NINE 

Felix was, of course, giddy with excitement when our taxi turned left into the long, illuminated driveway to Schloss Schönbrunn and a handful of policemen in bulletproof vests gestured to us to pull over to the side of the road. One cradled a black machine gun on his chest as if he were suckling a newborn baby, another shone a torch in our faces, straight at Felix’s big grin, while another looked under our car with some kind of long-handled device. The driver was given his license back and the officer gestured that we could drive on. Red banners flanked the driveway, showing the faces of the big names of the conference: the Simon Schamas, the Salman Rushdies, the Peter Sloterdijks, the Mathilda Wilsons, the Madeline Steinbergs. Pretzel was there, though he certainly wouldn’t be in a position to speak, and so, too, was Brik, his big, faithful dog’s face waving in the wind—something that Felix didn’t see, because he was almost wagging his tail on the back seat when he saw the metal detector gates at the stately entrance to the palace.

– You know what this means, Friso. Why would there be such tight security otherwise?

The guards looked alert; they took their job seriously. A man with an earpiece frisked us before we could even show our invitations, and only then were we allowed through the detector gates for a second opinion. Felix just kept on chattering away while a second man, with an even broader neck, if that were possible, frisked me again, more roughly, because in my case the metal detector had bleeped, at what turned out to be the buckle of my new belt.

– He’s here, he must be. Wow, fancy bumping into a celebrity like him out in the wild. It’s like walking down an Amsterdam street and coming face-to-face with a tiger, isn’t it?

The guard wasn’t too pleased. Sir, I’d like you to step back five paces so that I can do my job.

Felix did so, simply raising his voice so he could go on talking:

– Apparently he’s taller. In real life.

The guard’s hands felt icy cold as his fingers swept up and down my legs. It had suddenly gotten a lot chillier. The wind sliced through my trousers; it would probably start snowing again any minute. I looked up. Spotlights lit up the butter yellow facade of the Schloss; it stood out flawlessly against the dark sky, glowing like a spaceship that had just landed.

– I’m sure we’ll spot him straightaway. That peroxided hair. I wouldn’t know what to say to him, though. Ought one to enter into debate with him? One does rather owe it to one’s position. As an intellectual. It’s the perfect time to discuss that party manifesto of his, in which he talks about the dangers of National Socialism, putting “National” in quotes. In quotes! As if Hitler was actually a Socialist, and National Socialism was just sort of the flavor of the month. Bolognese Socialism. BBQ Ranch Socialism.

We joined a fidgety line. Our view of whatever was going on inside was impeded by the flapping shawls of the women in front of us. They complained in Italian, gesticulated, spoke with exclamation marks. Their handbags were inspected. Two hostesses in shiny gala dresses, their teeth chattering, checked the watermark on our invitations and handed us the guest book to sign.

– What should one say to a man like that, remarked Felix. I mean, what would you ask Hitler if you ran into him?

A tiger in Amsterdam. I took my time, scanning the guest book page for “P. de Vries” or Perhaps “De Vries, Philip,” and then for “S. Burgers,” “M. Winterberg,” or “N. Barth,” enemies multiply themselves, but couldn’t spot anything and the hostesses were giving me impatient looks. I wrote my name, and seeing it there, Friso de Vos, my handwriting struck me as strangely uncertain, as if I wasn’t sure of what I’d written. I looked at Felix:

– Munich Hitler or Berlin Hitler?

– Berlin Hitler, Felix answered.

– What would I like to ask him?

– Yes.

– Whether he wouldn’t rather have become a painter.

I heard myself say it. Inside we ran straight into the backs of a couple of hundred people who, assembled in the big hall, were being asked to raise their glasses. Apparently we’d just missed the welcome speech. The red conference banners hung on the neoclassical pillars between the state portraits of the Habsburgs, who looked down on us from eternity. On the podium stood a statesmanlike figure with a neat white side parting; he raised his glass of champagne and struck up “Gaudeamus igitur” without the least inhibition. I was amazed that anyone would dare ask this gathering of professors and intellectuals and journalists and artists and students to sing along, and even more amazed when they did so—at the tops of their voices, even—so the whole room reverberated. The words were projected on a screen. It had exactly the same effect as a national anthem. Just by opening their mouths and singing the old words, the congress-goers no longer felt numbed by the long lectures or chilled by the cold weather, but instead incorporated into an international brotherhood of minds. Post iucundam iuventutem / post molestam senectutem, nos habebit humus. The literary critic who saw the books section in his newspaper shrinking by the year, the professor whose budget for PhD students had dwindled to almost nothing, poets and thinkers, lost souls, they sounded as if they’d looked forward to this moment for weeks; each Latin phrase was sung with full conviction, sincerely, self-assuredly. Under different circumstances this would probably have been exactly what I’d have expected—have hoped—of life, that you could walk into a salon in a palace and find it full of men and women in evening dress, people who all knew their Shakespeare and Tarantino, their Tocqueville and Kissinger, with whom you could have a good long talk about…about any topic under the sun, surely? That was our anthem being sung. This should have been our society, our new republic, a meritocracy of knowledge, all these people, so well read—but under other circumstances. Then I’d have sung along wholeheartedly, then I’d have felt a member of the club, then I’d probably just have fallen into line behind Brik in the conga and felt the pats on his shoulder as if they were on my own. But now I wasn’t enjoying it. I felt a distance, and there was more to it than just Brik. All I could see were the backs of people’s heads, I tried to distinguish one crown from the other, the tamed quiff of Philip de Vries, the yarmulke hair of Winterberg, the relocated follicles of Sweder Burgers, and perhaps also, why not, the hair helmet of Mrs. Chilton. Felix stood next to me, radiating neurotic energy as he sang along dutifully, programmed always to play the role expected of him, but I saw that he, too, was looking around, searching, in his case, for that peroxided pompadour.

Enter Friso. I’d expected that as soon as the singing stopped, people would turn around, that everyone would look at me, that my name or Brik’s, as the former star of this conference, would be on their lips—or actually, deep down, I hadn’t expected it at all, but would have liked to have expected it, would so like to have genuinely hoped that people would follow the stage directions of the script in which I’d ended up. Enter Friso. Because actually it didn’t surprise me that the only people who had everyone’s full attention were the waitresses, whose trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres were being stormed like the autumn sales. Live music now sounded from another room, a not-very-swinging jazz band with a black singer, who was crooning numbers from the Great American Songbook with an accent that was almost Brikian.

Anodder seashon, anodder reason

For making whoopee.

Felix took me by the arm and led me through a sea of people toward an adjoining room.

– Did you see him? I didn’t. But not everyone’s here, I bet. This palace has got, what, ten reception rooms? Let’s do a tour.

Wherever we went, the vibe was restless. People were talking to each other but not concentrating on what was being said. Everyone was looking around them, in search of better, more famous, more successful conversation partners. Look, there’s X! Look, over there, Y! Names echoed all around. Some meant something to me, others didn’t.

– Look, there’s Nicolas Fokker.

