Amsterdam 2012 (3 page)

Around midnight
Marjon
asked where Peter and I were staying, and when we said we didn’t have reservations but had considered the youth hostel in town, she suggested we spend the night.
 
“We have a guestroom in the windmill.
 
Let me show you.”

The other dinner guests didn’t appear to be preparing to leave, but we were obviously being dismissed.
 
Perhaps we looked tired, I thought, or their friends had something private to discuss.
 
I sensed a hint of false joviality from our hosts at our goodnights—the way parents will tease their children before putting them to bed so they won’t dwell on their worried asides about money and family trouble.
 
I hated to miss out.

Marjon
led us through the French doors in the kitchen onto a brick path that led through a perennial garden.
 
The air smelled of white narcissus made luminous in the moonlight.
 
Beds of red and yellow tulips nodded in the gentle breeze.

The windmill was the size of a small lighthouse, squat and shapeless like a rook from a chess set.
 
It was covered in weathered cedar shingles, but the turbine was modern.
 
“It used to be a polder mill,”
Marjon
explained, “used for draining water from the farm land.
 
We refurbished it last year with the latest wind power technology.
 
The old windmill made much noise, but this is
more quiet
.
 
Some people find it helps them sleep.”

We entered and climbed up a windy staircase to a loft.
 
It smelled like the inside of an old wine cask, sweet and
oaky
.
 
The furniture was simple, a wide platform bed with a white down comforter, white nightstands, a white trunk at the foot of the bed, a white wardrobe and bureau, a little white table with a bowl and water pitcher, and two white chairs.
 
All the white contrasted charmingly with the rough wood interior and the antique iron farm tools displayed on the walls.

“I’m sorry there is no bathroom.
 
We plan to put in plumbing next year.
 
I’ll leave the back door unlocked so you can use the one in the house.”

“Thank you,” I said.
 
“This is perfect.”

“I’m so glad you are here,”
Marjon
said, taking my hand.
 
“If there is anything you need, let me know.
 
We stay up late.”
 

Her gaze unnerved me.
 
I looked away quickly, eyes burning.
 
Was it the wine or fatigue?
 
No, it was
Marjon’s
probing sincerity.
 
As if she thought I was in some kind of trouble and needed her help.
 
I felt unworthy.
 
I thanked her feebly and reached for Peter’s hand.

As
Marjon
clomped down the stairs, a heavy dizziness washed over me.
 
I dropped my backpack on the floor and collapsed on the bed.
 

Peter placed his pack on the table, took off his socks and shoes, and lay beside me.
 
He turned me over onto my back and kissed my brow.
 
The room spun for several moments, then stopped and became almost too clear, the edges of objects falsely sharp as if a montage, cut out and pasted.
 
He held me silently.
 
When he let go I realized he had been squeezing me so tightly it almost hurt.
 
He rested his head on my chest and sighed.

“What?” I whispered.

He propped himself up on an elbow, lips pressed together, eyes half closed, the way he looked at me when he was trying to come up with a way to explain something I wasn’t getting.
 
“Hansel and Gretel,” he said, falling back on his pillow.

“You think we’re being fattened up by an evil witch?”

“Something
like
that.
 
Don’t you find it strange they’re so friendly?”

“That’s the way Europeans are.”
 
I combed his thick dark hair with my fingers, loving the soft weight of it.
 
“When I went to Italy with my family as a kid, total strangers bought us gelato and showed us around.
 
They adored my little sister.
 
People came out of stores and cafes to play with her.”

“That was Italy.
 
This is Holland.”

“Doesn’t matter.
 
It’s the same.”

“No it isn’t!
 
Europeans hate Americans now.”

“No they don’t, Peter.
 
They know Americans don’t all agree with our government’s policies.
 
I’m tired.
 
Let’s go to sleep.”

“What about those guys?
 
Didn’t you find them strange?”

“The Moroccans?
 
No, I thought they were nice.
 
Can we go to bed, please?”
 
I roused myself, peeled off my clothes, and dove under the covers.
 
The bed was incredibly soft, the down comforter like whipped cream, the thump, thump of the windmill like a relaxing heartbeat.
 
I felt as if I were in the stomach of an ancient benevolent beast, safe, hidden, protected.
 
My muscles became jelly, sinking, drifting.
 

Peter sat for a moment, completely still.
 
He then undressed, folding his clothes neatly on a chair.
 
Before he crawled into bed, he removed something from the wall and placed it on the nightstand.

#

The sun poured through a small paned window high above the bed and woke me.
 
I imagined for a moment I was Anne Frank, taking refuge from the Nazis, hidden by the Dutch resistance in a windmill.
 
I realized I must have dreamed of her.
  

As I blinked awake and stretched my neck, I noticed an iron hand tool—a hoe or something—on the nightstand beside Peter.
 
I smiled—my hero.

Peter and I had met as freshmen at Canterbury College near Philadelphia.
 
It was one of those highly academic liberal arts schools that delay adulthood for the well-to-do and prepare them for virtually no job whatsoever.
 
I was an art history major.
 
