“We should go,” I said, “otherwise you’ll miss your tram.”
•
It was a time in my life when I seemed to be holding my breath. I was living within myself, waiting for the future to be revealed. Most days I talked to either Isabel or Juliette. I thought they were both, in their different ways, trying to show me the paths that were open to me, and, though I listened to them both, I still held back. The memory of the walk across the ice had stayed with me. I had to move carefully because there was always the possibility that something might give way, but, equally, I felt that confidence would be rewarded.
One night, after the bar closed, I had a beer with Gusta and a friend of hers called Renate who had just returned from India.
“You’ve travelled, haven’t you.” Renate turned to me greedily, wanting to establish common ground.
The three of us walked to Renate’s houseboat, which was filled with incense candles, gold Buddhas, and cushions that had miniature mirrors sewn on to their covers. We drank more beer. I asked what the strange smell was. Renate explained that it was perfume she had bought in Varanasi. She showed me several small glass phials, each one containing a different brightly coloured liquid. We smoked grass through Renate’s home-made bong, and all of a sudden I was alone with her. Apparently Gusta had left. I hadn’t noticed.
“Yeah,” and Renate chuckled huskily, “this is good pot.”
She was sprawling on a couch, watching me through half-closed eyes.
“You can fuck me if you like,” she said.
“I don’t know. . . .”
“You fuck everybody else,” she said. “What’s wrong with me?”
I shook my head. “I’m too stoned. . . .”
“Oh well. Just thought I’d ask.”
And there was a time when it would probably have happened. Because, now I thought about it, she did remind me a little of Maude. She had the same sturdy ankles, the same coarse hair. . . . But I had reached the end of something. I was exhausted. As soon as it was possible to imagine walking home—a distance of no more than a few hundred yards—I rose to my feet and said good-night. Still lying on the cushions, Renate gave me a mocking, dismissive smile.
About three days later I met Juliette for lunch. This was unusual because Juliette’s acting classes lasted all day, while I worked in the bar most nights and then slept until one or two in the afternoon. Also, since that kiss on the ice, I had been trying to discourage her—or if not discourage her, then at least move slowly, give myself more time to think. It might have been the weight of everything I was carrying, the thought of having to explain it all to her (she knew almost nothing about me; she didn’t even know I used to be a dancer). Or perhaps sex had been a means to an end for so many years that I could no longer equate it with closeness or with love. I don’t know. In any case, though it was only a twenty-five-minute tram-ride from my house to hers, I behaved as if she lived in a different country. We talked on the phone, for hours. We had the heightened intimacy of people living thousands of miles apart. The distance I put between us intrigued her, though. She thought I was mysterious. Once, she even told me I was cruel. She didn’t have to explain that. I understood. I realised that my strategy, if you could call it that, was only binding her more tightly to me. By resisting her, I was making myself irresistible. There was a sense in which I was only delaying something that was bound to happen.
That lunchtime I was in the middle of telling Juliette about Isabel’s recovery when I sensed somebody standing to one side of me. I glanced round. It was a girl of about twenty-five, with short blonde hair. I knew from the look of contempt on her face that she must be someone I had slept with, though I had no memory of her.
“So this is what you’ve been doing,” the girl said. “So it’s black girls you go for now.”
“This is Juliette,” I said. “We’re just friends.”
“Juliette.”
The girl spat the word out as if it was something rotten she had eaten by mistake. “No wonder you haven’t called me for so long. No wonder you just dropped me like a stone. . . .” She brought one hand up to her face. Suddenly she looked as if she might be about to cry. “Don’t you have any feelings?”
“It wasn’t like that—”
“I bet you don’t even remember my name. What’s my name?”
She was right, of course. And she saw that she was right.
“Fuck you,” she said, and walked out of the café, slamming the door behind her.
I looked down at the table. When I lifted my eyes again, Juliette was staring at me in bewilderment.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said.
She tried to laugh the whole thing off, but the laughter caught on something in her. With a kind of shocked wonder in her voice, she said, “What did you do to her?”
“I can’t explain it.”