Indeed, there was Nicolas Fokker, small, plump, and celebrated. Écrivain européen. An author who looked like a retired bank manager. He lived off caviar and canapés. He would be a personal friend of the queen’s. Each year the call from Oslo failed to materialize, and there he stood, hands in his pockets, talking to a boy with unruly curls and mournful eyes, armed with pen and notepad, who looked as if he were from the local school newspaper:

– Well of course, the list of people who haven’t won it is much more impressive.

The boy noted his comment dutifully. As we moved on we passed two women, one young, one older, who were also looking at Fokker. The older lady seemed vaguely familiar somehow. She was diminutive—about a head taller than a shopping cart—with an expensive dress, a weathered face, and teeth that were very white and disproportionately large for her mouth, as if they had belonged to someone else. The girl addressed her:

– Oh my God, those things you wrote about Fokker…

– It wasn’t that bitchy…

– No I mean, he deserved it, but reading your review made me feel like I was peering through the sights of a sniper’s rifle in the mountains above Sarajevo.

People were still coming in out of the cold; despite the late hour, it was open house. The waiters were already struggling to get through with their trays. We heard a woman laugh loudly; somewhere a glass fell to the floor.

– We’re not going to find him here, said Felix.

I saw Vikram Tahl talking to a man who was a head taller than him and it was only now, from a distance, that I saw how good his footwork was. Like a boxer. He moved with each movement of the speaker’s head, so as to always stand squarely in front of him, unignorable. Tahl was gesticulating; he looked thwarted:

– But how can you not be interested in the history of India? he asked, with a forced smile.

– Well, I’ve just never forgiven those guys for what they did to Ben Kingsley in Gandhi.

Wanting to avoid Tahl, I steered Felix toward the window seats, where two mustachioed men who’d commandeered an entire tray of canapés were gobbling miniature meatballs and laughing loudly. (“And you know what the worst thing was? He submitted his volume of poetry to me in Comic Sans!”) Next to them were the youngest faces I’d seen up to now, two boys in blazers too big for them.

– What’s your favorite war? one asked.

– The Crimean has everything you can expect of a good war, I’d say, the other replied.

Two girls, perhaps their dates, stood a little ways off. They seemed a bit older, a bit more self-assured. One said to the other with a superior smile:

– And then he looked at me and said: “Girl, let’s not talk about les mots, in your case I’m much more interested in les choses.”

– Oh wow, like Foucault was trying to chat you up.

In the middle of the room stood a camera crew, and right in front of the camera stood Madeline Steinberg, a scion of the piano family, in a cocktail dress that, given her fifty summers, was shorter than you’d expect at this time of year, or any time of year. She was drinking something with an olive in it. This was a woman who had won the Booker Prize with her debut novel, eons ago, and since then had abandoned the genre, had never felt the need to write another novel. Now she wrote books with subtitles like On the Conscience of Words or When Writers Are Silent. Her neck was long, her eyes old and warm and elfin. A sprinkling of gray highlighted her dark hair. She wore a great many bracelets, enough gold and silver to buy an entire Indian tribe.

Brik had once warned me about her: as vicious as a cat, he said. “And the biggest gossip on the circuit, so watch out. In fact, watch out on two counts, because she’s a real cougar. She’ll devour you, and I wouldn’t like to see that happen to you and that sweet Pippa of yours.”

She was speaking in honeyed tones into the interviewer’s microphone.

– There was something vulgar about his encyclopedic knowledge. It was as if he was always trying to show you just how much he knew.

Felix was standing on tiptoe, trying to look over the heads of the crowd. He gestured that we should move on. But I went on listening to Steinberg. She continued:

– I mean, he was from some shitty little hamlet in the former Yugoslavia, right? Don’t forget that. He must have been overcompensating. Excusez les mots.

I grabbed Felix by the arm. Had he heard what she’d said? Did she mean Brik? He shrugged.

– There’s live music in the room next door, so he won’t be there. Wouldn’t it be great if you and I stood up to Wilders—gave him a piece of our minds? Two young intellectuals on the warpath. How about you wait down here, while I run upstairs and have a look, okay?

Felix didn’t wait for my reply, but slipped away. I hung around until Madeline Steinberg had finished with the journalists and then walked up to her. That sweet Pippa of mine. Take it easy, I told myself. You can handle this. Get in character just one last time. Play the role just one last time.

– Madeline Steinberg, right? Philip de Vries. I believe Josip Brik once introduced us.

– I’m fairly sure he never did.

She sounded amused, gave me a lingering handshake.

– Can I offer you something to drink?

– Young men like you can always treat me to champagne, she said laughing.

Champagne arrived on a tray. Steinberg looked at me curiously, her eyes wide.

– How strange to find a woman like you here alone.

She smiled again, somewhat uncertainly this time. I was overdoing it on purpose.

– So, Mr. Philip, what brings you to Vienna?

– Brik, of course. I’m here to take part in a debate tomorrow about Brik’s legacy, about what made Brik so special. How we can best interpret Brik. What I learned from my close connection with Brik, is that Brik might have come across as an absentminded professor, but that Brik himself was very well aware of how he functioned best.

I tried to use Brik’s name as many times as possible in every sentence. Brik, Brik, Brik, she must get the impression that Philip de Vries was the most boastful, name-dropping prole at the conference.

– “Philip,” he would say, because that’s my name, “Philip, I’m my own worst enemy, because God forbid anyone could do me more harm than I’m already doing to myself.”

She couldn’t be used to having conversations in which she wasn’t asked anything, I imagined, in which she wasn’t complimented on her latest book, essay, TV appearance, or Hello! magazine home feature, so I didn’t ask her anything, just waited.

– So you knew him well? she finally asked, clearly at a loss.

– I did indeed. In fact, I got this watch from Brik, I said, and pulled up my sleeve so she could see the watch my mother gave me as a graduation present. It was simple but elegant, with gold hands and a crocodile leather strap.

– I once told Brik that I didn’t have a watch. So he just gave me his! It was like he adopted me as his son.

– Oh really? she said. The son he never had, I take it?

You could see her interest in me waning. She scanned the room for someone more appealing to talk to. This was going well. There wasn’t anyone, so she pulled herself together and turned back to me again:

– Tell me, are you also involved in that journal, The Sleepwalker?

– No, I said. Pourquoi?

I was very proud of myself, coming out with that “pourquoi.”

– Well, I still had a bone to pick with Brik about it. A year ago I wrote to him, or rather to The Sleepwalker, after Brik wrote a piece on Srebrenica, marking yet another anniversary of the genocide.

– I remember that article well, I said, in the tone of someone doing a voice-over in a commercial.

– I wrote a letter about it. It seemed fair to approach him straightaway, rather than wait until he published it in some essay compilation for the general public, and then respond in an opinion piece.

– So what did you write?

