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My sister the negro
The harbour of the Dutch West Indian Islands begins with a long channel that ends in a capricious bay; on the map a stem with a cluster of flowers. The entrance is so wide that large steamers can easily move in it and so long that ships can moor along the quays on both sides.
On an afternoon like countless others in the tropics, a steamer was just entering the harbour; small tugboats hauled on cables that kept striking against the surface of the water, as if invisible giantesses were skipping rope. A young man stood on deck, watching. He thought: everything about life is mysterious. It is even strange that I am called Fritz Ruprecht, which might merely be the two Christian names of another. And that I return to this island where I was born because my parents are dead, and maybe, too, because I've had enough of Europe, where you see far too few negroes. I am glad that I will always be rich now. I'll live with a negress. I'll call her: my sister the negro. I hated those pale faces in Europe, cold as fishes, with their lack of brotherly and sisterly sympathy.
From the quay, where a row of old pointed Dutch gables formed a background, a private launch suddenly darted out towards the large ship and, after a sharp swerve, came to a stand still against the gangway, hardly rocking on the waves. The mulatto, who had been sitting at the rudder, fastened the small vessel with a hook on to the huil of the large ship, near a scupper from which jets of water spouted at rhythmical intervals. Then a small, stout gentleman in grey shantung, with a straw hat, stepped from the motorboat to the ladder, which he climbed slowly. On deck he was greeted by the captain and another gentleman in white linen, wearing a sun helmet.
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Ruprecht watched them. They formed a typical group of the tropics: a sun helmet, a straw hat, a sleeve with three or four gold stripes. They talked together like people who are in a hurry, but still want to gossip. On their laughing faces, especially the captain's, crow's feet appeared around the eyes. They bowed to each other. Then the captain turned in the direction of Ruprecht and called in a loud voice, because of the distance: ‘Mr. Ruprecht, these gentlemen would like to speak to you.’
Before Fritz Ruprecht could collect himself, the two tropical men were standing before him. The one in white, who was the younger and whose face showed tiny red veins like the ribs of a leaf, held both hands out to him: ‘You have changed a great deal, naturally, since you were last here, fourteen years ago. I am Dr. Wellen.’
‘I still remember you, doctor.’
The stout gentleman in shantung, whose yellowish-grey face at first repulsed him, because he had grown so unfamiliar with the effects of the tropics, held Ruprecht's hand in his while they talked until their hands became sticky: ‘I am sorry that I cannot look after your physical welfare like our friend Dr. Wellen, nor am I the man for your spiritual welfare...’ With these last words he broke off his sentence, laughed self-consciously and stared in front of him as if he suddenly felt a stab of conscience... ‘but your property is, for the present, still in my hands...’
‘I had imagined you as older, Judge, that is why I did not recognize you immediately.’
‘No, young man, no compliments. I am getting old. Soon I will follow your poor father.’
‘I remember how often you came to our house to play whist,
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as a child I could not keep my eyes off the counters. Round and oblong, red and white, green and black.’
‘Old memories...’
The judge gripped his forehead between his fingers, gave a short laugh and grasped Fritz by the arm as though he were examining his biceps.
‘Let me begin, Fritz Ruprecht, born on May 4, 1902, son of Alexander Ruprecht and Marie Antoinette Clémence Villeneuve, by handing you this bunch of keys, as the town formerly handed over the keys to a victorious general. I have attached those tags to them, something like counters, so you can tell them apart. And I wrote on them where they belong: the house in town, the coach-house which, by the way, will give you a shock, it is badly in need of repairs; the house on the plantation and as you know, a plantation is still called “cunúcu” here. The key for the gate of the cunúcu is also here. In any case, it is all written down precisely. Here, then, are the keys. It is warm on board. I won't make a long speech. I hope you will make the same use of them that your poor father did.’
‘I thank you, judge.’
‘Of course, you will come along with me now. We will have a little lunch and you can see my wife and Tonia, whom you will not recognize.’
‘Yes, she must have become quite a big girl in these fourteen years.’
‘Yes, quite a big girl. That is the exact expression for it. Afterwards you may have my auto and Wansitu for to-day. Don't you understand me? Wansitu is my chauffeur.’
‘It is very kind of you, judge. I hope you will not mind if I do not accept your offer. I would like to see everything with my own eyes, do everything with my own hands.’
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‘What do you mean by that? I am getting old. When people start acting strange I cannot follow them.’
‘I only want to go to the coach-house for the old Ford, you wrote me that it still runs. I want to go to the cunúcu in it. I will find my way. I remember everything precisely, I was sixteen the last time I was here.’
‘I'm sorry. My wife expected you. Besides I thought you would stay at a hotel for the first few days. You would be quite free there and could get rested.’
‘Oh, please do not be offended. It would perhaps be easier for me to be alone these first days.’
‘I understand, I understand, my boy, but at least you must come in my boat.’
The doctor, who had left them for a few minutes, returned and took part in the conversation: ‘Just a little medical formality. You are feeling healthy, Fritz?’
‘Terribly healthy, sometimes I even feel like a brute.’
‘You do not have to be especially healthy for that.’
They laughed. Fritz went away a moment to see about his luggage. He put a few personal things in a brief case and joined the judge again. They descended the ladder slowly. Ruprecht cautioned the older man to be careful.
Above, leaning over the railing, the captain and doctor waved to them. The doctor put his mouth to the captain's ear and whispered, as though telling a risqué story not intended for others to hear: ‘A fine young spendthrift, he cost his father thousand's, it won't take long before the inheritance runs through his fingers like water, too...’ The captain nodded and grinned with his crow's-feet.
At a landing place, where the water splashed up against the low platform in swinging movements, Fritz disembarked.
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‘Can I leave you alone, Fritz?’
‘I hope I can take care of myself,’ Fritz answered with a laugh.
‘Yes, of course,’ the judge said, but with his thoughts somewhere else.
‘You look as though you had spent your whole life in Paris. I was there once too, long ago; Folies Bergère, Moulin Rouge, Claridge Hotel.’ And laughing: ‘In Paris one often sees types like you. I do not know exactly what I mean by that myself. In any case, good luck, my boy, and if you need any help, come to us. Then you can see my wife and Tonia who, as you said yourself, has become quite a big girl.’
They shook hands and Fritz took a well-measured step from the boat to the platform. The snow-white launch shot back into the harbour where the stern of the liner could be seen turning, like a huge placard with the name and place of origin printed on it.
Fritz stood all alone on the island where he was born, but which he had not seen in so many years. The first feelings that welled up in him were of pure delight. Though his father was dead and his mother too, these fearful realities did not cause an insurmountable dejection in the young man. They formed that background of melancholy which gives something fatal to life: you reach a half somnambulistic state of drunkenness in which it seems that since nearly everything is lost, nothing is forbidden, and you can indulge in the most bizarre adventures. Fritz Ruprecht would have his bizarre adventure. Those interesting white women of Passy and the winter resorts, of the Hague and Wimbledon! Je m'en fous et je m'en fous pas mal. I want ‘My sister the negro’. No more nonsense. Just blackness and affection.
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This gay mood gave way to a decidedly sombre one. He suddenly felt like committing hara-kiri, standing alone on this platform which he would soon have to leave for places where every nook and corner had become crystal-clear again in his mind. There was no salvation to be expected from something which left so little play to the imagination. This island, this distant corner of the earth was still divided in two parts: an eastern and a western part, separated from each other by the harbour deeply indented into the narrow island. One road ran from the harbour to the westpoint and one road from the harbour to the eastpoint. On the eastern as well as the western part, the road was flanked on both sides by plantations varying in size. There was but one difference: the road along the western part was hedged with cacti, the one along the eastern part with agaves. Sometimes at the fall of evening, in the extremely short tropical twilight, you could see a parrot sitting on top of a long, slender cactus stem: motionless, idolatrous, while rose-coloured streaks from the awful, bloodshot, setting sun gave the landscape of bare hills such peculiar colours, that it reminded Fritz not only of the island's western landscape, but also of the evening gown on the of a femme de trente ans, whom he had stood kissing under fragrant chestnut trees, somewhere in Europe...
