YOUNG TITANS--- by NESCIO

Nescio

Young Titans

(The Netherlands, 1918)

Translated into English by DAMION SEARLS

I

WE WERE kids—but good kids. If I may say so myself. We’re much smarter now, so smart it’s pathetic. Except for Bavink, who went crazy. Was there anything we didn’t want to set to rights? We would show them how it should be. “We”: that meant the five of us. Everyone else was “them,” the ones who didn’t see it, didn’t get it. “What?” Bavink said. “God? You want to talk about God? Their pot roast is their God.” Other than a few “decent fellows” we despised everyone —and secretly, I still think we were right. But I can’t say that out loud to anyone now. I’m not a hero anymore. You never know who you might need later. Hoyer also thinks you shouldn’t offend anyone. No one ever sees or hears from Bekker anymore. And Kees Ploeger talks about the good-for-nothings who led him down the wrong path. But back then, in our crazy days, we were God’s chosen ones, we were God himself. Now we’re sensible, again except for Bavink, and we look at each other and smile and I say to Hoyer, “What did it all get us?” But Hoyer doesn’t see it that way, he’s a lost cause, he’s turning into one of the bigwigs of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party and all he does is raise his hands in doubt and shrug.

We were never clear about what we were going to do exactly, but we were going to do something. Bekker had some vague idea about blowing up all the offices, Ploeger wanted to make his boss pack his own clocks and then stand there watching him with a cigar in his mouth, cursing at people who can never do anything right. We were unanimous that we had to “get out.” Out of what, and how? The truth is we did nothing but talk, smoke, drink, and read books. And Bavink went out with Lien. Looking back, I think we were a magnificent bunch of young men, we deserved a fortune but despised “having lots of money”; Hoyer’s the only one who started to think a bit differently about that before long. Bavink didn’t understand why some people could ride in carriages whenever they wanted and wear expensive coats and order other people around who weren’t any dumber than they were. You didn’t see many automobiles yet in those days.

We spent whole summer nights leaning against the fence around Oosterpark and talking and talking. We could have earned enough for a whole living-room set if only we’d kept track of it all. People write so much nowadays.

A lot of the time we were less talkative. We sat on the curb until long past midnight, right on the street, and were melancholy and stared at the bricks and then up from the bricks at the stars. Then Bekker said that actually he felt sorry for his boss, and I tried to write a poem, and Hoyer said he had to stand up because the cold from the blue limestone curb was seeping into him. And when, in that short, balmy night, the darkness turned pale above our heads, Bavink sat with his head in his hands and spoke of the sun, almost sentimentally. And we thought it was a shame to have to go to bed, people should be able to stay up forever. That was one of the things we’d change. Kees was asleep.

And then we were off to the Zuiderzee to watch the sun come up, except for Kees, who went home. Hoyer complained about the cold but Bavink and Bekker didn’t notice it at all. They sat on the stones down on the dike with eyes half closed and looked through their eyelashes at the little arrows of dancing gold that the sun made in the water. The sight made Bavink go mad; he wanted to run across the long, long, glittering stripe all the way to the sun. But he stopped at the water’s edge after all and stood there. I remember one day when we, Bavink and I, went to the seaside and half the sun lay big and cold and red on the horizon. Bavink hit his forehead with his fist and said, “God, God, I’ll never paint that. I’ll never be able to paint that.” Now he’s in a mental hospital. When we came back from the Zuiderzee we couldn’t see anything except yellow spots for a long time and our bosses didn’t like these excursions of ours at all. I was half asleep at the office afterwards and Bekker, who could handle it better than I could, sat at his desk daydreaming about the sun all day and looked out at the lit-up treetops on the far side of the garden more than usual and longed for six o’clock more desperately than ever.

We were also big on excursions after work to the ring of dikes around the city. We sat in the grass down on the dike, among the buttercups, and inquisitive cows came up to us with their big eyes and looked at us and we looked at them. And then it was a sure bet that Bavink would start in about Lien. One way or another those cow eyes must have had something to do with it. And then the twilight started to shimmer, the frogs started croaking, one frog made a horrible racket right next to my shoe, my foot was almost in the ditch. You could hear other frogs softly, far, so far away. The cow that in the half dark you could hardly see anymore you could still hear, trimming the grass. One started mooing pitifully in the distance. A horse ran back and forth, you could hear it but not see it. The cow near us snorted and started to get restless. Bekker said: “It’s nice here. If only it stayed like this.” Bavink stood up and spread his arms wide and listened, and then sat down again and said that we didn’t get it either, and we never would, he himself didn’t get it, and really we were not much better than everyone else, and I think he was very nearly right about that.

