“How’s Nadja?”
“Wait a moment, I think …”
“What is it?”
“Oh, I thought there was a knock at the door. I thought someone was coming to vacuum or empty the wastepaper basket. There’s so much to do here. Every week a young man comes to clean the windows. He takes the flowerpots off the windowsill, they’re blue Alpine violets, and puts them on the table, where they immediately start to give off their scent. Odd, the way they refuse to do so normally. He’s a very nice young man. He cleans the windows and scrubs for me. Because he knows I see no reason for a conversation, he suggested recently that he just turn on the radio. He hadn’t even touched the thing before a loud male voice was filling my room with talk about how both his father and his grandfather had led strikes and the entire harbor was going to be idle next Tuesday. Yes, I thought, yes of course, life means action, and I watch the boy reach for the bucket with such an absurdly, movingly intelligent expression, in order to go to the bathroom and fill it with water. I kept my own face neutral. My eyes are turned inward. The stage is empty and the lighting terrible, but now and then a shocked figure appears. I look at it blankly. Nadja …”
“Yes?”
“Oh, you know, basically it’s always remained inexplicable. But inexplicable doesn’t mean, according to people who know that sort of thing, that it doesn’t happen quite often. The goal of life, which everyone makes such a big deal out of, seems to be totally irrelevant when it comes to the actual impetus that keeps the whole thing going — it must be some terrifying sort of egoism, pure willpower, that can occasionally dump the whole mess at your feet. Nadja asked for a glass of water, and someone, a lonely lady sitting on a bench with a book, so they told me, went into a pub and got it for her. She had no heart trouble, at least nothing pathological, the autopsy established that. Strange, yes. The local doctor, lacking her medical history, couldn’t issue a death certificate. Nadja had driven her car to the center of the village. No, not for a long time, although she quite often came to Amsterdam while Mother was still alive. Next to her on the front seat was a folded newspaper, half read. As the traffic barriers came down and she had to stop, she may have glanced at it, but I find it unthinkable that a list of performances and events for music, art, and film could be the cause of a sudden fatal heart attack, mors subita, no matter how sensitive the victim was. So, to cut a long story short, the barriers went up again and the traffic moved on at a moderate pace. Suddenly I find myself wondering what novel the lady may have been reading as Nadja got out shakily and everyone behind her began to honk their horns, because they were still stopped on the train tracks. This line runs right through the village, it’s a much-traveled stretch, at any moment the warning signal could sound again. And the lady was reading, undistracted, under her tree, completely transported, wonderful. You don’t have to act, yet you still experience everything, you don’t have to speak, yet you converse with amazingly intelligent partners on your own level, and if you don’t know how to love and to flirt, well, you know now. Oh dear old Lidy, the sea-green screen between us has become completely transparent meantime. With one of us pedaling the bike and the other on the carrier, we race along the canal in the watery dusk. There’s no wind, all the flags are hanging slack on their poles. Does it still matter who read which book? Who lent the other which pullover, who inherited a child and a husband from whom? In cases of sudden death, the assumption is that some emotional distress unconnected with the immediate surroundings simply stopped the muscles of the heart.” “Dear God, Manja, does such a thing really happen?” “Apparently yes. Inner factors sometimes succeed in completely hollowing out the psyche undetected, and then … you’re suddenly gone. Do you know how much the heart of an adult woman weighs?”
“Well?”
“They check it during the autopsy, they weigh the heart.”
“Heavens! The scales, the pans of the scale, the weighing of souls!”
“It weighed twelve ounces, which is normal. You know, don’t you, that Nadja, who was widowed, was in love again, and didn’t want to talk about it to anyone — nor was she allowed to. So I don’t need to tell you what was involved, of course: a secret, adultery, hopeless. There came a time when she started to look pale, but was not audibly or visibly suffering. God preserve us, she may have thought, from the person who spends so much time pitying themselves that the whole world has to know about it. What was noticeable, however, during this period was that she went almost every day to the long-term-care section of Tabitha House, yes, here, where I am now, to visit her grandma, our crumpled, demented little mother, now almost ninety-three. If you’ve been bound to silence, you can still use an incomprehensible oracle to have dialogues with. Once when I asked her — looking all sympathetic the way an insider does — how Grandma was, she reported: ‘Oh, fine, we listened to a Schubert sonata together.’ It must have been about two months after the death of our little mother, previously known as our mother, that Nadja also crossed over and pulled the drawbridge up after her.”
“She was so sweet.”
“Oh God, wasn’t she!”
“So unselfaware. Once I went with her to a place that sold children’s clothes, where she was to try on a winter coat with teddy bears embroidered on it. She could already stand by then. The saleswoman sat her up on a chest of drawers, all jammed up in the thick, stiff coat that made her arms stand out like a penguin’s, and she gave me a blank look of such force that it silenced every piece of nonsense in my head. That winter she caught pseudo-croup, and Sjoerd and I were sure she was going to die, because she couldn’t inhale anymore.”
“I think you’re wrong. It wasn’t that winter, it was two or three winters later. But it’s true, we were scared to death. In those days in Amsterdam if you called a doctor in the middle of the night in a panic, he actually came, those were men—”
“They certainly were.”
“—who didn’t just keep the phone within reach of the bed but their shoes and socks too. ‘Of course she won’t die.’ He picked up the little girl, the favorite of my children forever, took her into the bathroom, and ordered us to turn on the hot tap. And I’m telling you, the steam made the swelling in her throat go down immediately, her air passages were open again, and in a flash she was back to breathing normally. Sjoerd and I lay next to each other in the darkness afterward, deeply impressed by how narrow the dividing line is between helplessness and a wonderful, warm bed. I stretched out my hand. My sister’s husband, I could feel it, isn’t going to be able to go to sleep yet, maybe he’s thinking about God and marveling at the compositional gift that He exercises when He sets life and death not one behind the other but side by side. In the morning, when I woke up, he was way over on the other side of the bed.”
“We always slept in each other’s arms.”
“Oh, mostly we did too.”
“Oh, oh, oh, we were so in love with each other! Love at first sight, colon, with this one, quote unquote. No power in the world could have aroused me like that for any other reason. Oh, that mad, grand, heathen ‘yes!’ That bow to nature, pure and simple!”