The Ice-Cream Makers (16 page)

‘What's up?' she asked.

‘Nothing.'

‘Something is, I can see it.'

‘I think you're amazing.'

Her bra came off; she did it herself. Such beauty.

At first I only touched them with my fingertips; it felt almost sacrilegious.

She said something vulgar, but very softly. I could barely make it out. Or had I misheard? I grabbed hold of her breasts and brought my mouth to her nipple.

She no longer put up any resistance, but gave my hands free rein. I rolled her tights down her legs. Her knickers were soaking wet and smelled of her. She kissed me feverishly. Her fingers enveloped my prick.

‘Would you like to go in my mouth?'

She started off tentatively, only the tip at first, but when I was almost completely inside her she let me put my hands on her head and determine the rhythm.

I made her move faster.

It was too much. I closed my eyes.

She must have realised, because suddenly she stopped. ‘You mustn't come,' she said. ‘Not yet.'

And then, ‘Fuck me.'

I slid in seamlessly, a canoe cutting through water. She had moved onto her stomach, but raised herself up at one point. Leaning on the palms of her hands, she looked back at me. I saw the fine lines around her eyes, which deepened the more she exerted herself. She moved her buttocks, her entire divine backside.

‘Keep going,' she urged me.

I didn't share this last bit, nor do I remember where exactly I broke off the story. Would Sophia figure out what had happened next? Luca had drained his glass by now. He looked over to the barman, who was eager to go home too.

‘I wish I could quit,' Sophia sighed as we walked under the dazzling December sky.

She worked in admin at her father's glasses factory. The days were monotonous, the same people and the same work every day. They were at odds with her joy, the joy of the girl who continued to catch snowflakes, who could touch the tip of her nose with her tongue. Although she had grown older, she was still extremely young, and more beautiful than her mother had ever been. Gracious and innocent. With eyes that showed no fear.

‘Why don't you tell me what's on your mind?' I said to my brother, who was still pretending to be asleep. He gave me no answer. It wasn't hard to guess, of course.

He was to become more and more like his father. It had started with a thumb, and this would be followed by the physical ailments, the twinges in his back, the pain in his knees. He would develop a more pronounced stoop and take an increasingly bitter view of the world around him — the world that had betrayed him, that had denied him his chance of immortality. And finally, he would start hating the woman he had once loved so much.

I wondered if Sophia had enquired after me at all, whether she had missed me, perhaps.

‘Have you kissed her?'

Still no response.

‘Well?'

My brother turned over in bed.

‘Sleep well.' I counted to twenty. ‘I said, “Sleep well.”'

‘I heard you.'

In Amsterdam I worked with poets on their manuscripts. I discussed their work with them in my office at the publishing company. All I had to do with the most talented writers was point out a lesser poem, one dodgy oyster in a big heap. We spoke about words, their meaning, the stress on particular syllables, their sound. These were conversations nobody else was having. It was like looking at language through a microscope. Then there were poems I had pored over for hours and still couldn't figure out. When I took it up with the poet, they usually offered a faltering clarification that shed some light on the mystery. But sometimes it only deepened.

‘I don't really understand it myself,' a female poet told me once.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean, I don't understand the poem myself. Or perhaps I ought to say I only partially understand it.'

I looked at her. She was dead serious.

‘It's like a dream,' she said after some time.

I remembered a conversation with Heiman about T.S. Eliot, who once said, ‘I write my poetry under a kind of divine inspiration so that often I myself don't understand what it means.' According to Heiman, this amazing statement touched on the very essence of poetry. Unlike prose, poetry required patience. It didn't take the reader's comprehension into account. In fact, sometimes it seemed as if a poem couldn't care less about a reader. ‘A novel speaks to you,' Heiman said. ‘The writer tells a story. A poet talks to himself.' Obviously, some poetry strikes an immediate chord, like an arrow into your heart, but equally it can take a while before you get it. There were no rules, there was no recipe. Poetry could overwhelm, touch, comfort, weigh on you or be absolutely weightless. And much more besides. Incomprehensible poetry could be brilliant poetry.

In summer, with the sash window open, fresh air would blow into the office along with the sounds of the canal. You could hear women laughing. If you went over to the window, you would see them sitting on the stern of a small boat. They invariably had long, blonde hair and bare shoulders. Their beauty was reflected in the water. The world was a mirror; everybody told them how beautiful they were. They sailed past, brimming with confidence. This was their time. These weren't the women in the smoky cafés — these were unapproachable women, women who were already taken or destined to marry a rich lawyer or the heir of a family with a double-barrelled name.

It would be many years before you got to know them. By now they were well into their forties, still blonde, but no longer naturally so, and with long, horizontal creases in their foreheads. Their husbands were older, their children had moved out. Some had bought themselves a dog, a fox terrier or a dachshund, and would walk it in the woods on the outskirts of Amsterdam every day. Others wanted more. They reckoned it was their turn now. They had raised the children while their husband had pursued a career. You would see them at readings. They wore expensive shoes, their legs still shapely, as though they had been embalmed rather than clad in shimmering nylon. Some wore corsets. Maybe they had been keen readers when younger, or they had once been in love with a book, a novel they had devoured in their girlhood bedroom. At any rate, literature was a favourite hobby now. Many of them had never been to university, or else they hadn't finished their degree, but people who read books radiate the same erudition as a graduate. Or at least that's what they thought, what they believed.

