English excerpts from 'Ook bomen slapen' by Annemarie Peeters

Excerpt from Ook bomen slapen, p. 83-84, translated by Paul Vincent

Son,

It’s better not to have children. I realise that now.

Can you imagine my freedom without you? The freedom not to have to return to the most beautiful thing a person can possess?

Of course, you remind me of her.

At the very beginning she scarcely spoke. She was beautiful and spotless: there was no taint in her voice, in her eyes, in the way she handed me my scores and sometimes took my hand.

We stood bent over the music together. I had a pencil in my hand, she had just her fingers, which she let glide over the notes, almost like a blind person feeling the surface of a still unknown face. Then, at a certain moment, her index finger would stop and she would point to a note, an interval, a chord.

Then she would look up at me as if she were asking me what the notes meant.

I circled the passage with my newly-sharpened pencil and started gesticulating frantically. I explained what the composer had meant, how this was one of those brilliant constructions that composers were able to build simply with the relations between sounds. I talked and talked, although I have always been economical with words, and she listened, soaking up my words. She drank of something that was inside me, a spring, with such intellectual zeal that that dried-up spring as dry as crackling freezing air, started flowing again.

Afterwards – that was the real miracle, when I stood on the dais and guided the orchestra through that same passage – a new radiance sparked from the score. Somewhere, deep within, without wanting to admit it to myself, I knew 1

that it was she who had led me to that hidden treasure. I became addicted to this game, and so, I suspect, did she.

We married in the town hall. The choir of the Munt sang Wagner’s bridal chorus and we kissed.

Perhaps she loved music more than me. That is possible. But she was my wife and I was her husband. Can you see me standing there in the Grote Markt?

Can you see how the man in the trilby breathed great a sigh of relief?

Your father

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Excerpt from Ook bomen slapen, p. 209-210, translated by Paul Vincent

Tosca, Floria Tosca: how wonderfully that woman could sing, it struck her when she opened her eyes again. A singer singing that she is a singer, that is like a Russian doll, that is just going on multiplying, flying into an exponential number of vocal heavens. She was everything: passionate and dazzlingly beautiful. And then that voice, so magnificent that she could blow over the whole world with it, so tender that you wished she were your mother. What man would not want to possess her? They were standing in line, fighting over her like dogs over a bone. But when it came down to it, neither man took her side, she suddenly realised. The thought spread through her body like an insidious flame. That was it, wasn’t it? For why must that softy Cavaradossi simply, there and then, broadcast his love for the republic? Signing his own death warrant instead of simply saving her. Was that what heroes were supposed to do?

And then it happened: suddenly a voice as loud as a fire alarm shrieked in her ears, a Molotov cocktail buried itself in her stomach. What choice did those bastards leave her? To protect her, go through fire for her: forget it, their love was not worth that much, obviously. What did they want from her? How strong must you be, actually, to survive this whole bloody mess? How in heaven’s could she not die in the end? And there was this whole auditorium full of bourgeois, well-fed idlers frittering their time away pleasurably gawping at her. She wanted to sling her shoes through the auditorium, but suddenly her limbs seemed made of reinforced concrete.

Then Tosca gave voice to her despair. Vissi d’arte: she had lived for art.

Vissi d’amore: she had lived for love. She could feel every note of the aria gliding through her own throat. How much she would like, how she would love.

Prima donna de luxe, singing this and then being given flowers. At least being given flowers.

She covered her face with her hands.

After the second act she fled outside, across the square, into the U-Bahn. What had she thought then, foe God’s sake, that Jakob could save her? She got on without a ticket, lost her way at the intersections between the red, green and 3

blue lines on the map, finally found the green one and got off at GĂśrlitzer Bahnhof.

What did she need, asked West African dealers barely out of the cradle, before she had even properly got off. They could smell her despair, followed her down the rattling steps. People were walking everywhere, criss-crossing in the semi-darkness under the tracks of the grating U-Bahn. The air was wet with weed.

A spliff was what she asked for. Rolled and stuck for her. She bent over and sucked in the fire. It was ages since she had smoked. She inhaled as if her life depended on it, deeper and further into her lungs than ordinary air would ever penetrate. She wanted to burn up.

Her legs carried her along automatically, without thinking or knowing where to. In the square in front of the church groups of young people were sitting smoking and drinking, there were radios on, young rastas were drumming on their djembĂŠs.

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