Amsterdam Stories

by Nescio

  She calmly came downstairs singing the chorus from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, “Day of light and Heaven’s glow,” which she had sung so many times without ever really thinking about it. Then she walked into the room and said “Hi, E.,” and stood on her tiptoes and stretched up and gave him a kiss on the mouth, like before, like a sister. And he, who had just been having a conversation with his father-in-law about linseed oil—he was just back from his trip, the things a little poet has to do!—he only said:

  “How big you’ve grown, child! I don’t even need to pick you up anymore.”

  And she loved him so much that she wasn’t even mad when he said that. Her breasts were already getting bigger, weren’t they? Just wait….

  “Dora, the milk’s boiling. Maartje went into town.” And Dora flew to the kitchen to turn off the stove.

  VI

  Now before I go any farther I should probably mention that my manuscripts too are recopied by my wife, and that she does not see the poetry in this story. Coba’s flirting is not so terrible, she thinks, it’s because the little poet was neglecting her. The lady on the tram deserved a slap in the face and the little poet too. It’s strange, in other stories she reads she doesn’t think things along these lines are that bad. I think it’s because I’m the one who wrote this story. Of course she knows that there’s a difference between the author and Mr. Nescio himself, but to her that’s splitting hairs. It’s a difficult situation. My domestic bliss is somewhat troubled—but still I’ll keep going.

  There’s the God of the Netherlands again, strolling across the Damrak’s burning-hot pavement. Again he’s wearing the same brownish suit and the same hat and has flakes of dandruff on his collar. This time he’s put a handkerchief over his collar, he’s sweating. He puts the tip of his walking stick down a long way from his body as he walks. His gray muttonchops stroll along with him.

  God of heaven and earth, of land and sea, take this oppression from me, gather it up in your hand and carry it far away from the Damrak and lay it gently down on a garbage heap next to the blue pots with holes in the bottom and the crushed tin cans and rusty barrel hoops and ashes and shrimp shells. Somewhere I never go.

  Now my spirit can abandon my damned self and rise straight up into the sky like blue smoke on a windless summer night, while a distant cow sorrowfully moos.

  And now everything is gone that once was and I am Dora and I am in a new world, the same as the old world but seen from the feet of the Father, and I look down from there at Dora, who I myself am, a woman now, a girl, for as long as the state of grace lasts.

  And just as the world itself is new for me, so too did it lie outspread and untouched and benevolent for Dora after that day. Oh, she accepted the miracle, but she didn’t understand it or understand herself, just as the earth doesn’t understand itself, the wheat grows out of it and is green and turns yellow and is mowed and the tall sheaves rest on the yellow wheat stubble and the earth knows nothing about it.

  And her breasts did get bigger, they moved when she walked. But she was still a slender girl with the indentation in her neck clearly visible, and her tendons and the tips of her collarbones stood out clearly, just like on her sister. And when she turned her head to the side you could see a deep hollow in her shoulder, if she had on her loose boatneck blouse. In her tan face her eyes were so white and so blue, dark blue. I saw the Zuiderzee frozen over once, and it was the same white. But all the warmth of her young body shone out of the blue of her eyes, without it cooling her body down at all. And when she stood with her hands on the small of her back, square on her two legs with her feet a little ways apart, you saw the points of her shoulder blades and a hollow between them like a poem that drew your thoughts into the distance, like a river lying outstretched, far away, then winding onward, you can’t see the end of it. And when she tilted her head forward—she wore her hair up now—the God of heaven and earth himself looked up for a moment from his eternal contemplation of the eternal lands and seas and propped his right elbow on his thigh and rested his head on his right hand, thumb under his chin and index finger along the length of his cheek, and he beheld the tan little bumps above the hollow that was a poem, and the fine hairs that glinted in the sunlight, and he smiled. Then he looked gravely back down past his feet at his Rhine winding back and forth between his mountains, and he mused: “What’s going on here? How did I let the Germans found another empire? Those Prussians….”

  And his noble, hairless visage darkened. Two deep furrows appeared above his strong straight nose.

  But she wasn’t thinking about any Prussians. She thought how sweet her sister’s husband was and that it was good that she loved her brother-in-law. He was her brother after all. And a poet. Coba had told her that. And a poet was someone dear to God’s heart. She had read that in a book somewhere.

  She was old enough now to read edifying books, with chocolate in her mouth and the rest of the chocolate bar on the table.

  If only she could write poetry too someday, or—a novel. A book about young love. Everybody was reading about young love back then. And one evening as she lay on the IJssel dike, her bicycle next to her on its side on the grass, with a blade of grass in her mouth that she turned around and around, looking out over the water at a tjalk’s sail clattering down along the mast and falling limp, she tried. But nothing much came of it. It made her feel all soft and weak inside, made her heart and her lungs feel so big and so melancholily full. She felt the evening landscape along the length of her spine, from top to bottom. The cows standing in the water and drinking and looking at each other, the rattling of the anchor chain, the light hung high on the mast of the ship—it all brought tears to her big eyes. But nothing came of it. She took the blade of grass in her mouth and split it lengthwise with her thumbnails but nothing came of it.

