Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  He shook off the thought and gave himself a quick, primitive, approximate lesson in physiology. The rough implication of her words was more serious than the Moroccan Crisis, the Franco-Russian alliance, or any foolish thing in the Balkans. He did not know if the trifles he and Alicia had engaged in until then could actually have left her impregnated, but if there were any chance at all, however unlikely, he had only one honorable course. He lifted his head to an angle of commendable arrogance, and, as if he were already a career soldier, a lifer in the Prussian Army, said only:

  —Du.

  With the informal second-person pronoun, Alicia realized that she had succeeded in using a time-tested, shopworn trick to hasten, against the deadline of conscription, a promise of marriage.

  He celebrated his birthday with pomp, got married with the blessings of both sets of parents, and received his call-up with residual good sportsmanship. Never pretending to be a wife of the bivouacking variety, Alicia remained in the Westerwald, passing time and living for the occasional weekend leave. The lie concerning the missing something was revealed in a moment of weekend tenderness. Before Adolphe’s return to his regiment, she spoke dreamily about how they ought to start making this soldier’s child. Conception took place that evening in an act of militant retribution.

  ‘Dolphe’s new uniform did little to change the standing between the three amateur brothers. Peter, ever flexible, simply changed “Have you heard the one about the Rhinelander?” to “Have you heard the one about the infantryman?” Hubert asked how hard it would be to overthrow the commanding officer and seize control of his regiment. Adolphe brought new facts (if the camp rumors he ate for breakfast could be called facts) to the perennial political debates. Adolphe continued, during leaves, to argue politics with Hubert all the way up until the day the Kaiser declared he would not recognize any more political parties, only Germans. If the two had still been in communication then, they doubtless would have continued to argue about what good Germans were to believe.

  But by the time the Kaiser used this edict to dissolve the Reichstag and put Adolphe to work for his stipend, Peter and Hubert had left the country. Juggling their citizenships as if so many hoops and plates, they crossed back and forth over the Dutch border with impunity. Allotted two free days every few weeks, they packed up dangerous secondhand bicycles with sack lunches and a change of clothes. They pedaled the thirty-five miles to Maastricht to visit their no longer legally living mothers. They rode, walked, forced, and nursed their machines over the taciturn terrain, sometimes worse off than if they had gone by foot.

  Hubert pedaled distractedly, caught his trouser legs in the exposed chain, serpentined as if a slalom skier, and continually went off the road with gritted teeth and squawks of surprise. Soon he discovered that he did better if he did not smoke and kept his eyes on the portion of road his wheel pointed toward. Peter crouched low, shoulders to handlebars, as he had seen the riders in the motocross do. He wrecked his throat making engine noises, and rubbed his right hand raw by pretending that his hand grip was a throttle. He became adept at running down chickens.

  On the second of such bike trips, Peter created a sensation in his old neighborhood by showing the photo that the boys had purchased in installments from the eccentric from Cologne. He explained how this one was better than a formal studio portrait because it showed them as they were, really, on that day, with no lies or covering up. An old Dutchman, dubious, remarked that they had been taken: if they wanted “as they were” they could look around them anytime and get it for free. If they were going to pay good money for a photograph, it ought to be for “as they ought to be.”

  But Peter’s mother adored the image. More fond of it than of her foisted son, she wanted to keep it in her oak press along with the rest of her life’s prizes. The boys explained that they had to rotate possession with Adolphe and Alicia. They promised to bring the photo along on every bike trip when it belonged to one of them.

  The city of Maastricht was and is the largest in South Holland, but still drops off abruptly into fields indistinguishable from those in the Westerwald. The city itself is a railroad nexus and an industrial manufacturer of glass, ceramics, textiles, and paper goods. But the surrounding fields, which in winter circle around the city like packs of wolves, have not changed since the Hapsburgs. A city wholly intent on producing useful material goods, Maastricht is large without luster or cosmopolitan quality. Detroit might be a good American analogy.

