She likes nice arses. Perhaps she’s addicted to them, as with many things she knows she can’t go without. She looks for places that can give her a good view. First, she compares women’s with men’s arses. A man’s arse can be tightly packed into close-fitting jeans. It’s a beginning. But that’s also where it ends. Most of the men in this area refuse to walk with any suppleness. Their hips don’t waltz. No, let’s stick to women. Although it’s less uncommon to see a woman move in a nice way, there still aren´t enough to go round. She thinks there must have been a time when women were more aware of their arses. You don’t see many; women walking about town, while managing to display their arse with any style. The right shoes and the right size heel are the things that matter. This has to do with hip flexibility. This has to do with self-consciousness. The right attire is, of course, also very important. A tube skirt might be helpful, but could, equally, work out badly. Tight jeans sometimes reveal too much and can give an arse a sad complexion. This has to do with grace and self-awareness. A nicely moving arse could have to do with submission. And it certainly has to do with meeting every shameless glance, every merciless judgement, the game that is staged during a late summer afternoon in a sun-drenched city.
She’s at a pavement café in a city called Utrecht. Straight across from her pavement café there’s another one, and to the left, diagonally behind her, another one still. That spot proves a feast for arse watchers, as if it can all be discovered all over again, from the very beginning. Women and men cycle past from the south, north and west. They whizz past and touch almost nobody. They catch and release the harsh light of the summer sun again and again. Everything flickers and glistens, like a stroboscope that lets the dark and the light dance with each other. And in this very chaos of wheels and deprived light, there is barely time for miracles. She can often see them coming from a distance. A woman who moves her arse nicely; you can tell by the front, it announces itself. She bites her lips when such a person presents herself. Yes, her hips move languorously. Yes, she looks straight ahead, but in a friendly way. Breasts sway as if they’re accompanying a lullaby. But the arse? A woman in a cocktail dress with a slightly punkish attitude à la Vivian Westwood strides past. She is wearing a multicoloured shawl round her neck. Her lipstick is perhaps a little too red. Her profile is sharply defined against the now receding colours of the local establishments, against the colours of this city. She turns round. And there it is, her arse, in all its glorious totality. The arse of a goddess. Slightly led astray by gravity, however, and by age. But that makes it authentic. Bicycles whizz past her left and right. The woman with the majestic arse is unapproachable. A perfect view of back and arse. Swaying. She feels a warmth rising in her stomach. She raises her glass of Cava – the previous dry wine hadn’t been dry at all – and she licks her lips. She brings a toast to the perfect arse, without the woman in question noticing this expression of gratitude. She puts down her glass and lights a cigarette. The third nice arse in Utrecht disappears from view. Three arses moving nicely in 2 hours’ worth of watching… And nobody to grant her a single glance. Almost.
This is good.
This feels refreshing.
This is Utrecht. This is where you begin again.
A sense of peace reigns in Anna’s house. It’s a beautiful building near the Nieuwe Gracht. It has a garden, frequented by two cats. They give her a brief stare. Their pelt shines in the sun. They yawn and stretch out on the garden table, but jump up at once, when she moves closer. Just as quickly, the pit-pat over the garden wall and a moment later, they’re gone. She smiles, sits down again in a rattan chair on the veranda and takes a sip of tea. She has fled. This is her refuge. But Anna’s garden proves to be too much of a… garden. In fact, she is someone who can’t sit in a park for very long, avoids forests of any kind and hardly ever takes up an invitation from some handsome man or woman to go for a bracing ramble in the countryside. She took up other invitations often enough. Too often, in her opinion. She has shared out her beauty. Which went alright, for a while. This sometimes led to euphoria, sometimes to anger. There wasn’t a man or woman left untouched by her appearance. But more often than not it appeared to be about possession and this seemed to make her less willing to share. One day, a week ago now, it had run out. Every glance in her direction proved too much. There wasn’t a woman who could bare herself to her, without being frightened of what would happen after sex. There wasn’t a man who could find sympathy in her eyes when he stood in front of her with a glistening erection and hope in his eyes. For they all showed that – hope. It made her wince, it turned her into a caged animal. She had simply run out.
