The poultry shop isn’t there anymore. It has big sheets of yellow cardboard over the window and black paper covering the glass in the door, there is no name or anything else written on the window, it is unrecognizable, gone, a woman walks out of the door and there’s nothing remarkable about her except that she’s leaving such a mysterious house.
This is not just a day in February, it’s a day in the final February, the month that no months will follow. A gentleman in a hat, collar, tie, and a very nice duffle coat is dragging a little sled behind him with a little bit of anthracite on it, he is going to try to survive this month of February in spite of the painful white impassable world down below and the pitiless gray sky up above and the icy wind. That’s what we all want to do, except for the people who aren’t buying the frozen fish from the fishmongers shivering and stomping their feet and blowing into their cold hands. Why isn’t anyone buying fish? Is fish so expensive now that the thought of maybe surviving this month of February runs up against the price and gives up?
Somewhere in the snow, between a stall selling sliced red cabbage and sliced Hoorn carrots and parsnips and another stall selling filleted flounder, there are three big tin milk cans and an even bigger, bulbous brass milk tank and a wooden crate with empty milk bottles. Just sitting there for no apparent reason. Women and a few men come and stand nearby with canisters in their hands. They stand there stoic and resigned, we have learned how to be stoic.
And then suddenly the past is standing there, suddenly it’s 1900, 1910, 1920. It’s Flip. I never forget faces from that time. An older man with a wretched walrus mustache that’s dirty yellow and gray with poverty, and a poor man’s red nose, but without a drop hanging off the end at least. On his head is a flat black fur hat with a shabby bare patch, he has on a colorless cheap tweed coat that used to be gray, years ago, and now is just dingy. But in this old-looking face I can very clearly see Flip’s face and he’s wearing the same pince-nez, the kind that goes with a walking stick, the same one he looked at me over in 1900 when he recited Kloos’s “The trees are barren, late in the season.” I see him look the same way he looked at me then and I feel the same feeling: he doesn’t think I understand a thing, he thinks it’s a shame he recited this poem for me. They all thought I was pretty silly back then, and here on Dapperplein, after more than forty years, I am no longer the retired executive (God in heaven!), no longer the well-known writer, but just a silly kid with long pants that are much too short. And I see the assistant director sitting at his desk again, he looks across his desk at the bank representative and then over to me and then back at the man across from him and he taps his forehead. And again I am sitting a little off to one side with the people out to change the world in the Horseshoe Café on the Dam (torn down a long time ago), and again I can’t tell if they’re pulling my leg or not.
And now he’s standing in the snow, gray and wrinkled, stoic, with his milk pot and his walrus mustache, looking at the sticky snow. And Kloos, and the plans from back then to change the world, and the green rye fields of Brabant too, and the bluish oat fields ringed with trees in the glaring sun of early July, there between Dommelen and Keersop, how very, very far away they seem, as far away as a ham sandwich and a half-pound packet of tobacco. To the left the shadow of an avenue of trees lies over the oat field, and next to that the rye field with a blue cornflower here and there, and a little pasture too with two red-brown cows.
In the snow a large man has appeared with thick shoes, a dirty yellowish corduroy jacket, and V.A.M.I.[4] in copper letters on the front of his cap, and he has a liter measuring scoop in his large hand and he scoops, dead and dispassionate, and people walk away dead and dispassionate, with their pans and their milk pots. Thank God he has some today — so there is a passion after all, or the corpse of a passion — and when Flip turns around with his gray enamel milk pot, with the enamel chipped off in a couple of places, I say “Bonjour, Flip,” like it was 1920 and I’d just seen him yesterday.
And he looks at me through his pince-nez again, a little teary, holds the milk pot in front of the top button of his jacket, and then he says: “God almighty, Dikschei.” Then he looks at the milk pot and smiles and that smile both tells the whole story of his downfall and smiles it off, and we stand on the snow-covered sidewalk, a little ways off from the milk cans, the last woman is just leaving with her milk pot and between us and this impoverished barren world is an endless garden full of wheat fields and grass and trees and flowers and winding streams. The world is green again. It is a day in May again and we’re sitting on the Vink by the edge of the water and drinking coffee, of course, we always drank coffee, no matter what the weather. The chestnut trees and lilacs are blooming, and the goldenrain, and there are still a few apple trees in bloom, the calves are standing out in the orchard, the little lambs leap on their little legs the same way they leapt when Akhenaton was alive, the sunlight glitters in the Gein, the first water lilies are floating on the water next to the reflection of the willows, the meadows and roadsides are covered with dandelions and buttercups, the trees cast their shadows on the duckweed in the ditches, larks and blackbirds and birds I don’t know the names of sing and chirp, a swallow skims the surface of the water, a frog croaks very loud and suddenly there’s the cry of a long-forgotten bird, the cuckoo cries, very far away, and another one answers, very far away, the sound comes from so far away, thoughts can hardly come from farther.
Other than that his story was like countless others. Laid off from his office, or “rationalized away” as the phrase went, with half a year’s salary, eventually on public assistance, a few odd jobs here and there. “I would invite you out …” He fell silent, looked down at his milk pot. “I’m staying with my brother and his wife, also unemployed. Nothing fancy, it’s no manor house with a garden.” Again he fell silent, it was a rather miserable attempt at a little joke. “You must live around here?” I said. “Take your milk pot home and come with me.” “You won’t take me anywhere fancy?” “Stop whining and come along. We’ll never have anything as nice as we used to anyway.” He raised his pince-nez to look at me. “You think we won’t?” He tapped his forehead, the way the assistant director had, but slowly and thoughtfully. “Here you can have everything as nice as you want.” “All right then, drop off your milk and let’s go.”
And so then we were sitting in De Poort van Muiden, with a view of the Colonial Museum and the vestiges of the Muiderbosch forest, and we kept our coats on since the heating wasn’t the best, and the waiter stood at our table and looked down at the dingy shoulders of Flip’s dingy coat. He stared a little too hard and too long, but my coat was still in good shape, three years old and barely worn and that made up for a lot.
And so then we were sitting across from each other again, he who’d been rationalized away and I who had done some rationalizing of my own until I’d collapsed under the absurdity of it all. And then we were drinking coffee together again, stubbornly ignoring that it was coffee substitute, and his drooping mustache hung over the rim of his coffee cup and a little coffee was left on his mustache and to get the conversation going I asked Flip if he remembered how the woman at the office used to attach his vest to his pants with a safety pin because his shirt always used to hang out in the front. And how the boss had suggested that maybe it was time to buy a new suit. “And while you’re at it, buy a hat instead of that cap.” And how he’d bought a derby hat, after all a writer and do-gooder and reformer out to change the world is an office worker too, in the end, he can’t get by without his salary, but he hadn’t bought the suit, he couldn’t afford it. Flip, stained blue because he could never figure out the typewriter, neither the ribbon nor the carbon paper, and so he smudged and smeared everything, his hands, his paper, his face.