As soon as I was inside the airport I went to a pay-phone and rang Juliette. She wasn’t there, so I left a message.
I’m back. I need to see you. Call me
. I rang her again when I reached my apartment, and this time she answered. She asked me what Christmas had been like. I told her that my parents had given me a towel, a tie and three pairs of socks. They had always been hopeless at presents. She laughed.
“Perhaps you’re a mystery to them as well,” she said.
“Perhaps.” I swallowed quickly. “That’s why I’m calling, actually. I wanted to tell you. All that’s over.”
Juliette was silent, and I could see her face, eyes lowered, as she weighed up what I had just said.
I asked her what she was doing for New Year.
“Oh, you know,” she said, “there are some parties.”
“I had an idea,” I said. “I thought we could walk down to the Nieuw Markt, just the two of us. They have fireworks down there, don’t they?”
“You know, I’ve never done that,” she said, “not in all the years I’ve lived here. Not even when I was a child.”
“So would you like to?”
“Yes, I would.”
“What about the parties?”
“What parties?” she said, and laughed.
•
I left my apartment at just after half-past eight on New Year’s Eve. The canals had thawed a few days before, and everything that had been thrown on to the ice had sunk swiftly to the bottom, never to be seen again. This seemed to augur well. It was strange. I had become superstitious for the first time in my life. I was seeing omens everywhere.
I had arranged to meet Juliette in a bar not far from the red-light district, and I walked quickly, wanting to get there first. As I crossed Marnixstraat I saw somebody aim a rocket out of the window of a passing car and light the touch-paper. For one extraordinary moment the car seemed to be attached to a nearby tree by a frayed bright-orange rope, then the car raced on, making for Leidseplein, and I stood and watched as the tree showered sparks in all directions, like a dog shaking water off its coat.
When I arrived, Juliette was already there, sitting on a tall stool at the bar. She was wearing a new black leather jacket and a short red mini-skirt with black wool tights. She sat very upright, which gave her a haughty, almost majestic air.
“I thought I was early,” I said as I walked up to her.
She looked at her watch, then smiled. “You are early,” she said, “but I was even earlier.”
Instead of the usual three kisses on alternate cheeks, I leaned forwards and kissed her lips. They were softer than I remembered, and sweet from the hot chocolate that she was drinking. I stood back. She looked both surprised and curious, and yet there was still the ghost of a smile on her face.
“I’ve missed you,” I said. “I really have. It’s been so long.”
“Do I look the same?”
“More beautiful, if anything.”
I ordered a whisky and stood beside her, aware that my leg was touching hers. All around me people’s faces glowed, as if lit from inside. The last night of the year.
“What’s in the bag?” Juliette asked, touching the small backpack I was carrying.
I handed it to her. “Have a look.”
She undid the drawstring, reached inside and took out a bottle of champagne. “For us?”
I nodded. “For later. Midnight.”
She reached inside again. This time she found a small white packet tied up with silver ribbon.
“That’s for you,” I said. “A present.”
This was not something she had been expecting. I watched her untie the ribbon, then undo the wrapping-paper. Inside was a small square box. She lifted the lid off the box and there, lying in a bed of cotton-wool, was a silver chain with a 2 1/2-guilder coin attached to it. It was the coin I had skimmed across the canal, the coin she had led me out across the ice to find. I wondered if she would understand what I meant by it. I hoped she would. I watched her as she looked down at the present, which was now coiled, glinting, in the palm of her hand.
“You trust me,” she said.
•
Though it was only a short distance to the Nieuw Markt, it took us twenty minutes, the crowd thickening as we drew closer. Once, somebody lit a firecracker that must have been at least fifteen feet long, and people scattered in all directions. I felt Juliette tighten her grip on my hand as we backed against a wall. We watched from a distance as the firecracker writhed and twisted and flung itself about, loud as a machine-gun in the narrow street, then the crowd flowed on, laughing, drinking, making jokes, and, all of a sudden, we were in the square. . . .
The atmosphere was jubilant, chaotic. Bonfires had been built on the cobblestones, using whatever came to hand: cardboard boxes, broken chairs, fruit crates—even a rowing-boat. We passed two men who were wearing giant, painted papier-mâché heads. We saw a girl on stilts stalking through pale, drifting clouds of smoke. Fireworks fizzed horizontally through the darkness, missing people by inches, and the air shook with constant explosions.
