TWO
What was the purpose supposed to be? The purpose? On the face of it, the taxi driver’s question, en route from the Vienna airport to the city center, wasn’t so strange. Conferences had purposes, certainly when the theme was climate change, disease control, world peace, the Big, Relevant Issues—but us?
To start with, you had the Linz Hitlerists, who perhaps didn’t even deserve to be classified as Hitlerists, mostly run-of-the-mill Germanists who published articles on the usual deadly dull socioeconomic topics: “The Postal Services in the Dual Monarchy: An Interpretation,” or “Enlighten Our Minds: Paradigm Shift in the Upper Austria School System, 1867–1938,” adding an opportunistic mention of father Alois Schicklgruber about halfway through and thus trickling into our movement. Then you had the Vienna Hitlerists, the first serious category of biographers, whom you could still never quite trust entirely: all too often the postadolescent Adolf appeared in their work as a Viennese Leopold Bloom, poverty-stricken, Bohemian, an art school dropout, wandering through the twilight of the Habsburg dynasty, after which they would lapse gratefully into essayistic lyricism about Mahler and Schönberg and Schnitzler and Freud, figures whose impact on Hitler’s radar was at best highly questionable. There were the Iron Cross Hitlerists, obsessed with the question of where, exactly, he had earned his medals in the First World War trenches, but they were pretty much a stand-alone category, like the Beer Hall Putsch Hitlerists, or the Bunker Hitlerists, who focused on a single, discrete period in his life, without connecting it to the rest. A day in the life. The two categories that towered above all the others were the Weimar Hitlerists and the Berlin Hitlerists, who faced off against each other like hooligans in two sections of a soccer stadium, chanting at the tops of their voices, vying for dominance. The Berlin Hitlerists, from 1933 to the bunker death, claimed the throne, logically, because theirs was the Hitler of power, of decisions, of consequences, whereas the Weimar Hitlerists, or Munich Hitlerists, 1918–1933, invoked a Hitler who was less powerful but therefore more interesting, because their Hitler was the unfinished version, still undergoing a spiritual and ideological growth spurt, inventing himself, at a time when he was first experiencing power and attracting followers.
There were other X and Y axes on which you could categorize these categories; I knew them all: a grid with a box for the intentionalists, who believed that all the destruction of the Third Reich—the war, the industrial genocide—had been Hitler’s intention right from the start (see the origin myth of Hitler studies: The Last Days of Hitler, Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1947). A box for the functionalists, who contended that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was to some extent a pose, and that the Holocaust was the result of a Byzantine bureaucracy in which ministers, Gauleiters, and subordinates took the initiative themselves, holding razzias and building gas chambers in an effort to please their Führer and climb higher up the Nazi ladder (e.g., Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock, 1952). In between the boxes lay gray areas, the domain of historians who saw evidence of compromise—that Hitler was first and foremost a pragmatist who, when he saw Operation Barbarossa grinding to a standstill in the Russian winter, the Americans mobilizing after Pearl Harbor, and General Montgomery turning back Field Marshall Rommel at El Alamein, realized that the cause was doomed, from then on focusing only on scorched earth and the Holocaust (The Meaning of Hitler, Sebastian Haffner, 1978, a book that everyone in Hitler studies had read two or three times and loathed, if only because its casually penned 192 pages were too convincing, thus undermining the entire discipline). And then there was a box that had to stand outside the rest of the grid, the metabox of the “inevitablists,” who believed that Auschwitz would have happened anyway, and that if Hitler hadn’t been born, someone else would have taken his place (see: The Origins of the Second World War, A. J. P. Taylor, 1960).
