He wanted me to know that he had lost his mother. That one day he looked at her hands and saw she was no longer wearing her rings. It happened so fast, the wasting away. The aging, too. In the space of three weeks, her hair turned gray. She was thirty-eight. He would come home from school to find her lying in the dark bedroom, enveloped by a strange, sweet smell. Like he said, it all happened so fast. Unbearable, suddenly. Lucia was eleven, he was nearly thirteen. The flowers disappeared from the kitchen garden. His father, sick with grief, remarried that same year, a woman from the village, Mieke Renes, a good-hearted soul who could laugh at nothing and burst into tears for no apparent reason. Salt of the earth, Ton said.
There were other things, too, confidences I no longer recall. One that has stayed with me, as a performance in my mind’s eye, is Lucia creeping into his cramped cabin of a bedroom one night to show him how her pet gerbil could crawl up one sleeve of her nightdress and out the other. Later came a tiresome year in which she constantly nagged her brother, insisting they should run away from home together and never come back.
We lay among the pillows at the head of the bed. I was closest to the window. The props with which the evening had begun lay scattered in the glow of the heater, a smoldering still life on the floor. A couple of glasses, a torn pack of frosted cookies, half-eaten. The cramped shoes from which Ton had freed my feet. To help him remove the pants without ripping them, I had knelt on the bed. It had taken me a while to work out how to unfasten the buckle. Shedding these strange clothes—and I do mean strange—had been a matter of some urgency.
One thing cannot go unremembered: the instant pleasure I felt in making love with him that first night. Perhaps he had told me, between one tale and another, how he had come by that talent, foreshadowed in the solemnity with which he slid the pinching shoes from my feet. Who can say, but thinking back on my own past flings, in him I seemed to have stumbled on a lover with an instinct for reading delicacies and desires in the scent of my skin. Ton certainly didn’t fuck like a farm boy.
A little later, I stared out of the window alone. Ton was asleep. Snow began to fall. The snowflakes danced in the beam of the brazen spotlight that kept poor old Boerhaave from his slumbers, and gradually covered the man and his book in a translucent blanket. I was woozy beyond belief, skin glowing as if I had spent a day at the beach. There was an ache behind my eyes. Who knows how long it throbbed there, but I was suddenly seized by the certainty that every word I had heard and had spoken that evening was a fabrication, plucked from thin air. Dished up for us by the venerable green specter outside my window.
After a while, I turned my head away. How still Ton was as he slept. The heater had gone out. My eyes wandered over the vague contours of a desk, a chair, the vertical metal line of a shelf unit, and failed to make even the slightest connection between them.
The clothes of two strangers were strewn across the floor.
“The clothes of two complete strangers were strewn across the floor,” I told him.
He raised a skeptical eyebrow. I had summed up our night as survivors in a string of dry facts. Perhaps he thought I was trying to inject a touch of melodrama.
“No, honestly,” I said. “Not a stitch belonged to us.”
We sauntered up the ramp that separated the aquarium from the amphibians. Here, too, we found ourselves half in darkness, but a different smell hung in the air, damp and earthy. Pleasant in its way. The trickle of water on all sides.
Somewhere in the distance, deafening screeches erupted. I listened for a while, and then said, “They belonged to a couple of teenagers: corduroy pants, sweaters, underwear. Even the socks and shoes.”
“What the hell is that?” he asked.
“Birds of prey. The zookeepers chuck rodents their way at twelve-thirty sharp.”
We peered into a display case bathed in grayish light. Clumps of stone. Sand. An overhanging fringe of ferns. At first sight there was nothing else to see in this miniature wilderness. Whatever lived here was hiding from us, or no longer existed and had yet to be replaced.
“You were lucky,” he said, without taking his eyes off the glass case. “Someone fished you out. Helped you off the ice.”
