Just One Year

it’ll take me to get out of here.

But O’Leary’s? O’Leary’s is right around the corner, not even a block away. That I can manage.

Eight

October turns cold and wet, as if we used up our quota of clear, hot days during the summer’s heat wave. It’s especially cold in my attic room on Bloemstraat, making me wonder if moving in had been the right call. Not that it had been a call. After I woke up on the downstairs sofa for the third morning in a row, having accomplished little during my days in Utrecht, Broodje had suggested I move into the attic room.

The offer was wasn’t so much enticing as a fait accompli. I was already living here. Sometimes the wind blows you places you weren’t expecting; sometimes it blows you away from those places, too.

• • •

The attic room is drafty, with windows that rattle in the wind. In the morning, I see my breath. Staying warm becomes my main vocation. On the road, I often spent whole days in libraries. You could always find magazines or books, and respite from the weather or whatever else needed escaping.

The Central University library offers all the same comforts: big sunny windows, comfortable couches, and a bank of computers I can use to browse the Internet. The last is a mixed blessing. On the road, my fellow travelers were obsessive about keeping up with email. I was the opposite. I hated checking in. I still do.

Yael’s emails come like clockwork, once every two weeks. I think she must have it on her calendar, along with all the other chores. The notes never say much, which makes answering them next to impossible.

One came yesterday, a bit of fluff about taking a day off to go to a pilgrim festival in some village. She never tells me what she’s taking a day off from, never elaborates about her actual work there, her day-to-day life, which is a bleary mystery, the contours filled in only by offhanded remarks from Marjolein. No, Yael’s emails to me are all in a sort of postcard language. The perfect small talk, saying little, revealing less.

“Hoi Ma,” I begin my reply. And then I stare at screen and try to think of what to say. I’m so conversant in every kind of small talk, but I find myself at a loss for words when it comes to my mother. When I was traveling, it was simpler because I could just send a sort of postcard. In Romania now at one of the Black Sea resorts, but it’s off season and quiet. Watched the fishermen for hours. Although even those had addendums in my mind. How watching the fishermen one blustery morning reminded me of our family trip to Croatia when I was ten. Or was it eleven? Yael slept late, but Bram and I woke early to go down to the docks to buy the day’s catches from the just-returning fisherman, who all smelled of salt and vodka. But following Yael’s lead, I excise those bits of nostalgia from my missives.

“Hoi Ma.” The cursor blinks like a reprimand and I can’t get past it, can’t think of what to say. I toggle back to my inbox, scrolling backward in time. The last few years and their occasional notes from Broodje, and the notes from people I met on the road—vague promises to meet up in Tangiers, in Belfast, in Barcelona, in Riga—plans that rarely materialized. Before that, there’s the flurry of emails from various professors on the economics faculty, warning me that unless I appealed “special circumstances,” I was in danger of not being asked back next year. (I didn’t, and I wasn’t.) Before that, condolence emails, some of them still unopened, and before that, notes from Bram, mostly silly things he liked to forward to me, a restaurant review of a place he wanted to try out, a photo of a particularly monstrous piece of architecture, an invitation to help on his latest fix-it project. I scroll back now four years and there are the emails from Saba, who, in the two years between discovering email and getting too sick to use it, had delighted in this instant form of communication, where you could write pages and pages and it didn’t cost any more to send.

I return to the note to Yael. “Hoi Ma, I’m back in Utrecht now, hanging out with Robert-Jan and the boys. Nothing much to report. It’s pissing down rain every day; no sign of the sun for a week now. You’re glad not to be here for it. I know how you hate the gray. Talk soon. Willem.”

Postcard Language, the smallest of small talk.

Nine

The boys and I are going to a movie, along with W’s new girlfriend. Some Jan de Bont thriller at the Louis Hartlooper. I haven’t liked a de Bont film since—I can’t even remember—but I’ve been outvoted because W has a girlfriend, and this is a big thing, and if she wants explosions, we will watch explosions.

The theater complex is packed, people spilling out the front doors. We fight our way through the crowds to the box office. And that’s when I see her: Lulu.

Not my Lulu. But the Lulu I named her for. Louise Brooks. The theater has lots of old movie posters in the lobby, but I’ve never seen this one, which isn’t on the wall but is propped up on an easel. It’s a still shot from Pandora’s Box, Lulu, pouring a drink, her eyebrow raised in amusement and challenge.

“She’s pretty.” I look up. Behind me is Lien, W’s punked-out math major girlfriend. No one can quite get over how he did it, but apparently they fell in love over numbers theory.

“Yeah,” I agree.

I look closer at the poster. It is advertising a Louise Brooks film retrospective. Pandora’s Box is on tonight.

“Who was she?” Lien asks.

“Louise Brooks,” Saba had said. “Look at those eyes, so much delight, you know there’s sadness to hide.” I was thirteen, and Saba, who hated Amsterdam’s mercurial wet summers, had just discovered the revival cinemas. That summer was particularly dreary, and Saba had introduced me to all the silent film stars: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Rudolph Valentino, Pola Negri, Greta Garbo, and his favorite, Louise Brooks.

“Silent film star,” I tell Lien. “There’s a festival on. Unfortunately it’s tonight.”

“We could see that instead,” she says. I can’t tell if her tone is sarcastic; she’s as dry as W is. But when I get to the front of the line to buy the tickets, I find myself asking for five to Pandora’s Box.

At first, the boys are amused. They think I’m joking, until I point to the poster and explain about the retrospective. Then they are not so amused.

“There’s a live piano player,” I say.

“Is that supposed to make us feel better?” Henk asks.

“No way I’m seeing this,” W adds.

“What if I wanted to see it?” Lien interjects.

I offer her a silent thank-you and she gives me a perplexed eyebrow raise in return, showing off her piercing. W acquiesces and the rest follow suit.

Upstairs, we take our seats. In the quiet, you can hear the explosions from the adjacent theater and I can see Henk’s eyes go wistful.

The lights go down and the piano player starts in with the overture and Lulu’s face fills the screen. The movie starts, all scratchy and black and white; you can almost hear it crackle like an old LP. But there is nothing old about Lulu. She’s timeless, flirting gaily in the nightclub, being caught with her lover, shooting her husband on their wedding night.

It’s strange because I’ve seen this film before, a few times. I know exactly how it ends, but as it goes on, a tension starts to build, a suspense, churning uncomfortably in my gut. It takes a certain kind of naivete, or perhaps just stupidity, to know how things will end and still hope otherwise.

Fidgety, I shove my hands into my pockets. Though I try not to, my mind keeps going to the other Lulu on that hot August night. I tossed her the coin, as I’d done to so many other girls. But unlike the other girls who always came back—lingering by our makeshift stage to return my very valuable worthless coin and to see what it