The Ice-Cream Makers by Ernest Van der Kwast Page A

brainwashed.’
    He was referring to the team behind the World Poetry Festival: the then director, his editors, the beautiful interns. Their offices were located across the street from the ice-cream parlour. In summer they would often come over for an ice-cream after work. But the director also came in the morning, just after we opened, when it was quiet, to drink an espresso. His name was Richard Heiman, a man with watery blue eyes and a deep voice. He was never without a volume of poetry. He would open it on the table and keep reading as he sipped.
    I don’t remember what volume he was reading when I first took his order for espresso, but I do remember that the dust jacket was missing and the cover was red. Dark red with golden letters, which you would have felt if you were to trace your fingers across them. Beauty is something you don’t notice until you reach a certain age. It’s invisible to children. It is there, but they look right through it. I like to think that the glossy letters on the burgundy book of poetry afforded me my first-ever glimpse of beauty.
    I had seen plenty of customers read, at the tables both inside and out. It was usually the paper, but some women read paperbacks with sumptuous covers, while taking forever to finish their cup of vanilla, hazelnut, or chocolate.
    â€˜Your ice-cream is melting,’ my father would sometimes say from behind the counter.
    And then the woman would look up, blushing, as though he had read her mind, seen the images of passion conjured up by the sentences.
    Richard Heiman was reading the most beautiful book I’d ever seen. Aged fifteen then, I attended the grammar school in Valle di Cadore but spent the three-month summer holidays in Rotterdam, reunited at last with my parents, so I hadn’t seen Heiman before. He failed to notice me by his side. He was completely engrossed in a poem.
    Even now, after all these years, I try to read the golden letters in my mind. Could it have been To Urania by Joseph Brodsky, or Philip Larkin’s High Windows ? Was he reading The Last Rose by Anna Akhmatova, or perhaps the collected poems of Paul Celan? I can no longer ask him; he has crossed the river, taking all his memories with him.
    â€˜Would you care to order something?’ I asked.
    He looked up, startled. ‘Pardon.’ One word, followed by those blue eyes trying to peer inside. ‘Had you been waiting long, sir?’
    No customer had ever addressed me as ‘sir’. It befitted his character, but I wasn’t to know that until later. Back then I saw what made him so gallant: at times he seemed to hail from a different era altogether. The era of the poets he held so dear. The Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey. And Shelley, Keats, and Lord Byron, of course.
    He ordered an espresso.
    The following day he opened a different book. I decided not to ask him what he wanted to drink and brought him an espresso. To my surprise he looked up from the poem he was reading and said, ‘That’s very kind of you, sir.’ Then he fixed his gaze back on the book.
    It was a month before I plucked up the courage to ask what he was reading.
    â€˜This,’ Heiman replied, ‘this is contemporary, impenetrable poetry with the occasional crystal-clear image. Let’s start with something else.’
    He asked me to join him at his table, and when I was seated opposite him he began to recite from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s long autobiographical poem ‘Epipsychidion’. First in English, then in the Dutch translation. ‘ I never was attached to that great sect, / Whose doctrine is, that each one should select / Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, / And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend / To cold oblivion .’ His hands moved as though he was reciting before a full auditorium. The other customers were looking at us, and even my mother, who was scooping ice-cream for a little girl, turned her head.