“You are a dancer?” the boy said at one point.
I looked at him, surprised. “I used to be.”
“I knew it.” He turned to the girl and translated for her. She listened carefully, with her head turned slightly to one side, then she looked at me again.
“How did you know?” I asked the boy.
“The way you sit.” He shrugged as if it was obvious. “It is very—” and he looked away into the dark trees of the park, trying to think of the right word. He didn’t find it. Instead, he tilted his hand on one side and then moved it up and down in the air, a slow chopping motion. I understood that he was talking about my posture.
“Do you know any dancers?” I asked him.
“Yes, I know. In Fortaleza. His name was Peter.” The boy smiled at me furtively. “But you stopped dancing? How can you stop? To be a dancer—” and his arm lifted into the soft night air, and he looked at me again with that beguiling smile of his, which was too young for him, somehow, too innocent.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“You can tell.”
“No. It’s too long.”
The boy spoke to the girl again, and she nodded, but this time she didn’t look at me. Instead, she stared at her hands, which were resting in her lap. They looked very brown against the pale-blue of her jeans.
“We can buy cocaine,” the boy said.
I looked at him, but said nothing.
He shifted on his chair. “But I have no money. . . .”
I asked him how much money he would need. He shrugged and said thirty thousand. I told him I could give him twenty. I wasn’t intending to do it myself—it was for him, for the girl too, perhaps—but when he came back ten minutes later he took my hand and led me off into the trees. The softness of the sky, the foliage so black above our heads, the girl’s skin glowing. . . .
When we were in the shadows, some distance from the bar, the boy opened a small envelope made out of a page torn from a comic book. He dipped the nail on his little finger into the powder and held it up to my nose. Then he looked me in the eyes and lifted his chin once, quickly.
Back at the table he grinned and said, “It’s good?”
“It’s very good,” I said.
I called the waiter over and ordered another bottle of beer. The boy took the girl off into the trees. When they returned, I poured them both a drink. I had so many things to say, and yet I couldn’t choose between them because they were all as interesting as each other.
“You will come with us tonight?” the boy asked after a while.
“Where are you going?”
“To the disco. You will come?”
“Yes, of course.”
It was an open-air club, not far from the river, with a concrete floor and a bar that was just a shed with a corrugated-iron roof. At midnight a live band played on a small stage under the mango trees. I remember seeing two girls in peach satin hot pants and stacked heels dancing with each other on the top of a wall, a lop-sided moon dropping in the sky behind them. Then everyone was dancing. The smell of hot skin, marijuana, rotting vegetation, and all the colours rich and bruised. . . . The music was outside me and inside me, as much a part of me as blood or muscle. I couldn’t resist it. I danced on my own, then I danced with a tall black girl in a yellow vest and a short skirt. Sometimes we were pressed together, our bodies touching. Other times we pulled apart, our arms out sideways, resting on the air. I didn’t feel that I had bones or joints or anything like that. I had no sense of being made of more than one pure thing. All the movement from the waist down, hips like water. Everything flowing and swirling and only held together by the music. . . . I wiped my forehead on my wrist, then on my forearm, but they were both already wet. I bought a beer, drank half of it straight down. I danced until my shirt stuck to my chest, and my hair hung dripping in my eyes. The tall girl was gone, and I was by myself again, deep inside the crowd. Once, I looked for the girl in the white T-shirt and the boy, but they were nowhere to be seen. Probably it was enough that I had paid for them to get in. Two days later I left the city on a boat bound for Manaus. . . .
My story told, I looked across at Paul Bouhtala. He was staring at me.
“It’s not like one of your stories,” I said. “It doesn’t really have an end.”
Bouhtala took a cigarillo out of the flat pale-yellow tin that lay on the table beside him. “The boy. He sounds fascinating.”
“Yes.” I smiled gently, without innuendo. “You would have liked him.”