One of these women was Joan Foks. She wasn't married, nor did she wear a corset, but she did belong to the circle of affluent reading women. Her husband, a renowned orthopaedist, had died unexpectedly. She had been divine when I was still only a toddler, but she appeared before me with a broken capillary in her face. It hadn't happened right there and then, but a couple of months earlier. Age had come like a thief in the night.

Robert Berendsen had invited her to dinner at his house, along with five other guests. His wife had cooked, four courses; she had started in the morning. In daily life she was a partner at a prominent maritime law firm, but she knew all the major authors on the list personally. She cared deeply about the publishing company and would read the occasional manuscript when her husband asked her to. Unlike many women in her social milieu, she was independent, and people envied her for her intelligence and dress sense.

I was the only guest who hadn't been round before. Robert introduced me as a professor of poetry. ‘He knows almost as much as I do,' he added.

He had met Joan Foks at a performance of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. His wife had been ill and she was on her own, since she enjoyed going to the theatre but never phoned anyone. They got talking during the interval. Despite being behind him in the queue for the bar, she had been served first.

‘
C'est la vie
,' had been her response when he commented on it.

‘You might have bought me a drink too.'

‘I never buy men drinks.'

It was a joke, albeit one with a grain of truth. ‘Beautifully staged,' Joan said in an effort to steer the conversation in another direction.

A proud Robert Berendsen had told her that both the translation and the adaptation had been done by a poet from his list. And so it happened that the following day she climbed the steps to his office. Her heels had echoed through the building.

During their lunch, Robert listened to stories about her life. Her husband had become unwell in a restaurant. He thought it was the bisque when in fact it was his heart. He collapsed, surrounded by white tablecloths and people in evening wear. She would never forget the woman who carried on eating. ‘She kept bringing her fork to her mouth,' she said. ‘Fair play to her, the food was amazing.'

He smiled. She was wearing an all-but-transparent silk shirt. Her nose was dead straight, like that of the Venus in Villa Borghese, the marble statue Canova had made of Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister.

She had been to Rome several times and was familiar with the statue.

‘Am I the first to note the resemblance?'

She didn't answer; that is to say, she didn't address it directly. ‘The question is whether she posed nude.'

‘What do you think?'

‘She told everyone it was warm enough in the artist's studio.'

‘That doesn't sound innocent.'

‘She was a promiscuous woman. Canova wanted to immortalise her as the goddess Diana, but Pauline insisted on being portrayed as Venus Victrix, with the golden apple in her hand.'

The wooden base contained a rotating mechanism so visitors could view the statue from every possible direction by candlelight in the evening. Canova had treated the marble's surface with wax so it acquired a certain sheen.

‘The story goes that Pauline came to regret it,' Joan said, ‘and that she asked her husband to remove the statue. He granted the request and had the statue stored in a wooden chest.'

‘Shame,' was all Robert said, his thoughts on the statue's skin illuminated by candlelight.

Joan herself had never cheated on her husband. She knew of at least four cases of adultery in her social circle — that's to say, of at least four women with lovers. She didn't approve. If you married, you made a promise. If you were unable to keep that promise, or didn't really believe in it, you shouldn't have got married in the first place. But perhaps that was easy for her to say. She had married late, and prior to that there had been many men. Which is not to say that she was uncomplicated. She did have certain standards, criteria.

Her husband's suits were still in the wardrobe in the bedroom. All of his shirts, neatly ironed and arranged by colour, were there.

His most romantic gesture was to give her a piano Erik Satie had once played.

‘Do you play an instrument?'

Robert shook his head. As a boy he had played field hockey, and the love of literature had come after this.

She told him that she had started playing the piano at an early age. The teacher made home visits and told her mother that she had never come across such a talented child, and Joan had overheard. It was a golden childhood memory.

‘I was supposed to go to the conservatoire, but something came up. I went abroad instead.'

She fell silent, perhaps thinking it was too early to tell the whole story, her whole life. Suddenly another memory surfaced: her younger self on the quay of a French seaside resort, bent over. An unimaginable girl wringing her hair. A silver ribbon of droplets splashing onto the hot cobbles, all but hissing.

‘Anyway,' she said, ‘that piano was the most beautiful thing I ever received in my life.'

It was the kind of glorious weather that makes you forget your coat in a restaurant. Nothing happened between them, except that they went for lunch again the following day. In fact, it happened so often that people began to notice, and Robert Berendsen had no choice but to invite her home. The three of them had dinner together, which was awkward to begin with, and in fact later that evening in bed his wife remarked, ‘She really is rather beautiful.'

But now she sat at the large table in the living room as a good friend. She looked magnificent, like a woman ten years her junior. The conversation revolved around the work of poets. Not the sacred, the vocation, but the jobs needed to make a living.

‘Joost van den Vondel was a hosiery salesman,' said one of the guests, an editor at another publisher. ‘He had a shop on Warmoesstraat.'

‘Gottfried Benn worked in a mortuary,' said a man who had written several biographies.

‘What kind of poetry does that inspire?'

‘Beautiful, degenerate poetry.'

‘Rimbaud was an arms dealer,' said the young woman who had come along with the editor.

‘But that was after he'd stopped writing poetry.'

‘I didn't know he ever stopped.'

‘At the age of twenty,' Robert told us. ‘He spent the rest of his life travelling. Europe, Indonesia, Africa.'