Dear Mr. M

34

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

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

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

“I wanted to thank you,” you say.

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

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

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

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

The men come back out with a pile of chairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tuesday? Tuesday’s fine.”

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

35

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

Are you dreading the gala this evening?

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

No, that won’t be necessary.

“But you’re not taking notes either.”

No.

“You’ll be able to remember everything?”

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

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

Do you need evenings like this evening?

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that a hard-and-fast rule?

“A rule? How am I to see that?”

You should see it in the sense that perhaps it’s always that way. That friendships can exist only between writers who find each other’s work fairly ho-hum. That you can never be friends with a colleague who is more or less your equal, who writes books that stand comparison to yours. Let alone with a colleague who is better than you.

“Jealousy exists. Envy. Why do I sell much less than colleague R? Why does L always come in right at the top of the bestseller list? I mean, these days it’s no longer such a circus for me when it comes to sales figures, but back in the days when I wrote the occasional bestseller, I felt as though I needed to apologize all the time. Sorry, my book is selling well. There are people who want to read my books. I’m so sorry. Next time I’ll try to write something no one wants to read.”

Among women, among girls, one often sees that a pretty girl chooses a very unremarkable girl as her best friend. Not an ugly girl, no, an unremarkable girl. The unremarkable girl’s function is to cast her pretty friend’s beauty into even sharper relief. At the disco, it’s immediately clear that the pretty girl will get the pretty boy and the unremarkable girl will get the nerd. Is it that way with friendships between writers? That the successful writer, for example, surrounds himself with less successful writers? As “friends”?

“That’s a striking comparison you make there. It could very well be. One does, indeed, rarely see two beautiful women who are best friends. That’s too much competition.”

Take your colleague N, for example.

“What about colleague N?”

At this moment, he’s your most direct competitor. In your age category, perhaps your only competitor.

“You’re right, he suffers from no lack of attention. Completely deserved, by the way. I should say that right away. The Garden of Psalms is also, without a doubt, his best book.”

Do you really think so?

“Well, let me put it differently. People consider it his best book. The critics. My own taste is different, but he is good in his own way. I see that too.”

But you don’t wish you’d written it yourself?

“No, no, not at all. I mean, however good it may be, I find the style…the subject matter, how shall I put it…a bit too easy. And that title. Why not call things by their name?”

Would you have had a better idea for the title?

“Not right off the bat. I mean, I’d have to think about it. But The Garden of Psalms…I don’t know, it’s as though the title was already there before N used it. That’s not good.”

N recently changed publishers.

“Really?”

He hasn’t done badly by the switch at all.

“But the important thing is the book itself, first and foremost. If the book’s no good, all those posters around town won’t help.”

Do you really believe that? You sound a bit like your own publisher. “The book’s the thing,” isn’t that what he always says? But do you believe that as well?

“Quality will always win out, I’m convinced of that. A good book can get by without posters or an author who speaks so glibly on all kinds of talk shows.”

But isn’t it also the times that are changing? Isn’t “the book’s the thing” just another way of saying, “in any case, we’re not going to push it”?

“In the days when my books were still being bought and read widely, at least, that wasn’t necessary.”

You’re referring to Payback?

“Payback was the first big success, but a few of the other books that followed didn’t do badly either. The Hour of the Dog…”

But these days it’s all subsided a bit, right? Liberation Year, of course, is still “the new M.” But do you mind my asking how many print runs it’s had till now?

“There’s a new one coming up. But you should also know that the first print run was quite large.”

What kind of numbers are we talking about here?

“I’d have to ask for the exact figures. But they’re the kind of figures a debuting author could only dream of.”

Until recently, you and your colleague N had the same publisher.

“That’s correct.”

In the interviews about his new book, N wasn’t very complimentary about his former publisher.

“We found that rather bad form too. By ‘we’ I mean the collective authors. That kind of thing is simply not done. It’s the kind of ‘kick them when they’re down’ tactic one usually sees only on the soccer pitch.”

But was he right?

“About what?”

Was he right to say that his former publisher, and now your publisher alone, has lost all contact with reality?

“He still has a very impressive list. One author who runs off can’t change that.”

But they’re all authors who are closer to the grave than to the cradle, if I may put it that way.

“Age is not a factor here. There are plenty of examples of writers who only really blossom at an advanced age.”

Do you count yourself among those? Do you feel that your best work is yet to come?

“I never think that way. I go from book to book. If I knew that I had already written my best work, I could just as well stop right now.”

But meanwhile, the sales of N’s latest book are astronomical.

“That’s true, and I’m happy for him. I sincerely mean that.”

Do you ever dream about that, that one of your books might take the bestseller lists by storm?

“The answer to that is the same as my earlier one. As to whether my best work is yet to come. I don’t worry about bestseller lists. No self-respecting author should.”

Let’s talk about Payback. Your most successful book to date. Do you also consider it your best book?

“No, definitely not. People ask me that sometimes. But I wrote better books before that, and afterward, too, if you ask me. Payback took on a life of its own. Apparently, I struck a chord somewhere. An open nerve.”

And which chord was that, in your opinion?

“A writer should never try to analyze his own work too deeply in retrospect. That can be crippling. Overly deep analyses by others can be fatal too. Sartre needed a whole book to interpret Jean Genet’s work. After that, Genet never wrote another word. But all right, it was a long time ago, so I’ll try to answer you. Even though I believe I’ve formulated that answer before this, so please don’t expect anything earthshaking.”

An “open nerve,” you said. I’ve never heard you say that before. Personally, I find that much more evocative than a “chord.”

“The particulars were well known. Everyone was shocked by that affair. Two young people — still children, really — do away with a teacher. Or at least make him disappear. No body was ever found. I remember it so well, the newspapers of course weren’t allowed to publish pictures of the culprits. To protect their privacy. But a couple of magazines did anyway. We saw their faces. A school picture. That girl with the long black hair. The boy with his blond curls. Not exactly two killers you would pick out of a lineup later on. Pick out of a lineup in retrospect. On the contrary. The girl was absolutely the prettiest girl in the class. But I looked hardest at the boy. He wasn’t bad-looking either, maybe even more handsome than most of the other boys in the picture. But then handsome in a way not all girls like. I can’t recall exactly what it was. A face that was a little too thin, a slender body. Gawky. What happens with a boy like that when the prettiest girl in the class chooses him? I asked myself. I saw a story in it right away. Just a story at first, then later it become a complete book. Did he do it for her? That was what I asked myself. That was the question I would try to answer by writing the story.”

But that wasn’t the nerve.

“No, the nerve was how recognizable it was. Every parent’s nightmare. Children who look normal in a school picture may turn out to be killers. And not just the parents’ nightmare. Also for their own age group. It’s still one of the books read most often by high-school students. Could that boy or girl sitting beside me be a murderer? Does that nice neighbor, who always feeds the cats when we’re on vacation, have his wife’s chopped-up corpse in the freezer? They were normal children, the ones we saw in the school picture. Perhaps a little more than normal. A pretty girl, a handsome boy. Not losers.”

There was also someone else in that picture.

“You’ve seen it?”

It’s on the Internet these days. A number of other pictures too. The little house in the snow. The teacher’s car. The nature preserve where he might be buried.

“That’s right, that teacher was also in the school picture. I cut it out of that magazine back then and hung it on the wall above my desk. Every day, before I started writing, I looked at that picture for a few minutes. It was taken a couple of months before the murder, that’s what made it so trenchant. There they are, I thought each morning. There’s the victim, and there are his killers. In one and the same classroom. He still doesn’t know a thing. They don’t know yet either. At least, that was my assumption. That the idea came up only much later.”