“And the dancing,” Bouhtala said, “you enjoyed it?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
Bouhtala smiled and nodded. “The cocaine.” He leaned back, lit his cigarillo and smoked for a while. “Interesting,” he said eventually, “the way you buried one story inside the other. The story you tell, and the story you don’t tell. . . .”
•
One evening in late August I was sitting in Stefan’s kitchen when he asked me if I would like to go to a party that his girlfriend Madeleine was giving in her apartment just behind the Concertgebouw. She had a roof terrace and a barbecue, he said. She shared the apartment with another girl, some kind of nurse. This last and seemingly innocuous detail had a dramatic effect on me. I suddenly remembered the argument that had taken place in the white room not long after Maude had given me that primitive tattoo. I remembered particularly something that Maude had said when she lost her temper. She had used the word ziekenhuis, which was the Dutch for hospital, then she had stopped in mid-sentence and hung her head. The other women swung round and looked at me, a reaction I could make no sense of at the time. What if Maude had accidentally let slip a vital piece of information? What if the hospital she had referred to was their place of work? What if the women were nurses?
All this occurred to me in the space of a few seconds, but it was enough to lift me from my chair and send me to the window where I stood looking out into the dark. It might still be true that the three women were bound together by damage that had been done to them. They had something else in common, though, something so obvious that I hadn’t thought of it before: a job. If my new hypothesis was correct, it would explain why they had stared at me like that. They were hoping I hadn’t understood what Maude had said. It would also explain why they had let me go so unexpectedly. They thought Maude could no longer be trusted. Suddenly I had the answer to questions I had never even asked. How had they got hold of the anaesthetic in the first place? How had they known what dosage to use? And how had they administered the anaesthetic without me noticing? No ordinary member of the public could have been so deft with a syringe. And what about the atmosphere in the room, that almost surreal climate of care . . .? There was also the time when Astrid dressed up in a nurse’s uniform in an attempt to arouse me. . . . As a double-bluff, this was so bold that it took my breath away.
I turned round to see Stefan staring at me.
“So would you like to come?” he said.
“I’d love to.” I smiled at him. “When did you say it was?”
The idea that the women were all nurses opened up a whole new angle of approach for me. The next morning I bought a Falkplan of Amsterdam. I turned to the page that listed the city’s hospitals. There were nineteen of them—nineteen!—though, on closer inspection, I was able to reduce the figure to eleven, since differently named institutions were sometimes located at the same address. Imagine my excitement when I noticed that there was a large general hospital near Muiderpoort station, the area I had searched so fruitlessly three years before! The fact that nurses usually lived close to their place of work on account of their long hours seemed to lend credence to my initial gut feeling—namely, that they lived somewhere in the Muiderpoort area. After all, the hospital, the station and several churches all lay within the same two-inch radius on the map. Though I was acting on nothing more solid than intuition and coincidence, it seemed a promising framework for my first tentative investigations.
•
The
following night I showered, then I put on the simple white cotton shirt and trousers I had bought in India. My tan hadn’t faded yet, and my hair was still bleached from the sun. Though I would never again reach the peak of fitness I had achieved while I was dancing, my body was still in shape from all the exercise I had taken during my years away. Studying myself in the mirror as I dressed, I thought I looked good—which was just as well, given what I had in mind.
Stefan had gone over to Madeleine’s apartment in the afternoon to help with the preparations, so I was alone as I set out for the party. I cycled up Spiegelgracht, then through the Rijksmuseum, that stretch of chilly, dimly lit road that runs under the building. A man in a fedora stood in the shadow of the arches playing a tenor saxophone. I rode past him and out into the night, leaving the music floating eerily in the cavernous gloom behind me. The moon was rising in the sky to the south-west. Only a few days short of being full, it had a rich, buttery tint to it, not unlike the saxophone I had seen just moments earlier.
I arrived outside the house as ten o’clock was striking. After chaining my bicycle to the high black railings, I pressed the top bell. Someone buzzed me in. It was an old building, with a tall, cool hallway, reminding me of an embassy or a museum. A flutter went through me, as if some winged creature had stirred beneath my ribs and taken flight, and I realised that I was trying not to think about the nurse. It was a party, I told myself. It was only a party.
