Dear Mr. M

  “I need to do it now,” he said. “Later on I might grow sentimental. Get attached to all the wrong things. I want to make a new start. Can you still smell it?”

  “What?”

  “That hospital odor. It had seeped into everything. Into the curtains, the bedding, even my clothes. But I sponged down the whole house, and I kept all the windows open for three nights.”

  Laura sniffed, she smelled something, but it wasn’t a hospital, more like cleaning products and soap—and a vague, oniony smell, probably from the pizza boxes.

  “You still can’t get that Herman off your mind, can you?” Lodewijk asked suddenly.

  “What?” Laura said. “What are you talking about?” Don’t blush, she told herself. Don’t blush, not now.

  “Laura, sweetheart, you don’t have to play make-believe with me. I saw the way you looked at him at the funeral. How you looked at him the whole time. And I can’t blame you. He is a bit skinny, and he’s certainly no Mick Jagger, but I know what I would do if I were you. I know what I would do myself. That type. Not really masculine. Wonderful! I can stare at that for hours.”

  Laura looked into Lodewijk’s eyes and saw something she had never seen before: the new Lodewijk, a Lodewijk who would no longer wear knitted sweaters, who would be who he was from now on, the way his mother had made him promise, who had chased away the hospital smell and would be himself.

  —

  “Ron asked why you named that movie Life Before Death,” Miriam said. “I’m curious about that too.”

  “I’m glad you mentioned it,” Herman replied. He was back at the dinner table now, and at first it seemed as though he was teasing Miriam as he put on a mock earnest expression and closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again he smiled at her. “That you both asked. No, but seriously. Life before death. Because that’s what it is, because that’s what we’re seeing. Two adults who have nothing more to say to each other just go on living. They stay together ‘for the children’s sake,’ as they say. But the only child in the house is me. They didn’t ask me a thing. That’s too bad. I can see their situation from a greater distance. I could provide them with advice.”

  “But your father’s got someone else, doesn’t he?” Miriam said. “It could be that he’d rather be with that other woman, but that he doesn’t dare to go away. Precisely because he has a child. Because he has you.”

  Laura saw how Herman’s expression suddenly stiffened; it lasted less than a second perhaps, Laura looked around at the others, but she was almost certain that she was the only one who’d seen it.

  “If my father were to ask my opinion, I would strongly urge him to buzz off as fast as possible to that cute new girlfriend of his,” Herman said. “I would tell him that he’s not doing me a favor by sitting at the table with that bored, deadpan face of his. But maybe your parents are nice, Miriam? I don’t know. Maybe you do have parents like that. They do exist. I know a couple. Laura, for example, has nice parents.”

  Laura was startled to hear her name, she didn’t dare to look at Herman, but then she did anyway. And Herman looked back. She counted to three, then lowered her eyes. Right away she felt the heat rising to her cheeks; she rubbed her fingers over them in the hope that no one else had seen. The way he had looked at her! She’d never been looked at that way by a boy. She was used to a whole spectrum of other looks: languorous looks, yearning looks, hopelessly infatuated looks—thwarted looks, above all, yes, if there was one thing that all those looks had in common it was the realization that permeated them: that they didn’t stand a chance. That she, Laura, was simply a bridge too far for most boys.

  Herman’s look was different: as a matter of fact, he had never tossed her a losing glance, she realized now for the first time. Never once. From the moment he had spoken to her beside the ransacked table at David’s party (So you’re Laura) up to his declaration of love in the midst of silence, just a few hours ago on the beach.

  If we were here alone now, he said during the whole three seconds in which he held her gaze, we’d know what to do. We’ve had to wait for months, Laura, we have a lot of catching up to do.

  “Still, when I hear Life Before Death, I tend to think of something positive,” Miriam said. “Not that you’re already dead and just go on living, but that you get everything out of life before you die. You know what I mean?”

  Herman looked at her, and this time his expression didn’t harden; an amused smile appeared on his face.