But most of the hands I would shake over the next few days belonged to the trivia merchants, the hobbyists, the common or garden historians, who sifted through and arranged minutiae with a passion verging on fetishism, without anyone ever really asking them to. You had the genealogists, who could by now trace Hitler sperm cells back to before the Battle of Lepanto. There were the exegetists who pored over every letter of Mein Kampf. There were the pathologists, obsessed by dental records and DNA residues, and in their wake the pathological psychiatrists who hoped to deduce something from the physical data—“Did he only have one testicle? How did that affect his sense of masculinity?” There were the Venus Hitlerists, the Immaculate Ones, who speculated about his love of women, about his unparalleled affection for his mother, the question of why four of his six known lovers committed suicide and whether he had in fact ever physically consummated a relationship. There were the Edelweiss Hitlerists, who focused on his role as host of the Berghof, the Alpine home where he received colleagues and friends for soirées and mountain walks. You had the epistemologists, who specialized in every letter and every document he’d ever signed; the cinephiles, who unearthed which films he’d ordered and which he’d actually watched; the bibliophiles, who researched the size and contents of his library in order to draw up a big Hitler Reading List. You had the sartorialists, who made sewing patterns and could reproduce the exact cut of all his uniforms; the hairstylists, who could calculate the dimensions of his mustache to the millimeter by studying old photographs; the watercolorists, who compiled the Hitler Canon from the 1,300 surviving watercolors he’d painted prior to 1914; and the curators, a rapidly expanding group, who approached The Sleepwalker every now and then with reports and essays on artworks and sculptures (“Where are they now?”) that Hitler had personally owned. A lot of Böcklin, a lot of Julius Paul Junghanns. Of course you had the Hollywoodies, who kept track in spreadsheets and long essays of all the actors who’d played Hitler, and to what effect—Brik loved that. Drawing on a study of Hitler’s vegetarianism (inspired less by animal welfare concerns than a fear of getting fat), three women attached to Temple University had written a Hitler cookbook, which prompted a lively debate in various academic periodicals—we might know his favorite dishes, but did we really know how he liked them to be prepared? And, taking a more overarching view, you had the chronologists, the category to which everyone perhaps belonged in his or her own way, who did nothing more or less than painstakingly order all the available data, until every day, every hour of his life was thought to be accounted for. A press release had been sent, announcing that a hitherto unknown researcher from Humboldt University, a man by the name of Erich Mariah Maier, had signed a deal with a big American publisher to produce a biographical tome describing every day from March 1919 up to 3:30 p.m. on April 30, 1945. He’d secured a six-figure advance. The publisher was aiming at a mass audience. (The period between November 1918 and March 1919 was the domain of the Black Hole theorists, the time between his discharge from a military hospital and his arrival in Munich, the last episode in Hitler’s life on which sources contradict one another and when no one can say with absolute certainty where he was—I’d seen every conceivable fantasy aired: that Hitler was on a retreat in an Orthodox monastery, or that he’d gone on a quest with Himmler to find the Holy Lance of Longinus.)
I explained to the taxi driver that the conference was funded by the European Union and that it would be attended by historians from dozens of countries, specializing in every period from the Renaissance to the present day, leaving out any mention of Hitler. In the semidarkness I could just make out the rash on his neck. I didn’t like taxis, I remembered now; I found it a disconcerting idea to place your life in the hands of a complete stranger. Pippa took the opposite view. Surrendering herself to an unknown individual gave her a feeling of detachment, she said, which was the next best thing to feeling safe.
– You like car? asked the taxi driver.
– Yes, very fine cars, Mercedes.
– I play for Fenerbahçe, now I drive this Mercedes from airport to city and back.
– Wow, I said, Fenerbahçe, you must have been very good.
From his breast pocket he produced a folded photograph that he passed back to me. It showed a youth in a soccer uniform, crouching down with his hands on the ball, looking up at the camera with big, childlike eyes that radiated a kind of disbelief, as if he, too, found it inconceivable that he was a professional soccer player, as if someone might pinch him at any moment, causing him to wake up with a shock.
– I play in Turkey, with Fenerbahçe soccer club.
– Yes, I said.
– Twenty-five years. Someone kick on foot. Kaputt.
– Foot is kaputt, I said.
– Yes, he said, I come from Turkey to Austria. Drive taxi. I never play soccer no more.
He took back the photo and I wondered why he’d suddenly told me this, and whether it was true—did he hope he’d get a bigger tip, because I felt sorry for him? I decided not to talk anymore, and looked out of the window. The landscape made me think of Mordor; the route from the airport was dominated by heavy industry: looming machinery and mountains of industrial waste framed against a fiery setting sun.
Of course, there was yet another category within Hitler studies, an increasingly popular one, that people like Brik and I belonged to, a category that wasn’t interested in facts, certainly not ones that had recently come to light. What use is information that nobody possesses? Brik liked to say. What use is knowledge that nobody knows? Nightmare visions that everyone perceives as real are much more significant, much more potent than any mere facts. It’s all about how ideas find fertile ground and take root in our imagination—who of our generation could think about D-Day without picturing images from Saving Private Ryan? Whether those ideas have any foundation in reality is no longer even relevant.
