Eventually, I went to the desk, my eyes still on the shelves, and she asked if she could help me. I shook my head, I said that I was only browsing and asked if she was the owner of the shop. She laughed, a loud and indecorous sound. Far from it, she said and smiled. I asked how long she had worked at the shop. Three years, she said. It wasn’t a bad job, it was quite interesting and the customers were colorful—antiquarian books drew a certain kind of clientele, although it wasn’t only antiquarian volumes, they sold all kinds of things. Then, because she was silent and I wished to prolong the conversation, I said that I was looking for a history of the city, something that would make a nice gift.
She rose and retrieved several volumes, opening them to display beautiful maps and foldout plates, as I examined the books she said they ranged in price from a hundred euros to considerably more. I asked her when the volumes had been published and she said they were mostly nineteenth century. I touched the morocco binding, they were beautiful things, and although it was more money than I had to spend, I told the woman I would buy one of the books, I thought I might give it to Adriaan.
As she was ringing up the purchase, I asked her who the owner was. She seemed surprised by the question and I said I only asked because the bookshop had a great deal of personality. The statement was inane and yet it was not untrue, you could feel the imprint of the person behind the shop. She said the owner was a man called Anton de Rijk. Quickly, I asked if he was often at the shop and she said that normally he was, but he had unfortunately been called away, when exactly he would be back she couldn’t say. I thought she seemed uneasy and yet I couldn’t help but ask, Nothing serious, I hope? And after a pause, she shook her head, not in the least, I had only to return in a week or two and I would find him there. A week or two, she repeated, or possibly three. Abruptly she held out the packaged book. I took it from her and thanked her for her help.
I left the shop, the package in my hands. I hardly knew why I had ventured in, or why I had asked so many questions about De Rijk. A week or two, she had said, or possibly three. I had been obscurely relieved to hear this. When I returned to the apartment I unwrapped the book and held it in my hands, it was strange to see it here, in this room. I placed it on the coffee table and then picked it up and moved it to one of the bookshelves in the living room. I saw that after all it wasn’t entirely right, it stood out and looked like a foreign object, with its ornate binding and rubbed edges. In the end I didn’t know who it was for. I sat down on the sofa. I missed Adriaan, and for a brief moment I felt stranded in the enormous apartment, as if I had been left behind.
I slept poorly and when I woke the following morning, it was no longer the weekend and it was later than usual. There was no question of returning to my apartment to change, I showered and then put on the same clothes, for the third day now. On a whim, I opened the door to one of the wardrobes in the bedroom, inside was a vast array of pressed shirts and suits, more than one man could reasonably wear. They were a revelation to me in their excess, so many shirts and so carefully arranged. I knew that a cleaner regularly attended to the house, not a cleaner but a housekeeper, who did the shopping and restocked the cupboards when they were bare, who no doubt fetched the dry cleaning and placed the shirts in the wardrobe after removing their plastic covers. I had run into this woman once, outside the apartment, and from the way she had both ignored and scrutinized me, I knew that she was someone who had been in the family’s employ long before Gaby’s departure.
I left the apartment without tidying up—what days did the housekeeper come to the apartment? Adriaan did not say in his note—locked the door behind me, and carefully placed the keys inside my bag. I boarded the bus around the corner, which quickly reached the shore, and then proceeded parallel to the rolling dunes, in the direction of the Court. Perhaps ten minutes later the bus passed the Detention Center where I had been three nights earlier. In all the months that I had worked at the Court I had only been aware of the Detention Center in principle, I had never imagined it within the context or geography of the city. It had remained as abstract as the photographs displayed on the information boards in the lobby of the Court, photographs that failed to communicate the brutal reality of the place I had seen only the other night—a dark enclosure, standing in utter contrast to the light-filled transparency of the Court itself, a building defined by its density.
By daylight, the Detention Center was less sinister than it had appeared by night, and there was something almost matter-of-fact about its presence on the side of the road. The bus did not stop outside the Detention Center and I saw the wall and outline of the building only fleetingly through the window, it was simply another one of those buildings that exist in the landscape in which you live, of which you never take real notice and whose purpose you never know. There are prisons and far worse all around us, in New York there was a black site above a bustling food court, the windows darkened and the rooms soundproofed so that the screaming never reached the people sitting below. People eating their sandwiches and sipping their cappuccinos, who had no idea of what was taking place directly above them, no idea of the world in which they were living.