On the cupboard are the three gold rings and the wrist- watch.
She’s allowed to sit down and stay for as long as she likes. He’s not allowed a sip of water, but she can run a thick, soaking-wet cotton swab around his parched mouth. Aside from the constant interruptions of the care-givers coming in to give injections, measuring this and that, and taking notes of the same, the two of them are alone.
She is dreaming. He is dozing. An echo of that one story that was always theirs.
Once, on a winter evening when there was a layer of snow over the countryside, Joseph and Lucie were driving home towing an empty trailer from Westdorp in Drente. Just after the crossing at the forestry station at Odoorn, the car, which was traveling fast, began to lose speed of its own accord. Joseph shifted down a gear but realized that the engine was losing power whether he accelerated or not. He stopped the car on the frozen shoulder and got out with the headlights still lit. For a moment Lucie saw his face illuminated from below, then the hood went up. A moment later she was standing next to him with the flashlight, shining it on his hands, which were already covered in motor oil. First he undid a couple of screws and then lifted up a heavy square part and half stripped it and then put it back together again with unbelievably delicate, patient movements. She had no idea how much time it took. It was cold. While she stood there in the wind, beneath a small crescent of moon and icy stars, Lucie looked with a calm that became increasingly serene at a couple of dirty hands that were assembling a dirty engine, because in them she saw the order of her life. Start her up! She went back behind the steering wheel and obeyed. Then a gesture of his hand, enough! His narrow face was still set in a surly expression. Without the slightest hint of the kind of courtesy — so hard to describe — that exists between married couples, the chore had been done and he slammed the hood shut.
Lucie scrambled out of the driver’s seat. He went to the trunk. She picked the wrenches and pliers up off the ground. He twisted a cleaning rag around his fingers.
Having lost more than an hour, they were able to leave the roadside and take the route through the forestry area. Lucie said she thought the road, with trees with creamy white trunks and intertwined crowns of ice, was just like a fairy tale. Joseph smiled, he thought so too. Without any problem the car raced through the wood, across the bridge over the Oranje Canal, and onto the expressway to Coevorden. Joseph pushed the engine hard, as though nothing had happened. They were home before midnight. Joseph got out, opened the gate, and got in again. I look at the car driving past with two shadows in the darkness. Their consciousness surrounds me like light, like wind, and sets mine working too. As they drive toward the lighted windows of the house — Gerard is still up, the children are asleep — they both have the feeling of regaining something, just like that, a lost happiness at the end of the day.
Just under a week later Joseph is lying in the six-person ward and is allowed visitors. The children have already been, and now Gerard is sitting on a stool in front of the washbasin looking disapprovingly at the floor. He’s completely thrown and doesn’t say a word. Only after about five minutes does he get to the point of speaking.
“How’s the greenhouse doing, Dad?” Joseph has asked. And he added, “I’m very comfortable here.”
But Gerard doesn’t react. He is troubled by the murmur of the visitors at the other beds. The smell of flowers and disinfectant is foul, serving only to remind him of something that presses on his soul with a formidable weight. Once he knew what he loved, what troubled him, and what he could best leave alone. Now his understanding has been disrupted. His consciousness makes connections that no one can follow except him. In a room bathed in the light of the sun and a couple of diabolical ceiling lamps, Gerard thrusts his neck out, furious he looks at Joseph, and opens his mouth.
