“What’s the matter with you!” I hissed. “You’re making a fool of us.” I took his arm and led him to the group that had gathered around the crown princess. They were playing Snap. Before joining the circle I told him to pull himself together. He muttered something under his breath.
“What did you say?” I growled, and then he repeated, in an angry voice: “If only you wouldn’t show off all the time!”
He had the gall to say that! It was outrageous. As if he had reason to be ashamed of me! I tried to look unconcerned, as Anna Pavlovna would have done, as if the absurd words had never been uttered. The cards had been dealt, but instead of concentrating on his hand, Kwame stared into the void.
So as to avoid further aggravation, I turned away and challenged Sophie to a game at the chess table. I played quite successfully, but she did not notice this for some time.
“I prefer playing with you than with Willem Alexander,” she said. “He’s such a poor loser.”
“I’m not losing.”
She seized my bishop with a pawn. I countered her move smoothly, but Sophie was unperturbed. I told her that her confidence reminded me of Napoleon before the Battle of Waterloo.
“Quame isn’t playing,” she observed. “He’s sitting there holding his cards, but he isn’t doing anything. Is he scared?”
“Kwame is the worst loser of all,” I said. “Let’s see . . .” And, with a malicious flick of the wrist I indicated the tour my knight would take to capture her castle.
“But the two of you have suffered so much loss already,” she said, giving me a steady look. Unflinching. There was no trace of strategic intention in her eyes. We gazed at each other, and it was as though she was satisfied with my silence. My muscles tensed. I was filled with longing, but did not show it.
“That’s true,” I said. “But I think I’m a better loser than he is.”
“Thank goodness for that,” she smiled, “because there goes your knight! I told you there was no advantage to the right of first move!”
We bowed our heads over the board in silence while I pondered my strategy. I was close to calling checkmate, and it was her turn to think hard. “Sometimes I think he blames it on me,” I said.
“What?”
“The distance. Between us and other people.”
She nodded as if she understood, reached for a chess piece, but wrinkled her nose and changed her mind.
“People are foolish,” she said soothingly, “don’t let it bother you.”
“But it doesn’t bother me, I want to be as much like everyone else as I can. I don’t want to attract attention.”
“Nothing attracts attention like trying to belong.” There was a hint of disapproval in her tone, and she slid her bishop forward resolutely. It was my move.
“I know what you mean about distance,” she said. “My own family is utterly isolated. People are watching one and judging one all the time, but they don’t come close enough for one to get to know anything about them. It’s as if my face were disfigured by a scar or birthmark, which sets me apart from other people. Everyone can see it and yet no one dares mention it.”
My eyes flitted across the board, unseeing. In the meantime I was groping desperately for words to confirm the perfection of her features, as she no doubt expected me to do.
“Mamma says,” she went on, “that loneliness is the privilege of the strong.” She surveyed the board and laughed as if she had already won the game. I couldn’t make up my mind, and slid my piece this way and that until I gave up concentrating. Which was lucky for Sophie.
The rest of the evening was spent at the card table, where Kwame managed to spread his gloom to everyone else.
“Why don’t you play something for us on the piano, Prince Quame,” Anna Pavlovna suggested. She enthused at length about his talent and yet he was not easily persuaded. “I beg you, a little musical intermezzo performed by the birthday boy himself would be a suitable finale for this celebration.”
“I have nothing to celebrate, madam,” he said, averting his eyes. There was a silence. Anna Pavlovna took his hands in hers.
“I know,” she said, “I know.”
“Oh, Mamma,” sighed Sophie, “ça c’est le mal de René.” I thought she was referring to young René Labouchère, who sat two rows behind me in class and who suffered from fainting spells, which I attributed to his over-tight trousers. I asked her how she knew him, but she waved dismissively, as if she did not wish to be distracted from emotions she had made such an effort to comprehend.
“When I think about home,” said the crown princess, “I always sing one of the songs my mother taught me.”
