I didn’t see him approach me. One second I was standing there alone, the next second he was beside me. In front of me. He had left his bicycle a few feet away.
“Do you speak English?”
I could tell he wasn’t a native English speaker.
I said, “Yes, I do,” but I wanted to ask where he was from.
“I just wanted to say that you are very nice.” An arrow straight to my heart.
“Thank you.”
Such pain and such joy at once.
“I think you are very nice,” he repeated.
“Thank you.”
I’m sure I smiled.
He turned toward his bicycle and pedaled away. I watched his back. His hair. His legs. All at once I wanted to cry and I wanted to shout after him not to leave. I wanted to go have a coffee with him and tell him all my secrets. I wanted to know who he was and what he was doing here, and why he had chosen me.
But I didn’t move. I stayed at the intersection. Looking at the traffic light across the street. I waited for it to turn red again, then green, then red.
When I eventually crossed the street I looked in the direction he had gone and saw him in the distance. He had propped his bicycle against a building and was standing next to it, his hands in his pockets. Watching me. I started walking back to the office again.
It was already getting dark when I looked out the window by my desk at the sky and wondered why I hadn’t waved to him, or walked over to him. His words had echoed in my head all afternoon. I was “very nice.” I wasn’t sure what he had meant. I typed the word “nice” into an online dictionary. Pleasant, agreeable, friendly, sympathetic, cute, charming, attractive, congenial, adorable, seductive, pleasing, fantastic, cheerful, fun, pretty, lovely, hot, good-looking, magnificent, affectionate, beautiful, gorgeous, elegant.
Was I all these things or just one? At least I knew I was “very” whatever it was.
After work I kept an eye out for my cyclist all the way to Karen Abrams’s bar. When I turned into the street where the bar was my phone rang. Although I knew it wasn’t him calling, I wished it were. It was Anneke. I didn’t answer.
It was two in the morning when Karen Abrams locked the door of the bar and turned out the lights. We sat down at one of the tables where a candle still flickered. It wasn’t the first time I had stayed on after closing time. It seemed extraordinary to me to have the whole place to ourselves.
Karen Abrams was at her best when the bar was empty. A few months earlier, when I had stayed late for the first time, she had said, “After closing I don’t have to be the owner or the waitress anymore. When everyone has left, I’m just another client who can sit down at a table or on the other side of the bar. If you stay past closing time, you’re also no longer what you were. You’re no longer a customer and I’m not going to serve you. If you want something to drink, help yourself, okay?”
“Okay.”
“But tomorrow, if you come again after work, you’ll be a customer again, eh? Don’t think that once you’ve gone behind the bar you’ve earned a privilege for life!”
That night she had just drawn two beers when we sat down at the table. Karen Abrams made her usual gesture for “ah, peace and quiet”—opening her hands on the table while breathing deeply. Then she took a sip of her beer and said sweetly, “Have you learned anything else about the word in the box?”
“I haven’t done any more research.”
“See, I said that you wouldn’t have time for it. Why don’t you give me the box and I’ll do it.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. But she was dying to find out what the word meant and why it had been hidden in a box with a false bottom.
“You’ve got to do something. And if you’re not going to do anything then you should return the box to the dead man’s family. I’ve thought it over. You could call the airline and tell them you took the box by accident and that you want to find the dead man’s family.”
“Yeah, I could.”
“But I already know you won’t. You want to keep it a little longer, don’t you?”
“Because I feel like the dead man wanted to tell me more than he was able to. Because I always fall asleep on planes, and I didn’t finish my conversation with him. And when I woke up, he was dead.”
“Do you think he knew he was going to die, and that he wanted to tell you something before it was too late?”
“If that’s the case I failed him, because I didn’t let him keep talking.”
“I know my mother told me everything she wanted to say before she passed away. It gives me peace of mind. I think that’s really important.”
I wanted to end this conversation. I’d had enough.
“I have to tell you something,” I said mysteriously. “Something that happened to me today.”
I told her about my encounter with the foreign cyclist. I repeated his words in English and they sounded made-up as soon as I said them. Like a screenwriter had written some bad dialogue. But that wasn’t true. I had been there, it had happened, and it was magical.
“Things are always happening to you,” Karen Abrams said.
“What do you mean?”
“Something like that would never happen to me. I see a lot of stuff happening from behind the bar, but none of it involves me. You’re out there, in life. You do things. I don’t. I watch things.”
When Karen Abrams put it that way, I could see the difference between her life and mine, too. But why did it seem like I also watched life instead of living it? I considered exploring the topic further with her, but I quickly changed my mind. It had been a good day.
“If I were you, I’d go to the same spot on Monday and wait for him,” Karen Abrams said, curious.
“He probably won’t show up.”
“Of course he’ll show up. It’s the easiest way to see him again. It’s like a secret code. Everyone knows that.”
