Dear Mr. M

12

That’s the way it goes, a writer’s life. He gets up, he showers, he dries himself off — just like the rest of us. But soon afterward, the first problem presents itself: breakfast. He’s on his own today, wife and daughter have gone to their country house, he doesn’t know how to use the coffee machine. Under duress — on the heels of a shipwreck, a nuclear catastrophe, an earthquake — he might be able to wrest it from his memory. A filter. Ground coffee. Boiling water. But today, the end of the world has not arrived. It’s Saturday and the sun is shining. Across the street from his home is a newly opened café with a patio. He closes the door behind him and takes the elevator down.

The girl who finally comes outside ten minutes later (no, that’s not the way it went, he had to go in and get her!) clearly has no idea who she’s talking to. She mumbles something about milk that they don’t have. She can’t leave the café behind untended, that’s her excuse. “But I’m here, aren’t I?” he says. “I’ll hold down the fort for a few minutes.” But the girl shakes her head. “I can’t do that,” she says. She hasn’t been working here long. Only on Saturdays. She’s only a college student. So what are you studying? he could ask. Instead he stares irritatedly into space. He lays his hand on the flapping pages of the newspaper.

It’s been happening more often lately, people who fail to recognize him. Young people especially. Entire generations who no longer read his books. He could grouse about how it’s all the school system’s fault. The high schools, after all, don’t even teach literature these days! But deep in his heart he knows that it has nothing to do with the educational system. It’s oblivion that beckons — a finger beckoning to him from a freshly dug grave. Nothing to get hysterical about. The promising talent, the breakthrough at middle age, and finally the forgetting. The forgetting that comes before the ultimate silence. He’s at peace with that. All experience is worthwhile, he tells himself.

Turning the corner of his own street — he has abandoned the prospect of coffee, black coffee is one thing he can’t handle on an empty stomach — he sees a couple coming toward him. Not a young couple, somewhere in their late fifties he guesses. Their children have probably already flown the coop, they’re out for a walk together, the shared void of a Saturday morning — of an entire weekend! He sees it in their eyes right away: looking, looking away, looking again. As they pass him, they nudge each other. They laugh guiltily and greet him with a nod. He takes a little bow, yes, it’s me, it’s really me, then goes on his way.

He passes the bookshop window. The poster with his face on it is still stuck to the glass. From 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., your book signed by…He looks at his face on the poster and then at his face reflected in the display window. Find the differences. The face on the poster is younger than the one in the window, true enough, but not blatantly younger. When he gives a reading at a library, he sees it in the expressions of the female librarians who welcome him. All along, they’ve been expecting him to be a pompous ass. A pompous ass who allows only flattering portraits of himself on the backs of his books. Digitally manipulated photos that remove all pimples and moles. It’s amazing, he sees the librarians thinking, in real life he looks almost exactly like the photo. Age becomes him.

Not like N, he thinks. N who always has them change the lighting on his wrinkled face to make it look like a portrait by a Dutch master. A viceroy. A Roman emperor. A Greek idol. The writer portrayed here, those photos seem to shout, lives in the certainty that most women would still give an arm and a leg to have his almost-octogenarian body perform a low-flying mission over their own. And he’s probably right, M thinks. He glances one last time at both his faces in the display window, then walks on.

There are writers his age who do things differently. They get caught up in their own rejuvenation. They prance about in cream-colored sneakers. All Stars! They wear flashy red jackets and buy sports cars. They drive the cars from library to library. They see to it that the sports car becomes part of their look, just like the jacket and the All Stars. I may be seventy-eight, but inside my head I’m younger than all of you put together, that’s what they try to communicate with their getup. “The important thing is to stay curious,” they tell the one hundred and twenty middle-aged women gathered around them beneath the harsh fluorescent lighting of the library. “That’s what keeps you young.” When the reading is over, the middle-aged women throng to the table where the author is signing his books. As they help the writer spell their names correctly (“It’s for me: Marianne with two n’s and an e at the end”), they are thinking about only one thing. Not about the stale odor that would probably waft up from the cream-colored All Stars, were this fantasy to pan out. All of them would gladly put up with that, as they would with the endless moaning and groaning and the way the eternally young writer’s tongue tastes of too much red wine. Red wine the morning after a party, a puddle left in a glass with a cigarette butt in it too. He uses that same tongue to lick them all up and down, but it takes a god-awfully long time, it seems like it will never end. The next day they call all their girlfriends. “You’ll never guess who stayed over at my place last night…”

Today M is fairly lucky. The library where he’s expected to turn up is within walking distance, in a neighborhood at the edge of his own town. The worst thing about giving a reading in Amsterdam is the audiences. The audiences here radiate a certain self-importance, to put it mildly. What they radiate above all is the fact that they could be attending so many other, perhaps even much more interesting performances, matinees, or concerts. Still, on this sunny Saturday, they are here, with you, in the library. They’re raring to go, but make no mistake about it: they’re not about to settle for the same old song and dance, not like those provincial bumpkins who, for lack of a richer cultural agenda, go gladly to see an older, visibly dwindling writer.

At the door to the library he is welcomed by a woman who introduces herself as Anke or Anneke, or something like that. He didn’t really catch the name, or rather: his hearing picked up the vowels and consonants in a certain sequence and sent them on to his brain, but upon arrival they all fell apart, like some appliance or machine you’ve stripped down despite your better judgment — a toaster, the engine block of a moped — but then can’t put back together for the life of you.

Anna (Agnes? Anneke? Anke?) extends a hand — it’s a dry hand; he glances down at his fingers to see whether there are flakes of eczema sticking to them.

What is it with these lady librarians? he asks himself, not for the first time, as he follows her past endless rows of borrowed-to-tatters, dog-eared, and therefore totally unappetizing books. Why do they all wear their hair the same way? He has nothing against women with short hair. On the contrary. Short hair, even a crew cut, can look splendid on a woman. But this isn’t like that. This is easy hair, easy to keep up, like a front yard full of paving stones rather than a lawn.

The library itself is one of those responsibly renovated buildings, everything dressed in a motley (low-threshold!) newness meant to seduce readers into doing their book-borrowing here; the same way the churches tried, not so very long ago, to draw in unbelievers with pop music during the services. In the olden days libraries were merely dusty, he thinks, introverted. Today they all do their best to look like airport departure halls.

“Do you have any objection to signing during the intermission, and after the reading?” the librarian asks; they’ve stopped in a corridor hung with posters and bulletin board notices.

How could he have any objections to that? That’s what he’s here for, isn’t it? Why do they always ask that?

“And would you like to stand or sit?” she goes on. “We have a table and a rostrum, so you can choose. Do you use a microphone? What would you like to drink during the reading?”

He looks again at the librarian’s easy hair. When you stop to think about it, it’s simply a slap in the face, walking around like that. There’s no need to have one’s hair cut in the ugliest possible fashion. But “have one’s hair cut” seems the wrong way to put it too. Far more likely that she wields the shears herself. That’s cheaper. What do I care how I look, they say to themselves and the outside world. Then they attack their hair with the scissors.

Suddenly he feels exhausted. The rest of the afternoon stretches out before him like an empty plot of land without trees or buildings, a vacant lot beyond the reach of any zoning ordinance. The female librarian has asked him a number of questions, one after the other. He’s already forgotten the first and second ones. They usually ask these questions much earlier on. They call you three to five months in advance. He used to answer the questions himself. Microphone. Sit/stand. Drink. Sign. For the last few years, though, his wife has done that for him. They usually call in the evening. At an inconvenient moment. During the eight o’clock news. They have a keen nose for moments when you really shouldn’t be bothering people.

These days he just stays on the couch in front of the TV and lets his wife answer the phone. He looks at the images of a bombed-out city, of a suburb retaken from rebel hands, he has the volume turned down low.

“He’d rather stand,” he hears Ana say, “but a table is okay too.”

“Of course, he’d be happy to sign.”

“If the room’s not too big, there’s no need for a microphone.”

“Just plain water. And during the intermission he likes to have a beer.”