  She stood up. The stars were shining in the pale sky, the water was rippling and swirling and turning and flowing as though there was no Dora standing in the colorless summer evening. A heavy wagon crunched laboriously over the gravel road in the distance. Melancholy rose up out of the darkening land; the water still held a little light.

  Then she stretched out her arms but there was no one to answer her. Then she didn’t know if she wanted to live or die and she slowly rode her bike home, where Mother sat yawning over her Daily News under the gas lamp with her glasses on the tip of her nose. She looked hard at Dora, then took off her glasses, wiped them, felt for the top of the glasses case on the newspaper and bent down since the other half of the case had fallen on the floor. “Here, Mom.” Then Mom stood up, yawned, and folded the paper in half, looked at the little clock on the mantelpiece, and said, through another yawn, “Quarter past ten.”

  Back in her room Dora took off her clothes and smelled the scent of her own clean warm body. And a great desire filled her again, the same way the evening landscape had filled her with a great desire, and the dark river that flowed out to a point that was light for a moment and then it turned and was gone. But what it was she desired, that she didn’t know.

  She suddenly saw it all before her eyes again in the darkness of the room: the water with the ship at anchor and the light on the mast, the cows across the water, nearby. She saw that dusk didn’t fall, it crept up out of the land, it was the first time she had realized that. She especially saw the end of the river, flowing out to a point where there was a patch of greenish light in the water, where the riverbank curved round. And she heard the distant crunching of the heavy wagon on the gravel road.

  “God, if only I could be dear to your heart,” she said childishly. And she had a dream that night. She dreamt that E. was taking a walk with Coba in a meadow, she in white linen, he all in white flannel with the cuffs of his pants legs turned up and a flat straw hat on and brown shoes. She dreamt that they were smiling and laughing at each other, and he kissed her on the mouth, four kisses one after the other until she laughingly pulled free. And that she, Dora, ran up to her sister and threw her arms around her neck and la
y her head on her shoulder and said: “Coba, how sweet you are.” Then suddenly her mother was standing there, with her glasses up on her head now, and she said, “Thirteen minutes to two.”

  VII

  Meanwhile our well-loved little poet calmly wended his way along the road to the grave like a good little citizen and the traffic on the Damrak and on the Rokin and all throughout Amsterdam took its course as though he didn’t matter in the least.

  He was promoted at the office and inherited a little money and gradually started buying his clothes and shoes from different stores. That was when he bought that white flannel suit. He took to smoking four-cent cigars instead of two-and-a-half-cent cigars, he had a box of them at home, and he wore nice shirts and stopped wearing those thick wool socks, washed his hands before and after each meal, and spent a few guilders every week in cafés, both alone and with his wife. He took pleasure in his tobacconist’s polite greeting and the respectful cordiality of the conductor on Line Two. He had started working harder at the office over the years, started to get better at it, and it even sometimes happened that he went back after dinner and worked late though his boss never asked them to. His concierge held him in higher and higher esteem, and considered him a very educated man. Even his aunt from Delft or Oldenzaal began to respect him and nodded benevolently when Coba told her about how her nephew was getting ahead. He never talked about it himself. He had subscriptions to the The People and the Handelsblad and the Groene by that point and was a member of the Party and of the Dutch General Union of Mercantile and Industrial Workers. He never attended meetings but when they came to see him and asked him to sign a petition in support of a strike or to contribute an hour’s wages to the Party he offered them a cigar and Coba poured them a cup of tea and he had a chat with them without talking down to them in the slightest and pledged one or two rijksdollars and walked them to the front stairs and even held the door for them. He himself was just a salaried worker, and as a young man he too had worn taps to make his shoes last longer, and a very long time ago he had lived in a building where the neighbors always left their front door open and he’d sat down to a plate of rice for dinner, before his father had found that job that paid so well.

  And when he got another raise they ate soup every day from then on, and Coba bought three silver napkin rings, one for Bobi too, and from then on she didn’t want to pack lunch anymore when they went for a Sunday walk in the country, the way she always used to.

  Their friends had moved up in the world too: Bonger, the doctor, and Graafland, who was head clerk in the Postal Service and had given up writing books, and van der Meer, who sold cars and wanted nothing to do with poetry. The ones who hadn’t moved up in the world they never saw anymore. There was Kool, for instance, who always scarfed down his sandwiches and who had schemed to reform the world for so long that he ended up shipped out to the colonies, God knows where. They wrote to each other at first, but that stopped after a while, they ran out of things to write about. He had run into Hein again a while ago, who was determined to be a painter. He painted the inner essence of things’ souls but that didn’t bring in any money and after his father died he was flat broke. The little poet hadn’t seen him for years.

