Here we are in the kitchen. The open upper windows and the stone floors with the dog in the middle.
Into this big room a low band of sun falls against the wall like a spotlight on a marquee: Here you are free, go on, completely without any plans. Here you can leave what you were planning to the moment itself, and that moment, darling, will devour it. Will twist things that are obvious and turn them on their heads a little, did you mean this? Okay, let’s do that. Look, he’s standing next to my sideboard, the collar of his shirt is open, the sunlight shifts and starts shining even lower and harsher. I put out my arms.
“Listen, Joseph, aren’t you thirsty?”
My dress already a little unbuttoned, showing him a little of myself because, oh, this party’s going to last a bit, I play the hostess.
“Try it,” I say. “Taste!”
My first-class Beerenburger. I’m crazy about the stuff myself. He leans with his shoulder against the sideboard, smoking, yes, okay, yes you go ahead and make free with my cigarettes!
“Very nice,” he admits.
“Isn’t it? Personally, I don’t know anything nicer before a meal.”
He’s put his hat on the mantelpiece. His dark face is taut. I interrupted his impulsiveness by turning around, bending down, and muttering a few endearments as if I were talking to the dog. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am: Will I be satisfied with that on this exceptional occasion?
So let’s eat, my friend. Don’t pull such a suspicious face! I’ll come and sit so close to you that our legs touch. There’s going to be action this evening. A plan with a good chance of success. I note that he’s tired, but on the other hand not at all. He is alert, looks, endures, with a smell of fire and cooking oil around him now. I put heavy silver cutlery on the table, he takes a knife and weighs it in his hand.
“Solid,” he says. “Old.”
I must be crazy, but it amuses me, it amuses me enormously to fill an old Delft blue dish, a family heirloom, with beef and beans. He stubs out his cigarette. I thrust the wine at him.
“Here, you open it.”
Brightly and flickering, the evening sun falls into the glasses and colors our hands red. Do you think all gentile women are sluts? Except for her, Lucie, that is? When I look for his eyes, I see nothing except defenses lulled to sleep.
He pushes his chair back with a jerk. The dog growls.
“Put it down.”
I assume a subservient expression and put my glass down. All right, I’m ready too. Now we might as well head for the bed, which as far as you’re concerned could be any woman’s, but tonight happens to be mine. I push the door open with the tip of my shoe.
“Mind the hook.”
In the side room it’s serious work. Why should a kiss, ice-cold and fiery at the same time, not be able to say: Make yourself at home? On the bedspread, on a pattern of black and blue flowers, an alliance is forged. The simplest one there is. And the shortest, of course. And wouldn’t I find it funny if, in a little while, she can’t get it out of her mind for the rest of her life?
A white shirt on the floor, dark arms that know exactly what the intention is, under the circumstances. Fantastic, really, Mr.. . . Mr. Plato? Your deep-set eyes don’t look at me for a second. I praise my fellow villager for having fallen for your typical stern behavior back then.
Fifteen or sixteen years ago, if memory serves. When she’d long been accepted by virtually everyone. A creature that quietly, almost half-wittedly, but somehow determinedly, went her own way. And she was good with horses. I saw in astonishment the completely coincidental talent with which she set about rearing jumpers at a time that, in hindsight, was just right for it. You saw her in every market and in every stable: upright and sturdy, and often dressed in the silly wide skirt, with which she also sometimes got into the stirrups and, leaning back like an English hunting amazon, her legs forward, raced over her father’s land. A village gets used to someone like that. To someone who always says hello only at the last moment, who says very little and replies with a smile as if not she but the person who’s asked something isn’t quite right in the head. In those days, like most of us, she went into The Tap when the market was over at the end of a Wednesday morning. Then I’d see her standing smoking at the bar with that face with those thinly arched eyebrows and that line around her mouth that had a way of infuriating me. She seemed pleased with herself. She pressed her beer glass against her lip and stirred the froth with her tongue. And one rainy July day the Gypsy went over to her, this one here, yes, her great love whom she’ll find in the bed here tomorrow morning, with his arms outstretched, dead to the world after an exhausting journey followed by the kind of adventure that happens to men quite often. A stroke of fate.
