A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  Shortly before the brothel was raided by the police, Vratna accepted a loan from her sympathetic client. The older man paid her share of the rent for a window room, which she used with two other girls from Eastern Europe, and so she became a window prostitute. As for the “loan,” which Vratna could never repay, her seeming sympathizer became her most privileged client; he visited her often. Naturally she charged him no fee; in fact, he’d become her pimp without her knowing it. Soon she was paying him half her earnings from her other clients. As Sergeant Hoekstra later thought of him, he was her not-so-sympathetic client.

  He was a retired executive named Paul de Vries, who’d taken up pimping for these illegal Eastern European girls as a kind of sport and pastime. It was no more than an amusing game for him: to fuck young girls, at first for a price but later for free. Eventually, of course, they would be paying him —and he would still be fucking them!

  One Christmas morning—one of only a few recent Christmases that Harry had not taken off—Harry had ridden his bicycle through the new snow in de Wallen; he had wanted to see if any of the prostitutes were working. He’d had an idea, not unlike Ruth Cole’s, that in the new snow of a Christmas morning even the red-light district might look pristine. But Harry had been, uncharacteristically, more sentimental than that: for those few girls who might be working in their window rooms on Christmas morning, Harry had bought some simple presents. Nothing fancy or expensive, just some chocolates and a fruitcake and not more than half a dozen Christmas-tree ornaments.

  Harry knew that Vratna was religious, or at least she’d told him that she was, and for her—just in case she was working—he’d bought a present of slightly more value. Still, he’d paid only ten guilders for it in a secondhand jewelry shop; it was a cross of Lorraine, which the salesgirl had told him was especially popular with young people of unconventional tastes. (It was a cross with two crosspieces, the upper shorter than the lower.)

  It had been snowing hard, and there were almost no visible footprints in de Wallen; some tracks surrounded the one-man urinal by the old church, but in the untracked snow on Vratna’s small street, the Oudekennissteeg, there were no footprints at all. And Harry had been relieved to see that Vratna wasn’t working; her window was dark, her curtain closed, the red light off. He was about to ride on, with his rucksack of humbly inspired Christmas presents, when he noticed that the door to Vratna’s window room was not properly closed. Some snow had drifted inside, and the snow made it difficult for Harry to close the door.

  He’d not meant to look into her room, but he needed to open the door wider before he could close it. He was scuffing the snow off the threshold with his foot—it was not the best weather for his running shoes—when he saw the young woman hanging from the ceiling-light fixture. With the door to the street open, the wind rushed in and caused her hanging body to sway. Harry stepped inside and closed the door against the blowing snow.

  She’d hanged herself that morning, probably a little after the first light of day. She was twenty-three. She was dressed in her old clothes—what she’d worn to the West for her new waitressing job. Because she was not dressed (which is to say, un dressed) as a prostitute, Harry hadn’t at first recognized her. Vratna had put on all her jewelry, too—what there was of it. It would have been superfluous for Harry to have given the girl another cross. There were a half-dozen crosses around her neck; there were nearly as many crucifixes, too.

  Harry didn’t touch her, or anything in her room. He merely noted that, from the chafe marks at her throat—not to mention the damage to the ceiling plaster—she must not have suffocated right away. She had thrashed for a while. A musician rented the apartment above Vratna’s window room. Normally he might have heard the hanging girl—at least the falling plaster and the presumed grinding of the ceiling-light fixture—but the musician went away every Christmas. Harry usually went away for Christmas, too.

  On his way to the police station to report the suicide—for he already knew it was not a murder—he’d looked back at the Oudekennissteeg only once. In the new-fallen snow, the tire marks from his bicycle were the sole evidence of life on the tiny street.

  Opposite the old church, there was only one woman working as a window prostitute that Christmas morning; she was one of the fat black women from Ghana, and Harry paused to give her all his presents. She was happy to have the chocolates and the fruitcake, but she told him she had no use for the Christmas-tree ornaments.

