The Ice-Cream Makers (21 page)

‘The big day,' I said.

‘Yes.'

‘You're looking good.'

‘See you later.'

Then he walked on, leaving me, his older brother, his witness, in the corridor. Four words he had spoken to me, four in one year, and they were absolutely meaningless. They were sounds more than words.

The bathroom smelled of him, of his body, the odour I knew from his bedroom, but even more so from the attic in Rotterdam, the sheets he pushed back in the morning, the warm air that spread and reached my nostrils, sometimes in a dream.

I washed my face and put on the suit I had carried with me across more than ten thousand kilometres. The jacket was badly crumpled, but the trousers had retained their sharp crease.

The four of us walked to church, the heels of our shoes tapping on the cobbles. My mother kept glancing at my brother with a smile, and then at me. She looked unbelievably happy, and the wedding ceremony had yet to take place.

There were already quite a few people on the oval square in front of the San Marco Nuovo. They all looked splendid, the men sporting ties and some even hats, their wives smelling of soap and wearing dresses that showed more leg than usual. They looked younger, and their daughters a couple of years older, than their age. Ice-cream makers shook hands and exchanged a few quick words. Little puffs of steam came out of people's mouths. And then the church bells started ringing and everybody went inside.

I sat in the front row, next to my parents and Sophia's mother, who was also a witness. The fur stole she wore did little to conceal the fact that she was the only one in church with bare arms and shoulders. Her dark-blue skirt stopped above the knee.

When the organist started playing, all heads turned, practically as one. Sophia walked down the aisle on her father's arm. She wore white, a long dress with a bodice that gleamed like the inside of an oyster. Her blonde hair was braided in a single plait and wrapped around her head, a golden crown. She all but glided across the church's smooth flagstones, gorgeous and self-assured, looking straight ahead the whole way. Luca beamed as she came towards him.

Although the church was packed — the pews were all full, with people standing at the back — it was dead quiet when they got to the vows. The priest, in his long robes with gold stitching and purple patches on his shoulders, gave the bride and groom a long, hard look before asking them to rise and hold hands. He started saying the age-old words that Luca and Sophia had to repeat.

I watched, I listened, and I would remember this for the rest of my life, but part of me didn't want to be here, in these wooden pews in this church, but in India instead, at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, terribly delayed, waiting for a sky-blue plane while an English voice reads out names and a new load of passengers is disgorged.

Everybody appeared to have been holding their breath, and now that the vows were complete, they relaxed and let go. Applause rose from the pews, my mother cried, and Sophia's mother dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. The bride and groom turned around and looked into the church. My brother's eyes found those of my parents', mine found Sophia's. The winter light illuminated her face and her fairytale dress. Only now did I see the change in Sophia, from a girl who caught snowflakes with her tongue to a woman in her prime. She smiled and I smiled back. It felt as if we touched.

Outside, children threw handfuls of rice at the couple. Sophia bowed her head and closed her eyes. Luca turned towards her and they kissed in the white rain. And as I joined in and threw rice at them too, my memory built a bridge back to that day we threw snowballs at one another and I went down.

They got into the old Alfa Romeo, hired from Belluno, which had driven countless newlyweds to married life. The chauffeur wore a cap and smelled of tobacco, and while his nails were yellow, the old-timer car didn't have a scratch on it. Standing in front of the church, I watched the car drive off as a castaway on a desert island watches a ship in the distance.

To touch it isn't necessary for someone to sit close / Even from very far it is possible to touch.
It was the voice of the Hindi poet Manglesh Dabral, whom I had heard in Delhi, which now made its way across the sea to me.
Rather, touch the way the tall grass appears to caress the moon and stars.

My parents walked towards the car. Others followed. A small procession formed, as it did on Sundays, made up of families dressed in their finest, moving along the narrow footpath.

‘The next wedding will be yours,' someone said, and I felt a big, strong hand with a calloused thumb on my shoulder.

We met again in spring. I had expected her to be showing, but Sophia was as slender as ever. She looked a little bored behind the ice-cream.

‘Hello, brother-in-law,' she greeted me with a smile. ‘I'd like to give you a kiss, but I'm not tall enough to lean over the counter.'

‘You can make me just as happy with an espresso.'

I sat down at a table inside and listened to the noises produced by the espresso machine. As the coffee trickled into the cup, I counted the seconds. Twenty-six, not a breath longer. The machine stalled like an engine.

‘It's been raining all morning,' Sophia said as she walked towards me with a tray in her hands. ‘It's going to be a bit warmer this afternoon, but still wet.'

‘Welcome to the Netherlands.'

‘It will remain overcast all week while the wind is set to pick up.'

I thought I heard my mother talking.

They had been open for a week, Sophia told me. But they were off to a bad start. They were selling more coffee than ice-cream.

My parents were out grocery shopping. Luca was in the kitchen; I had glimpsed him through the window, and he me, I would have thought.

I took another good look at Sophia's apron, but nothing showed. Her face didn't look any different, either.

We used to pass rainy days in the ice-cream parlour making cones, but once we got those delivered in boxes we had enough time on our hands to count the rain drops. I read poetry, collections lent to me by Richard Heiman or ones I had bought myself in the bookshop two doors down. The bookshop had a tall window display and a red tomcat traipsing jauntily past the crammed bookcases; the owner was a blonde lady who had written a few books herself, all since long out of print. The reverse of our shop was true for hers: on cold and dark days it was busy, on muggy days people stayed away. But she had come up with a solution. In summer she wore flimsy tops with a plunging neckline. Some men couldn't take their eyes off as she gift-wrapped a book, prompting her to once ask a customer, ‘Shall I wrap these two as well?'

