The Book of Revelation (15 page)

When I talked to Isabel on the phone I didn’t say anything about my disappearance. I didn’t even mention the fact that Brigitte and I were separating. I simply asked if I could come and stay with her for a while. Her response was immediate and typical: I could stay as long as I liked—in fact, I’d be doing her a favour, she said, because she had to teach in Oslo that summer, and she’d been thinking she should find someone to move into the place while she was away. This was also typical of Isabel, that she should underplay her generosity, disguise it as self-interest.

That evening I dialled Fernanda’s number and spoke to Brigitte. I told her she could live in our apartment. She had her dancing to think of, her career—her life. It would make more sense, I said, if I was the one to leave.

“What about
your
career?” she said. There was a curious flatness in her voice, a sort of reluctance, as if she was only asking out of politeness.

I said something noncommittal. When she asked me where I would go, I told her not to worry. I would find somewhere.

“What about money?”

I didn’t follow.

“The rent,” she said. “I can’t pay the rent by myself.”

“Oh, I see.” I paused. “You’ll have to find someone to share with you.”

She took a quick breath, as if I had startled her, and I realised that she was smoking. She often smoked when she was on the phone. She would be holding the cigarette packet and the lighted cigarette in one hand, and the receiver in the other. This whole thing had started with the absence of a cigarette, and now, as we came out the other side, Brigitte was smoking. There was a neatness about it, a symmetry, that was almost comical. But she was saying something.

“Someone to share with me?” She sounded nervous, apprehensive.

“It shouldn’t be too difficult,” I told her. “It’s a nice place.”

•

I have heard people talk about the comfort a woman can provide, but it’s not something I’m particularly familiar with. Perhaps there’s a lack in me, some kind of failing or deformity. I don’t know. Or perhaps it’s just that I never looked for comfort, never needed it—at least, not until that still grey afternoon in May when I walked back into our apartment after an absence of eighteen days. . . .

Then I needed it more than I have ever needed anything.

Since it wasn’t offered, though, since it didn’t become available to me, I couldn’t begin to unburden myself; I couldn’t begin to shift my anger or my sense of shame. I was unable to forge a link between the life I’d had before and the life I would have from that point on. Instead, the two lives became separable, at odds with each other, like stray cats fighting for the same piece of territory, and it would not be long, I felt, before one of them was driven off for good.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Brigitte had put down the glass jug she was holding and said,
Come here
. If she had taken my head in her two hands and drawn it gently to her breast. . . .

It’s a fantasy, of course.

Certainly, it would have been unlike her. Brigitte was a dancer—an artist. The only thing she was capable of nurturing was her own talent. I don’t mean to sound bitter or resentful. I don’t even mean to criticise her. It’s simply a fact.

The truth is, in the context of our relationship, there was only one person who was capable of providing comfort and support, and that was me.

•

I took almost nothing from the apartment—my notebooks, a few photographs, some clothes. Midday was striking as I walked to my car. I loaded the boxes into the boot, then I unlocked the door on the driver’s side and climbed in. Through the windscreen I could see a man of about my own age reading on the roof of a houseboat. He had tangled black hair and wore a pair of oil-stained dark-green Bermudas. He was too deep in his book to notice me. I watched a cat pad past him, its tail curling round one of his thin tanned legs. The sun lay flat on the canal, making the water look opaque. In the distance I could hear a motor launch, a drowsy sound, like a wasp trapped against a window-pane in September. I slid the key into the ignition, but didn’t turn it. I wanted to stay exactly where I was, for ever. The man reading the book, the cat, the sunlight on the water. . . . One minute passed, and then another. The spell lasted. Then I started the car, shifted into gear and, pulling out into the street, drove in the direction of Haarlemmerweg, which, as its name suggests, would take me to Haarlem, and then on, towards the coast. . . .

