As I help him into his old tweed coat, I ask, “Are you still looking for work?” He shrugs his shoulders again. “Do you still have that derby hat?” And we both have a short laugh. That derby hat from Kniepstra, who had a shop on Dapperstraat, who died of consumption forty years ago. “Back then we died of consumption, not tuberculosis. So, see you soon. You have to come by and see where I live, even though it’s not very nice. Yes, that derby hat. It was so big it fell down over my ears.”
He looks thoughtfully down at the tips of his greased-leather shoes.
“I don’t believe I was cut out to be a true gentleman, Dikschei.”
I am sitting in front of my stove again, thinking. Insula Dei. I have to think about that. Is it only a refuge for old men?
The thinking is not going so well. The gray sky is almost white and it looks like a soft rain is coming.
The room grows darker. Rain! And out of the past, a past from five weeks ago but so, so far away, the trees in Frankendael Park rise up out of the past, blue and red drops glisten on the branches, a white drop sparkles fiercely and trembles and suddenly is pale blue. The trees are bare, of course they’re bare, it’s January. Long ribbons of light glow on the branches and when I look up I see all the delicate twigs and the little buds against the faint blue sky. The treetops are already looking toward spring, in the distance, and down below the black trunks lead their own lives. A doe could stand there with raised head and childlike eyes, and why do I never get to see the dancing pixies? It is almost spring after all. I would catch a cold and rheumatism if I did but the stone maiden stands there with her naked breasts, so many stone maidens have nothing on and stand in gardens in January, the enviable things, and they stay healthy for a hundred and fifty years, two hundred years.
How often in summer I have looked at those same trees, full of leaves, looked at the light on the trees and the shadow, and the darkness under the crowns. Every day I went by and looked. There were shadows from the leaves on the grass; in between, the light was intensely golden. Then it was as if the trees had always been there, exactly the same, and always would be. Who, when he sees a friend, thinks that he will never see him again? Now the ground between the trees is brown and dingy, it’s the leaves from back then, and not even all the leaves. I looked at them so many times and it didn’t help them a bit, they fell anyway.
Insula Dei. I force my thoughts back to that.
Yes. And no. I think about these eventful times. You want to do something, make a difference. But these aren’t the first eventful times I have lived through and if I’m granted even more years then with God’s help I will most likely get to my third war. The silent course of things takes its silent, implacable course, the little man who is a hero today will tomorrow, when peace comes, be scolded in his stupid little job or maybe won’t have a job at all and will turn back into the useless piece of clockwork he used to be. And if he has a little more to him, maybe he will read the first chapter of Ecclesiastes: “All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it.”
Eventful times. What remains from Italy’s eventful times in the thirteenth century except Dante’s Inferno?
Do. As if I haven’t had enough pointless doing. Oh they have nothing else, they only are when they do. I want to be, and for me to do is: not to be.
It slips away from me again. I see the spring. Like the highest branches of the trees I see the spring from far away. God help me, what a winter we’ve had. Cold. And snow and everything jumbled together. A train has pulled into Amsterdam-Muiderpoort Station from Utrecht, going to Centraal Station, and the stationmaster is about to give the signal to proceed when he quickly asks the conductor hurrying onto the train, “Tell me, what train are you again?”
But now it’s thawing, thank God. I think back to last year’s crocuses in the parks in Groningen, in the gardens of the villas on the way to Haren, and farther. Spring was late last year. The crocuses were in full bloom in mid-April. Yellow, purple, and white, the vanguard of spring. And the Paterswolde lake lay there in the distance, you are standing a little higher in the landscape but you barely see the meadows sloping down, there are low dikes with willow trees on them, the alder catkins are hanging down, here and there a farm-stead is surrounded by tall trees, there are even a few cows in a scrawny pasture. Over there too. I count seven. The lake is all dark blue beneath the April sky, in front of the Eelder woods that are the outer edge of the world, small from a distance but also large. And black. And at the same time blond. However I want to see them. In the middle is a large tree I recognize. And the next day the lake is pale blue and the day after that it’s a delicate gray with a sail on it. A magnificent view, magnificent enough for me, my heart swells and the landscape swells with it, the sky is so high, it is as though I could live there like that, without friends, without the baker and milkman and butcher and grocer, without garbage cans and clothes and even without cigars if necessary and without a pipe, and that’s saying a lot. Ach, I will have to live without tobacco and cigars all too soon anyway, but not on the side of the road to Haren and not beneath the trees in the Frankendael. But I’ll never be rid of the baker and the rest of them. Although God knows, maybe them too. But then the side of the road to Haren will be a very different roadside, like the one you sometimes read about in the paper, where a dead body is found in the winter sometimes. And as for clothes, I can’t do without them, unfortunately, and the police go after nudists whenever they occasionally do turn up. “The beauty of the human body” is written in respectable books but we ordinary folks have to go to museums for it, if we ever get to see any of it at all.
It’s clear I’m not up to it. It wouldn’t be enough for me. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.”* Do I want to be satisfied? Yes. And no. There is no answer.
And suddenly I am at peace with it. There is no answer. That’s good too. In a month the crocuses will be in bloom again. It’s barely started thawing and already the women are looking around. There is still something to hold on to in this time of war: the thought of peace and the feeling for “that which is not of this earth.” That doesn’t sound bad, it even sounds a bit sublime.
So then: Insula Dei?
I give up and go eat a couple of slices of bread and butter. At the table I awaken in a clear, tangible world. It still feels strange for a moment. A plate, a knife, a fork, some leftover sauerkraut from the day before, it’s clear exactly what you have here: not quite enough.
In the twilight that evening I walk past Frankendael again. The snow is still lying on the gardens in front of the manor house and it’s still light out. But the tall trees are there, to either side. They are silent, life cannot be more silent.
I look slowly up past the trees. Down below the trunks rise up darkly out of the snow, it is a secretive, three-quarters-dark world where Dikscheis led astray by our dear Lord can frolic with nymphs like the ones you see in museums. But up above, the crowns of the trees against the last light of a pale sky look out into the distance. There is no sound, no wind. The trunks wait, they wait for an answer from the crowns. Are the herons returning? Is spring on its way?
And then God does what he always does, thank God, time and time again, every day. In the end that’s why I could never make anything of myself in society. He shows me something that is not there: the blue lake next to the endless field with yellow daffodils, water and daffodils both waving in the breeze. Wordsworth’s “Daffodils.”