No, we didn’t actually do anything. We did our work at the office, not all that well, for bosses we despised—except Bavink and Hoyer, who had no bosses, and who didn’t understand why we went in to see ours every day.

But we were waiting. For what? We never knew. Bekker said: “For the Kingdom of God.” At least that’s what he said once, without explaining any further. Bavink always talked about “the end that is also a new beginning.” We knew exactly what he meant and said nothing more about it.

II

That summer we met almost every night at Kees’s attic. Kees had decided he needed a “place” too. His place was the biggest and the easiest for all of us to get to. The neighbors didn’t like everybody going up and down the stairs every night. Kees’s father didn’t see the point of the whole thing. Now Kees’s father greets me very politely and calls me “Mister Koekebakker,” because he’s seen my name in the Handelsblad.

Bekker told Kees how he had to decorate it. They bought cheap wallpaper with a little flower pattern for three cents a roll and then glued it to the wall reversed so that the plain green backing faced out. Bekker wrote out a proverb in calligraphy and stuck it to the wall next to the door: “J’ai attendu le Seigneur avec une grande patience, enfin il s’est abaissé jusqu’ à moi.”* [See NOTE at the end.]

I don’t know anymore where he got that from. Kees couldn’t read it. But Kees did contribute something, he made a shovel and Bekker managed to attach it to the wall pointing at the proverb. It wasn’t clear at first what it was supposed to mean, but later it turned out that Bekker wanted to go live on the heath someday and work a little piece of land, and never have to go back to the office. Bavink thought that was a good idea but was afraid Lien wouldn’t agree, and Hoyer preferred to hang around in bars.

Then we sat there and tore everything to pieces. Or almost everything. I remember that Zola and Jaap Maris came out more or less unscathed, maybe one or two others. Bekker read to us from Dante, he knew Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs and the Book of Job by heart. It was very impressive. Not much of the outside world made it into Kees’s attic. The only window was almost shoulder-height off the floor; when you sat at the table, you couldn’t see much more than a sliver of sky, the color slowly draining out of it, and a few stars when it was dark out.

Paint? Who still knew how to paint nowadays, to hear Bavink tell it! You could palm anything off on people today, literally anything. I should paint a picture myself—he was talking about me, Koekebakker. He would tell me what to do. “Paint two horizontal stripes, one on top of the other, same width, one blue and one gold, and then put a round gold bit in the middle of the blue stripe. We’ll write in the catalog #666: The Thought, oil on canvas. And we’ll submit it under my name: Johannes Bavink, Second Jan Steenstraat, number soand-so, and we’ll price it at eight hundred guilders. Then you can just sit back and see everything they come up with. They’ll discover all sorts of things in there that you didn’t have the slightest idea of.”

Bavink was still very young back then. Later on, Lien came over too sometimes and made tea. One time, she scrubbed the floor and dusted everything off, but that was very unpleasant. It caused some embarrassment for Kees when she came over, because his old man had definite misgivings about the young lady, and Bavink was never the way we liked him when Lien was around. He was always giving her little squeezes and pinches. It was annoying.

Luckily he started to leave her at home before long, because he thought she was making eyes at me. Bekker said “Girls, they’re not worth it” and puffed on his clay pipe with especial satisfaction the first time she didn’t come. And that evening it was really nice too. We sat for hours in the dark. The lamp got fainter and fainter, then went out. We just stayed there sitting and smoking, for hours. Every once in a while someone said something. Bavink decided that painting was the dumbest thing anyone could do. Kees didn’t understand anything, as usual. “You have to just sit quietly and stay like that,” Bavink said, and looked up at the sky. A big greenish star twinkled. “You have to just sit quietly and stay like that and long with all your might, without knowing what for.” He filled a fresh pipe.

III

It was a strange time. And when I think about it, I realize that that time must still be happening now, it will last as long as there are young men of nineteen or twenty running around. It’s only for us that the time is long since past.

We were on top of the world and the world was on top of us, weighing down heavily. Far below us we saw the world full of activity and industry and we despised those people, especially the important gentlemen, the ones who were always so busy and so sure they’d gotten pretty far in the world.

