That forehead, those eyes: Insula Dei. There it is. While I’m looking Flip starts reading again with his forehead resting on his hands. Ideas by Multatuli, a cousin of the wing collar. But she is alive. Beneath that hairstyle and behind that pince-nez she lives on, in the peculiar external shape of a cocky lead- and tinsmith.
I wait until Flip looks up. “What’s that notebook, are you writing again?” He blushes. By God, the sixty-year-old cocky lead- and tin-smith blushes. “I’m doing something totally crazy.” He hesitates and I don’t press him. “I got the idea after we met.” I wait. He studies my face, I think he wants to know if I’m really the kind of person he thinks I am. “I’m making a list of all the cafés we went to in those twenty years, and all the hotels where we stayed.” And sure enough, he blushes again. “It’s a great thing to do, everything comes back to you. The whole geography of the Netherlands, Belgium, northern France, the German Lower Rhine.
I hold out my hand but he shakes his head. “Not yet. I’ll show you something else.”
He has brought out another photograph. “Liza.” His wife. A child’s eyes, a lively, delicate nose, a sweet mouth. And another: two small children, between two and three years old maybe, standing next to a chair, each with a little hand on the seat, in truth I see only their foreheads and surprised eyes. They have their grandmother’s forehead and eyes. Insula Dei.
I wait. “Dead,” he says, “all dead. TB. She died in ’35. Even in ’34 I didn’t realize how bad it was. A person can really be stupid, when God decides that he shouldn’t be worried about something. I thought she was over it for good. She was complaining about tiredness again, and sometimes the smallest thing made her burst into tears, but I had no idea that anything would go wrong, much less for good. We had a wonderful time together that year in Saint-Georges.”
“Saint-Georges?”
“Saint-Georges-les-Bains, Département de l’Ardèche, le Vivarais, right by the Rhône, right bank, about ten miles from Valence. Population three hundred, a ‘spa’ in a tiny little river. Almost no one there. No real hotels, just three bars, with climbing vines, nice places to have a drink but you can’t stay there. Everything a bit dirty, except for the ‘Château.’ The Salvation Army had set up a children’s summer camp there and they let a few guests stay there in the off-season, by special arrangement. At least they did then. My wife had a friend who worked for the Salvation Army in Paris, that’s how we ended up there. Cheap, decent, not the most private. We lived like kings, high up, a few miles from the Rhône, with a magnificent view over the broad valley with mountains rising up again in the distance. A large house, a spacious regal ‘perron’ with a stone balustrade, old-style French columns, and two stone staircases, a large terrace in front with trees and benches and a balustrade of its own, a semicircle at the edge of the cliff. Almost regal steps zigzag down the mountain from the Château to the gardens. It’s like the view from the Westerbouwing but everything is bigger, and instead of Nijmegen with its little hills you have the start of the Alps, far away, mostly hazy. And the Rhône in the landscape, and lots of trees, lots of pointed poplars, fields in many different shades of green, and little houses, grand but at the same time flowery and charming, now and then a train in the distance. Reminiscent of Montferland sometimes, of the view from the hotel there, the Cleve towers could have been on the mountains opposite. The river was the life in it. A landscape without water is a blind landscape; water is like an eye.”
While he is talking he has put his elbows back on the table and rested his forehead in his hands and he looks at the table. And so, in that godforsaken pit, he keeps talking, in a monotone, talking to himself. And the sun is shining on a vast, warm landscape and God’s warm smile lies over everything.
The voice keeps talking.
“She came back to life. Every day I could see her reviving. We took walks if it wasn’t too hot, it was in June, but mostly she just liked to look, she got to know the fields, the trees, the houses, the mountain-tops in the distance. It was warm, on June 18 they started mowing the hay. The real South starts sixty miles farther, where there are olive trees, but there were figs there already, on the trees, and not just trees in fenced-in orchards but out in the fields, just here and there.
“And flowers. Camellias, honeysuckle, jasmine. Linden blossom. Everything saturated with fantastic smells. And crickets, and frogs. Little lizards everywhere. And there was a cuckoo there too, one cuckoo, our cuckoo. There was so much. The river wound downhill in the valley, between trees and shrubs. More of a creek, actually. The Turzon. From above you could only see the trees and shrubs.
“She recovered completely. The journey there was exhausting but she recovered completely. Her cheeks were rosy like a child’s again. And she was so grateful, and loved the countryside so much. The fields, the trees, the flowers, the houses, the Rhône, our cuckoo— they were her friends. She said good morning to them every day and good night every evening.
“Where else have I ever stayed in a place like that? Other than in Veere, 1908 and 1910, at De Campveerse Toren. On one side, the Château borders nothing, it’s surrounded in back by the woods, a little path connects it to the road so there’s no traffic, and even the road isn’t busy. So high up that you’re closer to our dear Lord. In a place with no noise, no billboards, no attractions, no radio. Just think about all the miserable guesthouses and furnished vacation rentals in the world and the abject horror of needing to leave such places and then return to them, with all the miserable human stuff there that makes you ashamed before our dear Lord.”
Typical Flip. He thinks about his wife and sees a landscape. It really is absurd that he never wrote anything after that one book, which in truth was nothing exceptional; it wasn’t personal enough, him enough, it was too much in the style of the time. After so many years he sits mumbling in his pit with his slightly disgusting hair-style and he gushes like a fountain, a whole landscape shoots up into the air and a whole countryside is conjured up in front of you.
He is sitting half turned toward me again, a little slumped to the left on the arm of his chair, toward the table.
“When we came home she was dead tired again and six weeks later we knew that something was really wrong. I’ve often thought that I shouldn’t have let her take that trip. But that’s how it always was: I got it into my head that I wanted to get away, I had to try somewhere else. Two weeks before her second child was due I was in Veere. Always the same. I couldn’t be any other way. Now I know that I was always looking for that damned island. God knows what I’ve selfishly trampled on all these years, always searching, always looking up at the clouds.
“And she never held me back. She herself sent me away when she couldn’t come along: ‘Go see how it is there, then come tell me.’ And the letters she wrote me. I still know a couple of them by heart.
“‘You’re having a great time there, hmm? I’m glad. If only I could have some fun here too, it’s so dreary, I want so badly for it to just be over, it gets so boring, the same aches and pains every day. I’m sure you’ll have so much to tell me when you get back. Liesje is so sweet, she’s getting a lot of fresh air.’
“‘I expected you to be back home all this week, actually, especially on Friday. At midnight I was still awake, wishing the whole time that you’d still come, but I was wrong. No, Liza, Papa’s having too much fun. Write me something? a postcard or two at least?’
“She died the same year we went to Saint-Georges. It was beyond my understanding. I still can’t talk about it. When I try to think about it, even now, I still just see a big black chasm I have no words for.”