THE YOUNG HOOKER under whom Uncle Herman had died was called Rolinda. She was barely eighteen and not as stupid as I’d thought. I had walked her home that night, to a rather posh flat in the centre of town, not far from Herman’s hotel. There, I poured us each a large glass of white wine – I had to search the whole place first before I found anything to drink – and she lay on the couch with a wet cloth on her forehead and told me she was at university (really?, I thought) and that a girlfriend had helped her get a job with an escort service.
‘Does it pay well?’ I asked, after I had handed her the glass and sat down in a Corbusier chair that I wished were mine.
‘Not bad,’ she said. She sat up slowly and took a large gulp of wine. She ran the wet cloth over her face, peeled off a set of false eyelashes, and wiped the lipstick off her mouth. When she was done, she blinked her eyes.
‘What do you study?’
‘Political science,’ she said.
‘Pol … Jesus. Then you certainly had the … er … the right man.’
‘Oh?’
I told her the whole story. ‘He was an extraordinary person,’ I said, when I had finished – to the girl beneath whom he had died.
She swallowed hard. ‘He’s on my reading list,’ she said after a while, and mentioned a title, something like The Libertarian Movement After 1945.
‘There was a picture on the back of the book.’
‘But you and he never spoke about his work …’
‘I wasn’t with him that often. I’ve only seen him three or four times, at most.’
‘I hope he was good to you,’ I said. ‘I’d like to remember him as someone who, even though he might have paid for sex, was still …’
‘He was good to me.’
I emptied my glass and stood up.
‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘I’d really like it if you stayed a while.’ She swallowed again. ‘I’ve never seen a dead man before.’
I sank back down in my chair and studied her. She looked much better without that painted pout and those glued-on lashes.
She got up and left the room. ‘I’m just getting changed,’ she called out from the other side of the wall. ‘I feel a bit funny in workclothes. What do you do? Are you a political scientist?’
‘Me?’ I said. ‘No. I write fairy tales.’
‘Fa … You’re a writer?’
‘Fairy tale writer,’ I said. ‘I’m a fairy tale writer.’
She poked her head round the door.
‘Someone’s got to do it,’ I said. ‘Some folks are call girls, other folks write “Once upon a time, in a far-off land”.’
She looked at me quizzically, then disappeared behind the door and went on talking about things I could hear but couldn’t see, and I told her what I had written and where I lived and …
‘Strange pair, you and the great old man,’ she said. She was standing in the living room again, dressed in an ankle-length, flowery skirt and a pastel pink blouse. She was wearing round, wire-rimmed glasses, her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Political science, no doubt about it.
‘Good God,’ I said. ‘You look like a different person.’
She smiled. ‘You thought I was some air-headed bimbo, didn’t you, in that short black skirt and babydoll make-up?’
I waggled my head a bit.
‘Men like that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘There are even some who’ll pay extra if you show up in white kneesocks and patent leather shoes. I could tell you stories … things you wouldn’t dream of.’
‘I’m sure you could,’ I said, and that was true. ‘I think I’ll be going now, if you don’t mind.’
‘I … Why?’
‘It’s getting late, it’s already late, and it’s been quite a night and I have to get back to my hotel.’
‘How old are you, anyway?’ she asked suddenly.
‘That sounds as if you don’t think I’m as old as I look, or that I should actually be quite a lot older.’
It took a while for my words to sink in. ‘Hell, no. I mean, God … Do you always confuse people like this?’
‘Fifty-five.’
She looked at me for a moment and then nodded.
‘Does that mean, yes, you can imagine that?’
‘No. Yes. You look older, but at the same time, you don’t.’
‘That’s because I never associate with other people. Keeps you young.’
This time she gave me a long, hard look. ‘And what’s your name?’ she asked finally.
‘Nathan. Nathan Hollander.’
She looked startled.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’ve got to phone the agency. I don’t want them hearing this from the police first.’
‘Sounds like a good idea.’
At the door of her flat, she stopped me. ‘Mr Hollander,’ she said. ‘Nathan. Would you … Do you think we could talk again some time? I mean, there’s nobody else I can talk to about it, I …’
‘I’ll be in town for a while. I still have to make the funeral arrangements.’
She nodded. We agreed to meet the following evening and I walked out onto the thick hallway carpet. In the lift, next to the polished brass panel, I suddenly remembered that Herman was dead. During my conversation with the girl I had spoken about him in abstract terms. Now I realized, only too well, that he was gone.