This last comment is perhaps the most important of all. The core of the reading, the pivot, or perhaps more like the tipping point. You can put up with anything as long as you’re allowed to slowly sink back into yourself after fifty minutes. The questions that come after the intermission he answers rather offhandedly. But the beer calls for a separate mention. Experience has made him wiser. They used to ask him during the pause whether he would prefer coffee or tea. Whenever he mentioned beer, they would raise their eyebrows. Then one of the lower-ranking librarians would be sent out on a scavenger hunt. Sometimes she would come back just before the intermission was over with one bottle that had, unfortunately, not been refrigerated. By the time they found a bottle opener, the reading was over.

“No, it’s not that far, is it?” he hears Ana say. “He’ll walk from the station.”

That’s right, they always ask that too. Whether he wants to be picked up at the station. No, he doesn’t want that. Nothing is worse than to have the blathering start long before the reading itself has even begun. No, that’s not true, there is one thing that is much worse than being picked up, and that’s when they insist on bringing you to the station after the reading. In a cramped car, the blanket covered in dog hair has to be tossed onto the backseat to make room for you. Normally, the passenger seat slides back further than that, but the handle broke off yesterday. There he sits, the bunch of flowers or bottle of wine in his lap, his knees jammed up against the dashboard. The engine turns over. “There’s one question still on my mind, something I didn’t dare to ask in there…” All the way home on the train, the odor of dog clings to his clothes.

“Would you like some coffee? Shall I take your coat?”

He doesn’t want any coffee, he prefers to hold on to his own coat.

“How many people are you expecting, more or less?” he asks, for the sake of having something to ask. In order not to have to look at the librarian’s haircut, he pretends to examine a poster announcing a comedian who will come here soon to talk about “his profession.” The picture shows the comedian wearing a funny derby, a nutty pair of plastic spectacles, and a fake mustache glued to his upper lip. Anyone who lets themselves be portrayed like that on a poster should be taken out and shot, he thinks. Right here, the moment he gets to the library, or else at home, in his sleep — with a silencer, of course; it would be a pity to wake anyone up with the blast.

“We have about twenty reservations,” the lady librarian says. “And there are usually about twenty more who show up. But, well, you never know. It’s such nice weather…”

And what if it had rained? he thinks, trying to imagine how she must have looked as a young girl, long ago. Where did it go wrong? At which age did that face slam shut like a book no one felt like finishing? What would she have said if it had been raining—You never know, it’s raining out?

“I need to use the restroom,” he says.

She leads him to a space with a photocopier and a bookcase filled with loose-leaf binders. A coffee machine is sputtering in the corner. This is where the toilet is.

He tries to fend off the thought that the librarians use this toilet too. Standing at the little sink he takes a few deep breaths and looks in the mirror. The final moments alone — the trick is to make these moments last as long as possible. Sometimes he fantasizes about not coming back at all, about how the librarians would glance at their watches with concern. “He’s been in there for fifteen minutes. I hope nothing’s happened to him? Could you go and sort of knock quietly, Anneke?”

It would be a nice addition to his obituary: found dead in the restroom of a library where he was about to read from his own work. And then? What else would the obituary say? He looks in the mirror, and suddenly he can’t help thinking about his mother. What if she could see him like this, he thinks. Would she be proud of him? He suspects she would. Mothers are not hard to please. They’re always proud, even of a writing career that’s nearing its expiration date. Thoughts arise in his mind about her troubled deathbed, her mouth trying to smile at him, trying to reassure him, go on back outside, go have fun with your friends, Mommy’s just a little tired. And with no clear transition, he thinks then about his young wife. About Ana. Instead of a youth full of discos and a new boyfriend every two weeks, she chose him. Sometimes he thinks he stole those boyfriends and discos from her, but that’s not true. She decided of her own free will to share her life with a writer, a writer who was aging rapidly, even then.

He flushes the toilet for form’s sake, then steps outside.

13

The reading begins. He sees about thirty people in the audience, most of them women, not one of them younger than fifty-seven, he guesses. Four or five men, tops. One man is sitting in the front row, he recognizes the type: they often have beards, they come to the reading wearing sandals or hiking boots. This one, for a change, has on a sleeveless khaki vest with a wealth of pockets, zippers and rivets, the kind photographers and cameramen wear; there are marking pens and ballpoints sticking out of a few of the pockets. His broad, hairy, and tanned arms are crossed at his chest, the chairs on both sides of him are unoccupied, and he has a pair of (reading?) glasses pushed up over his peaky, mussed-up hair. The hair of a troublemaker, M knows, a man in bad boy’s clothing who, like the bewhiskered ones in sandals, saves the impertinent questions for after the break. What do you actually think of your own work? What do you get paid, anyway, to come here and read a few bits from your book? Can you give us one good reason why we should read your books?

Further back, toward the middle of the room, he sees two other men. Colorless men. Men in sport jackets and striped shirts who apparently could think of nothing more pleasant to do on this Saturday afternoon than accompany their wives to a reading. Deep in his heart, he feels an almost nauseating contempt for men like these. He’s a man too. Would he ever attend a reading at a library — a reading by a writer like him? No, never. Not even if all other options had been exhausted.

Startled, he sees a familiar face in the audience: his publisher. He vaguely recalls a phone call from him about a week ago. “There are a couple of things I need to talk to you about,” his publisher had said. “Maybe I’ll pop by the library.” Were they planning to dump him? he’d wondered during the phone call. No, that wasn’t likely. His sales might be dwindling, but his name is still one everyone would be pleased to have in their stable. He could find another publisher at the drop of a hat. It seems more likely that they just want to discuss that interview Marie Claude Bruinzeel asked about, the one he’s succeeded in putting off till now. “Please!” M had said. “Don’t do that to me!”

All the way at the rear, in the backmost, almost empty row of chairs, is another man. A young man. Well, youngish…about thirty years younger than he is, that’s for sure. The man’s face looks familiar to him somehow, but he can’t quite place it. Might be a journalist, you always have to watch out for those. It wouldn’t be the first time that his own remarks, made in the familiar hominess of a library reading room, would end up twisted around completely in the pages of some free local paper, torn out of context and then drawn to his attention by his publisher’s publicity department. I never knew you felt this way about racism/the environmental movement/home birthing, someone — the publicity assistant on duty that day, or else his editor — would scribble at the bottom of the clipping. No, neither did he. More or less that way, but not exactly that way.

When he opens Liberation Year to the first page, he is struck by a mild dizziness. It’s a dilemma each time: the longer he reads, the less blather he has to listen to, both from the audience and from himself. Where did you come up with the idea for the book? Do you write in the morning, or in the afternoon? Do you use a computer, or do you write longhand? What do you think about the rise of right-wing radicalism in Europe? Does your wife read your books before they go to the publisher?

The answers, too, he knows almost by heart. He always remains polite. He smiles. He lets his gaze roam over the faces of his audience. Lately he has started fantasizing about a flatbed truck showing up about halfway through the reading and rounding them all up. Calm down everyone, stay calm, there’s nothing to worry about. It’s only a drill, you’re being evacuated for your own safety. Then the tailgate closes and the truck drives out of town. At a clearing in the woods, the audience has to climb down. Take it easy, people, don’t look back, just walk on quietly until you’re out of the woods. Only when they catch sight of the freshly dug pit do they realize what is about to happen.

“I write longhand,” he says. “I need to feel the words flow down my arm.” He hears himself talking, as though someone else were giving these answers. A spokesman or press officer. He starts reading. From the first sentence, he has the feeling that the text is not his own, that it was written by someone else. He has that feeling more often lately, but it usually overcomes him in his own study: he rereads the things he wrote months ago, and suddenly each word is new. In fact, he can’t remember ever writing this text. That’s one of the advantages of old age. The forgetting. Something old will sometimes look new the very next morning. But this is different. He reads the words about the resistance group, pinned down behind the railway embankment by an ambush, the description of the landscape, the sunrise, a duck quacking in the distance, and not only does it seem like the work of another writer, but like text from a writer he wishes he had nothing to do with. What a load of tripe, he thinks, there we go with that war again. The Dutch resistance, what a bunch of schmaltz.

