Their drinks arrive. Madison had asked for a Kir Royale. She tastes it and makes a face. ‘Taste this, would you?’ she asks.
Barshay tastes it.
‘That’s disgusting,’ he says. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
They walk to the door.
‘So now what?’ Madison asks once they’re outside.
He looks at his watch. He has no idea. That’s not like him at all, he always has ideas, plans, suggestions, but right now he doesn’t know where they should go.
‘Most of the children in Chinese orphanages are girls, because no one wants them. At least not in China,’ he says in the hope that he will come up with something, if only he keeps talking.
‘If I had been a boy, I don’t think my mother would have wanted me either,’ Madison says with a pride that Barshay finds touching.
He leans over. He kisses her, and she lets him. She tastes like lemonade concentrate. There’s still a wad of chewing gum in her mouth. The chewing gum doesn’t get in their way.
After the kiss, they walk rather aimlessly in the direction of 14th St.
‘And why haven’t you ever tried to find your biological parents?’ Barshay asks.
‘I was afraid we wouldn’t have anything to say to each other.’
Once again, her reply touches him. Of course, imagine you met your parents and then a silence descended. A painful silence. It could happen. They kiss again. Longer this time. Less carefully. As though they’ve been doing this for a while.
He notices that she has taken out her chewing gum, without him seeing it.
‘Now what?’ she asks finally.
Is he responsible for her entertainment? Is he her chaperone? She is little, but pretty, that’s true. And she touches him. Her answers. Her boldness.
‘I’ve got wine at home. I can make a gin and tonic. And I’ve got some good port.’
‘Port,’ she says.
It is two thirty in the morning, Sunday, 7 November.
‘Have you ever actually been to China?’ Madison wants to know, in the taxi on the way to his apartment.
‘Not yet.’ He looks at her in the semi-darkness of the cab. ‘You’re different,’ he says. It sounds like a confession.
‘Different from who?’
He should really say ‘different from the other women I’ve taken back to my apartment’, but he doesn’t.
‘You’re special,’ he says. ‘I’m a sceptic, I don’t often say that to women. I’ve never said it before. You’re special.’
‘You’re different too,’ Madison says.
They kiss again.
‘Who named you Madison, anyway?’ Barshay asks after another kiss and a brief silence. ‘Your real parents or your adoptive parents?’
‘My adoptive parents. I didn’t have a name yet when I came to them. My real mother didn’t give me a name, because she knew she was going to give me away.’
She takes a compact out of her purse and looks at herself in the little mirror. ‘And who named you Aron?’
‘My parents. I’m not adopted.’
‘Too bad.’
When they get out, he has to help Madison. The heel of her shoe is stuck somewhere. She worms her way free.
Barshay lives in Central Park West.
The night porter greets Barshay coolly. He watches as the psychiatrist walks past. Watches how he stands with the girl, waiting for the elevator, how they enter the elevator.
For a moment, Barshay is afraid he knows what the night porter is seeing.
‘I’m going to go change my trousers,’ Barshay says once they’re inside.
Then he lights three candles, that’s all he has, and dims most of the lights.
He changes quickly in the bedroom. A different sweater, a different pair of pants. No shoes, no socks.
Madison is sitting on the couch, waiting for him.
He pours two glasses of port and sits down next to her.
‘Am I allowed to smoke here?’
‘Rather not. Unless you really have to. Do you really have to?’
‘Not yet. Maybe later.’
She sips at her port.
‘This reminds me of my grandfather,’ she says, after tasting the port. ‘He used to put cherries in it. How old is this port?’
He looks at the bottle.
‘Twenty years. About as old as you are.’
She looks around. ‘So this is where the Chinese baby is going to live?’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘This is going to be the Chinese baby’s house.’
He shows her the room that is reserved for the child he will adopt.
They walk past the freshly painted walls like a couple looking to see whether this house might be something for them.
‘Do you think she’ll like it here?’ he asks.
‘Adopted children are satisfied with almost anything.’
They kiss, they undress each other, they make love, standing up first, then on the floor, in the room reserved for the Chinese baby.
After that she lies down on the couch in the living room, she says she’s hungry. Barshay offers her an apple and a slice of melon.
She eats the apple first, then the melon. They make love again.
Barshay feels like he’s in love. He declares his love to her. She laughs.
They have another glass of port.
It is seven o’clock and growing light out when Madison says: ‘I have to go.’
She puts on her clothes.
‘I want to see you again,’ he says. ‘We could go to a movie. Cook something together. Do you like cooking?’
She takes a pocket diary out of her purse, tears out a page, writes her phone number on it and gives it to Barshay.
‘You have to come back again real soon,’ Barshay says. ‘Then we can cook something together. What kind of food do you like?’
‘I’ll eat anything.’
Before she gets into the elevator she turns and blows a kiss to Barshay, who is standing half-naked in the doorway.
Fifteen minutes later he sends her a text message. ‘I miss you,’ he writes.
Contented, Barshay falls asleep. He is a man who will soon be a father and who, in the face of all probability, has also fallen in love just before he turns forty.
At two in the afternoon he wakes up. It has stopped raining.