‘Rolinda – what sort of a name is that?’ I had asked her the following evening, as we drove out of town in her Beetle.
We were bumping along the country roads between the city and the village where her horse was stabled. There was sandy heathland as far as the eye could see. I clung to my seat as she talked and talked and didn’t, I thought, pay enough attention to the road. She had resolutely turned down my suggestion to meet in the dining room of my hotel. That would only lead to awkward silence. It would be much better if we did something, and seeing as how she was going to see Olivier anyway …
‘Some strange idea of my father’s. He thought it went well with our surname.’
‘And that is?’
‘Kokuvacec. At school they called me Cookie.’
‘Cookie. Hm.’
‘My friends call me Lin.’
‘Lin Kokuvacec. Good name for a stewardess.’
Her mouth fell open slightly.
‘If this makes you uncomfortable, you don’t have to give me an answer, but do you use your own name when you work?’
She looked left down a dark side road.
‘Did he really live in New York, Herman Hollander?’
The mention of his name startled me. All day long I had been busy arranging things. Even though Nina had offered to take care of the funeral – she had arrived in Rotterdam that morning and checked into my hotel – I still had to phone banks and credit card companies, and Herman’s institute.
‘Yes, since 1939. He stayed on in the apartment we had all moved into after we arrived.’
‘We? You lived there too?’
‘Yes, me too. My whole family. Uncle Herman and my father stayed behind, the rest of us went back.’
We drove on. I welcomed the silence that had fallen. I didn’t know why I preferred not to speak. Here, at my side, was an intelligent young woman, and the fact that she had been present at Uncle Herman’s dying hour didn’t particularly bother me. If he had died under a car, I wouldn’t have envied the driver of that car either. Nina hadn’t been terribly enthusiastic about my dinner with Rolinda. When I walked into her room that afternoon to tell her we couldn’t have dinner together, and why, she had asked if I thought I was Jesus Christ. ‘Because of the harlots and publicans?’ Yes, and if I thought I owed that tart something. I hadn’t answered. I told her we would see each other later that night and walked out the door. Now that I was sitting here next to the young woman who, less then twenty-four hours ago, had heard Uncle Herman’s last words, I wondered if perhaps that were true, that I thought I owed her something, and what that might be. Why did she want to speak with me again? Because she had no one else to talk to about what had happened? Was that really the reason?
‘I’ve always been mad about horses,’ she said. ‘I used to be one of those girls with pigtails and a hacking jacket. My idea of heaven was mucking out a stable.’
She had always dreamed of having a horse of her own, so she would no longer have to share her hero with rivals. Once she began working for the ‘agency,’ she saved up enough within six months for an entire horse, an ochre-yellow gelding named Olivier. She rode twice a week, lunged him every Saturday. If she couldn’t come, the owner of the stable let him run around the paddock. The creature was in fine shape, that much I could tell. When Rolinda threw open the stable door, he towered over me like a nightmare of gleaming hide and shifting shadows. I instinctively took a step backwards. The stern gaze, the massive stench of manure and sweat – I suddenly remembered what it was that I had against horses. As Rolinda stepped inside and stroked the animal’s neck, I felt the demanding, penetrating gaze of the big black eye. This was a horse that had very different views on domestication from mine. I moved farther away, leaned my back against the stable wall, and dug around in my pocket for something to smoke. From inside the stable came a faint stumbling noise. I found my cigarettes and lit one.
‘Hey,’ Rolinda called out, ‘could you hold him for a minute so I can lock up here?’
I gulped.
‘Come on, hurry up.’
I inched forward, until I was back at the stable door, and looked at the gleaming patches moving about in the darkness. ‘I’m not very good with animals,’ I said, as Rolinda backed out of the stable, the reins in her left hand. She turned round and looked at me with raised eyebrows. I threw away my cigarette and sighed.
‘Here, right by the bit,’ she said. ‘And hold on tight, he’s pretty headstrong.’
I grinned foolishly and took the reins from her. I hadn’t had the leather in my hands for more than two seconds when I felt something change, in the horse, in me, in the reins, in the air. The mighty head bowed down, so low that I was almost forced to look the beast in the eyes.
‘Nice horsey,’ I said. I brought my free hand up to the broad neck and began gently patting. The head went up again, slowly, almost carelessly. I breathed out and looked at the animal.
