The first time I met Pippa’s extended family was on a Sunday morning, years ago now, in the function room of one of The Hague’s best-known hotels, where all the Lowenberg clan had gathered to celebrate her grandfather’s ninetieth birthday. Her grandfather was small and stout, and his bald head had strange dents in it, like an egg before you peel it, and although he still talked with a thick accent like the working-class hero he was, you could see he liked the way the waiters called him “Sir” and darted to his side with hors d’oeuvres and glasses of jenever at the wave of a hand. He’d been in the Resistance; three successive queens had decorated him for his services to the country in the Hunger Winter and afterward. In April 1945 he’d been arrested while carrying illicit documents, but the capitulation was signed before the Germans had time to find a spot in the dunes near Scheveningen where they could decently shoot him.
– So you’re our Philomena’s new boyfriend?
– I am indeed, I said.
– And you’re a historian?
– That’s right.
Well, well, he said, and turned away from me again and walked up to someone else he needed to greet.
Pip had warned me. Her grandfather derived a virulent moralism from his status as Knight in the order of Orange Nassau and never scrupled to end every conversation he had with his children and grandchildren—on topics ranging from their choice of university course to immigration policy—with the pronouncement that “something like that would have been unthinkable during the war, young lady,” or “you wouldn’t have gotten very far in the Resistance with that kind of attitude.” A man of deeply entrenched views, Pip told me, he would contemptuously dismiss any historian who dared comment on the war: “What does a whippersnapper like that know about it? He wasn’t there.” End of debate. So I was primed. But unnecessarily, it soon turned out. That “Well, well,” was as much as I’d get out of him—during the hors d’oeuvres he clutched at his chest and collapsed.
He struggled in the hands of the paramedics as if he were a bank robber being bundled into a police van after a long spell on the run, and just before the doors closed we heard his voice one last time, loud enough to drown out the sirens, “And keep your goddamn hands off my organs.”
As far as Pippa knew, these were the last words her grandfather ever spoke, because in the ambulance he suffered a second, catastrophic heart attack, blasting every chamber apart, and before they even got to the hospital the ambulance crew had been able to stow away the defibrillation paddles.
Pippa told me that later. I’d walked back to the hotel’s conservatory, where I’d ordered another orange juice. No one asked me to join them, and, uncertain of my role in all this, I just stayed put. Three quarters of an hour or so passed, and I could feel the warmth of the sunlight falling through the glass panes on my legs and belly. My body grew heavy and despite the sirens, despite Pippa’s family and the hotel guests checking in and out, I felt I could just shut my eyes and fall asleep on the spot. A quarter of an hour later it dawned on me that I was the only one left of the whole party. Pippa had abandoned me there, apparently, had gone to the hospital with her parents without telling me. The head waiter subtly drew this to my attention:
– May I give Sir the bill?
Less than a week later, the men of her family turned out in the same suits they’d worn that Sunday, only this time with more subdued shirts and dark ties.
The church was big, but all the pews were packed, and even though I gathered from Pippa that since the death of his wife, ten years previously, her grandfather had become increasingly intolerant, bullying his sons and treating his daughters like housekeepers, half his grandchildren were crying before the service had even begun. His three sons sat gazing stoically at the floor; his two daughters wore enormous sunglasses. The fifteen grandchildren sat in the second pew. The mourners in the third pew included a lady of about sixty who kept dabbing at her eyes with a white hanky—she was the chief heir. To the surprise and rage of his children, their father had changed his will, making his new girlfriend the beneficial owner of his house on Regentesselaan. Right now she was being cold-shouldered by the children. Later she would be determinedly sued, but I am getting ahead of myself.
Among the mourners in the front row was an older gentleman with a yarmulke and next to him a beautiful girl of about our age, with big brown eyes and thick, dark curly hair. Halfway through the service—after a former queen’s commissioner had given a humanist, patriotic eulogy that, with a bit of cutting and pasting, must have been adaptable for all Resistance heroes—she led the man, presumably her grandfather, to the pulpit. He spoke about faith and belief in dark times and about the intrinsic goodness of mankind. “We are born old,” he said. “We are born with the weight of all that history on our shoulders. We have a supremely loaded past and a supremely intense present.” He talked about his emigration to Israel in the late 1940s. Pippa’s grandpa had visited him twice and—another surprise in the lawyer’s office—had left his Zionist organization a few thousand euros.
He finished with the announcement that his granddaughter would now join the quintet of conservatory students led by the youngest daughter, Pippa’s aunt. They struck up Pachelbel’s Canon in D, and because her face was hidden by her violin I couldn’t see whether she was proud or tense, but as far as I could tell, every note was played flawlessly, calmly, solemnly, though the performance perhaps lasted a bit longer than intended. When they had finished, Pip’s aunt stood up and walked back to her seat with her violin, carefully avoiding any eye contact, and I wondered whose gaze she would normally have sought out among the audience—her father’s, probably.