  Natives would object to this description, pointing to the eleventh-century church, the Roman antiquities, even the rich historical overtones of the city’s original name—Mosae Trajectum, the ford over the river Maas. But they would be clouding the issue. The town lives first and last for industrial production. It makes things, things that can be used.

  Peter, brought up on the narrow cusp between the urban center and blank fields, enjoyed ridiculing Adolphe, lording it over him merely because in the Westerwald, Jan Kinder had had to walk to work in the fields, slaving there for fifteen hours a day, whereas in his second life in Maastricht, the boys’ mutual father took the train each day to a ceramics factory, working there only twelve. To Peter, this represented a metal-pipe dream, a vision of progress and mechanical betterment. Given a transmission long enough and a gear box to put it in, one can move the world.

  Maastricht doubled as the capital of Limburg Province. Limburg stands in relation to the rest of the Netherlands as, once again, the Midwest stands to the U.S. Limburg permits the continued existence of Amsterdam, just as Michigan permits the continued existence of Boston, the East Coast. Yet both provinces have second-class standing. Both cultivate customs so different from those of their sophisticated partners as to have little in common with them aside from language and a loose federal hegemony. Both are the object of ridicule of the more cultivated if dependent parts.

  From early times, Limburg changed hands as often as a block of short-term investment stock. A string of changed allegiances attest to a contrary spirit. Like Bohemians and Parisians, Limburgers oppose everything. They cheered the revolt from Spain, but out of apathy fell back into Spanish hands soon after the creation of the Netherlands state. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands later reclaimed the province and with it the resentment of the populace. Limburg has always harbored French sympathies except for those periods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when parts of it fell under French control.

  The separation of the area into Belgian and Dutch halves in 1831 left each part hankering to trade places with the other. The creation of Belgium by the Great Powers in that year was an experiment in the idea of buffer states: an attempt to keep two fighting dogs apart by dangling a piece of raw meat between them. More remarkable than the idea’s illogic was its success. Guaranteed by the underwriters, Belgium’s neutrality had gone unimpaired from 1831 to the year of Peter and Hubert’s bicycle trip. But to Limburgers, Belgium meant just another national state to resent.

  To a Limburger, separatism was a pastime, avocation, religion. Freud once compared the replacement of the id by the ego to the Dutch draining of the Zuider Zee. The analogy relates Limburg to that part of the mind that has always been fully conscious, high and dry: congenital resentment, homelessness.

  Native contrariety alone could not explain why Peter, with an adopted mother near at hand, had to cycle all day to see a mother he had signed away. For Peter had become a naturalized German to the extent of believing that kindness ought not to take you more than a mile or so off your path. A long bike ride, like excessive personal grooming or sticking with a too-difficult book, had to rest on a higher motive. Peter had begun frequenting a tobacconist’s widow who kept an aromatic shop in Peter’s blood mother’s old neighborhood.

  This woman had a son two years older than Peter, and between mother and son they pushed near six hundred pounds. For this woman’s company, Peter had forsaken a Gertie of some plain beauty and dangerously buck teeth. In public, he preached an idolatry of the perfect and beautif
ul woman. But his tastes thus far in his brief life always took him toward the grotesque. The widow kept an army cot in the back of the shop, surplus from the Sedan confrontation. There they had sex in all but the technical sense of the word. On account of an unshakable fidelity toward her dead husband, she would not permit him genuine intercourse. Instead, she made soft cavities out of her excess flesh that did just as nicely. This was the closest he had come to what he bragged to his new brothers about having accomplished years ago.

  For the woman’s part, she kept the boy around to liven up a remarkably dull trade. Her husband was dead, her son married, and tobacco was only good for a smoke. The boy’s anarchy was her only amusement. He would walk about the shop yawning, then suddenly pounce on the longest, thickest maduro cigar he could lay hands on and hang it in suggestive pantomime from his front trouser crotch. She would laugh, screaming, “Liar,” “Dreamer,” or “Novelist,” the three being roughly equivalent to her.