A linear pattern of wrinkles. Suspicious eyes, certainly, but still with something principled about them, although he has forgotten exactly what principles for the moment. When someone says hello to him, he doesn’t return the greeting for perfectly good reasons. When someone sits down next to him, daughter or son-in-law, he quite rightly looks angrily to the side. If he goes into the potato field, he sits down on an upturned crate, pondering a question he can’t ignore that draws his eyes down to the unplowed ground for hours on end. What can you do against evil, against injustice? The afternoons go by and the umpteenth sun turns to a bloodshot eye. Not bending is the least of his worries. When he pushes against a rickety gate with his shoulder, he starts cursing as soon as it springs open. Once he used to look around his land and have contact with a logical world. Now there’s something wrong with the climbing rose, the trotting mill, the horses, the chickens that spend the night on the rusty perches, the bench outside the house, and the ringing of the church bells after supper. Now incomprehensible statements are being made by his daughter and by his son-in-law, the Gypsy he had to find today, for Christ’s sake, in Department B on the fourth floor of the Wilhelmina Hospital. What is he supposed to do? Nod in agreement?
“Fools! Bunch of idiots!”
People in and around the other beds look up in interest.
The following Friday, January 9, Lucie is able to collect her husband. Joseph is sitting fully dressed at the table by the window waiting when she appears in the room jingling her keys at about ten in the morning.
She takes the bag. He goes around shaking hands.
In the elevator they watch without a word the changing numbers of the floors. It’s busy in the hall, with a smell of coffee. He heads for the revolving door, she follows him outside. She stops when he stops and looks at what he looks at, huddled in his coat. Along the wide street opposite the new building, a streetcar consisting of three compartments full of schoolchildren passes. What will she remember of this moment later? He pushes his hat down over his eyebrows.
“It looks as if it’s been freezing,” he says.
His face is extremely pale, but in the eyes you can see a hint of good humor. The real Joseph is still there. Handsome, and a little disheveled. Happy at the simple fact of having regained the freedom to go outside. Despite the fact that, within this wall, he keeps for himself something that belongs to someone else, that will never see the light of day. He’s wearing a heavy blue-black overcoat with epaulettes, which has been buttoned up under the collar. A scarf up to his side-whiskers. Beautiful, deft hands. And fancy semibrogue shoes, buckles, by which you can recognize his kind immediately, if you know. His portrait of January 9.
Would it have been any better if she’d realized that at this moment his last journey home was in fact beginning?
“It certainly has,” she says. “It was at least four below last night.”
She has parked in front of the yew hedge by the exit of the site. In the porter’s hut sits an old man with a cap and heavy spectacles, through which he examines every car that comes or leaves with great authority. The barriers are up. The Chevrolet stops by the shark’s teeth painted on the road to yield to a cyclist and then turns left. Past the traffic circle is A3 5 toward Enschede.
She drives. He lights up a cigarette.
2
That feeling of surrender almost always comes. I think it’s something to do with the drugs. The one who is about to leave looks in a detached way at the curtains, the drinking glass, and a few flowers from the garden. It was great while it lasted, but I won’t mind in the least ceasing to exist shortly .. . won’t mind?
This must be a fraud! Deliberate deceit by the enduring world. Worried about her guests of honor, nature provides a serum at the difficult moments — arrival, departure — to make us forget or be calm. How many would be born if birth were not the most ethereal torture that exists, a dream pain, forgotten at the baby’s very first cry? How many would go without regret if they had their senses? Surrender? No. Never. Forget it. They would refuse. No one would die if that superintoxication hadn’t blotted out that desperate consciousness.
