Duke of Egypt Read online

  He passed Gerard’s farm. He didn’t see the gnarled sign on the oak by the gate. Two wavy lines crossed by a third were at eye level for a horseman. After about a mile came the path. Through a hedge of brilliant green he reached the factory site, where a familiar scene awaited him. A scene that, allowing a margin for time and place, had been the same for as long as he could remember. On one side, the caravans, a muddy field, steps with children on them. On the other, the police.

  It was a wet summer, the summer that Joseph and Lucie met. Rain and more rain makes a camp like that look anything but thriving. But those endless muddy routes lead past plowed fields and orchards, under warm suns, under cool moons, they point where you can stretch your arms out and look into a pair of kindred eyes. How’s your father? How’s your mother? And those dreadful aunts and uncles? The annual fair, the scrapyard, over the centuries you have become adept at a very quick presentation of your person.

  Unfortunately your greatest achievements lie outside world culture. There is the square where the audience loves to listen to a pair of demonic musicians. You stand under a blossoming chestnut tree with a Stradivarius. You are one of the exalted. With a cool head and ironic fingers you play variations on the theme of melancholy, while your eyes flirt. There are people who remember their earlier softness, their true selves, and they can almost feel the tears coming. So be it. Let them enjoy their fit of melancholy, you must be on your way. Fairs. Lions’ cages. There’s not a circus where the lion tamer isn’t one of you. An expert in the dialectics of logic and rapture persuades not only people.

  But on that patch of green next to Smeenk’s factory, little could be achieved with persuasiveness or anything else. The policemen pulled out a document: According to official reports we have received, you have stationed six caravans on this site. Joseph parked, got out, and walked over to the police cars where two of his cousins, Branco and Sanyi, were talking to four policemen. Branco had a letter in his hands which he gave to Joseph with a look that suggested he’d read every word without the slightest problem. Politely, but with no trace of a smile, Joseph greeted the authorities. He explained that he’d requested an interview with the mayor at the town hall. The policemen looked at him stupefied. Then, a shaking of heads.

  “I’m afraid we’ve got our instructions.”

  Joseph flashed an accommodating smile. “With a temporary residence permit...”

  This time the shaking of heads was accompanied by a flicking gesture toward the letter in his hand, as if a mosquito had to be shooed away.

  But Joseph knew that an order did not apply until it had reached the eyes or ears.

  “This place is suitable,” he said calmly. “We can work, no problem. We’re basket weavers, car mechanics, grinders, fortune-tellers, musicians, horse trainers, horse buyers, chair caners, traders in fancy goods, dealers in accessories, dealers in carpets, blacksmiths, and acrobats.”

  He spat out the rest of his cigarette. His pride, round and gleaming, hung among the last raindrops falling from the poplars.

  “We have money.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Still energetically acting as family spokesman, he turned to the policeman who, from his insignia, was the highest in rank. “Can I have a word with you in private?”

  Under the canopy of one of the caravans he assumed a soulful expression and told the officer in lengthy sentences that the health of an old man in their company was deteriorating daily. As he talked his eyes wandered from the purple- tinged sky to the caravan where Nikolaus, a cousin of his father’s, lived. Old, he said, sick. He gave the authorities no further information, and that should have been sufficient. “Old and sick” should be enough to grant a man who, like any other, had wanted to be the hub of his own little universe, yet who all his life had been pestered by people in various uniforms, bothered for papers, for passport photographs, for fingerprints, for stamps and numbers, including the one searing number that had been stamped on his arm permanently — to grant such a man a short respite at the end of his life.

  His name was Nikolaus Andrias Plato. He was Dutch, born in Arnhem in 1909 while his parents were passing through. To call him old at the beginning of the 1960s was no exaggeration. Men and women of his age were considered ancient rarities at that time in Continental Europe if they had olive-brown skin, gold teeth, steely blue hair, or the eyes of a burnt-out acrobat. If their appearance was the kind that made civilizations prepare the stake.

  These things always start insidiously. A bit of nuisance, a bit of antipathy, and then suddenly there are signs everywhere saying that all the charlatans known as Bohemians and Egyptians must leave the country. We are now in the sixteenth century. Humanist Europe is building, draining, opening up new territory. This new Europe is looking askance at these strange people who require constant and more police. The bizarre lot flees to a neighboring country but are rejected in the same manner. From now on they are branded and flogged. The right ear is cut off and, if anyone dares to show his face again, the left one too. From now on, in the centuries that follow, there is talk of a “Gypsy problem.” France sends them to the galleys. Prussia strings them up. In the Dutch Republic, after eighty years of war, people are finally free to take matters into their own hands. The down-to-earth border provinces of Gelderland and OverlJissel start talking to their neighbors about a radical solution, and Cleves and Munster are prepared to cooperate with an elimination plan.