Josip Brik: “Truths are nebulous and transparent and come in many guises, like ghosts. You can believe in them, but you can never quite put your finger on them.”
But I could spend the whole day quoting Brik.
I hadn’t seen it coming up, but suddenly we crossed a river and the first horses on plinths appeared. Ringstrasse, said a street sign. Kärntner Ring, said the next. The buildings got bigger and classier and the taxi pulled up right in front of the opera house, just next to the historian Maarten van Rossem, who was talking into a camera, his hands in his pockets.
Once I’d gotten through the revolving doors and past the top-hatted porter, escape was out of the question. The circus had arrived. Two men I vaguely recognized from an earlier conference were standing in the lobby. One of them greeted me. Matthew something-or-other. I saw a man wrestling a lamp into the elevator, TV lighting equipment, presumably, followed by someone lugging at least ten yards of cable, followed by a heavily made-up woman—Mathilda Wilson, BBC host of nostalgic programs about stately homes and aristocratic dynasties. A small, brisk figure straight from the Shires, the icon of provincial lesbians, with her eternal tweed jackets and her short gray hair, which stuck up in permanent confusion, as if it didn’t know which way it was supposed to be growing. To be here—in Vienna, in Hotel Sacher! The hotel of the famous Sachertorte, the hangout of the Habsburgs, shahs and kings, and the Allied Command right after the war. To be here with a limitless credit card. It had been Mrs. Chilton, “call me Liddie,” who’d sent me here—she’d suddenly appeared in the doorway of my Sleepwalker office, surrounded by her husband’s Dalmatians, sunglasses the size of twin Ping-Pong paddles. She’d known the hotel manager for years, she said, and I should really treat myself for once, at her expense.
– Friso, believe me, nothing feels like immortality as much as absolute, unassailable wealth.
But that sense of wealth was instantly sullied by the sight of so many other conference-goers, equally keen, it seemed, to escape the fate of the generic hotel chains where the hoi polloi were billeted. I’d wanted to be here alone. The fewer who share in luxury, the more luxurious it feels. But I realized I was making a fuss. The journey had been tiring. I’d paid extra for a direct flight, and by the time the plane was bumpily descending over the Alps after eleven hours in the air, and a baby in the row of seats behind me started to screech like the Nazgûl, my patience had run out. I noticed that even covering the short distance between the taxi and the lobby made me breathless. The day before I left for Vienna, Pippa, in one of her more grandmotherly moods, had sat down next to me and forced me to think of at least three things I could look forward to in Austria (going straight on to answer for me: “One: you’ve never been to Vienna. Two: you’ll see Felix again. Three: a change is as good as a rest.”). To say nothing of Four: a multimillionaire has slipped a credit card into your hand as if you were a corrupt cop, so there’s actually no limit to what you can do.
– Think of it as if I were giving you a big green apple bursting with vitamins, Mrs. Chilton had said. You’ll feel healthier with every bite you take.
– Didn’t they say that to Snow White?
While I was waiting to check in, the revolving doors made a quarter turn, propelling a man in a fedora and a long raincoat into the hotel like a bingo ball in a lottery, and for at least three seconds I really thought it was Sir Ian McKellen—by the flame of Udûn—when just then I was addressed by the youth behind the desk, a boy in a fancy suit, who’d eventually managed to tear himself away from his young female colleague. My German—or were they speaking Austrian?—was too rusty to grasp the nuances, but the gist of their flirtation was clear. I pushed the printout confirming my reservation toward them:
– I’ll just check…
– It’s for six nights, I said.
– Yes, here you are in our system, that’s right, six nights for Mr….Vos, de, Friso!
The girl behind him gave him a congratulatory pat on the back and shot me an apologetic glance, while struggling not to laugh. The boy continued unflappably, an equally broad grin on his face:
– We’ve reserved room 262 for you, Mr. Vos, de, Friso.
Scooping up the key and my luggage, I turned around, nearly running straight into the man with the hat and the raincoat, who’d lined up behind me. He wasn’t Ian McKellen, and only now did I see his female companion, a girl who immediately stood out, as beautiful blonde girls with full lips and big blue eyes tend to do. Her wavy hair was cut in an old-fashioned style, level with her jawline, accentuating the length of her neck. If you took the time to look, and I did, you couldn’t help but marvel at the flawlessness of her skin, her face, her neck, her modest décolleté in her baby blue sweater. It was as if she were made not of the same mass of dying and renewing cells as the rest of us mortals, but of some kind of warm plastic that had been melted and die-cast.