  The two of them invented a game in which she would retreat into the back room and he would stay behind the counter until a customer came in. Then, in answer to anything the client might say or ask, the mock proprietor would repeat the last few words of the phrase, inflecting them as needed.

  —Young man, I’m looking for a birthday gift for my husband.

  —Your husband?

  —Yes. He smokes a pipe. Have you any recommendations?

  —Any recommendations?

  —You know. . . . This brier pipe, for instance. It looks like it gives a good smoke.

  —It gives a good smoke.

  —I must say, young man, you are not being very helpful.

  —Not being very helpful!

  —Now don’t you get huffy on me. I want to speak to the owner. You know, the heavy woman.

  —I know the heavy woman.

  While not very good for business, this routine always sent the tobacconist’s widow into hysterics. She peeked through the draw curtain to witness the transactions, sometimes giving them away with her cackling. In a corollary game, they would watch people pass by on the street and rate them as to how many rounds of the echo game each would last before losing temper: “Now there’s a pompous ass; I bet he’d not go more than three. Note that gullible sap. You could get him to twelve, easily.” Later, this became abbreviated to a nod of the head and a grunted “six” or “eight.”

  In visits to the tobacconist’s widow, Peter slowly worked out his moral code. His disposition and makeup did not encourage sticking to principles for very long, but for the interim, at least, he’d devised rules of behavior running something like: going outside bareheaded beats wearing a hat that might be thought silly. If someone is to be taken in, make sure you are on the delivering end. And most important, in conversation, jokes go over better than current events. This last precept was to take him well into the Great War before it failed him.

  Hubert was the big loser on these bike trips. With his mother seldom free and Peter consorting with a petite bourgeoise, he could only suffer desertion with the same placidity with which he had suffered Peter’s cruelties along the way. The fluid, folded age lines in his face came from his never knowing when he was being hurt by someone. What marked him alternately as a case of crib death and one of senescence was his continuing halo of resigned bafflement, a look that seemed to remark: I had better find something to do for two days.

  To kill time, he would head down to Hoog Straat and the public fountain. This piece of northern propaganda, commemorating the most recent retrieval of Limburg by the Dutch, meant to bribe the province into a semblance of nationalism. Alabaster was cheaper, if not as immediate as agricultural reforms. The poorer element of Maastricht, however, were able to do their wash in it. Incapable of thinking figuratively, Hubert misinterpreted the fountain’s brass inscription: In Dutch Hands Alone. He thought that meant only Dutchmen could put their hands in the water, and that his new German papers made him anathema. So each trip, without fail, he bathed his whole torso with all the urgency and delight of a criminal.

  He broke laws with the same sense of constructive accomplishment that other boys got from building little model towns. A blow here and there for the cause, mosquito bites on the fat buttocks of burghers. If he’d owned a pick and shovel, he would certainly have been out destroying a road somewhere. Instead, he loitered below the windows of the state-run charity grade school, waiting for lulls in history lessons to yell out his own interpretations of the past and prescriptions for the future. He twice received lazy warnings from languid, mounted constables.

  The anonymity of an industrial city also allowed him the freedom to do shameful things. To Hubert this meant not masturbation or blasphemy, but playing streetball with the local urchins. The first two sins he looked on as agreeable obligations, something a mature, responsible person ought to do regularly—like work, or talking politics. But he felt real shame at not being able to give up streetball. This shame marked his first passage out of narcissism into guilt, out of childhood into adolescence. A few more years might add a brand of Catholic contrition for the sins he committed so cleanly now. With the process initiated, only a small leap of years would lead him into the final shape of shame: adult indifference.

