Paperback(Reprint)
-
SHIP THIS ITEMIn stock. Ships in 1-2 days.PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802138958 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2002 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
I last heard the planes half an hour ago. They crossed the river diagonally at high altitude and then their deep roar faded away to the east. Now it is quiet again, except for the noises that go with a winter's night by the water's edge. Restless wind. Waves lapping the posts of the jetty. No birds. No sudden cries anywhere. There is, though, somewhere behind me on the quay, the occasional rattle of a window that isn't properly closed. I'm standing alone on the furthest jetty, its wood black with moisture and slippery as glass, and am looking intently at the water. On the far bank of the river lies the city, windows blacked out, aimless tram rails, treeless streets. I am looking at the far bank but can scarcely see it any longer.
For a moment I imagined what it would be like to fly east in the planes, towards Germany. I pictured what it was like in the confined space of the cockpit, with men in leather jackets doing their work silently. A single gesture is enough for them to understand each other. There is only the light of a couple of monitor lamps, green and blue. An illuminated dial. Perhaps the glow of a cigarette. Then I thought of the vast space below the belly of the plane, the keel seeking its way through the thin air, with nothing to hang on to, no support, and I began to feel dizzy. I thought of the distance between the men and their target and of what slid beneath them meanwhile, small and invisible: the polders, the heath and the woods, the farms with their steep roofs, groups of houses huddling together against the cold in the villages, the towns with their factories and around them the grey streets where at this moment people everywhere are sitting together with the same black paper over the windows. I thought of the lakes, the canals large and small, the ditches and the rivers. I thought especially of the water because water, silvery, is the first to wake when day breaks and life begins anew.
Across the river lies the city. I can't see it, but it's as if I can feel how heavily and anxiously it is breathing. Like some great animal that has been hibernating for too long, and stinking, far too thin, wonders if it will ever wake up. I can scarcely see even the bridge from here, the bridge with its elegant lamps that links the suburbs and the stately houses on the embankment behind me. I shiver in my raincoat. I sit down. I close my eyes. Sleet strikes my face.
But when I lean back and stretch out I suddenly feel the wood warm down my spine and against the backs of my legs once more, as if the warmth had been waiting there for me all those years. And then it is summer again and above me I see an almost cloudless, brilliant blue sky, a dome of air stretched tautly across the river, the city and the country. All day long the sun has warmed the planks of the jetty until they are cooked through, light grey, almost white, and red hot. In a second the sun also dries my sweaty face, leaving only salt, which feels grainy on my skin.
The jetty is actually a raft that is attached by metal rings to a number of posts alongside the boathouse, so that it can move up and down as the level of the river rises and falls. It slowly sways in time with the afternoon waves, almost imperceptibly, except when, like me, you lie back languidly and float away on your exhaustion and no longer know where your body ends and where the wood, the water and the sky begin. In the distance I hear David calling.
I don't answer.
I close my eyes.
When I open them, he has come up behind me. I look up along his legs, which are powerful and covered in dark hair; I see that he has taken his shirt off and put it over his shoulders.
'Done in?'
I can't see his face properly, but I know the kind of look he's giving me. Sarcastic. Friendly and sarcastic. That's how he always looks. He has the face and body of someone who at birth was given not just a life, but the whole world in his lap. That's why he approaches us, the others, so calmly, with his friendly irony.
'Shattered? Too much for you?'
I say nothing and do not accept the hand that is offered to help me up. I'm not an invalid, far from it. I roll on to my side and in a rapid, supple movement stand up beside him. When I'm standing I'm as tall as he is. Not as powerfully built. Not as calm. But just as tall.
Now I can see that he is tired too. Sweat is still streaming from under his black curls, along his nose, into his mouth. He grimaces and wipes it away with his rolled-up shirt. For the first time I dare to think that he is not just my partner, but more than that, perhaps a friend. We have trained hard. Under the fierce sun, under the clear sky, we have rowed as fast as we could along the river. A little way down the pontoon is the empty boat, its brass gates flashing, the oars crossed. We lift the boat out of the water. We wipe the cedar-wood shell with a cloth to dry it, take it inside and fetch the oars. And then, as we walk together to the shed, each of us carrying an oar, David puts his hand on my shoulder for a moment. Not just friendly, but like a real friend. Not sarcastic, but serious. I'm so tired. I squeeze the hard wood of the oar and feel my muscles flex one last time. A wave of deep happiness sweeps through my hands, my arms, my shoulders, my chest and my legs. I am tired and happy.
