by John Irving
Jack and Alice didn't see any of Sami Salo's other tattoos--nor was Salo in a mood to converse.
"The deal is," he began again, "I tell you about The Music Man and you leave town. I don't care where you go."
"I'm sorry your business is suffering," Alice told him.
He accepted her apology with a nod. Jack was embarrassed for the poor man; the boy buried his head under the pillows. "I'm sorry if my wife spoke rudely to you at the restaurant," Salo may have said. "She doesn't much like having to work nights."
His wife would have been the opinionated waitress at Salve, Jack guessed. With his head under the pillows, the four-year-old found that the adult world seemed a nicer place. Even Jack could tell that Mr. Salo was a lot older than his overworked wife, who looked young enough to be his daughter.
Their apologies stated, there was little more that Alice and Sami Salo needed to say to each other.
"Amsterdam," the scratcher said. "When I inked a bit of Bach on his backside, he said he was going to Amsterdam."
"Jack and I will leave Helsinki as soon as we can arrange our travel," Alice told him.
"You're a talented lady," Jack heard Salo say; he sounded as if he was already in the hall.
"Thank you, Mr. Salo," Alice replied, closing the door.
At least Amsterdam was a town on their itinerary. Jack couldn't wait to see Tattoo Peter, and his one leg.
"We mustn't forget St. John's Church, Jack," his mother said. Jack had thought they were on their way to the shipping office, but he was wrong. "That was where your father played. We should at least see it."
They were close to the sea. It had snowed overnight; the branches of the trees drooped with the heavy seaside snow.
"Johanneksen kirkko," Alice told the taxi driver. (She even knew how to pronounce the name of the church in Finnish!)
St. John's was huge--a red-brick Gothic edifice with two towers, the twin spires shining a pale green in the sunlight. The wooden pews were a dark blond that reminded Jack of the hair in Hannele's armpits. The church bells heralded their arrival. According to Alice, the three bells played the first three notes of Handel's Te Deum.
"C sharp, E, F sharp," the former choirgirl whispered.
The round altarpiece featured a tall, thin painting--the conversion of Paul on his way to Damascus. The organ was a Walcker from Wurttemberg, built in 1891. It had been restored in 1956 and had seventy-four registers. Jack knew that registers were the same as stops; he didn't know if the number of registers made a difference in how loud an organ was, or how rich it sounded. (Since William Burns had been demonized in Jack's eyes, the boy didn't have a consuming interest in his father's instrument.)
In Helsinki, on such a sunny day, the light through the stained glass sparkled on the pipes, as if the organ--even without an organist--was about to burst into sound all by itself. But the organist was there to greet them. Alice must have made an appointment to see him. His name was Kari Vaara, and he was a hearty man with wild-looking hair; he appeared to have, seconds ago, stuck his head out the window of a speeding train. His actions were marked by the nervous habit of clasping his hands together, as if he were about to make a life-altering confession or fall to his knees--the suddenly shattered witness to a miracle.
"Your father is a very talented musician," Vaara said almost worshipfully to Jack, who was speechless; the boy wasn't used to hearing his dad praised. "But talent must be nurtured, or it withers." His voice sounded like the lower registers of an organ.
"We know about Amsterdam," Alice interjected. She appeared fearful that Kari Vaara was about to reveal a terrible truth--something in the not-around-Jack category.
"Not just Amsterdam," the organist intoned. Jack looked at the Walcker organ, half expecting it to issue a refrain. "He's going to play in the Oude Kerk."
The reverence with which Vaara spoke was wasted on Jack, but his mom was glad to know the church's name.
"The organ there is special, I suppose," Alice said.
Kari Vaara took a deep breath, as if he were once more preparing to stick his head out the window of that speeding train. "The organ in the Oude Kerk is vast," he said.
Jack must have scuffed his feet or cleared his throat, because Vaara again turned his attention to him. "I told your father that big is not necessarily best, but he is a young man who must see for himself."
"Yes, he has always had to see everything for himself," Alice chimed in.
"Not always a bad thing," Vaara offered.
"Not always a good thing," Alice countered.
