by Gayle Forman
“Here.” I push my battered passport across the desk. “This has my history.”
She opens it. “Oh it does, does it?” she says. Her voice has changed, from friendly to coy. She flips through the pages. “You get around, don’t you?”
I’m tired. I don’t want to do this dance, not right now. I just want to buy my airplane ticket and go. Once I’m out of here, away from Europe, somewhere warm and far, I’ll get back to my old self.
She shrugs and returns to leafing through my passport. “Uh-oh. You know what? I can’t book you anywhere yet.”
“Why not?”
“Your passport’s about to expire.” She closes the passport and slides it back. “Do you have an identity card?”
“It got stolen.”
“Did you file a report?”
I shake my head. Never did call the French police.
“Never mind. You need a passport for most of these places anyhow. You just have to get it renewed.”
“How long will that take?”
“Not long. A few weeks. Go to City Hall for the forms.” She rattles off some of the other paperwork I’ll need, none of which I have here.
Suddenly I feel stuck, and I’m not sure how that happened. After managing for two entire years not to set foot in Holland? After going to some absurd lengths to bypass this small-but-central landmass—for instance convincing Tor, Guerrilla Will’s dictatorial director, to forgo performing in Amsterdam and to hit Stockholm instead, with some half-baked story about the Swedes being the most Shakespeare-loving people in Europe outside the UK?
But then last spring Marjolein had finally cleared up Bram’s messy estate and the deed of the houseboat transferred to Yael. Who celebrated by immediately putting the home he’d built for her up for sale. I shouldn’t have been surprised, not at that point.
Still, to ask me to come and sign the papers? That took gall. Chutzpah, Saba would call it. I understood for Yael it was a matter of practicality. I was a train ride, she was a plane ride. It would only be a few days for me, a minor inconvenience.
Except I delayed for one day. And somehow, that’s changed everything.
Seven
OCTOBER
Utrecht
It occurs to me, belatedly, that maybe I should’ve called. Maybe last month, when I first got back. Certainly before now, before showing up at his house. But I didn’t. And now it’s too late. I’m just here. Hoping to make this as painless as possible.
At the house on Bloemstraat, someone has swapped out the old doorbell for one in the shape of an eyeball that stares reproachfully. This feels like a bad omen. Our correspondence, always irregular, has been nonexistent in the last few months. I can’t remember the last time I emailed or texted him. Three months ago? Six months? It occurs to me, also belatedly, that he might not even live here anymore.
Except, somehow, I know he does. Because Broodje wouldn’t have left without telling me. He wouldn’t have done that.
Broodje and I met when we were eight. I caught him spying on our boat with a pair of binoculars. When I asked what he was doing, he explained that he wasn’t spying on us. There’d been a rash of break-ins in our neighborhood, and his parents had been talking about leaving Amsterdam for somewhere safer. He preferred to stay put in his family’s flat, so it was up to him to find the culprits. “That’s very serious,” I’d told him. “Yes, it is,” he’d replied. “But I have this.” Out of his bike basket he’d pulled the rest of his spy kit: decoder scope, noise-enhancing ear buds, night-vision goggles, which he’d let me try on. “If you need help finding the bad guys, I can be your partner,” I’d offered. There were not many children in our neighborhood on the eastern edge of Amsterdam’s center, no children at all on the adjacent houseboats on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht where our boat was moored, and I had no siblings. I spent much of my time kicking balls off the pier against the hull of the boat, losing most of them to the murky waters of the canals.
Broodje accepted my help, and we became partners. We spent hours casing the neighborhood, taking pictures of suspicious-looking people and vehicles, cracking the case. Until an old man saw us, and, thinking we were working with the criminals, called the police on us. The police found us crouched next to my neighbor’s pier, looking through the binoculars at a suspicious van that seemed to appear regularly (because, we later found out, it belonged to the bakery around the corner). We were questioned and we both started crying, thinking we were going to jail. We stammered our explanations and crime-fighting strategies. The police listened, trying hard not to laugh, before taking us home and explaining everything to Broodje’s parents. Before they left, one of the detectives gave each of us a card, winked, and said to call with any tips.
