The Book of Everything Page 7

  Father watched as she put the dried knife in the drawer.

  “Yes, sorry,” said Mother. “It completely slipped my mind.”

  “Sorry, Papa,” said Thomas. “I meant to tell you, but then I suddenly had to go to the bathroom and then …”

  “How many chairs should I put out?” Father asked.

  “A dozen or so, I think,” said Mother.

  “TWELVE?” Father looked at her, aghast. “Where did you suddenly get TWELVE friends from?”

  “Margot and Thomas and you and I will want a seat too,” said Mother.

  “EIGHT? EIGHT FRIENDS?”

  But Mother did not respond anymore. She handed the dishwashing brush to Margot. “Can you finish up?” she asked. “I really have to go and get changed.”

  She pushed past Father into the hallway and ran up the stairs. “The table over to the side and the chairs in a circle,” she called once more.

  “Eight friends,” Father muttered.

  “Mama is just guessing, you know,” said Margot. “There could be more. Some of my friends are coming too.”

  “WHAT?” Father shouted.

  With a lot of clattering, Margot stacked the plates in the cupboard. Thomas played a serenade on the saucepans. From the bedroom, Mother gave a performance of “Ev’ry Bud Is Springing Open, Ev’ry Blossom’s Peeping Out.”

  “And what about ME?” Father called up the stairs. “Where am I supposed to go tonight?”

  No one answered. Dejectedly, he went into the room and started tugging at the table. He dragged it into the back room and then arranged the chairs in birthday formation. “But it is nobody’s birthday as far as I know,” he complained.

  “Who is making the coffee?” Mother called from upstairs.

  “I will, Mama,” Margot shouted back.

  Then the doorbell rang. Thomas pulled the rope at the top of the stairs and the front door clicked open. It was Aunt Pie. “Halloo-oo!” she sang out. “We’re here!” Two more ladies climbed up the stairs behind her.

  “Leave the door open, Aunt Pie,” called Margot. “There’s more people coming.”

  The door stayed wide open.

  “There you are, my boy,” she puffed when she got to the top. She carried a white box into the kitchen. Then she got hold of Thomas and hugged him. “This is Aunt Magda.” She indicated a huge flowery dress behind her.

  “Oh,” said Thomas.

  “And that is Aunt Bea.”

  Aunt Magda and Aunt Bea shook his hand. They were brand-new aunts Thomas had never seen before. Aunt Bea had a gold tooth that glittered cheerfully when she laughed. And she laughed a lot.

  They went into the room.

  “There you are, man of God,” Aunt Pie called to Father. She went and kissed him. There were red spots on his cheeks from her lipstick. “You’ve met Magda and Bea, I think?”

  “I haven’t had the honor,” said Father. Under the huge flowery dress, all sorts of things wobbled about while they shook hands. It did not escape Father’s notice.

  “Yes, you have,” said Aunt Pie. “They come to all my birthdays. And what do you think of my slacks?”

  She was wearing a pair of pale-blue slacks with a zipper on the side.

  Father didn’t think anything of it.

  “Pie can carry it off,” said Aunt Magda. “My bottom’s too big for it.”

  Father didn’t want to look at any bottoms, so he looked at the ceiling. It really needed painting. The ceiling, that is.

  There was more noise on the stairs. Thump-creak-thump-creak. It was music to Thomas’s ears. He ran into the hallway. It could possibly be someone with one old shoe and one new one. But more likely, it was someone with a leather leg. He pressed his back into the toilet door.

  It was Eliza. She didn’t notice him in the dark hallway. She went through into the room. “Hi, Eliza,” he heard Margot call out. There was some bustling noise.

  “Where is Thomas?” asked Eliza. “I want to sit next to him. Thomas is my friend.”

  All over Holland and the rest of the world, far into the deepest tropical regions, every bud was springing open, every blossom peeping out.

  “Oh, Jesus,” whispered Thomas. “I am so happy.” But now he really didn’t dare go inside.