I was happy listening to Karen Abrams speaking about her world. I was happy to be in her bar instead of somewhere else, some other bar, with the cyclist who thought I was “very nice.”
“You know what? I envy you. But I’m happy for you, too. This could be something special. You’re on the brink of a great love story.”
The next day I stayed in the office during lunch. I remembered Karen Abrams’s words. I thought about the love story. The shortest one ever.
Him
One day I made a mistake. I didn’t go home after work.
Maybe it wasn’t a mistake, maybe I had to go away to be able to come back. We can be strong, but not invincible, and I was tired and lost.
I was angry because I was tired and I hadn’t been able to be strong enough. Doubt had made me weak. There were times when I lost all hope, when I thought that we had moved to Figueres just to watch Willemien die more slowly than she would have if we had stayed in Eindhoven. There were moments when I escaped from the grief by imagining a life with Mariana, and I hated myself for not being able to imagine a future with Willemien.
One day, after a quiet lunch in the bedroom with Willemien, I picked up a letter from Mariana that had just arrived in the mailbox and left for work. I read the letter on the way to the shop and I spent that afternoon thinking about a different life. By the time I left after work I had started to believe in that other life.
I know there’s no excuse, that I should have thought of Willemien and the children at home, worrying when they realized I wasn’t coming home. But I didn’t think of them, because I couldn’t. All I could think about was disappearing. I hated myself and I was ashamed of my thoughts, my desires, my weakness. Part of me believed that Willemien hated me, too, and that they’d all be better off without me.
The way the mind works is extremely complicated. That’s the only explanation I can come up with.
I disappeared without a word but I never arrived at m
y destination. Because the truth was that I didn’t really have one.
Later I learned that the boys never knew about the real reason for my disappearance or that Willemien had suffered, because she told them that a distant relative had taken ill suddenly and that I’d had to leave without being able to say good-bye.
I just wanted to get away.
I took the last train from Figueres to Barcelona. In the city I walked around the neighborhood near Sants station all night. I wasn’t the only one waiting for dawn to make or continue a journey. The eastern and western façades of the station were crowded with travelers sitting, leaning against the windows, waiting, dozing, reading, chatting. I decided not to join the tableau. I decided that the reason I was waiting for a train had to be completely different from everyone else’s.
There was a moment, at four in the morning, when I passed a phone booth and thought about calling home to let them know I was okay. I didn’t though, because I thought I’d need all the change in my pocket to be able to get somewhere.
When the station came to life I bought a ticket for a train to Madrid and spent the time till its departure reading a copy of yesterday’s paper that someone had tossed on a bench. I remember that feeling of living in the moment, of not wanting to think about the past and not being able to think about the future. The freedom of worrying only about the present moment. Reading a page of the paper as if that page of the paper and I were the only two things in the whole world. I had no more plans, no more responsibilities. I washed my hands of it all and for once in my life I was completely alone. At first I felt free. But that didn’t last long.
As soon as I closed the paper desperation set in: the moment after finishing the last page was a void.
I realized that freedom doesn’t exist. If I didn’t have concrete plans, I’d have to create each minute of my life from nothingness. Without a sense of purpose, each moment became a decision. I could board the train or not. I could go all the way to Madrid or I could get off at some other station. I’d have to continue choosing a path each second of my life, and that was a massive burden. At some point I began to miss the security of the life I was fleeing, the sureness of knowing what each day held, as much as it might exhaust me.
I ended up boarding the train, with the newspaper I had found in the station. I read it again. Everything, even the classifieds, many times over. I had never read the paper so carefully.
In Madrid I found a hostel. In a rancid-smelling room with traces of damp on the walls I read the paper again, until I fell asleep.
On Sunday at five in the morning I awoke with a start, I couldn’t breathe. I opened the window, stuck my head out, and breathed in the city air several times. When I lay down in bed again I realized it wasn’t my bed, and that I didn’t belong there, and I decided to go out into the street.
I walked around the city, crossing paths with young men who had been drinking. I thought of Arjen, Simon, and Robert. Sleeping in their child-size beds. Near the Puerta del Sol I paused outside a phone booth, hesitating. Eventually I entered the booth and dialed our number in Figueres.
“Where are you?” Willemien asked, breathless, when she picked up.
I didn’t answer.
“Are you alright?” she asked a little more calmly.
“I’m in Madrid.”
“What are you doing in Madrid?”
“I don’t know.”
The line was heavy with silence. I was waiting for Willemien to ask me when I was coming home, but she didn’t.
“Are you alright?” she asked again. I still couldn’t answer the question.
“I’ll call you back in a minute,” I said.
“Okay.” I heard her voice breaking. I felt her slipping away. I realized I didn’t want her to slip away yet.
“Are the boys alright?”
“Yes, we’re all fine.”
“Sorry for waking you up.”