At first he doesn’t notice that he has stopped reading. He looks at his hands, his fingers on the page of his own book. These fingers will probably never freeze off, not in the years still allotted to him, he thinks, but they will disappear. He looks at the faces in the audience. A few of them may already be walking around with some disease, but will only get the diagnosis next week. Only a couple of months left, ma’am…six months at most. He shakes his head.

“Could I ask how many of you have already read my book?” he asks, trying to win time. A few fingers are raised.

“I had hoped to read your book before coming here this afternoon,” a woman in the second row says. “But the library has it lent out all the time. I’m on the waiting list.”

He looks at her, no, not really, he looks at her face, at everything except her eyes. He has never understood why people would want to borrow a book. All right, maybe because they don’t have a lot of money, but there are so many things you might choose to deny yourself for lack of money. He himself finds it filthy, a borrowed book. Not as filthy as sleeping in a hotel where the sheets haven’t been changed and you’re forced to lie among the last guest’s hair and flakes of skin. A book with wine spots and a crushed insect between the pages, with the grains of sand from the last reader’s holiday falling out as you read.

“So why don’t you buy my book?” he asks; he tries to smile, but only succeeds halfway. He can’t see his own face — if it’s a smile, then it’s a fairly contemptuous one, he suspects.

“Excuse me?”

The woman is staring at him, startled. He hears someone chuckle, but otherwise the room is mostly silent.

“Are you that poor? Can’t you afford a book that costs less than twenty euros?”

He is still looking at her face, then at her hair — it has a wave to it and is obviously dyed: a color like that is biologically impossible at her age.

“I—” the woman starts in, but he beats her to it.

“How much did you have to pay the beautician who did your hair this morning?” he asks. “Four times the price of my book, I estimate. But still, you’d never cut corners on that beauty parlor. You would never want to be seen with a head full of gray ends just to save enough money to buy my book.”

Now the room is truly, completely still, no one is chuckling anymore.

He sees the librarian glance at her watch. What’s this? Then he realizes: it’s time for the intermission. During a reading, time fades away. Or no, it becomes something else, time does: outside, people are walking around in the sunshine, a van misses a motor scooter by a hair, a waitress’s hand takes a glass of wine from a tray and places it on the table of the sidewalk café. But here in the library, time has followed a different logic, like that of water seeking the shortest route to the sea — or to the drain, rather. It is, literally, lost time: time you’ll never get back again. An intermission has been imposed. A commercial break. “We’ll be right back with more stories and anecdotes from M, the writer. Don’t go away. Feel free to remain seated.” Most of those present don’t even need to be encouraged. Now they are being entertained; when this is over there gapes the chasm of a Saturday afternoon, the panicky fear of boredom.

“Would you like coffee or tea?” the librarian asks.

14

“Longhand, first. Then I type it all out on the machine.”

“Do you write in the morning or in the evening?”

“I start early in the morning. Nine o’clock. Not at ten to nine, and not at ten past nine. Nine o’clock on the dot. I don’t wait for inspiration. I made a pact once with my subconscious mind: If you prompt me with ideas, I’ll keep up my end of the bargain. I’ll make sure I’m at my desk every morning at nine. You can count on me.”

There is some muted snickering from the audience. They think it’s a good joke, but he’s serious. It may be the only thing about his writing practice that isn’t a joke, it occurs to him.

“Do people ever recognize themselves in one of your characters?”

“That happens, yes. The opposite happens more often, though. That people whose face and body I’ve described most accurately don’t recognize themselves at all. There are simple tricks for that. Changing the person’s profession, for example. Or turning a man into a woman. The more precise you are in describing faces and personalities and objectionable traits, the less people realize that it’s about them. No one sees themselves the way others do. And then there’s something else: they simply don’t believe it’s possible. They can’t believe that you, the writer, would be ruthless enough to portray them in such a terrible way. Even if it’s a perfectly accurate portrayal. But there is no other choice. As a writer you have to approach the truth as closely as possible, even if there’s collateral damage. ‘Never marry a writer,’ my first wife’s mother once said. ‘Before you know it, you’ll find your whole life in some book.’ ”

Suddenly he falls silent. How did he arrive at this, for God’s sake? His first wife? Her mother turned out to be right. In The Hour of the Dog, he had painted a merciless portrait of her. After the divorce. A reprisal, pure and simple. And as recognizably as he could. She had left him. For someone else. For more than a year she’d had something going with Willem R, the eternally drunken painter. Willem R had visited their home, eaten dinner at their table, and he — the cuckold — had suspected nothing. He had labored under the mistaken impression that his first wife was not at all charmed by the painter’s drunken gibberish. He’d had no qualms about them going off on jaunts into town together, meeting up for lunches or dinners. R poured red wine down his gullet without really tasting it. He stank a little, there were spots on his shirts and holes in his black turtlenecks. At the table he used his napkin to dab at his forehead, his sweat smelled of wine too, it was simply unimaginable to him that his wife would even allow the painter to touch her with his fingertips, which were undoubtedly covered with an invisible layer of stale sweat too. That she — and here the imagination reeled and all M could do was groan quietly, his eyes clamped shut — would tolerate Willem R’s chapped, perennially purple lips on hers…

He wrote The Hour of the Dog in six weeks. In a fury, growling and writhing in his desk chair. When it was finished, his publisher tried to warn him. Only for form’s sake, he realized later — so much later that it was far too late already. No publisher could pass up a book like that one. The readers couldn’t either. The Hour of the Dog became his second bestseller, after Payback. Most critics thought it went too far, all that dirty laundry and overly intimate detail. An embarrassing display. And they were right. It started when he read aloud a passage from it on the Sunday afternoon culture program, and the interviewer let a brief silence fall when he was finished. He had almost snorted with pleasure as he’d read that excerpt, laughter had risen now and then from the studio audience, but now the silence was total.

“It’s almost as though you’d beat her to death if you ran into her tomorrow on the street,” the interviewer said. “Or am I mistaken?”

“Beat her to death?” he’d replied. “Beat her, no, of course not…”

Back at the house, he had started reading. Starting at page one. It hurt right away. Each sentence, each word caused him pain — in a deep, dark, and previously vacant spot between his heart and midriff. How could he ever have let it come to this? What had he been thinking, for Christ’s sake? What business did readers have knowing that his first wife had cheated on him with that smelly, shoddy painter, R? The details were the worst of it. Her physical imperfections, her bizarre habits, how she scratched at the mole above her lip when she lied to him about where she had been and with whom. The same mole he had called one of her “seven beauties” and which he had always made her vow never to have removed. Now he had shared that scratching at the mole with tens of thousands of readers. Just like her habit of wanting to show up everywhere — dinner dates, birthdays, train stations and airports — far too early, because she was afraid they would otherwise come too late or miss their train (or plane). Having arrived at the dinner address or birthday party, they were always forced to walk around the block a few times, at airports they spent hours nosing through the duty-free shops. He had always found that endearing too, but now he used it against her. In The Hour of the Dog he had blamed it on “her bourgeois fear of being caught red-handed,” and called her “a whore who feels guilty about her profession.”

He had tried to call her that same afternoon, after the broadcast, but the phone was answered by the painter, who announced that he must have a pretty good idea why she didn’t want to talk to him anymore. A few minutes after they hung up, the phone rang. He picked it up on the second ring, but it was a girl — a girl’s voice, asking whether he might consider doing an interview for her school paper.

Less than a year later, the drunken painter died. M felt no glee when he heard about it. Regret was what he felt, mostly. He never looked at The Hour of the Dog again, and when his publisher started talking about an inexpensive paperback edition he said he needed time to think about it. In the last few years he had seen his first wife a few times in the café of the artists’ club. She tended to sit on the glassed-in porch, and she always had a glass of white wine in her hand. One time he watched as she let her head sink down into the lap of an old poet. By then Ana was no youngster anymore, yet at such moments M still felt ashamed. Another time he had been very close, he had already slid back his chair and was about to walk up to her and apologize. But just at that moment his first wife, who was sitting at the bar beside an octogenarian concert pianist, tossed back her head and laughed loudly. The laugh was much too loud, dry, and without resonance — the laugh of someone who wants everyone to know that she’s doing fine. He sat back down again. For the first time he felt sincere compassion for her, and the next moment he was disgusted by that feeling all over again. Compassion. It was almost worse than the things he’d written about in The Hour of the Dog.