What happened after that, I can’t say. The next thing I remember is the stable roof tilting, the muddy cobblestoned path to the barn and the full moon streaking across the sky. I heard Rolinda scream as I tumbled through the darkness wondering where I was and why I could no longer see the horse’s head and then I felt a throbbing in my right knee and Rolinda was bending over me and asking if everything was okay. Why does she want to know that, I thought, but when I tried to get up the pain shot through my knee and I heard the dull clippity-clop of receding horse’s hooves.
‘What happened?’ I shouted.
Rolinda tucked her arm under mine and tried to pull me to my feet. Using her for support, I hoisted myself up until I was standing on my left leg, and felt my knee.
‘He tricked you,’ she said. ‘He’s a real devil.’
‘Can you walk?’
I nodded.
‘I’ve got to go after him,’ she said. ‘He’s run out into the field. If I don’t find him straight away, he’ll get stuck in the sand drift and then it’ll take me hours. Wait here, I’ll go get Alice.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ I said.
‘With that knee?’
‘Do you think I’m going to let two women go wandering around the heather in the pitch-darkness trying to catch that wild beast?’
She looked at me blankly. ‘Alice,’ she said, ‘is a horse, and there’s no heather here, and Olivier is no wild beast.’ She stuck her hand in her jacket pocket and pulled out her car keys. She held them up and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Take the car. Drive down to the end of the path and turn left. Keep on driving until you get to the sand drift. Wait there until I’ve sent him your way or until I come to get you.’
‘My, we’re assertive. Is it those boots you’re wearing?’
‘Like father like son,’ she said.
‘What?’
She turned away. ‘I said, you’re just like your uncle. But you can’t say like uncle like nephew, can you? Please drive carefully, with that leg of yours.’
As I limped to the car, I heard Rolinda running off. I looked back and saw her hurrying through the sodium yellow of an arc lamp.
I couldn’t help it. I wondered if she ever wore those boots in bed.
I am a city person. I live in hotels, sleep at airports and stay in the flats of people who live in the centre of old cities and new, I smoke Belgian cigarettes and drink beer and wine and in the evening I listen to radio stations that turn the world into a network, a city of listeners. That’s my world. In the urban jungle, which I have never really thought was much of a jungle, I can always find my way about. I know where you can buy live carp in Rotterdam, I know bars in New York that stay open all night long, where bakers and greengrocers go for a drink at five in the morning before lighting their ovens or heading for the auction. In Barcelona I know a seafood restaurant that opens late and closes late and looks like a covered market, where you can buy oysters and fresh salmon for a song and they still make a decent salade niçoise. Elderly Spanish gentlemen go there with young women in severe black suits and wealthy thirty-year-olds in designer jeans and shy young couples on a shoestring. If you need something welded, I know a smithy in Amsterdam that looks as if a stagecoach can come riding in at any moment. And in Stockholm I know a restaurant, in the Writer’s Union Building, where the menus are old books. In London I know a hotel, in Kensington, that looks as if Miss Marple might pop up around every next corner of the labyrinth of corridors and staircases, and whenever I’m there I eat at an Italian restaurant in Charlotte Street and buy bagels and lox in a street off Tottenham Court Road. My greatest joy is this: early autumn, temperature still on the mild side, gentle rain, the reflection of sodium lamps on wet asphalt and a bus slowly pulling away, leaving behind a blue-grey cloud of smoke. The smell of diesel on a rainy night … Or men standing three hundred feet above street level, welding something on an office building, shouts from the marketplace, antiquated bicycles outside student pubs, whores loitering around Soho newsstands. I am perfectly at ease with all of this, but put me in a field with an animal that isn’t sliced, pickled, or stamped with an expiry date, and I go to pieces.
Yet here I was, driving in second gear down a dark asphalt road past black, empty fields. The moon hung in the night sky like a speckled lightbulb and in the glow of that moon I saw something in the field that looked like a cracked mirror. It was a long time before I realized that it was a puddle, a puddle in a furrow that shone in the moonlight.
Fifteen minutes later the asphalt suddenly turned into a bumpy dirt road with deep tyre tracks. I steered the car with one half in the verge and the other on the hump of the path. I was perspiring heavily. Each time the car hit a bump, I felt a stabbing pain in my knee. The path ran in a gentle curve towards a grove of trees. I began to wonder where that sand drift might be. I jolted along through the grove, the road dipped, I slowed down and switched to full-beam. As I drove slowly on, I saw shadows leaping about among the trees.