I threw away my card, but Broodje kept his. For years. I spotted it when we were twelve, tacked to the bulletin board in his bedroom in the suburbs where he wound up moving after all. “You still have this?” I’d asked him. He’d moved two years before and we didn’t see each other frequently. Broodje had looked at the card, and then looked at me. “Don’t you know, Willy?” he’d said. “I keep things.”
• • •
A lanky guy in a PSV soccer jersey, his hair stiff with gel, opens the door. I feel my stomach plummet, because Broodje used to live here with two girls, both of whom he was constantly, and unsuccessfully, trying to sleep with, and a skinny guy named Ivo. But then the guy eyes spark open with recognition and I realize it’s Henk, one of Broodje’s friends from the University of Utrecht. “Is that you, Willem?” he asks, and before I can answer he’s calling into the house, “Broodje, Willem’s back.”
I hear scrambling and the creak of the scuffed wood floorboards and then there he is, a head shorter and a shoulder wider than me, a disparity that used to prompt the old man on the houseboat next to ours to call us Spaghetti and Meatball, a moniker Broodje quite liked, because wasn’t a meatball so much tastier than a noodle?
“Willy?” Broodje pauses for a half second before he launches himself at me. “Willy! I thought you were dead!”
“Back from the dead,” I say.
“Really?” His eyes are so round and so blue, like shiny coins. “When did you get back? How long are you here for? Are you hungry? I wish you’d told me you were coming, I would’ve made something. Well I can pull together a nice borrelhapje. Come in. Henk, look, Willy’s back.”
“I see that,” Henk says, nodding.
“W,” Broodje calls. “Willy’s back.”
I walk into the lounge. Before, it was relatively neat, with feminine touches around like flower-scented candles that Broodje used to pretend to dislike but would light even when the girls weren’t home. Now, it smells of stale socks, old coffee, and spilled beer, and the only remnant of the girls is an old Picasso poster, askew in its frame above the mantel. “What happened to the girls?” I ask.
Broodje grins. “Leave it to Willy to ask about the girls first.” He laughs. “They moved into their own flat last year, and Henk and W moved in. Ivo just left to do a course in Estonia.”
“Latvia,” Wouter, or W, corrects, coming down the stairs. He’s even taller than me, with short, unintentionally spiky hair and an Adam’s apple as big as a doorknob.
“Latvia,” Broodje says.
“What happened to your face?” W asks. W never was one for social pleasantries.
I touch the scar. “I fell off my bike,” I say. The lie I told Marjolein comes out automatically. I’m not sure why, except for a desire to put as much distance as possible between myself and that day.
“When did you get back?” W asks.
“Yeah, Willy,” Broodje says, panting and pawing like a puppy. “How long ago?”
“A bit ago,” I say, treading water between hurtful truth and balls-out lies. “I had to deal with some things in Amsterdam.”
“I’ve been wondering where you were,” Broodje says. “I tried calling you a while back but got a strange recording, and you’re shit about email.”
“I know. I lost my ph
one and all my contacts, and some Irish guy gave me his, including his SIM card. I thought I texted you the new number.”
“Maybe you did. Anyhow, come in. Let me go see what I have to eat.” He turns right into the galley kitchen. I hear drawers opening and closing.
Five minutes later Broodje returns with a tray of food and beers for all of us. “So tell us everything. The glamorous life of a roving actor. Is it a girl every night?”
“Jesus, Broodje, let the guy sit down,” Henk says.
“Sorry. I live vicariously through him; it was like having a movie star in the house having him around. And, it’s been a little dry these past few years.”
“And by past few years, you mean twenty?” W says drolly.
“So you’ve been in Amsterdam?” Broodje asks. “How is your ma?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I say lightly. “She’s in India.”
“Still?” Broodje asks. “Or there and back?”
“Still. This whole time.”
