Perhaps he should have been a baker. Or a chef. He created a kitchen first and foremost, with a wood-fired oven, a seven-burner gas hob, a double sink, a bread machine, a fridge big enough to keep a garrison of soldiers fed for a month, and a kitchen island the size of Australia. His idea was that the whole apartment would be built around that kitchen island. Every room and every corridor would lead to that island. It was like a vortex: no matter which way you turned, you found yourself back at the island. The kitchen became a kind of panopticon: wherever you looked, the kitchen was looking back at you.
He moved into one of the flats himself. A hundred and fifty square metres, with a view of the waterfront. His apartment was finished before we turned thirty—I helped him clear up after the housewarming and I can still remember him sitting at that kitchen island, opening a bottle of beer, and saying: “Do you know what? In a completely ordinary way, things are going spectacularly well for me.”
Knowing him as I did, I understood that by “ordinary” he meant middle class. Even bourgeois. But the bourgeoisie only exist in the minds of Marxists with pitchforks and five-year plans.
What he was really saying was that he had a kind of unexpected hold on his life. Things were under control. While we were at university, it wasn’t so much that money burned a hole in his pocket as that he didn’t have pockets at all. But these days, he would send me messages at the weekend telling me he’d got bored and gone to MediaMarkt to buy himself an air fryer or a Roomba, a kind of robot vacuum cleaner that moves through your home of its own accord like a flying saucer.
“Picture the scene,” he said. “It’s a Saturday. You find yourself standing in the queue at MediaMarkt waiting to pay for a Roomba.”
“Did you need a Roomba?”
“No, of course not. When I got home, I tore its box into a thousand tiny pieces and let it hoover them all up. Like a chicken eating its own egg.”
“Which came first, the Roomba or the box?”
“This is the robotization that the politicians are so afraid of in action,” his girlfriend said. “It will put our poor Daria out of work.”
His life filled up: with wood-fired ovens, bread machines, air fryers, Roombas, Daria the Romanian housekeeper, fellowships in Florence, grants from royal foundations, and projects in Beijing.
He had always liked the sound of his own voice, but these days he could really hold forth.
“The thing about the Chinese,” he said, “is that they assume the rest of the world wants to be like them. By far the most important thing we can learn from the Chinese is that there isn’t a neat solution to every problem. You can never have complete control. Focusing too much on control disrupts the harmony of the universe. That’s what Laozi teaches us: the power of doing nothing, weakness as a strength. China has always played its enemies off against each other. If Britain tried to colonise an area, they’d invite the Russians to do the same, then sit back and watch the two of them fight it out amongst themselves. Balance is key, especially when all you have to do is hold the scales. Imagine being the biggest country in the world and never having to get your hands dirty. Managing to stay out of it every time. Did you know that “China” literally means “middle kingdom” or “in between”?”
So he wasn’t alone in that big apartment. We had met her together, when she strolled into Café Het Brood: tall, we were both half a head shorter, red hair, a dress with a split in the side. She was waiting for someone, and that someone was keeping her waiting. One of us would have to make the first move.
“According to Nash’s game theory,” he said, “if we both went for the top prize we’d end up with nothing. We’d block each other. So hold my beer.”
He got married, made partner, and spent six months working in San Francisco. Those were the years when we drifted apart, like pieces of broken ice on the sea, as so often happens when your student days come to an end. I saw the updates on social media: his wife, with her beautiful wavy red hair, that angel, got pregnant. A daughter. Julia. But pronounced in a sort of strange Mediterranean accent: Ghulia. In those years, I used to call him for advice on job applications, or to ask which health insurance I should take out. Or to find out what he thought about my pension gap. There had been a gearshift when it came to adulthood. He was playing in the league above me.
“You’ve got it all together, dude,” I said to him at one point. “You’re like a baby boomer.”
But that was then and this was now. In meteorological terms, these were the darkest days of the year. The black office blocks in the business district loomed above us on the ring road heading for the airport. He pointed to his own office, to the one department where the lights were still on.
“Sales,” he said. “They’re Neanderthals.”
How we had got back here, exactly how he had become the person I rang when I needed a lift to Schiphol, was harder to explain. The causality was beyond me. I knew the outcome, but not the precise chain of events. I couldn’t understand how cause x had led to effect y. There seemed to be something wrong with the axes. The lines never met.
Academics call it the historian’s fallacy: the way we look back and see certain connections that make everything appear logical, forgetting that the people living through events at the time had no idea which actions would have which consequences. People can’t see into the future and replay it over and over again the way we do with the past.