But we were poor. Bekker and I had to spend most of our time at the office and do whatever those gentlemen said, and listen to their ridiculous opinions when they talked to each other, and put up with the fact that they thought they were much more clever and capable than we were. And when they thought it was cold then all the windows had to be shut and in winter the lights had to come on much too early and the curtains had to be pulled shut so we couldn’t see the red sky and the twilight in the streets and we had no say in it at all.

And we had to live on streets that were too narrow, with a view of the oilcloth curtains across the street and the tasseled fringe and the potted aspidistra with an impossible flower on top.

Oh, we took our revenge, we learned languages they had never even heard of and we read books they couldn’t even begin to understand, we experienced feelings they never knew existed. On Sundays we walked for hours on paths where they never went, and at the office we thought about the canals and the meadows we had seen and while they ordered us to do things that we didn’t see the point of we thought about how the sun had set behind Abcoude on Sunday evening. And how we had thought our way through the whole universe, without words; and how God had filled our head, our heart, and our spine, and how stark raving mad they would look if we told them about it. And how, with all their money and their trips to Switzerland and Italy and God knows where else and with all their clever hard work, they could never feel such things.

But still, they had us in their power, they confiscated the greater part of our time, they kept us out of the sunshine and away from the meadows and the seaside. They forced us to constantly fill our thoughts with their incomprehensible business. Even though that only went so far. They chewed us out; at the office we were totally insignificant. “Ah, Bekker,” they said to each other. The gentlemen had been well brought up; the woman on the third floor said “That harebrained idiot,” but the gentlemen were too well brought up for that. And they were bright, much brighter than the woman on the second floor, whose husband was a lamplighter, a good job that didn’t need much education. My boss asked me if I wrote poetry by any chance. Bekker thought that a man like him shouldn’t utter the word poetry, shouldn’t be allowed to. “What did you tell him?” I hadn’t said anything, I only looked at his face and saw what a thick skull he had and I thought: “He doesn’t know who he has standing here in front of him, he hasn’t got the brains.” And they paid us badly, the gentlemen did.

IV

And we were in love. For months Bekker went out of his way to walk down Sarphatistraat every morning. He was in love with a school-girl of seventeen or so, and he walked fifty steps behind her or on the other side of the street and he looked at her. He never knew her name, never said a word to her. Over Christmas break he was unhappy. In February he took an afternoon off to wait for her when school got out. He stood there on the quiet canal-side street in the snow and a man rode by on a white horse wearing a blue smock and a straw hat. How odd, that on precisely that afternoon he had had to see something so ludicrous. But Bekker left at five minutes to four, he didn’t dare stay. He walked slowly away, and on Weteringschans she caught up to him. She was laughing loudly with a friend, another girl. I don’t think she ever knew Bekker existed.

Bekker wanted me to tell him where this was heading, it couldn’t go on like this. And it didn’t either. After summer vacation she never came back.

“Girls,” Bekker said, “they’re not worth it…. She had a spring in her step when she walked.” He turned the lamp up a bit and turned the page in the book he was reading. “Where do you think she is now? Do you think she’s kissing someone?” A little spark fell from his pipe onto the book. He put it out with his matchbox. “Damn, a hole, that was stupid.” “It’s better this way, girls aren’t worth it, they don’t get you anywhere, they only distract you. They’re pretty at a distance, to write poems about.”

He read. After a short pause he looked up again…. “You know what the strange thing is? When she caught up to me that afternoon she walked past me, right next to me. She only just missed me. There was so to speak nothing separating us, a little clothing on her and practically none on me.” (Bekker went around summer and winter with only an overshirt covering his bare chest.) “That’s not much, you know?” I said it wasn’t much—there was a lot more between the Naarden tower and Bekker’s room, for example. “Between the Naarden tower and this mustache,” Bekker said, “is much less, much less, than there was between her shoulder and mine that day. No comparison, Koekebakker.” He turned another page, looked into the light, and said “That’s how it is,” and went on with his reading.

V

And so it was: God showed his face and then hid it again. You never got anywhere, especially if you only looked at the girls from a distance and let other men kiss their pretty faces, the important gentlemen they as a rule liked a whole lot more than us. They were so much more respectable and spoke so well. And we were bums.

