Gerrit Krol
On Sundays the Christian shops had their shades drawn. Their windows would be hidden by shades, mostly of light-brown paper, so that people would not be seduced on Sunday to return and buy something on Monday. On the corner of little Brouwerstreet and Ebbingestreet, for instance, you had the Paalman bookshop. It wasn’t any bigger than a large living room. There was a counter behind which (“he’s nice, she’s wearing the pants”) Mr. and Mrs. Paalman operated as if it were a grocery store. The shop was especially busy toward the feast of Saint Nicholas. One waited one’s turn, and when it was finally there, one uttered one’s wishes, in the manner of “a light novel for a girl of seventeen” or “a historical novel, preferably illustrated,” and then racks and piles would be searched for such a book. It was found, opened on the first page, and shown to the customer who, with his glasses on, would read the title, the name of the author, and the publishing house; then he would take off his glasses and nod the way one approves of a wine in a restaurant.
This bookstore’s shades were drawn on Sundays. Closed off from the world. But one of these Sundays, on my way to the children’s church, I saw, because the shades didn’t close completely (they had stuck somewhere, leaving a mere two-inch gap), precisely in those two forbidden inches part of a folded tourist map or biking map that, perhaps because of the Sunday light, had slightly curled so that, on my haunches now, I could be surprised by the degree of detail and especially by the name I read: Dorkwerd. The village I knew so well and that I had never seen on a map! And farther to the right the northern part, indicated with red, of the city of Groningen: the Heights and a small stretch of railroad track, the New Canal and the bike path alongside. Everything clear and close, everything enlarged. Never had I seen such a map, with such minute detail.
Monday afternoon, in the bookshop, I pointed to it. I did not have enough money, so that I had to wait until Saturday.
That Saturday . . . At one thirty I brought it home with me and opened it on the table.
“Even the stoneworks are on it,” I cried out, moved as I was.
A whole table full of new things. Later that afternoon I sat on the floor with it on my knees in front of the stove. What excited me was the thought that it now made sense to have been everywhere. The prospect I was going to cover the earth with my body. To be everywhere . . .
The feeling didn’t go away. On the contrary. I had drawn a blank map of the Netherlands and indicated the roads where I had biked; and the roads I had not had yet, that is where I went, I biked them so that I could draw them. Some roads (and the number increased) I traveled two times or more, but this did not count. To have been there once is to be there always; my map indicated this.
When I had to recognize that I occasionally traveled somewhere by train, so not really by myself and neither in direct contact with the road, my dream would fade away in the sense that I did not keep track of these trips. The area around the city was covered, but because I had had all roads, nothing was added anymore, and one day I would remove the map from the wall. It had become meaningless. I haven’t kept it either.