We sat down by the fountain and opened the champagne.
“I’ve got some pot,” Juliette said.
She took a joint out of her pocket, lit it and passed it to me. I drew the smoke into my lungs and held it there.
“Look,” I said.
From where we were sitting, at the base of the fountain, we could see two transvestites, one dressed in a full-length black ball-gown, the other one in white. They wore extravagant, eighteenth-century wigs, with heavy rolls of hair that tumbled halfway down their backs, and, judging by the way they lurched and tottered across the cobbles, their heels were six inches high. They called out to each other in raucous voices, trading obscene remarks and grimacing theatrically through layers of foundation. Small kerosene lamps arranged in a wide circle marked their territory.
Juliette was smiling. “They’re wonderful.”
We stood up and walked over. The transvestite in the black dress was drinking from a champagne bottle. The one in white blew smoke rings and winked at men whenever he caught them watching. They took turns lighting the fireworks that were placed haphazardly on the ground all round them.
As I passed the champagne to Juliette, the transvestite who was wearing black swayed over to her. Up close his dress looked exactly like charred newspaper. I had the feeling that if I touched the fabric it would crumble into dust.
He raised his bottle and touched it against hers. The weighty clink of thick green glass.
“So who are you with tonight?” he said.
Juliette grinned, but didn’t answer.
The transvestite turned to me. His teeth were gappy and rotten, and his hollow eyes glittered with an almost subterranean light. He spoke to me in Dutch, putting his mouth close to my ear, so close that I could smell the alcohol and tobacco on his breath, and the sickly, sodden perfume of his skin.
“She’s beautiful,” he said. “Look after her.”
Then he staggered away across the cobblestones, stooping once to light another firework with the tip of his cigarette.
“What did he say?” Juliette asked.
I smiled. “I can’t tell you.”
“It was about me?”
I nodded.
“Was it nice?”
I looked at the transvestite. He was twenty yards away, flirting with a group of boys who were drinking beer out of cans. His champagne bottle was empty now, and he held it by the neck like a juggler’s club. I let my eyes drift beyond him. The sky flashed mauve and white and crimson above the rooftops as fireworks exploded in the side-streets behind the square.
“It was perfect,” I said.
Just then all the clocks began to strike. It was midnight, and we hadn’t even realised. I laughed and took Juliette in my arms and when the last note sounded, a roar filled the square, as if a furnace door had been opened, or a great wind had descended, and we clung to each other, and we kissed for so long, my tongue touching hers, that when I opened my eyes I was dazzled by the eerie silver light that seemed to surround us. I stood back and looked at her and even though I was stoned by now, drunk too, I still had the same feeling of absolute certainty that I had had while I was looking into the mirror at my parents’ house five days before.
At half-past twelve we left the square and walked back to my apartment in the Kinkerbuurt. The streets were covered with the remnants of firecrackers, scraps of dull red paper that lay in heaps, like autumn leaves. We passed a young couple dancing slowly on a bridge. The girl was humming a tune I didn’t recognise, her eyes closed. The boy’s leather coat had the gleam of chrome.
“I used to be a dancer,” I said suddenly.
Juliette turned and stared at me.
“I was a choreographer as well. I used to be quite famous.” I smiled at the thought of that.
She asked me what I had done, and I mentioned the titles of my ballets.
“You know, I think I saw one of them.” She was standing in the middle of the street, between the tramlines, nodding to herself. “My father took me. I must have been about fifteen.”
She began to describe a ballet, which I scarcely recognised.
“It’s funny,” she said, “but when I first saw you, on the train, I thought there was something familiar about you. It made it easier to talk to you, somehow.”
I had to smile at that. It was her very unfamiliarity that had attracted me to her. It was the fact that I knew for certain that I had never seen her before.
“But you work in a bar now. . . .” She left the sentence hanging in a such a way that it became a question.
“It’s temporary,” I said.
“Will you go back to dancing?”
“Not dancing. Choreography maybe. In the last few weeks, it’s surfaced again, the urge to do something. . . .”
On Jacob van Lennepkade there were lights burning in most of the apartment windows, though the canal was quiet and still. We turned into the street where I lived. As I took out my keys, Juliette put a hand on my arm.
