‘Don’t let me keep you; you must have many urgent demands on your time.’
‘I assure you that only a charitable impulse has kept me in your company this long; ordinarily I don’t like to get too close to obscurity, it’s like quicksand.’
‘You’d better back off then before you get swallowed up.’
‘Are you working on a novel now?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Good luck with it, I hope you resolve your difficulties.’
‘What makes you think I’m having difficulties?’
‘You seem to be falling into the spaces between the successive appearances of yourself. If you’re not careful you’ll disappear.’
‘If I stop thinking you it might well be you that disappears.’
‘I’m disappearing now,’ he said, ‘but you will continue to think of me,’ and he withdrew.
Thinking of him I went upstairs and stood in front of a painting by Frans Post (1612-80), Catalogue No. 915, Gezicht op het Eiland Tamaraca. It was a strange painting, a little on the naif side — as apparently artless in its composition as a snapshot, as if the painter had sat himself down on the beach, aimed himself at the island across the water, and painted whatever came between him and it: two black men; two white men; two horses; an expanse of pinky dawn-looking water; two small boats moored by the island; in the foliage of the island was a naked place that looked bitten out by a giant. One of the black men balanced a basket on his head with one hand. He wore nothing but a pair of short white trousers. The other black man, also in white shorts, had put down his basket of yellow fruit and stood holding the reins of a white horse. One of the burdensomely clothed white men stood on the beach waving at or pointing towards the island while the other sat his chestnut horse which had a white blaze on its face and a white sock on the offside hind leg. He did not look at the island.
Perhaps the actual time in the painting was not dawn. But here in the Johan de Witthuis the water across which the Island Tamaraca was seen was dawn water. I could feel in this dawn a presence looking out at me, I could feel in it the buzzing and the swarming of what was gathering itself. I could feel myself approaching the correct frequency, I held myself carefully tuned to it when it came.
Out of the pinky dawn water, naked and shining in the dawn, rose Luise, quivering like a mirage between the beach and the island seen across the water. Quivering, shimmering, her body becoming, becoming, becoming a face loosely grinning, with hissing snakes writhing round it in the shining dawn. Around me ceased the sounds of the day; the stone of me cracked and I came out of myself quite clean, like a snake out of an egg, nothing obscuring my sight or my hearing. The Gorgon’s head, the face of Medusa, shimmered luminous in a silence that crackled with its brilliance. Her mouth was moving.
What? I said. What are you saying?
You have found me, she said. I trust you with the idea of me.
You, I said.
Yes and yes and yes and yes, she said. Look and know me. Hold the idea of me in you by night and by day, never lose it.
Yes and yes and yes and yes, I said, I look and I know you. I will hold the idea of you in me by night and by day, I will never lose it.
She was gone in the pinky dawn water between the beach and the Island Tamaraca.
I went out of the Johan de Witthuis and looked all around at the unimpeachable objectivity of the Dutch daylight. One would be ashamed to draw badly in that light.
Moving carefully so as not to disturb the unknown idea I had lunch in some sunny windowed place that looked out on the street. Then I walked back to the station, noticed a little hotel opposite with its name in quotation marks, ‘Du Commerce’, took a room for the hours remaining until the departure of the boat train at 2200, was shown upstairs, lay down, fell asleep, and dreamed of a secret cave behind a waterfall.
It was between four and five in the afternoon when I woke up. Careful not to ask myself any questions, I had a shower, went down to the bar, drank beer, drank gin, brought a second beer up to my room and looked out of the window at the early evening. The light had gone a grainy purple-blue. Beyond the station stood white office blocks, fluorescent-lit against the sky, looking as if they belonged to memory and time long past. Yes, I thought, there were people then; they too were happy and sad, they too looked out upon just such a purple-blue evening. Through the glass sides of the Pieter de Hooch railway station I saw the yellow carriages slide in and out.
I switched on the overhead room light, it was a little flame-shaped bulb in an electrified oil-lamp. Somewhere such bulbs are manufactured; what does it say on the box? 10 w ETERNA-FLAME DEPRESSION perhaps. Outside the window a double street lamp stood up like a luminous pinky-orange hibiscus. Beyond the lamps the yellow trains arrived and departed with a soft and rapid dinging of bells in the grainy purple-blue evening. Passing under my window was Luise walking slowly away towards the station in a yellow mac the same colour as the trains.
I ran down the stairs and out into the road. She was still there, manifesting herself as ordinary reality and not disappearing. She paused at the sound of my footsteps and turned. ‘Herman,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I came to see the Vermeer girl but she’s gone to America. What about you?’
‘I’m here with my husband, he’s installing a computer system.’
Time ceased to be an automatic progression: the present moment exploded into millions of sharp-edged fragments and nothing followed. The bells dinged softly, the yellow trains moved in and out, the purple-blue darkened but the next moment did not come. It seemed so little to ask, that the next moment should come. Perhaps if I moved my mouth. I moved my mouth, it said, ‘You’re married then, you finally found the right one.’
‘Yes, I found the right one.’
I had a piece of folded-up paper in my pocket, I always do: yellow A4. ‘Luise,’ I said, giving her the paper and a pen, ‘please write your name and the date on this for me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because all of a sudden it’ll be some other time and I want to have something from this time.’
She wrote her name and the date, the piece of paper is stuck on the edge of the monitor screen along with the Vermeer-girl postcard. I was right, all of a sudden it was some other time and the engines of the St Nicholas were throbbing as they drew a line across the night from Hook of Holland to Harwich. In my hand were the postcard and the folded yellow paper on which was written Luise Nilsen and the date. She lived in Oslo now, her husband’s name was Lars, he was forty-two, tall and bearded, they did a lot of skiing, they did a lot of sailing, they owned a forty-foot ketch named Eurydike, they had a daughter named Ursula who was almost a year old, they called her Ursel, Luise thought of me sometimes, she’d read Slope of Hell and World of Shadows and recognized herself and incidents from our two years together, that time seemed very far away now. We sat in the bar at the ‘Du Commerce’ and talked as if it was a possible thing to do: there she was, I could have reached out and touched her, and she was gone out of my life for ever. I had no part in her days and nights, she would continue without me as if I were dead.
I went out on deck and walked aft to look at the white wake widening astern in the night. Seeing the actuality of Luise married and gone for ever, was that what the stone had cracked and freed me for? I could feel that something had happened, I could feel the Hermes of it, could feel myself on a night road to somewhere else. One couldn’t ask more than that — to be sometimes on a night road to somewhere else. ‘I have no name but the one you give me,’ I said, ‘no face but the one you see.’