A Widow for One Year (68 page)

The girlfriend of
that
moment had given Harry back his gift; it was of no sentimental value to
her
. At the moment Harry didn’t have a girlfriend, nor did he imagine that he would ever be inclined to bestow his cross of Lorraine on another woman—even if there
were
another woman.

Harry Hoekstra had never suffered from a shortage of girlfriends. The problem, if it was a problem, was that he always had this or that girl for only a moment. He was not a libertine. He never cheated on his girls—he had them only one at a time. But whether they left him or he left them, they didn’t last.

Now, stalling at the task of cleaning out his desk, Sergeant Hoekstra—at fifty-seven and fully intending to retire later in the fall, when he would be fifty-eight—wondered if he would always be “ unattached.” Surely his attitude toward women, and theirs toward him, was at least partially job-related. And at least part of the reason why Harry had opted for an early retirement was that he wanted to see if his assumption was true.

He’d been eighteen when he’d first gone to work as a cop on the street; at fifty-eight, he would have put in forty years of service. Naturally Sergeant Hoekstra would be given a slightly smaller pension than if he waited until the standard retirement age of sixty-one, but as an unmarried man with no children, he wasn’t in need of a bigger pension. And the men in Harry’s family had all died fairly young.

While Harry was in excellent health, he was taking no chances on his genetic predisposition. He wanted to travel; he also wanted to try living in the country. Although he’d read a lot of travel books, he’d taken few trips. And although Harry liked travel books, he liked novels still more.

Looking at his desk, which he was loath to open, Sergeant Hoekstra thought: It’s about time for a new novel by Ruth Cole, isn’t it? It must have been five years since he’d read
Not for Children
. How long did it take her to write a novel, anyway?

Harry had read all of Ruth’s novels in English, for Harry’s English was quite good. And in the streets of the red-light district, in “the little walls,” English was increasingly becoming the language of the prostitutes and their customers—
bad
English was the new language of
de
Wallen
. (Bad English, Harry thought, would be the language of the next world.) And as a man whose next life was about to begin at fifty-eight, Sergeant Hoekstra, a soon-to-be-retired civil servant, wanted
his
English to be good.

The Reader

Sergeant Hoekstra’s women usually complained about his indifference to shaving; that he was clearly not vain may have attracted the women in the first place, but eventually they took his lack of attention to his face as a sign that he was indifferent to
them
. When the stubble on his face began to resemble a beard, he shaved; Harry didn’t like beards. Sometimes he would shave every other day, sometimes only once a week; other times he would get up in the night and shave, so that the woman he was with would wake up to a different-looking man in the morning.

Harry exhibited a similar indifference toward his clothes. Harry’s job was walking. He wore sturdy, comfortable running shoes; jeans were the only pants of necessity. He had short, bandy legs, a flat stomach, and the nonexistent bum of a young boy. From the waist down, he was built a lot like Ted Cole—compact, all function—but his upper body was more developed. He went to a gym every day—he had the well-rounded chest of a weight lifter—but because he generally wore long-sleeved, loose-fitting shirts, the casual observer never knew how muscular he was.

These shirts were the only colorful part of his wardrobe; most of his women commented that they were
too
colorful, or at least too busy. He liked shirts “with a lot going on,” he used to say. They were the kind of shirts you could never wear with a tie, but Harry almost never wore a tie, anyway.

He rarely wore his police uniform, either. He was as familiar to everyone in
de Wallen
as the most flamboyant and long-in-residence of the window prostitutes were; he walked the district for at least two or three hours every working day or night.

For a jacket, he preferred windbreakers or something water-repellent—always in dark, solid colors. He had an old leather jacket that was lined with wool flannel for the cold weather, but all his jackets, like his shirts, were loose-fitting. He didn’t want his Walther ninemillimeter, which he carried in a shoulder holster, to make a visible lump. Only if it was raining hard would he wear a baseball cap; he didn’t like hats, and he never wore gloves. One of Harry’s ex-girlfriends had described his mode of dress as “basic thug.”

His hair was dark brown but turning gray, and Harry was as indifferent to it as he was to shaving. He had it cut too short; then he let it grow too long.

