I saw her before she saw me. She was sitting at right-angles to me, against a dark-yellow wall. She was wearing a brown, long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Her face was pale, clean and plain, and she had put her hair up in a bun. I felt she was someone I had never met. I had nothing in common with her. My presence in the restaurant seemed unlikely, inexplicable.
I sat down. She gave me a watery smile. We didn’t kiss. I ordered a carafe of red wine and some olives. It was loud in the restaurant, the waiters shouting and gesturing and elbowing their way through the smoky, ochre-coloured air. Sitting at the table next to us was a Spanish couple, the woman middle-aged, black-haired, grand, the man in a tight-fitting pale-grey suit. The man leaned towards her, as if what he was talking about was either private or of huge importance, and, every now and then, he fell silent suddenly, looked down and, with raised eyebrows, twisted the signet ring on his little finger. I drank a mouthful of wine, which tasted sour, and glanced at Jeannine. She was smoking. I had no idea what to say to her.
Then, as she reached out to extinguish her cigarette, she asked me what South America was like.
“What?” I said. “All of it?”
And suddenly we were both laughing.
It wasn’t too bad after that. She had a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour that I had seldom come across in Amsterdam. She told stories against herself, and yet she didn’t come across as pitiful or unlucky. Instead, you thought she was probably a survivor. Perhaps it was the wine, but, as the evening wore on, she grew in confidence, so much so that when we stood outside the restaurant, unlocking our bicycles, she was able to say, half jokingly, “My place or yours?”
We cycled to Prinsengracht, which was closer. The night was cool, and a mist had risen off the canals, turning the trees into grey blurred shapes. It was after one o’clock by the time we walked into the house, and though a thin strip of light showed under Stefan’s bedroom door we decided not to disturb him. We climbed to my attic apartment in silence. While Jeannine was in the bathroom, I undressed and slipped under the covers. A few minutes later she appeared, wearing a white vest and a pair of knickers. She asked me if I wanted her to turn the light off. I shook my head.
“I want to see you,” I said.
She climbed into bed beside me. Her skin was cold to the touch. She kissed me on the mouth, then leaned on one elbow, with her head propped on her hand, and looked down at me.
“Your body,” she said. “It’s like the body of a samurai.”
I laughed quickly. “Is it?”
Her face had a kind of stubbornness about it, a complacency, and I knew then that I should never have allowed things to go so far.
“Wide shoulders,” she went on, “a narrow waist . . . long thighs—you’re very beautiful. . . .”
A man coughed in the street below. I felt awkward, almost embarrassed, as though the man was in the room with us. Jeannine kissed my shoulder, then my neck. Her hair, loose now, brushed against my chest.
I ran one hand into the hollow of her waist, then over her left hip, taking her knickers halfway down her thighs. I noticed at a glance that she had no scars of any kind, and that her pubic hair was brown. Well, I suppose I had known it all along, really. She could join the list of women whose innocence had been established. It was still a short list, I realised, and the thought tired me suddenly.
“What is it?” she said.
“Nothing.” I lay back. “Did you ever dye your pubic hair?”
She laughed. “What a strange question.” Then she saw that I was serious. “No,” she said, “I’ve never done that.” She paused. “Would you like me to?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t even sure why I had bothered asking. Perhaps it had just been something to say.
She reached out and touched my penis. It didn’t respond. She started to pull at it, which only made it worse. I took hold of her hand, moved it away.
“Don’t you want to?” she said.
I sighed. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” She laughed quietly, and then she lay back, staring at the ceiling. “I think I’ll go to sleep now, if you don’t mind.”
In the early morning I felt her wake and ease out of the bed. Through half-closed eyes I watched her dressing by the window—the pale curve of her spine, her hair black in the dim light and hanging perpendicular to the floor as she bent down to pull on her tights.
Before she left the room she leaned over me and kissed me. I opened my eyes.
“You going?” I said.
She smiled faintly, sadly, as if she knew I had been deceiving her.
“I’m working today,” she said, “and I have to go home first.”
I nodded.
“Goodbye,” she said.
