Dear Mr. M

  I’m washing my hands in the men’s room when the tumult begins. First there are only a few excited voices. Then the screaming grows louder, the voices become distinct, with distinguishable words and sentences. “Cut it out!” “Stop…knock it off…knock it off…You hear me? Knock it off, right now!” “Grab him!…Grab him, goddamn it!”

  There is a loud thud against the door of the men’s room, as though someone has fallen or been pushed forcefully against it.

  “Pervert!” a voice screams. “Dirty piece of shit!”

  A dull boom, the wood cracks: That was someone’s head, I think right away, the back of someone’s head hitting the door—being hit against the door.

  “I’ll kill you, you pig! I’ll rip your fucking lungs out!”

  The show in the big theater was over more than an hour ago. I won’t dwell too long on the show itself. You look at your watch a few times. You sigh deeply. When the woman comes on stage on her bicycle, you start to shift in your seat and groan. Everyone saw it. We all saw that the bike had wooden wheels, that the woman was wearing clogs and had a yellow Star of David sewn to her worn coat. You could feel it run through the audience. Everyone held their breath. Then the woman started talking. With a weird accent, the way drama school actors think normal people in Amsterdam talk. “Chrise Amighty,” the weird voice said. “Here I bike all this friggin’ way out to the farm on wooden wheels to get some spuds, and the Krauts confiscate my tater peeler!” The audience laughed. It was a laugh of relief. We were watching a sketch. We were allowed to laugh, no one was going to recite any poetry in honor of the resistance, thank God for that. But after that first wave of relief, the laughter dwindled. Vicarious embarrassment settled over us like a cloud of gas. An odorless but deadly gas. “Tulip bulbs? Tulip bulbs?” the actress shrieked. “Go tell that one to the floralist!” No effective antidote has yet been found for vicarious shame. It’s something physical. It hurts in a place you can’t get to. You could leave, try to sneak out of the theater as quietly as possible, but you don’t budge. Vicarious shame is contagious. Not only does it infect the people around you, in the end it also makes its way back to the source of the embarrassment. It was only a matter of time before the cloud of gas drifted up onto the stage. The actress began speaking faster and louder. She was probably in desperate search of a point where she could cut the monologue in half. Away! Away from this stage, into the wings, the soothing fit of weeping in the dressing room—anything was better than going on acting cute in front of an audience that apparently didn’t think it was cute at all.

  Then it was over at last and we shuffled out of the theater. You looked left and right, shook someone’s hand, someone else tapped you on the shoulder. You introduced me: the mayor, the cabinet minister, a colleague: “Ana stayed home with our daughter, she’s ill, this is my neighbor.” The mayor, the cabinet minister, and the colleague all shook my hand just to be polite, their eyes lingered on my face for less than a second, then they turned away, sometimes quite literally, with their whole body. And so we finally reached the stairs beside the men’s room.

  I won’t try to claim now, in hindsight, that there was tension in the air from the very beginning. But maybe you thought so? I don’t know, something in your colleagues’ faces, their glances, the way they looked at each other more than at you. I could be wrong, though, I don’t actually know how writers look at each other—maybe they always look that way.

  In the men’s room, I am not alone. There are about five of us at the sinks. Famous faces, less-famous faces, an awfully famous face is just coming out of one of the cubicles.

  When the shouting starts, we all look at each other. No one wants to be the first to go out. Excited voices are still coming from outside the door, but a little further away now, the ruckus seems to be moving—a thunderstorm passing, the number of seconds between flash and rumble is increasing, soon it will all be over.

  Finally, I’m the first one to the door, the first one to open it and step out.

  At the foot of the stairs, two old men are on the ground. Or rather: one old man is lying on his back on the dark red carpet, the back of his head pressed at an uncomfortable-looking angle against the bottom step, the other old man is sitting on top of him; he raises his fist and punches the man on the ground in the face. The carpet is sprinkled with glass.

