I was sure Jana must be pleased, it was an impressive, even ostentatious, display. The room was crowded with delighted guests, the noise and chatter of their appreciation. Jana appeared behind us at that moment, slinging an arm around my shoulder, and asked what we thought. Eline said at once that it was wonderful, and Jana said that they had commissioned a food artist to make the dioramas, a young woman who had studied at the Rijksakademie and was now getting commissions from all the big biennials. She was whisked away before she could continue, I saw that she was animated by the success of the evening. There was no formal seating plan, instead there was a towering stack of plates piled on a table set in the middle of the lobby. Guests were crowding around the paintings, plates in hand, sawing away at sides of meat and cheese wheels through the various picture frames, the entire scene was bizarre and amusing.
I thought of Adriaan, it occurred to me that this was the world he had inhabited with Gaby. They would have circulated through this room with ease, I was sure that between them they would have known most of the people in attendance, in some ways it was their world even more than it was Jana’s. I felt a rush of fear crowd into me. I was not of this place. I had an image of Adriaan, together with Gaby again, for a moment it was as if they were there in the room. Around us, lines were forming. Shall we? Eline asked gently, as if aware of my distraction. I like the look of that Clara Peeters.
She indicated a display of cheeses and said with a laugh, I think our dinner will consist of cheese and bread, the fish and lobster have already been depleted. It was true, happy diners were now sitting down at the banquet tables, their plates heavy with food. Servers circulated with pitchers of wine, everything had been thought of. We joined the line and then reached through the frame to cut slices of cheese. Eline took an apple and some other fruit from another display, It is wonderfully executed, she murmured as she bit into a peach and surveyed the scene. If you look, the lighting has been adjusted to mimic the paintings. She gestured to the lighting rig above. Even the wreckage is somehow funny and interesting, you never get to see the paintings in this state.
A while later, Jana joined us. She sat down in the chair next to me and slipped her heels off. What a night, she said. She sounded tired, the words a little ambiguous, the evening might have been a success or a disaster in her eyes. Eline said, It’s wonderful, you must be very pleased. Jana leaned forward eagerly. What did you think of the exhibition? she asked. Eline reached for Jana’s hands and grasped them in her own, It’s a triumph. There was a great deal of kindness in her voice, and although I did not doubt the sincerity of her words, I could see she was aware of how much they meant to Jana. Jana nodded as if relieved, and a little later Eline stood up and said that she needed to go. It was such a pleasure to meet you, she said to me, and although the words were mere convention, I again felt she meant them. Can we meet again? she said, and Jana immediately said that she would put us in touch.
Eline smiled and said good night. As she watched her go, Jana yawned, the crowd was beginning to disperse and it was as if she had officially clocked off, she reached for her glass of wine. Isn’t she lovely? Did you like her? she asked. Very much, I said. How did you meet?
She was in front of my building.
What do you mean?
Her brother was the man who was attacked—you remember, in that mugging last month.
I looked at her, startled.
She didn’t tell you? Jana drank from her glass. That’s how we met, she was standing in front of the apartment building, maybe one week after the attack. It was so clear she didn’t belong there, I thought she was lost, or I don’t know what, but for some reason I stopped and asked if she was okay. She looked at me and then she burst into tears. We went to the café around the corner and she told me what had happened, that her brother had been attacked and beaten while in the neighborhood, that he had been hospitalized for over a week.
Jana reached over and squeezed my hand, her manner warm and affectionate. You know, I’m sorry not to have been in touch. The exhibition has taken up all my time.
But he’s fine? I asked. Her brother?
Eline’s brother? I think so, she said with a shrug. Although I don’t think there’s been much progress in the case. He can’t remember anything. He doesn’t even know why he was in the neighborhood, or what he came there to do. It’s a total mystery.
A waiter was moving through what remained of the crowd, distributing plates of seedcake. Jana took two plates and handed me one. She began eating, she must have been very hungry. How is Adriaan? she asked between bites. She wasn’t looking at me as she spoke, but there was nothing false about the casual way in which she asked the question, she was too tired to be self-conscious. I thought he was very nice, she said, and her manner was so matter-of-fact that I wondered if I had imagined it all, the complicity and the flirtation. He seemed kind. Which is a rarity. She took another bite and then looked at me. Don’t you think? I nodded. I didn’t say anything further. But I believed her words to be true. Later that evening, I sent Adriaan a message, I asked when he would return, and then I asked how things were with Gaby, where things stood with his marriage.
11.
Adriaan did not reply to the message. A day passed, and after I reached for my phone yet again in the hopes of having received a reply, I lowered it and looked around me. I had been living in Adriaan’s apartment for over a month and yet I had changed almost nothing inside it. I realized I had been trying to occupy the apartment in as discreet a manner as possible, as if to illustrate to Adriaan upon his return how easily I would slip into the fabric of his life, how little disturbance I would cause. To understand this was humiliating. I was a woman waiting for a lover, dressed in obscene lingerie, body arrayed on the bed in a pose of hopeful seduction.
