Читать книгу Ventoux - Bert Wagendorp - Страница 14

-

IV

André lived in an apartment complex in South Rotterdam. I parked my car by the water, crossed the road, and walked toward a large glass door. I looked for number 85 and rang the bell. I had traced his address through a lawyer with whom I was friendly and sent him a postcard. On it I had written that I would be at his place on 16 March at 11 o’clock, and he should let me know if that didn’t suit him. I got an email in reply. ‘Bring your bike with you,’ it said. ‘You looked as if you were in training.’

‘Bart!’ cried a familiar voice. ‘Good to see you, man! Same as ever! Didn’t shave this morning, I see,’ There was a buzzing tone. ‘Door’s open. Come right up. Fourth floor. Got your bike with you?’

I didn’t reply, but pushed the door open and went to the elevator.

Of all my old friends, André is the most precious to me. Or perhaps I should say: the memories of André are dearest to me. Our friendship is older than we are. Our mothers were friends because our grannies were already friends. We went about together when our mothers sat opposite each other at table with their big tummies. Once we were born, a week apart, we were immediately an inseparable duo.

I have a photo in which the two of us are sitting in a playpen, two boys of eighteen months, in the same pink knickerbockers and the same white jumpers. ‘November 1965, Bart and André’, my mother has written on the back. We are playing with blocks, me with my left hand, André with his right. We have put our free arms around each other. ‘The two of you sat like that for hours,’ says my mother.

I think friendship is based more on shared experiences than on compatibility or attraction. I share more with André than anyone else.

He gave me a Russian bear hug, long and powerful, kissed me on both cheeks, and beamed at me. He was moved, and I was probably the only person in the world who could spot that.

‘Bart, man, I’m so pleased to see you again.’

‘Me too, André.’

‘Coffee? Cappuccino?’

‘I’d love one.’

The huge room was white. White walls, a floor of white tiles, and a white ceiling. In the middle there was a black Gispen table with six Jacobsen chairs around it. In front of the window with a view of the River Maas stood a large sofa; hanging on the wall was a TV screen of cinema proportions. In two corners were two tall speakers. Apart from that, the room was empty.

André’s father was caretaker at the Baudartius, our secondary school. He had been a renowned amateur cyclist with a powerful finishing sprint. In André’s parental home, the living room was full of lamps, vases, and other knick-knacks that old Gerrit had won in the criteriums of the eastern Netherlands. Perhaps that explained André’s sparse interior.

The emptiness spoke for itself and did not beg to be filled. In that emptiness stood a bike, a splendid racing bike. I walked around it once, I touched the stem and stroked the saddle. It was soft brown, like the tape on the handlebars and a strip on the tubes. The bike itself was white. Gold leaf seemed to have been applied on the down and seat tubes of the triangle of the frame.

‘Wow,’ I said. I saw André smiling contentedly as he came into the room with two cups on a tray.

‘Listen a minute.’ He took a remote off the table and pressed the button. I heard a guitar, and a little later a couple of violins, and then Nick Drake: ‘When the day is done, down to earth then sinks the sun…’

André sang along, in a rather hoarse voice. ‘When the night is cold, some get by but some get old…’

He turned the sound down and shot me a questioning look.

‘Fives Leaves Left.’ He nodded with pleasure. ‘Sjaak’s first LP, 1970, I think.’ Sjaak was his elder brother.

‘When he was out I always played this track, do you remember? I actually wasn’t allowed to touch his turntable. There were all kinds of scratches where I put the needle on, just before “Day is Done”. We were very young, weren’t we? Right away, I thought it was the greatest song I’d ever heard. And I still do. That guitar at the beginning, or those violins. I had no idea what the words were about. I do now.’

I didn’t understand why he was playing the track. ‘What a fabulous bike, André. A bit different from that old Raleigh of your father’s.’

He laughed mysteriously. ‘Pegoretti, hand-built. Dario Pegoretti is his name. I went to Caldonazzo, where he lives. Plays only jazz in his workshop. Love, man, love. I’ve never seen so much love. I just stood and watched and I never wanted to leave.’ Now ‘Day is Done’ sounded through the room in a jazz version. ‘Pegoretti is a jazz freak. I’m standing there and he puts this on, in a version by Brad Mehldau.’ I still didn’t understand.

He put his hand on the saddle. ‘This model is the Pegoretti “Day is Done”.’ He stopped talking and looked out of the window.

‘Do you understand anything about chance, Bart?’

‘There’s no such thing as chance. We call things chance for want of a better explanation. The fact that you go to an Italian cycle-maker and he’s making a bike he names after a song that you played forty years ago until the record wore out only seems to be chance, because we have no idea how such a thing is possible, because we are terrified of admitting that it isn’t chance at all.’

