Simon Carmiggelt, Niks

Nothing

An agreeable sun gave the market on the Lindengracht festive colors. It was busy and full of joy. As progress and scale advance on the feet of the robot, the tender feeling of simple things from earlier times increases. The eternal market belongs to those things. I ambled without purpose along the stalls. The salesmen sang the bizarre opera of their recommendations. Many bases. I wasn't in a hurry and didn't have to go anywhere, a mood bordering on bliss.

At the end of the Lindengracht, where the market stopped I halted without a goal. Now what? Another pass along the stalls? An older lady with a heavy shoppingbag crossed the street and walked towards me. She stopped in front of me and asked: "Are you visiting our neighborhood too, sir?"

She was smaller than me, and older. But her blue eyes were unspoilt, almost like a girl.

The market... I answered. 'A market is always nice'.

She nodded. But she wasn't entirely convinced, you could tell.

'I know the market from before', she said. 'I was born here in this
neighborhood, you see'.

It was my turn to nod. And to wait. Because she wanted to tell me more. I would have wanted to do that too in the neighborhood of my childhood years.

'My husband used to be a baker here', she said. 'Back then there was a market here too. But with lots of Jewish salesmen. They came to buy their bread. I would cut them in half. And then they'd add the butter in the store, and the toppings they brought with them. That's how we did things in those years'.

She smiled.

'It had something cozy', she said.

I nodded again. I could see the scene in front of me.

'I still have to think about those people often', she said, without any pathos. 'There isn't a day or I'm thinking of them.'

She put her shoppingbag down on the sidewalk.

'Next to us lived a Jewish tailor,' she said. 'He was the only one that saw it coming.'

Her gaze became blurry.

'How did he see it?' I asked, after a while.

'I don't know,' she said. 'But just before the war, eh, he told me 'miss, I'm leaving. I'm going to England. Here it will all go wrong." And he did too. He was single, no need to confer with a woman. He had an elder brother and a father. He tried to get them to go with him, but the father was already quite old, and the brother said "Oh, they  won't hurt us".
So he went alone. From one moment to the next, he left his stuff behind. He even left a pot with food on the stove, but fortunately the gas was off. Yes, he saw it coming. After the war I walked in the paleisstraat and there he was. He said: "I'm still left, miss. I am. But my brother and father they're not. I'm the youngest and I'm still here. If only they had listened." Yes. He looked very well. He had not changed at all.'.

She lifted her bag again. Almost shy she said: 'And our only son, we lost him too on the Waalsdorpervlakte.' That sentence came out with some difficulty. I didn't know what to say to that. Behind us the market continued to make noises.

'Yes, we went through all that,' she said. 'You just never forget. Even though many years have past.'

She looked at me seriously and spoke: 'Wat I still do with Germans, eh, that is point them in the wrong direction. Even today. Just the day before yesterday. A fat, German couple. Nearby here. They came at me and asked me where they could have dinner. Really good food, they wanted. So I told them: "Dan laufen sie so.", and I pointed in the wrong direction. Not there, where the restaurants are, but *there*, you get it?'

Her smile was a little mischievous now.

'And you know, sir,' she said, '*there* is nothing.'