A week later, when I had settled in, I called Isabel. I wanted to give her my new address and number. To my surprise, Paul Bouhtala answered the phone.
“You were lucky to catch me,” he said. “I just dropped in to collect a few of Isabel’s things.”
“Why?” I said. “Where is she?”
“She’s in hospital in Haarlem. She has cancer.” He was silent for a moment. “Didn’t you know?”
After speaking to Bouhtala, I put the phone down and stared out of my living-room window. The sun was shining. White clouds hung in a blue sky, motionless and two-dimensional. They looked like targets in a fairground rifle-range. Below the clouds, there was a row of houses. A bathroom-fittings shop. A tree.
Nothing seemed to be moving. Nothing seemed real.
It was only when I arrived at the hospital in Haarlem the following afternoon that I realised what a vicious echo of my life this was, a parody of that period when all I wanted was an excuse to spend time in medical institutions.
Well, now I had it.
I came to a standstill in reception. Looking at the floor, I felt a sense of shame sweep over me.
•
When I walked into Isabel’s private room that day I was shocked by the change in her appearance. Her face had tightened, withered, aged. I could see right through the skin to the structure that lay beneath: I could see the joins in her skull. I laid my flowers at the foot of her bed and sat down beside her. I had a feeling in my throat, as if I couldn’t swallow.
“Beautiful flowers,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
She used her eyes to smile with. It seemed there was something painful about the inside of her mouth.
I could think of nothing to say.
I noticed her arms, which were resting on the outside of the blanket. Her left arm was almost impossibly thin, just skin and bone. All the muscle tone, all the sinew she used to have, had been wasted by chemotherapy. Her right arm was in plaster to the elbow.
“What happened?” I said.
Isabel looked where I was looking. “I leaned against the wall to steady myself,” she said, “and it just broke.” She paused for breath. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”
“Oh, Isabel.”
“I must look dreadful. Like one of those shrunken heads you saw in South-East Asia.” She tried to laugh, but no sound came. “You sent me a postcard, remember?”
Her hand moved fractionally across the blanket towards me. I took it in both of mine. I looked down at her skin, which was as fragile as wafer. I looked down at her veins, wiry. Almost black.
“I can feel the strength in you,” she whispered. “Strange how strong people feel. . . .” Her eyes closed for a moment, then they opened wide, and she looked around, as if uncertain of her whereabouts.
“It’s all right, Isabel,” I said. “It’s all right.”
She smiled up at me. I sensed that she was trying to tighten her grip on my hand, but the difference was barely discernible.
“Paul says you’ve moved. . . .”
I described my new apartment to her, in detail. I told her that, although the living-room was small, it had windows that faced both south and west, which meant it would be flooded with sunlight in the summer. From the west-facing window I could see a bathroom-fittings shop, which never seemed to open. From the south-facing window I could see a small section of canal. I told her that my kitchen had green walls and a green ceiling; it was a shade of green I had never seen before, somewhere between lettuce and eau-de-Nil. It looked perfect at two in the morning, though, which was when I sat at my simple wooden table, drinking herb tea and reading the newspaper. I told her about the plumbing, and how the water crackled and crunched when it ran down the pipes, as if there was a dog gnawing on a bone inside the wall. I told her about the person who played the piano at the same time every evening. There was something poignant about it, I said, because, although the playing was technically proficient, there was no emotion in it whatsoever. I told her about the bar round the corner, and how the owner had wrists like a baby’s and a nest of brassy hair, and how she drank crème de menthe at ten o’clock in the morning.
I didn’t tell her I was working there.
After a while she closed her eyes again, and this time they did not open. I thought she must have fallen asleep, though it’s difficult to tell with people who are very ill: the gap between the two states narrows, and they can slip from one to the other and then back again without you noticing.
Outside, the light had faded, though it wasn’t even four o’clock. From my chair beside the bed I could look out of the window, look down on a main road that was filled with rush-hour traffic. The road ran past the hospital, then curved slowly away into the distance, the unknown. Most cars had their headlights on, as if they had come from a place where it was raining heavily, or already dark.
•
Standing outside the hospital, I couldn’t feel the world at all. The cold wind, the car-park. The buildings. They were just the same, and yet I was receiving them in a new way. They seemed at one remove from me, and utterly without significance. I noticed something similar in the taxi that took me to the station. The driver talked to me the whole time, his eyes shifting between the rear-view mirror and the road, one hand lifting off the steering-wheel to emphasise a point. I had the distinct impression that he was reciting lines, and if he seemed pleased with himself, even a little smug, it was only because he had learned them perfectly.
On the train to Amsterdam this sense of dissociation stayed with me, so much so that when the black girl sitting on the other side of the carriage spoke to me I didn’t notice, not until she reached across and touched my shoulder.
“Are you all right?” she said.
I looked at her blankly. “Yes, I’m fine. Why?”
“You were talking to yourself.”
“Was I?” I stared straight ahead. I had no memory of talking to myself. “What was I saying?”
