by Nescio
Yes, Flip remembered it all very well. He smiled, but only weakly, and he still looked a little teary, but the tip of his nose wasn’t as red anymore.
I summoned the waiter and ordered two rolls with butter and ham and had already calmly put the ration cards on the table before he could say anything. “And two more coffees.” I saw him take a look at my coat; he almost looked human. “Yes, sir, just a moment.” “Really,” Flip said. “I eat all day long,” I lied. He sat there resigned.
When the waiter came back, he was human. He had two plates, he looked at me for a moment then put one in front of Flip and one in front of me, and each of them had two thin slices of bread with ham, and Flip said “Oh,” and the coffee (not coffee substitute— there was no such thing), the coffee gave off curling wisps of steam and Flip sat there quietly and looked at me over his pince-nez again with his extremely nearsighted eyes and then he smiled, not pathetically anymore but the way you smile at someone who has done you a real favor. That was nice of Flip.
Then he turned his full attention to the food and drink and we didn’t say anything for a while. His mustache kind of spoiled things, but was also kind of nice in its own way. And then I said, “That book of yours, remember?” The book that was finally published, and reviewed (a bit condescendingly), and not read, and forgotten almost twenty years ago. Flip just shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. At the time he had found it rather depressing. But it wasn’t much of a book anyway, he knew that now.
“I’ve thought of you often, Dikschei, and envied you, because you will leave something good behind you. Good for you and for me and for a few other people, at least. I’m long past that. Not that I don’t think it’s very nice, what you wrote, for me and the few other people, but as for me … I’ve long since given up on immortality. Everything ends in …” He paused for a moment, looked sadly outside. “In snow and ice.” I fidgeted.
He wiped his mouth again. Then he looked right at me through his pince-nez and said, “How do I seem to you, actually?” I said I had to think about it. “You can just say it. I know perfectly well how I am, and how I seem to you too. I seem pathetic.” I stayed silent a moment longer, looked down at the lenses of his pince-nez, and then nodded.
“I’m not pathetic. I am an island.”
“An island,” I said, as expressionlessly as I could. “Isn’t everyone an island?”
“Maybe, I don’t think much about everyone, but I am an island.”
Silence for a while. I stared at the ring of a coffee stain on the table. “It won’t come out,” Flip said, wiping it with his semi-clean napkin. The waiter was standing a ways off, still waiting for customers who never came. He looked disapproving.
“Not just an island. I am a big island. There is everything on it. You remember the Dommel with its bends, its half-ruined little bridges, its half-ruined waterwheels, its meadows, its wheat fields, its willows and poplars. Do you remember Valkenswaard, Dommelen, Keersop, Breugel and Son?”
I nodded to each one.
“And the Moerdijk? And the Tongeren cathedral? And the chalk cliffs of Dover the way we saw them from Sangatte over the calm, rippled, blue sea? And the view of the IJssel and the Veluwe near Westervoort? Can you see the Gooi forests from here across the Loosdrecht lakes? Stand at the ferry landing and see Schoonhoven across the Lek in the half dark and hear the bell towers toll eight o’clock?”
I just nodded. I saw it all very clearly. Later I would return to every one of those places, more than once.
“No snow, no ice. Just whole rivers of flowing water. The Rhine, the Waal, the Maas, the Scheldt below Antwerp. I can’t name them all. And cities: Middelburg, the way it used to be, Maastricht, Hattem, Lier, Saint-Omer, I can’t name them all. All of the Netherlands, and Belgium, and a corner of France. I’ve carved out the worthless parts.”
“And not occupied?”
He looked up. Now he had to stop and think for a minute. He looked back down at the ring.
“The Occupation?” he said, musing. “I’ve never thought about that. No. How could someone occupy me? That has nothing to do with me. Being poor has nothing to do with me either. My island is a sanctuary, a monastery. Without walls, an enormous monastery. Dapperplein isn’t there. And when I’m standing on Dapperplein I’m not there myself.”
We were silent. Then he asked: “What time is it? … Twelve thirty, then I have to go, they’re waiting for me, my brother and his wife.” He didn’t say: “go home.”
We left. I saw that he still had good shoes, greased leather with thick soles, big and unwieldy but strong and whole.
“Where do you live?”
