In the middle of lockdown, I felt trapped in my house, with the sensation of my days being erased, not lived through, not experienced.

I wandered around from room to room—this house, this haven, where I returned from trips to write in my study with its pastel walls and shaggy rugs.

The high foyer, the lingering lemony scent in the rooms, the reassuring off-and-on hum of central air.

I liked to sit out on the deck and watch the leaves turning gold in the fall in the beautiful preserve of trees that my mother called a forest.

Now the trees were bearing down on me, their branches hostile and pointy, shorn of leaves.

I dreamed of escape but I was too anxious even to walk down the slope of my driveway and check the mailbox.

One day I stood by the front door longing for a walk.

I had so often walked the nearby trail, lightly and swiftly and pumping my arms, sometimes slowing to savor a bird’s orange plume, or a tortoise on its toes, or other small treasures.

When I reemerged on the road, to a friendly wave from a neighbor driving past, I felt flush with accomplishment.

So precious now, that simple walk.

I looked for long minutes at my driveway, the wilting plants at its edges, the dead grass.

I unlocked the door to step outside, to breathe open-air air for the first time in weeks, but I hesitated, thinking of the woman in the news who got the virus even though all she did was crack a window.

And she lived in a spacious suburb too.

I locked the door without opening it.

How could I possibly be both sluggish and restless? But I was.

There were rumblings of an impending end; the protests on television against lockdown felt like gestures of reassurance, of the possibility of an ending.

I worried about Kadi.

She was losing weight; the slackening of her flesh aged her.

She was the only one whose video calls I still took.

She looked thinner on the screen, her clavicles sticking out, her cheeks sunken in.

Even though I saw only her face, I sensed the downcast air of her posture.

She was suffering.

Her face carried so much weight, the weight of unsolvable problems.

Her lawyers were coaching her on video calls, the prosecutors were questioning her on video calls.

I could barely imagine the intensity of it.

“Is it normal?”

I asked Zikora.

“Is it normal for the prosecutors to act as if they’re not on her side?”

“I’m guessing they just want to have a watertight case.”

“But should she be feeling so distrustful about them?”

“Chia, I’m a corporate lawyer.”

“It just feels wrong.”

“It can be a lot, but if they do it well it should be an easy win, never mind the rapist’s team of star lawyers.

If they make it about just that day.

What happened that day.

It’s tough to argue that a minutes-long consensual act happens in extraordinarily improbable circumstances.”

“I know!”

Zikora was finally sounding as I wanted her to, her neutral-lawyer cap put aside.

Often I imagined Kadi walking down the court steps in a halo, a spark again in her eyes.

If only the trial could begin right away.

“Kadi, you know there’s a woman in France, a White woman, who said he did the same thing to her,” I said.

Kadi shrugged, uninterested.

“I don’t know.”

I watched the woman on television, slim and sensitive, speaking with the courage that truth can bring.

She had gone to interview him in an apartment and he grabbed her, and she went from asking a question to wrestling him away, her jeans already savagely undone.

She was impressive.

I felt a new sadness for Kadi that she had felt herself undeserving of the right to fight him off with her full might.

Omelogor said once that she wished Kadi had clamped down her teeth as hard as she possibly could.

—

LaShawn sent a text to say, My mom’s gone.

I can’t believe it.

LaShawn’s mother.

I spent Thanksgiving with them in my senior year of college, and she told me of her time in the Peace Corps in the sixties; she had traveled across West Africa and loved being in the motherland, except that everyone told her not to chew fufu before swallowing.

What was the point of swallowing without chewing?

“What’s the point of fufu?”

she would ask me each time I saw her after that, and we would both laugh.

She introduced me to sweet potato pie.

She raised four children in a White town in Georgia and kept them home from school on Martin Luther King Day every year, even though Georgia did not recognize the holiday.

Now she was gone.

A vile virus determined to wipe away a generation too soon.

I called LaShawn and when I heard her voice I burst into tears, saying, “I’m so sorry, LaShawn, I don’t know what to say.”

“She got sick and just died on me, just like that.

It was so fast.

I can’t think of how she got it.

We were so damned careful.

She died on me, just like that.”

“Oh, LaShawn.”

We think we have time but we don’t, we really don’t.

—

My mother sent voice notes saying, “ Anyanwu ututu m, please let me see your face, please.”

