by John Boyne
To my surprise, it was Charles I thought about the most. He might have been a hopeless adoptive father and I might never have been a real Avery but nevertheless I had grown up in his house and buried inside me were tender feelings toward him, feelings that seemed all the stronger for our estrangement. I thought of Julian less frequently and when I did it was no longer with desire or lust. Instead, I wondered whether he had forgiven me for the lies I had told him and for the terrible crime I had committed against his sister. For the most part, I tried not to think of Alice at all, pushing her out of my mind whenever she appeared, for while I did not blame myself for all the hardship I had caused others in my life, I certainly blamed myself for the pain I had caused her. Still, in my naïveté I assumed that enough time had passed for them both to have moved on and perhaps to have forgotten me. I couldn’t possibly have guessed the things that were taking place in my absence.
There was something enchanted about walking along the river on cold nights like that, the lights on the Amstel Hotel illuminating the cyclists as they made their way up and down Sarphatistraat, the sightseeing barges sailing past us with tourists taking photographs through misted-up windows. Bastiaan and I could hold hands as we made our way home and passing couples didn’t bat an eyelid. In Dublin, of course, we would have been assaulted, beaten to within inches of our lives, and when the Gardaí finally arrived to scrape us off the pavement they would have laughed in our faces and told us that we had no one to blame but ourselves. In Amsterdam, we exchanged Christmas greetings with strangers, remarked on the cold weather and felt under no threat at all. Perhaps it was the fact that we lived in such peace that made the appearance of the wounded boy huddled on our doorstep in the snow such an incongruous sight.
I recognized him instantly from our two previous encounters. He was wearing the same clothes that I had seen him in on the night of the altercation with his deerstalker pimp and his hair was as haphazardly bleached as it had been when I’d watched him stepping into the taxi with the Manchester Utd supporter. But his face was swollen above the right cheek now and a dark bruise beneath his eye was preparing to flower into a rainbow of colors over the days ahead. Dried blood ran from his lip to his chin and I could see that he had lost one of his lower teeth. Bastiaan moved toward him quickly, reaching for his wrist to check for a pulse, but it was obvious that the boy was still alive, just very badly beaten.
“Should we call an ambulance?” I asked.
“I can take care of him,” said Bastiaan, shaking his head. “It’s mostly superficial. But we’ll have to take him upstairs.”
I hesitated, uncertain whether I wanted to bring a stranger into our home.
“What?” he asked, looking toward me.
“Is it safe?” I said. “You realize he’s a rent boy, right?”
“Yes, and one who’s been badly assaulted. Do you want to just leave him out here to freeze to death? Come on, Cyril, help me pick him up.”
I acquiesced grudgingly. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel for the boy but I had seen what his pimp was capable of and didn’t particularly want to involve myself. But by now Bastiaan had already started to lift the boy and he turned to me with a frustrated expression that asked what was I waiting for and soon we were dragging him upstairs to our apartment, where we propped him up in an armchair as he opened one eye sleepily and looked back and forth between us, mumbling something indecipherable beneath his breath.
“Get me my bag,” said Bastiaan, nodding toward the corridor. “It’s in the wardrobe,” he told me. “You’ll see a black leather satchel above my suits.”
I did as instructed and watched from the doorway as Bastiaan spoke quietly to the boy, trying to get some sense out of him. At one point, he roused himself and lashed out, shouting unintelligible words at us both, but Bastiaan held his arms until he collapsed back into a half-sleep.
“How old do you think he is?” I asked.
“Fifteen. Sixteen at most. He’s so thin. He can’t weigh more than sixty kilos. And look.” He lifted the boy’s right arm and showed me a series of pockmarks that ran along his arm, puncture wounds from hypodermic needles. He took a bottle from his bag and soaked a ball of cotton wool in liquid from it before applying it to the red marks. The boy winced a little as the coldness of the liquid touched his skin but didn’t wake.
“Should we call the police?” I asked, and Bastiaan shook his head.
“There’s no point,” he said. “The police will only blame him. They’ll take him to a cell to dry out but he won’t get the help he needs.”
“Does he need a doctor?”
Bastiaan turned to me with an expression that mingled amusement with irritation. “I am a doctor, Cyril,” he said.
“I mean a real doctor.”
“I am a real doctor!”
“I mean a GP,” I said, correcting myself. “An emergency room. You know what I mean. You’re a research scientist! When was the last time you did something like this?”
“He doesn’t need anything more than what I’ve already done for him. It’s best to let him sleep it off. He’ll be sore when he wakes up, but I can write him a prescription for painkillers in the morning.” He lifted the boy’s T-shirt and felt his prominent ribs for cracks. I could make out dark-purple spheres from where his assailant’s fist had struck. Bastiaan checked the underside of his left arm but it was clear and then took off his shoes and socks to check his feet and between his toes but there were no more needle marks there either.
“He’ll have to stay here tonight,” said Bastiaan, standing up and walking to the bathroom to wash his hands. “We can’t send him back out on the streets like this.”
I bit my lip, uncertain whether I approved of this idea or not, but waited for him to come back out to say so.
