2
The next time she called, I answered. That is, the volume on the answering machine was turned up, the ‘Hello, how are you …’ sounded sickly and crackly, and after Mister Beep, Miriam’s voice resonated through the room.
‘Adri, just answer … I know you’re there. Adri?’
I removed the receiver and shut off the answering machine. ‘You’re in love against me,’ I said.
‘Oh?’
‘Not with him — against me.’
‘Does that exist?’
‘You invented it.’
‘Gosh, without even knowing.’
‘There is another kind of in love against.’
‘Nothing would surprise me anymore.’
‘In love with each other, and together in love against the world.’
‘Doesn’t sound bad.’
‘Shall we then?’
‘I’ll think about it.’
3
In love against. Now that I knew what I didn’t know back then, and knew that Miriam knew what I didn’t know back then, I can almost muster up some compassion for my rival. Our Man in Africa had served, even during his absence, primarily as a shield with which to deflect Miriam’s weapon against me.
I left my Procrustean bed on Duivelseiland and moved back in with Miriam and Tonio on the Leidsegracht, even though for the time being I had to make do with the living-room sofa. I was not granted much sleep, for at the crack of dawn Tonio would come to claim his place. Sometimes I would awaken in response to his mere presence. I would open my eyes, and there the nearly four-year-old stood, eyeing me earnestly, stuffed animals and security blankets under his arm, a dummy between his lips that swung up and down in his mouth with the regularity and speed of an engine’s piston. If his piercing gaze did not wake me, he would think of something, the corner of a teething rag or the fluffy tail of his monkey, with which to tickle me under my nose, until I got up, groaning, and relinquished half of the sofa to him. Together we would watch an episode of The Big Mister Cactus Show on video.
In fact, Our Man in Africa — also known as The Borderless Correspondent — was, in the course of the whole unpleasant business, conspicuously absent — which did not lessen the imminence of his return.
‘Adri, I want to close this book in style,’ Miriam said one Thursday afternoon. ‘If you go out tomorrow evening, do me a favour and for once don’t go to one of your usual hangouts. During the hostilities I always loved bumping into you unexpectedly at Tartufo, Schiller, and De Favoriet. But not now. Okay?’
Upon further questioning, I learned that Our Man would be in the country very briefly, for just over a week, before flying back to the regions of Africa where the borders, to the chagrin (or delight) of the publishers of world atlases, could shift at any moment. Now that Miriam was no longer in love against her husband, the necessity of being in love with the correspondent was negated, and she wanted to relay this message ‘in style’, via a kind of farewell dinner.
Just to be sure — ‘I’m not going to reserve anywhere’ — she rattled off a whole list of cafés and eateries I would do best to avoid this Friday. ‘It’s painful enough as it is.’
Now that my rival had been vanquished, it did not require much self-sacrifice to grant him one last date with my wife. ‘If need be, Minchen, I’ll go to Haarlem for the evening. Or, if that’s still too close for comfort, to Antwerp.’
4
I complied almost slavishly with Miriam’s request (or command) not to show my face in the neighbourhood where she might rendezvous with her journalist. Accompanied by one of the ‘regular girls’ who had helped me through those lonely months, I did a pub crawl until the wee hours (Brouwersgracht quarter) where I would otherwise have never set foot. After all these years I can’t remember who it was — Ilke or Adriënne or Bernadette — but I do recall her being offended by my extreme ebullience, because she could see it had nothing to do with her company. Even when I looked into her eyes, I beheld the vision of a new future.
Damn, what a woman, that Miriam: how she, with chilling subtlety, managed to blackmail me into mending my ways with her deceptive strategy of being ‘in love against’ me. Far more effective than kicking me out of the house or charging at me with a blunt object.
By now it was two, half past two. I sat it out. After eating and Dropping the Bomb, they might have gone to Schiller to talk it out over drinks, but under these circumstances they’d never have made it to De Favoriet or another late-night pub. Miriam must be home by now.
I remember delivering Ilke or Adriënne or Bernadette to her front door, wherever that was. There is a vague recollection of the offer of a nightcap — no thanks, I’ll be getting along now. I probably did not mention that my old life, now irreparably improved, was waiting for me at home. She had taken it away from me, but not for good, and in the meantime it had only appreciated in value.
5
It was three in the morning. I had a spring in my step, like a freed prisoner. Took the stone steps up to the front door in two, three bounds.
I assumed I had taken the wrong key from my pocket, the one to my flat in Duivelseiland, because it didn’t fit. The teeth glanced off a shiny new cylinder lock that had taken the place of the old, dull one. The copper plate maliciously reflected my fingers holding the useless key. Around it, some of the canal-green paint had been chipped off, undoubtedly during the replacement, and these chips now lay at my feet among some wood splinters and two minuscule piles of sawdust. Apparently no one had walked through it yet. The new lock must just have been installed. I stood there, half paralysed, looking incredulously at the paint chips, the splinters and the sawdust. Once again, everything was turning out differently than I had been led to believe. So this was what being in love against could lead to. The fatal blow, right behind my ear.
I trudged down the steps and walked backwards as far as possible across the street, to the edge of the canal. I nearly had to pull my chin upward with my hand before I dared look. There was light in the sitting room, whose white curtains were drawn — which usually meant, at this late hour, that someone was home.
And there was someone at home. A Chinese shadow play was being projected against the white pleats, two wavy figures approaching each other. It was just like an old Hollywood film, with a private eye crouching behind a garbage can and the husband leaning against a streetlamp, nervously smoking and sprouting horns. The two figures stopped for a moment, and then wrinkled intimately through one another. My wife and the Borderless Correspondent, no doubt: I recognised Miriam by the terraced way she put up her hair, whose contours did not get lost in the shadow play.
Goddamn it, how could I have let myself be fobbed off to a distant neighbourhood, so that they could, undisturbed, carry out their plan to shut me out once and for all? Someone this naïve did not deserve any better.
And then: well well, a third silhouette appeared. Tall, masculine, with a large head cut off by the top of the window frame. An object was passed from one outstretched shadow-hand to another.