Amsterdam Stories (16 page)

The city rose up out of the water into the blue sky, quay and houses and then more houses farther up, half visible or all visible above the houses lower down, with red roofs everywhere and over there an enormous church like a sign by which God could recognize his city. It had two sharp spires, tall and powerless, reaching up even higher. The way a little poet reaches up, powerful and powerless, from the raging river of his poethood toward God, who never does come out from behind the blue sky and show himself. The little poet had to laugh at the miracle before his eyes, the eyes that saw a monument to God's majesty where actually there was nothing but shacks full of measly small-town life, not even in civilized Holland but out east.

They looked straight down a street that ran steeply uphill from the quay. Shadows were starting to appear on the right side. And up on the hill was a terrace with an iron fence around the edge and over there, on another terrace, a washtub, and someone more than halfway from the river to God opened a window that fiercely reflected the bright sun for an instant.

To the left of the city was a low ridge of green hills in a straight line “
ins grosse Vaterland.
”
*

A golden alley cut gently up across the slope. The golden letters of the French boarding school, “Notre Dame aux anges,” shone far above in the distance, on a tall building at the foot of the hills, where the grassy plain ended. “Notre Dame aux anges,” innocent naked little angels and innocent fully clothed students. The God of the Netherlands is right after all, you can never tell with poets. Are they respectable or disrespectable, decent or indecent?

Then the little poet recaptured the wan romance of the whole situation. God didn't mean anything by it. He was only playing around, only getting everything ready for a new production of
The Sorrows of Young Werther
if the little poet was up for it.

So they chatted and played with words and thoughts and flights of fancy and looked at the sparkling in each other's eyes whenever a new flash of inspiration struck. Then they stood up and crossed the river. She wanted him to have a nice present to take home to Coba that night, so they went to go buy it together. She hung on his arm, her left arm through his right and her little hands clasping each other tight in their black kid gloves.

A light-purple silk shawl with a knotted fringe—that's what he should buy, oh yes, Coba would be so happy with that. Come on, be a nice brother-in-law. She looked into his eyes and pressed his arm, for her sister. There was no duplicity in her head, there was blood rushing in her head but no duplicity. “Look, it's so pretty.” They were standing in the valley and looking up at the hill, and the arch of the bridge up there that led to the Belvédère framed a little picture: a stretch of gravel road, deserted, climbing gently, with the blue ribbon of a footpath on either side, and trees with blazing orange-yellow crowns, the branches clearly visible through the leaves, and a pair of streetlamps far apart with frosted glass globes, bright white— like a tinted engraving just waiting for someone to write “October 5” underneath.

There was no duplicity in her thoughts when she suddenly fell silent, the engraving having derailed their conversation. Even though she felt it herself. But she didn't understand it, just as Adam and Eve didn't understand their nakedness, or the “
anges
” of Notre Dame their angelic state, or the boarding-school students their fully-clothedness. My God, what is a woman who understands herself.

But he understood himself all right, it was horribly clear to him, and that is why nothing happened. He looked at her and the poet in him worshipped her and raised her up to the throne alongside the God of heaven and earth and he didn't dare touch her.

And at the same time, deep inside the little poet, the wild animal crouched, ready to pounce and devour all the things that taunted him, everything that stood around him and walked past him and didn't notice him. First of all, her—the beautiful, the beloved, first—so that there would be no reason not to devour everything else. To lift her up as high as the stars in the winter night and do his worst with her and then let her fall down into the unfathomable deeps. To avenge upon her, in his pleasure, the whole world's taunting indifference. And besides, what would a little poetess want more than to fall like that?

Those were his thoughts while a little sparrow flew from a piece of horse dung on the gravel road up into one of the orange trees. But he said, “Do you know a nice shop around here?”

They bought a very beautiful shawl, elegant and fine. Too bad she was wearing black. She tried the same shawl on herself, but in black, to see how it looked, and her upper body bent the tiniest bit back as she tried it on. But the purple one,
that
was gorgeous. Coba would definitely squeal with pleasure.

And so on that day she was simultaneously and alternately sister and wife and little poetess and courtesan and she did not know her divided nature and did not understand any of it.

But what a day to end all days it was.

She sang out loud on the road to Beek, which was also deserted, and she skipped as she went, she couldn't help it, she could move mountains around for fun and snatch the sun from the sky with one hand and toss it over her shoulder into the Waal just to hear it hiss.

The electric tram gathered them up and trailed a long stream of dry yellow leaves whirling and shuffling and rustling behind it, a little joke of God's, one he could easily permit himself on a day like this.

From Beek they climbed to Berg en Dal, winding through the hills. And the hills were not nearly high or steep enough, how could you tire yourself out on those? And she had to tire herself out or else she would burst apart with power, shatter into fragments of little poetess and wife and sister and courtesan. At the summit they looked down into a little valley with black and yellow and green rectangular fields sloping up and down the hills, stands of pine and copses of oak between them. And past that, down on the plains, hours and hours away with no distinguishing features except a straight stretch of wide river that ran off until losing itself in a bend. There, very small, the red roofs of a brickyard and its chimneys, tall but still lost in the distance.

There they stood, and then they realized that there was nothing to do now except go back.

But that night in bed she couldn't sleep, the brilliant clarity in her head just would not go away. She relived the whole day over and over again and saw everything again, perfectly clear. And all at once it was like the sun itself was inside her skull: “I love him. I can't help it. I want to. God be with me.” She got out of bed and drank down her whole carafe of water.

The next morning she sat in her nightie on the edge of the bed and looked down at her ankles and pondered. “That's the way it is, I guess.” But the brilliant clarity was gone.