  Thump-creak-thump-creak. “Oh, is that where you are, Thomas!” said Eliza. “Are you hiding from me?”

  “Of course not,” said Thomas.

  “Come here,” she said. She held out her hand. It was her good hand, with five whole fingers. Hand in hand, they walked into the room.

  Fortunately, Father did not see them, because he was hidden behind Aunt Magda’s big bottom.

  “Let’s see now,” said Eliza. “We’d better sit somewhere where everybody doesn’t fall over my leg.” She looked around the circle. “There, by the window,” she said.

  They sat down. Her leather leg stuck out, but that did not matter, because she was out of everybody’s way.

  “Well,” she said. “How do I look?”

  “Lovely,” said Thomas, because she was wearing a sky-blue dress with a white collar. “By the way, does your father play violin?” he asked.

  Eliza looked surprised. “Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”

  Thomas shrugged. “I just know. And your mother sings really beautifully.”

  Now Eliza was really perplexed. She let go of his hand and put her arm around his shoulders. “You’re a very special boy, did you know that?” she asked.

  “I do, sort of,” said Thomas shyly.

  “Now I suddenly knew what Eliza knew,” Thomas wrote in The Book of Everything. “She knew it, and so did I: what there is about me.”

  Margot and Aunt Pie were bringing around coffee. And cakes from Aunt Pie’s white box. There was more noise on the stairs. “Go and see who it is,” said Eliza. “I’ll keep your chair for you.”

  Thomas went into the hallway. Mrs. van Amersfoort was there already with her portable gramophone. Behind her, four elderly ladies were coming up the stairs. The first of them was carrying a flat case that held the records.

  “This is Thomas,” said Mrs. van Amersfoort when they were all in the hallway. “He is not afraid of witches.”

  “Just as well,” giggled the lady with the records.

  “At least I won’t have to be careful then,” said the old lady with the bunch of flowers.

  “At last, a real man,” sighed the old lady who held a bottle of red cordial in each hand.

  “I prefer them a little bit scared,” said the last of them. “Keeps them in their place.” She laughed loudly. That was a scary sight, because you could see her upper teeth even when she had her mouth shut. And you could see them even worse when she snapped her mouth open.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem for you,” said Mrs. van Amersfoort tartly. “Will you take the gramophone inside, Thomas?”

  They walked into the room in single file. There was a chattering and a cackling like nothing on earth. Aunt Bea and Aunt Magda and Aunt Pie and Mrs. van Amersfoort and Margot and Eliza and the four old ladies all talked at once and nobody could understand a word. But everybody was having a great time.

  “Oh!” Mrs. van Amersfoort cried suddenly. “We nearly forgot about you!”

  Father stood pressed against the sideboard, because there was almost no room behind Aunt Magda’s bottom. Mrs. van Amersfoort tried to shake his hand around Aunt Magda.

  “Can you reach?” Aunt Magda asked. She bent forward, sticking out her bottom.

  Now Mrs. van Amersfoort could get hold of his hand over Aunt Magda’s shoulder. “It’s hot in here, isn’t it?” she said. She let go of Father’s hand and called, “Can we have a window open?”

  “Good idea,” Eliza called back. She jumped up smartly on her leather leg and pushed the window up. A fresh breeze blew into the house.

  And then Mother appeared in the doorway. Because the window and the front door were both wide open, her dress flapped like a flag. “Hello, everybody,” she said. Everyon
e looked at her and the chattering died down. Her dress was pale yellow, almost white, and narrow at the top, with a wide skirt. She had carefully put on lipstick. Her hair hung down loose over her shoulders.

  Thomas had never seen her so beautiful. He looked at Father, to see if he’d noticed. Father did notice. His face became as red as the flowers on Aunt Magda’s dress.

  “Has everyone got coffee?” asked Mother.

  Then the chattering broke out again. Thomas could not imagine there ever being silence again in the reading-aloud club.

  They had all finished their cakes. Coffee cups and lemonade glasses were empty. Aunt Bea treated Father to a cigar and lit one herself. And then the great moment arrived.

