by Nescio
When it gets to that point you have to talk about it. You can’t always keep quiet. So I talked, I said more in a few evenings than I had in the six months before.
I had met someone that summer, someone I went to school with eighteen years earlier, and right away we started talking and couldn’t stop. That happens only once or twice in a lifetime. When one of us talked the other one sat there without thinking about what he was going to say when it was his turn, he listened, eloquently. We couldn’t get enough of it.
We sat outside at the Tolhuis café one evening and looked out across the IJ at the city. The electric lights along the railroad embankment burned lavender up above, against a dark blue sky. There was heat lightning around the three sharp spires of the church on Haarlemmerstraat, a train engine was puffing under the glass and iron roof of Centraal Station, the streetcar drove grumbling across De Ruyterkade, the water rose and fell, desolate, cold blue, in nervous, short, paltry waves, made a weak noise against the stone edge of the seating area and smelled faintly of stagnant water. Nearby, in total silence, a fisherman’s little boat lay on the water, its bare mast sticking scrawnily up against the dark city with its tip in a light patch of sky. I saw that the little boat looked tall from the front and short from the back and I liked just looking at it like that.
It was quiet, there were not many people, we could barely hear them talking. There was the sound of glasses and cups now and then, the city on the opposite shore breathed softly and innocently and innocently shone its violet and yellow lights that zigzagged as reflections in the IJ.
And then he started to talk, the way someone talks who has kept many things to himself and can’t keep them to himself any longer.
But you need to be patient with me. I’ll get there, in fact the novel has already started, we are all, so to speak, in the middle of it, you just haven’t noticed yet.
Last night came the report that the Triple Alliance had accepted Wilson’s proposal. This morning I went into the city to see if people were drunk. It was a soft gray October Sunday morning and the little trees on the Damrak had only a few leaves left. The IJ was so quiet, so bluish gray, and behind a few long furrows it quietly thought back over the year that was coming to an end. But it was quiet on the streets, no drunk people celebrating, no flags. I wonder when shoes will get cheaper.
October is especially beautiful this year, we live in a golden city, and not for any amount of money, not for a hundred thousand rijksdollar bills would I want to be respectable. I’d rather just stay who I am, a piece of humanity like this walking right at the edge of the embankment, beyond the trees, stopping and turning around every time, like someone a little confused. And it has stopped raining, it hasn’t rained for days and I’m no longer dreaming about wet feet, I’m wide awake. And definitely confused.
The novel, my dear sir! We are in the middle of it.
There was no one on that stretch of Herengracht. The green and gold crowns of the trees were still thick with leaves. One by one the yellow and brown leaves slowly fell, you could count them as they fell. They lay quietly on the cobblestones, which were damp, and black, and in a little puddle that was still there somehow. Whole fields of them lay quiet in the water of the canal.
October 13, 1918
[1] Draft material from a piece Nescio abandoned; see note on page 159.
THE VALLEY OF OBLIGATIONS
I SIT ON the hill and look down into the valley of obligations. It is barren, there is no water, there are no flowers or trees in the valley. A lot of people are milling around, most of them drooping and misshapen and constantly looking down at the ground. Some of them look up every once in a while and then they scream. They all die sooner or later but I don’t see their numbers decrease, the valley always looks the same. Do they deserve anything better?
I stretch and look up past my arms at the blue sky.
I stand in the valley on a slag heap next to a small pile of scrap wood and a broken wash kettle. And I look up and see myself sitting up there, and I howl like a dog in the night.
November 1922
THE END[1]
NO, YOU’RE wrong. This isn’t what you think. Twenty years have passed since 1917. From 1897 to 1917 was twenty years too, but those were years of a completely different kind. You create a world of your own, you reject this and take a close look at that, you discover, you add more, and finally you see that it is good. And then the disintegration starts, slowly at first, you barely notice it and don’t realize what’s happening. What you’ve worked so hard to make your own— what you love—disappears or changes into something unrecognizable: landscapes and waterscapes, roads, bridges, buildings, villages and cities, people too. They don’t ask you first, they just do it. The elms near the Kortenhoef church that reached up to the tip of the spire were chopped down years ago, and they cut down the tall trees on the dike facing Rhenen too, the trees that went with Rhenen the way the gatehouse goes with an abbey. You have to walk farther than ever to find anything like what you love, anything that hasn’t been altered yet. If you’re an ordinary little citizen and move around in your own little world, you won’t find much.