His wife left him, taking Ghulia with her. And Daria, the Romanian housekeeper. If I’m honest, I didn’t give too much thought to what and why and how it had all gone wrong for him back then. I probably wasn’t a very good friend. I didn’t see much of him for a while. I was travelling a lot too and I had an excuse, not that I even bothered to make it. For us, watching from the outside, it was as if he had violated the terms of his adulthood and been relegated to our amateur level. It was painful.
In the end, we went for a run together one Sunday, I invited him along to a pub quiz, we became friendly again, picked up where we’d left off, and slid back into each other’s lives without explanation, thanks to that male privilege that means we never have to talk about how we feel.
He was talking now though, in the car. He didn’t turn to me but kept his eyes on the road.
“Remember when we had to accept an offer just under the market price on our flat in Amsterdam Noord so we could sell it fast? Back then, the market wasn’t like it is now. Suddenly I was alone. She was gone, and Ghulia too. I found a new apartment pretty quickly—the benefits of being in the business—but I had to wait a couple of weeks while a new bathroom was fitted. Our flat was empty. All the photographs were gone from the walls, and there were only a few novels that neither of us wanted left on the bookshelves.”
He had lived off ready meals, he said. So much for that kitchen island. He had stopped shaving and worn the same shirt day after day. The cliché of a man on his own. But that’s exactly what a cliché is: you can see it, but you can’t escape it. You spot the pothole from a few feet away but you still drive into it.
And the new owners of the apartment had arrived already. A husband and wife in their early fifties. A guy with one of those huge camel coats. A woman who probably had a great job at a trendy advertising agency and organised evening cultural events in her spare time, book clubs and shit. They had bought not just his apartment but the one upstairs too. Two floors. A couple of hundred square metres.
“They were really understanding when I said I couldn’t move out on the day of the sale. Very sympathetic, they just asked if they could store some boxes in my apartment while they decorated the one upstairs. I slept among my successors’ possessions for four or five nights. They’re beautiful people with beautiful things. I stayed up all night, carefully looking through each of their boxes. I couldn’t get enough. This was how things should have gone for me, this could have been my life. Clothes, dinner plates—all completely perfect. Expensive, well looked after. A couple of fantastic modernist paintings, thirty or so framed pen and ink drawings. On the last night I found a whole series of little porcelain animals spread across different boxes. I think they were supposed to depict the Chinese zodiac. Not kitsch at all, really unusual, anthracite, the porcelain was patterned, as if it had been engraved. They weren’t big, you could hold them in your hands. Pigs, monkeys, tigers, a dragon. In China, somebody once told me that I was born in the Year of the Dragon. Dragons are proud and passionate, they’re successful and extroverted, they inspire people, and they believe they’re special. I identified with that. I wasn’t like other people. That’s honestly what I felt.”
He overtook a van and turned sharply, only just making the exit for the airport.
“Serene, timeless pieces, I’ve no idea how old they were. And suddenly I thought: I’m going to take one. The Chinese dragon. Why not? It was that simple, this one was mine. About a month later, the dragon was standing on the mantlepiece in my new apartment. Staring at me. It had become the centrepiece. Just like in The Big Lebowski: it really tied the room together. I had convinced myself that the new owners were too chic to have packed their own boxes, so perhaps they hadn’t realised anything was missing. But every time an unknown number flashed up on my phone, I was convinced it was them, furious. I told myself: my dragon. It’s mine. The dragon stayed on my mantlepiece for exactly three months. Then I couldn’t bear it any longer. I wrapped it in a cloth and put it in my bag.”
There was a lot of traffic heading for Schiphol and the car crawled along. He was quieter now, as if slowing down had somehow made the conversation more intimate, and made him more vulnerable. The story was obviously coming from somewhere deep within him—and I wondered why he had chosen to tell me all this now. I didn’t have him down as the sort of person who sought moral absolution from others.
He took the anthracite dragon into work and gave it to his secretary. He didn’t want that dragon anymore. He didn’t want what the dragon stood for. His secretary would just have to send it back.
I knew his secretary: I followed her on Instagram. He had thought about whether he should put a letter in with it, and formulated sentences in his head, apologising, explaining that he had taken it because it symbolised something, to fill a hole in his life. In the end he wrote simply: I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me, and signed it.