And feeling remorse for worrying her, my thoughts dark with LaShawn’s mother, I went back to joining Zoom calls.

As soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t.

The sense of doom returned.

From an untimely apex the world was splintering and fracturing, about to topple, and take with it all that was clear and certain.

Bunachi was reeling out thousands of the European dead.

Afam said politicians in Nigeria were hoarding palliatives meant for the poor, and I imagined these wealthy people piling bags of rice and cartons of Indomie noodles in their homes while the hungry roamed the streets.

—

Omelogor said she was worried when I wouldn’t take video calls, she knew I wasn’t writing, and so she took to sending me texts she hoped would make me smile, teasing me about rummaging in my past.

Don’t forget your tall thin white men phase, she wrote.

It did make me smile, remembering how Omelogor had studied Luuk’s photo and then studied the Englishman’s photo and finally said, “Strange what people like.”

I met Luuk soon after the Englishman, too soon, the weeks after I came back from London so barren that I must have wanted to escape the singular tragic story of my life.

I recoiled from memories of the Englishman, banning and shutting down and closing, but memory imposes itself even with photos erased and texts wiped clean.

Often, I thought of him at home, revising his manuscript, waiting for his wife to come home so he could give her a cuddle.

I imagined her as an un-nurselike figure, a certain kind of Englishwoman: matter-of-fact, Tory-voting, brusque and flinty, a little mannish in style, a person whom you dared not annoy.

His book was published not long after and once, with Luuk in London, I saw it displayed in the Waterstones on Piccadilly.

I picked it up and then forced myself to place it back on the shelf without looking at his photo on the back flap.

—

Luuk did look like the Englishman, very tall and very lean, but I told myself it could not be a transferred attraction, because the resemblance was superficial.

Luuk was nothing like him.

Luuk was curious, but about things rather than ideas.

He brimmed with that mix of information and insecurity so common in men who want to own the latest gadgets.

The Englishman would think Luuk vulgar, with his monogrammed travel case and his pampered hair.

Luuk would think him faded and forgettable.

“Are you an artist?”

Luuk asked me, at an art gallery in Mexico City.

I was the only Black woman there, in the high-ceilinged space, sedate paintings hanging on very white walls.

I told him I was writing a travel essay about the art scene in Mexico City.

“Who do you write for?”

“I’m freelance.”

“Freelance,”

he said.

“My English is not great.

My mother tongue is Dutch.

I spoke Spanish and French before English.

So you must forgive me if I have misunderstood, but freelance means unattached? So you will be free to have a drink with me.”

He overflowed with flagrant, flaming charm.

He was too obvious, too much, and yet not unappealing.

I said yes to dinner; something to do on my last night in Mexico City.

The restaurant had unusual volcanic walls.

Luuk pulled out my chair with a flourish, and when I ordered an apple juice he teasingly said, “You know I meant a proper drink, no?”

The waiter spent too much time at our table, entranced by Luuk, laughing at Luuk’s jokes.

Luuk asked his opinion of everything and listened and nodded and finally said yes to his suggestion: fig tacos to start, followed by a dish made of rabbit.

I had never liked the idea of eating rabbits but the waiter was so enthusiastic that I kept silent.

“Do you want to taste?”

Luuk asked, and offered me his agave cocktail.

I shook my head, amused.

How inappropriate to ask me, a stranger, to sip his drink, and yet also how oddly disarming.

His manner felt familiar, almost African: expansive, sensitive to status, heedless and harmless in crossing boundaries.

He was an executive at a Dutch company, managing a Mexican subsidiary for a year, being groomed to become CEO of the whole thing back in Amsterdam.

I would have been mortified to praise myself as he did himself, his words tumbling out as unheeded as the self-praise.

He had managed major companies in Brazil and India and Russia and was voted best CEO in all three; he sailed and went deep-sea diving and flew small planes; his golf was excellent and his tennis even better.

He was a talker who didn’t need a listener, a person allergic to silence, and from time to time my mind wandered away.

I remember the moment I awakened to him; it was not gradual but an exact instant, a singular ascent to affection.

He was talking about visiting a commercial apple farm he had invested in and how shocked he was to see fields full of stunted apple trees.

“The trees came up to just above my knees,”

he said.

“Trees! Can you imagine? Very unnatural.