It was an easy enough exchange. Anna had been in Barcelona for a while. She had attended a film festival and afterwards had had to conclude there wouldn’t be any more aeroplanes taking off, due to an ash cloud from an Icelandic volcano. She’d had a wild week there, waiting with scores of other partygoers, like in a party hall without an exit. They’d made a virtue of necessity and reasoned away any possible restraint on debauchery. Stolen time, that’s what it was about. When the partygoers heard the news that air traffic had been cleared again, it could well be that Anna was the only one to stay behind, in love with a Catalan, having succumbed to a passion, perhaps pinned down for good like a butterfly on the cardboard called time. And her house in Utrecht? You give shelter to a friend in flight, it’s as simple as that. That’s how she justified it to herself. It’s remarkable to undergo the weather here. It seemed like a joke when she read the weather report in the newspaper. Sunshine in the Netherlands? But the joke became a reality. Since she unpacked her suitcases, the temperature had been rising every day. 27 degrees now, 30 tomorrow. Anna has good taste. Anna has beautiful furniture. Anna’s bookshelves are bulging with the strangest books. She’s also a reader. In a blink of an eye she realises she’d always wanted to own such books and that she should be content to have them at her disposal. Apart from that everything here is fine. That’s right. Everything is fine, strangely fine, as if Anna had known from the beginning that she might never go back. There’s a map of Utrecht on the table in the living room. The words ‘Aboriginal Art Museum’ are marked with a cross. Beside the cross there’s a sticky note, reading: ‘This is where you can always begin again.’ It makes her smile lovingly. Tears even well up in her eyes. Everything appears to have been prepared just for her. She even found her favourite tea in a large tin box on the kitchen sink.
She takes another sip of tea and sighs. The sigh sounds theatrical, badly theatrical. She wants to add something out loud, an ironic footnote to the sigh. She starts a sentence. She says: ‘So, here...’ But she is suddenly daunted by the silence in the adjacent gardens. She feels caught in the act. The garden, the tea, the peace. Nothing here is in need of irony, an uttered quip would be simply ridiculous. It wouldn’t work. You don’t have to do anything here anyway. So what do you do? Watch. What, for example, are those bees doing in this civilized country garden? She gets up. The chair creaks. She bends over and watches how a bee revolves its belly around a flower’s pollen stamen. Never given it much thought, those birds and bees. How long ago did she first have a garden at her disposal? Twelve years? It hadn’t even been her garden, but his. He loved it. She didn’t. Or rather: left her cold. And how long did she stay with him? At least four months, surely. He’d promised her an exciting life. But the reverse was true, in fact. She made his life so exciting that he almost succumbed to it. He kept sending her letter for years after that, which she sometimes read with a glass of chilled white wine on a Sunday morning, sometimes not at all. They were messages from a different time zone. It was a pity that she couldn’t persuade him to go and live in a different city. Which means their glances still sometimes meet. And his gaze is still too much in her eyes. Perhaps, with hindsight, his had been the first. The first of a series of glances too many. Letting go… is it really that hard? You’d have to hire a therapist for that much aftercare. She laughs. Out loud. She stifles a second laugh in her tea. Her father had actually always provided aftercare in his love life. When a woman just wouldn’t disappear from his life, he referred her to a good female friend of his, also an ex. There, the rejected and hence unbearable woman could then have a good cry. She would also be given advice. And they all became bosom friends, those fallen women. That could work with men, couldn’t it? Only yesterday, she read in the newspaper that men suffer heartbreak longer than women. That doesn’t surprise her. She takes another conscious look at the garden and then tries to imagine the men and women that have ever felt touched by her and whose glance she now finds exhausting. But her imagination finally refuses to stretch that far.
The garden is just a garden. Nothing, nobody, is looking back.
The blackbirds sound louder.
It’s almost evening.
Under the wonderful, tepid gushes from the shower, she asks herself why she’s getting ready to go into town. There’s already a black dress spread out on the bed. Two pairs of shoes are ready to be compared. A lingerie set has already been chosen. And she knows which lipstick goes best with her dress. ‘The doubt of the female warrior.’ She repeats the sentence. A melody creeps in. She sings. She’s celebrating life, she thinks.
The dress is perhaps a little tight. That’s something she’ll have to deal with whenever she wants to recline on a terrace chair during this sultry, sweet evening and most probably, night.
