Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  “You’re up by the zoo,” Chuck told me when I rang him. “Walk down Flatbush to the big church. I’ll meet you there.”

  I had never been to this section of Flatbush Avenue. Every second premises, it seemed, was devoted to the beautification, one might even say veneration, of those bodily parts that continue to thrive after death: there were hair palaces, nail palaces, barbershops, African hair-braiding specialists, wig and hairpiece suppliers, nail bars, beauty parlors, unisex hairdressers. West Indian enterprise dominated. The food outlets—delicatessens, pie shops, bakeries, the very occasional restaurant—were almost exclusively Caribbean, and the music coming out of a hole-in-the-wall store was dance reggae. Presently the towers of Erasmus Hall High School came fabulously into view, promising Trebizond or Tashkent; and then I saw the leaning wooden white spire of the old Reformed Protestant Dutch church. Chuck was waiting for me by the church entrance, a phone pressed to his ear. When he was done talking, he took my arm and said, “Let me show you something, my friend.”

  He led me into the graveyard at the rear of the church. Blurred ancient headstones, crumbling and toppling, filled the muddy yard. These, he told me, were the graves of Brooklyn’s original settlers and their descendants. “This entire region,” Chuck said, “everything for miles and miles around, all of it was Dutch farmland. Until just two hundred years ago. Your people.” The word “Yankee” itself, I was informed, came from that simplest of Dutch names—Jan.

  He thought I’d be thrilled. But it struck me as a baffling little drama, this neglected smattering of pale Dutch farming folk who had, I learned from my friend, cleared dense hickory and oak forests, and repelled the Canarsie and Rockaway Indians, and developed the pasturelands of Vlackebos and Midwout and Amersfoort, and worshipped at this old village church, built in 1796 with predecessors going back to 1654. We walked among the headstones. A few names had not yet been completely effaced: Jansen, van Dam, de Jong…I practically heard clogs ringing on the flagstones. But then what? What was one supposed to do with such information? I had no idea what to feel or what to think, no idea, in short, of what I might do to discharge the obligation of remembrance that fixed itself to one in this anomalous place, which offered so little shade from the incomprehensible rays of the past. Also, it had quite recently struck me with force that I did not want to join the New York dead. I associated this multitude with the vast burying grounds that may be glimpsed from the expressways of Queens, in particular that shabbily crowded graveyard with the monuments and tombs rising, as thousands of motorists are daily made to contemplate, in a necropolitan replica of the Manhattan skyline in the background. A quality of abnormal neglect and dismalness attached to this proliferation of urban graves, and each time I hastened by, invariably on my way into the city from JFK, I was reminded of the tradition of oblivion in force in this city—in which, howling ambulances aside, I went for years without ever seeing a sign of funerary activity. (The moment came, as everybody knows, when that changed.)

  Evidently Chuck was having related thoughts. Walking down Church Avenue he said to me, “Seriously, Hans, have you made plans for your funeral?”

  From anybody else, the inquiry would have struck me as bizarre.

  “No,” I said.

  “I have made plans,” Chuck affirmed.

  We turned off Church, and in an instant that raucous Caribbean boulevard, with its ninety-nine-cent stores and discount clothing outlets and solo sellers of cocoa butter and its grocery stores displaying yams and green bananas and plantains and cassava and sweet potatoes, had given way to a neighborhood unlike any other I’d seen in New York. Huge old houses—Victorians, I learned to call them—rose on both sides of a grassy mall, each building of a unique character. There was a plantation house with huge neoclassical columns. There was a Germanic place with dark green window frames inhabited, to all appearances, by an evil doctor from a Hitchcock movie. There was a sprawling yellow manor with countless yellow-brick chimneys and, startlingly, there was a Japanese-style mansion with upturned eaves and a cherry tree in photogenic blossom. But most striking of all was the quiet. New York City was here as still as The Hague.

  Chuck’s place was on a slightly less grand block. “This is it,” he said, and for a moment I thought we were entering a vinyl-coated two-family house with a bricked-up porch and a front window conspicuously covered by an Old Glory that almost thoroughly obstructed any view of the outside world. But Chuck’s house was one lot farther along and more substantial. It had a wooden wraparound porch, six bedrooms, nicely painted clapboard, and a little tower.

  Chuck led me directly to the garden and sat me down in a wicker armchair while he went indoors. Manhattan seemed far away. Lilacs bloomed, a cardinal flashed through the trees, and a serpentine hose lying in Chuck’s flower beds dribbled water out of the hundreds of holes in its coils. The day itself was perforated by the rattle of a woodpecker.

  I jumped out of my chair. Squatting next to my foot was the most enormous and repulsive frog I had ever seen.

  Chuck, returning at that moment from the house, shouted out happily. He bent down and picked up the monstrous fat torso and the long, uncannily flippered legs; it seemed, in fact, as if he grasped a tiny, rotund frogman. “This is an American bullfrog,” Chuck said. “It’ll eat just about anything. Snakes, birds, fish…” I followed him to the plastic fence that marked the border with the property containing the vinyl house. “There’s a pond back there. This guy must have escaped.” Lodged in the fence, I saw, were the corpses of other neighborhood frogs that had died trying to migrate into the garden with the water. Chuck dropped the bullfrog where he belonged.

  I was thinking about telling Chuck the only frog story I knew—about the annual shutdown of the Duinlaan, which ran in sight of my house, to enable the safe crossing of the little frogs of The Hague—when Anne Ramkissoon appeared at the back door. She was an African Caribbean woman of around fifty, markedly paler than Chuck, with very short hair. She wore a shapeless green sweatshirt, jeans, and white training shoes. She smiled shyly as Chuck made the introductions.

