It was a strange time. And when I think about it, I realize that that time must still be happening now, it will last as long as there are young men of nineteen or twenty running around. It’s only for us that the time is long since past.
We were on top of the world and the world was on top of us, weighing down heavily. Far below us we saw the world full of activity and industry and we despised those people, especially the important gentlemen, the ones who were always so busy and so sure they’d gotten pretty far in the world.
But we were poor. Bekker and I had to spend most of our time at the office and do whatever those gentlemen said, and listen to their ridiculous opinions when they talked to each other, and put up with the fact that they thought they were much more clever and capable than we were. And when they thought it was cold then all the windows had to be shut and in winter the lights had to come on much too early and the curtains had to be pulled shut so we couldn’t see the red sky and the twilight in the streets and we had no say in it at all.
And we had to live on streets that were too narrow, with a view of the oilcloth curtains across the street and the tasseled fringe and the potted aspidistra with an impossible flower on top.
Oh, we took our revenge, we learned languages they had never even heard of and we read books they couldn’t even begin to understand, we experienced feelings they never knew existed. On Sundays we walked for hours on paths where they never went, and at the office we thought about the canals and the meadows we had seen and while they ordered us to do things that we didn’t see the point of we thought about how the sun had set behind Abcoude on Sunday evening. And how we had thought our way through the whole universe, without words; and how God had filled our head, our heart, and our spine, and how stark raving mad they would look if we told them about it. And how, with all their money and their trips to Switzerland and Italy and God knows where else and with all their clever hard work, they could never feel such things.
But still, they had us in their power, they confiscated the greater part of our time, they kept us out of the sunshine and away from the meadows and the seaside. They forced us to constantly fill our thoughts with their incomprehensible business. Even though that only went so far. They chewed us out; at the office we were totally insignificant. “Ah, Bekker,” they said to each other. The gentlemen had been well brought up; the woman on the third floor said “That harebrained idiot,” but the gentlemen were too well brought up for that. And they were bright, much brighter than the woman on the second floor, whose husband was a lamplighter, a good job that didn’t need much education. My boss asked me if I wrote poetry by any chance. Bekker thought that a man like him shouldn’t utter the word poetry, shouldn’t be allowed to. “What did you tell him?” I hadn’t said anything, I only looked at his face and saw what a thick skull he had and I thought: “He doesn’t know who he has standing here in front of him, he hasn’t got the brains.” And they paid us badly, the gentlemen did.
And we were in love. For months Bekker went out of his way to walk down Sarphatistraat every morning. He was in love with a school-girl of seventeen or so, and he walked fifty steps behind her or on the other side of the street and he looked at her. He never knew her name, never said a word to her. Over Christmas break he was unhappy. In February he took an afternoon off to wait for her when school got out. He stood there on the quiet canal-side street in the snow and a man rode by on a white horse wearing a blue smock and a straw hat. How odd, that on precisely that afternoon he had had to see something so ludicrous. But Bekker left at five minutes to four, he didn’t dare stay. He walked slowly away, and on Weteringschans she caught up to him. She was laughing loudly with a friend, another girl. I don’t think she ever knew Bekker existed.
Bekker wanted me to tell him where this was heading, it couldn’t go on like this. And it didn’t either. After summer vacation she never came back.
“Girls,” Bekker said, “they’re not worth it…. She had a spring in her step when she walked.” He turned the lamp up a bit and turned the page in the book he was reading. “Where do you think she is now? Do you think she’s kissing someone?” A little spark fell from his pipe onto the book. He put it out with his matchbox. “Damn, a hole, that was stupid.” “It’s better this way, girls aren’t worth it, they don’t get you anywhere, they only distract you. They’re pretty at a distance, to write poems about.”
He read. After a short pause he looked up again…. “You know what the strange thing is? When she caught up to me that afternoon she walked past me, right next to me. She only just missed me. There was so to speak nothing separating us, a little clothing on her and practically none on me.” (Bekker went around summer and winter with only an overshirt covering his bare chest.) “That’s not much, you know?” I said it wasn’t much — there was a lot more between the Naarden tower and Bekker’s room, for example. “Between the Naarden tower and this mustache,” Bekker said, “is much less, much less, than there was between her shoulder and mine that day. No comparison, Koekebakker.” He turned another page, looked into the light, and said “That’s how it is,” and went on with his reading.
And so it was: God showed his face and then hid it again. You never got anywhere, especially if you only looked at the girls from a distance and let other men kiss their pretty faces, the important gentlemen they as a rule liked a whole lot more than us. They were so much more respectable and spoke so well. And we were bums.
There was nothing to hope for from God — who goes his own way and gives no explanations. If there was something we wanted we had to take care of it ourselves. But we realized that it was easy for Bavink and Hoyer to talk, they had talent, they could really accomplish something in the world, but we — Bekker and Kees and me — the only difference we’d ever make was as socialists and it did seem a bit weak, after sitting at God’s table, to address envelopes or join the Kastanjeplein Neighborhood Association. And nothing came of life on the heath either, because even when Bekker did get a little money his shoes needed repairing. Maybe we could join Van Eeden’s commune, but when we walked out to Bussum one Sunday, four hours on foot, we saw a man strolling around in a peasant smock and expensive yellow shoes, eating sponge cakes out of a paper bag, hatless, in inner harmony with nature as people used to say back then, with crumbs in his beard. We couldn’t bring ourselves to keep going, we turned right around and walked back to Amsterdam, walked along the Naarder canal in single file, singing, and a farm girl said to a farm boy, “There wasnt nothin about it in the paper, inn’t that some-thin? D’you know about that?”
So we didn’t do anything. No, actually, that was when Bekker wrote his first poem.
I still remember it perfectly, it was on a Sunday, of course, because whenever anything happened it was on a Sunday. The other six days a week we spent dragging our chains around from nine to six.
I was out looking for a job in Hillegom, a job with a bulb dealer with fat red clean-shaven cheeks. The others decided right away to make a day of it. Bavink, Hoyer, and Bekker had all said so many times that they wanted to go to the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, this was the day. Kees had to come too, he did whatever the others did. I was going to meet them in Leiden.