She halted for a moment and looked at me, a look of recognition. Her mouth opened slowly, as if she wanted to say something—but before she could do so I felt a hand on my wrist, and found myself looking into the excited face of Vikram Tahl.
– Hey, dude, have you read my article yet?
– No.
– And why not?
– I’ve been really, really…
–…really busy. Bizzy-bizzy. Sure. That’s what you said last time too.
You couldn’t overlook him, even though he was about two feet shorter than the average European. Among all the guests strolling or lounging about the lobby, he stood tensely erect, fizzing with energy. I’d met him a few times. His gray hair had a military cut, and his head seemed disproportionately big: his eyes were large and bulging like those of an animal that can see in the dark. His speech was a weird mixture of Oxbridge don and Bombay taxi driver–cool (though I’d never been to Bombay):
– I’ve just been seriously ill, and of course Brik has…
–…has just died, his defenestration, such a pity…But a little bird told me you gave a terrific speech at his memorial service, so I thought: Hey, old Friso can’t be that sick…!
– That wasn’t me.
–…so he must have read my article too, by now. Perhaps you think me naive for assuming this, but I take it you can at least follow my thought process?
– Will you be in Vienna all week? I asked.
– Holy moly! Is this a pledge to read my article by the end of the conference? Will the mere threat of my physical presence get you reading? Seriously, Friso, if that’s the case, I’ll take it!
Tahl was not to be fucked around with. He’d set up a Hitler studies curriculum at Delhi University that, despite its complete mediocrity, derived status from the budget with which he flew in Western professors, installing them in Hilton suites (along with their wives or mistresses) while they gave a guest lecture or two. Since then he’d popped up at every conference, peddling his studies and articles that no one was greatly interested in, but that no one wanted to reject too explicitly—for fear of missing out on those three-star invitations. For at least six months now he’d been hawking around an essay that he fondly imagined was original because it compared Voldemort with Hitler.
– Have you got it with you?
– What?
– My article. What else did you think I meant?
– It’s in my mailbox.
– But I’m guessing you haven’t brought a printer with you, huh? In your hand luggage? Do you like to read seven thousand words on a laptop screen?
– No.
– No, nobody does, Friso. No problem.
Tahl gestured to a serious-looking girl who was standing some distance away, and she instantly hurried up. Twenty, at most, glasses, Asian, but not entirely—had he flown his own PA in?—and she immediately started noting down Tahl’s instructions: that she was to print out his article at a copy shop first thing in the morning and give it to me, not leave it at the desk, but hand it to me personally. I gave her a friendly smile, out of a kind of solidarity, because you always feel embarrassed for someone else who’s being ordered around, but she didn’t smile back. Tahl introduced her, and the girl made a point of ar-ti-cu-la-ting her name very clearly:
– Yuki Hausmacher, how do you do?
– Nice name, I said.
– My father is German, my mother is Japanese.
– Gosh, did they meet at an Axis Powers reunion party?
No one laughed. I tried to move slowly toward the elevator, backward, like a lackey who knows he must never turn his back on the prince. Tahl gradually raised his voice as the distance between us increased:
– Sure, I get it and I feel for you, about Brik and all, but it’d be awesome if you could read my article! So we can talk about it! Because I think it would be absolutely perfect for The Sleepwalker! And I said it before, but I gather you really stole the show at the memorial service!
– That wasn’t me! I shouted back.
– Are you sure? It was in the paper!
My room was dark and chilly, and it took a while to find the slot to stick my key card into to turn the lights on. I kicked off my shoes and noted with satisfaction that this was indeed the biggest hotel room I’d ever stayed in. The minibar was full—old-fashioned glass bottles of Coke!—and there were framed portraits of Vivaldi and Haydn on the walls. Perhaps it was tiredness that suddenly overcame me, the sight of a bed, after having been awake so long. Perhaps it was a reaction to the parade of well-known faces I’d encountered unexpectedly, unwantedly, as soon as I arrived at the hotel.
It was only now, in a full-length mirror, that I saw how hunched up my shoulders were, making it look as if I was trying to hide my neck. I slung off my jacket, suddenly finding its flimsy weight unbearable, as if I’d been carrying another person piggyback all this time. My neck felt like a solid, unkneadable lump of rubber and I had an overwhelming urge to grab a fold of skin and jab a knitting needle through it—surely that would release the tension? I rubbed and rubbed it until my fingers started to tingle, making me think at first that I was having a heart attack, until I realized I didn’t have the other symptoms.
