I pressed a thumbtack into the paper.
Out back, Braams was roused from his doze by a loud, sharp noise and knew immediately that it was malign.
The fever of sleeplessness drives people to do the strangest things. They whisper poems that appear in mirror-writing behind their eyes, weigh grains of rice on imaginary scales, picture themselves lying on a bed of red velvet. Most just pop a pill. That has never really worked for me. The tranquilizer would turn things foggy very quickly and for a moment I would feel the world behind my eyelids begin to spin as I sank deeper. But the next instant it would all kick off and I would be swamped by an onslaught of images. At unbridled speed, old fears, old faces, old objects from my past would come charging through my mind. And there I’d be, transfixed all over again by a monstrosity in white plaster, my grandfather’s leg, the one they eventually lopped off.
I never encountered Ton. As far as I know, I have never dreamed of him. Or if I did, it must have been when I dreamed I was awake. It happens. I know of people who sleep soundly but dream they have been tossing and turning all night and wake up in the morning exhausted. So it is possible that I have gone downstairs in my dream, turned on the kitchen light, and taken the big bowl and the small bowl down off the shelf. And that, at some point, I recalled the strange, subtle scent that hung in the air at the funeral home.
“Did the corners of his mouth always turn down like that?” I asked Lucia. “Do you know?” And she stepped away from the immaculate vertical pleat of a gray funeral home curtain, looked down beside me and said, “Nah. ’Course not.” This triggered thoughts of the note, the farewell letter, the explanation. A few people had asked. I had hunted high and low, but I had yet to find one. As I turned away from my late husband’s face, impervious now to tears or laughter, and walked toward the door, it occurred to me for the first time that there was no note. My husband had shaken off his existence, including our time together, without a word. A private matter, that was all it had ever been. He would not permit anyone to read what had held sway over his life, or rather his death, not a single soul. Stepping out into the warm sunshine with Lucia, I felt the need to say something momentous.
“I will never be young again.”
“Oh, cut it out,” she replied.
I should not be up and about tonight. On a night like this I should be in bed, down for the count, resting soundly against the hipbone of a man. Given half a chance, I try to arrange a firm support for the small of my back. I lie on my side, legs pulled up in front of me, and roll back. And as soon as I feel solid ground behind me, I lean into the bone and feel my spine settle.
Tonight is different. I can’t put my finger on what’s keeping me awake. Today was pleasant. Everything that happened today was ordinary—ordinary in the most baffling way. I step away from the counter. My breathing is a little heavier now, but I am still not tired. In a few minutes it will be half past two. I wipe my hands and set the kitchen timer. After all my exertions, the dough is ready and now needs an hour to rise. I cover the bowl with a damp dish towel and place it on the little stool beside the radiator. Anatole gets to his feet. His jaws yawn wide and a peep escapes from his throat.
He was all for the idea. Though he did wonder whether the animals would feel like braving the cold. I told him I had heard that lions and tigers don’t mind snow in the least. That they even get a kick out of it. But lions and tigers aside, perhaps it would be best to stick to the indoor enclosures on a morning like this? And I told him about the owl cave, the reptile house, and the heated aviary where the rain forest birds were free to flit around.
Though it was only a short walk from the station, we set off at a brisk pace. I left my car parked on a side street. The center of town was busy. The men and women coming toward us looked colorless, the children all seemed to have a cold. Once again, I had a sense of wading against the tide, everyone bent on taking a different path from my own. I knew very well that this was all in my head. Even as a child I had the feeling that most of the other kids were off playing somewhere else.
Today there was someone going my way. Glancing to the side, I saw a look of amusement, cheeks blotched red from the cold. Perfectly at ease with himself, he turned in the direction I pointed out.
We strolled into the bare gardens and there they were, the animals. The white birds of prey. The cattle with their desolate eyes. The wild horses, motionless, waiting. We followed the signs to the aquarium, and distant cries mixed with the scent of the worlds held within the bodies of these exiled creatures lent an air of unreality to our walk.
There was a spring-loaded hinge on the aquarium door. We had to push hard to get in. Bright with curiosity, we walked up the broad marble steps and entered a hall where the walls consisted of tanks teeming with fish. A quiet, twilit place.
“Has it been long?” I asked when we had wandered almost the full length of the hall. In his letter he had written that his wife had left him.
He grasped the thread immediately.
“Over three years,” he said. “She left in October.”
“What’s her name?”
“Louise,” he answered.
I knew I could ask any question that entered my head. In these circumstances, there could be no such thing as indiscretion. During one encounter, barely half an hour after laying eyes on the man, I had found myself picking over some peculiar sexual problem or other.
“Is it something you regret?” I asked, for the sake of something to say.
“Regret,” he said. “Regret, hmm …”
He seemed to lose himself in thought for a moment. The yellow light from the aquarium made a carnival caricature of his face. I saw that his eyes were following the movement of a flatfish.
Then he said, “When she got out of the bath, her hair curled up like a poodle’s. It was all so passionate at the start, a trip through Italy. At night, from our hotel room, you could see a fleet of boats out at sea, four powerful lamps attached to their masts. The fishermen lured their catch to the surface with shafts of light … Look at that!”
