Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  Apart from spitting at the ground, the bowler didn’t respond. He returned to his mark, ran in to bowl, and delivered another throat-ball. With roars and counter-roars of outrage coming from the boundary, Chuck approached the captain of the fielding team. “I warned the bowler,” Chuck said, “and he disregarded the warning. He’s not bowling anymore.” The other fielders ran in and noisily surrounded Chuck. “What right you have? You never warn him.” I made a move to get involved, but Umar, my Pakistani batting partner, held me back. “You stay here. It’s always the same with these people.”

  Then, as the argument on and off the field continued—“You thiefing we, umpire! You thiefing we!”—my eye was drawn to a figure walking slowly in the direction of the parked cars. I kept watching him because there was something mysterious about this person choosing to leave at such a moment of drama. He was in no hurry, it seemed. He slowly opened the door of a car, leaned in, reached around for a few moments, then stood up straight and shut the door. He appeared to be holding something in his hand as he strolled back into the grounds. People started shouting and running. A woman screamed. My teammates, grouped on the boundary, set off in every direction, some into the tennis courts, others to hide behind trees. Now the man was ambling over somewhat uncertainly. It occurred to me he was very drunk. “No, Tino,” somebody shouted.

  “Oh shit,” Umar said, starting toward the baseball diamond. “Run, run.”

  But, in some sense paralyzed by this unreal dawdling gunman, I stayed where I was, tightly gripping my Gunn & Moore Maestro bat. The fielders, meanwhile, were backing away, hands half raised in panic and imploration. “Put it down, put it down, man,” one of them said. “Tino! Tino!” a voice shouted. “Come back, Tino!”

  As for Chuck, he now stood alone. Except for me, that is. I stood a few yards away. This required no courage on my part, because I felt nothing. I experienced the occasion as a kind of emptiness.

  The man stopped ten feet from Chuck. He held the gun limply. He looked at me, then back at Chuck. He was speechless and sweating. He was trying, as Chuck would afterward relate, to understand the logic of his situation.

  The three of us stood there for what seemed a long time. A container ship silently went through the back gardens of the houses on Delafield Place.

  Chuck took a step forward. “Leave the field of play, sir,” he said firmly. He extended his palm toward the clubhouse, an usher’s gesture. “Leave immediately please. You are interfering with play. Captain,” Chuck said loudly, turning to the Kittitian captain, who was a little distance away, “please escort this gentleman from the field.”

  The captain tentatively came forward. “I coming now, Tino,” he called out. “Right behind you. No foolishness, now.”

  “Don’t worry,” Tino muttered. He looked overcome by exhaustion. He dropped the gun and left the field slowly, shaking his head. After a short break, play resumed. Nobody saw any reason to call the cops.

  When the match ended, both teams came together by the old clubhouse and shared Coors Lights and whiskey Cokes and Chinese takeout and talked gravely about what had taken place. Somebody called for quiet, and Chuck Ramkissoon stepped forward into the center of the gathering.

