under one arm and a large leather weekend bag under the other. He sank to his knees, the soft coat touching the tiles. He opened the machine and put his coloureds and his whites in together. The back of his neck was freshly shaven, still a little red, just been to the barber’s. He stared at the machine, she stared at him. She wondered whether he had a piano.
He sighed and she wanted to say: give me your washing, love, come here, let me do it. As though she knew she would never see him this hopeless again, that it had to happen now, otherwise the man would just disappear from her life with his soft coat, his shaven neck, and his piano.
She began to speak to him very quietly, so that nobody would hear that she was helping him.
‘You need to take out all the really white things. They’ll discolour.’
He looked at her but didn’t do anything. She felt it was an invasion of privacy to touch his washing but did it anyway. She pulled two white towels and a T-shirt out of the machine.
‘Anything else?’
He slowly shook his head, no.
‘Go for the coloured wash option at forty degrees. Here. Forty is always good. Or is there any wool here?’ He shook his head again. ‘Do you have any detergent with you? Or do you want the stuff from here?’
‘From here?’
‘It’s horrible.’ She took a box of washing powder out of her bag. ‘Use mine then. Two scoops. In the drawer there. Right-hand compartment, left is for prewash.’
He didn’t take the packet, so she filled the compartment with washing powder. She put her own softener in as well. He carried on watching her while she worked.
Instead of thanking her, he said, ‘You’re good at that, helping me, you’ve got didactic skills, you should do something with that.’
The way he was trying to turn the tables moved her. It made him even more helpless—a man unable to accept help.
He stood up and went to sit on a bench against the wall. He left his book in his lap, and opened the newspaper. She didn’t tell him that he could simply give the owner an extra euro and he would put everything in the dryer and fold it up afterwards so that you didn’t need to sit here and wait. She sat down next to him and asked for a section of the paper.
‘Which part do you want?’
She didn’t want to say that it didn’t matter, so she said, ‘Business please.’
She remained silent and felt his body warmth, smelled a faint whiff of aftershave. She pretended to read the stock-market report and tilted her head slightly to be closer to him. She wanted to rest her head on his lap, on that woollen coat.
She would have liked to have said, ‘If you want, I’ll stay home tonight.’ She would never have to go anywhere again. She thought about her friends and how she’d be happy to swap them all for a man with a piano.
Even though she dried and folded her own washing that afternoon, she gave the owner a euro afterwards, along with her phone number, so that he’d call her the next time the helpless man came to do his laundry. She had loved him instantly, conclusively. So here he is, she thought, like a mother looking at her newborn baby, so here he is. There was nothing more to be done.
That second time in the launderette, she deliberately hadn’t taken much washing with her.
She nodded at her bag. ‘If it wasn’t so intimate,’ she said, ‘we could just put everything in one machine.’ She smiled at him girlishly, giving him the opportunity to play the conquering hero. He took her bag from her firmly and put her washing into his machine. Later on he’d say it had been his idea.
The first time they arranged to do something together, he simply announced it to her, ‘We’re going out for dinner. I’m paying.’ It sounded like a gift. She was amused that he was ordering her around like that, and because she found it amusing, she didn’t mind being ordered around.
He picked her up, he was wearing a suit. In the restaurant she tried to see what kind of body was hidden under the jacket. She loved his body before she’d even seen it. He told her about his divorce, which hadn’t officially come through yet. He didn’t have a piano. He loved the fact that she spoke Russian. He asked her to translate all the names of the dishes into Russian. She was much younger than him, but luckily there was one thing she could do that he couldn’t. Without the Russian, it would never have amounted to much.
The first time they fucked, that evening, in his bed, in the small apartment above his practice, she looked at him, ‘with large, frightened eyes’, as he would later recall. It was fast. It hurt and she thought: if I don’t think of this as pain, it won’t matter if it hurts.
He even asked her, ‘Am I hurting you?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘You look as though I am hurting you; that’s not good.’
She would try not to look like that.
‘Why are you studying Russian?’ he asked her, and she told him how it had started: that she’d read an interview with someone who talked about a book by Vera Panova and called it ‘a friendly book about nice people.’ The words had made her feel extraordinarily calm, as though she’d only just noticed that she was restless. The calmness was so overwhelming that she could no longer think about anything except the calmness, and the calmness became an obsession and turned back into restlessness again. She’d searched feverishly for the book, but it didn’t seem to be translated into Dutch. One thing had led to another and now she was a third-year Russian student. As it turned out, the book had been translated into Dutch. They’d given the wrong title in the interview.
He’d liked the story. Back then he didn’t know that the story would just fizzle out, that after three years she was still studying Russian because of that single line: ‘a friendly book about nice people.’ There should have been other reasons by now. She was like an old man who, after forty years of marriage, says something like: I married her because she had such beautiful hair.
Hans took her to museums and art galleries. They drove for hours for tiny exhibitions. He took her to restaurants where she was the youngest customer. There they’d drink lots of different wines, one after another. It was a way of drinking she was unfamiliar with. Drinking had always been a straight road, downing a lot of the same thing like you were learning a new song. Carry on at a steady pace, until you got there, until you understood it and thought: actually this song’s not that difficult, did I really need all that time, all those glasses? The business with all those different wines was a confusing slalom through her head.
He asked her things, constantly: What are you thinking about now? What’s going on? What did you feel? What does that look like?
At first it overwhelmed her. Often she would open her mouth and not say a single thing, afraid to put her thoughts into words. Until every answer seemed acceptable to him. Not a single thought was considered strange. It was new, as though she was speaking Dutch for the first time.
He bought her complicated clothes: blouses with horizontal pleats. He said everything suited her. And she thought: I could be anybody, but this is who I’ve become. She studied less and less.
It was nice when he accompanied her to her father and stepmother’s. They got along well, he took over, she could just sit back and watch.