  The program began.

  Item one: Thomas Klopper recites a poem by Annie M. G. Schmidt.

  Thomas stood up. He started with Master Sweet who washed his feet in the aquarium. He knew the whole poem by heart.

  When he had finished, there was loud applause.

  The old lady with the teeth asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up, Thomas?”

  And Thomas said, “Happy. I want to be happy.”

  Everyone thought that was a good idea.

  But then, suddenly, Father said, “Give a proper answer, Thomas. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “I wanted to be happy, and nothing else,” Thomas wrote in The Book of Everything. “I searched my brain for a proper answer, but I didn’t find anything.”

  “Only good-for-nothings and weaklings are happy,” said Father. “Life is a struggle.”

  All the aunts and all Mrs. van Amersfoort’s friends stared at him as if he had farted. And Mother nervously twisted a strand of her hair.

  Thomas sat down and looked at his shoes. Eliza put her good hand over his.

  “Have you faced many struggles in your life?” the lady with the teeth asked Father. “Were you in the Resistance? Are you a brave man? Do you protect your wife and children against the evil world? Do you stand up for the weak? Are animals in good hands with you?”

  Bewildered, Father stared at her teeth. “Well …” he began.

  “Item two on the program,” called Mrs. van Amersfoort. “Music from the portable gramophone.”

  She turned the handle. “One of Eliza’s records,” she announced.

  Music rushed into the room such as Thomas had never heard. A whole lot of instruments were hooting all at once and there was a banging of drums. At first he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. But then a bright trumpet gained the upper hand over the others. The trumpet sang and giggled like a skipping angel. It was hard to keep your legs still, because they wanted to skip along.

  “Louis Armstrong,” Aunt Bea called out, flashing her gold tooth.

  “Oo-ooh!” shouted Aunt Magda. She raised her hands in the air and shook her upper body. The flowers on her dress bobbed like small boats on choppy water.

  Mrs. van Amersfoort got up and handed Thomas the cover of the record. It showed a black man with a shiny trumpet at his mouth.

  “That is a black man,” said Thomas, amazed. Because he thought that black people lived on the small coins the children took to school every week for the Missions. And not on trumpets. “I have never seen a black person for real,” he said.

  “There are so many things in the world we have not seen,” said Eliza. “For instance, I have never seen a Rolls-Royce for real.”

  “Isn’t it fantastic music!” Aunt Pie shouted. There was some whipped cream on her upper lip. “It gives me the shivers.”

  “Where? Where?” called the old ladies.

  “All over,” laughed Aunt Pie. She ran her hands over her blouse and her slacks.

  When the music stopped, Father got up. “I’ve still got a lot of work to do,” he said. He squeezed between a couple of chairs to the door. Thomas hoped he would go to the side room without saying anything. But when he got to the door he turned. “And anyway, I have no desire to listen to heathenish black music,” he said. “And to poems that sound like empty vessels.”

  “Tiddlyum, tiddlyum, tiddlyum-tum-tum,” sang Margot.

  Father looked at her.

  Margot stopped singing. She looked back. She did not look angry, she did not look friendly, she just looked. There was nothing to be read in her eyes.

  Then Thomas saw that her eyes started to shine like mirrors. Father looked into those mirrors and saw himself. Nobody saw what he saw, because he was the only one who could look straight into her eyes. He had to face it all alone.

  “Margot was no longer afraid,” Thomas wrote in The Book of Everything. “And I saw her become a witch before my very eyes.”

  The aunts and the old ladies started talking away happily as if it were a perfectly normal thing to happen. Nobody took any more notice of Father.

  “Item three on the program!” called Mrs. van Amersfoort. “Thomas recites another poem by Annie M. G. Schmidt.”

  And Father just stood there. He stared helplessly into Margot’s eyes. Thomas saw that he loved her. And him. And Mother. He saw that Father wanted to stay in the room, but wanted to get away at the same time.