– That there were some stupid mistakes in it. Hemingway didn’t commit suicide in Cuba, but in Ketchum, Idaho. Klaus Barbie didn’t come from Austria, but Prussia. Things he should have known. But it was mainly about a change that struck me in Brik’s writing. Back in the late 1980s, when the Wall was still in place, he was already writing interesting cultural critique pieces, but they were always quite mild, quite reticent, as if he were restraining himself, as if there were a truth that could be deferred. After 1991, that restraint disappeared. Suddenly he was writing with much more authority and conviction. Much more judgmentally. It took a while before I realized what had changed: it was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the death of the Socialist dream. At some level he’d always seen Socialism as an alternative to Western life. That was what made him noncommittal. When that fell away, first the Wall, then the Soviet Union, there was only one path he could follow. I suddenly noticed it in that piece on the Balkan conflict. That the great, ironic critic of ideology himself had solid ideological foundations. Anyway, I wrote to Brik and got a friendly email back from him, saying how gratified he was that I’d been reading his articles for so long, and that he’d certainly pass on the letter to the editor of The Sleepwalker. The letter never appeared in the journal.

It was a sharper analysis than I’d expected of her. I squeezed out a smile.

– I don’t know anything about that, I said, and for the first time I was speaking the truth, which tasted like a foreign language.

She looked at me intently with an expression I couldn’t interpret. I put on my best poker face.

– Were you talking about him just now, when you were being filmed? I asked.

My attempt at inscrutability didn’t seem to have worked. She smiled discreetly, satisfied.

– Very telling that you assume it was about him. Shall I unleash some psychotherapy on you, young man? Do you know what it is—hey look, Nicolas Fokker.

Indeed, he’d just shuffled into the room, perhaps looking for the camera crew. Steinberg filled me in.

– He’s one of the guests of honor this week. Got a medal this weekend from the city of Vienna, because he wrote novels about how awful the Second World War and the Holocaust were.

– Glad someone has the guts to make that known, I said.

She laughed. He’s such a little shit, she said. I have to say hello to him. Thank you for the champagne, Philip.

She greeted Fokker with three air kisses and she was off. “Do you know what it is?” No, don’t tell me, I thought. Now I was alone. Normally you could kill some time by going to the bar, lining up, and ordering something, and then a quarter of an hour had gone by, but here there were staff everywhere, ready to dash forward with whatever you needed.

I was struck by how many other people were alone. Especially men: you hardly noticed them in the crowd, but they were there. They just stood there vacantly, with name stickers on their lapels, stickers that might just as well have said which nursery they should be taken to if they lost their mothers. They didn’t go anywhere, they didn’t speak to anyone, they drummed their fingers on their wineglasses in time to the music, made a great show of inspecting the paintings on the walls. A man with a Tolstoyan beard was holding one of the curtains, testing the fabric between his thumb and index finger as if he were planning to order a few yards of it from the waiters. The fact that you’d read a lot of books didn’t at all mean you could just join in with the rest. I was alone. Would Philip be alone too?

– And you’re Friso de Vos.

The answer to my question. I’d once bungee-jumped with Pippa in Thailand, on our first holiday together, because I quite needlessly wanted to impress her by jumping off a crane at a carnival on the beach. The feeling I was having now reminded me briefly of that moment when your freefall stops and the elastic jerks you up again, that moment when you’re gripped both by the cord’s resistance and by gravity. The face in front of me didn’t look as much like mine as I’d feared, a fear I’d never entirely dared formulate, but there was a basic resemblance. His mouth and teeth were different, fuller, larger, his eyes rounder, but we had the same vertical lines, jaw, nose, ears. Our hair was identical, equally fair, the same combination of tufts falling forward and sideways, though his seemed more solid, as if it were all one piece.

A tiger in Amsterdam. I once found myself next to Brad Pitt in a bookshop, and he was smaller than I’d imagined, older too, but he filled the space with a strange sort of energy that made you walk more erect. The energy didn’t come from him, I knew that, it was in me, but he triggered it.

– I recognized you straightaway. I’m Philip de Vries. As in Brik.

He stuck out a hand and I reflexively did the same. He wasn’t wearing black tie, but a gray suit with a white shirt and a light brown tie, which immediately made me feel a fool for conforming to the dress code.

– I’m Friso.

– I know!

– Friso de Vos. Also as in Brik.

– Of course!

– Oh?

– If there are two dyed-in-the-wool Brikians, it’s us.

– Oh really?

– Yes! You rather more than me, of course. It’s great to meet you, Friso.

– It is?

– Absolutely. Brik talked about you a lot.

I smiled stupidly. He smiled too, a wide, relaxed Colgate smile, as if he wasn’t smiling at me but flashing his teeth, like a scary man in the park.

– No, seriously. I was often jealous of you. All the things you’d done together. He told me about the time you set off in a cheap little rental car to visit his elderly mother, somewhere near Belgrade, and that the engine cut out at the slightest hill, and you had to take turns pushing the car, but you couldn’t move it with him inside. Hilarious.

He was still holding my hand and beaming.

– Philip, I said, but was unable to finish my sentence. Not because he interrupted me, but because I didn’t know what to say to him, or even where to start. There wasn’t a trace of irony in him. Instead he radiated a kind of happy innocence that you usually only see in family dogs. The master’s back, the master! He was simply happy to be here, truly happy to meet me.

– Call me Flip, he said. All my friends call me Flip.

Flip. “Call me Flip.” Please, I thought, please not this.

– I hadn’t yet had a chance to call you back, I said. Did you want to discuss our debate tomorrow?

– No, I’ve got a kind of odd dilemma, he said (his voice had a lilt to it, perhaps West Frisian, it was different from what I remembered from his TV appearance). I got a call, last week, I think it was. From the crematorium. They said no one had left any instructions about Brik’s ashes.

I managed to say: “What?”

– Brik was cremated, someplace near Groningen. You know. In Uithuizen. The crematorium called me up to ask who they should send the urn with Brik’s ashes to.

Not this, I thought.

– So I said: “No worries, I’ll come and pick him up.” He gestured to a passing waitress, gave her a broad grin, got one back, and took two glasses of champagne from her tray. He gave one to me and raised his in the air:

– Cheers, he said.

Let’s have a toast for the douchebags.

– Cheers, I said. He emptied his glass in a single gulp. Smiled at me again.

– A bit weird, perhaps, but I’ve got the urn with me. In my hotel room. I thought you’d know better than anyone what should be done with it. Brik was really crazy about you. You’d know what to do, I thought.

– You’ve got Brik’s ashes?

– Yes.

– With you?

– Yes! Just packed him in my carry-on luggage. Had to fill in a special form, go through a separate scanner at Schiphol. No problemo. Did that Liddie Chilton give you money too? She called me later, after New York, you know, the memorial service, wanting to know if she might slip me some cash, so I could buy a nice suit and stay in a swish hotel in Vienna. Pretty chill, eh?

– Super chill, I said.

– Wasn’t going to argue with that. Booked something cheap on Hotels.com, figured I’d gotten myself a free vacation. Asked my girlfriend: “Babe, where do you want to go?” Shazam! Booked two tickets to Bali on the spot. We’re flying on Boxing Day. Thank you very much! I mean, Brik wasn’t the kind of guy who gave a fuck what you wore, so why shouldn’t I spend it on something else? You’ve been to this conference before, right? Is it very different, now that he’s no longer with us? Perhaps I’m being naive or too obsessive about Brik, but if the primus inter pares drops away like that, isn’t it a bit like the king dying? When that happens, what’s left?

