Duke of Egypt

by Margriet de Moor

  “Hey, it’s coffee time. How about coming over to the house with me?” And she said it in such a way that he understood perfectly well that over there, in the farmhouse, it was really the coffeepot that was waiting for him and not the bedroom under the eaves with the swallows’ nests. His face remained controlled, inwardly he was cursing, yet his pique was not serious. Walking back into the sun with Lucie, Joseph, though frustrated, thought in his heart it was wonderful that the woman he was beginning to be obsessed with didn’t give in just like that. Because in his circles it simply isn’t done for a woman who is adored to lie flat on her back at the first sign like some gentile lady.

  How long will the game last? You don’t know, Joseph, but if you ask me, not too long. A week. Then she’ll be standing brushing out a tub in the pantry, and you’ll just have finished with the feeding troughs. You will have kept bumping into each other that day, agonizing meetings in which you kept lowering your eyes and found it hard to swallow. At noon the two of you ate potatoes and salt fish with Gerard and the casual laborer who’s operating the combine harvester. All the devils in hell can’t stop you now. You knock at the door. You see her over your shoulder smiling at you and politely pointing you to the boot bench with the foaming brush in her hand. But with a motion of your head you order her to come with you.

  The pair of you walk past the barn. One of the dogs comes up wagging its tail, and she sends it away. “Off you go! Good dog!” It’s September. The leaves of the linden tree are already yellowing. The stinging nettles are already starting a second flowering. Is it September or April? All the animals are outside. In the distance a bilious green machine cuts a swathe through the grass, growling as it goes. There’s no better idea than for the two of you to walk along the edge of the ditch behind the orchard, in single file. Around the bend an alder grove with an infinitely soft bed begins. Sink to the ground there. Can you feel the depth under you and the height above you leaping up? Intoxicating. Freedom. That’s right, isn’t it? Direct connection and you don’t have to know with what. Joseph, after a week of pain and violence in his chest, pressed to the ground a woman who surprised him after all by sinking her teeth into his shoulder. When the fury in her eyes calmed, he loosened his grip a little. She half rose. He saw her bending over in her dress like a dancer to pull the heel of her boots off. It was Wednesday, about two o’clock. By six o’clock Lucie was standing in the kitchen cooking pancakes for her father and herself. Gerard was sitting at the table with his sleeves rolled up. He didn’t know that his daughter, tossing pancakes by the stove, was a married woman, with a piece of metal hanging on a chain under her blouse. It was a very ancient example of traveler’s handicraft, which, among strange signs, bore the image of a dark woman. She represented a Black Madonna, whose style harked back stubbornly to the original powers of Ana, the mother goddess who, through no fault of her own, gave life to a grubby white bird with two heads.

  Time for coffee, she said. He followed her into the kitchen. He put his hat on the table and sat down only when she offered him a chair. Smoking, tapping his cigarette inconspicuously into the ashtray, he observed her as she let in the dogs and put water on to boil.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I won’t be cooking for a long time, but I expect you’re hungry. I’ll get some bread.”

  “Don’t go to any trouble, Lucie.” She had told him her name and now he was practicing. “I’m happy with a cup of coffee.”

  He heard her rattling the cups. When she opened a cupboard, he smelled cinnamon. He saw her walk over to the windows and look outside with her hands on her hips while behind her back the water ran through the filter. I want that woman, he thought. I feel very good. Just a short while ago I had a lousy dream every night.

  She pushed the dogs away with her feet and put the coffee on the table.

  “Don’t insult me,” she said.

  She meant the apple cake that she’d cut for him. His interest in her increased when she started talking about the business.

  There had always been horses. Until recently her father tilled his acres with only a couple of Gelderland mares or geldings for the plow and the mower. Ever since she was a child she had loved the stables where, in winter, the very presence of that breathing, that warmth, had something pleasant about them and where, as the months went by, the light increasingly flooded the hayloft. In the summer there was the spectacle of work, of the stepping and turning of a pair of animals totally geared to the land and with a pulling power of twelve hundred pounds each.

