The Book of Revelation (20 page)

Shivering suddenly, despite the heat, I got up from the table. I leaned against the windowsill and gazed down at the canal. Another tourist boat glided by, the sun glancing off its curved glass roof. In the end, I didn’t have much to go on, and in the time that had elapsed, even the little that I had could easily have changed. Moles could be removed, for instance. Scars could fade. Hair could be cut, or dyed. I remembered Isabel’s story about the ballerina with the birthmark at the bottom of her spine, a pale-pink birthmark that was shaped exactly like a sea-horse. If only I had something as unique, as unmistakable, as that. . . . I was beginning to realise the difficulty of the task that lay ahead of me.

•

Halfway through August I travelled down to Bloemendaal. Isabel had just returned from Budapest, where she had been teaching dance, and she had invited me to supper. It was another grey day, and, as the train slid through the dull wet countryside, I had an odd churning sensation in my stomach, as if it was trying to turn over or change shape. More than three years had passed since I had last seen Isabel, but it felt like nothing suddenly, and I wondered what I had done with all the time.

She had invited Paul Bouhtala to supper as well, she told me as I followed her into the living-room. It would just be the three of us. She hoped it wouldn’t be too boring for me.

“Isabel,” I said, reproaching her.

She looked just the same, with her head set at that imperious angle and her hair coiled in a chignon, but she seemed different, less patient than I remembered, more demanding—almost querulous. She had altered in some small way that made her virtually unrecognisable, just as a mistake of a fraction of a degree when you are navigating can take you hundreds of miles off course.

It was an awkward evening altogether, and it ended with an argument. In Isabel’s opinion, I ought to be dancing—or if I thought it was too late for that, then at least I should resume my career as a choreographer. I told her I didn’t feel ready yet. She treated these words with something close to contempt. You’re wasting your life, she said, your talent. . . . She gave me a sideways look, the eyebrow nearest to me raised, then she turned away and lit one of her Egyptian cigarettes. We went round and round in circles. We got nowhere. I felt sorry for Bouhtala, who had to listen to it all. I noticed that he watched the conversation closely, though, the way you might watch a precious object teeter on a high shelf, ready to reach out and catch it if it fell.

At last, at about eleven-thirty, Isabel threw her napkin on to the table and stood up. “I’m feeling rather tired. I think I’ll go to bed.”

Seeing that Bouhtala was about to rise out of his chair, she stopped him by placing a hand on his shoulder.

“Stay a little longer,” she said, “and see if you can’t talk some sense into him.”

I waited until I was alone with Bouhtala, then I looked at him. He gave me a rueful half-smile and reached for his drink.

“She thinks so highly of you,” he said. “She has such hopes.”

“I know.” I sighed. “But she doesn’t seem to realise how far I’ve gone. From that whole world, I mean.” I looked past Bouhtala, into the dark corner of the room. “I only danced once in all the time I was away.”

The diamond merchant waited, his sombre, heavy-lidded eyes seeming to draw words out of me.

“It was in northern Brazil,” I said. “Belem. You know the place?”

“I was there once,” he said quietly.

And suddenly our roles of three years before were reversed, and I was telling Paul Bouhtala a story. One night, not long after arriving in the city, I went for a drink in the centre. It was an outdoor bar, next to a park, with old, bad-tempered waiters and wrought-iron tables that had been painted green. I was sitting by myself, drinking a beer, when a boy of about fifteen walked up to me. He stood there, right in front of me, just smiling. He had curly hair and sharp white teeth, and dark eyelashes that were so long, they almost touched his eyebrows. I remember thinking that it looked as if a devil’s face had been laid over the face of a child. I smiled back, though. He sat down at my table and pointed at my beer. I nodded. He signalled to a waiter, asked for two more glasses. By the time the glasses arrived, a girl of about his age was sitting beside him. The boy poured the girl an inch of beer, poured himself an inch, then put the bottle back on the table. He began to talk to me in English. He was proud of his English. He had learned it in Fortaleza, which was further down the coast. Nice place, he said. Beaches. Many tourists. From time to time he leaned sideways and spoke to the girl in Portuguese. I watched her as she listened to the boy, her face angled away from him, his mouth close to her ear. Her skin had a glow to it, a fullness, and the whites of her eyes were as bright as her white T-shirt. She would look at me, then look away. Then she would look at me again. Her gaze had no amusement in it, no curiosity either, only a kind of steadiness. I had no idea what she was thinking.