So you’re wrong if you think “Oh, good!” and hurry to start reading. The terrible disintegration won’t matter to you, it won’t touch you at all. You think, thank God, that what you think is more important than the German Reich, Mussolini, Russia, and the Japanese put together.
Far, far away I see Koekebakker, a tiny figure on a bicycle on the road between Hakkelaarsbrug and Muiden. It’s a brick road with grass growing between the bricks. It is in June, the sun is low in the sky, the water in the barge canal is smooth and reflects the reeds. The bicycle whirs over the bricks. Other than that there is silence. Then he gets off the bike and suddenly it is even more silent, the bike isn’t whirring anymore, he hears his watch ticking in his vest. Just think back to that, if you can: June 1904.
Suddenly the man sitting across from me says: “There are only five things worth bothering about, and I list them here in order of importance: Amsterdam, early spring, the last ten or fourteen days of August, women, and the incomprehensibility of God. From most to least important.” He has a walking stick and he’s sitting with both his hands on the knob and his chin on his hands, old-fashioned as all get out, and he’s looking at me through his pince-nez and wearing a bowler hat that he could have bought from Kniepstra, the shopkeeper on Dapperstraat who died of consumption forty short years ago (I say consumption, not tuberculosis), and in his wide, tanned, fifty-year-old face covered in crow’s-feet above his heavy cheekbones, his eyes twinkle and his forehead has deep, undulating furrows. And I know that he’s just talking off the top of his head, there are plenty of other things worth bothering about. They don’t ask you first, they just do it. But by God they haven’t heard the last from us. One day we will stand up firm and steadfast again for what was always worth bothering about but never mattered to them.
Everything went so differently from how we thought. That the world didn’t care much about us—we all understood that a long time ago. But we still thought, for a while longer, that it was up to us to make the silent course of things take their course.
The man across from me says that he and that silent course of things have nothing more to say to each other. “Laugh at it and hit back. Other than that, God only knows.” His high bony forehead has two very sharp planes. He says in his Amsterdammish: “The more barbarians the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
Maybe you weren’t wrong after all, though it’s slow going at first. The man across from me stands up to leave and notices that he’d kept his hat on the whole time. “And I,” he says (now in proper Dutch), “I used to be a real gentleman.”
On the landing, he says: “Mister Koekebakker, I hope that we will see one another again. I have read your little books with great pleasure, but I have one thing to say to you: You are too good-natured.”
And that was the beginning of the end.
December 14, 1937
[1] Unfinished and unpublished by Nescio; see note on page 161.
INSULA DEI
I
FEBRUARY 1942. A gray, icy day. A stiff nor’easter, several degrees below zero, overcast sky, and snow on the streets. Sticky hard snow clumped into mounds at the edge of the sidewalks; narrow, beaten paths where people walk with difficulty, single file, sometimes stumbling, looking at one another’s legs, bumping into everyone they pass and everyone they overtake. On side streets the snow lies thick and sticky in the middle of the street.
A hostile world, a world in tatters. A world of cold and poverty. Poverty in the many thin wrinkled faces, in the closed shutters of many shops, in the frosted-over shop windows, poverty in the streetcar rails where no streetcars were driving even though the snow had been cleared off somewhat, poverty in the little line of people by the corner of the old Jamin candy store, next to a pile of snow six feet high, poverty in the stands selling frozen fish that no one is buying, in the snatches of conversation you overhear.
“I’ve still got a sack of coal, and some peat.” A woman is talking to another woman, shouting across the whole width of the street. Another one, a bit farther on: “I’ve got nothing left in the house.”
Poverty in people’s heads: ration cards, food, fuel. And: “How much longer?” Especially the growing children, between fourteen and twenty, they need so much.
The poultry shop isn’t there anymore. It has big sheets of yellow cardboard over the window and black paper covering the glass in the door, there is no name or anything else written on the window, it is unrecognizable, gone, a woman walks out of the door and there’s nothing remarkable about her except that she’s leaving such a mysterious house.
This is not just a day in February, it’s a day in the final February, the month that no months will follow. A gentleman in a hat, collar, tie, and a very nice duffle coat is dragging a little sled behind him with a little bit of anthracite on it, he is going to try to survive this month of February in spite of the painful white impassable world down below and the pitiless gray sky up above and the icy wind. That’s what we all want to do, except for the people who aren’t buying the frozen fish from the fishmongers shivering and stomping their feet and blowing into their cold hands. Why isn’t anyone buying fish? Is fish so expensive now that the thought of maybe surviving this month of February runs up against the price and gives up?
