Dear Mr. M

  And did that happen?

  “I don’t know…I could simply say that I never received a direct reaction from anyone involved, and be finished with it. But on the other hand…by now it must have passed the statute of limitations. But you have to promise me that this will remain completely off the record. I wouldn’t want to get anyone into trouble, forty years after the fact.”

  Perhaps you could tell me first whether it changed your view of what happened. Whether the new information made you think differently about precisely what went on in that house in Terhofstede.

  “Yes, it did.”

  —

  And then there is a knock at the door. You say “yes” again, but this time with a question mark behind it. The door opens and your wife comes in. In a little over an hour the two of you have to be at the book ball; you might expect that she has come to ask what you think of her dress, that she has come to ask you to close the zipper on the back of her dress, that she would be at least half or three-quarters of the way dressed for the party, but she is still wearing her jeans and white sneakers—the untucked tails of a white shirt (a man’s shirt, I can’t help but notice, maybe one of yours?) are hanging loosely over the jeans.

  She’s holding a thermometer.

  “We’re almost finished,” you say—apparently you haven’t noticed the thermometer, or at least you ask no questions about it.

  “[…] hasn’t been feeling well all afternoon,” your wife says; she mentions your daughter’s name, the name I’m still leaving out; you know her name anyway, and it is indeed no one else’s business. “But now she’s really running a fever.” She takes a few steps toward you and holds out the thermometer, but you are looking only at her. “I don’t like the idea of going away while she’s sick in bed.”

  “But Charlotte’s coming in a bit, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I’d rather not leave her alone with Charlotte. I would just feel much more comfortable staying with her myself.”

  You stare at her. I think I know more or less what is going on in your mind. Without your wife, without your much-younger wife, you won’t be complete at a party like this. As though you were being forced to show up in the nude; no, not in the nude, in just your boxer shorts.

  “But…,” you start in, but your wife is too fast for you.

  “You don’t have to go by yourself,” she says—and then she looks at me for the first time.

  The last two times it had been more than she could take. She couldn’t stand it anymore. That was why she held the thermometer up to the lightbulb. It was, in fact, a completely ridiculous and unnecessary thing to do. As if M would actually check the thermometer! Still, the black digits made it somehow more real: 101 degrees. Thermometer in hand, she knocked on the door of his study.

  The last couple of years she had started dreading it a week beforehand. Like a visit to the gynecologist. A hollow feeling between navel and abdomen. It started with wondering what to wear this year. A different dress each year. Bare shoulders. Bare arms. And most important of all, of course: the décolleté. How much to show off. In her experience, it was the women whose shelf life had expired long ago who also sported the deepest décolletés. The same went for women who were too fat, for women who smoked, for the redheads. The women with faces on which two packs of Gauloises and two bottles of red wine a day for twenty years had left their mark. Pits and craters and stretches of dead skin—a face like a polluted river in which the last fish had bobbed to the surface years ago. But with a deep décolleté they could draw attention away from that face. The skin there was none too young either, usually too red or too tanned, but the men’s gazes often remained hanging there. First they looked at the bared no-man’s-land, and only then at the face.

  After that the program began. The male and female authors gathered in the big theater. They looked at each other, said hello with a nod of the head or waved to each other from a distance. What they paid particular attention to was the seating arrangement, to who sat where. A moment of suspense, each year anew. Not for her and her husband. They knew beforehand, of course, where they would be seated. That never changed. Second row from the front, in the middle. But most colleagues had no fixed place. They could end up somewhere else each year. Those who sat all the way at the top, up in the second balcony, didn’t even count. The same went for the side balconies. Writer L hadn’t put a word on paper for years; these days he sat behind a pillar where no one could see him. G had been at the top of the bestseller list for three months, hence her spot in the front row of the lower balcony. And then of course there were the old hands who never failed to show up. A couple more of them dead each year. The spots they vacated in the middle of the theater were assumed by other aged men and wrinkled women. The policy was to be accommodating toward literary widows. During their first two years of bereavement they were allowed to keep their regular seats. After that they were quietly banished to the second balcony, or simply not invited anymore.

