Breakwater, page 7
“Hi, Vincent.”
“Beauty.” He kisses her on the cheeks. He smells of alcohol.
“How was your Streetcar received?”
“Haven’t you read about it?”
“I don’t keep up with all that, Vin.”
“No, why would you.”
“Well?”
“Very decently, very decently. Except by you-know-who.” He pulls a strange face and gives her a cross-eyed look as he says it, probably in imitation of you-know-who. “But in fact that’s a compliment.” She has no idea who he’s talking about. “Almost forgotten about it already. Started on something new.”
“Chekhov, wasn’t it?”
“That’s later, next season. No, you definitely need to see that. No, a little thing, a little thing, a minor directing job with a young cast.”
“What play?”
“They’re so young, Emilia. Early twenties. And they’re so nice. So much nicer than I was. And more civilized, far less radical. Is that pure chance?” His face adopts a panicky expression. He’s taken hold of her arm.
“I don’t know, Vincent.”
“And they’re so beautiful, so lively, so, so … And they don’t realize it, not at all, they drink water and eat salad, Emilia. They’re so … They have no idea. It’s driving me mad.”
“What is, Vin?”
“That I’m so old, that I’m so sodding old.”
“You’re not old.”
“Compared to them I am. I’m old. And they’re young and don’t even know.”
“Youth is wasted on the young.”
“That’s true, that’s really true. Wilde?”
“Shaw.”
“You’re an exceptional woman.”
“Don’t act the fool.”
“I am a fool. That’s the truth. But you’re not. You’re someone who can keep a secret. And that’s incredible.”
What kind of talk is this? She needs to get away from here. Soon she’ll never be rid of him. If someone tells you a secret, you become partly responsible and can’t just take to your heels. He’s grabbed hold of her arm. He looks as though he’s about to pour his heart out.
“Emilia.”
“Chin up, Vincent, stay strong. Theatre isn’t everything, right?” She turns up her collar.
“No, I guess not, I guess not. Okay. Say hi to Bruch.”
She tries to remember whether Vincent has a girlfriend at the moment, whether there’s anyone she ought to send greetings to. He continues to stand there, as motionless as those willows in the meadow, while she moves away from him.
Josepha has thick blonde hair and a sleepy face. Her small eyes are wide apart and her mouth is big. There’s something sensual about her, with that mouth and the languid way she moves. Although it’s only early afternoon, they’ve ordered wine. Eddy comes into the café. He doesn’t look particularly broken. He immediately corrects them: Marieke hasn’t pressed charges, she’s merely reported it to the police, which has no further consequences. Eddy orders bitterballen. And there’s that email to all the staff in which she describes the times that he went and stood right up against her, the remarks, the invitations, and ultimately the assault at the end of the day after everyone had left. How he kissed her and touched her all over and how, petrified and unable to do anything, she endured it.
“So is all of that true?” Josepha asks.
Eddy shrugs, says an accusation of sexual assault is quite often the mould into which a girl pours her regret. That he hadn’t for a moment got the impression she wasn’t enjoying it. Josepha asks him how likely it is that one of the others, former staff members or former interns, will add an episode to the story.
“No chance,” says Eddy, exclaiming that they know him, don’t they?
“We certainly do,” says Emilia. “Precisely.”
At that Eddy is deeply offended. “I’m a virile man, not a brute.”
“You should keep your hands off the interns.”
“Even when there’s mutual consent? And only off the interns?”
“Jesus, Eddy, come on, cut your losses. Apologize, hand Marieke over to me, take a week off, talk to the staff. Admit you were wrong.” As she’s talking, Josepha makes a brushing gesture over the tabletop, as if trying to sweep the subject away.
“Eddy.”
Eddy sighs.
“Emilia.”
“Have you ever raped anyone?” She’s looked up the statistics. Every day, four rapes are registered in the Netherlands and many times that number go unreported. She hasn’t been able to find any figures at all for the percentage of men who rape, or the average number of rapes per rapist. “I don’t mean that murky grey area where opinions differ. Have you ever actually, against the wishes of the woman you were lying on top of …”
“No, of course not.” His voice sounds loud and flat and he isn’t even looking at her. Is he shocked by her suggestion, or is he lying?
“We’re your friends. Wouldn’t it be nice, interesting, just to lay all your sins on the table?”
“Emil, shut up.” Josepha looks at her, frowning. “Come on now, stop.”
“I mean it. It happens, doesn’t it? About ten times a day, if not more. And somebody does it, right? Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could have a conversation on the subject? Wouldn’t that be progressive?”
“But what if there’s no conversation to be had? What if I’ve never raped anyone?”
“But you have sexually assaulted someone.”
“Without knowing it!”
“Do you think it’s normal for a person to be petrified while they put up with you touching them?”
“I never noticed she was petrified. I didn’t notice!”
“So what did you notice?”