‘You haven’t changed a bit, Bart, you’ve always got an answer. So it isn’t coincidence either that you’re here. It wasn’t coincidence that you were sitting in that court with your notepad.’ He looked serious.

‘It was cool calculation. I thought: I’ve got to see André again. Let’s have a look to see where he might be. Hey, he’s on trial.’

‘They couldn’t touch me, could they? Those guys didn’t stand a chance. Suckers.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ I said.

‘Leave it. I mustn’t talk to you about it. You put it nicely. André T., unproven dealer in pleasure and oblivion. That’s how it is. That’s how it was, I should say. I’m going to do other things. Important things. For myself, that is.’

I looked at him and saw that he did not want to go into details about his new activities. Not now, at any rate.

‘Bart, you old wanker. It’s as if you were here yesterday, with that slow Puch moped of yours. Haha.’

‘I was never the Kreidler type. I’m still not, as a matter of fact.’

He looked at me seriously. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘for all those years of silence. I should have responded, at least to the announcement of your daughter’s birth.’

‘I expect you were busy.’

‘Pretty.’

‘No excuse, bastard.’

‘No.’

‘She’ll be 21 soon.’

‘Yes, well anyway, congratulations on your daughter’s birth.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Do you have a photo with you? I’m interested to see what you’ve produced.’

It happened by itself, he said a little later. ‘People always want to know how it could have reached that point, how you wind up in the wrong world. The answer is simple: step by step. You scarcely realize that you’re going irrevocably in a certain direction. Just like people who have the same office jobs all their lives. How did it happen to them?’

‘If you ask me, you were already involved when I got married. With your Porsche and your Mandy.’

‘That’s right. It didn’t work out with Mandy.’

‘And how did it happen?’

‘You say to yourself: this is easy money and I obviously have a talent for it. Let’s carry on with it.’

‘No pangs of conscience?’

‘Pangs of conscience are like muscle ache. You massage them away.’

He made a movement with his hand. Enough of this. He took me by the arm. ‘Glad you’re back, Bart, really glad. Come and have a look.’ He walked over to a work of art that consisted of scores of seemingly identical images of a racing cyclist on a cycle track, just before the finish line. If you looked closely, the photos were all different.

‘Attack on World Hour Record by Tony Rominger, Bordeaux, 5-11-1994’, it said underneath. ‘Tom Koster,’ said André, ‘graphic designer, great bloke. He died four years ago. I bought work from him regularly. Running, cycling, skating. One day he realizes: I can’t make any headway, what’s wrong with me? He goes to the doctor and the doctor says: Tom, my friend, you’ve got lung cancer. Nothing they could do. Lived another eleven months. Sold all his paintings to pay for the funeral and that was that. He’d just bought a new bike, shame. Was always concerned with time and suddenly time was up.’

I looked at the photos and tried to see the differences.

‘Stasis is movement,’ said André. ‘Movement is stasis. We all do our best, we all try to improve on our own world endurance record, and what’s the result?’ He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Rominger’s world endurance time was scrapped from the record books,’ I said. ‘Because of his bike, I think. Or because he established it in the EPO period. Whatever the case, all for nothing.’

‘The most beautiful thing he left was this work,’ said André, ‘except that Rominger doesn’t know about it. I should call him. It might be a consolation.’

Someone came into the room. I turned around and thought I was going crazy. She shook hands with me and introduced herself, but I was momentarily lost for words.

‘This is Bart,’ said André. He pretended not to notice my astonishment. ‘I told you about him. Bart Hoffman, Dustin’s second cousin.’

‘Bart!’ said the woman. ‘André has told me a lot about you. I’m glad to meet you at last.’ She had an English accent.

‘Ludmilla,’ said André. ‘Tolstoy. You’re looking at the genes of War and Peace.’

‘Stop it, André,’ said Ludmilla.

I was speechless. Laura. André had found her again, in Russia, in England, Rotterdam, or God knows where. Perhaps he’d had her copied by a friendly plastic surgeon from his coke customer book.

It was Laura aged 35. She ran her hand through her hair in exactly the same way and had the same look in her eyes, that look halfway between embarrassment and challenge.

Ludmilla said she was popping into town. ‘See you later,’ she said. ‘I assume you’ll be staying for dinner.’

‘That’s right,’ said André, when she had gone. ‘I thought at first that I was having visions. But it was real. Look not and ye shall find. Once you start looking, you lose.’

I got my Pinarello out of the car and put the front wheel on. André was waiting on his Pegoretti, with one leg on the ground. He was wearing a red-and-black jersey of the Amore & Vita team. On the chest was the big M of McDonald’s.

