Everything There Was

by Hanna Bervoets

  Yesterday morning Kaspar said, “We have to hoard up all the food.” When Barry laughed at that, he looked puzzled. “Sorry,” Barry said, “but ‘hoarding’ suddenly just sounded very Chip ‘n’ Dale.”

  “I’m just being practical,” Kaspar said, a little more quietly.

  Leo put his hand on Kaspar’s shoulder, “And that seems very sensible to me.”

  To gather all the food, we decided to systematically go through all the rooms, closets, and classrooms. Leo thought it would be most efficient to do this in pairs, but Kaspar preferred going with the whole group. I thought: Kaspar knows the building; he probably wants to give us a tour. But Leo said, “Don’t you trust us, Kaspar?” It sounded like a joke, but Kaspar wasn’t amused. “I do, no, that’s not it,” he said, “I really do trust you.” He said it too emphatically.

  The thought that Kaspar didn’t trust us annoyed me. Even though it is likely he had grounds for suspicion. Had we gone through in pairs, and had Barry and I found a granola bar, we could have split it between the two of us. Because: If seven people take one bite, seven people have nothing. If two people take four bites, two people have something. Nothing for seven people or something for two: Not a difficult decision, if there’s just the two of you.

  Dozens of studies with monkeys and students have proven it: Altruism is egotism in sheep’s clothing. We share because we hope that it will make others share with us. But in the end it’s not even about what we do. It’s about what other people think we do. Perhaps that’s why I was annoyed that Kaspar didn’t trust us. People who think other people aren’t sharing probably aren’t sharing either.

  Before we started, Kaspar gave each of us a trash bag. “To put in any food we find.”

  “Chic,” said Barry.

  * * *

  In the teachers’ lounge we found a box of cookies and two bottles of wine. Kalim pointed us to a jar of coffee creamer high on a cabinet. Only Leo could reach it.

  In the classrooms we looked in all the little desks. That felt weird. As if we were looking at strangers’ Facebook timelines: Not illegal, but inappropriate nonetheless.

  “You’re still peeping into these kids’ lives a little,” Barry said. And the children’s lives all looked alike. The same pens over and over, the same notebooks, and the same zippered cases that came packaged with a ruler, pencil, sharpener, and a notebook too small to write anything in.

  In one of the desks I found a thick pink diary. It belonged to a Melissa. On the first page I read: “green eyes, class 4b, 7 years old.” Seven. An age when the color of your eyes still matters. But also an age when you don’t yet have any homework or appointments. So the diary was rather empty, even though Melissa had clearly tried her best to think of things to put down on the flowery purple pages. On the class-schedule page she’d written “swimming lessons” under Friday, and on the weekday pages she had written “swimming” under every Friday for the rest of the year. There were also things like “maybe play at Caro’s,” “Checkers’ birthday,” “check Habbo Hotel at four,” “maybe visit Grandma.” Apparently having a full diary was something Melissa aspired to. By the time she has a real one of her own, it’ll be disappointing of course: All those days full of appointments. Maybe she’ll complain that she never even has the time to just bake an apple pie. At that point she’ll have forgotten her pink diary from fourth grade. That is, if Melissa is still there.

  “Check this out!” Yuri shouted. “I don’t have this one yet.”

  He took four plastic spinning tops from a desk. Spinning tops with serrated edges, they looked like little circular saws.

  “What are those?” Leo asked.

  “Beyblades! You can battle with them and these are worth a ton of points.”

  “Put them back, sweetheart,” Natalie said.

  “Why?” Yuri asked.

  “They belong to another boy.”

  “But he’s not here.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Yuri sighed as he put back the tops. I was still holding the pink diary. When I saw Yuri looking at me, I quickly put it down on a table.

  Later that afternoon we found a gym bag, left hanging on a coat rack in the hallway. Kaspar looked inside. “Nothing edible. Just shoes and a towel.”

  “A towel!” Natalie shrieked. “We need that!”

  Natalie and Yuri have been drying themselves with the red tablecloth. Sometimes it was still wet when they slipped under it at night.