In the bathroom I unbuttoned my shirt and hung it on a peg. Standing in front of the mirror, I noticed something sticking out of my belly to the right of my navel, a swelling that wasn’t matched on the other side. I prodded it. The lump was soft, and moved up and down when I poked it. You couldn’t see anything in the mirror, but as I looked down, it really stood out. I should just do what Mrs. Chilton had said, treat myself for once and have a masseur come tomorrow. But could massage do anything about my tumor? Because wasn’t that what it was, deep in my stomach? Cancer of the esophagus? Very aggressive, apparently. Cancer was something that happened to other people, like sexually transmitted diseases and computer fraud, and I couldn’t see myself as one of those cases where you’re terminal all of a sudden before you know it. It had to be fat—but why would that heap up in a single place?
It was marvelous, the silence in my room, as if the hotel was deserted. This was what I wanted.
My shoulders were still crooked, like the wings of a banking plane. I straightened my back and aligned them, and the lump in my belly disappeared. Aha. I turned on the shower and, before getting under it, lay down next to my bed and did fifty sit-ups.
The silence was pleasing, it was so delightful lying here, cushioned by the deep-pile carpet, merely gazing up at the ornamented ceiling, merely staying awake, that I didn’t want to think about Vienna, or home, or Pippa or Brik. I saw the face of the Chilean Susan Sontag nurse, kind and authoritarian. Relax, Friso. Just close your eyes for a moment. Let the shower run.
Friso de Vos, can you just tell us very briefly what kind of philosopher Josip Brik was?
“Very briefly”? I don’t know if I can. I don’t know that I want to. Maybe I want to tell you at great length.
In two sentences—come on, you can do it.
A philosopher, Brik always said, isn’t someone who has a watertight theory about the world. Someone who thinks like that isn’t a philosopher, but an ideologue or a politician. What fascinated Brik was how ideology appeared to have disappeared from art and films and literature, but if you looked closely, it hadn’t. “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist,” he liked to quote.
And just who was he quoting?
Come on, you should know that one. It’s from…The Usual Suspects.
Very good. You were seen as his right hand. You had a lot of personal contact with him, you often accompanied him on journeys. Do you feel responsible for his accident?
Yes and no.
Why “Yes” and why “No”?
“No” because Brik was a grown man who was perfectly capable of booking trips, arriving on time for flights, and checking into hotels himself. The fact that this Amsterdam hotel had a rotten window frame that broke when he leaned against it was something neither he nor I, nor anyone else, could possibly have foreseen. He could just as well have fallen downstairs, or been knocked down by a taxi.
And “Yes”?
Because if I’d been there he’d never have been in that hotel—I booked better hotels. I knew much better than him the sort of place he’d feel at home. And if I’d gone along he wouldn’t have eaten and drunk alone, and would never have been alone in his hotel room at that time of evening. I feel responsible because if I’d been there the circumstances would have been different. But that’s pure speculation. Perhaps it was written in the stars, if you believe in that kind of thing. Perhaps his time was up, and fate couldn’t have been averted. My mother was a fulltime housewife who looked after me and my brother and sisters day in, day out. But my brother still has a scar on his cheek from the time he fell through the glass coffee table, and my sister has a mark on her shoulder where she was scalded by a pot of tea that got knocked over. Things happen.
Do you miss him?
Before I came here I went and sat at his desk in the university building in the evening, after everybody had gone home. No one knows I have the keys. I just wanted to sit there for a minute.
What was it like?
It was dark.
Were you scared?
No. It was a good kind of dark, just like there’s a good kind of cold and a good kind of pain.
Where were you at the time of his funeral?
In a bed on the third floor of the University of Santiago Medical Center, in Chile, where a task force of specialists eventually diagnosed a form of septicemia known as the Nubulae-O’Higgens variant and treated me for it.
Did you think about what was happening on the other side of the world at that moment?
I was asleep.
Did your girlfriend go to the funeral?
Pippa went to the memorial service two weeks later. She’d been with me in Chile till then, but I told her she should definitely go back to attend the service. It made sense, I thought. He’d played an important role in our lives, and she had a close bond with him. Of course she should go. But in the end it turned out to be a social event, a “see and be seen” affair. Half of New York turned up. From a professional perspective it would have been good to be there. I, we, could have drawn attention to The Sleepwalker‘s ties with Brik, to the importance he attached to The Sleepwalker.
