“I think they expected you to read for only a few minutes,” I told her. “And then perhaps to answer some of their questions.”
“The novel is four hundred and thirty-four pages long,” she replied, shaking her head. “If they want to understand it, then they must hear the entire thing. Or, preferably, read the entire thing. How can they possibly get a sense of it from a mere ten minutes? The time it takes to smoke three cigarettes! Philistines! Barbarians! Boors! Never again, Cyril, I promise you that. Never again.” And on this matter, she was as good as her word.
Ignac, of course, made no such errors of judgment in Ljubljana. By now he was experienced on stages, knew exactly how long an audience was prepared to listen and had a good sense of how to charm them with a few well-chosen and self-deprecating quips during the interview that followed. His publisher had lined up an enormous amount of newspaper, radio and television interviews and by the third afternoon, when his writerly responsibilities came to an end, he suggested a trip to Maribor in the northeast of the country for the following day.
“What’s in Maribor?” I asked, consulting the guidebook that I had clung to over the previous few days as tightly as Lucy Honeychurch had to her Baedeker.
“It’s where I was born,” he told me. “Where my family comes from.”
“Really?” I said, surprised, for I had never heard him mention the town before. “And you’re sure you want to go back there?”
“Not entirely,” he said with a shrug. “But I think it might be good for me.”
“Why?” I asked.
He took a long time to answer. “It’s not as if this will be my only trip back to Slovenia,” he said. “I’ll come again but probably not for a long time. Not until the children are old enough to see it. And when that day comes, I don’t want to be still dealing with the past. I think I should see Maribor now, with you, and then lay it to rest forever.”
And so we went, renting a car and driving north, eventually finding ourselves on the cold, run-down streets where he had spent his childhood and adolescence. He was quiet as he led me through the town, shortcuts and alleyways coming back to him without any hesitation, recalling shops and the houses of friends from his childhood. We passed a school that was boarded up, its facade covered in indecipherable graffiti, and another that had been built more recently but looked as if a strong wind might take it down. We ate lunch in a restaurant where the locals stared, recognizing their most famous son from newspaper articles and television reports, but seemed wary of approaching him, as if uncertain what his response might be. Only one person, a nine-year-old boy who had been sitting with his father reading a Floriak Ansen novel, came over, and when the pair spoke, before Ignac signed his book, it was in Slovene and I didn’t understand a word of it and asked no questions afterward. Finally, he took me down a cobblestoned lane that led to a tiny abandoned hut with boarded-up windows, a roof that was falling off, and he placed his hand flat on the front door, closing his eyes and breathing deeply, as if he was either trying to control his temper or prevent tears from falling.
“What is it?” I asked. “Where are we?”
“This is the one,” he said. “The house where I was born. Where I grew up.”
I stared at it. It was so small that I could scarcely imagine a single person living inside, let alone two adults and a child.
“There were just a couple of rooms,” he said, guessing what was going through my mind. “As a child, I slept in the bed with my parents. Then, after my father left, my mother made a nest for me on the floor. There was a toilet out the back. Nowhere to wash.”
I looked at him, uncertain of what to say. We had never spoken of his father since that night in Amsterdam twenty-one years earlier when Jack Smoot had stabbed him in the back.
“Do you want to go inside?” I asked. “If we pulled off some of these wooden beams—”
“No,” he said quickly. “No, I don’t want that. I just wanted to see it, that’s all.”
“What about your neighbors?” I asked, looking around. “Do you remember them?”
“Some. A lot will be dead by now.”
“And your friends?”
“I didn’t have many. I won’t be knocking on any doors.”
“Then let’s leave. You’ve seen it, let’s move on.”
“All right,” he said. “Do you want to go back to the hotel?”
“No, let’s go for a beer,” I said. “I feel like we should get drunk, don’t you?”
He smiled. “That’s exactly how I feel,” he said.
We wandered down the road and I suggested heading back into the center of the town where I had noticed some decent-looking pubs earlier but he said no, that there was a bar close by that he wanted to visit. When we reached it, I was surprised that it was nothing special, just a couple of tables placed on the street outside a delicatessen, but we sat down and ordered a couple of Slovenian lagers, and he seemed happy to be there. There was a strange atmosphere in the air between us, however, and I felt uncertain whether he wanted to be left in peace with his thoughts or would prefer to talk.
“Do you remember the first night that we met?” I asked him finally, recalling the evening that Bastiaan and I had discovered him lying on the street outside our apartment on Weesperplein, his dark hair bleached blond and a bruise discoloring the skin beneath his eye as a line of blood ran from his lip to his chin. “When we reached down to help you, it felt like picking up a frightened puppy who doesn’t know whether you’re going to feed it or beat it.”
“You know I was planning on robbing you?” he asked, smiling a little.
“You weren’t just planning it,” I reminded him. “You actually did it. You took my wallet the next morning, remember?”
“Oh that’s right,” he said. “I’d forgotten that.”
“Any chance I’ll ever see any of that money again?”
“Probably not,” he said, smiling. “But I’ll buy you dinner later if you like.”
“I was afraid you’d come in and kill us as we slept.”
“I would never have done that,” he said, looking a little offended. “But I thought that if I could sell some of your things then I might be able to get off the streets. Get away from my father. It was only after I ran away the next morning that I came up with a better plan. I brought your wallet back, hoping that you might let me stay.”
“You have Bastiaan to thank for that,” I told him, taking a sip from my beer and feeling the ache that built inside me whenever I recalled happy times between the two of us, times that seemed so long ago now. He had been dead for fourteen years by now; it was hard to believe it. “I thought he was crazy when he suggested it.”
“But still, you said yes.”
“He persuaded me.”
“I’m glad he did. I don’t know what would have become of me if he hadn’t.”
“Don’t underestimate your own strength,” I told him. “I think you would have been fine in the end.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“I wish he was here,” I said after a pause.
“I do too,” said Ignac. “The world is a fucked-up place.”