“It was a relief. My house started to feel like my own again once that foreign object was gone. I had to go to China for a fortnight and those two weeks were perfect. I felt about a stone lighter. When I got back, I picked up a stack of parcels from my neighbours. I get sent all kinds of things for work, lots of blueprints, but books too. One package was too heavy to be a book. I cut it open and it was full of anthracite powder. I thought it was anthrax at first; a cloud of dust rose up when I opened the box. Then I thought someone had been cremated and I had been sent the ashes. But there was a note with it: I’m sorry, it said, I don’t know what came over me. And for a few seconds I thought to myself: what kind of maniac would do something like this? Can you believe I didn’t even recognise the handwriting? I thought I’d got rid of it. I’d told my secretary to send it to my apartment. I meant my old apartment. She assumed I meant my new apartment.”
There’s a Chinese author I was a fan of for a while. His great skill was that he never allowed you to get to the bottom of his novels. He had fled China after Tiananmen Square and lived a fairly nomadic existence ever since. I read a theory on a blog claiming he was the guy in front of the tanks in that famous photograph, but I doubt it. I found out later that he had died in Blanes in Spain the exact same week that I was there too, getting drunk and partying after my last exam. He once said in an interview that he liked to write open-ended metaphors. He said it in Chinese of course, but I read the English translation. Metaphors with open ends, labyrinths without exits.
He wasn’t finished yet:
“Here’s the worst part. A couple of weeks later I got on a plane without anything to read. I borrowed a book from the woman sitting next to me, the memoirs of an elderly writer from New York. I’d never heard of her. She wrote about friendship, about her failed marriages, about being alone. And then she suddenly spent two paragraphs telling an anecdote about a friend who had got divorced and stolen a vase from the new owners of her house. She had started to feel guilty after a while but when she tried to send the vase back it crumbled to dust.”
He laughed mirthlessly: “It was my story, almost word for word. Seriously. I put the book down and stared straight ahead for the rest of the flight.”
He opened the boot of the car and took out my suitcase. I patted my breast pocket for the ninety-fourth time to check my passport was still there. We stood by the car. That business with the dragon and the powder had happened a year ago, but it was still going round and round in his head. He had to talk about it.
“It was the book by the old author that did it. Adding insult to injury,” he said.
“It’s a coincidence.”
“But that’s the worst part. The idiotic coincidence of someone I’ve never met having written about it all. As if my ridiculous drama wasn’t even mine. As if I wasn’t the original, just a copy.”
He told me that he’d talked to other friends about it too. “And?” I asked. “What did they make of it?”
“They saw the dragon as a metaphor and the powder as a symbol for fate. Together they add an extra dimension to the story of the divorce.”
“They’re metaphors in the first instance,” I said.
“Yes, but at the same time it’s real. I haven’t made it all up.”
“It’s as if the metaphors stand for the story itself. As if the symbols threaten to eclipse the meaning.”
He hugged me and walked back round to the driver’s side: “It’s one what-the-fuck after another.”
“In the end they’re not symbols and there’s no meaning,” I say.
“That’s what I hate most. It sounds crazy but I’m so angry with that stupid dragon. And that stupid writer. If the dragon isn’t a metaphor, then what is it? A simple coincidence? Nothing at all? Is my life just an anecdote?”
My mother told me that men are good at leaving, but women are good at breaking up. Sitting you down, looking you in the eye, and telling you the conclusion they have reached. I think she was talking about my experiences more than her own, but this is the era of feminism and I wanted to believe it. Once they discover what they’re worth, she said, they’re not going to meekly accept something under the market price anymore.
As coincidence would have it, a quarter of an hour after I waved goodbye to him, I saw his wife walk past, his ex-wife I should say. I thought she looked more beautiful than ever—there was a kind of extra sharpness to her face, a line. She was wearing a blouse in some sort of pale pink crêpe and a tight black skirt that came down below her knee. She was wheeling a case the size of a sarcophagus.
She had been cheating on him back then. He had actually introduced them, a project manager at another firm whom he sometimes worked with. She hadn’t tried very hard to keep the affair secret, he told me at the time. She would ask if he could look after Ghulia one afternoon because she was going to the cinema and then be unable to tell him what the film was about or who was in it when she got back. Or she would be out for hours shopping with friends and come home with hardly any bags.
I remember him telling me that when the penny finally dropped the first thing he felt was awe. “I’m supposed to be angry now, right? I’m supposed to throw plates and smash ornaments.”
“This is probably the best excuse you’re ever going to have to start chucking stuff out of the window,” I replied.
“Maybe anger would be easier, but my immediate response right now, my primary emotion, is awe. That she would dare. So amoral. So in-my-face. Such an adult decision.”
She saw me. It was that awkward moment at security when you’re standing at the end of the conveyor belt in your socks, trying to put your jacket back on and do your belt up at the same time. Holding your passport between your teeth.
She smiled at me and waved her passport.
“New York!” she called.
“Istanbul!” I shouted back.
And that was that.