  As for the cross of Lorraine, Harry had kept it for a while. He even bought a chain for it, although the chain cost him more than the cross had. Then he’d given the cross and the chain to a girlfriend of the moment, but he made the mistake of telling the girlfriend the whole story. It was one of those things he was always misjudging about women. He’d thought she would take the cross and the story as a compliment. After all, he’d been genuinely fond of the Russian girl; this particular cross of Lorraine had some sentimental value for him. But no woman likes to hear how cheap a piece of jewelry was, or that it was purchased for another woman—not to mention for an illegal alien, a Russian whore who’d hanged herself in her place of business.

  The girlfriend of that moment had given Harry back his gift; it was of no sentimental value to her . At the moment Harry didn’t have a girlfriend, nor did he imagine that he would ever be inclined to bestow his cross of Lorraine on another woman—even if there were another woman.

  Harry Hoekstra had never suffered from a shortage of girlfriends. The problem, if it was a problem, was that he always had this or that girl for only a moment. He was not a libertine. He never cheated on his girls—he had them only one at a time. But whether they left him or he left them, they didn’t last.

  Now, stalling at the task of cleaning out his desk, Sergeant Hoekstra—at fifty-seven and fully intending to retire later in the fall, when he would be fifty-eight—wondered if he would always be “ unattached.” Surely his attitude toward women, and theirs toward him, was at least partially job-related. And at least part of the reason why Harry had opted for an early retirement was that he wanted to see if his assumption was true.

  He’d been eighteen when he’d first gone to work as a cop on the street; at fifty-eight, he would have put in forty years of service. Naturally Sergeant Hoekstra would be given a slightly smaller pension than if he waited until the standard retirement age of sixty-one, but as an unmarried man with no children, he wasn’t in need of a bigger pension. And the men in Harry’s family had all died fairly young.

  While Harry was in excellent health, he was taking no chances on his genetic predisposition. He wanted to travel; he also wanted to try living in the country. Although he’d read a lot of travel books, he’d taken few trips. And although Harry liked travel books, he liked novels still more.

  Looking at his desk, which he was loath to open, Sergeant Hoekstra thought: It’s about time for a new novel by Ruth Cole, isn’t it? It must have been five years since he’d read Not for Children . How long did it take her to write a novel, anyway?

  Harry had read all of Ruth’s novels in English, for Harry’s English was quite good. And in the streets of the red-light district, in “the little walls,” English was increasingly becoming the language of the prostitutes and their customers— bad English was the new language of de Wallen . (Bad English, Harry thought, would be the language of the next world.) And as a man whose next life was about to begin at fifty-eight, Sergeant Hoekstra, a soon-to-be-retired civil servant, wanted his English to be good.

  The Reader

  Sergeant Hoekstra’s women usually complained about his indifference to shaving; that he was clearly not vain may have attracted the women in the first place, but eventually they took his lack of attention to his face as a sign that he was indifferent to them . When the stubble on his face began to resemble a beard, he shaved; Harry didn’t like beards. Sometimes he would shave every other day, sometimes only once a week; other times he would get up in the night and shave, so that the woman he was with would wake
up to a different-looking man in the morning.

  Harry exhibited a similar indifference toward his clothes. Harry’s job was walking. He wore sturdy, comfortable running shoes; jeans were the only pants of necessity. He had short, bandy legs, a flat stomach, and the nonexistent bum of a young boy. From the waist down, he was built a lot like Ted Cole—compact, all function—but his upper body was more developed. He went to a gym every day—he had the well-rounded chest of a weight lifter—but because he generally wore long-sleeved, loose-fitting shirts, the casual observer never knew how muscular he was.

  These shirts were the only colorful part of his wardrobe; most of his women commented that they were too colorful, or at least too busy. He liked shirts “with a lot going on,” he used to say. They were the kind of shirts you could never wear with a tie, but Harry almost never wore a tie, anyway.

  He rarely wore his police uniform, either. He was as familiar to everyone in de Wallen as the most flamboyant and long-in-residence of the window prostitutes were; he walked the district for at least two or three hours every working day or night.

