I did not! she exclaimed flirtatiously. I did nothing of the sort. I only asked some questions, I’m very protective of my friend, you know she’s quite alone here—words that somehow made me feel as if I did not belong in this city or country or even in this room. She wrapped her arm around my shoulder, a gesture that was surely affectionate, but which came across as bizarre and out of character, she was not usually physically demonstrative. She squeezed my shoulder, an embrace that recollected my encounter with Kees at the party, when I had first learned that Adriaan was married. I must have looked uneasy, or perhaps he had himself observed the similarity between the two embraces, because Adriaan now frowned a little and after a moment Jana lowered her arm. I cleared my throat, I asked if we shouldn’t eat. Jana turned away abruptly, she said, Adriaan brought Indonesian takeaway, from a place I don’t know.
She had set the table, there were cloth napkins and place mats and candles. Let’s eat, Jana said. The food is in the oven, keeping warm. We didn’t know how late you would be. I realized that neither of them had asked for an explanation for my tardy arrival. She began taking foil containers of food out of the oven, she shook her head when I offered to help, and told us to sit down.
Adriaan and I stood by the dining table in silence, staring at the flickering candles—Jana or Adriaan or someone had taken the trouble to light them. How is work, how have you been? Jana called out. She was making a great deal of noise as she retrieved the food from the oven, banging the door open and shut and clattering plates. It’s fine, I shouted back, a reply that seemed barely to register. A part of me was relieved, it would have been difficult to talk about work without mentioning the arrest, I would have been speaking around something that loomed so large in my thoughts that they would have sensed it through its omission.
There was more noise from the kitchen, and after glancing at Adriaan, I went to Jana, saying, Let me help you, and together we began ferrying out dishes of food to the table. The food looked delicious and Jana was quick to compliment Adriaan on his choices, I never could have ordered so well, she said. It was a strange and slightly inane compliment and one that was almost certainly a lie, Jana loved to cook and eat out and at any rate it wasn’t a particularly stellar achievement, ordering a takeout meal. Jana lifted her glass of wine and said, Well, here we all are. She was still smiling and her voice was vibrating with tension. Adriaan nodded as he raised his glass, he thanked Jana for inviting him into her home, of the three of us he was the only one who seemed truly at ease.
For a moment, Jana and I both watched him serving the food. We were converted into women admiring a man’s competence, an absurd and appalling situation. He was only dishing out noodles and rice and chunks of meat onto our plates, and yet I also found myself watching him appreciatively, perhaps because of my awareness of Jana’s own admiration. I knew very well that the reason for Jana’s present excitement was her own attraction to Adriaan, she could be competitive and would have felt the need to establish primacy in this situation, one that she had initiated, after all, by suggesting dinner in the first place.
As for Adriaan, he might have been thinking or feeling anything. I couldn’t tell what he made of Jana, or indeed the entire situation. Perhaps he thought it had been a mistake to agree to the dinner, it was only the three of us, it was obvious that it had been organized so that Jana might get a look at him, so to speak. Meanwhile, Jana was being careful to avoid the subject of Adriaan’s marriage and separation, she asked Adriaan a little about his work, the area he lived in, innocuous questions to which she already knew the answers, she did not venture near territory that might be potentially compromising.
The entire exercise had an air of futility and falseness. Adriaan must have been perfectly aware of the fact that Jana knew everything not only about his job and where he lived, but also about his marriage to Gaby and its unresolved state. Nor could the skillful façade of her conversation conceal the fact that Jana also knew that Adriaan knew that she knew, disavowed knowledge reverberated through the room. And yet our behavior did not seem especially strange, people behave with such conscious and unconscious dishonesty all the time. Or perhaps the dishonesty was more concrete, I suddenly thought, perhaps it lay in something they were keeping from me, some argument or agreement between them, and then I wondered if they’d had it out the moment Adriaan arrived, perhaps Jana had let him in and then said, Listen, I want to know how it is between you, I want to know exactly what your intentions are.
