Amsterdam Stories by Nescio Page B

is a serious person and secondly is there on assignment. The man had done his best to laugh and then said, “You must be joking, Mister Bavink.”
    Then even Bekker had to laugh and call himself an idiot and say he was going to quit his job and sell his suit and smoke cigars with the money. Which of course he didn’t do.
    And Bavink had answered that he wasn’t joking and the man was completely flummoxed. He couldn’t sneer at Bavink because he had heard from well-known persons that Bavink “was doing remarkably fine work.”
    â€œSo I presume,” he’d said, and paused for a second and peered at Bavink through his pince-nez and then said again, “So I presume that you put all of your seriousness into your work?”
    â€œWhat would you have done then, Koekebakker, if it was you there?” The fellow had spoken with so much respect that Bavink had thought “What an absolute ass he is” but didn’t dare to say anything.
    â€œYou know what I would have done, Bavink? I would’ve asked if he wanted a smoke.” “That’s exactly what I did too, and he said, ‘No thank you, I don’t smoke.’”
    The fellow talked like he was reading out loud from a newspaper. He understood perfectly well that Bavink did not want to talk about himself, he himself felt the same way, it is always rather unpleasant, but you simply can’t always avoid it, you understand, life carries with it certain obligations and an artist (the guy really emphasized that word) more or less belongs among those who … Then Bavink thought that he might as well say something that sounded like it was straight out of a speech too, so he said: “Indubitably.” The guy was taken aback. He was happy to hear that Mister Bavink shared his opinion with respect to this point—guys like that always call these things “points”—and as a result he took the liberty of asking Mister Bavink in all candor whether it was true what certain newspapers (he called them “journals”) had printed, namely that he was, to a great degree, a great degree, indifferent to fame?
    â€œJesus,” said Bavink, “there I was, I thought if Hoyer was here he’d know what to say to him.”
    â€œAnd what did you say?”
    â€œI asked him: Is that what it said in the paper?”
    â€œDon’t you read the newspapers?” he said then, just like a normal person.
    â€œI’ll be damned,” Bekker said, “so he wasn’t going to leave empty-handed after all. Now he can write in his little rag that Johannes Bavink never reads the newspaper.”
    â€œThat’s what I thought too,” Bavink said. “Now he’s got his hands on something, now I’ll never get rid of him. He was already starting in with his notebook.”
    â€œWhat a mess,” I said. “Mess? You have no idea. What was I supposed to do then? How could I get rid of him? The longer he sat there the more room he took up. I saw him growing and spreading, he filled my whole studio and the whole street was full of the little men, everyone the three of us, Hoyer too, have seen for all these years on the street, everywhere, they were standing out on the street and I knew they were standing there. My studio looked at me like it didn’t know me anymore, I wasn’t Bavink anymore, I felt like I was Bekker with some factory owner on the phone.” “Hey,” Bekker said. “That can happen,” I said. “You hear that, Bekker? I said that can happen. It’s a lousy feeling. You know I feel sorry for you.” “Hey,” Bekker said. We fell silent.
    â€œYou know, Koekebakker, how at your last job you had to ask every evening before you could go home if the receipt was on the spindle?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œAnd how every time you asked that you felt like you had muttonchop sideburns?”
    â€œDefinitely.” “So, it