Rob Verschuren was born in Malden, The Netherlands, in 1953. He has long worked as a copywriter in advertising. He has been living outside the Netherlands since the mid-1980s, spending the last fifteen years in Vietnam with his Vietnamese family, and is an example of what Salman Rushdie has called ‘translated men’, expat writers whose geographical, cultural and linguistic transgressions lead to a rich cross-fertilization between identities and perspectives.

Since 2016 he has published four novels and a short story collection with the long established literary publisher In de Knipscheer.

The Apricot Blossom

The town where this story takes place is squeezed between the sea and barren hills of black basalt. Therefore, it has always remained a small and insignificant town. It has a fishing port, a twelve-meter high seated Buddha, and a museum that is as unimpressive as the town itself. The only justification for a visit to this museum is an oil portrait of an old woman. With her calm, clear eyes, she seems to gaze at the visitor from the boundary that separates our world from the spirit world, so fine, almost translucent, her face is painted.                                                      

   About The Apricot Blossom, as the portrait is known, I want to tell a story that is as moving as the way the painter has immortalized his model. It starts on a beautiful spring day, in the late seventies of the last century, when the country was slowly recovering from the civil war. The wounds were still fresh, and there was a shortage of everything, except poverty and hardship. As always after wars and disasters, life first resumed at the market. In the small town by the sea, the River Market spread its tentacles along the quays again, and with the range of goods for sale, the courage of the townsfolk grew, who had long survived on a diet of rice and propaganda slogans.        

   A crowd had formed in front of a stall selling clothes. A bale had arrived from China, flimsy dresses of thin cotton and smelling of inferiour dyes, but they were colourful and cheap. And, as mentioned, it was a beautiful spring day, a day on which new summer dresses are almost irresistible. The seller was a young man, named Hai. Hai leaned against a corner post of his stall and watched a girl his own age who held a red dress to her chest. Mindlessly, she smoothed the fabric and her gaze was directed at the sky, where a narrow strip of blue was visible between the canvas of the market stalls. Her lips moved as if she was doing mental arithmetic. “You can try it on,” Hai said. She looked at him. “Behind the curtain.” He pointed with his thumb. She shook her head and hung the dress back. “It looked good on you.” “You think?” “Yes, red suits you well.’” Her hand went back to the dress, then she shrugged, smiled at Hai and walked on. “What’s your name?” Hai called after her. She looked half back. “Apricot Blossom, why?” “May I paint you?”

   Almost half a year passed before she posed for him. They had been seeing each other for a while by then, and Apricot Blossom knew that his question had not been a new flirtation trick. Or not just a new flirtation trick. Painting was Hai’s passion. He invested all his money in paint and materials and on Sunday he made landscapes and seascapes and occasionally a portrait, which he copied from a photo in a magazine. The other days he helped his mother at the market stall. His father had died at the start of the war. Only traditional child duty saved Hai from starving, for he would have gladly given up everything, food and drink and the rest, for a life as an artist. Because he rarely had enough money to buy materials, he kept painting over his canvases, so that a fishing boat on the beach hid a woman’s head in profile, underneath which a sunset behind the mountains covered a stormy sky above the bay. For the portrait of Apricot Blossom, he bought a meter of the finest linen, imported oil paint in six colours and three badger hair brushes.

    “You made me much too beautiful,” she said when the portrait was finished. “I am not that beautiful in real life.” He looked at her with eyes that were red from squinting and turpentine and a smear of yellow ochre on his forehead. “With my poor talent, I can’t even hope to approach your beauty. The only thing I hope for is to be able to look at it for the rest of my life.” She looked at him in surprise, for Hai was not a man for sentences. Then she started laughing. “Is that a marriage proposal?”

   On his sleeping mat, they made love for the first time, in an air of resin and linseed oil. When they lay naked and sticky next to each other, he stroked a mole on her thigh. She pushed his hand away. “Ugly, isn’t it? See now that I am not as beautiful as you thought?” “It only makes you more beautiful. It looks exactly like a little heart.” She took his hand and put it back on her thigh. “Then it’s yours now.”

   In the first week of the new year – a Year of the Dragon – the museum reopened after recovering from the war damage. One of the festivities was an exhibition featuring the work of local Sunday painters. Hai submitted the portrait of his newlywed bride. It was not only accepted, but praised as one of the better contributions, and after the exhibition, it remained in the museum. Hai wasn’t asked anything, and he certainly didn’t get paid for it. The painting just stayed where it was and Hai was too honoured to protest. He didn’t paint anymore. When Apricot Blossom asked him why, he just shrugged his shoulders with a smile. What he couldn’t express was that painting had been his way to conquer the world. Now there was nothing left to conquer, he had everything.

   Every morning at half-past six, Hai tied his goods on his Honda Cub and left for the market. Apricot Blossom watched him, although little of Hai could be seen due to the high-stacked goods. Then she started filling tubs with water. She did the laundry for families in the neighbourhood. At the end of the afternoon, when sheets and clothes were hanging to dry in the quiet air of the courtyard, she walked a bit down the street to look out for Hai. She helped him unload the moped and then he joined her in the kitchen. While cooking, they told each other about their day. “Jade came by with her little girls this morning,” said Hai. “Which Jade?”  “From the hairdresser.” “Ah.” “The oldest one in a school uniform. She came to exchange the pants she bought last week. She hadn’t worn them yet, she said, but when I folded them I saw egg yolk on them.” And Apricot Blossom said: “A squirrel was in the mango next door for quite a while. It sat still watching me do the laundry. For about fifteen minutes. Then it wagged its tail and whoosh, it was gone.” That’s how their conversations went. They were light as the rustling of the waringin leaves in the sea breeze and meaningful as the discussions that other people have about religion and politics.

