Duke of Egypt

by Margriet de Moor

  Part Two

  1

  I‘m leaving tomorrow, Lucie.

  I always knew well before she did. I had seen him tinkering with his car for weeks, seen him trudging through the wet grass in flat shoes that were far too elegant, seen him sitting at the bar in The Tap with a surly expression and buying rounds with the air of someone who does favors but accepts no thanks. “I’m off tomorrow.” Lucie had gone on calmly clearing out her cupboards.

  I take the view that a man belongs in the place where his wife lives. When you walk up the path from the road, past a couple of outbuildings made of planks overlapping like roof tiles, you can hear the play of the wind among the boughs of a small apple orchard. Fifty yards farther you come to the farmhouse. There it smells of grass and work shoes and even, still, of the cowshed that once stood here, though at the time when this was taking place, thanks to the rib of beef with onion rings that Lucie had on the stove in an orange pan, it smelled mainly of very pleasant living conditions. Take it from me that those two loved each other. Under a sloping roof where you could hear the swallows at night, they had a bed in which you automatically rolled into the middle.

  But why did she overlook the fact every year that April or sometimes even May comes around?

  “I’m off tomorrow, Lucie.”

  He stood at the kitchen table and, without paying her any attention, drank his coffee at leisure.

  “Why?” was her belated question.

  He glanced at his watch.

  “Business.”

  It was getting on toward ten in the morning. Through the window fell a cold shaft of sun, gusts of wind chased the starlings from the hedge. Something in the air makes someone like me, for example, think, I’m still alive, but may well make another person pull out a bag, dust it off, and set it on the stone floor of the barn. When Joseph went to put his things into it in the late afternoon, one of the dogs was lying with its nose under the canvas.

  “Yes?” he said, sensing Lucie’s sudden presence behind him with some unknown urgent errand.

  “The buyers,” she said. “Didn’t they need to know today how much we’re asking for Dusty?”

  Kneeling in the semidarkness of the stable, he took a tin of shoe polish from the objects around him and shoved it among the things in his bag.

  “Phone them,” he said. “Say that they can have the foal for two thousand if they come and collect it late tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Tomorrow!”

  Only now did he raise his eyes to where she was standing. In the dusk she looked at her husband’s appearance in astonishment, and at his hand that pulled a passport from the inside pocket of his jacket and flipped through it quickly. In a flash she saw a character with a thin nose and deep-set eyes, one of those types who hold everyone up at the border because his mug alone is enough to have him singled out.

  “Two thousand,” she said a little later on the telephone, in a businesslike way but still with the astonishment, which for that matter didn’t lessen any in the course of the evening. Not during the meal, when she found him cold and dark. Not when they were watching television, when she had lost every memory of him, and not later either, under the sloping roof, when everything she had experienced with him there in the past had abandoned her. Even in her sleep she was still astonished at the man who in a kind of love at first sight kept holding her immovable in his arms.

  Then it was morning — it doesn’t matter what morning — it was one of those mornings when one thing became completely clear to her. Let me be off, look how the sky is clearing.

  She’s standing in the grass, in the stinging spring wind. Joseph has got into his car, the engine starts up, he leans forward and fiddles around under the dashboard. A gust of wind catches her in the back. With both hands she grabs her hair, which has gone haywire, and sees him turning onto the road through the puddles. Her eyes stare as usual, and yet she understands quite a lot this morning. She understands that he won’t look back. Why should he? What good is her gray dress to him at this moment, her red hip-length hair and her jacket? It’ll always be there. When she turns around to get to work in the stable, she lets out a sigh that means nothing more than: Between this spring and next autumn there is only the summer. Which puts her back on exactly the same wavelength as her husband.

  Who is saying softly, “Benckelo, Nijmegen, Venlo.” His car approaches the village, he turns right before the milk plant, soon his house will have merged with fields and distant woods. If someone were to ask him if he didn’t have some sense of farewell, his face would assume a thoughtful expression and he would say nothing for quite a while. Now he’s approaching the border. I see him arriving there at about eleven, the barrier comes down in front of his bumper, there is the usual fuss. I see Joseph brake slightly to move into the right lane and get out in order to hand over his papers, those of a nonhostile nonillegal intruder, so that they’ll have to admit him anyway.

