Try as he might, he could not recall Brian Geist. After all, nearly forty years had passed, and no shred of memory, not the slightest personal detail, survived.
When Bo was a boy, his family had hosted American students through various exchange programs. Geist claimed to have stayed with them for only a couple days before the youth band with which he was traveling had to move on east into Germany. He searched old photos, but apparently nobody had saved anything about him, and the man remained elusive. And so when Geist had tracked him down through social media, asking if he had the correct Bo van der Zoek, he was, to say the least, perplexed.
Curious, nonetheless. Geist was on business in Rotterdam and had the afternoon of his final day free before returning to the States. Could he possibly meet him on the 12th? He checked the calendar. Sure, he replied. Why not? Best to meet at the restaurant on Gansjeweg near the roundabout. He told Geist to look on the patio at 1:00 for a stocky man with a brown Amstel cap.
A late summer storm had just swept through Zwijndrecht, and although a light rain continued to fall, he kept the car windows down to capture the scent of ozone hanging in the air. Eager for answers, he drove impatiently, swerving every now and then to avoid the small branches that still littered the straat like disregarded victims of traffic accidents. He arrived and surveyed the lot from a dry spot beneath the awning.
After half an hour and no sign of Geist, he went inside to use the bathroom. Returning to the patio, he spied through the front window a car pull in and its driver alight. He expected the man to be his own age, but he appeared much older. His neatly trimmed goatee had turned quite gray, and a wearied, professorial air lingered about him. He tried to imagine a younger version, but the man’s face triggered no memories.
Then the man caught sight of him in the window and pointed to his forehead in recognition of the Amstel cap. Bo smiled back and waved him inside.
“Sorry I’m a bit late. I got lost after the A16.”
They shook hands and spoke their names, as if to reassure each other of their identities.
“Can be easy to get lost. I mentioned the roundabout. I thought to use a landmark was easier. If you have been away for so long.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
The hostess showed them their table, and the man ordered a cocktail with his lunch.
“You?” he asked.
Bo declined. Despite his Amstel cap, he did not drink.
The man settled himself into the cushion, an elaborate affair of adjusting his seat several times apparently before achieving maximum comfort.
To ease back into the conversation, Bo returned to the topic of the man’s trip.
“On your way, did you explore any streets in the neighborhood east of here? There is Mozartlaan, and—let me see—Schumannpad and Sibeliusstraat. I myself live on Delibesplaats.”
The man’s eyes did not light up with recognition as he expected.
“Because of your background in music,” he explained. “You said you were here in a youth orchestra.”
“Ah, yes.”
“What was your instrument?”
“Trumpet.”
“Do you still play?”
“Not for years.”
“Too bad.”
“People change.”
He had burned to ask from the start why the man had wanted to meet, but it would have sounded rude, and so he merely smiled. The man seemed reluctant to resume and glanced at the decorations on the wall. There was an awkward pause as the waitress placed his drink before him.
“So why have you abandoned your music, if you don’t mind the question?”
“Life. I had college coming up. It was time.”
“Too bad. Did it no longer bring you joy?”
“Oh, I enjoyed it. Perhaps too much.”
“Pardon that I ask this, but how can you enjoy something too much?”
“Believe me, you can.”
The man seemed about to elaborate but then stopped.
“So you went to university, but no music. What did you study?”
“Engineering.”
“That is what you do now?”
“Yes. In fact, that was the reason for my trip. Consultation. Site inspection. My firm has interests in wind energy.”
The man seized the opportunity. Cost management analysis was one topic he had no problem discussing, but the conversation became lopsided with all the warmth of a formal lecture. Bo felt a slight irritation creeping upon him. Eventually he lost patience and abruptly shifted away from the business world.
He asked about a wife. Yes, married but then divorced. Children? An only daughter. The curtness had returned. The man easily could have been ticking off the boxes on an application.
“What is your daughter’s name?”
“Chelsea.”
“Do you have a photograph that I can see?”
The man paused and then withdrew his wallet. He had several pictures of her securely tucked away.
“Een heel mooi meisje.”
He had lied. The poor girl was not particularly attractive. She had her father’s pinched and grim-lipped expression.
The man accepted the compliment and nodded his thanks.
“In that last photo. Who is that with her?”
“Fiancé.”
The whispered word was weighted with loss of ownership.
“Oh, your daughter a blushing bride, as you say? Then you have a wedding coming soon?”
“Soon. Yes, soon.”
The man peered through the window into the relentless mist gathering in the branches of the gnarled and prickly trees of the patio garden, and then pivoted about in his seat, searching for the waitress.
