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54

Yelena seemed tired and sad. I assumed Maarten had kicked her out of his house and that she had no choice but to return to the ASC, from a house with just one other person to a building with more than five hundred. The first day she sent me to Reception to get her some aspirin. I did, and right away she asked me to go get her two more. I told her they wouldn’t do that.

“Just say they’re for Yelena in O-124,” she said, as if her name were a magic password for aspirin. Instead, I commandeered another asylum seeker to fetch two aspirins in his name, and then brought them to her with a glass of water.

“Did you say they were for me?”

“Of course, otherwise they wouldn’t have given them.”

“See? I told you so.” After the affair with Maarten, and the headache from the affair with Maarten, Yelena needed to talk. The reason for this, as I understood it, was that she hadn’t talked much since meeting Maarten because he, like so many Dutch people, said things only once and only wanted to hear things once.

Yelena’s analysis of Dutch people was comprehensive, varied, and amusing. They do not exaggerate, she said, and are not quick to laugh. A joke has to be strong, logical, and catchy just to get a smile out of them, and if you repeat a joke to get them to laugh, they become irritated.

Yelena did not understand why Dutch people, even if they were sitting in a group together, always spoke English if there was one non-Dutch speaker among them, or someone who couldn’t keep up with the conversation. But the worst was that the Dutch people could smother a person’s hope. If the weather was bad, they did not say: “Soon the sun will come out again,” but: “This is going to last a good two and a half months.” For any given problem, they had enough information not to find a solution, but to be better informed about the problem itself, so that a minor issue could be turned into serious trouble. Another irritation was that if you spent the whole day cooking, people would comment the whole time about how nice it smelled, but during the meal they talked about everything under the sun except the food and how good it tasted.

Dutch people with children had completely lost touch with reality, because when it was Maarten’s birthday and his two sisters dropped by with their children, one of them changed her 18-month-old son’s diaper in the middle of the living room full of guests. It took three days to get rid of the smell.

Yelena kept saying that Maarten was thrifty when he was in love, and a tightwad when he wasn’t. His family was stingy, too, and his neighbors and friends and colleagues, and even his cat. The Dutch were a stingy folk, according to Yelena, so she was surprised they gave asylum seekers free room and board and aspirin and condoms. On the other hand, Yelena said, they were the most honest and harmless people around. She liked the fact that everything was well-organized, but abhorred their taste in clothing. They had only one or two kinds of perfume, not to spray, but to look at on their bathroom counter.

“The ASC is better,” she sighed. It had been her own choice to return.

We resumed our walks to the sea, and she talked about Maarten and about Maarten’s family, Maarten’s neighbors, Maarten’s colleagues, Maarten’s cat, Maarten’s photo albums from his birth to age twenty-eight, and Maarten’s psychological problems that started when he was twelve, when his parents got divorced.

Talking about Maarten also exposed her own self-doubts. Was she pretty? Was she cut out for a relationship? Was he the right guy? She missed sex. She had tried everything: with make-up, without make-up; short skirt, long dress; with lingerie, without lingerie. But Maarten did not respond. She didn’t dare tell him she wanted to make love, because she felt that her looks should be enough. I could certainly go along with that.

“Once, I told Maarten not to come into the bedroom for half an hour, because I had a surprise for him.” She had thought long and hard about it; the surprise should be something that would melt the ice that had formed between them. After endless discussions with Maarten about philosophical problems and social problems and economic problems and mental problems, it was now time for sex. So half an hour later Maarten opened the bedroom door. Yelena lay naked on the bed, surrounded by hundreds of tea lights. She had opened the two windows all the way, as if to say: “Warm me! Burn me! Fuck me!” I nodded with difficulty, because all the while I was fantasizing that I was Maarten, and that Yelena was surrounded not by policemen and asylum seekers, but tiny candles.

All I could squeeze out was: “And …?”

“And what?”

“Did he do anything with you?”

“No.” She turned sour. “He just glared at the open windows. The cold draft made the candles flicker.”

“And then he jumped on top of you, to warm you up?”