I felt no sadness as I drove, no sense of bitterness or remorse. No, none of that. Instead, there was a feeling of suspension. As if, after days of weighing too much, I now weighed almost nothing. I noticed how the trees shivered at the edge of the road, and how the sunlight silvered all their leaves. I noticed the rush of cool air through the half-open window, air that seemed delicately laced with salt. I was using only the bright parts of my mind, the shiny surfaces: if I tried to imagine the inside of my head I saw something smooth and concave, something lustrous, and nothing could find purchase there, everything slid effortlessly away.

I think there’s a sense in which all dancers are introspective. There’s also a sense in which they’re vain. It’s part of being self-critical, and self-criticism, if you’re a dancer, is central to your art: you have to know how to exploit it to your advantage. If you had visited the apartment where I lived with Brigitte you would have seen photos of us everywhere. It wasn’t exhibitionism exactly—or, if it was, then it was only because our art revolved around exhibiting ourselves. Dancers spend more time in front of the mirror than any other profession I can think of. They study every aspect of themselves—every muscle, every tendon, every line of every limb. They learn their bodies off by heart. They are exploring their own potential, but they are also looking for limitations, flaws. So they can work on them. In that respect, their vanity is a form of meditation, even of perfectionism. Of course, some dancers take it to extremes. Vivian, for instance. There was always something wrong with Vivian—or not
wrong,
necessarily, but not quite right. Her sensitivity to her own physical condition was so highly developed, so finely tuned, that she would feel injuries coming, injuries that often never actually arrived. If you walked up to Vivian and said,
How are you?,
she would take the question literally. On a good day she would say something laconic like,
Oh, you know, I’ll survive
. Otherwise you would have to listen to a whole litany of ailments. And then there was Milo, of course—Milodrama, as we called him. . . . This degree of self-absorption was not unusual in the world of dance, but I was outside it now. I had left it behind. I had been freed from something I had lived with for many years—lived
by,
you might almost say. I had been freed from something I had loved. It was a freedom, finally, that had no qualities, neither good nor bad. It was only unequivocal. It was a freedom such as death might give you.

•

The house stood at the top of a small incline, which Isabel liked to refer to as the highest point in Holland. As I drove up the long, curving road I was surprised to see her step out of her garden gate—surprised because I had not told her when I was coming. Even at a distance, she was recognisable; with her straight back and her chin slightly raised, she often looked as if she was reviewing troops. She was wearing a plain white dress that afternoon, and she had coiled her hair into a chignon. Sunglasses hung against her breastbone on a silver chain. I parked the car and walked towards her with a bunch of Montenegro lilies I had bought in a flower shop on the way down.

“I heard the door-bell,” she said, “but there was no one there,” and she frowned quickly and then shook her head, as if she thought she might be going mad.

“You were a few minutes early,” I said, “that’s all.”

I kissed her three times, as is the Dutch custom, then handed her the lilies. She looked down at them, but only for a moment.

“Exquisite,” she said.

I couldn’t help smiling. I had seen Isabel with bouquets so many times—on stage, in dressing-rooms, at parties—and though she often appeared offhand, if not downright unappreciative, I knew this had less to do with arrogance than with its opposite, a kind of modesty, a feeling of general unworthiness, an inevitable dissatisfaction with whatever it was that she had achieved.

We turned and walked into the house. In the hallway we came across a stocky middle-aged man. He had black hair and dark eyes, and he was slitting a letter open with a paper-knife. I remember thinking that the suit he was wearing was exactly the same colour as milk chocolate.

“Isabel,” he said, “I thought you were in Oslo.”

Isabel said she wasn’t leaving until Friday, as he knew perfectly well; she had told him so at least half a dozen times. The man listened to her with an expression that was both sombre and amused. His eyes dropped momentarily to the lilies she was holding, then lifted again—not to her face, though, but to mine. His gaze was oddly appraising, as if he remembered hearing something about me and was now measuring me against it. Isabel introduced us. The man’s name was Paul Bouhtala, and he was a neighbour of hers. When she told him I would be spending the summer in her apartment, he suggested we might have dinner together one night—but only if I had time, of course. I smiled and thanked him for the invitation.

“Paul used to be a diamond merchant, among other things,” Isabel told me as she opened the door to her apartment. “I think he retired, though.” She let out a sigh, which had more to do with how she viewed her own retirement, I felt, than that of Paul Bouhtala.