“Where the devil is our food?” he suddenly blurted. “I’m going to the bar for another drink. Sure you don’t want something there?”
“No, I am fine with my water.”
“Suit yourself.”
He was sorry to admit to himself that based on their conversation so far, as brief as it had been, he did not much like this fellow. He watched the man lean into the bar as he ordered, grandly producing his wallet and thrusting his body forward as if on a mission to snatch up what few trifles others held dear. Spoiled child, just like his president. It was always money with Americans. What was he after? What could he stand to gain by developing a relationship with someone as modest as himself, a relationship flimsy at best? He did not like to think ill, but he was struck with the notion that the man harbored some dark design.
He was staring into his napkin when he suddenly felt a hand upon his shoulder.
“Okay. Enough about me. Let’s hear about you. Tell me about your family.”
He was taken aback. The man sounded downright cheery, as if he had received a shot of congeniality along with his highball. But he welcomed the change. He would chat a little bit, show him his own wallet-sized photos, relate humorous stories of his wife and the two boys, now grown and starting families of their own.
And the man, his smile glimmering as he listened, seemed truly engaged. Perhaps he had upbraided himself at the bar for his lack of politeness. Encouraged, Bo grew garrulous. Yet something in him remained on alert. He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but he thought the man’s eyes began to dart about the edges of his narrative, the way that little boys search for a path through a thicket.
He was finishing one particular account about his childhood when the man burst with the question, “And your sister, how is she?”
It was obvious, even to Bo, whose job as a landscaper dealt with the honest nature of flowers and trees, and never required a deep understanding of human cunning, it was obvious that securing this intelligence had been Geist’s objective all along. The man had plopped the question onto the table between them clumsily like a sack of fertilizer. Forklifts maneuvered with more grace.
“Anja? She still calls herself by her ex-husband’s name. Why you couldn’t locate her.”
He paused and sighed.
“Ziezo. I will tell you about Anja.”
It was about time somebody slapped the smirk off her face, Anja told herself, and godverdomme, she was the one to do it, Saskia looking down her nose and snorting and calling her knokig, her fingers clawing the air like a skeleton’s, yes, well worth it, being sent home from school for an early weekend, and besides, that American boy was soon to arrive, so Geert wouldn’t have a chance to yell at her until Monday, when he’d demand to know yet again exactly why his daughter couldn’t behave as well as Bo, two years younger but already more mature.
But bones, no…. Bones stuck in her mind, touched nerves still as raw as the days she asked her pappje for five things she could do to help out about the house, even though she always ended up entwined with her in bed, Mama was so tired and disappearing more and more every day, her flesh so bluish pale, near see-through, her hands limp pouches encasing fragile bones that swashed about unanchored, and she wanted to interlace herself to the point at which she couldn’t tell where Mama’s limbs stopped and hers started, but the merger was not easy, and she had to squirm to find the right fit, a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle to realize the picture of love. When Mama vanished completely in 1975, her body slipping into the coffin as snug and secure as destiny, she tried to recapture a similar sense with Pappje, who after a while had to decline because she was now becoming too old for all that.
Cross-legged on the floor, relishing the slap’s sound and Saskia’s shock, when Geert walked in with a boy called Brian, hier is de nieuwe jongen, and introduced him first to her grandfather, then Bo, then Albert, who was straight out the door for his night job, and finally her, and the new boy gripped her hand for a hearty shake and lingering stare, so intent he was on remembering names and faces she imagined him making notes in a little black book. When she leaned towards him, she smelled fresh summer winds off the North Sea, which the youth band had that morning crossed from England, blended with the scent of talcum, as if he had been delivered across the waters by way of stork. John Wayne, John Wayne! Opa cried, demonstrating he knew just as much about America as the next gentleman, but she knew far more about the new boy from the way he had fit his hand into hers and pumped it with a frontier sincerity, a boldness beyond custom, unlike anything she had ever encountered in Zwijndrecht before, where all the good folks subdued themselves into a bland conformity that only inspired her to run. Even the way he had scooped the worst from his boerenkool at the dinner table and refashioned it into a sandwich, making Geert and Opa gape and Bo giggle, that was an assertion of desire that only she could appreciate.