Peter, smarter and more practical than I, had a dual major, political science and engineering.
 
He was tall and lean, with a mop of straight dark hair.
 
I was crazy about him from the moment I saw him, his aloof manner, his equestrian bearing, his warm white smile that contradicted every other impression he made.
 
I had this notion at the time that if you listened hard enough you could hear the soundtrack that went with a person.
 
I thought of myself as ragtime or a Nino Rota theme from a
Fellini
movie.
 
Peter was the score of an epic saga, like
Doctor
Zhivago
or
Lawrence of Arabia
.
 
He had all the nervous energy of youth, bound with a deliberateness and dignity that tantalized me.
 
I was a popular sort of girl—I had never bothered going after a guy before—but something made me beat my wings around his flame, my heart fluttering, appearing where I knew he would be, making sure he saw me, but careful not to make eye contact.
 
One day he spoke to me while picking up his mail.
 
We had been together every day since.
 
I suppose I felt I had found my life partner.
 
I never thought about dating anyone else again.
  

The block of sun crept up on the pillow and across Peter’s face.
 
I adored watching him sleep, when he couldn’t resist, or analyze, or make me feel foolish.
 
But even in his sleep, he didn’t appear vulnerable—like a classical marble bust of a Roman orator that seems to own a power that protects it from vandals.
 
I studied him—the lightness of his skin where he shaved, the tiny gap in his eyebrow where he had a scar, the faint creases by his eyes that one day would be character lines, a rash of red by his nostrils, his long curly eyelashes—details I knew by heart.
 
Yet in a way he seemed a total stranger.
   

He woke—a twitch of his shoulders, a rounding of his cheeks,
a
flare of his nostrils.
 
He saw me through his eyelashes and pulled me to him.
 
As we made love—a silent lazy early morning kind of lovemaking, a function of his waking erection more than any emotion or passion—I felt a sense of doom I had never known before,
an intimation
that however much I loved him I would do something stupid to lose him.
 

“I’m starving,” he announced moments after he came.
 
He kicked the tangled sheets off his body as if an alarm had gone off.
 
“What about you?”

“Famished,” I whispered.
 
I was desperately hungry.
 
I wanted to eat until my skin was tight.
 
Until it hurt.

We pulled on our jeans, poured water from the white pitcher into a bowl, and splashed our faces.
 
We tiptoed down the stairs and burst through the door.
 
Dew sparkled on the grass.
 
The tulips were translucent—almost glowing—in the early morning light.
 

We crossed the yard, creaked open the door to the kitchen, and walked in.
 
I could’ve sworn I smelled coffee brewing as we walked through the garden, yet the kitchen was still.
 
Wine glasses, stained pink and waiting to be added to the dishwasher, sat on the counter.

“Do you think we should start breakfast?” Peter asked.

“I don’t think
Marjon
would mind.
 
I have to pee first.”

“Me, too,” he said grinning.
 
The race was on.

The bathroom was across the living room at the base of the stairs leading up to the second story bedrooms.
 
We raced each other across the kitchen and down the hall—I was in the lead—giggling as I fended off Peter’s groping hands.
 

I turned into the living room and froze.
 
I gasped, grabbing behind for Peter,
then
slid to the floor.
 
He stared silently for a moment, then pried away my fingers and stepped past into the room.

#

Six bodies lay dead.
 
Ribbons of dried blood ran from one maroon puddle to another.

Marjon
, on her stomach, lay by the front door.
 
Nicholas was in the hallway, as if coming to help.
 
The Moroccan-looking guys were on the couch where they had been sitting when we went to bed.
 
The blond couple lay on their backs in the middle of the floor.
 
Each of the six bodies had been shot in either the head or chest.
 
Each throat was slit from one ear to the other, almost decapitating them.

Peter was so calm my hysteria disappeared at once.
 
He stepped around the blood and squatted by one of the Moroccans.
 
After a few moments he stood and moved his eyes around the room from one body to the next.

“Peter,” I whispered, pointing at Nicholas.

He walked over and pushed Nicholas onto his back with his foot.
 
A dagger pinned a note to the middle of his chest.
 
Peter looked at the note for a long moment without reaching for it.
 
I began to get up, but Peter shook his head, warning me.
 
He walked to the front door and removed a brown scarf from a peg on a coat rack.
 
Stepping carefully around the bodies, he wiped off the table and chairs where each of us had sat during
dinner,
and the armrests of the chair in the living room where I had eaten dessert.
 
Then he pulled me up by the elbows and led me back through the kitchen.
 
“Go pack our things,” he said.
 
“Wipe down all the surfaces.
 
Bring me our bedding.
 
Now.”
 
As I stumbled out the back door, he added the last of the dishes to the dishwasher and turned it on.
 

Within twenty minutes, we were walking briskly down the road.
 
After a half mile, we climbed onto a crowded bus headed toward the city center, where we transferred to a train to
Schiphol
Airport.

We were both in shock.
 
The gears in my brain jammed, my mind shut down.
 
The only thing I remember feeling was a panicky sense of relief, as if we had just missed slamming into a bus on a hairpin turn.