– A republic, I said.

– There’s always something a bit pathetic about a republic, though. It always comes after something. After a kingdom, after an empire. It never just exists spontaneously, as if it’s just not a natural state of affairs.

I remembered what Brik had written in The Red Machine: when the executioner Sanson held up the dripping head of Louis XVI to the mob on the Place de la Révolution, nothing happened. People simply cheered and went home. The really shocking thing, Brik wrote, was that Paris just went back to the order of the day. The city gates opened again. People went to market, ate in cafés, swept their doorsteps, and went to bed. The republic was ushered in without musket fire or the roar of cannons, without bonfires or dances of joy.

I could still hear him say it: Who are you, Friso, my Dauphin or my Robespierre? And if we weren’t Dauphins, then what was left?

– Smart thinking, I said, as if I were giving him a present.

He shrugged.

– Apparently the Spanish crown prince is here this evening. He’s going to be presented with some forty-volume standard work on the Franco era. That’s why there’s all this security.

– Hey, Philip, I said, nerving myself, who’s Arkady Rossovich?

He smiled.

– Why on earth do you ask?

– Arkady Rossovich. The Hitler maquette. It was stolen from Brik’s house.

He put his hand on my shoulder and his smile grew even wider.

– You’re joking, right?

– No.

– You know the X-Men?

– Of course.

– Arkady Rossovich is a Russian mutant, Omega Red. A supervillain.

– What?

– I wrote about him for the new issue of Blondie, Journal of Hitler Studies. You must know it, surely? Their annual Hitler fiction issue? I wrote a piece of fan fiction about Brik.

– Fan fiction?

– Yes. About Brik. It seemed fun, thinking up a story like that. I have literary ambitions, you know—more literary ambitions than academic ambitions, actually—and the idea of turning Brik’s ideas into a gripping tale really appealed to me. Do you like writing?

– I hate it.

– Ha ha, well I don’t.

– So the whole story, the whole maquette business, is made up?

– Totally!

I smiled, and he answered my smile with a smile. What a cheerful chap. No conversation with Felix had ever been as easygoing as this five minutes with him.

We wandered from one room to the other, in search of a quieter spot. He told me about the book he was reading, while I kept on looking around, as if having found Philip wasn’t enough, as if there might be another Philip still at large. He said he was plowing through the Russian classics in chronological order on Brik’s advice, and that he struggled to keep track of all the characters’ names. But I wasn’t really listening, I was looking over his shoulder at what was approaching. Markus Winterberg was bearing down on us like an icebreaker cleaving the Barents Sea, parting little knots of guests like ice floes. Behind his fat neck I could see the fedora of his master heave into view.

– Oh, kid, I said to Philip, who gave me a startled look. Oh, dude, you are so going to make it as a fiction writer. You’d be amazed at what you can bring to life.

Winterberg stepped aside so that Burgers, in a tuxedo, could join us. The four of us formed a little circle. Everyone looked at everyone else in turn.

– Mr. De Vries, good evening.

– Hallo, Mr. Burgers, I said.

– Have we met? asked Philip.

– You owe me something, I think, said Burgers.

– A Lannister always pays his debts, I said.

– We’d agreed you’d give me some more information this evening.

– Information about what? asked Philip.

– Arkady Rossovich, I said, and winked at Philip.

– Arkady? You mean my Omega Red? he asked.

– Does he know about the maquette? asked Winterberg.

– Mr. Burgers, I said, may I introduce a good friend of mine…

– The maquette? Yes, great, isn’t it, said Philip, beaming from ear to ear.

–…far and away the best, the most loyal student Brik ever had.

– Have you read my story?

– What story? asked Winterberg.

– About the maquette!

–…He is not my brother, yet he is the son of my father, I said.

– So three guesses, who am I? laughed Philip, blissfully unaware.

– Philip de Vries, will you tell this gentleman why you wrote the story about the Rossovich maquette?

– It was commissioned for the fiction issue of Blondie, Journal of Hitler Studies. It was fan fiction. But it’s only going to be published next month, how do you know…

– Philip de Vries? said Winterberg.

– That’s me, said Philip, why?

– He’s Philip de Vries, Mr. Burgers, Mr. Winterberg. The author of fan fiction about Brik. That’s what your maquette was, I said. Fan fiction. With the emphasis on “fiction.”

– Hey, you don’t despise the genre, do you? said Philip.

– Who are you then? Burgers asked me.

– Sorry, who are you actually? Philip asked him.

– I’m Sweder Burgers. Of the Burgers Foundation, among other things, he said.

– And fucking Mossad or Shin Bet or something like that, I bet, I added, though not aloud. My gaze was fixed on a bare back and a long neck under a perfectly coiffed head of short blonde hair. Her arms were thin but her shoulders angular and muscled, a swimmer’s shoulders, I thought. Her ultramarine dress was very low at the back and you could see that her skin was uniformly tanned, carefully bronzed on a sun bed. Her hand found the hand of the man next to her, an older gentleman I’d never seen before. He bent down and whispered something in her ear. He was smiling, clearly flirting. Perhaps he said her name, Nina Barth, or perhaps by now she had a new one.

– So you’re Philip de Vries? asked Winterberg.

– Yes and he’s Friso de Vos. As in Brik, said Philip.

What would she earn on an evening like this, I asked myself. What would I have been worth? The man’s hand moved lightly down from her shoulders, his fingertips explored her bare back, while he spoke in her ear. Would she have been sent to him, as she was to me, or would he have approached her? She probably had no idea we were standing ten feet away, was oblivious to the denouement of the train of events she’d set in motion, thanks to the din of the chattering people and the music from the room next door. He drew little circles on her back with his middle finger. How much would he have to pay? A picture flashed through my mind, of me going to a cash machine with Mrs. Chilton’s credit card and withdrawing the sum for her. Though my motives were more territorial than noble, I felt if I intervened now, I could save her from this creep.

– Friso de Vos, said Winterberg. I turned back to them.

– Friso de Vos, editor in chief of the The Sleepwalker, Journal of Hitler Studies, Since 1991. Nice to meet you.

– But the antiques shop, was that all made up too? Doesn’t it have a German cabinet? asked Burgers.

– What are you talking about? said Philip. Why do you think he’s me?

– They’ve got absolutely everything a Nazi would want for Christmas, I told Burgers.

– Jesus, they look so alike, said Winterberg.

– Dammit, that’s no excuse, Markus, Burgers snapped.

– Why don’t you ask Nina? I said. She’s over there.

– Where? Burgers and Winterberg chorused in shock.

But even entropy ends sooner or later. Eventually, things materialize. The abstract becomes concrete. At first I didn’t really register it, but I heard it, nevertheless. The music had just died down and instruments were being shoved about on the stage. Burgers heard it too, because he stopped talking and looked at me, pointing at his ear. I nodded.

– Would Philip de Vries come up onstage?

A loud buzzing noise followed, of someone holding a microphone too close to a speaker. Winterberg had gone silent now too, and I put my hand on Philip’s shoulder as a sign he should quieten down a bit.

