With David, you never know if he means something, or if it’s a joke. This was somewhere in the middle, probably. He bombarded me with reading tips for the project. I had the impression that he spent half his time in the travel agency on research for my book.
‘How’s your French? You’ve got to read the new biography of Anquetil. You’ll see the link between behaviour on the bike and view of life brilliantly illustrated. Do you know that Anquetil was disappointed when he won a time trial by twelve seconds? He thought it was eleven seconds too much. Brilliant, isn’t it? You can use that, or can’t you? Or else there are his views on love and sexuality? Haha! And then there’s Peter Sloterdijk, the German philosopher. He’s written very interesting things about …’
‘David, listen. I’m frightened I’ll never get round to writing if I read all these books you’re recommending first. I’ll die reading in bed without having put a single word down on paper.’
He looked at me in disappointment for a moment. Then he turned to the waiter who came to the table to take our order.
‘Two Wednesday, Henk.’
‘Wednesday?’, I asked.
‘Great. You’ll see. I don’t think we’ve ever eaten here on a Wednesday, or have we?’
David picked up the napkin from the table, laid it on his lap, leaned forward slightly, and looked at me. He was already over the disappointment.
‘Bart, you’ll never guess. Who suddenly walked into my place last week? Well?’
‘No idea.’
‘Marga Sap. Marga Sap! An American lady comes into the office, you know, heavy make-up, Botox, and I’m thinking: now what? And suddenly I see it. Marga Sap. Guess what she’s called now?’
‘Haven’t got a clue. Marga Juice?’
‘Marge Armstrong. I swear. Marge Armstrong. Haha!’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘True!’
‘And?’
‘We went for a meal. Here.’
‘Original.’
‘Before that we walked through the town for two hours. She hadn’t been back for at least twenty-five years. She was all eyes.’
‘And then?’
‘After dinner I took her back to her hotel, and she told me what she thought when I came into your class for the first time.’
‘Well?’
‘She’d heard that all black guys have an enormous dong and she thought: there’s one.’
‘Cut it out, David.’
‘So, yes…’
‘No!’
‘Yes. Marga Sap. Finally.’
‘And now?’
‘Now she’s gone back to Jack in Lansing, Michigan. She sends you her best wishes.’
-
VII
The day Hinke and I got married was also the day when my friendship with Joost and André was put on ice. In the preceding years the contact had already become much less intensive, and now came the separation.
During the dinner, Joost stood on his chair and started holding forth. When he dropped the name Laura in his slurred speech, I knew it was going to end in tears. He talked of ‘Bart’s great love,’ the woman ‘who should have been here this evening, perhaps at Bart’s side.’ Or, he added, ‘at mine.’ People looked up in surprise and couldn’t understand a word. The speech was meant for my ears only. It was as if he had waited for this moment to pay me back.
‘Get him to stop,’ hissed Hinke. ‘I’m so ashamed. I don’t want to hear all this, make him stop!’ She shook my shoulder. I made a few vague hand gestures to Joost, but he was unstoppable. It went embarrassingly quiet; I could see a disaster looming, but I wasn’t capable of taking appropriate measures.
Joost had just launched into a detailed description of Laura’s appearance when David got up, walked over to him, whispered something in his ear, grabbed him by the waist, and threw him over his shoulder. He set him on a stool at the bar, spoke forcefully to him, and came back to the table as if nothing had happened.
I spent my wedding night on an airbed in the living room. I could understand why—after all, Joost was my friend.
André turned up at the wedding in the brand-new Porsche. He had brought a blond girlfriend with him who seemed to come from a different universe. André didn’t say much, not even to his parents. There were scores of people he knew, but he moved through the company like a ghost. He wore a white suit and snakeskin shoes. When he left, he hugged me and said: ‘Sorry, Bart.’ For a long time those were the last words I heard from his mouth.
-
VIII
If you walk from the Groenmarkt to the Marspoortstraat in Zutphen, after a couple of hundred metres you reach the river. On the other side are the river floodplains, which flood in winter and sometimes freeze over so that you can skate.
One warm July evening in 1980, David, André, and I were sitting on a low wall on the town side, looking out over the water. Joost was missing, as he’d gone to a summer camp for young astronomers in Drenthe.
We watched the ships sailing past. André checked whether there were any pretty women at the helm. He was talking about a TV series in which a mysterious water gypsy had arrived in her boat at a little village on the river. There, she had initiated a boy into the secrets of love. ‘Could happen here, too,’ he said. ‘She could moor here any day. And I’ll be at the head of the queue.’
I asked what that meant, being initiated into love.
‘Screwing for the first time.’
‘Yes, I get that. But what’s so secret about that?’
‘That’s a secret.’
David was throwing pebbles in the water. For my Dutch exam, I had just read a story about a moped going to sea, and I imagined one zooming over the water from the direction of Kampen, right under the old steel bridge, on the way to the Rhine.
‘Ridiculous,’ said André. He jumped off the wall to go home. At that moment, David pointed downstream. ‘Look at that!’ he shouted.
We saw a huge black shoebox coming our way. The monster towered high above the water, and was being pushed along by a small boat with a long chimney from which came puffs of smoke. It was as if a little yapping dog was snuffling at a black Dobermann with its snout.
André stood up and started waving. The tug ploughed slowly on with its heavy load and shifted course towards the quay. We could see a small man with a large moustache at the helm. Suddenly a hatch opened on the flat roof of the black box. A boy with blond curly hair climbed out. He stood on the roof, like a field marshal following the course of a battle from a hilltop. He raised his hand. To us, or perhaps it was a sign to the man in the tug, who pointed in our direction.
‘Ahoy, steady as she goes!’ shouted André. The boy and the man did not react. It took about another fifteen minutes before the captain managed to manoeuvre his way to the quay. ‘Hey!’ he shouted in our direction. ‘H-h-help us a minute!’
We ran to the quay. The boy was still standing on the roof. The captain, who was wearing overalls covered in oil stains, had climbed from the pushing boat onto the gangway of the black box, and threw a thick rope towards the shore. André, who had been to sailing camp, grabbed