He cleans up the living room. A piece of melon, apple peels, an almost empty bottle of port, an empty pack of cigarettes, burnt-out candles. He does it thoroughly, as though by cleaning up he is also clearing away the memory of her.
A pile of old newspapers and magazines he throws away as well; he’s not going to read them now anyway.
It all goes into big plastic bags that he takes downstairs, where he talks to the porter a bit about a leaky tap that needs fixing.
Then he takes his car out of the garage. He feels like going for a drive, out into the woods. It’s nice weather for walking.
On the highway, he sends Madison a text. ‘What are you up to?’ he writes. ‘Are you awake already?’
Outside Tarrytown, Barshay parks the car. He walks for more than hour through the woods. It’s quiet, he doesn’t stick to the path.
He walks, following his intuition, zigzagging through the woods. You couldn’t get lost here anyway. The sensation of being in love grows stronger. You can also save adopted children by starting a relationship with them. Or isn’t being in love the same thing as wanting to save someone?
After his walk, in a restaurant in Tarrytown, he orders a cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream, and sends another text message to Madison. ‘What are you doing?’
It is Sunday evening, a little before six.
Barshay leans back, he looks at the other customers, there are only a couple of them. He imagines how he and Madison adopt a little Chinese baby together, then he starts fantasizing about a vacation. A luxury hotel, a swimming pool, Madison on the diving board. Does she like diving boards?
At ten past six the phone rings. A masked num
ber, he sees.
It isn’t Madison, a man has dialled a wrong number.
The disappointment doesn’t last long. He lets his thoughts flow on to destinations where he might go with Madison. Not like a daydreamer, more like someone who works at a travel agency. Which hotel would be best, how long a flight would be justifiable for a week’s vacation. In any case, he doesn’t want to take her to Florida. He’s been there too often. Miami is done with, there’s nothing left for him to do there.
By nine thirty that evening he still hasn’t heard from her. He drives home and calls out for Thai food, which he eats on the couch, hurriedly and in deep concentration.
On the floor of the room set aside for the little Chinese girl he finds an earring. He places it beside the alarm clock on his nightstand, as though it were a religious ritual.
On Tuesday evening Aron Barshay attends another information meeting at the adoption agency. ‘You will pick up your child at the airport, she will have a little suitcase with her,’ a lady tells them. He is annoyed by the condescending tone in which the lady from the agency speaks to the prospective adoptive parents. As though they were toddlers.
During the break he confers with the other prospective parents.
A few of them agree with him, others have no problem with the way things are going. One couple is afraid to say anything; they’re worried that they won’t be given a Chinese child if they do. Barshay appreciates their honesty.
The enquiries into the persons of single parents are more exhaustive than those for the couples. The prospective adoptive parent has to pay for the investigation too. It costs a fortune. But Barshay doesn’t mind. He makes another appointment with the interviewers, who will come to his home in two weeks’ time for an in-depth interview.
On his way home in the taxi he sends Madison another text message, the sixth one since her visit to his place. She hasn’t reacted to any of them yet. He has already called her twice, maybe the text messages aren’t getting through, but she doesn’t answer and her voicemail box is full.
The next afternoon, after a meeting that was almost exclusively about money, Barshay’s secretary announces that he has visitors. It’s important, apparently. Urgent even. Madison, he thinks. How did she find him? Was it supposed to be a surprise?
But once again, no Madison, and no unexpected visitors from the adoption agency. A man and a woman. About his age, maybe a little older. They apologize a few times for disturbing him at his work, but they were unable to reach him at home.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asks.
His desktop is almost bare. Barshay likes an empty desk.
Once Barshay told a woman: ‘I’m empty inside.’ That shocked her. It’s not a nasty emptiness, though, it’s a tidy emptiness. Inside Aron Barshay, everything is nice and neat.
‘We’re here about a missing person,’ says the woman.
Barshay looks at her; a look that some of his colleagues think looks rehearsed. As though he’s acting. Which may very well be true. A psychiatrist often has to act.
‘We’ve been hired by the girl’s parents,’ the man says. ‘The police are slow.’
From a white envelope, the man produces a photo. Almost tenderly, he shows the photo to Barshay.
‘This is the girl,’ the man says, ‘do you recognize her?’
Barshay looks at the picture.
He looks at the man. Not a man of whom you’d think: He tracks down missing persons.
Then he looks at the photo again.
‘Why are you asking me this?’ Barshay asks.
‘Because we think you saw her recently,’ the woman says. ‘Is that right? Did you see her recently?’
The woman slides the photo over closer to him. She is more forceful than the man. More aggressive.
Barshay picks up the photograph. Even though he doesn’t need to. She’s very recognizable, but still totally different from the way he remembers her.
Barshay rummages in a drawer, pulls out a stick of lip balm and rubs it on his lips.
The photo of Madison makes him melancholy, sad, and that surprises him, that annoys him. What annoys him is the feeling that he misses her. He doesn’t like to miss people. Missing people is more dangerous than a messy desk; it is an illness, the start of an obsession.
‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘I saw her last weekend. Met her, actually.’
The man and woman glance at each other.
‘Where exactly did you meet her?’ the man asks.