But in your book the idea came up beforehand. And not just after the teacher came by the holiday home.

“It was difficult. I struggled with the motive. Or let me put it another way: I simply couldn’t believe that they would have done it just like that. And of course, just like that wasn’t interesting for a book. In dramatic terms. Dramatically speaking, a murder is better if it’s planned beforehand.”

And do you still see it that way? What I mean is, did you actually believe in a murder that happened just like that, but decided that a murder like that wasn’t dramatic enough for your book?

“That’s an interesting question. I asked myself the same thing while I was writing it, and afterward too. Whether there really was a motive. That teacher had had an affair with the girl. She breaks it off, but he keeps bothering her. He goes to find her at the holiday home where she’s staying with her new boyfriend. Motives aplenty, you might say. An adult — an adult in a position of power — imposes himself on a couple of minors. They could have reported him to the police. Maybe that wouldn’t have helped much, but the teacher would have been fired at the very least.”

But these days, do you believe a bit more in the just like that theory? In the lack of a motive?

“There are any number of classic situations in which the balance of power is out of kilter right from the start. In which the stupid ones sometimes have more power than the intelligent ones. The few intelligent ones, I should say. An army, a prison. A sergeant humiliates a recruit who’s smarter than him. Guards torment a prisoner. At a high school, the balance of power is not so very different. A high-school teacher is not among the most intelligent of the species, and that’s putting it very mildly. A physics teacher will hardly be the one to develop a new theory of relativity. Generally speaking, they’re sort of stuck in the middle. Lame and frustrated. You can keep that up for a few years with empty talk about idealism and the transfer of knowledge to coming generations, but in the long run a frustrated intelligence like that devours itself from the inside out. Teachers don’t stick around long enough to get old. That has nothing to do with their ability or inability to maintain order. Day in, day out, they stand in front of a classroom full of intelligences just as mediocre as their own. In principle, things can go on that way for years. But every year there are also a few people in the class who are more intelligent than them. They can’t handle that. Just like a soccer trainer who was once a mediocre player himself, teachers will try to frustrate an intelligent student wherever and whenever they can. The soccer trainer makes his best player sit on the bench. The teacher can’t give low grades to the student who’s smarter than him. That student already gets those. Only mediocre, hardworking students get good grades. The above-average intelligence is bored to death in high school. A C-plus is the best he can do. And so the frustrated teacher thwarts him in other ways.

“Deep in his heart, what the frustrated teacher hopes for is that the goaded student will explode. You can go on tormenting a prisoner until he finally stabs a guard to death. In the barracks, the recruit who has been provoked will yank the machine gun out of the sergeant’s hands and open fire. The employee who has been sacked returns to his former place of work and kills the personnel manager and his secretary before taking his own life. But that still happens only rarely at high schools. Whenever one or more of the students finally settles accounts, it’s automatically front-page news. We are shocked by it. We are conditioned to have it shock us. A high school! What’s become of the world when high schools are no longer safe? But we see no further than the ends of our noses. What has always surprised me, in fact, is that it doesn’t happen much more often.

“For years, a student is made a fool of by a teacher — by an inferior, mediocre intelligence. One day the provoked student comes into the classroom to get even. He restores the natural order of things. Sometimes a student like that will go wild and wreak vengeance on the whole school. On the innocent. Innocent in the objective sense, perhaps, but seen from a broader perspective those are the stooges who are now getting a taste of their own medicine. The obedient students, the eager beavers who have spent all those years trying to cull favor with their teachers. The weaklings who have lowered themselves. During the nightly news shows after a massacre, all the attention focuses on the culprits. People say that they had been acting peculiar for years. They had watched violent films, of course, and played even more violent games on their PlayStations. The ‘wrong’ books were found in their bookcases and desk drawers. Biographies of Hitler and Mussolini. They also dressed weirdly or extravagantly, of course, and were severely withdrawn because they didn’t take part in all kinds of school social activities. But then you can still wonder: Who is more disturbed? The student who wants to be left in peace, or the student who takes part voluntarily in all kinds of idiotic activities meant to develop his or her ‘social skills’? In an army, it’s always the socially skilled who volunteer first for an over-the-top suicide charge. Those who function well in a group will find it easier to herd the villagers together onto the village square. To torch the houses and then separate the men from the women.”

In your book you chose to use the perpetrators’ perspective. For the moment, let’s leave aside the question of whether they were actually perpetrators in the usual sense of the word. Did you ever consider trying to meet with them? To ask them what happened? Or what might have happened, I suppose I should say.

“Of course I considered that. I would have been interested to find out more. On the other hand, though, I realized right away that it would curtail my freedom. My freedom as a novelist. As it was, the teacher’s disappearance was only a pretext. I could fill in the rest myself. What do they call that: ‘based loosely on the facts’? I was afraid that, if I actually succeeded in meeting the boy or the girl, I would hear things that would endanger my novel, the way I saw it in my mind’s eye.”

So you already had it planned out? Before you started?

“No, no, absolutely not. All I’m trying to say is that I didn’t want to risk curtailing my freedom by being confronted all too abruptly with the facts. My imagination had to do the work. I’ve already told you about my premise. The relationship between the two of them. Pretty girl, a somewhat less handsome but still reasonably attractive boy. Who has the power over whom? As far as that goes, that teacher wasn’t interesting. He is only the victim. No one deserves to be bumped off for something like that: stalking a female student. But you can never completely shake the feeling that he, at least in part, brought it down on himself. That’s what we read back then in the first newspaper reactions, that’s what we heard in the conversations, both on TV and in the cafés. A grown man, a teacher who does something like that, can’t count on much sympathy. But I wasn’t interested in his motives anyway. Grown man falls for young girl, you can be sure he wasn’t the first man to have that happen. He is rejected, can’t take that and goes crazy. He turns into a bothersome stalker. Our sympathy rarely focuses on men who pant on the telephone, men who follow young girls all the way to their doorstep, who stand guard under their bedroom window at night. From that moment on, in fact, the girl becomes the victim. If she had gone downstairs, walked outside and kicked him hard in the balls, we would all have applauded.”

You talk about the novelist’s freedom. About his imagination, which could be obstructed by too much knowledge of the facts. But the reader is very much familiar with the facts. Of the most important facts, in any case. One reads your entire book knowing how it will end: with the teacher’s disappearance.

“That’s true. As a writer you’re free to use that, I think. It’s about the imagination, how do you as a writer fill in the blank spots: Could it have gone this way or that way? The real facts, the ones everyone knows, I should say, serve only as the perspective within which the narrative takes place. There are plenty of examples of that: you write about a Jewish family in Germany in 1938; everyone knows then that something is going to happen, that the sinister shadow of the future is already looming over the characters. These days a lot of writers — especially American writers — have their story begin on the morning of September 11. Or one week before. One day. Six months. It makes you read that story differently. Throughout the entire book you’re waiting, as it were, for the first plane to slam into the North Tower. That’s also the way I started on Payback. A teacher, a boy, and a girl. A high school. A holiday home in the snow. All the ingredients are laid out on the counter. The only thing left is to prepare the meal itself.”