  One day he was walking down Pieter Vlamingstraat and saw him, dressed like an undertaker: Hein, who had shown a painting at a gallery once, called Portrait of a Young Tubercular Syphilitic (in French no less) and “theosophical in conception.” They were burying a local grocer. The men in black stood on the sidewalk holding umbrellas. Hein too. It was drizzly. He had a mourning hat on his head, a top hat, crooked, too small. His formal mourning coat with knotted cords was buttoned up tight, it was much too small for him and was almost bursting open, it stretched over his rib cage with ridiculous creases everywhere. “My goodness,” Hein said, “what a fine fellow you’ve turned into.” Right then, thank God, they carried the dead grocer out of his house. It’s not so easy to move up in the world, even if you know deep down that you’re still a little poet. In any case, he didn’t like walking around in that neighborhood very much and after that day he never wanted to set foot there again. And then you sometimes had to let yourself be taken out to eat, and be handed a menu you couldn’t make heads or tails of, not a single line. During the first course you take too much of everything since you don’t know what’s coming next or how far along you are, and then you try to do better in the next course and end up with too little of everything, and then you have to smoke a big heavy cigar on an empty stomach. That’s when you wish your father had just gotten you a job in the sanitation department where you could walk around on a quiet, sunny canal street in the morning in a blue smock, with a garbageman’s rattle and a shiny leather cap with a brass number on it, rattling your rattle without thinking about it, in thick double-soled shoes.

  And twenty-eight years farther on down the road to the grave he saw his father’s gray head. He had always done well too and had not accomplished anything special either. He saw himself with exactly the same head having trudged along for another twenty-eight years and felt like he was his own father. And twenty-three years behind him trudged his daughter, still just a little girl. Bobi wouldn’t get anywhere in the next twenty-three years either and yet she would walk the same road he was walking, the same and yet different. It was an absolutely meaningless procession, the little poet thought. It weighed on his soul.

  But inside this harmless, proper, bourgeois young gentleman there still lived something that wasn’t a gentleman but a person, someone who didn’t want to just die, who wanted to build a tower of his own that reached up into the blue sky and would stand forever. And who was a wild animal too, who wanted to devour all the indifferent creatures, living and dead, who acted like he wasn’t there, and wanted to keep devouring and devouring until it was all wolfed down and he was the only thing left with nothingness.

  But he didn’t know how to start, so nothing ever came of it. He never got any farther than having a poem accepted in a magazine now and then. The Handelsblad praised him, but they praise so many people; Professor Scharten, thank heavens, called him “very promising”; his friends, who had turned into serious men, said an appreciative word or two about it when they saw him, but they no longer got very worked up about anything. And slowly the issues of the magazines began to crumble away, just like the little poet’s life, and other than that nothing happened. The people in the office didn’t read any magazines but he wrote under a pen name anyway.

  One time, on a pleasure cruise, he saw a young couple, fiancés, sitting and looking at the water—the boy had his right arm around the girl’s shoulder and held her right wrist tight and she had put her left hand on his right hand and they sat like that, pressed close together. The little poet looked at them, it’s so lovely to see a nice young couple like that. That these children are excited because they want more, that they are only getting each other worked up for what they can’t do and don’t dare to do, that they never know where to stop— no one ever notices that or thinks about that. It was very lovely, and maybe the truth was that they had just recently gotten engaged and were still satisfied with being madly in love with each other. Then they looked at each other and he said:

  I look aslant into the pools of your eyes

  And see a blue and golden spark

  and he kissed her on the lips. She blushed: “That man is watching.”

  That was the only time in his life that the little poet ever felt his own life being lived in someone else’s head, and he was even more embarrassed than the girl and blushed too and gave a quarter to the man who came around collecting money for the musicians.

  After that there was no one, among the dead or among the living, who showed that they had any idea of what the little poet felt in that poet’s head he was dragging around with him to his inglorious grave.

  The little poet had had enough. He had one good thing left:

  My dead heart is so hard to bear …

  But he threw it into the kitchen stove.
There was no fire in the fireplace since it was summer.

  And then he got so enraged at everything, living and dead, that he interrupted his endless eroticism and wrote a grim and bitter little book that made him famous right away. But that happened later, we’ll get to that.

  For the time being he only gritted his handsome teeth and then he said out loud, alone in his room, “To become a great poet and then to fall, dammit!” He had untied the laces of his shoes and he kicked one of them off with such violence that it startled the missus downstairs.

  VIII

  That was in the summer. By fall the little poet had gotten to the point that it was “impossible” to get away from the office. His aunt had reason to be pleased—her nephew was “terribly busy.” He spent three or four evenings a week at the office. He was supposed to spend a week with her, in Velp (she was living in retirement at the time, having sold the family business), but he couldn’t get away, just like a real businessman.