Dear Mr. M (29 page)

“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.”