“What if he wakes up in the middle of the night and he’s completely confused about where he is or what’s happened to him? He might think we beat him up. He could come into our room and kill us.”
“You don’t think you’re being a little melodramatic?” asked Bastiaan.
“No, I don’t. It’s a possibility. You read about these kinds of things in the papers all the time. And what if his pimp comes back looking for him?”
“He’s not going to come looking for this kid until his bruises have healed and he can rent him out again. Cyril, we’ll be fine. Look at him; he’s barely there. He wouldn’t be able to hurt a fly.”
“Still—”
“If it sets your mind at rest, we’ll lock our bedroom door. And we can lock the living room door too. If he wakes up in the night and tries to get out, I’ll hear him rattling the handle and come out to him.”
“All right,” I said, not entirely reassured. “But just for tonight, OK?”
“Just for tonight,” he said, reaching over to kiss me. “He’ll be sober in the morning and we can bring him somewhere better then.”
I gave in. There was no arguing with Bastiaan when he wanted to help someone. It was in his nature. And so we laid him on the sofa with a couple of pillows beneath his head and threw some sheets over him. As Bastiaan turned out the light, I glanced down at the boy again. His breathing had become more regular and he’d brought his thumb to his lips as he slept. In the pale moonlight that seeped through the half open curtain, he looked just like a child.
The following morning, I woke up surprised that there had been no sounds in the night and even more surprised that there still weren’t any. My first thought was that the boy was dead, that he’d woken up in the early hours, taken something else and overdosed. We hadn’t checked for anything in his jacket pockets, after all, and who knew what he kept in there. I shook Bastiaan, who looked back at me sleepily and then sat up, scratching his head.
“We better go in there,” he said.
He unlocked the door slowly and I held my breath, preparing myself for some horrendous scene, but to my relief the boy was alive, awake and sitting up on the couch with one of the blankets wrapped around him. He looked utterly
furious, however, and breathed noisily through his nostrils as he glared at us.
“You locked me in,” he said, and as he started to speak I could see that his jaw still hurt, for he put a hand to it to ease the pain.
“It was for our safety,” said Bastiaan, stepping into the room and walking slowly over to sit by the window. “We had no choice. It was for your safety too.”
“I should be gone by now. It costs more if I spend the night. You locked me in so you have to pay for it. Two hundred guilders.”
“What?” I asked.
“Two hundred guilders!” he shouted. “I want my money.”
“Shut the fuck up, we’re not giving you any money,” said Bastiaan, but in a completely calm tone. The boy looked across at him, startled, and Bastiaan smiled in reply. “How does your face feel?” he asked.
“Sore.”
“And your ribs?”
“Even worse.”
“It’ll take a few days. Who did this to you?”
The boy said nothing, looking down at the pattern on the blanket and frowning deeply. I suspected that he was unsure how to deal with the situation in which he found himself.
“You have to pay me,” he said after a lengthy silence, but this time in a more plaintive voice. “It’s not fair if you don’t pay me.”
“Pay you for what?” I asked. “What do you think happened here last night anyway?”
He jumped to his feet and marched around the room in search of his shoes and socks and when he found them, sat back on the sofa, massaging his toes for a few moments before putting them on.
“You’re bastards if you don’t pay me,” he said, and I could hear the emotion building in the back of his throat. Tears, I suspected, were not far away. “And there’s two of you, so I want twice as much. Five hundred guilders!”
“It was only two hundred a minute ago,” I said. “Wouldn’t double be four hundred?”
“Interest!” shouted the boy. “And a tax for locking me in overnight! Every minute you don’t pay, my price goes up.”
“We’re not going to give you any money,” said Bastiaan, standing up and approaching him, but when the boy took a combative stance he held his hands in the air in a peaceful gesture and sat back down again.
“Six hundred,” he said now, his voice rising in fury, and if the entire scene had not been so peculiar I would have laughed, for there was absolutely nothing threatening about this child. Bastiaan could have felled with him the side of his hand had he chosen to.
“We’re not going to give you any money,” repeated Bastiaan. “And whatever you might think, nothing happened here last night. We didn’t bring you here for sex. We found you outside. At our front door. Lying in the snow. You’d been beaten.”
“You’re a liar,” said the boy, looking away. “You both fucked me and I want my money. Seven hundred guilders!”
“We’ll have to take out a mortgage if this goes on much longer,” I said, throwing my hands in the air.
“I can help you, if you want me to,” said Bastiaan. “I’m a doctor.”
“A doctor who fucks little boys, yes?” shouted the boy. “You and your friend here?”
“We didn’t lay a finger on you,” I said, exhausted now by his petulance and wishing that he would just leave. “So one more line like that and you’re back out on the street.”
The boy jutted his tongue into the corner of his mouth and looked out the window. The light seemed to hurt his eyes and he turned back to me almost immediately. “Why did you bring me up here if you didn’t want to fuck me?” he asked. “You only want to fuck this old man?”
“He’s hardly old,” I said. “He’s only thirty-three.”
“Why didn’t you leave me out there?”
“Because it’s the middle of winter,” said Bastiaan. “You were injured and you were freezing. You think I would have left you on the streets? I told you, I’m a doctor. I do what I can to help people. The marks on your arms…what drugs are you taking?”