Such things were difficult to fathom: had he kissed her so deeply because she looked like Sylvia Sydney, whom he only knew from the films, or because she wore an evening gown in the hues that the twilight in the distant landscape took on?
The plantation of the Ruprecht's lay in the western part. He only knew the eastern part because as a child he often had to visit an uncle, an aunt, or at least distant cousins. On the small island all the whites were related either by birth or by
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marriage. The negro coachman Pedritu would take him to the uncle, the aunt, or the distant cousin. In his little boy's snit, with knickerbockers, he had sat bobbing up and down for hours next to Pedritu, who told him fairytales about spiders, about princesses who sang in heaven, about the ghost who appears as a white donkey with a blue star between his upstanding ears; the negro wanted to amuse and comfort the little boy who began to complain that his trousers stuck to his buttocks, and to press himself close to the coachman and whisper:
‘Pedritu, I feel so afraid here, everything is different here.’
Fritz knew better now: east or west, it was all the same. Only the agaves lent the landscape another character. It was this other character that frightened the small boy. Not the agaves themselves. You could do something pleasantly naughty with agaves. You could take a piece of broken glass or a rusty nail, and carve on the leaves the words that the boys in Europe chalked on fences and public lavatories. You could also lay bare your heart, that most vulnerable of human organs, and tell: I love Lydia or Jane or Carlotta. In a few days a crust would appear and then the words would stand out on the green leaves in clear parchment letters. When the agaves flowered you could see hummingbirds, like large butterflies, fluttering around the blossoms... What name would Fritz Ruprecht carve now if he stood before a fresh green agave leaf with a rusty nail in his hand? Probably he would not know.
Ruprecht could not remain standing there on the platform bemusing himself with memories. He must do something. He walked rapidly down the main street of the town. Once or twice a negro woman would stand still and watch the young man, who moved too swiftly for the tropics; then she would call to some other negro woman, stretched out on a doorstep taking
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a siesta: ‘Who is that? Is it a stranger or is that someone from the island?’ When Ruprecht answered in the negro patois, the women became hilarious and jabbered back, shouting with laughter. Ruprecht walked on.
Along the wide street stood the most dissimilar kinds of houses. Large mansions with balconies along the whole width of their gables varied with less ostentatious houses, and with those which might better be called huts. The huts were still the liveliest; inside black women sat on the floor combing and dressing each other's hair; the kinky locks were pulled to their full length with oil; the one who did the pulling took advantage of the opportunity to abuse the other; the one whose hair got pulled answered with a string of curses wherein especially the Virgin Mary figured prominently. The large houses, however, lay completely still with all the jalousies closed. Ruprecht suddenly remembered that a young girl had once stood between two pillars on one of these balconies; somewhat tall and lanky, with rather large feet, but also with clear blue eyes and long blond hair. She stood between the two pillars and laughed as silently and cruelly as only girls of fourteen can. Even now, after so many years, Fritz Ruprecht still felt her laughing at him. Pain flitted through his heart, as once more an old wound was broken open. At that moment he heard the clacking of jalousie slats being let down. Ruprecht looked up quickly. Between the narrow openings he saw part of a human face, that part which is left uncovered by harem women; eyes, the bridge of the nose and a little of the cheeks. Probably a lonely white woman was peering at the stranger whom she could not recognize. What a melancholy thought: ‘A woman of thirty who peers at me now, and a girl of fourteen who laughed at me formerly; it would be absurd and incredible
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if, by chance, they happened to be one and the same. However, the chance did not turn out to be such a good one. At that moment he caught sight of a gasoline station, with the yellow Shell pump; there would be no gasoline in the coach house. Good-Year and Dunlop-tyres were hanging there and the little Michelin-man, as everywhere else in the world. And auto parts: headlights, carburators, spark-plugs. The man who came towards Ruprecht was an American in shirt-sleeves, without a tie; a belt held the white linen trousers around his heavy waist and a white oval served him for a face.
‘I want two cans of gasoline.’
‘You want to take them with you?’
‘No. Haven't you a boy?’
The man did not answer, but went outside a moment and called something down the street. Soon a negro was standing there with a wheelbarrow on which the two cans were loaded. Using the native tongue, Ruprecht said to the negro: ‘Follow me’. On hearing his own patois, the man flooded Ruprecht with questions about his origin.
‘I knew your father well. I often got gasoline for your father too. As a matter of fact, I often did errands for your father. I brought thousands of letters to the post office for your father.’
They both laughed. There had been times when Ruprecht's father, obsessed by heaven knows what kind of fear, had suffered from a mania for writing letters, apart from those which formed his business correspondence.
This laughter brought the conversation to a close. Ruprecht gave no more answers. The rolling of the one small wheel could be heard; the two cans rattled as they collided.
Finally Ruprecht turned into a narrow street of huts, where a sweetish smell of bananas hung in the air. The women sat
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on stools against the huts. They shouted their questions at the negro who, rather under the impression of Ruprecht's silence, only gave timid answers. Their curiosity was satisfied, however, for the women called in loud voices; the young master has come back, the young master has come back. He had a special significance for these negroes; he was the landlord of the neighbourhood.
The small street ended where the estate of the Ruprecht's began. The large house itself stood somewhat aside, it was a square building with a pyramidal roof; a wing had been added to one side covered by a half-saddle roof at the height of the first storey. This square white house with the closed jalousies, on which the light green paint was blistering, looked like a mausoleum; not for anything in the world would Fritz Ruprecht have opened it. He felt that his dead patents lay here rather than in the cemetary, which he would pass at full speed: the Ford could surely do 60 kilometres; his parents lay together in the closed house, with their wide-open eyes staring at the ceiling. For the present he would not enter it.
From the large gate, where the sweetish smelling street ended, small paths led, between agaves and anglos (the buttercups of the tropics), to the different parts of the estate; the house; the bleaching field beyond it; the coach-house nearer by; the small house that stood apart, where the old seamstress lived who, notwithstanding the ever prevailing drought, grew flowers: velvet dahlias, roses that were fragrant, and camelias, to be admired especially by the eye. Besides the agaves and little yellow anglos on the ground, red clusters could be seen flowering on the Spanish Karawara. Near the house a large tamarind wove its top in the sky; underneath by the trunk of the heavy tree Ruprecht could see big black spots; these were
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the stains of dried blood from the scores of sheep and goats that Pedritu had slaughtered in the course of time. Ruprecht remembered as if it were yesterday the short, violent convulsions of the animal as the neck artery spurted empty; with one stroke of the keen knife, which was first sharpened at length on a whet-stone, the animal's life was taken... Blood... this life is of blood... A tamarind broke loose from a twig and fell silently to the ground; the only sound that Ruprecht heard was the squeaking of the one wheel on the wheelbarrow. He stood before the coach-house. After a short pressure with his key in the yale lock, he could open the doors to both sides, like the leaves of a very heavy book. The silent negro, scratching his head from time to time, helped him. The judge was right; the coach-house was frightfully dilapidated, his father must have neglected it for years; even from outside you could see that the planks, which had never been painted a second time, were mouldering. From the open door, he looked at the back of the old Ford; he could see the number plainly, specks of dried mud and, through the back window, the steering wheel and the dash board... To one side of the car, against the wall, a plank rested on two stone blocks; Pedritu had slept there in the time of the tilbury... Greasy playing cards lay on the ground, red diamonds and black spades, recalling, like the judge's counters, the excitement of long forgotten games. From a beam in the ceiling also hung a harness, from the time of the carriages. Ruprecht started slightly; there against the wall he saw three rustly gasoline cans. With a tap from the toe of his shoe, he discovered they were not empty. This was the gasoline his father had not used up because he had died.