She was more than capable of doing such a thing—like Adriaan she could be unusually direct in her manner. Now Jana turned to Adriaan and said playfully, I know you don’t approve of a young woman living in this area—I looked up, startled, I had not told Jana this, and yet she was not incorrect in her assessment of him, and how he would feel about the neighborhood, she had intuited a conservatism I doubted he himself would recognize. And it’s true, Jana continued, it’s not as safe as other parts of the city, just the other day there was an incident. A man was mugged, right outside my front door.
Adriaan lowered his fork to his plate, as if to give Jana his full attention.
The other night, when I was here? I asked and she nodded.
The man is in the hospital. Jana paused. It could have been one of us, it could have been you, she said, looking directly at Adriaan. In fact he was not unlike you, I looked him up, he was wealthy, a professional, probably he was in the area seeing friends for dinner, almost exactly as you are doing now.
But how do you know? I asked. They released the name, she said. It was in one article, there wasn’t that much information, but once I had the name, you know the internet, everything is available. He’s a book dealer, a man called Anton de Rijk, he has a business in the Old Town that is very successful. He probably lives in your part of the city, she said to Adriaan. Although the subject matter had suddenly become very serious, her flirtation persisted, taking the form of blunt aggression, it wasn’t exactly friendly to hypothesize that it might just as easily have been Adriaan lying in a hospital bed.
Yes, she continued, he was probably visiting friends, on his way to a dinner party, only he never arrived, how long do you think his friends waited before they sat down to eat? An hour? An hour and a half? She stopped, as if remembering that they had only recently been waiting for me to arrive, that they might sit down to dinner. One day you are living an ordinary life with its ordinary ups and downs, and then that life is ripped apart and you can never feel entirely secure again. You spend your days looking over your shoulder, your understanding of the world is changed, you see it as a brittle place, full of hostility.
She picked up her fork and began eating, she had barely touched her food and was obviously hungry. Adriaan said that this was how violence functioned and why it was so effective at disrupting society, that was why terrorism worked. Jana swallowed, setting down her fork and reaching for her glass of wine. Of course, she said abruptly.
Still, something must have gone wrong, Adriaan said. There’s no reason to beat a man if all you’re after is money, if a man threatens you with violence, if a man asks for your wallet and phone, you give it to him, we all know that.
Yes, but things do go wrong, Jana said. Even the most hardened criminal can panic and go further than he intended, the body is both more resilient and more fragile than one expects, even those who are accustomed to violence can be taken by surprise. Or perhaps the criminal was an amateur, and underestimated his own strength. Or perhaps he acted out of malice, that’s also not impossible, is it? Jana shrugged. In a way the intention doesn’t matter because whether his attacker—or I suppose attackers, there may have been more than one—acted out of malice or out of panic, the result is the same, the poor man is still in the hospital and you know it’s been several days, I can only think that he must have been very badly injured.
Did they catch whoever did it? I asked.
I’m sure they have it under control, she said, they
probably already have a suspect, there are CCTV cameras on that block, nothing goes undetected anymore. I always hated the cameras, I thought it was the sign of a surveillance state. But now I find they make me feel a little bit safer, I suppose this is how people become conservative. She sounded a little calmer than before. Being a property owner changes your perception of things whether you like it or not. Even the smallest apartment is enough to do the job, it’s difficult not to be contaminated by it, there’s a difference between living in theory and living in practice.
She spoke as if home ownership had transformed her completely, as if she’d been buried in the battlements of her apartment, her life ossified. But I knew this wasn’t true, that Jana’s own situation remained contingent, the stability around us was simply a matter of appearances. That must have been, I realized, what Adriaan had felt when he had returned home to find an empty apartment. I gazed at him across the table, that must have been what he felt when he gathered the children and sat them down, when he searched for the words to tell them that their mother was gone. Every certainty can give way without notice. No one and nothing was exempt from this rule, not even Adriaan.