Shortly before midnight, with the adults safely asleep, she hauled Bo up to the boy’s bed in the attic, for she was not as good with English as her brothers were, or else she would have gone alone, and there through Bo’s translations she asked him all about his life, his family, his high school, and—most important—his favorite music, to which he casually replied, John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot, stuff like that. Well, that was different! Kraftwerk had been her favorite when she went with Martijn—until the fit no longer worked, when she temporarily fled to nose-ringed Stefan and graduated to Siouxsie and the Banshees. But John Denver! He wasn’t serious! Wasn’t he afraid of being called…een seut? (Translate, Bo! A geek, Bo whispered.) But the boy laughed, laughed with unassailable confidence, the way a gunslinger laughs when he knows he can easily outdraw, let them think what they want, he didn’t care, and she tugged her earlobe coyly, simpered with half-shut eyes, and asked what his girlfriend thought. Wat? Geen vriendin? No girlfriend? She knew enough English to understand her brother’s unsolicited comment: my sister, you see, she already likes you much. Sending Bo away would have been too obvious, so she bounced back to her own room and dreamed of the boy later in the night sprawled across that large attic bed with the overstuffed mattress, his body losing itself trying to find the right fit among the linen and large pillows beside the set of shelves where Geert kept all the old boxes of jigsaws Mama had saved, completed and therefore treasured. She dreamed he might have reached across the floorboards and touched her hand. Gosh darn it, he might have replied, he liked her too.
The next morning, she called her friend Corrie. Corrie would be so jealous when she saw she had an American.
The program of his band’s noon concert was tedious, but the zeal of his blowing held her fast, and the notes of his solo were as clear as water. “Trumpeter’s Lullaby” he played only for her, though all of Zwijndrecht surrounded them, tapping their feet and waving index fingers like dotards in time to the beat. She resented his being part of something that Zwijndrecht enjoyed so well. And as he meant to please them, she resented his inconsistency. She would win that battle.
The reception that evening at the town hall required formal attire, but Corrie would bring what she needed hidden in the backseat in a paper bag. She grabbed his wrist, drew him aside. Dit eindigt al snel. Veel plezier met mij. He didn’t protest—he seemed bemused, might have thought it was all a joke—and he only looked back to propriety once or twice before Corrie opened the passenger door and ordered him into the front. Her father knows where you are, Corrie lied. This is Dutch hospitality! You cannot refuse! He began to ask all sorts of questions she could not understand—inconsequential anyway—as she lay across the backseat and shed her dress, and pushed his cheek whenever he turned around curious. Kijk niet, je stoute jongen! Corrie chuckled low as she slipped on her short skirt and halter top. The car approached the bridge as she unzipped the makeup bag. Rijd voorzichtig! Ik heb mascara!
She knew fairly well this seedy section of Dordrecht, and after they parked among the stifling alleyways that had always led her into inescapable surprises, and careful on the cobblestones in her platform heels, she watched him absorb this brave old world, an initiation into a madness his buttoned-down naiveté would not well understand. The scarred plaster of buildings had in places broken away, revealing the brown bricks beneath like dried blood on pocky faces, and in other places, the scrawl of graffiti, savage messages like VENOM! and ROTBEEST! Abandoned bikes, abandoned bike stands like stunted metal plants, medieval oval cellar doors rusty-bolted shut. In the distance, the pulsation of amplified heartbeats promised abandon. Dance! Dance! she cried and impulsively hugged him, her platform heels raising her to his height.
Carnival light bulbs sequenced round the blood-red letters that spelled out Het Poppenhuis. Wiebe the Frisian was posted outside, his muscles on duty, but Corrie shoved guilders into his trouser pockets and nibbled his lobe for the favor, and she took the boy’s hand and pulled him inside. The driving rhythm of Knapperig Plas, the live band covering The Clash, entered her soul as she waded through the smoke guided only by intermittent flashes of the strobe and random scintillations that swam like anxious fish across her field of vision. Drink eerst! she yelled into his ear, moving towards the bar she could find in both sleep and stupor, pushing aside patrons who had only half decided to dance as they loitered. She held up two fingers for Henk, who knew the usual, and bestowed one of the cups on the new boy, devotedly at her back. She held up hers in mock toast and tossed it back, the warmth of the alcohol suddenly spreading through her chest, and he, dutiful boy, did the same. The lead singer, decrying the recent British ban on The Sex Pistols, launched his own band into a tribute, and she drew him to the middle of the floor, surrendering herself to the harsh music that ate through her skin and pushed all thoughts of mortality far, far away. Occasionally she opened her eyes and checked on the boy, who seemed to be battered about by the blows of the drumbeat and a projected spectrum blazing upon him with the blinding speed of subway cars. Poor boy. He was entirely self-conscious. He jerked about as if his bones had been fused or else taken apart and put back in the wrong places, but let the next three or four numbers loosen him up. Let the joint he was handed help him to face the chaos and embrace it for what it is, the unpatterned inconsequence of our short and futureless days. Corrie floated by taking Polaroid snaps to remember what would just as soon be forgotten.
