Postcards from No Man's Land (The Dance Sequence)

by Chambers, Aidan

  But it was only now, here in this crammed, smoky, noisy café hidden in a back street of a strange city in a foreign country, a long way from anywhere he had ever called home, that the actuality of being independent, of being responsible for himself, informed his inflamed nerves and inhabited his disturbed mind.

  As if his memory had been waiting for this moment, back to him came the poignant little tune of the song Daan had sung to him after they had visited Titus that afternoon, and along with it Daan’s voice speaking the translated words. I’ve spent my life looking for you, only to learn, now I have found you at last, the meaning of solitude.

  And, Jesus!, he thought, is that it? The long and the short of it, the be all and end all, the last word? Alone, alone, all all alone. On your tod, Todd. Is that what being grown up, being adult, means? Solitude?

  He felt a hand laid on his shoulder and heard Ton say, ‘Jacques?’

  He stirred himself, looked up in to the boy-girl face, put his hand over Ton’s, and smiled.

  Ton said, ‘He’s coming. See you again soon, eh?’

  Jacob nodded.

  Ton smiled, and bending to him, placed a kiss at the corner of Jacob’s mouth, left, then right, and a third, gently lingering, on his lips.

  POSTCARD

  ‘Begin at the beginning,’

  the King said gravely,

  ‘and go on till you come to the end.’

  Lewis Carroll

  JACOB STARED OUT of the window of the mid-morning train from Amsterdam to Bloemendaal on his way with Daan to visit Geertrui. To take his mind off the coming ordeal he concentrated on the view.

  People had told him Holland was boring, a land of cosy little red-roofed boxes arranged with Toytown predictability, and with not much of anything between one place and another except unending flat fields and canals. But this was not how it was, not for him that morning. The flatness of the landscape with its wide low sky, softened with haze, so that land and sky almost merged, he found soothing. The trim cared-for appearance of the houses and gardens, farms and fields, canals and dykes, even the factories and modern office blocks they were passing at this moment appealed to his liking for the clean and orderly. But as well: the colours. Burnished reds of old brick and roof tiles. Fresh shining greens and browns of the strips of field, each framed by thick dark pencil-lines of ditches. Belts of sky-reflecting water ruffled to silver by the passage of workhorse barges. And something in the atmosphere of the people that he liked, a sense of purpose, of getting on with life without any fuss. He hadn’t noticed any of this till now. For the first time since he arrived he began to like the place. And why now, in a train on his way to see a dying old woman? He thought: How difficult it is sometimes to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.

  Daan was sitting in the opposite seat reading a newspaper, its title, de Volkskrant, in letters which looked old-fashionedly modern, spiky and stern. He was wearing specs, the first time Jacob had seen them: small oval lenses in thin black metal rims, also old-fashionedly modern and also making him look a bit spiky and stern. He had hardly exchanged a word with Jacob since last night. Briefly to show him where to find food for breakfast, a sentence or two about when they must leave the house, and how they would pick up Jacob’s belongings on the way back. And an explanation: ‘I’m no use in the morning. A night person. It means nothing if I don’t talk.’ Which Jacob didn’t mind, for he wasn’t in a talking mood either.

  He had slept surprisingly well, heavily in fact, all things considered—yesterday’s horrors, catastrophes, shocks, strange bed in strange house, but/and yes, now he thought about it, pleasures too (Ton, Titus, Alma). During the night he had surfaced only once, two thirty by his watch, when he heard voices and laughter in the big living room below, one Daan’s, the other Ton’s, but he had plunged back in to the depths again at once.

  This morning he’d woken with a spongy head and lethargic limbs that had to be forced to get out of bed. Revived by a shower he could take his time over, luxuriate in, not worrying about anyone else needing it, because he had his own guest’s bathroom, which hadn’t been the case at Daan’s parents’ house, where there was only one. Daan had loaned him a change of underwear (blue boxer shorts, red T-shirt), and to go over the T-shirt instead of his tired sweater, an old black jacket in a loose baggy style Jacob decided he rather liked, even though it was a touch too large, because it made him feel different and more Dutch and therefore less conspicuously English, which amused him, because the designer label inside said Vico Rinaldi.

  The station had been busy and the train was full of gadabout Saturday crowds, tourists with luggage, locals with shopping, a high proportion of younger people with their clutter of backpacks and sports bags, chattery but not loud. They had a robust up-front freshness of look and manner; not at all English, but not alien either; and not as he was himself, Jacob thought, but how he might wish he could be. Tried to pin it down, this quality that attracted, but had come up with nothing better than ‘unaggressive confidence’ before the train pulled in to Haarlem station and most people got off.

  Daan folded his paper and leaned towards Jacob. ‘One more stop. Tessel will be at the verpleeghuis. We won’t stay long, it would tire Geertrui. The nurses know you’re coming, so the doctor will have given Geertrui some extra help to keep the pain down while we’re there. I’ll let you know when it’s time to leave. So it should be okay, nothing to upset you.’

