CHAPTER ELEVEN

Maybe it is better for a person not to write about revolutions in the past, but rather those in their own lifetime. However tedious, planned, and apparently well-balanced a life may seem, there’s always at least one fault line that stands out in hindsight as having completely changed one’s direction. For me, it was the autumn of 1990, when Julia and I swapped Moscow, which always felt like a trembling, thudding high-pressure cooker, for the low-lying country of the Netherlands, where I was born.

Pozorski’s liquidation had little to do with it. We’d already decided that Swindleman would trade places with me. But at that moment, I was quite relieved to take my leave of the settings that I’d been roaming around in for the last two years. I couldn’t wait to collect the rest of my money from my partner. I calculated that it was just under two hundred thousand dollars net. Enough to get by for years. I’d sometimes hinted to Julia about renting a little apartment somewhere in Amsterdam, or maybe in Rome, Barcelona, or Paris, with complete freedom to write, after which we could maybe think about … but she always cut me off, out of superstition, and also because she couldn’t believe that she’d been given a six-month Dutch residence visa — in the end, the consul on the Bolshaya Ordynka had been pretty accommodating — and that the light-blue KLM tickets from Sheremetyevo-2 to Schiphol for the end of October were ready and waiting in the drawer of the desk, where we’d consumed our first inedible boeuf stroganoffs earlier that year.

Meanwhile, Pozorski was stone dead. Before we left, I went to the militia station for interrogation three times, where they soon started asking about my business connection to the murdered Russian from Leningrad (which I couldn’t deny, so didn’t), and kept coming back to the briefcase. I didn’t know which briefcase they were talking about: the one that I’d handed to the foreigner or the one that he’d given back to me, the sea-green one with the million dollars in cash. I flat-out denied everything, playing at wounded innocence, until the sergeant with the predatory grin in the greyish-blue uniform, who’d been putting me through the wringer this whole time, yawned last night’s vodka out of his gob for the umpteenth time and yelled, ‘All right, now piss off. The fact that a swindler like you could steal army secrets is completely down to those idiots in the Kremlin. But their days are numbered. It’d be better for you if you didn’t show your face in this country again.’

Then he took my passport, which he’d taken off me at the start of every interrogation, and flung it on the desk in front of me, filled with loathing.

Standing outside Schiphol airport, we could both smell the sea right away.

‘It seems as if the air’s lighter here,’ Julia said.

My parents didn’t have a car, so I’d told them flat out not to come to the airport. We’d take a taxi and be home in half an hour. A few days earlier, my father had ordered the best steaks from his regular butcher. When we arrived, my two brothers were already sitting at the table laughing. It was strange to lie beside my Russian lover that night in my old room, pressed together in my boy-sized bed. My parents hadn’t been able to arrange a bigger one in time. And they didn’t know what my plans were.

The next day was the day of the great sniff. My mother took a sniff of Julia, my girlfriend took a sniff of my mother and father, and I took a sniff of both my parents who I hadn’t seen for such a long time.

‘And so, lad, what are you going to do now?’ my father fished. His frame was terribly reduced because of all the surgical procedures. He didn’t know anything about my successes. Every time we’d talked to each other on the phone in the preceding months and he’d asked me how things were going with business, I’d keep it light. I wanted to surprise him. As soon as I’d collected my share of the proceeds from Swindleman, I’d lay one of the envelopes bulging with thousands of guilders on my parents’ table and thank them for everything they’d done for me, so that they could at least live with no cares for the next few years.

I’d called Swindleman from a phone booth just after we’d landed at Schiphol. I’d left all the papers, the contacts, and the ongoing business, in fact our entire correspondence, neatly arranged in Moscow, in the double hotel room that he would take over from me. There was a made-up bed ready and waiting for him, although I hadn’t yet let him know about the death of Pozorski, which meant he’d have to look for another partner for his prospective flower business. I’d decided by now to quit the Intersoviet Consultancy, but would of course man the office in The Hague for the first few months and help with looking for a replacement, before withdrawing as a partner for good.

‘This is the answering machine of Ragnar Swindleman. For important or urgent business, please leave a short message after the tone.’

