Landing

by Laia Fàbregas

  The images made the article seem unreal. I had become one of Lianne Pérez-Horst’s characters, a confused little girl who had invented an angel and spent her life searching for a hologram.

  I hadn’t felt this way when I read the draft of her article. The photos and the newspaper had endowed the story with a fictitious quality. From the outside, this girl’s life was so transparent. I was standing in the street, with my shopping bag between my legs, the newspaper open in front of me. I cracked.

  I woke up in a hospital bed. Again. This time Anneke and Jan were next to my bed. I couldn’t speak. I cried for three days without stopping. Anneke held me for three days straight. She cried with me and I felt her with me.

  Back home I found my inbox full of messages Lianne Pérez-Horst had forwarded to me. Most of them expressing sympathy for that eight-year-old girl who had lost her parents. A number of them suggested I get in touch with the TV show Disappeared. Some of them recalled something about the accident, but no one knew anything about the man I had perhaps invented. Jasper Bouwmans, Ineke Crooijmans, Julie Martens, and Loesje Meijer, people on my list whom I had already found, wrote that they were thinking of me, and that they hoped the article would help me find my savior. I didn’t receive a single message from any of the twenty-seven people I had yet to meet.

  The days were suddenly empty. After a week at home I slowly began to return to my life, but in a new way. During the day I worked and I spent the rest of my time at home. The weekends were tricky, but Anneke often kept me company. She looked after me.

  I didn’t have anything to do. There was nothing to do. There was a huge void ahead of me and I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to begin filling it. Sometimes Karen Abrams called from the bar, when it was quiet. She said she missed her best customer. Karen Abrams told me stories about the bar. Things her customers had told her or things that had happened in the neighborhood. At times I thought I’d be happy if I could have Karen Abrams’s life. Or if I could share her life.

  Life could be simpler than I had made it. But I didn’t know where to begin.

  One day Lianne Pérez-Horst came to see me. I came home from work to find her sitting with Anneke in my living room. I took a deep breath and smiled at them both while I took off my jacket. Anneke was sitting at one end of the sofa, like she didn’t belong there, and I could tell from her face that she wasn’t sure whether she had made the right decision, letting Lianne Pérez-Horst in.

  Anneke offered to make some tea and went to hide in the kitchen. I sat down on the sofa, as far away as possible from the woman who had changed everything.

  “How are you?” she asked gently.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Have you heard anything?” she was talking to me as if I were unwell.

  “You think I imagined my angel,” I stated.

  “No, that’s not what I think. There’s no way I could know. I wasn’t there. You were.”

  I looked toward the kitchen. I missed having Anneke near me.

  Lianne Pérez-Horst began walking around the living room, looking at everything like she was a detective. It was exactly what I had expected her to do, it was the reason why I had wanted to do the interview in Karen Abrams’s bar, not at home. And after all that, here she was in my living room, looking at the photos of my past.

  I closed my eyes and wished for her to stop, for her not to say anything else, and with my eyes closed it was like I could read her mind. I knew she was looking around, I knew she wanted to say something, although she didn’t.

  The photos on my wall were old. They were images of another time, another life. They were scraps of the life of an eight-year-old girl who no longer existed. None of the people in the photos were still alive. Maybe it was my fault. Because ever since my parents had died nothing had changed, despite the fact I was still alive; I had let life slip away.

  There was no point in continuing to live that way. I opened my eyes and wondered whether one day I would hang a photo of Lianne Pérez-Horst on my wall. Whether she would play a role in my life beyond the one she had already played as a journalist. I imagined watching her children grow up, and, one day, seeing her soccer-fanatic son play for Ajax and thinking I’ve known him since he was a kid.

  I felt the urge to open up to more people, but at the same time I repressed the urge to call Karen Abrams. I realized Lianne Pérez-Horst was, in a way, my savior. Her presence, her questions, and her behavior made me want to be different, to change things, to want to live my life.

  “I have something for you,” Lianne Pérez-Horst said when I had come out of my reverie. A month had passed since the publication of the article and she had brought a bag full of letters. She forwarded the emails as soon as she got them, but she hadn’t had time to send the letters, she said.

  She brought me the bag and set it at my feet.

  “Have you opened them?”

  “Of course not.”

  Anneke returned from the kitchen. I looked at her and realized that her presence at my side was completely unconditional. She had put up with everything and she was still there for me. She still believed in me. She still lived for me. I felt grateful for the fact that, after all I had done, she still wanted to be my mother.

  “Lianne Pérez-Horst brought some letters for me,” I told Anneke, handing her the heavy bag. I didn’t know what else to do with the letters. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  “We’ll open them some other time, okay?” she said, taking the bag. I didn’t reply.

  It was quiet while she took the bag to my office, and it was still quiet when she returned.

  “Are you still working through your list?” Lianne PérezHorst asked tentatively.

