Ach, Minchen, Minchen, it didn’t have to come to this. My Friday night bliss shot to hell, the bliss that wasn’t to be mine. And Miriam? She had simply dragged in the happiness that hadn’tjust come naturally, and changed the locks behind her. No cutting corners.
But why such a roundabout charade? She could have just left me, which would have been bad enough. Why add insult to injury with such hard, durably executed symbols? Not to mention the after-hours surcharge. Slamming the door in someone’s face was apparently not enough these days. If the poor sucker locked outside had the skin of an elephant and stayed waiting patiently for someone to open the door, then he could just see how a fine drill bit bored through the wood …
Meanwhile, damn it, I stood there in front of a locked door, which meant that I had underestimated the wiles of the other party after all.
Perhaps I had clung too much to the notion that Miriam was out of love with me, rather than in love with him, the other. The possibility that she was about to break off with Our Man in Africa did not mean I was automatically back in her good graces. It was my misjudgement to think that this whole ‘in love against’ thing was in itself something temporary. I no longer ruled out the prospect that she was so totally and fanatically out of love with me, and that, regardless of any other man, I was being unceremoniously dumped, right here on her front stoop.
6
I was reminded of a morning shortly after Tonio was born. Up early, I looked over at Miriam, my sleeping treasure, in the early morning daylight. Entirely unexpectedly, in a kind of wavelike slinking motion, her hand crept over the bottom sheet toward my head. A five-legged creature. Near my chin she scratched the light-blue fabric with her index finger, emphatically, as though she were trying to warn me of something, or wanted to gently wake me up to put an end to my snoring.
I wasn’t snoring, nor was there any danger of it either, as far as I can recall. The hand, its fingers dirtied with an excess of pigment, pulled back, but quickly scampered back to resume its scratching.
‘Minchen …?’
I had to repeat her name a few times before she answered with a soft groan, from way down deep. She slept on. Except for her hand, which kept creeping toward my face, again and again, to resume the scratching. I did not know what it meant, but the gesture was strangely moving. Later, when she was feeding the baby, I imitated her manual drill, but she did not believe me.
Those funny things of hers I’d never see again. Not to mention all the wonderful things Tonio would do that would likewise be denied me from now on. Like just recently, when he raised a finger and called out: ‘There come the knights!’
I went back up the steps of the stoop and rang the bell. In the still of the night you could always hear it ring upstairs. But not now. Of course, when we went out, Miriam would usually turn off the bell so as not to startle the cats, but now that she was apparently home, its off-ness could only mean yet another way for me to be shut out, shunned.
I wailed her name through the letter slot, perhaps more as a farewell than an attempt to elicit mercy. More or less at once, the upstairs door to the stairwell opened and I heard the downward cadence of footsteps.
In retrospect I have to conclude that those quick steps, Miriam’s trotting downstairs, said it alclass="underline" that we belonged together, and would stay together. That patter on the steps meant that my feelings were not to be hurt. She arrived, out of breath, to welcome me back. A fresh start, but this time a level higher.
She was almost there. I knelt at the door, my eyes level with the letter slot, my thumb holding the flap open.
‘Adri, it’s not what you think,’ she called out.
It was not what I thought. The door swung open. (I don’t know why, but I was reminded of the first time she opened a door for me. I stood on her front step with a bottle of Dimple whisky under my arm. ‘I never drink whisky.’ — ‘Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.’)*
[* A line from The Count of Monte Cristo spoken by the hero, Dantès (the count of the title), claiming that he cannot eat any food in the house of his enemy.]
‘First tell me what I do think.’ (If it could be everything I didn’t think, that would be enough to quieten the hell.)
‘Come upstairs and I’ll explain.’ Her face was so overcome by embarrassment that I almost felt sorry for her. ‘Don’t just stand there.’
‘I don’t know what I’ll find upstairs.’
‘I’ll explain everything.’
Her chagrin reversed the roles. At first, I was planning to play the injured party and skulk off, but in the end I followed her up the stairs, determined to make a scene.
7
I could hear men’s firm voices through the open door to the flat. I held back on the landing to listen. I could have been mistaken, but it sounded like the discussion was about hinges and door furniture in medieval churches — not exactly a subject related to Africa.
The living room was vaguely changed, although I couldn’t put my finger on it. When I entered the room, the conversation fell silent. My rival got up from the sofa, or better said: he leapt up, startled. When I extended my arm to shake hands, he jerked his head sideways, as though he expected a punch. Fortunately, he realised his mistake quickly enough that my well-meant gesture didn’t fall completely flat.
The tall man, who until now I had only observed as a Chinese shadow puppet, knelt on the rug beside an open tool bag. He started digging around in the bag, maybe to avoid having to shake hands.
‘Have the gentlemen been offered drinks?’ I asked Miriam.
She pointed to the long-drink glasses on the coffee table.
‘Who’ll join me for a vodka?’ I said.
The kneeling man, in overalls, declined. Our Man in Africa acquiesced with a sheepish nod.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see how the first man fished two elongated objects out of his bag, and started screwing them together. That was the only thing missing in this farce. A silencer made sure that it produced no more noise than ‘an arrow as it pierces a ripe piece of fruit’, as I once read in an old detective novel. The ripe fruit: my head. Rotting and wormy. Full of rusty-brown flesh that oozed out through the holes that had been shot in the peel.
I realised that while killing time in the Brouwersgracht pubs I had become quite drunk.
I watched the tall man. He held an electric drill. He got up and walked over to the front door of the flat, and drilled several holes around the gap where the old cylinder lock had once been.
The scent of sawdust permeated the living room, but I smelled something else, something that had hit me the moment I walked in. Damp cardboard. I looked around the room. There were moving boxes all over, some with their flaps folded open. On each box, an orange cross in a black circle: the stylised pulley block of the ERKENDE VERHUIZERS logo. As long as I kept my eyes glued to that circled cross, my thoughts would organise themselves automatically. What on earth was going on here?
The bookcase behind the sofa on which the Borderless Correspondent sat seemed fuller than before. I might have had a lot to drink but I wasn’t seeing double, certainly not double book spines anyway. Just to be sure, I squinted at the bookcase with one eye closed. Damn, there were more books, but from this distance I couldn’t make out their titles.
Miriam came in with the vodka bottle.
‘So,’ I said, nodding at the boxes, ‘today, treason smells like damp cardboard.’