I threw away my card, but Broodje kept his. For years. I spotted it when we were twelve, tacked to the bulletin board in his bedroom in the suburbs where he wound up moving after all. “You still have this?” I’d asked him. He’d moved two years before and we didn’t see each other frequently. Broodje had looked at the card, and then looked at me. “Don’t you know, Willy?” he’d said. “I keep things.”
• • •
A lanky guy in a PSV soccer jersey, his hair stiff with gel, opens the door. I feel my stomach plummet, because Broodje used to live here with two girls, both of whom he was constantly, and unsuccessfully, trying to sleep with, and a skinny guy named Ivo. But then the guy eyes spark open with recognition and I realize it’s Henk, one of Broodje’s friends from the University of Utrecht. “Is that you, Willem?” he asks, and before I can answer he’s calling into the house, “Broodje, Willem’s back.”
I hear scrambling and the creak of the scuffed wood floorboards and then there he is, a head shorter and a shoulder wider than me, a disparity that used to prompt the old man on the houseboat next to ours to call us Spaghetti and Meatball, a moniker Broodje quite liked, because wasn’t a meatball so much tastier than a noodle?
“Willy?” Broodje pauses for a half second before he launches himself at me. “Willy! I thought you were dead!”
“Back from the dead,” I say.
“Really?” His eyes are so round and so blue, like shiny coins. “When did you get back? How long are you here for? Are you hungry? I wish you’d told me you were coming, I would’ve made something. Well I can pull together a nice
“I see that,” Henk says, nodding.
“W,” Broodje calls. “Willy’s back.”
I walk into the lounge. Before, it was relatively neat, with feminine touches around like flower-scented candles that Broodje used to pretend to dislike but would light even when the girls weren’t home. Now, it smells of stale socks, old coffee, and spilled beer, and the only remnant of the girls is an old Picasso poster, askew in its frame above the mantel. “What happened to the girls?” I ask.
Broodje grins. “Leave it to Willy to ask about the girls first.” He laughs. “They moved into their own flat last year, and Henk and W moved in. Ivo just left to do a course in Estonia.”
“Latvia,” Wouter, or W, corrects, coming down the stairs. He’s even taller than me, with short, unintentionally spiky hair and an Adam’s apple as big as a doorknob.
“Latvia,” Broodje says.
“What happened to your face?” W asks. W never was one for social pleasantries.
I touch the scar. “I fell off my bike,” I say. The lie I told Marjolein comes out automatically. I’m not sure why, except for a desire to put as much distance as possible between myself and that day.
“When did you get back?” W asks.
“Yeah, Willy,” Broodje says, panting and pawing like a puppy. “How long ago?”
“A bit ago,” I say, treading water between hurtful truth and balls-out lies. “I had to deal with some things in Amsterdam.”
“I’ve been wondering where you were,” Broodje says. “I tried calling you a while back but got a strange recording, and you’re shit about email.”
“I know. I lost my phone and all my contacts, and some Irish guy gave me his, including his SIM card. I thought I texted you the new number.”
“Maybe you did. Anyhow, come in. Let me go see what I have to eat.” He turns right into the galley kitchen. I hear drawers opening and closing.
Five minutes later Broodje returns with a tray of food and beers for all of us. “So tell us everything. The glamorous life of a roving actor. Is it a girl every night?”
“Jesus, Broodje, let the guy sit down,” Henk says.
“Sorry. I live vicariously through him; it was like having a movie star in the house having him around. And, it’s been a little dry these past few years.”
“And by past few years, you mean twenty?” W says drolly.
“So you’ve been in Amsterdam?” Broodje asks. “How is your ma?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I say lightly. “She’s in India.”
“Still?” Broodje asks. “Or there and back?”
“Still. This whole time.”
“Oh. I was in the old neighborhood recently and the boat was all lit up and there was furniture inside, so I thought she might be back.”
“Nope, they must’ve put furniture in there to make it look lived in, but it’s not. Not by us, anyhow,” I say, rolling up a piece of
“You sold Bram’s boat?” Broodje says incredulously.
“My mother sold it,” I clarify.
“She must’ve made a boatload,” Henk jokes.
I pause for a second, somehow unable to tell them that I did, too. Then W starts talking about a piece he read in
“Not this boat. You should’ve seen it,” Broodje says. “His father was an architect, so it was beautiful, three floors, balconies, glass everywhere.” He looks wistful. “What did that magazine call it?”
“Bauhaus on the Gracht.” A photographer had come and taken pictures of the boat, and us on it. When the magazine had come out, most of the shots had been of just the boat, but there had been one of Yael and Bram, framed by the picture window, the trees and canal reflecting like a mirror behind them. I’d been in the original of that shot but had been cropped out. Bram explained that they’d used this one because of the window and the reflection; it was a representation of the design, not our family. But I’d thought it had been a fairly accurate depiction of our family, too.
“I can’t believe she sold it,” Broodje says.
Some days I can’t believe it and other days I can absolutely believe it. Yael is the sort to chew off her own hand if she needs to escape. She’d done it before.
The boys are all looking at me now, their faces blanking out with a kind of concern that I’m unaccustomed to after two years of anonymity.
“So, Holland-Turkey tonight,” I begin.
The guys look at me for a moment. Then nod.
“I hope things go better for us,” I say. “After the sad offerings during Euro Cup, I don’t know if I can take it. Sneijder . . .” I shake my head.
Henk takes the bait first. “Are you kidding? Sneijder was the only striker who proved his mettle.”
“No way!” Broodje interrupts. “Van Persie scored that beautiful goal against Germany.”
Then W jumps in with math talk, something about regression toward the mean guaranteeing improvement after the last lousy year, and now there’s nowhere to go but up, and I relax. There’s a universal language of small talk. On the road, it’s about travel: some unknown island, or a cheap hostel, a restaurant with a good fixed-price menu. With these guys, it’s soccer.
“You gonna watch the game with us, Willy?” Broodje asks. “We were going to O’Leary’s.”
I didn’t come to Utrecht for small talk or for soccer or for friendship. I came for paperwork. A quick visit to University College for some papers to get my passport. Once I get that, I’ll go back to the travel agent, maybe ask her for a drink this time, and figure out where to go. Buy my ticket. Maybe take a trip to The Hague to pick up some visas, a visit to the travel clinic for some shots. A trip to the flea market for new clothes. A train to the airport. A thorough body search by immigration officials, because a lone man with a one-way ticket is always an object of suspicion. A long flight. Jetlag. Immigration. Customs. And then finally, that first step into a new place, that moment of exhilaration and disorientation, each feeding the other. That moment when anything can happen.
I have only one thing to do in Utrecht, but suddenly the rest of the things I’ll need to accomplish to get myself out of here feels endless. Stranger yet, nothing about it excites me. Not even arriving somewhere new, which used to make all the hassle worthwhile. It all just seems exhausting. I can’t summon the energy for the slog
