No Trace - Statement 20010211
Statement of Lawrence de Boer, regarding the events leading up to and the disappearance of Arytom Tade in 1994. Original statement received in mail, on the 2nd of November, 2001.
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Through all of this, I’ve tried not to keep count of it. Maybe if I pretend that it isn’t my last thought each night, and that I don’t check the bed every morning to see if he is there, maybe then he’ll come back. It’s a bit like convincing myself that I am not looking for the piece of script I desperately need to memorise, and then it will turn up in the corner of my eye.
I’ve tried not to keep track, but it’s been an awful, empty seven years and three months since Arytom disappeared. I know what you’re thinking, and I promise I’m not writing to you about a mundane missing person’s case, my partner didn’t just go off the grid in an overnight frenzy. You don’t understand. In the simplest, most quintessential sense of the word, he disappeared.
And I would have written sooner, I really would have, but you must understand, when so many policemen and search and rescue officers tell you that your partner has most likely fled the country or died in a ditch somewhere, you start to believe it. It was easier than hoping for the impossible, but my heart wouldn’t let my mind rest. I heard of your institute from a friend, she’s really into the occult and all that, and I figured that if anyone had something intelligent to say about all this, it was you. Let me try and be more concise, from the beginning.
Tyoma never chatted much about his childhood. But it doesn’t take a genius to guess that growing up in the USSR was suboptimal. He had always made a point to add after whatever horrid story he was telling that he had gotten the better of it, that there was always worse. He often mentioned him and his mother standing in lines in the freezing morning, in front of grocers, waiting to get a cut of fresh meat. It was always frozen, salted, and smoked black, which I guess was as fresh as it got in soviet Hungary.
I only got to know him in 1989, when the first thing he did was scrape all his money together and hurry to the Netherlands. He always joked about having feared that the country would be shut down again. He always got a nervous twitch in his leg after that.
Overall, he was a bright young man, and I am almost certain that he made a living out of translating from French to English and back, before his plays got picked up. Surprisingly, out of the two of us, I had been the one living from paycheck to paycheck. Come to think of it, it’s not that surprising… the only artist poorer than the poet is the actor.
I met Arytom Tade while I was performing at a community theater in Leiden. It was some philosophic piece, about morality, or perhaps mortality, dragging on and on, the kind of theater that you left feeling worse than when you had entered. I had found it hard to relate to my character, and to be passionate about the play. He was too much of a stickler.
On the third night of performing, I peeked out through the ruffles of the cheap, flaking curtain. The fancy folk always sat in the front rows, back when people still dressed up to go to the theater, they sat in the front row, to be looked at. It was why I never did. And generally it could be said that there were always empty seats, and even if people had bought a place to sit further back they would often sit closer, a few minutes before the show. So generally I was acting to the first six rows out of twelve.
That night, there was a man sitting, all the way in the back. Perhaps my mind deceives me, but it is entirely possible that he was also in the corner. Naturally, this perplexed me. And then someone had moved a prop and we had to rush to help the prop manger find it, leaving the curtain to sway shut.
During the performance, my eyes kept darting to him, across the room. He kept watching me, which yes, it was what he had come there to do, but there was such a strange quality to his eyes. Of course it seems foolish now, knowing Tyoma as well as I do, but I couldn’t help but fall out of character for a moment as I quickly snapped my eyes away from him.
After quite a rocky show, that might or might not have had something to do with the handsome stranger in the corner, I got out of makeup, out of stage clothes, and headed for the bus. I usually slept on the way home, because I didn’t get much of a chance to do anytime else. You can probably guess who I found waiting at the station.
He was looking up at the arrival time tables, with a brimmed hat on his head and a coat hugging his torso, like it had been sewn right onto him. He looked at me, and I almost walked into traffic. In clumsy Danish, he complimented my performance, and I asked which bus he was waiting for. He smiled and we kept conversing on the bus which we apparently both took.
He was tall, and the kind of lanky that could only be the result of a lifelong hunger strike; you should have seen what he called cooking. He wore turtlenecks and that godawful coat that could vanish him into the crowd of street dwellers seamlessly.
There was a sort of charm to everything he said, and how he managed to pack as much meaning into as few words as possible, even when we transitioned to English. He could use silence to communicate just as well as he used words, perhaps even better. I told him I was short on money, and he told me he was short on roommates, and before the end of the month he was helping me carry my things up the stairs to his flat.
Of course, I’ve always known something wasn’t quite right with him. He was jumpy, and if I stared long enough, I could swear that his pupils had melted into the dark colour of his eyes. I felt as if we both were to go mute the next day, we would have still perfectly understood each other.
And of course, I’ve always known of the things that had made him so. He had told me, not long after starting to live together, how he had been a journalist, back in his homeland. How he had been greatly unfavoured by the government. This was especially unfortunate, considering that they had no restraint when it came to the matter of bugging entire houses and telephone lines.