There was nothing to hope for from God—who goes his own way and gives no explanations. If there was something we wanted we had to take care of it ourselves. But we realized that it was easy for Bavink and Hoyer to talk, they had talent, they could really accomplish something in the world, but we—Bekker and Kees and me—the only difference we’d ever make was as socialists and it did seem a bit weak, after sitting at God’s table, to address envelopes or join the Kastanjeplein Neighborhood Association. And nothing came of life on the heath either, because even when Bekker did get a little money his shoes needed repairing. Maybe we could join Van Eeden’s commune, but when we walked out to Bussum one Sunday, four hours on foot, we saw a man strolling around in a peasant smock and expensive yellow shoes, eating sponge cakes out of a paper bag, hatless, in inner harmony with nature as people used to say back then, with crumbs in his beard. We couldn’t bring ourselves to keep going, we turned right around and walked back to Amsterdam, walked along the Naarder canal in single file, singing, and a farm girl said to a farm boy, “There wasnt nothin about it in the paper, inn’t that some-thin? D’you know about that?”

VI

So we didn’t do anything. No, actually, that was when Bekker wrote his first poem.

I still remember it perfectly, it was on a Sunday, of course, because whenever anything happened it was on a Sunday. The other six days a week we spent dragging our chains around from nine to six.

I was out looking for a job in Hillegom, a job with a bulb dealer with fat red clean-shaven cheeks. The others decided right away to make a day of it. Bavink, Hoyer, and Bekker had all said so many times that they wanted to go to the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, this was the day. Kees had to come too, he did whatever the others did. I was going to meet them in Leiden.

It was in December. I stood in the back of the tram, all the way in the back. It drove through the country and stopped and started again, it took hours, the countryside was endless. And the sky got bluer and bluer and the sun shone until it seemed like flowers would have to start sprouting out of the country bumpkins. And the red roofs in the villages and the black trees and the fields, most of them covered with straw, had it nice and warm, and the dunes sat bare-headed in the sun. And the road lay there, white and smarting, it couldn’t bear the sunlight, and the glass panes of the village streetlamps flashed, they had trouble withstanding the glare too.

But me myself got colder and colder. And the tram ran as long as the sun shone. It’s a long ride from Hillegom to Leiden and the days are short in December. By the end, a block of ice was standing there on the tram staring into the big stupid cold sun that was flaming red as though the revolution was finally starting, as though offices were being blown up all over Amsterdam, but still it couldn’t bring a spark of life back to my cold feet and stiff legs. And it kept getting bigger and colder, the sun, and I got colder and stayed the same size, and the blue sky looked down very disapprovingly: What are you doing on that tram?

Bekker wrote his first poem that afternoon. When I got to Leiden, as they were lighting the gas lamps, and I found the immortals sitting in a row on a long bench in the third-class waiting room at the train station, near the stove, it was my turn to undergo the poem. It was beautiful. No title? Bekker shook his head. But Bavink and Hoyer shrieked that they’d seen something written at the top. A well-dressed gentleman said “Louts” to the man who punched his ticket at the door. Bavink snatched the sheet of paper out of Bekker’s hands. What was written at the top? Was it even a question? “To her.” Just what I would have guessed.

Bavink thought the stove could use more coal but he couldn’t find the scoop. They always take the scoop out of the waiting rooms, otherwise the public uses too much coal. So Bavink tossed lumps of coal into the stove with his bare hands, and got into an argument with a guy in a white smock.

It was fun that night. Kees and Hoyer fell asleep on the train. Bavink chatted with a girl from The Hague and inhaled the smell of heliotropes given off by her dear little frame.

Then Bekker started talking about the heath again. How he wanted to live there in peace and wait and see what God had planned for him. And not have to do anything. He was deeply melancholy. I had an objection to the heath: it’s so dry out there. And I asked Bekker what exactly he planned to live on, office workers don’t usually do too well on the farm, except in America (we believed all kinds of lies about America). But he wasn’t worried about that. He didn’t need anything.

Now he knows better. Only God doesn’t need anything. That is precisely the fundamental difference between God and us.

So life on the heath came to nothing too.

VII

Four of us sat in the fine white sand at the foot of the dunes in Zandvoort and looked out at the ocean. Kees wasn’t there. It was late July. The sun was still high above the ocean at seven o’clock and it made, again, I can’t help it, it’s God himself who keeps repeating himself, it again made a long golden stripe in the water and shone in our faces.

A tugboat was puffing on the horizon. It rose and sank; when it sank we could only see the steam pipe.

Bekker was going to Germany the next day. His knowledge of languages had gotten him a job as a clerk in a factory handling foreign correspondence. And Hoyer was off to Paris, to paint.