“I don’t know. Just words. Like people talking in their sleep.”
I looked at the girl again and saw that she was beautiful. Her eyebrows arched disdainfully above her oval dark-brown eyes. Her lips were soft and full. She had straight hair, which was exactly the same colour as liquorice. She had drawn it back in a short ponytail, the end of which stopped in the air an inch or two above her collar. Something about this beauty of hers released the truth in me.
“A friend of mine is dying. I’ve just been to see her.”
“I’m so sorry.” The girl looked down at the book she was holding in her lap. Her fingers were long and slender, with dark-pink nails. “Is she a close friend?”
“In some ways, she’s the closest.”
I turned to the window. It was dark now, but I could just see the land stretching away—land that should have been invisible, under water. Somehow, this angered me, though the anger quickly passed.
“She looked after me a few years ago,” I said. “When I was going through a bad time.”
“There aren’t many friends like that,” the girl said.
“No.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Cancer.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
The train’s announcement system crackled, and then we heard the conductor’s voice, a lifeless monotone: “Amsterdam Central Station. . . . This is Amsterdam Central Station. . . .” The girl gave me a resigned expression, then she closed her book.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Juliette,” she said. “Juliette Voerman.”
I told her my name, and, reaching across the aisle, we shook hands. “Would it be strange if I asked you for your number?” I said.
She smiled faintly. “No, not strange.”
She wrote her name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. I looked at it, to make sure I could read it, then I pushed it deep into my trouser pocket.
“We could have a drink sometime,” I said.
She nodded.
The train drew into the station, slowed, then stopped. We both stood up.
“Thank you for talking to me,” I said. “It made things better.”
She smiled again, but said nothing.
I saw her once, inside the station. I caught a glimpse of her short, dark ponytail about twenty yards ahead of me. Then I lost her in the crowd.
Later, in my apartment, I stood by the window and studied the piece of note-paper again. I was struck by the neatness and elegance of her handwriting. A phone number. Like dozens of other phone numbers I had asked for during the past eighteen months. And yet, this one seemed different. . . .
I stared down into the empty street—the street-lamps, so evenly spaced, and where they ended, a section of canal. A cold night. Motionless. As if the city lay beneath a crystal dome.
In the winter months in Amsterdam there were nights of such perfect stillness that, if you were out walking, you could hear the ticking of bicycle wheels in the next street, or a couple talking in their bedroom three floors up. This stillness had always reminded me of the fairy-tales I had read when I was young.
Juliette.
Of course, I knew what was different about her. I suppose I must have known it as soon as I looked at her. She could never have been one of the women in the room. She was innocent, in other words. And there was no doubt about that, not even a shadow of a doubt.
It was the colour of her skin that proclaimed her innocence.
It was the colour of her skin.
•
In the middle of November I came home from the bar at one-thirty in the morning to find a message on my machine from a woman who said her name was Else. She was calling to tell me that Isabel was in remission. Isabel had returned home, to the apartment in Bloemendaal, and would like me to visit her. When I knocked on the door two days later, in the middle of the afternoon, it was Else who let me in.
“You’ll find Isabel in the living-room,” she told me.
Isabel was lying on the divan, propped up on half a dozen pillows, with a Guatemalan quilt thrown over her. She wore a turban of amber silk, and her fingers glittered with valuable rings (the only glamour that old women have left, she had said to me once—and, naturally, I had disagreed with her).
“Isabel,” I said.
I walked up to her and kissed her on the cheek, then I sat down in the chair that had been placed close to the divan. The last of the day’s sunlight slanted across the wall of books behind her.
“You look so much better,” I said.
Isabel made a face, drawing down the corners of her mouth in a haughty, disbelieving mask.
“Really,” I said, “you do.”
“I’m a corpse,” she said. “But what about you?”
I told her how my apartment was coming on, and then I told her I was working in a bar, just to make some money, then, all of a sudden, I found that I had run out of things to say. Embarrassed, I looked down. Isabel put a hand on my wrist. Her hand felt so insubstantial, almost weightless. I looked up at her.
“What are you doing to yourself?” she said.
I laughed nervously. “What do you mean?”
She repeated the question. “What are you doing to yourself?”
“I’m not doing anything,” I said in a low voice.
Isabel considered me for a moment, then she reached sideways for her glass of water. She swallowed a tablet and leaned back against her pillows.
“I know something bad happened to you,” she said.
I stared at her, almost in fright.
“I know something about it,” she said, “because that policeman mentioned it. What’s his name? Olsen.”
“But I didn’t tell him anything—” not really. . . . I thought back to the conversation I had had at Paul Bouhtala’s birthday party. I could still see Olsen’s sympathetic face, the glass of beer held just below his chin. . . .
Isabel gave a little shrug. “Well, you must have said something.”
The bookcase behind her head was plunged in shadow now. Outside, beyond the terrace, the sun had dropped so low in the sky that it lit only the tops of the pine trees, staining the foliage a bright burnt orange, almost exactly the same colour as the turban Isabel was wearing. Turning back into the room, I saw her reach up with one thin arm and pull the string of metal beads that switched on the lamp.