Once outside, she follows the Nieuwe Gracht canal, to the point where the waterway bends to the right. She’s brought a handy-sized mini map of the city. It’s been a long time since she’s explored a city without someone on her arm. And again, it’s hard not to speak out loud, all on her own. Her high heels have trouble negotiating the city’s cobblestones. But she keeps walking bolt upright and her arse has no other option but to show itself in its most elegant light. She follows the bend and winds up in a street where it’s as quiet as a convent. Everything small. Everything cute. Almost Bruges, almost dead. Two students quickly cycle past, hair in the breeze, paragons of inexperience. At the end of the street, she can, somewhat to her relief, conclude there is still something stirring. To her left, or so the map tells her, is the Tolhuis bridge. She takes another look at the cross that marks the Aboriginal Art Museum. ‘Not yet,’ she whispers, ‘perhaps tomorrow, or the day after.’ She’s a long way from the museum at the moment, far enough in her opinion. At least three pavement cafés in sight. The Louis Hartlooper Complex turns out to be a restaurant with a cinema. She sits down at a pavement café straight opposite. To look at people and perhaps to study arses. But the majority consists of half-grown students and these provide little satisfaction in that area. They all look the same. All very Dutch. A girl with blonde hair, wearing a black apron, walks up to ask her what she wants to drink. Dry white wine again. And again it isn’t dry enough. The girl ignores the ten euro note she had put ready to settle up. It’s still hot, even though it’s well past nine. She smells sweat. Not hers, but belonging to a nearby group of amateur racing cyclists, who, with sun burnt heads and tight shirts, are enjoying a beer. Lads will be lads. A few loud laughs now and then. Here we go, she knows. There is always a hot-head who keeps staring at her, followed by a nudge to his friends – with his mates giggling in the background – to offer her a beer. They’re all sitting there with their half-naked legs widespread, slouching, in a cloud of euphoric testosterone. There is still enough sunlight to justify sunglasses. She digs into her handbag. She wants to put on the glasses, but they prove broken. One of the little screws is, hopefully, at the bottom of her handbag. However, this isn’t the time for clumsy fumbling, not under the possible gaze of scores of men. So, she looks sideways. She offers her better profile. The café to the left is filled with yuppies in striped shirts, with a blonde bimbo here and there who should have realised long ago that you don’t grab a drink after work with your colleagues. You could, but not if you stay for longer than necessary. Then you’re making it far too easy for those men. At first they’re happy you’re trying to be one of them, but as soon as their eyes glaze over, they’ll want more. And you could give them more, but better to do this discretely and not under the watchful eye of all those other office prowlers. Meanwhile, she hears one of those amateur cyclists order another round. At a different table, a man with tears in his eyes takes his Asian-looking girlfriend by the hand. ‘You don’t know yourself…’ he says softly, but loudly enough. The Asian girl nods half-heartedly and then looks away. The man, whose clothes are too warm, grabs his cigarette again, idly burning in an ashtray. A ruckus. A new group of racing cyclists arrives. This group is more stylishly dressed, with a few Italian sunglasses here and there, pressed up against wet hair. They place an order. One of them has great tanned legs. They look recently shaven. With one hand, he scratches the stubble, while, with his other hand, grabbing a lager. Back to the pavement café opposite. The yuppies are still politely companionable. Not even a snigger when one of the blonde bimbo’s, totally arseless, makes her way to the toilet. No winking at each other. She also gets up, slowly, quite discretely, given her overly tight dress. She walks into the café and heads for the toilet. And no, not a single glance aimed at her, not even at her back or arse. She is equipped with a sixth sense. And it senses nothing.
She decides right there not to go to the toilet, but to pay straightaway. Her bill states ‘Thank you and goodbye’ below the café’s name, Ledig Erf (Vacant Site).
She laughs briefly at this, while she walks back in the direction of the Nieuwe Gracht.
Not a glance.
No whistling in her direction.
No beer, offered half-drunkenly.
Nothing.
And it hasn’t even gone ten yet.