The tank was filled with the gasoline he had brought with him. A few minutes later he sat behind the steering wheel on
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the country road. On both sides were cacti. A blazing, barren landscape. The few trees on the slopes and crests of the hills were distorted by the northeast trade wind, blowing from time immemorial in the same direction, always in the same direction...
After several kilometres, larger or smaller coconut groves began to appear in the landscape, their fronds swaying. Then the cactus hedge would temporarily give place to a white-washed wall and a white plantation house would loom up on one of the hills. It was at such a house, that after a couple of hours, he would end his journey behind the steering wheel, which he constantly jerked from left to right because of the bumpy road. Groups of negro girls, carrying their trays and baskets of fish, melons and fruits to the town, darted to the side of the road and pressed themselves against the hedge as the car approached. He could see them coming in the distance; they carried the wares on their heads, hands supporting their swaying hips. As the auto drew near, they grabbed at their heads and started to run, laughing like fleeing black nymphs. The dust raised by the car screened them from view. In the mirror, where he tried to catch a last glimpse of the girls, he saw nothing but the yellow-red dust that disappeared slowly, like smoke after a shot.
Fritz Ruprecht put on the brakes, stopped the car and got out. He had come to a spot where the road widened into a kind of village square, with a small white church covered by a sadle roof bearing a white stone cross on its ridge; in these poor surroundings, it looked much too conspicuous. Nearly as conspicuous as the policeman in white trousers, blue coat and a blue linen helmet, on which the arms of the House of Orange with the words: ‘Je maintiendrai’ stood out in
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shining copper. With his club in one hand, the policeman stood before the only normal house in the village. Small negro boys gathered around the Ford, crowding one another to get a look inside at the dash board. Farther on, near the brown loam huts with thatched roofs, stood a donkey tied to a pole in the ground, his head hanging low; one of his ears and the hide of one of his legs quivered from time to time.
Fritz Ruprecht walked up to the policeman.
‘Is the district chief in?’
The policeman touched his helmet.
‘Yes, shall I announce you?’
‘That won't be necessary, I'll do it myself.’
Fritz Ruprecht walked to the front door of the house before which the policeman stood. From the custom acquired in Europe, he first looked for a bell, but then knocked on the panel with his knuckles. A negro woman opened the door. Ruprecht called over her shoulder:
‘Are you home, Karl?’
‘Who is there?’ came from the distance.
‘I am, Karl... Fritz Ruprecht.’
‘Come along, fellow, come along.’
Following the voice, Ruprecht walked through the house; his steps sounded hollow in the emptiness of the rooms which, as often happens in the tropics, were draped rather than furnished. For the rest, oddly enough, this house was not very different from any house in the Hague where he might ring the bell; probably a caprice of the government builder who could not get his fatherland out of his thoughts. Finally Ruprecht went through the back door into a small yard where most of the space was used for drying clothes. Some damp pieces were stretched out on the ground, held in place by heavy
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stones. The voice called: ‘Here I am’. The man whom he called Karl, sat in a garden house, a small wooden shed with one side left open, so that he could be seen sitting there as a painter would portray someone in a room. He sat in a wicker chair with a flabby book in his hand; on a wicker table stood a green bottle and a couple of chipped glasses. Next to them were some open coconuts.
‘Wel, I'll be... it's you Fritz. Sit down. Do you want some rum and coconut milk? That's something even for a European not to turn down. It must be quite a life there in Europe. At least, to enjoy yourself, but not to hear someone else babbling about. So you'd better down your rum and coconut milk and be off. There's not much news here.’
‘I didn't come to tell you any news either. I only wanted to see you. I suddenly remembered that my father wrote me four years ago that you had become the district chief here. A district chief is something like a sheriff in America isn't it?’
‘Listen here, Fritz. I don't mind you showing up unexpectedly, without any warning. As a matter of fact I heard from the judge that you'd be coming this year. But why come floating in like a ghost?’
‘Karl, I hope you haven't become afraid of ghosts during these years... Do you still remember how we used to go hunting together? For rabbits, pigeons, wild ducks, parrots, parakeets...’
‘I have enough time to remember everything, I haven't rambled all around Europe. That's why I say: remain a ghost. Don't bother about the years we haven't seen one another. Nothing is so boring and disgusting to me as people who tell about their lives.’
‘Come cheer up, Karl, or the white devil, as the negroes
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used to call you. Pour me the rum and coconut milk. I won't burden you with fourteen years of Europe. Besides, I think that you greatly overestimate that continent.’
‘But, you'll have to admit that anything good that could be said about this piece of earth I live on would, to put it mildly, also be overestimating.’
‘I don't know, perhaps I am somewhat irresponsible, but two months ago I felt so miserable in some place or ether in Europe, that I suddenly packed all my bags and cried out: here I sleep in the arms of fishes, their fin arms smack mockingly against my body, I want a negress... Besides, now that my parents are dead and I have no one why shouldn't I lead a deliberately mad existence.’
‘Finish your drink, Fritz, I'll pour you another, perhaps you've missed this sometimes in Europe too: rum and coconut milk. You're wound up. No one will keep you from having a negress here. As far as I'm concerned, three negresses. I only have two myself. Screaming about it the way you do, though, shows that it goes deeper. Speaking about deep...’ Karl broke off his sentence. He pushed his elbows across the table so close to Fritz that the latter looked at him with some surprise.
‘Naturally, you think that this book I am reading here, is a kind of detective novel that I kill time with in the jungle, a Wallace or an Ellery Queen, and that I am also a slave to alcohol. It is not a detective novel. It is Shakespeare. I had not yet read Othello.’
Ruprecht's eyes opened wide. He did not at once understand what Karl had said, even thought he misunderstood. And still less did he understand the hard look on Karl's face and the sudden change in the tone that he had used till now.
‘What's that, Karl? Forgive me, I have hallucinations
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recently and sometimes hear meaningless words and voices.’
With his faded blue eyes, Karl looked him straight in the face, his lips parted slowly and slowly came together again ‘Othello of Shakespeare’.
Fritz' face filled with amazement. That Karl read Shakespeare on this forlorn village square was in itself astonishing, but what astonished him still more was the tone in which this declaration was made, a tone that lingered between wilfullness and enmity; not a trace was left of the voice which in the beginning, though indifferent, had not sounded unfriendly. Fritz would like to have cried once more: Come, cheer up, but this time the hearty words died on his lips. He remained looking at the district chief. A smile spread slowly over the red face, cold and at the same time self-satisfied. It was absurd to suppose that Karl wanted to insult him. Nevertheless Fritz stood up, pushing back his chair. He stood there before Karl who remained sitting; Karl, who had once been his friend, but who now behaved in an incomprehensibly equivocal manner. Perhaps the horrors of life finally made every one half irresponsible: hesitating, Ruprecht held out his hand, as if he were greeting a former friend for the last time. Karl lay his hand, like a dead bird, in that of Fritz; at the same time he turned his face away, not because he could not stand the look of the other, but as though he did not consider him worth another glance. Fritz walked slowly through the empty house; step after step echoed with a sound that seemed to exist in itself, apart from Fritz. Outside the policeman touched his helmet. Still pondering on the incomprehensible conversation, he turned the awkward crank. Puffing out a cloud of smoke from behind, the Ford disappeared followed by the eyes of the little negro boys with their poverty-swollen bellies.