  “See how easy that was?” he had said to Stella and Laura the night before, after he apologized to Miriam. They were standing at the foot of the attic stairs, Miriam had gone to the bathroom to wash away the worst traces of her crying jag. “She’s not very smart,” he said. “She’s just oversensitive, I think that’s sweet.”

  Later that evening Miriam settled down on the couch with a book of crossword puzzles. Herman raised his eyebrows, then poked Michael and then Lodewijk and Ron too.

  “What have we here, Miriam?” he’d asked, when he could apparently contain himself no longer.

  Miriam was concentrating so closely on her crossword puzzle that she didn’t hear Herman the first time around.

  Laura remembered the tense silence that had come over the group then, when Herman called out in a sarcastic tone: “A crossword puzzle!” And then again, but this time with a slightly different stress: “A crossword puzzle!”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?” Miriam had asked.

  “Nothing,” Herman had answered. “Nothing at all. One has crossword puzzles, and that’s a fact we have to live with. As long as no one feels the need to solve them, there’s not much of a problem.”

  “What kind of self-inflated bullshit is this, Herman? Is this off limits too? Like all the rest? TV, newspapers, the—what do you call it again?—‘non-self-made music’? Are we only allowed to read really impressive books? Well, I don’t happen to like reading, and there’s no TV here. So maybe I can do something for myself, so that I don’t get bored? Or would I be better off sitting still and thinking deeply?”

  Laura glanced at Herman, then at the others. David was busy again examining something on the thigh of his jeans, Ron and Michael were sitting on either side of Herman, their arms crossed; they were looking at her almost reprovingly, as though she had done something that really could not be tolerated around here. Lodewijk was in the easy chair by the fire, reading, or pretending to. Stella was at the table writing, a letter probably, every two days she wrote a long letter to her mother.

  The way Herman looked at Miriam, though, was anything but a rebuke; he seemed, above all, amused.

  “Miriam,” he said, “you shouldn’t take things so personally right away. Yet you brought it up yourself. Listen, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to do anything. But apparently, when you think you get bored. At least that’s what you said. Is that right? Do you feel bored when you think?”

  Miriam let the book of puzzles fall to her lap, she took a deep breath and tapped her pen against her front teeth.

  “What’s wrong with crossword puzzles, Herman? You still haven’t successfully explained that to me.”

  “Nothing, in principle, but I said that already. I only wonder what goes on in the mind of someone who is searching for another word for ‘sailboat.’ With seven letters. I can’t help but think that it’s mostly a way to kill time. And time doesn’t need killing. Time is our friend. As long as we learn to experience it.”

  At that point Miriam surprised Laura, and everyone else too probably, by bursting into laughter. “Oh, Herman,” she said. “How lovely! Are you going to give us yoga lessons? Or is it meditation? What exercises must we do precisely in order to experience time? Our friend time?”

  Even more surprising perhaps was Herman’s reaction; he stared at Miriam, speechless, for half a second, then started laughing too. “Sorry,” he said laughing. “Yeah, now I hear myself too. I hear myself talking. I’m going to try it one more time, if you’ll permit me, Mir
iam. What goes on in your head while you’re solving a crossword puzzle?”

  Once again, Laura thought she was the only one who had seen it, but this time she was less certain: the half second of total panic in Herman’s eyes when Miriam laughed at him. He had regained his footing with lightning speed though, it’s true, within that half second he had found the emergency exit.

  “I think about things,” Miriam said. “Or maybe I’m fretting about something. Then I start on a crossword puzzle. Ten minutes later I’ve forgotten what I was thinking about, what I was worrying about. I’m busy solving something. Something outside myself. Something that has nothing to do with myself and my own, limited way of thinking. One hour later I’ve finished the whole puzzle. And I’ve totally forgotten what I was fretting about. I can recommend it to everyone.”