I didn’t want to look at them.”

For once, his voice roughened and darkened and it moved me to see how affected he was by the terrible wrongness of stunted trees.

Suddenly I wanted to hug him close.

There were deep cuts in his life, strained sensitivities, lurking beneath his flamboyance.

I knew I would see him again, and again.

I felt, strangely, a protective desire to shield and save him.

He was divorced; they had not been married, but after eleven years together he called it a divorce.

He took this Mexico job to escape her efforts at reconciliation.

Her name was Brechtje.

He did not say “my ex”; he said Brechtje as though I, too, knew her.

They had raised her child together.

“It must be difficult for you.

Divorce always is,” I said.

“Yes, but sometimes a relationship ends a long time before we say okay it has ended.

I felt released finally.”

He sipped his drink and repeated “released.”

“Is that the English word you meant to use? ‘Released’?”

“Yes, like being freed from a prison that is not so bad but still it is a prison.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You have had this same experience?” he asked.

“No,”

I said, because I would not sprinkle old ashes on fresh surfaces.

“I’m very happy to be supporting the galleries here.

Otherwise I would not have met you.

I was nervous to talk to you, at the gallery.”

“You didn’t look nervous.”

He laughed, he laughed as one would expect a self-aware successful business executive to laugh, a lusty satisfied sound.

“You think so?”

“I thought maybe you had a Black woman fetish.”

“Fetish?”

“You were interested in me because I’m Black.”

“Oh, I have a fetish, yes, but it is a beautiful woman fetish,” he said.

I was smiling.

It was impossible not to be swept up by the glamour of his flattery.

It gave him power, the kind you accede to willingly, and sheepishly.

The extravagant courting he embarked on when I returned to Maryland was so predictable it felt improbable.

Slender jewelry boxes wrapped in matte paper arrived by signature-required courier; elegant boxes of frozen gourmet food appeared at my door, followed by elaborate arrangements of roses, some so heavy I needed the delivery person to help settle them on my kitchen island.

Each time I thought, Oh goodness, what has Luuk sent now?, shaking my head, and yet for the rest of the day I walked around in a cloud of delight.

I didn’t like roses and hardly wore bracelets, but I felt special to be thought of like this, to live so sumptuously in his mind.

I told him I loved lilies and tulips, and he sent an arrangement of heritage tulips, swirly colored with wrinkled petals, and laughed indulgently when I said I really preferred ordinary tulips.

—

With Luuk I existed in a universe of touch, his palm always grazing my back, my shoulder, my waist.

It was not territorial, but softer, an act of wonder, as if to say, “You’re really here.”

He was so tall I joked that I had to stand on tiptoe when we held hands.

In bed, I faked orgasms, but happily.

They weren’t coming and so I pretended they did, because I was sure that one day they would.

How could they not, with this charismatic man, head nestled between my legs, and arms raised above his head, as though in ever-patient crucifixion.

I spent long weekends with him in Mexico City, and sometimes in Monterrey, where he had a second office.

He would leave after breakfast, groomed and glinting in his slim-cut suits, and return hours later, looking just as fresh and talking nonstop, full of plans for what we could do.

We were always doing—live comedy, a theater opening he had underwritten, an art gallery he had sponsored, a new restaurant, a gala, drinks and dinner with visiting business associates.

He ordered dresses for me, and I would slide them out of their sheaths and say, “Luuk, I have breasts.

This is too low cut,”

and he would say, “That’s why I picked it.

In it, you will be all woman, from head to toe, all woman.”

He glowed with pride, looking at me, but his expectations haunted and hindered me.

How does insecurity creep up, and spread and choke your mind like weeds? It flattered me, to be the trophy he liked showing off, but I felt inadequate, the wrong kind of prize.

For his annual company gala, I abandoned my braids and got a long wavy weave, spending hours at a salon in Washington, D.C., because it felt to me more suitable.

Kadiatou sucked her teeth when she saw it.

“If I have hair like you, never anything else artificial.

Weave is for people like us.”

And she pulled off her scarf to rub at her bald temples.

“No, Kadi, I think he will like this, it’s mainstream glam,” I said.

But Luuk’s face fell when he picked me up at the airport.

“But your African look is the best, the braids are beautiful, I like even more the cornrows.”

I like even more the cornrows.

What a confidence tonic a man’s words could be.

