“Don’t think about it too much, just say what comes immediately to mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her that I might not want to answer her question. She moved the poster left and right, up and down against the mirror. I saw how the light changed as she moved it. I pulled gently at the upper right-hand corner of the poster to place it next to the mirror, rather than on top of it. Her hands followed mine. Then I looked at the poster in its reflection.
An energetic “ping” announced our arrival at the twenty-third floor. She moved toward the door. I glanced at the poster once more and said, “It represents a moment of happiness, just before an accident happens.”
The girl stood there frozen, staring at me. I wondered if she hadn’t understood me, or if she thought I had captured the spirit perfectly.
“Can I ask you one more thing?” she said.
I got out of the elevator and followed her into an office. Her name was Jenny. It was her job to bring the characters and the settings of books and screenplays to life. She translated words into images so the director, actors, location scouts, and stylists could familiarize themselves with these characters and settings. It seemed to me her job was the exact opposite of a writer’s. Whereas a writer translates mood and fantasy into words in black and white, Jenny did the opposite, translating those words back into original sentiment.
“What about the poster makes you think of happiness?” she asked.
“The combination of a caravan, a blond boy, and a love letter, all of those images make me think of a family.
“And what about the accident?”
“The accident’s not there. It could happen at any moment; perhaps it’s because these are all static images, frozen in time. Why freeze time unless it’s to avoid an accident?”
She was taken aback by my explanation.
“I’ve never thought that way about a photo,” she said, looking at the poster again. “That’s why I like sharing my work with strangers, because the people who are going to see the film are strangers.”
“It’s just one opinion, my own point of view, it’s colored by my personal experience.”
Her face grew pensive. Then she looked at the poster again and said, “In the movie they won’t be static images. Can you imagine what it would look like then? Can you look at the poster without seeing it as frozen in time?”
“In that case it makes me nostalgic for something that’s been lost.”
“Yes!” she said triumphantly. “That’s exactly what I wanted to capture. I hope other people see it that way, too,” she said enthusiastically. That’s when I realized she was new on the job. “How did you put it before? Your perspective is a product of what you’ve experienced. Let’s hope there are more people who’ve had the same experiences that you and I have.”
I wanted to say that I certainly hoped not, that it was a cruel wish. But I knew that she couldn’t possibly know what she was saying.
“What’s the movie called?” I asked, though I didn’t really want to know.
“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that. You might hear it in the hallways one day, when it’s wrapped and they let us talk about it.”
“I don’t work here, I’m on my way back to Amsterdam.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was looking for someone, but I didn’t find him.”
“Who are you looking for?”
“Sorry, I don’t really have time to go into it, I should leave.”
She looked disappointed. I could have stayed and talked to her for hours, because it had just turned ten and my train didn’t depart until 3:45. But I decided to leave her. She had upset me somehow, and I didn’t want to open up to her.
On the way down, the elevator stopped on the tenth floor, but no one got in. For ten seconds I glanced around the office of a man who didn’t want to talk about his father. I wondered whether he, too, might once have had a conversation with his boss about being friendlier in the office. Probably not, because he was his own boss, and perhaps because he was able to talk about his mother.
Out in the street, the air was clear and dry. My hair behaved differently in the soft breeze than it did in Holland. It moved more freely and returned to its original style more neatly after being blown around.
I had time to kill. The Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood seemed like a good place to go. I got off the U-Bahn at Schönhauser Allee. I walked past a shopping center, in search of a more peaceful place. The cold streets of the old laborers’ district felt familiar to me. I wandered along wide streets lined with bars and wondered whether anyone would think I was German, whether I looked like I fit in. Prenzlauer
Berg had been fixed up, but it retained the same feeling as it had years ago. I imagined Jenny lived on one of these streets.
I had an early lunch in a bar and continued walking in the direction of the train station. I walked for a good hour, and I felt the grandness of the city around me. My country was little.
I thought about the conversations I’d had that morning. I noticed a kind of leitmotiv of dismay. I realized how thin the line between a normal conversation and the memory of a disaster was. I had upset Sven Kils with an innocent question about his father and Jenny had upset me with a well-meaning, naïve comment about my past. I shouldn’t hold it against Jenny, any more than Sven Kils should hold it against me. Fortunately. When you take a step back, life can seem extraordinarily sad.
It was already dark by the time I boarded the train. On the way home I thought that Karen Abrams would have liked to meet Jenny. Back in Amsterdam I learned I was right. It was midnight on the dot when I walked into her bar.
“In another lifetime I made mood boards,” Karen Abrams said when I told her about Jenny’s job. “See those photo montages on the walls? They’re kind of like mood boards.”