•
If Stefan knew anything about what had happened between myself and Jeannine he did not refer to it. Though we often talked about the party afterwards, what a success it had been, Jeannine was never mentioned. Perhaps she never spoke about it to anyone. Or perhaps he simply hadn’t noticed. In the meantime, while walking in the Vondelpark one afternoon, I had met a tall, dark-haired girl who worked at the Alexander van der Leeuwkliniek on Overtoom. . . .
I was beginning to spend a lot of time in hospitals, or in the neighbourhood of hospitals. At first I would pretend to be visiting a sick relation, which allowed me to loiter in different wards and then fall into conversation with the nurses working there, but I realised that, before too long, I would be found out. I needed a legitimate excuse. It was then that I had a stroke of luck. One morning I saw a flyer on a notice-board, advertising a Hospital Visitors programme. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? During the next few weeks I signed up with programmes all over Amsterdam, and, from that point on, my presence in hospitals was justified. No, more than justified. It was actively encouraged. After all, I was contributing something to the community. I was doing good. When Stefan asked me what I did all day, I told him that I had become involved in charity work! And it was true. I would spend hours with old people, or people who had no families, and I would listen to their complaints, their dreams, their reminiscences—sometimes it reminded me a little of sitting on the brown velvet sofa in Paul Bouhtala’s apartment—but all the time I would keep a close watch on the nursing staff, scanning them for attributes or qualities that seemed familiar.
That winter I often found myself in awkward situations. I remember one nurse in particular. I had noticed her in a hospital ward, wheeling a silver meal trolley, and I had stopped to talk to her. She had agreed to meet me in a bar after work. When she walked in through the door, she was wearing a black plastic raincoat belted tightly at the waist, and she had painted her fingernails cobalt-blue. Though her face was delicate, her eyes had a jaded look, as if she had seen everything there was to see. It was her eyes that had brought her to my attention. We drank shots of neat vodka, then she took me back to where she lived, a squat on the top floor of a derelict container terminal in East Amsterdam. I followed her through dripping corridors to a room that overlooked an industrial canal. I remember the water, how thick it looked, and how it smelled of rust and oil, and I remember the yellow weeds that nodded in her window. She offered me some pills, which she had stolen from the hospital pharmacy. I refused, but she took three, knocking them to the back of her throat with the flat of her hand, then washing them down with the dregs from a can of Coca-Cola. When we were lying together on her mattress, she crouched beneath me, tearing at my body with her tiny blue nails, as if she wanted to open me up and look inside. Later, in a slurred, sardonic voice, she told me she had been abused by her father, but no one had ever believed her because he was such a friendly man, so popular, he worked for the fire department, she said, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was not alone: there were others like me, people who were operating in the fourth dimension, a world that was parallel to this one, a kind of purgatory. Oddly enough, she had a little round scar too. It was on her arm, though, halfway between her elbow and her shoulder. Still, I let out a gasp when I saw it. She asked me what was wrong, but I just shook my head and told her it was nothing.
•
Towards Christmas I came home one evening to find Stefan sitting at the kitchen table, working out his accounts. Standing in the doorway, looking at the piles of invoices and receipts, I realised that I would have to find a job before too long. My uncle’s money had not run out yet, but it wouldn’t last for ever.
Stefan leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head, and studied me for a few moments, then he smiled and slowly shook his head. “You know, you really are something.”
I didn’t follow. “What do you mean?”
“You’re so successful with women,” he said. “Every time I see you, you’re with somebody different.”
I frowned. It was true that I had slept with a lot of women since returning to Amsterdam, but I didn’t think of myself as successful, not at all. In fact, that was the last word I would have used. As far as I was concerned I had failed miserably.
“You’re like some kind of playboy,” Stefan said.
“Stefan,” I said.
“I’m serious,” he said. “It’s extraordinary.”
His face showed elements of both admiration and disbelief, but, underneath, I saw a kind of bewilderment, as if something was dawning on him, and I thought I knew what it was. It had just occurred to him that Brigitte might have been right to suspect me. It had just occurred to him that I could have been unfaithful to her after all. Well, there wasn’t much I could say about that. I turned to the window and watched the rain running down the glass.