The only difference being that everyone knows roughly when World War II started. The same way everyone knows — now, in hindsight — that neither of those planes flew into the Twin Towers by accident. But in Payback, you fantasize blithely about exactly what might have happened in that holiday cottage. Using what you call your imagination, you saddle the suspects with a theoretical murder.

“Something else occurs to me now. Because we were just talking about September 11. There is a fifteen-minute gap, a naive eternity, between the first plane and the second. Witnesses all thought it was a horrible accident. The dime only drops when the second plane hits. ‘Oh, my God!’ you hear them all shouting. But, as a writer, I’m much more interested in those minutes in between the two planes. In the accident. The belief that there are no evil intentions at play. We all look at it differently now. Now we see the footage of the first plane, and we already know. The accident is gone completely. It was there once, but it has disappeared for good. It’s the writer’s task to bring back that naive belief in the accident. To let us relive those minutes between the first and second planes. Today we sometimes see the Twin Towers in movies or TV series from before September 11, 2001, and you know right away that this is a fairly old movie, if you couldn’t tell already from the clothes and the cars. But those towers in a feature film also remind me of the old archive footage of German cities. A German city in 1938. You see streetcars and crowded cafés, mothers pushing prams, men playing chess in a park, and you know: This will all be laid to waste. Later, all this will be gone completely.

“In the same way, with the same perspective, I often looked at that school photo tacked up above my desk. A normal school photo. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands of photos like that. They’re all different, in that there are other people in each of those photos, yet they still all look alike. There are more similarities than differences. A teacher, a man or a woman, is posing with his or her students for the school photographer, the clothing and hairstyles usually tell you roughly when the picture was taken. Everyone is posing, everyone is looking straight into the camera, except perhaps that one student who doesn’t want to be there, the eternal troublemaker who would like to leave school as quickly as possible, and often there are also one or two jokers who are sticking out their tongues or holding up their fingers in a V behind the head of a fellow student, but those exceptions too are what make the school photos look alike. Sometimes though, with the passing of time, the photos take on more significance. That boy with the pale face and the greasy hair is now a famous writer; that girl with the round cheeks and pigtails is now an anchorwoman on the eight o’clock news; that handsome boy with the sunglasses pushed up on his forehead rose quickly through the ranks of the underworld and was shot and killed a few years ago in the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel. And then of course you have the class photos charged with portent, photos of classes in which more than half the students will not survive the war. But in those photos, too, the tone is largely set by innocence. The faith in a future. Every morning, before I started writing, that’s how I looked at the photo of Class 5A at the Spinoza Lyceum.

“These days there’s a program, it’s called Classmates; it didn’t exist back when I started on my book, but I thought about it later on. That you would bring together that whole class and let each of them tell their version of that school year. They’re all in that picture. Herman and Laura of course, first of all, and the teacher, Mr. Landzaat. Obviously I changed all the names, but Mr. Landzaat is an improbable name for a book anyway, sounds a bit too suspect, too unbelievable. You always start by changing the names, then come the facts, at least insofar as they’re available.

“But to come back to that photo: I always looked at the protagonists first, then at the bit players, the other members of that group of friends. David, Lodewijk, Michael, Ron. I looked them in the eye, one by one, and I tried to figure out what they were thinking, what they knew, only later of course. The class picture was taken at that empty moment of innocence, the vacant space between the first and second planes, just after the summer vacation. Of course I asked about that, about when those pictures were usually taken: it was shortly after the start of the school year, after that same summer vacation when they went together to the house in Terhofstede, but still before the three protagonists came into alignment. Laura only hooked up with Mr. Landzaat during the junior-class field trip in late September; Herman and Laura became a couple during the fall vacation in October. In December, on Boxing Day, Mr. Landzaat visits Laura and Herman at the house in Terhofstede and disappears. None of that can be seen in the class photo, there are no signs; most of the students look serious, a few are smiling, many of the boys have their hands in their pockets: on the one hand they want to show their indifference to the fact that a class photo is being taken, on the other they want to be sure they look good in the picture. A class photo doesn’t show just a single individual, not like a passport photo or vacation snapshots. You can throw away a passport photo and have another one taken, as often as it takes to satisfy you, or perhaps I should say as often as it takes to be passable. We can dispose discreetly of vacation snapshots that aren’t flattering, or at least not glue them into a photo album. We stuff them into a shoebox that we run across every couple of years. ‘Oh, no, not that one! I look so terrible in that!’ and we try to yank the picture away from the person with whom we’re delving through photos on the couch. Then it disappears again for years. A class photo is a very different thing. We can’t allow ourselves to look bad in it, because later, a few weeks later, everyone in the class will see it. Hence all the serious expressions, the stiff poses, the mortal fear of looking stupid, laughable. The photo can’t be secreted away somewhere, because the whole class has it. ‘Look at that expression on Henry’s face, he looks like he had to pee so badly!’ ‘Oh, Yvonne’s teeth! Oh, I feel so sorry for her!’ ‘Theo, did you wash your hair before you came to school that day? Never do that again!’ You take the class photo home with you, you can hide it from your parents, but then parents aren’t likely to say that it makes you look like a retard: their love ruins their eyesight. You wish you could destroy the photo, tear it into little bits, or even better, burn it. But you know it’s no use. You have twenty-eight classmates, twenty-eight copies of your ugly face are in circulation for all eternity.”

You didn’t mention Stella.

“What?”

Stella. You just reeled off the names of their group of friends. But you didn’t mention Stella.

“I didn’t? I didn’t realize that.”

She’s in that class photo too, right? She wasn’t sick that day, was she?

“Yes, I know she’s in the photo. Standing beside Laura. Two best friends. The boys are also all standing together, the way friends do. I have it here in a drawer, but I don’t have to look at it anymore, it’s etched in my memory.”

And do you sometimes take it out and look at it?

“No, that chapter is closed. That book is finished. As I said: I could draw it for you, from memory.”

You don’t mention her in your book.

“Who? You mean Stella? No, that’s right. In fact, I don’t name anyone, it’s fiction, I purposely kept the minor characters vague.”

But there’s a difference between keeping something vague and leaving it out completely. In your depiction of the friends’ club, there’s only one girl, Laura. In Payback she’s called Miranda.

“I felt as though I had to choose. And it definitely was not an easy choice. I had to choose between two storylines. Or rather: this book needed one storyline, and that was enough. A second one would only have weakened it. I chose for the teacher, the boy, and the girl. No other diversions. A tragic love story. A fatal conclusion. Or at least the suspicion of a fatal conclusion. That seemed more powerful to me. A difficult decision. I did start on it. I made an attempt, but it didn’t work. Look at it this way: I didn’t leave her out on purpose. Initially, I didn’t want to leave Stella out at all. On the contrary. There were mornings when I looked at the class photo, and the one I looked at longest was her. I was completely fascinated. She’s one of the only ones who doesn’t look into the camera, although you have to examine it closely to see that. She’s looking straight ahead. No, that’s not right either. She’s looking at herself, it took me weeks to finally see that. Those big eyes, that smile, that sweet face, an open face too; it’s open, but as an outsider you can’t see a thing. At most, you see that the face is dreaming. It’s sufficient unto itself. It’s full of itself.

“You have people, I know a few, certainly among my colleagues, who never actually look at you, they probably don’t even see you, or at least they see you only in relation to themselves. They ring your bell, you open the door and you see it right away in their faces, in their eyes. They’re not happy to see you, let alone do they wonder whether they’ve come at a convenient moment. No, they’re happy they came. They’re happy for you. They’re happy for you that they are now standing there in front of you. That they’ve taken the time and gone to the trouble to ring your doorbell. Here I am, they say with their faces all aglow. Enjoy. That’s the kind of expression Stella is wearing too, right in the middle of that group with all her classmates. There’s no real reason to look into the camera, at the school photographer. No, the school photographer should be pleased to have her in the picture. The way she is. All by herself.

