Free The Ice-Cream Makers by Ernest Van der Kwast

Dutch ice-cream makers came from Vodo or Venas, from the Cadore Valley. They looked down on the Tuscans, who had originally sold figurines but now made a living selling ice. The Tuscans were seen as copycats, their ice of inferior quality, at least by the ice-cream purveyors from Cadore.
    â€˜They offered you a job to get their hands on our recipes! They’re thieves.’
    â€˜I’m not preparing ice, I’m scooping it.’
    â€˜Are you selling sandwiches too?’ my father asked disparagingly.
    Tofani’s sold sandwiches as well as ice-cream. In fact, the family had a second ice-cream parlour in Amsterdam that served chips too. In my father’s view there was nothing worse than an ice-cream parlour that reeked like a chip shop.
    â€˜Whatever next?’ he once asked at the dinner table as he railed against the Tuscans. ‘Soft serve?’
    I wasn’t working for the enemy. I was working for barbarians.
    Luca no longer talked to me. Whenever I was in the ice-cream parlour, he pretended not to see me, or he refused to leave the kitchen, where the ice-cream was made. Since I wasn’t working, he had to work. He wanted me to see it, to feel it.
    Only my mother enquired after my studies and wanted to know what Tofani’s ice-cream was really like.
    â€˜Their fruit flavours aren’t as good as ours,’ I told her, ‘but they’ve got ice-cream made of pine kernels that is irresistible.’
    My degree was everything I expected it to be. All my classes were taught in English. In lectures, the academics showed the same dedication to their subject as Heiman; in seminars, we discussed literary texts in small groups — The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus , Shakespeare’s sonnets. It made you feel like an aristocrat from the Elizabethan age. You ended up talking like one, too. All flowery and posh. It wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Some students dropped out after a month, switching to another degree.
    I spent most of my time in the library, where I read the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, the first great English poet. The Canterbury Tales , Troilus and Criseyde . It was indeed a choice for a different life; there was the same silence that surrounds monks, except it came accompanied by young women burying their noses in heavy tomes. Sitting across from me on one occasion was a girl reading Shakespeare’s tragedies. The bard had written the greatest and most powerful within the space of just a few years: Othello , Hamlet , King Lear , Macbeth . Heiman reckoned these were his best plays. They were tragedies that cut through the soul, but without the frills and the plethora of confusing names you find in history plays such as Richard III . Shakespeare had followed Macbeth with a couple of romances, but none of them achieved the depth of his best work.
    The girl had blonde hair and a snub nose and came from a village in Brabant called Wouw. When she woke up the following morning, she said: ‘Gosh, you move a lot in your sleep.’
    â€˜I dreamed about what we did.’
    She rubbed her eyes and yawned. It made her look innocent, extremely young. Or maybe it was the snub nose that did it, the freckles on the slightly turned-up tip. She turned into a little girl when she stretched.
    I hadn’t been allowed to make any noise. Her housemate was already in bed and the walls were like cardboard. She had taken me home after we’d had wine in a café — glasses to begin with, and then a whole bottle. The plan had been to go for a meal, but by the end of the evening the wine had driven away the hunger. A different hunger had taken its place.
    â€˜You pedal,’ she had said.
    I didn’t have a bike in Amsterdam at the time and used to go everywhere on foot. But now I was invited to mount an old-style granny bike that had been painted yellow, with a girl on the back, her legs dangling down the left-hand side. The headlights of