  The chosen people are not the only people to have been chosen; there is a younger brother, an artful dodger, a dangerous marginal figure. The Wandering Jew does not journey alone; he is accompanied by a tramp with bare feet, gifted, exceptionally musical, though alas totally illiterate. By Spinoza’s side walks an anonymous fantasist holding forth about the uncreated universe in which one day God appeared, with his companion the Devil next to him, and about the fact that both are mere words: the eternal story of good and evil. Berlioz listens to a rakóczi on the violin. Freud is accompanied by an old woman, a puri dai who interprets dreams. Among the masses that have to pass through the gate with its inscription about how work liberates, there are a number of freebooters who are scarcely surprised to be welcomed on the other side by an orchestra playing a fine tango by Malandò. Nikolaus Andrias, his parents, and his whole family were arrested by the Dutch police on May 16, 1944. They lived on Bilderdijkstraat in The Hague.

  Joseph took out his cigarettes, offered the policeman one, and lit up. Behind him in the doorway of the caravan stood two little children. He looked the policeman straight in the eye.

  “I can offer you a sum of money.”

  It was too late. A regretful gesture of the head. The man either didn’t want or was unable to take him up on his offer. It was too late for any kind of accommodation. The letter, which spoke of this article and that clause, warned about the penalty charges that would be imposed if the caravans were not removed from the municipality of their own accord within twenty-four hours.

  Twenty-four hours. You might just have had time to hang out the washing among the trees after all that rain, when that patrol car appeared again to check up. You might have promised a nearby farmer four tubeless tires to put his Opel nicely back on its feet, no problem: how unpleasant when that twenty-four-hour countdown started again. Twenty-four hours — sometimes forty-eight — then you left. Toward the evening of the third day the Andrias family started tapping water again and stowing the gear firmly in the caravans. They left in the morning. Four caravans, two old Culemborg vans, and six cars crammed with men, women, and children. Joseph, at twenty-seven still without a family of his own, was carrying two nieces in the front of his car and in the back “his uncle” Nikolaus and Nikolaus’s wife and one of his sons, Sanyi.

  I’m thinking of that rocking caravan. Of the drowsy atmosphere in those cars. It was just starting to grow light. Six in the morning. The path led past a meadow where the heads of the cows protruded above the ground mist. I only need to stand by Gerard’s farm and in the distance I can see the p
oint where they turned onto the road. Joseph drove carefully. In the mirror he occasionally looked with concern at the face of the old man, who had had a miserable night. His mood was that of someone who, when he sees a tree, thinks only of a tree and, when he sees a pothole, thinks only of a pothole. So when he happened to look up at Gerard’s oak tree and his eye fell on the Gypsy sign, he thought of nothing except those two wavy lines crossed by a third. I heard him shifting gears as he drove past — very handsome and serious — and I believe that he didn’t even know that those lines, which in more mythical times had meant a welcome, were a sign from one stranger to another reassuring him that decent people lived here, people with whom you could eat and talk. I doubt whether he knew, because you hear the craziest things about those magic signs and, as for truth, you never really know it.

  There’s something else I’m not entirely sure about: whether Joseph, shifting into third gear, had a sneaking intuition that in the course of that same year his suit would be hanging over a chair at night at this address and that his low-heeled black shoes would be placed under the bed of the red-haired daughter of the house. Who is to know? Anyway, something had been prepared for. What had been prepared for was the theme of Joseph and Lucie, which in a friendly but resolute way would supersede another theme in his life: Joseph and Parasja.

  It had been about thirteen months since she left him. After six years of marriage that had never been considered a real marriage because no child was born, Parasja had been taken back by her family. She wasn’t reluctant to go. They had met each other during a long summer in the fields of an abandoned Serbian monastery near Banja Luka. Parasja, slim, strong, glowing in a meadow full of horses, defied her grandmother and her uncles. As a result of an old dispute, they did not eat with Joseph’s family. They had ridden off one night when the stars fell clean through the fields of corn. When they returned, no permission was granted for their union. Having still not conceived after six years, Parasja began to think of the imprecations that must have been uttered at the time.

  They were surrounded by the police. Once they reached the outskirts of the village, they were hemmed in by two patrol cars. A policeman stepped out of his car.

  Kata, Nikolaus’s wife, was in a bad mood. “May your father’s bowels and those of your mother and your brothers shrivel up,” she began. “May your grandfather’s stupid head ...”

  Joseph rolled down the window ready to reply to the kind of questions he had been familiar with from time immemorial:

  “Where are you going?”

  For an instant, pressing on the gas pedal and feeling the friction of steel seemed the only thing to do.

  “We’re taking A3 5 toward Almelo.”

  As usual they had an escort. A white car in front, and another behind the convoy, a service of the Netherlands state. Joseph, accustomed to unexpected official action in his life, had his mind on other things. Having been jolted awake, he thought: Parasja, I’m going to forget you. I’m going to forget all about your hair, your head, your chin, your lips, which all seem to be fixed in a permanent smile. I’m not going to remember a thing — not a single detail. I swear that by God the Father.

  That’s what he thought as they approached the municipal boundary and the Benckelo police peeled off.

  Do you think that I want to go on seeing you and your gold bracelets in the years to come? And your shawls, and your sacred panties with that flower design that you always hang out to dry under a towel but which, of course, I’ve seen anyway? How many nights in the course of his life do you think a man can lie tossing and turning, thinking: Come here now and crawl in beside me?