  Dreamily she waited by the wagon until the hay had been pitched on. She owed it to her father that by the age of twenty-one she was completely at home in the stud farm. He owed it to her that the stables began to make money, because she’d understood that times were changing and it was better for a horse to be fast, strong, and with a red-white- and-blue pedigree. This year a sister of Delaleen’s with six wins in show jumping had been sold for sport to Germany.

  She took a deep breath. “Damn it, Joseph! The stables could be expanded.”

  They could go on breeding from the line of Delaleen, she thought of the Holstein stallion Amor, and in addition there could be two new broodmares. She knew of a beautiful Courville mare with a filly by Furioso. They could first get a couple of foals from the young horses and then train them for jumping, and they would go very proudly to the shows. Did he know that a jumper could sometimes fetch as much as ten thousand guilders?

  She put out her arm and asked if he wanted another cup. Then she looked at him. “But if you don’t mind my saying so, no idiot is going to get me to stop using Gelderlanders.”

  They agreed that he would start the following morning at seven o’clock.

  Because of circumstances it was twelve o’clock.

  Twelve noon is when the sun stops climbing for a moment. Suddenly all the sounds fall silent. The shadows become pale. Time contracts. Trees and estates disappear in an infinite everywhere-and-nowhere that has its feet on the ground and holds heaven between its fingers. I know of people who say that this is the hour of the mulo. That the sun has stopped for a moment to allow the mulo, the person who is dead, the chance to interrupt his journey on the other side of the grave and pay a brief, silent, calm visit to the area where he was once at home. When Gerard saw the Gypsy coming toward the house, he confused him with the memory of an old friend.

  “God and all the saints,” he muttered in amazement. “It’s Jannosch Franz.”

  A striking man walked past the windows of the house in which Gerard was having lunch with his daughter. Despite the hat his skin was weathered by the sun and wind. He had a mustache, wore a black ribbed jacket, and in his eyes there was a mixture of passion and indifference, focused on pipe dreams, which Gerard would recognize instantly in a crowd of a thousand people. Boy oh boy, how young he’d stayed! With a pair of worn-out boots in his hand he went straight to the side door. He knew the way. Gerard heard him say something to the dogs and appear in the doorway with a greeting.

  “Afternoon!”

  His daughter jumped up. She needed no encouragement at all from Gerard to fetch a plate and fork for his dead friend. I’m going mad, he thought. I’ll be fifty-three next month and I’m already losing it.

  During the meal the Gypsy started explaining something to him and Lucie. Gerard tried to look up from his soup plate with his usual expression to nod now and then. He had the feeling it wasn’t working. Of course he knew about the new stable lad. His daughter had told him the evening before. But now there was a door ajar behind his back through which a great draft of breath and smell and sound swept over him. He was sitting, God Almighty, at table with the man with whom some twenty years ago he’d ridden on horseback in the darkness of a forest path behind a field-gray Mercedes. Trying to keep up appearances, he listened intently to the young man who was explaining that he couldn’t get there earlier because the replacement of a leaky radiator had taken up the whole morning.

  When Lucie and the new lad got up fifteen
minutes later to start work, Gerard stayed sitting at the table with Jannosch.

  Silence. “Care for some gin, Jannosch?”

  “Good idea, Gerard.”

  “It’s been a long time, Jannosch.”

  “I felt like coming this way again for a change.”

  “That was a good idea. I imagine you’ve seen that quite a few things have changed hereabouts?”

  “Oh, that’s the way it goes.”

  “Horses have had their day in the countryside.”

  “What can you do?”

  “Come on, let’s have a drink!”

  “I’d like nothing better!”

  “We don’t see you folks here that often anymore.”

  “Do you want me to tell you where we’ve all scattered to?”

  “In a while. First of all a glass.”

  “Right, cheers!”

  “Your very good health!”

  “That’s right, make me jealous! I’ll drink to yours, old brother. May your blood go on flowing till Judgment Day. May your possessions double. What’s over there in that vase on the cupboard?”