The walls of her bar were covered floor to ceiling with old photos of the neighborhood.
Him
In the summer of 1964 Willemien came with me to get to know my town, my country, and my family. My in-laws wanted to buy their daughter a very expensive plane ticket so she wouldn’t have to make the long train trip, but she said no, as she did to all her parents’ offers, and together we boarded the special train that Philips had chartered for its Spanish employees. When we arrived in Cáceres we boarded the bus for five neighboring towns in the Jerte Valley.
The bus stopped in the town square and Willemien and I disembarked along with four of my colleagues. My mother and sisters were waiting for us. They all greeted me first, then Willemien, looking her up and down several times, unsure of what to say. Until Willemien said in Spanish, “Pleased to meet you,” with her winningest smile, and we set off for home.
Willemien had hardly crossed the threshold when she decided that our families were total opposites. She was confused by the warmth of their reception, and she asked me how I could have left such a loving family behind for her cold country. I remember being tempted to list all the disagreements that were obscured by the joy of such a happy reunion. But I didn’t. I just told her I had to leave to earn more money. And since I kept my mouth shut that night, I kept it shut forever. I never told her about Mariana, and Willemien never asked.
Those first days of that visit I also saw my country through the eyes of a foreigner. I showed Willemien chestnuts, oaks, and ilexes, mountains and valleys, cherry trees and olive trees, the wild nature of the rivers, with their ravines and waterfalls.
But her favorite thing was something I had never really noticed. Something I had seen without really seeing and which she stopped to examine carefully. She called them the “stone fields.” She could spend hours on end staring at these gigantic stones. Stones which her country, built on sand, did not have, and which here, in my country, she could touch and embrace.
One night that summer, during a family dinner, Willemien expressed her fascination with these large stones scattered thro
ugh the vast fields. So Mariana told her that in Cuacos de Yuste there was a magnificent one right on the center of town, surrounded by houses.
The next day Willemien insisted that we go to Cuacos, so we went. We walked through the town, discovering its sites and its landscapes. I had never been before. Throughout the peaceful little town, Willemien would turn the corner before me and hide behind a column or in a doorway. When I found her, she asked me to kiss her quickly. She had yet to learn that many things she did without a second thought in Holland were frowned upon in my homeland. Deeply frowned upon.
The second time she asked me to kiss her I looked around and said no. She thought I was playing and tried again.
“Willemien, lieverd, not now. There are eyes watching us behind these curtains.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. Here it matters very much.”
It was probably the first time I had refused her a kiss ever since we had met. Perhaps that’s why she reacted the way she did. Looking me straight in the eye she said Miguel would never have done that.
Bringing Miguel into it made me angrier than I would have expected. I answered her, glancing sidelong around us, trying to figure out if anyone could be eavesdropping on our conversation through an open window.
“Miguel never brought you to Spain. He’s from a town in this same country, where the people and the customs are no different. He would have done exactly the same thing as me. All the men in this country do.”
She remained silent and continued walking alongside me without looking at me. We were in my territory. Now it was her turn to deal with different customs, ones she didn’t understand. Although I was angry that Willemien seemed not to want to learn the customs of my country, I fully understood her confusion. I also knew about her country’s freedom. I, too, had grown accustomed to kissing in the street, and putting my arms around her without drawing attention. I whispered in her ear that I’d kiss her later, when I thought the coast was clear. She smiled at me, and that was the end of one of our first marital disputes.
After walking around in circles a few times, we found the huge stone Mariana had told us about. It was truly a magnificent stone, built into the walls of the houses around it, which were like woodland mushrooms that had sprung up on top of it. Willemien looked around in wonder.
“Here, long before there was a town, there was a vast field of stones,” she said slowly, as if she were my tour guide. “There were stones of all sizes scattered everywhere,” her voice had become lower, more thoughtful. She was writing a story in her head. “One day a man came to this stone field and he began to move them, to make room to build a house. While he was pushing one of these boulders he thought he’d be able to move it more easily if he split it in two. He tried, but it split into four or five different-sized pieces instead of two. He thought he could use the smallest pieces as bricks for building his house. And you know what happened then?” she asked, her eyes full of magic.
“No, tell me.”
“His house was lovely and strong, and the other men from the region decided to build their homes near his. That’s why the stones slowly began to disappear from the fields, turned into bricks of the homes they were building. But there was one stone, a very large one, which was indestructible. The story has it that all the men who built a house in that town each tried to break the stone at least three times. No one succeeded.”
Two kids had wandered over and were listening to my Willemien as if she were a wise old grandmother.