“I don’t take drugs,” said the boy peevishly.
“You do take drugs,” said Bastiaan. “You inject yourself with them. It’s obvious. We’ll have to do something about that. And what about diseases?”
“What about them?”
“Do you have any? Gonorrhea, chlamydia—”
“Of course I don’t,” he said. “I don’t fuck women. You only get diseases if you fuck the dirty bitches in the windows; everyone knows that. You can’t get anything from men.”
“The world is a cesspool,” said Bastiaan. “Believe me, I know. It’s my field. Anyway, I don’t care how anyone makes a living, what you do is up to you, but if you need help, if you want help, then I can help you. It’s your choice.”
The boy considered this for a moment and then leaped from his seat and lashed out, aiming a punch at Bastiaan’s jaw, but Bastiaan was too quick and strong for him and he caught his arm, holding it tightly behind the boy’s back.
“Calm down,” he said.
“You calm down,” said the boy, bursting into tears.
Bastiaan pushed him away and sent him toppling back onto the couch, where he sat, head down, his face in his hands. “Please give me some money,” he said finally, looking up at us.
“How about we buy you lunch instead?” asked Bastiaan. “Are you hungry?”
The boy gave a bitter laugh. “Of course I’m hungry,” he said. “I’m always hungry.”
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
The boy thought about this for a long time before answering. It felt as if he was weighing up the question of whether or not he should be honest. “Ignac,” he said finally, and I knew he was telling the truth.
“Where are you from?”
“Ljubljana.”
“Where’s that?” I asked.
“Slovenia,” said the boy contemptuously. “Don’t you know anything about geography?”
“Not really,” I said with a shrug, and I could see Bastiaan hiding a smile. “How long have you been in Amsterdam?”
“Six months,” he said.
“All right,” said Bastiaan, standing up and nodding determinedly. “Let’s go out, all of us. I’m hungry, Cyril’s hungry. We’ll get some lunch. You’ll come with us, Ignac. All right?”
“If I come to lunch with you,” said Ignac, “can I come back here afterward?”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“Where do you normally sleep?” asked Bastiaan.
“There are some rooms,” said the boy, non-committally. “Near Dam Square. The boys from Music Box and Pinocchio go there during the day. When the men don’t want us.”
“Then that’s where you should go,” said Bastiaan.
“I can’t,” said Ignac.
“Why not? Was it a client who hit you or your pimp?”
The boy said nothing, just stared at the floor. He was starting to tremble a little and I went to the bedroom to fetch him a jumper. Bastiaan followed me in and sat on the bed as he put his shoes on. A moment later, I heard the sound of the front door slamming and, as we both ran out into the hallway, the clatter of footsteps running down the stairs. I looked at Bastiaan, who was leaning back against the wall, a disappointed expression on his face, shaking his head.
“Well,” he said with a shrug. “We tried.”
“My wallet,” I said, looking over at the table by the door where I always left it when I came in at night, next to my keys. Of course it was gone. “The little fucker.”
A Surprise Visitor
Three nights later we were home alone, watching television, and I found myself still thinking about the boy.
“What do you think he did with that money?” I asked.
“Who?” asked Bastiaan. “What money?”
“Ignac,” I said. “The money he stole. Do you think he used it to feed himself?”
“It wouldn’t have got him far,” he said. “You only lost a couple of hundred guilders. Far less than he wanted. He probably spent it
on drugs. And I’m sure he has debts to pay off. We’re kidding ourselves if we think he bought fruit and vegetables.”
I nodded. I loved Amsterdam but this experience had left a sour taste in my mouth.
“Do you think we should move?” I asked.
“Move where?” asked Bastiaan.
“I don’t know. A quieter part of the city. Or Utrecht maybe. It’s not so far away.”
“But it’s convenient here,” said Bastiaan. “For the hospital, for the Anne Frank House. Why would you want to move?”
I stood up and walked over to the window and looked down toward the street where people were making their way up and down, alone, in pairs, in groups. Any one of them, I realized, might be preparing to rent someone, anyone, for an hour or for the night.
A knock on the door surprised me—we never had visitors—and I made my way out to the corridor to open it. Standing outside was Ignac, paler than he had been a few nights before, his bruises half-healed. He looked very frightened. In his hands he held my wallet and he trembled as he held it out to me.
“This is yours,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Right,” I said, taking it off him, completely astonished to see him again.
“It’s empty, though,” he added. “I’m sorry about that too. I spent all the money.”
“Yes,” I said, looking inside. “So why did you bring it back to me?”
He shrugged and turned away, glancing down the staircase, and when he turned back, Bastiaan was standing beside me, equally surprised to see the boy at our door.
“Can I stay here tonight?” he asked us. “Please?”
A Time of Slaves
Despite having sat at that same table and looked at that same photograph dozens of times, it still came as a surprise when I finally realized why it looked so familiar to me.
“This picture,” I said to Bastiaan as he sat down, placing a couple of fresh beers on the table, followed by Ignac, who was carrying our dinner from the kitchen area. “The one of Smoot and Seán MacIntyre. Do you see the building they’re standing in front of?”