Leave the windows open, he would have said, I’m sure of it
. I’m sure he would have said: Leave my shoes where they are. Wash my shirts. Just leave my toothbrush and razor on the shelf under the mirror, from where I want to make faces at you as I stretch the skin of my face while I’m shaving. I’m staying, you see. Why should I disappear into nothingness? I’ve always liked breathing. On spring mornings the wind came in through the windows and pushed up the leaves of the calendar. I’m staying, staying to go on holding my possessions, you and the children tight in my hands. You remember when we took them on adventures? The children in the sand drifts, the children by the windmill, the children at the seaside, tanned, with red swimsuits and the wildest eyes in the world, those children of mine, when they outran themselves from the top of the dunes and we saw them rolling like tops, like red things you can wind up, down the slope toward the sun. So don’t get rid of my clothes. At the small offices of the Salvation Army you have to push your loved one’s clothes through a slot, where, untouched by human hands, they then land on other unwanted clothes. You have to tie up shoes in pairs by their shoelaces. Don’t do that. For that matter, don’t get rid of my passport, my driver’s license, and the wallet with the photos in it either, because whoever has those things has a right to exist. Who’s trying to get me to surrender? Why should I be so keen on the ultimate dream? Who can guarantee me that there in the world of the pure spirits they won’t do something terrible to me? Hold my hand. Hold me tight with your eyes. Listen. Buy oil for the outside lamp, buy a crate of lager. We sat talking outside on warm days thinking that it would stay like this forever. Memories, expectations. Between them the facts. What can I expect at this point from the eternal dimensions? When it’s a matter of our words? Sometimes we talked sense, sometimes we just babbled. The fire on which we’d cooked smoldered under the holly tree. A good storyteller takes the things that happen and fuels the wildest ideas with them. So I’m refusing. I’ll do without the hereafter. I’m staying. Even if it’s only to believe in God for a little while longer.
Can’t we agree on something? That, let’s say, I’ll come and sit with you when you’re alone? And walk with you when you go out? And look with you under the light of the lamp, into the dark of the stairwell, under the blue of the sky, and that then I will see earthenware, letters, silver, carpet patterns, blue-painted wood, leaded glass, leaves of trees, light, colors? We ate those golden-brown plaited rolls on Saturday mornings. On Sundays the children crept into bed with us like young kittens. Can’t we arrange that when you’re sitting alone outside on the veranda I come and smoke a cigarette with you — keep my lighter, buy cigarettes — and then we can discuss the necessary repairs to the house? You know how handy I always was with that kind of job. I liked a quick, spectacular result. Have the outside of the house painted every three years at least. Get them to coat the cracks in the wood with epoxy resin and then fill them with a preparation against rot. Every winter I remembered to turn off the outside tap. Sometimes there was frost as early as November. And then we’d come outside and immediately smell that typical crisp air that sometimes brought exotic birds on big, powerful legs onto our grass that same day. So remember to turn off the well in the garden and open the valve at the end of October. Remember there may be huge spiders at the bottom. Don’t be frightened by the toads that can suddenly leap up. Don’t be surprised if you can lift up the heavy stone lid of the well easily, without the slightest twinge of pain.
He dies in the second week of April. In the village there are quite a few who say that they have been expecting it. They say that they’ve noticed his absence for quite a while and agree that when he did occasionally turn up, in a shop or in the street, he looked bad and didn’t feel like talking.
“He just looked,” says the landlord of The Tap to me and tells me that one evening Joseph sat down at the corner table. “He scarcely moved a muscle. After maybe half an hour he left without drinking anything.”
There are quite a few people who come up with a last image of him.
“He was with his daughter,” remembers the cashier of the supermarket and describes to me how Katharina lifted the light shopping bag and he the heavy one off the conveyor belt. To my astonishment she adds, “I thought he looked as if he hadn’t slept a wink that night.” To my astonishment, I say, because I had thought I was the only one who’d not only looked at him but also seen him.
In the countryside. In his car. Occasionally still on a horse. Digging his heels in. In the winter weather. In the rising cold and the wind that shook the copses where a few birds fly off and return. His medication had long been affecting his sense of time. In the evenings, lying on the sofa, he followed Lucie’s bustling about: He and she were ultimately not inseparable.
“He was driving over there,” the former stable boy says to me, pointing. “In his Chevrolet in the square. And when he saw me he waved, but he didn’t brake.”
Personally I believe that he wanted to live for as long as he could and then stop. Come and sit next to me, he would sometimes say to one of the children, and they would watch television together. Once he said to Lucie that in a while it would be best if she started breeding carriage horses as well. Buy a handsome-looking team, he recommended to her, for example from Plaisier’s stable in Adorp.