I didn’t just get his answering machine when I was at Schiphol, but the day after too, when I tried to reach him from my parents’ living room. In the end, I tried an alternate number for the office on Javastraat. The girl on the line hung up the moment she heard the name Swindleman. When I called back and asked for Baldwin Borger, the same thing happened — the connection was promptly broken. When I rang Swindleman’s home number shortly after, he finally answered. My partner greeted me very jovially. He asked me how my journey was, apologised for not having been available, and said we should meet the next day at around four in his new apartment in Amsterdam. He was still in Paris now. He’d re-routed his home telephone to the one in his hotel room. ‘We have a lot to discuss … What did you say about old Borger? That’s a story in itself … Tomorrow I’ll tell you everything … I’m going to go off and enjoy myself now…Paris in the autumn, there’s no more beautiful place in the world … I’m trying to recharge physically and pep up my morale too; months of grey Russian misery lie ahead of me …’ He gave me the address of his new place, in a street close to Nederlandsche Bank.

That morning, Julia and I walked for hours over the beach and through the dunes. The sky in North Holland was a gleaming blue dome. The October sun was almost warm. Even though there was an absence of pine trees here on the coast, it reminded my lover of the former German seaside resorts on the Baltic Sea. One day, she said she’d take me to that fairy-tale blond, amber-riven coast where Thomas Mann had once had a country house built.

‘Thomas Mann?’ I asked, astonished.

I told her how the seaside resort where I’d grown up had looked before the war. A pearl of the belle époque, with chic shopping arcades, an opulent Pavilion, a covered circus theatre and restaurants that even the former Austrian empress Sissi had twice visited. There was a photo of Anne Frank at the beach, taken a couple of years before she was murdered. Julia gave a quick feline flutter of her eyelashes as she peered up from the coastline with disbelief at the treeless boulevard, an ugly hotchpotch of flats and Jerry-built houses from the 1950s. Inconceivable, she sighed, that the same Germans that had besieged Leningrad for nine hundred days had also wreaked havoc here to build the Atlantic Wall. The fact that one people could be capable of such things!

Earlier that day, I’d taken Julia to the supermarket to get some fresh bread rolls. I hadn’t really thought about it, but at a certain point she found it dizzying among the full shelves. The shock of the sudden abundance was too great. She flew into a brief but intense rage at the realisation that for all these years she hadn’t only lived in the universe of the big Soviet lie, but most of all in one of scarcity, a scarcity that tens of millions of her countrymen still had to cope with, while this had been here all the time, and was completely normal. And then the rage passed.

After we’d had a coffee with some shortbread that my mother had made, I asked her if she was coming with me.

‘Where?’

‘To Amsterdam. I have an appointment with Swindleman.’

For the first time, Julia watched the Dutch landscape passing by from the train window. Once we were walking along the canals through Amsterdam, she sighed that she had the feeling that she’d come home now. She’d stood in front of the paintings of the Dutch masters in the Hermitage hundreds of times. The images were lodged in her mind like an encyclopaedia.

At three-thirty, I left her at the Rijksmuseum. I’d come to pick her up again at six, and then we’d eat in an Indonesian restaurant that I’d sometimes visited in my student days.

‘A ticket, please,’ Julia said to the lady behind the till, in Dutch with almost no accent.

I wandered along the canal to the neighbourhood where Swindleman lived. I stood for a moment on the corner of Van Woustraat, peering into the basement apartment that I’d lived in for almost three years during university. I’d never been unhappier than then. Lonelier too. I was a bad student, rarely went to class, had various part-time jobs through the week, could connect to almost no one and nothing. In the streets full of litter and graffiti, in the avant-garde temples to music, at the university — the winds of revolt had been blowing everywhere. The protesters cried, ‘No home, no queen.’ There were riot police. Some of my fellow students had broken off contact with their parents. Those bastards with all their cash, who’d had it so easy in their youth. But us? We were studying for unemployment; in their minds they had no future.