  Nothing to upset you felt like a rebuke, a judgement even, as if Daan were saying that Jacob was not up to the situation, not strong enough to witness the dying woman’s pain and so must be protected from it. And that he was an outsider, not one of the family, a visitor who, good manners dictated, must not be troubled by family torments. He resented both judgement and fact. But, he wondered as the train moved on, should he react in this way to what was, after all, a passing remark, not meant as he had taken it? But, meaning it or not, Daan had touched a nerve.

  Determination gathered in him, felt like a force-field round his spine, that he would not turn away from whatever he found or hold it off, but accept it. Enter in to it. And to do this for his own sake. For the sake of his self-respect.

  This much of an answer he knew. It surprised and pleased him. Not such a wimp after all, then. Perhaps.

  *

  He had expected the nursing home to be a cosy little building where a handful of old people quietly spent their last days with the comforting help of dutiful nurses. Instead, the building Daan led him to was huge. Three storeys with several wings branching out from the central block in the middle of a well-tended park provided with plenty of trees and flowers and patches of garden no doubt meant to dress the place up to look like a well-to-do country house or a luxury health spa. But nothing could disguise the institutional bulk of the ‘home’ or the endless comings and goings of cars and vans and buses and bikes and various vehicles of a clinical type, and the people—patients, visitors, medical staff—who thus arrived and left. In fact, not a home in any honest sense of the word but a busy hospital for the treatment of the legion of ailments, failings, accidents and calamities, including the final requirement of death, that afflict the elderly, senior citizens, those in the autumn of their years.

  And how, thought Jacob, the human race insists on conning itself with euphemisms. As in: passed away, lost, met his end, taken from us, breathed her last, called to God, departed, at rest. Not to mention the more comic coinings not advised for use in the presence of the newly bereaved, such as cocked his toes, gave up the ghost, croaked, kicked the bucket, pegged out, gone to meet her maker, dropped off the hook, snuffed it. All meaning nothing else than dead. The only word that said exactly what is meant. For which reason, it seemed, people preferred not to use it.

  By now they were inside the main entrance, which Daan said was called (another euphemism) the village square. To Jacob it looked like it had been designed with the departure hall of a small domestic airport in mind. Appropriate in the ci
rcumstances, come to think of it. Not only check-in desk (receptie, informatie), but shops, library, flower stall, café, areas to sit and wait, even rooms for meetings. All set about with indoor trees and bushes growing in chunky plastic tubs. And as with passengers and their hangers-on something of the same pretence of calm and cheerfulness inadequately disguising boredom, anxiety, impatience, relief and a general desire not to be there at all, radiating like emotional sweat off the patients-to-be and those accompanying them, the ones seeing-off and those being-seen-off, the relatives and friends taking-away and the soon to be expatients being-taken-away. (The corpses of the dead ones, he supposed, would be carted off from some discreet exit at the back of the building so that none of the living, patients or guests, would be faced with the final reality of the reason for them being there.)

  Jacob was relieved that Daan did not linger but took him quickly to the lift, which carried them up to the third floor, and then down a wide corridor with windows in bays where people sat overlooking the park. Very pleasant and civilised, Jacob thought, but still a hospital, with hospital sounds and hospital smells. And worst of all, that lukewarm hospital air, flavoured with disinfectant, that seems both clammy and too dry, and also as if it has been breathed and breathed again by fevered lungs and never ever been outside for refreshment. Everywhere, signs of thoughtfulness, of an attempt to make the place into what it was not—soothing modern colours on the walls, well-framed pictures, more real plants in companionable groups, comfortable chairs, cheerful curtains—all better than any hospital he had been in at home, even the newish place where Sarah recently had the hip operation that prevented her from coming to Holland.

  Geertrui was in a room on her own, the only patient like that on the ward. The other rooms held six or four or two. A concession, Daan had explained, a last privilege.

  While Daan approached his grandmother to say his hellos, Jacob observed from the door, hesitating between out and in. Geertrui’s white-haired head was propped up on a bank of white pillows in a white iron-frame bed shrouded (the only right word) with white coverings. The walls of the room were pink. On a white bedside cabinet, a still-life of colour: an earthenware bowl of oranges, apples, pears, bananas; a blue glass vase brimming with red roses; a bronze-framed triptych of photographs displaying pictures of two men and a woman. The woman Jacob recognised was Mrs van Riet, Daan’s mother, younger than now. One of the men was Daan. The other man he didn’t know. Not a hint of medical gear, no sign of sickness. But he guessed this was deliberate. Like a living room tidied up for a visitor. In the air, though, he sensed tension, an uneasy silence.

  She’s like a moth, Jacob thought, who has settled for the winter, prepared for hibernation. But her large sunken eyes were alert, and took him in, peering from either side of Daan’s head as he stooped to give his grandmother, slowly, delicately, a three-barrelled kiss.

  Mrs van Riet was sitting in the only arm chair at one side of the bed. She got up and came to Jacob.

  ‘I’m sorry about the trouble you had,’ she said in subdued tones. ‘Are you comfortable at Daan’s?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll take you to the ceremony at Oosterbeek. I’ll come for you at nine fifteen. Please be ready, we mustn’t miss the train. We’ll talk then.’

  ‘Nine fifteen. Right.’

