He’s been right behind me, Herbert thinks. He knows everything. He’s been spying on me from an untraceable hiding place. But he’s up on the roof now. By the tracks I can see he hasn’t turned back.
He fills his hands with snow and rubs his face with it.
I must keep a cool head, bring things to a close quickly. But let’s tackle the genever bottle first.
He retreats a few steps and closes the hatch.
Warily, Herbert crosses the square, looks up at the windows of his apartment.
It looks uninhabited, he thinks. The lace curtains are yellow with brown rings. Is that something moving there, behind the curtains? He shakes his head and pats his cheeks with his fingers. I mustn’t turn into a shying horse. I can see from here the window’s ajar. The wind’ll be stirring the curtains. How long has it been open? Bad for the plants. I’ll shut it before I leave. Liesbeth’s head’s been standing on the roof for eight hours already. If it’s not completely stripped by now I’ll leave it there till tomorrow morning; then I’ll wrap it in plastic and put it in my suitcase. I’ll set it down among the cobbles along the Dordogne.
He feels in his pockets for the key and looks up. The chests of the seagulls protrude over the edge of the roof as though they are part of the building’s trimmings.
‘You’ll miss me,’ he mutters. ‘Tighten your belts: that’s all I can recommend.’
Right by his feet, on the pavement, lies a dirty-white sphere. Herbert bends down and picks it up.
Don’t look round, he thinks, I’m just picking something up; everyone does that from time to time. And I’ve even read that they peck the eyes out of babies lying unguarded on the beach, and devour them.
He puts his key in the lock and enters the dark stairwell.
It feels like the devil’s egg of a stinkhorn, he thinks. I’m still able to walk up the stairs, but I’ve got to take my time over it.
The front door opens behind him. A neighbour comes in; she halts at the letter box.
‘Such a long time I haven’t seen your wife,’ she says. ‘Has she got to stay in again?’
‘I took her to the train last week; she wasn’t feeling too well; she’s gone south.’
‘Taken the Sun Express to the deep blue sea?’ the woman asks.
‘Quite, quite,’ Herbert replies. ‘To the deep blue sea. I’ll be following her tomorrow.’
Carefully, he slips off into the dark stairwell.
That eye was as hard as a billiard ball this morning, he thinks, clenching his fingers. Now it’s soft and squishy. There’s a thaw on: spring has sprung.
Translated by Richard Huijng
16
Cees Nooteboom
Paula
1
Ghosts I do not believe in, but photographs are another matter. A woman wants you to think of her, and contrives to make you come across a photograph of her. The dead, if neglected for too long, can affect you that way. Or perhaps I should say: if they feel neglected they can affect you in that way. In my case neglect does not apply, because I still think of Paula pretty often. I don’t know about the others, I hardly ever see them these days unless by chance. Gilles is dead, Alexander got his degree in the end and is now a medical inspector for the social services in Groningen, Ollie has moved to the States, and the Doctor’s an invalid, last I heard. So that is not much use to her, because she is without doubt one of the unquiet dead. It’s down to me, then. Perhaps by default, but nevertheless.
All right then, Paula, here I am, remembering you. I’m good at that, always was.
Because I never stopped. It’s an eternity since I’ve been living on my own. Excess baggage disposed of long ago, but there seems to be no real end to it. I keep finding more. Top-floor flat in a modern building, sparsely furnished, quiet neighbours, peaceful, views over the wide polder landscape. People seldom visit; when they do they look about them warily like cats scanning the surrounds for danger. Bed, table, chair, all streamlined. Minimalist, remarked the Baron with that pale smile of his, that one time he dropped by. He had come on account of an old gambling debt, stood there with the air of a bailiff assessing my possessions in case I didn’t cough up. I had no intention of coughing up, not then and not now. I had been expecting that visit for years; I knew he’d turn up eventually. Old habits die hard. I’m not sure how your memory fares these days, but I have no doubt you remember the Baron. Seeing you two dancing together was always a treat, especially to the Rolling Stones. Old men themselves these days. He’d go into a sort of mechanical trance like a wound-up robot, with you rippling and swirling around him, but he always linked up at the supreme moment, and the result was a pulsating machine that drew everyone’s eyes. As my eyes are now drawn to you. Your photograph, propped up against my white wall. Well I never, there’s Paula, said the Baron when he was there. Long time no see.
