Dear Mr. M (14 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he looks at M for the first time.

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

She wasn't attracted to him right away.

“There's a boy coming, he's a junior,” David Bierman had told her. “He might be somebody for you.”

Laura had done her best to look as uninterested as possible.

“Not that he's quite your type,” David went on. “He's no one's type really. But he
is
one of those people you have a strong opinion of right away. You either think he's something special, or you think he's a complete asshole.”

At the party a few days later, David pointed him out across the room. The boy was sitting slouched down in a leather armchair, his green rubber boots crossed casually at the ankles; he was holding a tumbler filled almost to the rim with some clear liquid—it wouldn't be water, Laura thought.

He was, above all, very thin, thinner in any case than she liked them. She wanted a boy to have some substance to him. Flesh. Warm flesh that gave a little, pliable flesh under soft skin, not bones sticking out everywhere. This one had gone to no trouble to disguise his thinness, she had to give him that. Atop his tight-fitting jeans he wore an even tighter T-shirt that crept up a little to reveal a white section of stomach and a navel surrounded by blond hair.

But the rubber boots were what drew your attention most; they were half-Wellingtons—the boy had turned down the tops to reveal the light-green insides.
Who wears rubber boots to a party?
was the first thing she thought. But later she would often think back on those green boots.

Laura herself was in the habit of getting up each morning half an hour before her parents and her brother, who was two years younger than she was. Half an hour was what she needed to shower, wash and blow-dry her hair, and put on her makeup. But there were days when she didn't do the makeup. She would just spend half an hour in the shower, gradually turning down the tap from hot to ice-cold. Then she went to school with her own face—the water treatment kept her cheeks a soft pink all day long—and she saw how people looked at that face of hers.

That's right, I can get away with it.
She looked back.
I don't need it, the mascara, the eye shadow and lip gloss. Even after a shipwreck, after months of bobbing around on a wooden raft in the burning sun, I'll still be irresistible.

The thin boy with the rubber boots broadcast a similar message. Not exactly the same message, because even with the best will in the world you couldn't call him irresistible, but like Laura he knew that the other people's eyes were on him.

She couldn't deny that she was curious—if only for the space of a few seconds—about how the boy in the green rubber boots kissed. Then she forgot about him.

The party was almost over when Laura suddenly found herself standing beside him, at the table where earlier in the evening there had been wooden planks with cheeses, baskets of French bread, and dishes of peanuts and raisins, and where at this hour of the night, except for a single flattened and melting triangle of brie or Camembert, there were only some bread crumbs and peanut shells left.

The boy looked at her. No, it wasn't just looking: he was sizing her up. Not from head to toe, it's true, but from a point on her forehead, somewhere above her eyebrows, down to her neck. She saw his eyes, which were an almost translucent blue.

On his thin, well-nigh emaciated face—his jaw and cheekbones seemed ready to poke through the skin—was the same blond down she had seen before around his navel. Soft hair, not bristles. He hasn't started shaving yet, she could tell.

“So you're Laura,” he said.

He grinned, peeled the triangle of cheese off of his paper plate, and held it up for her. She shook her head vigorously, not so much because she wasn't hungry, but because of his self-satisfied tone.

So you're Laura.
As she watched him stick the cheese, rind and all, into his mouth in one bite, she suddenly realized what that sentence meant, and she felt her cheeks start to glow.

So you're Laura
could only mean that David had talked to him about her beforehand too. In her mind she heard David's voice:
This girl I know…she could be right for you. You'll either like her immediately, or think she's a huge bitch.

That next Monday she saw David in German class, first thing in the morning.

“Well, what did you think of him?” he asked.

“You were right,” she said. “He really is a complete asshole.”

Now, on this day after the day after Christmas, as she waited in her parents' house in Terhofstede for him to come back, she thought about that first meeting.

After tossing some more coal on the fire, she lay down on the mattress. Every once in a while she got up and went to the window. Hours seemed to have gone by since he and Landzaat had left for Sluis; there was no clock in the house, and at his insistence they had left their watches at home too. “We're going for total timelessness,” he'd said. “When the sun comes up, then it's light. And when it's dark, it's dark.”

At some point she must have fallen asleep: outside now, except for the glow of the streetlight, there was total darkness. She got up and opened the front door. The snow had stopped, there was no wind, it felt like the air was frozen too, as though you could break it into tiny pieces and then crumble it between your fingers.

She pulled on her boots and walked out to the road, through snow that came up almost to her knees, past the history teacher's car and on to the crossing in the middle of the village where the streetlight stood. Here, in the hard white light, the sight of the snow hurt her sleepy eyes. She halted. A few houses further up on the left lived a farmer from whom her parents sometimes bought potatoes and onions. The farmer also kept an eye on the house when they were gone; one time he had replaced a pane of glass that broke during a storm. She thought she remembered the farmer having a telephone—but who would she call? Her parents in New York? Somewhere in one of the pockets of her traveling bag was a slip of paper with the numbers her parents had handed her on the day they left. The number of the hotel, but also the numbers of her aunt and uncle in Amsterdam, and the neighbor lady. She tried to figure out what time it was in New York, but she wasn't sure.
A six-hour time difference,
she remembered her father saying, but here in this stock-still, frozen landscape, beneath the light of the streetlamp, the concept of time seemed to have lost all meaning.

And what would she say, anyway?
Don't be startled, nothing really terrible has happened, but…
She vaguely remembered the farmer's living room, where she had been maybe two or three times. Dark, heavy furniture, she recalled, a table with a plastic floral tablecloth. The farmer himself was so big and broad that he barely seemed to fit in the living room and had to duck under every doorway. His face was red, probably from working outside so much, she thought.

She imagined him standing there as she called her parents in New York: he would only be able to hear her side of the conversation (
I don't know exactly how long ago…A couple of hours, for sure…It's dark here now
) and he would draw his own conclusions. He would take his coat down off the rack, put on his cap, and help her look—or he would immediately call the police. She turned around and walked back to her house.

She had already passed the teacher's car and was just about to lay her hand on the garden gate when she heard someone shout her name. And even before she turned around she felt something warm, something warm inside, so warm that the cold air no longer had a grip on her.

She slipped a few times as she started running toward him, as fast as the snow allowed. She had already seen it, and later she would often remember it that way too: that they would meet right under the light of the streetlamp, that they would embrace, cover each other's cold cheeks, eyes, lips with kisses—
like in a movie,
that was what she was thinking when, only a few yards from him now, she realized that he was alone. For a moment she focused on a spot somewhere behind him, the point where the snow-covered willow stumps on both sides of the road dissolved into darkness.

He himself wasn't running; he stumbled toward her, it looked as though he was limping. The next moment they had hold of each other. The kisses, the tears—there was snow, or ice, in his lashes she saw after they had stopped kissing for a moment to look into each other's eyes.

“Sweetness,” she said. “My sweetheart.”

He was crying too, or at least something wet and shiny was running from the corners of his eyes down to his upper lip.

“Where's…?” She looked again at the road behind him, disappearing into the darkness.

“Isn't he…?” He nodded toward the house. “Isn't he here?”

She looked straight into his eyes, then shook her head slowly.

“I lost him,” he said.