7.
For a long time, Jana was quiet. Her face was creased with fatigue and worry and I had a vision of her restless in the night, peering out the window, getting out of bed to check that the door was locked. There was no ghost of coquetry in her manner now, nothing that was in the least bit performed, she seemed to have turned completely inward.
Perhaps a full minute later, she looked up and smiled. What a depressing turn to the conversation, that’s my fault. She reached for the bottle of wine and poured herself another glass, and then filled both my glass and Adriaan’s. I shook my head and said, It’s only natural to worry, or words to that effect, words without any particular meaning. The subject had seemed so innocuous, mere small talk—and yet it had cordoned each of us into a private realm, it was as if we had mutually agreed there was nothing more to be said between us.
Let’s talk about something else, shall we? Jana smiled at Adriaan and me, as if to reassure us that matters were exactly the same as before. Not too long after that, Adriaan looked at his phone and said that we should be going, and that he would order a car. I asked him mechanically if he hadn’t driven, and he shook his head. A little later, his phone pinged. The car had arrived and we stood up. Jana followed us to the door, then reminded us that she had an exhibition opening in several weeks, she hoped we would both come. I nodded and she embraced me quickly before saying she would look forward to seeing us then.
* * *
—
As we sat in the back of the taxi, Adriaan took my hand and then said, I’m going to be away for a week, possibly longer.
For work? I asked. My voice was flat, I was tired from the previous night and the dinner had been wearing. I was disappointed by Adriaan’s announcement but my mind was elsewhere, preoccupied with these stories of violence, in the Court and in the street. They changed the register of the city I saw through the windows of the car, I thought of Anton de Rijk and how recently he had walked these very roads. Adriaan was silent for a moment and then he cleared his throat and said, No, I am going to Lisbon to see Gaby and the children. He held my hand a moment longer and then said quietly, I’m going to ask her for a divorce.
I turned now to face him. In the dark, his features appeared tentative, and then soft with misery. I was caught off guard, the distance between my elation—because that was what I had felt upon hearing his words, elation unbidden and uncontrolled, that pulsed through the whole of my body—and his frank unhappiness was overwhelming. I wondered if he had reached this decision reluctantly, a step taken after months of unmet hope and hesitation, an internal debate he had kept from me. He seemed aware of my uncertainty and smiled. I’m not looking forward to it, he said, but there are some things we need to discuss, things that cannot be talked about on the phone or written in an email, and that need to be done face-to-face.
I nodded, I only asked him when he was leaving. Tomorrow, he said. I decided to make the trip a few days ago. My flight is early, I’ll need to leave the apartment at five in the morning. Have you booked a car? I asked. He ignored the question and took my hand again. I thought you might like to stay in the apartment while I’m away, he said. You’ll have less of a commute in the mornings and it would make me happy to imagine you there. He paused. I don’t like to leave you. We haven’t known each other for very long, but I want to know that you’ll be here when I return.
I’ll be here, I said. He took my hands and kissed me. At the time it didn’t occur to me to wonder why he needed this assurance, or why a departure of a week required such declarations of intent. Good, he whispered, and I saw that he was relieved, some matter now settled in his mind. We rode in silence back to the house and when we entered the apartment he asked once more, So you will stay? I nodded. He again looked relieved. He said that he would leave keys out for me. It will only be a week, or possibly a little longer, he said and I thought that he was trying to reassure us both.
He was true to his word on this point, departing early the next morning. I awoke some hours later in the oversized bed. It was the first time I had been alone in the apartment. I got up and went out into the hallway. Behind the doors lining the hallway there was only silence. I briefly wondered if Adriaan might have changed his mind, if there would be no key after all, the offer retracted either by intention or by oversight. But he had not forgotten, and when I entered the kitchen I immediately saw a set of keys, resting on the kitchen counter alongside a note that read I will imagine you here while I’m away.
