drunken moment in the kitchen, it had for Graham the taste of the annunciation paintings with the dove, Mary, and the seed sliding down the ray of light from God to Mary’s ear (zap), that baby in the womb his, a miraculous infant.
Holland is not quite as big as Vermont but the dykes if placed in a straight line would reach from New York to beyond Chicago.
(De) dingen Vielen uiteen. Things were falling apart
They would walk and walk through the city, gray skies, reflections, in the water everything was doubled. The city regarded itself, whole and multiplied, shimmering, in every piece of water, every shining surface.
Built entirely on huge piles driven through the marshy surface soil and intersected by countless canals, Amsterdam has inevitably been described as “the Venice of the North” though its canals differ from the Venetian in being almost invariably lined with quays.
They were it seemed to Jess like very early humans, prehistoric, cave dwellers, fumbling around with the beginnings of speech, clumsily attempting the shaping of tools, a small stirring in their muddled broths of brains. Hairy, cold, wet, scared, they groped their way through the peaty darkness, trying to reach each other, try g to read the marks scratched on the walls of the caves, but it was no use. There were not enough words, they were not fine enough, the ice age was coming and it was cold, there wasn’t enough food, there wasn’t enough fire, it was dark, they were lost.
In the next room the child cried.
The Zurich Doctor Konrad Gesner was the first to discover the tulip in the garden of the Fuggers in Augsburg in about 1555. The true home of the tulip, however, is not Augsburg, but much further east, in Armenia, the Crimea. In about 1560 the Austrian Ambassador at the court of Ibrahim Pascha brought a few tulips with him to Vienna and presented them to the botanist Carolus Clausius or Charles L’Ecluse. When the latter was appointed to the University of Lieden, his tulips came with him to the Netherlands to be ever afterwards associated with the name of that country.
bread broad
doof deaf
vies dirty
waar true
geel yellow
dun thin
It was his birthday, Thursday, and he must have a treat. He wanted to go to the Hilton Hotel for a celebration dinner. Come on, she said. You must be kidding, she said.
No, I really mean it. I want to go. His face was puffy and white. I want hamburgers and a milk shake and french fries and the whole deal. Just like him, he begged, just for a joke.
So they sat in the Drug Store Restaurant, the three of them, eating the American meal. Rachel was overexcited, her face bloody with ketchup. Graham had eaten three hamburger specials with all the trimmings, and Jess grew sick at the sight of the plates stacking into squat towers on the table.
He called the waitress over again. It’s my birthday, he said. Do you have a cake? Jesus, Graham, Jessica hissed.
The waitress brought a large cake, ornately iced, pink frosting roses on top and candles in plastic holders.
Jess stood up. I’m going home, she said. I’ve had enough.
Wait, wait just a minute. He was pleading. His forehead was wet, and there was grease on his mouth. Have some cake, please. It’s my birthday. He bent to blow out the candles. Look, Ray, he said. I’m making a wish. I’m blowing out the candles.
Jess began putting on the child’s coat. No more, she said. You can come back with us, or you can stay. We’re going back to the hotel.
Not yet, he said. Just have one piece. It looks like very good cake. Rachel, bewildered, began to cry. Cake, she screamed, growing more excited, I want cake. People were staring at their table. Jess picked up the weeping child, and Graham grabbed her arm. Please, he said. Please. She tried to pull away. Rachel, suddenly, began to gag. She vomited, shuddering, covering Jess and the table.
In the ladies’ room, cleaning up, Jess and the child cried and cried.
He grew fatter. None of his clothes fit any more. Gluttony is not a modern sin. His stomach distended, his face was wreathed with fat, he panted now, going up the stairs. They fought, were quiet, fought again. He brought her flowers, armfuls of flowers, they filled the vases, bowls, all the surfaces, and rotted sweetly in the room.
Remission and relapse. A cowboy movie was on in the center of town and they decided to go, on whim and something deeper, some obscure, pervasive homesickness that led them to a frantic consumption of Am
erican totem objects when they found them. Jess had bought some peanut butter and marshmallows in a shop and brought them home, they fell upon them, finished them all, and were sick through the night. Laughing, rueful, the ache persisted.