“You went out with her, though?”
“No. Not exactly.”
Juliette looked at me, then slowly shook her head.
“Juliette,” and I took her hand, “you have to believe me. There was nothing between us. Nothing at all.”
I suppose I could have used the sudden intrusion of the blonde girl to discourage Juliette for good, but what I learned from the episode, even while it was happening, was that I didn’t want to discourage her. I now felt that Juliette was closer to me than anybody else I knew, and I could not afford to lose her.
By the time we left the café, I had succeeded in persuading her that I was innocent of any wrongdoing, though I could tell by the look she gave me as she walked away, just one look, over her shoulder, that I was more of a mystery to her than ever.
•
Later that week, on my day off, I travelled down to Bloemendaal to visit Isabel. Else let me in, as usual. Isabel was still in remission, she told me, and growing stronger every day. The doctors were cautiously optimistic.
For the first half-hour, though, Isabel just complained. She thought chemotherapy was barbaric. With all the recent advances in medicine, she found it hard to believe that treatment was still so primitive. She wished Else didn’t fuss so much. Else was always fussing. And as for her doctors, they were tyrants because they had forbidden her to smoke. Then, as the light outside began to fade, she asked if I had ever heard of Nova Zembla. I shook my head.
In the Middle Ages, she said, if you wanted to travel to China, you had to sail south, past the Cape of Good Hope. It was a long and dangerous voyage. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, however, a Dutch explorer tried to change all that. He sailed north instead, hoping to establish a shorter, safer route. The explorer’s name was Willem Barentsz, and there was a street in Amsterdam named in his honour. There were also streets named after his captain, Van Heemskerck, and Nova Zembla, the island which played such a big part in their story.
Barentsz’s last expedition had left Amsterdam on 18 May 1596. Some weeks later, his ship became trapped in ice off the north coast of Russia, and Barentsz and his crew found themselves marooned on Nova Zembla. In pictures, the island appeared to have a certain stark beauty. The ice that surrounded it for most of the year was pale-blue, almost turquoise, and sculpted into strange shapes by the elements. The sunsets could be breathtaking—bands of crimson folding into deepest black. To Barentsz, though, it must have seemed like the end of the world. There were no trees, only stones, and, from August onwards, it was dark almost all the time. Using materials commandeered from the ship, the men built a makeshift camp. They called it “Het Behouden Huys,” which meant “The Sheltered House” or “The House That Remains.” They spent the entire winter there, living on a diet of Arctic foxes and polar bears, which they shot with the muskets they had brought with them. Finally, in June of the following year, they managed to row to the mainland. They did not reach Amsterdam until 1 November 1597. Only twelve of the crew survived.
In 1871 a Norwegian expedition discovered the remnants of the camp where Barentsz and his men had lived for so many months. On the ground were books, tools, clothes, ammunition, cutlery and navigation equipment, all of which had been lying undisturbed on Nova Zembla for almost three centuries. But, to this day, the ship that had been captained by Van Heemskerck, and the grave of Willem Barentsz, who had died on the homeward journey, had never been found.
When Isabel had finished talking, I sat quite still and stared into the fire. While I was being held in the white room I used to think there was a place inside my body that the women could not touch. I used to see this place as a house. A house inside my body where I lived. Where I was safe. From its windows I could look out over land that was flat and featureless. I could see the women, but they were tiny figures, far away. They were always there, but they were always in the distance, and they never came any closer. Even if they had come closer they couldn’t have entered. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did. And now, after hearing what had happened to the Dutch explorer and his crew, I realised that that was how I had survived. . . .
At last I looked away from the fire, and I felt as if my eyes were glowing, as if they were sending beams of bright, pale light into the room.
“What do you think of the story?” Isabel asked.
“It would make a great ballet,” I said, surprising myself. The thought and the words seemed to have arrived simultaneously.
But Isabel was smiling, as if I had given her the answer she was looking for.
“I think so too,” she said.
When Else walked in a few moments later, to persuade Isabel that she should rest, we were both still smiling at each other.