I stood in the kitchen and read the note twice. I picked up the keys, I felt a shiver of pleasure. I decided to make a coffee using the ludicrous machine, I looked in the cupboards and found a cup, poured out milk and added water. The machine began to grind and whir, and then to spurt out coffee and milk. I sat at the counter and drank the coffee, I realized how removed the apartment was from the stream of life outside, through the miracles of double glazing and insulation. Alone, the quiet had a different meaning, forlorn and almost burdensome. Suddenly restless, I put my coffee cup down. I had a set of keys, I could come and go as I wished, I had been told to treat the place as my own.
I dressed and made my way down to the street, the area was well serviced by public transportation and within moments I was on a tram running in the direction of the Old Town. I had been on the tram many times of course, but somehow this journey felt subtly different, the city frequently changed before my eyes but now I felt an attachment I had sought but not previously felt, it was as if an anchor had been dropped. I stepped off not too far from the Mauritshuis and stood for a moment in the crush of pedestrians and tourists. I walked down a street at random, and realized it had been some time since I had moved through the city in this way, with this leisure and freedom.
I had been walking for some time when I passed a bookshop with leather-bound volumes in the window. I suddenly remembered Jana’s words, He’s a book dealer, a man called Anton de Rijk, he has a business in the Old Town that is very successful. Giving in to sudden impulse, I circled back and entered, there were not so many bookshops in the Old Town and there was at least some likelihood that this was the one. A young woman looked up as soon as I entered and smiled in a vague but not unfriendly way, I nodded and pretended to examine the shelves. Despite the deliberation with which I perused the titles and the emptiness of the shop—I began to worry that it was not so successful as Jana had thought—the young woman did not approach or speak to me.
Eventually, I went to the desk, my eyes still on the shelves, and she asked if she could help me. I shook my head, I said that I was only browsing and asked if she was the owner of the shop. She laughed, a loud and indecorous sound. Far from it, she said and smiled. I asked how long she had worked at the shop. Three years, she said. It wasn’t a bad job, it was quite interesting and the customers were colo
rful—antiquarian books drew a certain kind of clientele, although it wasn’t only antiquarian volumes, they sold all kinds of things. Then, because she was silent and I wished to prolong the conversation, I said that I was looking for a history of the city, something that would make a nice gift.
She rose and retrieved several volumes, opening them to display beautiful maps and foldout plates, as I examined the books she said they ranged in price from a hundred euros to considerably more. I asked her when the volumes had been published and she said they were mostly nineteenth century. I touched the morocco binding, they were beautiful things, and although it was more money than I had to spend, I told the woman I would buy one of the books, I thought I might give it to Adriaan.
As she was ringing up the purchase, I asked her who the owner was. She seemed surprised by the question and I said I only asked because the bookshop had a great deal of personality. The statement was inane and yet it was not untrue, you could feel the imprint of the person behind the shop. She said the owner was a man called Anton de Rijk. Quickly, I asked if he was often at the shop and she said that normally he was, but he had unfortunately been called away, when exactly he would be back she couldn’t say. I thought she seemed uneasy and yet I couldn’t help but ask, Nothing serious, I hope? And after a pause, she shook her head, not in the least, I had only to return in a week or two and I would find him there. A week or two, she repeated, or possibly three. Abruptly she held out the packaged book. I took it from her and thanked her for her help.
I left the shop, the package in my hands. I hardly knew why I had ventured in, or why I had asked so many questions about De Rijk. A week or two, she had said, or possibly three. I had been obscurely relieved to hear this. When I returned to the apartment I unwrapped the book and held it in my hands, it was strange to see it here, in this room. I placed it on the coffee table and then picked it up and moved it to one of the bookshelves in the living room. I saw that after all it wasn’t entirely right, it stood out and looked like a foreign object, with its ornate binding and rubbed edges. In the end I didn’t know who it was for. I sat down on the sofa. I missed Adriaan, and for a brief moment I felt stranded in the enormous apartment, as if I had been left behind.
Intimacies Page 6