  Farewell? I mumble meanwhile. Is he venturing far from home, then? His relatives live all over Europe. They are Europe. They are the plateaux of the upper Rhine, the terraced fields of Lorraine, the Dalmatian coast with snatches of music from the cafés, they are the Silesian- Moravian corridor, the brown bears and the wolves of the Carpathian Mountains, the mirages above the great Hungarian plain, and they are also the villages and towns on that eternal route, the alleys, the squares. They’re all of that, in a moving form, and farewells, ladies and gentlemen, have no part in that.

  Nor does looking back, of course.

  Are you still following me, darling?

  Well, no. Not exactly. While Joseph has been allowed to go on his way with a nod of the head from the border guards, Lucie is sitting at the table with her notebooks. While Joseph with hair hanging over the collar of his coat looks in all directions, Lucie is stocktaking. Space, the serious stillness of the fields. It’s all familiar to him. Joseph whistles through his teeth and knows that two hours from here there is a camp near Krefeld that he will recognize first from the crows above the landfill.

  He looks, she does the books. Two hundredweight of concentrate. Twenty rolls of wire. The rain patters at the windows. On the floor her son is playing with a yellow Labrador. Tonight she’ll leave her cashbook and in an old armchair covered with a rug open another book, a novel, compellingly beautiful. Lucie loves to sit and sob in a knitted pullover at the eternal dramas of the world which, checked in their flight, have alighted on the bookshelf next to a beautiful potted linden tree. Capital, invested in enduring paper.

  Joseph will sit on an upturned bucket in the dark meadow.

  Oblivious of space or of time. You’ve found lots of relatives in the camp near Krefeld. When it’s dark, a fire flares up on the field enclosed by rusty wrecked cars. Beneath a deep blue sky full of scudding clouds, men and women who can be incredibly long-winded tell their stories. Does time pass? You wrap him around with so many words that he no longer knows if he’s living forward or backward.

  He looks drowsily around the circle at the faces. Of course he knows what it’s all about, he’s simply still a little dazed by the extremely circuitous syntax of his native language. The latest news changes imperceptibly into fables. A cushion of chatter is fluffed up and the first to snuggle down on it are himself and the little children who are staring at him. Now the bragging about distant relatives begins, they’re long dead, may the Virgin keep your ghosts away from us, but your peculiar behavior simply travels along with us. Why should your antics be left behind in time?

  He doesn’t say much. He sits in the row of men and sleepily passes the bottle of liquor. Whatever is being talked about concerns his life, but tonight it’s good just to test the warmth and the pulse of it all. He won’t be staying here long anyhow. By the end of April he’ll be floating in a hammock among the Yugoslav plane trees. In mid-May he’ll be repairing harnesses and saddles in a marshy region. In June he’ll be dealing in scrap in a suburb of a Central European city. In July and August he’ll be lugging bales of hay w
eighing more than a hundred sixty pounds and sleeping in blossoming meadows. But most of all he’ll be found on the campsites, well off the road, of a race of people with lungs so full of air that it simply has to escape: as lamentation and ranting, as song, as story.

  Family and adventure novel. Everything centers around the campfire. Anyone who squats down next to the flames in a white shirt stays silent first for at least a minute. All those present feel a huge tension mounting that quickly moves closer as this person pushes his hat back and announces that it’s time for the next person. When he then spreads his arms, they know what is coming. They start staring. For though the facts may be known, the words bring something to light that nevertheless starts reverberating, aloud, that starts rushing around humming incessantly on wings so huge they almost touch your shoulders.

  At the edge of the wood an irrepressibly curious audience has assembled. It stares at the words, finds them marvelous, unsurpassable, and there are some who hear the restlessness in them and the hesitations in the text. The story is good, enough to make you almost die laughing, but in the hesitations you can hear something of police checks, of identity papers, and if you’re sensitive you can hear the criminal code in them. Doesn’t matter. The fact that you get the hiccupy staccato of your native language in the pit of your stomach is good for feelings of belonging, solidarity.

