Luckily the little poet didn’t hear a thing, his poem without end has once again reached a stage that is driving him out of his mind. He sees all the women sitting at the outdoor tables and walks past them to the street. “Oh God,” he thinks, “what if you performed a miracle now, what if all their clothes suddenly fell off?” A nearly mad little poet thinks the strangest things. You and I, dear reader, never think such things. And my lady readers…. Mercy me, perish the thought.
Six years they’d been married. And while she sliced the bread every morning and spread the butter and poured tea, for him and for Bobi and for the maid, and sometimes for the cleaning lady… You try slicing bread and making sandwiches for four kids just once, if you’re not used to it, the way the unfortunate writer of these pages has done on occasion, it’ll drive you insane. Over time you’d probably get used to it, but dear God, over time it would also get horrifically boring if you were unfortunate enough to think about it.
All right, so, while she was doing these things over and over again, it pleased God — the true God, God of heaven and earth — to make Dora, her sister, grow up and turn into a woman, beautiful as a racehorse. She was one of the two little sisters who had been sent to bed early on the evening he was allowed to come upstairs for the first time.
It took a long time before he saw her. But she had seen him long before. It was when she was fifteen. He was recently married, just over a year, and he came back from a trip where he’d gotten a lot of sun. He was wearing a light gray suit and brown shoes and a white hat with the brim folded down all the way around. Back then they still threw stones at you on Reinwardtstraat if the brim of your hat was folded down all the way around, but now it’s allowed. His in-laws lived in the country then, somewhere along the IJssel River in a white house with a sunroom and a porch along the second floor. She was still barely more than a child, her skirt came down halfway between her knees and her ankles. Now grown women walk around like that. She was wearing a sundress with straps over her shoulders, wide vertical red stripes with thin white stripes between them; the shoulder straps were just red. Under this high-cut dress she had on a white blouse with a stiff raised collar. And her face was tanned too. She wore her dark hair with a part and loose in the back with a black bow. She was bareheaded and playing on the grass in front of the house like a child, playing diabolo, for the last time, though she didn’t know it.
It was in early June, the tall trees behind and on either side of the house were a solid green mountain. Here and there a brown beech tree stood amid the green. The pink hawthorn was in bloom, the red flowers of the chestnut trees had fallen while the delicate empty calyxes left on the branches stood straight up. The acacias were in bloom, and the jasmine. The sunroom and all three porch doors were open wide. There was a little round pond in front of the house with leaves and white petals from the water lilies floating on it and reeds and yellow irises along the edge. The gravel road ran past the garden and on the other side of the road, flanking the garden on this side too, there was green rye everywhere as high as your head.
With raised arms spread wide she caught the spinning diabolo on the string, but it fell, and when she was about to bend down to pick it up she saw her sister’s husband.
“Hi, Dora, don’t you recognize me?”
He saw a child and a lawn and the pond and the white house and the tall trees and the acacia and jasmine in bloom to one side. He was recently married and hadn’t yet started his poem without end. But she saw him, her eyes grew wide, the blood rushed upwards in her body. Why didn’t she throw herself around her brother-in-law’s neck and give him a kiss? She had always done that before, whenever he was a sweet brother-in-law who brought her bonbons and brooches and rum balls. The rum balls were their little secret.
“Hi E.,” she said and held out her hand.
“Dora, how pretty you look, are your mom and dad home?” He wanted to pinch her cheek, the way he’d always done with “the children,” but she ran off and burst into the house. “E.’s here.”