The windows of the basement bedroom are wide open. A breath of wind is playing with the curtains, but it’s still hot. She is sleeping with her mouth open. There’s a masked woman across from her, dressed in black leather. She is being watched. The masked woman stands very close to her. A hand in a leather glove grabs her by the throat. She startles awake, wide-eyed. She sees a black mask. She doesn’t see any eyes. A stifled gurgle escapes from her throat. The masked woman presses down on her throat and says: ‘It’s time. And you know it.’
The sound of a lawnmower wakes her up, the first sign of any human presence since her stay in this house began. Groggily, she walks to the bathroom. In the mirror, she can see welts on her throat; red, blue and purple. She remembers there are a couple of brightly coloured shawls in the cupboard. She chooses a while one, with red dots. There’s a white dress hanging from a chair in the bedroom.
She checks in at the counter of the Aboriginal Art Museum as if she were an everyday tourist. Very few people could tell you why they opened such a museum in Utrecht. Perhaps it was due to a series of coincidences, a course of small incidents, failed agreements and a generous helping of nonchalance. She has, naturally, heard about it and walked past it countless times. However, she has saved it for later – until today. She thinks she looks spectacular, but the coloured lady at the counter, who looks quite coquettish herself, hardly notices her. The totem poles to the right of the entrance reek of danger, as if a secret struggle between the Dutch and the Aboriginals has yet to be settled. The ticket still in hand, she walks up the two flights of stairs that lead to the uppermost floor, in search of a beginning. The museum is almost deserted. Once upstairs she sits down on one of the white benches positioned right opposite an enormous painting. It feels as if everything here has been readied as well. Time glides by. She senses the world around the museum through the scarce sounds that still manage to reach her in the relative silence of the white space. Utrecht, the city in which nobody looks at each other, then gradually falls silent, as if it’s saying goodbye. The sounds are turned off one by one. The few cars manoeuvring their way through the city centre fade first. Then the ringing of cycle bells fades away. Then the conversations in all the pavement cafés go quiet. The murmuring ends. No more birds. She is reminded of Barcelona and of Anna. She thinks about the things she’s left behind. She thinks about the places where she’s lived. She thinks about the men and the women whom she has loved. She thinks about running from the inevitable. She thinks about every anchor that people drop into the depths, hoping this will bring them stability. She thinks about beginning again, an endless activity, whereby every new beginning carries with it the end of that chapter. She thinks – and this is a first – about what she now sees as the actual tragedy. She doesn’t think – like she used to – about the insurmountable end, but about the actual dizzying tragedy; that, on the contrary, it never ends, goes on forever, goes on endlessly.
And with this thought, something begins to grow out of her, which she knows can never be severed, an infinite line. At the same time, her own loneliness begins to weigh her down, first only hesitantly, but as soon as she lets it in, more and more heavily, more and more intensely. ‘This is where you can always begin again.’ Perhaps it’s a lie, committed to a fleeting piece of paper.
There are tears running down her cheeks.
And then and only then, the painting begins to talk to her.
Dumbfounded, she looks at the jagged brown lines.
It’s a mountainous landscape, cut off sharply at the top by a steel-blue sky.
It displays endless lines and their insurmountability.
It makes it clear to her that this painting and this museum haven’t just been dumped on this city.
Perhaps it’s a temple for people who have never needed a temple.
Perhaps it’s a memory for people who have refined the art of memorizing to such a degree that every fibre, every brushstroke and ever line on the canvas contains a code that comprises a 65,000-year-old culture – in a single, continuous line.
Perhaps this makes it clear that the desire for a new beginning has the allure of a joke of cosmic proportions. Not only in Utrecht, but also in Barcelona, in whatever city you happen to be.
Trace the radical lines of the mountainous landscape with your finger and find out where it takes you.
Look at Utrecht.
This city doesn’t have to be about looking at arses, nor about looking or being looked at.
Look at Utrecht.
It could be any city.
This is where you leave and then arrive again.
As in every city.
Look at Utrecht.
It proves to be a portal.
Once she’s outside the museum, she begins to drink discretely, almost furtively. But nobody here catches her in the act, because nobody sees her there, not even that she’s drinking. She doesn’t utter a word out loud. She limits herself to drinking. Now and again she closes her eyes and sees the magnificent painting loom large before her inner eye. Then her gaze crosses his, the one who just won’t budge, who has never wanted to move. It’s only for a moment, but it’s enough to want to order more, to keep ordering more wine.
