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  Can I see you tomorrow?

  I always visit my parents on Saturday.

  I say he can come to supper on Sunday if he’d like that. It doesn’t matter to me whether I cook for one or two. I like cooking, I manage to add. There’s something at least that I like to do. When we say good night, he kisses my hand again.

  I can’t sleep. I listen to him walking around upstairs and washing up and going to the bathroom. He is kind and attentive and terribly polite, but he’s a little bit scary too when he smiles. It’s too bad we always distrust people when they’re nice.

  In the morning I wake up with a splitting headache and a bitter taste in my mouth. Over breakfast already I’ve started looking through my cookbooks for ideas. I said I would make something really simple, but now I feel like impressing him. There’s not much in the way of interesting vegetables in the stores this time of year. Most of it has come a long way and doesn’t taste of much. Green beans from Kenya, I mean, come on. I’d rather buy frozen. That night I get in a stupid argument with my father.

  On Sunday I spend the whole afternoon in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I can’t hear anything upstairs. Maybe Patrick’s gone out. But punctually at six o’clock the bell rings. He’s bought me an enormous bunch of flowers, and he kisses my hand again. I hope that’s not his thing he does with everyone. I don’t own a big enough vase, and I have to put the flowers in a plastic bucket in the bathtub to start off with. I don’t get flowers often—never, really—and I don’t buy them myself either. Lots of them are supplied from the third world, and the men who pick them get sterile because of the spray they treat them with. Now I’m being all negative again, instead of thanking him for the lovely flowers.

  Over dinner, he keeps on telling me how delicious everything is, until I can’t stand to hear him say it anymore. Although, it has to be said, dinner is good. Cooking is one thing I can do. You can cook too, he says. I must be perfect. I almost laughed in his face. I can’t bring myself to take his compliments seriously. It always sounds as though he’s parroting something he heard some grownups say. I really do seem to impress him, I can’t imagine why. Each time I open my mouth to speak, he stops eating and stares at me with big round eyes. And it seems he remembers everything I say to him. Already he knows so much about me, and I don’t know the first thing about him.

  When we’re sitting on the sofa later, he clumsily knocks over his glass. I almost gave him a smack, the way I do with the little ones, when they do something naughty. Luckily I manage to restrain myself at the last moment. I go to the kitchen for salt and mineral water. I picture laying Patrick over my knee, pulling his pants down, and smacking his naughty bottom.

  Of course I can’t remove the stain. I’ll never get rid of it. What a stupid idea anyway, buying a white sofa. But I liked it, I like my white sofa. I bought it after my brother died, and somehow it’s something to do with him. Patrick is standing next to me vaguely, watching me scrub away at the stain. He apologizes profusely and says he’ll buy me a new sofa cover. But I’m still annoyed and shortly after I say I need to go to bed, tomorrow is Monday. He gets up. In the doorway he shoots me a tragic glance, and apologizes one more time. Never mind, I say, what’s done is done. We don’t arrange to meet. He doesn’t say anything, and I’m still a bit pissed at him.

  I wonder if he can hear me as clearly as I can hear him. When I’m taking a shower, I suddenly feel naked. When I go to the toilet, I lock the door and sometimes don’t flush, so that he doesn’t hear. I need to drink plenty of water for my kidneys: I seem to spend half my life peeing. In fact I’m only just starting to realize how much noise I make. That I keep my street shoes on in the apartment, turn up the radio when vacuuming, sometimes scold or sing to myself. I’d better stop all that right away. I buy a pair of soft-soled slippers. When I drop a glass and it shatters, I listen for minutes for some sound from upstairs. But nothing—silence.

  I can’t stand it that he’s so near, doing God knows what, and listening to me. I start to go out a lot. Then I sit in a cafe, or go for a walk, even though it’s gotten cold again, and I need to be careful not to catch anything. Last year I had a bladder infection that simply refused to go away. I had to take antibiotics and was off work for days. Afterward, Janneke and Karin made snide remarks. A bladder infection. To them, that could mean only one thing.