I gave him my address. “You have to come see me,” I said. “I’m home almost every morning from ten thirty to noon in this weather. And evenings, when we’re allowed to go out again.” He looked thoughtful. “All right. Yes, I’ll come, I’ll come by in the next couple of days. I feel like talking.”
I walked home, watching where I set my feet, and finally reached the canal ring and looked around. Everything there was white, I thought about the eventual death of all things, there were mounds of hard sticky snow on the ice, six half-dead gulls sat shivering between the piles of snow, you almost couldn’t see them. This used to be my water, reflecting the houses lit by the sun and their reflections glittered with sunlight too. There was no water anywhere. Middenweg lay there dead and white, but in the distance black trees rose up from the white and waited. “How much longer?”
I kept walking, on a path of hard dirty-brown and white muck. The world was gone again, all that was left was the path and my galoshes.
III
Luckily it’s thawing.
We’re sitting, each on one side of my stove, in comfortable low chairs and each smoking a little cigar and the flames in the stove dance gently up and down.
Luckily it’s thawing. You can see the sky through the windows again, a damp, mild, gray sky. The windows had been frosted over for a long time, while the stove burned, and the house was besieged by winter.
Luckily it’s thawing. I’ve stretched out my legs and I lean back with my hands behind my head and look at Flip and Flip looks into the fire and smokes intently, the way you can only smoke in wartime when there are no more cigars.
Then he says: “Lucky that it’s thawing. I already felt a drop on my skull from a house. On the way here.”
I look at Flip and listen and feel my youth, supposedly past, I see and hear my youth and I feel my freedom. I’m free, after forty years I’m free, and I can cut my hair whenever I feel like it and let it grow too if I want.
Insula Dei.
He is dressed well. A dark black suit with narrow gray pinstripes, a bright white collar, a blue tie with little white polka dots. A suit left over from his better days, saved and cared for, probably six or eight years, a suit to apply for jobs in, at least if he’s kept that illusion. Illusion! The knees are a bit shiny, maybe some other patches too. But he’s come to see me in a hat with no visor, a beret, and a drop of water fell on it and he felt it through the hat.
Flip holds his cigar under his nose and smells it intently. We are in the time when the cigar shops have empty boxes in their display cases and a sign hanging on the door: “Sold Out. Please do not ring unnecessarily.” I know that I have sixty-five cigars left, after these two, and I don’t think any farther ahead than that.
“I still had a few genuine Havanas,” Flip says. “Last year, when I was staying with my brother in Eindhoven, I always used to light one up after a meal, in secret.” He smiled. “In secret?” “Yes, I didn’t want to share them with him. One-and-a-half-guilder cigars.” I say “Insula Dei” and he just shrugs his shoulders and spreads his hands wide. Just like Flip. I wonder how many of those cigars he might have had back then.
For now, we sit there pleasantly relaxed, it’s warm and we’re smoking and spring is coming. While we sit there we’re getting closer and closer to spring and both of us know it.
We already know how
each other’s life has gone. We don’t need to talk about the war: we’ve looked each other in the eye a couple of times. We only need to sit quietly and the past rises up between us and spreads out all around us, we see the faces, we hear the voices, we see the endless meadows, we see the house fronts and the rivers and streams, the water splashes, if we listen closely we can hear the creeks too, “burble burble,” a cow is standing in the creek, we see the leaves on the trees. We sit out in front of the little cafés on the market squares and we wait on the ferry causeways, hands on our bicycles.
“A lot has changed,” Flip says. “They’ve cut down the elms near the Kortenhoef church.” “A long time ago,” I say. “They reached to the top of the spire, it completely changed the landscape. Remember when Ko shaved his beard off? It was like that.” I nod. “Another cigar?” At first he wants to say no, but the occasion is too pleasant. I light myself another one too. Only sixty-three left. “And our trees on the dike across from Rhenen. A stand of trees such as our dear Lord gives us here and there. And tall too, hmm, they were tall trees. And they went with Rhenen. Had to strengthen the dike. So they chopped down our trees. Who were we that they shouldn’t chop them down because of us? It would have cost money to do it differently. Then Rhenen was like an abbey without a gatehouse.” He is quiet for a while. “And now Rhenen must be lying in ruins.”
“And the Muiderweg,” I begin. “I can see myself biking between Naarden and the Hakkelaar bridge. June 1904. June 1904, just think back to that, if you can. I was coming from the Gooi, on a Saturday, near evening. The sun was low in the sky, the water in the canal was totally still and reflected the reeds. The grass was growing between the stones.”