The room is permeated with pleasure and satisfaction. His head has sunk down a little way from mine. Through tousled black hair a shining cheekbone is visible. She can do whatever she likes, but from tomorrow onward Lucie will know that I’ve experienced a few things. And when we look at each in the future or get into conversation, then I can, if I want, allude to it very delicately, a look, a word, and whatever happens she’ll have to show me that she’s understood.
He turns sleepily away from me.
“What’s that pounding noise I can hear?” he murmurs.
I raise myself on my elbows, my interest still completely intact.
“That’s my neighbor,” I say. “He’s profiting from the full moon and is dredging the ditch with his digger.”
I myself don’t feel at all like sleeping. I get up, take his shirt off the floor, and go to the pantry where there’s the tub for hand washing.
Five hours of sleep is enough for me. It’s scarcely daybreak before I get up and go into the field to get the Appaloosa. The mare gives me a lively look and her skin shines. As I walk down the path with her, I breathe the delightful morning air deeply. The poplars rustle, the sky is already turning blue, blue and with that calm feeling of September for which there are simply no words. I tether the horse in the yard and glance at the dusty car that has been parked there since yesterday. Well, and inside a man is sleeping so wonderfully that he won’t want to be woken for the time being. Let me go and make some coffee. The real fun won’t start for a little while. How often can you lure one stupidity toward the other so that together they make an accident?
On the kitchen table are yesterday’s plates, mine still half full. While the smell of coffee spreads through the house, I unfold the ironing board to iron a shirt. Then I pick up the phone.
“ .. . Come before nine, please.”
I call the dog and put a dish of tripe by the hedge. The old, lethargic cat creeps in after me as though he knows that there is a plate with gristly meat for him on the floor.
Let him gulp it down.
I sit at the table with a cup of coffee in front of me. The light has meanwhile become even brighter, even more cheerful. A fly buzzes from the window to the sideboard and then to the table, where it lands. What will she say about the Appaloosa? With my eyes I follow the bluebottle as it crawls across the table. Now I can hear a car coming down the road, slowing down and then turning into the yard of Second Eden.
Right.
Part Five
1
The red December sun is still low behind the apple trees as they drive down the path. Joseph is at the wheel, Lucie next to him. For the last week or two you can see them leaving home regularly at this time, because Joseph has to go the hospital for tests. They usually appear about nine and get into the car without a word. When they turn onto the road they always give the impression that the only thing on their minds is to take that drive together as warmly and as comfortably as possible. They put the radio on, adjust the heater, and pull the ashtray out of the dashboard. The roads are usually quiet at this time. Today they have luggage with them for the first time, it has struck me, but Lucie puts the weekend case containing her husband’s pyjamas by her feet as if it were nothing and leans back in her seat. He’s got to stay, they’re
keeping him over there, the operation will be tomorrow.
“Stupid, isn’t it?” she says when they’ve driven through the wintry landscape for fifteen minutes. Even she has finally noticed that his right hand keeps straying from his knee to the steering wheel and back.
“Christ, yes! Have you got some candy or something?”
She hunts in her coat pockets, then in the side compartments of her handbag. He mustn’t smoke. He hasn’t been supposed to smoke all these months, but only today, with the obscure tour de force that the doctor must perform on him in prospect, does he obey.
“Here.”
She has found a couple of liquorice sticks. When she puts her hand to his mouth, her fingers brush the mustache that’s just been trimmed this morning. His lips are warm, she knows that, they always have been. I look at her as she stares at the road again. Her face expresses nothing except the calm agreement not to light up either. She and Joseph are now driving along the canal. Then there is a drawbridge. The barriers are down, and on one of them, would you believe it, sits a cockerel.
“Look at that cockerel,” says Joseph.