  “Okay,” Herman said. “That’s clear enough. At least it’s clear enough to me.” There was still a bit of doubt and hesitation in his voice, but his tone was no longer sarcastic—he smiled at Miriam. “I won’t keep you from it any longer.”

  That had been last night. Laura remembered that she hadn’t liked it much, this sudden mutual respect between Herman and Miriam. Above all, things mustn’t get too cozy between those two. She wondered whether Miriam was really as stupid as Herman had thought—and whether he himself realized now that he had been mistaken.

  All in all, Laura would rather have seen it end in a new clash and a crying jag, she’d even considered trying to steer it in that direction—but decided against it, it would have been too obvious.

  Now she was glad she’d kept her mouth shut. Miriam had changed from the “dumbest” girl in the group to an ally within the space of a single evening. That could prove handy later on, when Herman told Stella how things stood. She didn’t have much to worry about as far as the others went, she figured. Michael and Ron always sought confirmation from Herman before doing or saying anything. David was still solidly Herman’s best friend, albeit a friend without a backbone. Lodewijk, in fact, was the only free agent in the group. Lodewijk always spoke his mind right away; there was no doubt about it, he had become stronger since his mother’s death.

  Laura looked at Stella sitting beside Herman, her arm slung around his shoulders. Right after dinner Herman had announced that he was going to the garden to smoke a cigarette. Laura was just heading into the kitchen with a pile of dirty dishes, and as he passed he brushed her forearm gently.

  Laura found him behind the shed.

  “I’m going to tell her tonight,” he said.

  “Tonight, when?” Laura asked.

  “Before bed, in any case. It’s painful. It’s going to be real nasty. But still, it would be weird…Anyway, that would just be weird.”

  Laura leaned into him. He tasted of tobacco smoke, he was indeed very thin beneath his T-shirt, she could feel the bones sticking out under the skin of his hips and then, when her fingertips reached the front of his body and crept up slowly, his ribs. But his tongue was less clumsy than she’d expected, based on Stella’s detailed reports.

  “Come on, let’s go inside.” He pushed her away gently, he was panting. “If someone sees us like this…if they find us out here…” He tugged softly on her hair. “That would not be good,” he said.

  —

  It was long past midnight. They had gone on chatting for a while about the movie Herman had made of his parents. In the end, Herman agreed with Miriam that Life Before Death was perhaps not the best title after all. Then he had talked a bit about the script he and David were working on, for a longer movie this time. A feature film about a high-school revolt. The uprising would begin after a teacher had wrongly sent a girl out of the class, but unrest had of course been brewing within the student body long before that. At first it was to be a purely idealistic uprising, a revolt against injustice, but as the days and weeks passed—the students had occupied the whole school, the teachers were being held hostage in the gym, the building was surrounded by the police and the army—the leaders of the uprising would be faced with increasingly difficult decisions. To press home their demands, they forced a teacher to stand blindfolded at one of the classroom windows.

  “All the other windows have been covered with newspapers,” Herman said. “So then you’ve got a number of possibilities. Either the students have no way of going back and really have to hurt the teacher in order to maintain their credibility, or else the blindfolded teacher is the signal for the army to rush the building. The revolt is brutally crushed.”

  And at that point Stella stood up and stretched.

  “I think I’ll go upstairs,” she said. “Are you coming up too?” she said to Herman.

  “I was thinking…,” Herman began, but then fell silent.

  “What?” Stella said.

  “Shall we…I don’t know…” He stood up, he didn’t look at Stella. “I actually feel more like taking an evening stroll. Just the two of us.”

  “I just wanted to tell you,” you begin—but you stop as a truck turns into our street with rumbling motor and screeching brakes, making further conversation impossible. As we wait for the truck to pass—the white walls of its closed bed are decorated with blue letters: the name of a moving company, a cell-phone number and a website—I look at your face.