After about fifty yards I caught my first rabbit. I had heard before that some animals could be immobilized by light, but this was the first time I had ever witnessed it. In the white beams, the tiny eyes glittered like shards of mica. I stepped on the brake and waited. The rabbit hopped a bit to one side and then stopped. I turned down the window and stuck out my head.
‘Hey! I haven’t got all day!’
The animal shivered gently and stayed right where it was. I sank back in my seat and sighed. The rabbit stared at the light. It probably thought Rolinda’s Beetle was the Great Rabbit God.
‘Go dig a hole!’ I shouted.
By the time it occurred to me to turn off the headlights, I had been standing there in the middle of nowhere for at least five minutes. At first I couldn’t see a thing in the darkness, but when my eyes adjusted, the road ahead of me was empty. I drove on with my lights dimmed, in the hope that this would make me less attractive to small game. After a while the path curved and came to an end. Before me was nothing but tangled, overgrown field. I plodded slowly on, until suddenly the car shot downwards and the sand drift unfolded before me. I drove another twenty yards, very slowly, and then turned, so that the nose of the car was pointing roughly in the direction from which I had come. I got out and smoked a cigarette next to the open door.
What made me think of that old Stones number, ‘Lady Jane’? Your servant am I, and will humbly remain … I smoked my cigarette and stared into the darkness and asked myself what I was doing here. Why had I gone along with that hooker, why had I given in? I heard a high-pitched shriek in the distance, not quite human, but not agreeably animal-like, either. It was a disturbing scream, as if some beast or other were turning some other beast-or-other inside out. I cursed, at the trees, at Rolinda’s horse, at this whole bloody countryside, that didn’t smell like wet stones, as it should, but pine-scented bubble bath and shit. If Uncle Herman had seen me standing here, or, better yet: if he had seen me hobbling through the darkness, he’d have had the night of his life. But Herman was dead, and if he were laughing at all it was the relieved laughter of a man who was free of this world.
Somewhere ahead of me, where the sand drift glowed pale beneath the moon, I heard a noise. I hid my cigarette in my hand and squinted. I prayed it wasn’t that damned horse. I leaned my head forward and listened to the sounds of the wild, thinking: God, if I were ever let loose out here without food and water, I’d probably die of hunger and thirst, and I wouldn’t know a deer if I saw one, or what sound a horse makes. At that moment I smelled a pungent odour, a mixture of leather and Irish Moss.
It was Rolinda’s horse.
Let me say first: I assumed it was her horse. Something was panting a hot, damp cloud down my neck and stank of leather and … and horse. When I turned round, the beast looked at me with a sardonic grin. The foam on his black lips flickered softly in the moonlight. A great, bulging eye gleamed blue.
The horse was standing in front of the driver’s door, so that I would have had to walk all the way around the car to hide inside, if I didn’t already know for certain that I had pushed down the lock (I’m a city person, in the city they steal cars you don’t lock).
‘Down, boy,’ I said.
The horse bowed its neck and studied me. Then he raised his head and turned round. I got a hoof-full of sand in the face – and there was silence. She’s not going to like this, I thought. Miss Kokuvacec is not going to like this one bit.
‘Christ, Rolinda!’ I roared, when I was back behind the wheel and pressed down on the accelerator with my sore leg.
As the car ate its way through the sand, in the direction in which the horse had disappeared, the darting headlights suddenly made me think of the lights of the patrol boat that I had seen dancing over the black water of the Maas the night before, searching for a car that had gone off the quayside.
I drove on until I came to the path where I had stopped for the rabbit. I braked, switched off the light and the engine, and waited. I couldn’t imagine where the horse might have gone.
Five, six minutes I waited there in the dark, peering out at the emerging contours of the landscape. Then I started up the engine again and drove back to the stables.
As I parked Rolinda’s Beetle next to the empty stable and crawled out, dragging my leg behind me, the memory of what she had said earlier flashed through my mind. Like father, like son. The thumbs. Suddenly I thought of Uncle Herman. He had what they called in my family the ‘Hollander thumbs,’ two wide, flattish things with odd, crescent-shaped nails. My father had been spared this identifying mark, but I had not. Nor had my sisters, though we only had one, on our right hands.