He looks up at the audience, but in fact he’s not looking at all; he lets his gaze wander over the faces in the group, afraid as he is to establish eye contact with any one person in particular.

A woman raises her finger.

Do you ever see your first wife anymore? Have you ever had the chance to explain to her why you did what you did?

“Do you have any advice for Dutch teachers who use your books in their classes?” is what the woman really asks.

He breathes a sigh of relief. When he smiles, he feels the skin on his lips stretch painfully.

“I remember quite well how that used to go at school,” he says. “We had a teacher of Dutch literature who would just start reading aloud from something. Outside the sun was shining, from the windows of our classroom you could see the ducks floating in the canal. The teacher read, and after that he talked about what was so special about that particular book. Why it was that the writer had created nothing less than a masterpiece. My Dutch teacher was what they call an ‘inspired teacher,’ he sincerely loved literature. He tried to communicate his enthusiasm to us. But the whole misunderstanding lay precisely in that enthusiasm, for how can you love literature and then decide to read it aloud in front of a classroom? That’s the last thing books are for, isn’t it? Or, to put it differently, those who love literature keep those books at home. They don’t take them along to a high school. And they certainly don’t read aloud from them. That misunderstanding continues, right up to this very day.”

“But then how are we supposed to do it?” the woman asks — she’s not so very old, in any case a few years younger than the average person present here today, he thinks. “How are we supposed to get young people to read?”

He sighs deeply.

“You yourself work in education, I suppose?”

“I teach Dutch at a secondary school.”

“I was afraid of that. In your question I detect that other major misunderstanding. Namely, that young people — or invalids, or vegetarians — should ‘have to read.’ That’s completely unnecessary. We shouldn’t want to force anyone to read, just as little as we should want to force people to go to the movies, listen to music, have sex, or consume alcoholic beverages. Literature doesn’t belong in a secondary school. No, it belongs more on the list of things I just mentioned. The list that includes sex and drugs, all the things that give us pleasure without any external coercion. A required reading list? How dare we!”

Then, in the front row, the man in the sleeveless vest raises his hand.

“In Liberation Year, you wrote about a sympathetic Nazi and an evil Jew,” the man says. “Did you have a particular reason for that?”

“No,” he answers. “Except that sometimes I feel the need to show that stereotypes should be seen through. Not every Nazi is just a Nazi, and not everyone in hiding is automatically a good person.”

“You talk about stereotypes,” the man says. “But wasn’t it precisely the stereotypes about Jews that led to the Holocaust?”

“That’s true, I’m very aware of that. But in my book, the Jewish man in hiding is not a stereotype. He is a man of flesh and blood, with good and bad traits.”

“But as a writer you must know how careful you have to be about that. There are plenty of readers who will be all too pleased to read about an unsympathetic Jew. And that group of readers will only see their own prejudices confirmed in your portrayal of the Jew in hiding.”

“First of all, I never think in terms of groups of readers. And even if I wanted to, I could never help the prejudiced to rid themselves of their prejudices, to the extent that those people read my books at all.”

“But you did once write an extremely enthusiastic pamphlet about Fidel Castro. About Castro and Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. And you have never distanced yourself from that. You even refused to sign a petition calling for the release of political prisoners in Cuba.”

He suddenly feels flushed. Here we go again! It’s become a bothersome habit, the way they remind him at every opportunity about his pamphlet on Cuba and Fidel Castro. He’s already addressed that sufficiently on more than one occasion, hasn’t he?

“I was enthusiastic about the revolution in Cuba,” he says. “In fact, I couldn’t understand those who weren’t enthusiastic about it. I visited the island, and I was struck by the aura of excitement there. It was almost electric. People had dislodged a cruel dictator with their own hands. The Cubans were visibly proud of that. Everywhere you went, you saw only happy, smiling faces and thumbs raised in victory.”

“While a little further away the executions were taking place and the corpses were being bulldozed into mass graves,” the man said. “But I suppose you didn’t take a look over there?”

“Those were mostly traitors and collaborators. Every revolution has its victims. But it was definitely not the pitiful or the good who were shot there.”

“And who decides that, whether they were good or bad? Is it you? Or is it all those so-called revolutionaries?”

If they only knew what he really thought, he thinks. Then he would have to pack his bags and run for it. That would be the end. He doubts whether the reading clubs full of bored housewives would still come to see him at the library after that. Sometimes he fantasizes about an ending like that, a final twist to his writing career: at the last moment, with one foot already in the grave, he would say what he really thought. Then he would jump into the coffin as quickly as possible and pull the lid shut behind him. In his books he let those thoughts shine through dimly at best, for those with ears to hear, for those who could read between the lines. That was what a writer’s freedom was all about, it was in fact perhaps the only freedom: to think things through to their logical conclusion, and then to ease up on the gas. What the reader finally encountered was never more than an echo of those logical conclusions.

If he were to write down what he really thought, in its rawest and most unabridged form, it would all be over, just like that. The readers would turn their backs on him in disgust. Bookshops would refuse to sell his work. The rare critic would dedicate a final, concluding article to his oeuvre, the main gist of which would be that now everything “must be seen in a different light,” including his earlier, never-renounced love of Communist dictatorships. He would have to turn his Order of Merit back in. A statue, or even a plaque bolted to the wall beside the front door to his house (In this house, from…to…, lived and worked the writer M ), would be out of the question. A future biographer would (if Ana gave him permission — but she would, they’ve already talked about that a few times in a roundabout way) delve into his correspondence and have little trouble finding “the first signs of his later derailment.” In certain circles, though, his popularity would only increase. Circles in which no one, not even he, would want to be popular. Those circles would do all they could to co-opt the writer and his work, but that wouldn’t be too easy, the books were too unruly for that, and their author too elusive. The Netherlands would ask itself out loud whether it is allowable to be proud of an author like him, whether the author and his work should be seen separately. A “national discussion” would ensue, the kind of public brouhaha the Dutch all know and love. As always, the double-standard straightedge would be taken out of the drawer. The same double-standard straightedge a socialist mayor of Amsterdam applied years ago to bar from the city a writer who had visited apartheid South Africa, while the public advocates of leftist dictatorships and left-wing concentration camps, including himself, could simply go on living there.

No, he thinks then, that’s not how it will go, not at all. He can say whatever he feels like. At most, people will laugh at him. No, not even at most, they will do nothing but laugh at him. Another war would have to come along before he could be relegated to a “right” or “wrong” camp. And it would also depend on who won that war as to whether he would be arrested, liquidated, or simply have his head shaved and be dragged around town atop a manure wagon. Or, in the event of a different winner: the statue, the Order of Merit, and the street named in his honor — the victors are the ones who get to choose between the manure wagon and the statue.

His gaze sweeps the faces in the audience. At last, he looks at the man in the sleeveless vest. He could do it, he thinks, it’s possible. An experiment. A corner of the veil. He could acquaint them with a glimpse of his real opinions. Maybe it would make Monday’s papers, maybe not. Maybe Marie Claude Bruinzeel would cancel their interview. Or maybe she would be even more eager to talk to him. He clears his throat, coughs into his fist. An experiment.

“Let me tell you something about good and evil,” he says. “Or better yet, about right and wrong.”

15

Barely fifteen minutes later — the librarian has glanced at her watch a few times by then — it is suddenly over. That’s how it goes, there is a time to come and a time to go. What really gets the librarians’ goats are the writers who don’t know when to stop. The writers who would like to hear themselves talk all day. Colleague S is notorious on the circuit. He has no qualms about going on for an hour longer than agreed (“I see another question there at the back…”) and when it’s over they almost have to drag him to his little red sports car in the parking lot.

