Читать книгу Ventoux - Bert Wagendorp - Страница 18

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VIII

If you walk from the Groenmarkt to the Marspoortstraat in Zutphen, after a couple of hundred metres you reach the river. On the other side are the river floodplains, which flood in winter and sometimes freeze over so that you can skate.

One warm July evening in 1980, David, André, and I were sitting on a low wall on the town side, looking out over the water. Joost was missing, as he’d gone to a summer camp for young astronomers in Drenthe.

We watched the ships sailing past. André checked whether there were any pretty women at the helm. He was talking about a TV series in which a mysterious water gypsy had arrived in her boat at a little village on the river. There, she had initiated a boy into the secrets of love. ‘Could happen here, too,’ he said. ‘She could moor here any day. And I’ll be at the head of the queue.’

I asked what that meant, being initiated into love.

‘Screwing for the first time.’

‘Yes, I get that. But what’s so secret about that?’

‘That’s a secret.’

David was throwing pebbles in the water. For my Dutch exam, I had just read a story about a moped going to sea, and I imagined one zooming over the water from the direction of Kampen, right under the old steel bridge, on the way to the Rhine.

‘Ridiculous,’ said André. He jumped off the wall to go home. At that moment, David pointed downstream. ‘Look at that!’ he shouted.

We saw a huge black shoebox coming our way. The monster towered high above the water, and was being pushed along by a small boat with a long chimney from which came puffs of smoke. It was as if a little yapping dog was snuffling at a black Dobermann with its snout.

André stood up and started waving. The tug ploughed slowly on with its heavy load and shifted course towards the quay. We could see a small man with a large moustache at the helm. Suddenly a hatch opened on the flat roof of the black box. A boy with blond curly hair climbed out. He stood on the roof, like a field marshal following the course of a battle from a hilltop. He raised his hand. To us, or perhaps it was a sign to the man in the tug, who pointed in our direction.

‘Ahoy, steady as she goes!’ shouted André. The boy and the man did not react. It took about another fifteen minutes before the captain managed to manoeuvre his way to the quay. ‘Hey!’ he shouted in our direction. ‘H-h-help us a minute!’

We ran to the quay. The boy was still standing on the roof. The captain, who was wearing overalls covered in oil stains, had climbed from the pushing boat onto the gangway of the black box, and threw a thick rope towards the shore. André, who had been to sailing camp, grabbed the rope and wound it around a bollard.

‘M-m-mind your f-f-fingers,’ shouted the captain. Meanwhile, he had gone aft and jumped ashore with a second rope in his hand. After he had secured it, he came over to us. ‘Thanks a lot, l-l-lads. My name is Seegers, W-w-willem Seegers. And up there on the roof is my s-son Peter.’

‘Hello,’ said Peter.

The tug still puffed out the occasional plume of smoke, as if still panting from the effort. Captain Seegers checked the mooring lines. ‘Otherwise I’ll have to pick it up in K-k-kampen tomorrow. And we’ve just come from there. And they don’t like our kind of b-b-boat there.’ He pointed to a couple of nasty marks on the side of the vessel. ‘Do you see w-w-what I m-m-mean?’

‘Paint and eggs,’ shouted Peter from the roof. Captain Willem started hooting with laughter. He turned a winch, which lowered a gangplank hanging upright against the boat. Next, the door hidden behind the gangplank opened. A woman of about 40 walked ashore down the plank in high heels. She was wearing sunglasses. Captain Willem disappeared inside through the door.

André nudged me and grinned. ‘Here she comes.’

The woman looked around her as if she had just stepped ashore on an island inhabited by savages. I saw that the tug was called Little Red Rooster, while the big box had no name. Meanwhile, some more people had gathered on the quay.

No one said anything. We were all waiting for an explanation from one of the three people on the boat. Captain Willem Seegers reappeared. He had changed his clothes, and now looked like a waiter in a chic restaurant. He had exactly the same kind of bow tie as Karel Giesma. He fixed a sign next to the door. SWEET LADY JANE, it said, and underneath: FLOATING SAUNA, with the opening hours.

