Читать книгу Craving - Esther Gerritsen - Страница 9

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MY MOTHER IS dying, Coco thinks, wanting to say the words out loud. She knows to whom and she is also looking forward to being comforted by him. The feeling in her stomach resembles being in love, she can still remember it from last year, though it might be hunger too. Funny, the way she can just keep on cycling; she still knows the way to the deli on the Rozengracht. Getting into the right lane at the big crossing goes as smoothly as usual, she takes the tram rails diagonally. It’s not that she’d expected her emotions to make cycling impossible, she is far from sentimental, but she does long for a fitting reaction. She would like to stop and reflect, and this feeling does really seem like hunger. It’s not that far to the snack bar on the Kinkerstraat that has RAS super fries, crispy on the outside, soft in the middle.

As she approaches the snack bar, she sees that the blue lettering on the façade no longer spells ‘De Vork’ but ‘Corner Inn’—there’s a new owner, and now she realises that the feeling in her stomach is not love, it is not hunger but panic, because bloody hell, they must still have RAS super fries, mustn’t they?

It isn’t until after she’s ordered, ‘One RAS fries and two battered sausages, please,’ until after she’s paid (did he hear her properly?) and the sausages have been dipped into the batter, and the man has turned his back and used the concealed RAS fries machine, that now she sighs, turns around, and sits down at a table in the window in relief, a view of the key-cutting shop on the other side of the street. She slumps into the hard plastic bucket seat, is happy, thinks calmly: what was that other nice feeling again? And is shocked to discover it is the news of her mother’s impending death.

She stares at the safes in the key shop window, searching for appropriate thoughts, and is fairly satisfied with: later I’ll be able to think, ‘this is where I was when I heard that my mother was going to die.’

The new owner brings the fries and the sausages on a brown plastic tray. She doesn’t take the food from the tray. She should eat slowly, ideally in a calm state of mind, but she doesn’t.

When she’s finished everything, she sits there aimlessly, staring at the key-cutting shop. As much as she’d like to share the news, you should wait with something like that, she thinks. And she knows that it’s only half past three. His last client leaves at four, he gets home about half past.

‘Apart from my parents,’ she’d said, ‘I don’t know anyone who still has a house phone.’

‘Yes,’ he said, not for the first time, ‘you’re too young for me.’

Telling him over the phone would be a shame, she’d miss his facial expression. She’ll call and leave a message that he has to eat at hers tonight, that she’s cycled right across town to fetch truffle pasta.

Hans flies into a rage. Coco looks at the red flush on his cheeks and is happy, as though she’s hit the bull’s eye on the shooting range and a bunch of roses has popped up.

‘She told you like that?!’ Hans says, ‘on the Overtoom?! “I’m dying” on the Overtoom?!’

Coco nods, wild, like a child. ‘Yes, like that, just as I was about to cycle off.’

Hans is no longer leaning on the counter, he is standing with his hands on his hips, his belly thrust out. ‘And then she left? Crossed the tram rails and that was that?’ His eyes are enormous.

‘“We’ll call,” she said.’

‘We’ll call?!’ He thrusts his belly out even further.

‘Yes, that’s what she said.’ Coco carries on nodding and just stops herself from saying: bad, isn’t it?

‘And that was that?’ Hans asks.

The water boils, Coco turns down the heat.

‘Oh yeah,’ she almost shouts, ‘whether I’d had my hair cut, she asked that too!’

‘What a horrible woman! She must be a ho-rri-ble woman.’

Coco grins from ear to ear. She basks in the indignation he is so good at.

She says, ‘Oh well,’ and again, ‘oh well.’ She carefully lowers the truffle pasta into the water with a wooden spoon and waits for more indignation, louder exclamations.

‘You can put the plates on the table, we’ll eat in three minutes.’

‘Oh well?’ Hans repeats.

‘Oh well,’ Coco says, ‘perhaps she was caught off guard.’

‘Oh well?’ Hans says again.

‘Oh well.’

‘Are you going to be like that?’

‘Huh?’

