“He walks around now in a uniform and a cap, he has Amsterdam’s three white Xs and ‘AmGas’ on his head and a little book under his arm. And another guy with him, with a black bag.” Bavink found it quite a sight. His job is to go around emptying the two-penny coins out of the gas meters, the other guy’s job is to carry them around his bag. And after they’ve gotten the coins out, Kees has to go ask the lady of the house if she wants twopenny coins back again in change for the meter. Bavink spent a while with him, he had never walked along with someone doing that before. But it got boring fast. He never did it again.
I gazed at the Bokhara carpet lying in front of the club chair and saw clearly before my eyes the deserted cobblestones of Linnaeusstraat and the blue limestone curb and the seam where two stones were set next to each other, and the bricks of the sidewalk. I saw us sitting there in the summer night. Bavink and Bekker and Kees and Hoyer and me. I saw that the cobblestones and the dust on the street were wet, the watering cart had been by, there was a wet sheet of newspaper somewhere. And I heard Hoyer say that he was standing up, the cold from the stone was seeping into him. Now I was hearing the same voice, only a little more refined, more modulated, saying: “You must excuse me, Koekebakker, I have a consultation at eleven.”
Outside, the spring sun shone down on the cheerless street. My God, how could a street like this exist. I was absolutely not allowed to kiss the girl in the tram but a street like this was allowed to exist. That was allowed.
On one of the grand canal streets I stood on the stairs and read on the door: “P. Bekker, Agent, Sales on Commission.” I rang the bell and waited. It took a long time. Then the top half of the door swung open and I saw a young man with a blockish head. “Is Mister Bekker in?” That sounded strange. While the young man opened the bottom half of the door, not without some difficulty, I remembered how the front door used to open without my seeing anyone, there was a cord he could pull from upstairs, and I would yell “Hi, Bekker!”
“Is Mister Bekker in?” Mister Bekker was with someone at the moment. A large roll of carpets was lying in the marble passageway. “Who may I tell him is here?” “Koekebakker.” “Would you follow me, please?” The young man went first, up a narrow staircase that changed direction too many times to count.
Upstairs, at the end of a dark narrow hallway, he stopped. In the dim light I could just make out the words “Samples Room.” “Is this where I’m supposed to wait, friend?” I asked, pointing at the words. I could tell that Friend found me a bit odd. “We’ve just never changed the sign, sir.” He knocked.
I heard Bekker’s voice call out “Yes.” The friend went in and the door shut behind him and there I was.
Would I be so kind as to wait here? I was led to a small back room with a view of a blind wall. A massive roll of packing paper hung on a bar from the ceiling, with the end of the paper hanging down above a large, empty packing table. The young man went and sat at a little desk by the window, with his back to me, and started to tap on a typewriter. I looked at the packing paper hanging there, I saw that it had been torn off at an angle, I looked at the office worker’s broad, bent back and bony shoulders and at the blind wall out the window. One of the bricks was broken and dark red inside; that crumbled piece of brick was the most beautiful thing I saw.
The worker typed away at God knows what. Whenever he stopped for a moment I could hear two men’s voices through the closed door, and recognized Bekker’s voice without being able to make out any words. I sat there for twenty minutes, dying. Per me si va nella città dolente.*
Then the door opened and Bekker appeared. He was nervous and embarrassed. How was I doing? I looked good. He was terribly sorry. He was with a client, from Bordeaux, the man had come especially to see him. He didn’t think he could get rid of him before late that evening…. “You understand — man, you sure look good. Just back from Algiers?” I understood perfectly. Yes, back from Algiers. “Where are you staying? If I can I’ll come by and see you at nine tonight.” I wasn’t staying anywhere, I was out of money, but that’s not something you can say in an office with a stranger standing right there. So I said I didn’t know yet. I’d drop by again later. “Better luck next time!” I knew he’d say that. It’s one of those things that fine men and women say to each other where you don’t even need to listen.
He brought me to the front door. He thought it was a damn shame. I looked at the little sign, “P. Bekker, Agent, Sales on Commission,” then into his eyes. And I saw that he suddenly heard it too, the cow mooing, the cow in the twilight ten years ago that you could hear but not see. We shook each other’s hand. “Per me si va tra la perduta gente, Koekebakker.” He held my hand tight and put his other hand on my shoulder. “Let me know if you need any money, okay?”
I went down the front stairs. The client was standing at the window with his hands on his hips, legs spread wide, looking out at the street. He looked rich and well-fed. I respectfully doffed my hat to him and he returned the greeting, politely and graciously.
I’m coming to the end now, slowly but surely. Thank God, someone will say. Ach, I knew before I started that this wouldn’t amount to much. What does the life of an Amsterdammer ever amount to, these days? When I was young there were so many times when I wished something would happen, anything. But nothing ever happened. We never even changed address. And later …
Only Hoyer knows what it all adds up to. He inherited some money, now he’s loaded. He’s a member of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, and he reads The People.
In the evening he sits in the reading room and leafs through the Berlin Tageblatt. He doesn’t paint anymore. And he has a reason why he doesn’t paint too: it’s because we live in an age of decline. A new art is coming, he is sure of it, and waiting for it to arrive. Meanwhile, he brings Art to the People — how, I don’t know. A bricklayer asked him once: “What does all that nonsense get me?” Hoyer had an explanation for that too: “We Social Democrats know only too well….”
He says loads of things that are absolutely true, and when you start to think “Now this is getting interesting,” that’s when he stops. One afternoon in Café Poland he had a whole lot to say about “proletarian sentiment” and “bourgeois ideologies.” I just listened. One time I said to him, “It’s wonderful how you understand everything so well.”
At that he started right in again and I couldn’t get a word in edge-wise for half an hour. And it really is wonderful, to someone who has to do what other people tell him his whole life without understanding much about it himself, and who is constantly being snarled at and has to eat margarine and live in stuffy little apartments. If I was allowed to keep even the slightest doubt I would join the Social Democratic Workers’ Party too. One good thing, though: the people who always end up in stuffy apartments don’t need me. And maybe they’d manage, somehow, without Hoyer too. I should check if it is allowed: doubt.
Things went badly with the agency, sales on commission. The sales on commission part was total nonsense, Bekker had just put it there because it sounded good, and someone who has translated Dante and written poems, even if there were only thirteen of them, should not be an agent for domestic and foreign firms. On a rainy December day, with the lamps lit along the canal, I found Bekker leaning on his desk with his head on his hand. The room was half dark. He was motionless. I turned on the gaslight. There was three days’ mail, unopened, in the wastepaper basket behind him. He’d shoved the whole pile in with his elbow, deliberately, without looking at it. He had gotten rid of his employee months ago. They’d taken away his phone. There he sat. A list of steamship departures hung on the wall; the most recent one had long since returned and set sail again, several times. On the mantel was a thick book: a deluxe edition of the Divina Commedia.