‘R-r-right,’ said captain Willem. ‘Th-th-that’s up.’ Peter disappeared inside through the hatch.

A little later we found ourselves in the bar of the Sweet Lady Jane. There were windows on the side of the boat facing the water. There were red curtains in front of them, through which you could see the vague contours of the other side of the river. There was soft pink carpeting on the floor, and a couple of comfortable sofas were placed around gold-coloured side tables. Captain Willem pointed to the woman behind the bar. ‘Madame Olga,’ he said. The woman had kept on her sunglasses and greeted us with a barely perceptible nod. ‘My mother,’ said Peter.

‘What would the gentlemen like to dr-dr-drink?’

‘A beer for me, captain,’ said André.

‘Yes, we’ll have a beer, too,’ I said, pointing to David. We didn’t feel at ease. Madame Olga opened a fridge.

‘You may be thinking: what a funny b-boat this is,’ said Captain Willem, to break the silence. ‘Well, the g-g-girls will be here tomorrow.’

Peter smiled. He was roughly the same age as us.

‘We’ll be moored here for a week or so,’ he said. ‘That’s for publicity. Usually we’re in the paper after about three days. Then everyone knows we’re here, and we move to a spot approved by the council. And then the men come.’

‘The men?’ asked David. ‘Your father said: the women.’

‘Yes. To the brothel.’ Peter’s father stood nodding in assent. ‘Peter has the gift of the g-g-gab. I don’t kn-kn-know who he gets it from. Not from m-me, in any case.’

‘So it’s not a sauna,’ I concluded. André looked at me reproachfully.

‘A kind of sauna,’ said Peter. ‘We’ve got a kind of sweatbox and a Turkish bath.’

‘It’s a sauna for fucking.’ André said it as if that was a generally recognized kind of sauna. Peter’s mother looked angrily at him and put three bottles of beer and glasses on the bar. She now said something for the first time, in a language we couldn’t understand.

‘That’s Russian,’ said Peter. ‘She says it’s the first and last time we shall see you here, as the Sweet Lady is only for men over 21.’

‘Shame,’ said André.

Peter told us that he would be going to school in Zutphen. In Kampen he had been in the fourth year of high school.

‘Great, then you’ll be in our class. At least if you’re coming to Baudartius.’

‘Of course he isn’t,’ declared André. ‘It’s a Christian school.’ Madame Olga nodded to indicate that he was.

‘We have another friend,’ said David, after he had explained to Peter where our school was. ‘Joost. He’s not here at the moment, he’s stargazing on the heath. His father’s a doctor.’

‘A d-doctor,’ cried Captain Willem. ‘We n-need one here for the girls.’ He said something in Russian to his wife, who nodded in agreement.

David grabbed a pen from the bar and wrote something on a beer mat. ‘Perhaps it will be better if you call yourself. This is the number.’

Captain Willem nodded. ‘If you lads will excuse me, then I’ll g-g-get to work for a bit, because everything must b-b-be ready by tomorrow. Peter will stay with you for a bit. He’s a poet. I’m very proud of him.’ Those last words came out without a stutter. For the first time, Peter looked a bit embarrassed. ‘He’s a b-bit ashamed of it, but that’s non-non-nonsense. His poems are won-won-won-derful.’ We looked at Peter.

‘It’s true,’ he said.

Peter had something serene about him. He did not seem to belong in a floating brothel, which, come to that, applied to his father and mother, too. They were more like an extravagant, gallery-owning couple, specializing in Russian art.

When we had finished our beers, Madame Olga gave Peter a nod. He nodded back. On board Sweet Lady Jane, there was a lot of communication with short nods.

We climbed onto the roof.

‘So, tomorrow the whores will arrive,’ said André.

‘The girls,’ said Peter. ‘We never call them whores. It doesn’t sound nice, my father thinks.’

‘How many of them are there, actually?’ asked André.

‘Four.’

‘Are they pretty?’