We’re told to find it within ourselves, and some people can, like Omelogor, but I viewed myself with more esteem because Luuk liked the way I looked.

I like even more the cornrows.

I wore heels and the dresses he bought, low cut but tastefully so, and I smiled through the surprise of some people who met us, because I was not what they expected for him.

In every gathering, he set out to win over everyone, his head bobbing above the room.

The appeal of his lithe and sinewy height, the undeniable luster of his charm, the boom of his laugh.

Men liked his directness, how he said “fucker”

when nobody expected it.

Women were attracted to him; they signaled possibility, even availability, and made innocuous comments syrupy with other meanings.

He flattered and flirted, always lightly, to show that his devotion was cleanly mine.

I like even more the cornrows.

Sometimes the success of other men became a personal affront to him, and he was quick to read meaning into their actions or words.

“He said it’s tough with a Fortune 500, the fucker.

That’s a dig at me.

Doesn’t he know what net we posted? Just because they are listed higher?”

he said, on our drive back from the gala.

“I don’t think he meant it that way, Luuk,”

I said, consoling.

“Did you see how he shook my hand? Like ‘I am superior,’?” he said.

“No, actually I think he admires you.

You’re younger than him and you’re about to become the big star in Amsterdam.”

“You think so?”

“Yes.

And he’s jealous that he can’t dress like you.

Boxy American suits are terrible, but his takes the cake.”

Luuk liked that, and laughed.

I knew he would; he noticed men’s watches, ties, things.

He’d bought his first iPad because one day at an airport lounge, he was reading the pink pages of the Financial Times and noticed the men around him were all reading the newspaper on their iPads.

And he felt stupid.

When he told me this story, I told him he shouldn’t have felt stupid and those men probably thought he was a cool contrarian, and anyway you read more widely with an actual newspaper than with the clear-cut sections of apps.

So strange how we wade through life’s swamps thinking our insecurities are unique to us.

If I had been watching Luuk as a stranger from afar, I would not think he cared about using the device which other men had.

His excitements seemed considered, curated, like his magpie hoard of watches.

“Like it?”

he would say about a new watch.

I didn’t know much about expensive watches; they all looked the same to me, with their artisanal cluttered faces.

“Very nice,”

I would say.

“I think my father has something like this.”

His daysailer was the only thing he owned that wasn’t the latest.

I liked going because it was the one thing I felt made him shed his self-consciousness, he wasn’t watching for other people’s reactions, wasn’t noticing or comparing.

I would watch him, my life jacket wrapped tight, feeling unsteady as I had never been sailing before.

His deft maneuvering, the rippling leanness of his raised arms, and I thought here was a person doing something that brought him pure joy.

I thought it made him happy, too, when we stayed in his house in Monterrey, swimming and lounging, the pool unfathomably blue in the sunlight.

Or when we sat in his grassy garden in Mexico City surrounded by birdsong.

He said “our house”

and he said “we”

and I said “we”

too, and I liked our both saying “we,”

even though sometimes I felt myself loitering on the edges of this shared life.

One day he came back from work springy on his feet with childish excitement because the egomaniac company chairman was finally leaving and, in a few months, he would move back to Amsterdam and take over.

“Very soon, when I travel together with you, no more flying commercial!” he said.

I smiled, swinging on the verandah hammock, and wished for him that it mattered to me.

His housekeeper Yatzil appeared with a tray.

She worshipped him, bloomed under his teasing and his praise, and each day she tried to outdo herself, with yet another fresh fruit plate, another freshly cooked mole sauce.

She always looked at me with suspicion-sharpened eyes, as if distrustful of my intentions toward Luuk.

I wondered if it was me, or if she would be that way with any other woman.

In all the time I spent with Luuk, she smiled at me only once, a short smile quickly sucked back as if she had betrayed herself.

She’d brought a plate of fruit, guanabana and mamey and mangoes, and I said, “Thank you so much, Yatzil.

I love guanabana! When I was growing up, we had the trees and we always tried to let them get ripe and soft but also pluck them before the birds could get at them.

Sometimes we were too late and we would have to cut off the parts with holes from the birds.

This one is so nice and fresh! Soursop, it’s called soursop in English.”

Her smile saw me differently, for once, a person with a story, with family and trees in a country, and not just Luuk’s woman.

