Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

‘Hurry up a little, damn it.’

My arm holding the suitcase is on fire. At the locks in the distance there are no children to be seen. Breaths of wind rustle in the poplars’ crowns, the world is keeping its head down in the motionless afternoon heat. Only when we get to the locks does she let go of my hand. We stop. There are plucks of sweaty hair at the back of her neck, transparent spots of perspiration shine through the body of her dress. There is little left of the stately rage with which she stamped out of the farmhouse. Melted. Now she is hopping on one foot, taking off a slip-on pump. Then the other one. She reaches around behind her and gropes until she finds the zipper. In one fluid motion she bares her back. It’s impossible to imagine deep red blood pulsing beneath that smooth, marble-white skin, to imagine her consisting of anything but gleaming skin. She gives a little shrug, the dress slips off. It’s as though she’s stepped out of the shadow. Snowy white underthings. She unhooks her bra. Across the skin on her back and shoulders a pattern of stripes. Crouching down a little she descends the sandy bank step by step, until the slope becomes too steep, then she straightens up and dives into the water. She re-emerges, she laughs, pushes the hair back out of her eyes.

‘It’s lovely! Come on in, Ludwig!’

Not me. What if the children show up? She rolls onto her stomach and swims to the far side in a few strokes. A car is approaching in the distance, Uncle Gerard’s orange Opel. He stops at the locks. She swims back over and climbs up the bank. Uncle Gerard stands nailed to the spot, he forgets to reach out and give her a hand.

‘Hello, Gerard,’ she says.

She stands in the road, tilts her head to one side and wrings the water out of her hair. His eyes follow the lines of her body like a hand that caresses. (Only much later, in the Uffizi, did I see what Uncle Gerard saw that day at the locks: Botticelli’s Venus, born of sea and foam, never in his life has he seen anything lovelier along that canal. I look at the poor man, his reddened face, his eyes flashing hunger and shame — so much and all at the same time, for the first time I catch sight of how complicated these things are.) She asks why he’s come. He tears his eyes off of her and looks back in the direction he came from.

‘Wanted to give you two a lift to the station.’

My mother slips her arms through the straps of her bra and fastens it. She steps into her dress and turns her back on Uncle Gerard. Looking back over her shoulder she asks, ‘Would you?’

He holds his arms out as though to keep her at a distance. His rough fingers pull up the zipper.

‘Thank you.’

She takes off her wet panties and stuffs them into the suitcase. Uncle Gerard puts our suitcases in the trunk, we drive to Groningen in silence.

‘Where are you two headed?’ he asks before we get to the station.

‘To England,’ I say quickly from the backseat.

My mother nods.

‘Too bad,’ she says, ‘it had to go like this.’

‘Yup,’ he says.

She climbs out, he takes the suitcases from the trunk. He waves to us as we walk away. My mother doesn’t look back. But I do.

It was winter and we were standing in a low-ceilinged living room. The living-room window looked out on the sea. On the horizon were ships that seemed to be standing still, but had advanced undeniably whenever you took another look.

‘The view, that’s the great plus,’ the owner was saying. ‘You live here, as it were, in your view.’

Rabbits darted out from beneath the gorse, there was a whole maze of holes in there.

‘And of course it’s not winter all the time,’ he said.

Hanging beside my ear was a mummified spider on a thread; whenever I moved it spun in the current of air. The man hadn’t done much to make the house presentable. We heard the murmur of the waves and something else, above our heads, quiet and persistent. An endless gnawing. My mother peered up at the dark beams.

‘Little holes,’ she said after a moment.

The man looked as well, and said, ‘Woodworm.’

He ran the flat of his hand over a sideboard.

‘They eat everything,’ he said. ‘Little bastards.’

He dusted off his hands. Thousands of tiny jaws, grinding the woodwork to fine powder.

‘I’ll have to get around to treating the whole thing.’

‘It seems like a lovely house, for the two of us,’ my mother said.

The man shook his head.

‘One problem,’ he said.

We looked at him.

‘Erosion.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘The whole thing’s slowly sinking away.’

He pointed outside, at the edge of the cliff.

‘With every storm we lose a little bit more. The politicians aren’t doing a thing, neither is the district council.’

‘I don’t understand,’ my mother said.

‘Two or three meters a year. All my land, all gone.’

‘So don’t buy it, is that what you’re saying?’

‘Ah!’

He raised his index finger and said we should follow him. We went outside. A surreal amount of rubbish was piled up around the house. Someone who couldn’t throw away a thing, who even saw an ice-cream truck in an old dairy van, with a few modifications here and there. That draughty dairy van, faded to old ivory, was the biggest of the objects that had ground to a halt there. For the rest it was cement mixers, rails, crossties, building materials. A hill of petrified sacks of cement and the overgrown remains of what looked like a crane.

‘It’s all going out,’ he said.

He waved his hand casually, as though those tons of scrap iron could be carried off by a magician’s sleight of hand. Amid the thorns and the old iron was a kind of goat path which took us to the edge of the cliff. My mother’s mantilla caught in the thorns, the bushes were taller than I was. Then, before us, opened the panorama of sea and sky.

‘Look,’ the man said.

My mother’s hand was resting on my shoulder; we peered over the edge, down where he was pointing.

‘I’m making a wall,’ he said. ‘To stop the sea.’

In the distance, a low, dark barrier had been thrown up against the foot of the cliff.

‘What the sea washes away during a storm, I put back the next day. If I didn’t, we’d soon be standing in the water here.’

He was talking to the horizon.

‘Not a meter of the cliff gets lost down there anymore. A soft seawall, made of building debris. A closed system.’

‘But. .’ my mother said.

She pointed to where his wall stopped, a few hundred meters to our right.

‘On its way,’ the man said. ‘By next winter, I’ll be here.’

He pointed to the spot below our feet.

‘Once the foundation’s been laid, it’s just a matter of keeping it filled. Every year I lose thirty-five to fifty tons of material. On a good day I can have a thousand tons added. At a pace of forty to fifty truck-loads a day. In two years, once the wall’s reached the northern end of the cliff, all I’ll have to do is keep it up.’

A utopian. It was seductive to listen to. We stepped back from the edge. The house was about fifteen meters from the cliff.

‘It’s lovely here,’ my mother said. ‘Does it all belong to you?’

He nodded.

‘And you really want to sell this?’

‘None of the children are using it. An empty house is an unpleasant thing to look out on, that’s what the wife and I think.’

His house was located back behind ours, further inland. It had white plastered walls and a pointed roof that stuck up above mountains of scrap and the wild growth of thorn bushes. The houses were thirty meters apart. He would be our neighbor. If he and his wife were nice, a path would be worn through the bushes; if they turned out to be bastards I knew my mother would start thinking about a fence. She was quite solitary, I had never seen her try her hardest to make contact with others. Vast towers of cloud parted, sunlight came gushing between them. We looked at the house.