– WOULD PHILIP DE VRIES COME UP ONSTAGE?

He looked at me.

– That’s me, he said.

– That’s you, I said.

– Do you think I’ve won something? He laughed and walked off, past the guests, who made way for him. The beautiful woman in the ultramarine dress stepped aside. I saw her face in profile and realized it wasn’t Nina. Her forehead was larger, her nose smaller, the balance was lacking. She looked away quickly when she saw me staring at her, much shyer than Nina would ever have been. By now Philip had reached the stage, on which stood two boys and a girl, surrounded by musical instruments. It was a big room. They were too far off for me to see their faces. I walked toward the stage, aware that Winterberg was on my heels. As Philip climbed onto it, all eyes focused on the little group. A lot happened at once. The girl began to recite into the microphone: “We are young, love is a battlefield! For too long now, the past has dominated the present! It’s time to wake up! In our own time! For too long now, old meanings have hijacked timeless gestures!” Philip was still looking amused—probably thought he’d been picked out of the audience, like at the circus, to hold up the hoop for the lion to jump through—but his smile vanished at the next words. “An outstretched arm as a mark of unity! Twelve years of German Fascism…!” The two boys next to him, their right arms proudly aloft, stood Hitler-saluting the audience, who immediately began to boo.

– Oh fuck, I said.

Of course Philip didn’t play along with this nonsense, annoying one of the boys, who tried to force his arm into the air—“The time has come for the de-Hitlerization of the right arm! History cannot harm us!”—but he wrestled free, knocking the boy over, just as the advancing security guards reached the stage. Philip was the first casualty: the foremost security guard charged him with a shoulder tackle, lifting him straight off the ground and propelling him into the drum kit with an almighty crash. Chaos ensued: blows were exchanged, you could hear cloth ripping, see pushing and shoving, people fell over, the Hitler-saluting boys disappeared under an avalanche of guards in rented black tuxedos, people screamed, a cello broke in two, and the girl with the microphone—“WE ARE THE RIGHT ARM LIBERATION FROOOOONT!”—was picked up bodily by a burly security guard, who tossed her over his shoulder like a small child.

– Markus, let’s get out of here, I heard Burgers say. He was fuming with anger.

Out of the corner of my eye I could just see Winterberg. He was holding his hand in front of his mouth, as if he wanted to check whether he had bad breath, but now I saw he was speaking into a tiny microphone attached to a wire emerging from his sleeve:

– Abort mission, I repeat, abort mission. Stand down.

Before he, too, disappeared in the crowd, our eyes met briefly, very briefly, and he pinched my wrist. Not angrily, not aggressively, but amicably, perhaps even with a sort of professional admiration. The urn, I thought. Brik.

So there it was at last. The plot I’d been waiting for these last two days. The pawns had behaved as expected. Including me. When I went outside, it was snowing again,

and for a moment I thought the morose-looking security guards approaching the castle were heading for me—but they passed me by on their way to the party inside. No one followed me.

The utter calmness I felt made me realize how tired I was. My anger was spent.

In films, the most common line is “Let’s get out of here.” In novels, at scene-setting moments, it’s “Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked,” or something like that. I looked back at my footprints and counted to see how long it took before they were obliterated by fresh snow—another popular image in fiction, easy symbolism, history being wiped out. Thirty seconds, forty seconds. The prints remained visible.

Should I deduce something from that? Did it represent a deeper truth? Was I doing anyone a service by trying to turn my own footprints into a metaphor?

Enough. Done.

With my fists clenched in my coat pockets I walked on, past the castle’s immense gardens, past the clipped shrubs, past the pond. Two swans floated along aimlessly, leaving ever-widening V-shaped ripples in their wake.

Were they real? Didn’t swans fly south in winter?

Their eyes were dark, their beaks expressionless, like all beaks. Perhaps that’s why you can’t ever feel real sympathy for birds: you can’t read their faces. They never seem to be truly interested in anything. They could even be fake swans, I thought, with propeller-driven legs and little cameras mounted in their eyes, so security guards could just sit in a room somewhere and keep an eye on visitors by twiddling a remote control. Perhaps that big screw in the sign saying DON‘T WALK ON THE GRASS was a microphone.

Thinking up all this stuff made me so tired. Thinkingthinkingthinking.

I was not made to think. I was made to eat.

Even from a distance I could hear the security guards chatting and laughing—apparently there’d been no major panic at the castle, or if there had, it was now once more under control.

“Right Arm Liberation Front kaltgestellt. No survivors.”

Friso: stop thinking.

The chatter ceased as I neared the exit; the guards wished me good evening in chorus. One told me that if I needed a taxi I’d be sure to find one outside the gates, just on the right.

I liked the way the snow was muting my footsteps, as if I were walking in socks. It would have been nice to linger in the palace gardens, but I had a mission. There were five taxis, and I chose the one that wasn’t blasting out pop music or news. The driver was silent, too, as he drove steadily down the city’s broad avenues, toward Philip’s hotel. To distract myself from my thoughts I concentrated on my body, monitoring all my faculties, trying to register every tiny discomfort. A nagging ache in my lower back, tingling fingertips, burning sphincter, racing heart, and tense, hunched shoulders—complaints that had become normal since Chile, familiar, even. The hotel porters had left their posts and were huddled alongside the staff behind the reception desk, bent over a small television set. Even without seeing the screen you could tell it was a soccer match, probably in injury time; the commentator sounded hoarse and excited.

– Sorry to trouble you, I said. But I lost my room key.

– What’s your name, sir?

– My name is De Vries, D.E.V.R.I.E.S.

The boy keyed it in apathetically.

– Room number 612?

– That’s right, I said.

– Just a second please.

He pressed a few buttons and turned back to the TV for the full twenty seconds it took for a rattling machine to spit out a new key card.

– Have a nice evening, he said.

It went just as easily, just as smoothly as I’d imagined. Let your imagination become reality. Don’t trust in security, don’t trust in privacy, don’t imagine that anyone at all feels responsible for you. To the strains of “The Girl from Ipanema” the elevator took me to the sixth floor. Room 612. I stuck the key card in the slot as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and the little green light flickered on and the door unlocked.

It was the same type of room as Nina’s, but bigger. The same familiar, sterile hotel room smell. I walked through the little hallway, just like the one where I’d pulled off Nina’s swimsuit. Double bed, beige sheets, white pillowcases. “I want you to go down on all fours in front of me.” Nina—where was she now? Would she be doing the same thing in a hotel room in Amsterdam or London? Would she be growing more photogenic with every performance? From a distance, the desk looked like solid wood, mahogany or something, but up close it turned out to be cheap, painted plywood. The round knobs on the drawers weren’t really brass. The wooden chair was uncomfortable. In the right drawer there was only hotel stuff: a room-service menu, house rules, writing paper. The left drawer contained a folder with printouts of emails confirming the hotel and flight bookings, a map of the town, some conference papers, lecture schedules. Nothing personal, just documents showing how diligently and enthusiastically he’d prepared for the conference—he must have so looked forward to it.