I followed his finger. A white shark-like creature had its snout pressed to the glass, gnashing angrily with a mean little mouth.
“It’s like the plastic surgeon botched the operation,” I said.
“Three or four years in, she was already convinced there was no point staying together when you’re no longer in love. But then …”
“But then, there’s the children,” I hazarded.
He nodded.
“And so we began to make deals.”
“Deals …” I echoed.
“Yup. ‘A deal’s a deal.’ That was the deal. You know … so you don’t end up waging war over every little thing.”
“Ah …”
When we fell silent again, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the stillness of this water palace. I wondered when the other visitors would turn up. The Saturday morning grocery run must be over by now. Or were water and fish the last things people wanted to see on such a cold, cold day?
“One night she chucked a vacuum cleaner at me,” he said.
I turned and looked at him, speechless.
“I was just lying there sleeping.”
He began to laugh, chuckling silently at first and then out loud, a solid, cheerful laugh. I laughed, too.
“Do you know which ones I like most,” he said, turning back to the glass wall. “The plain old codfish.”
They were enormous creatures, the slightest sweep of the tail sent them sailing along at high speed. Lips sharply drawn in the dullest of grays, constantly opening and closing. Yes, there was an undeniable beauty in those worried, good-natured faces. Still laughing I said, “I don’t believe Ton and I ever got that intense. We simply didn’t take the time.”
We agreed about us from the very start.
Is that what they call love at first sight? The strange thing was, at the time I never gave it a moment’s thought. I couldn’t have cared less what it was, why ever since that first day Ton and I
simply, unthinkingly, stayed together. There was a casual inevitability to it. Not that I was an ingenue. I knew it could drive you mad. As a child I had devoured enough books to glean a suspicion, and at sixteen I lived through it after my violin teacher ended a lesson by ordering me to sing a pure fifth. To this day, I have never been asked a more intimate question. I gawped at him like a fish, this man with his high forehead and a remarkable light in his eyes. What followed was a rush of afternoons and evenings when I ran through the streets to reach his classroom, at full speed from water’s edge to town square. What followed was that I could not see a cloud, a tree, a child without infusing them with elements to which, strictly speaking, they bore no relation whatsoever: his fiery assertion that David Oistrakh was the world’s only living musical genius, the scent of cigarettes and lotion that seemed to emanate from behind his hair, the sounds that rose up in him and in me—mysteriously not of our making—when he finally got around to easing me back onto the divan that stood next to the piano. What followed was that I no longer gave a damn about the loneliness that had been handed me at birth. And then, late one glorious day in July, his head and naked shoulders came poking out of the window of his upstairs apartment and he called, “Sorry, you can’t come up right now because … um … the wisteria has fallen over and jammed the door shut.”
With Ton it was different.
It wasn’t until my graduation year in Leiden that I fell in with that group of friends. I was practically a teacher already, busy doing school internships on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and flicking through the weekend papers to be reassured that there were plenty of jobs available in elementary schools. It was January, and a protest meeting was being held at the concert hall. Don’t ask me what I was doing there. Don’t ask me what I was supposed to be up in arms about. I turned up on a whim. And it was on a whim that I left with one of the Neefjes sisters, perched on the back of her bike as she pedaled home to her student quarters on Pietersteeg. A bunch of them lived there: Milou and Dela Neefjes, cheerful girls who both studied math; a pharmacology student called Hugo Kakebeke, who had painted the walls and ceiling of his room midnight blue; and Lucia, who was studying chemistry at the time. No, I didn’t meet Ton that evening.
Only Lucia. A farmer’s daughter who embraced student life with an allure all her own. That winter, whenever I ran into her in town, she was usually on her way to some urgent gathering or on her way back from one. She was a fixture at all kinds of union committees and action groups, a fervent advocate of the democratization of everything under the sun. But sometimes she would be carrying a tennis racket and a white sports bag. And sometimes she would be wearing brown boots that fitted snugly around the calf and heel. As soon as she saw me she would park her bike. I remember how she would walk next to me, coat always buttoned to the collar, scarf tucked under her chin. All wrapped up like a precious artifact. She was naturally pale and wore her lush red hair long and straight. It was never covered. When she wasn’t speaking, she seemed to be in a daydream. When she spoke, she looked straight at you. Light, gray-green eyes. She smiled, was critical yet eager to convince, keen to share her indignation or her delight. To her, sorrow seemed to be an unknown quantity.
Why she took a shine to me, I will never know. But for a girl like me, she was ideal company. I am perfectly willing to come out of my shell; it’s just that I have no idea how. During the discussions that filled that first evening, she nudged me several times, smiling at the others, and then back at me. She said things like “Don’t you think so too?” and “Yes, I couldn’t agree more,” and announced to the entire group that she was planning to borrow my sweater sometime.
Less than a week later, Lucia marched into my room one morning, jolting me from a dream of tigers on the prowl. She yanked open the curtains. The statue of the physician Boerhaave that stood outside my window looked greener and colder than ever.
“The Braassem, the Schie, the Wetering are frozen over,” she announced. “Even the Singel is all ice. Get up. We’re going skating on the canals.”
