He wished he could just give up painting, but that wasn’t so simple either: what’s inside you wants to come out. And so the torture started up again: work, work, work day and night, paint all day and fret all night, stay with it, work through it, worry about whether you’ve really got hold of the things this time. He didn’t sleep or eat much; at the beginning he would smoke an enormous number of cigars, one after the other, but after the first day he stopped doing that too. He had moments of the greatest bliss, a joy that all his languid submersion in that “delicious beauty” couldn’t give him. And then they came to look, this person, that person, they stood behind him in twos and threes and fours and they looked and nodded and pointed. And suddenly it was over. Then he said “Dammit” and went and lay down on his cot and sent someone out for a flask of jenever and he was done. After a few days he put the canvas away with the rest. In the days that followed he was wretched, tired, miserable, numb, and sick, and he started “shuffling around” again, as he put it: doing nothing, loafing, walking around. If he needed money he dragged something out of his “garbage heap,” looked for a “scrap” that “somebody would give something for,” and sold it. Nobody could change his ways — that’s just how he was. His strengths and weaknesses were one. When he sold something, he stuffed the money into his pocket and clinked with guilders and rijksdollars and walked down Kalverstraat whistling a tune. He said a friendly hello and waved happily whenever you ran into him.
Then he came up and stood next to you and slyly showed you all the “coppers” in his pocket, and laughed out loud, and said, “Can you believe those suckers?” He never accepted paper money: you can’t clink bills in your pocket. He had to have gold and silver, and when it was too much for him to carry he said he’d “come by to get the rest later.”
That was Bavink. Clearly someone in a constant state of overcoming the body would be thoroughly interesting to him. He could learn something from a man like that. Someone who thought it was fine just to let the wind blow through his hair, let the cold, wet wind soak his clothes and his body, who ran his tongue over his lips because the taste of the ocean was so “goddamn delicious,” who sniffed his hands at night to smell the sea. Someone who thought it was enough to be alive and in good health, who went on his joyful way between God’s heaven and God’s earth and thought it was idiotic that people caused themselves so much trouble, and laughed out loud at them, and sat there eternally with his beatific smile, quietly enjoying the water and the sky and the clouds and the fields, and let the rain soak him through without noticing it and then said “I think I’m wet” and laughed. Someone who could eat an expensive meal and drink expensive jenever better than anyone in Holland and then, at other times, on his long walks (because he didn’t always sit around, every so often he spent days at a time on his feet), he’d eat dry rolls day in and day out and be moved to tears because out in the open “a piece of bread like this can taste so good.”
And when Bavink was working, Japi sat nearby on the grass or back-to-front on a chair inside, smoking. When they were both inside, Japi kept another chair nearby with a little glass of liquor on it, and reached out his hand for it every now and then. And he kept Bavink on track. Bavink had never spoken a word to anyone when he was working but he talked with Japi.
“The hell with it,” Japi said, “what does it matter if it’s good or not! You do what you can, you’re just a poor bastard like everyone else. You have to paint. You can’t stop, can you? The things don’t care if you don’t get them down exactly how you see them. And other people don’t understand anything anyway, not the things and not your work and not you. As for me, I could spend my time in a lot more interesting ways than sitting here boozing and eyeballing that mess of paint. You think I’d be any worse off?
“No, that’s all wrong,” he said then, “much too blue — don’t you remember what we talked about yesterday? Much too blue. Please. You think it would have grabbed you the way it did if it was that weird blue color?”
Japi was worth his weight in gold to Bavink. Bavink brought him along everywhere. It was Bavink who made Japi what he was when Bavink turned up with him in Amsterdam.
In no time Japi was worse than low on funds. Bavink wouldn’t let him go for all the money in the world. Japi’s only job was to look through the “garbage heap,” and he got the hang of it in no time— never before had “the dump” turned such a profit. Since then, Bavink paid for everything, or almost everything. Now and then Japi got a little money from home. But that didn’t make any difference since sometimes they lived it up like tycoons — when they were in the mood they went to Amsterdam for a few days, to Brussels, Paris, Luxembourg, they spent two weeks in Normandy. Japi usually brought along a few things from the scrap heap, “a chip off the old scrap heap” he called it. In France and Belgium he went up to people on the street, rang doorbells. There was no one else in the world Bavink would have let do any of this. But no one else understood the art of keeping Bavink alive, as Bavink said. His conversation was inexhaustible. And he had a memory for landscapes that bordered on the miraculous. He knew everything along the railroad line from Middelburg to Amsterdam: every field, every ditch, every house, every road, every stand of trees, every patch of heather in Brabant, every switch in the tracks. If you had been traveling for hours in the dark and Japi was stretched out asleep on the seats the whole time and you woke him up and asked “Japi, where are we?” you would just have to wait until he fully woke up and all he had to do was listen to the sound of the train on the tracks and then he’d say, “I think we’re in Etten-Leur.” And he’d be right. He could tell you precisely how, on such-and-such a day, the shadow of such-and-such a tree in Zaltbommel fell on such-and-such a road, and which ships were sailing down Kuilenburg into the Lek at the moment when you and Japi were crossing a given railroad bridge. And then he’d sit attentively at the window: “Now this is coming, now that is coming.” For hours. And he’d nod and laugh whenever he saw something he knew especially well. Or else he would say, “Look, the tree is gone,” or “Hey, there are new apples on it now, I didn’t see any last time.” Or: “Two weeks ago the sun was right behind the crown of that tree, now it’s a little to the left, and lower, it’s because we’ve gone two more weeks, and we’re also running ten minutes late.”
And so when winter came to Amsterdam they came too, and Japi sat in my room one night and smoked the cigars sitting on my table for the taking, one after another. My cigars.
That was the night Hoyer was over. He had just drifted back from Paris again and now he sat there, tall and lanky, wearing a straw hat, in November, and a salmon-colored jacket, and griping about his work, and about girls. He was in the middle of an incomprehensible story about a young lady and a hired coachman and a basket of eels when we heard the stomp of footsteps coming up the stairs. It was in a working-class neighborhood so you could usually just come on up, most of the front doors were left open.
Bavink came in first and said, “How’s it going, boys? It’s me. Ha, if it isn’t Hoyer! How are you, Hoyer? Still griping? Well heartiest greetings to you. To you too, Koekebakker, may you long be with us.” Japi stood in the door. They smelled of salt water and grass. “Come in, man, come in!” Bavink invited him in — into my apartment.