Ventoux. Bert Wagendorp

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СКАЧАТЬ did not take part in all the macho behaviour and tried to keep us together. He saw before we did how jealousy would drive us apart—and he did his best to stop it. ‘You lot are horny apes,’ he said. ‘Eager beavers.’ David already knew that everything we call romantic is, in fact, the destroyer of romanticism, or in any case of unselfish boyhood romanticism.

      ‘So you wouldn’t like to fuck her?’ said Joost. David shrugged his shoulders in irritation. ‘You don’t say you’d like to screw André, do you?’ he said. ‘You don’t talk like that about your friends.’

      ‘But I don’t want to,’ said Joost. ‘That’s the difference between women and friends.’

      Laura knew what her effect on us was, but at the beginning she showed no sign of favouritism, as if she knew that that would mean the immediate end of her place in our group. She balanced like a ballerina on pointe and divided her attention between the five of us as if she were keeping an account in which she maintained an accurate record of the distribution of her sympathy.

      I don’t know exactly what it was about us that attracted her. Perhaps it was our closeness that gave her a safe feeling; perhaps together we formed a protective wall against everything she had grown up with. Together, we were sensitive, well read, intelligent, funny, and sporty. Peter quoted from world literature, André was the star player on his local football team, Joost could explain relativity theory or point out the constellations in the sky. You played him ten seconds of a saxophone solo and he knew who it was. David was the understanding listener who never interrupted you or brought up his own worries. But with every day that she was with us, every word that she spoke, every look, and every touch, it became clearer that this ménage à six could not last forever.

      She was a year younger than us, born on 21 April 1965. The reason that she was in our class was because she had skipped a year. She was better than us in almost all subjects—perhaps Joost had a little more scientific precision, but she could sometimes amaze even him with the speed at which she got to the bottom of mathematical problems.

      Her great love was poetry in English, and Emily Dickinson in particular. And she loved the plays of Ionesco and Pinter. In the fifth year, we performed Pinter’s Birthday Party. Joost was Stanley, the main part; André and I played Goldberg and McCann. Our acting talent was sadly wanting, and the fact that the performance was a great success was due entirely to her role as director.

      Quite soon, something grew between Laura and Peter that was different from the relationship André, Joost, David, and I had with her. Peter had found a soulmate. From the beginning, Laura clearly felt a deep admiration for Peter’s talent. She was fascinated by what she immediately recognized as something exceptional. We also saw that Peter could do things we couldn’t cope with, but when he became too airy-fairy, we could just as easily put him down as a facile versifier-to-order.

      When Peter and Laura talked about poems, they were way above our heads. We didn’t mind, and when we had had enough, we said so. Joost, in particular, didn’t beat about the bush. ‘Crooner and Swooner’, he once called them.

      Peter gave a new poem to her to read first. He handed it to her and followed her eye movements as she read it. Then he hung on her every word as she gave her judgement. Usually she thought for a moment, then came out with a review you could have put straight in the paper. All the references, all the images, all the associations—she combined them all into an opinion that was, by the way, invariably positive, with occasional suggestions for a slight improvement or adjustment. Peter always accepted them, at least at first.

      ‘Sometimes she finds something that I haven’t consciously put in myself at all,’ he said. ‘That happens a lot with poems, of course. My father also interprets for all he’s worth. Sometimes he creases me up with all the things he reads into it. But with her, there’s something strange going on. It’s not her interpretations, it’s my encoding that she unravels. She tells me why I’ve written things in a certain way, and she’s very often right. Sometimes she gives me a nasty fright, because she says things I would have preferred not to know.’

      Peter’s talent blossomed when Laura started to become involved. He was still very young, and she was younger still, but she seemed to make him mature as a poet in a short space of time. Sometimes they went to Amsterdam to comb the bookshops—and he made passionate use of her suggestions. They were mainly English-language poets like Thomas, Hughes, and Heaney.

      She was subservient to Peter’s talent, as if he were the one who could put her own ineffable longings and pain into words, if only she fed his soul enough. Inevitably, she figured more and more in the poems he wrote, until, almost as a natural progression, he began a cycle that revolved completely around her. To avoid direct association, the girl in the poems was called Anna, but it was clear enough that it was about Laura. Of course she saw that herself, too, but it did not change her attitude. She gave him the beads to make the necklace that was intended for herself.

      Peter’s message was not: I love you. It was about surrender, about a person he could give himself to heart and soul, and from whom he demanded complete surrender.

      We did not see immediately that there was a direct line from Peter’s poetry to reality. For us, a poem was something that was far removed from everyday life. We understood that the Anna of his poetry was the same as Laura, but at the same time, the poems were about a Laura we did not know, who was perhaps a little like Laura, but seen through the eyes of a poet, and poets simply looked completely differently, and disguised reality until it was unrecognizable.

      We did wonder exactly what their relationship was like. We could also see that the dynamic between the two was changing, that, after a while, Peter reacted differently to Laura’s comments than he did at the beginning, and that he paid less attention to them and corrected her more often. Once they had an argument when Peter called her a ‘prudish cow’ because she criticized a couple of sentences in which he was sexually very explicit and said she found them ‘vulgar’.

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