On Fridays at four o’clock, I’d take the train to the seaside to work with my brothers until Sunday evening in the restaurant, hotel, and banquet room cum eternal workhouse that my grandfather had started in the 1950s, which was now on its last legs. I stood behind the stove with my father. He could no longer pay for staff. Because of the problems, he’d begun to drink. Halves of lager. His always pristine white cook’s apron hid a slack belly, which was only growing in girth. A combination of goodness and naivety towards their fellow man had broken the family. For twenty-five years, my father and my mother’s three brothers, who’d built the business up together, had placed their trust in a Mr Van Keulen, the bookkeeper. He came by to see us twice a year with his grey bird’s head, always in a grey pinstripe suit, with a waistcoat pocket with a gold watch-chain dangling from it. Every year, when the summer season had come to a definite end in late September, and the period began for the winter club-life, parties, and festivities, and most of all the marriages, Van Keulen would park his big American car right in front of the door, step out and walk into our hotel, with the air of a diplomat entering an embassy. By the day before, everyone was already tense. Although he was paid for his services, my father and uncles placed the maths whizz on a sky-high pedestal; he’d been helping my grandfather with the accounts since just after the war; he’d studied in America for a year, and was fluent in French, the language that he’d spoken with his family in his youth in Maastricht. I’d often heard my mother sigh how on earth it could be possible that while we all worked so hard, we had so little left over. My father would go on about the taxes, the social security payments, the insanely high insurance premiums for healthcare that you had to pay as an independent small trader. The couple of employees that we had were essentially better off than we were. ‘But I’ll have to ask Van Keulen sometime,’ my father would say to shut up my mother. For him too, with his two classes of lower education, Mr Van Keulen was a sort of saint. Meanwhile, the bookkeeper hadn’t only given my family bad, expensive advice for years, but had craftily embezzled from them too. When one day he asked for a temporary legal proxy to arrange a few matters with haste, no one dared to refuse him. He explained that he was going to convert the general partnership into a limited company, which was better fiscally and indeed for everything else too. I was thirteen. When I was in bed that evening, listening to my father and mother talking in the living room downstairs about the shining future that was waiting for us, I hoped for one thing: that we could all finally go on holiday together, preferably abroad, where I’d never been. In the following week, Van Keulen carried out a number of transactions, with our hotel as security. He did the same with seven other businesses that he had in his portfolio. Then he vanished. The fraud made the papers. Seven years later, it was reported that he’d been tracked down. All that time, he’d been living with a woman thirty years his junior in Montevideo, where he was found dead one morning.

It was a story like in a film. But the catastrophe was complete. My family was left with a mortgage debt that was worth almost 80 per cent of the building, which had already half been paid off in the thirty years before with their tireless work, often sixteen hours a day. The interest was more than 10 per cent. The debt slowly consumed our business from the inside out, like a malignant tumour. When my parents were sixty, everything was sold to avoid bankruptcy. My father had worked since he was fourteen. He had to cling on for his state pension with the forty thousand guilders that he had left. His private pension had been spent by Mr Van Keulen in Montevideo.

As a good son, I would now put everything right.

Swindleman’s apartment was on the third floor of a historic building. It was a shame that I’d had to leave Julia behind at the Rijksmuseum; I would rather have shown her how fine the interior of some Amsterdam houses can be.

‘Bonjour!’ Swindleman opened the door with an electric buzzer. ‘Hey, could you bring up the paper for me?’

I slowly climbed the stairs with a fresh NRC.

In the months that I hadn’t seen my partner, he’d grown slimmer. His body had an almost athletic quality, although his face was still as puffy as before. The yellow tint had disappeared; the dominant colour was again poppy.

‘The whole world is still lyrical about that Nobel Peace Prize for Gorby …’ Swindleman pulled a frown over the front page of the paper after I’d handed it to him. ‘But I reckon it’s all yet to start. In every peace lurk the seeds of the next war. The same is true of what we’re living through …’ My partner dropped the evening paper onto the floor, casually stepped over it, and then grinned and gave me a bear-hug. ‘How’s it going, old boy? Damn it, am I glad to see you. But where’s that lovely girlfriend of yours? I thought you’d bring her along. What do you fancy? A beer? Wine? Vodka?’

When I walked into the living room, my mouth dropped open in astonishment. The room and suite, which were illuminated by the yellow, blue, and pelican-pink art nouveau stained-glass windows, must have been ninety square metres. Modern and tastefully furnished.

‘Well?’ He looked at me enquiringly in his white sports shoes, which squeaked every time the soles slid over the parquet.

‘A cold beer, please,’ I said, and then told him of my genuine admiration for his new home.