‘No, no, no.’ Hans takes a couple of steps backwards, as though he wants to view the situation from a greater distance. ‘This is typical of you. Feeding me horror stories about your parents and then playing it cool. “Oh well.” And then you keep coming up with new details and let me do the swearing and then you go and defend them. I’m not going to go along with this. I refuse to have an opinion about this. Yes, well tell me, Coco, what do you think?’ Hans looks triumphant. He doesn’t lay the table and the pasta will be ready in two minutes.

‘The plates,’ she says. Hans gets the plates.

‘Well?’

‘Perhaps she shouldn’t have told me… like that?’

‘I don’t know, you tell me.’

Coco looks at the clock on the microwave and feels like her party has been spoiled.

Hans doesn’t stay. Hans has to work.

‘A client?’

‘I have to work.’

‘Reading.’

‘You can read here.’

‘Sweetheart,’ he kisses her forehead, ‘I’ll give you a call before I go to sleep, all right?’

She nods slowly.

‘Or you should say: “It’s very important to me that you stay.”’

Coco doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t know whether it’s important or not. It seems like a trump card that she can only play once. She’ll keep it.

She met him a year ago in the launderette. A middle-aged man who didn’t know how a washing machine worked. She had just loaded her wash and was wondering whether to go back to bed or go somewhere for coffee. She suspected that she was still drunk from the night before and that the headache would come later. That was when he came in. She was still crouched down next to the machine. He was wearing one of those expensive, long, soft woollen coats. He just stood there in front of the machine next to hers. He had a book and a newspaper under one arm and a large leather weekend bag under the other. He sank to his knees, the soft coat touching the tiles. He opened the machine and put his coloureds and his whites in together. The back of his neck was freshly shaven, still a little red, just been to the barber’s. He stared at the machine, she stared at him. She wondered whether he had a piano.

He sighed and she wanted to say: give me your washing, love, come here, let me do it. As though she knew she would never see him this hopeless again, that it had to happen now, otherwise the man would just disappear from her life with his soft coat, his shaven neck, and his piano.

She began to speak to him very quietly, so that nobody would hear that she was helping him.

‘You need to take out all the really white things. They’ll discolour.’

He looked at her but didn’t do anything. She felt it was an invasion of privacy to touch his washing but did it anyway. She pulled two white towels and a T-shirt out of the machine.

‘Anything else?’

He slowly shook his head, no.

‘Go for the coloured wash option at forty degrees. Here. Forty is always good. Or is there any wool here?’ He shook his head again. ‘Do you have any detergent with you? Or do you want the stuff from here?’

‘From here?’

‘It’s horrible.’ She took a box of washing powder out of her bag. ‘Use mine then. Two scoops. In the drawer there. Right-hand compartment, left is for prewash.’

He didn’t take the packet, so she filled the compartment with washing powder. She put her own softener in as well. He carried on watching her while she worked.

Instead of thanking her, he said, ‘You’re good at that, helping me, you’ve got didactic skills, you should do something with that.’

The way he was trying to turn the tables moved her. It made him even more helpless—a man unable to accept help.

He stood up and went to sit on a bench against the wall. He left his book in his lap, and opened the newspaper. She didn’t tell him that he could simply give the owner an extra euro and he would put everything in the dryer and fold it up afterwards so that you didn’t need to sit here and wait. She sat down next to him and asked for a section of the paper.

‘Which part do you want?’

She didn’t want to say that it didn’t matter, so she said, ‘Business please.’

She remained silent and felt his body warmth, smelled a faint whiff of aftershave. She pretended to read the stock-market report and tilted her head slightly to be closer to him. She wanted to rest her head on his lap, on that woollen coat.

She would have liked to have said, ‘If you want, I’ll stay home tonight.’ She would never have to go anywhere again. She thought about her friends and how she’d be happy to swap them all for a man with a piano.

Even though she dried and folded her own washing that afternoon, she gave the owner a euro afterwards, along with her phone number, so that he’d call her the next time the helpless man came to do his laundry. She had loved him instantly, conclusively. So here he is, she thought, like a mother looking at her newborn baby, so here he is. There was nothing more to be done.

That second time in the launderette, she deliberately hadn’t taken much washing with her.

She nodded at her bag. ‘If it wasn’t so intimate,’ she said, ‘we could just put everything in one machine.’ She smiled at him girlishly, giving him the opportunity to play the conquering hero. He took her bag from her firmly and put her washing into his machine. Later on he’d say it had been his idea.

