Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  At a certain moment I asked Shiv if I could crash at his place. “I’m too tired to head back,” I said. He nodded, looking away. He knew what I was offering.

  I sometimes wondered why the respect of these men mattered so much to me—mattered more, at the time, than anyone else’s respect. After that night with Shiv, I thought I had the answer to my question: these people, who in themselves were no better or worse than average, mattered because they happened to be the ones, should anything happen to me, whom I could prevail on to look after me as Shiv had been looked after. It was only after the fact that I figured out they’d already been looking after me.

  Chuck merged, in my mind, with these other West Indians and Asians I played with, and I suppose their innocence became confused with his innocence, and his numbers game with the one we played on a field. There was a physical merger, too. Chuck loved to watch cricket and watched us whenever he could, keeping an eye on the play as he made phone calls. Now that he had quit umpiring, he became a follower of the team and assumed the right of a follower to give advice. One afternoon, after I’d struggled as usual to hit the ball through the outfield, he said to me, “Hans, you’ve got to hit the thing in the air. How else are you going to get runs? This is America. Hit the ball in the air, man.”

  I tore open my pads’ Velcro straps and tossed the pads into my bag. “It’s not how I bat,” I said.

  The last league game of the season was played on August’s first Sunday. It was hot, we were playing Cosmos CC, and we batted second. Four wickets fell and I was the next man in. I pulled a plastic chair into the shade of a tree and sat alone, bareheaded and sweating. I fell into that state of self-absorption that afflicts the waiting batsman as he studies the bowling for signs of cunning and untoward movement and, trying to recall what it means to bat, trying to make knowledge out of memory, replays in his mind bygone shots splendid and shaming. The latter predominated: in spite of the many matches I’d played that season, I’d never found myself in that numinous state of efficiency we evoke with a single casual word, “form.” There was a handful of shots I could look back on with pleasure—a certain flick off the legs, a drive that streaked through extra cover for four—but the rest, all the wafts and dishonorable pokes and thick and thin edges, was rubbish beneath recollection.

  And on this day, when we were chasing almost two hundred fifty runs, a big target that required quick scoring on an outfield made especially sluggish by a wet summer, I was once again confronted by the seemingly irresolvable conflict between, on the one hand, my sense of an innings as a chanceless progression of orthodox shots—impossible under local conditions—and, on the other hand, the indigenous notion of batting as a gamble of hitting out. There are hornier dilemmas a man can face; but there was more to batting than the issue of scoring runs. There was the issue of self-measurement. For what was an innings if not a singular opportunity to face down, by dint of effort and skill and self-mastery, the variable world?

  A cry went up in the field. A stump lay stricken on the ground. I lowered my helmet over my head and walked out.

  “Go deep, Hans! Go deep!” somebody shouted from the boundary as I chalked my guard on the mat. The voice was Chuck’s. “Go deep!” he shouted again, demonstrating the shot with a swinging arm.

  I took stock of my situation. There was the usual plotting afoot between the bowler and his captain, who was making adjustments to his field, moving one fellow a few paces to his right, bringing another in to a close catching position. Finally the traps were set and the wicket-keeper slapped his gloves and crouched behind the stumps. I settled into my stance.

  The bowler, a specialist in fizzing Chinamen and thus a very rare specimen, ran up and turned his arm. I blocked the first two balls.

  “Do it now!” Chuck called. “Do it now, Hans!”

  When the third ball came looping down toward my legs, something unprecedented happened. Following the spin, I executed an unsightly, crooked heave: the ball flew high into the trees, for six. A huge cheer went up. The next ball, I repeated the stroke with a still freer swing. The ball flew even higher, clearing the sweetgums: there were shouts of “Watch it!” and “Heads!” as it bounced wildly in the tennis courts. I thought I was dreaming. What happened after that—I was soon out, and in the end we were defeated—ultimately didn’t count. What counted, after my disappointment about the match result had waned and the last beers had been drunk and the extra-hot Sri Lankan chicken curry had been finished and the matting had been rolled back up and stuffed into its box and I found myself, once again, in the privacy of my ferry ride, what counted was that I’d done it. I’d hit the ball in the air like an American cricketer; and I’d done so without injury to my sense of myself. On the contrary, I felt great. And Chuck had seen it happen and, as much as he could have, had prompted it.

  All of which may explain why I began to dream in all seriousness of a stadium, and black and brown and even a few white faces crowded in bleachers, and Chuck and me laughing over drinks in the members’ enclosure and waving to people we know, and stiff flags on the pavilion roof, and fresh white sight-screens, and the captains in blazers looking up at a quarter spinning in the air, and a stadium-wide flutter of expectancy as the two umpires walk onto the turf square and its omelette-colored batting track, whereupon, with clouds scrambling in from the west, there is a roar as the cricket stars trot down the pavilion steps onto this impossible grass field in America, and everything is suddenly clear, and I am at last naturalized.

  I’M STILL WORKING AT M——. IT WAS SURPRISINGLY uncomplicated to arrange for a transfer to London and to start up again, this time in a corner office that permits me, depending on which way I spin my chair, to admire St. Paul’s Cathedral or the Gherkin.

