He wiped his mustache with a napkin that wasn’t entirely clean to begin with. He stood up and hung his fur cap on the coat rack, he was getting warm. His hair rose up on one side of his part, the same as it used to, but it was a color there is no name for. Not gray, or yellow, or dirty brown either, but with something of all of those, more or less. It was a head of hair both full and pathetic, the same as his mustache, the whole man was rather sad and resigned just then, rather gray and furrowed, rather too much of a piece with his dingy coat that the waiter had so objected to. He objected to the man himself, as a matter of fact, and he stood at the back of the café with a napkin draped over his arm, looking outside, and clearly not finding the whole situation very much to his taste.
Yes, Flip remembered it all very well. He smiled, but only weakly, and he still looked a little teary, but the tip of his nose wasn’t as red anymore.
I summoned the waiter and ordered two rolls with butter and ham and had already calmly put the ration cards on the table before he could say anything. “And two more coffees.” I saw him take a look at my coat; he almost looked human. “Yes, sir, just a moment.” “Really,” Flip said. “I eat all day long,” I lied. He sat there resigned.
When the waiter came back, he was human. He had two plates, he looked at me for a moment then put one in front of Flip and one in front of me, and each of them had two thin slices of bread with ham, and Flip said “Oh,” and the coffee (not coffee substitute— there was no such thing), the coffee gave off curling wisps of steam and Flip sat there quietly and looked at me over his pince-nez again with his extremely nearsighted eyes and then he smiled, not pathetically anymore but the way you smile at someone who has done you a real favor. That was nice of Flip.
Then he turned his full attention to the food and drink and we didn’t say anything for a while. His mustache kind of spoiled things, but was also kind of nice in its own way. And then I said, “That book of yours, remember?” The book that was finally published, and reviewed (a bit condescendingly), and not read, and forgotten almost twenty years ago. Flip just shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. At the time he had found it rather depressing. But it wasn’t much of a book anyway, he knew that now.
“I’ve thought of you often, Dikschei, and envied you, because you will leave something good behind you. Good for you and for me and for a few other people, at least. I’m long past that. Not that I don’t think it’s very nice, what you wrote, for me and the few other people, but as for me … I’ve long since given up on immortality. Everything ends in …” He paused for a moment, looked sadly outside. “In snow and ice.” I fidgeted.
He wiped his mouth again. Then he looked right at me through his pince-nez and said, “How do I seem to you, actually?” I said I had to think about it. “You can just say it. I know perfectly well how I am, and how I seem to you too. I seem pathetic.” I stayed silent a moment longer, looked down at the lenses of his pince-nez, and then nodded.
“I’m not pathetic. I am an island.”
“An island,” I said, as expressionlessly as I could. “Isn’t everyone an island?”
“Maybe, I don’t think much about everyone, but I am an island.”
Silence for a while. I stared at the ring of a coffee stain on the table. “It won’t come out,” Flip said, wiping it with his semi-clean napkin. The waiter was standing a ways off, still waiting for customers who never came. He looked disapproving.
“Not just an island. I am a big island. There is everything on it. You remember the Dommel with its bends, its half-ruined little bridges, its half-ruined waterwheels, its meadows, its wheat fields, its willows and poplars. Do you remember Valkenswaard, Dommelen, Keersop, Breugel and Son?”
I nodded to each one.
“And the Moerdijk? And the Tongeren cathedral? And the chalk cliffs of Dover the way we saw them from Sangatte over the calm, rippled, blue sea? And the view of the IJssel and the Veluwe near Westervoort? Can you see the Gooi forests from here across the Loosdrecht lakes? Stand at the ferry landing and see Schoonhoven across the Lek in the half dark and hear the bell towers toll eight o’clock?”
I just nodded. I saw it all very clearly. Later I would return to every one of those places, more than once.
“No snow, no ice. Just whole rivers of flowing water. The Rhine, the Waal, the Maas, the Scheldt below Antwerp. I can’t name them all. And cities: Middelburg, the way it used to be, Maastricht, Hattem, Lier, Saint-Omer, I can’t name them all. All of the Netherlands, and Belgium, and a corner of France. I’ve carved out the worthless parts.”
“And not occupied?”
He looked up. Now he had to stop and think for a minute. He looked back down at the ring.
“The Occupation?” he said, musing. “I’ve never thought about that. No. How could someone occupy me? That has nothing to do with me. Being poor has nothing to do with me either. My island is a sanctuary, a monastery. Without walls, an enormous monastery. Dapperplein isn’t there. And when I’m standing on Dapperplein I’m not there myself.”
We were silent. Then he asked: “What time is it? … Twelve thirty, then I have to go, they’re waiting for me, my brother and his wife.” He didn’t say: “go home.”
We left. I saw that he still had good shoes, greased leather with thick soles, big and unwieldy but strong and whole.
“Where do you live?”
I gave him my address. “You have to come see me,” I said. “I’m home almost every morning from ten thirty to noon in this weather. And evenings, when we’re allowed to go out again.” He looked thoughtful. “All right. Yes, I’ll come, I’ll come by in the next couple of days. I feel like talking.”
I walked home, watching where I set my feet, and finally reached the canal ring and looked around. Everything there was white, I thought about the eventual death of all things, there were mounds of hard sticky snow on the ice, six half-dead gulls sat shivering between the piles of snow, you almost couldn’t see them. This used to be my water, reflecting the houses lit by the sun and their reflections glittered with sunlight too. There was no water anywhere. Middenweg lay there dead and white, but in the distance black trees rose up from the white and waited. “How much longer?”
I kept walking, on a path of hard dirty-brown and white muck. The world was gone again, all that was left was the path and my galoshes.
Luckily it’s thawing.
We’re sitting, each on one side of my stove, in comfortable low chairs and each smoking a little cigar and the flames in the stove dance gently up and down.
Luckily it’s thawing. You can see the sky through the windows again, a damp, mild, gray sky. The windows had been frosted over for a long time, while the stove burned, and the house was besieged by winter.
Luckily it’s thawing. I’ve stretched out my legs and I lean back with my hands behind my head and look at Flip and Flip looks into the fire and smokes intently, the way you can only smoke in wartime when there are no more cigars.
Then he says: “Lucky that it’s thawing. I already felt a drop on my skull from a house. On the way here.”