Amsterdam Stories Read Free Page B

in June.
    For the earth everything was simple enough. It just turned on its axis and followed its course around the sun and had nothing to worry about. But the people on it fretted out their days with troubles and cares and endless worries, as though without these troubles, these cares, and these worries, the day wouldn’t turn into night.
    Japi knew better. The sun went down into the ocean by the Walcheren dunes on its own. But Bavink was in a bad way sometimes.
    Bavink was someone who usually worked hard. People thought he was pretty good. He had a good laugh about that. He didn’t sell anything when he didn’t have to; he put aside his best work and never looked at it again, always dissatisfied. As long as he was working everything went fine, as soon as he stopped he suffered; sometimes he was half dead with fatigue. If people knew how he really saw things, how things gripped him, they would laugh at his bungling, his dismally botched attempts to reproduce that majesty. There were times when Bavink did nothing, just let himself go, neglected everything, looked lazily at everything and thought it was “nice” that things were “so damn beautiful,” as he put it. Times when he felt a pain in his skull thinking about all his futile efforts, his “admirable work.” Admirable work! It made him want to throw up just thinking about it. “Admirable work,” they said. They didn’t know the first thing about it. God obviously hadn’t kicked them around like Bavink.
    He wished he could just give up painting, but that wasn’t so simple either: what’s inside you wants to come out. And so the torture started up again: work, work, work day and night, paint all day and fret all night, stay with it, work through it, worry about whether you’ve really got hold of the things this time. He didn’t sleep or eat much; at the beginning he would smoke an enormous number of cigars, one after the other, but after the first day he stopped doing that too. He had moments of the greatest bliss, a joy that all his languid submersion in that “delicious beauty” couldn’t give him. And then they came to look, this person, that person, they stood behind him in twos and threes and fours and they looked and nodded and pointed. And suddenly it was over. Then he said “Dammit” and went and lay down on his cot and sent someone out for a flask of jenever and he was done. After a few days he put the canvas away with the rest. In the days that followed he was wretched, tired, miserable, numb, and sick, and he started “shuffling around” again, as he put it: doing nothing, loafing, walking around. If he needed money he dragged something out of his “garbage heap,” looked for a “scrap” that “somebody would give something for,” and sold it. Nobody could change his ways—that’s just how he was. His strengths and weaknesses were one. When he sold something, he stuffed the money into his pocket and clinked with guilders and rijksdollars and walked down Kalverstraat whistling a tune. He said a friendly hello and waved happily whenever you ran into him.
    Then he came up and stood next to you and slyly showed you all the “coppers” in his pocket, and laughed out loud, and said, “Can you believe those suckers?” He never accepted paper money: you can’t clink bills in your pocket. He had to have gold and silver, and when it was too much for him to carry he said he’d “come by to get the rest later.”
    That was Bavink. Clearly someone in a constant state of overcoming the body would be thoroughly interesting to him. He could learn something from a man like that. Someone who thought it was fine just to let the wind blow through his hair, let the cold, wet wind soak his clothes and his body, who ran his tongue over his lips because the taste of the ocean was so “goddamn delicious,” who sniffed his