I’M IN LOVE with a strange woman who might not love me or might love me for the wrong reasons. Maybe I’m just a passage to another life for her. I wouldn’t mind that; at least I’d feel I was accomplishing something, leading someone to another place, a place of peace, a quiet garden. I wouldn’t lose anything except a trusting body and an obedient woman. I could get along without Myriam, though when she is here, I feel reassured.
Since her life was more tragic than mine, she has the right to conceal things, and not tell all. I can talk about my ordinary life easily, because that’s what it is: ordinary. I have nothing to conceal. My failures in love can be explained, my relationship with women as well, my father’s suicide and my mother’s accidental death stand like distant events, banal things. They surprised me, but did not hurt me. I search through my past for frustrations, pain, empty spaces so I might enter Myriam’s life, and share a sense of torment. But I find nothing except Kabanga and the injustice of him being freed. The last train to Den Haag Central has gone by. It is 2:45 in the morning. Silence will reign until 5:45 when the first train to Utrecht will wake up the crows and the ducks on their pond. Tomorrow evening, we’ll be in Kinshasa. This has all happened so quickly, but the mysterious and uncertain future does not worry me. I feel no sense of concern. I am a pearl of salt in the great tide moving toward the coast with the unstoppable logic born of the currents, deep and strong, that determine the climate, throw up and pull down the cliffs, and spend millennia digging out sculptures from the pink granite of Brittany. I will go where life takes me. Why, all of a sudden, do I feel I am right? Kabanga, three thousand child soldiers, an insolent smile, gold cufflinks, his eyes, not a murderer’s, but a chief full of himself, grasping for power and wealth through any means possible. A contemptible individual. But I have never lived in the world of primal emotions and I have never considered him as anything other than the accused whom I believe to be guilty. I have left the rigorous universe of justice for the arbitrary and blurred land of passion. I am not so sure that’s a good thing, but this is the road I have chosen.
Myriam shifted her weight. I knew she was going to speak.
“You want to kill Kabanga?”
I am against capital punishment.
“No.”
“You know, it’s easy to kill someone. You just need to think he’s less human than you are. How long is the flight?”
“Eight hours. We need to sleep.”
I couldn’t kill, Myriam, I just know I couldn’t.
Her breathing grew calm. I followed her rhythm. I couldn’t sleep. I thought of Martin, the owner of the wine bar. I never told him I loved him, never told Max, or Tom the Vietnam veteran, or Marco who sells Murano glassware on the Denneweg, or that rotund, puffy-faced man regurgitating his feudal Dutch patois, or Louis, so elegant with his crown of white hair, elegant in thought too, which is no mean feat, or that Norwegian as handsome and frigid as a Viking, or that pair of American lesbians who irritated me to no end, or that old cow who lamented her lost children after the second drink. I thought of all those shipwrecks of solitude who helped me survive, for they were my only human contact. I am leaving them without a word. That’s not right. I should have told Martin that I loved him and that he would have been a good father for me. And I should have had enough friendship for Max to tell him he was acting like a teenager. If I ever see them again, I’ll tell them. If I ever see them again.
Will I be able to speak and act like a man, and move from cold observation and meticulous analysis to words and actions? I think so, even if I know nothing of the process that appears to be so natural, but is baited with traps, by the illusions of the educated and aware man: the feeling of being superior, the certainty of the analysis, the incomprehension of chance and the unconscious. Only my ignorance of man will keep me from being a man. How many emotions have I repressed that way, abortions of my own self?