  Most publishers organized a dinner for their authors before the ball started. The lucky ones went to a real restaurant, but in recent years the buffet dinner had becoming increasingly popular. Her husband’s publisher (“subpar results,” “recession,” “sector-wide structural malaise”) had switched to the buffet last year. She remembered the long line waiting to be served by the college-aged temps, who ladled casserole and mashed potatoes onto their paper plates. The hot plates were silver, but the line of hungry faces reminded her of a soup kitchen. Of breadlines in a region struck by natural disaster.

  Before the actual show began, a few speeches were given. No one was anxious to hear them. The speakers were always gray-haired men in suits, who said right at the start that they would “keep it short.” For the last decade or so the whole event had been sponsored by the Dutch Railways, and while the representative from that organization was giving his speech she wondered whether she was the only one thinking of delayed departures, frozen switches, and stranded passengers. After the show, which usually featured a hand-me-down nightclub performer or a singer-songwriter whose career was on the rocks, or—even worse, if that was possible—a writer who thought he was funnier than his colleagues, the big loitering began…the endless mingling in the catacombs of the theater.

  Thermometer in hand, she went to her daughter’s room. Catherine had been mopey all day, complaining of a headache and nausea, but there was nothing wrong with her appetite; after finishing two pieces of toasted white bread, she had asked for a third.

  “Drink your milk first,” Ana told her. “If you’re still hungry after that, you can have another one.”

  That was when the prospect presented itself to her: an evening at home with her “sick” daughter, beneath a blanket on the couch, watching a DVD of some animated film she and Catherine had already seen a hundred times before. Anything was better than the theater corridors, the predictable conversations, the publishers, the journalists, the “nutty” decorations on the walls and ceilings, even in the restrooms. And last, but definitely not least, the writers themselves…

  Put a hundred writers together in one space for a party and you get something very different—in any case, not a party. With M she usually stuck to one round of the corridors, a nod here, the briefest possible conversation there, a photographer asking them to look into the camera for just a moment, their heads a little closer together, yes, that’s it, now smile, you look so serious, it’s a party isn’t it? After that one round they settled down on the stairs to the right of the second-floor men’s room. Before long, the others would join them there. M’s colleagues, writers whose greatest similarity was that none of them had long to live. The oeuvre would soon be complete, the folio edition of collected works was ready to go, the obituaries had mostly all been written, the lucky ones (or unlucky ones, depending on how you looked at it) already had a biographer who had established a bond of trust with the prospective widow.

  N always snapped at his girlfriend. Or ridiculed her to her face.
She, too, was much younger than he was, but no more than twenty years or so—not nearly as big a difference as between M and herself. Unlike most writers’ wives, N’s girlfriend also did something herself, though Ana could never remember exactly what. Something with websites, she thought. Something that required no skills.

  And then you had C, who was somewhere in his eighties too by now but tried to wear his seniority as boyishly as possible, like a pair of worn-out sneakers, ripped jeans, and safety pins; he liked to be seen in recalcitrant clothing: no sport coat, let alone a tuxedo; just a T-shirt with V-neck that revealed a landscape of sagging sinews, razor burns, and three or four snow-white chest hairs. Halfway through this landscape, which shifted from red to dark purple on its way down, C’s Adam’s apple looked as though it were trying to break out through the skin, like an oversized prey—a marmot, a rabbit—that has been gulped down by an overly rapacious python and become stuck in its gullet. Behind the lenses of his spectacles his dilated pupils floated in the whites of eyes that were no longer completely white, trashed as they were by any number of broken capillaries; they reminded her most of some raw dish, something on a half shell, an oyster, something you had to slurp down without looking.

  And each and every one of the old writers looked at her, Ana, like children waiting for their favorite dessert at a birthday party. N literally licked his lips, he didn’t care that his girlfriend was standing beside him, when they said hello he first kissed her on each cheek, then let the third and final kiss land just a little too close to the corner of her lips, almost as though by accident. But it was no accident. Meanwhile he did something with his fingers, something right above her buttocks, his thick fingertips pressed softly against the spot where the zipper of her dress started, right over her tailbone, then slipped down a fraction of an inch.