The cinema musty with generations of cigarettes and once gorgeous hangings of gilt and plum velvet (Van Eyck), they sit in the front row. Rachel, sitting between them, is rapt; her hands stuffed with melting chocolate which she forgets, in her abandon, to eat. Half full, an audience of devotees and the aimless on this Tuesday afternoon.
The newsreel is full of death. A bull in Spain, a group of anonymous, blurred soldiers in Vietnam, a black woman in a riot in Milwaukee. In that film, through some oddity of camera, her fall from the second story window to the street seemed endless. She falls and falls, the only movement on the screen, everyone else in the chiaroscuro scene frozen with inertia or surprise. Finally she lands, a small heap, strangely jointed, and the other figures, released, begin to move again, gesture, cry out. Fire, flood, war, disease. Bad news, bad news.
A man somewhere behind them coughs and spits, a boy, about ten, runs down the aisle and back. Then a fresh turning towards the great screen, a rustling, a hush, and the giant American West is spread before them, the mammoth pan of grass and the immense blue sky. Beyond the grass, in the weird hills glowing pink and purple in the coming sunset, the band of Indians wait. Big-nosed, feathered, striped with paint, they grunt to their spotted ponies, they wait to set upon the band of pioneers. A puff of smoke rises from a mesa towards the cloudless sky. The attack is about to begin.
The sub-titles give an odd extra dimension to this drama. Warhoop, smack, bang, thud, the attack. Only the horses are surprised. The air fills with bullets, with arrows and the sound of arrows. Indians, pioneers, horses are hit, quiver, fall to the grassy ground.
Blood and dust mingle, and the colors swim in Jess’s eyes, the gum turns to salt in her mouth. She cries for the pioneers adrift on the huge prairie, their wagons burning, their children screaming loudly in the flames; for the Indians who, victorious in this battle, she knows to be doomed; she cries for Graham and herself, and for the little band of believers hyddled in the movie house, and for America, torn and awkward, rich and bewildered now, fumbling through history, the fat boy hated by his classmates.
The film ends and they stumble out into the streets of the foreign city, their pupils clench, their vision blurs.
The lights and shops and herring stands, Wyoming is more real.
TRANSLATE
Who can sing this song? Who knows the answer to this question? Who has lived in this house? From whom did you hear the story? What have you painted your house with? What shall I talk about? Which man is your neighbor? What kind of cigarettes do you smoke?
The fighting went on and on, and it was about no reason in particular, it was about all the reasons, simply all the facts about them and the world, their lives, their birthdays, politics, the colors of hair, tooth-paste, painters; it was that the islands and the dykes, and the sanity and the civilisation were too hard to build, they could not build it, they had run out of stones and sand, there was not enough daylight, not enough words, they weren’t strong enough, there was too much water.
They were so tired, they allowed each other no rest, and they couldn’t leave each other alone, not even for a little while, just for a breath. Jess spoke of going, with Rachel, to Paris or Italy, just for a week or two, just for a break. But their unhappiness had paralysed them into a kind of puppet show, an absolute routine of sleep and anger, and she couldn’t break it, couldn’t get away.
He followed her through the streets one day, and kept asking her the questions they both knew, she wanted to be alone, just for a few minutes, but he followed her, into the cafe, down the street, through the park. They were standing on one of the small bridges over the canals. He pulled at her arm, her shoulder, and she tried to get away, people were looking at them, and she was crying. She tried to get away, and he kept holding on to her. Then she grabbed the camera from his other hand and while he yelled at her she threw it, threw it up and over the side and into the canal; it splashed in the dark green water, sank, circles spreading outwards, and he hit her, twice, over the ear and the side of the face. She tasted blood. She cried leave me alone, and ran down the street. He didn’t follow her.
Hours later he found her, sitting in the American Express office, tears sliding down her face with no sound coming from her mouth, staring at all the Americans, fat and thin, who came and went in the rooms. He took her back to the hotel.
That night, Jess asleep in the hotel, he screwed one of the prostitutes who sat in the windows looking out at the streets. She was young, with long legs and gray eyes which, whenever he looked, were open. Afterwards he remembered mostly the calendar on her wall, a picture of a windmill standing against a very blue sky.
Could it be, he said to Jess one night, that where the water has been it still holds power? That this whole trip has been through water, under water, in that way?
They got a wire telling them to phone Graham’s sister in Oregon. The two-languaged operators’ voices and the strange mechanical syllables of sound seemed to Graham the tickings of a huge brain; such a black space extended from the receiver in his hand, pressed to his ear. The key hole at the other end of the space illuminated, his sister was on the line.