‘Lord of the Universe,’ I said.
‘What did you say?’
I looked around and saw, in the half-light of a lamp farther down on a wall, the pale glimmer of Rolinda’s hair. She was leading a slender little horse by the reins.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I waited, but you didn’t come.’
‘You were already gone by the time I came,’ she said. ‘I saw you drive off. Did you see Olivier?’
‘Who?’
‘The horse. Did you see him? I’m sure he must have come this way.’
I nodded.
‘Yes? Did he come this way?’
I bowed my head.
‘Oh God, no! I ride all over that sand drift trying to round him up and you just let him walk straight past you? You could’ve bloody well held onto him until I got there!’
‘Dammit,’ I said. ‘Just because you jump on a horse doesn’t make me an animal trainer. What do you know about fairy tales?’
She looked at me for a while with one raised eyebrow. It was quiet. From the stable came the fumes of manure and hay, and in the distance, a horse whinnied in his stall. The little horse behind Rolinda stuck its head over her shoulder and eyed me curiously. I smiled at the animal and shrugged.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I was just having a private chat with your friend here.’
‘Amazing,’ Rolinda said. ‘You are one of the few people in this world that I don’t understand a thing about. And the same went for your …’
‘Uncle,’ I said. I took out a cigarette and gave myself a light.
‘Yes.’ She turned away and looked at the stable.
I inhaled. The horse, which was still peering over Rolinda’s shoulder, tilted its head slightly, as if it were wondering if perhaps it ought to start smoking, too. I opened my mouth, but closed it again when Rolinda looked back at me.
‘Did you want to say something else to Alice, or …’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I can understand your being angry that I let your horse get away …’
‘Twice …’
‘… okay, twice, but try and understand my situation. You hand me the reins of some monster and expect me to act like the world’s best jockey. These things happen, you know.’
‘Maybe we shouldn’t have seen each other again,’ she said distractedly.
‘What?’
‘I said: maybe …’
‘I heard what you said. What does that have to do with this?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We met under such strange circumstances. Your uncle and that hotel and … I don’t know.’
‘Then work it out,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to be so nasty about it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’ I drew on my cigarette and let the smoke sink down inside me. I tipped back my head, looked at the moon, and enveloped the night sky in a dull white cloud.
‘I didn’t mean it as an insult.’ She sounded a bit uncertain, as if, now that we were on the subject, she was no longer sure if that were really true.
‘I didn’t take it as one,’ I said, still staring up at the sky. I thought: this is the story of my life, if I ever get famous and I’m on TV and they want to show everyone at home how I lived, it’ll be over in five minutes. ‘What did you want to tell me, Rolinda?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I …’ She sighed deeply.
I felt a great, calm rage rising within me, something made of marble, that was how it felt, cold and glittering and hard. I flicked the ash from my cigarette. ‘I’ve got better things to do in this lifetime. If you’ve got something to say, then say it.’
She laid her hand on the horse’s nose and rubbed it absently. I smoked and waited. Alice pressed her cheek against Rolinda’s temple and looked at me with a compassionate gaze. I threw my cigarette on the ground, stamped it out, and walked off.
I could hear her calling. She asked what I was doing and, when I was a little farther away, shouted that I shouldn’t be so silly and, when I was farther still, to watch out for my knee … And then there was darkness all around and I hobbled onto the service road, between the beech trees and the misty fields.
I had walked back, three miles to the outskirts of the city, where I found a tramstop, and all that time on the narrow path I had hovered between rage and self-pity. When at last I stumbled into the tram shelter and sank down on the grimy bench, the agitation was just beginning to outstrip the dejection. I sat there, as a knife plunged into my knee every now and again, and chewed, with slow, thoughtful movements, on nothing. I chewed out of anger and pain.
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Nina, when I finally lay in my hotel room, leg stretched out on the bed, a Jameson’s in my hand to kill the pain. ‘That you’d even bother talking to someone like that.’ She picked up the phone and called down to reception for a doctor. I protested softly. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, one hand over the receiver, ‘it’s nothing, it’ll be fine in the morning.’ She spoke into the receiver and arranged, in a rather implacable tone of voice, for someone to come up, here and now and without delay. I sipped my whisky and tried to ignore the shooting pains in my knee.