Bekker in particular was deeply melancholy again. He wished he had never taken that job. He couldn’t understand why he’d done it. He was in that miserable factory town for two hours, for the interview, and got sick, homesick. He fled back to the train station as fast as he could. The rails still lay there, luckily running straight to the horizon and beyond, back to Amsterdam. He had already bought his ticket, and on it was clearly printed, right there: “To Amsterdam.” And the train came on time and carried him home along the rails, and when he got off at Centraal Station his heart was so full of emotion that he struck up a conversation with the engineer and gave him a cigar, an expensive cigar, and even stroked the locomotive with his hand and thought: “Ahh, nice locomotive.” And then he took the job anyway. It brought in a lot more money than he was making here. Now he had to go away and not see the ring of dikes around the city again. All that time the rails would be lying there, but he would only be able to go stand on the platform and watch the trains pull out in the evening, and all day Sundays, many times a day.

The sun was lower now, and red, the golden stripe was gone. It was a warm, still evening. The red water rippled a little, the waves rolled slowly in with a gentle hiss.

Bekker had a theory that he would save money and come back and go live on the heath. But in his heart he didn’t believe it himself. We tried to believe it, even Hoyer tried, and we convinced ourselves that that’s what would happen, but we didn’t believe it. And it didn’t happen either. Bekker came back a year later, he had saved a couple hundred guilders and he walked down Linnaeusstraat at half past eight every morning again with his sandwich in a bag from home. There’s a lot a person needs.

But we weren’t thinking about reused bags that night. We were doing our best to believe that we would still manage to accomplish something, really something. We would shock the world, unimpressive as we were, sitting calmly there with our legs pulled up and our eight hands clasping our eight knees. Hoyer had decided to paint all kinds of ordinary things. He had read an article in a magazine about the social duty of the artist, and now he was all in favor. He started to argue with Bekker about the heath. It was a miracle of erudition. He tried to convince Bekker that it was a mistake to withdraw from the world and go off to the heath, which he would never do anyway. An artist belongs at the center of modern life.

Hoyer wanted to hear what I thought. I just said I’d never thought about it. I didn’t know what Hoyer wanted either—he knew it already, why did he need to know what I thought too?

Bavink was the only one who didn’t say anything, he just sat with his chin on his knees and took the sun into his heart. The sun was as flat as a lozenge now, and dull red, almost gone.

Hoyer couldn’t sit still. He jumped up and took Bekker with him. They walked along the beach and from a distance we could hear Hoyer screaming, he was obviously worked up. Bavink and I stayed sitting there for a while, then sauntered slowly after them. It wasn’t very nice to have a worldview, it seemed to me. Hoyer was screaming so much.

Bavink and I stopped and looked down at the tips of our shoes and the waves rolling in over them. The sun was gone, the red shimmer on the water began to fade, a bluish darkness rose in the south. It smelled of mud. In the distance, near the village, the arc lamps suddenly came on along the beach.

“You understand all that?” Bavink asked. “About social duty?”

I shrugged. “What kind of guy d’you think wrote that article? Do you have a Sense of Responsibility, Koekebakker?” Hoyer had talked about that too.

“Hoyer sure talks nice,” Bavink said. “Awfully nice. I don’t have a sense of responsibility. I can’t be bothered with that. I need to paint. It’s not a walk in the park. What was it he said again?” “Who?” I asked. “The guy in that book, what was it he said artists were?” “Privileged.” “You know what I think, Koekebakker? That that’s the same guy who wrote the train timetables. I’ve never understood how anyone could write those either. Privileged… God is everywhere, Koekebakker? Or isn’t he? They say that too, don’t they?”

I nodded. The darkness started to rise up everywhere from the water; the horizon to the northwest still glowed a yellowish green, the last light was leaving from over our heads. There were no clouds.

“So, he is everywhere,” Bavink said. “There, and there, and there.” He pointed all around us with an outstretched arm. “And there, beyond the sea, in the land we can’t see. And over there, near Driehuis, where the arc lamps are. And on Kalverstraat. Go stand with your back to the water there and listen. Can you stay out of it?”

“Out of what?”

“Out of the ocean?”

I nodded yes, I certainly could.