Happiness? You shouldn't talk about it. One word too many and it becomes ridiculous. Two words and it's vanished, gone. And yet it doesn't feel fragile, the happiness of this summer. You can take hold of it and lay your head on it. I hold it in my hand for hours and it doesn't go away.
And now too I am holding on to that summer, not just in my thoughts, but with my whole body, from my numb fingers down to my toes. That summer when the river was ours, and so was the boathouse, the city, the meadows and the reeds at the water's edge. Happiness only exists when you can touch it and I held it, I'm still holding it, that summer of 1939, now, here, tonight. I hear the soft chatter of the water and deep in my bones I can still feel the warmth of the planks of the pontoon.
My first memory of the river consists mainly of light and space. I see myself and my father walking through the streets of our neighbourhood, along Topaz Street, past the square with the public baths and then into the wide Emerald Street, which did not lead to another street but issued on to the wide avenue along the river and hence into a sea of sunlight where trees rustled and flags flapped and crowds of people were abroad and where noise did not fill the space but fanned out in all directions, over the water and up into the sky.
I must have been about two or three, not much older, because I was sitting on my father's shoulders and my father is small and delicate and not strong. I think there was a regatta or some other form of water festivity to which he had taken me, because in my memory the river is a carpet of silver wavelets with countless boats of all shapes and sizes.
Since then I have been to many of those festive days and although they sometimes say the first impression is always the strongest, I am not aware that my joy at such river festivities has diminished. It was more like love at first sight, which then grew ever deeper and more intense. Later, I loved it when on holidays the river filled with pleasure craft, cruisers, rowing boats, punts, scows and sailboats, flat-bottomed vegetable barges of wood and iron, elegant clinker-built wherries, tugs, and whatever else can float and sail, all decked out and packed with cheerful people laughing and shouting about nothing, just because the sun is shining and they can stand and sit without any firm base underfoot, for the sheer joy of a beautiful, useless day on the river. I also got to know the river in empty moments, under scudding clouds, with waves that batter each other and make even the sturdiest ship feel alone and vulnerable; in the winter, just before the water turns to ice; in the autumn; in the treacherous spring; in summer rain when the water is suddenly lashed out of its indolence and is pockmarked by an unexpected downpour at the end of the day — and I grew to love all those faces. The river taught me the meaning of movement and taught me that movement is life. Does that sound exaggerated? Perhaps it is. But that's what I feel, and I can't help it.
On that first day when I consciously saw the water I must already have felt some of its special power. Or perhaps I made that day into the first time because I now know the end of the story. Be that as it may, besides the colours and the shimmering I remember one image in particular that made an indelible impression on me.
The afternoon was drawing to a close, it had already got quieter on the river and in the surrounding streets. We had walked along the quayside and climbed up the steps of the bridge with the cast-iron lamps, the bridge which grandly and elegantly links the mansions on the quiet bank of the river with the city. We stopped half-way across the bridge. My father lifted me off his shoulders and let me lean over the railing and look down. Seen from as close up as this, the water was not silver but greyish blue and green. At the very moment that I leaned right over and my father tried to hold me back by my armpits, a pointed brass tip shot into view from under the arch of the bridge, followed by an almost equally slender bow covered with silvery-white material. There was no time to recover from that first astonishment, because the canvas was followed by the first, second, third of eight men in all who were drawn out from under the bridge like a string of pearls, or rather who drew themselves out, riding and gliding, jack-knifing and reaching forwards to the left and right as they engaged the water with their long oars, pushing it away from them and letting go of it again, eight men in white shirts in perfect rhythm, followed by a small cox in a blue jacket holding a brass megaphone, like the dot under a long exclamation mark. It was over in a few seconds, but for as long as I could I stared after the rowers, and not just the rowers, but also the trail that they were pulling with them from under the bridge, a trail of lines and whirlpools, where the oars had hit the water hard, like footprints that the moment they were made immediately started erasing themselves, after first slowly merging into one another.
I don't know what made the greatest impression on me at that moment, the supple way the men moved together or the movement they caused in the river.
I only know that I held my breath. Because when I recall it, I still do.
My father was small and delicate and not strong. It did not take me long to recognize this. This realization, though, had nothing to do with muscular strength. Every child has confidence in its father's power as long as he is able to stand between it and the world. But even before I could think about such things, let alone talk about them, I must have sensed that my father could only just about hold his own in that world. I could see that from the timid way he left the house every morning in the dark-grey uniform of the tram company — my father must have been the only man in the world who did not derive power and authority from wearing a uniform, but instead projected even more anxiety and helplessness, as if people could now see all the more clearly that he wore his clothes like a shield. And it also had something to do with the way in which he came back home again every evening, like an animal that is glad to have reached its lair but still can scarcely believe it is safe. And that was how my mother treated him. Softly mumbling and moaning, she fluttered round the chair into which he had flopped. She poured him a cup of coffee or chicory, she loosened his collar, she lugged in a basin of water for his bunion-covered feet.