  Three days later, Patrick rings the bell, right after I’ve got home from work. He must have been waiting for me. He’s got a new sofa cover, and a gift-wrapped box. He helps me cover the sofa. Our hands touch. Inside the box is a fish kettle. Just because that time I made dinner, I said I wished I owned a fish kettle. Now he goes and buys me one. They’re not cheap.

  You’re crazy. You didn’t have to do that.

  Because of the trouble I put you to.

  He smiles. We kiss for the first time. It just happens, I couldn’t say who started it. There’s something greedy about his kisses, he drapes his lips over mine, and shuts them and opens them and shuts them as though to gobble me up. The whole time he holds me firmly in his arms, and I feel how strong he is. I can hardly move. When I tell him he’s crushing me, he lets go right away and apologizes. He does like an apology. He seems embarrassed about having kissed me. I imagine him undressing me and sleeping with me on the newly slip-covered sofa. Sperm stains are tricky, by the way. Why do I keep thinking of all this nonsense. He’s just looking at me.

  Now he’s upstairs again. I keep having to think of him though. I don’t know anything about him, not if the things in the apartment are his, not if he lives there, or is only staying for a while. I don’t know his middle initial, or his age, or what his job is. He seems not to be short of money for generous presents. I imagine what Janneke and Karin would say if they saw us together: Oh, she’s lost it now. Or: She’s beyond good and evil anyway. Or: She must be paying him, he’s exploiting her. And all the time I feel I’m exploiting him.

  From now on we see each other every two or three days. Sometimes he comes down, sometimes I go up to him. We always know when the other is home. Sometimes we talk on the phone for hours. Then after a while I’m not sure if I’m hearing his voice through the phone or through the ceiling.

  When we eat dinner together, we drink a lot, but he doesn’t seem to get drunk. We chat like old friends. We only kiss good-bye. It’s almost become a habit. I started the French kissing. I started stroking him. Then he does it too, but only with his fingertips, my hips and the small of my back where I feel pain sometimes. When I put his hand on my breast, he leaves it there for a moment inertly and then takes it away again. He needs time, I think. But I don’t have the time. Of course I don’t say so. I’ve gotten to be careful about what I say and don’t say. I keep an eye on him. I listen.

  Some nights he doesn’t come home. I don’t sleep on those nights, and stay up and listen and in the morning I’m dog-tired. I hate myself for it, but I can’t help it. The next time we see each other, he tells me straight out where he was, with his parents or some friends or other that he hasn’t mentioned to me before. He must have sensed my distrust.

  At work, Janneke asks me how I’m doing, and whether I’m sick again. She says I’m looking tired. I’m not sleeping properly, that’s all I say. I’ve lost weight. What can I do if I don’t have any appetite? Janneke says she wants to leave Stefan, that was one of her New Year’s resolutions she hadn’t yet told him about. We talk about her problems. Everyone comes to cry on my shoulder, but when I give them good advice, they don’t take it, they just say things aren’t that simple. Karin is in a bad mood, she doesn’t know why. She’s unbearable sometimes, even with the kids. Until one of them starts to cry. Then she cries too.

  Patrick says he really likes me, and I’m much too good for him. Then he kisses me again, but he keeps me at a distance. I’ve already asked myself whether perhaps physically there isn’t something wrong with him. He looks fit enough, but that can be deceptive. There are more men all the time who can’t get it up, or who can’t be bothered w
ith sex. The quality of sperm is falling off a cliff. It has to do with female hormones that leach into the groundwater.

  I’ve set myself a deadline. If he hasn’t decided by the end of the month, then I’m putting an end to it. But now what do I mean by decided? I’m not exactly sure what I’m expecting from him. That he rips my clothes off and jumps me on the sofa? Certainly not. But that he opens himself to me. Entrusts himself. It’s a matter of a few words.

  When I get home the next day, I can hear Hello by Lionel Ritchie booming down from the top floor, much louder than the music he usually plays. It was a CD I played to Patrick once. He must have bought himself a copy. He’s been waiting for me to come home, and this is his way of welcoming me. I’m expecting him to call, or come downstairs. I hear him leave his apartment. But he keeps going, and shortly after, the street door falls shut. It’s after midnight when he gets back. I hear his footfall, the slow steps, the creaking of the floorboards. For a second, I think he’s not alone, but that can’t be. Then silence. Silence is the worst. I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept for days. I have the most ridiculous imaginings, horrible things that I feel ashamed to entertain.