The first time they arranged to do something together, he simply announced it to her, ‘We’re going out for dinner. I’m paying.’ It sounded like a gift. She was amused that he was ordering her around like that, and because she found it amusing, she didn’t mind being ordered around.

He picked her up, he was wearing a suit. In the restaurant she tried to see what kind of body was hidden under the jacket. She loved his body before she’d even seen it. He told her about his divorce, which hadn’t officially come through yet. He didn’t have a piano. He loved the fact that she spoke Russian. He asked her to translate all the names of the dishes into Russian. She was much younger than him, but luckily there was one thing she could do that he couldn’t. Without the Russian, it would never have amounted to much.

The first time they fucked, that evening, in his bed, in the small apartment above his practice, she looked at him, ‘with large, frightened eyes’, as he would later recall. It was fast. It hurt and she thought: if I don’t think of this as pain, it won’t matter if it hurts.

He even asked her, ‘Am I hurting you?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘You look as though I am hurting you; that’s not good.’

She would try not to look like that.

‘Why are you studying Russian?’ he asked her, and she told him how it had started: that she’d read an interview with someone who talked about a book by Vera Panova and called it ‘a friendly book about nice people.’ The words had made her feel extraordinarily calm, as though she’d only just noticed that she was restless. The calmness was so overwhelming that she could no longer think about anything except the calmness, and the calmness became an obsession and turned back into restlessness again. She’d searched feverishly for the book, but it didn’t seem to be translated into Dutch. One thing had led to another and now she was a third-year Russian student. As it turned out, the book had been translated into Dutch. They’d given the wrong title in the interview.

He’d liked the story. Back then he didn’t know that the story would just fizzle out, that after three years she was still studying Russian because of that single line: ‘a friendly book about nice people.’ There should have been other reasons by now. She was like an old man who, after forty years of marriage, says something like: I married her because she had such beautiful hair.

Hans took her to museums and art galleries. They drove for hours for tiny exhibitions. He took her to restaurants where she was the youngest customer. There they’d drink lots of different wines, one after another. It was a way of drinking she was unfamiliar with. Drinking had always been a straight road, downing a lot of the same thing like you were learning a new song. Carry on at a steady pace, until you got there, until you understood it and thought: actually this song’s not that difficult, did I really need all that time, all those glasses? The business with all those different wines was a confusing slalom through her head.

He asked her things, constantly: What are you thinking about now? What’s going on? What did you feel? What does that look like?

At first it overwhelmed her. Often she would open her mouth and not say a single thing, afraid to put her thoughts into words. Until every answer seemed acceptable to him. Not a single thought was considered strange. It was new, as though she was speaking Dutch for the first time.

He bought her complicated clothes: blouses with horizontal pleats. He said everything suited her. And she thought: I could be anybody, but this is who I’ve become. She studied less and less.

It was nice when he accompanied her to her father and stepmother’s. They got along well, he took over, she could just sit back and watch. He had never met her mother. He didn’t go to the birthday gatherings she attended.

‘I don’t like parties, you mustn’t take it personally.’ Not that she did.

By the time they’d been together for six months, she had grown too fat for the blouse with the horizontal pleats. He didn’t mind, of course. He knew all her Russian songs by now too.

The evening she knows her mother is going to die, she is on her own and eats Caramac and Toffee Cups in bed. These are the sweets she eats when he’s not looking because she’d rather conceal her childish taste. She knows he is going to leave her. He can no longer bear how satisfied she is. He never needed to pursue her. She was simply there one day and he could have her. For a while things went well, he had just got divorced, and for a time he liked things that were unambiguous. A year of that was enough.

But now there’s a sick mother; things like that excite him. It’ll keep him occupied for a while. She won’t die that fast. Perhaps while that happens, they’ll be able to salvage something. Coco doesn’t know how, all she knows is that there’s still time and that’s the main thing.

In two days’ time they’re going out for dinner with her father and stepmother. Coco pictures herself telling them. She is already looking forward to it.

In her mind she hears Hans asking her, ‘What exactly is it that you’re looking forward to?’ But this time she doesn’t feel like answering.