The Book of Revelation

by Rupert Thomson

  At half-past twelve we left the square and walked back to my apartment in the Kinkerbuurt. The streets were covered with the remnants of firecrackers, scraps of dull red paper that lay in heaps, like autumn leaves. We passed a young couple dancing slowly on a bridge. The girl was humming a tune I didn’t recognise, her eyes closed. The boy’s leather coat had the gleam of chrome.

  “I used to be a dancer,” I said suddenly.

  Juliette turned and stared at me.

  “I was a choreographer as well. I used to be quite famous.” I smiled at the thought of that.

  She asked me what I had done, and I mentioned the titles of my ballets.

  “You know, I think I saw one of them.” She was standing in the middle of the street, between the tramlines, nodding to herself. “My father took me. I must have been about fifteen.”

  She began to describe a ballet, which I scarcely recognised.

  “It’s funny,” she said, “but when I first saw you, on the train, I thought there was something familiar about you. It made it easier to talk to you, somehow.”

  I had to smile at that. It was her very unfamiliarity that had attracted me to her. It was the fact that I knew for certain that I had never seen her before.

  “But you work in a bar now. . . .” She left the sentence hanging in a such a way that it became a question.

  “It’s temporary,” I said.

  “Will you go back to dancing?”

  “Not dancing. Choreography maybe. In the last few weeks, it’s surfaced again, the urge to do something. . . .”

  On Jacob van Lennepkade there were lights burning in most of the apartment windows, though the canal was quiet and still. We turned into the street where I lived. As I took out my keys, Juliette put a hand on my arm.

  “Let me,” she said.

  She took the keys from me and opened the door. Inside, she found the light-switch. There was a dark-green door to the left and, beyond it, a narrow flight of stairs leading steeply upwards.

  “Which floor?” she said.

  “Third.”

  We climbed the stairs in silence. On the third floor she hesitated, studying each of the doors in turn.

  “It’s on your right,” I said.

  The light on the stairs clicked off as she turned the key in the lock. She pushed the door open cautiously and stepped inside. A ghostly rectangle rose out of the darkness beyond her like a photograph developing. The living-room window. Outside, on the street, there was a plane tree, and the intricate shadow of its bare branches covered one entire wall and all the furniture in that half of the room.

  I followed Juliette into the apartment, closing the door behind her. The air smelled of the jute matting I had put down and also, faintly, of dried flowers. In the middle of the living-room she turned to me, her face serious, intent, but apprehensive, as if she was about to attempt something dangerous.

  “I’m in love with you,” she said.

  Putting one hand on my chest, she reached up and kissed me. Her mouth was relaxed, cool. She kissed me again, slipping her leather jacket off her shoulders, allowing it to fall on the floor behind her. We were still in darkness. On the wall the mirror glinted, alive and silvery, a magnet for what little light there was.

  I drew her close to me. She pressed her body into mine, as though she wanted to leave an imprint of herself on me. There was an urgency about her, an insistence, which made me feel that I was less experienced than she was. Faintly, in the distance, I heard the whistle of a rocket.

  In the bedroom we undressed each other, taking the same care that she had taken with her present earlier that evening. It was the only thing she was wearing that she would not part with. As she lay down, I watched the coin slide between her breasts and settle in the hollow of her collarbone. In the darkness, naked, she looked so black. Like something I could disappear into.

  “Kiss me,” she whispered. “Kiss me all over.”

  I started with her feet, moved slowly upwards.

  I had seen so many women’s bodies, even in that room, that bed, but always in a highly twisted state of anticipation. I was always looking for marks, for signs—for evidence. I had been a detective, eliminating suspects. Now, though, with Juliette, I knew there would be nothing I had ever seen before. Everything was strange. Everything was new.

  “Your hair smells of fireworks,” she murmured.

  I wanted to delay the moment that I entered her. I wanted to please her endlessly before that happened. Because, for once, there was no reason not to. Because, at last, I could.

