CHAPTER FOUR. The schoolhouse
1
‘Let’s go back to the waiting room,’ I said to Miriam. ‘Hinde will never find us here.’
The walled courtyard was making us more and more claustrophobic, but that cubby-hole, where the air was heavy with old coffee (forever associated with Tonio’s birth) was no better. Hinde had not yet arrived. The clock above the door showed half past twelve.
2
During Tonio’s first year, I did a good job of maintaining a stable day-to-day existence, dedicating life and work to my small family. Alarmingly, however, the managers of Huize Oldenhoeck, the brothers Warners (or, as we called them, The Warner Brothers of the Amsterdam School), contrary to their promise not to unload the apartment building designed by their uncle, had turned it over to a management company. From then on, every vacant flat was drastically renovated, stripped of every ornament that referred back to the original 1924 Amsterdam School interior, and then let to a new resident at three times the original price — preferably a member of the corps diplomatique stationed around Museumplein, because those folks paid no attention to the price and never stayed longer than a year, after which the rent could be hiked up once again for the next consul general or his right-hand man.
The high turnover rate in Huize Oldenhoeck meant there were always a couple of flats being renovated at any given time. In the lift or the stairwell (from which they hadn’t yet ripped out the dark purple marble), I encountered, more often than not, a grey-dusted man dressed in a denim suit and cowboy hat: the project supervisor and, I found out later, one of the new managers.
‘I’d never buy a second-hand car from him’ is often used to describe an untrustworthy person. Well, I wouldn’t take any car from this dungareed cowboy, not even if he paid me. Although younger than me, he had those deep grooves between his nostrils and the corners of his mouth that gave him the expression of a sad wolf; he could look at you as sympathetic and guilt-ridden as you please, his head cocked slightly to one side like a dog trying to figure out what his owner is saying. If I complained about the construction noise, explaining that I worked at home, he cringed with servility. The man had a guilty conscience, and took full advantage of it. He offered me fawning, hand-wringing apologies, promising to keep the inconvenience to a minimum. But, of course, nothing changed, except that the cowboy honed in on my Achilles heel. I imagine, in retrospect, how, as soon as I was out of sight he went from grovelling to gloating: he had figured out how to drive the Van der Heijdens from their flat, probably the most desirable in the entire building. Just step up the construction noise.
Yielding in turn to my own guilty conscience, I rented a room on the Kloveniersburgwal, a few doors down from where Miriam and I had been so happy in ’84 and ’85, so I could work in peace. I convinced myself (and Miriam) that this was a good a way to keep myself on track. Every morning I took tram 16 there, but the only thing I achieved was an overwhelming restlessness. Wielding scissors, glue and sheets of A3-sized construction paper, I fashioned a comprehensive montage of my notes for the new novel as they had accumulated over the last three years — including cardboard beer mats, which from the side gave the metre-and-a-half high document a decidedly wavy form. I kidded myself into believing that I could, on the basis of this rough but strictly ordered material, transfer a definitive version directly to the typewriter.
The higher the beer-mat draft, the more paralysing my ergasiophobia. Beyond that fussing with scissors and tape, my work amounted to nothing. Yes, I wrote erotic letters as a warm-up exercise for the ‘real work’. (Admittedly, passages from those epistles did find their way, much later, into the novel.) I had more or less doubled our living expenses and halved my responsibilities as paterfamilias and breadwinner. At home, Miriam and the baby were at the mercy of the management cowboy. When I left the Kloveniersburgwal in the late afternoon, I did not always follow the ‘responsible’ route to the tram stop in front of the Bijenkorf. More and more often I cut hurriedly through the red-light district in the direction of the Spui and its cafés.
So the spring of ’89 plodded along in a sort of padded emptiness. Restiveness reigned. Where had my choice for the ‘everyday’, unobtrusive life as husband and father gone wrong? Café visits hardly ever resulted in anything spectacular except for the liquor bill.
3
As hot as it was, Miriam trembled quietly and rhythmically — something in between a shiver and a shudder. As far as her shaking head would allow, she focused on a point on the floor in front of her, like you do when you’re nauseous and the room is spinning and you’re determined not to throw up.
‘Minchen, I’ve just thought of something … That work space on the Kloveniers back in ’89, that was a big mistake.’
Miriam did not look up, did not answer.
‘I was so disillusioned. Huize Oldenhoeck, happily settling into that enormous apartment with you and Tonio, I had set my sights on it. Just like you did. And suddenly that goon with his Stetson and sledgehammer. Remember him?’
Miriam nodded, but it wasn’t clear whether she was really listening.
‘I understand my own disenchantment,’ I continued, ‘but that was no excuse to take refuge in bars, to miss out on so many evenings with Tonio … that magical hour before he went to bed … how he bonk-bonk-bonked over to me on his knees and elbows when I came into the hall. Always laughing.’
Miriam laid her hand on my thigh and gave it a weak squeeze. ‘Don’t torture yourself,’ she said softly.
4
In mid-June 1989, I took a taxi to the Kloveniersburgwal. The lease was up as of 1 July. I had loaded my things into the boot, with the exception of the collage of notes, which I preferred to keep with me on the back seat. As I carried it down the stone steps, I only realised then how heavy all that glue made it.
I wanted the kind of vacation I imagined at the close of a working year: easy-going, without alcoholic bacchanals or daredevilry on motorboats and water skis. Tender togetherness with my little family, from sun to shade and back again. Occasional swimming or walking. Nothing more outlandish than a bottle of cold rosé at lunch under a parasol. Musing on the work that would resume after the summer … finally, writing with fountain pen again instead of a glue stick …
Agreeable visions, but it was Miriam who went in search of a house in France to rent for six weeks. She found a former maison d’école in the Dordogne, near the medieval town of Monpazier. The house, which belonged to the borough of Marsalès (all of its older residents had gone to school there), was not far from a campground popular with Dutch families. There was an artificial swimming pond with a sandy beach where Tonio could play. Couldn’t get more low-key than this, and it was exactly what we had in mind. What I had in mind, at least.
We travelled by bus, which left from Stadionplein in Amsterdam in the early morning. At the back of the coach was a storage area for bicycles. Miriam had brought her bike, with child seat: this way we’d be more mobile with Tonio, who had just celebrated his first birthday and who had only now started experimenting with walking on his own.
I had negotiated a double-wide seat at the back of the bus with the tour leaders (that is, the two alternating drivers) so that I could stretch out on the folded-down seat backs with Tonio at night.