The Book of Revelation (21 page)

I climbed the marble staircase slowly, noting the name-plates of other residents—Korzelius, Camacho, D’Amore. . . . The door to Madeleine’s apartment had been left open. I walked inside. There was an immediate and unexpected sense of space. The main room stretched into the distance, its walls looking as though they had recently been whitewashed, its stained wood floor the colour of caramel. Forty or fifty people stood about, talking and drinking. Nobody I knew.

I found Stefan by the french windows that led to the roof terrace. His eyes were slightly glazed, and his mouth was set in a mischievous half-smile. His nostrils, which had always been curved, now had the elaborate, almost ridiculous complexity of the toes on a pair of Turkish slippers. He had already drunk three or four cocktails, he told me, and he had smoked some pot as well. At that moment a girl with short black hair and a red mouth seemed to float out of the darkness behind him. Resting one forearm on Stefan’s shoulder, she gazed at me steadily with dark-brown eyes.

“You must be Madeleine,” I said.

She smiled. “I’ve heard all about you. You’re a dancer.”

“I used to be.”

“What happened?”

“It’s no good asking,” Stefan said. “He won’t tell you.”

Madeleine lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out in a slow, thin stream.

“This apartment’s beautiful,” I said. “You share it, don’t you?”

“Yes, I share it with Jeannine.” Madeleine looked past me, into the room. “I’m not sure where she is. . . .”

So that was her name. Jeannine.

After a while I slipped away, saying I should get myself a drink. I walked through the room, wondering which one she was, wondering if I had already set eyes on her without knowing it. I drank a fruit punch and talked to several people, but I didn’t come across anyone called Jeannine.

Two hours passed. At midnight I ran into Stefan again. This time he was outside, on the terrace. As I moved towards him, he tipped his head back and stared up into the sky. “What a night.” He dipped his mouth into his glass and drank. “You’re lucky, you know.”

“Lucky?” I said.

“To have been away. To have seen the world. . . .” He gestured with one hand—a sloppy semicircle. The world.

This was a conversation I had already had at least once that evening, and I didn’t want to have it again. Since Stefan was so obviously drunk and stoned, I thought I could risk being blunt.

“Have you seen Jeannine?” I said.

“Jeannine? She’s over there.” He stood up straighter, swayed a little, then pointed across the terrace at a group of people talking.

“Which one?”

“Red hair.”

The dark air seemed to shudder suddenly. I turned away. The city stretched out below me. I stared down into a space where there were hardly any lights. The Vondelpark. Named after a seventeenth-century dramatist whose play
Lucifer
had been banned because he had dared to portray heaven and the angels on a stage. Beyond the park, a bright strip of motorway—a ring-road which, if you followed it, would lead eventually to Rotterdam, The Hague—

A nurse, red hair. . . .

I took a deep breath, faced back into the terrace. Stefan was going on about my luck again. Only half listening, I leaned against the railing and watched Jeannine. Her hair was long and fine, and it flowed over her head, showing the shape of it, as water might. She had white skin, as red-haired people often do. Could she really be the leader of the women? Could she be Gertrude? I moved closer, watched her lift a cigarette towards her mouth. I saw the tip of her cigarette glow like a cinder as she inhaled. She wasn’t wearing any nail-varnish. Well, these things change.

For the next half-hour I followed her as she moved through the party. She drank and smoked. She laughed. She was confident. I didn’t think she had noticed me yet, but then it occurred to me that if, by some bizarre coincidence, she actually was Gertrude, then she must be
pretending
not to have noticed me, she must be
pretending
that she didn’t know who I was. In that case, we would both have been watching each other, but without appearing to. . . . What would she do when I approached her? Presumably she would behave like somebody who had never met me before. The women were gamblers, after all. They knew how to take risks. They had nerve. Still, I couldn’t imagine what would happen after the first few moments. . . .

I had been wondering what to say to her, how to effect a meeting, but in the end she did it for me. At about one in the morning I was following her downstairs for the second time when she suddenly stopped, turned round. She must have forgotten something, or remembered something. At any rate, it all happened so abruptly that we collided. She apologised in Dutch.