I never despised my father for what he was, indeed I am certain I loved him. First, because there was a time, a short time, when he really could lift me up and carry me around outside on his shoulders, and later because I saw that he had to summon up so much courage to keep going outside that there was really nothing left for his wife and child. I understood from an early age that I was left to my own devices. It made me a quiet, introverted boy who made up his own games among the furniture and fabrics of the flat and whose only choice was to triumph over or be beaten by himself. Later, a serious and dutiful schoolboy, who because of his inability to get in the last word was sometimes regarded by others as sneaky. The only child between two parents who had their hands full with themselves in a dark, narrow house.
For my parents, that house with its weird bays and its windows scarcely bigger than shooting slits must have been a dream come true. They were the first occupants, the cement was not dry in the mortar courses when they followed their simple furniture up the stairs. It was not the new street that was important to them, not the neighbourhood and certainly not the neighbours, who were all new and strangers to each other, but who from day one were busy saying hello, arranging meetings, paying visits, telling stories, doing mutual favours, organizing their lives to make them congenial and cheerful and worthwhile. As far as they could, my parents withdrew from all social intercourse. It wasn't people, it was the house itself from which they expected security and happiness, the roof, the ceilings, the walls, bricks and mortar. I'm quite sure they entered it that first time with the firm intention of becoming one with every cranny and skirting board, so that it would be not only socially, but biologically impossible ever to tear them away. For them it was an advantage that the house was dark and poky, because its function was to be as little as possible like the rest of the world.
Our neighbourhood had been planned in the Depression by the city's strong men, patriarchs with a social conscience who saw it as their sacred duty to give the population four walls and a roof over their heads. But only in theory did they recognize people's right to accommodation according to their own requirements and taste. Or else they would have given us residents light, space and big windows instead of subjecting us to a geometrically pure street plan, a succession of squares, shops, bathhouses and doorways which one could traverse in only one direction and a house design that was so compelling that not so much as a chair, let alone a table or a settee, could be placed in a spot which the powers-that-be considered socially irresponsible.
The streets were distinguished solely by the house fronts. Some undulated and finished up in sharp right angles, others started out straight but converged in series of round towers, crowned with battlements, as if the Middle Ages had paid a flying visit. The bricks had been laid in the strangest shapes to create a fascinating pattern of lines and shapes, not for the benefit of the individual houses or their residents, but as a constituent part and embellishment of the whole, the street, the neighbourhood aesthetics. Roof tiles, windowframes, gutters, staircases, even the house numbers seemed intended in the first instance as ornaments. They were not ours and never would be; we were simply allowed to live behind them.
My parents were the ideal residents for this new neighbourhood. Citizens who were sincerely happy with what little the authorities granted them. Faceless people, the extras on the architectural drawings that were admired at home and abroad. Obedient children of those well-intentioned patriarchs, children who, once put in their place, would never utter a word of complaint and in gratitude would not move any more than was absolutely necessary and required.
The countless times I heard my parents say that it was a great blessing that my father had not only been able to find a house, but had found a house close to his job. He worked for the municipal transport company, in the big tram depot, which exits by means of a wide row of doors on to the river bank. The gleaming rails follow the course of the water for a moment then turn off in various directions, to the city centre where the big shopping streets are, the warehouses and the Royal Palace, to the docks, to the station, to other suburbs which did not stop at the waterfront like ours but got bogged down in the meadows, with their gardens, animals and water slurry. My father never saw any of those places, I suspect, and I'm sure he was never curious about them. His job was in the depot, he looked after the trams that were at a standstill, after the maintenance of pipes and wheels, after the cleaning of floors and seats. The depot is often quiet and dark also. It was a home away from home for him.
There is another memory from my childhood that concerns the river. It was a hot, boiling-hot summer's day. I was five or six. Sand had been dumped for the construction of the new bridge. The new bridge belonged to our neighbourhood: built in the style of our streets, and brazenly equipped with tram rails, modern lamps and wiring, it was to disrupt the quiet dignity of the other bank. I can still see the floating cranes, the piles and the partitions in the water. And I can see the sand. There was so much that a temporary golden-white beach was created in the middle of town, a beach that began a little below the shore and undulated seductively towards the coolness of the river.