Were you upset at missing the funeral and the memorial service?
Of course—he was my friend, and I should have been there. Had I not been drugged up and down for the count I’d have been furious, stuck there in that hospital bed in Santiago. But it’s pointless to dwell on it. You can’t turn back the clock. It is what it is.
Were you jealous of Pippa, because she was there and you weren’t?
Up to a point. Just as I was jealous of everyone who was there. Pippa isn’t very verbal, she likes to avoid conflict. There’s no getting around it, memorial services like that are political affairs, certainly in the case of someone like Brik, who had almost no family. Anyone could claim him, even people who scarcely knew him. So it’s handy to be there, and to stand your ground if necessary.
What does Pippa do for a living?
By the age of twenty-five she already had her own little art restoration business. You’d drop in on her to find a sixteenth-century oil painting on an easel, a seventeenth-century gouache under the windowsill, an Impressionist watercolor propped against the sofa. She had all kinds of clients—including museums like the Rijksmuseum and the Hermitage. There she’d sit, for three hours at a stretch, fiddling away at a bit of canvas the size of a postage stamp with a three-haired brush. Her parents had lent her the money for the apartment—her father had a tanning salon empire—but she earned back the money in a flash.
And could she go on doing this work in the U.S.?
That was one of the reasons we went, actually. Through Brik, or rather through his friend, the dean, Mr. Chilton, she was able to get a three-month internship at the Metropolitan Museum. After that, the university’s art department got her a lot of assignments. She’d drive to New York pretty much every week to pick up canvases or return them.
How did you two meet?
It’s not a terribly romantic story. I’d just moved to Amsterdam, was trying to get a job at a publishing company or a journal. She sometimes went to the café where I hung out, and one evening we got talking. Friends warned me. They knew Pippa slightly, she wasn’t the type of girl to go back to someone’s place just like that, they assured me, but after the café closed we felt each other up in a nearby doorway as if it was the most natural thing in the world. What did come as a surprise was that a week later I went shopping with her sister, and two weeks later played a round of golf with her father and brother.
How come it all went so quickly?
What can I say? Why do you fall in love? She’s very pretty, very sweet. Cliché answers, right? She has this air of being—not childlike, and not like she’s a victim—but, how shall I put it, she has a permanently puckered brow. As if the world’s an obstacle that she needs a bit of help in dealing with. And because she’s so sweet and so pretty all you want to do is protect her.
But she’s not very “verbal,” you said.
At times it seems as if she doesn’t have a one-to-one relationship with words. You can ask her the most basic question, How was your day?, and she can ponder it as if no word could possibly exist that does justice to her emotions or experiences. If you ask what she’d like to eat, she pulls a face as if you were giving her an oral exam—you can see her thinking: Shall I say what I’d like? Shall I say what I think he’d like? Would he like me to go for something healthy? Does he mean I need to lose weight? Is he hinting at something I’ve forgotten to buy? And so on and so on. Meanwhile I’m standing there with my head in the fridge, waiting. If someone at the post office holds a door for her, that’s a diplomatic dilemma, as if a brief “thanks” couldn’t be enough. The other thing she does is use words that are so much weightier than the occasion calls for. She’s not apprehensive about a job interview, but “petrified,” her contact with a gallery isn’t unpredictable, it’s “hazardous.” We’ll cycle past ten girls in baggy tracksuits being made to collect for charity by their sorority—some kind of mild hazing ritual—and Pippa will say, “Those girls are being intensely humiliated.” I’ll mention that another Hitler studies periodical is having difficulty getting academic publishers to advertise with them, and she’ll just say in a doom-laden tone, “It will be their downfall.” Words like that make everything so heavy.
And then you say…
Then I say: “Jesus, Pip, ‘their downfall,’ they’re not getting advertising—it’s not like they’re sitting in a subterranean concrete bunker, shooting themselves in the head one after the other.”
Does that make her laugh?
Hysterically. I always make her laugh.
And does she make you laugh?
Daily. She’s brilliant at impressions. Have you ever seen her Tyrannosaurus rex walk? She could easily have gotten into drama school. She can sing along perfectly with any song by Burt Bacharach.
You don’t have any problems on the verbal front, right?