  Father was afraid of laughter and joy. He was particularly afraid of ridicule. He was afraid that someone would say that humans are descended from apes. Or that the earth is much older than four thousand years. Or that someone would ask where Noah got his polar bears from. Or that someone would swear. Father was terrified.

  Mother looked back at him. Come on, love, she gestured. Come and join us.

  He could not. He did not dare belong with people. He turned and locked himself in the side room.

  Thomas saw things other people could not see. He did not know why this was, but it had always been like that. He saw Father clean through the wall. Behind his desk. Alone. Thomas had an awful feeling in his stomach. At first he thought he had swallowed a rhinoceros, but a moment later he understood that he was feeling sorry for his father.

  He recited his poem and received his applause, but his mind was not there.

  At eight o’clock he had to go to bed, because the following day was a school day. Downstairs, music and laughter went on for a long time. He tried to think about Eliza, and not about Father in the side room. That was difficult.

  “I was hoping he was sitting in front of the window so he could think,” he wrote in The Book of Everything. “And not on his knees with his eyes closed.” But he knew better.

  It had been a wonderful evening all the same. The door had been open and anyone could come in. They had listened to exciting music and amusing poems.

  “Come on, love. Come and join us,” Thomas whispered.

  “What did you say?” asked a familiar voice.

  Thomas couldn’t keep his eyes open, he was so sleepy.

  “I said, ‘Come on, love, come and join us,’” he murmured.

  “Okay,” said Jesus. The Lord sat down on the edge of Thomas’s bed.

  “It was a great evening,” said Thomas.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Jesus.

  Then they were silent for a while. Downstairs, Louis Armstrong played his trumpet.

  “Jesus?” asked Thomas.

  “Yes, Thomas?”

  “Can you help Papa?”

  “I am afraid not.”

  It was a pity, but Thomas understood that some people are hard to redeem.

  You couldn’t ask the Lord Jesus for the impossible.

  “Do you think Eliza will wait for me?”

  “I would think so,” said Jesus.

  “Is it scary when she takes her leather leg off?”

  “Of course not,” said Jesus. “You’ve faced worse things.”

  That was true. In his young life, he had already seen quite a few scary things. A Bottombiter, Granddad’s artificial teeth, a wooden spoon, a swollen nose, a carving knife, and a woman with outboard teeth. And even so he was going to be happy later.

  “Because I am going to marry her, you see,” said Thomas.

&nb
sp; The Lord Jesus put a hand on his head and said, “You have my blessing.”

  Then Thomas fell asleep and Jesus ascended into Heaven.

  The angels were waiting for Him anxiously, heaving deep sighs.

  “How are things with Thomas?” one of them asked.

  “Yes, how is he?” at least a hundred others asked in unison. They were all hopelessly in love with him, you know.

  “He will be all right,” said Jesus.

  “Are You going to call him to You soon?” asked a pitch-black angel. “I would so much like to play trumpet for him.”

  “No,” said the Lord Jesus. He smiled. “Anyway, none of you would have the slightest chance with Thomas.”

  “Why not?” the angels asked, appalled.

  “None of you has a leather leg that creaks when you walk,” He said.

  That was too much for them. Every single one of them was extraordinarily beautiful, but none had a leather leg. You can’t have everything.

  Guus Kuijer is one of the Netherlands’ best-known and best-beloved writers, with published work spanning short-story collections, novels for children and adults, stage plays, and television scripts. The Book of Everything won the Flemish Golden Owl Award, and his Polleke series has been made into a feature film. Guus lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

  John Nieuwenhuizen’s translation of The Baboon King by Anton Quintana won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for outstanding literature in translation in 1999. The Guardian praised his translation of In the Shadow of the Ark by Anne Provoost, describing it as “stately, plain, and elegant.” Born in the Netherlands, John now lives near Melbourne, Australia.

  Text copyright © 2004 by Guus Kuijer

  Translation copyright © 2006 by John Nieuwenhuizen

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920, by arrangement with Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij B.V., Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

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