Postcards From No Man's Land (16 page)

‘Was it that obvious? How could you tell?’

Ton thought for a moment. ‘When you’re an open gay, like me, you only survive, even in Amsterdam, where it’s easier than in most places, if you learn pretty quick how people behave. What makes them do what they do. You have to be all eyes. Have to learn the danger signs. And to avoid trouble, you have to—let’s say—be ahead of it.’

‘Anticipate it?’

‘Yes, anticipate it. Or else in this wonderful world of ours, where everyone believes in individuality, and being yourself, isn’t that so?—’

‘And being what you want to be.’

‘Being what you
are
—’

‘True to yourself.’

‘And we are all so tolerant of each other, aren’t we, and this and this and this, and well … Where was I? I’ve got lost in my English! … Oh yes—Or else, if being what you are is being like me, you soon get your head beaten in. Or worse. That’s what I wanted to say.’

‘I know,’ Jacob said, ‘I know.’

With surprising simplicity, Ton raised a hand and stroked the back of his fingers down Jacob’s cheek, and, smiling, said, ‘No, dear Jacques, I don’t think you do. You’ve heard about it. You’ve read about it, I guess. But you don’t know it. If you knew, you wouldn’t ask about it.’

Jacob hung his head, smitten with embarrassment at Ton’s caress, but also in a pique. To mask his feelings, he took a sip of coffee. It was almost cold and had a thick bitter taste.

On a sudden impulse he said, ‘Then show me.’

‘Show you!’ Ton’s face was as close now as it had been while they sat together reading the map of Amsterdam that morning. ‘Show you what?’ His breath feathered Jacob’s brow. ‘What it’s like to be me? Or what it’s like to have your head beat in? Or what it’s like having sex with me?’

Jacob shrugged, sat back and ran a hand through his
hair. His stomach curdled; he felt sick.

‘I don’t know,’ he said with difficulty. ‘I don’t know why I said that.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Another day, if you still want it,’ Ton said, then, looking at him with a different care: ‘Are you all right? You don’t look well.’

‘I’m okay,’ Jacob lied.

‘Maybe, I think, you’ve had enough. I’ll get Daan. You should go home.’

He was gone before Jacob could stop him. The loud talk and laughter seemed to assault Jacob directly now as if Ton’s presence had been a baffle, and the smoky air thickened his lungs. He withdrew into himself.

The word ‘home’ echoed in his head. Daan’s apartment, ‘home’! He wished he really was at home, and imagined his room at Sarah’s. But then, for the first time, and with a shock which braced his nerves, realised that was not his home either, but a room in Sarah’s house. And at his parents’, where he used to live, the room that had always been his till he decided to stay with his grandmother had been taken over by his brother Harry because it was bigger and, as Harry had said, Jacob didn’t live there any longer whereas Harry did. If he wanted to stay for a night or two, then Harry’s room, the smallest in the house, would do. Jacob hadn’t objected; how could he? He had chosen to leave, had preferred to live somewhere else—or rather, to be accurate, with someone else. At the time, because he was doing what he wanted, he didn’t mind about his room being taken over. Indeed, he was secretly pleased. He had grown up there, it belonged to his childhood. He regarded leaving it as the end of his childhood. By giving it up he had taken the next step towards becoming adult, a person in charge of himself. And achieving that state was something he had always wanted for as long as he could remember. He had never really liked being a child, had always wanted to
be grown up, independent, responsible for himself. Had always wanted to be as free as he could be to live life as he wanted to live it. Even though, he had to admit, he did not yet know exactly how he wanted to live.

But it was only now, here in this crammed, smoky, noisy café hidden in a back street of a strange city in a foreign country, a long way from anywhere he had ever called home, that the actuality of being independent, of being responsible for himself, informed his inflamed nerves and inhabited his disturbed mind.

As if his memory had been waiting for this moment, back to him came the poignant little tune of the song Daan had sung to him after they had visited Titus that afternoon, and along with it Daan’s voice speaking the translated words.
I’ve spent my life looking for you, only to learn, now I have found you at last, the meaning of solitude
.

