Then Bavink said “I’m going to be famous” the way someone else would say “They overcharged me ten cents,” and we all felt we had gotten the short end of the stick, all three of us, Bavink and Bekker and me.
Then Bavink told us about a visit he had received from a gentleman he’d never met, a short, well-fed man in a suit jacket. Bavink remembered his name and it turned out I knew him, we went to school together, back when he was still a scheming kid.
He’d come on assignment from a magazine founded by another ambitious gentleman who had poured a ton of money into it and gone around collecting original opinions and slogans and ideas from all sorts of people and presented them as his own, and still didn’t get famous, and then later he gave up too.
“So,” I said, “he came ‘on assignment’?” And all three of us had to laugh, we laughed our heads off, though Bekker was a little subdued because he sometimes wore a suit coat himself, and a top hat and white tie too not long ago, to help bury a client, and he had almost said a few words by the grave and had come home with a cold.
“What was he really there for?” “To make my acquaintance.” “How did it go?” “It started well,” Bavink said, “but I think the guy couldn’t really make heads or tails of me.”
Bavink had started by saying that he was incapable of talking seriously — a funny thing to say right off the bat to a man like that, who in the first place is a serious person and secondly is there on assignment. The man had done his best to laugh and then said, “You must be joking, Mister Bavink.”
Then even Bekker had to laugh and call himself an idiot and say he was going to quit his job and sell his suit and smoke cigars with the money. Which of course he didn’t do.
And Bavink had answered that he wasn’t joking and the man was completely flummoxed. He couldn’t sneer at Bavink because he had heard from well-known persons that Bavink “was doing remarkably fine work.”
“So I presume,” he’d said, and paused for a second and peered at Bavink through his pince-nez and then said again, “So I presume that you put all of your seriousness into your work?”
“What would you have done then, Koekebakker, if it was you there?” The fellow had spoken with so much respect that Bavink had thought “What an absolute ass he is” but didn’t dare to say anything.
“You know what I would have done, Bavink? I would’ve asked if he wanted a smoke.” “That’s exactly what I did too, and he said, ‘No thank you, I don’t smoke.’”
The fellow talked like he was reading out loud from a newspaper. He understood perfectly well that Bavink did not want to talk about himself, he himself felt the same way, it is always rather unpleasant, but you simply can’t always avoid it, you understand, life carries with it certain obligations and an artist (the guy really emphasized that word) more or less belongs among those who … Then Bavink thought that he might as well say something that sounded like it was straight out of a speech too, so he said: “Indubitably.” The guy was taken aback. He was happy to hear that Mister Bavink shared his opinion with respect to this point — guys like that always call these things “points”—and as a result he took the liberty of asking Mister Bavink in all candor whether it was true what certain newspapers (he called them “journals”) had printed, namely that he was, to a great degree, a great degree, indifferent to fame?
“Jesus,” said Bavink, “there I was, I thought if Hoyer was here he’d know what to say to him.”
“And what did you say?”
“I asked him: Is that what it said in the paper?”
“Don’t you read the newspapers?” he said then, just like a normal person.
“I’ll be damned,” Bekker said, “so he wasn’t going to leave empty-handed after all. Now he can write in his little rag that Johannes Bavink never reads the newspaper.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Bavink said. “Now he’s got his hands on something, now I’ll never get rid of him. He was already starting in with his notebook.”
“What a mess,” I said. “Mess? You have no idea. What was I supposed to do then? How could I get rid of him? The longer he sat there the more room he took up. I saw him growing and spreading, he filled my whole studio and the whole street was full of the little men, everyone the three of us, Hoyer too, have seen for all these years on the street, everywhere, they were standing out on the street and I knew they were standing there. My studio looked at me like it didn’t know me anymore, I wasn’t Bavink anymore, I felt like I was Bekker with some factory owner on the phone.” “Hey,” Bekker said. “That can happen,” I said. “You hear that, Bekker? I said that can happen. It’s a lousy feeling. You know I feel sorry for you.” “Hey,” Bekker said. We fell silent.
“You know, Koekebakker, how at your last job you had to ask every evening before you could go home if the receipt was on the spindle?”
“Sure.”
“And how every time you asked that you felt like you had muttonchop sideburns?”
“Definitely.” “So, it was like that. I thought about you and I felt like I was turning into a ‘fellow’ like that guy, just from him sitting there across from me. I thought, I’m about to start talking about intellectual currents, where are these words even coming from? It all happened in just the time it took for the guy to start up again and say, ‘Sir, you …’”
Again we fell silent. In the long run, you can’t fight them, there are so many of them and they’re always right. They had a reason to exist. We were the ones with no reason to exist. That’s the way it had to be, it was God’s will. Bekker looked down at the ground, between his knees.
“How did you get rid of him?” I asked. “I was furious,” Bavink said. “Goddammit, I can’t help it if I paint my pictures and I have to sell them. But I kept my wits about me. I interrupted and said: ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I am terribly sorry to have nothing to offer you, but there’s nothing in the house.’ I was talking as fancy as I could. ‘I regret to say that I don’t believe we understand one another.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Perhaps we might understand each other better in ten years, but today, we do not understand each other.’ I stood up and he stood up too. ‘I appreciate your good intentions …’”
“I appreciate your good intentions!” Bekker said.
“That’s what I said,” Bavink said. “Where did those words come from? ‘I appreciate your good intentions, but I’m afraid I don’t think we have one single intelligent word to say to each other. If there is anything else about me you’d like to know, may I suggest you pay a visit to Mister Hoyer …’”
“What?!” both of us cried at the same time.
“‘Pay a visit to Mister Hoyer,’ I said, ‘on Van Woustraat, he can tell you everything you need to know and he talks like a newspaper. 28 Van Woustraat.’”
We sat there thunderstruck.
The fellow had stayed perfectly polite, he wrote down the address with a fountain pen, thanked Mister Bavink, and said, “Don’t trouble yourself, I can find my way out, thank you.”