Luuk said, “Yatzil brought it especially for you.”

He was blind to Yatzil’s distrust, and was convinced she liked me.

I didn’t correct him.

I didn’t mind her dislike, I understood it, but it would upset Luuk if he knew, because he liked things to be as he had decided they were.

—

He was reading a glossy travel magazine, and he tore out a page, and said, “This is the place to go this year.

They say all the fashionable set is going this summer.”

I mock-groaned.

“Not another top place to go, please.”

We had gone to the U.S.

Virgin Islands because a magazine said it was the top place to go.

He wanted fashionable and I wanted interesting.

“Okay, you choose between these two.”

“No, you choose,”

I said.

“Wherever you decide, it has to be after I come back from Ramallah.”

“If you get the visa, no?” he said.

“Luuk! That isn’t very hopeful.”

“Well…”

He shrugged and laughed.

He didn’t want me to go to Palestine.

“It’s all too sad,”

he’d said when I told him I wanted to write about the restaurants and food scene in Ramallah.

“I wonder what it’s like, somebody who wants to visit your country has to get permission from another country,” I said.

“Horrible,”

he said.

He peered at my laptop screen, a YouTube documentary about the Deir Yassin massacre.

“I need to know a bit of the history,” I said.

“Okay.

Enough of this.

We watch something more uplifting now, okay?”

“I know you don’t mean a comedy,”

I said.

I teased him about liking comedies too much.

When he went diving, he took his phone, caged in a waterproof box, so he could watch comedies during long decompression stops.

I imagined him deep in the sea watching Fawlty Towers as seahorses floated past.

Sometimes I felt his life was lived as though in flight from sorrow.

He was a restless, jerky sleeper.

He woke me often, his body twitching as if in some internal rebellion, and I would hold and soothe him until his movements ceased.

—

Luuk marveled at my relationship with my parents.

When I talked on the phone with them, he would come by from time to time, shaking his head in amazement.

“Talking for so long? And laughing like this?”

“My mother is such a talker,”

I said.

“My father talks a bit too but not like her.

How was your dad?”

“He never talked.

He preferred action.

More efficient, you know?”

“How?”

“This is the best example.

One day he pushed my head into a dustbin on our street and told me if I ever got a girl pregnant, he would make me eat the rubbish.”

Luuk roared with that laughter of his.

I watched him, thinking about the uses of laughter.

Laughter as shield.

Laughter as deflector.

“When did he die?”

“Seven years now.”

“Is—was—your mother a talker? I mean, before.”

I was stumbling to be tactful about his mother’s dementia.

“Even less.”

He paused, as if about to say more, before he abruptly changed the subject and asked when his bestie Omelogor was coming so he could finally take her skydiving.

It hadn’t surprised me how easily they became friends when they met.

Omelogor said Luuk was a Nigerian born in a European body, down to his strong cologne, and Luuk smiled, pleased.

It was in New York.

Omelogor had come for a conference and I was with Luuk on a business trip.

We were in Luuk’s hotel suite.

Luuk got a message saying his wife’s friend had passed out while skydiving in Switzerland.

“At one thousand feet!”

he said, as if we would understand whether that was good or bad.

“Did she die?” I asked.

“No, she’s recovering.”

Omelogor said, “I don’t understand why people jump out of planes.”

Which made Luuk laugh.

“You’re very direct, no?”

he said to Omelogor, and I said, “Maybe she’s a Dutch woman born into a Nigerian body,”

and Omelogor gave me a look filled with knives.

“I’ll take you skydiving and you’ll see why,”

Luuk said.

“Gravity is very powerful.

It makes you know we are very small on this earth.”

“I know that already,”

Omelogor said.

At some point she asked Luuk, “Where did you learn about sex?”

The question she was asking everybody.

She had asked Zikora, and Zikora primly said from books, offended that Omelogor had assumed it was from pornography.

“But Zik, we were all curious as kids,” I said.

“I never watched blue films,”

she said.

She had a puritanical strain, Zikora, and had life gone as she wanted, she might have been extremely conservative, leery of openness.

Luuk’s response to Omelogor’s question was “This is not something I have thought of.”

“You must have seen a film or a dirty magazine when you were a teenager,” she said.

“But learning from it? I don’t know, maybe I learned from practice?”

Luuk glanced at me, jokingly clamped his hands over his ears, and said, “I don’t remember now!”

