Ode to Aagje Deken | Dear Aagje

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Dear Aagje,

That first night we met, you stood beside my bed: thin, almost translucent. But you did not frighten me: I had already scraped away all the layers that had hardened you over the centuries. That's how you emerged, as a name carved in wood, as young lovers do.

Twenty-five you were when you left Orphanage D'Oranjeappel; twenty-five I was when I moved in. You never quite disappeared there.

We, beings from another time. We longed so desperately for love. The frightened flight from solitude was at an end. I, who wanted nothing more to do with myself, fleeing from my past, sheltering in the place where you too found shelter.

In your mind, with your spirit, in the spirit of - taking up the pen. Sometimes I lurked over your shoulders when you wrote old Dutch poetry, at the little table by the window, where I too set up my writing table. There was too much God in it for my taste; I just wanted to get rid of that. My knees fair with impotence, complaining that heaven was so god-awful unfair. Your folded children's hands still offered comfort. So naive still, a state I longed for. I understood you: finding happiness in the unearthly. Searching for a way to make sense of the world again. You must have seen it: I had a terrible time with it, living without it. Relating to that - that abstraction.

We write the past in the present tense, as if no second passes. Every sentence an absolute truth and an absolute fabrication. The pain we felt but could never really get right on paper - it didn't matter.

To understand, we had each other.

And the silence.

Sometimes we would say nothing to each other for days, staring at the courtyard garden: watching the maple's helicopters float slowly through the air. The garden shed, so tender and romantic now, but then a redundant place. Two entrances. In through the right door, saying goodbye to those we knew so closely and thought immortal, out through the left door, and never being able to be the same again.

What was it like for you to live in a place where you knew a quarter of the children would not make it to the next winter? Maybe we shouldn't dwell on it too long. We have already seen so many die, we shouldn't repeat it.

Children we were and yet already grown up, children we remained.

The winters, with those leaden clouds that gave us headaches. Death-head butterflies that nested in the beams, grew attached to them, as if they were tumours. Washing ourselves clean with tender words. Looking everything deep inside straight in the eye, scraping words together, rising in our mother tongue.

In your time, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht had only just been built: you could look over the stately buildings from your sleeping place, towards the meadows. For the first few months I saw nothing: no trees, no houses, no people, just flickers.

I no longer saw reality. I didn't care what people thought of that: I saw you and that was enough.

After you left D'Oranjeappel, you met a lover, like you a writer, a life companion. You became famous with Sara Burgerhart, the very first epistolary novel, exploring the limits of freedom. The end of your freedom: success brought jealousy, turmoil, oppression.

It may not surprise you because I called on you so often and shared my desires with you: but when I moved into the orphanage, in time I found my lover, writer and companion there.

Words like orphans came to make sense.

For a moment I hesitated to ask you if you would like to read my novels. And since you are so famous to put in a good word for me. But I hear your voice: Friendly Companion, Then your good days are out.

I write to you, at the window overlooking the maple tree - and see you standing there again.

Love, André