  “We have an expression in the English language,” he said, as silence began to establish itself among the players. “The expression is ‘not cricket.’ When we disapprove of something, we say ‘It’s not cricket.’ We do not say ‘It’s not baseball.’ Or ‘It’s not football.’ We say ‘It’s not cricket.’ This is a tribute to the game we play, and it’s a tribute to us.” By now, all chatter had ceased. We stood around the speaker, solemnly staring at our feet. “But with this tribute comes a responsibility. Look here,” Chuck said, pointing at the club crest on a Staten Island player’s shirt. “LUDE LUDUM INSIGNIA SECUNDARIA, it says here. Now I do not know Latin, but I’m told it means, and I’m sure you’ll correct me, Mr. President, if I’m wrong”—Chuck nodded at our club president—“it means, ‘Winning isn’t everything. It’s only a game.’ Now, games are important. They test us. They teach us comradeship. They’re fun. But cricket, more than any other sport, is, I want to say”—Chuck paused for effect—“a lesson in civility. We all know this; I do not need to say more about it.” A few heads were nodding. “Something else. We are playing this game in the United States. This is a difficult environment for us. We play where we can, wherever they let us. Here at Walker Park, we’re lucky; we have locker-room facilities, which we share with strangers and passersby. Most other places we must find a tree or bush.” One or two listeners exchanged looks. “Just today,” Chuck continued, “we started late because the baseball players have first right to play on this field. And now, when we have finished the game, we must take our drinks in brown paper bags. It doesn’t matter that we have played here, at Walker Park, every year for over a hundred years. It doesn’t matter that this ground was built as a cricket ground. Is there one good cricket facility in this city? No. Not one. It doesn’t matter that we have more than one hundred and fifty clubs playing in the New York area. It doesn’t matter that cricket is the biggest, fasting-growing bat-and-ball game in the world. None of it matters. In this country, we’re nowhere. We’re a joke. Cricket? How funny. So we play as a matter of indulgence. And if we step out of line, believe me, this indulgence disappears. What this means,” Chuck said, raising his voice as murmurs and cracks and chuckles began to run through his audience, “what this means is, we have an extra responsibility to play the game right. We have to prove ourselves. We have to let our hosts see that these strange-looking guys are up to something worthwhile. I say ‘see.’ I don’t know why I use that word. Every summer the parks of this city are taken over by hundreds of cricketers but somehow nobody notices. It’s like we’re invisible. Now that’s nothing new, for those of us who are black or brown. As for those who are not”—Chuck acknowledged my presence with a smile—“you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I say that I sometimes tell people, You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black.” People laughed, mostly out of embarrassment. One of my teammates extended his fist to me, and I gave it a soft punch. “But we don’t mind, right, just so long as we can play? Just leave us alone, and we’ll make do. Right? But I say we must take a more positive attitude. I say we must claim our rightful place in this wonderful country. Cricket has a long history in the United States, actually. Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man. I won’t go into that now,” Chuck said quickly, because a frankly competing hubbub had broken out among the players. “Let us just be thankful that it all ended well, and that cricket was the winner today.”

  There the umpire stopped, to faltering applause; and soon after, everybody headed home—to Hoboken and Passaic and Queens and Brooklyn and, in my case, to Manhattan. I took the Staten Island Ferry, which on that occasion was the John F. Kennedy; and it was on board that enormous orange tub that I ran once again into Chuck Ramkissoon. I spotted him on the foredeck, among the tourists and romantics absorbed by the famous sights of New York Bay.

  I bought a beer and sat down in the saloon, where a pair of pigeons roosted on a ledge. After some intolerable minutes in the company of my thoughts, I picked up my bag and went forward to join Chuck.

  I couldn’t see him. I was about to turn back when I realized he was right in front me and had been hidden by the woman he was kissing. Mortified, I tried to retreat without attracting his attention; but when you’re six feet five, certain maneuvers are not easily accomplished.

  “Well, hello,” Chuck said. “Good to see you. My dear, this is—”

  “Hans,” I said. “Hans van den Broek.”

  “Hi,” the woman said, retreating into Chuck’s arms. She was in her early forties with blond curls and a plump chin. She wiggled a set of fingers at me.

  “Let me introduce myself properly,” Chuck said. “Chuck Ramkissoon.” We shook hands. “Van den Broek,” he said, trying out the name. “S
outh African?”

  “I’m from Holland,” I said, apologizing.

  “Holland? Sure, why not.” He was disappointed, naturally. He would have preferred that I’d come from the land of Barry Richards and Allan Donald and Graeme Pollock.

  I said, “And you are from…?”

  “Here,” Chuck affirmed. “The United States.”

  His girlfriend elbowed him.

  “What do you want me to say?” Chuck said.

  “Trinidad,” the woman said, looking proudly at Chuck. “He’s from Trinidad.”

  I awkwardly motioned with my can of beer. “Listen, I’ll leave you guys to it. I was just coming out for some fresh air.”

  Chuck said, “No, no, no. You stay right here.”

  His companion said to me, “Were you at the game today? He told me about what happened. Wild.”

  I said, “The way he handled it was quite something. And that was some speech you gave.”

