Peter Van Rijn is closing his car door and is no sooner behind the wheel than he is backing out of the driveway and onto the dirt road, which he stirs into a dusty cloud as he accelerates towards his shop, passing a slow procession of families as he goes. At the bottom of the street he passes George Bedser’s house, where the party lights are glowing in the twilight, temporarily transforming it into a river barge, floating on the long, khaki grasses of the vacant lots either side of it. He turns left, then right, and takes the old wheat road to his shop.
When television first came to the suburb it was Peter Van Rijn who sold them. He grew up in Delft, in a house by the river, not far from the cathedral. A print of Vermeer’s View Of Delft hangs in his workshop. An electrical engineer, he spends his working hours repairing the worn parts of wireless sets, replacing old valves and soldering broken wires back together so that the wireless will function again and his customers will be able to hear their music, their cricket and their news.
But it was television that made him. At first his shop window was filled with wirelesses, transistors and record players, with large colour posters on the walls advertising the latest European and American gramophones. When television arrived, however, his shop window changed. The radios, transistors and record players made way for television sets, the screens of which would all be aimed at the shop window so as to catch the eyes of the people passing. It is still his weekday practice to switch one of the televisions on, between five and seven o’clock, and commuters walking home from work often pause to watch the new American serials or the old movie cartoons. On Saturday nights he leaves the television on until transmission ceases.
It was an act of generosity and an astute strategy, for it not only allowed people to watch the televisions free of charge, it also gave them a taste for television, making the lounge room and the wireless dull by comparison when they returned home. In summer, families would go to Peter Van Rijn’s shop window as they would to the cinema. There, they would stand about on the footpath watching whatever came on. In time he sold all his televisions. And as soon as they were sold he got more. For a short time televisions transformed his shop, from a quiet radio repairer’s to the most successful business in the street. But not everybody was happy.
He parks his car at the front, jumps from the driver’s seat, and stands running his fingers through his dark, curly hair. The glass from his shop window is all over the footpath, and while occasional shards are still wedged inside the window frame, most of the window has been shattered and the glass is either inside or outside the shop. Remarkably, as he steps forward and peers into the window, nothing has been stolen or damaged; all the televisions, radios, gramophones and transistors are exactly where they were placed. It is only when he has finished counting the items and stock in the window that he looks to the tiles below it and sees in large, red print the word ‘commie’.
A young man, with a young family, who left Holland after the war with the precise intention of leaving all this hatred behind, he spends the next hour sweeping the glass from the footpath and taking all the stock from the window, placing it in the back workroom which he can lock. When he is finished he takes a bucket and scrubbing brush and removes the painted word from the tiles at the front of the shop. Finally, he pastes large pieces of cardboard across the broken window and returns to his car.
There he sits for a long time, quietly listening to the car radio. The shop has taken years of patient work to build up. He is proud of the way the shop looks, proud of the up-to-date goods he has for sale. He keeps in constant touch with all the latest trends in his business. If, he has always argued to himself, he feels good about walking into his shop, his customers will feel good about it as well, for a shop should feel good to be in. He is proud of his displays, of his posters, and of his new cataloguing system which tells him at a glance where everything is, as well as the dates of ordering, purchasing and selling.
Occasionally people pass and pause at the now taped-up window, and he is glad that the crudely painted word has been removed. As he sits in the car he takes gum from the glove box and silently chews on it while watching the street, the shattered window of his shop looking like the shattered windows in all the bombed-out streets he left behind, and at the occasional strollers who may even have made a special trip to stand at his window. He feels responsible for their disappointment. Some of these families walk over a mile, there and back, for the Saturday-night treat of standing at his window and watching the television they can’t afford to buy. Before starting the car again he rests his chin on the steering wheel, taps the dashboard lightly with his fingers, then turns the ignition.
As he drives slowly back along the old wheat road, past the Presbyterian church on his left, past the school, and into his street, he notes the muted lights of the quiet houses and the bare front yards in which modest gardens are struggling to grow. That afternoon, as he drove home in the late, summer sun, the scene had been a pleasant, reassuring one. Now, he passes those quiet houses oppressed by the uneasy thought that any one of them could have thrown the brick.
As he pulls back into his driveway he nods, without smiling, to a family on the footpath opposite his house. They wave back and he parks the car, then walks inside to change for the party.
Michael waves as the old, black Vauxhall belonging to Mr Van Rijn comes to a stop in his driveway. Michael is one of those who, after school, have often lingered at his shop window for over an hour watching the cartoons. When Mr Van Rijn is gone Michael returns his attention to his parents and the rest of the street. He slowly walks backwards, deliberately facing the direction from which they have come.
The lights in Peter Van Rijn’s lounge room snap on. The window is open. Van Rijn’s voice is low, but his wife is clearly proclaiming, as if to the whole street, that no, she will not go to the party. She will not mix with people who could do this. And nor should he. The window shuts like a guillotine. Their voices are lost and Michael turns back towards his parents.
A summer song is just audible. It carries from the Bedser’s lounge room along the street to Vic, Rita and Michael. The song is familiar, and although the words aren’t clear, Vic sings them in silent accompaniment. It is this year’s summer song. Every year has a summer song, and this one talks of soda and drive-ins and pretzels and beer.
But even as he hums the tune to himself a steam engine passes over the high trestle bridge in the Scotch thistle country just to the north of the suburb. Vic closes his eyes and turns his right ear to the sound and listens like a blind man. The sound is faint, but he knows it’s steam. He knows the rhythm, the chug of a steam engine, and there are moments, his nose to the breeze, when he swears he can almost smell the thing.