‘All right, give me your glasses.’
They huddled in a doorway, looking about them in case anyone was watching. Moorlag took his glasses off. Osewoudt put them on. Straight lines were now curved and misty, the colours of pavements, buildings, roofs and sky running together like splashes of watercolour paint. Every time he moved his head the world became elastic. He could feel his gullet tightening as if he were seasick; with each step he took the ground seemed to fall away.
‘Can you see anything?’ Moorlag asked. ‘I’m very short-sighted, the glasses are pretty strong, minus four, and the right lens is also cylindrical.’
‘I can’t see a damn thing.’
‘Nor can I. I’m no good without my glasses.’
‘Let’s stop playing around like this. Here, take your glasses back.’
‘No, don’t give up. What if some German turns up and recognises you? Come on, better keep moving.’
Osewoudt sensed that Moorlag was pinching his coat sleeve between thumb and forefinger. Swallowing hard to suppress his nausea, he walked on, with Moorlag bumping along beside him.
‘I say,’ said Moorlag, ‘the glasses aren’t enough, of course. You’ll have to get a hat. Makes an enormous difference to a face.’
‘Come off it. You’ll be giving me a false beard next. Damn!’
‘You’ll have to get glasses of your own. I’m not saying that because I want mine back, you understand, it’s just that you should get some with a black frame and plain lenses.’
‘Come off it. What will the optician say?’
‘No, I’ll buy them for you, at least I will if you give me the money.’
‘All I have is seventeen real silver guilders.’
‘What?’
‘Real silver guilders! From that girl I had to take to Amsterdam yesterday. She got them in England! To live on as a secret agent! God almighty!’
‘Don’t get all worked up for nothing. Give me the guilders, I’ll go and change them for you. I’ll make a profit, you’ll see. I know somebody. The black-market boys are scared their paper money won’t be worth a cent after the war. They give three times the value for silver guilders!’
‘Mind they don’t call the police,’ said Osewoudt. ‘Oh damn it all. I wonder where they’ve taken my mother. Given her an injection straightaway, maybe — finished her off. They do that sometimes with cripples or mental cases. Damn and blast.’
‘Stop swearing, Henri. Look, you can wait here while I do the errands.’
They were standing in front of a narrow display window. Osewoudt raised the glasses, blinked a few times and read the sign on the pane: EAST INDIAN RESTAURANT PEMATANG SIANTAR.
There was a white card behind the glass in the lower right-hand corner, which said, in Gothic script: FÜR WEHRMACHTSANGEHÖRIGE VERBOTEN. DER ORTSKOMMANDANT.
‘Wait for me in there,’ said Moorlag. ‘No Germans allowed, and it’s still early so it may be empty. No one will see you.’
Osewoudt opened the door.
‘Let me have my glasses back for now,’ said Moorlag, ‘I can’t do without them.’
Osewoudt handed back the glasses, went inside and took a seat roughly in the middle of the empty restaurant.
A smell of fried onion and garlic reached him.
A white-coated Javanese waiter with a batik cloth tied around his head enquired in a whisper whether he wanted his rice on the ration or off. But suppose Moorlag didn’t manage to change the guilders?
‘I’ll have a glass of soda water,’ said Osewoudt, rubbing his eyes with both hands, still unaccustomed to being able to see properly.
A gentleman and a lady came in, sat down and ordered fried rice off the ration. It was half past twelve. Four young men came in, also for fried rice off the ration. More people drifted in. By two o’clock the restaurant was full to bursting, but Moorlag had still not returned and Osewoudt was now sharing his table with three strangers, all having fried rice off the ration while he had nothing but his soda water to sip every ten minutes. He kept studying the menu, from which he could glean nothing of interest except that a glass of soda water cost twenty-five cents. A relief. He still had three zinc ten-cent coins in his pocket. No need to run off without paying, in so far as running off without paying would be feasible in a crowded restaurant.
He leaped up when he saw Moorlag through the window at last and deposited his three ten-cent pieces next to his glass. Moorlag came in carrying a large paper bag in his left hand. He cast his eyes around the restaurant, barely looked at Osewoudt, shrugged as if to say the place was too crowded for his taste, and walked out again. Osewoudt followed.
‘Did you manage all right?’
‘Of course. I got forty-five guilders for them. I also ordered a pair of glasses with plain lenses, but they won’t be ready until this evening. And here’s your hat.’
Moorlag opened the paper bag. It contained a green hat of coarse felt.
Osewoudt took the hat from him, Moorlag screwed up the bag and threw it away.
Osewoudt walked along, swinging the hat nonchalantly as if it had always belonged to him and he just happened to be carrying it in his hand. Then he put it on.
‘Moorlag, I know it’s awkward for you, but let’s stop in this doorway so you can give me your glasses again.’
Moorlag promptly took off his glasses and handed them over.
‘We must get a move on, we’re taking the tram to Leiden. I know someone there who’s well connected.’
They staggered on, both of them practically blind. Nausea welled up in Osewoudt’s gut; the world now consisted of bulging gelatine, his brains seethed under the hat, for he had never worn a hat before and the hooks of the glasses chafed behind his ears.
‘That friend of yours with the connections, any chance he could get me a new ID card?’
‘Of course, that’s what I had in mind.’
‘I also need another one for that girl I told you about.’
At Bezuidenhoutseweg they boarded the tram to Leiden.
Osewoudt sat by the window with his hand shielding his eyes to ease the headache, and also to raise the glasses slightly, so that he could look out from underneath.
Squalid, run-down tenements along Schenkweg. Prim, middle class free-standing houses on Laan van Nieuw Oost-Indië. Stretches of sodden grassland. Beyond that the railway track, on which an electric train was racing against the tram. Voorburg. The small white station. Further back, to one side, was where I first saw her, in her white raincoat, a rolled-up newspaper in her hand.
Stop. Conductors get off. New conductors get on. A low whistling sound. Under the floor of the tram an electric pressure pump begins to throb angrily.
The tram gathers speed. Shade: the Leidschendam viaduct. On the horizon three windmills in a row. Shimmering glasshouses.
He felt the sweat beading on his brow; the leather hatband on the inside was beginning to smell.
Voorschoten. The tram slowed down as it rolled into the street where he lived.
He was now covering his face almost entirely with his hand, but his eyes bored holes between his fingers.
EUREKA CIGARS AND CIGARETTES. He kept his eyes on the shop as they went past. No German car outside, no crowd. Not a soul. The blind over the door had been fully lowered, but the blind over the shop window had caught on one side and hung down lopsidedly like a half-open fan. That’s how the blinds hang in houses whose occupants have left in a hurry: from the street there is nothing much to see. You ask yourself why they didn’t at least lower their blinds properly before they went. But the neighbours know that the back of the house has been torched and that only time will tell how long the front will stay up.
At a white stuccoed house on Hoge Woerd, Moorlag rang the bell. The fanlight was decorated with a realistic, life-size painting of a white duck. Osewoudt took off the glasses and rubbed his eyes. Moorlag noted this.