“I thought she was nervous, that she was too young and inexperienced, too … too blown away … by me … I thought maybe she was still a virgin. I stopped, because I thought maybe she was still a virgin, and that seemed like going too far, I only wanted to … as two adults together. I sent her away then. I think that’s what … what made her angry. That she felt rejected. That it’s completely the opposite of what she claims. I think she’s in love with me. But I’ll deny it all, guys, all of it, because of Yildiz.”
All three of them are silent. The bitterballen arrive.
“I believe this. I believe you. What about you, Emilia?” Josepha orders a fresh round of drinks. Emilia wonders whether it’s possible to have a real conversation, with anyone, a real, frank conversation. About what happens to you, about what you do wrong, about what you think, about what you don’t normally dare to say. What would that be worth? Is it interesting? Would Eddy’s secret inner life really interest her? You probably get to know people just as well from the ways they hide themselves.
“So you believe him. And does it make sense to you that he believes her immobility was love and admiration? Oh yes, and lack of experience? If that’s his defence, then his claim that he’s never raped anyone is meaningless. Maybe he didn’t notice?”
“Does the possibility exist in your world that Marieke made it all up?”
Emilia thinks about that for a moment. Then she shakes her head. That possibility is out of the question.
“The whole moral outcry,” Eddy snorts. “That ‘you should keep your hands off the interns.’ As if Marieke isn’t an adult, for God’s sake; as if we aren’t two grown-ups who can say yes and no! I mean, I didn’t drug her or tie her up or beat her to a pulp. I swear I’m telling the truth. Do you believe me?”
“It doesn’t matter. Does it?”
Towards six o’clock Emilia rings Bruch. They decide to forgive Alicia for the whisky transgression so that they’ve got a babysitter. She stays in Amsterdam.
Chapter 11
Bruch had opened the window. The streetlights hanging from cables strung across the street swayed in the wind and lit up the rain beneath. He hadn’t asked about her absence. She hadn’t said anything about it. He cooked. She found an Italian language course in the bookcase, loaded one of the cassette tapes, and repeated the lines. They named all the countries they’d been to. They named all the countries they wanted to visit. He talked about his patients and she talked about her company, the SOS. He made tea. They made love again. He made love to her without dropping that watchful gaze. He looked at her body while he was touching it. He looked at her face while he entered her. He kissed her eyelids and licked her lips. “You’re moaning,” he said when she moaned. He fell asleep. She studied his face. After that, she too went to sleep and when she woke he was looking at her. He made coffee and fetched the newspaper.
“I arrived at that party of Jacob’s when it was almost over. You tried to blow the snow out of my hair and insisted on putting an icicle in my drink. It seems you’d all done that earlier in the evening, but the edge of the roof was empty and you slipped on the balcony. You were fairly drunk. But you had a beautiful bright glow in your eyes. I thought Jacob was your boyfriend. I got talking with someone in the kitchen. I stood there tossing back drinks because I’d arrived completely sober at a party where everyone was already bombed. I got into a blinding row about dressage, a ridiculous subject that I don’t understand at all. When I came into the living room you were lying on your back, on the floor, in between your two brothers, listening to atrocious psychedelic music. I stood looking at the three of you for a bit. Then I left.”
“With someone?”
“With someone, yes.”
“Someone you’d never met until that evening?”
“Correct.”
“And never saw again after that.”
“Almost.”
“Only a few times.”
“Only a few times …”
“But when we saw each other at the hospital six months later you recognized me immediately.”
“Yes.”
“Because you’d been thinking about me all that time.”
“No.”
“You’re supposed to say yes. For the story.”
“Yes.”
“So no, then?”
“No.”
“You’d forgotten about me. But when you saw me you remembered that bright glowing look of mine and the purpose of your life.”
“And you didn’t recognize me at all, but that felt as if you’d forgotten something very important.”
“Yes.”
They talked endlessly about those first meetings, reconstructing their thoughts, imagining possible variations, sharpening their memories, polishing them into glorious confirmation. Emilia believed it underlined the correctness of her decision to keep quiet about what had happened to her. He would never talk to her with such insouciance or let himself go in her arms like that if he knew.
Later, she thought. When everything’s back to normal. When we know each other and what’s happened can’t soil me in his eyes. Then I’ll tell him.
They went to bars and they lay in bed. They told each other about their lives, their childhoods, their work. He got up early to go for a run. She made coffee and fossicked through his things. She found postcards from his ex, Mariette. Even the smallest details of his life—annotations in a book, the start of a letter to a friend whose name hadn’t yet come up in his stories, a loose photo, a pebble he’d kept—made her feel she was penetrating deeper into him.
Bruch changed jobs. Emilia gave up her room and moved in with him. Although they both worked a lot, it was as if they had endless time for each other. They no longer walked through the city so much. They went to the cinema, enjoyed sitting in bars imagining what the people around them did, fashioning them into characters. They went on holiday together for the first time, to Italy, and decided to marry. He introduced her to his parents, intelligent, standoffish people who made her part of the family without any hesitation but without much warmth either. She met his sister, Philippa, with whom he had a difficult relationship, not because of anything that had happened but because of irreconcilable temperaments. She’d been converted to Christianity and according to Bruch it had magnified all the dogmatic, superficial, condemnatory tendencies in her character. Emilia told Bruch about the death of her mother. As for her father, she said only that there was a rift that could never be repaired.