“When I finally figured that out, every morning for weeks I looked almost exclusively at her. Not at her classmates, in the same way she didn’t look at them. I think she never looked at her classmates, at least not the way we, as quote-unquote normal people, look at each other. At most, she gauged the reactions in the faces of others, the way those others reacted to her. She was, of course, a very pretty girl, but pretty in a different way from Laura.

“In the photo, Laura is the prettiest girl in the class, the girl all the boys chase, of whom all the boys dream. She’s completely aware of that, which is at the same time her handicap. When girls are too pretty, they easily become isolated. Without being able to do anything about that themselves. Unapproachable, we think when we see the prettiest girl in the class, she doesn’t even know I exist. And from that moment on we avoid all contact. In order to keep from being disappointed, or even worse: from being completely humiliated. We’re afraid the prettiest girl will look us over from head to toe and then deliver a crushing verdict. A verdict from which we’ll never recover, that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. Sometimes even literally, in the words literally used by the prettiest girl with regard to your person: You don’t actually think—that’s how the devastating rejection almost always starts—that you stand a ghost of a chance with me, that I even knew you existed before today? I would strongly urge you, as of today, to never — I repeat: never — speak to me again. And so we do all we can to avoid exchanging looks with the prettiest girl. We’re in no hurry to have her point out the category to which we actually belong. Not her category, in any case.

“Stella’s beauty is of a different kind. Precisely because she is so sufficient unto herself, she is beautiful in the way a landscape can be beautiful: a green, rolling landscape with a few sheep grazing on a hillside, a snowy mountain peak at sunset. That landscape doesn’t care whether we enjoy it. It’s always been there, tomorrow it will still be there, and the day after tomorrow too, and a hundred years from now. She gives off light, but at the same time she absorbs it, as something that goes without saying. She’ll never wonder why, it’s just always been that way. She wonders about it as little as the earth’s surface wonders why the sun shines on it. Or better yet: the light of the moon.”

The difference being that a landscape can’t be rejected. You yourself say that a landscape doesn’t care whether we enjoy it. But a landscape also doesn’t care whether we reject it.

“That’s the way I always looked at the class photo too. Every day. I looked at Stella’s face. A boy has declared his love to her, he is standing a few yards away, among his friends. She finds that only natural. At that moment, everything is still fine and dandy. The teacher is sitting at his desk. He is breathing, even though we can’t see that in the photograph. What we can see in the photograph is that the teacher in question is taken with himself. He’s sitting there cheerfully amid his students, in a checkered shirt with the two top buttons open, at a time when teachers still tended to wear jackets and ties. He wants to be one of them, he insists that they call him by his first name, he’s trying to smile with his mouth closed. Standing beside Stella is Laura, her best friend. But Stella probably has no idea that her best friend is the one she should watch out for most. It wouldn’t occur to her; girls like Stella believe unconditionally in the trustworthiness of their best friends, just as she believes in the trustworthiness of her boyfriend. Of Herman. It would never come up in her, in Stella’s, mind that her boyfriend is actually attracted to her best friend, or that in a few weeks’ time that friend is going to hook up with the jovial teacher in order to draw Herman’s attention. What happens in the mind of a girl like Stella when she realizes one day that not she, but someone else, is the chosen one? That she has only been used as a diversionary tactic? She thought it was normal that Herman would want to start something with her, just as she would have thought that was normal for any other boy; what boy, after all, wouldn’t fall for a girl like her? And then, one day, quite unexpectedly, out of the proverbial blue, he breaks up with her. And not only does he break up with her, but he tells her he is trading her in for Laura. For her best friend.”

But you didn’t do anything with that. In Payback, Stella isn’t mentioned at all. As though she never existed.

“There was nothing I could do with it. I mean, there was nothing I could with it because of the way things went. Because of what happened afterward. I did try. In the first draft, I still had two girls. But it didn’t work. I realized that I needed to focus on one thing and one thing alone. The teacher’s disappearance. What Stella…What she did…That would distract readers too much from the essence of my story. It might throw the whole book out of balance. You read books sometimes that give you the impression that the writer was trying to sweeten the pot. That he thought that one central premise wasn’t enough. It’s quite understandable too. Every writer has that urge, you work on a book for months, often years, you’re sick and tired of it, the story is starting to bore you, and to combat that boredom you toss another element into it, a surprising twist, something spectacular. But there’s a very real chance that adding that element will destroy the book’s balance right away. Maybe the writer is bored, but the reader isn’t. Not yet. The writer forgets that the reader doesn’t spend months or years with a book. Only a couple of days, or a week at most. He doesn’t get enough time to become bored. Payback is not some five-hundred-page doorstop, I knew from the start that half that would be enough. Stella would have been a new narrative line. That would have made it a very different book. There was a very real chance that that one new narrative line wouldn’t have been enough. That happens often. Two storylines can be confusing, while three or five aren’t, then it’s simply that kind of a book. But I didn’t feel like writing that kind of a book. I felt that the teacher, the boy, and the girl were enough.”

But in reality we also make do with any number of storylines, don’t we? Why is it that writers are always so afraid of that?

“Because one expects a certain degree of order in a novel; a clearer, more compact reality. Actual reality doesn’t worry about that compaction. A writer has to chop into reality. For example: an acquaintance of mine was recently hit by a garbage truck. The ambulance took him to the hospital with a broken leg, and there he was told that his wife had just been admitted to that same hospital: one hour earlier she had fallen off her bike and broken her arm. That’s a true story. The kind you would never make up. In the book version, only one of the two remains: either the husband with the broken leg or the wife with the broken arm. It’s up to the writer to decide which one gets cut out of the book.”

In Payback, of course, you already made that decision by giving your imagination free rein. In your book, the boy and the girl finish the teacher off and hide the body in an ingenious fashion. While in real life there was never any solid evidence to indicate that. The teacher no longer disappears in the literal sense of the word. The reader knows how it went.

“Yes, I thought that was fascinating. What might have happened? That question, in fact, remains interesting. We still don’t know how it went.”

But don’t you ever have the feeling that you, as a writer, have a certain responsibility with regard to reality? There is no Stella. The teacher is murdered in cold blood. It may all be your own imagination, of course, but little is left to the reader’s imagination.

“Maybe I was unconsciously hoping for a reaction, who can say?”

You mean a reaction from the murderers? From the suspects, I should say?

“First of all that, yes. As I’ve already said: I myself never tried to make contact, to the extent that they would have allowed me to; I didn’t want any explanation on their part to get in the way of my imagination. But afterward…Once the book was published, I noticed that I started asking myself whether they were going to read it. Whether they would feel like refuting my solution. And whether their refutation might expose them. Maybe even betray them. Please note: morally speaking, it didn’t interest me at all. They were right in whatever they did. But still, one remains curious. We’re always curious about the fate of someone who disappears from the face of the earth. But I wasn’t thinking only about Herman and Laura, I also thought about the others, about what they knew. Within close groups of friends like that, nothing remains a secret for long. You confide in each other. The way I imagined it, Herman and Laura would have wanted to tell someone their story. In fact, I was sure of it. You can’t walk around with something like that for years, or even weeks. One day you simply have to try to tell someone. David was very close to both Herman and Laura. So was Lodewijk. My speculation was that one of the others from that group of friends might want to react to the book. That they would approach me, anonymously or not, with their version of things.”