  But emptiness is something else. Emptiness in a story can be filled up recklessly with images. At the edge of the wood there are a number of men and women for whom certain images have no words. Long ago these images entered through the eyes and now refuse to leave via the mouth. Such things leave gaps in a story, empty spaces that, contrary to reality, the reality of the time, began with such unambiguous place names: Biala Podlaska, Czestochowa, Warsaw, Lodz, Belgrade, Hamburg, Munich, The Hague.

  For Joseph it began with’s Hertogenbosch.

  It was the crack of dawn. Day had only just broken, May 16, 1944. He was woken by the voice of his mother peering out through a window of the caravan. “Holy God,” she said. “Why have you got it in for us?” Only then did the tumult that he had heard in his sleep get through to him. Harsh voices, not German, Dutch voices, just the voices of the Dutch police. Pounding on the doors of the caravans. He was only seven and a half. From under the quilt next to him his sisters appeared. One of them was called Wielja, a quiet girl of five, the other Umay, three years old. With her round hands and her curls, she was his favorite. In a basket at the foot his brother Leitschie slept peacefully through it all. He heard his mother strike a match, a cigarette glowed. He watched the door till it flew open with a bang and a policeman climbed in.

  “Here,” said his mother, “here you are.”

  It was all very polite. The policeman shone his flashlight on his mother’s papers and the inside of the caravan and he counted the children. Then his mother, Gisela Nanna Demestre, was told that she must hitch up the horse.

  There were about six caravans in the convoy. The police had left the gentile travelers in the surrounded camp unmolested and rounded up only the Gypsies. There were about forty of them. In the early May morning they drove their caravans into town. There was the Graafseweg and the Zuidwal. The tall windows of the mansions on Parklaan gleamed in the first sun of the day. People who were already up would have seen the procession. Horses, caravans with decorative carvings were moving slowly, and on the driving seat an exotic couple, a man holding the reins. At the windows children’s faces, swaying, white, impenetrable, barely distinguishable from the faces, outside, of the men wearing the black uniform of the Netherlands Home Guard marching imposingly beside the caravans.

  Joseph Plato thought of his father. Sitting between his mother who was driving and his sixteen-year-old cousin Paulko who had come to keep them company on the driving seat, he wasn’t frightened. Awake, he was daydreaming in the cool air and looking at the back of the horse as he used to when he was still a boy with his father who dealt in horses over a wide area. They were on their way to the station. He didn’t notice people stopping on the sidewalks and cars and wagons pulling over to the curb for them. His father had disappeared earlier that year, arrested at an address in Benckelo, in an area where the family had been going for years. Weeks had passed. Gisela had begged and cursed at the police station, but no one had told her what she wanted to know. Then the winter came and she decided to go to relatives in Brabant. His little brother was born. The’s Hertogenbosch assembly camp was a spot singled out and organized by the authorities for undesirable elements.

  Horse manure on the road surface. The bells of the episcopal city striking seven when the group arrived in the station square. The Gypsies had to park their caravans in as neat a line as possible under the chestnut trees which were almost in bloom and were given permission to pack clothes and bedclothes and even something to eat. Joseph felt like some bread with a slice of bacon, but Paulko said, “I don’t.”

  “Eat, Paulko,” said Gisela. When he replied, “I can’t eat because of the train,” she glared at him.

  Later they all stood on the platform, the whole bunch of vagabonds, roused from their sleep and badgered, who nevertheless vaguely believed what they had been told that morning, that somewhere in the north of the country in a place where some of them had actually camped before, Westerbork, the men would be put to work, the children could go to school, and the women would be allowed to stay at home. The whistle of the locomotive came closer. The train from Eindhoven pulled in. It was an ordinary passenger train, nothing special, but the rear carriages were old rolling stock with lowered blinds. How full it is, thought Joseph when they got on. Are they all going to the north too? In the compartments and in the corridors, besides a group of gentile caravan dwellers, were all the Gypsies from Limburg and East Brabant. When the newcomers came in, there was a whole spectacle of greetings and the space was taken up again. The train left with two policemen at both exits of the carriage. Joseph sat between his relatives on the soft seat.

