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STEFAAN 1998

When was the last time anyone asked him what happened to his finger? Stefaan looks at his fingertip with its missing piece. He’s become so used to it that he rarely notices it at all. If there’s a thunderstorm or a heavy downpour, he feels it in his finger. It’s as if the world were using his finger to warn him, as if he had contact with some other system.

He’s staying off season in a vacation hotel on the outskirts of Istanbul. The whole place is abandoned and empty, except for a few faded kiddie cars and buckets in the sandy back garden. After arriving at the hotel at eight in the morning he immediately went to his room. He locked the door behind him and dropped onto the bed, fully clothed. After an hour of tossing and turning in the irritating light that pierced through the net curtains, he gave up and called room service for breakfast. He was lying in bed when he heard a woman place a ‘Turkish breakfast for one’ outside his door, sighing loudly. She knocked. He jumped up, opened the door and looked into the corridor, but there was no one to be seen. At his feet was a tray with a fake silver pot of tea and a plate containing a piece of white bread, oily black olives, and a thick slice of feta cheese.

Yesterday he was still in Dubai. He stayed in a super-deluxe suite the size of a soccer field, yet he still couldn’t sleep. He can’t sleep at all anymore. He’ll never again be free of the burning eyes, the marbles rolling around in his head, the spinning world beneath his shaky feet. It’s not for lack of trying: valerian drops, big glasses of whisky, two hours of power training, a hot water bottle, milk before bed, a footbath with a soothing bath fizzer. Mieke keeps coming up with new remedies and tricks, but nothing helps. What still helps best is not talking about it. Whenever Mieke calls to ask how he slept, he nods vaguely.

‘I can’t hear you,’ he says. ‘I can’t hear you. There’s static in the line again. I’m going to hang up.’

The plane that took off from Dubai had an eight-hour stopover in Istanbul. Instead of hanging around the airport or making a useless flash visit to the city, he went to the first hotel he came across on the way to Istanbul. He has to get some sleep or he’ll collapse. Yesterday afternoon a meeting had been scheduled in Dubai with the government representative. At the very last moment, five minutes before the talk was to take place, a veiled secretary with crimson lipstick came to announce that the thing had been cancelled. The same meeting was supposed to have taken place three days earlier, and yesterday it was rescheduled for today at the selfsame time, ten o’clock, but he couldn’t stay in Dubai a minute longer. He heard from an offended partner of the sister company in Italy that the Arabs make a game out of jerking Westerners around.

All that bright white in Dubai, with the sun beating down on it, was driving him crazy. He left his air-conditioned suite, with its sparkling fresh dates and pineapple slices, and went out to the terrace. The desert had seen him coming. He heard the djinns calling into the wind: Go away. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he felt so miserable that he scraped together what was left of his energy and got one of the ubiquitous hotel staff to drive him to the airport at top speed. He fled from the gaping maw of the desert, ran away from the inhuman, loathsome, gaudy buildings that prove for the umpteenth time that humanity is doing all it can to make itself impossible. In the middle of the desert, bushes and plants are brought in every day and irrigated continuously by means of complicated watering systems. At the opening reception of the conference there were dozens of ice sculptures, proof that man can overpower nature. Stefaan has no respect for such things.

He stares at the slice of white cheese on his plate. The cheese doesn’t melt, despite the intensifying heat. He takes off his shirt. A pair of black trousers and a white sleeveless undershirt, that’s how the men here appear in public. He saw it when he was in Istanbul last month for some negotiations and was given an unsolicited tour.

A sip of tea, that ought to work. Sweet tea. All his life he’s had a sweet tooth. He takes the little glass, pours the tea in, and spills some on his white undershirt. A green-brown stain spreads across his belly. He looks at it. He’d like to react, but his system is blocked and threatens to seize up entirely. He negotiates with himself, he begs: do something, curse, laugh, cry. The last time he laughed was when the CEO recently told him about the upcoming split. He burst out laughing, only silently. First they all almost risked their lives for the merger, and now the whole thing is being split up again. It’s just like a family where you do everything you can to keep your child well-protected, only to let her go eighteen years later. It’s a circular movement whose only benefit is that the split-off part will repeat the same pattern.