‘We wouldn’t get any customers if they weren’t.’

André thought for a moment. ‘And do you get a free turn?’

Peter looked at him. Then he started laughing. At first a short hiccup, which turned into longer howls and ended with a regular shaking, as if he had convulsions.

‘Sorry,’ said Peter, when he came to his senses a little. ‘But I thought it was a funny question. No, I’m not allowed any turns at all.’ He threatened to fall into a coma of laughter again.

‘Is that so funny? It’s not all that odd, is it? If your father has a garage, you’re allowed to drive the cars, aren’t you?’

‘Drop by once we have our permanent mooring. If you stand in the wardrobe in my room, you can hear the noises from Cabin 3 with a glass. It’s amusing.’

‘Okay,’ said André. ‘Amusing. You’re on.’ Peter climbed back down, and we followed. ‘Amusing,’ André repeated again.

In the bar, Madame Olga polished the gold tables until they shone. She said something to Peter.

‘She says I must ask if I can be your friend,’ he said, in a tone as if the question, besides being quite normal, was totally superfluous.

‘That’s fine,’ said David. André and I nodded to indicate it really was fine. Peter nodded to his mother. She nodded to Captain Willem, who was standing on some steps, replacing a light bulb above a sofa.

‘I’m v-v-very happy about that. Friendship is the most beautiful thing in the world.’

A week later, Peter joined our class. He was modest and calm, but also had a self-confidence you wouldn’t immediately expect in a boy of 16. It was striking that he got on just as well with the girls as with the boys. The girls behaved as if they had known him for years. Peter was the natural leader who didn’t have to do anything to win and retain his leadership.

And yes, he was a poet. Odd poems, we thought. They were so full of wild leaps and associations. Sometimes they were four lines long, sometimes a hundred. In the bookcase in his room, besides scores of videos, there was also a whole row of poetry collections. He could recite poems by heart, even very long ones. As he stood there declaiming, you could see how he seemed to disappear into another world. How the words and images seemed to take possession of him. Sometimes a look came into his eyes that struck fear into me.

Close friendship is a rainbow. The rational spirit of Joost, the emotional one of André, the romantic one of Peter, and the stoical one of David fit together well. It is always difficult to analyze oneself, but I think I had something of everyone in me. You may find that a lack of a personality on my part, but also the binding force of the modest ego. If they formed the different colours, I was the reverse prism that merged the beams of light.

Peter left the PR for his poetry to us, and to his father, who had asked Hein Broekhuis of the Modern Fashion Store to make copies of Peter’s poems in calligraphy on handmade paper. Calligraphy was Hein’s great hobby, and Peter’s father paid him in kind. Captain Willem framed them nicely and hung them on the wall of the Sweet Lady Jane.

Peter himself was modest about his poems. When he got a letter telling him that work of his was to be included in a literary magazine, he gave it to us to read without saying anything.

‘Congratulations!’ cried Joost. ‘You’re going to be famous, man!’

‘I want a signed copy,’ said André. ‘They’ll be worth a fortune later.’

‘It’s a magazine,’ Peter corrected him, ‘not a collection. That will come later.’

We were proud that such a great poetic talent wanted to be our friend, even though we were not capable of properly judging his talent. ‘That lad over there is Peter Seegers,’ Joost said one evening in the Talk of the Town disco to a guy at least two metres tall, wearing an earring. He pointed in our direction. ‘You know, from the Sweet Lady Jane. He’s a poet. The writer Gerrit Komrij has called him a great talent.’ Joost had had too much to drink.

‘Who?’

‘Gerrit Komrij! Christ, man. Surely you know who Gerrit Komrij is? Comes from these parts, too. When he says you’re a great talent, then you are one. You can be sure of that.’

The guy looked at him with contempt. ‘Get lost man, with your Gerrit complex.’ He stood up and pushed Joost aside. ‘Whore chaser.’

‘Yokels,’ said Joost, when he came back with a tray of beers. ‘Haven’t got a clue about art.’