What I expected of her was very simple, very basic. She’d gone to the memorial service in New York, I hadn’t. So I’d hoped she’d be my ears and eyes. But dear, smart, highly educated Pippa, who couldn’t tell a joke with a punch line if her life depended on it, doesn’t ever give away information just like that. If you want to know something, you have to drag it out of her, as if she couldn’t possibly conceive that it’s important. Who spoke at the service? What did they say? How did they say it? What was funny? What was moving? Who got a big response?
And you’re sure you don’t hold it against her that she was there and you weren’t?
I already said I couldn’t be there, right? It was only logical she should go. I didn’t give her any instructions beforehand, no checklist to tick or anything like that. It’s just that the things she’s struck by aren’t necessarily what I’d be registering.
Did she say anything about Philip de Vries?
Nothing! Not a word.
And that doesn’t bother you?
No. I already said, I’m not angry.
You realize you’re asking these questions yourself, don’t you?
I’m calm.
So why don’t you give her a quick call then, Friso? Hadn’t you promised to call when you arrived?
And precisely at that moment, as if on cue, the phone in my room rang—always louder and more startling than you’d expect. The flashing lights on the display made me realize how dark it had grown. With an arm that had half gone to sleep I picked up:
– Hello, this is Philip de Vries calling.
These were, it seemed, the most disorientating words I could have heard. It was as if a stream of icy water was shooting out of the receiver into my ear.
– I’m looking for Friso de Vos.
The phone vibrated in my hands, impatiently, flirtatiously, because this was the start of something. I’d made plans in recent weeks, about what I would say to him, how I would provoke him, but something in me rose uncontrollably, like milk when it’s about to boil. If not fury, then disbelief—or rather fury at myself, for taking everything into account except his actual presence, for failing to realize that he, too, had first-strike capability, that a telephone line goes in two directions. For being oblivious to the reality of his existence. I’d thought myself anonymous and safe in this room, four days before our debate, but all of a sudden he was here—not tangibly, not visibly, but incontrovertibly, an immaterial presence that filled the entire room and demanded a response—a response that I, dammit Friso, didn’t have ready. Even this was too much for me.
– Hello?
I heard him breathe in with a single deep sniff, like you do when you’re walking outside after it’s just snowed and you want to savor the cold, in all its sharpness, deep inside your lungs.
– Sorry, wrong number, I answered, in Dutch, U bent verkeerd verbonden, and banged the receiver down much too violently on the plastic hook.
I got a bottle of Coke out of the minibar, and emptied it into a glass. I took the immaculate white cotton hotel slippers out of their plastic packaging and put them on, and without knowing why, I walked to the little hall between the bathroom and the door of my room, perhaps to hear the sound of the firm rubber soles of my slippers on the marble floor, and once I’d gotten there, I opened the door for no reason. Left, right, nobody in sight, you could have heard a pin drop.
I’d answered in Dutch. In Dutch. In my high school final exams I’d passed German with flying colors, and gotten nearly top marks for French, merci beaucoup. At work I spent much of the day emailing, texting, and making phone calls in English; I sometimes even spoke English to myself—and now I’d answered in Dutch. Like a dimwit. Like a total moron. What did he want from me? Why was he calling me now? I’d known that I looked down on his connection with Brik, his supposed connection with Brik, but even so, the fact that a single little sentence from him could conjure up such a wave of unfiltered aggression came as a surprise.
I heard the elevator doors open at the end of the corridor and automatically glanced sideways. Two men in gray suits emerged, nothing odd about that, though one seemed to have something in his ear. Before I could even identify that something as a tiny microphone, a third man got out of the elevator behind them, a man whose face I didn’t even have to see to recognize, because he was so much taller that his peroxided pompadour stood out majestically above his retinue. Here, in the wild. The two bodyguards, because that’s what they must have been, had seen me standing there; it would have looked suspicious if I’d suddenly panicked and backed into my room, I thought. So I stayed there, half in the doorway, and when they got to within a few yards of me I smiled affably and gave a little nod. The only person who responded was Geert Wilders* himself, for indeed, it was he. A surprisingly warm smile spread over his tired face.
– Good evening, he said amicably, in German.
– Bon soir, I replied.
I went back into my room and watched through the peephole in the door as Wilders and his minders walked down the corridor, and as soon as they’d vanished from sight I instinctively pressed myself flat against the wall, breathless and as terrified as if the Balrog of Moria had just passed by.
* Prominent far-right politician, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom.