Dear Mr. M (30 page)

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.”

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.