The strangest feeling. As if the place was trying to speak to me.
Look,
it was saying.
This is what you have become
. And the people riding along the dirt track on their bicycles, smiling and nodding at me. . . .
I sat on the grass for at least an hour and watched the river slide from left to right. On the far bank I saw smoke rise from the jungle. That was Laos. The country was closed to foreigners that year, and it had the allure of the prohibited—that wall of undergrowth and foliage, that blue smoke rising, drifting. . . .
This is what you are.
Below me, boats had been drawn up, propped against the wet black roots of trees. The boats were thin and curved, like ancient dried-up pods, like bits of rind. The beauty of those shapes as the sky brightened and the day began to impose itself. . . .
Just then, I felt the edges of my flesh dissolving. I was the same as the wood the boats were made of, the same as the water of the river. One flowed straight into the other, with no frontiers, no distinctions. I was so wholly present that I was wholly absent. And yet, at the same time, curiously, I was able to register a feeling of relief. To be rid of myself, if only for a few moments. . . .
The Mekong, at Chiang Saen.
That was one of the times when I understood the nature, the true weight, of what it was that I was carrying.
•
What else do I remember? Everything and nothing. So much happened to me that, in the end, I found that I could no longer take anything in (though, if you had read the postcards I sent, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise because I filled them with the kind of jewelled details I knew my friends would appreciate). If a fellow traveller asked me what it was like in Sulawesi or Bhutan, I would use superlatives.
Incredible, fantastic. Great
. I became the type of person I had never understood—the person who has been everywhere, but cannot tell you anything. I had met people like that on holiday with Brigitte. We would have two weeks, at the most, and they would have been travelling for ever. And they would have nothing to say. What was the point of travelling, I used to think, if the experience could not be communicated? Ah. Well. Slowly, as my time away stretched into months, then into years, I began to understand. You take in so much. You’re too full. Which is the same as being empty. That seemed to be the effect. As if the brain could only process so much information. . . . That emptiness, though—that became the point. For me, at any rate.
At first I achieved the state unwittingly. Then I started to co-operate with it. I stopped keeping a diary; I gave my camera away. I travelled more and more lightly. I bought nothing, kept nothing. Because that was what I wanted. To journey beyond my skin. To forfeit all awareness of my blood, my bones—my soul. To disappear completely into what I was looking at.
Not destinations then. Not adventures.
Movement.
The feeling of a ship or a train or a bus beneath me, each with its different rituals, its different rhythms. A destination was useful because it was a substitute for purpose; it answered any question I was likely to be asked. Movement became my reason for being, my excuse. Movement for its own sake. I forget who it was who wrote about the importance of doing nothing, how the art of doing nothing is one that most people seem to have forgotten. Well, I decided to resurrect the art. In doing nothing, I would be reduced to what I was moving through. I would, quite literally, become part of the scenery. I would blend, immerse. Dissolve.
And wasn’t this, also, in the end, a way of dealing with death? Death, which is the root of all anxiety. Death, which requires us to justify ourselves. Death, which makes us believe in God.
All that I could happily dispense with.
Do nothing. Whatever happens, happens. Let it come.
•
Perhaps it couldn’t have gone on, though. I don’t know. Perhaps I would have reached a point where I lost myself completely. Certainly I had no idea where the path I was following would lead me. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine what it would take to make me think of going home—what conversation, what event, what set of circumstances. . . .
After travelling for three years or so, I found myself in the village of Lovina on the north coast of Bali. I had rented the usual bamboo hut. It had a small terrace at the front, facing the sea, and a creaky double bed. The inside of the hut smelled of coconut milk and mosquito coils, and also of the coarse string they used instead of springs to support the mattress. At night the palm trees clattered in the breeze that blew in off the Sea of Java. I breakfasted on Nescafé and papaya, then spent the day walking on the beach, or swimming, or lying in a hammock, reading. In the evenings I would meet up with a German man, a taxi-driver from Munich, whose name I have now forgotten. We would drink beer together, and I would watch the whites of his eyes turn red as he smoked the local grass. It was a peaceful place, one of many peaceful places that I had seen, and I thought I would probably stay there for a week or two before moving on to Lombok, Flores, Ambon. . . .