Around noon, librarians are eager to escape. Especially on a Saturday or Sunday. They still need to swing by the supermarket, or they have a sick nephew coming over for the weekend — which means they like to stick to the schedule. Organizations that hire you in for a Friday or Saturday evening are a different story, though. There they start off by asking whether you’d like to join them for a bite to eat beforehand, and, if so, if you could arrive no later than two and a half hours before the reading. And afterward they assume you’ll join them in one for the road at the most authentic pub in the village. They tell you stories about your colleagues. Colleagues who helped close down the pub. “Colleague N hung around here till three in the morning.” “It took four of us to drag colleague C up to his hotel room.” “Colleague D fell asleep in the backseat of my car, we just let him lie there.” You know you will only disappoint these people if you head home before midnight. “Colleague P is a real party animal, he got up on this same table and started dancing.” You feel obligated to do something. Something, it doesn’t matter what. Something that will allow the organizers to describe their evening with you as unforgettable too, or at least link it to some juicy anecdote. “He passed out right here, facedown in a bunch of flowers, then he went out on the village square in the pouring rain, stripped, and sang ‘The Internationale.’ ”

“I need to catch the last train,” he always tells them. “I have to get up early tomorrow, I need to get on with my book.” He sees the disappointment on their faces right away.

But all he ever wants to do is go home. He’s boring — that’s how they’ll remember him later too. In the car on the way to the station he remains silent, not out of unwillingness, no, the words have simply dried up, he’s said enough for one day.

The lady librarian has come up and is standing beside him, not too close — she probably finds men scary and dirty. She thanks the writer, she thanks the audience, then she hands him the bouquet of flowers. Applause. He steps down from the podium, sits down at the table with books, and screws the cap off his fountain pen. A little line forms. He can’t make out the first name, the librarian asks if he’d like something to drink, music is suddenly coming from a loudspeaker somewhere. Lame music, with neither head nor tail. When he asks for a beer, the librarian looks worried. A woman places her book on the table in front of him, open to the title page, and hands him a slip of paper with text on it, written in blue ballpoint.

“Would you write that in it, and then under that your name and ‘have fun reading’ and ‘Amsterdam’ with the date above that?”

For Els, because you were there for me when the others had already given up, a big kiss from your Thea.

“Why, of course,” he says.

The line grows shorter. One last dedication—for Maarten, for your 60th birthday—and it’s over. Beside the door, through which sunlight is streaming, stands his publisher, talking to the lady librarian. M recognizes the pose — the publisher has his elbow cupped in one hand, with the other hand he supports his chin, the index finger pressing against his cheek. Interested. A listener.

M is just about to get up when a shadow falls across the table. Standing there is the “young man” from the back row. Once again his face seems familiar to M. His first instinct is to glance at the man’s hands. They usually wait till the very end, till everyone’s gone, the aspiring writers who try to leave him with a copy of their unpublished manuscript. Hundreds of typed pages, often without paragraph breaks, printed in a font that is too small and frequently with even smaller spaces between the lines — all in a wrinkled, dog-eared envelope or bound together with a big rubber band.

Long ago, he sometimes took those packages home with him and read the first few sentences. Then came the staring at pages packed too full with letters, as though the sentences and characters were fighting for space on the page, as though they were about to be crushed, like people in a heaving crowd on a city square.

But the man’s hands are empty. M braces himself for a question, a question the man didn’t dare to ask with everyone else around. How one goes about writing a book. How to get started.

M takes a copy of Liberation Year from the slightly diminished pile (eight copies sold today, he estimates, and then you had the man with a bulging plastic bag from which he produced M’s entire oeuvre, and not only the books he’d written in their entirety in the course of a long writer’s life, but also all the collections, anthologies, and yellowed literary journals to which he’d ever contributed, “if you’d just jot your name down here, and here…,” the man said). He opened it to the title page.

But this man has still said nothing, asked nothing. He leans across the table of unsold books and looks around a few times, as though making sure no one can hear him.

“Yes?” M says — looking him straight in the eye. He adopts an interested expression. “What can I do for you?”

16

Fifteen minutes later he is sitting with his publisher in a dark and empty old-fashioned pub around the corner from the library. His publisher raises his glass to his lips and nibbles at the foam. M himself has almost finished his first beer.

“About that interview,” his publisher says. “With Marie Claude Bruinzeel.”

M sighs. He knows Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s reputation. First she’ll try to lull him to sleep during an ample meal with beer and wine. She will praise his work, as well as his attractive appearance — his pronouncedly masculine features that have become only more irresistible with the passing of time. Then, without warning, she will zoom in on his mother. On “the lack,” on the absence of a mother during his formative years, the years that formed him as a writer. “Do you still think about her often?” Marie Claude Bruinzeel will ask as she orders another bottle of Pouilly-Fumé. Every day, he replies — he should reply, but he doesn’t. He shrugs. “Oh, well, you know…,” he says. Then she moves right on to the childhood photos. From her bag she produces a photograph of him as a boy, sitting on his mother’s lap. “She was a beautiful woman,” Marie Claude says. “You take after her. Did her physical beauty influence you later on, when it came time to choose your own women?” She mentions the names of a few vague relatives whose addresses and phone numbers she had wheedled out of him on a previous occasion. “Your cousin, V, told me that you’ve never been the same after your mother’s death. That you steeled yourself. That your aloofness these days can be traced back to that dramatic event.”

He tries not to think about the final days, but he can’t help it. The closed curtains, the doctor’s footsteps in the hall, the consoling hand on his cheek. Your mother, it’s over, boy. That sentence. That word. “Over.” A sentence he would carry with him for the rest of his life, he knew that even back then. And then the leave-taking in the bedroom. He had never known that the dead could lie so still. Truly still, not the way a person or an animal sleeps, no, as still as a vase on a table — an empty vase, without flowers. His mother, that which had been his mother until a few hours ago, was already somewhere else, in any case not here. He had heard somewhere that the human body becomes twenty-one grams lighter at death. The faithful attributed the difference to the departure of the soul. But he was not religious, or at least he did not believe in souls that could be weighed on a set of scales.

He was alone with her for a few minutes, with what was left of her, while in the hallway his father spoke to the doctor in a muted voice. He promised her something, he promised it in a whisper.

I’ll always carry you with me, he whispered. From now on, you’re here. And he raised his finger to his head and tapped it softly — it is a promise he has always kept.

Now he thinks about his cousin V. What’s he been doing, shooting his mouth off about aloofness to some journalist he doesn’t know from a bar of soap? Cousin V, with whom he used to play in the sandbox at his parents’ home. After his mother died, his father sold the house and they moved to an apartment in Amsterdam. In one of his books — he doesn’t remember which one — he spoke of the house with the sandbox as “the last house in which I was ever happy.”

“I’m afraid that an interview with Marie Claude Bruinzeel is not on,” he tells his publisher. “I’ve started on something new, I’m in the middle of it, more chattering about the last one will only disturb my rhythm.”

His publisher sighs, it’s probably the same sigh he breathes with all his authors when they’re “being impossible.” He’s referred to it before as “the spoiled artist routine,” but then he was talking about a colleague who refused to let his wife appear in “Partner Of.”

“Working on something new? Already? What’s the hurry?”

M reads his publisher’s expression: the raised eyebrows, the almost shocked, in any case not happy look in his eyes, the mouth forming a botched smile, the jaws clamped together just a little too tightly.

“Is that so strange?” he asks. “I just happen to feel better when I’m working on something. Especially in a period when a new book comes out and everyone suddenly has something to say about it.”

“Sure, sure, whatever works for you. It’s just that I think it would be a pity if Liberation Year were to disappear from the public eye too quickly. Anyway, Marie Claude Bruinzeel is thinking more in terms of a portrait of your entire career. A seven-page spread in the magazine. Lots of pictures.”