And did that happen?

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

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

“Yes, it did.”

—

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

She’s holding a thermometer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

36

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well? How are things at home?” he inquires, but she doesn’t answer right away; she knows that by “home” he doesn’t mean their actual family life. And sure enough: “Is he working on something new?” he asks after that brief silence.

Ana admires him for how skillfully he maneuvers among all those sensitive egos, but in the course of the years she has also grown truly fond of him. A sort of secret understanding has developed between them, an understanding based on the mutual, always unspoken knowledge that it is of course all a bunch of nonsense, these writers and their attention issues, the publisher who — like the soccer trainer — always receives the blame when things don’t turn out as hoped, but rarely or never a compliment when he succeeds in making a book successful. She shows him, indirectly, that she feels for him, and he shows her that he appreciates that.

“Oh well, you know, something new…” She raises her glass of white wine to her lips and takes a sip — the white wine, too, is almost at room temperature; the bottle has probably been on the table beside the peanuts and olives for the last few hours, or else the new trainee forgot to put it in the fridge first. “He never stops working, he’s in the study almost all day, you know that, but he never tells me what he’s working on.”

“It would be too bad if Liberation Year were to drop out of sight too soon,” the publisher says, looking around to see who he’ll talk to next — she doesn’t blame him for that, he has to hurry, there are already people gathering their coats at the door. “I have great expectations for the Antwerp Book Fair. Marie Claude Bruinzeel is going to interview him there, in public. That can really get the discussion about the book off to a good start.”

Ana knows Marie Claude Bruinzeel’s reputation, based on her interviews in the Saturday literary supplement. They’re the kind of interviews that leave no stone unturned. Marie Claude Bruinzeel has the tendency to focus on the vermin that hide beneath those stones; the worms, beetles, and pill bugs that can’t stand the light of day and go scuttling for safety, and she doesn’t put the stone back where she found it, no, she actually holds it up for a while longer. “Do you still dream sometimes about a winning smash, an Olympic gold medal?” she’d asked a diabetic table-tennis star who’d recently had a leg amputated. At first Ana had been shocked, the question seemed impertinent, and tears had actually come to the table-tennis star’s eyes, but later she had realized that it wasn’t such a strange question after all. Do you still dream…Well, why not? Why shouldn’t people with only one leg still dream? Then, right away, she starts wondering what Marie Claude Bruinzeel will ask M at the book fair. Do you still dream of writing a bestseller? A book like Payback? Do you still dream that you might…She thought about it for a moment; a question about his work or the dream of future successes won’t expose any creepy pill bugs. Do you sometimes dream of being younger? Of living to see your daughter grow up? Even if it’s only to her eighteenth birthday?

“Will you be there too?” the publisher asked. “Will I see you in Antwerp? We could go to that fish restaurant afterward, if you two feel like it.”

She shakes her head. I don’t think so, she feels like saying, I don’t want to leave my daughter alone too often. But there’s a different reason, actually. Antwerp is too close, there are no surprises in store there anymore. In other cities, yes. Rome, Milan, Berlin. Sometimes she went along with M when he traveled abroad. As long as the engagement was still a ways off, he looked forward to it. But as the departure date came closer he grew increasingly nervous.

“I should have canceled,” he’d say, “but it’s too late now.”

“You could always say you’re sick,” she said.

“That would be boorish. They invited me a year ago. If I canceled now, they’d panic.”

“But what if you really were sick,” she tried, for form’s sake. “You couldn’t go then either, could you?”

He looked at her as though she’d suggested that animals might be able to talk.

“But I’m not really sick,” he said — and a few days later they were standing together at the airport check-in. The ladies at the desk recognized him occasionally, if they were older than thirty. They would give him their prettiest smiles — some of them even blushed — and treated them with great respect. “I read your latest book from start to finish, in one night. Have a lovely trip, Mr. M!” The younger girls treated him like the old man that he was. They raised their voices almost to a scream when handing him his boarding pass, and drew a circle around the gate number and boarding time, as though they assumed that he was already hard of hearing. The rudest among them looked at her and then at him and then back again — they made no attempt to disguise their curiosity. Is this his daughter, or some crumpet forty years younger than he is?

M wasn’t fond of flying. In the duty-free zone he always went to the bar and knocked back a couple of beers before boarding.

“Look at that,” he said, pointing at a group of men in long robes and women in veils. “Let’s hope they’re not on our flight. But maybe they’ll blow themselves up here before we leave the ground. How many beers have I had, anyway? Three or four?”

On the plane he always wanted an aisle seat. After flipping through the in-flight magazine from back to front in record time, he would breathe a deep sigh and look at his watch. A book was useless; he couldn’t read on a plane, he said.

“I thought hippos were only allowed to travel in the cargo hold,” he said a bit too loudly when the stewardess, who was indeed rather portly, stood right beside his seat to demonstrate the use of the oxygen mask and life preserver and accidentally brushed his hair with her elbow.

“How many does this make?” he asked, popping the top off his can of Heineken before tearing the cellophane from the double-decker sandwich with cheese spread. “I can’t eat this,” he said after sniffing it. He pushed the button on the console above his head. “We seem to be hitting turbulence,” he said when the fat stewardess came hurrying toward him down the aisle.

But after the landing — in Milan, in Frankfurt, in Oslo — he usually perked up quickly enough. As soon as he saw his foreign publisher’s publicity person in the arrivals hall, holding up a sign with his name on it, he relaxed visibly. From that moment on he played his part — the role of Dutch writer with a certain reputation abroad — with verve. In the taxi he asked all the usual things. How many people live in the city? That opera house, was it rebuilt brick by brick after the war? Do you have problems with immigrants here too?

The usual itinerary followed. Interviews in the lobby of his hotel, and that evening a dinner at a restaurant with staff members from the publishing house and a few local bigwigs. During those dinners he answered his hosts’ questions. Ten years ago, foreigners had never asked so many questions about the Netherlands. They never got further than the standard clichés. Drug abuse, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. But then the politically tinted murders took place, and these days they asked about only one thing: the rise of right-wing extremism.

When they did, he would apply the knife to his veal escalope or Norwegian sea bream, take a sip of wine, and smile affably.

“First of all, I need to correct you,” he said. “In the Netherlands, it’s not about right-wing extremism pur sang. That’s what makes it so difficult to dismiss right off the cuff. The Dutch extremists, for example, are great advocates of gay rights. And our brand of extremism is not at all anti-Semitic, not like in most other European countries. The very opposite, in fact: the right-wing extremists in our country are among the most outspoken supporters of the state of Israel. And when it comes to social equality and care for the aged, you could almost call that particular party a socialist one.”

But the Netherlands had been the most tolerant country in the world for decades, hadn’t it? What happened to that tolerance all of a sudden? his hosts wanted to know.

Putting down his knife and fork, he used the tip of his napkin to wipe an imaginary bit of escalope or bream from the corner of his lips.