“So the town continued to grow, and the story of the stone spread throughout the region. Some people even said the stone was cursed, or that it had a life of its own, and would get up and leave town of its own accord one day. But, day by day, the stone found itself surrounded by more and more houses and narrow streets. Such that in the end, even if it had grown legs to get up and go, there was no way for it to leave.”
Willemien paused and looked at the two boys.
“What’s your name?” she asked the boy who had come closest.
“Francisco.”
“And yours?” she asked the other one.
“Francisco too.”
“Okay. Do you want to hear the end of the story?”
“Yes.”
“Some time later, two men from a neighboring town arrived. Their names were Francisco and Francisco, and they were good friends. Francsico told Francisco that they should use the stone to build the wall of a house. And Francisco replied that it was impossible to make bricks out of that stone. But Francisco said that they didn’t need to make bricks, they could build their homes onto the stone. The stone itself would be a wall. So they’d only have to make bricks for the other three walls. Then others copied their idea, and that’s how this lovely corner of Cuacos de Yuste came to be.”
One of the boys asked,“Which Francisco am I?”
“Whichever you want to be,”Willemien said.
“I want to be the one who built the house.”
“Me too, me too,” the other Francisco said.
“They both built a house, you can both be the Francisco that builds a house. You should each choose a house, that’s all.”
The boys hurried off to look at all of the houses around the stone, as if they had never laid eyes on them before.
Willemien and I returned along the same street we had taken earlier. In the distance we could hear the boys arguing over the same house.
That day, after our first argument, I fell in love with Willemien all over again. Mariana was becoming a distant memory of misunderstanding and pain. Willemien was my future.
Her
“How’s it going with your list?” Karen Abrams asked one Tuesday night.
“Same as ever,” I answered. “Sometimes I think what’s the point? I usually get so caught up talking to the people I meet that I forget about what I’m looking for.”
“Yes, I can imagine, the people you meet are so different,” she turned away to make coffee for a customer. I paused for a moment before deciding to confide in her.
“I opened the box,” I said, without elaborating.
She stopped making coffee and looked at me in astonishment.
“When?”
“Yesterday,” I lied.
“What’s inside?”
“Ash.”
“What kind of ash?”
“I don’t know.”
“Cremains?”
“I don’t think so. It looks more like paper ash.”
I had never seen cremains before.
“I want to see it.”
“I don’t know, it seems quite personal.”
“Personal? To you?”
She was hurt, but I couldn’t help it. It really was a personal matter. Of course, it was someone else’s business, but it was still personal, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to make it into a circus. Plus I wasn’t completely sure that it wasn’t cremains. I didn’t answer. She said something under her breath and added,“It’s so typical of you!” Having raised her voice, she lowered it again to a near whisper.
“Let’s not forget you stole it!”
I was used to telling her my stories. Karen Abrams always listened attentively from the other side of the bar. She believed everything I said, she found it interesting and always wanted to know more. Plus, she never forgot a thing and I liked the fact she knew what was going on. My stories were like a television series for her, or a movie. Something she watched but didn’t play a part in. Until she asked if she could see the box. I hadn’t expected her to want to become involved. I realized I didn’t want to show it to her, but I sensed that our friendship, or our proprietor-customer relationship, or whatever it was we had, hung in the balance.
“Okay, I’ll show you,” I eventually said. “Just come to my place, alright?”
“I can’t leave the bar right now.
I’ll come after closing?”
“Alright. I’ll wait for you at home.”
I left on my bike, realizing that it would be nice to arrive home knowing that my day wasn’t completely over, that I wasn’t alone for the night quite yet.
At twelve thirty Karen Abrams called to say she had just closed the bar and was on the way to my house on her bike. I put the kettle on and waited for her with the box on the dining room table.
She looked tired, but happy and excited to see the box.
She sat down opposite me at the table and touched its lid. She knew she ought not to open it until I had given her permission, but I was surprised by her impatience. Until then the box had been a secret between me and the dead man. Now there would be more than just us two, and everything would change.
“Can I see?” Karen Abrams asked.
“I’ll open it for you.”
I put my hand on the lid and opened it carefully. I had to do it slowly, painstakingly, because a quick movement could create an air current that would displace the ash from the box.
“Look,” I whispered, as if it really were someone’s cremains.
“Don’t worry, I won’t touch, I just want to take a closer look.”
“Do you think they’re cremains?” I whispered in her ear.
“Two weeks ago we cremated my mother,” she said, impassively.
I was taken aback.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t like to talk about things that make me sad.”
We looked at the ashes in the box together.
“It’s too dark and too fine to be cremains . . .”
“Then what do you think it is?”
“It’s burnt paper.”
“Are you sure?”
“Have you moved it around a little?”
“No.”
“Do you think we could?”
“I don’t know.”
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