At the stroke of five, sometimes earlier, she would open a bottle of wine, while the tomcat in the window basked in the sun breaking through the clouds.

Looking back, it was inevitable really, with the World Poetry offices across the street and a bookshop less than ten metres away. The street was a magnetic force field. It was a miracle my parents and my brother didn't feel it and just stared into space on rainy days. If I ever left a book of poetry on the freezer, nobody picked it up.

Sophia didn't seem to feel it that week, either. Sometimes she enquired after my work, but more often than not she just wanted to hear about the city I had visited: the footpath cafés, the restaurants, the popular night spots. On the rare occasion when I read out a poem, she quickly turned to something else, as though I was doing something illicit. She was my brother's wife and she knew that ice-cream and poetry were incompatible. It was one or the other. Those who listened to the song of the Sirens were lost.

The kitchen door swung open. Luca walked over to us with two spoons in his hands. He wanted us to have a taste.

‘Tomato,' said Sophia.

‘And basil,' I added.

‘Amazing.'

‘Extraordinary. I wonder what Beppi will say.'

But Luca had already turned round and gone back into the kitchen.

That dreary spring, three things happened that were seemingly unrelated. My father bought two birds, my brother threw himself into making new ice-cream flavours, and I moved to Rotterdam.

Until then I had lived in Amsterdam, where I continued to work at the publisher's one day a week. Robert Berendsen had made me promise him two things: I would keep a hand in the poetry journal, and I would get as many of his poets as possible onto the World Poetry programme. They were promises made in the pub. I had told him the news after he had taken a sip of his first De Koninck. Many more beers were to follow that evening. As Victor Larssen had predicted, Robert understood my decision. He was happy for me to have the job. ‘I think it's a great opportunity,' he said, ‘and I'm really curious about the poets you'll discover.'

We talked about the festivals he had visited. ‘Liège is very intimate. It's the oldest festival on the calendar. The poets are practically on your lap,' he told me. ‘But Medellín beats all the others, hands down. More than a hundred poets are invited and performances take place at lots of different locations: in cafés, in little backrooms, in the street, at the university. It's as if poetry has taken over the city. You have to see it to believe it. During the opening night, over ten thousand people spend seven hours listening to poets out in the open air. And even if it starts raining they stay seated. It goes on until the early hours.'

His eyes got smaller and smaller. We were among the last to leave the café. ‘I'm really pleased for you,' he said again as we put our coats on, before adding with a broad smile, ‘And of course for our poets, who will all be invited to Rotterdam now.'

With Victor Larssen's blessing, I had established a partnership between World Poetry and the poetry journal. Every year we would publish a special festival edition with poems by the performing poets, supplemented with interviews and essays. My first festival as editor had yet to take place, but I was already spending my days reading, translating, phoning, and writing letters. I was assisted by an intern who was studying Russian. She had spent her childhood in St Petersburg and reckoned there was no greater poet than Marina Tsvetaeva.

She would brook no contradiction.

‘
Thinking of something, carelessly, something invisible, buried treasure, step by step, poppy by poppy, I beheaded the flowers, at leisure. So someday, in the dry breath of summer, at the edge of the sown, absentmindedly, death will gather a flower — my own!
' she would recite at me.

Xenia, her name was. Platinum blonde hair, pale skin, and bright red lips. Her boyfriend usually picked her up at the end of the day. He had black hands and occasionally even smudges on his face. He worked in a garage, which is where she met him, when she dropped off her Volkswagen. The V-belt was squeaky and needed replacing; she had fallen for him like a brick.

‘Does he read poetry?' I asked after hearing how they had met.

‘No, of course not. He's a car mechanic; he likes long-legged blondes.'

‘And you like him?'

‘Yes,' she replied. ‘Are you surprised?'

I didn't know what to say. I thought it was a curious combination, but I didn't want to come across as conservative.

Xenia told me about her lecturer who, when she was studying Russian herself, had an affair with her professor for many years. But now she was married to a window cleaner. They had two children and a beautifully furnished house together. She set off for the university every day while he drove to the suburbs, where he leaned his ladder up against the walls of other people's houses.

‘And do you think they're happy?'

‘Yes, I think they are,' she said, before immediately correcting herself: ‘I know they are.'

My father had married a woman who also hailed from an ice-cream-making family. When she was young, my mother vowed never to work in an ice-cream parlour. She wanted to be a nurse or a kindergarten teacher, but things didn't work out that way; it had been inescapable. Luca had lost his heart to a girl from Modena, the daughter of a factory boss, but she had picked up the
spatola
like a natural.

Meanwhile I had bought a top-floor studio apartment in Rotterdam. The ceiling had been knocked through to the attic, making the room more than six metres tall. But the place was not very big: the kitchen was part of the living room, and my bedroom just a screened-off area. There was no scope for growth.

The apartment was a five-minute walk from the World Poetry offices, and therefore also from the ice-cream parlour. When I went to work, the doors of Venezia were still closed, but I usually glimpsed someone in the semi-darkness. Occasionally my father would gesture for me to come in and have an espresso. On one of those mornings he showed me a cage with two small birds. He had bought them from a Surinamese customer who came in regularly to eat ice-cream with some buddies.

‘They're songbirds,' my father told me. ‘That's to say, the male is a songbird.'

‘What about the female?'

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘He's supposed to sing to her.'

I looked at the birds in the cage. They did nothing, and struck me as rather fearful.