“Not me. The windows. He shut them and said that this all cost heaps of money. That is was three below zero outside and now the bedroom wasn’t eighteen degrees anymore, and the furnace would have to heat the place up again, and that gas wasn’t cheap in the Netherlands, like it is in Russia. He started in about the gas trade between Russia and Europe, and how the Dutch government did its best to keep the cost of heating for ordinary people like him affordable. When he saw that I had wrapped myself up in the blanket, he said, ‘But it really was a nice surprise, to convince me that Russians can take the cold better than the Dutch.’ Then he blew out all the candles, because not only our house, but the whole neighborhood could go up in flames.”

“And then?”

“And then he explained that the houses—”

“I meant, did he do anything with you?”

“Of course not. If he had, I wouldn’t have come back here.”

Yelena talked, and I could barely concentrate on what she said, because inside, I was on fire. If I kept listening, smoke would start pouring out of my nostrils. We walked back from the sea and I thought that Yelena was not only beautiful, but funny and romantic, and that she truly followed her feelings, and not just the promise of a residence permit.

When we arrived back at the ASC, she suddenly turned and looked straight at me.

“I’ll go in first,” she said, and then uttered the most romantic thing a beautiful woman had ever said to me in my whole life: “You go get condoms from Reception and come to O-124.” She shook her blonde curls onto her shoulders and sauntered to the entrance.

I wanted to run after her. Her beauty had devoured my last ounce of patience.

“Condoms,” I panted at Reception. My trembling hand grabbed the strip of three foil packets and I walked into the ASC, which Yelena had instantly transformed into paradise. I was so flustered that I forgot to put them in my pocket, so that before I reached the orange wing, all of Orange, Green, Blue, and Yellow knew that Yelena had walked into the ASC alone, and that I was trotting after her holding three condoms. I decided to first take a shower. I hurried to my room and put the condoms on my bed.

“Aha, I see you got a residence permit,” joked Fouad.

“Not one, but three,” I replied.

I went to the shower rooms with my underwear, towel, shampoo, and condoms, and was finished within four minutes. So as not to lose any time, I wrapped the towel around my waist, grasped the condoms firmly in my hand, and went straight to room O-124. Yelena opened the door and saw me standing there, the water still dripping onto the floor in the hallway. I still see everything happen in a slow-motion replay. She looked at the towel and at my hands, then raised her eyes to my face. Her glance held mine for no more than a second. Then she looked at the wall behind me and shouted a single word in her strong Russian accent. A word that was worse than deportation.

“Loser.”

She slammed the door.

I turned in my puddle of water and saw three Afghans, two Chechens, an Iranian, a Turk, four Armenians, one Chinese man, seven Iraqis, and at least ten Africans standing there. Water dripped from my chest hairs. Going to bed with me was the last thing in the world Yelena was planning to do, this much was now clear.

“And now? Now I have to clean up again!” Belsi griped, who was already mopping up the trail of water leading from the showers to room O-124.

“Don’t worry, man, everything is the same,” John said. “Here, for five euros you can have a day pass, take it to Amsterdam, the ladies behind the train station are much prettier than that Russian nut case.” I shuffled back to the shower room, threw the condoms into the wastebasket, and punished myself for my vain hope and stupid behavior by taking an ice-cold shower.

Then I lay down on my own bed instead of the one in O-124, but the shame and the missed chance kept me from sleeping. An hour later there was a soft knocking at the door. I hoped it was Yelena, because this was just the way she knocked.

But instead of Yelena, I saw Hatim, the blind asylum seeker with the sharpest ears in the entire ASC.

“Hood evening,” he said.

“Good evening,” I replied.

“Is it true, what I heard?”

“What did you hear?”

“That you got three condoms from Reception, and that you took a shower for four minutes and then had sex with the Russian woman in O-124? But why didn’t I hear anything? It was so quiet in her room, there couldn’t have been anything going on. Or did you take her somewhere else?” His blind eyes rolled every which way, as though I was a mosquito flying around inside his head.

“I don’t know for how long I showered, but the part about the three condoms is correct.”

“And where did they end up, the condoms? In the right place?”

“No. In the garbage can.”

“What a pity.” He turned and said, “I thought to myself: Why don’t I hear anything in O-124, maybe nothing happened. Now I understand!”

He walked off, and from my bed I could hear the tapping of his cane die out as he disappeared down the hallway.