  I remember that she reached out and touched my wrist and that the clock on the bedside table said twenty-five-past four. She held her face quite still below me, as if it was full to the brim, as if it might spill.

  “Put it in me now,” she whispered.

  •

  At the beginning of January in Amsterdam there are images of abandonment and desolation almost everywhere you look. After the New Year people put their Christmas trees out on the street. The trees lie on their sides, shedding scores of brittle, bright-orange needles. They quickly become skeletal. Clogging the gutters are the remains of all the Chinese firecrackers, another kind of foliage, faded and soggy, but still red. Dead trees, dead leaves. . . . It’s a dead time, perhaps, in any city. The holiday is over, and most people go back to work, with nothing to look forward to for months. It’s a strange time to be in love. You feel as if you’re going against the grain. You feel chosen. Lucky.

  That year the weather was cold and grey. When the bar closed, I would walk home to find Juliette asleep in my bed. Sometimes she woke when she heard the door, and she would rise up out of the bedclothes, eyes wide open, and say my name. She wasn’t awake, though, not really. I would stroke her hair, and kiss her, and she would soon sink back among the pillows. When her breathing had deepened, I would go into the kitchen, with its green walls, and make myself a cup of herb tea. I would sit there quietly, reading English newspapers. Outside, it would be silent except for the late-night traffic two or three streets away, a soft rushing sound that reminded me of air-conditioning, and, every now and then, there would be a rustle of sheets as Juliette turned in the bed. After an hour, when I had left work far behind, I would slide into bed beside her, fitting my body against hers, one hand resting on her upturned hip. There were nights when I lay there in the darkness, in the silence, and my thoughts slipped their moorings. Time slowed down. Opened out. I felt myself float free. I was happier than I had ever expected to be, given the circumstances. But also, curiously, I felt as if my happiness was earned. I had waited so long for it. I deserved it. Which gave it a different quality, a different value, to any happiness I had known before.

  In the mornings, if I woke first, which was unusual, I would watch Juliette sleeping. Her face had a dull gleam to it, as if, deep down, it contained a seam of gold. I loved the dark lines on the palms of her hands, and I loved the sweet smell of her, a mixture of parsnip and oat biscuits. If it was a weekend, we would stay in bed until eleven or twelve, sometimes just holding each other, or talking. Outside, it would be so gloomy that the bathroom-fittings shop would have its lights on. . . . Later, wearing a kimono I had bought in Osaka years before, Juliette would walk into the kitchen and put on the coffee. While she was waiting for the milk to heat in the saucepan, she moved idly through the apartment, looking at things. I would see her pass the bedroom doorway, the kimono much too big for her, trailing along the floor behind her like a bridal train. Sometimes she lost herself in a book, or in the view from a window, and there would be a sudden cry, and I would hear her run back into the kitchen to find that the milk had boiled over. She never bothered to tie the kimono at the waist, so when, eventually, she came towards me with the coffee, an upright section of her, the middle part, would be exposed—the smooth space between her breasts, her stomach with its slightly protruding belly-button, her pubic hair, which was as straight and black and shiny as the hair on her head, the insides of her thighs, her narrow knees, h
er feet. . . . If it was a weekday, and Juliette had drama classes, I would often drift off to sleep again. Later, we would meet in a café, or see a film. Afterwards I would cook an early supper, then I would leave the house and walk to work. Though she didn’t care for Gusta, Juliette sometimes came to the bar at midnight. She would sit at a round table in the corner with a weis bier, reading a play or a script. Every now and then I walked round, collecting glasses or emptying ashtrays, and she would look up with a smile that seemed to say, Isn’t it strange, that I should be here? Isn’t this unlike me? She always seemed to have that view of herself, that she was unexpected, out of place—a surprise both to herself and others.

  Of course, we were not dissimilar in that respect.