I felt sudden and real anger toward Adriaan, who had placed me in this absurd position, who had asked me to live in his apartment, had promised to return in a week, only to abscond into silence. It was not that I had never before experienced an unexpected silence from a man, but I would not have expected that from Adriaan. I placed the phone on the table, I looked around again, nothing had changed in the apartment, with the exception of the volume I had purchased at Anton de Rijk’s shop in the Old Town. I had been complicit in my own erasure.
I picked up the book, this history on The Hague, and held it in my hand. I saw the volume now for what it was, the artifact of a brief moment when I thought I might yet have a place in Adriaan’s city. I threw the book hard across the room. The burn of humiliation remained in my throat all day, and by the following day I felt deflated and worn out. I had made myself too easy to leave, stashed away like a spare part, I had asked for too little, and now it was too late. That feeling was with me still when I received an email from Jana, a few days later, addressed to both Eline and myself. It was obvious that we should be friends, she wrote, and she was putting us in touch.
I scrolled down the email chain and saw that it was Eline who had written first, congratulating Jana again on the success of the exhibition and saying how much she had enjoyed meeting me. I felt flattered, I remembered how I had liked Eline, and I wrote back at once. I wanted to be taken out of my own thoughts, away from the entire impossible situation. We arranged to meet at a café close to Adriaan’s apartment. As I entered, it occurred to me that she might ask if I lived in the area, and I did not know what I would say. Happily, that feeling of uncertainty dissipated as soon as I saw her. She was sitting at a table by the window and in daylight she seemed more delicate than she had at the Mauritshuis, her skin even paler. There were lines around her eyes that I had not noticed before, she was likely older than I had first thought.
As I sat down opposite her, I was conscious again of her brother, Anton de Rijk, like a prickling in the skin. He was a man I had never seen but of whom I had been aware for some time, and whose phantom image she now seemed to summon. She was drinking a cup of herbal tea, she sa
id that of late she had been having trouble sleeping. I nodded. I thought it was likely because of her brother, and it occurred to me that if I asked her why her sleep was so troubled she might even tell me, about the assault, about her brother’s physical health.
After a moment, I asked, Is it something in particular? As I asked the question I glanced around the café, as if looking for the waiter, to keep the query from gathering weight. She shook her head. I have a touch of insomnia, it’s been that way for years, even when I was a child I was an insomniac. I looked back at her, she was smiling as she spoke. I could never sleep in my own bed, she continued. I would crawl into bed with my parents, I would sleep on the floor in the sitting room, one time my parents found me sleeping on the kitchen counter. She laughed and took a sip of her tea. That no longer happens, thank goodness. But I do all the usual things, I take the necessary precautions. No caffeine after noon, no screens in the bedroom.
She paused. You haven’t even ordered, I apologize. She raised her hand and the waiter came to the table. I ordered a coffee, despite my own trouble sleeping, which had redoubled with Adriaan’s recent silence. After the waiter left, she said, Jana told me you’ve been here less than a year, that you’ve put the city on probation. We both laughed, the invocation of Jana’s name furthered our ease. How are we doing, she asked, will you stay? Possibly, I said, if my contract is extended. I didn’t say anything about Adriaan.
Where is home?
My family’s now in Singapore. Before that I lived in New York.
She nodded. And you enjoy the work?
It’s not without complication, I said, and I thought of the former president. The other interpreters had taken to calling me his favorite; it was and it was not a joke. I’d realized that to the others it was a matter of recognition and even distinction, being requested by the accused in this fashion. That such attention could be considered desirable was troubling, it changed the way I saw my colleagues, the register of our interactions in the office, the small talk we made over lunch.
In and of themselves, the sessions with the defense could be exceedingly dull, notwithstanding the tension inside the room, again and again I had the sense that the former president was bored, that he was not hearing the words as I spoke them, that he was barely listening at all. I began to wonder if, rather than bringing home the nature of the acts he had committed, this process was causing them to recede further and further into some state of unreality. The question of his innocence or guilt seemed of little interest to the people in the room, instead they spoke of degrees and framing and context.
In those moments, in the face of the former president’s resolute indifference, in that small, airless conference room amidst the folders and piles of paper, something yawned open inside me. The depersonalized nature of the task—I was only an instrument, and during the hours that I was there I was almost never spoken to directly, in fact the only person who bothered to address me at all was the former president—sat alongside the strange intimacy of the encounter, the entire thing was a paradox, impossible to reconcile. Despite the uniformity of these meetings, each time I approached the room with trepidation, and each time I felt I did not know what waited on the other side of the closed door. As for Kees, he never again acknowledged our past acquaintance or the exchange in the corridor, he never even seemed to look at me—he too behaved as if I were not there.
Eline was still waiting for me to respond.
It can be challenging—emotionally, I mean.