My watch was lying next to the ashtray. Almost ten. I shook my head.
“It’s Tuesday. I’ve got my internship at the Pater Wijnterp School this afternoon. I’ve prepared a lesson on the amphibian reproductive system.”
She snatched my address book from the table and headed for the door.
“Well, those little brats can kiss their tadpoles goodbye.”
As I was pulling on my socks, I heard her dialing a number on the phone out in the hall and then summing up symptoms in a muted, compelling voice. “Swollen glands. A pulsing headache behind the eyes, temples, and forehead.”
I hoped she wouldn’t overdo it. How was I going to show my face again on Thursday if—
“No,” I heard her say. “Thursday’s out of the question, too.”
We climbed down onto the ice by the derelict paper factory on the Singel. Hugo Kakebeke, the pants of his thick tweed suit tucked into knee-length socks, surprised me by getting off to a sprightly start on his old-school wooden skates. The Neefjes sisters took to the ice like true professionals and—as Lucia and I sat on the embankment fumbling with our laces—they whizzed back and forth in their colorful skating gear, dinky backpacks, knees bent, hips low. Lucia strapped on a backpack, too, provisions for along the way, she explained when I asked. Then she gave me a nudge. I looked up to see two boys and a girl, none of whom I knew, sliding down the slope of frosted grass to join us. Lucia introduced me to one of the boys, whose every outbreath came as a white cloud. Her brother Ton. I noticed he was wearing her brown-and-white checkered scarf. Hugo Kakebeke yelled to see if we were finally ready to go. I was the last to rise gingerly to my feet. A mist was settling in. Even before we had rounded the bend, ice, air, and quayside had merged into a tunnel of gray.
It’s best to focus directly in front of you. By reining in your gaze, you can keep an eye on the color of the ice and the cracks in its surface. Gaze into the distance and you can lose yourself in the primordial trance of the skater: in space, in dreams, in solitude. I heard the calm scrape of skates beside me. No, don’t ask if I was curious who was there next to me, riding in a rhythm I could feel from my fingertips down to my toes. Don’t ask what we said to each other, in short bursts of conversation to save our breath. Or what it was that made us grind to a halt, unable to contain our laughter, panting, juddering soundlessly side by side. Although neither of us were poor skaters, still we were unable to keep up with the group. By the time we reached the mill at Rijpwetering, an impressive campfire was already crackling away at the bottom of the dike. The rest were huddled around it, Dela and Milou Neefjes dangling tinfoil parcels on sticks into the flames.
“Ton, you are a man who takes milk in his coffee,” said Hugo Kakebeke a short while later, proffering a Styrofoam cup. “This I know. Alas, my domestic rigor was not quite up to that this morning.”
That winter’s day passed without my being able to exert even the slightest influence on events. Ton and I lost sight of the others again when, somewhere close to Hoogmade, the mist thickened for a while. From then on, ditches, fences, and low bridges recurred in such faithful succession that we could do nothing but follow. I experienced a sense of gliding out of the world. There was no wind. No color. No temperature even. Nothing on which to impose my will. Only the sound of the blades on the ice, close beside me.
Dusk had begun to descend when we fell through the ice. We had just agreed to stop at the next village and take the bus back to Leiden when it happened. Sudden as a trapdoor. We shot under a little bridge and all at once there it was, a gleaming black gap in the icy surface. We sank too quickly to scream. I think all I did was sigh.
That night we slept together. How could we not, having survived such a spill?
I can picture us, in my room. On my bed by the window that looked out on the green patina of the statue of Boerhaave, sedentary man of science. It had felt like waking up, Ton and I agreed. No, like being woken. A door thrown open in your face. A j
olt to the chest and then an ice-cold flannel …
My memories of that night run deep. The intoxication. The warmth. There was almost no light in my room, but the gas heater burned red and yellow, the glow of stained glass set in solid rock. It was well past midnight. The pleasure of sex still close. Then, as now, I loved the stillness that sinks into my body and my limbs when the heat has burned out and desire takes a pause or simply nods off, a state in which the deepest intimacy can sometimes be reached. We lay stretched on crumpled sheets, my fingertips traced the line of his brow, his nose, his lips and I said, “If I were blind, I would have read your expression now.”
We were dead tired. As exhausted as two street bums who, keeping pace with the sinking level in the bottle, have chewed over every detail of what it was to be young and flush before the markets crashed. I believe we tried to get to know each other that night.
He wanted me to know that, although he was studying law, first and foremost he was a farmer’s son. That on their farm, flies never buzzed around the kitchen, thanks to the woodwork—painted blue—and the elderberry bush that grew outside the window. That the living room had three tall windows and from November to March you looked out on the bare land and an outbuilding with concrete gutters and stables, vacant but for a single horse. His father was a market gardener, not a livestock farmer. Bedrooms were in short supply. For as long as they lived at home, he and Lucia had slept in two adjacent wooden bunk rooms above the stables. Snug spaces, full of life: their own, the horse beneath them, and the endless flights of hysterically honking geese overhead. Three or four times a year, a storm would pry its way in through the roof and walls, triggering a flurry of repairs.
Sleepless Night Page 3