He
didn't want to think. As a proper, respectable gentleman he sat quiet and aloof on Line Two on his way to the office.

“Mornin', ladies and gentlemen.” And he grimly went to his desk and started sorting his mail.

It was the end of March when the fullness of time arrived.

All day long they had corrected proofs, Dora and he. They were all business. Coba was with Bobi in The Hague visiting a rich cousin from the Indies. They had both taken a few days off from the office.

At five o'clock she had gone home to eat and afterwards she came back to finish their work. When twilight fell they were done, the stack of paper lay on the table with the letter to the publisher next to it, all it needed now was stamps.

It was in a room upstairs in the city but on the edge of the city— the canal in front of the house had an open field on the other side. Dora sat on a chair by the stove, in a coat and hat, and looked into the fire and thought about the fullness of time, a fullness that lay a long way off for
her
. He lay flat on the couch between the window and the stove, so flat that she could hardly see him in the dark room, and he looked at the yellow light of the streetlamps on the ceiling and the red glow from the stove on the floor.

Behind the house was the city, lamps lit in many of the windows, but they didn't see them because they were sitting at the front of the house. When Dora looked up she saw the countryside where the high sky was losing its last light and darkness already lay across the earth.

The little poet had had enough, of everything. His book was finished, he had murdered his never-ending poem, his position in society was a farce. Coba and Bobi had enough to live on without him. God would console them; time heals all wounds. That was a proverb on the wall of his aunt's house in Velp.

It was spring. It still looked like winter but it was spring. It still snowed here and there and it was a bit cold at night, with a frost sometimes, but that was just a little pleasantry, nothing to take too seriously.

The days were growing longer, people turned on their lights at seven o'clock. At six thirty the gas lamps were lit along the canal, they hung there pale and astonished. The snow swirled around them, in little spring snowflakes and melted before it fell onto the street.

And they both thought about the summer rains that would come, and their noses, the noses of incorrigible bohemians who
couldn't
stifle their souls, smelled the fresh hay. He, grim as the title of his book,
Genghis Khan
, and as grim as the book itself, thinking that he would never smell that smell again, that this too he had forsaken in kingly abdication; she full of vague longings and so, so moved in her heart. She folded her hands on her skirt where it was stretched tight between her knees; she sat there like that, bent forward on her chair.

The cows had already been out in the fields, he and she had seen them one sunny day. The land had recognized them right away and they stood trustingly on it and the sun was happy to see them too. After that the days had grown colder again and the cows had had to go back inside for a time. But in the end the hail couldn't stop the spring.

The birch trunks were silvery white, but prettier than silver. Language is poor, fatally poor. Anyone who knows the Father's work knows that.

The meadows looked less waterlogged, the farmers had spread manure, the sun rose higher and set more slowly. And Dora thought about how the sun had been big and red and cold in the sky in December, and low near the horizon at four o'clock, and had passed into a cold mist and vanished, weak and defenseless. But that was a long time ago. And she thought about how in winter people turned on their lights at four o'clock and hoped that daylight would eventually return. But now she knew for certain that the sun would come up the next morning. And after that, well, what then?

Still they said not a word.

He thought back to the time when he had worked, “worked hard” as people like to say. And how his family had said that he was starting to become more reasonable now. That he'd complained once about all the pressure he was under and about all sorts of things going wrong at the office, he'd said he was dreaming about them at night, and that his aunt had replied: “Yes, my boy, life is a serious business.” She would surely read his book, and expect to receive a signed copy, and wait to see if it would be included in the subscription library. She would want to be horrified by it, but wouldn't dare since so many other people had praised it. He saw himself already circulating among the library subscribers in Velp and that
really
made everything worthwhile.

“What now?” Dora thought. She had seen the snow melt once more and the buds grow bigger on the trees. Next the crowns of the tall trees would turn brown all over.

It seemed to her that she had seen the same things a very long time ago, the same way, with her hands folded on her skirt, knees apart, bent forward on her chair.

The sun was shining again, she saw the houses in the light and the trees and the golden glow on the pond. She saw the weeping willow turn yellow, its branches hung down and they reached for the water, they hung in deathly silent yellow adoration over the pond and they saw their own yellow light in the water. The woolly white clouds sailed in the pond, they skimmed across the blue sky but didn't conceal it. And those were the weeping willows in the city in early spring, a material embodiment of God between the clog-like buildings, so tall, awakening a longing that is grace and misery at once. You turn the corner, a foul, disgusting corner next to a fish stall that stinks of marinated herring, and suddenly something blazes from your eyes into your heart, you see gold crash down like an ocean and you stand there and a little boy wipes his nose with the back of his hand and yells: “Fancypants!” That is Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, in early spring.

It was almost night. The lumps of coal in the stove suddenly shifted with a thump and little flames shot up and their light filled the room.

“Dora,” he said without warning, “what do you think of Penning?” Penning was another friend from his youth. He hadn't seen him in years and knew only that he'd become an engineer. And now he'd run into him two weeks ago and he had dropped by a few times while they were busy with the proofs, and each time he stayed and chatted for an hour. He was a big fresh-faced young man, well on his way to a fine career but still youthful outside of work. He'd told them that in a few months he was off to South America for a year or so, to dredge something somewhere or build a pier or something like that. The little poet had also brought him to see his mother-in-law, and she was instantly taken with him. Em didn't like him.

“What do you think of Penning?” “He's all right,” Dora said absently. Silence. In the light the streetlamp cast on the ceiling you could see the shadows of falling snowflakes. They were bigger now.

“Em's getting married next month.” She looked up. He was talking so strangely again, it was like Bovenkerk with Em. She didn't answer.