“That’s all right,” I said. “You’re Jeannine, aren’t you?”

She registered surprise with a slight backward movement of her upper body and a twist of her head, her cigarette held out sideways, at shoulder-height.

“You’re a nurse,” I said.

“You seem to know all about me.” There was a wariness in her voice, as if she hadn’t yet decided whether my knowledge was a good or a bad thing.

I introduced myself. “I’m living with Stefan.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Haven’t you just been away?”

“That’s me.”

To give myself some time, I asked her where she worked. She wasn’t really a nurse, she said—at least, not any more. She was attached to a psychiatric clinic, doing research into the treatment of depression. While she talked about her job, which she did quite naturally, I tried to form a picture of her body. She was dressed in a see-through turquoise shirt with a black bra underneath, and a pair of black hipsters that flared slightly towards the ankles. Though her clothes could be said to be revealing, it was surprising, in the end, how little they actually revealed. I could see her collar-bone, and the beginning of a cleavage, both of which seemed unfamiliar—as did her wrists, her hands, her fingers. . . . But if she took off everything she was wearing, then I would know for sure. Something primitive would flash through me. My body would remember. If I saw her naked I would know.

“You’re not listening,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was looking at you.”

An odd expression rose on to her face, a mixture of amusement and confusion. She didn’t know what to make of me. She dropped her cigarette into the empty glass she was holding. A quick hiss as the cigarette went out. Downstairs they were playing the club re-mix of a song that had been famous that summer.

“Would you like to dance?” she said.

I shook my head. “No, not really.” Then, almost without thinking, I leaned down and kissed her. Though I had surprised her, she had let it happen.

“Is there somewhere we could go?” I asked.

“You don’t waste much time, do you.” Once again, she seemed more amused than anything, as if she had never come across someone like me before.

Taking my hand, she led me down to the next floor. During our conversation on the stairs I must have changed my mind at least a dozen times. One moment I was disappointed because she obviously wasn’t one of the women I was looking for; the way she was behaving, wary and yet provocative, was entirely natural, I felt. The next moment, imagining that she was Gertrude, I silently applauded her extraordinary skill in dissembling. She should have been an actress, not a nurse. . . .

I followed her along a corridor lined with books, through an unlit hallway, then down another, smaller corridor and into an oblong room with a high ceiling. She stood aside to let me go in first, then locked the door behind us. There was a washbasin against one wall and a toilet in the corner. Was this a reference on her part, a sign of guilt? I turned round. In the darkness I could hardly see her—just the outline of her head and shoulders, and the almost metallic gleam of her teeth when she spoke.

“The light doesn’t work,” she said. “Do you mind?”

I said I didn’t.

She moved towards me until she was only inches away from me. Each time my heart beat, the air behind her appeared to contract. I put my hands on her hips. We kissed two or three times, quickly, as if touching something that we feared might be hot, then we kissed more slowly, and for longer. Her mouth was sweet from the alcohol, though I could also taste the charred flavour of cigarette smoke. I guided her towards the window, which was tall and set deep in the wall. Lights from outside showed through the old-fashioned frosted-glass like fireworks frozen in mid-explosion. She seemed to know what I wanted her to do. When she felt the gap behind her, where the window was, she hoisted herself up on to the sill. She was even harder to see now that she had her back to the light. I knew her face was plain—not ugly, but not memorable either—and I found, strangely, that that excited me. I unfastened the buttons on her turquoise blouse and watched it float away from her shoulders, then I undid her bra. Her breasts were round and resilient, with tiny nipples. I kissed them gently. Her head snapped back, banged softly against the glass. From somewhere inside her came a murmur, almost as if she was humming to herself.

I pulled her trousers and pants down to her knees, then I eased her forwards until the tops of her thighs were level with the thick lip of the windowsill. Again she seemed to anticipate me, reaching upwards and backwards, and gripping the sash of the window with both hands. She was looking down at me, her hair falling across her face. Her breasts shone where I had touched them with my tongue.