Kari Vaara leaned over Jack. The boy could smell the soap on the organist's clasped hands. "Perhaps you have talent for the organ," Vaara said. He unclasped his hands and spread his arms wide, as if to embrace the Walcker. "Would you like to play?"
"Over my dead body," Alice said, taking Jack's hand.
They went up the aisle and out of the Johanneksen kirkko. The sunlight was shimmering on the newfallen snow. "Mrs. Burns!" Vaara called after them. (Had she told him she was Mrs. Burns?) "They say that in the Oude Kerk, one plays to both tourists and prostitutes!"
"Not around Jack," Alice said, over her shoulder. Their taxi driver was waiting; the shipping office was their next stop.
"I mean only that the church is in the red-light district," Vaara explained.
Alice stumbled slightly, but she regained her balance and squeezed Jack's hand.
There was mention of traveling by ship from Helsinki to Hamburg, and then taking the train from Hamburg to Amsterdam. But that was the long way to go, and perhaps Alice was afraid she might stay in Hamburg; her desire to meet and work with Herbert Hoffmann was that strong. (Maybe they wouldn't have gone back to Canada; Jack might never have attended St. Hilda's, and all the rest.) She'd sent Hoffmann so many postcards that Jack had memorized the address--8 Hamburger Berg. If they had sailed to Hamburg--if they'd seen St. Pauli and the Reeperbahn, and Herbert Hoffmann's Tatowierstube at 8 Hamburger Berg--they might have stayed.
But they found passage on a freighter from Helsinki to Rotterdam. (In those days, freighters frequently had passenger accommodations.) Then they took the train from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, a short trip. Jack remembered that train ride. It was raining; some of the fields were flooded. It was still winter, but there wasn't any snow. Out the window of the train, it looked as if spring would never come. Alice rested her forehead against the pane.
"Isn't the glass cold?" Jack asked.
"It feels good," she replied. "Maybe I have a fever."
Jack felt her forehead--she didn't feel too warm to him. She shut her eyes and nodded off. Across the aisle, a businessman-type kept glancing at Alice. Jack stared at the man until he looked away. Even at four, the boy could stare anybody down.
Jack was excited about Tattoo Peter's one leg, and he must have been trying to imagine the size of the vast organ in the Oude Kerk. But a question of a different kind popped into his head.
"Mom?" he whispered. He had to speak a little louder to wake her from her sleep. "Mom?"
"Yes, my little actor," she whispered back; she hadn't opened her eyes.
"What is the red-light district?"
Alice gazed without seeing out the window of the rushing train. When she shut her eyes again, the businessman across the aisle sneaked another look at her. "Well," Alice said, with her eyes still closed, "I guess we're going to find out."
6
God's Holy Noise
After Amsterdam, Alice was a different woman--one whose small measure of self-confidence and sense of moral worth had been all but obliterated. Jack must have noticed that his mother had changed--not that he would have known why.
On the Zeedijk, the northeastern-most street of the red-light district, there was a tattoo parlor called De Rode Draak--The Red Dragon. The tattoo artist in that shop, Theo Rademaker, was called Tattoo Theo. The nickname mocked Rademaker because, in Amsterdam, he was forever in the shadow of Tattoo Peter.
Rademaker's second-rate reputation didn't
discourage William Burns, who'd had Tattoo Theo etch a cramped fragment from Samuel Scheidt, "We All Believe in One God," in a crescent shape on his coccyx. The music was partially obscured by the words, "Wir glauben all' an einen Gott"--it was William's first tattoo in Amsterdam.
He was later tattooed by Tattoo Peter, who told him Tattoo Theo's work was amateurish and gave The Music Man a Bach tat-too--"Jesu, meine Freude" ("Jesus, My Joy"). Tattoo Peter wouldn't say where--only that the music and the words were, in this case, not at war with each other.
His real name was Peter de Haan, and he was arguably the most famous tattoo artist of his day. Tattoo Peter's lost leg was one of the more tantalizing mysteries of Jack's childhood; it was a gift to the boy's imagination that his mom refused to tell him how it happened. What chiefly impressed Alice was that Peter de Haan had tattooed Herbert Hoffmann, and the two men were friends.
