Dear Mr. M
“Well? How are things at home?” he inquires, but she doesn’t answer right away; she knows that by “home” he doesn’t mean their actual family life. And sure enough: “Is he working on something new?” he asks after that brief silence.
Ana admires him for how skillfully he maneuvers among all those sensitive egos, but in the course of the years she has also grown truly fond of him. A sort of secret understanding has developed between them, an understanding based on the mutual, always unspoken knowledge that it is of course all a bunch of nonsense, these writers and their attention issues, the publisher who—like the soccer trainer—always receives the blame when things don’t turn out as hoped, but rarely or never a compliment when he succeeds in making a book successful. She shows him, indirectly, that she feels for him, and he shows her that he appreciates that.
“Oh well, you know, something new…” She raises her glass of white wine to her lips and takes a sip—the white wine, too, is almost at room temperature; the bottle has probably been on the table beside the peanuts and olives for the last few hours, or else the new trainee forgot to put it in the fridge first. “He never stops working, he’s in the study almost all day, you know that, but he never tells me what he’s working on.”
“It would be too bad if Liberation Year were to drop out of sight too soon,” the publisher says, looking around to see who he’ll talk to next—she doesn’t blame him for that, he has to hurry, there are already people gathering their coats at the door. “I have great expectations for the Antwerp Book Fair. Marie Claude Bruinzeel is going to interview him there, in public. That can really get the discussion about the book off to a good start.”
Ana knows Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s reputation, based on her interviews in the Saturday literary supplement. They’re the kind of interviews that leave no stone unturned. Marie Claude Bruinzeel has the tendency to focus on the vermin that hide beneath those stones; the worms, beetles, and pill bugs that can’t stand the light of day and go scuttling for safety, and she doesn’t put the stone back where she found it, no, she actually holds it up for a while longer. “Do you still dream sometimes about a winning smash, an Olympic gold medal?” she’d asked a diabetic table-tennis star who’d recently had a leg amputated. At first Ana had been shocked, the question seemed impertinent, and tears had actually come to the table-tennis star’s eyes, but later she had realized that it wasn’t such a strange question after all. Do you still dream…Well, why not? Why shouldn’t people with only one leg still dream? Then, right away, she starts wondering what Marie Claude Bruinzeel will ask M at the book fair. Do you still dream of writing a bestseller? A book like Payback? Do you still dream that you might…She thought about it for a moment; a question about his work or the dream of future successes won’t expose any creepy pill bugs. Do you sometimes dream of being younger? Of living to see your daughter grow up? Even if it’s only to her eighteenth birthday?
“Will you be there too?” the publisher asked. “Will I see you in Antwerp? We could go to that fish restaurant afterward, if you two feel like it.”
She shakes her head. I don’t think so, she feels like saying, I don’t want to leave my daughter alone too often. But there’s a different reason, actually. Antwerp is too close, there are no surprises in store there anymore. In other cities, yes. Rome, Milan, Berlin. Sometimes she went along with M when he traveled abroad. As long as the engagement was still a ways off, he looked forward to it. But as the departure date came closer he grew increasingly nervous.
“I should have canceled,” he’d say, “but it’s too late now.”
“You could always say you’re sick,” she said.
“That would be boorish. They invited me a year ago. If I canceled now, they’d panic.”
“But what if you really were sick,” she tried, for form’s sake. “You couldn’t go then either, could you?”
He looked at her as though she’d suggested that animals might be able to talk.
“But I’m not really sick,” he said—and a few days later they were standing together at the airport check-in. The ladies at the desk recognized him occasionally, if they were older than thirty. They would give him their prettiest smiles—some of them even blushed—and treated them with great respect. “I read your latest book from start to finish, in one night. Have a lovely trip, Mr. M!” The younger girls treated him like the old man that he was. They raised their voices almost to a scream when handing him his boarding pass, and drew a circle around the gate number and boarding time, as though they assumed that he was already hard of hearing. The rudest among them looked at her and then at him and then back again—they made no attempt to disguise their curiosity. Is this his daughter, or some crumpet forty years younger than he is?
M wasn’t fond of flying. In the duty-free zone he always went to the bar and knocked back a couple of beers before boarding.
“Look at that,” he said, pointing at a group of men in long robes and women in veils. “Let’s hope they’re not on our flight. But maybe they’ll blow themselves up here before we leave the ground. How many beers have I had, anyway? Three or four?”
On the plane he always wanted an aisle seat. After flipping through the in-flight magazine from back to front in record time, he would breathe a deep sigh and look at his watch. A book was useless; he couldn’t read on a plane, he said.
“I thought hippos were only allowed to travel in the cargo hold,” he said a bit too loudly when the stewardess, who was indeed rather portly, stood right beside his seat to demonstrate the use of the oxygen mask and life preserver and accidentally brushed his hair with her elbow.
“How many does this make?” he asked, popping the top off his can of Heineken before tearing the cellophane from the double-decker sandwich with cheese spread. “I can’t eat this,” he said after sniffing it. He pushed the button on the console above his head. “We seem to be hitting turbulence,” he said when the fat stewardess came hurrying toward him down the aisle.