  A semicircle has formed around the two combatants: men in tuxedos, men in sport coats, men in jeans. At a safe distance. No one does anything. No one intervenes. There are women in the semicircle too: women in evening gowns, women with nutty hats and even nuttier dresses—but the women are standing a little back, behind the men.

  “You pig!”

  I suppress my first urge to go rushing over, to grab your fist, which is now poised in the air for the next punch, to say that enough is enough. I put my hands in my pockets and find a place among the lookers-on.

  I do what the others do.

  I do nothing.

  It feels good, he hadn’t known it could feel so good. He plants his knuckles hard against N’s upper lip, he’s already done enough damage to the nose; there had been too much ambient noise to actually hear it crack, but he’d felt it. Perhaps he should have done this long ago, maybe not only to N (to N, too, of course, in any case to N!), but also to all the others who had foiled him all his life. All those failures and near-failures who begrudged him his success. Sometimes the talking has to stop and one must act. During the war, collaborators were shot and killed in their own doorways. Talking is something you do in peacetime. Yes, you should have done this long ago, he knows now, raising his fist in the air once more.

  In his long life as a writer he has done a lot of talking, but even more often he has been silent. Dozens, maybe even hundreds of insults and left-handed compliments, below-the-belt taunts, unfounded accusations: he has swallowed it all. Usually he kept his mouth shut, turned and looked the other way, got up from the table. But sometimes he was awfully close. One more word, he told the other person in his thoughts. One more word and I’ll shut that mouth of yours once and for all. One more insult in the guise of an ironic comment and that face will shut down for good. But it had always been as though the other person realized in the nick of time that he was toying with his own well-being—perhaps with his life. Something in M’s eyes must have warned him, a minimal change in M’s breathing had told the other person that they were about to cross a line: two cars racing at each other down a narrow road, which one will swerve first and run off the road? Almost never, M realized to his regret, had the other person turned their back on him, they must have realized just in time that they were dealing with a dog. A dangerous dog with its teeth bared, a dog in a barnyard where they had no business being. Always maintain eye contact with a dog, walk backward slowly, never turn your back on it. No, they were smarter than that: they quickly changed the subject in order to save their own skin.

  The eye. The eye is a soft target par excellence; his fist doesn’t land quite right, his wedding ring nicks the brow, blood wells up between the hairs and runs into the swollen eye. Like a boxer, it occurs to M in a flash. Muhammad Ali. Joe Frazier. But when an eyebrow keeps bleeding, they have to stop the fight. That would be a pity, he’s not finished yet.

  At first, just after he had grabbed N by the lapels and slammed the back of his head against the men’s room door, colleagues, publishers, booksellers had tried to separate them. Hands on his shoulders, on his upper arms, at his wrists. But that’s over now. He knows how it works: Too dangerous. They probably saw the look in his eyes, the grimness with which he went to work. The others are now only spectators. Onlookers.

  Then M feels it between his legs, in his groin. N’s knee has come up and hit him there, intentionally or not, precisely at the spot you have to hit when you’re trying to get away from an opponent who’s on top of you. He gasps for breath, there’s no pain yet, just deep nausea, he has to be careful not to puke all over N’s face, he thinks, and the next moment the head lifts itself from the s
tep: he wonders how that can be, how the hell that’s possible, he had assumed that he’d had him pinned completely, both knees on N’s upper arms, his right hand squeezing N’s throat. Now something really is coming up through his gullet, he opens his mouth wide to let it out, it’s only air, warm air, it reminds him of the air in an underground subway station, the air that an onrushing train pushes out ahead through the tunnel. It tastes sour, he notes then, the pain rising at the same moment, the pain spreads out from his balls all over his lower body, the tears well up in his eyes—and at that moment, at that very moment, N’s forehead slams hard into the bridge of his nose.

  I literally saw stars…That’s how people often describe the sensation after a hard blow or fall. But it’s not like that: it’s more like flashes of light, a reel of film flapping loose from the projector, sunlight reflected off a windowpane rattled by the wind, like lightning from a violent storm right above your head. And immediately after that comes the blackout. There is nothing that comes after, or at least there is no chronology. Between N’s forehead hitting his nose and the moment when M himself is lying on his back on the soft carpet of the theater, there’s something missing—for good, as it turns out.