“I can’t, or just barely,” Bavink said. “It’s so strange, having that melancholy sound behind you. It’s like the ocean wants something from me, that’s what it’s like. God is in there too. God is calling. It’s really not a walk in the park, he is everywhere, and everywhere he is he’s calling Bavink. You get sick of your own name when it’s called so much. And then Bavink has to paint. Has to get God onto canvas, with paint. Then it’s Bavink who’s calling ‘God.’ So there they are, calling each other. It’s just a game to God, he is everywhere and without end. He just calls. But Bavink has only one stupid head and one stupid right hand and can only work on one stupid painting at a time. And when he thinks he has God, all he has is paint and canvas. It turns out God is everywhere except where Bavink wants him to be. And then some guy comes along and writes that Bavink is privileged and Hoyer memorizes it and goes around blathering it at Bekker. Privileged, right. You know what I wish? I wish I wrote timetables. God leaves people like that alone, they’re not worth the trouble.”

I offered Bavink a cigar and suggested we walk to Driehuis. I felt like a coffee. I didn’t think it was very nice of Bavink to put down a useful fellow like that who was just doing his job. Behind us, Hoyer and Bekker came walking back; they were still going at it.

At eleven o’clock that night we were back on the beach. The wind had picked up, the waves hissed. A little something to drink had driven off the gloominess and melancholy. A new age was about to dawn. Bekker, in the solitude of his German boarding house, would translate Dante as he had never been translated before. Bavink had a great painting in his head, a View of Rhenen, he had been there once and could see it all clearly in his mind. And Hoyer was going to go work on his social duty—he would show them. And I tried to believe it all.

The cool wind blew around us. The ocean made a complaining sound, the ocean that complains and doesn’t know why. The ocean washed woefully up onto the shore. My thoughts are an ocean, they wash woefully up against their limits.

A new age would dawn, we could still do great things. I did my best to believe it, my very, very best.

VIII

I stood in the twilight in Rhenen, on the bridge over the railroad tracks, and looked north. Far below me were the rails, running out to the horizon, with the hill rising up steep on either side, overgrown with light green grass and dark green gorse covered in yellow flowers. I looked at how the slope of the hill got lower and lower until, far away, it became the flat plain.

Again the darkness started creeping stealthily up out of the ground, the way I had seen it do so many times before. The last light of day rested on the mountaintop, nervous and afraid, while the valley was full of darkness, and a red light came on on a post by the tracks. The sky was coated in gray and looked colorlessly down on the beaten, defeated day.

I had been away for six years and now I was standing there, just back in Holland, in the place I had thought about so often, which they had described in almost every letter they wrote me (every year Bavink wrote me at least twice, Bekker a bit more often). Back at the hill that Bavink had sent me seven drawings of over the years and Bekker had written two very short poems about.

I had come back to Holland to suffer poverty and write articles and stories in the neighborhood where I had lived for so long. And I wanted to go through my last two rijksdollars in the city that for a while, in my absence, had been the center of the world.

In the north the darkness was gulping down the light, the mountain was nearly swallowed up, the day’s last escort fled to the northwest and I stood on the little bridge on the edge of nothingness, enveloped in infinity.

I leaned my elbow on the railing and propped my chin in my hand and looked into the darkness and thought about the flat red sun that had set long ago into the green waves of the Atlantic-waves that rose up with sharp edges and scooped-out sides and fell and rose and were rising and falling even now. About the yellow lights in the shops in the poorer neighborhoods of Amsterdam, which I would shortly see again, which had shone every night while the ocean never stopped moving.

And the vague expectations from back then rose within me again, and the longing, without knowing what for.

But I also had a feeling I hadn’t known before. All those days had passed and many more days would pass as well, and on every one of them my expectations would remain unfulfilled and my longings unsatisfied. Bavink had worked for years, on and off, on his View of Rhenen—on the river, the mountain, the Cunera tower, the blossoming apple trees, the red roofs of the city, the chestnut trees with their red and white flowers and the brown beeches between the houses in the distance, and the little windmill somewhere up on the mountain. For years Bekker had spent every Sunday in the cabin on the mountain that Bavink rented, translating Dante and writing little poems now and then, for years I had drifted around the world. And what did it all mean? For the world, for God, or even for us?

I stood on the Rhenen tower and looked into the distance, and my heart went out into the distance, to the red sky in the west. But even if I could have flown off the top of the tower into that distance, I would have found only that the distance had turned into the nearby, and my heart would have gone out to the distance once more. And what good did it do me—the wisdom that taught me that nothing would ever change, it would be like this forever?

Every day we longed for something, without knowing what. It got monotonous. Sunrise and sunset and sunlight on the water and behind the drifting white clouds—monotonous—and the darker skies too, the leaves turning brown and yellow, the bare treetops and poor soggy fields in the winter—all the things I had seen so many times and thought about so many times while I was gone and would see again so many more times, as long as I didn’t die. Who can spend his life watching all these things that constantly repeat themselves, who can keep longing for nothing? Trusting in a God who isn’t there?