  “There you go, ma’am,” said Kaspar. He threw the towel to Natalie, “I think it might even be clean. Boys never shower.”

  Yuri looked at his mother, angry, “Now you and Mr. Kaspar are also taking something that doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Yes,” Natalie said, “but we really need this.”

  “I also really needed those Blades!”

  “Quit it now,” Natalie hissed. She swung the towel around her neck, signaling that the discussion was over.

  Caprice, I thought. To be able to live with ourselves, we sometimes suddenly consider caprices to be necessities. We must do it more often than we think. All day long, probably.

  “I’m just going to the bathroom,” I said.

  While the others continued down the hall, I walked back into 4B’s classroom, picked the pink diary up off the table, and quickly stuffed it in my trash bag.

  Our expedition ended in the kitchen. We’d been there before. The first days, we emptied out the fridge and ate the bread. We knew there was more food, but not exactly how much.

  The kitchen is upstairs. Following the French example, they served hot lunches here, something the principal had thought up back when “farm-to-table” was fashionable. For some parents it was even the reason why they chose this school. Only many Dutch kids aren’t used to having warm lunches. So the number of kids staying for lunch quickly declined and within a year one of the two chefs had been fired.

  “I can just pick up Yuri for lunch,” Natalie had told me. “That way I get to see him. And making a sandwich doesn’t interfere with my work.” Then she told me that she sold homemade laptop and iPad covers through her own webshop. Business was good, especially since one of these “skins”—the one with the tulip in the shape of a hand grenade—had appeared in a women’s magazine. I remember asking how much she made doing this, how much time she spent on it, and how long it took for her to make one.

  It had been the last time we talked before the bang. Afterwards we never talked about laptop covers again.

  Kaspar pulled open the kitchen cabinets one by one. We watched as if he were opening a gift basket; nobody wanted to miss a thing.

  We found four regular boxes of rice. Four of pasta, one of lasagna sheets. Another box of rice. Tomato paste, sweet soy sauce. And a piece of ginger on the counter.

  In my head I began to calculate: Seven people, nine boxes, four sheets.

  Natalie asked, “How long will this last us?”

  “Depends on the size of the portions,” Leo said.

  Kaspar put the ginger in the palm of his hand, weighing it.

  * * *

  We emptied our trash bags and stocked the kitchen cabinets with all the food we found.

  A few oatmeal bars, some sandwiches, two apples, a banana, a half-empty energy drink.

  “Can I have one?” Yuri pointed to the package of M&M’s Kalim was about to put in a cabinet.

  “You want this?” Kalim gently held it up between the nails of his thumb and index finger, as if it were an archeological find.

  “Please?” Yuri mimed. He looked at Natalie. And Natalie looked at us.

  “I think we can divide those up,” said Leo.

  He tore open the bag and emptied it into a bowl.

  “Six point three per person,” said Yuri. Leo laughed, “Right, you’d know that.” Yuri nodded proudly. We each took six M&M’s and immediately started eating them.

  “Do you always look at the color of your M&M before sticking it in your mouth?” Leo whispered right beside me
.

  “What do you mean? Did I just do that?”

  “Yes,” Leo said. “You did.”

  “Oh. Don’t you?”

  “Apparently not. Because I was looking at you doing it.”

  Leo put his hand on my back. He gave it a rub.

  * * *

  We drank the wine that night, in the gym, on the floor. Kalim didn’t want any, leaving exactly one coffee cup of Bordeaux per person. The alcohol on our empty stomachs made us talkative.

  “I wanted to join the army, but when they rejected me on account of my eyes I ended up getting a bachelor’s in education. Looking back I’m happy I did. The army ultimately involves a lot of waiting, and waiting’s not for me.”

  “I’m from Utrecht but I lived in Apeldoorn for a long time because my boyfriend ran a stable there. Ex-boyfriend, I mean.”

  “First Sociology and then a master’s in Research and Journalism.”

  “North Dakota was an enriching experience, maybe just a little cold.”