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After the district chief heard the door close behind Ruprecht, he remained staring vacantly for awhile. Then he suddenly burst into laughter. All by himself in the little garden house, he slapped his thighs with pleasure. He poured himself another rum and coconut milk and reached for his flabby book: not Othello by the great English poet, but a detective story by Wallace, in which a guileful Chinese who had studied at Oxford, tries to abduct a Britannic girl. He closed the book again however and put it back on the table. Yawning and stretching himself, he shouted a few words in the native language which sounded exceptionally crude in the mouth of this white man whose red face was blotchy like those of alcoholics often are. The words were loudly repeated by a negro woman's voice in the house, as in Africa messages are sent on by a telegraph of living people. Immediately afterward the policeman stood before the garden house.
‘Listen Tonchi,’ the district chief began, ‘we haven't had anything to do in a long time. We'll have to go out to night, if only for the variety. We could post ourselves near the country house of Mr. Ruprecht who was just here. Yes, that was Mr. Ruprecht. Nothing will happen though, for he was always a big boaster. I just took him in nicely. Tonchi, never read Othello of Shakespeare! Our fine gentleman has nothing to do, he lets everything go because he wants a negress. Now, you and I have nothing else but negresses but we don't make such a fuss about dirt. Let him have his negress. His Othella. Perhaps we'll have a laugh to night.
The grey-black face of the negro policeman with its mongolian cheek bones grinned. It pleased him to hear one white man degrading another; for his benefit, justice drove a wedge between the people who considered him inferior. He
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made some rapid gesticulations, uttered rapid words that sounded loud and bird-like, with which he only indicated that he would be very glad to go out with the district chief and that he would advise the district chief to climb over the fence of the plantation at a certain spot and follow a certain road to the house where they could easily hide in the dark. Picturesque names of paths, woods and hills, flew from his mobile mouth. Sharp gesticulations of his hands in the air connected and combined these words into a strategic plan.
‘Upon my word,’ interrupted the district chief, ‘you really do look Chinese. Do you know who your father was? Yes? Well every time I hear it I'm surprised all over again that he wasn't Chinese. You look like a black Chinaman.’
The policeman guffawed. The district chief's face however remained motionless. Then the policeman saw the quiet smile spread over the red face which he always took as a sign to leave.
Evening had already begun to fall when Fritz Ruprecht fumbled with the padlock on the wooden gare of the plantation ‘Miraflores’. Behind him the Ford seemed to be lifted into space by the vague colors of the approaching dusk. The hilly landscape with its sparse, distorted trees was covered by the green transparent veil of twilight which would soon be condensed into black night.
It was the old negro caretaker who came to see what the fumbling with the padlock was. He stood just in front of Fritz, on the other side of the gate. Fritz felt irritated with the old man who did not recognize him at once, but seemed to look straight through him with blank eyes that stared into the distance. The blackness of his face stood out in sharp contrast
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to the whiteness of his shirt, like black sealing-wax on a white envelope; he still wore a tight fitting apron over his trousers. His kinky grey hair was so wooly, it looked as if the wind could blow it away.
‘Don't you recognize me, Wancho? I am Fritz Ruprecht.’
‘Mister Fritz!’
The padlock unclasped, the two doors of the gate swung backwards, while the old negro talked and apologized.
‘Forgive old Wancho, he is getting old, his eyes are getting weak and Mister Fritz comes so unexpectedly at the fall of evening.’
‘Naturally, the judge could not tell you much, either.’
‘No, only that you would come before the year was over.’
Fritz sat again behind the wheel. But he did not push down the starter at once. He looked sadly around him. With bowed head, Wancho stood to the side of the gate, the heavy iron padlock in his thin, old negro hands. Further, not a trace of a human being. For a moment Fritz too bowed his head and looked at the steering wheel where the varnish was worn off on the sides by the hands of his father, and of a chauffeur he had not known. Then his eyes followed the line of the landscape again. Chalky white, like a shriek in the transparent green evening, the white-washed walls stretched out, raised endlessly by the slaves at times when there was no other work to be done; when there was no lime or charcoal to be burned, no coconuts to be clambered for in the high tree-tops, when the cattle needed no tending, the irrigation works no care... All were white-washed: the walls that began on either side of the gate, the walls on both sides of the driveway.
Near the entrance stood the gables of the former slave houses like large white posters from which the perishable
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words had been washed away by streaming rain. In the distance, on top of the hill, he saw the plantation house dimly reflected on the wide stone terrace. From here its whiteness and the shape of the roof made him think of a vast tent, left behind by people, who had travelled farther in baste. With its white canvas sides it could heave in rough weather like the pinions of an immense bird.
Fritz pushed down the starter, with a jerk the car shot up the driveway. The caretaker closed the gates behind him. He only vaguely remembered the way to the garage, a former stable; he knew in which direction it was but seemed to have forgotten just where it stood. Now he noted that in fourteen years certain things can reach a state of oblivion. It was silly to be offended because Wancho did not recognize him at once; without the help of the captain probably the judge would not have welcomed him so heartily either. Fritz drove slowly, feeling his way with the front wheels. Wancho was already standing with the doors wide open when he reached the garage.
‘You had better go to the house and tell that I've arrived. I'll close the doors myself, I have the judge's keys.’
He remained listening to the last jolts of the dying motor and then got out. Reluctantly. With the door of the car closed behind him, he had the feeling that he was going towards an uncertain future, now that he was about to enter the house again where he had lived many years ago with his mother and father. They had urged him again and again to come back and see the island where he had spent his youth... Then, many years ago his mother had died and a few months ago, his father too... Absently, he remained leaning against the car with one foot on the running board... His mother... His father... Sometimes they appeared in his mind's eye so distinct,
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so alive, that it frightened him. Sometimes they were only ideas, names. He wondered why he had come here like this on the very first day. He wondered if he should stay here for the night. He could go back to the town now and stay at a hotel as the judge had advised him to do. Then, from one of the balconies, he could look out on the harbour where the lights from the port-holes fell sparkling across the water. He could even stay on board one more night, in the familiar cabin.
He closed the garage slowly. Outside utter darkness reigned now. Slowly, he continued up the driveway, but when he reached the steps that led to the terrace, he wanted to turn around and run away. Deep within him cried an old, nearly dead voice: in the dark your mother is sitting on the terrace in a rocking-chair... you do not see her... the sound of rocking and your mother's scent guide you... then you bump against the rocking-chair... you touch your mother's dress... you feel the lace collar around her neck... your mother gives you her hand... you play with the hand... you turn the one ring that was not, and the other one that was her wedding ring...
Poignant was the remembrance of this hand which he had formerly played with in the dark and which he had sometimes brought to his lips to bite one of the fingers, with a strange kind of playfulness. He relived it again in his memory: his mother laughed happily, but pulled back her hand. Then the child pressed his face against his mother's who pressed hers back against his. And at the same time, also out of a kind of playfulness but which was mixed with an excess of tenderness, they both made a humming sound, deep in the breast, with teeth clenched.
This was long ago, however. Now he walked across an empty terrace. He would not bump against a chair again in which a
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young woman sat rocking alone. And this gave him a feeling of immense, almost nauseating emptiness; as if he were plunged from void into void.
Light was shining from the house. Old Wancho stood in the doorway and looked at Fritz with his blank eyes that stared into the distance. The man remained staring at him. Ruprecht looked back frowningly. It was the second time that Wancho aroused his irritation. Then the caretaker turned with a bow, ‘good night, Mister Fritz’.
What did the man want? Probably he was old. While Fritz stood there, lost in thought, he heard a skirt rustle by, heard a woman greet him with the official phrase: ‘Welcome to Miraflores, Mister Fritz. I will get you something to eat.’ ‘Very well,’ Ruprecht had answered, staring after Wancho until the old negro disappeared completely in the dark. Then he entered the house... It was as if high flood gates were opened. Reality and memory poured over him, each struggling for ascendancy. First, his thoughts carried him to the garret which, as a child, he used to reach by clambering up a ladder and clumsily pushing open a trap door with head and hands... A tangle of rafters and tie beams. Swarms of bats hung there by their paws, heads down. Motionless. But they began to swing slowly as soon as steps could be heard thumping on the floor. Ghost-like the animals swung, like flocks of black cotton.