  The children who gathered in the alleys in the early afternoon played a game that vaguely resembled soccer in that it used a round ball. None was yet in his teens, so Hubert cut an odd figure among them, feet taller than the rest, blocking and checking as if in a professional match. The children called him opa: Grandfather. While opa committed brutal penalties, Peter called his girl friend’s son “sir” and Adolphe received weekly letters from Alicia, two years his junior, beginning “My Dearest Child.” Age is more moldable than clay. The streetballers revered opa as their greatest curiosity until an eight-year-old named Sjefke stole center stage by appearing in an eye patch after having had his eye put out by his father.

  Aside from these activities, Hubert split his time in Maastricht pretty much evenly between a fourteen-year-old girl named Wies and a retired laborer named Willy. Wies, a policeman’s daughter, loved men to an extreme, and was never out of their company for any length of time. But she threw them all over the instant Hubert hit town. The most severe of lovers, she meant to save people. Hubert, more than any single person she had ever met, was in serious need of salvation.

  Their courtship never varied from a strict routine. Hubert arrived unannounced at her parents’, always surprising her in some degree of intimacy with a new cousin of hers. Flustered, she would introduce and summarily dismiss the crestfallen relative. Hubert then would take Wies out walking, usually to a place where they gave out yesterday’s bread for free. The daughter of a moderately well-off police officer, Wies always offered him money. His rejections of charity—“What use has a So-veet for money?”—were to her a powerful aphrodisiac. Watching the boy gnaw on stale bread aroused her even more. She would begin by leading him to some dark public park, all the while saying how the Lord planned each person’s life, if they would only stop being foolish and selfish in rejecting Divine Will.

  When she reached the part about those short-sighted people who thought they were put on this earth simply to experience pleasure, that was Hubert’s cue to lift up her many-layered greatskirts and begin playing with her underclothes. He overruled her modest objections, polemicizing, “So-veets have no use for God.” This pragmatic argument served him well. Wies, a girl of very low sexual threshold, would in minutes be heaving under his hand. After climaxing, she would begin to cry, striking him with all the violence possible for a fourteen-year-old daughter of a policeman. Her blows rapidly became equally violent strokings of Hubert’s trousers, as if the worst and best course ever allowed is retaliation. He never took much longer than she.

  When a calm and awkward grace descended again on the two, he would fill the odd silences by telling her everything he knew about communism and the socialist movement. In three minutes, he exhausted his store. Love, after the exchange of indoctrinations, had t
o adapt to silence. He would laugh the laugh of a barnyard animal, shrug, and leave her to find her way home alone. And so, in the unconscious race on the part of the three brothers to preserve a disintegrating childhood, Hubert won without contest. He had not yet seen his love any way except fully clothed.

  On leaving Wies, he generally went to Willy’s. This old fellow slept only for half-hour stretches during the morning and afternoon, and he was always ready for company at any hour. At Hubert’s age, Will had already compiled five years’ experience as a brick carrier. Outfitted with a curved plank that sat on his shoulders, a notch cut in it accommodating his head and neck, he carted carefully stacked pyramids of bricks from the ovens to waiting trucks. At Hubert’s age, Willy’s single motivating desire had been to get a job inside the factory, preferably working the ovens. Inside jobs paid fifteen cents more a day than carrying, and it was easier on the spine. When he finally earned his promotion, he rested content for several years, secure in knowing more about bricks and brickmaking than all but a very few people on this earth.

  After a time, however, that sense of superiority grew thin, and Willy had to look around him for other novelties. A true Limburger, he hit upon discontent as a consolation. He had read about the Second International in a newspaper that had been short on copy and run an account of the great movement of the left as a filler. After asking himself, “The Second International what?,” he thought no more about it until some of the younger hands at the brick plant started talking strikes and trade unionism. At that moment he put the two together and experienced one of those rare, lasting descents of understanding that sometimes kill the normal state of daily incoherence with one of demanding simplicity. He could combine a moral cause with a gratifying belligerence to achieve that almost unattainable happy marriage: justifiable martyrdom. He had come into his heritage.