Where was the urn?

This should have been very easy—if Hollywood has taught you what war looks like, then TV has trained you how detectives operate. Look with “soft eyes,” as they said in Pip’s favorite series. Look beyond things. Don’t just see them for what they are, but for what they might be. See how things relate to each other.

I shut the drawer again softly. Softly, just like my father always told me not to slam the car door. Softly, because I didn’t want to shatter the silence of the room. Brik dead, unforgivably dead, and me here, all alone.

History is made by men in back rooms. The minibar contained nothing it shouldn’t: a small bottle of Coca-Cola (0.2 liters) for €4.99, a miniature of whiskey (0.125 liters) for €11.99, a bar of milk chocolate (9 ounces) for €3.99. I opened the bottle of whiskey with my teeth, tasting the metal of the cap, and poured it into one of the minibar glasses. I added the Coke, took a sip, and spat it out, partly back in the glass. Sweet and bitter.

An outdoor jacket very like mine hung in the wardrobe. Gore-Tex, water-repellent, hip in a subversive, young-fogeyish way. I checked all the pockets, finding only a receipt for an airport shop. My hand fell on a blue shirt on a hanger. I took hold of the collar and yanked the shirt free with a single movement, tearing off the top button. I did the same with the second shirt. I rechecked the pockets of a suit: jacket and trousers. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

The bathroom was empty except for a toiletry bag: I overturned it in the sink. He had the same brand of surf-look hair gel as I did, salty eco-toothpaste similar to Pippa’s.

That left only the chest of drawers. Don’t panic. There were three big drawers, three possibilities. Upper drawer: boxer shorts, T-shirts, shirts, all neatly folded. Three ties, carefully rolled up. I tossed everything in the direction of the wastebasket, mostly missing it, my turn for the Sack of Jerusalem. Among the clothes I came across a book, The Red Machine, in Dutch of course. He was reading Brik in translation. Couldn’t cope with six hundred pages of English. The title page bore Brik’s signature, a date, “Groningen,” and underneath, in his scratchy child’s handwriting: “For Ph. A promise is a promise. JB.” There were a few Post-it notes stuck between the pages, but otherwise it looked brand-new. Perhaps he’d never read The Red Machine. The thing in my hands didn’t feel like a book, more like something alive. I opened it wider, felt the hard spine of the book resist, the resistance crack. I kept on pressing until the spine snapped—this must be what it felt like to throttle a small animal. A deep groove now ran right through the middle of the B of “Brik.” I tore out the page with the signature and stuffed it in my pocket. I threw the book away, the front and back cover flapping like impotent wings. It landed somewhere behind the bed.

Second drawer. Socks in all colors of the rainbow. Hip. A pair of sneakers. A hoodie. Nothing interesting.

Bottom drawer, last fucking chance, Philip de Vries. Or should I say: “Last chance for you, Friso de Vos”? The moment I touched the knob and felt how light the drawer was, I already knew. Nothing. Empty. And my head instantly filled up again.

Friso de Vos, Josip Brik’s Dauphin, his intended biographer, connoisseur of his work, I should also say “aficionado”—did you feel no pity at all for Philip de Vries?

You mean “Flip de Vries”?

No, really, joking apart, did you feel no pity? Be honest.

Somehow it seemed as if he didn’t really exist. As if I’d invented him. That he very much existed was something that I, at that moment, in that hotel room, preferred not to acknowledge.

Why were you so destructive?

It was seeing all his things, I think, they just made it worse.

Because?

They made his existence so concrete. And my intolerance so real.

How did you feel?

Short of breath, actually. I was panting, there in his room.

Why was that? Tension? Fear?

No, I wasn’t afraid. It was more like I’d just eaten five plates of stew. As if I was full to bursting. As if I had to unbutton the top button of my trousers.

What were you thinking about?

Back when I was a student in Groningen, a friend in my fraternity told me that when his father died, some hellish document opened in his head, and that everything connected to his father’s death, even if only indirectly, was copied and pasted into it and declared sacred. The black wool tie he wore at the funeral, the music that was played—“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and Pachelbel’s Canon in D—and via Pachelbel an old film of Robert Redford’s because that piece of music featured prominently in it. He remembered someone’s daughter crying angrily in the family room of the oncology department and cursing Lance Armstrong for saying that if you keep fighting, you’ll win, because you couldn’t win this and fuck you, Lance Armstrong—and so Lance Armstrong, too, landed in the document, along with that Dutch sports commentator, because those two went together like a crocodile and one of those little birds that picks the crocodile’s scales clean.

Soon after the funeral our fraternity organized an anniversary trip to Venice (paste): he came along, we visited the Peggy Guggenheim Museum (paste) and the distraction did him good, but a year later, when he was playing some PlayStation game in which a hired assassin sprinted and climbed through the streets and canals of Venice, he was suddenly reminded of those days, and it made him almost sick with misery.

He told me that two or three days after the funeral, the son of a famous Dutch writer died in an accident, and that the boy’s father later wrote a book about it. Every journalist in the Netherlands wrote how awful it was about the son, and it was, of course, but his father was dead too, simultaneously dead, and that was just as awful, but no one damn well devoted any column space to that, so that book was also cut and pasted.

Did the document ever close itself?

Ultimately.

So what was in your document?

Nothing.

Nothing?

I didn’t want to open that document, I resisted it.

But isn’t it also the idea that you absorb a document like that, incorporate it, so you can—apologies for the cliché—move on?

I preferred to reject it, to put up a fight. I didn’t want to make any accommodations, I guess.

It might not have been pasted, but it was all cut, surely? Isn’t your clipboard totally clogged up with all that unreleased data?

It’s only a metaphor.

You’re angry, aren’t you?

You can’t always get what you want.

Why do you feel the need to blame somebody or something?

Imagine not being able to blame somebody.

What then?

Then none of it matters. Then it’s all chance.

A man leans out of a window, the window frame breaks, the man falls and dies. It’s a window frame that people have been leaning on for thirty years, perhaps, and yet in his case it breaks. What can you make of that other than chance, than simple bad luck?

You offset chance by making it the punch line of something, by giving Brik’s death meaning, fitting it into a story. Even if it means inventing the story.

But all that fiction—isn’t that a form of self-deception too?

It was only then that I saw it. It was standing on a bedside table, big, unmissable actually, but the urn looked so industrial it had escaped my attention—I’d taken it to be a lamp, or a meter box, part of the room’s equipment. I’d assumed that urns were kind of vase-shaped, but this looked more like a keg.

There was Brik. I put it (“him”!) on my lap, couldn’t get the image of a keg out of my head. A beer tender full of Brik.

Did I dare look? Feel?

Unscrewing the lid of an urn, it turns out, doesn’t give you immediate access to the contents—the ash was sealed off, like vacuum-packed coffee under silver foil, like that little sliver of silver you have to peel off when you open a new tube of toothpaste. I ran my thumb over the silver, tracing figure eights, and could feel the vacuum, the suction, the unnatural force holding everything together—if I pressed harder, I would press right through the silver, poking my thumb into the ash, into Brik.