Then a view of the interior of the house startled him. He had lived with delusions during all those years in Europe. The division of the house had nearly nothing in common with the intricate, half obscure images he had created for himself at those countless times when he could not fall asleep, half sitting up in bed with his arms around his knees and staring into the dark, or during the day, stretched out in a sunny wood with a
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handkerchief over his face and gnats buzzing in his ears. The same two inner walls, which were now simplicity itself, had appeared to him then as something mysterious. They ran parallel to the width of the house, dividing the space into a narrow fore part, a narrow rear part and a broader middle section. The middle section was then sub-divided into three parts: his parents' bedroom to the left, the room in which he used to sleep to the right, and a living room in the middle. The mysteriousness was heightened by the arched openings in the walls that separated the living room from the fore and rear parts. The light could fall through these arches as in an old, deserted church. The pillars that supported them rested on a thick, knee-length wall, so that the small boy could easily clamber under the arches to read his children's books. Fritz rubbed his hand across his eyes in an effort to drive away the images which still tried to sway him. The varying light under the arcades had shaped that deceptive labyrinth in his imagination, which had gradually supplanted reality.
He stood lingering before the passage from the front of the house to the living room. Something kept him from entering. The luster, spread unevenly across the cement floor, as light across an animal's hide, shone almost intensely near this passage which, in his imagination, had become something like the portal which separates two worlds. Would not the life of the architecture, for the most part, also have disappeared, together with the human faces, whose expressions changed as capriciously as the light in the arches of the arcades? In the living room it had always been his father and mother or white relatives that he saw. In the narrow fore and rear part of the house, the slight smell of colored people always hung in the air. A smell he had often missed in Europe. That of the house- | |
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keeper, the caretaker, or of other colored people who came to speak to his father. At such times his father would remain standing at the door talking to them or would take them to the room at one corner of the house.
The corners at the fore and rear parts had been partitioned off, making rooms for various purposes. Thus the kitchen had sprung up at the left front corner, where smoke streaks looked like continents and where negro women were sometimes bustling about and sometimes lying sound asleep on mats. The rear corners had become the bathroom and the former bedroom of the housekeeper. When those rooms were locked, as a child, he had imagined all kinds of things happening behind the thin door panels on which he had even beat with his fists at times. The other room at the front was where his father had done his correspondence when he was on the plantation. This room had left a deep impression on him. Probably the full-rigged three master in a bottle would still be hanging there. And the typewriter which had given him such a fright would still be standing there; he had pushed down one of the keys and the machine shot like an arrow from one end to the other, with a hard bang. It would be standing there in its cover as in a shroud. - In Holland, when a relative had asked him if he did not wear a mourning band, he had felt nauseated. - In his father's study, still leaning against the wall in a corner, would also be the guns with which he used to go hunting with Karl, who was now district chief and who bore ill will against him; why, he could not possibly guess.
But it was not only the district chief, the whole island bore him an ill will. He had returned to his native land with empty hands. That is why he had to wander along empty roads and through empty rooms and past people whose hearts remained
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empty for him. He could better have avoided the roads, the rooms and the people, as he had the house in town. That is why he hesitated on the shining cement floor in the passage way, he would rather not enter the living room. A great fear mastered him when a power, stronger than himself, drove him inside. The lighting from the very dim oil lamps in the fore and rear parts, and from the stronger hanging lamp in the living room, was spread out across the floor and walls in circles of various sizes, convolute or intersecting each other; and the segments of stronger and weaker light, together with the shadows cast in the arches of the arcades, formed an immense corolla of light. It seemed to Fritz that he stepped into this corolla and, at the same time, into an ambush, into something insubstantial, a vacuum in space. His eyes sought a fixed point in this vacuum and fastened on the door of the room to his left. There his parents had slept formerly. He used to run in there in the early morning and look at himself in his mother's mirror and go and lie down next to his mother; then his father would already be our ranging the plantation, sometimes on the shy sorrel called Boulanger, and sometimes on foot with hatchet in hand, to chop away the cacti and lianas... ‘Behind that door my parents are still sleeping, my father, my mother,’ called a voice loudly within him. The voice also resounded outside him. Ruprecht was hardly aware of what he did. He sprang towards the door and threw it open. He saw light reflected in his mother's mirror. At the same moment, it was as if someone or something with glowing eyes sprang back at him out of the darkness, gripped him by the shoulders and screamed in his ears. Deathly pale, he slammed the door closed again. He broke into a cold sweat. Everything seemed charged with electricity: he got a shock from everything he came into contact with. But
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he controlled himself. This went too far. He must really be in a somewhat irrational state, he was over-wrought. He would have to put bizarre adventures out of his head; the most important thing was to become calm. A person must withstand his emotional excesses.
It was only to assume a feeling of safety that he sauntered so carelessly to the rear of the house. The knob turned, creaking in his grip. The door swept from his hand, like a rag in a whirl wind; the back door was on the north side, where the full North-east trade wind blew... For a moment Fritz felt as if he were being assailed by the wind. Then he grew accustomed to it and let the cool breeze blow through his hair.
He looked into an impenetrable darkness. Gradually his eyes also grew accustomed to this. But it was so dark that objects could not be distinguished save by a greater or lesser degree of blackness or by their sounds. Only far in the distance did he see some drifting paths of light on the sea, between the high dark arms of the rocky coast. The North coast of the island was so inaccessable that the small bay, which he saw from here had, in former times, only served as a play ground for Fritz and his white and coloured playmates. Among them was Karl, who went hunting with him in later years and who today gave him a hand like a dead bird. Also among them was the little cousin whom he had painfully remembered that afternoon in town; she had stood between the pillars, with her lanky body and rather large feet, but also with her clear blue eyes and golden hair, and laughed at him. When, still younger, they had played games on the plantation she also made fun of him. All the games invented by Karl, with his faded blue, forget-me-not eyes, she had found wonderful. She even curled her lips scornfully at the lovely shells, with the rose-colored insides,
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that Fritz found on the beach by the little bay, while she tossed back the hair that had blown in her face with a sharp gesture. No, she had not been very fond of him. Over there they had also played. There, where the coconut and date fronds rustled. A single flash of light, heaven knew from what century-far star, struck the metal leaves. The rustling of the sea mingled with the rustling of the palms only to detach itself again, so that the two motives could also be heard distinctly... The rustling music awakened in him the memory of another little girl... A feeling of gratitude arose in Fritz Ruprecht's heart for the little negro friend Maria, who had taken his side against the cousin and who, in her turn had found all of Karl's games very tiresome, preferring even the simplest ones of Fritz.
In the garden, where the coconut and date palms rose above the clustering groups of mango and medlar trees, moss-grown stone benches stood here and there; made in the time of slavery for no other purpose than to enable the various Elizabeths, Virginias, and Carolinas to listen to the rustling of the palm groves: the rhythmical scraping of the fronds against each other, the periods of breathless silence, the distant snapping of a twig. Then the little boy, Fritz, had made up the game of clambering onto the old stone benches and just sitting there next to one another. The cousin, naturally, could not have found it sillier, and ran off with Karl. Fritz sat there with Maria and they counted how often they could hear the wood pigeons coo in the distance. A fervent cooing, deep in the breast.