Somewhere in the snow, between a stall selling sliced red cabbage and sliced Hoorn carrots and parsnips and another stall selling filleted flounder, there are three big tin milk cans and an even bigger, bulbous brass milk tank and a wooden crate with empty milk bottles. Just sitting there for no apparent reason. Women and a few men come and stand nearby with canisters in their hands. They stand there stoic and resigned, we have learned how to be stoic.
And then suddenly the past is standing there, suddenly it’s 1900, 1910, 1920. It’s Flip. I never forget faces from that time. An older man with a wretched walrus mustache that’s dirty yellow and gray with poverty, and a poor man’s red nose, but without a drop hanging off the end at least. On his head is a flat black fur hat with a shabby bare patch, he has on a colorless cheap tweed coat that used to be gray, years ago, and now is just dingy. But in this old-looking face I can very clearly see Flip’s face and he’s wearing the same pince-nez, the kind that goes with a walking stick, the same one he looked at me over in 1900 when he recited Kloos’s “The trees are barren, late in the season.” I see him look the same way he looked at me then and I feel the same feeling: he doesn’t think I understand a thing, he thinks it’s a shame he recited this poem for me. They all thought I was pretty silly back then, and here on Dapperplein, after more than forty years, I am no longer the retired executive (God in heaven!), no longer the well-known writer, but just a silly kid with long pants that are much too short. And I see the assistant director sitting at his desk again, he looks across his desk at the bank representative and then over to me and then back at the man across from him and he taps his forehead. And again I am sitting a little off to one side with the people out to change the world in the Horseshoe Café on the Dam (torn down a long time ago), and again I can’t tell if they’re pulling my leg or not.
And now he’s standing in the snow, gray and wrinkled, stoic, with his milk pot and his walrus mustache, looking at the sticky snow. And Kloos, and the plans from back then to change the world, and the green rye fields of Brabant too, and the bluish oat fields ringed with trees in the glaring sun of early July, there between Dommelen and Keersop, how very, very far away they seem, as far away as a ham sandwich and a half-pound packet of tobacco. To the left the shadow of an avenue of trees lies over the oat field, and next to that the rye field with a blue cornflower here and there, and a little pasture too with two red-brown cows.
In the snow a large man has appeared with thick shoes, a dirty yellowish corduroy jacket, and V.A.M.I. [1] in copper letters on the front of his cap, and he has a liter measuring scoop in his large hand and he scoops, dead and dispassionate, and people walk away dead and dispassionate, with their pans and their milk pots. Thank God he has some today—so there is a passion after all, or the corpse of a passion—and when Flip turns around with his gray enamel milk pot, with the enamel chipped off in a couple of places, I say “Bonjour, Flip,” like it was 1920 and I’d just seen him yesterday.
And he looks at me through his pince-nez again, a little teary, holds the milk pot in front of the top button of his jacket, and then he says: “God almighty, Dikschei.” Then he looks at the milk pot and smiles and that smile both tells the whole story of his downfall and smiles it off, and we stand on the snow-covered sidewalk, a little ways off from the milk cans, the last woman is just leaving with her milk pot and between us and this impoverished barren world is an endless garden full of wheat fields and grass and trees and flowers and winding streams. The world is green again. It is a day in May again and we’re sitting on the Vink by the edge of the water and drinking coffee, of course, we always drank coffee, no matter what the weather. The chestnut trees and lilacs are blooming, and the goldenrain, and there are still a few apple trees in bloom, the calves are standing out in the orchard, the little lambs leap on their little legs the same way they leapt when Akhenaton was alive, the sunlight glitters in the Gein, the first water lilies are floating on the water next to the reflection of the willows, the meadows and roadsides are covered with dandelions and buttercups, the trees cast their shadows on the duckweed in the ditches, larks and blackbirds and birds I don’t know the names of sing and chirp, a swallow skims the surface of the water, a frog croaks very loud and suddenly there’s the cry of a long-forgotten bird, the cuckoo cries, very far away, and another one answers, very far away, the sound comes from so far away, thoughts can hardly come from farther.
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.”
II
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 li
ttle 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.