  Of course, it felt strange to be back. In the first week I was sitting at one of the long tables that litter the bank’s cafeteria—we lunch in rows, like monks—when I noticed a familiar-seeming face a few spots away. I was almost through with my lunch before I realized, with a little shock, that this was the same S.V.P. who’d ominously stepped into my cubicle half a decade before.

  I felt a strong impulse to approach him, say something about our shared exilic lot. But what to say, exactly? I was thinking it over when he got up and left.

  Since then I’ve seen him around quite regularly—he’s with the M-and-A crowd and every now and then puts his name to a fairness opinion—but in two years I have not spoken to him. I still haven’t figured out what there might be to say.

  My work these days is directed at the activity in and around the Caspian Sea: on the map on my office wall, black stars stand for Astrakhan and Aktau and Ashgabat. Last year, the bank ordered a promising young analyst, Cardozo, to fly over and help me grow the operation. Cardozo, from New York out of Parsippany, New Jersey, loves it here. He has a flat in Chelsea and a girlfriend from Worcestershire who has forgiven him his exotic name. He wears pink shirts with pink silk cuff links. He twirls a tightly furled brolly on sunny days. His pinstripes grow bolder and bolder. I wouldn’t be amazed to see a signet ring turn up on his pinkie.

  I understand something about what’s going on with Cardozo, because when I arrived in London in my twenties I too felt like a performing extra. There was something marvelous about the thousands of men in dark suits daily swarming down Lombard Street—I even remember a bowler hat—and something decidedly romantic about the leftover twinkle of empire that went from Threadneedle Street to the Aldwych to Piccadilly and, like tardy starlight, perpetrated a deception of time. At Eaton Place, in drizzle, I half expected to run into Richard Bellamy, MP; and when I say that in Berkeley Square I once listened for a nightingale, I’m not joking.

  But nobody here holds on to such notions for very long. The rain soon becomes emblematic. The double-deckers lose their elephants’ charm. London is what it is. In spite of a fresh emphasis on architecture and an influx of can-do Polish plumbers, in spite, too, of the Manhattanish importance lately attached to coffee and sushi and farmers’
markets, in spite even of the disturbance of 7/7—a frightening but not a disorienting occurrence, it turns out—Londoners remain in the business of rowing their boats gently down the stream. Unchanged, accordingly, is the general down-the-hatch, who-are-we-fooling lightheartedness that’s aimed at shrinking the significance of our attainments and our doom, and contributes, I’ve speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York self hood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point. As to what this point actually was, I can only say that it involved wistfulness. An example: one lunchtime, Cardozo, mulling over popping the question to his Worcestershire girlfriend, points out a beautiful woman in the street. “I’ll no longer be able to go up to her and ask her out,” he says, sounding dazed. Plainly the logical response is to inquire of Cardozo exactly when was the last time (a) he asked out a girl on the street, and (b) she said yes, and (c) he and she went on to greater things; and in this way bring home to him that he’s being a dummy. I say no such thing, however. We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?

  On a recent Friday, Cardozo and I knock off work early and walk in the direction of the river. It is an English summer’s evening of the best sort, in which the day cloudlessly slips past nine o’clock and the price of a barrel of oil, scandalously ticking over in the seventies, seems to have not the slightest bearing on the world. The lanes south of Ludgate Hill are crowded with happy gangs of drinkers, and at Blackfriars we decide to stop for a quick one. An interval of this kind is most natural in this unwieldy city, where to be in one’s home is, in terms of society, more or less to be like the fellow washed up on the little island with the single palm tree.

  Cardozo and I take our drinks outside and stand around in the sunlight and the fumes. We get on very well. He coins flattering, if ridiculous, professional nicknames for me (the Dopester, the Ax) and in return I clue him in on the little tricks that go into holding oneself out as an augur in the matter of world affairs, which more than ever is what our line of work requires. I seem to have an aptitude for the act: voice a firsthand opinion about the kebabs of Baku and people will buy almost anything you follow up with; and if, at a dinner party, I talk about West Texas intermediate crude or the disgustingness of the Volga, or drop the name Turkmenbashy (the man, I add at that moment, who renamed January after himself), even my wife’s ears will prick up. But there is usually no call for my show of expertise. At the said dinner party—and so much, in this city, revolves around these drinky, smoky, chronic get-togethers of friends who have known one another since college, if not school, days—the talk invariably concerns itself with ancient running jokes or the doings of old so-and-so, whom everybody except me knows, and I’m only able to chime in when the topic switches to, say, the traffic, which everybody bitterly agrees is worse than ever and not at all relieved by the private buses that have been released like cattle onto the London streets or indeed by the congestion charge, and then of course there is the galling and wondrous fact that one’s taxi home will cost more than a flight to Italy—an observation that quickly leads to the subject of holidays. Nowadays I spend a lot of time discussing gîtes, and plages, and ruins. I don’t remember anyone in New York talking about his vacation for longer than a minute.

