Dear Mr. M (32 page)

Besides his rage, M also feels light; he feels himself drifting away slowly, being lifted into the air: in the same way that they, as by some fortunate circumstance, were also drifting a bit further away from his remarks about the Dutch resistance.

“Each and every day,” he goes on, because no one else is saying anything. “ ‘Liliane is a whore! Liliane is a whore!' I assert my right to express myself freely. Maybe I'm wrong, N,” he says, addressing his colleague directly now. “Maybe she's not a whore at all. But I'm allowed to say so. After all, we live in a free country.”

“You're a pitiful figure,” N says. He adopts a sad expression as he says it, which makes the countless wrinkles and folds in his cheeks and around his eyes seem to deepen even further—the landscape of gorges and deep valleys above which the sun is now going down. “In fact, I've known that for a long time, but today I know for certain.”

“And
The Garden of Psalms
is a tired shit-cake of a book,” M says—the water has stopped boiling, the gas has been turned off, the pan placed in the freezer: he feels calm. This calm, this
icy
calm, is something he hasn't felt for ages. “But I don't think I have to tell you that. I think you know that yourself already.”

“And that from the writer who keeps churning out books about the war, year in and year out? We all fell asleep long ago, M. I think you're the only one who hasn't realized that yet. Why don't you write about something else for a change? About your mother, for example. In that interview you spend three pages whining about your dear mother, but in all those flog-a-dead-horse war books of yours we never read a word about her.”

I'm washing my hands in the men's room when the tumult begins. First there are only a few excited voices. Then the screaming grows louder, the voices become distinct, with distinguishable words and sentences. “Cut it out!” “Stop…knock it off…knock it off…You hear me? Knock it off, right now!” “Grab him!…Grab him, goddamn it!”

There is a loud thud against the door of the men's room, as though someone has fallen or been pushed forcefully against it.

“Pervert!” a voice screams. “Dirty piece of shit!”

A dull boom, the wood cracks:
That was someone's head,
I think right away,
the back of someone's head hitting the door—
being hit
against the door.

“I'll kill you, you pig! I'll rip your fucking lungs out!”

The show in the big theater was over more than an hour ago. I won't dwell too long on the show itself. You look at your watch a few times. You sigh deeply. When the woman comes on stage on her bicycle, you start to shift in your seat and groan. Everyone saw it. We all saw that the bike had wooden wheels, that the woman was wearing clogs and had a yellow Star of David sewn to her worn coat. You could feel it run through the audience. Everyone held their breath. Then the woman started talking. With a weird accent, the way drama school actors think normal people in Amsterdam talk. “Chrise Amighty,” the weird voice said. “Here I bike all this friggin' way out to the farm on wooden wheels to get some spuds, and the Krauts confiscate my tater peeler!” The audience laughed. It was a laugh of relief. We were watching a
sketch.
We were
allowed
to laugh, no one was going to recite any poetry in honor of the resistance, thank God for that. But after that first wave of relief, the laughter dwindled. Vicarious embarrassment settled over us like a cloud of gas. An odorless but deadly gas. “Tulip bulbs?
Tulip
bulbs?” the actress shrieked. “Go tell that one to the floralist!” No effective antidote has yet been found for vicarious shame. It's something physical. It hurts in a place you can't get to. You could leave, try to sneak out of the theater as quietly as possible, but you don't budge. Vicarious shame is contagious. Not only does it infect the people around you, in the end it also makes its way back to the source of the embarrassment. It was only a matter of time before the cloud of gas drifted up onto the stage. The actress began speaking faster and louder. She was probably in desperate search of a point where she could cut the monologue in half. Away! Away from this stage, into the wings, the soothing fit of weeping in the dressing room—anything was better than going on acting cute in front of an audience that apparently didn't think it was cute at all.

Then it was over at last and we shuffled out of the theater. You looked left and right, shook someone's hand, someone else tapped you on the shoulder. You introduced me: the mayor, the cabinet minister, a colleague: “Ana stayed home with our daughter, she's ill, this is my neighbor.” The mayor, the cabinet minister, and the colleague all shook my hand just to be polite, their eyes lingered on my face for less than a second, then they turned away, sometimes quite literally, with their whole body. And so we finally reached the stairs beside the men's room.

I won't try to claim now, in hindsight, that there was tension in the air from the very beginning. But maybe you thought so? I don't know, something in your colleagues' faces, their glances, the way they looked at each other more than at you. I could be wrong, though, I don't actually know how writers look at each other—maybe they always look that way.

In the men's room, I am not alone. There are about five of us at the sinks. Famous faces, less-famous faces, an awfully famous face is just coming out of one of the cubicles.

When the shouting starts, we all look at each other. No one wants to be the first to go out. Excited voices are still coming from outside the door, but a little further away now, the ruckus seems to be moving—a thunderstorm passing, the number of seconds between flash and rumble is increasing, soon it will all be over.

Finally, I'm the first one to the door, the first one to open it and step out.

