“E., what are you doing?” He sat in total silence on the edge of the bed, staring down between his knees at the rug on the floor. He stood up: “Dora.” There was everything in that one word and she heard it.
Then they fell together through the light into unfathomable deeps and they felt their bodies like singing suns.
But in the back of his mind was an ice-cold corner, and in that corner he thought: “It’s revenge, she suffers to atone for the world” …
The Devil was sitting in Café De Kroon, in the middle of the room next to a pillar. He placed his thin gold watch on the table in front of him. The two bumps on his forehead were bigger than ever.
“Quarter past eight. Consummatum est.”*
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. The God of heaven and earth was standing behind him. “Consummatum est, come see.”
At ten thirty Bonger and Graafland found him. Bonger had gotten the key from the mother-in-law.
He stood stark naked in the middle of the room. His left arm hung at his side, beside his body, fist clenched; his right arm was raised, finger pointing upward. There was a faint scent of lilies of the valley. A blue barrette lay on the floor. The bed was in chaos.
“Eduard!” they both cried at the same time.
“I am God,” he said. “I am greater than God. I am the Immovable, the Merciless. I know no good and evil. I do what I must do. What I do is good.”
Bonger picked up a sheet from the bed and stepped over to him.
“Go away,” he said and took a step back.
Bonger didn’t move.
“Didn’t I say I was God? I am the eternal life. I am procreation. God has sent me. Do not cover me.”
Again he stepped back.
“Do not cover me. I am procreation. Bring all the women here, all the young women. All of them I say. I know who you are. You’re Bonger, the other one’s Graafland. I know you all right. Put the sheet on the bed. She must lie on it. The first one, put her on it, naked. The others don’t need to leave. They need to see. You can go, Bonger, you too Graafland.”
Bonger put his hand on his shoulder. “Stand still. Put your arm down.”
The arm dropped. Bonger threw the sheet around him. “Sit down on this chair.” He sat. Graafland gathered up his clothes, from the bed, from the chair, from the floor.
“Get dressed.”
He meekly, slowly put on all his clothes.
The little poet is dead now. The people in Delft or Oldenzaal were proven gloriously correct. He was definitely never quite right in the head.
His book is in its fourth printing and his collected poems have been published too, with an introduction by Professor Scharten or someone like that. The weasel who managed to become the financial editor of the Provincial Arnhem and Gelderland Courant tells anyone who will listen that they went to school together. And whenever he comes to Amsterdam, which is fairly often, he hurries up to Bonger and rattles on about the little poet and his work and acts important and always says that he sat next to him in school.
Coba is kindhearted and forgiving and unaffected, the way she always was. She has become devout, even without proverbs on the wall to help her, and she goes to the Dutch Reformed Church on Boezemsingel every Sunday, since she lives in Rotterdam now, as punishment for having flirted with someone once while she was married. Kindheartedly and forgivingly she thinks about how she too was walking right on the edge of the abyss.
Dora is an “unwed mother.” She works at an office in Rotterdam where her boss knows her story and doesn’t look down on her for it, on the contrary. Which is very unusual for a Rotterdammer.
Thanks to that one man, it seems to me, that abomination of a city may be spared on the Day of Judgment. Which is too bad, actually.
She and her child live with Coba and Bobi and she moves through her life with her head held high, proud and silent. She plans to get her diploma and then, with the money from her father, who is dead, study law. Definitely not literature. She wants to work, not think. But I don’t believe that she’ll ever stifle her soul. Those dear to God’s heart above all others have to bear that burden to the end.
June — July 1917
For those who would like to know more about how love works, I will relate that Little Poet’s Dora originated as an idealized version of a young girl for whom I felt, from a distance, an old man’s affection.
After she read the manuscript I told her that, and her response was: “But I never played diabolo.” She said it not out of coquetry or embarrassment, she had simply not understood a thing.
NESCIO
January 5, 1918
FROM AN UNFINISHED NOVEL[2]
MY LIFE is too short, I can’t go any faster, my work is a cathedral and I need a long time, centuries. And how much longer do I have?
It was back when I was still planning to write the big thick book that I’ll never write and that you have to have written to become famous, or so they say. A big novel made of reinforced concrete, two volumes if possible, and epic, really epic — the epic saga is the highest genre of literature, I read that somewhere too, more than once. Those people write whatever they feel like. They endlessly make art, dead literature and other dead works of art, and it doesn’t seem to kill them either.
I was in love then too, I usually fell in love when all I had from my novel was the title. That’s not good for an epic.
When it gets to that point you have to talk about it. You can’t always keep quiet. So I talked, I said more in a few evenings than I had in the six months before.
I had met someone that summer, someone I went to school with eighteen years earlier, and right away we started talking and couldn’t stop. That happens only once or twice in a lifetime. When one of us talked the other one sat there without thinking about what he was going to say when it was his turn, he listened, eloquently. We couldn’t get enough of it.
We sat outside at the Tolhuis café one evening and looked out across the IJ at the city. The electric lights along the railroad embankment burned lavender up above, against a dark blue sky. There was heat lightning around the three sharp spires of the church on Haarlemmerstraat, a train engine was puffing under the glass and iron roof of Centraal Station, the streetcar drove grumbling across De Ruyterkade, the water rose and fell, desolate, cold blue, in nervous, short, paltry waves, made a weak noise against the stone edge of the seating area and smelled faintly of stagnant water. Nearby, in total silence, a fisherman’s little boat lay on the water, its bare mast sticking scrawnily up against the dark city with its tip in a light patch of sky. I saw that the little boat looked tall from the front and short from the back and I liked just looking at it like that.
It was quiet, there were not many people, we could barely hear them talking. There was the sound of glasses and cups now and then, the city on the opposite shore breathed softly and innocently and innocently shone its violet and yellow lights that zigzagged as reflections in the IJ.
And then he started to talk, the way someone talks who has kept many things to himself and can’t keep them to himself any longer.
But you need to be patient with me. I’ll get there, in fact the novel has already started, we are all, so to speak, in the middle of it, you just haven’t noticed yet.