The urge was strong; it’s always so tempting to break a vacuum, to unseal coffee, experience that split second when the vacuum is released—as if the coffee were breathing, taking a first breath, like something that has just woken up from a cryogenic sleep, a breath of life.

The keg was pleasantly heavy on my lap, like a sleeping child.

I sat there for a while, unaware of time passing, lost in the act of staring. Long enough, at any rate, for the silence of the hotel room to affect me. It began to lull me, to put me under.

Though I didn’t fall asleep, I could feel myself getting drowsy. I saw myself sitting there, on Philip’s bed, with Brik’s ashes on my lap, as if I were looking at someone else, and suddenly I had a vision of myself sitting with Brik’s ashes on my lap in Brik’s farm in Groningen. Why, I couldn’t tell, but all of a sudden I pictured myself sitting with his ashes on that wooden school bench that stood in his kitchen.

And I pictured his friends and colleagues gathered in the garden, pictured how I would get their attention without raising my voice and how I would lead them.

As if in a vision I saw it all clearly. We would leave from Brik’s house, two by two, like schoolchildren, down the garden path, past the rose bed and the tree planted to mark the birth of Queen Juliana. We would go over the little wooden bridge across the stream, to the farm of the neighbors opposite, who would be waiting there and silently join the end of our procession. We would walk into their cornfields, which stretched out to where their land ended, a few hundred yards off. The tall cornstalks would rustle in the wind, a sea of gold and yellow seeming to part in front of us. Even if you didn’t have them in the Netherlands, we would nevertheless hear the chirping of tree crickets, an invisible wall of sound.

Men would take off their jackets and hang them over their shoulders, women would wear big sunglasses. We would feel the day’s warmth on our bare arms, my hand would find Pippa’s. Little would be said, but the words that were spoken would be accompanied by familiar smiles, bright faces.

At the end of the cornfields we would climb the stone steps onto the dyke. The Wadden Sea would sparkle in the sunshine. We would walk along the dyke to that bit of the road that jutted out into the sea, where there was a bench, usually with a few cyclists on it, catching their breath and eating sandwiches. Not now, now the bench would be empty. Pippa would hold my hand until we got to the bench, and then place her hand on my back to support me as I climbed onto it.

I wouldn’t start speaking right away. First I would look down and take in all the faces: Pippa would be standing at the front, her arms crossed, a look of concentration on her face, lovingly anxious on my behalf. Her parents and her brother Jim would be nearby, her father’s hand on her shoulder. Felix would stand with his hands behind his back, patient as a vicar. There would be Mr. and Mrs. Chilton, their faces tanned like vacationers, his arm around her, the Australian art critic leaning on his walking stick, Nicolas Fokker, the little orange ribbon of his medal flapping on his lapel, the police officer from Onondoga County, his eyes invisible under his hat, the Viennese taxi driver with his foot kaputt in plaster. Hitler Lima senior and junior would stand next to each other and you would wonder whether they really shared the same DNA, the one so angular, the other so solid, like the difference between a slice of cheese and a thick beefsteak.

I would look down from the bench and smile, try to make eye contact with everyone, take away some of the tension. Sweder Burgers would be standing there like the big philanthropist, art collector, and uncomplicated Josip Brik fan that he was, his assistant Nina Barth next to him, tall and athletic, obscenely healthy, along with Markus Winterberg, as stately and unmoving as a monument. Vikram Tahl would be shifting his weight from foot to foot, impatient, but too polite to show it, with Yuki Hausmacher next to him to hold his jacket. The historian Maarten van Rossem, dressed in black, would be sweating in the midday sun. Not a hair of Geert Wilders’s head would move in the wind. Dame Mathilda Wilson would be wearing a kind of tweed hunting suit and a floppy hat, while Madeline Steinberg would be draped in one of those garments that as a man you never knew what to call, still less how to wear it: a sort of silk shawl-type cape or dress. Beads of sweat would trickle down the forehead of the nurse who’d just pushed Raimund Pretzel’s wheelchair up the dyke. The two boys and the girl from the Right Arm Liberation Front would be there, and if I looked closely I would see that something appeared to be growing under the noses of both boys: a strip of downy hair the size of a postage stamp—because apparently mustaches also needed to be liberated.

The dark eyes of the Chilean Susan Sontag would still radiate sympathy and reassurance, but from time to time she would glance aside with a look of concern at Jean-Philippe, the gangling student doing his PhD on Hitlerian Revenge Plays, who’d be clutching his atomizer and plastic bag.

I would slowly scan the rows, so the people in the back would know that I saw them. I would feel the sea breeze in my back, looking out, like a prophet over the flat fields, the promised land, the corn, Brik’s house, the windmill, the low country under the unnuanced clear blue sky.

I would spot Brik’s mentor Jack Gladney, with his eternal sunglasses and deerstalker. Ilsa the She Wolf of the SS would feel the sun on her long legs, bare below her kinky uniform shorts, her blonde hair braided so severely it looked like a weapon. The host of the TV program would wear a shiny suit that looked at least a size and a half too small for him. There would be the Greek woman from the hotel in Istanbul, with her broad, generous mouth and corkscrew curls (“very, very oral”), as well as Guus Le-Jeune, Erik Lanshof, Omega Red, and Arkady Rossovich. Behind them would be Bruno Ganz, Anthony Hopkins, that actor from Valkyrie, that other actor from Inglourious Basterds, all having come straight from the set, still in costume. Adolf Eichmann, looking just like his photo on the cover of Elsevier, and Josef Mengele, or at least Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil, because who knew what Mengele really looked like?

Behind them there would be perhaps two dozen students, the same faces you came across at all his lectures, quiet and polite, and in their midst Philip de Vries, taller and fairer than all the rest, the only one who would look me straight in the eyes. “Go get ’em, Friso,” his eyes would be saying. “Go get ’em, bro.”

All these characters and extras—I’d scan their faces, then address them, resolutely:

“Friends,

“Every now and then I still talk to Brik. I can’t help it. As I walk along the leafy lanes of the campus I catch myself saying ‘Okay, Brik, what shall we do?’ and then I start to talk about some problem, some dilemma, an email I have to write, or something I’ve seen, a film, a book I’ve read. Sometimes I repeat conversations we’ve had in my head, making myself more eloquent than I’ve ever been in real life.

“No, he doesn’t talk back. Don’t worry, the only voice in my head is my own.

“I never see him, but I see myself. As if he were standing in the room and looking at me, while I work in our Sleepwalker office behind what used to be our desk, I see myself sitting there, through his eyes. I make coffee and read a book and I ‘like’ an article from some periodical or other so that all my Facebook friends can see I’m an intellectual heavyweight. I see myself doing it, I see Brik laughing at me.

“Brik doesn’t talk to me, but I see the world through his eyes. I sit in the cinema and try to watch the film as he would. What would strike him? I don’t do it consciously, it just happens automatically.