  At the Delden traffic circle the column of caravans kept so close together that there was a minor traffic jam to the right of them. At IJssel a police van was waiting.

  He lost patience. Christ, Parasja, that scolding and hounding of yours! You don’t think I’m still in love with you, do you?

  “A very good morning to you! Can I see your papers?”

  Joseph handed over his documents. He felt a nervous pressure in his chest.

  How many places did we go to in six years? Must I go on seeing the suburbs of Gdansk, or Berlin, or Budapest, or the cornfields, or the vineyards where the women worked? During the storm over Reims you defied every law by continuing to walk around bareheaded with thunder and lightning around you. What good to me are our little Dutch fields? In a place caught between space and confinement, we’re allowed to make our Gypsy commotion for twenty- four hours?

  At last the papers were in order. The group owned a collection of the most beautiful passports and visas. And then came the question.

  “And where are we driving to?”

  Joseph started up, became silent for a moment, then again mentioned Almelo.

  But all right, all right, Parasja, you mustn’t joke about family! A distant uncle of mine called a distant uncle of yours a louse.

  They pulled away from the embankment. The cars merged with the rest of the morning traffic. The police van in front left little doubt about the nature of this transport. A little farther on, there was a brief stop at a shop open at eight in the morning. What group of women is served at such lightning speed with bread, pastries, and Band-Aids and then shown to the door with such fretful care? Between Zenderen and Almelo there was a provincial road. Where the developed area was marked off by a railway line was where the concrete path to the caravan site began. The police had disappeared. After an hour of costly negotiations with several other camp dwellers, the Andrias family were parked together with their wagons and cars. Behind Nikolaus’s caravan there was room enough for his imminent death.

  On the earth beneath you a mattress and a couple of thick pillows. Above your head a piece of canvas that doesn’t let a single raindrop through. In cold weather a fire at your feet. I think the tradition of fleeing your dwelling in your final moments is beautiful, but I don’t understand it. Gentle hands lift you up and carry you off while you’re still alive. The mourning has already begun. From all sides the eyes of your family look at you encouragingly. As darkness falls, you sometimes hear consoling lamentations. In a while they will be certain to put a bunch of hawthorn on your fresh grave, because no soul wants to be haunted by your mulo.

  Nikolaus Andrias died one afternoon in summer. The camp was full to bursting. The family that had flocked together bought a grave, asked for a chaplain, and summoned the village brass band to play the Radetzky March or anything at all. Their pained lament amounted to a final pact with the dead person: These were the tricks we played on you, you probably played plenty on us. That’s all right. We forgive each other.

  To depart as you came. Without possessions. Without debts. A legacy makes no sense in such a situation. After the funeral meal, which despite two downpours lasted for the rest of the day, the wood fire was revived as the sun flared up one last time. The scorched smell of Nikolaus’s suit, his shoes, and his socks and hat dissipated toward morning when a new storm erupted over the camp.

  “The Andrias family? What? Gone again?” was heard two days later at the town hall in Almelo. They didn’t understand why the Gypsies had left, because they were now on a legal site. Discussions had actually begun about work in the cattle-feed factory. How were Social Affairs supposed to understand that since a recent death something burning hot, something unbearably chaotic, lingered about those drenched poplars? There was no way of comprehending the sound the night began making, which, until then, no one had noticed.

  For that matter, the family itself made no effort. They left after that death, and there was no reason why, rather some sort of wild reflex of memory. Language and dreams. The true story takes place on that level, and anyone who writes down any of it takes possession of it. But those people don’t write anything down! Three days after the funeral Joseph began packing, and so did Branco, and Kata’s three daughters. What is not written down never becomes a text but remains an image. Kata sat at the table in her kitchen. In her hand a crystal glass with a gold
rim. Nothing is ordered in time. She took hold of a lemonade bottle in front of her and looked in astonishment at the label. Cause and effect have no fixed position. She couldn’t read what it said. There is no composition. She poured and brought the glass to her lips with a trembling hand. The image, completely clear and resolved, corresponds with life itself; we’re leaving here tomorrow!

  Is it proper to write about people who themselves don’t do it on principle? Am I allowed to sweep up the glass that the inconsolable Kata has accidentally dropped from her hands? And in one of the slivers, crooked, pointed as a dagger, accidentally see something of my own features?

  Joseph didn’t stay with his family all summer. His cousin Branco was man enough, so Joseph, single and with his own car, was free to go where he wanted. Free, for example, to drive to Alsace via Limburg and, via Vierzon, to Limoges and then on to Toulouse. And free on all these journeys to make contact with friends and relatives whom he sometimes knew only from the stories.

  Who else but I should follow him? Should ride with him in his Buick, gazing out beyond the big front windshield? It’s nice to merge with a wonderful blue landscape full of undulations at forty-five miles an hour. Joseph whistled through his teeth and thought peacefully of nothing. Towns, campsites, and parties in the evening. It’s worthwhile attracting the glance of the pipe-sucking, chatting Joseph from behind a bonfire. They told each other stories. Over the next fifteen years Joseph heard all kinds of anecdotes about his vanished parents, his vanished uncles and aunts, and occasionally he almost crossed paths with Parasja.