“You are a dancer?” the boy said at one point.

I looked at him, surprised. “I used to be.”

“I knew it.” He turned to the girl and translated for her. She listened carefully, with her head turned slightly to one side, then she looked at me again.

“How did you know?” I asked the boy.

“The way you sit.” He shrugged as if it was obvious. “It is very—” and he looked away into the dark trees of the park, trying to think of the right word. He didn’t find it. Instead, he tilted his hand on one side and then moved it up and down in the air, a slow chopping motion. I understood that he was talking about my posture.

“Do you know any dancers?” I asked him.

“Yes, I know. In Fortaleza. His name was Peter.” The boy smiled at me furtively. “But you stopped dancing? How can you stop? To be a dancer—” and his arm lifted into the soft night air, and he looked at me again with that beguiling smile of his, which was too young for him, somehow, too innocent.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“You can tell.”

“No. It’s too long.”

The boy spoke to the girl again, and she nodded, but this time she didn’t look at me. Instead, she stared at her hands, which were resting in her lap. They looked very brown against the pale-blue of her jeans.

“We can buy cocaine,” the boy said.

I looked at him, but said nothing.

He shifted on his chair. “But I have no money. . . .”

I asked him how much money he would need. He shrugged and said thirty thousand. I told him I could give him twenty. I wasn’t intending to do it myself—it was for him, for the girl too, perhaps—but when he came back ten minutes later he took my hand and led me off into the trees. The softness of the sky, the foliage so black above our heads, the girl’s skin glowing. . . .

When we were in the shadows, some distance from the bar, the boy opened a small envelope made out of a page torn from a comic book. He dipped the nail on his little finger into the powder and held it up to my nose. Then he looked me in the eyes and lifted his chin once, quickly.

Back at the table he grinned and said, “It’s good?”

“It’s very good,” I said.

I called the waiter over and ordered another bottle of beer. The boy took the girl off into the trees. When they returned, I poured them both a drink. I had so many things to say, and yet I couldn’t choose between them because they were all as interesting as each other.

“You will come with us tonight?” the boy asked after a while.

“Where are you going?”

“To the disco. You will come?”

“Yes, of course.”

It was an open-air club, not far from the river, with a concrete floor and a bar that was just a shed with a corrugated-iron roof. At midnight a live band played on a small stage under the mango trees. I remember seeing two girls in peach satin hot pants and stacked heels dancing with each other on the top of a wall, a lop-sided moon dropping in the sky behind them. Then everyone was dancing. The smell of hot skin, marijuana, rotting vegetation, and all the colours rich and bruised. . . . The music was outside me and inside me, as much a part of me as blood or muscle. I couldn’t resist it. I danced on my own, then I danced with a tall black girl in a yellow vest and a short skirt. Sometimes we were pressed together, our bodies touching. Other times we pulled apart, our arms out sideways, resting on the air. I didn’t feel that I had bones or joints or anything like that. I had no sense of being made of more than one pure thing. All the movement from the waist down, hips like water. Everything flowing and swirling and only held together by the music. . . . I wiped my forehead on my wrist, then on my forearm, but they were both already wet. I bought a beer, drank half of it straight down. I danced until my shirt stuck to my chest, and my hair hung dripping in my eyes. The tall girl was gone, and I was by myself again, deep inside the crowd. Once, I looked for the girl in the white T-shirt and the boy, but they were nowhere to be seen. Probably it was enough that I had paid for them to get in. Two days later I left the city on a boat bound for Manaus. . . .

My story told, I looked across at Paul Bouhtala. He was staring at me.

“It’s not like one of your stories,” I said. “It doesn’t really have an end.”

Bouhtala took a cigarillo out of the flat pale-yellow tin that lay on the table beside him. “The boy. He sounds fascinating.”

“Yes.” I smiled gently, without innuendo. “You would have liked him.”

“And the dancing,” Bouhtala said, “you enjoyed it?”