Fritz remembered this young black girl vividly. She was of a blackness that is seldom seen among the rather mixed negroes of the island. But there was something very unusual about her: the shape of her head, her nose and her lips were like those
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of a white person, they had nothing negroid. Even her movements were typical of a white person, with something angular and brittle about the joints, something quattrocento in her manner, which is not seen among the suppler negroes and which, in whites, can degenerate into woodenness. Maria did not make the impression of a mulatto, but of a full-blood negro in whom, however, certain definite features of a distant, non-negroid forefather were pronounced. Later, when he was wandering about Europe, Ruprecht had felt a desire to inquire about this little playmate of his youth. Gradually, the news he received of her formed a coherent story which, however, he had forgotten again years ago. She was the child of the caretaker's oldest daughter. The mother had not survived her birth, and her father had taken little notice of her afterwards.
He was one of those men who could at once be described as ‘unreliable’. He was called Theodore. Like Fritz Ruprecht, he had also gone astray in Europe. Ruprecht had run across him as a waiter at a smart restaurant in the Hague, and then again as a porter in one of those places in Paris where Fritz went chiefly to watch Lesbian women dancing together, with such painful expressions that they looked like drowning people who had just been pulled out of the water. That was the father, Theodore. The daughter Maria, with the help of Ruprecht's parents, had studied at the Normal school, in the only town on the island, to become a teacher of primary classes. This qualified her to stand day after day, with her somewhat astonished eyes, before the poor negro children who, with their arms folded carefully in front of them, repeated the monotonous lessons in a chorus: ab, bc, cd... three four five, one two three. That afternoon in town, the echo of these sounds was carried to him as he passed one of the buildings, but he had
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hardly noticed it then. Perhaps she was the one who was directing it. In any case he decided to look her up before he boarded a boat and left the island again. For despite all his expectations of bizarre adventures, he knew that he would not remain there long and that his short stay would be spent on talks with the old judge. He took a few steps backward until his heels touched the door sill. Musing, he had sauntered outside.
With the narrow door sill between his sole and heel, he rocked back and forth. A smile passed over his face; he was not in the least happy, but he felt as if he had been embosomed in a sphere of good will. Before him lay the darkness, which he had filled with tender images from his childhood. Behind him, in the living room, he heard the clinking of knives and forks, the clatter of plates being put on the table. It was the housekeeper who was setting the table for him.
‘How dark it is to-night; in Europe they think we only have clear moon and starlit nights in the tropics.’
The housekeeper made no reply.
‘When does the moon rise?’
‘There is no moon to-night,’ she answered with such a clear voice that he felt tempted to turn and see the woman who possessed it. But he did not turn around. He wanted to stand as he was awhile longer, rocking back and forth with the narrow door sill between his sole and heel, the light from the hanging lamp behind him, the clinking of silverware and clatter of dishes, the shuffling of the woman's sandals across the cement floor.
It gave him a safe, almost caressing feeling, to have the housekeeper continually moving about him; like a cat that is hardly noticed, but of whose presence one is constantly aware.
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He was glad that he had not turned around; it was exactly right that way: to know she was there without having looked at her. The housekeeper, a slender negress, was bending over the table, under the hanging lamp, from which the rays of light seemed to shine with increased intensity because of the white table cloth. Carefully, she arranged something on the table. When it was finished she picked up the tray on which she had brought in the dishes and food, and walked slowly past the arcade to the kitchen where she laid the empty tray on the table. As she left the room, she looked out of the corner of her eye at Fritz Ruprecht who was still standing with his back towards her. In the kitchen she blew up the fire in the charcoal brazier, sat down at the table, and rubbed her fingers across her forehead reflectively. Then she got up, lit the lantern and went outside. Her skirt, which just reached the knees, flapped in the wind. She crossed the terrace and walked slowly around it in the dark. The lantern swung softly, like an incense burner. Now and then the light fell on a cactus stem that suddenly flashed out of the dark and rose towards the sky. In the shrubs the lizards were startled awake and fled, rustling across the leaves. The light swayed over the bare earth, where even the tiniest stone cast a shadow. At a thickly grown piece of ground, which was in sharp contrast to its surroundings, she put down the lantern and squatted on her heels. Patches of light and dark relieved each other among the leaves and sterns. The woman's body was also touched only fragmentarily by the light: her neck, her face, her legs. A single ray of light struck the toe of one of her sandals. She watched a snail wobble over some clods of earth. On a heart-shaped leaf, a caterpillar was disturbed by the changing light and raised half its little body in the air. A bud sprang out of the dark, separated from its
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stem, that only caught the light again where it emerged from the ground. The woman groped with both hands among the leaves and tendrils of the melons, pulled and twisted one loose, her lips pressed resolutely together with the effort.
In the meantime Fritz Ruprecht sat at the table, with a laugh on his face. A contented, indifferent laugh, since the chewing of his food had brought him back to reality and to a skeptical attitude towards the stories with which people try to deceive each other. He had been told that Maria was Theodore's daughter. That might be so. But it might also be otherwise. He stopped eating, laid down his knife and fork. With his jaws clenched and his eyes squinting slyly, he continued the malicious train of his thoughts. He too was from this island, he knew its customs, he saw through its fabrications. Therefore it would not surprise him if one day or another he would be obliged to decide on the fatherhood, not of the roving Theodore, but of Alexander Ruprecht, his own father. Fritz knew that men like Theodore, who were destined to end in European bars, were often chosen to cover the sins of white gentlemen. One thing, however, always betrayed these white trespassers; they gave their secret children an education, making both the children and themselves suspicious in the eyes of others. What betrays a person the most, is always his own heart, with its few irresistable impulses.
Fritz turned his head. He had heard the shuffling of the sandals in the back of the house. He would have liked to speak to someone but she had already disappeared into the room at the right, where she probably slept, Fritz laughed and repeated to himself insinuatingly, almost obscenely: ‘Where she probably sleeps’. He continued, half aloud, raising his index finger and shaking it at an imaginary person opposite him: ‘Yes daddy,
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my daddy, how do I know everything you have been doing. Perhaps, here on the plantation, we are all children of Thine, O Father, which art in heaven’. Then at once his face became clouded, the impropriety of the remark and above all the gaiety of the voice penetrated him, as though coming from another. He continued his meal, as still as a mouse, rebuked by his own childish conscience. He wiped his lips and crumpled the napkin. Then he stood up. From the chair next to him he picked up the brief case containing his necessities. He went into the room where he had formerly slept, to the right of the living room, opposite the door he had closed because glowing eyes had rushed at him. He left the door open until he found an oil lamp with a copper reflector, on a table. He fidgeted with the lamp, lit the wick, and closed the glass chimney over it again. There were no windows in the room, but a second door that opened onto the terrace. There was a camp bed. He remembered how often, in Europe, he had longed to sleep on such a bed, especially because no blankets were used, only two thin sheets. On the wall hung a framed reproduction, that he also remembered, it showed a very young girl, kneeling in her night-gown, praying with folded hands. Pre-Raphaelite. He came across the original once, in the Tate or National Gallery, he thought it was the Tate Gallery. He had remained standing in front of it for a long time, because it looked like a copy of the reproduction on the distant plantation, just as the face, which he now examined in the round mirror above the table, looked like a crumpled copy of his childhood face. He remembered that he always had to let his hair be cut quite short, because the merest suggestion of long hair was looked upon by his father as something impossibly untidy. The hair grew into a tuft in the middle that fell into a lock on his forehead, a miniature
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Napoleon lock, that he had always found ridiculous. He pulled the drawer of the table brusquely open. All kinds of shells lay in it. He remembered that his father, who took pleasure in few things, was at times enchanted by the shells:
‘Give this one to your father, Fritz.’
Would the shells he had given his father still exist? If so, they must be in one of the drawers of his father's desk. He would go and find out at once. He walked hastily out of his room. He had already pulled open the door. He wanted to see the full-rigged three master in a bottle; the typewriter in its shroud; the guns and the revolvers; it was also from that room, that in his father's absence, he had climbed via ladder and trap door to see the bats, swinging like flocks of black cotton. The memory of the ghost-like animals could not frighten him now, as he wandered through his parental house, feeling as safe as when he was a small boy, running from room to room in a moment of excitement. The door knob, on which he felt the old dents, was familiar in his grasp. He had already walked half-way through the living room, had already turned towards the passage to the front part of the house, when he involuntarily stood still.