“No, there wasn’t a living soul for miles around. We heaved ourselves out of the water. Scrambled over the rim of cracking ice on our knees and elbows, made it across to the embankment. There was no point even trying to take off our skates. Feet wide apart, we staggered along in our freezing clothes. Scanned our surroundings and spotted a little house along the way. It turned out to be a fashionable bungalow. You know the kind: two Airedale terriers chained up behind the door. But the lady of the house saw immediately what state we were in. She bundled Ton into a hot shower and ran me a bath. The batty old girl sat there the whole time, nattering away. Showed us photos of her kids. Perhaps she was just glad of a chance to talk about them. Son and daughter, both at boarding school in Switzerland. Busy growing out of their clothes.”
He pointed. “Hah! There they are.”
Even so, it took me a while to spot them. They had been right under our noses all this time, rendered invisible by lack of motion. A pair of toads, big as fists. Dull gray, like something an old miner might cough up.
Next to every terrarium was a picture accompanied by an informative text. Out of habit, I absorbed a few factoids. Perhaps I already had an inkling about what tree frogs have to do to find themselves a mate. The males emit cries while the picky females listen intently. Set on breeding success, they will settle for nothing less than a male whose call vibrates at an exact frequency, thirty trills per second for example, which equates to a body temperature of 61 degrees. That’s how a female tree frog knows she has found herself a reliable specimen. The precision of all this appealed to me. Is it so strange that, now and then, I have found myself wondering exactly what prompted me to accept Ton as the love of my life without a second thought?
Just as we were about to head out into the cold again, the door was thrust open and we had to take a hurried step back. Two elderly women in wheelchairs were pushed in, one after the other. Despite the verve of the two young girls at the helm, the second chair caught on the threshold. One of the old women, sporting an orange rabbit-skin coat, gazed up at me goggle-eyed, brandished a baked roll, and said, “Sausage on white bread … You can’t beat it!” What came over me I do not know, but as we passed the jackals on the way to the restaurant, I was struck by an image of myself as a girl of eight or nine, scooping a hollow in the soil under the pine trees so that I could play marbles. The ground was hard. You had to cup your fingers and hold them steady, the dirt worked itself all the way under your fingernails, and when you finally came home in the dark, runny-nosed and numb with cold, the table was set for dinner and the lamp shining down on the white tablecloth almost hurt your eyes.
Settling down at our table in the restaurant, we talked about the past, about home, and we each wanted to know what the other had missed out on most. The food had yet to arrive, but a bottle of wine had been uncorked and stood on a silver-plated tray. He filled a glass, held it out to me, and I said without the slightest hesitation, “Belonging.” And he, one of seven children as it turned out, said, “Privacy.”
The night is at its coldest now. I do not need a clock to tell me how deep the darkness is. I can hear it in the cold. The timer has just called me back to the kitchen but I am in no rush. Haste will not help this job along. I press my forehead to the windowpane, feel and hear the cold beyond the glass. It comes in the distant howl of a dog, in the hiss of a passing train, its vibration concentrated, polished by the cold. It comes in the crack of branches encased in ice. I stand barefoot on a coconut-fiber mat. To my left and my right lies the land that is mine by law. Behind me, Anatole snorts and starts gnawing at his crotch. What am I to make of all this?
“Nothing,” I murmur and write the word on the fogged-up glass with my finger.
Then I take the large mixing bowl from the little stool and lift the dish towel.
The mixture has risen to the brim. With a nod of satisfaction, I use two spoons to transfer it to the Bundt pan and, as I do this, I wonder—not for the first time—if there is anyone who can explain it to me.
Perhaps I could have laid it out for him, this afternoon?
The fact that I lived so agreeably with my husband, on the very best of terms—we both thought that there was nothing better than sleeping between starched white sheets, that it made sense to do the grocery run once a month on a Wednesday afternoon, when hordes of housewives were otherwise occupied, that the postman was the spitting image of the caretaker at the teacher training college, that the sloping bosom of the woman next door made her look like a seagull, that we would wait another three years before having children—convinced life’s great passions still lay ahead of us. And yes, those passions showed up soon enough, and fell on fallow ground. The love, the hatred, the fascination with everything he had or had not done, fascination that spiraled into fervid curiosity. Into obsession. Into madness.