Back at the bar for another shot, a bump of coke, and the boy had finally forsaken silly Gordon Lightfoot. Wild! Wild! he cried as he gripped her arms and pulled her in for a haphazard kiss. He was desperate to explain something he found terribly important, shouting detailed explanations in a language she did not understand, but who needed words when his ecstasy was clear enough? His face was red, and he seemed about to explode. He was moving too fast for his own good. She brushed her hand over his forehead, ran her fingers through his hair. Oh, het zweet! Je moet afkoelen. Buiten!
Outside the Poppenhuis she wiped the sweat from his face with a handful of bar napkins. Shushing sounds she meant to calm him before another assault on the dance floor. The boy’s eyes traced the building’s line upward through the alley’s narrow gap to the moon peeking just beyond the rooftop. He glanced suddenly into hers. Beautiful, beautiful eyes, he crooned. Pale blue like the moon.
Footsteps behind.
“Wie is deze baby, Anja?”
She wheeled. She recognized the glint shooting off the nose ring. Stefan.
“Ben je nu ontvoering?”
His gang backed him up, each with a tart on his arm. One of them looked askance at her boy and spat a gob in his direction.
She thrust him an obscene gesture and retorted her date was not a baby, but a nice young man with more breeding than he would ever recognize. Stefan finished his cigarette and flicked the butt at her feet. When did she ever care about proper manners? And why didn’t he speak for himself? Well, if he must know, he’s an American. A rich and talented American.
“Een Amerikaan?”
He poured what was left of his beer onto the cobblestones, knelt, and smashed the bottle’s bottom.
“Vuile teringslijer!”
Gripping its neck, he waved it like a weapon.
“Vuile teringslijer!”
She whispered into his ear. Back inside. But two of Stefan’s gang stepped up to block the way.
“Ga naar huis, je magere kutwijf!”
Trapped. She had no choice but to obey, and taking his hand, she staggered back down the alley to Corrie’s car. Catcalls echoed off the walls.
“Who was that? What was that all about?”
It was the magere that hurt. Stefan had often called her kutwijf in moments of anger, but they always made up, and the experience was breathtaking, primal, as if the argument still lingered about the tangle of their eager limbs.
“What, we’re leaving?”
But Stefan had never used that other word, or anything else that specifically targeted her underdeveloped, wispy shadow of a body, her pitiful lack of femininity. That was out of bounds.
“Shouldn’t we get your friend? It’s her car.”
“Je weet dat ik je niet kan begrijpen! Stop met praten!”
She gripped her bare arms and hugged herself tightly.
“Do you have the key? Well, at least she left it unlocked.”
She pushed him out of her way, retreated to the back seat, and could not stop the tears from coming.
“I…am…so…very…ugly….”
She knew enough to say it in English, felt she could say it in any language. As far as she could tell, the admission was pure and honest and entirely spontaneous. The last thing she needed was his pity.
But that was what she got. He climbed in beside her, and those unintelligible English syllables flowed out from him, as if below scorching desert sands a current of fresh water had been dynamited miraculously into existence. After a while, she fancied she began to understand. After all, weren’t Dutch and English supposed to be close? But the definition of the various words in isolation—she understood not in that way, but in the compassionate cadence of his music. When he gently touched her chin, she comprehended perfectly. She hadn’t planned on it, at least not in this way, but she loosened his belt buckle, slid up her skirt, and gave herself to him in a moment that surprised the both of them.
Because her brother had offered to drive, Geist left his rental car at the restaurant. The choice was logical. He had no idea where the hospice was, and what he had learned had left him too shaky to navigate the roads through Zwijndrecht that had confused him once already. His fidgeting must have begun to annoy van der Zoek, who was suddenly handing him a little bag of licorices. Unthinking, he popped one into his mouth and, overcome by the horridly salty taste, promptly gagged.
“That is dubbelzoute drop.”
“Yes, I know. I forgot what they’re like.”
“There is tissue in the glove box. Spit it out.”
“I will. A bitter pill to swallow.”
“Huh. You Americans.”
And van der Zoek said no more. He must have intuited how he needed the silence because there was no other way he could have known explicitly the impact of his news. Anja would never have told him about that night. She was a much better person than that, much better than he was. He had bragged to Seannie the drummer and Jake the pianist not two nights later when they all sat around a dirty tavern’s table in Düsseldorf. They gave him high fives, and he immediately felt guilty, a sacrilege it seemed, but then he was also frustrated and resentful and God knows what he was feeling.