  “Ah, you’ve got sharp eyes, Jannosch. Those are your wife’s flowers, they’ve been there for about twenty years.”

  Red paper flowers. Gisela sold them from door to door. She gave them to you by way of thanks.”

  “I let you stable your horse with us. Because two of mine had already been requisitioned that summer.”

  “I put my beautiful Styrian in your stables. It was the autumn of ‘43. We were in two caravans in the woods. And my two-wheeled carriage was put under the hay at your farm too.”

  “Shortly after that you took another pilot to Limburg.”

  I remember. It was a Pole that time, a prisoner of war.”

  “You were the only one of us who could make head or tail of what that fellow was saying.”

  “I took him in the carriage. God, man, may all yellow- bellies get the pox, but those train rides of yours sometimes went badly wrong.”

  “That’s true. The Zutphen-Arnhem line didn’t have the best of reputations.”

  “It was a first-class outing. In four days we were at Chaplain Emile’s. ‘The greengrocer sends his regards’ was the password, God knows why. We’d only traveled during the day. Toward evening, it was fire, bread and cheese, and lemon gin in the flask. That Pole was a fellow with a kind face, but he drank too fast for my taste. ‘Whoa there, a sip at a time,’ I said. ‘Stop nagging,’ he said. We slept in hay barns, it was the end of September. You always wanted me to turn back at Echt, but I liked those passageways under the Pieters- berg. You find a way through by just standing still and sniffing quietly.”

  “Afterward it turned out that that line of yours was never wound up.”

  “Well, mate, may I drop dead if I’m lying, but I could have gone right on to the Pyrenees.”

  “Do you remember that attack near Wierden?”

  “A summer afternoon. Bright sunshine. The wind from the east.”

  “Two thousand ration cards, Jannosch. Two thousand of those bloody cards, and a month later we were in action in Enschede.”

  “Fantastic! I can still see it! A nice open-air acrobatics act on the tall iron fence of the police station. The audience were wearing blue uniforms. Music from police whistles. By the light of the moon I pointed my unlicensed gun at a couple of my fellow countrymen. And if I’m not mistaken, a little later we had to run away as though all the devils in hell were chasing us.”

  “There was a Plymouth around the comer. The engine was already running.”

  “What stories! Off we raced. Shreds of red inner tube shot out of the back wheel. Oh dear. The stories I’ve never been able to tell my family because of lamentable circumstances!”

  “Drink! Would you like another?”

  “Of course. Thanks for the hospitality. What a summer it is outside. The last time I had a drink here it was the depths of winter.”

  “The four of us were sitting here in the same kitchen.”

  “Yes, two gentile louts, a fool of a Gypsy, and that woman. The arrest after half an hour, perhaps. Is it true that that cow betrayed us?”

  “She helped. She helped and she helped and she helped. Mrs. Nicolien Nieboer-Ploeg. A map of the local labor exchange. Reports from the police station. She was a strapping woman, platinum blond, who seemed to be able to fix everything.”

  “You’re telling me. Up to and including our cell in the prison. Tell me, brother, how did you manage to grow old so gracefully?”

  “First a trial. Then the penitentiary in Siegburg. My papers got lost. What did you do? they asked. Not a thing. Where were you tried? Nowhere. Then the work camp where you had to dig tunnels, shafts a hundred and fifty feet deep. The hardest part was getting the drill at right angles to the face. If you didn’t go straight in, the tip snapped. My wife’s food parcels saved me.”

  “Don’t sigh. Be grateful for a little luck.”

  “You have no idea how shitty it is to survive a disaster.”

  Stop it!”

  “To come back, just you. There’s the linden tree, hasn’t changed a bit. There are the horses, the dog, the chickens, the doves, and in the doorway there’s your wife with a funny, puffy child of about five, copper curls framing her cheeks. You needn’t be surprised if you get all kinds of problems at night.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Slides behind your eyes, all real and with real people in them. So, here you are, Jannosch, tell me. What really happened?”