Tattoo Peter's shop was in the basement of a house on the St. Olofssteeg--thus William was tattooed twice in the red-light district. William Burns was a man who was meant to be musically marked for life, Tattoo Peter said, but Alice would be marked for life because of him.
The basement shop on the St. Olofssteeg was very warm. Peter frequently took off his shirt when he tattooed a client; he told Alice that it gave the customer confidence in him as a tattoo artist. Jack understood this to mean that the client couldn't help but admire Tattoo Peter's own tattoos.
"In that case," Alice told Peter, "I'll keep my shirt on." What Jack made of this was perfectly logical: since his mom didn't have any tattoos of her own, the customer might lose confidence in her altogether.
Peter de Haan was a fair-skinned, bell-shaped man with a pleasant, clean-shaven face and lustrous, slicked-back hair. He usually wore dark trousers and sat with his one leg facing the entrance to the tattoo parlor--the stump of his missing leg half hidden on a wooden bench or stool. He sat with his back very straight; he maintained excellent posture sitting down. But Jack never saw him stand.
Did he use crutches or two canes; or, like a pirate, did he strap on a peg leg? Did he come and go in a wheelchair? Jack didn't know--he never saw Peter come or go.
Jack would one day hear that Peter's son was his apprentice, but Jack remembered seeing only one other apprentice at Tattoo Peter's besides his mom. He was a scary man named Jacob Bril. (Possibly Bril made such an impression on Jack that he simply forgot Peter's son.)
Jacob Bril had his own tattoo parlor in Rotterdam; he closed it on the weekends and came to Amsterdam, where he worked at Tattoo Peter's from noon to midnight every Saturday. His faithful clientele would line up to see him; every fan of Bril's was a dedicated Christian.
Jacob Bril was small and wiry--an austere skeleton of a man--and he gave only religious tattoos, of which his favorite was the Ascension. On Bril's bony back was a depiction of Christ departing this world in the company of angels. In Bril's version, Heaven was a dark and cloudy place, but his angels had splendid wings.
For the chest, Jacob Bril recommended Christ's Agony--Our Savior's head bleeding in His crown of thorns. Christ's hands and feet and side were also bleeding; according to Bril, the blood was essential. On his own chest, in addition to Our Savior's bloody head, Jacob Bril had a sacred text--the Lord's Prayer. On his upper arms and forearms were a Virgin Mary, a Christ Child, and two Mary Magdalenes--one with a halo, one without. He'd saved his stomach for that most frightening figure of Lazarus leaving the grave. (Alice liked to say that the Lazarus tattoo was responsible for Bril's indigestion.)
It was reasonable to hope that the two Mary Magdalenes might predispose Bril to forgiveness--especially in regard to those working women in their windows and doorways in the red-light district. But Bril made his disapproval of the prostitutes plain. From where he got off the train, at the Central Station, Jacob Bril could have walked to Tattoo Peter's on the St. Olofssteeg without once passing a prostitute; in fact, the most direct route from the train station to the tattoo parlor did not go through the district. But Bril stayed in a hotel on the Dam Square, the Krasnapolsky. (In those days, the Krasnapolsky was considered quite a fancy hotel; it was certainly too fancy for Bril.) And whether leaving or returning to the Krasnapolsky, Bril made a point of walking every street of the red-light district--both to and from Tattoo Peter's.
When he walked, Jacob Bril's pace was as quick as his rush to judgment. Two canals divided the district; Bril patrolled both banks of the two, as well as the side streets. In the narrowest alleys, where the women in their doorways were close enough to touch, Bril hurried by at a frenzied pace. The women who saw him coming withdrew as he passed. (Jack used to think it was because Bril caused a draft.) One day, Jack and his mom followed Bril from the Krasnapolsky. They couldn't match the little man's speed; Jack would have had to run just to keep Bril in sight.
The Krasnapolsky was an overfancy hotel for Jack and Alice--not just for Jacob Bril--but they'd had a bad experience in a cheaper place. De Roode Leeuw (The Red Lion) was on the Damrak, just opposite a department store where Jack once became separated from his mother and managed to get lost for five or ten minutes.