I never saw those islands. One evening, after swimming, I stopped at the bar for something to drink. Three white girls were sitting at a cane table, wearing sarongs. I said hello, and we started talking. They asked me where I was from, as people always do when you’re travelling. I said that I was English, but that I’d spent almost ten years of my life in Holland. It turned out that they were Dutch. Two of them lived in Amsterdam, the other in The Hague. We knew the same café, in the Jordaan. We could have been there at the same time, all four of us, without knowing it.
“What a coincidence,” said the blondest of the girls, whose name was Saskia.
And suddenly it struck me.
Three Dutch girls.
For a moment the bar seemed to tilt away from me. My body became as weightless as the air itself. I couldn’t feel my legs at all. I wonder if the girls noticed any alteration in my manner. Probably not. They were only three weeks into their travels, and still starry-eyed at being so far from home.
When the feeling had passed, I smiled faintly.
“Yes,” I said. “A real coincidence.”
I slept with Saskia first, who was the most forward of the three. We stood in my hut one afternoon, facing each other, our hips almost touching. A breeze pushed through the window’s tilted slats.
“Will you undress me?” she said. “I like to be undressed.”
As I lifted her T-shirt over her head, revealing her breasts, I thought of the women in the white room. Parts of their bodies came tumbling into my mind, one after another, indiscriminately—the coin-shaped scar, the dark-red pubic hair, the mole. . . . Without taking my eyes off Saskia, I dropped her T-shirt on the bed. No mole. I kneeled in front of her, unfastened her sarong. As the sarong came loose and slid to the floor, I ran my hands up the outside of her thighs until I reached her hips. No coin-shaped scar. I drew her closer and pressed my face into her pubic hair, which was dark-blonde. . . .
After what had happened in Caracas, you might think there would have been some nervousness or apprehension on my part. But no. Not at all. In fact, much to my surprise, having sex with Saskia felt entirely natural and effortless. Almost preordained. What seemed to make it possible was the idea that it was connected in some way with the women who had abducted me. It was as if, in making that connection, I had managed to earth myself.
During the next ten days I slept with all three girls. I knew they weren’t the women from the room, but I still had to see them naked. I had to examine each of them in detail. Just to be sure.
They all thought it was unusual, the way I made love to them. The shyest of them—Camiel—said she found it cold and unalluring; I made her feel self-conscious, as if she had been put under a microscope. The other two were strangely flattered, revelling in my eager exploration of their bodies, revelling in what they must inevitably have seen as adoration. . . .
I left Lovina suddenly. The girls were out that day, visiting a village in the mountains. I slipped a note under the door of their hut, saying something like,
See you back in Holland, maybe
—I didn’t leave an address, though; I didn’t have an address—then I headed south to Denpasar, where I bought a one-way ticket to Amsterdam. . . .
Oddly enough, about a year later, I did run into one of them again. I had just eaten lunch with Paul Bouhtala at the American Hotel and I was crossing Leidseplein when I heard somebody call my name. I turned round, and there she was, not brown any more, but still slim, still blonde.
“Saskia,” I said.
We kissed each other on the cheek. She seemed pleased that I had remembered her name, that I had not forgotten her.
“When did you get back?” she asked.
I smiled. “I’ve been back for quite a while actually.”
“Really? I thought you were never coming back.”
She stood in front of me in her brown suede jacket and her jeans, with her blonde hair falling in a straight line to her shoulders. In that moment I thought she realised there was some kind of link between our meeting on the beach in Lovina and my decision to return to Amsterdam, and I saw a look rise on to her face, a frank, receptive look that seems to come naturally to the Dutch, a look that communicates both desire and availability. She seemed startled when I cut our conversation short without asking for her number. But I had already searched her body for evidence, and come away with nothing. There was no need to search again. She was innocent. How could I possibly have explained something like that to her? Instead, I told her that I was living with someone, which wasn’t true, and that I was happy, which wasn’t true either. Saskia became rueful, even a little misty-eyed, openly expressing the wish that she could find a man who wasn’t immature, who didn’t cheat on her—a man, she implied, who was more like me. If only you knew, I thought.
