Netherland. Joseph O’Neill
that one never found in Europe. (And at night, when we sat on a porch, gigantic moths and other repulsive night-flyers would thickly congregate on the screen, and my English wife and I would shrink into the house in amazement and fear…) My thoughts went back to a train journey I’d often made, in my student days, between Leiden and The Hague. The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent local municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague. Here, in the first American valley, was the contrary phenomenon: you went for miles without seeing a house. The forest, filled with slender and thick trunks fighting silently for light and land, went emptily on and on. Then, gazing out of the window, my eye snagged on something pink. I sat up and stared.
I’d caught sight of a near-naked white man. He was on his own. He was walking through the trees wearing only underpants. But why? What was he doing? Why was he not wearing clothes? A horror took hold of me, and for a moment I feared I’d hallucinated, and I turned to my fellow passengers for some indication that might confirm what I’d seen. I saw no such indication.
I was relieved, then, at the appearance shortly afterwards of Poughkeepsie. I’d visited the town, with its merry name that sounds like a cry in a children’s game – Poughkeepsie! – for the first time that summer. In its bucolic outskirts a colony of Jamaicans maintained a cricket field on a lush hillside. It was the only privately owned ground we played on, and the farthest north we travelled. The trip was worth it. There was a bouncy but true batting track made of cement; rickety four-deep bleachers filled with shouting spectators; and the simplest wooden shack for a locker room. If you smashed the ball down the hill it landed among cows, goats, horses, chickens. After the match – marked by an umpiring crisis, inevitably – every player went to the clubhouse in downtown Poughkeepsie. The clubhouse was a cabin with a small bar. Prominent signs warned against the use of marijuana. Presently women appeared with platters of chicken and rice. We ate and drank quietly, half following a dominoes game being played with the solemnity that often marked the social dealings of West Indian cricket teams in our league. Our hosts were proud to take care of us, to offer us a territory of their own in this remote place, and we were grateful. The tilted pretty cricket ground, the shipshape clubhouse – such pioneering effort had gone into them!
Somewhere beyond Poughkeepsie I opened my briefcase to glance at work documents. Protruding from a pocket was Chuck’s gift. I opened the envelope and withdrew a booklet. Titled Dutch Nursery Rhymes in Colonial Times, the booklet was a reprint, made by the Holland Society of New York, of the 1889 original edited by a Mrs E. P. Ferris. I turned the pages with some curiosity, because I knew next to nothing about the ancient Dutch presence in America. There was a song in Dutch about Molly Grietje, Santa Claus’s wife, who made New Year koekjes, and a song about Fort Orange, as Albany was first known. There was a poem (in English) titled ‘The Christmas Race, A True Incident of Rensselaerwyck’. Rensselaerwyck was, I surmised, precisely the district through which my train was now travelling. Stimulated by the coincidence, I gave the poem my closer attention. It commemorated a horse race under ‘the Christmas moon’ at Wolvenhoeck, the corner of the wolves. The owners of the horses were a certain Phil Schuyler and a gentleman referred to only as Mijnheer: ‘Down to the riverbank, Mijnheer, his guests, and all the slaves / went trooping, while a war whoop came from all the Indian braves … / The slaves with their whale lanterns were passing to and fro, / Casting fantastic shadows on hills of ice and snow.’ In addition to this poem there were hymns, spinning songs, cradle songs, churning songs and trotting songs – songs you sang while trotting your child on your knee – apparently in use all over New Netherland, from Albany to Long Island to the Delaware River. One such song caught my attention:
Trip a trop a troontjes
De varkens in de boontjes,
De koetjes in de claver,
De paarden in de haver,
De eendjes in de water-plas,
De kalf in de lange gras;
So groot mijn kleine——was!
You sang your child’s name where the blank was. Adapting the melody of the St Nicholas song that every Dutch child hungrily learns (Sinterklaas kapoentje / Gooi wat in mijn schoentje …), I hummed this nonsense about pigs and beans and cows and clover to my faraway son, tapping my knee against the underside of the lowered tray as I imagined his delighted weight on my thigh.
The week before, Jake and I had played in his grandparents’ garden. I raked leaves into piles and he helped me bag the leaves. The leaves were dry and marvellously light. I added armloads to the red and brown and gold crushed in the plastic sack; Jake picked up a single leaf and made a cautious, thrilled deposit. At one point he put on his superhero frown and charged a hillock of leaves. Wading into its harmless fire, he courageously sprawled. ‘’Ook, ’ook!’ he screamed as he rolled in the leaves. I looked, and looked, and looked. Fronds of his yellow hair curled out from the hood’s fringe onto his cheeks. He wore his purple quilted jacket, and his thermal khakis with an inch of tartan turn-up, and his blue ankle boots with the zip, and the blue sweater with the white boat, and – I knew this because I had dressed him – his train-infested underpants, and the red T-shirt he liked to imagine was a Spiderman shirt, and Old Navy green socks with rubbery lettering on the soles. We gardened together. I demonstrated how to use a shovel. When I dug up the topsoil, I was taken aback: countless squirming creatures ate and moved and multiplied underfoot. The very ground we stood on was revealed as a kind of ocean, crowded and immeasurable and without light.
Blocks of colour stormed my window for a full minute. By the time the freight train had passed, the sky over the Hudson Valley had brightened still further and the formerly brown and silver Hudson was a bluish white.
Unseen on this earth, I alighted at Albany – Rensselaer with tears in my eyes and went to my meeting.
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day. It was into one such dreamlike, double-dealing evening in January 2003, at Herald Square, that I stumbled out of the building occupied by New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles. After years of driving rental cars with a disintegrating and legally dubious international licence issued in the United Kingdom, I had finally decided to buy and insure a car of my own – which required me to get an American driver’s licence. But I couldn’t trade my British licence (itself derived from a Dutch one) for an American one: such an exchange was for some unexplainable reason only feasible during the first thirty days of an alien’s permanent residence in the United States. I would have to get a learner permit and submit to a driving test all over again: which entailed, as a first step, a written examination on the rules of the road of the Empire State.
At the time, I didn’t question this odd ambition or my doggedness in relation to it. I can say quite ingenuously that I was attempting to counter the great subtractions that had lessened my life and that the prospect of an addendum, even one as slight as a new licence and a new car, seemed important at the time; and no doubt I was drawn to a false syllogism involving the nothingness of my life and the somethingness of doing. All that said, I didn’t let Rachel know what I was up to. She would have taken my actions as a statement of intent, and maybe she wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. It would not have helped much to point out that, if I was indeed embracing an American lot, then I was doing so unprogrammatically, even unknowingly. Perhaps the relevant truth – and it’s one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I’m sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me – is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
Carried along, then, by the dark flow of those times, I approached the Department of Motor Vehicles. The DMV was in a building