The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy

by Richard Huijing

  Then - -se three gents, those simpletons had knocked at his door and they had got themselves drunk on the brandy he had sold them too dearly. The Admiral loathed such gents because they gave him the feeling that everything about him was wrong. They made him envious and caused him to feel sad for all he was not and would not become. The way they sat there on the wooden bench, with their boots of burnished leather and those hands gesturing you-know-what - it gave the Admiral satisfaction to ply them with brandy until their tongues writhed helplessly like fish on dry land. To frighten them, he had taken the head of Saint Hieronymus from the cupboard, but he himself had become afraid; the gents were not startled, on the contrary: they, with their rotund little turns, had had to laugh uncontrollably and wished most insistently to cast dice for 'that patron saint of brandy drinkers'. The Admiral wondered whether perhaps they were of the new faith that they dared mock a saint in so carefree a manner. And his loathing grew the greater because they seemed so at home with higher things and were not afraid at all, as if they had been able to strike a deal, somehow, with up-above.

  Shortly after the gents had left, with the head of the saint in an old sack, the storm had risen. For a moment, the Admiral rubbed his hands with glee at those waddling bunglers who would only find a hold on each other's flapping coattails - then he forgot them, because his house had begun to creak ominously.

  The peril his house was in notwithstanding, his neighbours came to seek shelter with him. His house had two floors and seemed almost impressive in the midst of the fishermen's hovels which most closely resembled tents, what with their posts and their canopies of sailcloth. But his house could not hold out against that battering North-Westerly either, and he was forced to seek refuge in the cellar. Here, there was only space for a few: the others had to go outside again to find what shelter they could under the oily sailcloth the storm tore at and the tempest hailed down upon.

  It was dark in the cellar and airless, and everyone sat bent down because of the flotsam timber shifting and subsiding ominously overhead. Buried in this grave, they had listened to the voices borne along by the storm. No praying, just occasional cursing, for everyone wished to hear those voices which were the voices of the lost, roaming dead. They had heard them more often at sea when the storm came from the North-West, from over yonder where the world disappeared in mist and where heaven and earth seemed to touch. Now, too, they listened to the voices again though they knew that these could not be understood.

  In the end it had quietened down and shortly afterwards they had heard the familiar shrieks of common terns.

  Now the storm had abated it seemed as if everything that once had been, had been taken away. The saint of storms had taken away their dwellings and their ships, and he had taken away the paths and made them roam in the wilderness. The fishermen wailed and cursed, but the Admiral was only tired. He knew that this was as it .was meant to be: one builds that which will be lost anyway - and that it is useless to know this. He would erect his two-storey house again, ridiculously puny with its thatched roof beneath the gruesome expanse of heaven. He again would lead the fishermen and they would believe themselves to be going somewhere because they followed him - the way they all followed the Lord and did not know that he was wrathful and had taken away the truth from the world, only leaving hope behind.

  They had been trudging along all the while, heads bent, bogbrained with tiredness, looking on without noticing how their feet left imprints behind in the wet dune sand, feet meandering across the smooth sand, fanning out, crossing and trampling each other without discernible cause. The men walked heavily, as if they were carrying something. There was something solemn about it, something rather ceremonial, the way they progressed in this stricken dune landscape, something terrifying, too: the misshapen child out in front like a messenger of doom. The bells of Maria-ter-Zee still tolled in honour of the mystery of death and, seen from a distance, the little troupe resembled a funeral cortege, impressed by something of which the meaning eluded them.

  Down below, the sea allowed its waves to unroll listlessly on to the bare coast.

  Thus they went on, oppressed and introverted - and because of this, they only saw the stranger when he was nigh upon them. He resembled a monk, but if so, one from an unknown order. Around his shoulders hung a drab blanket which was bound tight round his middle with a frayed length of mooring rope. His head was bald, the bald pate hard and smooth as brass. He did not speak nor did he look them in the face. He pointed towards the sea. And then, only then did they see what they might have seen a long time ago, for it had been there all the while.