You have to mix more with people or you’ll lose touch with reality. That’s what Mieke says. It’s true. You aren’t an island. Or a country, or a city, or a flagpole. Don’t talk to yourself, Stefaan. Read the welcome brochure. Enjoy these lovely surroundings, with their many assets and free bus service to the city. There’s lots to experience for the adventurous tourist. Or is shopping more your cup of tea? Istanbul is a shopper’s paradise. There’s something here for everyone.

He calls Mieke. He tells her that the plane has made a stopover in Istanbul.

‘Istanbul? I thought you had to be in Dubai until Friday.’

‘The meeting was cancelled. I’m trying to book a flight for tomorrow so I can come home. I’m in a beautiful area here. There’s lots to see and free bus service to the historic centre.’

‘What’s the name of your hotel?’

‘I don’t know myself, but it’s a regular paradise here.’

‘You sound strange. Is anything wrong?’

‘Caught a cold from the air conditioning.’

‘Take good care of yourself. And keep me posted.’

He nods.

‘It’s hard to understand you,’ she says. ‘There’s static in the line again. I’m going to hang up. I’ll see you tomorrow. Let me know when your plane lands.’

He’s doing it for Mieke, travelling from one side of the globe to the other, to give her the oxygen that he himself hasn’t been able to breathe for such a long time. As if a cork were stuck in his bronchial tubes.

The only thing you have is your family, he realizes, but you don’t know them. You’re a bystander with a ringside seat. You can’t go back to that bourgeois life where nothing is happening, but you can’t run away anymore either. You’re the right man, and all for nothing. It’s your own fault. It’s been going on for years and you haven’t wanted to do anything about it. Unlike Mieke, who sits down at the table with her inexhaustible optimism and tries to comfort him: ‘We let them walk all over us. We have to learn to say no. Really, Stefaan.’

He can say no. He’s done it plenty of times. Like that time he came home and found Sarah and the neighbour girl Emily diving into the bushes along the edge of the garden, next to a mud puddle, even though the garden was such a big beautiful paradise to play in. Usually he was very quiet at home, just like his mother. Only occasionally did he open the door to his innermost world. He rarely hollered, but when he did it was completely spontaneous. If he were to see a lab technician with a coffee cup leaning over a specimen, his roar would burst forth as unexpectedly as an avalanche in the mountains.

When he saw that the silver forks were just lying there, drowning in a mud puddle, and that his daughter and the neighbour girl were leaning over the puddle like giant swimming pool attendants, it took all the effort in the world for him not to roar with outrage. The silver forks and knives that he had paid for, for which he had wolfed down nauseating salt-free paté sandwiches and slurped hot coffee every morning to the tune of the Radio 1 jingle, for which he had pushed himself to give his all, all day, every day—those forks didn’t belong in a puddle.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked. It sounded incredibly loud, and even he was shocked at how many decibels he could produce.

‘The backstroke!’ Sarah said. She didn’t look up.

‘Oh, no you aren’t. Those forks were made for eating,’ he roared at his daughter, ‘not for doing the backstroke!’

‘Hi, Stefaan,’ said the neighbour girl Emily insolently. ‘We’re having a contest.’

‘Oh, no you aren’t,’ he repeated. He raised his foot and let it drop like an elephant’s foot in the middle of the mud puddle. The mud spattered all over the leg of his trousers. Dirty water dripped down his leg. His foot was wet.

‘Mama says it’s okay,’ Sarah said hastily. There he stood, one foot in the mud.

‘They’re old forks, Papa,’ Sarah added. His mouth was full of dry rags. The girls continued to sit next to the puddle, giggling and playing with the old forks they had gotten from Mieke.

He knew he shouldn’t have lost control, because that was the persona he had assumed. His wife’s authority towered over his on the home front. That had been their tacit agreement. He had his work as manager, where he could invest all his energy, and Mieke’s sphere was at home. There she ran the show. Actually she’s the one who works twenty-four-hour shifts.

Somehow he manages to pass the time. He leans listlessly against time, slowly kicking it down the road. He hangs out, he lies down, he looks out the window, where sand banks up like snow in a fierce winter. Fortunately he’s able to blame the objects here for his sleeplessness: mattress too thin, travel alarm clock too noisy, a strange droning in the old air conditioner, a tremor that comes right through the walls.

The next day he calls Mieke to let her know that something has gone wrong with the booking of his flight. What did you say? he asks Mieke. Yes, he’s going to try to get it straightened out today, so he can come home tomorrow. What? Yes, his cold is better. Now I really can’t understand you anymore, Mieke, say it again. She shouts why he never asks how she’s doing.