“You should see yourselves,” she said. “You’re like a couple of conspirators.”
That was exactly what we were. As a result of our various misfortunes, Isabel and I had become inextricably linked, and during the next few weeks, the weeks that led up to Christmas, we began to discuss a project that would bring us still closer together. The ballet would be based on the story of Barentsz, but only in the loosest sense; it would also draw heavily on my own experience. I wanted to use just four dancers—one male, to represent the explorer and his crew, and three female, to represent the various forms of hardship they endured—and Isabel agreed. I had even thought of music: at home, in my apartment, I had been listening to Jean Barraqué’s Piano Sonata, which was like a landscape in itself, with its dramatic storms of sound and its desolate silences. Though we had neither commission nor deadline, though the world knew nothing of our collaboration, we worked eagerly. Isabel took notes, using Labanotation, an old-fashioned method of transcribing movement that she had taught me several years before. I cleared a space around the divan so I could develop my ideas in front of her. I wanted to invent steps that captured the shock of being plunged into the unknown. They would be steps taken in the dark, in other words, steps that sought enlightenment. They would reveal how foreign we are to one another. They would illustrate the paradox that when we are naked we become less knowable, and that our skin is the greatest mystery of all.
It felt strange, after so long, to be producing choreography again, and I sometimes caught Isabel giving me an oddly satisfied and yet shrewd look, which it took me a while to dissect. I thought she was probably congratulating herself on having lured me back to work. That was part of it. But she might also have been wondering whether she would live to see the ballet finished. Or perhaps that did not matter to her. She had been the impulse behind it, the catalyst, and that was enough; she expected me to see it through on her behalf—or, even, in her honour. For, although she was stronger than she had been in November, she still tired easily. When she needed rest, I would put on my coat and walk out into the landscape I had grown to love, the pine forest that stretched behind the house, or the sand-dunes, and I would return an hour later with my ears ringing from the wind, and nothing in my mind, nothing except the bleakness of the place and the purity of light—the peace.
•
That Christmas I flew home to see my parents. We had a relaxing, enjoyable few days together. I was able to talk about my collaboration with Isabel, who was, after all, one of the most famous choreographers in Europe. I told them about Barentsz and Nova Zembla, realising, as I did so, that I was giving them a coded version of my own story. I saw once again how much I owed to Isabel. In telling the story of Barentsz, I could give him emotions I had experienced myself—shock, bewilderment, fear, hope, shame. This was as close as I would ever come to telling my family what had happened to me, and perhaps, in the end, it was close enough.
On Boxing Day I met up with Philip, a cousin of mine who I hadn’t seen for years. Philip was already drunk when he arrived at the pub. As soon as he sat down he started telling me about how he was having trouble finding a girlfriend. It was all he wanted, he said, to be married, to have children, but no one was interested in him. He swallowed a third of his pint, sighed deeply, and then said, “What about you?” Suddenly I found myself talking about Juliette. I talked about how we had met, on the train to Amsterdam, and how sympathetic and intuitive she had been. I talked about the quality she had, of seeming to stand all alone in the world, and how I thought it might be to do with her having been adopted. I talked about her beauty, and how lightly she carried it, as if it was a joke someone had played on her. I had never talked about her before, and though it seemed tactless, in the circumstances, I went on talking about her because I felt I was making discoveries. When I stopped, Philip looked at me, his face quite still for a moment, and then he said, “Well, it’s all right for some,” and plunged forlornly back into his beer. Later that night, as I prepared for bed, I leaned on the sink and looked deep into the mirror. Beyond my face. Into the space behind it. The space where we keep secrets, even from ourselves. It’s all right for some, I thought. And then I said the words out loud: “It’s all right for some.” In that moment something was decided—in a way I felt it had been decided for me—and, two days later, on the flight back to Amsterdam, I could scarcely contain my impatience. At last the plane begin its descent, and the clouds parted, and I caught a glimpse of the North Sea, cold and sluggish, and the strip of palest yellow that was the coast of Holland. Then the runway was flashing by, beneath the wing. . . .