  For a jacket, he preferred windbreakers or something water-repellent—always in dark, solid colors. He had an old leather jacket that was lined with wool flannel for the cold weather, but all his jackets, like his shirts, were loose-fitting. He didn’t want his Walther ninemillimeter, which he carried in a shoulder holster, to make a visible lump. Only if it was raining hard would he wear a baseball cap; he didn’t like hats, and he never wore gloves. One of Harry’s ex-girlfriends had described his mode of dress as “basic thug.”

  His hair was dark brown but turning gray, and Harry was as indifferent to it as he was to shaving. He had it cut too short; then he let it grow too long.

  As for his police uniform, Harry had worn it much more frequently in his first four years, when he’d served in the west of Amsterdam. He still had his apartment there, not because he was too lazy to move but because he liked the luxury of having two functioning fireplaces—one in his bedroom. His chief indulgences were firewood and books; Harry loved reading by a fire, and he owned so many books that it would have been a chore for him to move anywhere . Besides, he liked bicycling to work and home again; he believed in putting some distance between himself and de Wallen . As familiar as he was with the red-light district, and as recognizable a figure as he was in its crowded streets—for de Wallen was his real office, “the little walls” were the well-known drawers of his real desk—Harry Hoekstra was a loner.

  What Harry’s women also complained about was how much he remained apart . He would rather read a book than listen. And regarding talk: Harry would rather build a fire and go to bed and watch the light flickering on the walls and on the ceiling. He also liked to read in bed.

  Harry wondered if only his women were jealous of books. It was their principal preposterousness, he believed. How could they be jealous of books ? He found this all the more preposterous in the cases of those women he’d met in bookstores. Harry had met a lot of women in bookstores; others, although fewer lately, he’d met in his gym.

  Harry’s gym was the one on the Rokin where Ruth Cole’s publisher, Maarten Schouten, had taken her. At fifty-seven, Sergeant Hoekstra was a little old for most of the women who went there. (Young women in their twenties telling him that he was in terrific shape “for a guy his age” would never be the high point of his day.) But he’d recently dated one of the women who worked at the gym, an aerobics instructor. Harry hated aerobics; he was strictly a weight lifter. In a day, Sergeant Hoekstra walked more than most people walked in a week—or in a month. And he rode his bicycle everywhere. What did he need aerobics for?

  The instructor had been an attractive woman in her late thirties, but she was given to missionary zeal; her failure to convert Harry to her exercise of choice had hurt her feelings, and no one in Harry’s recent memory had so resented his reading. The aerobics instructor had not been a reader, and—like all of Harry’s women—she’d refused to believe that Harry had never had sex with a prostitute. Surely he’d at least been tempted.

  He was “tempted” all the time—although, with each passing year, the temptation grew less. In his almost forty years as a cop, he’d been “tempted” to kill a couple of people, too. But Sergeant Hoekstra hadn’t killed anybody, and he hadn’t had sex with a prostitute.

  Yet there was no question that Harry’s girlfriends were uniformly uneasy about his relationships with those women in the windows— and, in ever-increasing numbers, on the streets. He was a man of the streets, Harry was, which may have immeasurably contributed to his fondness for books and fireplaces; that he’d been a man of the streets for almost forty years definitely contributed to his desire to try living in the country. Harry Hoekstra had had it with cities—with any city.

  Only one of his girlfriends had liked to read as much as Harry did, but she read the wrong books; among the women Harry had slept with, she was also the closest to being a prostitute. She was a lawyer who did volunteer work for a prostitutes’ organization, a liberal feminist who’d told Harry that she “identified” with prostitutes.

  The organization for prostitutes’ rights was called De Rode Draad (The Red Thread); at the time Harry met the lawyer, The Red Thread enjoyed an uneasy alliance with the police. After all, both the police and The Red Thread were concerned for the prostitutes’ safety. Harry always thought that it should have been a more successful alliance than it was.