  On his birthday, he makes me dinner. He’s gone to unbelievable trouble, he’s even decorated the table with chocolate ladybirds. I manage to get a stain on my blouse and take it off to wash it out properly. Patrick has followed me into the kitchen, we’re talking, he’s looking at me. But he acts as though there’s nothing the matter. I could strip naked in front of him, he wouldn’t even notice. That can’t be normal. I wonder what his game is. I go downstairs and put on a clean blouse. While I’m downstairs, I hear him go to the toilet, and flush twice. Ideally, I wouldn’t go back upstairs. We’re in closer touch when we’re apart, when we only hear each other.

  We drank a lot of wine with dinner, a whole bottle. When we kissed good-bye, he suddenly started whispering it’s not fair, and he stopped. Now I’m lying in my bed, and I can’t sleep. He’s directly above me, just a few yards away. I spread my legs and imagine him on top of me, doing it to me. He’s pinning my arms, the way he does when he kisses me. He’s grabbing my hair, pulling it, slapping my face. I throw my legs around him. He’s kissing me hungrily. We’re sweating. There’s silence, all I can hear is him breathing, his breath in my loosened hair. I stretch out my arms to him. Come, I whisper to him, come! Come! He’s so close, I can almost feel him.

  A Foreign Body

  CHRISTOPH SWITCHED THE light off and the group fell silent. After a few seconds of darkness, there was disquiet, chairs creaked, someone cleared his throat, there were other sounds that were hard to trace. As the first whispers began, Christoph switched on the microphone, and the sudden element of amplification made the space appear still bigger and the darkness still more intense. If he’d been very concentrated and managed to focus his attention on the group, then surely it would be possible to get by without slides, and finally even without words, and just be in the dark and allow time to elapse for an hour or two.

  For hundreds of thousands of years no light, no smell, no life, no sounds but for the dripping of water, the plinking and flowing of water penetrating through cracks in the rock, collecting in trickles, widening cracks, forming courses, small streams by now, one or ten or hundred thousands of years later, a cavern or system of caverns. Christoph switched the projector on, and the Water Dome was there, a domed arch lit by several flashbeams, its upper reaches lost in the darkness. The first image was the most important, that had to captivate the audience straightaway. He had chosen it carefully, and let it stand for a long time, without saying a word. He felt it would be a good evening.

  After that first shot, there were others, less spectacular, the barred entrance to the cave, the first few hundred yards, paved paths and wire balustrades, the odd stalactite taken from somewhere on the inside and put out near the entrance for the trippers to see. The group relaxed and listened as Christoph talked about the discovery of the cave, the early expeditions into the interior, the technical difficulties of living under the earth’s surface. One of the slides showed a map of the passages that had been explored thus far, a tangled web of lines in different colors.

  Just over a hundred miles have been explored and charted, but we have to assume that’s just a fraction of the whole.

  The shot of a staircase going steeply down, and coming to a sudden unexpected stop in a pile of scree. The adventure is beginning, said Christoph, and showed pictures that needed no explaining. Difficult terrain, narrow couloirs, crevasses, meanders, faults. In some of the photos you could see cave explorers in dirty orange coveralls with carbide lamps on their foreheads crawling through narrow passageways or rappelling down seemingly bottomless gullies. Amazing the kind of places a man is able to slip through, Christoph commented.

  Then there was a shot of the bivouac, and for the first time there was the whole group sitting over fondue and wine at camp tables. You could almost forget you were in a cave, said Christoph, but if you need to answer the call of nature, then you remember. If the torch fails, if the light goes out, then you lose orientation in a matter of seconds. He showed pictures of the group in sleeping bags on thick foam rubber mattresses encased in plastic sheeting. The faces looked dirty and tired, but there was a wild flash in the eyes as in people just awakened. And then a brief pause. You’ll find my book on sale in the lobby, along with information on guided tours for a day or more. Christoph switched on the music and hurried out of the cave, to be the first at the book table.