  •

  One Saturday in the middle of January, I took Juliette to Bloemendaal with me. I had to smile when I saw Isabel that afternoon. Though she was lying on her divan, as usual, she had put on an elegant white dress and a headscarf of mauve silk, and her wrists and fingers glittered with an array of jewellery, including the bracelet Balanchine had given her as a token of his admiration. She had known I was bringing Juliette, and it was for Juliette that she had dressed. She looked so striking, in fact, that it was a while before I noticed Paul Bouhtala sitting in the shadows on the far side of the fireplace. After the introductions, I left the two women together and sat down next to Bouhtala. He seemed more than usually subdued, his eyes shifting from myself to Juliette and back again without so much as a flicker of curiosity or feeling. I asked him if he knew Paris. I wanted to take Juliette there for the weekend. He muttered something about a cemetery called Père Lachaise, and then he shrugged and, glancing downwards, removed a speck of dust from his lapel.

  “It was you who brought us together,” I heard Juliette tell Isabel in the silence that followed. “We have you to thank.”

  “I think you’re probably exaggerating my part in it,” Isabel replied, though I could see the idea appealed to her. Her life had been so restricted by her illness, so pared down. To have some influence—any influence—on events that happened beyond her living-room. . . .

  But she was tired that afternoon, and we stayed for less than an hour. As I bent down to kiss her goodbye, she held on to my wrist, making me promise to visit her again before too long. Even if it was only for a morning, or part of a morning. It was all she was good for, anyway. We had to continue with our ballet, she said. I told her I’d come down as soon as I returned from Paris. I had a new beginning, which I wanted to try out on her.

  On the train home I asked Juliette what she thought of Isabel. Juliette was leaning against the window, watching the darkness rush by.

  “She’s very grand, isn’t she,” Juliette said. “I always thought that people who were grand were only interested in themselves. She wasn’t like that, though.”

  I smiled. “She can be.”

  But Juliette didn’t seem to hear me. “Now I know why you were talking to yourself that night,” she said. “To lose someone like her. . . .” She stared out of the window for a moment longer, and then turned towards me, her eyes lit with sudden wonder. “Did you see that bracelet?”

  •

  We arrived in Paris on a Friday, checking into a small hotel not far from the Gare de l’Est. Our room was on the top floor, with big red roses on the wallpaper—like explosions, Juliette said—and a bed that creaked and twanged whenever we made love, or even moved. That night we ate in a brasserie just off the Rue du Faubourg St Martin, and then, at eleven-thirty, we took a taxi to a club Juliette had heard about. The entrance had been roped off, and a crowd of people waited on the pavement, their eyes fixed on the swaggering, tuxedoed doorman, but when he saw us climb out of our taxi he signalled to us, and the crowd parted obediently, and we walked right in. It became a joke between us, how fashionable we were. We returned to the hotel at three in the morning and sprawled on the bed, a little drunk. Juliette peeled off my shirt, which was still damp from the dancing, her hand pausing as it passed over the oblong, shiny patch of skin where my tattoo used to be. “Funny, isn’t it,” she murmured, “how we both have scars. . . .” But that was all she said, which came as a relief to me. Many of the women I had slept with had asked about the scar, and I had invented all kinds of stories—a car-crash, a sporting injury, a bungled appendix operation; I had never told anyone the truth, and I didn’t want to tell it now. At some level I suppose I must have realised that the love I felt for Juliette was rooted in ideas of escape and safety. While I was with Juliette I felt protected from the past, and I had no desire to jeopardise that feeling; I was happy where I was, sealed in a present that was continuous, unending. . . .