Her voice sounded very small and only just familiar.
Graham, she said. Graham, hello, I have some bad news. There was some interference on the line, a crackling like the sound for forest fires on a radio program.
What, what? he was shouting into the phone. Linda, I can’t hear you. Linda. The operator’s voice appeared, floating above the static, and then the line cleared.
It’s Mother, he heard Linda’s tiny yell from the other end of the cord, six thousand miles away. Mother. There’s been a plane crash and Mother’s dead.
Graham could hear that she was crying now, a strange grating noise that seemed to be some more of the machine’s own mechanical conversation.
She was on her way to visit Gary in Ohio—some kind of freak storm over the Rockies. The line fizzed again, then healed itself. Everyone on the plane was killed.
When his sister hung up Graham held on a minute, listening to the links and synapses click themselves out. He hung up, and the silence roared in. The bottom dropped out of his bowels, and he barely made it to the toilet. In the great light of the men’s room, in the spotty mirror, he looked like an old man.
There are 60 canals in Amsterdam.
When it came, it came quickly. Afterwards, looking back over the way they had travelled, they could see the signs which pointed and announced that this was coming, this and nothing else, but at the time it had not been so clear. The condition itself obscured their vision of it and left them unprepared, if one can ever be prepared for such a thing, all set, bags packed as it were, like getting ready to go to the hospital to have a baby, the new pink bed jacket, the kotex and the toothbrush.
All the bills came due at once, this in the sense of all the personal debts incurred, the most intimate transactions, the banks failed, the chickens came home to roost (this in the flat voice of the mid-western grandmother), the dykes, the dykes finally broke and the water came in and over, filling everything, covering everything.
Graham, surrounded by water, lay flat and quiet in that bed, in that room. People moved in the corner of his vision, forward and back, blurred white shapes, he could hear sounds come bubbling from them at him, but there was no sense to the sounds. Later they learned to wall off the sea by building dykes—first out of earth, centuries later out of stone, and today out of concrete and steel. The Dutch are presently building their gigantic “Delta Works”—a series of five new dykes that will seal off further large estuaries of the North Sea. And remember, too, that even after land in Holland is reclaimed, it must constantly be drained by canals and pumps—or else the water will rise again!
Creatures joined him in the flu
id life, ugly fish with shining scales. With unclosing bulbous jeweled eyes and long transparent tails they swim around him, bumping into his flesh, chewing at his fingers and the bottoms of his feet. He could feel the snails creeping up his arms, leaving behind the trails of slime that are their histories. Other creatures, those convoluted in shells, and those made of clear, brilliant jellies, nestled in his crevices, his ears, beneath the sheets, between his legs. New Orleans was burning. Denver was burning. San Francisco was burning. Vietnam is bigger than Rhode Island but smaller than Texas. Van Eyck, the Chinese, salt water, the secret passage, the starving millions in India.
As Rembrandt wrestled with the mighty task of the Night Watch Saskia wrestled with death; on June 14, 1642, she died, aged barely thirty. While she lay dying her features haunted his fervid imagination and pursued him into the thick of the soldiery peopling in Night Watch, conjuring up a world of strange imaginings in which we see her in the guise of a child, a realm of fantasy where time has ceased to be. Saskia! Saskia!
Holland is the paradigm of civilisation, of the attempt to make civilisation; the island, bailing to keep above the sea, planted with flowers.
They walked among the massed flowers. The sky was blue. De bloemen waren rood, geel, wit, roze, blauw, violet, and other colors, mixtures of colors. The scent, that compound scent, was indescribable. Het warme continent, de rode daken. To attempt to describe it would be foolish; it was like the smell of hair, of wet ground, het plekje tussen de borsten van een vrouw. Fish do not close their eyes. Little is known about the life of Vermeer. Translate: Do you expect your uncle today? De hond blafte en maakte de kinderen wakker. Waar is het toilet? What is the nature of vision? Het zonlicht op je haar. Food is good and plentiful in Holland, and need not be expensive. Saskia! De dijken, de bloemen, het water. De Koninklijke Familie gaat per fiets. Spreekt u Engels? Spreekt u Italiaans? Spreekt u Duits?
Strangeness Page 36