  It was the first time since I had met her that she seemed unsure of herself. It made her more real, more fragile, made me feel closer to her. Could I be friends with her? Was there a place for her in my life?

  “I gave up the search,” I said. It was the first time I’d said it aloud. I still wasn’t sure if it was true.

  “Searching tires you out,” Lianne Pérez-Horst said. “Sometimes we find what we’re looking for as soon as we stop. I don’t search, I find. It makes me feel good.”

  Maybe she was waiting for me to say what I thought, but I didn’t say anything. Anneke nodded.

  “I accept what comes my way,” she added. “I let myself be surprised, but knowing that whatever happens to me, it’s for the best, or at least something good will come of it.”

  It couldn’t be true that everything in life just came to you. It also couldn’t be true that whatever happens is for the best. Sometimes you have to search for happiness. And sometimes misfortune befalls you, you can’t escape it. So it’s better to search for happiness. To find the things that are important to you.

  If I didn’t search, there was just a void, a void I couldn’t face.

  There were ways to fill the void. If I gave up my search I could search for something else. I could concentrate on the word in the box, on finding out what it meant. It might be even more difficult than finding the people on my list, but I had never shied away from a challenge. And at the very least I would be filling the void, not just finding something.

  There were other options, too. I could look for my cyclist. Spend my days looking for the man who had said I was very nice, to thank him. I could look for him near my office, posting flyers all over the city or riding my bike around town.

  There had to be something. There had to be something more than getting up each morning to go to work, and eating dinner, sleeping, and going back to work the next day. How did other people do it? How did they survive without searching? How had my parents done it? Were they searching for something too? Or had they accepted the hand that life dealt them? The hand they had been dealt was death. I didn’t want to wait until I died. If I was going to do that, it would be better to die right now.


  I don’t know how long I spent lost in thought, but I know that suddenly I felt Anneke’s hand on my shoulder, and that my last words hung in the air. I’d rather die right n ow.

  Lianne Pérez-Horst was looking at me, startled. Anneke was calmer, because it wasn’t the first time she’d heard me say it. I was embarrassed to appear so disturbed. I sensed that Lianne Pérez-Horst would never be my friend, and I hoped that she would never write another article about me.

  “I think it’s a good idea, to end your search,” Anneke said. “You’ve searched everywhere and no one has been able to confirm that this boy was real.”

  I recognized her careful tone of voice and knew what she would say next.

  Lianne Pérez-Horst rubbed her hands nervously on her thighs. Anneke put a sentence together in her head. But I didn’t give her a chance to say it.

  “You both think that I imagined the angel,” I said.

  Lianne Pérez-Horst seemed like she was going to say something but she refrained. She looked at Anneke and Anneke looked at me, worried.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, and I meant it.“Now I think so too.”

  Him

  The day Willemien showed me her last artwork I didn’t know whether to rejoice because it was nothing like emptying a bottle of lemonade into the sea or to pinch myself awake from an astonishing dream.

  I wish I could recall the exact words she used before showing me something that was neither a painting nor a poster—it was nothing I could have imagined beforehand. But I now know I could never explain it as magically as she did to me.

  Willemien stopped painting when she realized that art could be more than a reflection of my dreams, or the reflection of the landscapes of my homeland. For her, “more than” meant it could be artwork in and of itself. I had understood that much; we hadn’t spoken about art for years, because we had been focused on bringing up our boys, getting settled in Figueres, and starting the painting school, which is where I thought she was getting her weekly dose of art, teaching her students. But there was more. Willemien had continued her exploration in silence, in secret. Until she decided it was time to include me in her journey, and its outcome.

  It was a summer Sunday, we had gone for a walk after siesta and on the way home Willemien wanted to stop by the art school. She wanted to show me some of her students’ paintings, she said. It had been a long time since she’d shown me one of her posters or constellations and, of course, it had been even longer since her last painting. Although we were going to see her students’ work, I knew there was something else she wanted me to see.

  When we entered the little school I rediscovered the scent of our attic in Eindhoven. That scent of oil paint, brushes, and imagination that was spilling down the stairs of our first house each time I came home from my light bulb factory. Accompanied by nostalgia, time lost and time gained.

  With the passage of time, nothing is what it seems.

  I paused on the threshold while Willemien turned on all the lights and chose some paintings to show me. Then I walked in. She showed me pictures of the sea, of forests, and of colors.

  “These paintings are my students’ attempts to recreate reality. Each time they’re faced with a blank canvas they try to think of something they’re familiar with or of an idea they have and they hope to capture on the empty space in front of them.”

  While she spoke, I was thinking of her students and wondering if they sometimes got lost listening to Willemien. I looked at the paintings, knowing that there was still some time before she would show me what she really wanted to. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to hear my opinion of these other people’s paintings, or whether they were part of a journey I needed to take to prepare me for something else.