“They say that’s the definition of a genius: someone who makes such a mark on a field that they change it for good. I don’t exactly know what Brik’s ‘field’ was—it’s a vague term when it comes down to it—Brik did hundreds of things simultaneously. But if my head is a field, a pound and a half of gray matter in my brainpan, Brik changed that for good. However small that is, however personal—that’s a legacy. It’s a privileged feeling, however individual. In that sense I am his heir. You don’t need more than that, I keep telling myself. This is enough.”

Then I would pause briefly, I would look at everyone and swallow, and go on in a more strident, impersonal tone.

“There’s not a whole lot you can hold against a man like Josip Brik.

“So what if it turned out he didn’t forward all the moaning letters he received to his editor in chief. So what if he never quite lost his Communist roots. So what if he came from some shitty little village and didn’t know where Klaus Barbie was born and where Hemingway died. In death, Brik owes us nothing. He has no promises he needs to keep, he has no reputation to maintain.”

My voice would then grow softer, warmer.

“But Brik has failed us. Of course he has: by dying. By stupidly falling out of a hotel room window he failed himself, ended a life that had by no means ceased to flower. About my grief I can say little, only that his death drew a line under a period of my life—a period of continual inspiration and wonder. But I also missed Brik when he was still alive, and in that respect, Brik failed us all. Brik systematically gave us less than we wanted of him.”

I would say “Love that isn’t satisfied, hungry love, is the best love. As W. H. Auden wrote: ‘If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.’”

I would keep my gaze fixed on Pippa while I said that.

“He was never there. We wanted to be with him, spend time with him, but his time also belonged to students who barely scraped passing grades. We wanted to have him to ourselves, but he also belonged to outfits like the Right Arm Liberation Front. We wanted him in America, but he had to go and talk to the Hitler family in Chile. We wanted to keep him on campus, but he made just one more trip to a crappy hotel in Amsterdam.

“You know the thing with Brik…”

But I would never finish that sentence. Once again I would pause, this time at greater length, more theatrically. I would open my mouth as if to go on speaking, but then close it again and smile—I would look away and smilingly shake my head, as if I wanted to say something, something definitive, but at the last moment had decided to keep it to myself.

That definitive thing, that thing I wouldn’t say—that would be my secret. Even if it didn’t exist.

“Anyone who was friends with Brik was forever bidding him farewell, and today we have to do it once again: for the last time. Brik loved this spot, here on the Wadden Sea. We have his ashes with us, here in this urn. I’d like to ask everyone to take a handful and throw it into the water, and then go back to Brik’s house, where the drinks are waiting. And bitterballen. Because boy, did Brik love a good old Dutch bitterbal! Thank you.”

And that would be it. I would take Pippa’s hand again, worm my fingers between hers and wait as the mourners one by one took handfuls of ashes from the enormous urn, the keg full of ashes, and threw them over the dyke, into the water. The Chiltons, Fokker, Nina, Wilders, Gladney, Lanshof—everyone would take a handful and toss it. It wouldn’t blow back, because the ashes would be heavy. Not like loose sand, but more like pellets: black, white, and gray pellets.

No one would think about the fact that they were holding Brik in their hands—was this pellet his nose? That one his eye? No—they would throw him, some would wave as they did so. “Adieu, Brik, Godspeed!” And they would walk on, back down the dyke and across the field.

Pippa and I would wait till everyone had gone and then walk to the keg ourselves. There’d be more ashes left than we’d expected. Pippa would throw a handful in the water. Then I’d follow suit.

What shall we do with the rest? she’d ask.

Tell you what, I’d say. You go on ahead, I’ll just be a minute.

Pippa would place an understanding kiss on my cheek and walk away without saying anything more.

The keg would be lighter than I’d thought, just as an empty beer bottle crate is always lighter than you think. I’d pick it up with both hands, raise it to chest height, and then upend it in one go, wham, like those winning sports teams throwing buckets of Gatorade over their coach.

The ashes would splash into the sea, and I’d watch to see how the water changed color for a moment, until all the ash sank to the bottom forever and the water became water again in the sunshine, water that sparkled so brightly it looked like it was trying to communicate with the sky, like a radar screen on which all the little lights were lighting up.

The keg was empty. Brik had gone.

And there I was in Vienna, awakening from this funeral fantasy, feeling as if I’d been underwater for a very long time and my face was now finally breaking through the surface, into the air.

The keg was still full. I was sitting on Philip de Vries’s bed with it in my lap, but that moment when I emptied the ashes into the water was still wholly with me. I was able to replace the urn on Philip’s bedside table without the slightest bitterness. That one vision was worth so much more than whatever I could actually do, no reality could ever match up to this. It was as if something had melted in my stomach, filling me with acceptance—a feeling I hadn’t had in months.

I sneaked out of the hotel and walked back into town, every muscle in my body tingling. The Heldenplatz was covered in snow, a white expanse, “as white as Saruman,” as white as an unwritten Word document.

My phone pinged and I dug it out of my pocket, surprised. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked at it. Someone had just tagged me in a photo. I clicked on the link and saw Felix’s Facebook page loading.

I looked around me: yes, this is the spot. That’s the balcony where Hitler must have stood, I saw it now.

It took a moment for the pixels to click into focus, but even while the photo was still blurry and grainy, I could make out the contours of a peroxided hair helmet. Wilders had wrapped one arm demonstratively around Felix’s shoulders, there was nothing ironic about their grins. A tiger in Amsterdam. An intellectual on the warpath. Yeah, Felix had given him a piece of his mind all right! I was tagged in the glass of beer he was holding: “ Friso de Vos , mission accomplished. Cheers!”

I’d run out of cynicism. My tank of irony was empty; perhaps it had been all along. I just clicked on Like to get rid of the thing.

A motorcade of police cars was slowly approaching the road that bisected the Heldenplatz. There were flashing lights, but no sirens. Flanked by motorcycles driven almost at walking pace by policemen in high-viz jackets, three black limousines glided silently through the snow. I scanned the cars, trying to see through the tinted glass. I was the only one standing by the roadside. One of the motorcyclists peeled off toward me, probably to show he was keeping an eye on me. When he got close I could see my reflection in the curved glass of his helmet: convex and distorted like in a funhouse mirror.

As silently as they had come, the cars disappeared again. I turned around to face the Heldenplatz and saw—nothing, actually. The place was deserted. I’d already lost sight of Hitler’s balcony. All I could focus on was that Word document: I knew the time had come for it to arrive. File (click) New Document (double click) and the white empty page stared at me, and for the first time I couldn’t think of a reason why I shouldn’t call Pippa, why I wouldn’t want to hear her voice. Damn damn damn. I was already holding my phone, wasn’t I? Fucking go for it! I don’t know how long it took for satellites to connect us, for the G3 networks to do their job, but when I pressed Pippa’s name on my phone I was still quite collected and by the time she answered it in America my eyes were swollen and wet and burning, and it felt like I was trying to stop a tsunami in its tracks with just my arms and back. “Hey, Voski,” Pip said, and of course she didn’t need to say anything else, ever, because just the fact of her being there and her voice being her voice meant so much more than any words ever could.

“Just come, Vos,” she said, infinitely understanding, just as understanding as I’d pictured her there by the Wadden Sea. “It’s totally okay.”