We sat on her terrace at the back of the house and drank home-made lemonade. I felt sure she noticed the grazes on my wrists, but she didn’t ask me what had happened—not on that afternoon, not on any afternoon. She didn’t even allude to it. And yet I had the feeling that if I had wanted to talk to her she would have listened. She had worked with dancers for more than half her life. She understood when to stand back and give them space, and when to intervene.

These are the people I have learned to value most, the people who know how to do that. That tact, that lightness of touch, that grace—I see it as a form of wisdom. They’re not born with it, these people. Nobody is. It’s a quality you have to identify in yourself and then develop.

•

That night Isabel cooked a light supper—fettuccine with wild mushrooms, and a salad of tomatoes and fresh basil. We drank a bottle of chilled white wine, following it with small glasses of a pear liqueur that she had distilled herself. With coffee, she smoked several Egyptian cigarettes, which smelled of wood, and also, somehow, of cream. She had started smoking in her sixties, and held her cigarettes horizontally, between finger and thumb, which gave her—or so I always thought—the air of somebody who gambled. Light-headed from the alcohol, I asked her about her early life, the years just before the war. I had heard whispers of a lesbian affair. While still married to a Dutch industrialist, she was supposed to have fallen for a prima ballerina from the Ukraine. The details were shadowy and scandalous.

“You’re not really interested, are you?” she said, watching me through smoke that twisted in front of her like pale undergrowth.

I assured her that I was.

“You’re humouring me,” she said.

I smiled. “I wouldn’t dare.”

“It’s the most terrible thing about being old,” she said. “Nobody wants to listen to your stories—and you have so many!” She chuckled, then coughed, and, reaching over, tapped a length of ash into the silver dish at her elbow.

That is my most enduring memory of that first night in Bloemendaal—the creamy sawdust smell of the Egyptian cigarettes she was smoking, that and something she told me about the ballerina.

“The most extraordinary thing. . . .” Isabel’s voice was low, and it had filled with a kind of wonder, as if what was stored in her memory still surprised her. “This girl had a birthmark on her back, at the bottom of her spine. It was a pale-pink colour, about so big.” She measured two inches in the air with her finger and thumb. “And you know what? It looked like a sea-horse. . . .” She paused, thinking back. “Exactly like a sea-horse,” she said, and then she shook her head and leaned back in her chair, her eyes lifting past my shoulder, drifting into the shadows behind me.

•

The spare room lay at the far end of the apartment, above the study. I had to climb a wrought-iron spiral staircase, past shelves crammed unevenly with books, then grope my way down an unlit corridor that was so narrow that my shoulders brushed against the walls. Eventually, I came to a door. Easing it open, I reached round to the right and found the light-switch. The room was not quite as I had remembered it. With its metal frame and its white counterpane, the single bed looked spartan, almost monastic—where was the divan Brigitte and I had slept in?—but the walls had been painted a powdery egg-shell blue, and the chest at the foot of the bed looked as if it might once have held a pirate captain’s treasure. On the bedside table stood a vase of irises. On the floor lay a simple rug whose rich pale colours made me think of the Sahara, though I had never actually been there. There was only one window, and it was set into the slanting wall that faced the bed, and opened outwards in two halves, the way shutters do. It was so quiet in the room that the air seemed to be making a sound of its own.

On that first night I leaned on the windowsill, a little drunk, and watched the blackness of the forest pulse and swirl. I thought of the pink sea-horse at the bottom of the ballerina’s spine, then I thought of the coin-shaped scar on the hip-bone of a woman I had called Astrid. After that my mind went blank.

A wind moved through the trees. There was a delicious smell of pine-needles mixed with sea-salt and damp earth.

I slept heavily and did not dream.

At ten o’clock the next morning I woke to see a thin bar of sunlight lying on the floor like a misplaced stair-rod. Still half-asleep, I felt it was telling me I should tread carefully. There were folds and wrinkles in the world. There were pieces missing. If I wasn’t careful I could trip and fall.