But after the landing—in Milan, in Frankfurt, in Oslo—he usually perked up quickly enough. As soon as he saw his foreign publisher’s publicity person in the arrivals hall, holding up a sign with his name on it, he relaxed visibly. From that moment on he played his part—the role of Dutch writer with a certain reputation abroad—with verve. In the taxi he asked all the usual things. How many people live in the city? That opera house, was it rebuilt brick by brick after the war? Do you have problems with immigrants here too?
The usual itinerary followed. Interviews in the lobby of his hotel, and that evening a dinner at a restaurant with staff members from the publishing house and a few local bigwigs. During those dinners he answered his hosts’ questions. Ten years ago, foreigners had never asked so many questions about the Netherlands. They never got further than the standard clichés. Drug abuse, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. But then the politically tinted murders took place, and these days they asked about only one thing: the rise of right-wing extremism.
When they did, he would apply the knife to his veal escalope or Norwegian sea bream, take a sip of wine, and smile affably.
“First of all, I need to correct you,” he said. “In the Netherlands, it’s not about right-wing extremism pur sang. That’s what makes it so difficult to dismiss right off the cuff. The Dutch extremists, for example, are great advocates of gay rights. And our brand of extremism is not at all anti-Semitic, not like in most other European countries. The very opposite, in fact: the right-wing extremists in our country are among the most outspoken supporters of the state of Israel. And when it comes to social equality and care for the aged, you could almost call that particular party a socialist one.”
But the Netherlands had been the most tolerant country in the world for decades, hadn’t it? What happened to that tolerance all of a sudden? his hosts wanted to know.
Putting down his knife and fork, he used the tip of his napkin to wipe an imaginary bit of escalope or bream from the corner of his lips.
“Perhaps we sh
ould start by redefining the term ‘tolerance,’ ” he said. “After all, what does it mean to be tolerant? That you tolerate other people? People of a different color, different religious beliefs, people with earrings and tattoos, as well as women who wear headscarves, people with a different sexual orientation. But there is really nothing to tolerate. By using the word ‘tolerance,’ you’re simply placing yourself on a higher plane than those you tolerate. Tolerance is only possible when one fosters a deep-rooted sense of superiority. That’s one thing we Dutch have never lacked, and it’s been that way for centuries. We have long considered ourselves better than the rest of the world. But now the rest of the world is suddenly thronging to our borders and taking over our houses and neighborhoods. Suddenly, tolerance isn’t enough. The newcomers laugh at us for our tolerance and see it primarily as a sign of weakness. Which in the long run, of course, it is.”
Then dessert arrived. The people from the publishing house ordered coffee with liqueur, but he said he was tired and wanted to get back to the hotel.
During those interviews, Ana would wander through the more exclusive shopping streets. Sometimes she would buy a purse, other times a shawl. In the afternoon there was a buffet lunch at the Dutch embassy.
“It used to be easy to represent the Netherlands abroad,” the ambassador sighed. “But these days we’re always on the defensive. It’s often hard to make it clear that right-wing extremism in Holland is different from in other countries. Just look at their attitude toward gay rights and Israel.”
There were times when she enjoyed those trips abroad, with just the two of them, but the worst were the festivals or book fairs with a whole delegation of Dutch writers. When just the two of them were abroad they would snuggle up together in their hotel bed, order a bottle of wine from room service, and watch reruns of some old Western series, dubbed in the local language. At such moments they were almost happy—or at least she felt so.
But when an entire division of Dutch writers would descend on a foreign city, such moments were rare. The Dutch could never exercise moderation. They always made a contest of seeing who could stay up latest. They would sit at the hotel bar until the wee hours of the night. Some of those writers shouldn’t have been drinking at all, the whites of their eyes were already the color of old newsprint, but they always took “one more for the road.” At breakfast the next morning they bragged about how late they had gone to bed. They winked conspiratorially at other colleagues who had gone on into the wee hours too. With that wink they shut out the others, the pussies and weaklings who had considered their own well-being or who simply preferred not to go to bed too late.
“No,” she says to M’s publisher. “I don’t think I’ll be going along to Antwerp. I think I’ll stay with my daughter.”
“But…” Someone taps the publisher on the shoulder, a female author whose coat is already draped over her shoulders, it was so much fun but she really has to leave now, they give each other three little pecks on the cheeks. Ana knows what the publisher’s objection would have been. The holiday house. The house outside H. is barely fifteen miles outside Antwerp, a half hour’s drive, no more than that. They’ve done that before. One time, after a festival where M had read, the publisher and his wife had actually slept over. Now that he’s finished saying goodbye to the female author, his glance ricochets around the French Room, which is a good deal emptier now, and then he looks at her again.
It’s possible that he’s forgotten what they were talking about. She’s had time to think about what she’ll say if he pushes on. It’s too close. He’ll understand that, she’s sure.
But he doesn’t press the point. He lays a hand on her forearm, squeezes it gently for a moment.
“I understand,” he says.