  “I didn’t want to. But, you know. I still fell in love again.”

  If people could have heard us talking like this—people in a parallel universe where everything was still there—they’d have probably thought this was a dinner party, one where everyone knows the host, but not the other guests. Leo probably would’ve seemed to be that host. He was the one who broke the oatmeal bars; the one who poured the wine; the one who asked the questions. And probably also the one we most wanted to tell our stories to.

  Barry talked about his new flame: If you can’t talk to the one you love, then talking about the one you love is the next best thing.

  They’d met at a wedding, but after they’d spent the whole night chatting pleasantly, Jeroen had suddenly left. When he didn’t react to a WhatsApp message, Barry thought: Whatever. But two days later Jeroen suddenly sent him a friend request through Facebook, and after Barry added him, Jeroen liked a holiday snapshot from three years earlier, which meant that he’d looked all the way through his old albums. “So I DM’d him to see if he’d like to meet up on Wednesday,” Barry said. “He couldn’t make it. But he could do the Tuesday after.” Details only someone in love would note.

  I already knew them, the details. Over many lunch breaks I had advised Barry about text messages, the right clothes to wear on a second date, and whether or not to immediately set up another date. Probably I—his colleague—knew more about the run-up to Barry’s new romance than his friends. But yesterday, on the floor of the gym, surrounded by people I barely knew, I wanted to hear everything again. Every date, every unanswered WhatsApp message, all the drunken misunderstanding from the first weeks, and all the jokes Barry made about those misunderstandings. It was nothing new or surprising. But it was the nicest story I’d heard in days.

  Sometimes Leo would translate something for Kalim. Then we’d speak English for a bit, although after a few sentences we’d fall back into Dutch. We were tired; being consistent requires energy. Kalim didn’t seem to mind. Sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t just understand us. I don’t know if anyone’s already asked him that.

  Kaspar was the first to announce he was going to bed.

  “Yes,” Leo said. He looked at the empty bottle of wine. “Let’s all head to bed.”

  “You guys don’t need to,” said Kaspar.

  “I’m also quite tired,” Barry muttered.

  * * *

  The first nights we kept all our clothes on. Now we all sleep in pieces of clothing we don’t wear during the day. Me in my undershirt, Natalie in her wrap, Kaspar in the t-shirt he wore under his button-down. That gets cold. So at night in the gym we leave the heating on. To compensate we’ve turned off the radiators in the hallway. Maybe we will have unlimited electricity in the coming days. But maybe we won’t.

  So it was cold when I walked to the bathroom last night. Cold and dark. I tripped over a bag and hit my knee against a table. As I was rubbing my sore leg, I saw something. In the middle classroom, close to the window, something flickered. A bluish light that illuminated the whole wall: it had a garland of paper figures with accordioned arms and legs, their faces smiling.

  “Hello?”

  Carefully I stepped inside.

  “Hello?”

  There was no one in the classroom. I walked to where the light was coming from, and heard buzzing and rattling. The computer. Of course: The much-too-bright stand-by light.

  In the beginning the computers were on constantly. Every half hour we checked whether the internet was back up again, each time to no effect. Finally Leo said, “If we keep doing this we’ll just get disappointed every twenty minutes. Maybe it’d be less stressful if we turned the computers off sometimes.” We agreed to check a computer three times a day. Apparently one of us didn’t think that was often enough.

  I jiggled the mouse up and down. The screen popped on, I typed an “n” in the search bar. The browser immediately brought up the right suggestion: Nu.nl, the news site we looked at most after the bang.

  Server not found. If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.

  Thoughtlessly I rolled my chair backwards. When I noticed I was almost touching the curtains, I quickly slid back to the table.

  Since the instructions we hadn’t opened the curtains, hadn’t been close to the windows at all.

  But now I’d had a full cup of wine.

  I got up, walked to the window, and carefully touched the white curtains.

  Nothing happened.

  I took the edge of the curtain, pulled it aside a little, and looked.

  Blinds.