“Perhaps we should start by redefining the term ‘tolerance,’ ” he said. “After all, what does it mean to be tolerant? That you tolerate other people? People of a different color, different religious beliefs, people with earrings and tattoos, as well as women who wear headscarves, people with a different sexual orientation. But there is really nothing to tolerate. By using the word ‘tolerance,’ you’re simply placing yourself on a higher plane than those you tolerate. Tolerance is only possible when one fosters a deep-rooted sense of superiority. That’s one thing we Dutch have never lacked, and it’s been that way for centuries. We have long considered ourselves better than the rest of the world. But now the rest of the world is suddenly thronging to our borders and taking over our houses and neighborhoods. Suddenly, tolerance isn’t enough. The newcomers laugh at us for our tolerance and see it primarily as a sign of weakness. Which in the long run, of course, it is.”

Then dessert arrived. The people from the publishing house ordered coffee with liqueur, but he said he was tired and wanted to get back to the hotel.

During those interviews, Ana would wander through the more exclusive shopping streets. Sometimes she would buy a purse, other times a shawl. In the afternoon there was a buffet lunch at the Dutch embassy.

“It used to be easy to represent the Netherlands abroad,” the ambassador sighed. “But these days we’re always on the defensive. It’s often hard to make it clear that right-wing extremism in Holland is different from in other countries. Just look at their attitude toward gay rights and Israel.”

There were times when she enjoyed those trips abroad, with just the two of them, but the worst were the festivals or book fairs with a whole delegation of Dutch writers. When just the two of them were abroad they would snuggle up together in their hotel bed, order a bottle of wine from room service, and watch reruns of some old Western series, dubbed in the local language. At such moments they were almost happy — or at least she felt so.

But when an entire division of Dutch writers would descend on a foreign city, such moments were rare. The Dutch could never exercise moderation. They always made a contest of seeing who could stay up latest. They would sit at the hotel bar until the wee hours of the night. Some of those writers shouldn’t have been drinking at all, the whites of their eyes were already the color of old newsprint, but they always took “one more for the road.” At breakfast the next morning they bragged about how late they had gone to bed. They winked conspiratorially at other colleagues who had gone on into the wee hours too. With that wink they shut out the others, the pussies and weaklings who had considered their own well-being or who simply preferred not to go to bed too late.

“No,” she says to M’s publisher. “I don’t think I’ll be going along to Antwerp. I think I’ll stay with my daughter.”

“But…” Someone taps the publisher on the shoulder, a female author whose coat is already draped over her shoulders, it was so much fun but she really has to leave now, they give each other three little pecks on the cheeks. Ana knows what the publisher’s objection would have been. The holiday house. The house outside H. is barely fifteen miles outside Antwerp, a half hour’s drive, no more than that. They’ve done that before. One time, after a festival where M had read, the publisher and his wife had actually slept over. Now that he’s finished saying goodbye to the female author, his glance ricochets around the French Room, which is a good deal emptier now, and then he looks at her again.

It’s possible that he’s forgotten what they were talking about. She’s had time to think about what she’ll say if he pushes on. It’s too close. He’ll understand that, she’s sure.

But he doesn’t press the point. He lays a hand on her forearm, squeezes it gently for a moment.

“I understand,” he says.

Some movies only get better once you know how they’re going to end. The two dogs and the cat escape from their new, temporary home and start on their quest for the old one. On their journey straight across North America they navigate somehow — by the stars? The magnetic pole? — the movie doesn’t explain that, in any case it’s something only animals can do, an ability humans lost long ago. During the fight with the bear, Catherine had crept up even closer to Ana, the bowl of popcorn was almost empty, Catherine hadn’t even touched her glass of lemonade. Ana herself definitely felt like another glass of wine, but she didn’t want to get up now and go to the kitchen, she was afraid of interrupting something.

She had vowed not to think about the book ball — about M being on his own at that party, first wandering the corridors, then at his regular spot beside the men’s room — in order to lose herself completely in the film, but she only succeeded partway. When the cat came out of the bushes as the first of the trio and ran across the lawn toward its owners, she tore open the packet of tissues she had waiting and handed one to Catherine.

“Oh, Mama,” her daughter said when the youngest of the two dogs followed from the bushes. “Do you think that old dog made it too? Or is he dead?”

Catherine had started crying quietly, she pressed the tissue to her eyes. Ana was crying too, perhaps even harder than the first three times she’d watched this.

“I’m not sure, sweetheart,” she said. “I really hope so. But I really couldn’t say.”

37

The long line of guests at the entrance forms the first hurdle. There are klieg lights and TV trucks with satellite dishes on the roofs, photographers and cameramen lined up behind the crush barriers on both sides of the red carpet. The trick, M knows, is to exude a certain nonchalance, to feign patience as naturally as possible, with an expression just a tad ironic and complacent. This is the forty-fifth, what, fiftieth time I’ve been here? Try telling me something I don’t know. M has mastered the trick like no other; after all, he really has lost count, he’s never missed a year. On his own at first, or with another new conquest on his arm each time, later with his first wife, and an eternity by now with Ana. There are other — younger, less famous — colleagues who clearly have a harder time with that, with exuding such calm indifference. They stand there with their coats half unbuttoned, their party clothes showing a little, the dress they bought specially for this occasion, the coat they picked up from the cleaner’s only a few hours ago; any way you look at it, it’s clothing that has been thought about. That red coat, isn’t it just a little too red? Isn’t that sequined dress a little too flashy? The rare guest attempts to defy etiquette: a T-shirt bearing the logo of a soccer team, white Nike high-tops with black laces, a weird cap or a crazy hat (nutty glasses don’t cut it here, nutty glasses are the uniform of the elite) — M himself abandoned that defiance years ago, he would like to erect a monument to the inventor of the tuxedo. The tuxedo, of course, is a uniform too, but then a uniform that — unlike the canary-yellow spectacle frames — makes us all equal, in the same way the military or school uniform does. When a man in a tuxedo stands among other men in tuxedos, you no longer look at the clothing but at the face, at the head sticking out above that white collar, black tails, and tie. All in black and white; it’s brilliant, everything else takes on new color above an outfit like that, including gray hair — even one’s facial complexion, be it ever so pale, will never be as white as the shirt.

His features are striking, M knows. The strikingness of those features is something age has never been able to corrode. Of course he mustn’t pose on a beach in his swimming trunks anymore, and it’s better if they don’t come by early in the morning to find him in his striped pajamas at the breakfast table, but in the pronouncedly masculine uniform that the tuxedo is he looks like one of those old Hollywood actors on his way to the Oscars or the Grammys. To the — what do they call that again — Lifetime Achievement Award. A prize for one’s entire life. It’s no fantasy or wishful thinking; he’s seen himself in the news footage, in the pictures in the paper the next day. He’s no slouch, he leads a healthy life, he’s a moderate drinker, he even has to be careful not to lead too healthy a life, he noted, after seeing last year’s footage. Something about his face (not his teeth, he definitely must not smile, as long as he keeps his lips sealed there’s no reason for concern), his cheeks were sunken, too deeply sunken, no longer charming, as though they’d been vacuum-sealed from the inside out. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who could see the foreshadowing in his face, the foreshadowing of that day when he would live on only in his work (or not live on, he had seen how quickly that went with most of his late colleagues). A skull. A death’s-head. He had started eating more, he had asked Ana to prepare prime rib and pasta dishes with bacon and cream, a slice of cream cake for dessert or a Magnum Almond from the freezer — within a few weeks the prescient death’s-head cheeks had fairly disappeared.