When he gets home, he’s going to take his wife’s hand and say: we’ve got to get to know each other again. He can already hear her voice: what are you talking about?

It’s nobody’s fault, but his strength is waning. When he was younger, after his father’s death, he drank an elixir that for a number of years made him a big strong man. That elixir has gradually worn off; he’s lost the formula. He’s sitting on the imitation leather chair in his room and his pants itch. He stands up, takes his pants off, and folds them up. It’s important that he eat something. No matter what your ailment is, eating always helps. Eat well, sleep well. His breakfast tray is outside the door. It may have been there for hours. Stefaan sits down with the tray on his lap. Now his legs are caught between the sticky imitation leather and the wooden tray.

All the grief that has been building up over all those centuries has accumulated in you, and you let it happen. In fact, you made it worse. How easy would it be to close your eyes now and wake up in a hundred years? He read Sarah the story of Rip van Winkle. Rip fell asleep and woke up a century later in a completely different world. He didn’t recognize anything anymore. What a relief it would be if he could advance time a hundred years.

A telephone rings somewhere in one of the hotel rooms. Someone is searching for someone else. No one can call him here, no one even knows he’s in this hotel. If a murder were committed here he could just walk away, a Turk among the Turks in his get-up, and no one would single him out. He’ll slip onto the plane and fly home.

The phone has stopped ringing. He hears a woman’s voice in the corridor. It’s probably the cleaning woman chatting with someone. She has many more rooms to clean, interminably more rooms. Although there are almost no guests at this time of year, her work is assured. Rooms have to be constantly maintained. His bathroom floor is covered in linoleum, thin from years of wear and tear. The shower smells of bleach and the grooves between the tiles are encrusted with filth. The woman has years of work ahead of her.

Stefaan stands up. He puts the breakfast tray on the windowsill because he doesn’t know what to do with it. He can hardly lay it on the moustachioed face of Ataturk, who is staring up at him from a picture book on the nightstand. The cleaning woman will certainly see the tray on the windowsill. Or won’t she? He’s hardly eaten any of the bread. Will she be offended? He sticks the knife in the slice of cheese and wiggles it back and forth. Now the cheese is broken up. She’ll see it: the cheese is broken up but none of it has been eaten. This is not respectful. He has to hide the cheese. There are a couple of tears in the window screen that separates him from the open air. He jabs the knife into a piece of cheese and pushes it out through a large tear. It falls down into the withered bushes. One small piece remains stuck to the screen. It could easily be a piece of fuzz.

Somewhere in the hotel—it’s difficult to tell exactly where; the lack of sleep has made him somewhat dizzy—the cleaning woman keeps on chattering. He leaves his room and wanders languidly in the direction of the sound. His legs are pale; he can see that now with the endless movement of left leg in front of right leg, over and over. The woman’s voice is coming from the downstairs corridor. He goes down the stairs, which descend in a spiral. It’s impossible for two guests to pass each other. One would have to wait until the other is off the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs he can hear her more clearly. She’s on the phone with the manager or with her husband. The door of the third room on the left is open. He walks up to it and stands in the doorway. She utters a series of little sounds; she’s probably listening to instructions. Run the vacuum at half speed, check the swimming pool for corpses, don’t give anyone a room after ten o’clock. It’s a good thing the man at the other end of the line is attentive, he says to himself. He could just as easily have been a man with base intentions. There are so many of them. It’s too much for any woman.

He is prudent enough to wait at the threshold. He is no intruder. He raises his hand to the cleaning woman as if to ask her a question. She’s aware of him standing there but ignores him for quite some time. He feels sorry for the woman. All that work awaiting her. The woman finally says goodbye and hangs up.

He holds up his damaged finger, like a fortune teller testing the atmosphere in search of the right answer. The woman utters a little cry.

Yes, a little piece of his finger is missing, a tiny little piece, the very tip. But does a fingertip serve any purpose? The woman stares at the grown-up E.T. before her.

‘Can I help you?’ The same sentence she used to welcome him when he arrived, a second-hand English sentence that she may not even understand.

He feels dizzy, as if he were looking down a spiral staircase on the thousandth floor into the heart of a whirlpool. You have to look into my eyes, he wants to say. That’s where the entrance is.