  “Well, I’ve had practice,” Chuck said, smiling at his friend.

  Pushing at his chest, the woman said, “Practice making speeches or practice with life-and-death situations?”

  “Both,” Chuck said. They laughed together, and of course it struck me that they made an unusual couple: she, American and white and petite and fair-haired; he, a portly immigrant a decade older and very dark—like Coca-Cola, he would say. His coloring came from his mother’s family, which originated in the south of India somewhere—Madras, was Chuck’s suspicion. He was a descendant of indentured laborers and had little firm information about such things.

  An event for antique sailing ships was taking place in the bay. Schooners, their canvas hardly distended in the still air, clustered around and beyond Ellis Island. “Don’t you just love this ferry ride?” Chuck’s girlfriend said. We slipped past one of the ships, a clutter of masts and ropes and sails, and she and Chuck joined other passengers in exchanging waves with its crew. Chuck said, “See that sail there? That triangular sail right at the very top? That’s the skyscraper. Unless it’s the moonsail. Moonsail or skyscraper, one of the two.”

  “You’re an expert on boats, now?” his girlfriend said. “Is there anything you don’t know about? OK, smarty-pants, which one is the jolly jumper? Or the mizzen. Show me a mizzen, if you’re so smart.”

  “You’re a mizzen,” Chuck said, fastening his arm around her. “You’re my mizzen.”

  The ferry slowed down as we approached Manhattan. In the shade of the huddled towers, the water was the color of a plum. Passengers emerged from the ferry lounge and began to fill up the deck. Banging against the wooden bumpers of the terminal, the ship came to a stop. Everybody disembarked as a swarm into the cavernous terminal, so that I, toting my cricketer’s coffin, became separated from Chuck and his girlfriend. It was only when I’d descended the ramp leading out of the terminal that I saw them again, walking hand in hand in the direction of Battery Park.

  I found a taxi and took it straight home. I was tired. As for Chuck, even though he interested me, he was older than me by almost twenty years, and my prejudices confined him, this oddball umpiring orator, to my exotic cricketing circle, which made no intersection with the circumstances of my everyday life.

  Those circumstances were, I should say, unbearable. Almost a year had passed since my wife’s announcement that she was leaving New York and returning to London with Jake. This took place one October night as we lay next to each other in bed on the ninth floor of the Hotel Chelsea. We’d been holed up in there since mid-September, staying on in a kind of paralysis even after we’d received permission from the authorities to return to our loft in Tribeca. Our hotel apartment had two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a view of the tip of the Empire State Building. It also had extraordinary acoustics: in the hush of the small hours, a goods truck smashing into a pothole sounded like an explosion, and the fantastic howl of a passing motorbike once caused Rachel to vomit with terror. Around the clock, ambulances sped eastward on West Twenty-third Street with a sobbing escort of police motorcycles. Sometimes I confused the cries of the sirens with my son’s nighttime cries. I would leap out of bed and go to his bedroom and helplessly kiss him, even though my rough face sometimes woke him and I’d have to stay with him and rub his tiny rigid back until he fell asleep once more. Afterward I slipped out onto the balcony and stood there like a sentry. The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The taillights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the mad thought that the final twilight was upon New York. Returning to bed, where Rachel lay as if asleep, I would roll onto my side and find my thoughts forcibly embroiled in preparations for a sudden flight from the city. The list of essential belongings was short—passports, a box full of photographs, my son’s toy trains, some jewelry, the laptop computer, a selection of Rachel’s favorite shoes and dresses, a manila envelope filled with official documents—and if it came down to it, even these items were dispensable. Even I was dispensable, I recognized with an odd feeling of comfort; and before long I would be caught up in a recurring dream in which, finding myself on a subway train, I threw myself over a ticking gadget and in this way sacrificed my life to save my family. When I told Rachel about my nightmare—it qualified as such, for the dreamed bomb exploded every time, waking me up—she was making some adjustment to her hair in the bathroom mirror. Ever since I’d known her, she had kept her hair short, almost like a boy’s. “Don’t even think of getting off that lightly,” she said, moving past me into the bedroom.