The diabolo lay on the walkway and the sticks with the string were on the grass. He gathered them up and kissed his mother-in-law and vigorously shook the old man’s hand. “Here, sis, your toy! Is Em still at boarding school?” And Mother-in-Law, who always liked very much to see people kissing decently and honorably, said, “Have the two of you said hello properly?” But Dora rushed out of the room with her toy and ran upstairs and stood in front of the open window in her room. Crazy, she was never out of breath and now she was panting and gasping. And she felt with her hands that her breasts were getting big. And the lawn in front of the house and the pond with the leaves and the white petals, with the reeds blowing gently back and forth, and the yellow lilies and to the left past the edge of the garden the blossoming acacias and the jasmine next to the rhododendron bush in bloom and the rye across the street, waving and shining in the sun, all these things looked so new and so beautiful. The larks were singing everywhere, a heron flew past, the sky was so high and the trees were rustling all around the house and the light — could you catch the light and hug it tight and take it inside you? She clasped her hands behind her head and felt her breasts pulled up. Then she stretched as far as she could. Arms high and spread wide, like when she was playing diabolo. And she felt the air penetrate down to the bottom of her lungs.
She calmly came downstairs singing the chorus from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, “Day of light and Heaven’s glow,” which she had sung so many times without ever really thinking about it. Then she walked into the room and said “Hi, E.,” and stood on her tiptoes and stretched up and gave him a kiss on the mouth, like before, like a sister. And he, who had just been having a conversation with his father-in-law about linseed oil — he was just back from his trip, the things a little poet has to do! — he only said:
“How big you’ve grown, child! I don’t even need to pick you up anymore.”
And she loved him so much that she wasn’t even mad when he said that. Her breasts were already getting bigger, weren’t they? Just wait….
“Dora, the milk’s boiling. Maartje went into town.” And Dora flew to the kitchen to turn off the stove.
Now before I go any farther I should probably mention that my manuscripts too are recopied by my wife, and that she does not see the poetry in this story. Coba’s flirting is not so terrible, she thinks, it’s because the little poet was neglecting her. The lady on the tram deserved a slap in the face and the little poet too. It’s strange, in other stories she reads she doesn’t think things along these lines are that bad. I think it’s because I’m the one who wrote this story. Of course she knows that there’s a difference between the author and Mr. Nescio himself, but to her that’s splitting hairs. It’s a difficult situation. My domestic bliss is somewhat troubled — but still I’ll keep going.
There’s the God of the Netherlands again, strolling across the Damrak’s burning-hot pavement. Again he’s wearing the same brownish suit and the same hat and has flakes of dandruff on his collar. This time he’s put a handkerchief over his collar, he’s sweating. He puts the tip of his walking stick down a long way from his body as he walks. His gray muttonchops stroll along with him.
God of heaven and earth, of land and sea, take this oppression from me, gather it up in your hand and carry it far away from the Damrak and lay it gently down on a garbage heap next to the blue pots with holes in the bottom and the crushed tin cans and rusty barrel hoops and ashes and shrimp shells. Somewhere I never go.
Now my spirit can abandon my damned self and rise straight up into the sky like blue smoke on a windless summer night, while a distant cow sorrowfully moos.
And now everything is gone that once was and I am Dora and I am in a new world, the same as the old world but seen from the feet of the Father, and I look down from there at Dora, who I myself am, a woman now, a girl, for as long as the state of grace lasts.
And just as the world itself is new for me, so too did it lie outspread and untouched and benevolent for Dora after that day. Oh, she accepted the miracle, but she didn’t understand it or understand herself, just as the earth doesn’t understand itself, the wheat grows out of it and is green and turns yellow and is mowed and the tall sheaves rest on the yellow wheat stubble and the earth knows nothing about it.
