Sleepless Night Read online

  www.newvesselpress.com

  First published in Dutch as Slapeloze nacht

  Copyright © 2016 Margriet de Moor.

  Published by De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam.

  Translation Copyright © 2019 David Doherty

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support

  of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  De Moor, Margriet

  [Slapeloze nacht. English]

  Sleepless Night/ Margriet de Moor; translation by David Doherty.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-939931-69-6

  Library of Congress Control Number 2018963552

  I. The Netherlands—Fiction

  Contents

  Sleepless Night

  It’s another of those nights. A night to live through, without sleep.

  For years now, I have been in the habit of getting up. As a novice, this was something I did not do. I stayed under the covers, flinging myself from one side of the bed to the other, and listened for the striking of the clock. Odd, when you think about it. All you want is to slip away, into the countless hours, the immense space where the ticking of only time occurs by way of a joke, but instead you lie there muttering, “One … two … three already, damn it!” And by an easterly wind, you hear your sentence confirmed seconds later by a faint clang from the village steeple. More chime than church bell. I would often listen to the trains, too. And it struck me that while all of creation lay still at this hour, these nocturnal transports rolled on, uninterrupted. In resignation or in panic, I would feel the wheels rumble even before I heard them, the vibration intensifying as it burrowed through fields and ditches to latch onto the dresser mirror, which would begin to rattle unbearably. What was it that had to be carried with such stealth across the silent country?

  What I do now is get up and make my way barefoot down the unlit stairs. Anatole, my mongrel German shepherd, hears me coming and knows what to expect. By the time I step into the kitchen and switch on the light, the dog has heaved himself up and is stretching his stiff legs. I take out the flour, the eggs, the hand mixer, two bowls—one big, one small—and begin without hesitation. I never have to think what to make. I just know. Shortbread cookies. Apple cake. Breton ham pie.

  I am grateful to my husband for installing the oven at eye level when he equipped the kitchen. My eye level. Just as he chivalrously made the kitchen counter to suit my height and not his, which—as I came to learn—was six feet four and a half.

  When it is time to slide the cake pan or baking tray into the preheated oven, I set the kitchen timer. This is essential. Once I have entered the dark living room in the company of Anatole, I lose all sense of temperature, aroma, and the time needed for a perfect golden-brown crust. From a corner of the room, I hear the dog sink to the floor with a smack and I begin to walk.

  I am grateful to my husband for this soft wooden floor, laid with his own two hands. I know that he salvaged these planks of oak from a scrapyard. I even know that the wood originally came from the Heide Hotel, an old hunting lodge. I walk a floor for which a tidy sum was once paid. As he worked away in the living room—I can still hear the short, intense blasts of hammering—I was running an angled paintbrush along the frame of the door that leads down to the cellar. I remember how pleased I was with the color, a grayish green that even now, almost fifteen years later, still seems just right. I recall the stiffness in my fingers when the paint that had dripped down the side of the brush began to dry. I didn’t have much space to work in. I see very clearly that the sweep of my clumsy efforts was hemmed in by a pile of secondhand chairs and boxes crammed with wedding gifts. While the Chinese bowls, the tablecloth embroidered with irises, the cocktail shaker, and goodness knows what else are items I still possess and see almost every day, Ton, my young husband, has vanished without a trace. The look on his face. The remarks he made from the living room.

  “Clear varnish might be best after all.”

  “Tea? Or a beer?”

  “You’ll never guess who I ran into this morning.”

  “Over halfway done and moving along.”

  “Sure. But it’s not what you’re thinking.”

  Along those lines. Accompanied perhaps by a whistled tune or a burst of laughter. I can stick my fingers in my ears and bring the remarks to mind. But they are words without intonation, spoken with a mouthful of sand. As he went about this task, I neglected to notice my husband.

  Walking the floor of the darkened living room calms me. There is nothing more to it than that. I sleepwalk over the bands of oak, which I would swear have grown warmer with the passing of the years and the friction of my footsteps. And there is no doubt that the effect I achieve bears more than a passing resemblance to the workings of dreams. The sense of melting into things hidden or shoved aside.

  I usually glance at the mirror as I pass. On a clear night, strange, haggard eyes meet mine and sometimes I can make out the line of dark-brown hair, cut along the jawline. By the window, I spend a moment or two looking out on the land. My land. The place I inherited. It rises up to meet me, a steepish slope that still brings to mind the swell of the sea. Depending on the season, a wave of corn, charred leaves, or raw, black earth seems poised to sweep away the farm, forming its own premature horizon beyond which the fields roll down to the village, out of view.

  On a night like this, it’s unusual for sleep to pass me by. An hour must have elapsed since I lifted the heavy arm off me. How much does an arm weigh, I wondered, gauging as I raised it. Thirteen pounds? Fifteen perhaps? He carried on sleeping, an amiable expression on his face. Sleeping so soundly in a strange bed. It has long since ceased to surprise me; they all do it. I folded his arm, placed his fist next to his cheek, and slid away from him. “Butter squares sprinkled with cinnamon” popped into my head, as I felt my way down the stairs.