“I have said this before,” she said slowly, “but I’m going to say it again, and if it sounds harsh, forgive me. I don’t have the time or energy for subtlety. Whatever happened, it’s behind you now. You have to move on. I can understand if you feel you can no longer dance, but what about your choreography? You were such a talented choreographer. Young, of course, but very talented.” Her smile was sly, half held inside her mouth. Even in her weakness, she could tease me. “Everybody in the world is looking for someone who can—” She broke off for a moment, to think. Then she said, “Someone who has something. Don’t you see that?”
I nodded, then I was quiet for a while.
“I don’t know whether it’s behind me,” I said at last. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel as if it is.”
We sat in silence, each caught up in our own thoughts. My mind drifted. I pictured Paul Bouhtala sitting in his study, the diamond eyes of his cigarette lighter glittering on the table beside him. . . .
The door opened, and Else’s pale face appeared in the darkness at the edge of the room. It was time for Isabel to rest, she said. I rose to my feet, preparing to leave, but Isabel held on to my wrist.
“Stay the night,” she said, “in your old room. Then we can talk again tomorrow.”
•
There are days when the landscape of Holland suits your mood. On the train back to Amsterdam the following afternoon, I sat by the window and watched the neat, flat countryside fly past, and I was soothed by it. There was nothing miraculous about its appearance. What was miraculous was that it was there at all. Once, in the distance, I saw a copse that looked wild and natural, as if it had sprung up haphazardly, but by the time the train drew level with it, the trees had resolved themselves into straight lines, into a grid, in fact. Order had been there all along. It was like a Dutch joke, and I found that I was smiling.
That morning Isabel had talked about my ballets, praising my imagination, my exuberance, my wit. This was untypical of her, and I realised that, in reminding me of my past, she was trying to return me to myself somehow. It didn’t have the effect that she intended. As I listened to her, I saw how much had been taken from me: I bore no more than a passing resemblance to the person she was describing. She insisted that I could use dance to exorcise the things that were troubling me. I responded by saying that the things that were troubling me made the thought of dance impossible. You have to work with it, she said. You have to move forwards. What I didn’t tell her was that I was working with it, I was moving forwards. Each woman I slept with was a step closer to the truth. Or so I believed. I still felt compelled to close that gap between myself and what I had experienced. What would I do if I was actually confronted by one of the women who had been in the room with me? I had no idea. Perhaps nothing. It wasn’t a matter of wanting answers. It wasn’t even a matter of asking questions. It was a matter of regaining proximity.
During the last few months I had widened the net. I was no longer looking specifically for nurses. I was just looking. After all, given the amount of time that had elapsed, it was conceivable that the women no longer worked as nurses—if indeed they ever had. My interpretation of the scene that had taken place in the room was only one of many possible interpretations. What if the women had broken into a hospital and stolen the anaesthetic? What if they were not nurses at all, but thieves? So, yes, the net had widened, and my methods had become entirely instinctive. If I had a gut feeling about someone I acted on it. I had gone to bed with all kinds of women—fat and thin, old and young. They assumed I wanted to have sex with them. They were wrong. In fact, once they had taken their clothes off and I realised they weren’t who
I had thought they were, I often lost all interest in them. There they would be, on a sofa or a bed, in a cheap hotel in the dead hours of the afternoon or an apartment late at night—moonlight on the floor, the radiators cold—or in the back of a car parked in an alley, on a blanket under a tree or among the sand dunes or beside water—a canal, an inland sea—there they would be, naked, unfamiliar and, above all, innocent. A complicated moment, this. Mostly, they would turn on me. They would accuse me of attempting to humiliate them. They would tell me I was only interested in power. They would ask me what I was trying to prove (now there was a pertinent question). They would say I was impotent, pathetic, cowardly—and they would also, as you might well imagine, call me a misogynist. They could become violent too. One woman had pulled a knife on me. I can still see her standing in her bedroom with nothing on, her face twisted, unsteady with rage. I can see the curtains behind her, drawn against the daylight, a burnt look to their brown and orange flowers. I can see the six-inch blade protruding from her fist. It took me an hour to calm her down. But sometimes—and this was worse, far worse—a terrible sadness would come over them, as if being rejected by me, which was how they always saw it, fitted some idea they already had about themselves. I felt so cruel as I watched them gather up their clothes, their bodies meagre suddenly, poignant—almost meaningless, somehow. What could I do, though? Say I was sorry? Say it was all my fault? I doubt that would have changed anything.
The train slowed as it pulled into one of Amsterdam’s suburban stations. There were times when I had almost given up, when I felt I could no longer face the anger, the tears, the silent resignation. . . . But then, I didn’t appear to have a choice. I knew no other way to live. Some kind of transmutation had taken place. I had become as monstrous as the women I was looking for. That was their effect, their legacy. Like vampires, they had turned me into another version of themselves.
The Book of Revelation Page 18