I wanted to say something sweet, something special we’d say to one another, something simple, like giving her a kiss or saying, “see you soon, lieverd” but it all sounded forced, untrue, at odds with my behavior.
“I love you,” she said.“And I understand you. I’m tired, too.”
“I’ll call you back in a minute.”
“Alright.”
After a few seconds I hung up the receiver. I put my hand in my coat pocket and realized that the letter from Mariana that I had read on the way back to work on Friday was still there. I went back to the hostel and sat on the bed. I read the letter again. I couldn’t understand what about it had made me want to leave my life behind. I fell back to sleep.
On Sunday I walked around Madrid and felt very far away from all the places I had ever been able to call home. The hours passed slowly, and little by little my desire to return was coming back.
Late that afternoon I headed to the station. I watched other travelers while I waited for the night train to arrive. I slept like a baby the whole way. Monday morning I called my boss from the station in Sants and told him that I’d had to go to Barcelona for personal reasons and that I’d get to work around noon. He didn’t make a fuss, though I could overhear how busy he was, and that they really did need me in the store. But instead of feeling weighted down I was at peace with the idea that there were people who needed me.
On the train to Figueres I read the paper again. Each time I reread an article I felt free, like I was back in Barcelona, on a bench in the station waiting for a train to begin a new life. I decided it wasn’t necessary to run away. I’d find ways to escape while staying.
When I arrived in Figueres I went straight to work. My boss didn’t ask me any questions, he just showed me the television I needed to fix and said that he hoped I’d have it ready by the end of the day. I got straight to work repairing it.
At lunchtime I walked home slowly. I opened the apartment door carefully and approached our bedroom as quietly as I could. I found Willemien dozing. There was an empty plate on the nightstand. I stood there, watching her; she didn’t look sad or worried. I realized that it had been too long since I had watched her sleeping, that I hadn’t been seeing her as she used to be. That moment helped me tremendously. I was happy to be back home, where I belonged. I wanted to touch her.
I took a step toward her and that same moment she opened her eyes. Instead of speaking, she bit her lower lip. I sat down next to her and she embraced me. I had nothing to say. I was empty. I thought about the articles in Friday’s paper.
We never talked about that weekend.
I kept that newspaper for several months. I took it out whenever I felt like running away.
We rebuilt our lives, and there never was any need to discuss what had happened. That weekend was just another one of my secrets. A secret shared, of overwhelming loneliness.
Her
We were flying home from holidays in Greece. I had never taken a flight with my real parents. I was twelve years old and I was flying for the first time, with my other parents, Anneke and Jan. Anneke was my mother’s sister, but she wasn’t anything like her. She hadn’t had any of her own children because she was unable to, but Anneke and Jan wanted children and were in the process of adopting a oneyear-old baby when I was orphaned. When they became my guardians they wondered whether or not they should still take the boy; in the end they turned the adoption down. Maybe, they thought, that time would come later, when I felt more at home with them. But “later” never came. It was a shame. I would have liked to have a cousin.
Anneke and Jan loved to travel. When I moved in with them they had recently returned from Italy, and they wanted to show me photos of their trip. Sometimes they traveled by car, when they went skiing for example. I didn’t go with them. I never wanted to get in a car again. A plane I could handle, because planes couldn’t crash into trees. But I was adamant about cars: I would never get into one again. Luckily Anneke and Jan began
to change their lifestyle so it wasn’t a problem. I was fine with bikes, buses, trains, and planes.
I knew my parents were dead from the moment my angel held me in his arms. When a doctor at the hospital told me later that my parents were seriously wounded and that “they could not come and see me” I knew that he had meant “never” instead of “not.”
Much later Anneke came to tell me that my parents had died. But she didn’t say died, she said passed away.
Everyone kept saying that I was lucky to be alive, but those first years without my parents there were times when I didn’t want to keep on living. Sometimes I wished for another accident, with Anneke, Jan, and me, and that I would be the one who died, to set everything to rights again.
We were on that flight from Greece when I finally began to talk about the accident. We had arrived late at the check-in counter, and we hadn’t gotten good seats. Jan was sitting alone in one row, and Anneke and I were sitting together behind him. Soon after we took off, Jan fell asleep with his head leaning a little toward the seat next to him. I looked at his hair between the seat backs and I kept telling myself his name was Jan. His hair was dirty blond, like my father’s. Anneke wanted to talk and pointed out the window at the view. I glanced out the window and decided I didn’t want to talk about the landscape.
“The last time I saw my father, I saw his hair against the back of a seat. The same way I see Jan’s hair now.” Anneke looked at me in surprise. “I saw his hair and my mother’s too. I was sitting in the backseat of the car and the radio was on. I fell asleep. Then I never saw them again. Not alive, not dead.”
“It’s better to remember them alive, sweetie, it was such a terrible accident . . .”
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