And, Jesus!, he thought, is that it? The long and the short of it, the be all and end all, the last word? Alone, alone, all all alone. On your tod, Todd. Is that what being grown up, being adult,
means
? Solitude?

He felt a hand laid on his shoulder and heard Ton say, ‘Jacques?’

He stirred himself, looked up in to the boy-girl face, put his hand over Ton’s, and smiled.

Ton said, ‘He’s coming. See you again soon, eh?’

Jacob nodded.

Ton smiled, and bending to him, placed a kiss at the corner of Jacob’s mouth, left, then right, and a third, gently lingering, on his lips.

POSTCARD

‘Begin at the beginning,’

the King said gravely,

‘and go on till you come to the end.’

Lewis Carroll

JACOB STARED OUT
of the window of the mid-morning train from Amsterdam to Bloemendaal on his way with Daan to visit Geertrui. To take his mind off the coming ordeal he concentrated on the view.

People had told him Holland was boring, a land of cosy little red-roofed boxes arranged with Toytown predictability, and with not much of anything between one place and another except unending flat fields and canals. But this was not how it was, not for him that morning. The flatness of the landscape with its wide low sky, softened with haze, so that land and sky almost merged, he found soothing. The trim cared-for appearance of the houses and gardens, farms and fields, canals and dykes, even the factories and modern office blocks they were passing at this moment appealed to his liking for the clean and orderly. But as well: the colours. Burnished reds of old brick and roof tiles. Fresh shining greens and browns of the strips of field, each framed by thick dark pencil-lines of ditches. Belts of sky-reflecting water ruffled to silver by the passage of workhorse barges. And something in the atmosphere of the people that he liked, a sense of purpose, of getting on with life without any fuss. He hadn’t noticed any of this till now. For the first time since he arrived he began to like the place. And why now, in a train on his way to see a dying old woman? He
thought: How difficult it is sometimes to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only
is
, and no knowing.

Daan was sitting in the opposite seat reading a newspaper, its title,
de Volkskrant
, in letters which looked old-fashionedly modern, spiky and stern. He was wearing specs, the first time Jacob had seen them: small oval lenses in thin black metal rims, also old-fashionedly modern and also making him look a bit spiky and stern. He had hardly exchanged a word with Jacob since last night. Briefly to show him where to find food for breakfast, a sentence or two about when they must leave the house, and how they would pick up Jacob’s belongings on the way back. And an explanation: ‘I’m no use in the morning. A night person. It means nothing if I don’t talk.’ Which Jacob didn’t mind, for he wasn’t in a talking mood either.

He had slept surprisingly well, heavily in fact, all things considered—yesterday’s horrors, catastrophes, shocks, strange bed in strange house, but/and yes, now he thought about it, pleasures too (Ton, Titus, Alma). During the night he had surfaced only once, two thirty by his watch, when he heard voices and laughter in the big living room below, one Daan’s, the other Ton’s, but he had plunged back in to the depths again at once.

This morning he’d woken with a spongy head and lethargic limbs that had to be forced to get out of bed. Revived by a shower he could take his time over, luxuriate in, not worrying about anyone else needing it, because he had his own guest’s bathroom, which hadn’t been the case at Daan’s parents’ house, where there was only one. Daan had loaned him a change of underwear (blue boxer shorts, red T-shirt), and to go over the T-shirt instead of his tired sweater, an old black jacket in a loose baggy style Jacob decided he rather liked, even though it was a touch too large, because it made him feel different and more Dutch and therefore less conspicuously English, which amused
him, because the designer label inside said
Vico Rinaldi
.

The station had been busy and the train was full of gadabout Saturday crowds, tourists with luggage, locals with shopping, a high proportion of younger people with their clutter of backpacks and sports bags, chattery but not loud. They had a robust up-front freshness of look and manner; not at all English, but not alien either; and not as he was himself, Jacob thought, but how he might wish he could be. Tried to pin it down, this quality that attracted, but had come up with nothing better than ‘unaggressive confidence’ before the train pulled in to Haarlem station and most people got off.