She’s asleep, with a book from Anna’s library on her stomach. The masked woman dressed in black leather is standing in front of the bedroom wardrobe. She takes out a flowery dress. An iron coat hanger briefly scrapes across a metal rod. She’s wearing black gloves. The leather crunches luxuriously. She turns to her with the dress in her hand. She looks at her in the scarce moonlight. Even her eyes aren’t visible. Perhaps she’s assessing whether Anna’s dress will suit her. Then she disappears silently into the neighbouring bathroom.
In the morning, she is woken up by the twittering of the birds. The bathroom door is standing half-open. There is a dress hanging from the shower cubicle. The room smells of Eternity by Calvin Klein. A scent she herself likes to use.
There proves to be a nice French restaurant in the city centre. Its pavement café is by the water. Ideal for lunch purposes. It’s 34 degrees now. The woman serving her speaks Dutch with a Polish-French accent. Against her better judgement, she orders foie gras and then notices with relief that the delicacy is melting on her tongue. She drinks a glass of perfectly chilled rosé. Tavel, her favourite. Her breasts bulge out from the flowery dress. Her eyes are hidden behind large black Chanel sunglasses. She hadn’t been able to repair her own sunglasses. Fortunately, Anna had forgotten to take her sunglasses to Barcelona. She looks through the black glasses. And, in one way or another, her outlook is different. Is it the wine? For years, you can know someone as well as yourself. You can call her your bosom friend, someone who’s always there for you, as you are for her. You naturally know almost everything about her, and she knows almost everything about you. Yet you can’t help but discover someone else when you live in the area she does, surrounded by her things, reading her strange books, looking at the things she’s so used to. Below every layer of intimacy there is another. Countless times they commented on each other’s bodies in the mirror. They summed up the minuses to each other and ritually played them down. ‘Surely not, you look great, really!’ ‘No, you look great!’ Another look, another giggle. They always ended up in bed together. And they could never distinguish the sex from self-gratification. That image causes a line of sweat to run between her breasts. She smells blossoms. Her thighs relax, as if a hand wishes to caress her there, as if the city wishes to caress her there urged on by an invisible Anna, her mirror image.
The coffee is served with almond cookies. The sun is still shining all around. Everyone moves about languidly. A morsel of happiness dissolves in her stomach.
‘Isn’t life beautiful!’ she suddenly exclaims to the Polish woman bringing her the bill.
She is given a questioning look. Nobody at neighbouring tables bothers to look up.
A barge full of girls bubbles past. Written on the side, with the definite article in block capitals: ‘THE tapas boat’. The women wave in her direction. She takes a quick look over her shoulder. Nobody is waving back. The howling and waving are indeed meant for her. One of the elated ladies says something enthusiastic about her dress. They are all wearing insanely large sunglasses and their lips are painted cherry red. They are surrounded by half-filled bottles of wine and snacks on little silver-coloured plates that glitter in the sunlight. The skipper is the only one to ignore her and doesn’t look up. The girls keep yelling. They gesture for her to come down. ‘Come on, hot stuff!’ one of them yells. She smiles doubtfully. But this is her world and her world is revolving again. She has been seen. She can’t escape it. There are loud cheers when she descends the stairs and gets onto the temporarily moored boat.
The woman stretching out her hand to help her onto the boat says:
‘How long have you been back from Barcelona, Anna?’
Utrecht.
Her personal city trip in her own city has ended.
She finally lets herself be recognised.
At that very moment, on the other side of the water, a woman shows off her perfectly swaying arse.
Anna fails to notice her.
Translated by Willem Groenewegen
Willem Groenewegen (1971) had a bilingual upbringing in Surrey (UK). He studied English Literature in Groningen (NL) and Manchester (UK). He began translating Dutch literature professionally in 2000 and has translated three selections of poetry of Arjen Duinker, Nick J. Swarth and Rutger Kopland. The latter, entitled What Water Left Behind, got him shortlisted for The Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation (The Poetry Society) in 2007. He also translates short prose and art-related texts. (www.willem-groenewegen.nl)
Podcast read by Willem Groenewegen
