For months they never left the village. Bavink, numb with cold, sat down by the sluice and painted; Hoyer, with mad idealism, walked for hours in the mist along the winding sea dike, to Uitdam and beyond, and never complained when there was nothing to drink, and loaned Bavink his light coat, and didn’t notice when his feet got soaking wet. In the morning he sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed the dried mud out of his socks and was content. Hoyer lived like a saint — a sketching, painting saint.
For weeks he was blue with cold, whole days went by when he hardly spoke a word since there was no one to say anything to, Bavink painted or slept, and still Hoyer never complained, he didn’t long for Kalverstraat in the city, or his bar, or girls.
Bekker was convinced it wouldn’t be much longer now before we astounded the world.
It was over with Lien, she had moved up in the world. One time, on a sunny afternoon in February, she came over on the little ferry. A childlike February sun was shining. She had on expensive clothes and a hat with a yellow-gold feather that cost more money than Bavink had ever gotten for one of his “little things.” Bavink was sitting down on the dike, on the pilings, painting; the saint squatted next to him, right on the water, scrubbing the grease from a pan with a stone in the brackish water of the Outer IJ, they were not too particular.
The moment they saw Lien they decided to take the afternoon off. Bavink had been wrestling with the Outer IJ for three months and had just about had enough. And there was Lien, sitting in the middle of the room on their only chair and looking first out the window on one side at the fields and then out the window on the other side at the scrawny trees and the light blue water, and in the sun like that the world really did look quite nice. And Bavink and Hoyer sat on the floor with their backs against the wall and smoked clay pipes and looked up, full of quiet contentment, at Lien and Lien said there was a draft.
Hoyer said he’d never noticed anything — Hoyer, who used to never sit on a stone curb because it was too cold!
Then Hoyer went out and took Lien’s purse and Bavink just looked and admired and continued to say nothing. Lien sat with one leg crossed over the other and she placed the tip of her umbrella in a crack between two boards on the bare floor and stretched out her arm and looked at the water and down from the water to the tips of her shoes and then up into Bavink’s eyes. Then Bavink looked into her eyes and took his pipe out of his mouth and said: “Lien, you sure look pretty. If I had it to do over again … and with those pretty clothes and everything, and that hat….”
Lien turned bright red and poked him with her umbrella, which almost made her fall off her chair.
Then Hoyer came back with a half dram of old jenever and a beer bottle full of eggnog for Lien.
Everyone was in a good mood till four o’clock. “Hey, Lien,” Hoyer said, “do you know how to get the grease off a pan? I tried it with a pumice stone down on the dike but it didn’t work.”
“You need hot water, dummy.”
“That’s what I thought,” Bavink said. “It was taking too long, I knew something was wrong.”
Then Lien said they were hopeless and she took off her nice clothes, tied one of Bavink’s coats around her waist, and went into the kitchen like that, in her slip, and washed the pan. And then she saw a stack of about thirteen dirty plates and two half-plates. She washed them all and wanted to throw out the half-plates but they wouldn’t let her, why throw out a perfectly good half-plate?
The pan had never been cleaned. They usually only cooked rice in it anyway.
But at four o’clock the farm children got out of school and pressed their little farm noses against the windows so that all you could see were little white triangles all over and they wouldn’t leave. There were no curtains.
And when Bavink and Hoyer took Lien back to her ferryboat, at four thirty, there were two men standing at the crossroads by the sluice, and they said “Well, well,” and then looked as though they hadn’t seen Lien at all.
Not long after that, I ran into Bavink in the city. He had Hoyer’s overcoat on and smelled of bread. I thought that was strange. I asked if Lien had come back again and he shook his head no. He was resigned: “What can you expect when you’re broke. Hey, look at this.”
He unbuttoned the top button of Hoyer’s expensive coat to let me peek inside. “Bread, a fresh loaf of bread. I got it on credit in De Pijp. Hoyer’s out too, I’m supposed to meet him at Muiderpoort at three.”
In Schellingwoude they couldn’t even get bread anymore. Poor though I was myself, I gave them a cash advance on the Outer IJ. Oh, it would work out fine with the money, Bavink’s share of the world we were going to conquer was large enough. I was financing an empire. Empire? I was giving him an advance on a whole universe.
Bavink shuffled down Kalverstraat with his collar up and a bulge under his coat and he was whistling the Marseillaise and he smelled of fresh bread.
July 1914
LITTLE POET
The third year of the war.
Bellum transit, amor manet.*
TWICE the God of the Netherlands shook his venerable head and twice his long venerable muttonchops slid back and forth across his vest.
It didn’t add up. There must be a mistake somewhere. A poet with no hair, that was very strange. The God of the Netherlands hadn’t cared much for poets for thirty years. You could no longer tell what to make of them. Respectable or disrespectable? Impossible to say.
“He said he was filled with me. That used to be a given.”
God sighed. He’d have to talk it over with a real poet tomorrow. Maybe Potgieter. These days he had nothing but worries on his mind.
A girl was walking down there, on Leidsestraat. God looked down upon her with fatherly satisfaction. The girl was like hundreds of other girls that summer, all in white, silk blouse and short knit skirt and white stockings, delicate little ankles and flat white shoes, and she had lovely eyes like hundreds of other girls in Amsterdam. Eyes that looked like they knew something very special. They didn’t like that. Our Dear Lord had never thought about it before. But now it bothered him. It had started with a line of poetry about “knowing eyes,” then one of them said that it was all a trick, a pious trick of God’s. That they didn’t know anything, they just looked as though they knew, they couldn’t help it. God had never thought about that before.
Now they had gotten him thinking about everything. And just when it was so important to stay focused. The Kaiser himself had said it again, just recently: “Der Tüchtigkeit ist die Welt.”*
But once you start puzzling over something it’s not so easy to stop. Now that he was paying attention, he saw hundreds, thousands of those girls, each one different and every one the same. Sometimes he no longer knew if he had seen ten thousand girls or one girl ten thousand times. “God in Heaven, had he created all these girls? Or was it a trick of the devil, all those knowing eyes?”
Look, there goes the little poet. A handsome young man, you have to admit: thin, with a nicely shaved boyish face except for a pair of flying buttresses in front of his ears, and so suntanned. He greets someone, tilting his straw hat a fraction above his close-cut hair.
Bizarre — so little hair — but it definitely was a little poet because God couldn’t figure him out, or Potgieter either. And Professor Volmer wanted nothing to do with him.
And he suffered terribly from those knowing eyes, more than any decent upstanding person would. The devil had him in his clutches. He was a weak little poet and they drove him insane. He was respectable out of weakness. Another strange thing that God had never thought about before — respectable was respectable, full stop. The little poet didn’t know which one he should fall in love with, no sooner had he looked into one pair of knowing eyes than he saw another. He was so weak, so wonderfully weak. But after he saw the twenty-fifth girl he felt something strange in his brain. He had already spitefully kicked over a chair on the sidewalk while walking past a café. Because he knew perfectly well that they didn’t know a thing, that they burst out in stupid giggles whenever he doffed his hat to them, or just stared at him, stinking of bourgeois-young-lady conceitedness. And still he couldn’t leave them alone. Then he had to flee somewhere where there were no women, and he raged against God and the devil too, and he said that he’d end up as a lunatic at this rate and sit slobbering for years with his mouth hanging open wearing a leather bib without even realizing it. But the next day he would look again, and think: “Mon âme prend son élan vers l’infini.”*