B007P4V3G4 EBOK by Richard Huijing Read Free Book Online

bread, too, is in no state to
stir the appetite. And there are two of those suspect little curly
hairs on the butter.
    But Mr Koopman is once again the same greedy gourmand as
ever. He doesn't even sit down. He grabs what's there as it comes.
Stuffs bread, cheese and spice cake inside, just like that. Licks the
jam pot clean. Cleans out the butter pot with his finger. Only the
egg. He doesn't eat the egg. He picks it up like a thief does a
stolen half-crown. His frozen fingers close around it. He walks over
to his bed. Slowly. With a bit of a shuffling gait. And that's how
he crawls under the blankets in his soaked through pyjamas. But
lying under the blankets, head and all, he presses that egg against
his belly. He will hatch it into a new conception. The truth for a
new life, the lies of which he has learned to get the measure of in
his old one.

     

Maarten Asscher
    There are islands which, in the course of their history, are continually being disputed over by neighbouring states. First they belong
to one country and have its language and governance imposed
upon them, and later, after a battle won or the decline of a
dynasty, they end up under the hegemony of the other state. Thus
they are shoved back and forth like the small change of history. In
time, after so many twists of fortune, such an island begins to
develop its own, hybrid culture, a bastard tongue sprouted from
the languages of its conquerors, an impure style of architecture
combining the influence of both. One might think of Greek-Turkish
Samos or of Pantelleria with its Moorish as well as Sicilian characteristics.
    Italian-French Argentera is such an island, tossed to and fro for
centuries between two Mediterranean cultures. Situated in the
westernmost part of the Gulf of Genoa, it lies almost exactly on
the French-Italian border were one to continue this as an imaginary
line from the land out to sea. There is, however, one particular
difference between Argentera and other islands that have fallen to
rival states by turns. For centuries, Argentera was held to be an
island of doom, and neither France nor Italy wished to number it
among its territories. France, even now, considers it to be foreign
soil and since 1919 refers to it consistently by its Italian name.
Italy, in its turn, maintains never to have signed the relevant treaty
so that this little speck is invariably indicated as Argentere on
Italian maps.
    Thus has been the fate of this rocky little island, from the late
Middle Ages onwards: an abandoned child between haughty
powers. There was a short period of prosperity in the sixteenth
century, when Argentere was colonised by the Genoese in the
expectation of there being silver to be mined on the island. On the
basis of obscure maps and speculative indications, much money
was invested at the time in the sinking of mineshafts but a
powerful earth-tremor put an end to these attempts - and to more than a hundred and fifty human lives. Argentera is still worth a
footnote in Napoleonic literature, for at first there was a plan to
banish Bonaparte there. But, as is well known, having learned from
the escape from Elba, the choice fell on Saint Helena.

    All of this was as yet unknown to me when I first caught sight of
the island of Argentera. I was aboard the ship from Marseille to
Livorno and sharing an inside cabin, a piece of French bread and a
bag of tomatoes with a not very talkative fellow traveller. Neither
in the booking office in the French port nor on the ticket had I
seen any mention of a port-of-call, so I got up, hesitant and
curious, when the ship suddenly could be heard and felt to be
about to berth though we couldn't possibly be at our destination
yet. Upon my question as to the reason for our delay, my
travelling companion growled something unintelligible and so I
decided to investigate. Having arrived on the upper deck, I saw
that loading and unloading was already in full swing: crates