‘Nathan? You know why I tell you these things, don’t you?’ Uncle Herman’s voice, less than forty-eight hours ago. I had left his hotel room and he had practically shouted it after me.
‘You can’t stand waste,’ I had answered.
And his reaction: ‘Yes.’ That was what he had said. And then: ‘That, too.’
How much of a margin should one allow? How great was my margin? Ten, maybe fifteen percent.
‘Have you eaten yet?’ Nina was standing next to the bed with the menu in her hand.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We never got that far. Would you mind handing me that notepad? Over there, on the table.’
She walked across the room, picked up the pad, shot a glance at the river, and came back. ‘I’ll order something, I haven’t eaten yet either. Think I’ll try the sashimi.’
‘That’s not eating, that’s noshing.’
She looked at me, expressionless.
‘Lamb cutlets,’ I said. ‘And order a decent wine to go with them. This whisky tastes awful.’
She picked up the phone again and gave her order. ‘The doctor’s downstairs,’ she said when she had finished. ‘He’ll be right up.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’ve made all the funeral arrangements. I’ve also phoned the solicitor, he expects us on Monday.’
‘Us.’
‘Yes, we’re the only ones left.’
The only ones left, I thought. My God, what a history.
There was a knock. Nina opened the door and a man came in, lightly tanned and clearly in a hurry. ‘Grünenbaum. This is the patient? The knee. Would you remove those trousers, please?’ He put his bag down next to the bed and Nina untied my shoelaces. I tried to stop her, but she ignored me. ‘If you have anything to say, Doctor, say it to me, because he’s one of those people who thinks he can do everything himself.’ The doctor gave me a sardonic look. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d put myself entirely in your daughter’s hands. In fact, I’ll prescribe it.’ He chuckled. Nina looked at me closely, but I refused to correct the error. ‘Child,’ I said, ‘fetch me my pen, would you please? It’s in my jacket.’ She nodded slowly and went to the wardrobe.
The doctor felt my knee, he tapped, kneaded, and twisted it and did a variety of other things that all seemed to be geared towards hurting me as much as possible. ‘Mr Hollander,’ he said, ‘your knee will be fine, but I’d advise you to walk with a cane for the next few weeks. And it would do you good to get some exercise. Your muscles are in very poor condition. A sedentary profession, I assume. With your height and build, the joints are easily strained.’
‘A cane,’ said Nina. ‘How charming.’ She smiled sweetly when I looked at her.
‘Any history of back trouble in the family, that sort of thing?’
Herman, he was the only one I could really … The thumbs. The back. What that girl, Lin, Rolinda, had said. No, I thought, with everything else that has gone on in this family, that can’t be true as well.
A waiter came in and began setting the table. Nina showed the doctor out. I stumbled to the table and smiled at the young man as he arranged the silverware and uncorked the wine and all the while fragments of memory drifted into my head like wisps of fog. Herman and I on a warm summer night behind the house, in wicker chairs, a cold Montrachet between us. Landing in a snowstorm at La Guardia and Herman waiting in the arrivals hall, so glad to have me home safe that he hid his relief behind grumpiness. The back, the Hollander thumbs. Suddenly I thought of my first visit from Uncle Chaim and Cousin Magnus and what Magnus had said, ‘We were there when Herman was a boy, too.’ Not Manny. Herman. I’m Herman’s son, I thought. I’ll be damned, I’m Herman’s son.
‘He told me,’ Nina let slip, as casually as she could, when she had sat down at the table, ‘that you might have to walk with a cane for the rest of your life, if you keep on like this. He didn’t think there was much point in telling you that himself, but that perhaps I, your devoted daughter, might have some influence on you. I say you should take up jogging.’
‘Thank you, child. But my daughter, you’re not. Far from it.’
She shook her head coolly and poured the wine. ‘Hollander,’ she said, ‘you’re hopeless.’
‘This is just the beginning,’ I said. ‘Now all I need is a hearing aid, bi-focals and arch supports and I’ll be the caricature of an old man.’
‘You,’ said Nina, as she sliced into a lamb cutlet, ‘have got the worst self-image I have ever seen. You think those fairy tales of yours are worthless, you think you’re worthless, you think everything you do is worthless.’
‘Guess I’ve just read too much Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.’
She raised her left eyebrow and, after a while, shook her head.
I brought the glass to my mouth. As I drank, I felt the wine filling the emptiness inside me.