—

When Luuk finally told me about his mother, I remembered how quickly he used to change the subject.

I was at the time fascinated by the shifting places of Europe.

This town used to be Romanian, now it is Ukrainian or Hungarian; that one used to be in Germany but now is in Poland.

The towns didn’t move, of course, the borders did, and you could leave your home in one country and return to the same home, many years later, now in another country.

Alsace-Lorraine was in Germany after one war and then in France after another, back in Germany during the Second World War and then again in France after it ended.

Did their souls sway from side to side? What did they do with their passports? I might want to keep old ones, to make it easier in case the borders shifted again.

At a restaurant, I tried discreetly to tell who was a tourist and who was a local bearing the history of two nations.

I wandered through quaint villages, past half-timbered houses that looked as if transported from a benign fairy tale; I would feel claustrophobic living in them.

Storks had built their tall nests on some of the roofs, piled-high twigs and sticks and grass, and I saw a few of the birds in majestic flight, wings widely spread, gliding through the air.

The driver I hired for the day talked endlessly about storks and repeated things he had said before: storks are mute and clap their beaks to communicate, storks are faithful to their nests and not to their mates, in local lore storks bring good luck.

I said how charming it was, and laughter erupted from him when I asked: with storks on their roof, did they wake up to see bird droppings splattered everywhere?

Later he slipped out of his tour-guide persona and told me the underground champagne tour was boring and I would get cold.

Still, I went, and halfway through I was shivering, made worse by a stomach roiling from the quiche in a quaint restaurant.

There was altogether too much quaintness all around.

The driver said there was a literary festival in a small town in the heart of the Black Forest, and we drove an hour there, but heard only the tail end of a Slovenian poet reading his ironic poems.

Afterwards I walked around the streets; farther away from the center the houses leaned closer together.

The locals stared at me with eyes shorn of warmth.

There weren’t many; I walked past a dozen people maybe.

A woman that made me think of a babushka character in a film slowed to look me over, her eyes scanning my head to my feet.

I saw one Black person at the literary festival but none on the streets.

If there were no Black people here, why were they hostile instead of just curious? Already I had an idea for my article.

“Feeling Black in the Black Forest.”

I told Luuk about it, saying, “I wonder where their view of Black people comes from,”

and I said this mildly, but redness crept up his neck and he burst out, “Germany is terrible, terrible! How can you ask where they get this racism? Look at what they did!”

“Well, good thing I didn’t turn and walk away when we first met, because I thought you were German.

You sounded German,” I teased.

“No!”

he said, unsmiling.

“You know where these fuckers killed the highest number of Jews in Western Europe? Holland.”

His expression confused me, a deep disruption of his well-being that I had not at all expected.

“Luuk, darling, I’m sorry.

I didn’t mean to upset you,” I said.

He shook his head as if to shake away his distraught.

“My grandmother, the mother of my mother, had a Nazi lover during the war.

You know of the Dutch women they punished when we were liberated? They beat them and paraded them on the streets and shaved off their hair, and poured sticky black tar on their bodies and all this.

My grandmother was one of them.

She was pregnant with my mother.

Nobody talked about it.

I was a teenager when I found this out, after a relative of my father said something rude about my mother.”

I stared at him, stunned, uncertain what to say.

“My brother still says the German lover was not our grandfather.

He says it was the Dutch soldier our grandmother was engaged to.

This Dutch soldier died early in the war, in 1940.

My mother was born in 1945.

Can you imagine? Now we perform miracles in my family.”

He snorted and I came close and held him and leaned into his warmth.

Was it what made him turn himself into this polished pot of charm, that he grew up with inherited shame? Or was I drawing a too simple line? But much of our lives could be explained by drawing simple lines; we inherit our parents’ scars more often than we know.

“Our house always smelled of blood sausages,”

he said.

“My mother kept a tidy house and she knitted and she cooked, and all the time the house smells of these blood sausages.”

I did not know how Dutch blood sausages in the 1970s smelled, but when we went to Holland and drove past his childhood home in Haarlem, I imagined the smell of blood sausages in the air.

He pointed.

“The dustbin was just there.

The one my father pushed my head into.”

We visited his mother in a nursing home, in a sad room with small windows, armchairs upholstered in faded print.

His mother no longer recognized him.

