Such unorthodox behavior putting off his mission sponsors who refused to renew his appointment, explaining in a letter to him he quote lacked God’s oratory gift unquote.
One afternoon Julia enters a clothing store.
The devil be with you for this uselessness you’ve become your father saying.
Don’t worry yourself, Pissarro confiding as we rambled along the duckshit green Oise one spongy May afternoon, hands knotted behind our backs like a pair of ancient philosophers. God takes care of imbeciles, children, and artists.
A shop girl is busy harassing Najib, accusing him of stealing, saying: All fucking Moroccans are fucking thieves. Julia admires how calm Najib remains, how he refuses to allow his dignity to falter before the shop girl’s loathing.
You have been the greatest disappointment in my life if only I had never been burdened with this woman of a son what evil did I commit to bring on such a punishment?
I sold a painting once.
When the shop girl finally huffs and wanders off, Julia approaches Najib with a compliment.
Feeling your stereotypical father turning you into another stereotype.
Once.
They exchange phone numbers. They arrange a date.
And then—
Once.
Enraged by Julia and Najib’s augmenting relationship, Floris attacks his rival in the street, knocks him from his scooter, kicks him as he tries to regain his footing. Theo loves this scene. The way the music works. The way the light tinks off chrome.
And then it is the last night and it is Ramadan and you are sitting cross-legged with your friends in your flat.
To Anne Boch, the Belgian painter’s sister, for four hundred francs.
Do well, and—how does that line go?
A time for fasting prayer good deeds.
Dear Theo: I would like to write you about many things, yet I feel in the end such an endeavor is useless, yet I keep writing. Why? —V.
Do well, and you will have no need of ancestors, Voltaire observing.
Is it—
It is February. It is 1890. No, that’s—
Julia’s father and Floris’s insisting the couple stop seeing each other.
Talking about the old days over lentil soup garbanzo beans diced tomatoes chopped celery cinnamon cumin turmeric cilantro leaves.
Some of these—
Najib’s family horrified by their son dating an unbeliever, his mother panicky he will elope with one just like his older sister did — and then what will others think of the woman?
How you used to get high tell crazy stories watch every movie by Angelina Jolie Brad Pitt Jodie Foster.
Four hundred francs.
The showdown taking place on Julia’s father’s yacht: a struggle between Floris and Najib exploding.
Belly-laughing at the way things turned out. What riches.
Somewhere in the midst of it, Floris shoves his rival. Hard.
All the possibilities available to you and here you are living this one praise be to Allah.
Look:
Najib tumbling back over the railing.
Sometime after midnight Rashid and Ahmed and you strolling along the Sloterplas pond a few blocks away from your flat just like—
It is early evening, the sky bruising.
Unable to swim, Najib splashing wildly, crying out for help.
— like a trio of ancient philosophers plugged into their iPods.
I am—
How Floris hesitates, suspended.
You stopping long enough to point up at the amazing sky.
I am—
His enemy slipping under.
How peaceful you saying like everything has finally arrived in its rightful place.
I am lying on my back on a dirt path, a squall inside my rib-cage, then I am stumbling through the dusk down into town.
Julia’s family refuses to permit their daughter to attend Najib’s funeral.
Each of you casually fingering your ear buds back into position and returning to the Quranic prayers cycling in your heads.
My legs sans sinews.
Several weeks later Julia drives to the beach at sunset, exits her car, and, still clothed, wades into the North Sea.
Because nothing else needed to be said anymore.
My arms no longer my arms.
The gray-foamed waves veiling her head.
The broken-backed cat.
A nail glowing bluely in the center of my chest.
A choppy surface and nothing else.
How do words explain the way you feel thinking about what it must have been like for your father to step off the train at the Central Station in 1965?
Dear Little Brother: You don’t need words to bring God’s tongue to those around you. — Your second selfing
Part empty-headed melodrama, part obvious propaganda, the reviewers called it.
An outsider cooped among outsiders in some cheap hotel in some uninterpretable country willing to do whatever it took in order to provide for his family back home.
Hoping.
All the intellectual resonance of a pop song.
The sanctimonious Dutch.
Yellow and blue irises vitaling the sides of the road even at this hour.
But interesting.
The faggots boasting about their long history of tolerance while willfully forgetting the opportunism wrapped up inside it the indifference Welcome to our country now shut the fuck up and scour our fucking toilets you fucking muzzies.
It is so easy to finish things, Toulouse-Lautrec once saying to me over a pipe in a Montmartre café. Nothing is simpler than to complete paintings in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.
The elfin scriptwriter, Justus van Oel, urging Theo to conclude the series on a slightly more heartening note.
Diaperheads sand niggers camel jockeys.
The thatched roofs bobbling into view.
That’s just how he phrased it: a slightly more heartening note.
The Huguenots the Surinamese the Turks it didn’t matter.
Notre Dame d’Auvers-sur-Oise: sober, somber, heavy gray Gothic despite its peaked stained glass window with Mother and Child and crimson and cobalt splashes.