Yes, she said. You must be exposed to terrible things, I can’t imagine.
At a certain point you no longer understand the words you are saying. I get lost—I’m so focused on the minutiae of the session that I lose track of the larger story. I couldn’t tell you at the end of a session what’s taken place or what’s actually been said.
The waiter placed a cup of coffee before me.
Did you ever see that movie, the one about the interpreter? Eline said once he had moved away. The plot twist is that she’s actually a revolutionary. Or not a revolutionary, but the lover of a revolutionary? It was a little hard to follow. On the whole, it didn’t make much of an impression on me. But I do remember thinking, what clarity! By the end the actress is waving a gun around, all ambiguity has fallen away, she knows what she has to do. She paused and smiled. You don’t have a gun, do you?
I shook my head. No gun. Nor clarity, for that matter.
She laughed. That’s probably for the best. My older son loved the movie, I think he has a crush on the actress, she’s very beautiful. I asked how old her children were and she said, Ten and twelve. It’s gone quickly, their childhood, but it’s also gone very slowly. When they are young, it is exhausting and you have no time for yourself, but you can still make them happy. That’s no longer the case with my boys. They’re old enough to understand things, they see the world as it is. They are wiser but they are also more vulnerable.
As she spoke, I thought of the violence that had entered their lives when her brother was attacked, violence that was not contained on their tablets or phone screens, that was not abstract but fully realized. They were ten and twelve, it was true that by that age many children had already confronted death in some form, a grandmother or a grandfather or a family friend. But death is abstract, even grown men and women can be incapable of understanding it. Violence was something different, violence was easier to comprehend, it existed within the realm of the imagination.
We live in strange times and there is a great deal to worry about, she said abruptly. For one, the possible demise of the European project. I nodded, the date of the Brexit referendum was rapidly approaching, and the polls indicated that against all logic, the UK might well vote to leave the EU. Even the possibility was disturbing, it said nothing good about the world we were living in, or the longevity of institutions such as the Court; nor did it bode well for the upcoming election in the United States. I knew that a Leave vote would be profoundly disorienting for my European friends and colleagues. Jana was especially troubled, she had told me that if the UK voted to leave, it would be impossible for her to return to England, it would no longer be the country she had once known.
I’m worried about the Dutch election next year, this country has a reputation for tolerance but peel back the skin of it— Eline paused. Given the general tendency, I am not optimistic.
It must be difficult for you to explain to the children, I said.
Yes. Their father is useless, he is worse than useless. He’s absolutely brutal with them, he doesn’t seem to understand that they are still children, that there is a limit to what they can comprehend. Her voice was bitter, she looked across the table at me. I’m divorced, of course. Their father lives in Amsterdam.
But the children live with you?
They go to see him every other weekend. He travels a great deal for work, so those weekends don’t happen as regularly as they should. Luckily, my brother and his wife also live in The Hague. She paused, her phone pinged and she picked it up. Her attention moved away from me and I felt the negative space of its absence. She looked up and said that she would need to be going, her son had just texted. His ride has fallen through, I need to go and pick him up.
I nodded, I found that I was disappointed, although I was uncertain of the precise source of my disappointment—was it because she would be leaving when we had only just begun talking, or was it because she had yet to tell me anything of her brother, Anton, or was it simply because I would soon be left alone, and to my own devices? Of course, I murmured. She took out her wallet and placed a bill on the table. As I reached for my bag, she held her hand up. Please, she said, it’s a coffee. She stood and waited for me to follow. We divorced a long time ago, she continued as we made our way toward the door. In fact it happened when I was pregnant with my younger son. Her voice was calm and untroubled, it was clear she was speaking of a drama that had long since been resolved. Of course it’
s important for the boys to know their father, but in many ways their uncle is the primary male presence in their lives, and his wife is more than an aunt to them.
I hesitated, and then said, You’re lucky to be so close to your brother. I thought she paused for a moment before she pushed the door open and turned to face me. We’re twins, she said. She didn’t say anything else, and I walked with her several paces until she came to a stop. I must have looked bereft, because she suddenly said, as if on impulse, Why don’t you come to dinner one night? I’ll invite my brother, you can see our funny little family in action. Do you have any siblings?
No, I said.
She nodded, as if she now understood something about me. I’ve often wondered what it would be like, she said, to not have a brother or a sister. Or rather, I have been thinking about it a great deal, of late. Abruptly, she turned to go. I will email you, she called over her shoulder, we’ll find a day. Before I could reply, she had hurried off. As I watched her go, I felt my phone vibrating in my bag. I immediately retrieved it, heart racing. The screen was black and there were no messages. I must have imagined the vibration. I looked up. Eline had disappeared from sight and I was alone. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, there was a sharp and unpleasant wind. I counted the days and then I counted them again. It had been over a week since I had asked Adriaan when he was coming back, how things stood with Gaby, it had been another week of silence.
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