  We’re standing on the corner by the garbage containers; I had just dropped a bag into one of them, and when I straightened up, suddenly you were standing there. What started as a fretful look, as though you were trying to recall who I was, now made way for something probably meant to look awkward or shy. It doesn’t suit you particularly well, an awkward or shy look, it’s as though all the muscles in your face struggle against it—but maybe it’s the first time they’ve ever tried it, and they just don’t know exactly how.

  Huffing and hissing, the moving van comes to a halt in front of the café across the street; two men in blue jeans and white T-shirts, also printed in blue letters with the name of the moving company, hop out of the cab and pull open the back doors of the truck.

  “I wanted to thank you,” you say.

  I raise my eyebrows and wipe my hands on the back of my jeans. I could ask what you want to thank me for, or I could skip that and show right away that I know what you mean.

  “Oh, that was nothing,” I say, choosing the latter. Anyone else would have done the same. But I don’t say that. Besides, it’s not true. Anyone else would have done something different. No, that’s not true either: anyone else would in any case never have done what I did for those reasons.

  For the moment there’s nothing else left to say, so we both look at the moving van in front of the café, where the two movers have now gone inside.

  “No, really,” you say. “You wouldn’t have had to. My wife is very grateful. And so am I.”

  The men come back out with a pile of chairs.

  “One time you would go in there and they wouldn’t have any milk, the next time it would take them half an hour to bring you your beer,” I say, “by which time, of course, the head on it had gone completely flat. But that they’d go out of business this quickly, I never expected that.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” you say. “About what you asked me last week. Last Saturday. At the library.”

  “You said you don’t give interviews anymore. Almost no interviews. Or only by rare exception.”

  “That’s right. But I’m prepared to make an exception. For you. What was it again, what did you say it was for?”

  “For…” I suddenly can’t remember what I said at the library. For a website? Could be, but I really can’t remember. “As part of a series,” I say. “A series in which writers—”

  “Would next Tuesday be all right for you?” you interrupt.

  “Tuesday? Tuesday’s fine.”

  “It’s a date. We’re going to H. again for a few days, but we’ll be back by Monday at the latest. Tuesday’s the annual Book Ball at the theater. We don’t have to be there till nine. So if you could come by around five…”

&
nbsp; We’re in your study: a plain desk, an expensive office chair and bookcases—your wife just brought us some tea and cookies.

  Are you dreading the gala this evening?

  “Yes and no. I feel a certain reticence, but that always goes away as soon as I’m past the red carpet. Aren’t you going to record this?”

  No, that won’t be necessary.

  “But you’re not taking notes either.”

  No.

  “You’ll be able to remember everything?”

  Probably not. But that doesn’t matter. It’s about the information as a whole. Didn’t you once say: “A writer shouldn’t want to remember everything, it’s much more important to be able to forget”?

  “By that, I mostly meant that you need to be able to separate the useful memories from the useless ones. It’s handy if your memory does that for you. But it almost never works that way. We remember things that are no good to us. Phone numbers. I once read somewhere that when we memorize phone numbers we’re misusing our memory. Phone numbers can be written down. After that we’re allowed to forget them. And that we should use the space then freed in our memories for more important recollections.”

  Do you need evenings like this evening?

  “What do you mean?”

  I mean, are they indispensible? Or could you, for example, just as well stay at home?

  “No, not indispensible, certainly not. As I said, they’re a part of the whole thing. You see a few friends. You talk to colleagues you never see anywhere but there. Once a year. And if you go, you have less to explain than if you don’t.”

  You mention friends and colleagues. Does that exist, friendship among writers? Or do they mostly remain just colleagues?

  “Among writers I have more colleagues than friends, if that’s what you mean. A few of those colleagues also happen to be very good friends.”

  “Happen to be,” you say. Does that mean that being colleagues makes it difficult to be friends?

  “No, on the contrary. If you ask me, you can be good friends with a colleague whose books you don’t particularly enjoy reading. And the other way around too: that a writer you think is good turns out to have an intolerable personality in real life.”