After lunch, I suggested we take a walk in the ice forest.
“The ice forest?” he repeated, as he struggled into his coat.
I explained that the forests here in the North were frozen. Before it could drip from the branches, the meltwater turned to ice. The trees were enveloped in transparent sheaths, a very sad, very beautiful sight. The slightest touch, by man or bird, caused the wood to snap.
As we stepped out onto the pavement, we noticed that the sun was on the verge of breaking through the clouds. The sky was milky blue. I drove us out of town. Forced to keep my eyes on the road, I made a few routine inquiries.
“What age are your children?”
“Eighteen and sixteen.”
“Do you see them often?”
He did not answer straight away, but began running his fingers along the edge of the floor.
“The handle is under the seat, on the right,” I said.
The seat slid back and he stretched his legs.
“The police came knocking,” he said and told me that his sons belonged to a group of boys who had managed to hack into the computer systems of an unlikely assortment of institutions. Not a shred of data was beyond their reach. His teenage sons were walking around with payroll lists, medical records, and the names of debt defaulters and investment fraudsters in their back pockets. Just for laughs.
This tickled me and made me think of what he had said about his own work that morning.
“So they take after their dad.”
“How come?”
“Facts, facts …” I began to say but clamped my lips together as I felt the wheels begin to slide. I eased up on the gas, let the car right itself, and, once I was back in control, steered it toward the center of the road.
He seemed oblivious to my maneuvers.
“There’s something wild and angular about the way they move. Like a pair of young colts,” he said. “They take after Louise.”
Louise. This was the second mention of her name. I felt I was getting to know her rather well. A woman with a tangle of damp curls and a knot of anger in her belly. She had brought two sons into the world. Her lovemaking was angular and wild. Her husband had loved her deeply.
Fleeting confidences. Free, no strings attached. Steering and switching gears on this freezing afternoon, I could have added up the exact balance of my life with ease, like a sum scribbled on the back of an envelope. An unremarkable man, the man who had shared less than eighteen months of my life, had—after a shooting incident in a darkened greenhouse—become a secret that would drive me to distraction.
After that first, fateful day, we saw each other three or four times a week, mostly in the company of others. That winter was a season of unrest in every university town: riots broke out, fires were started, a barricade could spring up on any street corner within thirty minutes. The group to which Lucia and Ton belonged was intensely involved in all this, but then so was the student population as a whole. Even I found myself prying cobbles from the street, screaming bitter slogans, and spitting at the barred windows of a dark-blue police van packed with vigilant energy.
One thing that has stayed with me is the constant warmth that radiated toward Ton and me. Everyone seemed delighted that the two of us were an item. Congratulations and invitations were the order of the day. What are you two drinking? And before we could so much as blink, we’d be standing there, beer in hand.
Easter arrived and we all went sailing on the Kaag. Blustery conditions had been keeping everyone on their toes all week, but on the day we decided to join in the fun, the wind died down and by the afternoon the entire fleet of rainbow yachts, two of which we crewed, resembled a cloud bank dissipating at a barely perceptible pace. Hugo Kakebeke, whose black humor I had come to know and appreciate, lazed by the rudder surveying us all in turn. “Ton,” he declared, “I see baldness and corpulence in your future.” About me he said nothing.
One Sunday we paid his father and his stepmother a visit. We took the train and then the bus and arrived in a village that consisted of farmhouses and a single convenience store. Dogs scampered around off the leash, roosters crowed, and goats grazed in front gardens. Everyone we encountered said hello.
In the kitchen with the blue paintwork, we were welcomed by Mieke Renes. She took both my hands in hers and squeezed them tightly. Suddenly her eyes grew red and tears began to roll down her cheeks. “Your father is out on the land,” she said to Ton, as she turned away and went in search of the cat. She was a woman of around fifty, sturdily built. A hand-knitted cardigan drooping to one side accentuated the rounding of her shoulders. As we walked in the sunshine to the greenhouse where the chicory was grown, Ton told me his stepmother had been a spinster who, until the age of forty, had looked after her father, a schoolmaster forced into retirement by illness and demanding beyond belief. When she married Ton’s father, she had abruptly left her old man to the tender mercies of the district nurse.