  He opens his eyes and sees N standing there—at his feet, his colleague is rubbing the bloodied knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other.

  “Goddamn,” N says to no one in particular. “Goddamn it…”

  And then there are already hands and arms helping M to a sitting position. A hand holding out a glass of water. Another hand wiping something from his face with a paper napkin.

  Someone has squatted down beside him, it takes a moment for him to focus, to slide the two images of a face on top of each other, to form one face. The lips move, but he hears nothing, only a hissing sound. The flashes of light have come back.

  “What?” he says—he can barely hear his own voice either, as though he’s swimming underwater.

  The face moves up, leans toward him until the mouth is close to his ear.

  “I’ll take you home,” M makes out.

  Jan Landzaat, history teacher at the Spinoza Lyceum, pulls on his socks and shoes. It is the day after Christmas, the radio forecasts are calling for heavy snowfall.

  He sits on the edge of his bed, his hair still wet from the shower. He thinks about Laura. Then he tries not to think about her. It works, for five seconds. He sighs, brushes back his wet hair with his fingers. He hasn’t shaved since the start of the Christmas vacation, four days ago—and maybe not before that either, he can’t remember. But this morning everything is different. A new start, at least that’s how it felt as he drew the razor across his soapy cheeks and, with each swipe, saw a bit of his old face reappear.

  Of his new face, he corrects himself right away. Last night, as he’d wolfed down his lonely, reheated Christmas dinner, he was still a loser. Someone for whom you could feel only pity. Self-pity—he was home alone after all, there was no one else around to feel anything for him. The magic moment, the turnaround, the insight, took place as he was unscrewing the top from the whiskey bottle. The discovery, in fact, that the bottle was only one-third full: not enough to drink himself into a senseless coma, in any case, not the way he had on the first three nights of the Christmas vacation. A buzzing coma, with no past or future, a test pattern with the volume turned off.

  “Here’s what I’ll do,” he said out loud. “Tomorrow I’m going to drive past the house in Zeeland, but I’ll be a different person.”

  The sound of his own voice in the otherwise silent room startled him. He hadn’t spoken since five that afternoon, it felt as though something first had to be dislodged at the back of his throat: dried spit and mucus, with a warm nicotine taste from the two packs of cigarettes he had smoked each day for the last couple of months—since the fall vacation.

  He had taken the tray with his half-eaten Christmas dinner—a piece of turkey breast in a sauce of walnuts and dark chocolate—from his lap, put it on the couch, and stood up.

  “I’ll drive to Paris,” he said, starting to pace the room. “I have friends there. I won’t be staying in Zeeland long, I have to move on. ‘It wasn’t that far out of my way,’ I’ll say. But after that I won’t bother her anymore. That’s how I’ll say it, too: ‘not bother you anymore.’ That way, I’m openly admitting that I did bother her in the past.”

  It wasn’t a little ways out of his way, but a big ways, no plausible little detour in any case, but he counted on a boy and girl of seventeen accepting that lie. He had thought about himself at seventeen: how he and a friend had hitchhiked to Rome with no idea of the best route to take, by way of Austria or Switzerland or France; all that mattered was that, about four days later, they actually ended up in Rome.

  The friends in Paris, that was something different. They definitely had to be believable, they had to at least sound believable, and so he had come up with two real names for them: Jean-Paul and Brigitte. A couple. A childless couple, he decided quickly enough—if he had to juggle even more names in his mind, he might slip up. To help him remember Jean-Paul and Brigitte he had devised last names for them as well: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Brigitte Bardot.

  Maybe he wouldn’t have to mention the names at all, but because he knew them, they existed. “Back in college,” he now replied to the question that had not been posed, pacing back and forth across the room. “For my master’s thesis about Napoleon. I spent a year at the Sorbonne. We were all in line for the same movie, Jean-Paul asked me for a light. After the movie, Zazie dans le Métro”—or did that one come out only much later?—“we went for a beer on Boulevard Saint-Michel. That’s how we got to be friends, and we’ve stayed in contact all these years.”