  The light in the compartment was on. What a shame he couldn’t look outside, he thought, but the shades had been nailed to the frames. Soon the train slowed down again, stopped, pulled away slowly and then, after a while, slowed once more. Paulko, who’d been sitting in the corridor without a word, got up to look outside through a chink at the side of the curtain.

  “A station,” he said. And then: “I’ll just see if I can still buy some cigarettes.” When he looked around he saw Gisela. She said, “Let Joseph go with you.”

  The two squeezed their way along the corridor.

  “Cigarettes,” said Paulko to the policeman at the open doors. He pointed toward the kiosk on the platform. The policeman, a lad with watery blue eyes, understood and nodded. Something that should never have happened, during that whole government operation to evacuate people in as practical and as disciplined a manner as possible from Beek, Best, Venlo, Sittard, Eindhoven, Zwolle, Amsterdam, and which needn’t have happened, happened anyway. Because of the nod of an absentminded young policeman, two Gypsies left the train.

  They walked in the direction of the kiosk. It was busy on the platform. People had been waiting for a long time for the delayed train from Eindhoven and were now anxious to get on board. Paulko and Joseph walked in the direction of the kiosk, past the stairs, turned right, and walked along the other platform directly toward a brick building with tall windows and above the door, in yellow decorative bricks, a word that neither of them could read, Stationmaster. The door opened heavily. They were both surprised by the emptiness and the abundant warmth of the room. A stove was glowing. A desk with a telephone on it was deserted. Against the walls there were wooden benches like in a church. Joseph had let go of his cousin’s hand. Something in that atmosphere of incomprehensible emptiness and warmth drew him to the windows that he could see out of the corner of his left eye. He put his fingers on the stone ledge, stood on tiptoe, and could barely see over the bottom of the window frame.

  There was no better lookout post. Less than four yards
away stood the train with its blinds drawn. Motionless, full of invisible life. The center of the world at the moment of departure. The carriage in front of him began moving. Umay, Wielja, he thought, and at the same moment a miracle happened, the shade went up. Joseph Plato stopped breathing because there, in an illuminated compartment, he saw his family.

  At the back the uncles. Standing, talking contentedly with arms folded. Seated, the aunts with loosely hanging hair, between them his mother. The beautiful Gisela had her baby at the breast. Clearest of all were Umay and Wielja, who were sitting closest to the window. They’re going, he thought, what a shame. I’d have liked to say something to them before they went. Why did I get off, damn it? Wielja was sitting yawning, he felt his jaws respond, Umay was fiddling about trying to unbutton her cardigan. I expect it’s as warm in there as it is here. He felt as if time behind him was passing, whereas in front of his eyes it was the opposite. He had ample time to see the fingers with which the stubborn Umay, her chin on her chest, pushed the buttons one by one through the knitted material. Wormlike fingers, lowered eyelids, which were as white and round as those of a marble angel in the Basilica of’s Hertogenbosch. Then he saw his father too. Where did he come from so suddenly? Jannosch Andrias Plato had appeared between his brothers in the compartment doors which had been slid open. Bareheaded and in his blue suit with suspenders, he was staring intensely outside as if in warning.

  A nudge to the arm. Paulko. “We must beat it.” The last compartment was disappearing around the bend in the railway line as the two descended the stairs of the station. Joseph felt nothing and heard nothing. That compartment, that dull red compartment full of his kinfolk was still in his mind. When Paulko pulled him past the baggage-check lockers, he didn’t yet know that that crammed compartment of all things could become a vacuum. They went into the bicycle tunnel. Joseph walked along blindly with his companion. He didn’t yet know that that compartment was a ghost. A story whose words are smashed. Inevitable result: an emptiness in his throat that, from that point on in his life, he would never be able to rid himself of, not even on the most beautiful summer nights, not under the fullest moons. Nor would he want to. He would just like, after so many years, to stay in a world of walls in the winter, of sheds, chains, stables, and people who evoke feelings in him but inflict a different kind of sadness on him than the sadness he already knew. Every human being has his reasons for inexplicable behavior.