While I tell it the thirty-seven or thirty-eight years disappear, they never were, they are still to come. My bicycle whirs over the bricks. Other than that, silence. I get off my bike and suddenly it is even more silent, the bicycle is no longer whirring, I hear my clock tick in my vest.
“Just think back to that, if you can, Flip.”
We smoke. “And just think of the hell of cars only twenty years later.”
“Yes,” Flip says, “now they’ve put a big highway next to the bike path, over the canal, and the grass grows between the stones there too. A long time ago too.”
“1904. Do you feel old?” he suddenly asks.
I think about it, thoroughly think it over, but it just takes a moment. “No. And you?”
“I used to.” His left arm went up, bent, and he made a gesture with his hand as though waving away smoke. “I used to feel that way. You think they’re destroying your world. At first you barely notice, you don’t realize what’s happening. Everything you’ve mastered with such difficulty disappears or changes beyond recognition. They don’t ask, they just do it. Paths and waterways, bridges, houses, villages and cities. People too. After twenty years I went back to Castricum and The Resting Hunter was still there but I couldn’t see it at first, it was so surrounded by everything. The main street looked like a bad haircut and then those ‘darling little apartments’ everywhere, dear God. Where can you still find a nice slender bridge? They need to be wide, for the traffic, much too wide for such short bridges. Abominations. And then ‘artistic’ too sometimes. I ask you. As long as they can drive fast. What do they know of God’s slenderness? The double drawbridge from Ouderkerk is high and dry in an open-air museum on the heath near Arnhem, incredibile dictu.”
“So,” I think, “it looks like he’s kept up his Latin.”
He keeps talking. “Now that all seems like nothing. You have to hike farther and farther to find anything that hasn’t changed, that still resembles what you used to like. But if you’re an ordinary person moving around through your own little world, you won’t find much. It seemed pretty dreadful to me, for a while. I wondered if it wasn’t up to us—to me, to you, to the people like us—whether the silent course of things could continue or not.
“God is often incomprehensible. His incomprehensibility is never far away. Just think about the snow that day when we ran into each other last week. And the neighborhood.”
His cigar has gone out. Slowly and laboriously he digs a match out of his vest pocket and an empty matchbox out of his jacket, re-lights the cigar, looks at the smoke, cautiously opens the stove by pulling on the knob with his hand in his handkerchief (a clean one), and tosses in the used match.
“Now I know better: God is here.” He points at his forehead and for the first time I really see the deep furrowed grooves, and that his eyebrows are black and long, the hairs wavy and dirty-colored and sad like his mustache. But he looks a lot less wretched now and I can’t help thinking that for very little money a barber could make a whole new man of him. “God is here.” Where have I heard that before?
Again, Flip keeps talking.
“Why should people have to cross their bridge slower for my sake, or your sake? God is with those people too, he has to do something for them, they have to go about their business too. We have so much else.
“Someone like you or me,” Flip says, and he looks at me. While he was talking he was cleaning his pince-nez with a real (and clean) chamois cloth, and now he looks at me over the top of it, with his nearsighted eyes, the way he always did when his heart was full of feeling. Looks at me like a faithful dog.
“This world is too small for someone like you or me,” he says. “We have the world inside us, and in it we are God’s envoy, Dikschei. And in it God is not incomprehensible. What is the pope, Dikschei, compared to us? The pope, tied down to everything? We are God’s humble servant. And you wander around in that world in all modesty and you’re happy and meanwhile you’re nailing rubber soles onto your brother’s old shoes and you sit there hammering and you yell, ‘Mie, you’re burning the milk.’”
“You have milk again?”
His cigar has gone out.
“Yesterday morning we did,” he says. He deposits an absolutely miserable little stub of cigar in my stove and struggles to his feet.
As I help him into his old tweed coat, I ask, “Are you still looking for work?” He shrugs his shoulders again. “Do you still have that derby hat?” And we both have a short laugh. That derby hat from Kniepstra, who had a shop on Dapperstraat, who died of consumption forty years ago. “Back then we died of consumption, not tuberculosis. So, see you soon. You have to come by and see where I live, even though it’s not very nice. Yes, that derby hat. It was so big it fell down over my ears.”
He looks thoughtfully down at the tips of his greased-leather shoes.
“I don’t believe I was cut out to be a true gentleman, Dikschei.”