As for his police uniform, Harry had worn it much more frequently in his first four years, when he’d served in the west of Amsterdam. He still had his apartment there, not because he was too lazy to move but because he liked the luxury of having
two
functioning fireplaces—one in his bedroom. His chief indulgences were firewood and books; Harry loved reading by a fire, and he owned so many books that it would have been a chore for him to move
anywhere
. Besides, he liked bicycling to work and home again; he believed in putting some distance between himself and
de Wallen
. As familiar as he was with the red-light district, and as recognizable a figure as he was in its crowded streets—for
de Wallen
was his real office, “the little walls” were the well-known drawers of his
real
desk—Harry Hoekstra was a loner.

What Harry’s women also complained about was how much he remained
apart
. He would rather read a book than listen. And regarding talk: Harry would rather build a fire and go to bed and watch the light flickering on the walls and on the ceiling. He also liked to read in bed.

Harry wondered if only
his
women were jealous of books. It was their principal preposterousness, he believed. How could they be jealous of
books
? He found this all the more preposterous in the cases of those women he’d met in bookstores. Harry had met a lot of women in bookstores; others, although fewer lately, he’d met in his gym.

Harry’s gym was the one on the Rokin where Ruth Cole’s publisher, Maarten Schouten, had taken her. At fifty-seven, Sergeant Hoekstra was a little old for most of the women who went there. (Young women in their twenties telling him that he was in terrific shape “for a guy his age” would never be the high point of his day.) But he’d recently dated one of the women who worked at the gym, an aerobics instructor. Harry hated aerobics; he was strictly a weight lifter. In a day, Sergeant Hoekstra walked more than most people walked in a week—or in a month. And he rode his bicycle everywhere. What did he need aerobics for?

The instructor had been an attractive woman in her late thirties, but she was given to missionary zeal; her failure to convert Harry to her exercise of choice had hurt her feelings, and no one in Harry’s recent memory had so resented his reading. The aerobics instructor had not been a reader, and—like all of Harry’s women—she’d refused to believe that Harry had never had sex with a prostitute. Surely he’d at least been tempted.

He was “tempted” all the time—although, with each passing year, the temptation grew less. In his almost forty years as a cop, he’d been “tempted” to kill a couple of people, too. But Sergeant Hoekstra
hadn’t
killed anybody, and he hadn’t had sex with a prostitute.

Yet there was no question that Harry’s girlfriends were uniformly uneasy about his relationships with those women in the windows— and, in ever-increasing numbers, on the streets. He was a man of the streets, Harry was, which may have immeasurably contributed to his fondness for books and fireplaces; that he’d been a man of the streets for almost forty years
definitely
contributed to his desire to try living in the country. Harry Hoekstra had had it with cities—with
any
city.

Only one of his girlfriends had liked to read as much as Harry did, but she read the wrong books; among the women Harry had slept with, she was also the closest to being a prostitute. She was a lawyer who did volunteer work for a prostitutes’ organization, a liberal feminist who’d told Harry that she “identified” with prostitutes.

The organization for prostitutes’ rights was called De Rode Draad (The Red Thread); at the time Harry met the lawyer, The Red Thread enjoyed an uneasy alliance with the police. After all, both the police and The Red Thread were concerned for the prostitutes’ safety. Harry always thought that it should have been a more successful alliance than it was.

But, from the beginning, the board members of The Red Thread had rubbed him the wrong way: in addition to the more militant prostitutes and ex-prostitutes, there were those women (like his lawyer friend) who’d struck him as
impractical
feminists—concerned mainly with making the organization an emancipation movement for prostitutes. Harry had believed, from the beginning, that The Red Thread should be less concerned with manifestos and more concerned with protecting the prostitutes from the dangers of their profession. Yet he’d preferred the prostitutes and the feminists to the
other
members of the board—the labor-union types, and what Harry called the “how-to-get-subsidized people.”

The lawyer’s name was Natasja Frederiks. Two thirds of the women who worked for The Red Thread were prostitutes or ex-prostitutes; at their meetings, the nonprostitutes (like Natasja) were not allowed to speak. The Red Thread paid only two and a half salaries to four people; everyone else involved there was a volunteer. Harry had been a volunteer, too.