Her pants and trousers had gathered around her ankles in an untidy heap. I could see her pubic hair now, darker than the darkness. I couldn’t tell what colour it was, though. Thinking I would have to be with her at least once more, I put my tongue in her belly button, then ran it slowly down into the first tight coils of hair. Then further down, to where the flesh parted, opened, turned to liquid. . . .

Later, as she closed the bathroom door, she said, “I hope you don’t—” Then she stopped herself.

“Don’t what?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

I told her that I ought to be leaving. Walking out of the apartment, I heard myself apologise, make an excuse—I had to be up early, I said, which was a lie, of course—but I promised I would call her in the week. Stefan would give me the number. As I rode off on my bicycle I glanced over my shoulder. She was standing on the top step, waving.

•

During the five days that elapsed between Madeleine’s party and the next time I saw Jeannine I slept with three other nurses. In a bar on Sunday night I talked to a girl whose sloping shoulders reminded me of Maude. In bed she turned away from me, as if from a bright light. Very faintly, in the distance, I thought I heard a voice murmuring.
Don’t worry. It’s only a dream
. . . . I leaned up on my elbows, looking down at her. I could see the curve of her left buttock, a handful of coarse brown hair. The skin at the base of her neck was milky, almost greenish in colour, like mould. Her body shook, as if she was crying. I tried to comfort her, but it was no use.

“Do you want to go?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. She just lay on the bed, with her back to me, naked and trembling.

“Perhaps you should sleep,” I said.

I drew the covers over her and turned out the light.

In the morning we passed Stefan, who was outside the house, unlocking his bicycle. He peered at us through the light rain, raising his eyebrows slightly, in surprise. Probably Madeleine had told him that I was seeing Jeannine. Or perhaps it was simply that we looked like such an unusual couple.

On Tuesday I slept with two nurses who worked at the hospital near Muiderpoort station. I met them in the Oosterpark, which was just across the road from the hospital. They often went for walks during their breaks, they told me, or, if the weather was warm, they lay on the grass and sunbathed. When the three of us were naked in their two-room apartment in De Pijp, they mixed French martinis, then turned on MTV and rolled a joint. They seemed just as interested in each other as they were in me, which suited me perfectly: it meant I could examine them both in detail. There was nothing remotely familiar about their bodies, nothing at all, and, as I lay beside them, noticing the differences between them—differences in build, differences in colouring and texture—I thought of Julia who used to work for the company, in the costume department. Once, when I was up there for a fitting, she had showed me her notebook. It was a record of the skin-tones of every dancer in the company. Sometimes the difference was dramatic—the difference between Tyrone, a black American, for example, and Suitsugu, who was from Japan—but what interested me most was the difference between people I had always thought of as more or less identical. Julia found the swatch that represented my skin, then she turned to Marcel, a French dancer, who was on the next page.
You’re both white,
she said,
but you’re so unalike. Marcel has more pink pigment in his colouration, you see? And here,
turning another page,
is Jorg. Something almost yellow
. . . . At the time I had seen the notebook in almost metaphorical terms, as a testament to individuality, as proof of everyone’s uniqueness—and so concise, so
precise,
in the way that it distinguished one person from another. Lying in bed with the two nurses, though, I came at it from a new angle. A notebook like that could be practical, I thought. It could help you find somebody. It was a means of identification.

By the time I met Jeannine on Thursday I was feeling awkward. Despite having sex, I had to avoid all personal involvement, and, unlike most men I have talked to, this did not come naturally to me. Ironically, it was those men I was now beginning to resemble. On one occasion that week I was sitting in a café watching students walk in and out of the medical faculty across the road when I happened to notice two builders at the next table. They were doing exactly what I was doing. I suddenly realised that, to an impartial observer, to somebody who had no inside knowledge, I was no different to the men with the dirty low-slung jeans and the cement dust in their hair. I was just a man watching women. And, like the builders, I wanted to go further, of course. In the case of Jeannine, though, I had the feeling that I had been clumsy. Our encounter at the party had had the excitement of the illicit. It had been too charged. Perhaps, also, I had allowed her to think that I felt something for her. But I couldn’t afford to have a relationship with her. I couldn’t afford to have a relationship with anyone. There was no room for it, no time for it. I walked towards the restaurant, knowing it would not be an easy night.