He’d been able to buy the flat quickly and cheaply, he said when he got back from the kitchen with the drinks. He gestured for me to sit down on the black leather couch. He flopped onto a white leather bucket-seat. Then he looked at me with a smile. He licked his tall glass with his wet tongue, as if it were an ice-cream. I told him that I’d left Julia at the Rijksmuseum but, of course, the three of us would have to meet up again before he left for Moscow.

‘So how are things going with that flower project?’ Swindleman said, getting straight down to business. ‘I want to start exporting this spring, but I haven’t had any feedback from you …’

When I told him that Pozorski had been shot dead in a liquidation the week before, he didn’t betray any astonishment or dismay. He only grunted something, took a swig of his rum and coke, and rolled his tongue inside his right cheek.

‘A dog deserves a dog’s death,’ Swindleman said. ‘I’ve never told you, but I already knew Pozorski before I met you. When you told me about your Russian contact for those smuggled bibles, I knew straight away it was him. I did a few jobs with him in Leningrad too. He was a shit, but I didn’t dislike him. When you first suggested him, I thought fine. Do you really think you’re telling me anything new? I got a call from my friends in Moscow an hour after it had happened. He seems to have been tied up with nuclear material. The greedy fool …! But anyway, there are thousands of other Russians who would like to get into the flower trade with me. It’s going to be a goldmine! Every drama has a number of acts. The curtain definitively fell on Baldwin Borger two weeks ago too. It was stupid of me to pay him half of the profit from our first business trip. Fifty thousand guilders for drawing up a list of names, phew! When I told him he could kiss goodbye to his ridiculously high commission from now on in, he was livid. He threatened to kick me out of his building. One afternoon, I picked up my stuff and left. It’s fine working here at home too. A telephone and a fax, you don’t really need anything else. I’ll show you my bedroom and study in a bit …’

I was so taken aback by his words that I stayed silent. I hardly dared to tell him of my decision to withdraw as a partner. I hesitantly asked when I could expect my share of our profits. For the last few months in Moscow, I’d been living mostly on what was left of my savings. For now, I was staying with my parents, but I wanted to rent somewhere with Julia as soon as possible.

‘What money?’ Swindleman asked.

I assumed that he hadn’t heard what I’d said, so I repeated my question, adding that I’d brought the number of my giro account with me. I thought it would be best to deposit it there.

‘What money?!’ my partner repeated, getting redder and redder. ‘First, my friend, all of the money is in my account. That is to say, what’s left after buying this flat. Second, you listen carefully to me. I’ll make you an offer to come and work for me. You’ll get a good salary, with back pay, of course. If need be, we can also talk about bonuses, but from now on you’ll NEVER talk about that money again. Who was the major instigator of this project? How did you manage to live there in that hotel in Moscow almost for free this whole time, with your girlfriend? That’s entirely down to my Siberian contacts! Without my daily direction, nothing would have come of it. In short, I’m offering you a good salary, with the promise that in six months you can go back to Moscow on behalf of my company as a senior consultant … Meanwhile, I’ve registered the company in my name as an LTD. OK, yeah! You can stand up angrily if you want, but that doesn’t worry me one bit. Keep your hands to yourself, mate! I’ve been at the gym every night for the last few months … Sambo, the Russian martial art! You’ll be sorry for not taking up my offer … Sue me? Go ahead and sue me! You’ve got no proof — there is no proof … I had our entire correspondence removed from the hotel room this morning … Now it’s safely stowed away somewhere in Moscow … I’ll ask you one more time, are you going to work for me? No? Fine, adios! But what’s your plan? With no money? And say hi to that girlfriend of yours! See how long the love lasts now, and do teach me all about these Russian bitches!’

Half an hour later, I was standing outside the Rijksmuseum again. It had started to rain. I sheltered in the brick vaulted arcade beneath the museum that cyclists continually rode through. I was at the exit around six. A little later, Julia stepped out into the drizzle with a blissful expression on her dark face. She said, ‘Oh, I’m so terribly happy. Of course, the collection of Rembrandts at the Hermitage in Russia is much better. To be honest, I found The Night Watch a bit of a disappointment. But I spent an hour and a half in that room with the small Dutch masters. And don’t they have some wonderful historical pottery here! What are you looking so glum about? Well, where’s this restaurant of yours? I’m starving. Don’t put on such a sad face, eh! It’s only a shower … I love rain, actually … Oh, isn’t everything and everyone here so wonderful, nice and kind …’