At the foot of the stairs, two old men are on the ground. Or rather: one old man is lying on his back on the dark red carpet, the back of his head pressed at an uncomfortable-looking angle against the bottom step, the other old man is sitting on top of him; he raises his fist and punches the man on the ground in the face. The carpet is sprinkled with glass.

A semicircle has formed around the two combatants: men in tuxedos, men in sport coats, men in jeans. At a safe distance. No one does anything. No one intervenes. There are women in the semicircle too: women in evening gowns, women with nutty hats and even nuttier dresses—but the women are standing a little back, behind the men.

“You pig!”

I suppress my first urge to go rushing over, to grab your fist, which is now poised in the air for the next punch, to say that enough is enough. I put my hands in my pockets and find a place among the lookers-on.

I do what the others do.

I do nothing.

It feels good, he hadn't known it could feel so good. He plants his knuckles hard against N's upper lip, he's already done enough damage to the nose; there had been too much ambient noise to actually hear it crack, but he'd felt it. Perhaps he should have done this long ago, maybe not only to N (to N, too, of course, in any case to N!), but also to all the others who had foiled him all his life. All those failures and near-failures who begrudged him his success. Sometimes the talking has to stop and one must act. During the war, collaborators were shot and killed in their own doorways. Talking is something you do in peacetime.
Yes, you should have done this long ago,
he knows now, raising his fist in the air once more.

In his long life as a writer he has done a lot of talking, but even more often he has been silent. Dozens, maybe even hundreds of insults and left-handed compliments, below-the-belt taunts, unfounded accusations: he has swallowed it all. Usually he kept his mouth shut, turned and looked the other way, got up from the table. But sometimes he was awfully close.
One more word,
he told the other person in his thoughts.
One more word and I'll shut that mouth of yours once and for all. One more insult in the guise of an ironic comment and that face will shut down for good.
But it had always been as though the other person realized in the nick of time that he was toying with his own well-being—perhaps with his life. Something in M's eyes must have warned him, a minimal change in M's breathing had told the other person that they were about to cross a line: two cars racing at each other down a narrow road, which one will swerve first and run off the road? Almost never, M realized to his regret, had the other person turned their back on him, they must have realized just in time that they were dealing with a dog. A dangerous dog with its teeth bared, a dog in a barnyard where they had no business being. Always maintain eye contact with a dog, walk backward slowly, never turn your back on it. No, they were smarter than that: they quickly changed the subject in order to save their own skin.

The eye. The eye is a soft target par excellence; his fist doesn't land quite right, his wedding ring nicks the brow, blood wells up between the hairs and runs into the swollen eye.
Like a boxer,
it occurs to M in a flash. Muhammad Ali. Joe Frazier. But when an eyebrow keeps bleeding, they have to stop the fight. That would be a pity, he's not finished yet.

At first, just after he had grabbed N by the lapels and slammed the back of his head against the men's room door, colleagues, publishers, booksellers had tried to separate them. Hands on his shoulders, on his upper arms, at his wrists. But that's over now. He knows how it works:
Too dangerous.
They probably saw the look in his eyes, the grimness with which he went to work. The others are now only spectators. Onlookers.

Then M feels it between his legs, in his groin. N's knee has come up and hit him there, intentionally or not, precisely at the spot you have to hit when you're trying to get away from an opponent who's on top of you. He gasps for breath, there's no pain yet, just deep nausea, he has to be careful not to puke all over N's face, he thinks, and the next moment the head lifts itself from the step: he wonders how that can be, how the hell that's possible, he had assumed that he'd had him pinned completely, both knees on N's upper arms, his right hand squeezing N's throat. Now something really is coming up through his gullet, he opens his mouth wide to let it out, it's only air, warm air, it reminds him of the air in an underground subway station, the air that an onrushing train pushes out ahead through the tunnel. It tastes sour, he notes then, the pain rising at the same moment, the pain spreads out from his balls all over his lower body, the tears well up in his eyes—and at that moment, at that very moment, N's forehead slams hard into the bridge of his nose.

I literally saw stars…
That's how people often describe the sensation after a hard blow or fall. But it's not like that: it's more like flashes of light, a reel of film flapping loose from the projector, sunlight reflected off a windowpane rattled by the wind, like lightning from a violent storm right above your head. And immediately after that comes the blackout. There is nothing that comes after, or at least there is no chronology. Between N's forehead hitting his nose and the moment when M himself is lying on his back on the soft carpet of the theater, there's something missing—for good, as it turns out.

He opens his eyes and sees N standing there—at his feet, his colleague is rubbing the bloodied knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other.

“Goddamn,” N says to no one in particular. “Goddamn it…”

And then there are already hands and arms helping M to a sitting position. A hand holding out a glass of water. Another hand wiping something from his face with a paper napkin.

Someone has squatted down beside him, it takes a moment for him to focus, to slide the two images of a face on top of each other, to form one face. The lips move, but he hears nothing, only a hissing sound. The flashes of light have come back.

“What?” he says—he can barely hear his own voice either, as though he's swimming underwater.

The face moves up, leans toward him until the mouth is close to his ear.

“I'll take you home,” M makes out.