Janwillem De Wetering - Tumbleweed

"Where did they go?" his wife asked, tucking some socks into a corner of the suitcase.

"We must have murdered them. Or the Spanish did."

"Ah," his wife said.

"A land of grasshoppers and prophets," the commissaris read aloud. "I wonder what that means." He looked at his wife but she had stopped listening.

He was looking at the cunucu now, a dry brownish veld stretching on for miles, and he was pressing his nose against the little window. The thorned bushes and pale green cactus trees seemed thrown about haphazardly. A dreary land, but then he looked at the coastline and changed his mind. The sea was breaking against rough cliffs, sending up rhythmical spray in high sparkling waves, sundrenched curtains, transparent and cool. "Lovely," the commissaris thought, rubbing his dry hands. "I must go out there. I'll hire a car and go by myself."

He saw the road, a narrow strip of tar, following the coastline. There were a few cars. The plane was low now and the view very clear. He saw an old Negro riding a donkey. He also saw the airport and a row of old-fashioned planes, bombers which he remembered having seen during the war. He recognized the Dutch markings on their gray sides. Dutch bombers on an island in the Caribbean. He shook his head. But he was still excited. There would be much to see, much to think about later, when he would be back in his garden in Amsterdam fighting the pain in his legs. Then he noticed that the pain had stopped. There was no pain at all, not even the slight twinge vibrating in his bones which had never left him during the last five years. The discovery stunned him. No pain. He saw himself living on this island, in a cottage, or even in an adobe hut like the one he had just seen on the cunucu. He would sit in the shadow of a tree and smoke a cigar and there would be no pain. But then the twinge returned and he shrugged.

"Silva," the big man with the suntanned face said as he carefully shook the commissaris' hand. "We are honored. It has been a long time since I welcomed a Dutch police officer. Did you have a good flight?"

The commissaris smiled and mumbled a polite phrase. They were standing at the bar of the airport.

"Jenever?" Silva asked. "Or rum? Rum is the drink here."

"Do you make rum in ?"

"Two daiquiris," Silva said to the barman. "No," he said, "we don't make anything here. The rum comes from Jamaica, packed in drums, rum jelly. We mix it with water in a little factory somewhere. Your health!"

They drank and the commissaris smacked his lips. The iced rum cocktail went down well. The twinge in his legs had gone again. He wondered if he should tell Silva about it; he suddenly felt very friendly.

"Silva," he said, "that's a Portuguese name, isn't it?"

Silva nodded. "Yes. There are many Portuguese names on the island, and Spanish, and English. But I am Dutch. I was born here but I studied in Holland and I came back. Most of us don't come back "

"You like your island," the commissaris said "

Yes. I love the island. It's nothing but a dry rock, of course."

The commissaris sipped his rum and studied the tall healthy-looking man, trying vainly to place him, but none of the general information his brain stored would fit. It seemed as if he belonged to a different species of man, in spite of the blue eyes and the dark brown hair. He had seen healthy suntanned men with blue eyes and dark brown hair before. A policeman, definitely. That much was clear. He would have recognized him as a policeman anywhere but when he tried to find out what, in particular, made Silva a policeman, he was groping again. Well, he would find out later.

"A dry rock?" he asked. "But you have beaches, surely, and the sea is all around."

"The sea is there," Silva said. "It's always there, nibbling at our foundation. The rock is mushroom-shaped, standing on a slim stem and the sea keeps on eating it away. One day the stem will break and we will all go down. But the rock itself is bare. It supports some hotels, and the refineries, and the tourists and the oilmen spend their money here and meanwhile we sit around and drink a little, and gamble a little, and gossip about each other and tomorrow is another day."

The commissaris laughed. "That sounds all right."

Silva's face lit up and he touched the commissaris lightly on the forearm. "I thought you Dutchmen didn't like idlers."

"We do, if we are honest enough to admit it. But you are Dutch yourself, you say."

"Island Dutch; it's a different brand."

A constable brought the commissaris' suitcase and the commissaris stared at the blue uniform. Silva noticed the stare.

"You recognize the uniform?"

"It's identical," the commissaris said, amazed, "exactly the same. Our uniform. I thought you would wear khaki and shorts and leather straps."

"I have one like it at home," Silva said.

"So have I," the commissaris said, still amazed.

But the landscape they were seeing from the car had nothing to do with the green pastures of Holland. The low barren hills hid the horizon; some tiny little black boys tended a small herd of goats. "We call them cabryts," Silva said. "Their milk tastes good and the cheese is even better, if you can acquire the taste. Cow's milk is expensive, a macamba's drink."

"Macamba?"

"A Macamba is a Dutchman, a Holland-born Dutchman who doesn't speak the local language, Papiamiento, a mixture of many languages."

"I am a macamba," the commissaris said. "I didn't know."

The constable laughed. "Macamba is a bad word, sir," he said.

"An insult?"

"Yes," Silva said. "The true Dutch aren't very popular. They make all the money."

"But you are accepted?"

"I am from the island," Silva said, "born and bred. I was brought up with cabryt milk and rum, I speak the language. I understand the poor people of the island. If I didn't I would never solve a single crime."

"Do they keep you busy?"

"No, not really. The island is small, one hundred and forty thousand people on three hundred square miles, everybody knows everything. Some fighting and thieving and that's it, but the island is dangerous. There's always a chance of explosion. Too much poverty, too little security and a mixture of races. Once the island was the center of the slave trade. Nobody has forgotten."

"I see," the commissaris said. He was wondering what the island would have been like when the first Spanish vessel sighted its coast. According to his books it would have been covered with trees. "It's us," the commissaris thought. "We are the curse of the planet; the earth would still be beautiful if there had never been any people."

They were in town now, entering Willemstad from the north. The town looked neat, with villas and gardens. Some of the houses were seventeenth-century Dutch in style but the colors differed. The commissaris had never seen a pink, or a yellow, or a palish-green gable house before. "Lovely town," he said, and obviously meant the compliment and Silva smiled and touched the commissaris' forearm again. "Good thing de Gier isn't here," the commissaris thought. "Just the sort of thing he would immediately try to imitate," but he didn't mind. He still felt friendly.

"I am taking you to a hotel close to my office, in Punda, on the other side of the harbor. You can have a bath and rest a little, and have a meal perhaps, and I'll meet you later this evening or tomorrow morning, if you like."

The commissaris closed the door behind the fat smiling black man who had taken his suitcase up and brought a tray with a large glass of orange juice and a pot of coffee. He had the world to himself now, until the next morning, when he would see Silva at the police station. There was no need to do anything about the case tonight. He was planning to stay several days anyway, on this mysterious island which would have to be the culmination of all his imaginary travels through books. He was, he thought-as he looked out of the window at the lamplit quay where, through the passing cars, he could see the silhouettes of schooners moored in an orderly row-very far from his ordinary routine. He had, wondering whether the thought was too far-fetched, died and he was born again. This island, this naked rock as Silva had said, this rock surrounded by a tropical sea could in no way be compared to the moist fertile bog covered and protected by low gray clouds which had frustrated, but also sheltered, his mind for more than sixty years. He felt, as he drank his orange juice, close to the origin of all that had mystified his wish to know, close to the terrible secret. He smiled, and rubbed his legs, which still didn't hurt. Terrible, no doubt. The secret of life, which he had never solved, and probably never would solve, would have to be terrible. But he didn't feel frightened.