  I wormed my thumb and index finger between two of the blinds and pushed them apart.

  Still nothing, just the darkness.

  Slowly I bent forward to see what was in the darkness.

  Then there was a bang.

  Startled, I let go of the blinds. I briefly stared at the curtains that had fallen closed again and then looked at the floor: The contours of a flowerpot. It must have fallen from the windowsill. I squatted, tried to put the soil back into the pot. The soil was moist. Had someone been watering the plants?

  I got up too quickly: The classroom spun. To keep from falling, I reached for a table.

  “Oh!”

  “Jesus.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You scared me.”

  Natalie was right in front of me. It was still dark, I recognized her voice, she saw me in the screen’s glow.

  “I thought,” said Natalie, “I thought: I’ll just go and check again.” I saw her vaguely gesture, probably pointing to the PC.

  “And you must have thought the same thing.”

  I shook my head, “No, that wasn’t it. I saw the light, and I—”

  “Oh sure,” Natalie said.

  She thought I was lying. It seemed preferable to have Natalie think I was telling the truth. It doesn’t matter what you do. It matters what people think you do.

  So I said, “You know, you’re right. I also wanted to check if the internet was working again. But no.”

  “It’s really not?”

  Natalie sat down behind the computer, took hold of the mouse, and clicked reload.

  Server not found. If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.

  “Dammit!” Only now did I see her face. Her eyes were red. From the wine and the exhaustion, I thought.

  “Sucks, right?” I said.

  But Natalie shook her head, “I don’t get you. I don’t get any of you.”

  She was still staring at the screen. Her chin began to wrinkle and the corners of her mouth trembled. I put my hand on her shoulder, softly squeezed. Felt her shivering.

  Natalie turned with a jerk. “You’re all so calm!” she yelled. “How can you all be so calm?”

  “I don’t know if we’re calm.” I was looking right at Natalie’s tearstained face. “Perhaps we’re just imitating each other a little…”

  Again Natalie shook
her head, “Suddenly we’re having wine and chatting like nothing’s wrong, all the while… Jesus, who knows how long we’ll have to be here and we barely have any food.”

  “Yes,” I said carefully, “yes, and you’re completely right. But we can’t talk about that all the time, can we? Sometimes it’s nice to talk about something else. Right?”

  Natalie inhaled deeply. Sniffled and rubbed the back of her hands over her cheeks. Her long nails glimmered in the screen’s light. The polish had started flaking off.

  “Yes,” Natalie said. “I know. Sorry. You know what it is… when I hear Barry talking about his boyfriend like that, it makes me think about Erik. And about how bad I feel that he’s not here. And that I miss him.”

  “I get that,” I said. “I completely get that. And Erik must miss you too.”

  “Yes,” said Natalie, her voice trembling, “if he’s still…”

  I put my arm around Natalie’s shaking shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  I pressed Natalie against me now, and she immediately nudged her face in my hair. I let her, I understood. The past few days I’ve often wanted to bury my face in someone else’s hair myself.

  I sniffed: Natalie’s perfume. Chanel, from a bottle in her purse. She still sprayed some on every morning.

  “Don’t you miss anyone?” Natalie whispered.

  “Sure,” I said. “My friends. But I try not to think about them. Then they don’t exist. And you can’t miss what doesn’t exist.”

  “Well,” Natalie whispered, “it doesn’t work like that for me.”

  We sat there like that for a while, silently. I brushed Natalie’s hair and let her blond locks go through my fingers. Sniffed her perfume again.

  And then again.

  * * *

  Many people see little black spots when they’re looking at a white wall. Small scratches on the retina, that’s what they are. In daily life they don’t stand out: They disappear in black curtains or a checkout girl’s dark uniform. But there are people who, when they discover these spots, really start paying attention to them. They keep seeing them all day: Whirling through their world like glitter in a snow globe. Then these people get restless; they want to see an ophthalmologist. “The spots will go away by themselves,” they’ll be told. But the spots remain; all you can do is not look at them. Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just can’t hurt you anymore.