“Apropos of which,” Hoyer suddenly said — Hoyer liked to throw around fancy phrases—“Apropos of which, I saw Japi in Veere with a French lady, a damned fine looker.” All night long the two of them had stood talking together on the stone jetty and looking out over the railing at the lit buoy and the revolving beam of the Schouwen lighthouse, and they’d listened to the waves, and “sucked face,” as Hoyer crudely put it. Bavink said again that he always knew something like that would happen, and I said, “What idiots we are, we should have known,” and then we couldn’t stop talking about Japi and how he wasn’t the freeloader we were used to anymore.
It took another month before Japi surfaced. His old man had found him a job and he was supposed to start on March 1. He didn’t say that he thought it’d be miserable. He would wait and see what he could make of it. He’d be earning fifty guilders a month. That night there was another severe frost. The stars were bright and terrifyingly high. The stove was cold. The three of us sat with our coats on, collars up, hats on, the way we sat so many times when we were tougher than the capitalist spirit and had nothing to heat the stove with.
Then Japi started talking and talking and wouldn’t stop. It was creepy. There you were, he said, hurtling on this earth through the icy blackness of space, where night never ends, the sun had disappeared never to rise again. The earth raced on through the darkness, the icy wind howling behind it. All these heavenly bodies hurtling desolately through space. If one of them hurtles into you then you’re lost, lost with all the other fifteen hundred million unlucky people. Japi sat shivering in his coat, it was freezing in the room.
Then he started in again on a different tack. The sun could be so beautiful, shining in the Waal River. He’d seen the sun shining in the Waal near Zaltbommel the last time he’d ridden the train over the bridge. Between the bridge and the city, the sun made a big patch of light on the water. The water flowed by and the sun just shone on it, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times. Two thousand years ago the sun was already shining on it and the water was flowing by. God knows how long it’s been. The sun had risen more than 700,000 times since then, it had set more than 700,000 times, and all that time the water was flowing. The math made him feel sick. How many rainy days had there been in all that time? How many nights had it gotten as cold as tonight, or colder? How many people had seen that water flowing by and seen the sun shining in it and seen all the stars on the nights as cold as this? How many people who are dead now? And how many will still see the water flowing in the future? And two thousand years, that’s nothing, the earth has existed for thousands and thousands more years than that and will probably exist for thousands more. The water will probably flow for thousands of years more, without him seeing it. And even if the world did end, that still didn’t really mean anything. There would be so much more time afterwards, time would never end. And all that time, he would be dead.
Japi’s teeth chattered. There was not a single sip of jenever left in the house and no way to get any on credit.
Then Japi got sentimental. He started to talk about Jeanne, for no particular reason, and as though we already knew everything about her. That her hands were so soft, and so warm, and how her eyes could sparkle. She had dark eyes and black hair. We started getting uncomfortable. He told us the most horribly private things, about a white lace dress, about a lavender silk dress, about her little white feet, about all sorts of body parts you can’t write about in a story.
By the end he was talking in French, we heard the words “chéri” and “chérie” several dozen times. (He pronounced the final “e” in “chérie.”) Then he was speaking Dutch again and got to the point. She was going to divorce her husband, a revolting old prune twenty years older than she was. We found it all rather banal. And on March 1 he had to show up at the office. Then he rubbed his face with his hands and said, “I’m leaving. Shake.” He stumbled down the stairs.
He did not show up on March 1. It was April before he was in any shape to go to work again. His freeloading days were over.
One evening a few months later, Bavink saw him sitting on the fourth floor of some office building. He was sitting in the window, working, and the place was brightly lit. Bavink went upstairs. Japi was alone and very busy. Bavink couldn’t get anything out of him— he just kept working and hardly said a thing. Bavink nosed around, took a book off the shelf here and there, flipped through it, and put it back, shook his head, said “Whoa” a few times, turned the handle on the mimeograph, looked down at the street, and opened all the windows for some fresh air.
Outside a light snow was falling. Some snowflakes blew in. “Shut the windows, please,” Japi said, and kept writing. Then Bavink picked up a copy book, read a bit in it, shook his head again and again, and walked over to Japi, the copy book open in his hand.
“Hey, did you write all this?” Japi barely looked up and just said, “Not all of it.” “You’re pretty damn smart after all,” Bavink said, “this business stuff isn’t easy.” Then Bavink left.
Japi turned into a hard worker. Not long after Bavink’s visit they sent him to Africa. Within two years he was back: sick, half dead. No one heard anything from him until I saw him one November afternoon standing next to the stone wall of the Wijk bij Duurstede harbor. There he stood, staring at the mud. I had trouble recognizing him. He was dressed in a bulky gray coat, much too big for him, with a bulky gray cap down over his eyes and ears. He had on a pair of bulky wide square-toed brown shoes and there were several young men behind him. I thought: That looks like Japi, actually. And yes, it was him, a bit pale and thin and with no beard or mustache and with a strange staring look in his eyes, but definitely Japi.
Japi didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “What are you doing here, how’s it going, what’s brought you here?” He stuck out his hand and said nothing, and was not surprised. “Just standing here staring,” he said.
“I can see that,” I said. “Come have a drink?” “Good,” Japi said. The louts who were leaning against the stone wall a ways off, amusing themselves for some time with very loud, ill-mannered commentary, now made very respectful greetings, since I had been throwing around quite a bit of money in Wijk bij Duurstede and had even slapped the notary on the back that very Sunday.
After a glass of jenever, some life came back into Japi. He had been working in Africa, tormented by the heat and the mosquitoes, had come down with a fever — spent more time suffering from fever than working or doing anything else. He’d come back that summer practically skin and bones.
His française was living in Paris with a young Dutchman who’d been articled to an office for a monstrously long time. Had another boyfriend too, a colonel. Treated him to dinner in Paris and called him a “good beast” in her broken Dutch and laughed in his face. Fastened her garter belt while he was right there so that he’d seen her bare knee. Then sent him away. He had to laugh. He wasn’t in love anymore. She’d had a light blue silk slip on. One time he saw her having a drink with the colonel at an outdoor table. The colonel was acting very smug and looked savage and overbearing. She gave Japi the eye behind the colonel’s back. She had lung problems and her months were numbered. Still, lively as ever. But had a hard time walking.