  He felt like a cigarette, cigarettes helped him to think clearly, but his new face, the face of that other person he would be from now on, had stopped smoking—quit completely. He had reached the kitchen by now, where he used his paper napkin to wipe the remains of the turkey into the pedal bin. Then he unscrewed the top from the bottle of whiskey and held it above the sink. “No,” he said then, screwing the cap back on. “I’m not an alcoholic. A non-alcoholic doesn’t have to protect himself from himself. I can control myself. A bottle with a third still in it speaks of more self-control than an empty one.”

  But what about the smoking? He looked at the clock on the wall above the kitchen door. A quarter past nine. He needed to think, to think about tomorrow. “At midnight on Christmas Day I quit smoking,” he said. “Forever,” he added after a brief pause.

  Lighting up a cigarette, he went back to pacing. There wasn’t a lot of room in his new house: a living room with a sofa bed and a kitchen with a little balcony. Two hundred square feet, the landlord had said. A hundred and eighty, not counting the balcony. “But tomorrow I can take my pick of a hundred college students lined up to have it for this price,” he said, looking Landzaat over from head to toe with almost shameless sarcasm, as though he had long figured out exactly how things stood with this unshaven grown man, “so I’d advise you to decide today.”

  He hadn’t shown his children these two hundred (a hundred and eighty) square feet, not yet. He would pick them up at the house, or else his wife brought them to a spot they’d arranged beforehand on the phone—like at the entrance to Artis Zoo this afternoon—and later she would come and pick them up again. This afternoon she hadn’t even stepped out of the car, she simply stayed in the driver’s seat with the engine running, she hadn’t even rolled down the window when he’d walked around to talk to her about what time she would pick them up. She had merely held her hand up to the glass, with all five fingers spread. Five o’clock, he saw her mime with her lips; she waved to their daughters, but didn’t look at him again.

  That’s what I’ll do. Still pacing, he had arrived at the glass door in the kitchen, the door to the balcony. He saw his own reflection in the pane, not crystal clear, but just right. A grown man in jeans and a sweater. Unshaven—at the moment, still, but tomorrow not anymore.

/>   —

  He looked at his reflection in the kitchen door. “That’s how we’ll do it,” he said. “From now on, I’m above it all.”

  The first thing he did on the morning of that day after Christmas was spend half an hour in the shower. He washed his hair three times. Then he lathered his face with shaving cream. His lonely Christmas dinner of the night before already seemed an eternity away, like something from a former lifetime. When he took the turkey breast out of the oven, he had been unable to hold back the tears. Tears of self-pity. He had seen himself as the lonely man he was, from a distance, as in a movie: a man prepares a gourmet meal for his sweetheart: he lights the candles and pours himself a little glass of wine beforehand, but the sweetheart doesn’t show and the audience starts reaching for their hankies—they know she has someone else.

  For just a moment, a fraction of a second, as he conjured the first stretch of smoothly shaven skin from beneath the white lather, he felt his eyes start smarting again, but he pulled himself together. He thought about Laura. He thought about her as someone without whom life had a purpose as well. Stand above it, he told himself. That’s how you have to show up there. I just came to say hello and goodbye. I’m on my way to Paris. But we can still be friends, can’t we? No, that was no good, that sounded too much like begging, as though she would be doing him a favor by consenting to be just friends. Ask no questions, he said to himself. Avoid the interrogative completely. They’re expecting me in Paris this evening. We can still be friends. Now, without wanting to, without being able to stop himself, he thought of Herman—and at the same moment the razor slipped sideways across his cheek. It drew blood right away. Not much, just the way that goes with shaving cuts: as soon as the blood gets a whiff of the outside air, it keeps on flowing. “Fuck!” he said—more at the thought of Herman than the blood. What did she see in that skinny kid anyway? You could hardly call that a man, could you? He picked up a towel, carefully wiped away some of the foam, and dabbed at the cut.