  On the beach lay, fearfully large and alive, the Leviathan.

  3

  Jan van der Does, the young Lord of Noordwijk, unwillingly took his leave of his Leiden host and in the company of a number of literary friends he left for his seigneurial demesne. He would rather have stayed to let himself be admired a little more as the scholar and particularly as the poet Janus Dousa, renowned in the Republic of Letters for his elegant Epigrammata, but duty called - duty he had inherited and which he bore like Aeneas his father. He hoped to amuse himself with his companions on the way; the previous evening they had sat up late and had argufied over the question of whether the classics might ever be surpassed. But now he was trotting along muddy roads, he had no longer any desire to shine. Because of last night's storm he had not had a wink of sleep, and he was tired and ill-tempered.

  Actually, he would have stayed in Leiden a few days more - some learned visitors from Leuven were expected - but his host had filled his head with worries. At first, he had wished to know nothing about them, but as time went by he had become worried nevertheless - now he was even in a hurry to get back home.

  The road was barely passable, thick mud and deep puddles forcing him into the verge. At walking pace, occasionally at a trot, the riders went along, one behind the other, each sunk into his own thoughts.

  Dousa was reminded of his return from Paris, when it had been autumn, too, and he had felt himself to be like Ovid on his way to Tomi, his place of banishment on the Black Sea. Longa via est: propera! Nobis habitabitur orbis ultimus, a terra terra remota mea'. In his head these wondrously beautiful verses, yet around him, on the carts and the barges, Dousa heard the shameless jabber of merchants, soldiers and fat monks - and he felt nostalgia for his student days in Paris where such stupid folk quite simply did not exist and where everybody spoke about books as though they were their personal friends. It was in a Zeeland barge, squashed in between farmers with baskets full of vegetables and decapitated geese, that he had seized upon the plan that he, too, must write a Tristia, emulating the great Ovid.

  But now, riding through the autumnal Rhineland, he recalled anew why nothing had ever come of those Noordwijk lamentations: this bleak region, this orbis ultimus where the wind always blew, this was not just any place on the edge of the world, this was his land and he belonged here. Here he knew everything like the back of his hand: the church spires of Noordwijk, Katwijk and Rijnsburg, the flat countryside with its canals and ditches, the dunes, the trees of 't Hout, the sea. What remained was the melancholy that fate had put him here and not in the fine, glittering life was there, but not for him. In books, however, he found solace; words to him were more real than that which he saw, and this was why he had memorised as many poems as possible in the libraries of Paris, Leuven and Antwerpen, so that he, no matter where he was, would only need to close his eyes to float away on words to wherever he wanted. He knew Ovid and Horace, Juvenal, Martial, Propertius and Tibullus - he only regretted that they did not know him and did not know that here he was, trudging through the mud on horseback in that noman's-land, well past the frontiers of the Roman Empire, lost in the mists of time, but that he was doing this with their poetry in his head nevertheless. Definitely.

  Behind him trudged his travel companions, comparative dunces who could not distinguish the Vulgate from classical Latin and who spoke with hollow reverence of 'the language of God
' while, in their heart of hearts, they would like best of all to be covened together inside their chambers of grand rhetoric, huddling around those crooked little Dutch rhymes of theirs. They had come along this time because they didn't mind staying at the country seat of a real humanist for once. Dousa tolerated such folk because Noordwijk was remote and his great friends Giselinus and Silvius did not come down that often. He had a need, from time to time, to promenade in educated company amidst the surrounding countryside, conversing on the bonae literae. He was continually uncertain about his own work, too, and hankered after judgements, opinions, even if only those of a few dotty rhetoricians. Without them, he would grow lonely, standing in vain on the look-out in the hope that the postilion with his brass horn would bring a letter from afar. Even Ovid, who had kept company with the best in happier days, would write in the language of the Geti at times, because he, in the midst of barbarians, would rather be the greatest poet of Tomi than nothing at all.