The first argument they had was about Jacob. Bruch said it wasn’t normal, the way he behaved with her. An angry exchange arose over the question of what was normal, and whether you could use “not normal” as an argument at all—as if there was such a thing as normal, as if there was a norm that Bruch personally knew to be right.
“He’s your brother!”
“You don’t say!”
“The way he touches you! The way he puts his paws on you. In my house.”
“In my house.”
“In our house. It’s not normal.”
“There you go again! Are you the great determiner of norms, Bruch? We’re close. He’s my big brother. He’s all I’ve got.”
“Jesus!”
“Apart from you.”
“Jesus!!”
“As far as family goes.”
“Pathetic!”
“Apart from Viktor. Who’s no use to me.”
“He ignores me when he’s here.”
“You’re jealous! How stupid! How ugly! I’m going out.”
He stopped her. They both brought it to a head. She said he was disgusting, acting like this.
“What am I supposed to think?”
“Something else, something more intelligent.”
“About you!?”
“Whatever you like. That’s what you do anyway, right?”
He gave her a slap. Then she gave him a slap. After that they stood looking at each other, bewildered.
“Ow,” she said, after a pause. He burst out laughing. She gave him another slap. He grabbed her wrists and they horsed around and collapsed in giggles. Until he was suddenly sitting on top of her, holding her arms above her head with one hand as he started to stroke her body with the other hand. Then she vomited. He let her go and moved away from her. She struggled upright and knelt there puking on the carpet. He didn’t say anything. She didn’t say anything either. He cleaned the floor while she lay curled up in bed.
Chapter 12
After graduating in medicine, Jacob told Viktor and Emilia that he wanted to become a psychiatrist. Viktor fell off his chair laughing.
“Don’t you need, er, empathy for that?”
Jacob retorted that he wasn’t going to become a social therapist, that it was still a branch of medicine.
“And incidentally, my interaction with people including my unhinged little brother has given me a kindhearted view of humanity.”
“Your unhinged little brother?”
“Yes. Look at you sitting there with your drooping shoulders and your inward gaze.” They’d fought, half for fun, and half for Viktor, to prove that although he wasn’t a man of Jacob’s magnitude, he made up for it in passion. Viktor had already spent three years studying a different subject each year. He wanted a broad education, he said, and wasn’t interested in a career. He worked at an anarchist radio station. He spoilt all their evenings with his urge to argue. Emilia was sixteen at the time and still living at home. She visited Jacob every other week, fitting seamlessly into the life he led. On the Sunday evening she would sit in the train home with a hangover, exhausted but recharged.
“Mercy, mercy,” Jacob roared, to humour Viktor.
They trawl through those memories at the huge table in the vast kitchen of the enormous house that Jacob and Lieke live in. The doors to the garden are open, the rain is tipping down, and the sky is an improbably dark grey. Everything about Jacob is big: his head, his hands, his ears, his arms, his belly. He radiates a coarse sort of stoutness. His hair is brown with a red sheen. He has a probing, arrogant gaze, which scares people who don’t know him and means that his patients have to overcome a degree of timidity before they reveal themselves, but also that ultimately they don’t dare lie to him.
On the kitchen counter, four large slices of salmon are waiting for the gathering to be complete.
“Didn’t Dad ever ask what we got up to in Amsterdam at weekends?” Jacob asks.
“I wasn’t speaking to him in those days.”
“But later you did, right?”
“Later I did, yes.”
“And then you stopped again.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
“It no longer matters. He doesn’t recognize anyone. He has no memory. He’s forgotten everything.”
“I thought it was an act. To make it all go away.”
“Did you really think that?”
“Yes.”
“He’s got Korsakoff’s Syndrome. I thought you knew.”
“I don’t know anything. But never mind. I don’t need to know.”
She stands up and lingers next to the sink. She sticks her finger into some soft cheese and strokes the fish’s pink flesh.
“Get a knife if you like. And a serving board.”
She opens the fridge and inspects the contents. There are only expensive things in it. Jacob and Lieke do their daily shopping at the delicatessen.
“Have you ever treated a rapist?”
“Has it ever struck you that our conversations often resemble interviews?”
“No. Really?”
“Yes, I have.”
“And?”
“What do you want to know?”
“The motive.”
“Anger, mostly. Hatred of women. Sexual deviance, sometimes. Sadism, occasionally.”
“And yours?”
“Anger. Poor impulse control.”
“Can I open that champagne?”
“Of course. Put another one in to cool. There, behind that door.”
“Did it trouble him?”
“Trouble?”
“Yes, you only treat people who’re suffering, right? Was he sorry?”
“Maybe. Yes. Maybe he was. He was depressed. For a while I worked one day a week in the jail. A completely pointless invention.”