She looked blankly at him with her rheumy blue eyes.

He gave her a bouquet of tulips and she took them, and placed them on her lap.

I wanted to leave the room to give them privacy even if she no longer recognized him, but he said no and tightly held my hand.

She was well looked after, her thinning silver hair clean and carefully brushed.

I looked at her and imagined her childhood spent in a cloud of shame.

Was it a relief to be separated from her mind, unable to remember her wounded past? Before we left, I moved closer and hugged her, and afterwards I wasn’t sure why I had.

She neither shrank away nor hugged me back.

In the car, Luuk’s eyes were wet.

“Your African warmness, so touching.

I’m so happy I came together with you.”

His somber tone, the whole visit, had unsettled me.

“?‘Together with,’?”

I mimicked him.

“It’s so cute how you say that: ‘together with.’?”

“Is it wrong?”

“I mean, you could just say ‘with.’?”

“Then I will stop saying ‘together with.’?”

“No, don’t stop, it’s very cute.”

—

Brechtje had been unwell, and he wanted to visit her before we left Holland.

Did I mind? he asked, as if he wanted me to mind.

He suggested what I might do while he was gone: a massage at the hotel spa, or the driver could take me shopping? I trailed my fingers against his cheek and said, “Luuk, my darling, I don’t mind.

I think it’s nice that you’re going to see her.”

“I will tell Brechtje about you.

You are not the reason we cannot come back, of course.

But she deserves to know,” he said.

I felt almost guilty, imagining this woman Brechtje, dark-haired and curvy and pretty in her photos, and her son who called Luuk Papa, both bereft, still holding on to hope—and now, on his first visit back since he left for Mexico, to hear about another woman in his life.

The finality, the blow of it.

“Maybe don’t tell her, not now.

I can imagine she’ll be very upset.”

“She will feel even worse to know you are Black.”

Silence followed, echoed by more silence.

I said nothing because I didn’t know what to say.

His honesty moved me and his honesty disgusted me.

What in her layers of humanness, what vital lack, what yawning void, would make her feel worse that I was Black?

“Always she says it’s the Black people who make noise on the trains, and she doesn’t mind the Turkish or Surinamese so much, but the Moroccan boys and the Black boys…You know about Black Pete in Holland? She said these people should stop complaining about the tradition, because the skin is black from the chimney.

I was asking, but why do the lips look so big, is that also from the chimney?”

Luuk sounded triumphant.

He was the story’s unstained hero, the righteous one, and that was all that mattered.

He couldn’t see how I would see it.

And what was to be said of his virtue if Brechtje could tell him these things?

“No, I don’t know about this Black Pete,”

I said, even though I knew, and I changed the subject to suggest we get a couples massage when he came back.

Some surfaces I prefer to leave alone because I fear what I will find underneath.

When he came back, he looked drained, a bluish tinge under his eyes.

He said, “She would not stop crying.”

I felt a flash of pity for her and then annoyed with Luuk for telling me this, and other things.

“Luuk, I don’t need to know more about Brechtje.”

“I want to share everything with you.”

Now I felt ungracious.

Was this not what women wanted, a man who did not build walls? And yet I did not want to hear another word.

He wanted to show me the gardens at Keukenhof, and we walked around the landscape’s vibrant palette, the flower-rich scents of spring and the flowers themselves, splashes of color lifting my spirits.

In the evening, we met his brother at a restaurant, which felt like walking into softness, with muted piano music and a large cluster of modern chandeliers glistening above.

Willem.

A flicker crossed his face when we stood up to greet him.

Surprise, confused surprise.

Luuk had not told him I was African.

He said hello and nice to meet you and we ordered wine.

We sat by the window, below us the shimmering vista of Amsterdam, miles of lights spread out like spilled jewels.

The air between the brothers was mildly charged with malice.

Luuk the older and more successful, his brother playing catch-up; he, too, alarmingly tall, but fleshier than Luuk. Willem said he had been to a new restaurant in London last week. Luuk said, yes, he knew the restaurant, not bad, two Michelin stars. No, three stars, Willem said. Their teenage rivalry had ripened but never burst open to free them. Willem said something in Dutch and Luuk replied, his voice a low growl that I had never heard before. Willem stiffened and drank his wine and then turned to me, to dispel their tension.

“Have you had a chance to see our beautiful city?”

he asked me.