  She had fears of her own, in particular the feeling in her bones that Times Square, where the offices of her law firm were situated, would be the site of the next attack. The Times Square subway station was a special ordeal for her. Every time I set foot in that makeshift cement underworld—it was the stop for my own office, where I usually turned up at seven in the morning, two hours before Rachel began her working day—I tasted her anxiety. Throngs endlessly climbed and descended the passages and walkways like Escher’s tramping figures. Bare high-wattage bulbs hung from the low-lying girders, and temporary partitions and wooden platforms and posted handwritten directions signaled that around us a hidden and incalculable process of construction or ruination was being undertaken. The unfathomable and catastrophic atmosphere was only heightened by the ever-present spectacle, in one of the principal caverns of that station, of a little Hispanic man dancing with a life-size dummy. Dressed entirely in black and gripping his inanimate partner with grotesque eagerness, the man sweated and pranced and shuffled his way through a series, for all I know, of fox-trots and tangos and fandangos and paso dobles, intently twitching and nuzzling his puppet to the movements of the music, his eyes always sealed. Passersby stopped and gawked. There was something dire going on—something that went beyond the desperation, economic and artistic, discernible on the man’s damp features, beyond even the sexual perverseness of his routine. The puppet had something to do with it. Her hands and feet were bound to her master’s. She wore a short, lewd black skirt, and her hair was black and unruly in the manner of a cartoon Gypsy girl. Crude features had been inscribed on her face, and this gave her a blank, bottomless look. Although bodily responsive to her consort’s expert promptings—when he placed his hand on her rump, she gave a spasm of ecstasy—her countenance remained a fog. Its vacancy was unanswerable, endless; and yet this man was nakedly in thrall to her…No doubt I was in an unhealthy state of mind, because the more I witnessed this performance the more troubled I grew. I reached the point where I was no longer capable of passing by the duo without a flutter of dread, and quickening on into the next chasm I’d jog up the stairs into Times Square. I straightaway felt better. Unfashionably, I liked Times Square in its newest incarnation. I had no objection to the Dis
ney security corps or the ESPN Zone or the loitering tourists or the kids crowded outside the MTV studio. And whereas others felt mocked and diminished by the square’s storming of the senses and detected malevolence or Promethean impudence in the molten progress of the news tickers and in the fifty-foot visages that looked down from vinyl billboards and in the twinkling shouted advertisements for drinks and Broadway musicals, I always regarded these shimmers and vapors as one might the neck feathers of certain of the city’s pigeons—as natural, humble sources of iridescence. (It was Chuck, on Broadway once, who pointed out to me how the rock dove’s gray mass, exactly mirroring the shades of the sidewalk concrete and streaked with blacktop-colored dorsal feathers, gratuitously tapers to purple glitter.) Perhaps as a result of my work, corporations—even those with electrified screens flaming over Times Square—strike me as vulnerable, needy creatures, entitled to their displays of vigor. Then again, as Rachel has pointed out, I’m liable to misplace my sensitivities.

  Lying on her side in the darkness, Rachel said, “I’ve made up my mind. I’m taking Jake to London. I’m going to talk to Alan Watson tomorrow about a leave of absence.”

  Our backs were turned to each other. I didn’t move. I said nothing.

  “I can’t see any other way,” Rachel said. “It’s simply not fair to our little boy.”

  Again, I didn’t speak. Rachel said, “It came to me when I thought about packing up and going back to Tribeca. Then what? Start again as though nothing has happened? For what? So we can have this great New York lifestyle? So I can keep risking my life every day to do a job that keeps me away from my son? When we don’t even need the money? When I don’t even enjoy it anymore? It’s crazy, Hans.”

  I felt my wife sit up. It would only be for a while, she said in a low voice. Just to get some perspective on things. She would move in with her parents and give Jake some attention. He needed it. Living like this, in a crappy hotel, in a city gone mad, was doing him no good: had I noticed how clinging he’d become? I could fly over every fortnight; and there was always the phone. She lit a cigarette. She’d started smoking again, after an interlude of three years. She said, “It might even do us some good.”