  They were simple, memorable days. We walked through the cold, sunlit streets until our feet hurt, we asked a Japanese woman to take our photograph beneath the Eiffel Tower, we drank pastis at zinc-topped bars. We even visited Père Lachaise, the cemetery that Paul Bouhtala had mentioned, and were astonished by the size and grandeur of the place, which looked more like a city than a cemetery, its cobbled pathways lined with graves built in the style of mansions or temples, and, every now and then, an obelisk, or a pyramid, or some other exotic, unexpected monument. Slowly, I was learning to know Juliette better. Though she could be strangely methodical, almost, at times, pedantic—she stood in front of Edith Piaf’s memorial with her head lowered for exactly a minute—she could also have moments of pure spontaneity. She had revealed that side of her once already, when she led me out across the ice. On Sunday night, which was our last night in Paris, she revealed it again. We had been invited to dinner by Madame Soffner, who was an old friend of her father’s, and thinking we should not arrive empty-handed, we had bought a bunch of crimson roses that reminded us of the wallpaper in our hotel room. In the 7th arrondissement, not far from where Madame Soffner lived, we saw a black limousine pull up outside an apartment building. The car door opened, and Catherine Deneuve stepped out. I thought it had to be her because of her hair, which was moonlight-blonde, and because of the clarity of her skin. Before I could say anything, though, Juliette was crossing the street. I watched her hand Deneuve the bouquet that we had bought for Madame Soffner. Deneuve looked down at the flowers, then she looked at Juliette and smiled. As Juliette walked back towards me, Deneuve vanished into the apartment building, followed by two men in dark suits.

  I turned to Juliette. “What did you say to her?”

  “I told her she was a great actress. Magnifique, I said. I told her I wanted to become an actress too.” Juliette frowned suddenly. “Is it all right to say ‘magnifique’?”

  “It’s fine. What did she say?”

  “She said the roses were very beautiful. She wished me luck with my career.”

  “So it really was her?”

  “Yes.”

  Juliette glanced at the entrance to the apartment building, which was now deserted, the lobby filled with an expensive, pale-gold light.

  “We haven’t got anything for your father’s friend,” I said.

  “Yes. That’s a problem.” Juliette spoke so earnestly, and with such a look of concern on her face, that I had to laugh.

  In the end, though, it wasn’t a problem. We bought Madame Soffner a bottle of champagne from a shop that just happened to be open, and the brand we chose turned out to be her favourite.

  There are times when the world is kind to you, when you cannot wrong-foot your good fortune, no matter what you do, but it was so long since I had lived that way that I felt as if my life had been dipped in syrup, as if it was deliciously, almost unbearably, sweet.

  •

  One Tuesday towards the end of that month Juliette decided to spend the night in her apartment. She had an audition early the next morning, and the theatre was close to where she lived. At six o’clock that evening we said goodbye outside my house. It was only our second night apart since New Year’s Eve, and I remember holding her so tightly that she murmured something about me crushing her. I wished her luck, kissed her one last time, then
watched her as she walked away, a slender, upright figure in a long dark coat, her black hair shining as she passed beneath a street-light.

  A young Scottish couple came into the bar that night. They had flown to Amsterdam for a week’s holiday. He worked for an oil company, as a geologist, and she was a make-up artist. Their names were Bill and Emma. At closing-time they told me they were going to a club, and asked if I wanted to come along. Usually, I made a point of never going out with people from the bar. Also, by one-thirty in the morning, I would be looking forward to the peace and quiet of my apartment—and since the beginning of January, of course, there had been the added incentive of seeing Juliette, even if she was asleep. That night, though, with Juliette not there, I thought, Why not?

  The weather had turned colder, and we walked fast, our breath clouding the air. Emma was wearing heels, and she kept stumbling on the cobbles or the tram-tracks and saying Shit, or Fucking hell, or Wait for me. She didn’t lose her temper, though. In fact, she was always grinning when she caught up with us.

  We went to a club on Singel first, then to another club on Reguliersdwarsstraat. Bill and Emma danced. I drank a beer and watched. It was hot in the club, but I was enjoying myself. I did not regret my decision to come out.

  By three-fifteen we were sitting in an upstairs lounge. It had dark-red walls and muted lighting, and there were blue velvet sofas that looked like scallop shells. Emma was talking about the time she worked with Liza Minnelli, and I was just thinking I could tell the story about Juliette and Catherine Deneuve when I noticed that Bill’s glass was empty.

  “Same again, Bill?” I said.