Last night came the report that the Triple Alliance had accepted Wilson’s proposal. This morning I went into the city to see if people were drunk. It was a soft gray October Sunday morning and the little trees on the Damrak had only a few leaves left. The IJ was so quiet, so bluish gray, and behind a few long furrows it quietly thought back over the year that was coming to an end. But it was quiet on the streets, no drunk people celebrating, no flags. I wonder when shoes will get cheaper.
October is especially beautiful this year, we live in a golden city, and not for any amount of money, not for a hundred thousand rijksdollar bills would I want to be respectable. I’d rather just stay who I am, a piece of humanity like this walking right at the edge of the embankment, beyond the trees, stopping and turning around every time, like someone a little confused. And it has stopped raining, it hasn’t rained for days and I’m no longer dreaming about wet feet, I’m wide awake. And definitely confused.
The novel, my dear sir! We are in the middle of it.
There was no one on that stretch of Herengracht. The green and gold crowns of the trees were still thick with leaves. One by one the yellow and brown leaves slowly fell, you could count them as they fell. They lay quietly on the cobblestones, which were damp, and black, and in a little puddle that was still there somehow. Whole fields of them lay quiet in the water of the canal.
October 13, 1918
THE VALLEY OF OBLIGATIONS
I SIT ON the hill and look down into the valley of obligations. It is barren, there is no water, there are no flowers or trees in the valley. A lot of people are milling around, most of them drooping and misshapen and constantly looking down at the ground. Some of them look up every once in a while and then they scream. They all die sooner or later but I don’t see their numbers decrease, the valley always looks the same. Do they deserve anything better?
I stretch and look up past my arms at the blue sky.
I stand in the valley on a slag heap next to a small pile of scrap wood and a broken wash kettle. And I look up and see myself sitting up there, and I howl like a dog in the night.
November 1922
THE END[3]
NO, YOU’RE wrong. This isn’t what you think. Twenty years have passed since 1917. From 1897 to 1917 was twenty years too, but those were years of a completely different kind. You create a world of your own, you reject this and take a close look at that, you discover, you add more, and finally you see that it is good. And then the disintegration starts, slowly at first, you barely notice it and don’t realize what’s happening. What you’ve worked so hard to make your own— what you love — disappears or changes into something unrecognizable: landscapes and waterscapes, roads, bridges, buildings, villages and cities, people too. They don’t ask you first, they just do it. The elms near the Kortenhoef church that reached up to the tip of the spire were chopped down years ago, and they cut down the tall trees on the dike facing Rhenen too, the trees that went with Rhenen the way the gatehouse goes with an abbey. You have to walk farther than ever to find anything like what you love, anything that hasn’t been altered yet. If you’re an ordinary little citizen and move around in your own little world, you won’t find much.
So you’re wrong if you think “Oh, good!” and hurry to start reading. The terrible disintegration won’t matter to you, it won’t touch you at all. You think, thank God, that what you think is more important than the German Reich, Mussolini, Russia, and the Japanese put together.
Far, far away I see Koekebakker, a tiny figure on a bicycle on the road between Hakkelaarsbrug and Muiden. It’s a brick road with grass growing between the bricks. It is in June, the sun is low in the sky, the water in the barge canal is smooth and reflects the reeds. The bicycle whirs over the bricks. Other than that there is silence. Then he gets off the bike and suddenly it is even more silent, the bike isn’t whirring anymore, he hears his watch ticking in his vest. Just think back to that, if you can: June 1904.
Suddenly the man sitting across from me says: “There are only five things worth bothering about, and I list them here in order of importance: Amsterdam, early spring, the last ten or fourteen days of August, women, and the incomprehensibility of God. From most to least important.” He has a walking stick and he’s sitting with both his hands on the knob and his chin on his hands, old-fashioned as all get out, and he’s looking at me through his pince-nez and wearing a bowler hat that he could have bought from Kniepstra, the shopkeeper on Dapperstraat who died of consumption forty short years ago (I say consumption, not tuberculosis), and in his wide, tanned, fifty-year-old face covered in crow’s-feet above his heavy cheekbones, his eyes twinkle and his forehead has deep, undulating furrows. And I know that he’s just talking off the top of his head, there are plenty of other things worth bothering about. They don’t ask you first, they just do it. But by God they haven’t heard the last from us. One day we will stand up firm and steadfast again for what was always worth bothering about but never mattered to them.
Everything went so differently from how we thought. That the world didn’t care much about us — we all understood that a long time ago. But we still thought, for a while longer, that it was up to us to make the silent course of things take their course.
The man across from me says that he and that silent course of things have nothing more to say to each other. “Laugh at it and hit back. Other than that, God only knows.” His high bony forehead has two very sharp planes. He says in his Amsterdammish: “The more barbarians the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
Maybe you weren’t wrong after all, though it’s slow going at first. The man across from me stands up to leave and notices that he’d kept his hat on the whole time. “And I,” he says (now in proper Dutch), “I used to be a real gentleman.”
On the landing, he says: “Mister Koekebakker, I hope that we will see one another again. I have read your little books with great pleasure, but I have one thing to say to you: You are too good-natured.”
And that was the beginning of the end.
December 14, 1937
INSULA DEI
FEBRUARY 1942. A gray, icy day. A stiff nor’easter, several degrees below zero, overcast sky, and snow on the streets. Sticky hard snow clumped into mounds at the edge of the sidewalks; narrow, beaten paths where people walk with difficulty, single file, sometimes stumbling, looking at one another’s legs, bumping into everyone they pass and everyone they overtake. On side streets the snow lies thick and sticky in the middle of the street.
A hostile world, a world in tatters. A world of cold and poverty. Poverty in the many thin wrinkled faces, in the closed shutters of many shops, in the frosted-over shop windows, poverty in the streetcar rails where no streetcars were driving even though the snow had been cleared off somewhat, poverty in the little line of people by the corner of the old Jamin candy store, next to a pile of snow six feet high, poverty in the stands selling frozen fish that no one is buying, in the snatches of conversation you overhear.
“I’ve still got a sack of coal, and some peat.” A woman is talking to another woman, shouting across the whole width of the street. Another one, a bit farther on: “I’ve got nothing left in the house.”
Poverty in people’s heads: ration cards, food, fuel. And: “How much longer?” Especially the growing children, between fourteen and twenty, they need so much.