The lamps were burning outside, pale and strange in the last light of day, like some unaccountable mistake. The way they so often did. Everything seemed like an unaccountable mistake.
Bekker is back working in an office now, with a good boss, who respects him for having translated Dante. On days when the weather is fine he lets Bekker leave early, so that he can walk around a bit in the sun.
Bekker didn’t turn to drink. He solves chess problems or sleeps. He has no vision of the future and no longings, not even for six o’clock. What good are they anyway? He takes a melancholy pleasure in collecting his salary, and a melancholy pleasure in using it to buy neckties and shoes. His clothes are properly brushed. Sometimes he feels a little pleased with himself for having “lived the life of the mind” once.
He still goes and looks at a painting every once in a while. I ran into him recently. He told me about The Arrival of Queen Wilhelmina at Frederiksplein, Eerelman’s painting, the one with the ad for ODOL mouthwash painted on it so naturally. Wouldn’t that be a lovely painting to hang in a fancy pharmacy, he said.
Kees is still working for the gas company and living in one of those stuffy little apartments I mentioned. He doesn’t know where they’ll find room for the next kid to sleep. The children are still small but in a year or two they’ll be squabbling every morning over the one faucet and the one bathroom, the way it always goes in District III neighborhoods. He struggles with what Hoyer calls “the chronic shortages in working-class households” and buys cigars only on Saturday nights. On Sunday he has to keep the children in line. He gripes about how he’d be doing so much better if he had only listened to his father sooner.
His wife is good to him. He gets a clean handkerchief in the middle of the week. But she wouldn’t awaken desire in anyone who isn’t used to her like Kees is. It was different six years ago.
In his father’s attic, where Kees used to have his “place,” his sisters’ underwear is hanging up to dry.
And Bavink?
In the battle against the “goddamned things,” Bavink lost, or surrendered. The things that wanted to be painted and then, when you thought “Well in that case it’ll have to happen,” turned out not to want to be painted after all. He was just starting to become famous when the struggle came to an end.
Two months after my return he came and told me, in a very calm voice, that he had cut his View of Rhenen to pieces. And so he had. The river, the mountain, the Cunera Tower, the blossoming apple trees, the red roofs of Rhenen, the chestnut trees with their red and white flowers, the brown beeches and the little windmill somewhere up on the mountain — into sixty-four identical rectangles 15 by 12 1/2 cm each, with a blunt penknife. It was hard work too.
The thing just wouldn’t stop pestering him. It was worthless, totally worthless garbage. He wanted me to tell him why anyone would paint. What’s the point? He didn’t know anything anymore. He stretched out his arm and waved it around. There, that’s where the things are. He hit his forehead with his fist. And here. They want to come out, but they don’t come out. It’s enough to drive you out of your mind.
Almost a year later I saw him at Centraal Station, seeing someone off on the eight o’clock train to Paris, a hairy guy with long black curls and a huge beard, more hair than man, and a high forehead with nothing behind it. The setting sun shone big and red, it was at the edge of the glass and metal roof, there was a reddish light in the windowpanes and the varnish on the train cars. Bavink was drunk. The train pulled away, slid out from under the station roof and curved to the left. As it turned, the light flashed brightly on the cars.
We strolled to the end of the platform. We came to a man with a signal lamp and I saw that as he passed us he looked at a conductor standing on another platform and made a drinking movement with his hand near his mouth. We stopped past the end of the roof and looked at the sun. “You see the sun, Koekebakker?” The sun was especially clear, right in front of us, close by, bigger and redder than I had ever seen it. It almost touched the rails, it didn’t flash brightly on things anymore, there was a dull glow only on the frosted windowpanes of the train shed to the right of the track.
“You think I’m drunk?” I did indeed. “It doesn’t matter, Koekebakker, when I’m sober I don’t understand anything anyway.”
“Do you understand what the sun wants from me? I have thirty-four setting suns leaning against the wall, one on top of the other, all facing the wall. But every evening it’s there again.”
“Unless it’s cloudy,” I said. But he wouldn’t let himself be distracted.
“Koekebakker, you’ve always been my best friend. I’ve known you since — how long has it been?”
“About thirteen years, Bavink.”
“Thirteen years. That’s a long time. You know what you need to do? Do me a favor. You have a hatbox?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Put it in a hatbox, Koekebakker. In a hatbox. I want to be left alone. Put it in a hatbox, a plain old hatbox. That’s all it’s worth.”
Bavink blubbered drunkard’s tears. I looked around helplessly. A man in a uniform with a yellow stripe on his cap came up to us and spoke to me.
“I think it would be better, sir, if you took the gentleman home.” I saluted and held out my arm for Bavink. He came willingly. He fell asleep in the taxi and woke up for a minute on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal when we drove over a pothole, and he wanted to start in on the hatbox again. But he fell right back asleep.
One morning he sat staring blankly in front of his last sunset. I arrived at his place with Hoyer. He didn’t recognize us. He just looked at the sun, a big cold red sun setting behind the clouds.
“It just looks at me, neither of us knows what to do with each other.” He didn’t say anything else.
Now he’s in an institution. It’s very peaceful there and he’s calm. He just looks up at the sky, or gazes at the horizon, or sits staring into the sun until his eyes hurt. He’s not supposed to do that but they can’t get anywhere with him. They can’t get him to talk. His paintings fetch a high price nowadays.
And old Koekebakker has turned into a sedate and sensible man. He just writes, receives his humble wages, and doesn’t cause trouble.
God’s throne is still unshaken. His world just takes its course. Now and then God smiles for a moment about the important gentlemen who think they’re really something. A new batch of little Titans are still busy piling up little boulders so that they can topple him down off his heights and arrange the world the way they think it should be. He only laughs, and thinks: “That’s good, boys. You may be crazy but I still like you better than the proper, sensible gentlemen. I’m sorry you have to break your necks and I have to let the gentlemen thrive, but I’m only God.”
And so everything takes its little course, and woe to those who ask: Why?
Finished January 1914
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
AGAIN the longest day was past. The days were getting shorter — it was still barely noticeable but we knew it was happening, this summer too would pass. Again the day came to an end, again the bright red above the horizon grew pale, the water in the distance kept its color, but barely, darkness crept up everywhere, out of the earth, now the canal in the distance had vanished in the night. We were gloomy about all the things that had passed, and about our lives, which would end while all these things continued to exist. We would see the days get longer a few more times, then we wouldn’t be young anymore. And after that, when the chestnut trees had blossomed red or white a few more times, we would die, in the prime of our lives or maybe as old men, which would be even worse. And the sky would be red again and the canal would still be there too, most likely, gold in the twilight, and they wouldn’t notice any difference.