The woman exudes a revolting anguish. She takes a step backward. Her husband Hamid hasn’t lifted a finger all day. She comes home after a hard day’s work at the hotel and he demands to be fed, or to be sexually serviced. Stefaan shudders to think of such men. As a man it fills him with shame. Men can feel deeply ashamed for the behaviour of their fellows. He must apologize, to make clear that not all men are like that.

He takes the woman by the hand and leads her to the chair. She can rest a bit there. He himself sits down on the bed, where there’s only a mattress and a mattress cover. The woman looks surprised.

‘Look, my finger,’ he says to her, and he holds his finger up again.

The woman turns her dark gaze to his fingertip.

‘Ouch,’ says the woman. She bites her lip and swallows her words. Doesn’t she dare say anything?

‘You can ask me anything you like,’ he says, to put her at ease. She shrugs her shoulders and points to her cart full of cleaning materials. He shouldn’t have said what he did. It’s up to him to entertain the woman.

Begin at the beginning. Give her something to drink.

‘Would you like something to drink?’ he asks. He takes a bottle of Coke from the mini refrigerator. ‘Coke?’

The woman nods slightly. He opens the bottle and gives it to her. He’s determined to talk with her. Talk for the sheer pleasure of it, talk to fight the drowsiness. But this is where we raise our objection. Enough of this messing around. Only when that misery, that attack on us, has been transformed into sentences and ejected from your system—only then can you go further. Speak, Stefaan, open your mouth. We demand that you tell her the true story of your brother Alain, who was never aware of any evil or danger.

It had snowed, and Stefaan and his little brother wanted to play in the snow. That was all right, as long as he took good care of Alain, because that boy was a little rascal. They were allowed to play in the field as much as they wanted, but they mustn’t go near the river. He promised his mother he would do what she said. After an hour they began to grow tired of the field and went over to the river anyway. There were more slopes there and the snow was thicker. It was the very best place for sledding. They climbed the hills endlessly and sledded down at lightning speed. At a certain point the sled slipped away from them, onto the frozen river. For a moment he thinks he’s telling a fairy tale. A Thousand and One Nights. A Thousand and One Sleepless Nights. His little brother wanted to go get the sled. ‘Okay, go ahead,’ he had said. ‘You go, since you’re the lightest.’ The fat ducks could walk on the ice without any problem, Stefaan reasoned, suspecting, not being at all sure, that the ice could bear Alain’s weight. It was a gamble with a tingling, uncertain tension. When Alain had almost reached the sled he suddenly dropped down, as if a rope had come out of the centre of the earth and had begun pulling hard on Alain the marionette. He fell through the ice. A black hole yawned open. Stefaan wanted to pull his brother out of the water, but as soon as he set foot on the ice he felt it crack. In a blind panic he walked back home. They never found Alain. He never dared tell his parents that he had given his brother permission to go out onto the ice, knowing full well that the ice could crack. That’s the way he is.

‘That’s the way I am,’ he said, and falls silent. The woman pushes herself up out of the chair during his brief pause and nods. She wants to leave. He stands in front of her and says, ‘Is this getting through to you? Do you understand what I’m saying? I caused my brother’s death. My fault. But you’re acting as if it were nothing. Unbelievable.’

‘Thank you,’ she says. She puts her empty bottle on top of the refrigerator, pushes her cleaning cart forward, and disappears from view.

Stefaan stands up and walks back to his room. He looks at his finger. If he were to cut off one fingertip for each person dead or wounded or hurt, like a Mafioso, he’d run out of fingers and toes. He clips into his damaged fingertip with his nail clipper. The searing pain does him good. It casts a light on his life. Be honest with us for once, Stefaan. You do it on purpose. There’s no end to the accidents and the stupid mishaps. Not only do you experience them but you also plot them, you set them in motion. You act as if you were helping other people, but actually you’re obliterating them. The Chinese workers, Berkvens, Alain, your wife, your child, the children you haven’t made yet. You’re your own worst enemy.

‘Mieke,’ he says on the phone. ‘I’ll be flying back home later on.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That I’ll be … that it’s very beautiful here.’

‘All right. But why don’t you come home now? Sarah is beginning to wonder how many meetings a person can attend.’

‘So am I,’ he says. ‘So am I.’

