What we do find, in the final section, ‘The Void’, is this: ‘What is called the spirit of the void is where there is nothing. Man’s knowledge cannot fathom this.’ Musashi offers us one way out of ignorance: ‘By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void.’ That was precisely why Nieuwenhuis and the Apostle Paul rolled off me like water off a duck’s back: they didn’t start their reasoning with things that exist, but with a nutty kind of messianism.
I heard jackdaws flying over, by reflex I looked up to see if I could spot Wednesday. A fire of longing roared in my chest.
‘But thanks be to God,’ Nieuwenhuis said with a dying fall, ‘which giveth us the victory, through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.’
Meanwhile, Engel was still dead, and the bottomless realization began to dawn that I would never, ever see him again.
At Het Karrewiel they were serving white buns with ham or cheese. There is comfort in the hunger we feel when we have lowered a loved one into the grave; hunger is unmistakably a sign that you’re alive. The eating of white buns distinguishes us from those to whom we have said farewell; we eat, we live — they are eaten, they are dead. With white buns in Het Karrewiel we return with a feeling of relief from the gates of Hades; our time has not yet come.
I had hoped we would stick together that afternoon, but everyone went their separate ways. Joe walked P.J. back to the White House, Christof took off with grooves of bitterness at the corners of his mouth — he wasn’t yet accustomed to this unusual rivalry at the heart of the friendship. I sat at home in that stupid suit and knew that the world had changed beyond recovery. And this wasn’t the end, there was a great deal yet to come. With Engel’s death, a crucial stabilizing force had disappeared from our social construct; I had a strong sense of more decay on its way, not much farther down the line.
At six o’clock I opened a can of frankfurters and shook them onto a plate, which I put in the microwave. Before eating them I dragged them through the mustard, because the taste of frankfurters always makes me think of morbidly deformed chickens in the death camps of the factory farms. Schnitzel or frying sausage produces the same disturbing awareness, with one phrase in particular haunting my mind: ‘pig pain’. As I ate I listened distractedly to that art program on Channel 1, the one where the interviewers are primarily interested in the life of the artist and almost never probe into his work. The girls I had seen today around Engel’s grave, I suspected, would end up someday on programs like that, reflecting with the earnestness of a child staring at its first turd in the potty. On the radio you almost never heard anyone talk about things like arm wrestling or bulldozers, those were worlds hidden to them.
Halfway through the frankfurters, an interview was announced with the author of a new novel, About a Woman: Arthur Metz. It took a couple of seconds for it to hit me: this was Lover Boy Writer. In my thoughts I had never referred to him by his real name, that would have implied that I recognized him as a man of flesh and blood whom P.J. had loved. The pseudonym helped me to keep my distance from that hated fact. First they played a song, then the female interviewer came back. I listened tensely.
‘With us here today we have the poet and writer Arthur Metz, whose novel About a Woman appeared last week. He’s here to talk about that book. Welcome, Arthur.’
A vague crackling in the mike.
‘Come a little closer to the microphone, Arthur, so we can hear you. Maybe it’s good to start off by noting that the narrator of your book is a writer who, I believe, resembles you rather closely. But the first question that came to mind when I read your novel was where you found the female character, Tessel. She’s the tragic heroine of the story, and I had the idea that she stood for the modern woman with all her troubles: the demands of eternal youth, for example, and the constant struggle against overweight, which I think a lot of women will be able to identify with. Did you intend About a Woman to be a modern novel of manners?’
It took a moment before a reply came, the writer cleared his throat rather loudly. The first audible word was ‘uuh’.
‘I could have given the book another title,’ he said then, ‘Whore of the Century or something, but my publisher, uuh, didn’t think that was a good idea.’
‘Why Whore of the Century?’ the interviewer asked. ‘That sounds like a personal vendetta. Is that what it is, a personal vendetta?’
‘There are no great novels without a personal vendetta.’
‘But did the events in the book actually happen to you, is that what you’re trying to say?’
‘I, uuh. . I don’t write anything that doesn’t fall within the possibilities of my own existence.’
Metz seemed to squeeze his words out one by one, like a turtle laying its eggs in a hole in the sand.
‘That’s an awfully sweeping statement. Could you be a little more specific? What do you mean by the possibilities of your own existence? Do you mean that in this book you’ve described the facts as they could have taken place?’
‘Uuh. . Yes.’
‘So you’re saying this is pure fiction?’
‘At a certain point, many writers have to deal with a woman who forces herself upon them as their muse. Tessel lives in the terrible realization that she is empty inside and, at the same time, that she does not fill anyone else’s life with, uuh. . love. She wants to be the most important thing in someone else’s life, in order to forget herself. And then preferably a, uuh. . writer.’
‘But why does she want that?’
‘She dispels her feelings of emptiness and, uuh. . futility by, on the one hand, fits of bulimic gorging, and by seduction. On the other. She looks for a writer in order to be immortalized as his muse, in order to, uuh. . recover her self-worth. Against the emptiness. A dangerous and extremely beautiful parasite. . in fact.’
‘Well yes, as I read your book I also had the feeling that she is both monstrous and helpless. Somewhere you write that she is a ”muse by calling”, a muse without an artist to immortalize her. Have you ever met anyone like that yourself, someone who perhaps inspired you in the writing of this book? I mean, it has such overwhelming autobiographical intensity.’
After a fairly long silence you could hear the spark wheel of a lighter scraping against flint, followed by cigarette smoke being inhaled with obvious pleasure into the tiniest branches of the bronchia.
‘First we’re going to listen to a song,’ the interviewer said. ‘Here is the lovely “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen.’