At first, old Castelen couldn’t see the point. ‘You might as well start selling torture.’ But David maintained stubbornly that, on the contrary, people needed a portion of real misery. As long as they could see an end to it, and could come home again safely after a short while and tell heroic tales. Finally, his father agreed.
David wrote an advertisement for the local paper about the Adventure Trip to the Far North, in which he described ‘the bellowing of the elks’, ‘the fascinating Northern Lights’ and ‘the age-old customs and richly coloured splendour of the Lapps.’ The trip was booked up within six days. Castelen Senior found it irresistibly funny that his customers would soon simply bump into their neighbours instead of a bellowing elk.
‘All the better,’ said David. ‘People like that.’
‘They’ve all gone crazy. But they’re getting what they want.’
And so East-West Travel Agency acquired another arm, Eastwest Adventures, headed by the world’s biggest home-body, David Castelen.
I didn’t have to look up David on a university website or use a lawyer. I saw him whenever I was in Zutphen, about three times a year, to visit my father when he was still alive, or when I was in the area for the paper.
After an hour or so I could hear my Eastern accent re-emerging, as if my tongue was glad to be able to form the innate sounds once more. Every so often the thought of returning resurfaced. Like the Greek emigrant who has made a pile in America and, after completing the task, returns to his village on an island in the Ionian Sea. Old Hoffman, who has seen the world, has become wise and returns to his roots. It would be nice if André and Joost did the same, then we could play cards in Annie & Wim’s café.
In the thirty-five years that David had lived in the town, he had succeeded in becoming a full-blooded Easterner. He spoke to the people who came to his travel agency in faultless dialect and no one thought it was odd.
He still lived above the shop, and the Adventure Trips were his best-selling line. He had profited from growing prosperity and boredom. One of his most successful trips was a two-week trek through Suriname, with overnight accommodation in bushmen’s huts and including a day’s piranha fishing. He also dropped people off in the Alaskan wilderness. Oddly enough, the demand for that trip had increased after one of his customers had only just survived an attack by a grizzly bear.
‘People are getting more and more demanding,’ he said. ‘It’s no longer enough to give them a walk through a desert full of scorpions or a survival trail through the jungle with rickety hanging bridges over crocodile-infested rivers. These days, they find that on the dreary side. Hang-gliding at the North Pole, a voyage to the Canaries in a leaky WWII German submarine, that’s the kind of thing you’ve got to come up with. There was someone here the other day who had read Moby Dick. Wanted to go whale hunting, expense no object. So I follow it up, and three weeks ago the guy flew to Japan and is now on one of those ships. He said he was going to bring me back a piece of whale meat.’
David has always remained unmarried. We never talk about it. He never asked about my marriage and afterward never about my divorce; I don’t pester him with questions about his bachelor status. We have enough other things to talk about. He is a reader who single-handedly keeps the bookshop of Zutphen in business, and his tastes are diverse. He praises the débuts of writers I have never heard of, and he also recommends obscure Icelanders and biographies of American generals—the Civil War is one of his specialties. He is constantly begging me to read and reread Turgenev. ‘Turgenev is the greatest. Certainly Chekhov comes close, he can also make you smell the steppes. But Turgenev is the only one with whom you can hear the people talking. It’s almost creepy.’
He is a fervent film buff, and in this area, too, he provides me with valuable tips. How he finds the time to read his way through those piles of books, and meanwhile see all those films, is a mystery to me. He says that he reads a lot when there are no customers. ‘Which happens more and more often because of that bloody Internet.’
I had informed David on the phone about my meetings with André and Joost, but he insisted that I come and give him a personal report. ‘I feel a reunion in the air. You can’t talk about that on the telephone. The Beatles never got back together on the telephone.’
‘They never got together again at all.’
‘That’s what I mean. When shall we meet?’
‘Wednesday?’
‘Wednesday.’
On Tuesday he sent me an email.
‘Dear Bart,’ he wrote, ‘so as not to give you a shock tomorrow, I must tell you the following. What happened? I’ve been feeling a bit tired recently, so I figure: let’s go and see the doctor. I see Doctor Coomans. He taps my chest, fishes around a bit over my belly and back with his stethoscope: in perfect shape. Blood pressure. Thing round my arm, pumps it up and lets it down again. Much too high. I’ve got to take medication and lose weight. He asks: do you do any sport? I say: I cycle. No idea why, because I don’t cycle at all. Oh, he says, that’s nice, I cycle too. Sports bike? I say: yes, a racing bike, a Koga. Only make that comes to mind. Fantastic, says the doctor, Sunday morning at 9.30 on ’s Gravenhof in front of Hotel Eden. I go straight to Van Spankeren: I need a Koga. Must it be a Koga? Yes, a Koga. He points to a Koga. Fine, I take that one. Pay out twelve hundred euros and walk out of the shop with a Koga. Plus an outfit. Sunday is the day, I’m dreading it.’
‘Dear David,’ I emailed back, ‘I would have been less surprised if you had acquired a Thai wife. Christ Almighty, the champion of Suriname. We’ll go out for a spin soon.’
‘Definitely,’ he replied. ‘With Joost and André along. Team ride. Ordered a Rapha jersey. Do you know it? Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Merino wool. And a silk bandana. If I’m going cycling, of course I want to look well groomed. That’s what they call it, isn’t it?’
I forward the email exchange to Joost and André.
I went into the Italian restaurant on the Houtmarkt, where David eats three times a week. He is a man of fixed habits; I didn’t have to look for where he was sitting. He was wearing a light-blue shirt, which combined elegantly with a pair of black trousers and shoes that looked as if they were woven. David orders his shirts from Italy, as well as his handmade shoes. He even travelled especially to Italy to have himself measured to the millimetre, one of the few foreign trips he has made in the last few decades.
‘Bart!’ He got up to shake hands and thump me on the shoulders. ‘Bart, man! A great pleasure to see you here again. This town is a rootless place when you’re not here. When are you coming back for good? Life would gain enormously in quality! Why don’t you set up here as a writer; that would also be very good for the fame of the town.’
David’s words of welcome were lectures, spoken in an Eastern dialect doused with vague memories of Paramaribo, which he laid on extra thick because he knew that it gave me great pleasure.
‘Friend David!’ I said, true to habit. ‘Cycling legend, in what exclusive eatery do we have the pleasure of dining this evening? Do you come here often?’
‘Only three or four times a week,’ he said, beckoning the waiter. ‘Today happens to be my thousandth visit, so I think we shall be lavishly fêted by the owner, who has made a packet off me.’
He ordered a bottle of white house wine. ‘Stick with what you like, is my motto. What do you think?’
‘You’re right.’
He asked me if I had already read Roland Barthes on the Tour de France. I said I had Mythologies on the to-read pile.
Apart from Anna, David was the only one who knew I was working on a book in which I wanted to link cycling and philosophy. To give it a working title, I called it Spinoza on the Bike. I had already read a lot about Spinoza and his views. I had also tried to work my way through the Ethics, but had unfortunately become bogged