Kwame bit his lip. After a long silence he said: “Out loud?”
“Certainly! Sometimes just the tune will do.” She hummed a few bars. Kwame let go of her hands.
“We don’t think about home much,” I said, for I was finding the situation increasingly embarrassing. “At least that’s what I try to do. Not think of home.”
Anna Pavlovna shook her head, vigorously but with a look of regret, the way headmaster van Moock did when you gave the wrong answer. She rose up and stepped into her sedan chair.
“People think remembering brings sorrow.” Her chair was lifted up by her footmen and she was suspended in midair. “The contrary is true. It is forgetting that brings sorrow.”
The summer months at boarding school were quiet. Most of the boys went home for the holidays. Mr. van Moock would try to delay their departure with extra revision and exams up to the last minute. He was sorry to see them go, and urged them to return promptly. “Knowledge,” he wrote to the parents and guardians of his boys, “is like the body of an athlete. It thrives on regular exercise. Lack of exercise causes atrophy.” Those of us who stayed behind knew that his concern for the boys’ pliancy arose from financial straits. Payment of school fees and allowances for board and lodging ground to a halt during the holiday periods—the very time when maintenance to the premises was due. Meals were reduced to twice daily, and the practice of serving roast meat on Sunday was discontinued, because, we were told, it was unwholesome in warm weather. We were not upset by the austerity of the diet, for the van Moocks themselves were clearly short of money. Mrs. van Moock sent her maid away until September, and did all the darning herself, besides polishing the brass and waxing the floors. Mr. van Moock continued to teach us until mid-July. After that we devoted our time to “drawing after the nature of the Lord,” which amounted to being sent off into the countryside in the morning with an apple, some coarse paper and watercolours. We were not expected back until supper time.
The first few days saw us flitting about like birds that have just discovered the door of their cage open. We ran this way and that across the fields, carefree and happy. We did not do any painting, but held wrestling matches instead and rolled about in the wheat field. But at the end of the first week van Moock demanded to see some results.
I lay face down in the grass, with a buttercup just under my nose. Clamping the tip of my tongue between my teeth I copied what I saw as accurately as I could, not missing a single vein, petal or carpel. Then I pulled the plant out of the ground and drew the roots in great detail. I poked my fingers into the earth to make sure I hadn’t left anything out. Finally I took my penknife and sliced the stalk lengthwise, pulled the skin off the leaves, scraped the pistil clean and drew the whole plant afresh, this time showing the underlying structures. When the object of my scrutiny lay before me in its dry, dissected and wilted state, it occurred to me that my own creation was superior to the original. My pictures were so neatly drawn that they seemed to defy the capricious, unruly diversity of nature itself.
Kwame set to work without any method. Whenever his eye was caught by a likely subject he would hitch up his trousers, lean against a tree, narrow his eyes and stare. He would stay in the same position for as long as an hour sometimes. Then he would take a sheet of paper and start painting—quite at random, it seemed. He would paint energetical
ly for a while, and then stop in midair with the brush poised over his composition, as if he were waiting for it to do the work for him. As he never looked up from his occupation, it was as though his subject came from within rather than from what he saw around him.
I could not bear to watch! Those dreadful smears and stains! Now and then he took a crumpled ball of paper and swabbed his painting with it, the way we had seen Raden Saleh do with a cotton rag. But Raden Saleh had been using oil paints on canvas, and our watercolours were wholly unsuited to such treatment. Dabbing wet paper just makes a mess. Once Kwame had painted his sheet all over, making the composition utterly chaotic, he put his paints aside and set to work with chalk, adding highlights, shadows and little touches to indicate perspective.