He looks down at his sunken stomach beneath his white undershirt. He can’t imagine that other kinds of garments actually exist. He knows in theory that the bazaars, the supermarkets, and the boutiques are bursting with clothes, that at this very moment garments are being put together in sewing factories, that haute couture is being shown on the catwalks, just as he knows that somewhere there are human beings, but not here.

That woman needs comforting. She works here alone in this deserted hotel. Some people have trouble with loneliness, especially women with children. Does she have children? He’ll go talk to her again, even though he finds her a bit frightening with her gypsy eyes and her sullen mouth. But she is a human being, so she can talk. He picks up the phone and orders a light lunch. Then he stands at the door until he hears her footsteps, her creaking joints, a plate rattling on the tray. Just before she’s able to drum on the door he pulls it open. This is your moment, Stefaan. You don’t know it yourself, but we do. An opportunity is presenting itself and you cannot let it pass. There are only two bodies here. The woman drowning in her work, and you.

‘Wait,’ he says. He holds up his hand like a policeman. She’s free to take a break. He’s the only guest in the hotel. He takes her cart and rolls it across the lumpy wall-to-wall carpeting, into his room. A bit of fluff wafts past. He leads the women inside and locks the door. She looks at him with wide-open eyes. Big brown eyes in a round brown head. He waits for an answer, a yes or a no. He wants her to contradict or confirm something.

‘Yes?’ he asks.

She nods unwittingly. She pretends not to understand him. One simple word, is that too much to ask? Does she want his company or doesn’t she? She closes her eyes. He’s doing his best, isn’t he? He gives her a Coke, he gives her an excuse to take a break from her cleaning, he lets her rest in the chair he paid for.

‘What is it?’ he whispers softly. He’s being friendly to her, isn’t he? The woman covers her face with her hands. Is he such a monster? Is he so horrible to look at? Is that the problem? He grabs her by the shoulders, straightens her out, and shakes her as if she were an oversized pillow. If you ask us, there’s something wrong with her. She’s not responding like a normal person. Don’t let yourself be taken in, Stefaan. This woman is taking advantage of your good nature.

He tears the thin, cheap fabric of her dress and pulls it from her body. Finally she cries out. She’s calling for her husband or her god, but they aren’t here. It’s just the two of them in one room. He clasps her wrists firmly. She’s brought at least one child into the world, he sees. Her body is made of rubber, light brown and drooping from the hips. He bites her rubber breasts.

‘Children?’ he asks her shaking body. Now that the woman is standing naked before him, it occurs to him that he urgently needs to call the company. They need him. It’s quite possible that he won’t be getting to London on time.

He doesn’t desire her, not in the least. He just wants to get her talking. He brings her wrists together, holds them tightly with one hand, and moves her mouth with the other. ‘Look, these are your lips. When you move them, you can talk.’ He doesn’t give up, although she is not proving compliant. He throws her on the bed and falls on top of her. He opens his underpants and shoves his penis inside her. A protuberance, a branch disappearing into the earth. The woman utters the same cry that she did on the phone.

With his eyes closed, and while clinging to that rigid body and trying to penetrate her deeper and deeper, he thinks about a blue Volkswagen. The car had stood for weeks in the parking lot near the woods, not far from the castle, its windshield shattered. Some young people had gone joyriding and had left it there, as if it had been used for a robbery. All the proof of identity had been removed. He and Sarah happened to bike past it. They stopped near the car and saw the ding in the windshield, and both were struck by the same feeling. Destruction calls for more destruction. Sarah bent down and threw a handful of pebbles that clattered against the body of the car. Scratches appeared on the dirty blue flanks. Together they took a large cobblestone and hurled it in through the back window. When another car appeared in the distance they jumped on their bikes and fled away, the adrenaline coursing through their bodies.

He comes. It’s painful. The pain awakens him; it does him good. He slides out of the woman, stands up, and pulls the sheet up over her as she sobs. He takes his wallet from his pants pocket, removes two hundred dollar bills, and throws them at her. He’s a walking cliché: the businessman who goes on a business trip in order to indulge himself. He pulls his pants on and stuffs all his things into his suitcase. Without even looking back he rushes out of the room.

Stefaan, this is a secret between you and us, we tell him as we charge down the stairs together.

At the reception desk there’s a glass bowl filled with dirty potpourri. The purpose of the object is to brighten things up and to fill the area with a pleasant fragrance, but for him it’s just the opposite: a gathering place for all the filth hanging in the air.