Reminds me of a Zen monastery, was another comment he made, but I have never been in a Zen monastery. I just wanted to keep things simple, no clutter, just bare, white space. I’m getting there. I don’t entertain, so one chair for reading is enough. Same one for reading and eating. All my walls are white, as you may have noticed. No idea what your sort do or don’t see. I detest looking at photographs of me when I was young, but it may not be the same for you. You are incapable of ageing, so you’ve never looked any different. How many years has it been? Forty? Forty-five? You made the cover of Vogue magazine, and we were all bursting with pride, even the girls. Nothing about the picture has aged, not you, nor the photograph itself. Last year you suddenly turned up among some newspaper cuttings from the old days – Provos in Amsterdam, love-ins, sit-ins, all that stuff. It’s hard to imagine any of it actually taking place. I was busy for months; it was like a military campaign. Suitcases, cupboards, folders. That steamer trunk with the diaries was the last to go, and that’s where I found you. All earmarked for the incinerator, with the exception of the photograph. You standing behind a closed window, left elbow raised against the frame in such a way that the just-lit cigarette between your fingers is slightly higher than your head. You wouldn’t see a model smoking on the cover of Vogue today, nor would the fingernails be so short. It was a brazen, sexy image then, and that still holds today. Thin, boyish body. A white bandeau wrapped around the torso, no doubt a fashion statement at the time. Intimations of a double mastectomy. The boobless wonder, said the Baron. The Writer used a more flowery expression, borrowed from some poet whose name I don’t recall. Dark hipster trousers, right hand in pocket, skin sprinkled with the raindrops clinging like tears to the window panes, your face looming out from the dimness beyond, lips slightly parted, gaze directed out of the picture. I can’t look at it for very long. There you are in the realm of the dead, and yet you are about to speak. I can hear you now, that voice we will all remember to the end of our days, the hint of rawness, hoarseness, drink, cigarettes, a kind of aspirated prelude to your utterances. Har har, and then you’d be off, working your wiles not one of us could withstand.
A lethal weapon in poker games, that voice of yours, capable of turning a lame hand into a full house.
2
I have taken my chair and am sitting in front of you. In a home with only one chair that means something. I have put your photograph up on the window sill with a couple of smooth beach pebbles along the bottom edge to keep it in place. It’s wet outside, which fits in with the raindrops on your window pane. This way you have rain in front of you as well as behind. I have this idea you can see me, but I suspect it is not the case. Which is probably just as well, because you might not even recognize me. That is also why I’m not saying these things out loud, although it’s in contradiction to our face-to-face arrangement. I never hear other people’s voices here, and no one hears mine. I think.
