The Corpse on the Dike by Janwillem van de Wetering Page A

that I gave you to keep the mosquitoes away? I am sure Father didn’t remember to water the laburnum; give him a shout when you see him, will you? I have never had laburnum before and the instructions say that it needs plenty of moisture. I put the seeds in the ground near my dead tree. If they come up they should grow all over the tree and their flowers will hang down. There are three different colors: red, orange and yellow. Perhaps I should have had yellow only. This way the tree may look like the box top of some cheap brand of horrible chocolates, but I can always snip off the wrong flowers. I am a gardener after all, not a lover of nature. To hell with nature. It doesn’t care about us, so why should we care about it? All this modern rubbish about pollution makes me laugh; why are we so concerned all of a sudden?
    Let the sea get full of oil and the rivers full of boiling soapy suds, I don’t care. I only care about the garden and the dead tree. If they take that away as well, I’ll find another spot. And if everything is mucked up, I’ll grow a few mini plants in an aquarium. Ah, I am being negative again; you don’t like that I remember. Sorry. It’s the way I am. But it’s true that you have often cheered me up, for which I send you my respectful thanks. It’s nice to live in a different atmosphere sometimes. I like you, Liza, and you are about the only person I like. I don’t like Father, the silly old buzzard, although he amuses me at times, especially when his club loses. You should see him stomp about the house.
    This holiday is drawing toward its end and good riddance to it. I am in Cassis-sur-Mer as you can see by the postmark. I shouldn’t be here but it seems that I am always in a place where I shouldn’t be. I certainly shouldn’t be in that silly office where I fill in the forms, but I have to return to it, so why grumble? And this Cassis-sur-Mer isn’t the worst place on earth. The tourists haven’t found it yet. I only found it because the brand-new car that Karel K. bought chose this convenient spot to break down completely. Something with the gearbox, I understand. Karel is in Marseilles; he had the car dragged there—it cost him a fortune—and it sits in a garage. He has taken a room in a hotel and goes to annoy the garage owner every day. A new gearbox has arrived and is being installed. I don’t like Marseilles; it’s a big city like any other although not quite as depressing as Rotterdam. I have begged him to let me stay here, in this little fishing port. At least I am close to the sea. Sometimes I take the bus to Marseilles and drink with Karel on a terrace. We drink Pernod, which hits you like a mule after a while, and watch the whores in the street. We make bets about whether or not they’ll manage to catch a particular customer. I usually lose, for Karel is a good psychologist. And then, when we are drunk, we go to see a film. We only see French films and it’s very enjoyable to make up your own story, fitting in the characters who shuffle or glide about the screen. I was so drunk the other day that I saw double and then it was even better. Two beautiful men kissing—or hitting; they hit each other a lot in these films—two beautiful women in two cars. I am glad I never bothered to learn French; we had it at school of course, seven hours a week, but the teacher was such an unbelievable clod that I refused to listen to him. And yet I passed the exam. Oh, life is full of miracles.
    In spite of everything I am doing wrong I still seem to be picking up the language now. I caught myself thinking in French yesterday, not just a few words but complete sentences; I was even conjugating the verbs properly. The first French I read here was on the label of the Pernod bottle and I looked up the words I didn’t know in Karel’s dictionary.
    Karel is a very pleasant chap, you know. Fancy that I have worked at the desk next to him for more than a year and I never knew that it would be