Wednesday, July 9, 1941, 9:30 p.m. German daylight time. The sun is low in the sky. Near the end of an unbearably hot day. A narrow bike path between young birch trees. Behind me is Waalre, behind me too is the magic alley of birch trees in Waalre that leads to the train station. At this late hour it is full of shadows, all the shadows of this whole blazing hot day have gathered under these trees. But here and there the sun still golds its way in, a heavy wagon jolts slowly ahead under a heavy vault of branches and leaves, the sun glides along the wagon’s back, the driver walks alongside it, the low sun sparkles on a bicycle too, the eye doesn’t reach all the way to the end of this alley, the vault ends in deep shadow, this road must lead somewhere good and peaceful where a stately man and a willowy woman with elegant faces are waiting for me in a white house with a large front lawn and beeches and lindens all around and with the tea waiting on the tea light. The road leads to the Aalst-Waalre station and service along that line has been canceled.
But the road is behind me, I have turned off to the left onto the bike path and am on my way to Eindhoven and I think about it only in passing.
For me the day has not been unbearably hot. Temperatures like this are fine with me, and almost no clothes — shirt, pants, and shoes; jacket draped over the handlebars. As Zus Zwaardecroon, the neighbor girl, would say: “Like a fairy.”
When I’m almost to Eindhoven, the countryside is wide open on both sides. Rye fields. The sun still burning, low and red. A stately row of Canadian poplars, a copse here and there. A striking emptiness and silence. The fields end somewhere but you can’t see where, lost in the distance against trees or bushes. And then there’s a fantastic golden cloud above the grain fields, climbing up out of the grain fields, shining and spreading up and to the right. The Judgment. I get off my bike, I await the Lord. The cloud drifts, drifts to the right and comes closer. And then something looms up out of the golden matter, at first it’s not clear what, but it’s not the Lord. And a moment later it’s a wagon piled high with hay, or rather, it’s hay that is slowly, listlessly, and almost inaudibly moving closer between the rows of grain, with a man sitting in front and a horse’s head enveloped in a drifting cloud of solid sunshine.
But the Lord is in the great silence and emptiness and in this wondrous end to a monumental day. The day has become mine once more and mine the enchanted world. The sun stands still, there will be no night. Time stands still; pitiless eternity takes pity. God has taken transience from me and from this blossoming world. The heavens arch still and blue over the benevolent green, the grain stands perfectly still and there is a golden radiance above it and the land lies there like someone you love. This world will always be, nothing more can come after it.
When my bicycle starts whirring again I suddenly hear a cuckoo. And all around, before and behind me and on either side, I hear its incomprehensible call. From where? Thirteen times this voice of God calls from beyond the bounds of understanding.
I am very grateful. “Hallelujah, praise he who is without beginning.” I have wrested a beautiful day from eternity. The sun has almost set. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
And so I walk home through the snow in the last light and the island of God is all around me. There’s another light frost.
Wilted is the word. It’s still thawing, the snow has wilted into a filthy sludge, the neighborhood is wilted, the house is wilted. There is a tin nameplate on the door with letters the same color: B. den Oever. On the upstairs neighbor’s door a patch is bare where the bad kids kick if the door isn’t opened fast enough. And there’s not much paint either on the doors and window frames.
A tall, thin woman in black opens the door. She has jutting cheekbones and sunken cheeks and stands very straight. As small and narrow as she is, she fills the whole cramped hallway. “Is Mr. Philip den Oever home?” Having looked at me, she turns around and opens a door with her left hand: “Flip, someone here for you.” Then, without saying another word, she walks off down the hall to what I guess is the kitchen. She leaves the door to the room open a crack and I stand there indecisively for a moment, then the door opens wider and Flip is standing in front of me. “Welllll, Dikschei, come in, come in.” He is wearing a very respectable old suit, blue serge, a little threadbare, and a very respectable shirt, dark blue stripes, with a matching collar, workingman’s quality though, cheap cotton.
That room. Small, dark, two windows looking out at the railroad embankment with a big sign on it, MUIDERPOORT, and some snow still there, no longer white, and a tall rusty fence with pointed posts running along its base. Dull brown curtains make the room very dark, at least there are no screens. Someone is shuffling right past the windows outside, there are little bits of trash on the street. A large cylindrical heater fills the room but the room is chilly anyway. The little space left is taken up by a table and six chairs. A dull brown tablecloth makes the room even darker. The six chairs look like kitchen chairs that somehow managed to get ahead in the world at one point but have since fallen behind again. The wide wooden frames holding the wicker, with knobs on top, try in vain to recall their once-high position but all they do is remind you of the cheap furniture store in the Dapperplein area, filled to bursting, where they were bought.
The chairs, the chill, the years without work, on welfare. The cramped space and the half dark and the railroad running past.
This is not even the valley of obligations. This is a pit. I look up from below at the back of God’s head. If I stayed here long it would seem like I’d never seen anything of God except the back of his head.
We sit at the table. Flip in his threadbare suit, with Ideas by Multatuli and an open composition book in front of him. Otherwise the table is empty. The whole room is grimly straightened up. There is a big framed photograph on the wall, under glass: Flip himself, his hairstyle, his eyebrows, the same features, the mustache, but a shirt with an old-fashioned wing collar and a thin black bowtie. And it’s not Flip after all — it’s someone ten years younger at least, with something in his nature that I can’t quite put my finger on: someone who knows what’s what. Flip sees me looking and turns partly around in his chair. “My father.” “Oh, yes, of course.” He reads my thoughts immediately and laughs: “You thought it was me? 1905. By now I’m probably old enough to be his father.” His smile gets broader, wider than I’ve seen it recently. “My father had a good business, lead- and tinsmith. Nowadays they’d call it an ‘enterprise,’ like the Germans do, it sounds more distinguished to the hoi polloi. You never met him? No, you never came over to our house back then. I’ll show you my mother.”
He disappears into the back of the house. The connecting door stays open a crack behind him and I can see into a dark alcove where a low bed is barely visible. When he comes back he leaves the door open a crack. There is a bit more light in the alcove, there must be another door open a crack on the other side.
A photograph, “cabinet format,” only slightly faded. A young woman from the 1880s, en face, her whole neck encased in a stiff collar with three little buttons in front and a narrow lace border sticking out of the top, a ruche that frames her face from below. High, noble forehead; big, lovely eyes. A miraculous rebirth of life in this pit of hopelessness. Nothing in Flip is like her except his eyes, his nearsighted eyes like a faithful dog’s. I can’t stop looking at the picture. Why isn’t this woman here the way I see her before me? Why did she change, and then die, so long ago?