I climbed the marble staircase slowly, noting the name-plates of other residents—Korzelius, Camacho, D’Amore. . . . The door to Madeleine’s apartment had been left open. I walked inside. There was an immediate and unexpected sense of space. The main room stretched into the distance, its walls looking as though they had recently been whitewashed, its stained wood floor the colour of caramel. Forty or fifty people stood about, talking and drinking. Nobody I knew.
I found Stefan by the french windows that led to the roof terrace. His eyes were slightly glazed, and his mouth was set in a mischievous half-smile. His nostrils, which had always been curved, now had the elaborate, almost ridiculous complexity of the toes on a pair of Turkish slippers. He had already drunk three or four cocktails, he told me, and he had smoked some pot as well. At that moment a girl with short black hair and a red mouth seemed to float out of the darkness behind him. Resting one forearm on Stefan’s shoulder, she gazed at me steadily with dark-brown eyes.
“You must be Madeleine,” I said.
She smiled. “I’ve heard all about you. You’re a dancer.”
“I used to be.”
“What happened?”
“It’s no good asking,” Stefan said. “He won’t tell you.”
Madeleine lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out in a slow, thin stream.
“This apartment’s beautiful,” I said. “You share it, don’t you?”
“Yes, I share it with Jeannine.” Madeleine looked past me, into the room. “I’m not sure where she is. . . .”
So that was her name. Jeannine.
After a while I slipped away, saying I should get myself a drink. I walked through the room, wondering which one she was, wondering if I had already set eyes on her without knowing it. I drank a fruit punch and talked to several people, but I didn’t come across anyone called Jeannine.
Two hours passed. At midnight I ran into Stefan again. This time he was outside, on the terrace. As I moved towards him, he tipped his head back and stared up into the sky. “What a night.” He dipped his mouth into his glass and drank. “You’re lucky, you know.”
“Lucky?” I said.
“To have been away. To have seen the world. . . .” He gestured with one hand—a sloppy semicircle. The world.
This was a conversation I had already had at least once that evening, and I didn’t want to have it again. Since Stefan was so obviously drunk and stoned, I thought I could risk being blunt.
“Have you seen Jeannine?” I said.
“Jeannine? She’s over there.” He stood up straighter, swayed a little, then pointed across the terrace at a group of people talking.
“Which one?”
“Red hair.”
The dark air seemed to shudder suddenly. I turned away. The city stretched out below me. I stared down into a space where there were hardly any lights. The Vondelpark. Named after a seventeenth-century dramatist whose play Lucifer had been banned because he had dared to portray heaven and the angels on a stage. Beyond the park, a bright strip of motorway—a ring-road which, if you followed it, would lead eventually to Rotterdam, The Hague—
A nurse, red hair. . . .
I took a deep breath, faced back into the terrace. Stefan was going on about my luck again. Only half listening, I leaned against the railing and watched Jeannine. Her hair was long and fine, and it flowed over her head, showing the shape of it, as water might. She had white skin, as red-haired people often do. Could she really be the leader of the women? Could she be Gertrude? I moved closer, watched her lift a cigarette towards her mouth. I saw the tip of her cigarette glow like a cinder as she inhaled. She wasn’t wearing any nail-varnish. Well, these things change.
For the next half-hour I followed her as she moved through the party. She drank and smoked. She laughed. She was confident. I didn’t think she had noticed me yet, but then it occurred to me that if, by some bizarre coincidence, she actually was Gertrude, then she must be pretending not to have noticed me, she must be pretending that she didn’t know who I was. In that case, we would both have been watching each other, but without appearing to. . . . What would she do when I approached her? Presumably she would behave like somebody who had never met me before. The women were gamblers, after all. They knew how to take risks. They had nerve. Still, I couldn’t imagine what would happen after the first few moments. . . .