IV
I am sitting in front of my stove again, thinking. Insula Dei. I have to think about that. Is it only a refuge for old men?
The thinking is not going so well. The gray sky is almost white and it looks like a soft rain is coming.
The room grows darker. Rain! And out of the past, a past from five weeks ago but so, so far away, the trees in Frankendael Park rise up out of the past, blue and red drops glisten on the branches, a white drop sparkles fiercely and trembles and suddenly is pale blue. The trees are bare, of course they’re bare, it’s January. Long ribbons of light glow on the branches and when I look up I see all the delicate twigs and the little buds against the faint blue sky. The treetops are already looking toward spring, in the distance, and down below the black trunks lead their own lives. A doe could stand there with raised head and childlike eyes, and why do I never get to see the dancing pixies? It is almost spring after all. I would catch a cold and rheumatism if I did but the stone maiden stands there with her naked breasts, so many stone maidens have nothing on and stand in gardens in January, the enviable things, and they stay healthy for a hundred and fifty years, two hundred years.
How often in summer I have looked at those same trees, full of leaves, looked at the light on the trees and the shadow, and the darkness under the crowns. Every day I went by and looked. There were shadows from the leaves on the
grass; in between, the light was intensely golden. Then it was as if the trees had always been there, exactly the same, and always would be. Who, when he sees a friend, thinks that he will never see him again? Now the ground between the trees is brown and dingy, it’s the leaves from back then, and not even all the leaves. I looked at them so many times and it didn’t help them a bit, they fell anyway.
Insula Dei. I force my thoughts back to that.
Yes. And no. I think about these eventful times. You want to do something, make a difference. But these aren’t the first eventful times I have lived through and if I’m granted even more years then with God’s help I will most likely get to my third war. The silent course of things takes its silent, implacable course, the little man who is a hero today will tomorrow, when peace comes, be scolded in his stupid little job or maybe won’t have a job at all and will turn back into the useless piece of clockwork he used to be. And if he has a little more to him, maybe he will read the first chapter of Ecclesiastes: “All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it.”
Eventful times. What remains from Italy’s eventful times in the thirteenth century except Dante’s Inferno?
Do. As if I haven’t had enough pointless doing. Oh they have nothing else, they only are when they do. I want to be, and for me to do is: not to be.
It slips away from me again. I see the spring. Like the highest branches of the trees I see the spring from far away. God help me, what a winter we’ve had. Cold. And snow and everything jumbled together. A train has pulled into Amsterdam-Muiderpoort Station from Utrecht, going to Centraal Station, and the stationmaster is about to give the signal to proceed when he quickly asks the conductor hurrying onto the train, “Tell me, what train are you again?”
But now it’s thawing, thank God. I think back to last year’s crocuses in the parks in Groningen, in the gardens of the villas on the way to Haren, and farther. Spring was late last year. The crocuses were in full bloom in mid-April. Yellow, purple, and white, the vanguard of spring. And the Paterswolde lake lay there in the distance, you are standing a little higher in the landscape but you barely see the meadows sloping down, there are low dikes with willow trees on them, the alder catkins are hanging down, here and there a farm-stead is surrounded by tall trees, there are even a few cows in a scrawny pasture. Over there too. I count seven. The lake is all dark blue beneath the April sky, in front of the Eelder woods that are the outer edge of the world, small from a distance but also large. And black. And at the same time blond. However I want to see them. In the middle is a large tree I recognize. And the next day the lake is pale blue and the day after that it’s a delicate gray with a sail on it. A magnificent view, magnificent enough for me, my heart swells and the landscape swells with it, the sky is so high, it is as though I could live there like that, without friends, without the baker and milkman and butcher and grocer, without garbage cans and clothes and even without cigars if necessary and without a pipe, and that’s saying a lot. Ach, I will have to live without tobacco and cigars all too soon anyway, but not on the side of the road to Haren and not beneath the trees in the Frankendael. But I’ll never be rid of the baker and the rest of them. Although God knows, maybe them too. But then the side of the road to Haren will be a very different roadside, like the one you sometimes read about in the paper, where a dead body is found in the winter sometimes. And as for clothes, I can’t do without them, unfortunately, and the police go after nudists whenever they occasionally do turn up. “The beauty of the human body” is written in respectable books but we ordinary folks have to go to museums for it, if we ever get to see any of it at all.