A few yards ahead of him in line is N, who knows like no other how to do that, stand in line. His hands are in his pockets, he already has his long mohair coat draped over one arm. He stands there the way you’d stand in line in a bakery shop. One sliced whole-wheat and two bread rolls, please. At first M sees only the back of his head, but then N steps over closer to the crush barrier and brings his lips closer to the TV reporter’s mike; behind the reporter, the blinding light of a camera flips on. The light shines straight through N’s hair: like a low-hanging sun above a dry and barren landscape, it underscores the depth of the almost-eighty-year-old creases and lines in his profile, but at the same time gives him something kingly — something imperious, M corrects himself right away.

Close to the entrance, a new torment begins. The party has a different theme each year. Sometimes it’s straightforward — the animal kingdom, youth, the autobiographical in literature — but there are also years when they have obviously been desperate to come up with something, anything. M recalls one year when it was about birds and nests, no one knew whether it was supposed to be about the nesting instinct, about eggs, or about something much more horrible than that.

At the theater entrance, at the end of the red carpet, awaits the evening’s major television moment: the reporter from News Hour who asks any author who counts, however slightly, to say something about the theme of this year’s Dutch Book Week. The tone of the question is usually slightly ironic (If you could be reincarnated as an animal, which one would that be?), but the reply, of course, is the important thing. The snappiest answers are the ones that are finally aired, mumbling and stuttering doesn’t stand much of a chance, not unless it’s the mumbling and stuttering of a big literary name: a famous writer who starts to sweat and stutter or can only come up with platitudes has a certain news value too. Whatever the case, it’s always an unequal battle: the reporter from News Hour has had almost a year to dream up his cutesy question, but the writer has to say something eloquent on the spot, right there under the bright klieg lights. A one-liner or two, in quick succession, that’s the best. “Since when are people no longer animals? But even if they aren’t: coming back doesn’t really appeal to me, one time around seems like more than enough.”

This year’s theme is “Resistance — Then and Now.” When he saw the announcement in the paper almost a year ago, M had groaned. There was no escaping it, there was no way he’d make it into the theater unnoticed, the war was his trademark. Even if he succeeded in slipping in behind a colleague, they would drag him back in front of the camera by the sleeve of his tuxedo. Are there things you still resist? If you had to go into hiding, with which colleague would you like to do that? And with which colleague absolutely not? Do you see similarities between the rise of right-wing extremism back then and the way it is today? A question about the truth concerning the resistance was impossible. That was still too touchy. The resistance in the Netherlands had been negligible. Nowhere else in Europe was so little resistance offered. Any German soldier told that he was to be stationed in Holland breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God not the Ukraine, Greece, or Yugoslavia, where the partisans showed no mercy to recruits taken prisoner. In the Netherlands you had the beaches, the tulips, and the pretty girls. Everywhere you went you were treated amiably. At a village party you could ask the girls to dance without getting a knife in your back. Without a homemade fragmentation bomb going off under a haystack. In Russia the girls got you drunk, then cut off your balls in the shed. The rare Dutch act of resistance seemed to disappoint and distress the Germans more than it made them truly angry. They reacted as though they had been betrayed by a sweetheart. They picked up a few chance passersby from the street on a Sunday afternoon, lined them up along a ditch, and executed them. Not too many, not whole villages like in France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Why did you people have to go and do that now? it seemed the Germans were asking. We were having such a good time!

Now M is almost to the entrance. He turns his head to locate his downstairs neighbor, who has lingered further back in line. Come on, M gestures, come on, it’s time to go in.

“Mr. M…”

The reporter from News Hour holds the mike up in front of his face. The lamp on the cameraman’s shoulder pops on.

Here comes the question.

And there — smoothly, in one go, he needs barely a second to think about it — comes the answer.

38

It’s half an hour after the show has ended; they are standing and sitting on, or leaning against, the stairs beside the men’s room. N is there, and C, W, and L — they’re not quite all present: a few minutes earlier, S had taken the arm of a young PR manager from his publishing house and, with a wink at the others, headed downstairs to the dance floor. Van der D has gone to fetch drinks, in accordance with the time-honored, roundabout procedure in which one must first stand in line to buy tokens and then move to the next line for the drinks themselves.

Tokens! Chits! If M were to sum up the Dutch national character in one word, it would be “chits.” He’s been all over the world, he feels he has every right to sum up the character of his own country in one word. In France, Spain, and Italy the chit has yet to be invented. In Germany they give you twenty at one shot; that’s also a way to undermine one’s confidence in the value of the chit. In Holland you never get more than two. No matter where, at the library, a literary café, a book festival — everywhere you go you’re handed an envelope containing the program printed on a sheet of white paper, and two chits. Once those chits are finished, you have no further right of appeal.

He had attended the Academy Awards ceremony once, years ago, when the movie version of By a Slender Thread, his best-known book about the war, received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. After the ceremony, waiters had made the rounds with silver trays filled with glasses of champagne, Jack Daniel’s, and white and red wine. The fancy tables with their linen cloths were loaded with platters of lobster and oysters on ice. Not a chit in sight, not like at the film festival in Holland where he had to “get in line just like everyone else,” as one of the bar employees snarled at him after the premiere of Payback.

He talks briefly with C, N, L, and W about the show, which N calls “a travesty” and C “a disgrace.” He puts in his own two cents by commenting that he would rather spend his time in the waiting room at the dental hygienist than at these horrible shows before the party itself is allowed to begin.

“You mean at the dentist’s?” N asks.

“The dental hygienist,” M says. “No need to make it worse than it is.”

“It goes with the territory,” C says.

“I’m thinking about skipping the whole show next year,” N says.

They glance at each other, they know that’s not going to happen: they remember all too well that N (or S, or Van der D, or C) said exactly the same thing last year.

A tall man in a tuxedo joins them. M recognizes him as N’s new publisher. First he embraces N, then shakes hands with the others.

“Excuse me, I really have to take this,” he says, still holding M’s hand and looking at the display on his cell phone. M hadn’t heard the phone ring. “Where are you? Where exactly? Okay, I’ll be right there.”

He winks at M and puts the phone back in his pocket.

“How’s it coming along?” he asks.

“What?”

“Liberation Year. How many copies? Second run? Third run?”

M is aware of the reputation of N’s new publisher. The rumors about the huge advances. They say he uses those advances to brazenly steal authors away from his colleagues, something that’s officially not done among publishers.

“Reasonably well,” M says. “I’m not dissatisfied.”

The tall publisher looks at him impertinently, mockingly.

“ ‘Not dissatisfied.’ That sounds a bit grim,” he says; he coughs and grins almost simultaneously. “I haven’t seen it in the Top 60 yet.”

M shrugs. “Well, you know,” he says as calmly as he can — but his face suddenly feels flushed—“I don’t really pay much attention to that. Not anymore,” he adds. “Not at my age.”

“The books in that Top 60 are all garbage anyway,” C says.

“So your colleague writes garbage,” the publisher says, with a little nod toward N. “That’s news to me.”

“Oh, but I didn’t know…,” C says. “That book’s been out for a year already! Is it still on the list?”

“One year to the day, next week,” the publisher says. “We’re going to raise a toast to that at the house. You men are all invited. And, if you’d like to talk sometime,” he says, turning to M again. “A cup of coffee, or a beer at the end of the afternoon.”

M says nothing, he glances at his empty champagne glass.

“No strings attached, of course,” the publisher goes on. “But I really think it’s a terrible pity. A book like Liberation Year deserves a much wider audience. Ask your colleague here, if you like. Ask N. He’ll tell you that I’m not nearly the bastard they think I am. The bastard they say I am. In any case, I haven’t heard N saying things like ‘not dissatisfied,’ not since he’s been with me.”