And now the gorse was blooming again, and the lilacs and apple trees and chestnuts, and the sun was blazing down on all of it. Full of emotion, I had seen it all again. And while I was thinking about it, my vague longings and expectations faded away.

God lives in my head. His fields are immeasurable, his gardens are full of beautiful flowers that never die, regal women walk there naked, thousands of them. And the sun rises and sets and shines low and high and low again and the endless domain is endlessly itself and never the same for an instant. Broad rivers run through it, curving and meandering, and the sun shines on them and they carry the light to the sea.

I sit quiet and content beside the rivers of my thoughts and smoke a clay pipe and feel the sunshine on my body and see the water flow ceaselessly into the unknown.

The unknown doesn’t bother me. I nod now and then to the beautiful women plucking the flowers in my gardens and I hear the wind rustling through the high pines, through the forests of certainty, of knowing that all this exists whenever I decide to think it. I am grateful that this has been given to me. And I puff on my pipe in all humility and feel like God himself, who is infinity itself.

I sit there aimlessly, God’s aim is aimlessness.

But to keep this awareness always is granted to no man.

IX

When I arrived in Amsterdam, about nine the next morning, and stood on the square in front of Centraal Station, I saw lots of electric streetcars, which I had never seen there before, and taxis, and policemen with caps instead of helmets. But they hadn’t filled in the Damrak yet, I saw the backs of the houses on Warmoesstraat right on the water and the Oude Kerk spire up above. So that was all right.

And the same fine gentlemen were still walking around, their hair was perfect and there was not a crease in their jackets or a speck of mud on their shoes. They still looked like they knew absolutely everything and felt that they’d pretty much succeeded in life. They were friendly and polite to each other, as always. Their clothes were slightly different from a few years before, but basically the same. You could see that they had everything figured out: A suit was a suit, same as ever, and a jacket was still a jacket, and a respectable woman was still a respectable woman and a girl was a girl. It all worked out perfectly. And they also knew perfectly well who and what were beneath them, I had no doubt about that. The Damrak would certainly be filled in too once they got around to it.

I took Tram 2 down Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. So it was a good thing they’d filled it in after all, otherwise the tram probably couldn’t drive down it, and now you could cross from one side to the other wherever you wanted.

Tram 2, the line par excellence for fine and important gentlemen. A couple of terribly important gentlemen were on the tram, I was nothing next to them. The good old sun was shining happily down on Voorburgwal, the buds on the trees were still pale green, and I saw that the shadow of Nieuwe Kerk didn’t reach the other side of the street, not by a long shot. And I remembered that years before, in late May, I had seen the same shadow looking exactly the same. And that on a sunny winter day, when there were no trams on Voorburgwal yet, I had walked through the shadow of the church which covered the whole width of the street. Now it didn’t even reach the rails, the tram drove past the church in the sunlight. In a few months the same tram (it was still brand new) would be driving in the same place through shadow. And when I looked back at the two terribly important gentlemen, I decided that the whole time Rhenen had been the center of the world, this world had hardly changed at all.

I thought about when these two gentlemen would die, and stand naked at the Last Judgment, and be forgotten down here. And about terribly important gentlemen coming and taking their place. Would they still have their silent self-possession when they arrived up there without their nicely polished shoes? And what would become of the perfect part in their hair? What about their idiotic air of superiority, might their faces not show a hint of modesty when they got there and saw the other, even more important men they had looked up to for so many years, and they were naked too?

And how many idealistic young people down here would have written essays by then, and written little poems and painted little pictures, and gotten angry and gotten excited about things. And kissed. And then grown important too, perhaps, and been forgotten as well.

Then a girl with a violin got on the tram and looked at the tips of her shoes with her dark eyes, and I looked at the rounded curves of her summer coat and forgot all about the elegant gentlemen.

X

Hoyer was home. He had a very proper apartment in a side street behind the Concertgebouw and he received me in a sitting room I hardly dared walk in because the carpet was so expensive. His curtains were velvet, his chairs were upholstered in yellow moquette, a black pendulum clock and candelabras were on the mantelpiece and I think I saw a bronze horse somewhere, all things from expensive shops. I didn’t dare to really sit down either, I sat on the edge of the chair the whole time, but I don’t think Hoyer noticed a thing.