“It’s a Harreveen cockerel,” says Lucie. “They can fly as well as a pheasant.”
As they drive on, she turns to watch the creature take off. What does it matter to her? Today Joseph has to report to Department B on the fourth floor of the Wilhelmina Hospital and she gives her attention to a piece of poultry that’s showing off. I’ve been worried, for over a year. And for over a year I’ve been wondering why she isn’t, or if she is, why she doesn’t act more anxious and sad. She’s noticed that he likes to stay in bed for a bit longer in the mornings and then needs some fresh air. But when she sees him strolling past the fence by the chicken rim she doesn’t see, if you ask me, what I see in his eyes: so much emptiness that absolutely nothing else could find a natural place in it. Where is her grief for him? There was always something lighthearted in her blood. Since last summer there’s been no sign of it anymore. Has the affair with that creature, with that Christina Cruyse, wrapped itself around her heart like a collar?
I don’t know, but I do feel that she could consider a few things now and then. When she makes coffee at about ten in the morning, she has already finished the necessary work in the stable and in the house. She stands at the countertop and pours milk into a saucepan. Plump hands, a round face that shows nothing except peace of mind. Where is her grief, for God’s sake? At the table by the window sits a waiting Gerard. Joseph usually comes a bit later. No stable boy. Now that a lot of horses have been gotten rid of, it’s no longer necessary. My glance wanders from Lucie at the stove to Lucie in the geometrical square of light of the window putting cups on the table and then calmly sitting down by them. And then words arise in me, sentences that try to connect with the impossible musings behind that face opposite me. But when she looks up, she looks right through me with ghostly eyes.
He’s ill, Lucie, and you know that. You were standing there when a couple of transparent photos were placed on light boxes and a doctor showed you the patches that were dark, darker than they ought to be. He’s going to leave you. Don’t pretend it’s something you’ve known for years: You stood and looked down with him at a series of scans of his lungs split into thin vertical sections and when you looked up you had to sit down and were given the result: malignant, Lucie, and malignant has something evil in it. Their faces had remained unmoved. They shook hands with the doctor.
Now they’re driving down the almost deserted road along the Twente Canal. The fields are empty, the contours of trees, banks, and ditches blurred in the winter sunshine. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. She leans forward and turns the dial of the radio. A dusky woman’s voice comes on singing a song that was very popular back in the 1940s. Merci, mon ami, es war wunderschön. Tausend Dinge möchf ich dir noch sagen. Liebling, wir miissen uns wiederseh’n. . . . She can’t understand the words. He would be able to, but he’s not following them. They’re both silent, caught up in the throb of the engine, the song on top of it, and the mist along the last stretch of the Twente Canal where the road forks and after about a mile and a half the sheds of the Dykel industrial zone appear.
They park behind the new building of the Wilhelmina Hospital.
“Brrr!” she says once they’ve got out.
They walk up the granite steps and go through the revolving door. On the left is the counter, neon lit. They take the elevator to the department and are shown into a waiting room by a nurse where together with some other patients and their families they can look out through tall windows. There Lucie bursts into sobs. Her face goes red. Because of the other people she tries to control herself, but that has the opposite effect. Under Joseph’s sympathetic gaze she raises her face to the view behind the windows and with her eyes squeezed shut, bolt upright in her chair, tries to smother her sobbing.
I’m afraid she won’t be able to do it as long as she lives.
Coffee is put down for them. What is there to say, anyhow? Without a word being spoken they’re given the opportunity to look at the ailing young plants in the enclosed garden below. It’s a cloudless day, and yet no shaft of light falls on the rhododendrons. A small pond has dried up.
Then: “Would you come this way?”
The floors are marbled linoleum and the sinks gleam. Of the six beds of white-painted metal, the one by the door is still free. Soon the doctor comes by to say something about the operation the following day, and Joseph’s and Lucie’s eyes look stunned. A kitchen worker has just asked them an enormous number of questions. “One savory, two sweet,” they decided when they were discussing the morning sandwiches. Now the doctor tells them that he will be starting at eight o’clock tomorrow. As soon as he’s finished, he will phone Lucie. She doesn’t understand.