  This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with weighing the felicities of Brittany against those of Normandy. But in London, it must be recognized, escape—to the country, to warmer climes, to the pub—is a great, bittersweet theme. Sometimes this results in a discussion of New York City, in which case I’m quite happy to listen to somebody report excitedly on the Chrysler Building or the jazz riches of the Village or the distinctive largeness of experience that a simple walk down a Manhattan street can summon. Here, too, my opinion is rarely sought. Although it’s not a secret that I lived for some time in the city in question, I’m not accorded any unusual authority. This isn’t because I’ve been back for a while but, rather, because I’m precluded by nationality from commenting on any place other than Holland—one of those parochialisms, I am pissed off to rediscover, that remind me that as a foreign person I’m essentially of some mildly buffoonish interest to the English and deprived, certainly, of the nativity New York encourages even its most fleeting visitor to imagine for himself. And it’s true: my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York—that New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin. It may be that this is what I like best about Cardozo, that he accords me the status of fellow émigré. “Pedro,” he murmurs as he reads the baseball reports in the Herald Tribune, rightly trusting that he need say nothing more.

  Not that long ago, at yet another gathering of familiars, our host, an old friend of Rachel’s named Matt, makes some remarks about Tony Blair and his catastrophic association with George W. Bush, whom Matt describes as the embodiment of a distinctly American strain of stupidity and fear. On this side of the Atlantic, this is a commonplace judgment, so commonplace, in fact, as to be of no real interest; but then the conversation strays in a direction that’s rare these days, to the events synonymous with September 11, 2001. “Not such a big deal,” Matt suggests, “when you think of everything that’s happened since.”

  He is referring to the numbers of Iraqi dead, and as a matter of arithmetic I understand his argument, indeed must admit it. He refers also to the dark amazement with which he and, if my impression is correct, most of the rest of the world have followed the various doings of this American administration, and on this score I again have not the slightest urge to contradict him. I speak up nonetheless.

  “I think it was a big deal,” I say, interrupting whatever somebody is saying.

  Matt looks at me for the first time that evening. It’s an awkward moment, because I look right back at him.

  Rachel says unexpectedly, “He was there, Matt.”

  Out of the best of intentions and acting as my loyal wife and Englisher, she wants to accord me a privileged standing—that of survivor and eyewitness. I’d feel dishonest to accept it. I’ve heard it said that the indiscriminate nature of the attack transformed all of us on that island into victims of attempted murder, but I’m not at all sure that geographic proximity to the catastrophe confers this status on me or anybody else. Let’s not forget that when it all happened I was a rubbernecker in Midtown, watching the same television images I’d have watched in Madagascar. I knew only three of the dead, and then only slightly (though well enough, in one case, to recognize his widow and his son playing in the sandpit at Bleecker Playground). And while it’s true that my family was displaced for a while, so what? If ever, out of a wish to appear more interesting or simply to make conversation, I’m tempted to place myself closer to those events—and, perhaps because I work in the financial world and am easily to be imagined in a high tower, some people have assumed I was closer to them—I only have to think of the waving little figures who were visible for a while and then not.

  I say, “That’s not my point. I’m just saying, it was a big deal.”

  “Well, of course,” Matt says, his tone marking me out as a nitpicker. “I’m not arguing with that.”

  “Good,” I say, with as much abruptness as the situation allows. “So we’re in agreement.”

  Matt makes a pleasantly concessionary face. Someone else picks up the chatter, and everything goes back to normal. However, I notice Matt leaning over and out of the corner of his mouth muttering to his neighbor, who mutters back. There is a secretive exchange of smiles.

  For some reason, I’m filled with rage.

  I lean over to Rachel. I gesture with my eyes, Let’s go.
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  Rachel has not followed what has happened. She looks surprised when I stand up and put on my jacket. It’s a surprise for all, since we have not finished our roast chicken.

  “Come on, Hans, sit down,” Matt says. “Rachel, talk to him.”

  Rachel looks at her old friend and then at me. She stands up. “Oh, piss off, Matt,” she says, and waves good-bye to everyone. It is quite a shocking moment, in the scheme of things, and of course exhilarating. When we step out together into the wet street, holding hands, there is a tang of glory in the air.

  Gratifyingly, Rachel doesn’t ask me what exactly transpired. But in the taxi home, there’s an epilogue of sorts: my wife, mooning out of the window at rainy Regent’s Park, says, “God, do you remember those sirens?” and, still looking away, she reaches for my hand and squeezes it.

  Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage’s course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door. Which they are, one comes to realize.

  Which brings me back to Blackfriars: Cardozo wishes to have that most British conversation about getting away to foreign parts, or so it seems as we discuss his imminent romantic weekend in Lisbon, where Cardozo’s ancestors lived and, according to Cardozo legend, in their capacity as mastic importers ran into Columbus himself. Then, with shadows creeping up to us from across the street, Cardozo says, “I’m going to ask Pippa to marry me. In Lisbon.”

  I raise my glass of black beer. “That’s wonderful,” I say.

  Toasting Cardozo’s matrimonial future, we each take a sip and renew our watch over the vehicles grunting toward Blackfriars Bridge. There are pedestrians to keep an eye on, too, hundreds of them, all trotting downhill to the train station.