“We’ve talked about it before,” N says, turning to M. “It’s opened whole new worlds for me. Like after a cataract operation. Suddenly, you can see again.”

N actually underwent a cataract operation a few years ago, so he knows what he’s talking about. But that they had talked about this before was simply not true. M may have become a bit forgetful in the last few years, but he would definitely have remembered something like that.

“That reminds me, suddenly…,” the publisher says. “Did you have a special reason for that, M? For what you said about the Dutch resistance?”

M has no idea what he’s talking about; he looks at the publisher questioningly.

“Wait, I’ve got it right here,” the man says, and pulls out his cell phone again. “On News Hour, at the entrance, wait, I’ve almost got it…”

M realizes only too late that within the hour, through the miracle of technology, they will all see and hear their replies to the reporter; he only actually believes it, however, when he sees himself on the display of the cell phone the publisher is holding up for him.

“There…here it comes,” the publisher says.

C, L, N, and W all crowd around the phone. Van der D also comes up and joins them at that moment, carrying a little tray with glasses of red wine.

“Here we go, you were thirsty and I gave you a drink…,” he says.

“Ssh!” L says. “Man, now I missed it!”

“Wait, here it comes again,” the publisher says.

He does something with his fingertips on the display, and there it is again, tiny but razor-sharp, the image of M leaning over to the reporter’s microphone.

This time he doesn’t look at the screen himself, he looks at his colleagues’ faces.

His words are clearly audible.

A silence descends, insofar as one can speak of silence amid the hubbub around the stairs. C’s jaw has literally dropped. Remarkably enough, it doesn’t make him look older, but younger. More boyish, M corrects himself; at our age you’ve seen everything, but rarely something that truly amazes you—what he sees on C’s face, though, is not amazement but dismay.

N is the first to break the silence.

“Well, well,” is all he says.

“Yes,” the publisher says. “That’s what I thought, too, the first time around: Am I hearing this right?”

“What were you getting at?” C asks. “What were you trying to say, for Christ’s sake?”

M looks into the eyes of his slightly older colleague. Is he crying? It’s hard to say. As a matter of fact, C always looks like he’s crying. M shrugs. What he would really like is to see the film one more time — he’d like to be able to think, It’s not that terrible, is it? Would like to say that. To his colleagues. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? It’s not that terrible?

He tries to do just that, but nothing comes out. He moistens his lips with the tip of his tongue.

“But that’s already passed the statute of limitations, hasn’t it?” Van der D says. “I mean, they won’t be breaking down your door tomorrow, will they?”

It was meant as a joke, but no one laughs.

“I don’t know what got into you,” N says. “To make it worse, the timing is miserable. Especially after that magazine interview. Maybe you should have kept your mouth shut for once.”

What interview? M wants to ask, but the next moment he realizes that it can be only one interview. That’s strange, isn’t it? Marie Claude Bruinzeel had promised to send him the text beforehand, but he never received it.

There’s also something else. He doesn’t like N’s tone at all. That’s not how colleagues talk to each other. And especially not with other colleagues around.

“We live in a free country,” he said. “We were once liberated, if I remember correctly. So that we could once again say whatever we like.”

“Well, if it had been up to your father that liberation never would have taken place,” N says. “Then all of us here”—he points around him at the colleagues, at the publisher—“would be in a concentration camp. And that’s only if we were lucky. Probably we would all have been taken out into the woods, shot, and dumped into a mass grave long ago.”

M stares at him. Where is this coming from, all of a sudden? N is an arrogant, completely self-important shithead, everyone knows that, but he can’t remember him ever using this tone with him before. With everyone standing around. The fact that M hasn’t read the magazine interview himself now puts him at a great disadvantage. He looks at the others. C lowers his eyes, W averts his gaze, L shrugs, Van der D acts as though there’s something floating in his wine, something that requires all his attention. The only one who isn’t avoiding his gaze is the publisher — the look in his eyes is no longer triumphant, it’s downright defiant, eyes in search of a row.

“Could I ask you to leave my father out of this?” M says at last. “My father made his own decisions at the time, but he’s no longer around to defend them now.”

“The point is that perhaps you should be a bit more conscious of what you’re saying,” N says. “You in particular, M. In your books you’ve always made clever use of your past and your background. That also gives you a certain amount of responsibility. When someone like you says things like this about the Dutch resistance, it’s different than it would be coming from some half-baked idiot. Especially in combination with all the dirty laundry that was aired in that interview. No, I find it absolutely tasteless.”

But the theme is resistance, isn’t it? M wants to say back to him. The theme of the party? If you make resistance the theme of a party, you can’t go complaining afterward when someone makes a few critical remarks about it?

“That we’re all allowed to say anything we like doesn’t mean that we have to say everything, does it?” C says. “I don’t get it, M. Especially not coming from you, with your background.”

Oh my God, here we go again! M thinks. Freedom of expression…and then especially the limits to that freedom.

“I agree with you completely, C,” M says in a conciliatory tone; at least he hopes it sounds conciliatory, because inside he’s already boiling like — a pan of water: you can turn down the gas, but the water won’t cool, not for a while. “Except there are some things that have to be said, because otherwise no one will say them these days. I’m not out to offend anyone; the two things are confused far too often: exercising one’s freedom of expression and demanding the right to offend whomever we please.”

“But there are cultures, religions, I don’t have to name names, that are offended awfully quickly,” Van der D says. “So are we supposed to censor ourselves and keep our mouths shut just because someone might feel insulted?”

“The point is to not apply a double standard,” M says. “If I stand in front of colleague N’s door every day and scream that his girlfriend is a whore, have I any right to complain when, on the third day, that girlfriend or N himself comes down and punches me in the face? Or do N and his girlfriend have every right to do that? They can, in any case, count on our sympathy. Or should we keep it simple and say that N and his girlfriend belong to a backward, medieval culture and that they are offended far too readily? That they have no right at all to defend that backward culture against insults?”

Besides his rage, M also feels light; he feels himself drifting away slowly, being lifted into the air: in the same way that they, as by some fortunate circumstance, were also drifting a bit further away from his remarks about the Dutch resistance.

“Each and every day,” he goes on, because no one else is saying anything. “ ‘Liliane is a whore! Liliane is a whore!’ I assert my right to express myself freely. Maybe I’m wrong, N,” he says, addressing his colleague directly now. “Maybe she’s not a whore at all. But I’m allowed to say so. After all, we live in a free country.”

“You’re a pitiful figure,” N says. He adopts a sad expression as he says it, which makes the countless wrinkles and folds in his cheeks and around his eyes seem to deepen even further — the landscape of gorges and deep valleys above which the sun is now going down. “In fact, I’ve known that for a long time, but today I know for certain.”

“And The Garden of Psalms is a tired shit-cake of a book,” M says — the water has stopped boiling, the gas has been turned off, the pan placed in the freezer: he feels calm. This calm, this icy calm, is something he hasn’t felt for ages. “But I don’t think I have to tell you that. I think you know that yourself already.”

“And that from the writer who keeps churning out books about the war, year in and year out? We all fell asleep long ago, M. I think you’re the only one who hasn’t realized that yet. Why don’t you write about something else for a change? About your mother, for example. In that interview you spend three pages whining about your dear mother, but in all those flog-a-dead-horse war books of yours we never read a word about her.”

39

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.

40

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 step: 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.