  But, from the beginning, the board members of The Red Thread had rubbed him the wrong way: in addition to the more militant prostitutes and ex-prostitutes, there were those women (like his lawyer friend) who’d struck him as impractical feminists—concerned mainly with making the organization an emancipation movement for prostitutes. Harry had believed, from the beginning, that The Red Thread should be less concerned with manifestos and more concerned with protecting the prostitutes from the dangers of their profession. Yet he’d preferred the prostitutes and the feminists to the other members of the board—the labor-union types, and what Harry called the “how-to-get-subsidized people.”

  The lawyer’s name was Natasja Frederiks. Two thirds of the women who worked for The Red Thread were prostitutes or ex-prostitutes; at their meetings, the nonprostitutes (like Natasja) were not allowed to speak. The Red Thread paid only two and a half salaries to four people; everyone else involved there was a volunteer. Harry had been a volunteer, too.

  In the late eighties, there’d been more interaction between the police and The Red Thread than there was now. For one thing, the organization had failed to attract the foreign prostitutes—not to mention the “illegals”—and there were hardly any Dutch prostitutes left in the windows or on the streets.

  Natasja Frederiks wasn’t doing volunteer work for The Red Thread anymore; she’d become disillusioned, too. (Natasja now called herself an “ex-idealist.”) She and Harry had first met at a regular Thursday-afternoon meeting for first-time prostitutes. Harry thought these meetings were a good idea.

  He sat in the back of the room and never spoke unless asked a direct question; he was introduced to the first-time prostitutes as “one of the more sympathetic members of the police force,” and the new girls were encouraged to talk with him after the usual business of the meeting was over. As for the “usual business,” there was often an older prostitute who told the first-timers what to be careful of. One of the old-timers was Dolores de Ruiter, or “Red” Dolores, as Harry and everyone in the redlight district knew her. Rooie Dolores had been a hooker in de Wallen, and later on the Bergstraat, a lot longer than Natasja Frederiks had been a lawyer.

  What Rooie always told the new girls was to make sure the customer had a hard-on. She wasn’t kidding. “If the guy’s in the room with you— I mean the second he puts his foot in the door—he should have an erection.” If he didn’t, Rooie warned the new girls, maybe he hadn’t come for sex. “And never shut your eyes,” Rooie always admonished the new girls. “Some guys like you to shut your eyes. Just don’
t .”

  There’d been nothing unpleasant or even disappointing in his sexual relationship with Natasja Frederiks, but what Harry most vividly remembered was how they had argued about books. Natasja had been born to argue, and Harry didn’t like to argue; but he enjoyed having a girlfriend who read as much as he did, even if she read the wrong books. Natasja read nonfiction of the change-the-world variety; she read tracts . They were mostly books of leftist-leaning wishful thinking—Harry didn’t believe that the world (or human nature) could be changed. Harry’s job was to understand and accept the existing world; maybe he made the world a little safer, he liked to think.

  He read novels because he found in them the best descriptions of human nature. The novelists Harry favored never suggested that even the worst human behavior was alterable. They might morally disapprove of this or that character, but novelists were not world-changers; they were just storytellers with better-than-average stories to tell, and the good ones told stories about believable characters. The novels Harry loved were complexly interwoven stories about real people.

  He didn’t enjoy detective novels or so-called thrillers. (Either he figured out the plot too soon or the characters were implausible.) He would never have marched into a bookstore demanding to be shown the classics or the newest literary fiction, but he ended up reading more “classics” and more “literary” novels than any other kind— although they were all novels of a fairly conventional narrative structure.

  Harry didn’t object to a book being funny, but if the writer was only comic (or merely satirical), Harry felt let down. He liked social realism, but not if the writer was without any imagination—not if the story wasn’t enough of a story to keep him guessing about what was going to happen next. (A novel about a divorced woman who spends a weekend at a resort hotel, where she sees a man she imagines having an affair with—but she doesn’t; she just goes home again—was not enough of a novel to satisfy Sergeant Hoekstra.)