It was the Year of Our Habit. That is what we called each year back then, because we were hooked, and we knew it. A shoeless evening was a waste of time. I can still feel the touch of the cards when I held the bank, I can feel it, and I can hear the s
ound. When you first arrived I was also holding the bank, left hand resting on the wooden side of the shoe, right hand poised, fingertips on the first card. The game is more generally known as baccarat or chemin de fer, but we had our own variant with our own rules, and we called it shoe, that was enough. It was shoe every evening, including that one. The room was dimly lit except for the table, which stood in a pool of light so the only faces you could see properly were those of the players. The doorbell rang, someone went to answer it and those of us who were not playing looked up expectantly. There was a hush, something that only happened when strangers turned up, people we did not know. You arrived alone, which was unusual, but no questions were asked. That was not our style. Much as we disliked interruptions, we broke off to shake hands, that’s when we first heard the voice. Cinco had given the address, you said. Cinco, remember him? The perennial loner? Checked tweed cap, used to prop up the bar at Hoppe’s? One-time city councillor for Traffic Safety because we had all voted for him. Har har. Cinco, who stopped coming after a while. Dead. This will be my refrain, I’m afraid. Can’t be helped, it’s part of my life nowadays. I lifted my hand from the shoe and set the stake. One hundred guilders. Perhaps I was just trying to impress you, it was still a lot of money back then. André was sitting to my left. Normally cautious, this time he called suivi. I drew the cards, inspected them. Two nines and a six, excellent hand. Over the players’ heads I looked at your face, eager, covetous. And I was not the only one: the Baron, Gilles, Nigel, even Tico and the Prodigy were looking, too. This was duly noted by the womenfolk, standing by with hackles raised and claws at the ready. It took a while for you to get them under your thumb. No, that’s not right – to get them to love you the way we did. Har har. To the women your laugh sounded different: hoarser, deeper, sweeter. I held the bank ten times or so. Two hundred, four hundred, eight hundred, banco each time, till I could ‘take chocolate’. You were a fast learner. Banco suivi, banco avec. Get it in the neck. That was ever the Writer’s response, we expected it. You lost time after time but in the end, when the stake was back to eight hundred, you called banco.
The hubbub subsided. I drew the cards slowly. You held them as you must have seen them do in films, tightly together at first, as if they were one card. You raised them close to your chest, still as one. Only then did you slowly lift them to eye level, spreading them fractionally, just enough to check the values. Har, you said, meaning ‘a card’. That was the first time I lost to you. From then on you were one of us.
But that is putting it mildly. It was more like you had always been one of us. Paula? Oh, known her for years.
Years? How long that period lasted I do not know, but what I do know is that everything shrivelled after you died. We followed somewhat from a distance what was going on in the rest of the world: Vietnam, riots in Amsterdam, squatters, cold war, the H-bomb, the Club of Rome with its apocalyptic forecasts, the first oil crisis, Prague ’68.
For most people the real war was still quite recent, clearly there were new conflicts that would bring even greater calamities, but, as Nigel would say with cool assurance, those calamities would be on a very different scale from what all the current fuss was about. We believed him, which probably had more than anything else to do with the fact that he always won. Besides, we had other things on our minds. Nigel’s field was mathematics, where order reigned. The world was chaos. We were rather vague, the whole lot of us, but the game was crystal clear.
Dodo and Gilles lived in a canal-side house in the southern part of Amsterdam. The canal was a poor imitation of the old ones in the centre, and more of a boundary between the city and the new suburbs that were springing up back then. As the Writer used to say, it was like having to cross a moat to gain access to their castle. Writer was his real name, and that he wrote for a living was a bonus. The Baron had introduced Wintrop, his associate in vague dealings with stocks and shares which they never discussed, not even with André and Gilles, who played the stock market themselves, or had done, that never became clear. Nothing was clear, really. There was no hierarchy. The Jewish Prodigy was studying to become a surgeon, Nieges dealt in dodgy antiques, and Merel ran a small travel agency with third-world destinations from a little office in the Pijp neighbourhood. Nigel, whose name jarred with his appearance of someone languishing in Dostoevsky’s basement, was studying maths, paying his way by playing poker at a private club from which we were barred. Tico was an agent for chartreuse wines and an obscure brand of champagne. The Doctor owed his name to having dropped out of medical school. Remember them? Ollie was with André; she stayed in Texas when he died. Absent friends and the dead, such are my companions.
Merel and Tico are still together, apparently. Like me they lead what I call shadow-lives, or rather, like me, they never came out of the shade. There were those of us who earned real money, those who already had it, and others like me who scraped it together here and here, but money was never an issue. How you got by I never discovered. You did some modelling, but not on a regular basis, and yet you never seemed to be out of pocket. The Writer published books we didn’t read, the Baron was a district judge somewhere, the Jewish Prodigy became a successful surgeon though he didn’t like to admit it, Merel’s agency flourished when immigration from Surinam took off, but money was never discussed, not by any of us. Nigel kept the records of the debts, which amounted to endless rounds of figures being cancelled out against each other. We were all permanently in debt. Every few weeks Nigel would say it was time to settle accounts, which would duly take place the following session.