“The thing is,” I said quietly, “I’m looking for someone.”
Stefan chuckled. “Aren’t we all?”
“Stefan,” I said.
Still amused, he looked up at me. “What?”
“It’s not what you think.”
•
I lived in the house on Prinsengracht for fourteen months, and during that time I slept with one hundred and sixty-two women. Most of them worked in hospitals or clinics, but there were some who had nothing to do with the medical profession at all. Perhaps I saw them from a certain angle, or in a certain light, or perhaps it was the mood I happened to be in, but in each case they appeared to be in possession of a secret, or harbouring some kind of guilt. It was a quality they all had, of seeming to conceal something from me, of being impenetrable, unknowable.
I had developed a new approach to the task I had set myself: I began to see it as a process of elimination. The more women I slept with, the more likely I was to find the women I was looking for. The longer I went on, in other words, the shorter the odds became. It wasn’t so much a quest as a dismantling. The three women were like soldiers whose cover was being gradually but systematically eroded. In time they would become visible to me.
That’s what I kept telling myself. It was just a matter of time.
One hundred and sixty-two women in fourteen months. . . . I don’t remember any of them now. No, wait. That’s not quite true. There is one I remember.
Daphne.
Because she peered at my scarred penis in the half-darkness of her bedroom, and then turned to me and said,
You haven’t got syphilis, have you?
•
On a bright, cold October afternoon I moved into an apartment in the Kinkerbuurt, not far from where I had lived before I met Brigitte. Though small, it was three floors up on the corner of a street, which meant I had plenty of light, and the rent was reasonable, less than eight hundred guilders a month. From one of my living-room windows I could see a segment of the Jacob van Lennepcanaal; I could watch the heavy, sluggish barges pushing past, their loads covered with tarpaulins and lashed down with ropes, their hulls low in the water. . . . On my first morning, as I was looking for a place to buy fresh bread, I saw a notice in the window of a local bar. They were advertising for staff. While living in Stefan’s house, my Dutch had improved, and I now felt confident enough to apply for a job. The bar had a row of tables on the pavement, facing a quiet stretch of water, and a beer-garden at the rear, with wooden benches and an ancient lime tree. It was so close to my apartment that I could walk to work and back. That night I had an interview with the owner, a blonde woman in her mid-fifties. Her name was Gusta. She wore mauve eye-shadow, and her wrists were as plump as a baby’s. In the sixties and seventies she had been a jazz singer. She had known Chet Baker. She had smoked a joint with him just hours before he fell from the window of that hotel—the Prins Hendrik, wasn’t it?—and died. I let her talk about the old days and by closing time the job was mine.
A week later, when I had settled in, I called Isabel. I wanted to give her my new address and number. To my surprise, Paul Bouhtala answered the phone.
“You were lucky to catch me,” he said. “I just dropped in to collect a few of Isabel’s things.”
“Why?” I said. “Where is she?”
“She’s in hospital in Haarlem. She has cancer.” He was silent for a moment. “Didn’t you know?”
After speaking to Bouhtala, I put the phone down and stared out of my living-room window. The sun was shining. White clouds hung in a blue sky, motionless and two-dimensional. They looked like targets in a fairground rifle-range. Below the clouds, there was a row of houses. A bathroom-fittings shop. A tree.
Nothing seemed to be moving. Nothing seemed real.
It was only when I arrived at the hospital in Haarlem the following afternoon that I realised what a vicious echo of my life this was, a parody of that period when all I wanted was an excuse to spend time in medical institutions.
Well, now I had it.
I came to a standstill in reception. Looking at the floor, I felt a sense of shame sweep over me.
•
When I walked into Isabel’s private room that day I was shocked by the change in her appearance. Her face had tightened, withered, aged. I could see right through the skin to the structure that lay beneath: I could see the joins in her skull. I laid my flowers at the foot of her bed and sat down beside her. I had a feeling in my throat, as if I couldn’t swallow.