  A man of Christoph’s age flicked desultorily through the desk copy of the book. Beside him was a slim woman who seemed a lot younger and had something elfin about her. Both were wearing fleece jackets. The man casually asked Christoph if he had ever been cave diving. Not bothering to wait for a reply, he volunteered that he’d been in cave complexes all over the world. His voice had an aggressive tone that Christoph had quite often heard among extreme sports aficionados. Sometimes he had the impression they only turned up at his talks to tell him about their experiences, and to measure themselves against him and challenge him. After the break he would show pictures from parts of the caves not open to the general public, Christoph said. He felt a little ashamed of the way he rose to the bait. The man didn’t react, and carried on flicking through the book. He asked if Christoph had ever been to the caves at Gunung Mulu in Malaysia. An elderly gentleman stepped up to the table. He bought the book without looking at it, and asked Christoph to sign it for him with a personal dedication. The couple stepped aside.

  Just before the end of the break, Christoph noticed them again. They were still by the table. The man was looking across at him and saying something to his girlfriend. There was a mocking expression on his face.

  And now, said Christoph, a little hammily, let’s explore Nirvana! This was a cave system that was hard to get to and that had only ever been seen by maybe a dozen or so people. He brought up the images from the darkness and slow-faded them, just the way they had flashed up in the cave and slowly faded on the retina: a candle stalagmite, a few needle-thin stalactites, gardens of karst that had grown up in the darkness since the last ice age, only to be seen in a single brief shock of light thousands of years later. Shades of brown, white, yellow, a mercury glimmer of damp-looking surfaces.

  Each time Christoph saw the photographs, a shiver went through him. He felt the pressure of the masses of rock, the fear of the complete indifference of the mountain, that with a tiny movement could have squashed all life out of him. He had set up the flashes, loaded the camera, the practiced moves had something calming about them that dispelled his feeling of paralysis. But the fear remained. It would always be there.

  There must be thousands of caves like these, said Christoph, where no man has ever set foot, where no man ever will set foot. There is a world beneath us in the rock, a world full of marvels and secrets. He stopped, he didn’t know what else to say. Words weren’t enough, pictures weren’t enough either. You had to have been there yourself, and mapp
ed out the senseless beauty. All that could be heard was the sound of the projector, the humming of the ventilator, and the clattering of the carousel that pushed one slide after the other in front of the beam.

  When you go back outside, it’s not the sun or the colors that overwhelm you, it’s the smells of the forest, the smells of life, of things growing and rotting. The cave has no smell. The last shot brought the audience back to the surface, it showed a picturesque little forest lake that was fed from the inside of the mountain. Each year thousands of tons of water-soluble limestone are carried out, said Christoph, the water works day and night, hour after hour, enlarging the cave all the time. He switched off the projector and microphone and turned on the light. People applauded.

  After the talk, a couple of the listeners went up to him and asked questions and inquired about the tours with shining eyes. When the last of them had gone, Christoph packed away the projector and the box of slides and put them on a cart, along with the unsold books. In the lobby he lit a cigarette. It had gotten cold.

  Will you come for a drink with us?

  Christoph gave a start when he saw the man standing a few yards away. He was standing in front of him, feet apart, it looked as though he was challenging him to a fight.

  All right, he said out of politeness. But just one beer, I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.

  The man went up to him and they shook hands. Clemens, he said, and that’s Sabine. He pointed into the darkness, where Christoph could see the faint outline of the woman.

  THEY’D BEEN SITTING in the bar for quite a while. The conversation was faltering. Clemens talked about expeditions he’d been on, an endless list of caves, all described with the same adjectives. He had taken thousands of pictures, he said. He’d be glad to show them to Christoph sometime. Maybe he could use them in his talks. Since being introduced, Sabine hadn’t said a word. Christoph didn’t say much either, just nodded from time to time and smiled, and pretended Clemens’s stories were interesting. When, after a long description of a diving trip, there was a silence, Christoph asked Sabine if she’d ever been in a cave herself.