“Phone me?”
“It’ll take hours . . .” she hears. “Sometimes there are unexpected complications. It would be better if you waited at home.”
Shortly after the doctor has gone, she realizes or thinks that she has to say goodbye to Joseph. She grabs his hand with a startled smile. Then she buttons up her brown overcoat.
“Give the children a hug! Kiss them!” he orders her with a seriousness surrounded by thick snow-white pillows.
When the elevator doors slide open on the landing, she peers inside for a moment but she has, I suspect, long since realized that she can’t make herself leave Department B. Without asking anyone’s permission Lucie has gone back and sat down in the waiting room, and when I see her sitting there again the following morning just after eight, there’s every indication that she’s simply stayed there passively and stubbornly next to an ashtray full of cigarette butts, looking straight ahead with the confidence of someone who knows how to wait.
Outside?
On the bed of the dried-up pond a couple of pigeons are now hopping about. The leaves of the rhododendrons are shaking, there’s a wind today. From the harsh blue sky around the buildings a multicolored bird sweeps past and lands fluttering on the place where the pigeons are, it’s a jay and the pigeons quickly take flight. From behind the windows my eyes follow the jay and I see its beak tapering imperceptibly into a wafer-thin scalpel making an incision. An invisible line breaks into loose ends of blood from the neck to the navel. While fingers in surgical gloves place clamps on the tissue, Lucie moves her feet apart. She looks into the courtyard garden where the wind and the cold are exactly the same as between the stables at home, with the hoof- prints of Linda, Walton Beauty, and Viking, who were sold off quite a while ago, still in the mud of the outside trough.
No one asks. When Joseph does the rounds of the stable in the evening, one of the children always goes with him, teenagers, two of them are at high school in Enschede. They too think there’s something nice about the animals and their whole fragrant accompaniment of fodder and straw and dung between whitewashed walls.
The three of them have enough knowledge of horses, but the size of the business doesn’t interest them muc
h because one wants to become a ship’s captain and the other probably a film star, and Jojo is only eleven. The indoor ring is closed. The trotting mill has been shut down. Joseph and Lucie are content to look after their remaining horses and no longer deign to talk about things like the Groningen horse trials, which they missed for the first time this year with their star mares. Sometimes, when the sun shines on the stable wall on nice days, they still trot to Rutbeek Heath. Nothing needs to be added to that. When they get back, they see Gerard come shuffling gray as a spider out of the chicory house and their animation disappears because they’re worried about Gerard. Gerard — and I started talking about this ages ago — is angry. They have no idea why. They don’t waste any thought on this either, but the furious way Gerard looks at them makes Lucie sad and upsets Joseph. Personally I think the old man has almost lost his marbles.
Last year Joseph bought a dwarf billygoat for him, a tiny one. Joseph had thought of certain horses, lonely thoroughbred horses that cheer up when they have a cat or a donkey near them. It’s well known. The Normandy top trotter Jeanne wouldn’t put a foot into a train compartment if her friend, a white rabbit, didn’t go with her. And for a time it really worked. Gerard enjoyed the beautifully marked creature and followed it everywhere. Lucie saw out of the side room of the courtyard how he pushed his fist against the ribbed horns to make the billygoat charge. “Look,” she said when Joseph went past, “Daddy’s clambering up that slope along the ditch with him.”
The recovery room is a large area with a fairly chaotic atmosphere. Three nurses are still wheeling a bedside cupboard closer, fixing a needle to the hand with adhesive, checking a catheter. One of them looks up and says the operation has been successful. White light. Dripping and bubbling of various liquids, clear in a flask hanging at the head of the bed, tea-colored and soft red in the narrow flat packs at the side of the bed. So soon after the operation they often continue to give oxygen. She moves her face over his and sees that his eyes are focused at the ceiling, completely lost. “Joseph?”
Duke of Egypt Page 18