Some movies only get better once you know how they’re going to end. The two dogs and the cat escape from their new, temporary home and start on their quest for the old one. On their journey straight across North America they navigate somehow—by the stars? The magnetic pole?—the movie doesn’t explain that, in any case it’s something only animals can do, an ability humans lost long ago. During the fight with the bear, Catherine had crept up even closer to Ana, the bowl of popcorn was almost empty, Catherine hadn’t even touched her glass of lemonade. Ana herself definitely felt like another glass of wine, but she didn’t want to get up now and go to the kitchen, she was afraid of interrupting something.
She had vowed not to think about the book ball—about M being on his own at that party, first wandering the corridors, then at his regular spot beside the men’s room—in order to lose herself completely in the film, but she only succeeded partway. When the cat came out of the bushes as the first of the trio and ran across the lawn toward its owners, she tore open the packet of tissues she had waiting and handed one to Catherine.
“Oh, Mama,” her daughter said when the youngest of the two dogs followed from the bushes. “Do you think that old dog made it too? Or is he dead?”
Catherine had started crying quietly, she pressed the tissue to her eyes. Ana was crying too, perhaps even harder than the first three times she’d watched this.
“I’m not sure, sweetheart,” she said. “I really hope so. But I really couldn’t say.”
The long line of guests at the entrance forms the first hurdle. There are klieg lights and TV trucks with satellite dishes on the roofs, photographers and cameramen lined up behind the crush barriers on both sides of the red carpet. The trick, M knows, is to exude a certain nonchalance, to feign patience as naturally as possible, with an expression just a tad ironic and complacent. This is the forty-fifth, what, fiftieth time I’ve been here? Try telling me something I don’t know. M has mastered the trick like no other; after all, he really has lost count, he’s never missed a year. On his own at first, or with another new conquest on his arm each time, later with his first wife, and an eternity by now with Ana. There are other—younger, less famous—colleagues who clearly have a harder time with that, with exuding such calm indifference. They stand there with their coats half unbuttoned, their party clothes showing a little, the dress they bought specially for this occasion, the coat they picked up from the cleaner’s only a few hours ago; any way you look at it, it’s clothing that has been thought about. That red coat, isn’t it just a little too red? Isn’t that sequined dress a little too flashy? The rare guest attempts to defy etiquette: a T-shirt bearing the logo of a soccer team, white Nike high-tops with black laces, a weird cap or a crazy hat (nutty glasses don’t cut it here, nutty glasses are the uniform of the elite)—M himself abandoned that defiance years ago, he would like to erect a monument to the inventor of the tuxedo. The tuxedo, of course, is a uniform too, but then a uniform that—unlike the canary-yellow spectacle frames—makes us all equal, in the same way the military or school uniform does. When a man in a tuxedo stands among other men in tuxedos, you no longer look at the clothing but at the face, at the head sticking out above that white collar, black tails, and tie. All in black and white; it’s brilliant, everything else takes on new color above an outfit like that, including gray hair—even one’s facial complexion, be it ever so pale, will never be as white as the shirt.
His features are striking, M knows. The strikingness of those features is something age has never been able to corrode. Of course he mustn’t pose on a beach in his swimming trunks anymore, and it’s better if they don’t come by early in the morning to find him in his striped pajamas at the breakfast table, but in the pronouncedly masculine uniform that the tuxedo is he looks like one of those old Hollywood actors on his way to the Oscars or the Grammys. To the—what do they call that again—Lifetime Achievement Award. A prize for one’s entire life. It’s no fantasy or wishful thinking; he’s seen himself in the news footage, in the pictures in the paper the next day. He’s no slouch, he leads a healthy life, he’s a moderate drinker, he even has to be careful not to lead too healthy a life, he noted, after seeing last year’s footage. Something about his face (not his teeth, he defini
tely must not smile, as long as he keeps his lips sealed there’s no reason for concern), his cheeks were sunken, too deeply sunken, no longer charming, as though they’d been vacuum-sealed from the inside out. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who could see the foreshadowing in his face, the foreshadowing of that day when he would live on only in his work (or not live on, he had seen how quickly that went with most of his late colleagues). A skull. A death’s-head. He had started eating more, he had asked Ana to prepare prime rib and pasta dishes with bacon and cream, a slice of cream cake for dessert or a Magnum Almond from the freezer—within a few weeks the prescient death’s-head cheeks had fairly disappeared.
A few yards ahead of him in line is N, who knows like no other how to do that, stand in line. His hands are in his pockets, he already has his long mohair coat draped over one arm. He stands there the way you’d stand in line in a bakery shop. One sliced whole-wheat and two bread rolls, please. At first M sees only the back of his head, but then N steps over closer to the crush barrier and brings his lips closer to the TV reporter’s mike; behind the reporter, the blinding light of a camera flips on. The light shines straight through N’s hair: like a low-hanging sun above a dry and barren landscape, it underscores the depth of the almost-eighty-year-old creases and lines in his profile, but at the same time gives him something kingly—something imperious, M corrects himself right away.