At the mention of pictures, he groans inside. He knows them all too well, the photographers who insist on coming up with “something special” at the expense of his old face and dwindling old body. Photographers with truly original ideas about how that special something should be given form can be counted on the fingers of one hand, that’s his experience. “I was thinking about taking you to a slaughterhouse,” they tell him on the phone. “Or else photographing you in a sauna, with only a towel around your waist.” There are photographers with lamps and umbrellas, photographers who take fifteen Polaroid pictures before getting down to the real stuff, photographers who claim that “two and a half, maybe three hours should be plenty.” When he invites them to his home they poke around in all the rooms, then stand there shaking their head for a long time, and finally, like every photographer he has ever invited to his home, take a picture of him in front of his bookcase. The occasional joker asks him to lie down on his bed. Another requests that he take off his striped shirt and replace it with a white one, only to start biting his lower lip half an hour later and breathe a big sigh. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to try it one more time with the striped shirt.” After that the photographers go out onto the balcony and stay there, sunk in thought, for a long time, or slide a table over to the window. “I don’t know what’s with me today,” they sigh, shaking their head again.

“I’ll think about it,” he tells his publisher.

“Okay, but not too long. They have a deadline. We have to jump on it by Monday at the latest, otherwise they’ll ask someone else.”

17

M opens the front door of his apartment house and takes the elevator up. As he passes the third floor, he can’t suppress a smile.

“Who was that you were talking to, there at the end,” his publisher had asked in the café.

“Oh, just some fellow,” M replied. “Just someone who wanted to know how you get to be a writer. You know the type.”

When he gets out on the fourth floor, he is still smiling. He thinks about what he needs to do. He could call Ana, no, he must call Ana, but he can do that later too, he thinks, tonight or tomorrow morning.

Once he’s inside he walks straight through to the kitchen, takes a beer from the fridge, opens it, and raises it to his lips. In the living room he puts on some music — the CD he often listens to when he’s home alone. He thinks back on the final part of the reading, the moment when the man in the multifunctional vest stood up and stomped out of the room.

“I’m not going to listen to any more of this!” the man had shouted.

M tries to recall exactly what it was that prompted that — he seems to have pretty much forgotten it already. It started with Cuba. M felt no desire to admit being wrong about Cuba. He still found it all a bit too smug, all these people who suddenly turn out, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, to have predicted long ago that there could never be any future in Communism.

“Do you know the great thing about revolutions?” he’d asked the man in the vest. “The essence? The essence is that first everything has to be torn down in order to actually start all over again. Right down to the ground. Barricades, burning cars and buildings, a statue roped and pulled from its pedestal. It is, to start with, a celebration. The laughing faces, the bearded revolutionaries atop a captured personnel carrier, the thumbs raised, the fingers making the victory sign. ‘If it can happen without bloodshed, why not?’ you might say. There are examples of revolutions in which no one was killed. Nonviolent resistance, peaceful revolutions, soldiers with a rose stuck in the barrel of their rifle, cheering women with carnations in their hair. But there is also something unjust about nonviolence. The soldiers who put down their guns, who refuse to shoot at the crowd, are we really supposed to accept them all with open arms? Can there really be forgiveness for the secret-police informers, the collaborators, the dictator’s sweethearts who fed human flesh to his crocodiles? Or should they all be finished off as quickly as possible, without trial? Their guilt, after all, has already been established. No lengthy legal proceedings are needed, are they? A revolution is a blackboard wiped clean with a wet sponge. Cleaned completely. But the teacher is still standing at the blackboard. Are we supposed to give him a second chance? Should he be allowed to once again cover the blackboard with his explanation of how things work? Or is it our blackboard now?”

Then the discussion had grown heated. The housewives had begun shifting uneasily in their seats, their eyes flitting back and forth between the sleeveless man and M. “Good and evil,” he had said at a certain point, staring straight at the man, “is far too simplistic, it leads only to generalizations.”

He should have stopped right there, M realizes now. He should have let it go. But he knows himself better than that. Winning by points was too easy, it had to be a knockout.

He has opened the doors to the balcony and is standing outside now, the can of beer still in his hand. It’s coming back again, word for word.

“When you look at the history of the twentieth century,” he’d said, “you can only conclude that those who were committed to the good account for just as many or more victims as those who knew deep in their hearts that they represented evil. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot: all of them, based on their belief in what was good, had millions of people slaughtered. The fascists, the Nazis, though, always did as much as they could on the q.t. They went to great pains to keep the locations of the death camps a secret. When the war was winding down, they did all they could to cover their tracks. Even today, they still deny what they did. But what does denying the Holocaust amount to, except the voice of a conscience? Anyone who denies the Holocaust is in fact saying that it didn’t happen because it’s too horrible for words. They weren’t that evil, the deniers shout. We’re not that evil either, they go on in the same breath. It’s so horrible, we can’t believe people are capable of that.”

Before this point — somewhere halfway through M’s monologue — the sleeveless man had stood up and made for the exit. Even though M hadn’t even started saying what he really thought. He had barely taken the corner of the veil between his fingers. Enough is probably enough, he’d thought. If the troublemakers start leaving the room at the very first jab, perhaps it was better to keep one’s real thoughts to one’s self. A few minutes later, the lady librarian glanced at her watch.

From his balcony he looks at the sidewalk café where he had failed to drink coffee with milk this morning.

He leans forward, not too far; when he stands on a balcony he always has the same fantasy — that you lean over too far and lose your balance. The center of gravity. The upper body is suddenly heavier than the lower part, the feet leave the ground, you try to catch yourself, but it’s too late.

M can see a bit of the balcony that belongs to his downstairs neighbor, a little corner of a white wooden armrest, a flowerpot with only soil in it.

He knocks back the rest of his beer, steps inside, and closes the balcony doors.

18

Marie Claude Bruinzeel is sitting at a window table in the café across from his house, all the way at the back of the dining room that is otherwise deserted on this Monday morning. She doesn’t get up when M sticks out his hand, but then he realizes why. She’s interviewed him once before, a public interview in a room at some book fair. It had gone uneasily at first, but afterward they had kissed each other three times on the cheeks, like old acquaintances.

He takes her hand and leans across the table. Once she catches his drift, she raises her cheek to him — but remains seated.

“It was sweet of you to call me yesterday,” she said. “It gives me a little more leeway with my deadline.”

Sweet. He lets the word sink in for a moment, he doesn’t remember them being so familiar before. This ice must have been broken as well during the last interview, he suspects.

Today there actually is milk for the coffee. And it’s not the girl from last Saturday who brings it to the table, but a thin man with a shaved head and a fuzzy little beard.

“The cappuccino was for…?” he asks before putting the cup and saucer down in front of M with a slightly too-elegant gesture, causing a bit of foam to spill over the edge. It’s a superfluous question, because Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s nearly full café-au-lait is already in front of her. When the thin man leans across their table, M sees something in his earlobe, an earring, a piercing, or something in between the two, something black in the shape of a snail or a shrimp. Through the wispy beard he now sees a few spots on the man’s face. Not pimples. Spots. It’s not something that can simply be turned on and off, this constant observing of superabundant detail; he is a writer, he tells himself, but the vacuuming up of details is purely obsessive. Often, after a day in the city, or a meal in a crowded restaurant, he comes home exhausted by all those faces and their irregularities.

He watches as a glop of foamy milk runs down the side of the cup, onto the saucer. But he’s not going to say anything about it. In a café like this, run by amateurs, things are what they are. Either there is no milk at all, or else it runs over the edges, there is no middle ground.

Now he looks at Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s face. He had forgotten how pretty she is. A bit too much makeup, perhaps, but not the kind of makeup that’s intended to hide anything, rather to accentuate everything that’s already there. She’s wearing her hair up; he follows a few loose strands all the way down to her neck, then lets his gaze travel back up via her chin and glossy red lips until he is looking her straight in the eye.

One of the rare advantages of an interview: you can keep looking into the interviewer’s eyes for a shamelessly long time, and when that interviewer is a woman, as is now the case, a woman as pretty as Marie Claude Bruinzeel, you can even keep looking for longer than might be good for you.