At The Red Lion, Jack was fascinated by a rat he found in the hotel's poolroom, behind the rack for the pool cues. Jack discovered that by inserting a cue in one end of the rack and wiggling it, he could make the rat run out the other side.
The Red Lion was a hotel favored by sales reps. A previous guest had left a sizable stash of marijuana in one of Jack's bureau drawers. Jack discovered it while looking for his underwear, and used it to replace the bedraggled hay in a creche his mom had given him at Christmastime in Copenhagen. Thus Jack's Little Lord Jesus lay in a bed of pot, and Mary and Joseph and various kings and shepherds (together with an assortment of other creche figures) were knee-deep in hemp, not hay, when Alice discovered them. She was led to the creche by the smell.
De Roode Leeuw was not the hotel for them, Alice said, but Jack never saw her throw the marijuana away. They moved to the Krasnapolsky. Staying in a hotel above their means was becoming old hat for Jack and Alice, although being in the same hotel with Jacob Bril would never have been their first choice. The rat at The Red Lion was friendlier than Bril was.
As for trying to follow Jacob Bril through the red-light district, Jack and Alice tried it only that once. Not only was Bril too fast--he didn't appreciate their company. Usually, when Jack and his mother walked through the district to and from Tattoo Peter's, they liked to play a game. They tried to take a slightly different route each time; that way, they got to know all the prostitutes. Most of them were friendly. In a short while, they knew Jack's name; they called his mom by her tattoo name, Daughter Alice.
The few women in their doorways and windows who were unfriendly to Jack and Alice were conspicuously so. Most of them were older women--to Jack, some of them looked old enough to be his mother's mother--but a few of the younger women were unfriendly as well.
One of the younger ones was bold enough to speak to Alice. "This is no place to be with a child," she said.
"I have to work, too," Alice told her.
In those days, most of the women in the red-light district were Dutch--many of them not from Amsterdam. If a woman from Amsterdam wanted to be a prostitute, she might go to The Hague; women from The Hague, or from other Dutch cities, or the country girls, came to Amsterdam. (Less of a scandal for the family; not so much shame.)
This was around the time families came to Holland from their native Suriname. To see a brown-skinned woman in the red-light district in 1970 was increasingly common. And before the Surinamese, there were the brown-skinned girls of a lighter hue from Indonesia--a former Dutch colony.
It was one of the darker-brown women from Suriname who gave Jack a present. What surprised him was that he'd never seen her before, but she knew his name.
She was in a window, not in the red-light district but on either the Korsjespoortsteeg or the Bergstraat, where Jack and his mom went to make some inquiries about his dad. Jack thought the Surinamese
woman was a mannequin--she was sitting so still, and she was so statuesque--but she suddenly came out on the street and gave him a chocolate the color of her skin.
"I've been saving this for you, Jack," she said. The boy was too surprised to speak. His mother reproved him for not thanking the woman properly.
Most weekday mornings, when Jack and his mom walked through the red-light district on their way to Tattoo Peter's, not many women were working--they went to work earlier on the weekends. At night, of course, every red light was on and the district was teeming; sometimes the prostitutes who knew and liked Jack and Alice were too busy to say their names, or so much as nod in their direction.
Even before the spring came, when the weather was still cool, the women were more often in their doorways than their windows; they liked to talk to one another. They wore high heels and short skirts, and blouses or sweaters with low necklines, but at least they wore clothes. And their friendliness--to Jack, if not always to his mother--enabled Alice to mislead her son about the nature of prostitution.
In those days, one saw only men visiting the prostitutes; Jack observed that the men looked most unhappy to be seen doing so. And when the men left, they were always in a hurry, which stood in sharp contrast to how slowly they had walked in the district (and how many times they'd passed a particular prostitute's doorway or window) before they finally made up their minds about which woman to visit.
Alice explained that this was because they were unhappy and indecisive men to begin with. A prostitute, Jack's mom told him, was a woman who gave advice to men who had difficulty understanding women in general--or one woman, such as a wife, in particular. The reason the men looked ashamed of themselves was that they knew they should really be having such an important and personal conversation with their wives or girlfriends, but they were inexplicably unable or unwilling to do so. They were "blocked," Alice said. Women were a mystery to them; they could pour out their hearts only to strangers, for a price.