When I said goodbye to her a few moments later, she leaned towards me and kissed me slowly on the mouth, softening her lips so that they seemed to grow as they touched mine, then she drew back and, smiling, turned away, still unaware of the profound effect that she and her two friends had had on me. I watched her blonde hair swinging against her brown suede jacket as she walked towards Leidsestraat. All of a sudden I felt strangely burdened, old.
•
I had flown into Schiphol direct from Bali on a warm grey day in early August. The flight had taken thirteen hours, and I had hardly slept. I walked through the efficient, hygienic spaces of the airport, noticing brightness, order and purpose everywhere I looked. This was something I hadn’t come across for months, and I felt a kind of bleakness settle over me. All of a sudden I was glad Stefan had offered to meet me.
I had called him from Denpasar, asking if he knew of anywhere I could stay on my return. I was in luck, he told me. He was still living on the first two floors of the house on Prinsengracht, but the apartment in the attic was empty. His father wanted him to find a lodger, and this would save him the trouble. He had some other news. He was no longer working as a dance photographer, he said. He had started taking portraits for newspapers and magazines. He added that he had lost touch with Brigitte. I think he wanted to put my mind at rest, to reassure me that if I lived in the house on Prinsengracht I wouldn’t have to see her, which was a relief, of course, but also, curiously, a kind of disappointment.
I saw him as soon as I emerged from Customs. Standing sideways-on to me, with his dark-brown hair as tangled as it had always been and his hooked nose aimed at the ceiling, he was studying the Arrivals on a TV monitor. I walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. He jumped. Then, laughing, we embraced.
“It was good of you to come,” I said.
He took a step backwards. “You look wonderful.”
“Stefan, I’ve been away, that’s all.”
“No, really,” he said. “You look, I don’t know,
famous
.”
Which was the one thing I no longer was, of course. His eyes slid sideways, as if he felt he might have said something tactless. He picked up my rucksack. “Is this all you have?”
I nodded.
He shook his head, as if he despaired of me, then he took my arm and led me towards the short-term car-park. Though I didn’t really know what to say to him I was still relieved that he was there.
Once we were on the motorway he said, “This must feel very strange to you.” He glanced out of the window at the grey-green land and said, “All this.”
“Stranger than you know,” I told him.
I slept for most of the next two days. On the third morning, after I had eaten breakfast, I sat down at the small table by the window. I felt artificial, as if I wasn’t actually back in Amsterdam at all, but had been superimposed on it, somehow. The weather had improved while I was sleeping. Trees stirred lazily against a pale-blue sky, and a warm draught pushed into the room. If I leaned forwards, I could watch glass-topped tourist boats cruise past, opening a thick, creamy fold in the surface of the canal. Somewhere in the city there were three women who had held me in a room against my will for eighteen days. . . .
At the time I had watched them closely, and I had been able to distinguish them, one from another, especially when they were naked. I had a good memory for people’s bodies—after all, they were my raw material, my inspiration—but how much could I remember now, years later? I summoned the women, one by one. Gertrude came first, wearing her cloak and hood. That way of moving that she had—upright, measured, almost self-important. Like a judge. After the banquet, though, when she had showed herself to me for the first time, her body had not been heavy or fleshy at all, I remembered, but well made, solid, with skin that looked unnaturally white, almost translucent—and then that moment when a single hair of hers, a red hair, had come floating downwards through the air. . . . Astrid appeared next, in boots with pointed toes and stiletto heels. She had had the kind of body most men fantasise about—her breasts, her thighs, her cunt like an exotic shell. . . . I tried to recall a distinguishing mark, a defect, but there was only that scar on her hip, the size of a guilder, and, if I closed my eyes, it was her fingers that I saw, fingers that were strong but elegant, with nails filed square across the top. . . . And what about Maude? Well, she was probably the easiest of the three. I could almost see her in her entirety. She had a lumbering, affectionate quality about her. Her shoulders sloped, and her feet turned inwards. She had a mole placed neatly just to the right of her navel. What else? She bit her fingernails. Her breasts were disproportionately small. And I could still hear her saying, in that halting, stubborn voice of hers,
My body is not exciting to you
—