And her breasts did get bigger, they moved when she walked. But she was still a slender girl with the indentation in her neck clearly visible, and her tendons and the tips of her collarbones stood out clearly, just like on her sister. And when she turned her head to the side you could see a deep hollow in her shoulder, if she had on her loose boatneck blouse. In her tan face her eyes were so white and so blue, dark blue. I saw the Zuiderzee frozen over once, and it was the same white. But all the warmth of her young body shone out of the blue of her eyes, without it cooling her body down at all. And when she stood with her hands on the small of her back, square on her two legs with her feet a little ways apart, you saw the points of her shoulder blades and a hollow between them like a poem that drew your thoughts into the distance, like a river lying outstretched, far away, then winding onward, you can’t see the end of it. And when she tilted her head forward — she wore her hair up now — the God of heaven and earth himself looked up for a moment from his eternal contemplation of the eternal lands and seas and propped his right elbow on his thigh and rested his head on his right hand, thumb under his chin and index finger along the length of his cheek, and he beheld the tan little bumps above the hollow that was a poem, and the fine hairs that glinted in the sunlight, and he smiled. Then he looked gravely back down past his feet at his Rhine winding back and forth between his mountains, and he mused: “What’s going on here? How did I let the Germans found another empire? Those Prussians….”
And his noble, hairless visage darkened. Two deep furrows appeared above his strong straight nose.
But she wasn’t thinking about any Prussians. She thought how sweet her sister’s husband was and that it was good that she loved her brother-in-law. He was her brother after all. And a poet. Coba had told her that. And a poet was someone dear to God’s heart. She had read that in a book somewhere.
She was old enough now to read edifying books, with chocolate in her mouth and the rest of the chocolate bar on the table.
If only she could write poetry too someday, or — a novel. A book about young love. Everybody was reading about young love back then. And one evening as she lay on the IJssel dike, her bicycle next to her on its side on the grass, with a blade of grass in her mouth that she turned around and around, looking out over the water at a tjalk’s sail clattering down along the mast and falling limp, she tried. But nothing much came of it. It made her feel all soft and weak inside, made her heart and her lungs feel so big and so melancholily full. She felt the evening landscape along the length of her spine, from top to bottom. The cows standing in the water and drinking and looking at each other, the rattling of the anchor chain, the light hung high on the mast of the ship — it all brought tears to her big eyes. But nothing came of it. She took the blade of grass in her mouth and split it lengthwise with her thumbnails but nothing came of it.
She stood up. The stars were shining in the pale sky, the water was rippling and swirling and turning and flowing as though there was no Dora standing in the colorless summer evening. A heavy wagon crunched laboriously over the gravel road in the distance. Melancholy rose up out of the darkening land; the water still held a little light.
Then she stretched out her arms but there was no one to answer her. Then she didn’t know if she wanted to live or die and she slowly rode her bike home, where Mother sat yawning over her Daily News under the gas lamp with her glasses on the tip of her nose. She looked hard at Dora, then took off her glasses, wiped them, felt for the top of the glasses case on the newspaper and bent down since the other half of the case had fallen on the floor. “Here, Mom.” Then Mom stood up, yawned, and folded the paper in half, looked at the little clock on the mantelpiece, and said, through another yawn, “Quarter past ten.”
Back in her room Dora took off her clothes and smelled the scent of her own clean warm body. And a great desire filled her again, the same way the evening landscape had filled her with a great desire, and the dark river that flowed out to a point that was light for a moment and then it turned and was gone. But what it was she desired, that she didn’t know.
She suddenly saw it all before her eyes again in the darkness of the room: the water with the ship at anchor and the light on the mast, the cows across the water, nearby. She saw that dusk didn’t fall, it crept up out of the land, it was the first time she had realized that. She especially saw the end of the river, flowing out to a point where there was a patch of greenish light in the water, where the riverbank curved round. And she heard the distant crunching of the heavy wagon on the gravel road.
“God, if only I could be dear to your heart,” she said childishly. And she had a dream that night. She dreamt that E. was taking a walk with Coba in a meadow, she in white linen, he all in white flannel with the cuffs of his pants legs turned up and a flat straw hat on and brown shoes. She dreamt that they were smiling and laughing at each other, and he kissed her on the mouth, four kisses one after the other until she laughingly pulled free. And that she, Dora, ran up to her sister and threw her arms around her neck and lay her head on her shoulder and said: “Coba, how sweet you are.” Then suddenly her mother was standing there, with her glasses up on her head now, and she said, “Thirteen minutes to two.”