Daan folded his paper and leaned towards Jacob. ‘One more stop. Tessel will be at the
verpleeghuis
. We won’t stay long, it would tire Geertrui. The nurses know you’re coming, so the doctor will have given Geertrui some extra help to keep the pain down while we’re there. I’ll let you know when it’s time to leave. So it should be okay, nothing to upset you.’

Nothing to upset you
felt like a rebuke, a judgement even, as if Daan were saying that Jacob was not up to the situation, not strong enough to witness the dying woman’s pain and so must be protected from it. And that he was an outsider, not one of the family, a visitor who, good manners dictated, must not be troubled by family torments. He resented both judgement and fact. But, he wondered as the train moved on, should he react in this way to what was, after all, a passing remark, not meant as he had taken it? But, meaning it or not, Daan had touched a nerve.

Determination gathered in him, felt like a force-field round his spine, that he would not turn away from whatever he found or hold it off, but accept it. Enter in to it. And to do this for his own sake. For the sake of his self-respect.

This much of an answer he knew. It surprised and pleased him. Not such a wimp after all, then. Perhaps.

*

He had expected the nursing home to be a cosy little building where a handful of old people quietly spent their last days with the comforting help of dutiful nurses. Instead, the building Daan led him to was huge. Three storeys with several wings branching out from the central block in the middle of a well-tended park provided with plenty of trees and flowers and patches of garden no doubt meant to dress the place up to look like a well-to-do country house or a luxury health spa. But nothing could disguise the institutional bulk of the ‘home’ or the endless comings and goings of cars and vans and buses and bikes and various vehicles of a clinical type, and the people—patients, visitors, medical staff—who thus arrived and left. In fact, not a home in any honest sense of the word but a busy hospital for the treatment of the legion of ailments, failings, accidents and calamities, including the final requirement of death, that afflict the elderly, senior citizens, those in the autumn of their years.

And how, thought Jacob, the human race insists on conning itself with euphemisms. As in: passed away, lost, met his end, taken from us, breathed her last, called to God, departed, at rest. Not to mention the more comic coinings not advised for use in the presence of the newly bereaved, such as cocked his toes, gave up the ghost, croaked, kicked the bucket, pegged out, gone to meet her maker, dropped off the hook, snuffed it. All meaning nothing else than dead. The only word that said exactly what is meant. For which reason, it seemed, people preferred not to use it.

By now they were inside the main entrance, which Daan said was called (another euphemism) the village square. To Jacob it looked like it had been designed with the departure hall of a small domestic airport in mind. Appropriate in the circumstances, come to think of it. Not only check-in desk (
receptie, informatie
), but shops, library, flower stall, café, areas to sit and wait, even rooms for meetings. All set about
with indoor trees and bushes growing in chunky plastic tubs. And as with passengers and their hangers-on something of the same pretence of calm and cheerfulness inadequately disguising boredom, anxiety, impatience, relief and a general desire not to be there at all, radiating like emotional sweat off the patients-to-be and those accompanying them, the ones seeing-off and those being-seen-off, the relatives and friends taking-away and the soon to be expatients being-taken-away. (The corpses of the dead ones, he supposed, would be carted off from some discreet exit at the back of the building so that none of the living, patients or guests, would be faced with the final reality of the reason for them being there.)

Jacob was relieved that Daan did not linger but took him quickly to the lift, which carried them up to the third floor, and then down a wide corridor with windows in bays where people sat overlooking the park. Very pleasant and civilised, Jacob thought, but still a hospital, with hospital sounds and hospital smells. And worst of all, that lukewarm hospital air, flavoured with disinfectant, that seems both clammy and too dry, and also as if it has been breathed and breathed again by fevered lungs and never ever been outside for refreshment. Everywhere, signs of thoughtfulness, of an attempt to make the place into what it was not—soothing modern colours on the walls, well-framed pictures, more real plants in companionable groups, comfortable chairs, cheerful curtains—all better than any hospital he had been in at home, even the newish place where Sarah recently had the hip operation that prevented her from coming to Holland.

Geertrui was in a room on her own, the only patient like that on the ward. The other rooms held six or four or two. A concession, Daan had explained, a last privilege.