“Oh. I was in the old neighborhood recently and the boat was all lit up and there was furniture inside, so I thought she might be back.”
“Nope, they must’ve put furniture in there to make it look lived in, but it’s not. Not by us, anyhow,” I say, rolling up a piece of cervelaat and shoving it in my mouth. “It’s been sold.”
“You sold Bram’s boat?” Broodje says incredulously.
“My mother sold it,” I clarify.
“She must’ve made a boatload,” Henk jokes.
I pause for a second, somehow unable to tell them that I did, too. Then W starts talking about a piece he read in De Volkskrant recently about Europeans paying top dollar for the old houseboats in Amsterdam, for the mooring rights, which are as valuable as the boats themselves.
“Not this boat. You should’ve seen it,” Broodje says. “His father was an architect, so it was beautiful, three floors, balconies, glass everywhere.” He looks wistful. “What did that magazine call it?”
“Bauhaus on the Gracht.” A photographer had come and taken pictures of the boat, and us on it. When the magazine had come out, most of the shots had been of just the boat, but there had been one of Yael and Bram, framed by the picture window, the trees and canal reflecting like a mirror behind them. I’d been in the original of that shot but had been cropped out. Bram explained that they’d used this one because of the window and the reflection; it was a representation of the design, not our family. But I’d thought it had been a fairly accurate depiction of our family, too.
“I can’t believe she sold it,” Broodje says.
Some days I can’t believe it and other days I can absolutely believe it. Yael is the sort to chew off her own hand if she needs to escape. She’d done it before.
The boys are all looking at me now, their faces blanking out with a kind of concern that I’m unaccustomed to after two years of anonymity.
“So, Holland-Turkey tonight,” I begin.
The guys look at me for a moment. Then nod.
“I hope things go better for us,” I say. “After the sad offerings during Euro Cup, I don’t know if I can take it. Sneijder . . .” I shake my head.
Henk takes the bait first. “Are you kidding? Sneijder was the only striker who proved his mettle.”
“No way!” Broodje interrupts. “Van Persie scored that beautiful goal against Germany.”
Then W jumps in with math talk, something about regression toward the mean guaranteeing improvement after the last lousy year, and now there’s nowhere to go but up, and I relax. There’s a universal language of small talk. On the road, it’s about travel: some unknown island, or a cheap hostel, a restaurant with a good fixed-price menu. With these guys, it’s soccer.
“You gonna watch the game with us, Willy?” Broodje asks. “We were going to O’Leary’s.”
I didn’t come to Utrecht for small talk or for soccer or for friendship. I came for paperwork. A quick visit to University College for some papers to get my passport. Once I get that, I’ll go back to the travel agent, maybe ask her for a drink this time, and figure out where to go. Buy my ticket. Maybe take a trip to The Hague to pick up some visas, a visit to the travel clinic for some shots. A trip to the flea market for new clothes. A train to the airport. A thorough body search by immigration officials, because a lone man with a one-way ticket is always an object of suspicion. A long flight. Jetlag. Immigration. Customs. And then finally, that first step into a new place, that moment of exhilaration and disorientation, each feeding the other. That moment when anything can happen.
I have only one thing to do in Utrecht, but suddenly the rest of the things I’ll need to accomplish to get myself out of here feels endless. Stranger yet, nothing about it excites me. Not even arriving somewhere new, which used to make all the hassle worthwhile. It all just seems exhausting. I can’t summon the energy for the slog it’ll take me to get out of here.
But O’Leary’s? O’Leary’s is right around the corner, not even a block away. That I can manage.
Eight
October turns cold and wet, as if we used up our quota of clear, hot days during the summer’s heat wave. It’s especially cold in my attic room on Bloemstraat, making me wonder if moving in had been the right call. Not that it had been a call. After I woke up on the downstairs sofa for the third morning in a row, having accomplished little during my days in Utrecht, Broodje had suggested I move into the attic room.
The offer was wasn’t so much enticing as a fait accompli. I was already living here. Sometimes the wind blows you places you weren’t expecting; sometimes it blows you away from those places, too.