   And so the years passed. Every day except Sunday, Hai went to the market and every day except Sunday, Apricot Blossom did the laundry in the courtyard. The little money they had left they saved. Every two or three years Apricot Blossom bought a golden bracelet that she never wore, but saved for their old age. They had no children to care for them later. Whether that was due to her or him, they did not know. They didn’t bother to find out. They had each other, and neither desired more from life. On Sundays they walked along the beach, hand in hand like an engaged couple, and occasionally visited the museum. Then she pulled him to her portrait and he pretended to resist. When they stood before it, she always said: “How young and beautiful I was then. Look at me now, you must regret marrying me so much.” And his answer was always: “You haven’t aged a day, I don’t know how you do it.” But of course, they were getting older, almost imperceptibly, as their life was like a river without rapids, rather boring to look at if you have no eye for the glitter of sunlight on rippling water.

   “Your heart has grown larger,” he said on a summer evening, as they lay next to each other under the slowly rotating fan. She caressed the mole. “That’s because I’m falling in love with you more and more.” In the weeks that followed, the heart grew further and began to itch. When she scratched, blood came out. She went to the doctor. Over the next months, Hai sold her golden bracelets one by one to pay the hospital bills, but the cancer refused to be treated. When Apricot Blossom died at the age of fifty-two, she looked like an old woman, although she was still beautiful. She continued to dye the gray roots of her long black hair until the very end, and she endured the pain with a smile that seemed to become softer and more content as the end approached.

   At the funeral, Hai was surprised by the turnout. Apricot Blossom had known many more people than he did. A week after her death, he was back at the market. He knew that his life from now on would be empty and pointless, but he couldn’t think of anything else. He sought his lost love in the eyes of the women who bought clothes, in the smell of freshly washed sheets, in the raked earth of her grave, on which no stone had yet been placed and, on a gray Sunday afternoon, in the museum. He looked at the portrait as he had never looked at it before and realized how superficial and uninteresting youthful charm was and how poorly he had captured her true beauty.

   The following Sunday, he returned to the museum. It was stormy. High waves crashed against the sea wall and fans of white foam shattered on the boulevard like suicidal seabirds. He paced restlessly through the halls, a skittish figure in an oversized raincoat. At closing time, he hid in the bathrooms. It’s telling of the shoddy way the museum is run that the guard didn’t discover him there on his last round of the day. The lights went out. Hai waited. Sweating in his raincoat, he waited in the stuffy toilet cubicle. After half an hour, he opened the door and found his way by the street light that filtered in through the windows. In front of the portrait, he unbuttoned his coat and brought out the items that had been hidden underneath. He turned on the flashlight and from each of the six new tubes of oil paint, he squeezed a dollop onto a small wooden palette. He poured a little thinner into a cup, picked up the largest of the three brushes, and looked at the painting. As an artist studies his model at the first sitting, guessing what kind of being is trapped in the cage of bones and skin, he looked at Apricot Blossom, who in thirty-three years had not aged a day. He looked at her for a long time, although his time was different from ours. When he finally brought the brush to the canvas, his hand was steady.  

   The light of the flashlight was dim, and dimmer as the night progressed, but what he painted was not what he saw. What he painted was longing, wonder, and regret. He saw Apricot Blossom sitting on the edge of their bed, fixing her hair, a hairpin between her lips and her gaze turned inward, as if she was still wandering through a dream that wouldn’t let her go. He thought of all the times he had looked at her like this and of all the times he hadn’t. He heard the angry noise she made when he got into bed while she was already asleep and with his weight settling, lifted her side of the mattress. He was so used to it that he got up and lay down again when she didn’t complain once. He felt the grip of her hand, rough and strong from washing, the strength with which she had gripped his wrist when the pain ate through her body like a mindless, blind worm. At regular intervals, a muffled thud could be heard when a wave hit the seawall. It sounded like a challenge from the depths: “Come here if you dare, I’m waiting for you. Come.” Otherwise, it was dead silent, as only a large empty space can be. It seems as if it all only took a day, Hai thought. It’s as if all those years fit into one long day. The first light fell through the arched windows. Hai took a step back to look at his night’s work and saw that it was finished. He dipped his finest brush in cadmium red and in the lower right corner of the portrait, where his own name had been, he signed Apricot Blossom.

   The new version of the portrait might not have been noticed – that’s the kind of museum it is – if the word WET wasn’t written on the wall below in dripping letters. The entire museum staff stood there that Monday morning looking at it. “What was that painting anyway?” the director asked. “Who was the painter?” Nobody knew, except an ancient guard who dragged his rheumatic bones through the halls in slippers. He remembered the reopening. That had been the biggest event in his guard life. “Hai the market trader who lives behind the pagoda,” he said. “He’s still alive?” the director said. “If he’s not dead. He’s not that old.” “Interesting,” the director said, “a living artist. Maybe we should inform him of this vandalism. That might be the decent thing to do. What do you think?”

   An art history student who was doing an internship at the museum was sent out to fetch Hai. As they waited for his return in front of the insulted portrait, the realization began to dawn on the others that The Apricot Blossom possessed more than ordinary quality and expressive power. Yes, it was clear to everyone that the only masterpiece of the entire collection was hanging here to dry. Only after an hour and a half did the student return, his hair windblown and speckled with seawater. He had gone to Hai’s house and then to the market, but Hai was nowhere to be found.