It was in December. I stood in the back of the tram, all the way in the back. It drove through the country and stopped and started again, it took hours, the countryside was endless. And the sky got bluer and bluer and the sun shone until it seemed like flowers would have to start sprouting out of the country bumpkins. And the red roofs in the villages and the black trees and the fields, most of them covered with straw, had it nice and warm, and the dunes sat bare-headed in the sun. And the road lay there, white and smarting, it couldn’t bear the sunlight, and the glass panes of the village streetlamps flashed, they had trouble withstanding the glare too.
But I got colder and colder. And the tram ran as long as the sun shone. It’s a long ride from Hillegom to Leiden and the days are short in December. By the end, a block of ice was standing there on the tram staring into the big stupid cold sun that was flaming red as though the revolution was finally starting, as though offices were being blown up all over Amsterdam, but still it couldn’t bring a spark of life back to my cold feet and stiff legs. And it kept getting bigger and colder, the sun, and I got colder and stayed the same size, and the blue sky looked down very disapprovingly: What are you doing on that tram?
Bekker wrote his first poem that afternoon. When I got to Leiden, as they were lighting the gas lamps, and I found the immortals sitting in a row on a long bench in the third-class waiting room at the train station, near the stove, it was my turn to undergo the poem. It was beautiful. No title? Bekker shook his head. But Bavink and Hoyer shrieked that they’d seen something written at the top. A well-dressed gentleman said “Louts” to the man who punched his ticket at the door. Bavink snatched the sheet of paper out of Bekker’s hands. What was written at the top? Was it even a question? “To her.” Just what I would have guessed.
Bavink thought the stove could use more coal but he couldn’t find the scoop. They always take the scoop out of the waiting rooms, otherwise the public uses too much coal.
So Bavink tossed lumps of coal into the stove with his bare hands, and got into an argument with a guy in a white smock.
It was fun that night. Kees and Hoyer fell asleep on the train. Bavink chatted with a girl from The Hague and inhaled the smell of heliotropes given off by her dear little frame.
Then Bekker started talking about the heath again. How he wanted to live there in peace and wait and see what God had planned for him. And not have to do anything. He was deeply melancholy. I had an objection to the heath: it’s so dry out there. And I asked Bekker what exactly he planned to live on, office workers don’t usually do too well on the farm, except in America (we believed all kinds of lies about America). But he wasn’t worried about that. He didn’t need anything.
Now he knows better. Only God doesn’t need anything. That is precisely the fundamental difference between God and us.
So life on the heath came to nothing too.
Four of us sat in the fine white sand at the foot of the dunes in Zandvoort and looked out at the ocean. Kees wasn’t there. It was late July. The sun was still high above the ocean at seven o’clock and it made, again, I can’t help it, it’s God himself who keeps repeating himself, it again made a long golden stripe in the water and shone in our faces.
A tugboat was puffing on the horizon. It rose and sank; when it sank we could only see the steam pipe.
Bekker was going to Germany the next day. His knowledge of languages had gotten him a job as a clerk in a factory handling foreign correspondence. And Hoyer was off to Paris, to paint.
Bekker in particular was deeply melancholy again. He wished he had never taken that job. He couldn’t understand why he’d done it. He was in that miserable factory town for two hours, for the interview, and got sick, homesick. He fled back to the train station as fast as he could. The rails still lay there, luckily running straight to the horizon and beyond, back to Amsterdam. He had already bought his ticket, and on it was clearly printed, right there: “To Amsterdam.” And the train came on time and carried him home along the rails, and when he got off at Centraal Station his heart was so full of emotion that he struck up a conversation with the engineer and gave him a cigar, an expensive cigar, and even stroked the locomotive with his hand and thought: “Ahh, nice locomotive.” And then he took the job anyway. It brought in a lot more money than he was making here. Now he had to go away and not see the ring of dikes around the city again. All that time the rails would be lying there, but he would only be able to go stand on the platform and watch the trains pull out in the evening, and all day Sundays, many times a day.
The sun was lower now, and red, the golden stripe was gone. It was a warm, still evening. The red water rippled a little, the waves rolled slowly in with a gentle hiss.
Bekker had a theory that he would save money and come back and go live on the heath. But in his heart he didn’t believe it himself. We tried to believe it, even Hoyer tried, and we convinced ourselves that that’s what would happen, but we didn’t believe it. And it didn’t happen either. Bekker came back a year later, he had saved a couple hundred guilders and he walked down Linnaeusstraat at half past eight every morning again with his sandwich in a bag from home. There’s a lot a person needs.
But we weren’t thinking about reused bags that night. We were doing our best to believe that we would still manage to accomplish something, really something. We would shock the world, unimpressive as we were, sitting calmly there with our legs pulled up and our eight hands clasping our eight knees. Hoyer had decided to paint all kinds of ordinary things. He had read an article in a magazine about the social duty of the artist, and now he was all in favor. He started to argue with Bekker about the heath. It was a miracle of erudition. He tried to convince Bekker that it was a mistake to withdraw from the world and go off to the heath, which he would never do anyway. An artist belongs at the center of modern life.
Hoyer wanted to hear what I thought. I just said I’d never thought about it. I didn’t know what Hoyer wanted either — he knew it already, why did he need to know what I thought too?
Bavink was the only one who didn’t say anything, he just sat with his chin on his knees and took the sun into his heart. The sun was as flat as a lozenge now, and dull red, almost gone.
Hoyer couldn’t sit still. He jumped up and took Bekker with him. They walked along the beach and from a distance we could hear Hoyer screaming, he was obviously worked up. Bavink and I stayed sitting there for a while, then sauntered slowly after them. It wasn’t very nice to have a worldview, it seemed to me. Hoyer was screaming so much.
Bavink and I stopped and looked down at the tips of our shoes and the waves rolling in over them. The sun was gone, the red shimmer on the water began to fade, a bluish darkness rose in the south. It smelled of mud. In the distance, near the village, the arc lamps suddenly came on along the beach.
“You understand all that?” Bavink asked. “About social duty?”
I shrugged. “What kind of guy d’you think wrote that article? Do you have a Sense of Responsibility, Koekebakker?” Hoyer had talked about that too.
“Hoyer sure talks nice,” Bavink said. “Awfully nice. I don’t have a sense of responsibility. I can’t be bothered with that. I need to paint. It’s not a walk in the park. What was it he said again?” “Who?” I asked. “The guy in that book, what was it he said artists were?” “Privileged.” “You know what I think, Koekebakker? That that’s the same guy who wrote the train timetables. I’ve never understood how anyone could write those either. Privileged … God is everywhere, Koekebakker? Or isn’t he? They say that too, don’t they?”