Amsterdam Stories by Nescio Page A

staring blankly in front of his last sunset. I arrived at his place with Hoyer. He didn’t recognize us. He just looked at the sun, a big cold red sun setting behind the clouds.
    â€œIt just looks at me, neither of us knows what to do with each other.” He didn’t say anything else.
    Now he’s in an institution. It’s very peaceful there and he’s calm. He just looks up at the sky, or gazes at the horizon, or sits staring into the sun until his eyes hurt. He’s not supposed to do that but they can’t get anywhere with him. They can’t get him to talk. His paintings fetch a high price nowadays.
    And old Koekebakker has turned into a sedate and sensible man. He just writes, receives his humble wages, and doesn’t cause trouble.
    God’s throne is still unshaken. His world just takes its course. Now and then God smiles for a moment about the important gentlemen who think they’re really something. A new batch of little Titans are still busy piling up little boulders so that they can topple him down off his heights and arrange the world the way they think it should be. He only laughs, and thinks: “That’s good, boys. You may be crazy but I still like you better than the proper, sensible gentlemen. I’m sorry you have to break your necks and I have to let the gentlemen thrive, but I’m only God.”
    And so everything takes its little course, and woe to those who ask: Why?
    Finished January 1914

THE WRITING ON THE WALL
    A GAIN the longest day was past. The days were getting shorter—it was still barely noticeable but we knew it was happening, this summer too would pass. Again the day came to an end, again the bright red above the horizon grew pale, the water in the distance kept its color, but barely, darkness crept up everywhere, out of the earth, now the canal in the distance had vanished in the night. We were gloomy about all the things that had passed, and about our lives, which would end while all these things continued to exist. We would see the days get longer a few more times, then we wouldn’t be young anymore. And after that, when the chestnut trees had blossomed red or white a few more times, we would die, in the prime of our lives or maybe as old men, which would be even worse. And the sky would be red again and the canal would still be there too, most likely, gold in the twilight, and they wouldn’t notice any difference.
    Then Bavink said “I’m going to be famous” the way someone else would say “They overcharged me ten cents,” and we all felt we had gotten the short end of the stick, all three of us, Bavink and Bekker and me.
    Then Bavink told us about a visit he had received from a gentleman he’d never met, a short, well-fed man in a suit jacket. Bavink remembered his name and it turned out I knew him, we went to school together, back when he was still a scheming kid.
    He’d come on assignment from a magazine founded by another ambitious gentleman who had poured a ton of money into it and gone around collecting original opinions and slogans and ideas from all sorts of people and presented them as his own, and still didn’t get famous, and then later he gave up too.
    â€œSo,” I said, “he came ‘on assignment’?” And all three of us had to laugh, we laughed our heads off, though Bekker was a little subdued because he sometimes wore a suit coat himself, and a top hat and white tie too not long ago, to help bury a client, and he had almost said a few words by the grave and had come home with a cold.
    â€œWhat was he really there for?” “To make my acquaintance.” “How did it go?” “It started well,” Bavink said, “but I think the guy couldn’t really make heads or tails of me.”
    Bavink had started by saying that he was incapable of talking seriously—a funny thing to say right off the bat to a man like that, who in the first place