  I arrive at the window, press my brow to the glass, and look outside. Clearer than ever tonight, the swell rises up to meet me. An ice-pale moonlit sea. It’s been a strange week in these parts. First the fields were buried under two feet of snow, then came a day of mild rain that failed to wash them clean before the wind swept in and the temperature plummeted to twelve below freezing. A brittle crest of shoveled snow lines the path in front of the house, and with next to no effort I recall my feet sloshing through tepid, yellow-tinged foam. I hail from the coast; as a child the stink of farmland used to fill me with dread.

  The locals all expected me to pack up and leave after the funeral. Back to the life I had left not so long before. What was there for me now, here on this land? The shameful death lent no luster to my newfound state, not a glimmer of tragic glory.

  “You have to stay,” Lucia had said. “That’s all. Just stay.”

  She was sitting on the kitchen windowsill and I remember fretting that she might lean back and rest her hand on the scales. They were my pride and joy, a mechanism sensitive enough to weigh flour or salt to a fraction of an ounce. What my sister-in-law did not know was that it had been settled since my first wakeful night: I could not leave this place. It was barely even a decision. This house is where I will stay. And as for the land, I will sell it to my neighbors, Braams and Pepping.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, the first since the commotion and fuss of the funeral. Other than Lucia, no one had dropped by that day. I had not been pitied or questioned. For some rea
son no mail had been delivered. The telephone had not rung once. My instinct told me that this was the beginning of a deeper stillness, one that would stay with me from now on. The world had deliberately left me alone with it today, as with a strange creature that had invaded my home, a snake or a wild colt. I had not been smart enough to keep it outside and no one would be crazy enough to share the chore of tending to it. That Saturday I had already begun to understand that I would have to find my own way to approach this stillness, a way to tame it and raise it.

  “And if they’re not in a position to buy the land, Braams and Pepping will be all too happy to lease it from you,” my sister-in-law continued firmly.

  Out of friendship and common courtesy, I looked at her. My eyes narrowed, I gave a slight nod and must have given the impression that I was mulling over what she had said. Instead, I found myself wondering whether she resembled her brother. It had never occurred to me before. His build, of course, had never been so slender. His hair couldn’t have been as red and nowhere near as full and glossy. But there was something about the eyes. She’s been through the mill this week, her blouse is soiled, ringed with sweat—she must have been sweltering yesterday or the day before—but there’s an ease in the way she looks at me. And those eyelashes, something that always tickles me about redheads, so light and densely planted, almost birdlike. The look of someone who has no time for nonsense, I thought, and no time at all for self-pity.

  “It’s worth thinking about,” I mumbled.

  With the passing of the years, the village has resigned itself to my staying.

  The timer goes off. Even from behind two closed doors, the infernal noise never fails to make me jump. Anatole gets up and we return to the kitchen. I remove the tray from the oven. The cake has turned out splendidly, and with the greatest of care, I slice it into two-inch squares. Once I have washed the dishes and wiped the counter, I put down a bowl of water for the dog. Knowing I have over half the night ahead of me and that the dough needs to rise for an hour, I decide there is still time for a Russian Bundt cake. Then it dawns on me that we took the vodka upstairs with us after dinner. Like a veteran married couple intent on rounding off the evening in style, we got up from the table at around eleven. I climbed the stairs behind him, carrying two slim, elegant glasses.

  I need the booze for the cake I’m going to make.

  Bottle in hand, I pause a moment by the bed. In his sleep, he has pulled the covers half over his head. The light from the reading lamp shines sidelong on the rumpled sheet. Looking more closely, I see the folds gently rise and fall. Rising and falling to the rhythm of audible breathing, the unmistakable slumber of a man after a hard day’s work.

  I know the feeling. I am usually worn-out myself. It is almost impossible to put into words how tiring it is to spend a day with someone you don’t know. Many’s the time I could barely keep my eyes open until that steady rhythm kicked in, the sound that all was well and I, too, could roll over.

  It’s a good system. Lucia and I came up with it years ago, a time when alarming things began to happen to me. I would get up in the morning and not be able to move my hands. Stiff as grappling hooks they were, rigid fingers spread wide for fifteen minutes, some days for up to an hour. Worse still was the discoloration and puffiness in my face, every hollow filled—the eye sockets, the curve between jaw and neck. The lines that speak of character, that express much more than the color of the eyes, much more than the shape of the lips, were bulked out under taut skin. Pressing my fingertips to my face, I could feel the thickness beneath. It did not hurt.

  “You’ve bolted down a hole and you won’t come out,” Lucia said. “Not even to come up for air. It’s an insult to your lust for life! Your elemental needs!”

  She smoked cigarillos back then, strode around in her riding breeches and an olive-brown Shetland wool sweater. Everything about her—I sensed it all too clearly in the way she looked and moved, even in the way she sat hunched and smoking on the little basket chair, chin on her knees—was shot through with sexual abandon, and had been since the young Martens lad had moved in with her a few months earlier.

  All I could do was agree despondently.

  “This convent existence is making my body livid.”

  “A nun’s best-kept secret.”