“Let me,” she said.
She took the keys from me and opened the door. Inside, she found the light-switch. There was a dark-green door to the left and, beyond it, a narrow flight of stairs leading steeply upwards.
“Which floor?” she said.
“Third.”
We climbed the stairs in silence. On the third floor she hesitated, studying each of the doors in turn.
“It’s on your right,” I said.
The light on the stairs clicked off as she turned the key in the lock. She pushed the door open cautiously and stepped inside. A ghostly rectangle rose out of the darkness beyond her like a photograph developing. The living-room window. Outside, on the street, there was a plane tree, and the intricate shadow of its bare branches covered one entire wall and all the furniture in that half of the room.
I followed Juliette into the apartment, closing the door behind her. The air smelled of the jute matting I had put down and also, faintly, of dried flowers. In the middle of the living-room she turned to me, her face serious, intent, but apprehensive, as if she was about to attempt something dangerous.
“I’m in love with you,” she said.
Putting one hand on my chest, she reached up and kissed me. Her mouth was relaxed, cool. She kissed me again, slipping her leather jacket off her shoulders, allowing it to fall on the floor behind her. We were still in darkness. On the wall the mirror glinted, alive and silvery, a magnet for what little light there was.
I drew her close to me. She pressed her body into mine, as though she wanted to leave an imprint of herself on me. There was an urgency about her, an insistence, which made me feel that I was less experienced than she was. Faintly, in the distance, I heard the whistle of a rocket.
In the bedroom we undressed each other, taking the same care that she had taken with her present earlier that evening. It was the only thing she was wearing that she would not part with. As she lay down, I watched the coin slide between her breasts and settle in the hollow of her collarbone. In the darkness, naked, she looked so black. Like something I could disappear into.
“Kiss me,” she whispered. “Kiss me all over.”
I started with her feet, moved slowly upwards.
I had seen so many women’s bodies, even in that room, that bed, but always in a highly twisted state of anticipation. I was always looking for marks, for signs—for evidence. I had been a detective, eliminating suspects. Now, though, with Juliette, I knew there would be nothing I had ever seen before. Everything was strange. Everything was new.
“Your hair smells of fireworks,” she murmured.
I wanted to delay the moment that I entered her. I wanted to please her endlessly before that happened. Because, for once, there was no reason not to. Because, at last, I could.
I remember that she reached out and touched my wrist and that the clock on the bedside table said twenty-five-past four. She held her face quite still below me, as if it was full to the brim, as if it might spill.
“Put it in me now,” she whispered.
•
At the beginning of January in Amsterdam there are images of abandonment and desolation almost everywhere you look. After the New Year people put their Christmas trees out on the street. The trees lie on their sides, shedding scores of brittle, bright-orange needles. They quickly become skeletal. Clogging the gutters are the remains of all the Chinese firecrackers, another kind of foliage, faded and soggy, but still red. Dead trees, dead leaves. . . . It’s a dead time, perhaps, in any city. The holiday is over, and most people go back to work, with nothing to look forward to for months. It’s a strange time to be in love. You feel as if you’re going against the grain. You feel chosen. Lucky.
That year the weather was cold and grey. When the bar closed, I would walk home to find Juliette asleep in my bed. Sometimes she woke when she heard the door, and she would rise up out of the bedclothes, eyes wide open, and say my name. She wasn’t awake, though, not really. I would stroke her hair, and kiss her, and she would soon sink back among the pillows. When her breathing had deepened, I would go into the kitchen, with its green walls, and make myself a cup of herb tea. I would sit there quietly, reading English newspapers. Outside, it would be silent except for the late-night traffic two or three streets away, a soft rushing sound that reminded me of air-conditioning, and, every now and then, there would be a rustle of sheets as Juliette turned in the bed. After an hour, when I had left work far behind, I would slide into bed beside her, fitting my body against hers, one hand resting on her upturned hip. There were nights when I lay there in the darkness, in the silence, and my thoughts slipped their moorings. Time slowed down. Opened out. I felt myself float free. I was happier than I had ever expected to be, given the circumstances. But also, curiously, I felt as if my happiness was earned. I had waited so long for it. I deserved it. Which gave it a different quality, a different value, to any happiness I had known before.