Why did Europeans do that? They called their cities beautiful, as if you had no choice but to agree with them.

I liked Nigeria well enough but I didn’t expect others to, and so I could not understand this European conceit.

I always said yes and agreed that the city was beautiful, even if I didn’t think it was.

But something about Willem irked me.

After our initial hellos, he had not addressed me, had barely looked at me, and as he spoke to Luuk, he didn’t include me in the sweep of his gaze.

This sudden interest was incidental and insincere.

He merely needed an emergency buffer between him and his brother, and anybody at that moment would do.

Even a dog or a cat would do.

Something alive to which he could deflect.

And I could not help thinking of the woman I did not know, Brechtje, and merging them both in my imagination.

They probably got along well.

“Have you had a chance to see our beautiful city?”

he repeated, unnecessarily; perhaps he also thought I was slow at comprehension.

“Yes, this isn’t my first time,”

I said brightly.

“Amsterdam has such a moldy charm.”

His brows furrowed. “Moldy?”

He glanced at Luuk, to confirm the English meaning.

“You mean like mold?”

“Yes,” I said.

Luuk burst out laughing and his laughter was a rain of darts aimed at his brother.

His brother colored.

I felt remorse, and then rebuked myself for wanting to appease this man who clearly had no use for me.

“That was a poor joke,”

I said, even though I did think of Amsterdam as a place of moldy charm: the canals and the houses near them looked as if they could benefit from a vigorous wash.

“The architecture is beautiful.

Something so confident about canal houses.”

“Yes,”

he said, instantly mollified; he really wasn’t the brightest of people.

For the rest of the dinner, Luuk talked and talked, giving Willem a litany of his successes, asking me some details he pretended not to remember while I mostly looked down at Amsterdam’s lights.

“Were we in Monterrey or at the retreat in Bermuda when the Harvard Business Review list of best-performing CEOs came out?”

he asked.

I said we were in Bermuda.

On our way back to the hotel, I asked Luuk, “What did your brother say that made you angry?”

He shrugged my question away.

“Oh, just one of his stupid things.

You know, I don’t tell him now when I buy a new car because he tries to buy the same car too, and he can’t afford it, of course.”

—

On the morning of our last day in Holland, we took a walk to a café, and ahead of us was an elderly White couple, both silver-haired and slightly stooped.

They walked slowly, hand in hand, and then stopped at the same time to look at a shop window.

They said little, their faces mere inches apart.

They looked at the shop window for a while and then continued walking, his foot rising as hers fell.

There was between them a quality of gentle, long-lasting collusion; each knew the other in a way that nobody else in the world did.

Watching them, I began to cry.

Luuk noticed my tears.

“Chia? What’s wrong?”

I shook my head.

“Is it cramps?”

he asked, and drew me close.

“Let’s go to this one for tea, something hot? Or turn back so I can give you a back rub at the hotel?”

He had read up about premenstrual dysphoric disorder and on my bad days would make me tea, rub my back, coax me into movement.

“Just walk with me around the pool,”

he’d say, slowing his normal lope.

“Yes, let’s go back to the hotel,”

I said, letting him believe my tears were from hormones rather than from the sudden overwhelming melancholy of seeing what I so longed to have and feared I never would.

Later, as Luuk and I drove to the airport, I looked out of the window, at the almost provincial calm, the women pushing strollers in the afternoon, on their day off from their part-time jobs.

Already I felt the sting of loneliness.

I could never be happy here.

We flew to Mexico City and then on to Monterrey.

On the plane, a man seated across the aisle looked often at me, a Mexican man with black hair a little too long, a rakish man, his shirt unbuttoned, a scarf wound carelessly around his neck.

He smiled at me, like a man eager to shrug off an old life, and I smiled back.

I imagined a new life with him, each day filled with excitement’s beating heart.

We landed and I watched him hug an autistic little boy at baggage claim; the boy’s repetitive hand movements, his open innocent face, filled me with shame for daring to long for a man so needed by his child.

“Ready?”

Luuk asked, after loading both our suitcases in a cart.

He looked quizzical, as if he sensed my new reserve.

In the lavish hum of our life together, I had felt like a spectator, sated and satisfied, but a spectator still.

We were not at the end but I knew, that day at the airport in Monterrey, that we were almost at the end.