In the farthest arch, near the kitchen, he had seen: the face of Maria. The shock sent the blood rushing through his body. His fingers tingled, were almost painful. He stood there like a dummy, with both hands stretched before him, his face and eyes frozen with astonishment. Gradually the shock subsided, he heard the ticking of the mahogony grandfather-clock, which hung in the back of the house, though this was the first time the sound had reached him that evening. The calm atmosphere of the living room, lighted by the oil lamp, flowed gratefully through him. It is remarkable, how the aspect of things can
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change according to our mood. The same room, which in the beginning of the evening had disquieted him with its corolla of light, into which he had plunged as into a vacuum, now reassured him with the shelter of its rustic lighting. It had been a long time since Ruprecht had stood in this tranquil light. He looked up at the oil lamp. He looked, as if for the first time, at the small specks of light on the reservoir. His glance travel led around its metal rim, which was fastened to the three chains by which the whole hung from the ceiling, over the table. Even the little clamps which pressed the burner more tightly against the glass chimney made him feel tender, for he saw in them a small detail belonging to the past.
It seemed nearly impossible that, in this peaceful atmosphere, one could be pursued by obsessions. Had it been reality or once more hallucination? Though the light shone calmly in the living room, the shadows in the arches of the arcades must have helped to evoke the adorable image: the face of Maria. Or rather, as he imagined the face of the little girl must have developped into maturity. Framed by the arch, it looked like a piously enlarged household photo of a woman who had died young. She had on a white linen blouse, tucked in a black skirt. It was the European profile; her hair also stood out more than is mostly the case with negroes... But it was not possible... He had also heard the shuffling of the housekeeper's sandals, and Maria could not possibly be the housekeeper here. She was a teacher in town, among the priests and the nuns who had brought their religion and their religious teachings to the little negroes of the island. Pure coincidence; the housekeeper bore some resemblance to Maria, which was not surprising, she was, perhaps, yes, even quite probably, related to Maria... Nevertheless he walked rapidly, almost
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ran, to the kitchen. As he went past the arcade he saw his own shadow, like a black cloak blowing from his shoulders. There was no one in the kitchen. The charcoal fire was already out; in the semi-darkness he saw a cat curled up on a chair.
He retraced his steps. First glowing eyes and now the face of Maria. Where would this end? Why did this woman hover so invisably around him? She had cleared the table while he was in his bedroom musing over paintings in the Tate Gallery. Why this invisible hovering about? In the writing room he pulled open one of the desk drawers. It was empty, only the plank was stained with dried up ink spots. In another drawer lay a browning, next to a yellow yard stick and an electric torch which he tried; he laid the browning and electric torch on the table and shoved the drawer closed. In the following drawer were only some wads of paper, resting on an open package of candles. It was in the fourth one that he found the shells he had gathered for his father on the white sand by the sea. Fritz turned the shells around and around in his hand; he felt the protuberances with his fingers but he had no eye now for their changeable colours and mother-of-pearl sheen, which had so attracted him formerly. He stared vaguely before him, he saw the face framed by the arcade; he had seen the eyes move slightly away, with fear, as if Fritz might mean misfortune for her. Had he ever meant misfortune to Maria? His thoughts travelled once more to the little girl with whom he had sat on the moss grown bench, in the palm grove. His heart melted with pity... He remembered how he had once scolded Maria. He had seen her lips tremble, but she had immediately pressed them together, like a brave little girl who did not want to cry... Before the first tear fell, he had kissed her, somewhere on the cheek...
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Who knows how unhappy she may have felt later... When a negro boy became a school teacher, his motive was obvious, his aim was quite clear: he wished to improve himself, not to be a servant any longer. But, on the other hand, a girl like Maria became a teacher because she wished to satisfy the demands made on her, nothing more... Who had made the demand on her to become a school teacher?... A girl like Maria would also be capable of returning to the place of her origin, just as Fritz had returned. Who knows but that, impelled by an inner urge, she had really exchanged her position as a teacher at the girls' school in town for life on the plantation again. From an inner urge to return to the place of her origin. She had given up the stockings and also the high-heeled shoes.
Fritz let his fancy run on, as he played with the shell in his hand. Finally he dropped it in the drawer; then he picked up another, to which he gave as little attention. In his fancy he convinced himself that it was really Maria whom he had seen. Into his fancy slipped, unnoticed, a strange elation.
She had given up the stockings and the high-heeled shoes. She stood there again in her sandals, as when she had played with Fritz in the different parts of the plantation: the beach, the palm grove. Perhaps, too, in the little garden they had planted together behind the house; they had sown bean and melon seeds and also some unknown kind, filched from a drawer, of which the future had had to reveal what they would yield. Who knows, perhaps Maria had enlarged that little garden and still squatted attentively next to a blade with two pods, or next to the melon vines, blurred and fuzzy, like the legs of insects. Possibly she even grew the useless things that are flowers: roses, dahlias, camelias... But who or what could
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have whispered to her to give up teaching and return to the plantation? It must have happened this way: She fell ill in the barren lifeless town. It will not only have been the shoes with the high heels that pinched her. No. The sweet nuns and the good priests will not have forgotten to exercise their pressure on her too. She will have fallen ill and come to spend some weeks with her grandfather, the caretaker. She will have gone back again, and returned once more. And then one day the thought ripened in her mind, just to stay away, never to put on the shoes with the high heels again, nor to climb on the bus that passed twice a day, nor to pay her respects to the Mother Superior ever again... Just stay here... Among the melons and roses and palms... The North-east trade wind blows through your hair... Life becomes sad, but full of a significance it misses elsewhere.
Fritz Ruprecht smiled tenderly. To achieve this she must have made up some kind of story to tell the caretaker. With his blank eyes that stared into the distance, it will have made him wonder to hear that a girl would want to exchange her respectable position as teacher for that of common servant on a plantation...
But perhaps she had not made up any story to tell the caretaker. Perhaps she had not returned to the plantation at all and these things were but figments of Fritz' imagination. Even so, he was unable to tear himself away from the almost frightening fascination of the other possibility: that he was only separated from her now by a few meters, that he only had to push open a door to experience the gentleness of her presence again. Fritz felt an irresistable impulse mounting in him to go to Maria's room and awaken her and ask her everything. How she had managed. And if his father had helped her. And
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if she wanted to remain here always... As she was, without a man... And wither gradually... And die away, like an autumn leaf sinks deeper into the earth, and dies...