  “First a cigarette.”

  “You always smoked such a strange brand.”

  “What?”

  “The red pack.”

  “Hercegovina.”

  “Have one! And now come on!”

  “It was rotten luck, Gerard, damned rotten luck that I didn’t quite make it in the end. I’ll tell you what happened. To start with I wound up in Amersfoort. That was in January. I had to wait in a snowstorm in the rose garden with a couple of others for them to shave me and take away my clothes and shoes. Yeah, they called it the rose garden there, a long piece of field fenced off completely with barbed wire. I stood there so often later. After a night in the horrible cold, in the morning they’d turn the high-pressure hose on you and a couple of hundred others. Those bastards were standing there laughing when you got caught up in the wire. Then I worked in the sawmill and the brick yard, but usually there was nothing at all to do and they let a thousand of you at a time just trudge around, crawling and standing up. At the end of May I went to Vught, and from there, after a few weeks, onto the train. I’d already heard that Gisela and the children, my father and mother, my whole family had been arrested by the Dutch police in’s Hertogenbosch and The Hague.

  “The journey took four days. In a wagon that you couldn’t have got more than six horses into, there were a hundred of us. It’s hard to understand how it’s possible but, peering through the barbed wire on tiptoe at the sky, everybody knew after a while that we were on our way to Oranienburg. And we were right. One morning we were unloaded and we marched to a little town full of nice villas to Sachsenhausen camp. When we marched out of the gate the next day again in rows of ten, we saw cornfields, trees, farmhouses, and finally the fence of the Heinkel factories. There two thousand of us slept on the floor of a factory shop. At night we watched the bombing of Berlin. The sky went red. During the day we took the place of gas by dragging trucks to the railway station in squads of fifteen. You know what was so crazy? The beatings by those camp guards made some difference everywhere else except with our squad. We went on at the same snail’s pace.

  “Then came November, wet and cold. Because my shoes had been stolen, I was wearing clogs with no tops. Everyone lost weight and began coughing and when we were doing a rotten job with stones and sand in the forest we had two guards who kept a really close watch. One, a Pole with an amazingly low number, fourteen, was the bastard who had singled me out. ‘Gypsy!’ he yelled as soon as he saw me. ‘Do you still not
know the meaning of work?’ Drop dead. Fuck you, you think as you feel the blows on your spine.

  “By about Christmas we were back in Sachsenhausen. We were put in Block thirty-four. Except for the Norwegians, all the prisoners were as thin as rakes. The Dutch were worst of all because they never got any Red Cross parcels. The only time that things improved a bit as far as food was concerned was in the shed where I found myself detached to the rolling mill with two Russians. One of them was a blacksmith from Omsk. He was a huge guy, and a genius at dodging work. From where he sat, he kept an eye on the huge shop doors opposite us. Only when a supervisor arrived did he get his machine rattling and the stuff pouring out. The rest of the time he just sat sewing mittens made of thick woolen material, of which he sold a couple every day. On the third day he nudged me and gave me a hunk of dog bread. The dog bread stank like a corpse. Your mouth got full of threads, and those white dots were pieces of bone that we spat out behind the rolling mill. All in all, this was my best squad — a whole load of Russians who took it easy sitting cross-legged on the tables. Quite close to me there was a group of storytellers. From their furious or triumphant looks you could tell what strange things were being talked about.

  “So midwinter arrived and the Red Army was already on the Oder. Throughout the whole camp area and in the barracks people were dying off faster and faster. Transports kept leaving, but the camp stayed packed and life went on as before. On Sundays there were soccer matches on the parade ground, except when there was an execution and you could see the steps standing ready below the noose. Sometimes there were international matches. From the gallery above the gate, the SS men watched with interest from between their machine guns that were aimed at us, and kicked stray balls politely back. At the beginning of February, the Russians were put on transport. A week later I was in a wagon that was so full you had to struggle to get on top of the bodies. With my cap over my face I was able to sleep pretty well, better than I ever did later in the Little Camp in Buchenwald.