Hoyer had had an amazing stroke of luck. They had made the same old stupid mistake and refused one of his nudes. He’d named the lady Lust and I must say, since I am writing for a respectable publication, that she did look “very nice.” And now Hoyer was living large in furnished rooms managed by an elegant widow with an aristocratic name, along with a female lawyer and a colonial official on leave with his wife and child. Hoyer ate out since the widow was far too elegant to cook for her boarders. Shoeshines cost extra.

And I sat on the edge of my chair the whole time and looked at the ornamental table legs and the gilded frame of the mirror. It was deadly. I had to tell Hoyer about my trip, of course, but I didn’t know what to say, I heard myself talking and listened, scatterbrained, to the sound of my own voice. The light in the room was dim and gloomy, I think the widow was afraid of people looking in. I just wanted to leave, and I looked around at the three walls I could see without turning around in my chair but they didn’t dissolve, I couldn’t see through them. I looked at the door—I couldn’t help it—I sat there staring helplessly. My eyes were just drawn to the door. I had vague visions of Cunera, of the Grebbeberg with its river, of the sunny square in front of Centraal Station and the clockface gleaming on the Oude Kerk spire, and through these semitransparent visions I saw the painted grain of the fake oak wood on the door. Someone was talking the whole time, oh, right, Hoyer. Then I myself answered, or not actually myself, but my tongue did move and sounds did come out of my mouth, I could hear them loud and clear.

Hoyer didn’t notice anything. His studio was upstairs. Shall he lead the way? I numbly followed. “This must be the lavatory?” I thought something along those lines was the proper thing to say when a gentleman was showing you his house. Hoyer didn’t notice anything. “No, that’s a closet,” he said. And I thought, why didn’t he say, “I beg your pardon, that’s a closet”? Surely that’s what he would be saying within a year or two.

The hall was a tight squeeze, the runner was narrow, the stairs proportioned accordingly, there was a thin banister with slightly turned posts, but everything was very fine and in good taste, I have to admit. Hoyer still didn’t notice anything.

Upstairs I recovered a bit, at least there was light, the famous “studio light.” The easel stood empty. There was an expensive chair in the studio and I sank into it. Never in my life had I sat in such a chair. Hoyer was painting portraits these days, of ladies and gentlemen, all in elegant clothing. He showed me the portrait he had just started of the lawyer in the building. She was traveling at the moment. Hoyer used to have his studio in another building at first, but the lawyer had convinced “Madame” to allow part of the attic to be converted into a studio. They had had a hard time persuading her and managed to only when she heard that Hoyer was going to paint a portrait of a young lady from Willemsparkweg, in winter hat, boa, and muff. And the rest of her clothes too, of course. And that he had been put forward as a member of Arti et Amicitiae.

Did Bavink ever come by? No, never, he’d never been here. Had he heard anything about Kees? Yes, Bavink had run into Kees on the street a while back and they had talked. He had gone through three or four jobs in the past couple years, with long stretches unemployed in between. His father had finally found him something with the gas company.

“He walks around now in a uniform and a cap, he has Amsterdam’s three white Xs and ‘AmGas’ on his head and a little book under his arm. And another guy with him, with a black bag.” Bavink found it quite a sight. His job is to go around emptying the two-penny coins out of the gas meters, the other guy’s job is to carry them around his bag. And after they’ve gotten the coins out, Kees has to go ask the lady of the house if she wants twopenny coins back again in change for the meter. Bavink spent a while with him, he had never walked along with someone doing that before. But it got boring fast. He never did it again.

I gazed at the Bokhara carpet lying in front of the club chair and saw clearly before my eyes the deserted cobblestones of Linnaeusstraat and the blue limestone curb and the seam where two stones were set next to each other, and the bricks of the sidewalk. I saw us sitting there in the summer night. Bavink and Bekker and Kees and Hoyer and me. I saw that the cobblestones and the dust on the street were wet, the watering cart had been by, there was a wet sheet of newspaper somewhere. And I heard Hoyer say that he was standing up, the cold from the stone was seeping into him. Now I was hearing the same voice, only a little more refined, more modulated, saying: “You must excuse me, Koekebakker, I have a consultation at eleven.”

Outside, the spring sun shone down on the cheerless street. My God, how could a street like this exist. I was absolutely not allowed to kiss the girl in the tram but a street like this was allowed to exist. That was allowed.

* “I waited patiently for the Lord, and he inclined unto me [and heard my cry],” the beginning of Psalm 40, quoted in French from Frederik van Eeden’s 1900 novel Van de koele meeren des doods