Fritz put the shells together again, pushing them into a heap as he had found them. Slowly he began to close the drawer. It hardly moved. Fritz thought: why should I not go to her and comfort her, who really is: my sister the negro? It could be accepted almost as a fact that she really was his sister, that she was not the daughter of Theodore, who swung doors for drowning Lesbians, but of Alexander Ruprecht, Fritz' father who, one night, had become enchanted by the caretaker's daughter as unexpectedly as by the rose-colored insides of the shells
Fritz banged the drawer closed and walked out of his father's study. He noticed that the woman had moved through the house again, while he had been in his father's study thinking about Maria; she had blown out the lamps in the front and rear parts of the house, only leaving the wick turned low in the living room. A woman moved around him in decreasing circles, or was it he who moved around the woman, approaching her? As he walked towards her room, the doubt rose once more in his heart, though now for the last time: whether she was Maria and whether Maria was really his sister. Then he forgot all doubt, for he no longer consulted the conjectures of his reason, he was in another world. He had already reached her door. He opened it, took one step and then another into the room, but still held the door knob in his hand behind him, and did not close the door. In the dark he heard how still she lay, without breathing. A sudden change took place in his feelings for Maria. He heard the whirring of the silence, he heard the whirring of his own blood. The scent of
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the woman hung in the room. It was as if he went towards something new, something shining. It was no longer the child in Maria that awakened his tenderness, but the woman who intoxicated him infinitely... Maria, or the other, who looked like her and who could be none other than Maria on this night... He reflected how strangely they were stranded together... Here, where everything was so far from Asia, America, Europe, with their sombre strivings in which, if he was not mistaken, he had also participated for awhile.. How insignificant their two powerless bodies seemed to him, breathing slowly - like animals in a corral - in this white house on a hill, where every glimmer of light was swallowed by the night, and every sound by the rustling of palms and sea. It was not only succumbing to his loneliness that drove him to her. In his vivid imagination he saw how the slight little sister had grown into a young woman. He looked on with delight. And as he visualized the ripening of the familiar little girls' body, it awakened in him a desire for her feminine maturity, for her embraces, for the curves of her body. His hand still rested on the door knob. He still heard how quietly she lay, without breathing. With his heart beating in his throat, he closed the door. It was so dark, he could not see his hand in front of him... Maria, or the other, did not resist him; she did not even make a shy attempt to. The arms, that she threw around his neck, held him tight against her for a moment; then she released him and holding him at arm's length told him: ‘Do you know, Fritz, how I have always remembered you? As the little boy, different from the others, with the two parts in your hair, your lock, your spiteful little mouth...’
He was startled for a moment because now it was an irrevocable certainty that this really was Maria. But she closed
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her arms around him laughingly; the spiteful little Fritz. His body relaxed in her embrace until it was he who embraced and her body that relaxed. His hand had already begun to caress the curve of her hip, the tenderness in his heart was flowing over into bodily desire, when suddenly the sound of violent rattling on the front door reached him. Fritz jumped up and stood by the bed. Tears of fury rushed to his eyes. And he tasted the bitterness in his mouth. Gruffly he snapped at her:
‘Have you a man around here?’
‘A man, Fritz?’
‘Don't play dumb. Have you a man? Yes or no?’
‘No. But what is the matter, Fritz? Let me open the door.’
‘No. You stay here.’
They would not get him. It was not that easy to square accounts with Fritz Ruprecht. He turned the key in her door; he still heard her voice: but Fritz, why do you do that?... In the living room he blew out the lamp so that the house was in darkness. He walked to his father's writing room, reached for the browning, pulled out the magazine; it was empty. He pulled the drawers open, two at a time; no bullets. He did find cartridges for the shot gun that stood in the corner. He threw the browning and magazine across the table. He grabbed the gun, loaded it. The rest of the cartridges and the electric torch he shoved into his pocket. He locked that door too and walked through the dark towards the front door. Again he heard the rattling. The sound enraged him. When he reached the door, he stood still, held his breath and listened. Just as the rattling began again, he jerked the door open and pointed the electric torch at the visitor: the blank eyes of the caretaker, that stared into the distance.
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‘What do you want at this hour, Wancho? I thought everyone still went to bed at eight o'clock here. This is the third time today that you've tried my patience. Couldn't you have waited till to-morrow?’
‘Mister Fritz...’
‘Mister Fritz nothing. Go along to bed. We can talk tomorrow...’
‘Mister Fritz...’
‘I remember those tricks. Surprise people in the middle of the night and think you can get what you want...’
‘I don't want anything, Mister Fritz...’
‘We know all about that not wanting anything. A goat for Aunt Carolina's birthday. Or a rabbit for Aunt Esmeralda. You'll get it all. But to-morrow. Not to-night. And now to bed, Wancho. I don't want to hear any more rattling. Sleep well.’
As he was about to slam the door in Wancho's face, he heard a scream as unreal as when he had opened the door of his mother's bedroom, at the beginning of the evening:
‘Maria is your father's daughter!’
He jerked the door open again. He did not know exactly what happened then. Probably he slipped on the worn doorsill, fell with his arms floundering in the air so that the barrel of the gun struck Wancho on the chest. When he recovered himself and was standing up again, his first thought was: lucky that the trigger spring wasn't released - only that had to happen too... He helped Wancho up, who had fallen when the gun struck him, and was moaning softly.
He had to do it by feeling, it was so dark; there were no stars to be seen, the sky was overcast. With words Ruprecht could easily hide his emotion from the old man whose teeth were still chattering audibly from the fright.
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‘Nothing has happened, Wancho. I only slipped so that my gun hit your chest. It was your chest, wasn't it?’
‘Yes, my chest...’ He could hardly get the words out.
‘Shall we put on some light and see what has happened?’
‘No, not inside. Maria must not know anything about this. I was only frightened, I feel no pain.’
‘Well, as you wish it, Wancho. But let me go with you until you've recovered from the fright.’
Wancho let himself be led by the arm, while Ruprecht reassured him.
‘I only slipped. You musn't think any more about it. You know, I myself had a slight suspicion that Theodore was only used as a cover. It was easy to suspect that because my father let Maria study to be a school teacher. I need not hide anything from you. You are an old man, your life was worth more to my father than mine, you have a right to know everything.’
The gravel on the driveway crunched under their feet. A glow worm shone and faded, the only light in the dark night. By the way the old mans arm rested on Ruprecht's, the latter understood that he must still accompany him a little way further.
‘I admit, Wancho, that your granddaughter is a pretty girl. I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jeruzalem. Do you remember that from the song of songs? I think you know the bible better than I do. If I had not at all suspected the truth, there might have been something to fear. But Wancho, good Wancho, why should I have such haste?’
Ruprecht felt the arm he was supporting begin gradually to withdraw.
‘Wancho, I think that you believe me to be more wicked than I really am.’
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He heard Wancho's shuffling gait beside him. He could have gone on walking for hours next to the old man, silently, without thinking. But above all, he did not wish to trouble him; as soon as he felt that the other no longer needed his support, he took leave of him.
‘Well, Wancho, let us shake hands. Sleep well.’
‘Sleep well, Mister Fritz. Do not be offended with me. I have seen many misfortunes. Some that I could have spared others.’
For a moment, the thin old negro hand rested in the young hand of the white man.
‘Sleep well, Wancho.’
The two parted. Wancho walked on. Ruprecht stood looking in the direction where he had disappeared, until he could no longer hear his steps. Hesitating, he stood there in the silence, then he turned suddenly, he had heard rustling behind him. He listened. It sounded like the whispering of human voices. For a moment he even thought he heard soft footsteps and giggling. He steadied himself, became alert; it had sounded so precisely like human whispering and laughing. But it must have been gusts of wind in the palm grove, that rebounded through the trees, creaking and grating. For some reason it reminded him of Karl who, as a boy, could only laugh at the expense of others. But Karl was reading Othello now with his incomprehensible smile, that lingered between willfulness and enmity.
This unpleasant memory of Karl swept past him, however, as swiftly as the breeze that blew through his hair... Fritz turned around. A grievous way back to the house, where he had found a sister, but lost a sweetheart. He was so tired that he only thought for a moment of something he could tell Maria and than gave it up again.
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Come, what must! But when he opened her door and found the room lighted, he understood immediately that Wancho's cry of fear had also penetrated here. She was half sitting up in bed with wide open eyes, staring at the floor. He sat down beside her, did not know what to say, and also stared at the floor. Finally he put his arm around her shoulder. He pressed his face against hers. She let him do it but her face did not press back against his as his mother's did in times past. They sat like that for awhile. Then he began to rock her slowly back and forth. And he made the humming sound, deep in the breast with teeth clenched, as he had formerly done with his mother. The tears rolled slowly from her eyes... Life became sad, but it became full of a significance that it missed elsewhere. And that is the one thing that cannot be taken from the children of this earth.
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