Joseph often walked along the side of the ditch huddled in his winter coat. During the day he didn’t stay in bed for long. He preferred looking out at the silvery spring sky or hanging around in the stable. A couple of nicely trotting stallions, Lucie, he repeated with conviction. Horses that look really stylish in front of a carriage. He didn’t seem to worry that she didn’t interrupt her work and didn’t answer. Once or twice he’d left home for a day in this period. Quite likely he visited one of the camps in Best, Ijisselstein, Nieuwegein, or Oldenzaal, still his natural environment, or the camp behind the railway line in Rotterdam where Guta, his maternal aunt, had lived in her caravan.
On the day of his death Lucie felt he was different from usual in the morning and rang the GR He came and together with her sat and looked at Joseph muttering restlessly in his bed for a while. After half an hour the doctor gave him an injection and left without having the idea, or having said, that things had reached crisis point. So Lucie left her children at school and her father somewhere in the barns or on the land. Not aware of the heaviness in her arms and legs that had been increasing for months, she hung around in the bedroom looking from Joseph to the windows and the furniture. For a while she kept her eyes fixed on the reproduction of a painting on the sloping ceiling above the bed, an interior, with a vase of yellow and red flaming tulips in front of a window. Then she lay down fully dressed beside him on top of the blanket. And allowed his now soundless sleep to overcome her.
Why shouldn’t those two give in to their exhaustion for a moment?
Around them, above the farmland and for miles around, hangs the April light, the most active light there is, falling fully on the grass and on the germinating plants and forcing its way into the earth. But it is very subdued as it brushes the walls of the room where they are lying asleep. Joseph with his hips twisted, to the left of her, motionless. It’s she who moves in her sleep, produces a couple of groans as one does, and at a certain moment wakes up. She sits up. She puts her hand on his chest, which moves a few times and then no more. She looks from him to the window behind which there is exactly the same light as in the reproduction with the yellow and red flaming tulips. When she looks back at his face, she sees immediately that he’s no longer there.
Gone. Miles and miles away. And not a sign.
Can she actually believe such a thing?
A funeral chapel is not usual for our village. The dead are laid out at home, in a north-facing room with the curtains closed and the mirrors covered. In amazement we obey the summons to take our leave of him in a building in a neighboring municipality from such and such a time to such and such a time. Even on the threshold we can smell the carnations and heliotropes that have been brought in great abundance. The family that we know from the village has been
extended by a score of outlandish strangers who are all in distress and give the impression of absolutely refusing to accept the disgraceful facts. It strikes me that Lucie doesn’t look at all out of place among women in skirts with flowered layers and not completely buttoned blouses.
The day after, there is a harsh wind. The clocks have just chimed half past eleven when the gate of the cemetery has to be opened wide for the mourners who follow the coffin onto the central path. We people from Benckelo are confused and surprised by the presence of death. By the supernatural gusts of wind and the swishing of the spruces. By the quantity of Gypsies who have attended the Catholic mass for the Orthodox Joseph and drowned out the requiem aeternam with their din.
“They make lots of noise, but they mean well,” you could hear people say afterward on the steps of the church.
The sky is a motionless, splendid blue.
Lucie follows the signposts along the path upward with her children and her father. The coffin is wheeled ahead of her quite fast by a couple of hired mourners, but the disorderly flock around her dawdles and seems to want to slow down the speed of the dead person. From where I stand the distance gradually becomes greater and greater. Having reached a high spot, near a pile of sand, in the unstoppable wind, one half of those present become very quiet. At a certain moment there are various people among them who more or less out of self-defense start thinking of the raising of Lazarus from the grave. The other half in contrast get to the point of throwing coins quickly followed by handfuls of sand into the hole with a great deal of fuss. And they are thinking on the contrary: Stay. Make sure you stay where you are. I observe that they fill in the grave with their bare hands and then turn their backs on it without so much as a backward glance.
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