After that the oldest daughter talked about how she used to go to the skating rink with her father, and then Pippa’s father stepped up to the lectern. He read a short psalm:
What shall I return to the Lord for all his goodness to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.
Finally it was Pippa’s turn, the elect representative of the grandchildren. What did I see then, when I looked at Pippa? Other things now, but in that spring, a spring that came in the guise of midsummer, in those first pangs of love, I couldn’t look at her in public without picturing her during those nights or afternoons when we existed in an almost permanent state of coitus, how she’d bitten my sweaty armpit the first time we fucked, how I’d held my hand under her as she peed, and felt the warm stream run through my fingers—that was what I’d been thinking about during the entire service as I stared at the back of her head, fifteen oak pews in front of me.
It was she who’d banished me practically to the back of the church, while I’d been so desperate to sit next to her, in my role of perfectly trained boyfriend. But Pippa had convinced herself that if I sat too close it would make her nervous. I’d seen her speech and had come up with a few helpful pointers, but when I added some more dashes to her printout, so she’d know where to pause for heightened dramatic effect, Pippa had said she didn’t want a prompter.
– The problem is, we’re born into a world that already exists. How do we relate to that? Pippa began in a low, unsteady voice.
In the week between the birthday and the funeral I’d had scarcely any contact with her. Not for lack of trying; she just walled herself off. I texted and emailed, but she barely responded. Was at her parents’ place in The Hague. Couldn’t come to me and didn’t give the impression of wanting to. While I, in love, high on hormones, whatever you want to call it, had never been crazier about her than then, when she was just out of reach. I lay in bed with a slowly deflating balloon in my stomach. My nights consisted of two- to three-hour catnaps, full of lucid dreams, in which I was aware from beginning to end that I was dreaming. I seized on a book that Pippa had left at my place, an essay by Alain Finkielkraut, who in the introduction alone posed enough questions to keep a dozen intellectuals busy for a year. What is art? What is civilization? What is the ideal? What is essential in life? How do novels help you live? How does fiction form the context of our lives?
In the chapter on Emily Dickinson Pippa had underlined some passages and scribbled comments in the margin. A note in pencil read: “I never wonder what someone looks like naked. When I picture people, I always dress them,” and though I read and reread what Finkielkraut wrote about Dickinson, I could find nothing in the text to which that comment could refer.
The lines and the comments and her fingerprints (she must have been eating something greasy at the time) conjured up Pippa’s physical presence so vividly that more than once I found myself holding my phone, on the point of calling an old flame I’d just waved off, sex with your ex, I wanted Pippa so badly I was prepared to hurl myself on her predecessor so I could sublimate my desire, could think of her during my infidelity, could betray her in order to get closer to her. I read Finkielkraut’s epilogue three times, and had I read it three times more could still not have found the coherence I sought between the paragraphs, between the sentences. As if his cast of topics threw such a long shadow as to make his discourse invisible. Camus, Dostoyevsky, Blixen, Chekhov blocked the view. The canon, cast in bronze, so safe, so dead.
I thought his message must be something like: literature does not yield truth. There is always friction between one story and another. Our mind is a cinema with a continuous show. We keep on consuming and producing histories. Everything that happens is told, all facts are turned into anecdotes, the purpose of history is to become a story. A veil hangs over everything, a Romanesque veil, Finkielkraut calls it, with a narrative structure.
In the end, desperate, I sent a text, a line of verse I’d once seen on a toilet door in a hall of residence: “If equal affection cannot be / let the more loving one be me.”
A day went by. Two days. Three. On the fourth day Pippa finally called to say that she was on the train to Amsterdam, that she wanted to drop by, that everything was all right, that she didn’t want me to feel let down. Okay, I said, okay. No worries, take your time.
It was such beautiful weather that week, calling for arms and legs to be bared. Pippa didn’t want to, her legs were too shockingly pale, she said, unfit for public view. I kissed them with open mouth. Afterward she lay on the sofa, “as limp as a noodle,” as she put it, and I drank Coke out of the bottle and started to tell her what I thought she should say at the funeral—I’d taken the liberty of jotting a few things down, I said, and got out my notebook:
– The problem is, we’re born into a world that already exists.