Ton’s father had only recently embarked on this horticultural experiment and he was brimming over with enthusiasm. He showed us the water system, the darkness behind the rubber curtain, and the cold store where the roots lay in the misapprehension that it was winter. At dinner, Ton and his father could scarcely speak of anything else. Later, as we washed the dishes, Mieke Renes and I watched them head out into the fields together, two farmers in overalls, crotches halfway to their knees. “Ton is getting more and more like his father,” said Mieke Renes and I was left wondering why this statement was accompanied by a peal of laughter.
In no time at all, the pieces of my life fell clattering into place. In May, I graduated. One week later, I slipped two job application letters in the mailbox and headed over to Pietersteeg where everyone was in shock. Lucia and Ton had left only fifteen minutes earlier, I was told. Devastating news. Their father had suffered a heart attack that day. Yes, he was dead. Dressed in gray, I sat beside Ton at the funeral. The service was accompanied by the loud sobbing of Mieke Renes, until the moment when she jumped up and stormed out of the church—I can still picture her, running with knees lifted high, the way children run. That same day she let everyone know she was moving back in with her father. Ton and Lucia spent a week talking things over with the notary and the bank. They examined the books. It was June. The countryside was bathed in glorious sunshine and the night rains smelled of grass. The farm badly needed taking care of and Ton decided to stay on and leave Leiden behind. We married in early July and fourteen months later I was a widow.
That was that.
“Light me a cigarette, would you?” I said.
There was more, of course, but that was another chapter.
Trees suspended in ice rolled by on either side. They looked like some exotic species. The branches hung unnaturally low, some of the treetops were crooked, not dangerously so, but still: a slight distortion and the familiar becomes strange enough to inspire fear or awe.
I stopped at a parking lot dotted with trash cans and signs bearing directions for w
alking trails. Before we got out of the car, he slotted a cigarette between my lips. The insides of his fingers felt rough.
I may be mistaken—it’s late, the middle of the night, and I am standing over a Bundt pan smoothing out cake batter—but I seem to remember him looking intently at my face. Perhaps he was toying with the idea of asking “And then?”
Had he asked, I would have answered, “And then began my search, my descent into madness.”
But he didn’t ask anything.
It was spring before it occurred to me to retrace his movements.
One morning I found myself standing in front of the wardrobe, staring for minutes on end, as if there were some need to be watchful. The wardrobe was a hulking great thing made of walnut, with two small mirrors set in the upper panels of the doors at a height that made no human sense. Overcoming indecision, I swung the doors wide. All our clothes were hanging there. Ton’s to the right. A few coats, a few jackets, shirts and sweaters. I was looking for my blue linen skirt. There was a March chill in the air, but I knew sunlight would soon be pouring in through the windows of my classroom. The peacoat Ton had worn that winter in Leiden caught my eye. Without thinking, I ran my hand over the indestructible fabric, unfastened a button, and felt the lining, still remarkably soft and luxurious to the touch. A coat made for a high-ranking officer. Then my fingers slid into the inside pocket and fished out a long ticket.
It was the punch card for a parking garage in Leiden.
“Thursday, March second, nineteen-seventy,” I read aloud. “Two thirty p.m.”
Over two years ago. I counted back. We had only just met.
Contrary to habit, I did not take the car to school that morning. My farmhouse is a short walk from the village, ten minutes at most, but the lightest shower is enough to flood the road under the viaduct, and the embankments I have to step onto when cars come up behind me are soft and muddy. That day I felt like walking. I played with the punch card in my coat pocket, nodded to the drivers who had to slow down behind me, and reached the village just as the storekeeper was putting out his sign announcing the week’s special offers. I bought a newspaper and began to chat about the weather.
Sleepless Night Page 4