Why had she refused? He had meant every word the night before outside that sleazy Dordrecht nightclub. He had always cringed at the old chestnut of giving one’s heart away, but only sixteen, he suddenly understood it was more than just some meaningless cliché. At the breakfast table, her father had fumed, wordless save for the clipped barks he directed at his daughter, and to him nothing particularly threatening but a certain coldness that made him wonder just how much he knew. Anja avoided his eyes. He wanted her alone again, but the father hovered about, ever-present.
His bags packed, he suffered in silence waiting for another host living nearby to pick him up. When the van arrived, it was now or never. He had it ready. He seized Anja’s hand, pulled her to a corner of the front yard, and told her they had to talk. No worry, birth control, she muttered, but he hadn’t even considered that, unimportant compared to what he produced from his jacket pocket, a small white and blue ceramic he had bought on impulse after the band had disembarked at the Hoek van Holland, a modest souvenir of a little Dutch boy and girl in mid-kiss. Swearing he would write every day until they could see each other again, he fit it into her hand, which inexplicably became rigid, her eyes inexplicably suspicious, and remembering the word he had heard in the attic, he added, vriendin, but she bitterly laughed and muttered Nee, nee, as if he were out of his childish mind, and about to protest that he was dead serious, that the covenant had been sealed, he was interrupted by Seannie (“Get a move on, loverboy!”), so having no chance to explain himself, he dashed away embarrassed, bewildered, watching helplessly as the pieces of his good character flew apart. His own damned fault. His own damned vanity. He had merely fallen in love with his ability to demonstrate love.
The rain had stopped but the sun remained shy as van der Zoek’s car crossed the Munnikendevel. Row houses passed by in orderly perfection, then a winkelcentrum, logistics offices, the develhoek. In the median, young trees regularly spaced, burgeoning from a continuous hedge closely clipped. How precise it all was here in sleepy Zwijndrecht, nothing chaotic, nothing unsightly or out of place, not even a stray piece of litter by the side of the road! A lie, really, considering how life generates so much trash that people tire of cleaning it all up and eventually say screw it and move on. That damned fiancé wasn’t going to treat his little girl right, he was sure of it, no matter how much he argued with her, but she would see he was right in the end, just like his ex, just like all the girlfriends that came after, working against their best interests, well, there was no saving some women, and this Anja woman, he had no idea why she had consumed his thoughts ever since Chelsea showed him her ring and he learned his company was sending him so close to her, hunting her down as if there were something tangible he hoped to achieve, and part of him, he had to admit, wanted to relish the regret in her eyes when he walked through the door, but then he remembered what van der Zoek had told him in the restaurant and thought himself a right spiteful bastard, that poor Anja had never asked to inherit her mother’s illness. He had to be generous, revert in spirit to the boy who could lose himself in the love of music and the music of people and trust that somehow they could have pieced together a world in which 3800 miles and an intrusive Atlantic and the folly of youth didn’t matter.
The hospice was a bare, white block of a building, impersonal as if reluctant to waste any decoration on those soon leaving. The visitors’ waiting room was similarly spare, and he searched for a water cooler to rid himself of the aftertaste of the drop while van der Zoek checked in at the desk.
“Let me see her first,” he said when he returned. “To make sure.”
To make sure of what? To make sure she was still alive? Why the hell had he been so insistent after he learned of her condition? It couldn’t have been to gloat. He wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t vindictive. He just wanted a sense of closure. Yes, that was all. Closure.
He heard his name softly called from not that far away. A few doors down the main hallway, van der Zoek was gesturing him forward. He approached slowly, stepping lightly on the tiles as if silence could make him vanish altogether.
“Guess what. She does remember you.”
Well, there was that at least. He wouldn’t look a complete fool. At the last second, he realized he should have brought her a gift. Regardless of what happened the last time. Flowers. Anything to keep him from appearing empty-handed.
He entered the room. She was sitting upright on the edge of her bed. Her body seemed lost in an oversized white sweater and a long brown skirt that hid nearly all of her emaciated legs. He searched her face for any sign of the girl she used to be. Eyes as lifeless as plastic. The effects of her illness or its treatment or both had transformed her into a stranger.
He swallowed hard.
“Hello, Anja.”
And ignoring what he had heard in the hallway, for some reason he added, “You probably don’t remember me.”
She smiled faintly, a pained smile it was, and opened the drawer to the nightstand by her side. Without a word, she withdrew a small ceramic, blue and white, and cradled it in her cupped hands. She held it up like some sort of oblation. It was their kussend paar.