  “Some are better than others,” I said, trying to show some interest.

  “They’re all looking for something they won’t find,” she said solemnly.“And I won’t find it either.”

  I’ve always thought it was that confidence, that conviction with which she pronounced things, which made it possible for her to create art.

  She accompanied me to the smallest room in the school, the one she had initially used as a storeroom. I hadn’t set foot in the room since we had opened the school, and Willemien had never told me she had turned the little room into her studio. She opened the door and I was surprised to find the space so different from how I recalled it. Instead of a dark, dirty storage space, we were in a twelve meter square room with a crystal-clear skylight in the roof and blinding white walls. In the room, which didn’t smell like anything, there was nothing but a table and a small cabinet. There wasn’t a single pencil or sheet of paper on the table, the table top was clean and empty.

  The space seemed strange, otherworldly. I missed the chaos of our Dutch attic.

  “This is the ideal space for creation,” she whispered in my ear.“There’s nothing here. Nothing to distract me from the essential.”

  “But there’s not even any paper to sketch on,” I said, bewildered.

  “There used to be. I had pencils and sheets of paper. But they distracted me from what’s essential. They made me draw pencils. So I put them away. Look.”

  I opened the cabinet and saw a shelf with paper, paintbrushes, pencils, and a few small paint cans. A tiny number of things, compared to the overflowing cupboards in the attic of our house in Eindhoven. This cabinet was more empty than full. Apart from the shelf with supplies, the shelf above held dozens of art books.

  Eventually I looked at the bottom shelf of the cabinet. Near the floor there was a cardboard box full of burnt paper. I bent over to take a closer look. The side of the box said constellations. I was going to ask Willemien what was in the box, but she didn’t let me. While she shut the doors of the cabinet she said,“I keep it closed, I don’t take anything out until I’ve made some progress in my search for what’s essential.”

  I didn’t understand what she meant by essential, but I didn’t ask.

  “Art shouldn’t represent,” she explained.“It should be.”

  “Of course,” I said. I had learned this lesson many years ago.

  “When we look at something, as viewers we always ask ourselves what it represents, what it reminds us of. That’s how we think we can understand a work of art.”

  I thought of the lemonade being poured out into the sea and what it might represent. Willemien continued explaining her view to me.

  “But I believe works of art aren’t meant to be understood, they’re meant to be felt. And since our minds are always trying to understand things, we need a work of art that can’t be understood at all. Something you can only feel. It’s about making a piece of art that doesn’t represent anything, and doesn’t remind anyone of anything either.”

  “Can that be art?”

  “Of course! Because it will move people. Do you see what I mean?”

  She had lost me. I wished she would show me her painting, or whatever it was. Maybe she saw the impatience on my face. She asked me to leave the studio for a moment.

  When I left the room I was confronted once again by the smell of paint I knew so well and that, in some way, I missed in her studio. For nearly a quarter of an hour I waited, pacing near the closed door and wondering how she had managed to keep the scent out of her studio.

  I heard some sounds, as if she were moving the table or the cabinet inside the room.

  “You can come in,” she said, sounding far away.

  I opened the door and from the threshold I could see the table was in the same place it had been before. The cabinet hadn’t moved either. On top of the table there was a birchwood box that was no longer its original light color. Although it had been painted completely black, I recognized the jewelery box I had given her many years ago.

  Willemien wasn’t in the room. I went in and looked around. I wondered if she was hiding in the cabinet, but I remember
ed the shelves and realized she wouldn’t fit. But I decided not to look for her. She wanted me to encounter that box alone.

  I approached the table. There was a little key in front of the jewelery box. I tried to remember the last time I had seen the jewelery box, where it had been, what had been inside it. I couldn’t remember. I took the key and put it into the lock. It opened easily. Before I lifted the lid I looked around me, listening, smelling. I felt like I was uncovering the secret of a stranger, like I didn’t have the right to be there.

  I lifted the lid of the box to discover an emptiness greater than that of the room I was standing in. At the bottom of the box there was an iron ring that made it look like the box had a false bottom. I put my finger in the ring and pulled carefully. I set the little panel aside and looked closely at what the secret compartment contained.

  I saw a word. I tried to say it:“Breiszat.”

  But no sound came out of my mouth.

  I was speechless, and my mind was blank. I just stood there looking at that word. I felt like smiling. As if I had just learned the secret of everything. And when I experienced this sensation, I wanted to share it with the whole world. I thought of all the people I knew, who ought to see what I was seeing, to feel what I was feeling.

  When I’d had enough, I put the false panel with the iron ring back on top of the word, shut the lid, and locked it. Slowly I left the table.

  Evening had turned into night. The skylight was dark, I had been standing in the shadows and I didn’t know how long Willemien had been standing in the doorway, watching me.