I had been wondering what to say to her, how to effect a meeting, but in the end she did it for me. At about one in the morning I was following her downstairs for the second time when she suddenly stopped, turned round. She must have forgotten something, or remembered something. At any rate, it all happened so abruptly that we collided. She apologised in Dutch.
“That’s all right,” I said. “You’re Jeannine, aren’t you?”
She registered surprise with a slight backward movement of her upper body and a twist of her head, her cigarette held out sideways, at shoulder-height.
“You’re a nurse,” I said.
“You seem to know all about me.” There was a wariness in her voice, as if she hadn’t yet decided whether my knowledge was a good or a bad thing.
I introduced myself. “I’m living with Stefan.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Haven’t you just been away?”
“That’s me.”
To give myself some time, I asked her where she worked. She wasn’t really a nurse, she said—at least, not any more. She was attached to a psychiatric clinic, doing research into the treatment of depression. While she talked about her job, which she did quite naturally, I tried to form a picture of her body. She was dressed in a see-through turquoise shirt with a black bra underneath, and a pair of black hipsters that flared slightly towards the ankles. Though her clothes could be said to be revealing, it was surprising, in the end, how little they actually revealed. I could see her collar-bone, and the beginning of a cleavage, both of which seemed unfamiliar—as did her wrists, her hands, her fingers. . . . But if she took off everything she was wearing, then I would know for sure. Something primitive would flash through me. My body would remember. If I saw her naked I would know.
“You’re not listening,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was looking at you.”
An odd expression rose on to her face, a mixture of amusement and confusion. She didn’t know what to make of me. She dropped her cigarette into the empty glass she was holding. A quick hiss as the cigarette went out. Downstairs they were playing the club re-mix of a song that had been famous that summer.
“Would you like to dance?” she said.
I shook my head. “No, not really.” Then, almost without thinking, I leaned down and kissed her. Though I had surprised her, she had let it happen.
“Is there somewhere we could go?” I asked.
“You don’t waste much time, do you.” Once again, she seemed more amused than anything, as if she had never come across someone like me before.
Taking my hand, she led me down to the next floor. During our conversation on the stairs I must have changed my mind at least a dozen times. One moment I was disappointed because she obviously wasn’t one of the women I was looking for; the way she was behaving, wary and yet provocative, was entirely natural, I felt. The next moment, imagining that she was Gertrude, I silently applauded her extraordinary skill in dissembling. She should have been an actress, not a nurse. . . .
I followed her along a corridor lined with books, through an unlit hallway, then down another, smaller corridor and into an oblong room with a high ceiling. She stood aside to let me go in first, then locked the door behind us. There was a washbasin against one wall and a toilet in the corner. Was this a reference on her part, a sign of guilt? I turned round. In the darkness I could hardly see her—just the outline of her head and shoulders, and the almost metallic gleam of her teeth when she spoke.
“The light doesn’t work,” she said. “Do you mind?”
I said I didn’t.
She moved towards me until she was only inches away from me. Each time my heart beat, the air behind her appeared to contract. I put my hands on her hips. We kissed two or three times, quickly, as if touching something that we feared might be hot, then we kissed more slowly, and for longer. Her mouth was sweet from the alcohol, though I could also taste the charred flavour of cigarette smoke. I guided her towards the window, which was tall and set deep in the wall. Lights from outside showed through the old-fashioned frosted-glass like fireworks frozen in mid-explosion. She seemed to know what I wanted her to do. When she felt the gap behind her, where the window was, she hoisted herself up on to the sill. She was even harder to see now that she had her back to the light. I knew her face was plain—not ugly, but not memorable either—and I found, strangely, that that excited me. I unfastened the buttons on her turquoise blouse and watched it float away from her shoulders, then I undid her bra. Her breasts were round and resilient, with tiny nipples. I kissed them gently. Her head snapped back, banged softly against the glass. From somewhere inside her came a murmur, almost as if she was humming to herself.
The Book of Revelation Page 16