  “You’re looking lovely as always, Ana,” he said. Then he stepped back: before letting her go completely, his hand slid to the front, by way of her buttock and hip to her abdomen, before he pulled it back. “We should go for coffee sometime. Just the two of us. Sometime when M is traveling abroad.” This latter remark was always accompanied by a big wink, he wanted to be sure she saw it only as a compliment and not a serious come-on, but his eyes traveled downward right away, resting on her lips for a few moments before descending further, to her breasts. “No, really, if I didn’t have Liliane, I know what I’d be doing,” he said—and this time he didn’t wink.

  The other old men were less forward, but they all looked. They looked when they thought she didn’t see them; C’s oyster eyes had a predilection for her buttocks, and she always felt the gaze of D, the travel writer, somewhere around her left ear, as though he wished he could clamp her earlobe in his doggy, wine-stained lips, then use the tip of his tongue to fiddle loose her earring and swallow it. Van E, the artist, had eyes like a mole, or some other animal that spends more time in darkness than in light; he always kept them squeezed in a tight squint behind his glasses and probably thought she couldn’t tell where he was looking: at her legs—first her thighs, then lower and lower, by way of her calves to her ankles.

  A recent addition to their little club on the stairs was K, who was about thirty years younger than the rest. K was what people called a modest writer. “Modest writers are the worst kind,” M had said once, referring to K. “In actual fact, of course, they’re not modest at all. They only act modest because, in their hearts, they consider themselves better than the rest. I can act normal, the modest writer figures. I can act normal because my greatness is beyond any shadow of a doubt. I’m like the queen, who can ride a bike like a normal person might, because everyone already knows she’s the queen. For readers, too, the modest writer is a delight. So normal! they tell each other. You can talk to him like a normal person. He didn’t act as though he was one whit better than the rest of us normal people. Not arrogant like M, not aloof and cerebral like N.”

  In interviews, K had more than once expressed a certain disdain for M’s work (“a writer from the past, a writer whose work will quickly be forgotten once he’s gone”), but whenever they met he always pooh-poohed the critique: “I hope you didn’t mind. It wasn’t really that bad. I didn’t mean anything by it, you know I admire your work as a whole.”

  K looked at Ana differently than most of M’s aging colleagues who gathered on the stairs beside the gents’. Or rather, he didn’t look at all. No randy perusal from head to toe, no suggestive kisses on the cheek, not even raised eyebrows or the faintest trace of flirtation. They were closer to each other in age, amid the fogies K could have considered himself the most likely of the lot, but he was the only one in the group who acted as though there was no pretty woman within a few feet of him. Once, when Ana had complimented K on his latest book—a village history smeared out over three generations—she had at some point used the word “special.” She remembered the sentence in which she’d done that, word for word: “I’m only halfway through the first section, at the point where that priest drowns. I can’t say a lot about it yet, but in any case it’s really special.” She had lied about where she was in the book, she wasn’t anywhere near halfway through the first section, after ten pages she had decided that it wasn’t her cup of tea—but the drowned priest was mentioned in the blurb.

  “I don’t think I’m special at all,” K had replied grimly, fixing her with his cold gaze; a neutral gaze above all, as though he wasn’t talking to an attractive woman his own age but to a postal clerk or a bailiff. “Just because I happen to be a writer doesn’t make me any more special than anyone else.”

  Ana had said something about his book, not about his person—and at that moment she suddenly understood M’s aversion to modest writers.

  —

  “What do you want to watch? Dumbo, or the real movie about the two dogs and that cat?”

  She sat down on the edge of Catherine’s bed and showed her daughter the thermometer again. “A hundred and one, Papa thought it was a good idea too, for me to stay with you. How are you feeling now?” she asked, touching Catherine’s forehead with her fingertips—it wasn’t warm, or at least no warmer than usual.

  “Not very well,” Catherine whispered. “Can we watch a movie right now?”