He’s good at it, at looking. He is never the first to avert his eyes.

“Well, I didn’t have too much going on,” he says. “My wife is out of town. I’m home alone.”

He said it without ulterior motives, but it could easily be interpreted as a pass, he realizes immediately. Oh, but then so what! She’s part of the target group. His target group. He may be old but, after all, she’s here because of his talent. If she had no interest in old men with talent, in babbling on about that talent, she would have picked a different profession.

“I’m all yours, Marie Claude,” he says. That may have been a bit too much, too smarmy, but he says it with a smile. He knows that women like it when you say their first name out loud. Not too often, then it becomes too possessive, but in exactly the right dosage. Casually. Besides, it’s a name he enjoys pronouncing, as though he were ordering something in a French restaurant, a spécialité de la maison that isn’t on the regular menu.

She returns his smile. It’s an agreement that meets with their mutual approval, he knows. During the ninety minutes that the interview takes, he is allowed to keep looking into her brown eyes. By way of quid pro quo, he is expected not to be too stingy with his answers. Besides an inside look at the wellsprings, at the workings of his talent, he must also give her something that has never been made public before. An illegitimate child. A life-threatening illness. A manuscript tossed in the fire. He wonders when she will start in about his mother.

“So,” she kicks off, “have you fallen into the proverbial black hole after finishing Liberation Year? Or not yet? Actually, you don’t seem to me at all like the type for black holes.”

For the first fifteen minutes his answers run on automatic pilot. Not too brief, not too long. He only shifts his eyes away now and then to look outside, to pretend he’s thinking about a question. But there’s not a lot happening outside. He sees his own quiet street, the big old trees and, catty-corner from where they are seated, the entrance to his own building. He can see no further than the corner. Around that corner, the postman has just appeared with his cart.

He hears himself talking. He’s given all these answers before. In fact, he would really like to give very different answers, new answers to old questions, but he knows from experience that that would not be wise. The new answers are seldom better than the old. He used to read over the interviews he’d given, both before and after publication, but he’s stopped that. He can’t stand to be confronted with his own waffling anymore; in print it’s often even worse than in real life.

“The black hole doesn’t exist,” he hears himself say. “Nor does writer’s block. Those are the cowardly excuses of writers without talent. Ever heard of a carpenter with hammer’s block? A carpenter who installs a parquet floor and then doesn’t know what kind of floor to put in next?”

He tries to smile as he says this. He tries to seem lively by making gestures to go along with the example of the parquet floor. He raises an imaginary hammer and pounds an imaginary nail into the tabletop beside his cappuccino. I have to make this look as though I’m doing it for the first time, he tells himself, but the look on his face, he suspects, will betray his boredom. So instead he concentrates on Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s eyes and imagines how he would look into those eyes if this wasn’t an interview at all, if he were simply sitting across from a pretty woman whom he would later invite to come to his place for a drink or “something other than coffee.”

What he’s actually waiting for is the moment when she will start to plumb the depths, or rather, the moment when she will step across the border between his public and private lives. He could of course dig in his heels, he could adopt his coldest, most impassive expression and shake his head. Sorry, that’s my own business. But he knows that’s not how it works with Marie Claude Bruinzeel. He only wonders what it’s going to be. His mother? The loss? The other women, both before, during, and after his two official marriages? Or perhaps, after all, the approach of death? His own death. What’s left afterward.

One more time he pulls his gaze away from Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s brown eyes, purportedly to think about yet another question (Are you finished with the war now? Or is there still a book about that subject somewhere inside you?), but in fact to take a little break, to catch his breath, to see something normal. The postman is still one door down from his building, he takes the bundle of mail out of his cart and distributes it in the letterboxes.

Maybe a postman would have been a better example than a carpenter, he thinks. What about the black hole of a postman after he has handed out all his letters? Could he, tomorrow or the day after, when starting another day’s round, suddenly find himself faced with a mail block?

“The question is not whether I’m finished with the war, but when the war will be finished with me,” he replies, not for the first time. “The same applies to the book. Whether there’s another book about the war inside me is not something I decide for myself. The book does that. The book always gets there before I do.”

Then, suddenly, she is at his mother. He does his absolute best not to look out the window again. No visible body language that Marie Claude Bruinzeel might use to jump to a conclusion. The thin man with the wispy beard was at their table only a minute ago, to ask whether everything was satisfactory and if there was anything else he could do for them. She had ordered an espresso, he another cappuccino, but in a café like this one, he knows, an eternity will pass before they arrive.

The “loss”—the word is there already, in her very first question. Whether he thinks there is a connection between the loss of his mother and the war. Or whether the fact that he returns to that war so often in his books has less to do with the war itself than with the fact that his mother fell ill in the middle of it. And whether there is perhaps also a connection between the age he has mentioned so often, the age after which he’s said no new experiences come along, and the fact that his mother died shortly after he reached that same age.

He grimaces. He shouldn’t do that, he thinks. He grimaces in spite of himself. This is all much too private, he should reply. I’d rather not talk about this. He has to hand it to Marie Claude, she’s done her homework. No, it’s more than just homework, she’s taken a few things and added them up, made new connections. Unexpected connections that no one else has made before, as far as he can recall. At least not in this way and all at the same time.

He has written about the war and about sick mothers. About dying mothers and the sense of loss. And about the age at which everything coagulates, the age after which the new experiences are no longer really new and can, at best, only be compared with the old ones — only he’s never done that all in the same book.

“To start with the loss,” he says to gain time, but then he doesn’t know how to go on anymore. He wants to stir his coffee, but his cup is empty. “I miss her,” he says. “I miss my mother, perhaps now more than ever.”

Marie Claude Bruinzeel looks at him expectantly with her big brown eyes. She’s waiting for his next sentence. A next sentence in which he’ll explain himself further.

He clears his throat. I can always take it out of the interview later on, he thinks. Take out the worst of it. But then he mustn’t forget to ask to see it before publication, for just this once, by way of exception.

“At first, it’s mostly the shock,” he says. “Or no, not really a shock, because you’ve seen it coming for months already. The illness. The treatment. The hope of recovery. The relapse. You’re prepared for it. But it’s still strange when it really happens. I kept hoping for a miracle, right up to the very last day. And then it happens anyway. From that moment on, you cross a line, all that’s left is before and after. With each day that you move further away from that line, the things that happened before become more important. Become clearer, take on more portent. You don’t want to forget your mother, but above all you don’t want to forget what it was like before. And then there are emotions you don’t often hear about in connection with death. The first is the novelty. This is real, you think. This is happening to me. No one else can say that. It was in the middle of the war, that fact is not unimportant. Death was hardly an uncommon event. There’s a platitude people still use these days: ‘There are worse things, aren’t there?’ Back then, that was really true. There were worse things happening in the world than the death of someone’s mother. Around the corner from us, a week before my mother died, a collaborator was shot as he cycled down the street, and then finished off with a bullet to the back of the head. Two weeks after my mother died, a British bomber was hit by German antiaircraft fire right above our house. I remember the burning tailpiece, the smoke and flames, the impotent screeching of the propellers as they tried and failed to keep the bomber in the air, the explosions of the ammunition going off in the hold; you hoped, no, you expected to see men jumping out of it, the pilot, the crew, that they would use their parachutes and float to safety. But that didn’t happen. The bomber listed over, cut a huge arc, and crashed in a field a couple of miles away. The first thought that came to me was that I had to tell my mother about it. I had even started formulating a description, in my mind I was describing the bomber’s last few moments in the air. And less than a minute later I realized that I had been living like that for a long time, everything that happened to me in my life, on my way to school, at school, on the way home, I had always shaped it right away into the story I would tell when I got home. To my mother, sometimes to my father, but mostly my mother. The downed bomber was the first story that I experienced all on my own, that I didn’t have to tell to anyone, that didn’t even have to become a story.”

He pauses for a moment — he knows what’s coming, he had set himself up for it, consciously or not.

“Because your father wasn’t there when your mother died?” she says now, indeed. “He wasn’t even in Holland. Was he?”

