For Lisel
This whole house — the books, the press, all of it — was built in a month I spent mostly somewhere else. This letter is my way of trying to give that month back.
Lisel,
I write code for a living, and I'm good at it, and the strange truth of our life is that the hard part — the actually hard part — was never mine. It was yours. I get to sit in a room and make a thing I love. You get everything else. You get the three of them, each wired their own beautiful unrepeatable way, none of them off-the-shelf, all of them needing a different key to the same door — and you find every key, every day, and then you put a real meal on the table on top of it. Not a survival meal. A good one. While you carry the money, the appointments, the school, the small daily emergencies that never make it into my field of view because you've already absorbed them before I look up.
I want to tell you what this book is, because you lived next to it for a month and you deserve to know what you were standing guard over.
Jakobus is me. You know that. But he is also my dad, and my brother — he's the line of men I come from, the soft ones who learned to keep the sunglasses on, who feel everything and show a fraction, who love hard and badly at the seams and would rather take a hit than ask to be held. I put all of us into one man and let him walk through the world I wish we'd all been braver in. Writing him was the closest I've come to taking the shades off. And the only reason I could do it — the only reason I could go that far down and come back up — is that I always knew you were on the surface, holding the rope. The Court is banked now. The work is real, it's saved, it exists. But it exists because you made a floor under a man who was, for a month, not entirely on the floor.
Let's call that month what it was. I wasn't "busy." I was gone. Dysregulated, half-here, lit up in flow and useless for everything that wasn't the page. You didn't get the version of me that helps. You got the leftovers, the distracted yes, the husband who was in the room and not in the room. And you didn't make me pay for it. You let me have it. Do you know how rare that is — to be allowed to disappear into the thing you were made for, and to come back and find the home still warm and no invoice waiting? That wasn't tolerance. That was love doing manual labour. So I'm writing this down, and putting it where it can't be lost, because a month is a real thing to give a person and I don't want to pretend you didn't give it. This is me trying to hand it back — not the days, I can't return those, but the seeing of them. You will not be the unsung one here.
And that month sits inside a harder six. You carried me while my mother put her heart on our kitchen table and you were the one who said it — hospital, now — clear and unflinching while I was still catching up to what was happening. You held the centre. You've been holding the centre while I held my own fear with both hands. There's a version of these last months that breaks a marriage, and you simply refused to let it be that version.
But here is the thing I most need you to hear, the thing that is bigger than any book.
Twenty-seven years. In twenty-seven years there have been times the words came out of me with a bite in them — too sharp, badly aimed, the old wiring firing before I could stop it. And not once, not one single time, did you turn that bite into a threat of leaving. You never reached for the one weapon that would have ended me. You stayed in the room. You let me be wrong without making me be alone. Do you understand what that does to a man who comes from a line of men who were always, somewhere in the back of their minds, braced to be left? You took the bracing away. You taught a nervous system that had never quite believed it that this one stays. That is the safest I have ever been in my life. That is the ground everything else grows in — the kids, the work, the books, the man I'm slowly becoming.
And while I'm finally saying the things out loud: I'm sorry about the shades. They're in every one of our wedding photographs — the one day above all days I should have let you and everyone else see my eyes, and I couldn't take them off. I'm sorry I wasn't at your side where I belonged that day, that I drank the anxiety down instead of standing in it next to you, that I made a fool of myself when you deserved a husband fully present and fully there. You were luminous and looking for me, and too much of me was hiding behind dark glass and a glass in my hand. I have carried the shame of that day quietly for a long time. You married the man behind the shades anyway. You always could see him — that's the part that undoes me. You didn't need the photos to show his eyes; you already knew them.
So when people read these books and ask what my religion is, the real answer isn't in the pages. It's you. My moral compass with no dogma and no doctrine — that's just what twenty-seven years of being loved properly by you has made of me.
And so it isn't only the trilogy. It's all of it — the whole library, every series, and the Jakobus Thread that runs through the heart of it. Every book I have written and every book I am going to write is dedicated to you. Not in spirit, not as a nice line on a page nobody reads — for real, by name, the lot of it. Wherever the dedication page sits, it says for Lisel. You are the floor the entire house stands on, so the entire house is yours.
I get to write code. You get to hold the world. I know which of us has the harder, holier job, and I know who the strong one really is.
So take the month back. It was always yours. Thank you for the floor. Thank you for the rope. Thank you for staying.
Sawubona. I see you — all of you — and I always will.
Yours, for the next twenty-seven and every one after,
Andries