In the late eighties, there’d been more interaction between the police and The Red Thread than there was now. For one thing, the organization had failed to attract the foreign prostitutes—not to mention the “illegals”—and there were hardly any
Dutch
prostitutes left in the windows or on the streets.

Natasja Frederiks wasn’t doing volunteer work for The Red Thread anymore; she’d become disillusioned, too. (Natasja now called herself an “ex-idealist.”) She and Harry had first met at a regular Thursday-afternoon meeting for first-time prostitutes. Harry thought these meetings were a good idea.

He sat in the back of the room and never spoke unless asked a direct question; he was introduced to the first-time prostitutes as “one of the more sympathetic members of the police force,” and the new girls were encouraged to talk with him after the usual business of the meeting was over. As for the “usual business,” there was often an older prostitute who told the first-timers what to be careful of. One of the old-timers was Dolores de Ruiter, or “Red” Dolores, as Harry and everyone in the redlight district knew her. Rooie Dolores had been a hooker in
de Wallen,
and later on the Bergstraat, a lot longer than Natasja Frederiks had been a lawyer.

What Rooie always told the new girls was to make sure the customer had a hard-on. She wasn’t kidding. “If the guy’s in the room with you— I mean the
second
he puts his foot in the door—he should have an erection.” If he didn’t, Rooie warned the new girls, maybe he hadn’t come for sex. “And never shut your eyes,” Rooie always admonished the new girls. “Some guys like you to shut your eyes. Just
don’t
.”

There’d been nothing unpleasant or even disappointing in his sexual relationship with Natasja Frederiks, but what Harry most vividly remembered was how they had argued about books. Natasja had been born to argue, and Harry didn’t like to argue; but he enjoyed having a girlfriend who read as much as he did, even if she read the wrong books. Natasja read nonfiction of the change-the-world variety; she read
tracts
. They were mostly books of leftist-leaning wishful thinking—Harry didn’t believe that the world (or human nature) could be changed. Harry’s job was to understand and accept the existing world; maybe he made the world a little safer, he liked to think.

He read novels because he found in them the best descriptions of human nature. The novelists Harry favored never suggested that even the worst human behavior was alterable. They might morally disapprove of this or that character, but novelists were not world-changers; they were just storytellers with better-than-average stories to tell, and the good ones told stories about believable characters. The novels Harry loved were complexly interwoven stories about real people.

He didn’t enjoy detective novels or so-called thrillers. (Either he figured out the plot too soon or the characters were implausible.) He would never have marched into a bookstore demanding to be shown the classics or the newest literary fiction, but he ended up reading more “classics” and more “literary” novels than any other kind— although they were all novels of a fairly conventional narrative structure.

Harry didn’t object to a book being funny, but if the writer was
only
comic (or merely satirical), Harry felt let down. He liked social realism, but not if the writer was without
any
imagination—not if the story wasn’t enough of a story to keep him guessing about what was going to happen next. (A novel about a divorced woman who spends a weekend at a resort hotel, where she sees a man she
imagines
having an affair with—but she doesn’t; she just goes home again—was not enough of a novel to satisfy Sergeant Hoekstra.)

Natasja Frederiks said that Harry’s taste in novels was “escapist,” but Harry adamantly believed it was Natasja who was escaping the world with her idiotic nonfiction of idle wishfulness about how to
change
it!

Among contemporary novelists, Sergeant Hoekstra’s favorite was Ruth Cole. Natasja and Harry had argued about Ruth Cole more than about any other author. The lawyer who’d volunteered her services to The Red Thread because she said she “identified” with prostitutes asserted that Ruth Cole’s stories were “too bizarre”; the lawyer who was a champion of rights for prostitutes, but who was not allowed to speak at any of the organization’s meetings, claimed that the plots of Ruth Cole’s novels were “too unlikely.” What’s more, Natasja didn’t like plot. The
real
world (which she so fervently sought to change) was without a discernible plot of its own, Natasja said.