Both of us came under the spell of nature. I wanted to know its secrets, I wanted to dig, to determine, to expose its riches. I began to understand the growth patterns of even the most developed species of plants, in which I was especially interested on account of the perseverance and resourcefulness with which they had survived the ages. I learned to distinguish the characteristics of the different families, and made a sport of classifying unusual specimens with great precision. Kwame took a broader view: his eye was drawn to the vanishing point of a country lane, to the swathes of colour in a field of wild flowers. He did not concern himself with stamens or corollas, but would perceive contrasts in a shady distance that to me was simply greyish.
Incomprehensible though it may seem, at the end of the day, despite the chaos of Kwame’s brushwork, there would be a picture that somehow captured the essence of the place we had visited. It was infuriating, but true. Kwame’s paintings were useless to a biologist, and yet people were moved by them. They inspired in many viewers a sense of nature as God’s dearest, most wondrous mystery. My own efforts to sort out the wonders of nature on sheet after sheet of painstaking depiction did not appear to matter to anyone.
We met Sophie only once that summer. It was at a soirée in a private house. We had not been invited as friends of the host, but as curiosities. The hostess kept urging us to play more music, until Kwame asked out loud if she had mistaken him for the young Mozart. But even after that we did not get a chance to talk privately with the princess. She exchanged a few civil words with everyone present. She glanced in my direction from time to time, which I took to mean that she would much rather be running about in the garden with us. I signalled back that I agreed, and to demonstrate the bond between us I behaved exactly as she did, responding to people left and right as if they had said something highly intelligent.
There was no mention that evening of the elderly king’s intention to wed his adored but unsuitable lady-in-waiting, although the subject was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The conversation revolved around the festive welcome that had been given throughout the land to heir apparent Willem Alexander and his bride. Sophie mentioned that her brother Prince Alexander was away visiting his relatives in St. Petersburg, and that she herself would pay a second visit to her aunt Maria Pavlovna in Weimar in the autumn. She would be spending the winter in the south of Holland. I could tell she was sorry that we would be separated for so long. Later on, during a quadrille, she whispered to me: “On the last Wednesday of August I shall be in Scheveningen. It will be quiet there. Professor Everard has prescribed seawater baths for Mamma.” That was all.
After she left the party a footman brought me a small volume bound in red vellum, containing the stories of Atala and René by Chateaubriand. It was Sophie’s personal copy. She had marked certain passages in pencil. The enigmatic inscription on the flyleaf, in her own hand, read: “Friends in the Bond of the Creeks.”
The next morning Kwame and I went out into the countryside again, but we did not paint or draw. We read each other the stories celebrating the life of nature led by North American Indians.
At daybreak on the last Wednesday of August, a farm cart took us to the royal residence. From there we walked to the Queen’s Pavilion in the dunes at Scheveningen. Princess Sophie received us as if she owned the place. Anna Pavlovna stayed in her room, where fresh tubs of sea water were delivered every hour. She suffered from indeterminate ailments, which she blamed on the Dutch climate. She was also absent from the light summer meal that was served on the terrace. Monsieur Cavin read out a few poems by Herr von Goethe, in connection with Sophie’s impending visit to Weimar. It was his aim that she should surprise her aunt with her knowledge of the work of the great poet, who had served as tutor to both her uncle Carl Friedrich and her cousin Carl Alexander. We escaped into the dunes with Sophie at the earliest opportunity.
Sophie had everything planned. She and I were Muskogees and Kwame was a Seminole—as the Indian tribes were called in the story of Atala. The three of us crouched under a teepee made of leaves. The Seminoles, she declared, had to seal a bond with the Muskogees. She pronounced the names reverently, as if they had magical powers. The Bond of the Creeks! Sophie took all this very seriously and made us swear an assortment of oaths—even that we would live our lives in the wild according to the laws of nature. She pulled out a hairpin, making her curls cascade over her face, and stabbed the pin into her fingertip to draw a drop of blood. But the point was too blunt, and she went off in search of a suitable thorn, leaving Kwame and me on our own.