  It took us the rest of the afternoon to draft the personal ad we placed in de Volkskrant. It wound up being a single sentence, albeit one that left little to the imagination.

  I hear the dog snuffling from one end of the hallway to the other. He is not used to me disappearing upstairs between acts. But it’s pleasant to linger, listening to the breathing, looking down at the half-hidden face, and as I do, it begins to dawn on me why I have so little need of sleep. I am not tired at all. What should have been a taxing day, drawing on all my reserves to face off with a complete stranger, in fact turned out to be a self-evident, almost casual affair. It was with a cool air of familiarity that this man came walking up to me this morning.

  The bustle at the station was not the agreeable kind. There were lines at the ticket counters, unusual for a Saturday. In the underpass between platforms three and four, it was all I could do to hold steady amid the surge of travelers rushing single-mindedly in the opposite direction. After a short, solitary wait on the platform for the 10:10 from Zwolle, an announcement came crackling over the speakers and, before I knew what was happening, people came scurrying from all directions. Service was disrupted. Frozen switches. Ice clinging to overhead lines. I joined the rest, staring into the mist at the blurred red glow of the signals down by the level crossing.

  A train pulled in. The doors clunked open and were stormed in an instant. Only then did it dawn on me that we had forgotten to agree on a sign, a way of recognizing each other. Not that this worried me. I continued to lean quietly against the stone balustrade at the top of the stairs.

  He must have alighted from a front carriage and made no attempt to hurry through the crowd. He simply remained behind when the train departed. A man in his forties—this I already knew—lean in the face, his receding hairline just the right side of attractive. In a long brown coat that had seemingly shrugged off every fashion of the past fifteen years, he walked up to me.

  We shook hands. Spoke our names in clouds of breath.

  “How was your trip?” I asked.

  “Not bad, all told. Left at eight. Snow in Roermond. We were the other side of Eindhoven before it started to get light. Ground to a halt for half an hour, couldn’t tell you where. Fields either side.”

  A man from the South without a southern accent. He spoke like my father, my brothers, my uncles.

  “Were you raised in the North by any chance?” I ventured. “Bulb-growing country?”

  “Lived up Bloemendaal way till I turned twenty. But what I’m wondering”—he looked around and his eyes lit upon the sign for the station cafeteria—“is whether they serve a decent cup of coffee around here.”

  Inside it was quiet and warm. The place was run by a no-nonsense character who was of the opinion that travelers should have a stove around which to gather. We sat down next to a cast-iron colossus that had been equipped with a gas burner. There, enveloped in the aroma of strong tobacco, coffee, and almond cakes still warm from the oven, we looked out at the coming and going of the trains, and at the passengers who, in thrall to the wintry conditions, seemed desperately jittery about reaching their destinations.

  We began hunting for our smokes. He thrust one hand deep into a brown coat pocket and pulled out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. I decided to have one of his. He held out a flame.

  It’s something I always look at in a man, a wrist exposed as it emerges from the sleeve of a jacket, or better still, an overcoat. That seemingly insignificant contrast between body and clothing; you need an eye for such things, of course, a feel for them, too, but I maintain that the casual flexing of a wrist dusted with reddish hair, or the transition from a wiry arm to a nervous hand, speaks a language all its own. A plain lang
uage, less prone to dissembling than the movements of the lips or the line of the body as a whole. Ton used to love helping me in the kitchen. We cooked impulsively, hurriedly. Macaroni, chicken and rice—simple, tasty meals. Yet the turn of his hand as he opened a can of beans is an image I can no longer bring to mind.

  He looked at me with frank curiosity.

  “So you teach at a village school,” he said, picking up a strand from my letter. As good an opening as any.

  My turn.

  “Yes. Going on fifteen years now. Fourth grade. The nicest age to teach, if you ask me. Not much harm you can do. The kids can already read, write, add and subtract, and that’s what they came for in the first place. What about you?”

  “I’m an editor for a historical encyclopedia.”

  “Oh, that must be fun,” I said cheerfully. “Everything that’s ever happened passes before your eyes. A man who’s concerned with the facts.”

  He returned my sly grin.

  “How they come and then go when they’ve had their time,” I mused.

  “Mmm,” he replied. “You’d be surprised how fast history goes to seed. It’s in constant need of sprucing up.”

  We shared a friendly gaze. I asked if the job gave him much satisfaction.

  “Well, you know, it’s work.”

  Our attention was caught by a bunch of young skaters in metallic-blue skin suits, as they charged up the stairs to the platform. In an all-or-nothing bid to make their connection, they leaped onto the tracks and only just managed to scramble onto the far platform as the train pulled in. Furious shouts erupted from all directions and the train let out a plaintive hoot. The stationmaster came storming past.

  An old lady dozing at a table strewn with newspapers woke with a start, put on her glasses, and shot us an embittered look.

  “You people nowadays think of no one but yourselves!” she shouted, trembling.

  Calm settled in once more. Again, I felt his eyes on me. Though it had never occurred to me that we might make each other’s acquaintance by this hulking stove, the situation was one I knew well. The questioning had begun and was set to continue for the remainder of the day.