“Wait, there’s something else I need to say. When someone has been ill for a long time, there’s always a sense of relief when it’s over. Relief on behalf of the sick person who no longer has to suffer, but above all on your own behalf. It’s difficult to admit, especially at the age I was then, but I felt an enormous relief because everything could finally be cleared out of the house. The curtains could be opened again to let in the light. This is where my life begins, I thought to myself. My new life. My life free of sickbeds. But there was also another thought. I want to see even more bombers go down, I thought. In those days, the war was already getting closer, it was the summer of the Normandy invasion, only a matter of time before it would reach us. I hoped it would come to our town as well. I felt guilty about finding the crash of a bomber more exciting than my mother’s death, but at the same time I could keep that feeling of guilt all to myself. It was my guilt, and I no longer had to make a story out of that for anyone either.”

There he stops. There’s more he could say about liberation and loss, but he decides to keep that to himself. For a book, he has been thinking for the last twenty years, but now he doesn’t even think that anymore.

The sense of loss started about thirty years after his mother’s death, and it has gone on right up to this day. The first years there was only the relief and the liberation, and the feeling of guilt about that — what people called “coping” or, even worse, the “process of grieving.” Sometimes he missed his mother, but more often he didn’t. In some way he couldn’t explain, she had become a part of him. Literally. That’s how it had felt to him on the evening she breathed her last breath. A quiet, whistling breath it had been; after that came complete silence.

There was no such thing as a soul, but out of that thin and at the same time swollen body, something had indeed risen up. He had looked around, perhaps it was already on its way to a heaven that didn’t exist when it saw the son standing at the foot-end of the bed.

I’ll always carry you with me, he had whispered to the dead body later that evening, but the promise had in fact been superfluous. She had already done it herself. With a final effort she had freed herself of her body and slipped into the body of her son. There, somewhere deep and distant, at a spot no one but him even knew was there, she would remain for the rest of his life.

That was why he had never hung up photos of her in his house. The photos were in a box, sometimes he took them out. Six months ago with his daughter, for the first time. This is your other grandma, he’d said, the grandma who isn’t here anymore.

But he didn’t have to look at the pictures every day. He remembered her better without them.

“Your father wasn’t there,” Marie Claude says. “Your father wasn’t at home when your mother died.”

No. He shakes his head. He feels tired. He’s already talked too much, remembered too much. Do we really have to go on now about my father? He feels himself closing down, it is time to wrap things up.

What he won’t go on to tell Marie Claude Bruinzeel, in any case, is about how he feels the loss these days. After thirty years. I miss her, he thinks. I carry her with me, inside myself, I have no pictures of her on the wall. In the meantime, the distance between her death and myself has grown and grown. But it’s all lasted an awfully long time. That’s what he has started thinking in recent years: it’s lasted long enough.

The thirty years after she died he dreamed about her often. In those dreams she was always already ill, sometimes she was lying in bed, in other dreams she shuffled slowly around the house.

But after those first thirty years the dreams disappeared too. Thirty years without his mother, that was still doable. But fifty years? Sixty? He misses the dreams.

“Your father had enlisted in the German army. That summer he was fighting on the Eastern Front,” Marie Claude Bruinzeel says.

“They couldn’t reach him right away,” he says — but this no longer interests him. He wants to go home. What he’d like to do most is go right back to bed. Close the curtains, shut his eyes. “My father did come home as soon as he could, when he heard about it. And he never left me alone again after that.”

Except for while he was in custody for collaborating with the Germans, he halfway expects her to say then. Or else she’ll ask him whether his father’s leaving for the East was perhaps an escape, away from the sickbed of his wife, the relationship with whom — to put it mildly — had cooled in those years.

But she doesn’t. She stirs her espresso, which arrived along with his cappuccino — even though he didn’t notice it, the moment when the thin man brought their orders has come and gone.

“The Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies recently started a new investigation of the unit your father served in,” she says. “Have you heard about that?”

He grimaces, but he would be better off not grimacing, he warns himself. He has heard about that investigation. He was above all surprised to hear that there were people working at the institute who apparently thought that an investigation like that made any difference. Pretty much everything had already been nosed through, hadn’t it? Maybe they had nothing better to do. Maybe they needed an investigation that no one was interested in anyway, simply to justify the salary they were paid out of taxpayers’ money.

He says that he has heard about it. He sips too hard at his overheated cappuccino — tormentingly slow, a white-hot rivulet slides down his gullet; he feels the tears come to his eyes.

Why is she starting in about this? He’s already tossed her far more material than he was planning to, hasn’t he? He can’t remember ever having revealed so much about his mother’s death.

“The results of the investigation won’t be published for a few months,” she says. “But I have my connections at the institute. The tentative conclusion is that it was no standard army unit your father was in.”

He says nothing, he wipes the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand.

“His unit operated behind the lines,” Marie Claude Bruinzeel continues, keeping her warm brown eyes fixed on his. “Not behind enemy lines, but in the area already taken by the regular army. They carried out special missions there. I don’t think I need to tell you what those special missions involved back then.”

To keep from having to look into her eyes, he shifts his gaze to look outside. The postman’s cart has now stopped in front of the door to his own building, through which a man has just come out. The man pauses and, from the looks of it, is saying something to the postman.

The neighbor, M recognizes him right away. The downstairs neighbor. Whenever he comes across him “in the wild,” he sees a face that seems vaguely familiar, like that last time at the restaurant, at La B. Ana had to tell him that it was the downstairs neighbor sitting at the bar, drinking a beer. Now he recognizes him immediately.

The neighbor and the postman are talking. M sees him shrug, the postman laughs, he leans over his cart and hands the neighbor a pile of letters.

“Well?” he hears Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s voice. “Did you know about that special unit?”

“Do you know what it is, Marie Claude?” he says. “Here in Holland there were millions of people who mostly did nothing at all. The vast majority sat at home on the couch and brooded. Less than one percent joined the resistance, maybe a little more than one percent went looking for adventure in some other way. By joining the army that was moving on to the Russian steppes, for example. I can’t help it, but I’ve always felt more admiration for the people who at least did something. Even if some were on the good side and others perhaps on the wrong side.”

Meanwhile, the postman has walked on with his cart, the downstairs neighbor has started distributing the pile of mail throughout the various letterboxes — he pauses for a moment, he looks at something, something in the mail, and flips it over. From so far away, he can’t make out what it is. An envelope? A postcard? Now the neighbor looks around, flips the letter or card over again, stands there with it in his hand for no longer than three or four seconds, then tosses it in the letterbox at the top, to the left of the door, the boxes for the fourth floor, M’s letterbox.

“But you don’t really mean that, do you?” Marie Claude says. “In fact, what you’re saying is horrible. As though someone who volunteered for a death squad was only looking for a little adventure.”

He breathes a deep sigh. His father never tried to hide anything from him. The uncomfortable details were something he had never withheld. Bit by bit, he had told M everything. The retaliatory measures. The executions. The mass graves. No one is innocent, his father had said. Least of all me. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you should stay at home beside the fire.

“I’m tired,” M says. “Actually, I’m drained.”

Only then does he notice the unshaven man standing beside their table. The man’s hair is disheveled in an intentional way; hanging over his shoulder is a bag, a bag that can only contain a camera, M realizes, and he feels his heart sink a few inches, a feeling like hitting an air pocket, an elevator going down too fast. The man has even more bags with him, round bags, cylindrical bags, bags with a number of zippers, and a tripod with an umbrella attached to it. It takes him a few minutes to spread it all out over the four empty chairs at the table beside theirs.

“Are you two more or less finished?” he asks. He looks around, taking in the café interior, peers squintingly at the tables outside. He sighs. “I can’t decide between in here or outside,” he says. “In half an hour, forty-five minutes I’ll have everything set up, then an hour, ninety minutes for the pictures themselves, so if I could get started it would be real nice.”

Then he looks at M for the first time.

“You’re a writer, aren’t you?” he says. “I guess you must have a bookcase at home then. Maybe we could finish up there. A couple of pictures, just so we have those.”