Barshay looks at the photograph again. She’s not wearing earrings in this picture, she does have a necklace, though. He recognizes her effortlessly, but in this picture she looks like someone else. Not the girl he met in front of the Soho Grand. Younger, even younger, brazen, even more brazen, a look that says fuck you to everyone and everything. Barshay likes that look. He wishes he had a look like that. First the scepticism, then the middle finger held up to the world, to fate, to culture, to science, to the gods, to the dead heroes, to the woman from the adoption agency, to China.
‘How did you actually happen to come to me?’ Barshay asks. ‘How did you find me?’
The man smiles. ‘That’s our job,’ he says. ‘People leave tracks. They can’t help it.’ He says it with a certain melancholy, as though it would be better if people didn’t leave tracks.
‘I’d really like to help you, but could we continue this conversation in two or three hours, say? Maybe somewhere other than this building? I have some urgent business to attend to.’
Barshay mentions a time and the name of a cafeteria where he eats lunch sometimes, when he doesn’t feel like going to the hospital canteen.
Once he is alone again he pulls a report out of a drawer, a report a colleague wrote; he’s supposed to correct it and comment on it. He reads, but he can’t concentrate on the text.
Barshay takes out his phone and sends Madison a text message, cheerful but urgent. ‘Where are you? Give me a call. I need to talk to you.’
He writes her name on a prescription pad, twice. Then he tries to go back to his colleague’s report on the function of memory among patients suffering from PTSD.
Barshay doesn’t feel like going to the cafeteria, but he goes anyway. He has nothing to hide. He has never had anything to hide. An immaculate sceptic, that’s Aron Barshay.
‘Was she actually alone? When you met her?’ the woman asks after Barshay has told them how they met. The Soho Grand. The rain. The nightclub.
Barshay thinks about it.
‘There wasn’t someone else? Someone talking to her, maybe?’ the man asks.
‘No. I’m the only one she talked to, as far as I know.’ It sounds proud coming from him, it sounds like an achievement. ‘She was standing outside, smoking.’
‘You know that she’s fifteen?’ the woman asks.
‘Jesus.’
He stirs his coffee, he adds a little milk.
‘She never mentioned her age. I thought twenty-two, twenty-three, something like that. Twenty, maybe. She seemed grown-up. We’re talking about the same person, aren’t we? I can barely imagine that, fifteen. That must be a mistake. No one asked her for ID, not even when we went to dance. She wasn’t fifteen.’
Barshay keeps the account of what happened that night to a minimum. He mentions the melon and the apple and the port, but not the lovemaking. He goes into detail about the Chinese baby he is planning to adopt.
‘And that Sunday? What did you do then?’ asks the man.
‘I went hiking, out by Tarrytown. In the woods.’
‘Do you do that often?’
Now it is the man who will not let go.
‘What?’
‘Walk in the woods?’
‘Not often, but often enough not to get lost.’
Barshay takes the subway home. He runs water in the tub and lies in it. He reads the paper. Nothing about Madison. That puts his mind at ease.
Then he leafs through folders from restaurants that deliver. He is unable to choose. He calls hi
s friend, but hangs up after letting it ring twice. Barshay lies down on his bed. He feels more in love than ever.
The people from the agency that looks for missing persons don’t come back to him. Maybe the case has been solved. Still, Barshay doesn’t dare to contact Madison. It’s up to her now, he figures. You shouldn’t force yourself on a fifteen-year-old. You have to give adolescents the time they need.
Again and again, he thinks back on the evening when he fell in love. The dinner with his friend, the hotel, the wine. The recklessness, the enthusiasm that had come over Barshay. The invincibility. The power, the pure power that being in love had given him, that Madison gave him, the way he was touched, the adoption. He wishes he could go travelling with her, he wishes he could say to her: ‘Now we’re going to adopt a baby together, and we won’t leave it at just one. The unwanted children who have no name because they’re so terribly unwanted, we’ll take care of them. You and me. We’ll give them a home. When you think about it logically, we’re all unwanted. Unwanted people who are stuck with an unwanted God, that’s what we are. So don’t feel unwanted. I mean, feel as unwanted as you like, but feel welcome. With me.’
One Thursday evening he calls his travel agency. He books a brief but all-inclusive trip to a Caribbean island.
Two days before his departure for the Caribbean island, he takes a bath in the evening and then goes to lie in bed with a bowl of peanuts. He watches TV, the local station, the news. Sometimes he dozes off, awakes with a start, eats a few peanuts.
At a little past nine thirty a man appears on the TV, talking about a girl they’ve found close to Tarrytown. Her photograph appears on the screen.
Aron Barshay sits straight up in bed. The bowl of peanuts falls to the floor.
He sees men carrying away a bag.
Aron Barshay looks at the TV, he looks at the photo of the girl on the TV. He looks and he looks and he looks, he tries to remember her, he tries to remember himself, the friendly sceptic, the sceptic in love, the psychiatrist who looks like a yoga teacher, but he stands before his own memory as before the gates to paradise, where he is not allowed in.
Translated by Sam Garrett
35
Sanneke van Hassel
Indian Time
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 57