Netherland Read Online Free PDF Page B

Tehran, it doesn’t matter. OK? Let’s do it. Let’s have an adventure. Let’s live.
    I was proud of myself as I gave this speech. I felt I had conquered my tendencies.
    She didn’t move. Then she said quietly, “Hans, this isn’t a question of geography. You can’t geographize this.”
    “What ‘this’?” I said masterfully, taking her hand. “What’s this ‘this’? There is no ‘this.’ There’s just us. Our family. To hell with everything else.”
    Her fingers were cool and limp. “Oh, Hans,” Rachel said. Her face wrinkled and she cried briefly. Then she wiped her nose and neatly swung her legs out of bed and went quickly to the bathroom: she is a helplessly brisk woman. I removed my coat and sat down on the floor, my back resting against the wall. I listened intently: she was splashing running water over her face and brushing her teeth. She returned and sat in the corner armchair, clutching her legs to her chest. She had a speech of her own to give. She spoke as one trained in making legal submissions, in short sentences made up of exact words. One by one, for what must have been several minutes, her words came bravely puffing out into the hotel room, conveying the history and the truth of our marriage. There had been much ill feeling between us these last months, but now I felt great sympathy for her. What I was thinking about, as she embraced herself ten feet away and delivered her monologue, was the time she’d taken a running jump into my arms. She had dashed forward and leaped with limbs splayed. I nearly fell over. Almost a foot shorter than me, she clambered up my body with ferociously prehensile knees and ankles and found a seat on my shoulders. “Hey,” I said, protesting. “Transport me,” she commanded. I obeyed. I wobbled down the stairs and carried her the length of Portobello Road.
    Her speech arrived at its terminus: we had lost the ability to speak to each other. The attack on New York had removed any doubt about this. She’d never sensed herself so alone, so comfortless, so far from home, as during these last weeks. “And that’s bad, Hans. That’s bad.”
    I could have countered with words of my own.
    “You’ve abandoned me, Hans,” she said, sniffing. “I don’t know why, but you’ve left me to fend for myself. And I can’t fend for myself. I just can’t.” She stated that she now questioned everything, including, as she put it, the narrative of our marriage.
    I said sharply, “‘Narrative’?”
    “The whole story,” she said. The story of her and me, for better and for worse, till death did us part, the story of our union to the exclusion of all others—the story. It just wasn’t right anymore. It had somehow been falsified. When she thought ahead, imagined the years and the years…“I’m sorry, darling,” she said. She was tearful. “I’m so sorry.” She wiped her nose.
    I was sitting on the floor, my shoes stupidly pointing at the ceiling. The yelping of emergency vehicles welled up from the street, flooded the room, ebbed one yelp at a time.
    I said disastrously, “Is there anything I can say that’ll make you change your mind?”
    We sat opposite each other in silence. Then I tossed my coat onto a chair and went to the bathroom. When I picked up my toothbrush it was wet. She had used it with a wife’s unthinking intimacy. A hooting sob rose up from my chest. I began to gulp and pant. A deep, useless shame filled me—shame that I had failed my wife and my son, shame that I lacked the means to fight on, to tell her that I refused to accept that our marriage had suddenly collapsed, that all marriages went through crises, that others had survived their crises and we would do the same, to tell her she could be speaking out of shock or some other temporary condition, to tell her to stay, to tell her that I loved her, to tell her I needed her, that I would cut back on work, that I was a family man, a man with no friends and no pastimes, that my life