I set the kilometre counter to zero and got on. We had to cross the Maas; we were going to do André’s training circuit, a ‘River Rotte run.’

‘You’re sponsored by the pope,’ I said.

‘Yes, I spread the Holy Word. No abortion, no euthanasia, just love and hamburgers. Got it from Ludmilla. Little moralist.’

After a kilometre we reached the Erasmus Bridge. ‘This is my mountain stage,’ said André. ‘When I feel like it I charge up and down it ten times. On the outer section, good for power.’

‘You’re taking it seriously.’

‘I live like a monk. No drink, no nicotine, no drugs. I stand on my head for an hour a day. Yoga. Rest, purity, regularity, that’s my motto now. And lots of cycling, to keep the head clear. Looking back, I think it’s a shame I didn’t ride out with you back then.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When you came and asked if I would come and race, don’t you remember? I was lying on the sofa with a comic. Maybe I could have built up a nice career in cycle racing. I had the genes. And I was mean enough.’

He stood up on the pedals and rode ahead of me. I looked out over the river. Nice escape, coke dealer at the front, crime journalist on his wheel. We rode through the city, until we reached the Rotte and turned north-east along the river.

I asked when he had started cycling.

‘About a year ago. On my old man’s Raleigh. Part of my inheritance, you could say. Had it done up and rode it until last month. Cycling with my dead father, that feeling. Had long conversations. Good conversations. Of course, he didn’t think what I was doing would amount to anything. I’ll tell you another time.’ He paused for a moment. ‘That bike is bewitched.’

‘I know that. I sometimes think that with every cyclist you come across, there’s an invisible peloton riding along with him.’

‘Recently I had the feeling that we’d finished. That I had more or less told him everything. Then I thought: time for something new. That Raleigh was made in 1977, so it was about time. And I thought it was rather a weird idea, that bike. That’s not that odd, is it?’

‘No. I wouldn’t want to ride one metre on it.’

We came to a white drawbridge. We crossed, after which we headed for town again along the other bank of the Rotte. On the Crooswijk bend, André cycled alongside me and put his arm on my shoulder. Then he stood up and pulled away from me. A little further on he sat up and stuck his arms in the air.

I was happy, too.

I clumped into the room in my cycling shoes. André gave me a towel and showed me where the bathroom was. The floor was covered in black marble. When I looked more closely at the dark-red tiles with hieroglyphic motifs on the walls, I saw little Egyptian figures on racing bikes.

Ludmilla Laura had prepared a Russian speciality, something with ground beef and cabbage. We ate in silence.

‘What did you think,’ asked André, ‘when you saw me in court? What a bastard?’

‘I’ve passed that stage.’

‘I wouldn’t have blamed you for thinking that. I was a bastard. And I enjoyed it.’

‘You don’t have to defend yourself.’

He smiled and took a second helping.

‘I was a sophisticated trader, make no mistake about it.’ He said ‘trader’, not ‘dealer’. ‘I saw politicians on TV pretending to be squeaky clean, though I had delivered a fresh supply to them the day before. Well-known names from TV, captains of industry, bankers. Oh, Bart, do I have to tell you that? You’re a journalist, aren’t you? Why do you think I got away with it?’

I said nothing.

‘Exactly. Your father used to say to us that what you knew was power, and he was quite right. And who you know is even more power.’

‘And now?’

‘Now it’s finished. My name has been in the paper, I’m tainted. All I can do is descend to regular trade, and I don’t want to do that. That would make it vulgar. Anyway, I don’t need to anymore. Actually I was glad I had to draw a line.’

‘What are going to do, then?’

‘Maybe something with vintage cars. Old Peugeots and Citroëns. I’ve got four of them in a shed outside of town. I tinker about a bit. Sit in them. You can smell the past in cars, did you know that? I’ve got a 1968 DS that I swear you can smell our nursery school in.’

‘Yum yum.’

‘And I read books about medieval poetry and philosophy. I go to auctions of incunabula. Do you know what they are? Do you remember, the library of the Walburgiskerk, with those books on chains? We went once a year with the class. I thought it was fascinating even then.’

‘André, bullshit. You were always tugging at those chains. You drove those people nuts.’

He laughed. ‘That was being a tough guy. Come with me.’ In his study was a classic English desk. Along three walls stood bookshelves that were filling up nicely. On the fourth hung a photo of the six of us on the summit of Mont Ventoux. He went over to the photo and pointed at Peter. ‘He has been marked out, but he doesn’t yet know it. To paraphrase Death in the poem: ‘That on Ventoux I saw the man / I must fetch at night in Isfahan.’

‘Carpentras.’

‘Doesn’t rhyme.’

I touched Peter’s face with my finger.