“Yes. God, yes.”

Bouhtala smiled and nodded. “The cocaine.” He leaned back, lit his cigarillo and smoked for a while. “Interesting,” he said eventually, “the way you buried one story inside the other. The story you tell, and the story you don’t tell. . . .”

•

One evening in late August I was sitting in Stefan’s kitchen when he asked me if I would like to go to a party that his girlfriend Madeleine was giving in her apartment just behind the Concertgebouw. She had a roof terrace and a barbecue, he said. She shared the apartment with another girl, some kind of nurse. This last and seemingly innocuous detail had a dramatic effect on me. I suddenly remembered the argument that had taken place in the white room not long after Maude had given me that primitive tattoo. I remembered particularly something that Maude had said when she lost her temper. She had used the word
ziekenhuis,
which was the Dutch for
hospital
, then she had stopped in mid-sentence and hung her head. The other women swung round and looked at me, a reaction I could make no sense of at the time. What if Maude had accidentally let slip a vital piece of information? What if the hospital she had referred to was their place of work?
What if the women were nurses?

All this occurred to me in the space of a few seconds, but it was enough to lift me from my chair and send me to the window where I stood looking out into the dark. It might still be true that the three women were bound together by damage that had been done to them. They had something else in common, though, something so obvious that I hadn’t thought of it before: a job. If my new hypothesis was correct, it would explain why they had stared at me like that. They were hoping I hadn’t understood what Maude had said. It would also explain why they had let me go so unexpectedly. They thought Maude could no longer be trusted. Suddenly I had the answer to questions I had never even asked. How had they got hold of the anaesthetic in the first place? How had they known what dosage to use? And how had they administered the anaesthetic without me noticing? No ordinary member of the public could have been so deft with a syringe. And what about the atmosphere in the room, that almost surreal climate of care . . .? There was also the time when Astrid dressed up in a nurse’s uniform in an attempt to arouse me. . . . As a double-bluff, this was so bold that it took my breath away.

I turned round to see Stefan staring at me.

“So would you like to come?” he said.

“I’d love to.” I smiled at him. “When did you say it was?”

The idea that the women were all nurses opened up a whole new angle of approach for me. The next morning I bought a Falkplan of Amsterdam. I turned to the page that listed the city’s hospitals. There were nineteen of them—nineteen!—though, on closer inspection, I was able to reduce the figure to eleven, since differently named institutions were sometimes located at the same address. Imagine my excitement when I noticed that there was a large general hospital near Muiderpoort station, the area I had searched so fruitlessly three years before! The fact that nurses usually lived close to their place of work on account of their long hours seemed to lend credence to my initial gut feeling—namely, that they lived somewhere in the Muiderpoort area. After all, the hospital, the station and several churches all lay within the same two-inch radius on the map. Though I was acting on nothing more solid than intuition and coincidence, it seemed a promising framework for my first tentative investigations.

•

The following night I showered, then I put on the simple white cotton shirt and trousers I had bought in India. My tan hadn’t faded yet, and my hair was still bleached from the sun. Though I would never again reach the peak of fitness I had achieved while I was dancing, my body was still in shape from all the exercise I had taken during my years away. Studying myself in the mirror as I dressed, I thought I looked good—which was just as well, given what I had in mind.

Stefan had gone over to Madeleine’s apartment in the afternoon to help with the preparations, so I was alone as I set out for the party. I cycled up Spiegelgracht, then through the Rijksmuseum, that stretch of chilly, dimly lit road that runs under the building. A man in a fedora stood in the shadow of the arches playing a tenor saxophone. I rode past him and out into the night, leaving the music floating eerily in the cavernous gloom behind me. The moon was rising in the sky to the south-west. Only a few days short of being full, it had a rich, buttery tint to it, not unlike the saxophone I had seen just moments earlier.

I arrived outside the house as ten o’clock was striking. After chaining my bicycle to the high black railings, I pressed the top bell. Someone buzzed me in. It was an old building, with a tall, cool hallway, reminding me of an embassy or a museum. A flutter went through me, as if some winged creature had stirred beneath my ribs and taken flight, and I realised that I was trying not to think about the nurse. It was a party, I told myself. It was only a party.