It must have been the heat that drove my mother out of the house. She wasn't someone who would set out on a walk on a weekday for no good reason. And it must also have been the heat that made her walk to the little beach. But perhaps it was me too who, small as I was, and craftily making use of her awkwardness, followed my penchant for water and directed her steps. She wore a dress of uncomfortable rayon-silk and a white pudding-basin hat with a ribbon. The summer wardrobe. As I walked beside her I could smell her sad, sweaty aroma, and the closer we got to the river and the beach, the more I had the feeling that she was losing her power over me, that she couldn't stop me, that now I really was deciding what was going to happen. She stopped on the bank as I ran down. I heard a final warning but paid no attention to it and her voice was lost almost immediately in the babble of voices around me. Scores of children, some in swimming costumes but most in vests and underpants, were splashing about in the water and teeming over the beach. Laughing faces, skinny legs, tummies, shoulders, white and pink and red and brown skin — and over all that a shower of water droplets and sunbeams, a bright fog of fun. I took a deep breath. Then I took my shoes off. And my socks. I left them behind on the sand, and in my short trousers and cotton shirt I walked slowly towards the water. At that moment, in my memory, all the noise stops for a moment. No screaming and howling children, no calling mother. A solemn moment. In a shaft of silence I entered the water. A little John the Baptist, although the Saviour was a long way off yet.
When the waves reached my knees I stopped. Was it then that I realized I was the only fully dressed child among all those other, half-naked water creatures? I don't know. All I know is that I stared at my legs and saw how puny and white they were and felt how wonderful the dark water was that enclosed my shins like a vase.
I stood there until the noise came back and then I unbuttoned my shirt, took off my vest, and smacked the water with one hand. I looked around me at the other children and smiled cheerfully at them, although none of them were paying any attention to me. A barge came past and launched a set of rollers towards the beach, to general acclaim. The water splashed against my skinny chest and I shivered with joy. With my hand I stroked my ribs, which I could feel one by one. I felt my soft little belly and realized I had goose pimples, but not from the cold. My clean short trousers were darkened by the waves. I turned round.
On the bank my mother was gesticulating wildly, but not too wildly, because she didn't want to make a scene. She was only worried about me. I pretended not to see her for a moment. I threw my clothes down on dry land and ran along the water's edge. I plunged my arms into the water, splashed at no one in particular, felt the sun and the water together. It was not the grandness of the river that enchanted me this time, but precisely the tangibility, the closeness of the water. You could touch it, it mixed with sand and turned into mud, with air and became rain, you could feel it between your fingers and, although it was gone again in an instant, you had at least made it move.
I looked at the bank again and saw my mother still signalling for me to come back. Why didn't she come to me? Why didn't she come and get me? The rayon dress would darken at the hem, the pudding-basin hat would float on the waves. I knew it was impossible. I took a couple of wild steps towards the middle of the river, then I went back like a good boy. Suddenly, a strange feeling in my right foot.
I must have stepped on a nail. When I lifted up my foot and turned it over I saw a delta of bright red blood spreading very fast across the pale sole. It didn't hurt. I dipped my foot in the water again and watched in fascination as the scene repeated itself. Limping, shoes in hand and putting my clothes back on as I walked, I returned to the shore. My mother had got even hotter than just before. I could smell that. She pulled me to her, whimpering softly, and pushed me away again to look at the wound. I heard her gasping for breath and then she pulled me close again, with my nose in the artificial silk, and in that way tried to drag me along with her, still only half-dressed, across the road and home as quickly as possible. In her panic she paid no attention to the traffic. I felt the rough heat of the cobbles on my bare feet and heard the furious ringing of the tram. The carriages grazed past us. My mother stood stock-still, sobbing and shivering, and then came to her senses. On the traffic island she put my socks and shoes on. Probably she shot a worried look in the direction of the tram depot, an apologetic look, because that's where my father was. With her hand on the scruff of my neck, she pushed me towards our house, her shapeless belly occasionally bumping into me. I couldn't imagine that I had ever come out of there and I knew that I had nothing more to do with it. She probably never told my father about our visit to the beach and of her panicky failure. Nor did we go near there again that summer. I do remember that many months later there was satisfied talk at home about the building work in the neighbourhood being finished. Everything was sealed. The last brick had been laid. Now there would be peace for ever.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On the Water by H. M. van den Brink. Copyright © 1998 by H. M. van den Brink. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.