Dear Mr. M (31 page)

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?”