At the funeral she wore her long auburn hair in a side ponytail. Her bare arms looked even paler in her gray-blue dress, as she’d feared, but I’d told her not to worry about it. I read along with her on my own printout and heard how she sometimes swallowed articles and even entirely skipped adjectives. But halfway down page two she stopped in midsentence and folded up the pages, saying it seemed “kind of inauthentic” to just speak from paper. I wondered what she meant by “speak from paper.” That she was reading aloud? Or that she was asking questions she only asked herself on paper, not in her head? And I feared what lay ahead, because she said her grandfather had been her guide to the classics, that he had pushed her through Greek and Latin at grammar school, and that she always thought of him when she wrote poetry. I’d known she had a poetic bent, that she had a notebook she wrote things down in, but since I’d never been allowed to read anything in that notebook, I’d never taken her poetic inclinations very seriously.
There lay the delta, there lay the burning arms of this classical river…The poem she suddenly recited by heart was full of names and words that didn’t even mean anything in the context of her sentences, I thought. The Hellespont, Alexandria, Luxor and the old queens, the blue flicker from the Pylons of Messina, but in themselves the words conjured up a world: a bygone era. A certain repetition gradually emerged, words and phrases that were repeated like a refrain. Augustus, Jupiter, “Our beloved Republic, eternally renewed.” You pictured marching legions, senate chambers, and other manifestations of Roman civilization, and you saw the link with her grandfather, who’d developed a fascination with classical warfare after his retirement and gone to see old battlefields all over Europe. Everybody thought that, I think. But another idea struck me: Pip’s poem was about inevitability, about history bearing down on you like a juggernaut and your longing to know its outcome; about everything that you resist, even though in the end things turn out as they must.
She spoke clearly, articulating every word, and after she’d finished she walked back to her seat, also without making eye contact with anybody, least of all me. She crept back like a little mouse and all of a sudden I got it: her poem was about me, about the teleology of her and me, that was it, surely: the new republic—that was her and me, our own statehood.
Afterward I did not, of course, stand next to her, among the partners and cousins, to receive condolences. I joined the row of guests, shook hands with her uncles and aunts, her father and mother, and then got to Pip. I knew better than to give her a significant wink, something to show I’d grasped her double meaning. She looked at me with naked eyes, and I’d never been so convinced I was right.
– Hey, little poet, I said.
I know now, retrospectively, that this is a false memory, that it isn’t real. But it still feels real, it feels as if it could be true. Just as flowing water can hollow out stone into a rainbow bridge, I’ve told this story so many times it’s etched itself into my memory. My imagination has imposed a penalty on a random image.
A designer at the periodical where I now work once told me that when she moved house she’d come across a stash of old diaries. She’d opened a bottle of wine, gritted her teeth, and started to read them. The strange thing was, she said, that half of what she’d written ten or fifteen years previously in the sacred one-to-one privacy of her own diary just wasn’t true. Stories about lecturers who were supposedly in love with her, housemates who were supposedly ripping her off, boys who stared after her—anecdotes that perhaps had a grain of truth in them, but what she had written, she now knew, was more than exaggerated. It had never been more than a hand on her shoulder, but when she wrote down the story of her day she couldn’t resist the temptation to make it noteworthy.
I sometimes think of that, when I think about Brik, but I don’t believe it. If I have a self-spun web of fiction, I can’t relinquish it—not yet at least.
I would see Brik once more, perhaps eighteen months after the Vienna trip, after I’d left the city on an earlier flight, after the antiques shop on the Marcus Aureliusstrasse had burnt down under mysterious circumstances, and after I got a text message from an unidentified number: “Silence is golden. MW.” I saw Brik standing on a low flight of steps on one of the little side streets leading from the Vondelpark to Overtoom, just past the old Film Museum. Although he died there, he didn’t like Amsterdam all that much. When he was in the Netherlands he preferred to be in Groningen, where he stayed in a rented farmhouse, near tall cornfields, close to the sea. “The Texas of East Groningen.” But there he was. Not the Brik I’d known, perhaps fifteen years younger, a lot thinner, the Brik who hadn’t yet slipped discs, who didn’t yet stand self-correctingly erect; his hair was darker but at the same time more flaxen than I’d remembered.
Perched on the back of my bike, Pippa pressed against me, her long arms wrapped affectionately around my waist. It was the day we’d registered to get married. She didn’t see anything, was facing the other way, and I only saw him in a flash, because perhaps that’s the deal between the dead and the living, that they don’t really look each other up, but only dwell in that watery region at the corner of your eye, that little chink you can just peep through, but where nothing really comes into focus. I’d like to say he looked happy, but I was cycling too fast to make that out, and I couldn’t stop—the turn onto the side street would have been too sharp for our rickety old bike, and there were too many cyclists, mopeds, and joggers to just brake right there. The sun lit up the leaves on the trees, like green gold, and when I took one last look over my shoulder he’d already gone, exit ghost, vanished into the light, but even without looking, actually, I’d have known that.