3
So what is it about remembering the dead? Yes I know, I won’t get an answer to that, nor to the question I really want to ask, which is, How is it that the older you get the more your life begins to look like an invention? Hard to say which is worse, getting old or being dead, but then you have never been old and I have never been dead.
I think the reason I have made the place so bare and empty is that I don’t want my invention to bear any resemblance to anyone else’s, though that’s nonsense, of course, because at best it’ll only be another invention, one that you do not come across that often. You knew all of those things all the time. You were an avid reader, but there was always a niggle, as if there was something missing. It was from you I got that idea about invention. We had been to see a film, which I found moving, as I remember. Almost the real thing, you scoffed as we left the cinema. Everything is a copy of something else, it’s hardly worth living when some guy can come along and squeeze your whole life into a ninety-minute feature film or a book you read in two days. To each his own novel, I say, but even that would take too long. Imitation, that’s all there is. I believe I was shocked; in any case I was lost for words. You went on to say something about time being compacted, and I could almost feel it happening. We were walking from Leidseplein to Vondelpark, where the gravel underfoot intensified the sensation. Our steps keeping pace with physical fact struck an accusatory note, as if they were clamouring to be conflated into a film sequence or into a line in a novel like every other. Nigel, who rarely said anything remotely personal, once remarked in the middle of a game, Paula, you’re in too much of a hurry to live. Nigel, another conquest. Nigel, who was having an affair with Dodo, who was married to Gilles. A whole pile of novels. You tried us all, tried all the films. Maybe Nigel was the only one you ever really cared about, but maybe not. So mysterious-looking with that white face of his, was all you said on the subject. He was the only one you couldn’t have. You had me, easily. There was no mystery about me then, there still isn’t. I went all out for you from that very first evening, and that was a story you’d read a hundred times already. The only time we made love you answered my transparency with yours: I don’t see what’s so special about fucking. C’est un geste rendu, no more than that. No less either. And afterwards you said: Evidently you and I were not made for each other. Don’t look so miserable, this is only the beginning. Good to get that out of the way. Best friend I ever had. It w
asn’t you saying that, it was me, and yet I never really knew how you felt about me. Sometimes you gave me a look as if you were hiding something. Three weeks out in the Niger desert, by jeep to Tamanrasset. You came up with the tickets after you’d fleeced us all that unforgettable night when it all went so fast Nigel could hardly keep the score. You were holding a bank that seemed impossible to break, the chocolate steadily melting over the table in your direction. Shoe, banco, suivi, chocolate. For the unthinkable contingency that you might have forgotten, chocolate was the profit you could take out of the bank if the stakes were too low. Banco meant you only wanted to place a bet equal to the bank total. Suivi meant you bet banco again after losing. The trip was unforgettable. I still spend some time in the desert, any desert, every year. En route you made out with one or two stray men. I won’t embarrass you, you said, I’ll say you’re my brother. In which case I’ll have to slit their throats, I said, you don’t give your sister up to the first caravan that comes along. But we had agreed: no jealousy. That was the deal.
I spent such evenings writing my own story, alone in a tent, dogs howling all across the oasis. My only pride was that it didn’t resemble any stories I knew. Whether you felt the same I don’t know. You made no comment, just gave an angry, rapacious look, as if you were left wanting.
Were you unhappy? What a crap question, you’d have said. Then, quickly, an arm round my shoulder, and a whispered – you could whisper, too – I wouldn’t have gone on a trip like this with anyone else. Wouldn’t and couldn’t. If you fancy a fuck just say so, we have all the decor we need right here: heart of Africa, palm trees, camels, stars. Har har.
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 31