It was in MacIntyre’s pub that I met Bastiaan for the first time. I noticed him when I arrived, sitting at a corner table with a glass of Jupiler, reading a Dutch edition of one of Maude’s novels. Although I didn’t keep track of the various languages into which her work had been translated, and certainly didn’t benefit from any royalties, all of which went directly to Charles, I understood from the occasional retrospective newspaper article that they were widely available around the world and that her work was now being studied at many universities. I had seen copies of Like to the Lark at a train station in Madrid, watched a stage adaptation of The Codicil of Agnès Fontaine in an underground theater in Prague and sat near Ingmar Bergman in a café in Stockholm while he made notes in the margins of My Daughter’s Ghost, three years before his triumphant adaptation of that novel at the Kungliga Operan. It seemed that her reputation was only growing as year followed year. Maude would have been mortified.
Bastiaan was utterly engrossed in the book when I noticed him and was only a few pages from the end. The closing pages, an epilogue, reunited a man and woman in a London hotel decades after the end of the Great War in a testy encounter that provided my favorite scene from any of my adoptive mother’s books, and I sat at the bar, drinking a beer while trying not to appear too obvious in my interest. When he turned the last page, he put the book down on the table and stared at it for a few moments before taking his glasses off and rubbing the bridge of his nose. I was aware that I was ogling him but I couldn’t help myself. He wore his dark hair shorter than the general style of the time, had about two days of stubble and was ridiculously good-looking. I guessed that he was around the same age as me, perhaps a year or two younger, and I felt the familiar pang that overcame me whenever I encountered someone so attractive that there seemed to be little possibility of our ever making a connection.
A moment later, however, he glanced over and smiled. I told myself to stand up, to go to his table, to sit down with him—God knows I had an obvious conversation starter with the book that he’d been reading—but for some reason I turned away. And then, before I could gather my courage, he stood up and to my frustration waved a hand toward the barman before leaving.
“Your timidity is going to be the death of you, Cyril,” said Jack Smoot, placing a fresh drink before me.
“I’m not timid,” I said timidly.
“Of course you are. You’re nervous of being rejected. I can see it in your face. You don’t have much experience of men, do you?”
“Not much,” I admitted. Sex, yes, I stopped myself from saying, but men, no.
“This isn’t Dublin, you know,” he continued. “This is Amsterdam. If you see someone you like, you go over and say hello. You talk to them. Especially if it seems that they like you too. And Bastiaan likes you, I can tell.”
“Who’s Bastiaan?” I asked.
“The man you keep staring at.”
“I don’t think he even noticed me,” I said, wishing that he would contradict me.
“Trust me, he noticed you.”
I returned to MacIntyre’s the following evening, hoping he might be there, but to my disappointment the table in the corner was empty and I sat down and carried on with De wereld volgens Garp, which I was reading for the second time—this time in Dutch—in an attempt to improve my language skills. About twenty minutes later, however, he arrived, glanced around the room and went to the bar to order two beers before sitting down opposite me.
“I came back hoping you might be here,” he told me by way of introduction.
“I did too,” I said.
“I thought if you weren’t going to speak to me, then I should speak to you.”
I looked directly into his eyes and somehow already knew that seated across from me was the most important man I would ever know in my life. More important than Charles Avery. More important than Julian Woodbead. The only one whom I would ever love and who would ever love me in return.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a little shy, that’s all.”
“You can’t be shy in Amsterdam,” he said, echoing Smoot’s words of the previous night. “It’s against the law. You can get locked up for less.”
“I’d spend a lot of time in prison if that was the case,” I told him.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“Cyril Avery.”
“Your accent. You’re Irish?” His face fell a little. “Are you just visiting?”
“No, I live here,” I told him. “I’m here to stay.”
“You work here?”
“At the Anne Frank House. I’m a curator there.”
He hesitated briefly. “OK,” he said.
“And you?” I asked. “What do you do?”
“I’m a doctor,” he told me. “A research scientist, to be more precise. Communicable diseases.”
“What, like smallpox and polio and things like that?”
He paused for a moment. “That sort of thing, yes. Although it’s not quite the area I work in.”
“What area do you work in?”
Before he could reply, Smoot appeared, pulling over a seat and grinning at us like some diligent matchmaker whose work was done.
“You found each other then?” he asked, grinning at us both. “I knew you would eventually.”
“Jack here is always telling me that Ireland is a terrible place,” said Bastiaan. “Can it be true? I’ve never been there.”
“It’s not that bad,” I said, surprised at my willingness to defend my homeland. “Jack hasn’t been home in a long time, that’s all.”
“It’s not home,” said Smoot. “And neither have you.”
“When were you last there?” asked Bastiaan.
“Seven years ago.”
“It’s not a good place for people like us,” said Smoot.
“People like us?” asked Bastiaan, turning to him. “What, bar owners, museum curators and doctors?”
“Take a look at this,” said Smoot, ignoring the question as he lifted his eyepatch to reveal a clump of scar tissue across the skin where his eye should have been. “This is what Ireland does to people like us. And this too,” he added, raising his cane and rapping it hard, three times, against the floor, making the other patrons turn their heads in our direction. “I haven’t walked easily on two legs in thirty-five years. Fucking Ireland.”
I gave a deep sigh; I wasn’t in the mood for Smoot’s bitterness that night. I glared at him, hoping he would take the hint to leave, but Bastiaan leaned over in interest and examined his wounds for a moment or two.
“Who did this to you, my friend?” he asked quietly.
“Some fat old bastard from Ballincollig,” said Smoot, his face darkening at the memory. “He took exception to the fact that his son came up to Dublin to be with me and so he followed him up one day, waited outside our flat until he could get in and then bashed the boy’s brains in against the wall before turning his fury on me. I would have bled to death if there hadn’t been someone else there that night.”
Bastiaan shook his head in disgust. “And what happened to him?” he asked. “Did he go to jail?”
“He did not,” said Smoot, sitting up straight, and I could tell that the pain was almost too much for him, even from a distance of so many years. “The jury let him off, but no great surprises there. A jury of twelve other fat old Irish bastards who said that his son was mentally disordered and so he had the right to do what he did to him. And to me. If you want to know what he stole from me, just take a look at the wall there.” He nodded toward a photograph nailed to the stonework next to us; I hadn’t even noticed it until now. “Seán MacIntyre. The boy I loved. The boy he murdered.” I stared at it, two men standing next to each other, one smiling at the camera, the other—a younger Smoot—glaring at it, while to their right, the figure of a woman was split down the middle by the frame. “A couple of months after that picture was taken, Seán was in his grave.”