There were nights when he woke from a dream, and shortly after I woke as well, to the sound of him rummaging through clothes and items, looking for wires and mechanisms. Once he had gotten close to ripping the wallpaper off. It wasn’t sleepwalking, or psychosis. He was awake, but it seemed like this intense state of paranoia had taken such hold of him that he had forgotten of his less imminent surroundings.
“They can see me, they can hear me,” he kept repeating, until I took his arm each time and shook some sense into him. I told him that this was the Netherlands, not some fascist nightmare behind God’s back, led him back to bed, and waited until he fell back asleep again. Often I slept next to him, dreams claiming me first.
He was never a people’s person. I always said that people just weren’t Tyoma people, but we both knew it was merely a kind gesture. He had little intention of getting to know new people, but came with me to rehearsals and dinner evenings each time I asked. He forced a smile but didn’t converse much, and his eyes kept darting around the room, like a trapped animal. He kept grabbing my arm, and took days to recover after each occasion. I suggested getting evaluated for asperger’s, but there was always such a reluctance on his part that I stopped pushing in fear of offending him.
It took almost a year of nagging him, but I had managed to convince him to take a play he had written to the director of Leiden community theater. He was adamant about only writing for himself, but you don’t understand. It was so simple, yet wonderful, I needed others to see it. I showed it to Grethe Selva, the director of the theater. Naturally, she fell in love with the script, like I knew she would. It portrayed the struggle of the working man beautifully, with fits of despair and short lived bursts of joy.
Back home, it took a good amount of apologising to get Tyoma to speak to me. I did manage to break even, when I reminded him that if it got put on stage, he would get to see me play in what he had written. I saw softness overcome his face, his eyebrows furrow, and I knew I’d won.
We prepared long and hard to have it put on stage, and Tyoma insisted on having me play the protagonist: it was his one request. On the opening night, I sat him down in the front row. Naturally, he whined about it, like I knew he would. He said it bothered him that people could see him, but he couldn’t see them. I said that if his play was good enough, no one would be paying attention to the back of his head anyway, and that seemed to calm him down enough to get the show started.
It was a success, of course it was. I had never doubted that. And still, I wish I could go back and wrestle the script out of my own hands before ever showing it to Grethe. I wish I could go back and slap myself.
At closing bows, in midst of the thunderous claps, I reached a hand out towards the first row, and beckoned Tyoma up. He seemed transfixed on my palm, as I helped him up onto the stage. My heart was overflowing and bursting with joy, and I spun him to face the audience.
I shouldn't have. I could feel that something was wrong the moment I saw the lights hit his face. He was pale, unnaturally so, even in the lights that already washed people out. His eyes were fixed at the audience, and I thought he’d never breathe again. And he had this terrified rigidness to him, this awful fear deep in his bones, I felt it with my hand on his waist, solid and shaking, I felt it in the frozen and hurried way he bowed when I lightly pressed at his back.
I think this must have been when it really started.
I held his hair as he vomited in the dingy theater bathroom. Something was very wrong, and the only thing I could do was hold his soft brown hair and soothe a hand down his back, again and again. He emerged from the toilet, looked at me, and there was no recognition in his eyes.
I lived with a ghost for the next six months. Arytom woke up in the morning, did his tasks, wrote exactly ten pages worth of stage instructions, and went back to bed. It went like this until I looked at him one day, and not only realised that he didn’t recognise me, but also that I didn’t recognise him.
I took him to clinics, to doctors he had before refused. They couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but I knew that that man was not my friend or partner. After his work, he didn’t fall asleep. He just lay in our bed, and stared at the ceiling, the same way he stared at me, like I too were just plaster on a wall.
One night, as I got into bed, he spoke.
“I hear something calling me every night. It’s like the buzzing of mechanical bugs inside of my walls. I heard it calling but I resisted.”
I still remember it perfectly. I didn’t know what to do, so I leaned over and kissed him. He looked at me for a moment, his hand rested on my cheek, and there was almost a twinkle in his eyes. I had almost gotten through to him, maybe if I had just kissed him harder. But I hadn’t. And he wished me goodnight and went to sleep.
In the morning, he wasn’t there. I dug through the house, then the garden, then the city. I ringed him a thousand times. It was no use. All of our keys were inside, and all of the doors were locked. And I doubt he jumped from a fifth story window. The policemen came, and search dogs came, and they couldn’t find his scent. They couldn’t find any clue leading to him. The curve of the mattress that had formed under him was gone. The leaking ink pens he always left out were gone. It was as if he had never even existed.
It’s awfully lonely without him. I don’t know what to do with myself. I suppose that’s why this letter is getting so lengthy, it’s been a long, long while since I talked to anyone like this. I apologise, I know this is in no way concise, or of much use to you.
Who did Tyoma see that evening? I keep thinking of the way he had stared into the clapping crowd that night, terrified recognition rippling through his face, like he had seen an old friend he owed money to. I keep thinking of how afraid he had always been of his name being printed, of being known. I keep wondering why.
And I keep trying to ignore the feeling of being watched while I’m in the home I shared with him.