• • •
The attic room is drafty, with windows that rattle in the wind. In the morning, I see my breath. Staying warm becomes my main vocation. On the road, I often spent whole days in libraries. You could always find magazines or books, and respite from the weather or whatever else needed escaping.
The Central University library offers all the same comforts: big sunny windows, comfortable couches, and a bank of computers I can use to browse the Internet. The last is a mixed blessing. On the road, my fellow travelers were obsessive about keeping up with email. I was the opposite. I hated checking in. I still do.
Yael’s emails come like clockwork, once every two weeks. I think she must have it on her calendar, along with all the other chores. The notes never say much, which makes answering them next to impossible.
One came yesterday, a bit of fluff about taking a day off to go to a pilgrim festival in some village. She never tells me what she’s taking a day off from, never elaborates about her actual work there, her day-to-day life, which is a bleary mystery, the contours filled in only by offhanded remarks from Marjolein. No, Yael’s emails to me are all in a sort of postcard language. The perfect small talk, saying little, revealing less.
“Hoi Ma,” I begin my reply. And then I stare at screen and try to think of what to say. I’m so conversant in every kind of small talk, but I find myself at a loss for words when it comes to my mother. When I was traveling, it was simpler because I could just send a sort of postcard. In Romania now at one of the Black Sea resorts, but it’s off season and quiet. Watched the fishermen for hours. Although even those had addendums in my mind. How watching the fishermen one blustery morning reminded me of our family trip to Croatia when I was ten. Or was it eleven? Yael slept late, but Bram and I woke early to go down to the docks to buy the day’s catches from the just-returning fisherman, who all smelled of salt and vodka. But following Yael’s lead, I excise those bits of nostalgia from my missives.
“Hoi Ma.” The cursor blinks like a reprimand and I can’t get past it, can’t think of what to say. I toggle back to my inbox, scrolling backward in time. The last few years and their occasional notes from Broodje, and the notes from people I met on the road—vague promises to meet up in Tangiers, in Belfast, in Barcelona, in Riga—plans that rarely materialized. Before that, there’s the flurry of emails from various professors on the economics faculty, w
arning me that unless I appealed “special circumstances,” I was in danger of not being asked back next year. (I didn’t, and I wasn’t.) Before that, condolence emails, some of them still unopened, and before that, notes from Bram, mostly silly things he liked to forward to me, a restaurant review of a place he wanted to try out, a photo of a particularly monstrous piece of architecture, an invitation to help on his latest fix-it project. I scroll back now four years and there are the emails from Saba, who, in the two years between discovering email and getting too sick to use it, had delighted in this instant form of communication, where you could write pages and pages and it didn’t cost any more to send.
I return to the note to Yael. “Hoi Ma, I’m back in Utrecht now, hanging out with Robert-Jan and the boys. Nothing much to report. It’s pissing down rain every day; no sign of the sun for a week now. You’re glad not to be here for it. I know how you hate the gray. Talk soon. Willem.”
Postcard Language, the smallest of small talk.
Nine
The boys and I are going to a movie, along with W’s new girlfriend. Some Jan de Bont thriller at the Louis Hartlooper. I haven’t liked a de Bont film since—I can’t even remember—but I’ve been outvoted because W has a girlfriend, and this is a big thing, and if she wants explosions, we will watch explosions.
The theater complex is packed, people spilling out the front doors. We fight our way through the crowds to the box office. And that’s when I see her: Lulu.
Not my Lulu. But the Lulu I named her for. Louise Brooks. The theater has lots of old movie posters in the lobby, but I’ve never seen this one, which isn’t on the wall but is propped up on an easel. It’s a still shot from Pandora’s Box, Lulu, pouring a drink, her eyebrow raised in amusement and challenge.
“She’s pretty.” I look up. Behind me is Lien, W’s punked-out math major girlfriend. No one can quite get over how he did it, but apparently they fell in love over numbers theory.