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 las
hed 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.
Somewhere between two gallows the bailiff halted. This was where they had last been seen. He was talking about the three cousins of his lord's wife who had gone out hunting and had not returned from the storm. At first, Dousa did not know what this was all about. The cousins, the Van Zuylen cousins, said the bailiff; they had gone out hunting and had not returned. Dousa thought: is this what I had to come along for all this way, for my wife's cousins? The Leiden friends, on the contrary, seemed to take the greatest possible interest in the case. They bounced back out of their decline. All kinds of details they wanted to know, such as the shoes the hunters had been wearing and whether or not they had gone on horseback; they wanted to know times and distances - and they whispered among themselves no end. Dousa did not understand how they could get so bothered about a load of cousins, and another's at that. The thought of those missing evoked in him an atmosphere of fleshiness: fat little hands gesticulating in full rooms and wasting time with a great ado about nothing, and he concluded that their disappearance amounted to no great loss.
Already, Dousa wanted to turn back on the spot but Woutersz gave him a sign. There was more: they must go on.
The ones from Leiden who had expected to be turning off down the dune track, retraced their steps, non-plussed. They would gladly have set off on a man-hunt for the disappeared gentry, with lots of trampling of hooves on the dull moss and cries of 'this way!', and an exciting catharsis with three run-through corpses in a thorny thicket. They did not understand how the two others could allow this spectacle to elude them, but they followed on, without protest. They were beginning to suffer saddle pains, for that matter: they were used to sitting down, but not on horseback. They were tired and Dousa, too, was tired, and this made them amenable.
All rode on, following the bailiff down the deep cart tracks among the gallows. The bells of Maria-ter-Zee sounded in the distance. The sky darkened, the wind got up, and soon it began to rain. It suddenly seemed much later, now drab-grey clouds blacked out the sun. As if the low sky lay heavily upon them, thus the horsemen bowed their heads. The birds, which at the announcement of the bad weather had been skimming criss-cross above their heads, had disappeared. Where do birds actually shelter, Dousa wondered. Behind the dunes roared the sea. It was here that the land met its end.
From a taller dune they saw what they had come for: the floods of the past night had swept away the dune-side facing the sea and the water had streamed freely into the fishing village. The chapel was awash; against its walls two little boats bobbed up and down. They saw people sitting on the roofs of the houses; other houses had collapsed. A few men waded through the knee-high water, pushing along possessions a-top pieces of driftwood. But when they took a better look they saw that these were not possessions bu
t corpses which had been tied to planks and doors, corpses which were being taken to dry land where they were laid down alongside other corpses. Then they would be untied and the wood would serve once more as a floating bier. There was no hurrying here which was why things looked as if this was the way they were meant to be. From a little distance away a few old dears were watching the way things are always watched when something changes place. So they were not watching the corpses lying there, a little gawkily, with feet that could walk no longer and hands that could no longer grasp and a head that never again would understand why it had ended up just there. The spectators had no interest in the corpses, abandoned by the soul, unprotected and defenceless, now seeking shelter in the void of the sky, no, they were watching the men pushing bier after bier through the black water, but it could also be that they were watching the raindrops, splashing and drawing rings, and the wake of the bier, drawing lines instead, and how the wind wiped all of this out.
The bailiff pointed downwards and asked Dousa what was to be done about this. How was he to know? How am I to know that, I who do not even know where birds take shelter in autumn when it rains and the trees are bare. I don't know, he said, and the bailiff did not know either.
Because they were getting cold up there on top of that dune in full force of the wind, they went on. There was more, the bailiff said, further on, down on the beach. And they saw the beach through a breach in the dunes and behind it lay the sea the way it always does. They descended; the horses slithered and were startled when they stepped into the cold water. Everybody watched the horsemen going along, one behind the other, through the water. The men with the biers stood still and looked up at the horsemen, and the old dears on dry land, too, watched how the gentlemen high up on their horses passed by them. Only once the gentlemen had passed from view did they continue with recovering the dead and watching the black water the dead were being fished out from, and only then did they hear the bells tolling because the birds did not sing and the women did not sing at their stoves and because the souls were lost and could not be found again.
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