I nodded. The darkness started to rise up everywhere from the water; the horizon to the northwest still glowed a yellowish green, the last light was leaving from over our heads. There were no clouds.
“So, he is everywhere,” Bavink said. “There, and there, and there.” He pointed all around us with an outstretched arm. “And there, beyond the sea, in the land we can’t see. And over there, near Driehuis, where the arc lamps are. And on Kalverstraat. Go stand with your back to the water there and listen. Can you stay out of it?”
“Out of what?”
“Out of the ocean?”
I nodded yes, I certainly could.
“I can’t, or just barely,” Bavink said. “It’s so strange, having that melancholy sound behind you. It’s like the ocean wants something from me, that’s what it’s like. God is in there too. God is calling. It’s really not a walk in the park, he is everywhere, and everywhere he is he’s calling Bavink. You get sick of your own name when it’s called so much. And then Bavink has to paint. Has to get God onto canvas, with paint. Then it’s Bavink who’s calling ‘God.’ So there they are, calling each other. It’s just a game to God, he is everywhere and without end. He just calls. But Bavink has only one stupid head and one stupid right hand and can only work on one stupid painting at a time. And when he thinks he has God, all he has is paint and canvas. It turns out God is everywhere except where Bavink wants him to be. And then some guy comes along and writes that Bavink is privileged and Hoyer memorizes it and goes around blathering it at Bekker. Privileged, right. You know what I wish? I wish I wrote timetables. God leaves people like that alone, they’re not worth the trouble.”
I offered Bavink a cigar and suggested we walk to Driehuis. I felt like a coffee. I didn’t think it was very nice of Bavink to put down a useful fellow like that who was just doing his job. Behind us, Hoyer and Bekker came walking back; they were still going at it.
At eleven o’clock that night we were back on the beach. The wind had picked up, the waves hissed. A little something to drink had driven off the gloominess and melancholy. A new age was about to dawn. Bekker, in the solitude of his German boarding house, would translate Dante as he had never been translated before. Bavink had a great painting in his head, a View of Rhenen, he had been there once and could see it all clearly in his mind. And Hoyer was going to go work on his social duty — he would show them. And I tried to believe it all.
The cool wind blew around us. The ocean made a complaining sound, the ocean that complains and doesn’t know why. The ocean washed woefully up onto the shore. My thoughts are an ocean, they wash woefully up against their limits.
A new age would dawn, we could still do great things. I did my best to believe it, my very, very best.
I stood in the twilight in Rhenen, on the bridge over the railroad tracks, and looked north. Far below me were the rails, running out to the horizon, with the hill rising up steep on either side, overgrown with light green grass and dark green gorse covered in yellow flowers. I looked at how the slope of the hill got lower and lower until, far away, it became the flat plain.
Again the darkness started creeping stealthily up out of the ground, the way I had seen it do so many times before. The last light of day rested on the mountaintop, nervous and afraid, while the valley was full of darkness, and a red light came on on a post by the tracks. The sky was coated in gray and looked colorlessly down on the beaten, defeated day.
I had been away for six years and now I was standing there, just back in Holland, in the place I had thought about so often, which they had described in almost every letter they wrote me (every year Bavink wrote me at least twice, Bekker a bit more often). Back at the hill that Bavink had sent me seven drawings of over the years and Bekker had written two very short poems about.
I had come back to Holland to suffer poverty and write articles and stories in the neighborhood where I had lived for so long. And I wanted to go through my last two rijksdollars in the city that for a while, in my absence, had been the center of the world.
In the north the darkness was gulping down the light, the mountain was nearly swallowed up, the day’s last escort fled to the northwest and I stood on the little bridge on the edge of nothingness, enveloped in infinity.
I leaned my elbow on the railing and propped my chin in my hand and looked into the darkness and thought about the flat red sun that had set long ago into the green waves of the Atlantic-waves that rose up with sharp edges and scooped-out sides and fell and rose and were rising and falling even now. About the yellow lights in the shops in the poorer neighborhoods of Amsterdam, which I would shortly see again, which had shone every night while the ocean never stopped moving.
And the vague expectations from back then rose within me again, and the longing, without knowing what for.
But I also had a feeling I hadn’t known before. All those days had passed and many more days would pass as well, and on every one of them my expectations would remain unfulfilled and my longings unsatisfied. Bavink had worked for years, on and off, on his View of Rhenen — on the river, the mountain, the Cunera tower, the blossoming apple trees, the red roofs of the city, the chestnut trees with their red and white flowers and the brown beeches between the houses in the distance, and the little windmill somewhere up on the mountain. For years Bekker had spent every Sunday in the cabin on the mountain that Bavink rented, translating Dante and writing little poems now and then, for years I had drifted around the world. And what did it all mean? For the world, for God, or even for us?
I stood on the Rhenen tower and looked into the distance, and my heart went out into the distance, to the red sky in the west. But even if I could have flown off the top of the tower into that distance, I would have found only that the distance had turned into the nearby, and my heart would have gone out to the distance once more. And what good did it do me — the wisdom that taught me that nothing would ever change, it would be like this forever?
Every day we longed for something, without knowing what. It got monotonous. Sunrise and sunset and sunlight on the water and behind the drifting white clouds — monotonous — and the darker skies too, the leaves turning brown and yellow, the bare treetops and poor soggy fields in the winter — all the things I had seen so many times and thought about so many times while I was gone and would see again so many more times, as long as I didn’t die. Who can spend his life watching all these things that constantly repeat themselves, who can keep longing for nothing? Trusting in a God who isn’t there?
And now the gorse was blooming again, and the lilacs and apple trees and chestnuts, and the sun was blazing down on all of it. Full of emotion, I had seen it all again. And while I was thinking about it, my vague longings and expectations faded away.
God lives in my head. His fields are immeasurable, his gardens are full of beautiful flowers that never die, regal women walk there naked, thousands of them. And the sun rises and sets and shines low and high and low again and the endless domain is endlessly itself and never the same for an instant. Broad rivers run through it, curving and meandering, and the sun shines on them and they carry the light to the sea.
I sit quiet and content beside the rivers of my thoughts and smoke a clay pipe and feel the sunshine on my body and see the water flow ceaselessly into the unknown.
The unknown doesn’t bother me. I nod now and then to the beautiful women plucking the flowers in my gardens and I hear the wind rustling through the high pines, through the forests of certainty, of knowing that all this exists whenever I decide to think it. I am grateful that this has been given to me. And I puff on my pipe in all humility and feel like God himself, who is infinity itself.