  Occasionally, however, Dousa would fear that his life was founded upon a misunderstanding and that he had gone the wrong way, irrevocably - like a midge at sea that flew on because it had wings and noticed too late that this world was too large for it.

  When they entered Noordwijk, riding across the wooden little drawbridge, he ceased his cogitations. Here he was lord, and he had to endure that his head would be taken up by others' lives forcing themselves upon him with their obnoxious insignificance. The villagers cheated him as regards their rents, tolls and excises; they poached on his hunting grounds and stole from his winter supplies - and still they were not ashamed to bother him about one thing or another. He permitted it because things were easier that way - he had a distaste for business and certainly for business of base quality. His contempt for material life, among which he also reckoned this illiterate clodhopperdom to be, was so great that he preferred to hide it, which meant he passed for an amiable man.

  He wished to reach his manor faun as soon as possible. To prevent his being addressed, he spurred his horse on with the consequence that dogs jumped up, barking, and ran along bothersomely amidst the horses. The villagers came out of their houses to see who was going with such haste along the Gooweg. On seeing it was their lord, they waved and cried out after him. He replied with mud splattering up from beneath the horses' hooves.

  Before he had reached the little lane leading to his estate, he was brought to a halt by the bailiff who tended his affairs during his repeated absences and who appeared to have need to speak with him urgently now. Pieter Woutersz was an insignificant man who was in awe of the house of Van der Does, sworn vassals of the Counts of Holland, with a coat of arms quartered: in the first and fourth, nine diamonds gold on red; in the second and third, the Noordwijk lion on silver. Dousa was irked by this servile creep whose meticulousness made things boil down to the fact that Dousa only needed to confirm whatever-it-was of concern at the time, which meant that things happened the way Woutersz wanted them to. The man had the irritating habit of speaking of 'we', which gave Dousa the feeling of being involved in an unsavoury tete-a-tete. He would likewise always refer to agreements which Dousa could not recollect at all. In such cases, Dousa had the tendency to put himself in the other's position thus forgetting his own interests, in the end agreeing to something that was only to his disadvantage. Afterwards he would then ponder for a long time still why he had said this and not that, and why he had not put Woutersz in his place in particular.

  As is more often the case with thinking people, a curious phenomenon would occur with Dousa in that he made a rather slow, even dunce-like impression while in reality his thoughts had rushed a long way ahead of the conversation, which meant that what he said already had nothing to do with that which he was thinking at the time; the words, uttered casually and carelessly, were to him but a small step in a dizzying train of thought, but to a blunt soul such as Woutersz these were the only things that mattered. It was like Zeno's paradox about the contest between Achilles and the tortoise: once Achilles has caught up with the tortoise the latter has already left again. Likewise, Woutersz kept ahead of him all the time. The thinker's thoughts were faster than reality yet they never caught up with it.

  This time, however, that jobsworth did not know what to do with himself, and it gave Dousa pleasure to continue at walking pace, just ahead of the bailiff, so that the latter had to speak up beyond his powers and could not be sure whether he was being understood. The lane was narrow and no matter how Woutersz manoeuvred on his big Gelder stallion, he remained uncomfortably situated, half hidden behind Dousa, while the bare little twigs of the trees lashed his face.

  Quite soon, Dousa lost himself in thought and he forgot his retinue. He remembered his plan to acquire land on the North side so that his estate would reach to the Lijdweg and he would be able to withdraw altogether within the seclusion of his domain. He relished the trees, some of which were showing their bare skeletal shapes and others were adorning their last days with a glow of gold-leaf - and it annoyed him that he did not know the names of the trees. He resolved to enquire into this and to make a study of nature. One did, after all, first have to study things individually before being able to fathom the whole. There was so much one passed over unheeding, there was so much there without one being aware of about it. Those trees just stood there and quite simply begged to be understood by him. Suddenly, Dousa was gripped by the impatient desire to know how they came into being, how they grew and why there were trunks and branches and all that leaf-cover that died and was reborn. And above him the sky stretched out in incomprehensible blueness. He was in a hurry; he wished to lock himself away in his library as soon as possible to delve into some books. Plodding along here, snail's pace, in the company of useless souls, was wasted time: all time not devoted to study was wasted time.

