Intimacies(29)

A waiter was moving through what remained of the crowd, distributing plates of seedcake. Jana took two plates and handed me one. She began eating, she must have been very hungry. How is Adriaan? she asked between bites. She wasn’t looking at me as she spoke, but there was nothing false about the casual way in which she asked the question, she was too tired to be self-conscious. I thought he was very nice, she said, and her manner was so matter-of-fact that I wondered if I had imagined it all, the complicity and the flirtation. He seemed kind. Which is a rarity. She took another bite and then looked at me. Don’t you think? I nodded. I didn’t say anything further. But I believed her words to be true. Later that evening, I sent Adriaan a message, I asked when he would return, and then I asked how things were with Gaby, where things stood with his marriage.





11.


Adriaan did not reply to the message. A day passed, and after I reached for my phone yet again in the hopes of having received a reply, I lowered it and looked around me. I had been living in Adriaan’s apartment for over a month and yet I had changed almost nothing inside it. I realized I had been trying to occupy the apartment in as discreet a manner as possible, as if to illustrate to Adriaan upon his return how easily I would slip into the fabric of his life, how little disturbance I would cause. To understand this was humiliating. I was a woman waiting for a lover, dressed in obscene lingerie, body arrayed on the bed in a pose of hopeful seduction.

I felt sudden and real anger toward Adriaan, who had placed me in this absurd position, who had asked me to live in his apartment, had promised to return in a week, only to abscond into silence. It was not that I had never before experienced an unexpected silence from a man, but I would not have expected that from Adriaan. I placed the phone on the table, I looked around again, nothing had changed in the apartment, with the exception of the volume I had purchased at Anton de Rijk’s shop in the Old Town. I had been complicit in my own erasure.

I picked up the book, this history on The Hague, and held it in my hand. I saw the volume now for what it was, the artifact of a brief moment when I thought I might yet have a place in Adriaan’s city. I threw the book hard across the room. The burn of humiliation remained in my throat all day, and by the following day I felt deflated and worn out. I had made myself too easy to leave, stashed away like a spare part, I had asked for too little, and now it was too late. That feeling was with me still when I received an email from Jana, a few days later, addressed to both Eline and myself. It was obvious that we should be friends, she wrote, and she was putting us in touch.

I scrolled down the email chain and saw that it was Eline who had written first, congratulating Jana again on the success of the exhibition and saying how much she had enjoyed meeting me. I felt flattered, I remembered how I had liked Eline, and I wrote back at once. I wanted to be taken out of my own thoughts, away from the entire impossible situation. We arranged to meet at a café close to Adriaan’s apartment. As I entered, it occurred to me that she might ask if I lived in the area, and I did not know what I would say. Happily, that feeling of uncertainty dissipated as soon as I saw her. She was sitting at a table by the window and in daylight she seemed more delicate than she had at the Mauritshuis, her skin even paler. There were lines around her eyes that I had not noticed before, she was likely older than I had first thought.

As I sat down opposite her, I was conscious again of her brother, Anton de Rijk, like a prickling in the skin. He was a man I had never seen but of whom I had been aware for some time, and whose phantom image she now seemed to summon. She was drinking a cup of herbal tea, she said that of late she had been having trouble sleeping. I nodded. I thought it was likely because of her brother, and it occurred to me that if I asked her why her sleep was so troubled she might even tell me, about the assault, about her brother’s physical health.

After a moment, I asked, Is it something in particular? As I asked the question I glanced around the café, as if looking for the waiter, to keep the query from gathering weight. She shook her head. I have a touch of insomnia, it’s been that way for years, even when I was a child I was an insomniac. I looked back at her, she was smiling as she spoke. I could never sleep in my own bed, she continued. I would crawl into bed with my parents, I would sleep on the floor in the sitting room, one time my parents found me sleeping on the kitchen counter. She laughed and took a sip of her tea. That no longer happens, thank goodness. But I do all the usual things, I take the necessary precautions. No caffeine after noon, no screens in the bedroom.

She paused. You haven’t even ordered, I apologize. She raised her hand and the waiter came to the table. I ordered a coffee, despite my own trouble sleeping, which had redoubled with Adriaan’s recent silence. After the waiter left, she said, Jana told me you’ve been here less than a year, that you’ve put the city on probation. We both laughed, the invocation of Jana’s name furthered our ease. How are we doing, she asked, will you stay? Possibly, I said, if my contract is extended. I didn’t say anything about Adriaan.

Where is home?

My family’s now in Singapore. Before that I lived in New York.

She nodded. And you enjoy the work?

It’s not without complication, I said, and I thought of the former president. The other interpreters had taken to calling me his favorite; it was and it was not a joke. I’d realized that to the others it was a matter of recognition and even distinction, being requested by the accused in this fashion. That such attention could be considered desirable was troubling, it changed the way I saw my colleagues, the register of our interactions in the office, the small talk we made over lunch.