Tumbleweed by Janwillem Van De Wetering

Author:Janwillem Van De Wetering
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2009-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

10

THE KLM PLANE BEGAN ITS DESCENT TOWARD PLESMAN Airport, , and the commissaris woke up. His small wizened face looked almost eager and he acknowledged his own excitement with good-natured understanding. He hadn't traveled much in his life although he had wanted to, and apart from the south coast of France, where he had spent a number of holidays with his family, first in cheap hotels and later in a rented cottage, he only knew the world through books which he collected, buying them second-hand from the book stalls in the Old Man's Gate in the inner city. He had looked through the few books which mentioned , immediately after he had come home to tell his wife that he was leaving the next morning, and while his wife fussed and packed his suitcase and found his passport and his medicines, he turned the pages of a thin volume written by a poet who had lived on the island. He read the lines aloud, repeating some of the words. "Cunucu," the commissaris said.

"Yes, dear?" his wife asked.

"Cunucu, that's the outback, the outback of ."

"Outback?" his wife asked.

"Fields," the commissaris said, "with nothing on it. Just cactuses, I imagine, and a few goats maybe. There used to be forests and Indians."

"Ah," his wife said, folding up a shirt. "Do you want a lot of ties?"

"Not too many. I wonder who chopped the forests down. I hope the Spanish did. They had it before us, you know."

"Indians?" his wife asked.

"There aren't any left."

"Where did they go?" his wife asked, tucking some socks into a corner of the suitcase.

"We must have murdered them. Or the Spanish did."

"Ah," his wife said.

"A land of grasshoppers and prophets," the commissaris read aloud. "I wonder what that means." He looked at his wife but she had stopped listening.

He was looking at the cunucu now, a dry brownish veld stretching on for miles, and he was pressing his nose against the little window. The thorned bushes and pale green cactus trees seemed thrown about haphazardly. A dreary land, but then he looked at the coastline and changed his mind. The sea was breaking against rough cliffs, sending up rhythmical spray in high sparkling waves, sundrenched curtains, transparent and cool. "Lovely," the commissaris thought, rubbing his dry hands. "I must go out there. I'll hire a car and go by myself."

He saw the road, a narrow strip of tar, following the coastline. There were a few cars. The plane was low now and the view very clear. He saw an old Negro riding a donkey. He also saw the airport and a row of old-fashioned planes, bombers which he remembered having seen during the war. He recognized the Dutch markings on their gray sides. Dutch bombers on an island in the Caribbean. He shook his head. But he was still excited. There would be much to see, much to think about later, when he would be back in his garden in Amsterdam fighting the pain in his legs. Then he noticed that the pain had stopped.

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