  ‘Now I’ll go and have coffee while you visit Mother. She insists it must be alone.’

  Mrs van Riet went, leaving her unhappiness behind like a vapour trail.

  Daan was standing by Geertrui’s bed, waiting for Jacob to be ready. Geertrui lay unmoving, her eyes, a washed-out blue, fixed on him.

  ‘Geertrui,’ Daan said, ‘dit is Jacob.’

  When he did not move, because he could not, Geertrui, smiling, said, ‘Please. Come.’

  Daan placed a chair where Jacob could be seen by Geertrui without her having to lift her head.

  The expression ‘walking on eggs’ made sense to him for the first time as Jacob crossed the room and perched on the edge of the chair. It was the intensity of Geertrui’s scrutiny that unnerved him. This was not a woman you would wrangle with. Necessary to sit with a straight back. Yet there was hardly anything of her. So little sign of a body under the cover that she seemed like a disembodied head and a pair of arms lying on the counterpane that ended in fine small hands, almost a girl’s except that they were mottled with the brown spots of old age.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Wesseling,’ Jacob said. ‘Sarah sends you her greetings. She also sent a gift and a letter, but they’re in my things at … Well, I expect you know.’

  ‘I’ve explained,’ Daan said. ‘I’ll leave you together. I’ll just be along the corridor. Geertrui says she’ll send you to me when it’s time for us to leave. Okay?’

  Jacob nodded. Daan gave him a look that meant ‘Don’t stay long.’ Then spoke to his grandmother in Dutch and kissed her again. There was a tone in his voice Jacob had not heard before. Very soft, tender, precise. Like a lover to the beloved.

  All the while Geertrui did not take her eyes off Jacob. Daan went, closing the door quietly behind him. There was a long silence before she spoke.

  ‘You have your grandfather’s eyes.’

  Jacob smiled. ‘That’s what my grandmother says.’

  ‘And his smile.’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘His … nature?’

  ‘Some. Apparently, I’m not as practical as he was. With his hands, I mean. With tools. He liked making things.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Furniture, even. Sarah still uses some of it. And gardening, he loved gardening, whereas I hate it. He was a big reader, and we share that. But I’m not as brave as he was, I’m sure.’

  ‘Have you had cause?’

  ‘To be brave? Does bravery need a cause?’

  ‘There can be none without.’

  For the first time since he entered the room her eyes left him. He could still not take his from her. But without her eyes on him he could relax enough to ease back in his seat.

  After a silence Geertrui said, ‘You live with your grandmother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not with your parents.’

  ‘No.’

  He waited, knowing she wanted him to explain, but pretending innocence. Would she wheedle or come at it direct? A game he played with Sarah.

  ‘Are you going to tell me why?’

  Direct. Not a woman for pastime games. Not now anyway, with so little time left to pass.

  ‘If you’d like me to.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He knew this mood also. Tell me a story, entertain me. Was that his job today, his reason for being here? Young children like to be told stories to help them go to sleep. Maybe old people like being told stories to help them die. Well, he thought, if that’s why I’m here, I don’t mind. As good a job as any. And a lot easier than conversation. Begin at the beginning, the King said, gravely, and go on till you come to the end.

  ‘You know I have an older sister, Penelope, and a younger brother, Harry? Penny—our father calls her Poppy—is three years older. Harry is eighteen months younger, so he’s fifteen and a half. My father dotes on Penny. Well actually, they dote on each other. I mean, just about verging on the obscene, in my opinion.’ He laughed, but there was no reaction. ‘I know Freud is supposed to have said that sons are in love with their mothers and want to kill their fathers, but in our house, it’s not like that at all. The problem is father loving daughter and vice versa. At least they don’t want to kill Mum.’ Still no reponse. ‘By the way, the mother-son thing is called the Oedipus complex, isn’t it. I wonder if the father-daughter affair has a name as well?’

  ‘Electra,’ said the head from the bed.

  ‘Electra?’

  ‘Electra complex. Daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. You don’t know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Electra convinced her brother Orestes to avenge their father’s murder by their mother’s lover Aegisthus. Go
on with your story.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks. Well, Penny’s an assistant manager in a chain-store boutique. We don’t get on at all. I think she’s a fashion-crazed zombie and she thinks I’m a boring and pretentious snob. At least, that’s her latest accusation. Harry is our mother’s favourite. Not just because he’s the youngest but because she had a hard time having him. He’s good at sport, so our father quite likes him as well, and he plays the oboe in the local youth orchestra. He’s also very handsome. In fact, he’s so good at everything I ought to hate him, but I don’t. I like him a lot, and am very proud of him. We get on fine. He wants to be an acoustical engineer.

  ‘I’m not good at sport, play the piano well enough to annoy anyone who happens to listen, am not particularly handsome, and prefer to be on my own than in with the crowd. So you see, I’m piggy-in-the-middle in our family, and also the odd one out. But I don’t mind because I’ve always had a special kind of feeling for my grandmother and she for me. Mother says that from the time I was born Sarah took me over. It was she who insisted I be called Jacob after my grandfather. Mother was happy with that, but Father was against it.’