  He had not noticed that the bailiff had overtaken him and he was startled when his way turned out to be barred: Woutersz had taken up position at right angles to the lane and he burst in brutishly upon Dousa's thoughts. He spoke confusedly, probably because he had been made to wait so long for his opportunity and now he was standing in all his glory in front of his lord, he no longer quite knew what it was he had been waiting for. His sentences reached out for something that always remained unmentioned; they twisted and turned and became encrusted with words they were unable to shake off. It pleased Dousa to let the uneducated bailiff wrestle to such an extent with the language as though it were a thing too large for him to grasp. But in due course the confusion of his otherwise so punctual bailiff began to worry him nevertheless, and when he was asked to accompany the bailiff, he did not demur.

  There were horses trampling and snorting in that little lane, reins were tugged and flanks were prodded with heels; for a moment all stood at right angles to one another and no one knew who wanted to go where - but the next moment all were off at a canter in pursuit of the hurrying Woutersz, and the bailiff led along the literary scholars in ignorance.

  Again they went along the Gooweg and turned off right, down the Heiligenweg. At St Hieronymus-In-Deserto they reduced speed, for in the churchyard the pit was open and the priest was busy sprinkling the dead with holy water as if something was still meant to grow forth from that corpse-cradle. A dog was bothersomely cunning about in front of his feet but the priest dared not give the creature a kick, bearing in mind the sacred actions undertaken. The dog sniffed between his legs and tried to get near the pit, something the priest countered with half-hearted movements. From a distance, a few stood watching. In front of the wall of the charnel house a choir had been arranged. With booming men's voices it sang a Dies Irae that fell quite dead under the bare sky.

  Through the open church doors they heard the true believers hurling abuse. They had been locked up in the lofts above the galleries where previously the skulls had been stored. Dousa had been surprised that the church had decided on this course of action, but the priest had explained to him that he himself had urged the inquisitors to be allowed to lock up the heretics
in the former charnel lofts so they would serve as frightening examples to those still erring. The prisoners had disturbed the liturgy with their hollering - and they would even chuck their excreta down during the eucharist. Churchgoers had complained but the priest had been adamant. He saw the Christian faith as a kind of wagerof-battle with evil, and he took pride in drowning the noise of the heretics with communal singing and thus have the corpus christi gain victory under a bombardment of heretic filth. When the faithful stayed away in great numbers, the priest reviewed his teachings and from then on, at the sacred hours, the prisoners would be bound and gagged or even knocked unconscious.

  Beyond the church the gallows began. These stood among the trees so one would only see them when watching out for them. From the odd one a forgotten skeleton would be dangling, but most of them were empty because the followers of the new faith had been warned in time and had been able to go to ground. The empty gallows stood along the Heiligenweg and along the Oude Zeeweg in the dunes; like herons at the water's edge, quiet and assured, they stood, all the way down to Noordwijk-op-Zee.

  Along this road they continued on their way.

  The friends from Leiden, who had been looking forward to cosy chats in a summer house, were getting fed up now and they asked where all this was taking them. Dousa did not know. I don't know, he said, and cantered off after Woutersz. You go from here to there, he thought, from there to yonder, but you get nowhere, for it is the world that is sliding from underneath if you look back you can see it disappear. Dousa wanted to hold on to this might be able to use it for a poem, when suddenly he was made to sidestep a dead tree-trunk, it had already evaporated. He did still try to track it down, but it was not to be found. How curious, the way thoughts came and went as you progressed, as though the head was making its own journey through the landscapes of the mind.