I look at Flip and listen and feel my youth, supposedly past, I see and hear my youth and I feel my freedom. I’m free, after forty years I’m free, and I can cut my hair whenever I feel like it and let it grow too if I want.
Insula Dei.
He is dressed well. A dark black suit with narrow gray pinstripes, a bright white collar, a blue tie with little white polka dots. A suit left over from his better days, saved and cared for, probably six or eight years, a suit to apply for jobs in, at least if he’s kept that illusion. Illusion! The knees are a bit shiny, maybe some other patches too. But he’s come to see me in a hat with no visor, a beret, and a drop of water fell on it and he felt it through the hat.
Flip holds his cigar under his nose and smells it intently. We are in the time when the cigar shops have empty boxes in their display cases and a sign hanging on the door: “Sold Out. Please do not ring unnecessarily.” I know that I have sixty-five cigars left, after these two, and I don’t think any farther ahead than that.
“I still had a few genuine Havanas,” Flip says. “Last year, when I was staying with my brother in Eindhoven, I always used to light one up after a meal, in secret.” He smiled. “In secret?” “Yes, I didn’t want to share them with him. One-and-a-half-guilder cigars.” I say “Insula Dei” and he just shrugs his shoulders and spreads his hands wide. Just like Flip. I wonder how many of those cigars he might have had back then.
For now, we sit there pleasantly relaxed, it’s warm and we’re smoking and spring is coming. While we sit there we’re getting closer and closer to spring and both of us know it.
We already know how each other’s life has gone. We don’t need to talk about the war: we’ve looked each other in the eye a couple of times. We only need to sit quietly and the past rises up between us and spreads out all around us, we see the faces, we hear the voices, we see the endless meadows, we see the house fronts and the rivers and streams, the water splashes, if we listen closely we can hear the creeks too, “burble burble,” a cow is standing in the creek, we see the leaves on the trees. We sit out in front of the little cafés on the market squares and we wait on the ferry causeways, hands on our bicycles.
“A lot has changed,” Flip says. “They’ve cut down the elms near the Kortenhoef church.” “A long time ago,” I say. “They reached to the top of the spire, it completely changed the landscape. Remember when Ko shaved his beard off? It was like that.” I nod. “Another cigar?” At first he wants to say no, but the occasion is too pleasant. I light myself another one too. Only sixty-three left. “And our trees on the dike across from Rhenen. A stand of trees such as our dear Lord gives us here and there. And tall too, hmm, they were tall trees. And they went with Rhenen. Had to strengthen the dike. So they chopped down our trees. Who were we that they shouldn’t chop them down because of us? It would have cost money to do it differently. Then Rhenen was like an abbey without a gatehouse.” He is quiet for a while. “And now Rhenen must be lying in ruins.”
“And the Muiderweg,” I begin. “I can see myself biking between Naarden and the Hakkelaar bridge. June 1904. June 1904, just think back to that, if you can. I was coming from the Gooi, on a Saturday, near evening. The sun was low in the sky, the water in the canal was totally still and reflected the reeds. The grass was growing between the stones.”
While I tell it the thirty-seven or thirty-eight years disappear, they never were, they are still to come. My bicycle whirs over the bricks. Other than that, silence. I get off my bike and suddenly it is even more silent, the bicycle is no longer whirring, I hear my clock tick in my vest.
“Just think back to that, if you can, Flip.”
We smoke. “And just think of the hell of cars only twenty years later.”
“Yes,” Flip says, “now they’ve put a big highway next to the bike path, over the canal, and the grass grows between the stones there too. A long time ago too.”
“1904. Do you feel old?” he suddenly asks.
I think about it, thoroughly think it over, but it just takes a moment. “No. And you?”
“I used to.” His left arm went up, bent, and he made a gesture with his hand as though waving away smoke. “I used to feel that way. You think they’re destroying your world. At first you barely notice, you don’t realize what’s happening. Everything you’ve mastered with such difficulty disappears or changes beyond recognition. They don’t ask, they just do it. Paths and waterways, bridges, houses, villages and cities. People too. After twenty years I went back to Castricum and The Resting Hunter was still there but I couldn’t see it at first, it was so surrounded by everything. The main street looked like a bad haircut and then those ‘darling little apartments’ everywhere, dear God. Where can you still find a nice slender bridge? They need to be wide, for the traffic, much too wide for such short bridges. Abominations. And then ‘artistic’ too sometimes. I ask you. As long as they can drive fast. What do they know of God’s slenderness? The double drawbridge from Ouderkerk is high and dry in an open-air museum on the heath near Arnhem, incredibile dictu.”
“So,” I think, “it looks like he’s kept up his Latin.”
He keeps talking. “Now that all seems like nothing. You have to hike farther and farther to find anything that hasn’t changed, that still resembles what you used to like. But if you’re an ordinary person moving around through your own little world, you won’t find much. It seemed pretty dreadful to me, for a while. I wondered if it wasn’t up to us — to me, to you, to the people like us — whether the silent course of things could continue or not.
“God is often incomprehensible. His incomprehensibility is never far away. Just think about the snow that day when we ran into each other last week. And the neighborhood.”
His cigar has gone out. Slowly and laboriously he digs a match out of his vest pocket and an empty matchbox out of his jacket, re-lights the cigar, looks at the smoke, cautiously opens the stove by pulling on the knob with his hand in his handkerchief (a clean one), and tosses in the used match.
“Now I know better: God is here.” He points at his forehead and for the first time I really see the deep furrowed grooves, and that his eyebrows are black and long, the hairs wavy and dirty-colored and sad like his mustache. But he looks a lot less wretched now and I can’t help thinking that for very little money a barber could make a whole new man of him. “God is here.” Where have I heard that before?
Again, Flip keeps talking.
“Why should people have to cross their bridge slower for my sake, or your sake? God is with those people too, he has to do something for them, they have to go about their business too. We have so much else.
“Someone like you or me,” Flip says, and he looks at me. While he was talking he was cleaning his pince-nez with a real (and clean) chamois cloth, and now he looks at me over the top of it, with his nearsighted eyes, the way he always did when his heart was full of feeling. Looks at me like a faithful dog.
“This world is too small for someone like you or me,” he says. “We have the world inside us, and in it we are God’s envoy, Dikschei. And in it God is not incomprehensible. What is the pope, Dikschei, compared to us? The pope, tied down to everything? We are God’s humble servant. And you wander around in that world in all modesty and you’re happy and meanwhile you’re nailing rubber soles onto your brother’s old shoes and you sit there hammering and you yell, ‘Mie, you’re burning the milk.’”
“You have milk again?”
His cigar has gone out.
“Yesterday morning we did,” he says. He deposits an absolutely miserable little stub of cigar in my stove and struggles to his feet.