He was being exceedingly difficult. One minute he was silent, the next he was hurling abuse at me. He didn’t want to play Sophie’s game at all. But he was too shy to tell her, and demanded that I should convey the message to her. I had no intention of doing so. I thought it was all rather fun. Then he ran off into the dunes, so angry and upset that I ran after him. I think he must have been hiding from me, because I could not find him anywhere. Back in the teepee Sophie and I sealed our bond, but she thought it didn’t really count without a Seminole joining in too. I had to urge her to prick my finger, and once I was bleeding we found we didn’t know quite what Muskogee did next. She suggested sucking the blood, although it was a disgusting thing to do. In the end we caught a few droplets of each other’s blood in the bell of a flower, shook it around and then buried the crushed vial in the sand.
She never mentioned our bond again. But I never forgot what it felt like to belong together, to be alone without Kwame: lonely yet exhilarating.
How long did we lie there in our leafy arbour—a quarter of an hour, an hour, the whole afternoon? In later years I began to doubt whether she really had looked the way I remembered, said what I heard her say, did what I remembered her doing. At the time I believed we were cementing our bond by lying still like that, by keeping silent, close together. Probably we barely touched. Or not at all—but that’s the kind of trick an old man’s memory plays.
Her white summer frock is sprinkled with traces of brown, dried blood. She blows on them, scratches a persistent crust with her nail and flicks it into the breeze. Takes my finger and studies my sacrificial wound. Wipes it. Squeezes my finger. There is no more blood. She holds on to my fingers with both hands, as if they are big, strange objects. Her eyes scrutinizing my skin. Her fingertips on the back of my hand, rubbing this way and that. Comparing the skin to that of her own hand.
“You can see the pores much better,” she says, “a jigsaw puzzle of a hundred thousand tiny black cells.” Then she turns my hand over. Like turning a page of a book, to continue reading. The palm is a pool. Cracks in the bleached earth. The dark water has seeped away. The pigment remains along the edge.
“They’re pink on the inside, white even.”
She turns them over and over.
“Black, white, black, white,” she laughs. “The outside is still African, and the inside is steadily turning Dutch. Don’t you agree?” She lays my hands in my lap. Sits facing me. Reaches out her arm. Her fingers touch my lips. Pulls down my lower lip: “Pink, too!”
That’s how livestock is valued, I reflect, and try to banish the thought at once. She raises my upper lip with her fingers and stares at the gums. That’s how slaves are valued.
r /> “Indeed yes! Your tongue, too!”
I clamp my mouth shut, grind my teeth. Then I explode with laughter, she lets go of my face and hangs her head, giggling uncontrollably. She has not replaced her hairpin. Her curls fall loosely forward, hiding her face. I want to see her eyes, and stretch out my hand to draw the curtain aside. The hair slides softly along my throbbing fingertip.
On the Noble Savage
Extract from a letter I wrote some years later to Kwame from Weimar:
With each step forward, civilization leaves a footprint behind. We have, unwittingly, come a long way. The distance we have yet to travel is impossible to gauge. So we keep hoping that the goal we can see on the horizon will prove to be the final one and also the highest, and that we will find shelter there before nightfall. If we turn to look back we can distinguish no more than a few footprints. Forty, fifty paces behind us the path we have been at pains to follow loses itself in the ploughed earth. We are glad to have come this far, and wish to pursue our course. Yet our thoughts are drawn to what lies behind us, more than to the uncertainty that lies ahead. There are moments of nostalgia for the valleys that our people claimed long ago. At the same time we are aware that the plains we have cleared and the forests we have burnt o fer no challenge. To live is to engage with the impossible.
That is what stimulates us and keeps us going. So we look ahead and persevere. We find consolation in the notion that we carry our past within us. But from time to time we are obliged to shed some of the burden weighing us down—possessions dear to us, now irretrievably lost. Our personal e fects consist of memories. And the more we value our memories, the less of a burden they are. So the course of man’s development, Kwame, bears a marked resemblance to the course of your life and mine.