Free Amsterdam Stories by Nescio

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 I 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