  Dumbo was one they’d seen together more than a hundred times, but the film about the adventuresome journey by two dogs and a cat across the United States, based on a true story, was one Ana had bought only a couple of weeks earlier. The first time they watched it they had cried together, the second and third times, too, even though they knew by then that it had a happy ending.

  “Let’s wait a bit, till Papa’s gone,” she answered. “In half an hour. Papa and that man are going to the party. Do you remember that man? The downstairs neighbor? The one who brought us to the house in H. when the weather was so bad?”

  It was more like forty-five minutes in the end, but then at last they were lying together on the couch in the living room. Catherine beneath a blanket, cuddled up against her mother. During the forty-five minutes that had passed, Ana had used an adhesive roller to pick the lint off of M’s tuxedo, she’d said something about his hair (“Nonsense, it looks perfect”), and then, for the third or fourth time, urged him to simply tell the truth at the party. Our daughter is ill, my wife insisted on staying home with her.

  After forty-five minutes she heard the front door close at last, then the doors of the elevator. She went to the kitchen and made popcorn in the microwave, poured a glass of lemonade for Catherine and red wine for herself. For a brief moment, as she was carrying the tray from the kitchen to the living room, she had a slight feeling of regret. No, not really regret, more like a gently gnawing sense of guilt. She could have gone along with M, she knew how important it was to him, how he reveled in having his wife by his side on such occasions. But she already did so much, she told herself, from the very start she had bravely shouldered the role of the wife of. Still with pleasure, during the first few years, lately less and less so; she didn’t know exactly why th
at was, perhaps it was the predictability. Like with the cocktail parties at the publishing house. The summer party, the autumn party, the New Year’s party, the spring party (“in the garden, if the weather’s nice”), there was no end to them. There were peanuts and dishes of olives on a table in one corner of “the French Room”—almost all the self-respecting publishers were housed in a canal-side mansion with marble corridors and gilded wainscoting—while the bottles of beer stood growing tepid. M’s colleagues greeted her politely but without interest, they never asked how she was doing, how she was getting along at the famous writer’s side, they only asked indirectly about him (“Is he working on something new?” “How did he react to that article, the one that said he no longer counts as the voice of his generation?” “Was he serious about what he said in that interview about the Nobel Prize?”). The colleagues fell into two categories: those who were more successful than M, and those who received less media attention and therefore had to make do with fewer sales. The colleagues in the first category were usually amiable, although it could also be seen as condescension. “It’s such a pity,” they said. “That last book of his really deserves a much wider readership. It’s puzzling.” The second category started in right away about the posters and public-transport campaigns, about the talk shows that were all too pleased to make time for “big names” like M.

  “The publishing house has a limited budget, unfortunately,” they said. “But that doesn’t mean they have to spend it all on the same authors.” And then they would go on to wonder aloud whether their work might get the attention it deserved at another house. “Just between the two of us, I sometimes think about going elsewhere.”

  All they’d really talked about at the last cocktail party was N, who truly had left, suddenly, out of the blue, without whining about it for months beforehand. From one day to the next he was gone, his switch made all the papers, and his next book with his new publisher was an instant bestseller. “I should have done this long ago,” he repeated in almost every interview dealing with the publication of The Garden of Psalms. “I should have traded in that old chicken coop long ago for a house where you’re not bumping your head all the time.” The authors who had remained behind in the chicken coop never spoke their mind about N’s departure. They all agreed, however, that it wasn’t “comme il faut,” the way it had gone, that one “simply doesn’t do that,” at least not in that way—just slipping away with no prior notice, and then “fouling one’s own nest” with sarcastic comments about your former publisher. Amid all of this, M’s publisher moves about the room like a birthday boy at his own party, a birthday boy who can’t really enjoy the party himself because he has to divide his attention among all the guests. A bit of chatting here, a horselaugh there, not in too much of a hurry to talk to the critic from the weekend literary supplement, not lingering too long with the bestselling author; no one must get the feeling that he’s not considered important enough. M’s publisher is a master at the game; when he gets to Ana, he touches her elbow gently.