  “My dear,” Chuck said, “Hans and I were just admiring a bullfrog.”

  Anne said, “Would you please not talk about that? We eating just now.”

  “It’s true,” Chuck admitted. “Frogs are disgusting. Even in Trinidad we draw the line at eating frogs.”

  “Some people eat frog,” Anne corrected him. “Mountain chicken, they call it.”

  “I heard that but I never saw it,” Chuck said. “And in Trinidad, boy, we eat just about any kind of wild meat. Lappe, agouti, manicou, turtle, iguana—we hunt them and we eat them with curry, to cut the gamy taste. Curried iguana with coconut milk? Mmm.”

  We went indoors and sat at the kitchen table. Anne began pouring coffee.

  I made conversation. “How do you hunt an iguana?” I asked.

  “Iguana,” Chuck said thoughtfully. “Well, some people might spear them, even shoot them, but we used to climb trees and just shake them down from the branches. You see, the iguana comes out in the morning sun and bakes itself on the branch of a tree. That’s your chance. One guy shakes the branch, and the other guy grabs the iguana after it’s fallen down. I tell you, you have to be quick, because an iguana is a rapid animal. My brother Roop’s specialty was hunting iguana.”

  He was on his feet now, pressing halves of oranges on a manual juicer. “Roop was totally fearless—and agile? My God, he could climb anything. That maple tree outside? He would have found a way up. They used to call him the monkey of Las Lomas. I used to be very proud of his nickname,” Chuck said. “It made him seem famous. Then one day my father heard me using it and he gave me a mighty lick. ‘Never call your brother that nigger name again.’” Chuck handed out glasses of orange juice. “He died hunting iguana—Roop. He was fourteen—or fifteen, was it?” Anne said quietly, “Fifteen.” “Fifteen,” Chuck said. “That’s right. I was twelve. One day he and some friends saw the green lizard up in a silk cotton tree. Now
the silk cotton is the biggest, most charismatic tree in the forest, this real giant reaching way up above all the others into the sky. You know the one I mean, don’t you? Most Trinidad people believe spirits live in the silk cotton. Nobody in his right mind would think of chopping one down. Just climbing a silk cotton is wrong—and they’re practically impossible to climb, by the way: huge bare trunks and branches covered with wild pines that’ll tear you to pieces. But Roop went right ahead. He went up this one tree and hopped over onto the silk cotton tree. He started to crawl on his belly toward the iguana, crawling along a big branch. There was a terrible explosion—like the world had exploded. They found my brother’s body on the ground. He had stopped breathing. Smoke was coming off his skin. When the old people in the village heard about it, of course, they said it was the spirits that lived in the tree. But it was lightning. My brother was killed by lightning.”

  I glanced at Anne. She was drinking her coffee and watching her husband.

  Chuck said, “I admired him so much. You know how, when you’re a kid, you have heroes? Well, he was my hero. My brother Roop.” He noisily stirred his coffee.

  Anne came to us with a dish loaded with an exotic pink mush. “Saltfish,” Chuck said, rather pleased. “You eat it with bread. Go on. I got it this morning at Conrad’s. That’s the best place for saltfish and bake.”

  While Chuck and I ate breakfast, Anne chopped up a chicken with a cleaver, making great slamming noises. I asked her what she was cooking. “Stew chicken,” she said. “I chop it like this and season it. Garlic and onion. Thyme. Chive. Fitweed.”

  “Tell Hans about the noise when you put it in the caramel,” Chuck said.

  Anne tittered.

  “Shoowaaa!” Chuck howled. “The chicken goes, Shoowaaa!”

  Their laughter filled the kitchen.

  “That stew chicken, Hans?” Chuck said. “It isn’t for you, and it sure isn’t for me. It’s for the bishop.” The bishop was the minister at Anne’s church in Crown Heights. His birthday was coming up and his devotees were getting ready for a week of celebrations. “Appreciation week, they call it,” Chuck said. He snorted. “He should be doing the appreciating. Four daughters in private colleges, all paid for by his followers.”

  “He’s a good guy,” Anne said firmly. “You can call him anytime, day or night. And he’ll bury anyone, even a stranger. You don’t get that at the Tabernacle. Our bishop say, It not my church, it God’s. Everybody welcome.”

  “Well,” Chuck said, “that’s something I want to talk to you about. Anne? Listen to me. Are you listening? I’m going to tell you something important. Listen to me now.” “I’m listening,” Anne said. She was covering a bowl of curried rice with cling wrap. “Put that down for a moment,” Chuck said. Without hurrying, Anne placed the bowl in the refrigerator. “Yes?” she said, now moving to the sink. Chuck said, “I want to rest here. In Brooklyn. Not Trinidad, not Long Island, not Queens.” Anne did not react. “Did you hear me? In Brooklyn. A cremation, and then an interment of the ashes. Actual burial, I’m saying. No columbarium, no urn garden. I want a real headstone, rising from real turf, with an appropriate inscription. Not just ‘CHUCK RAMKISSOON, BORN 1950, DIED’ whenever—2050.” He looked at me as if he’d just had a brainstorm. “Why not? Why not die a centurion?”

  Anne was rinsing dishes.

  “Will you respect my wishes?” Chuck said to her.

  She remained impassive. I later heard, in the course of some discussion or other, that Anne had already arranged to be buried in Trinidad with her three unmarried sisters. A plot had been bought outside San Juan, their hometown. The four women had even agreed on the outfits each would wear in her coffin. How Chuck was supposed to fit into this underground sorority was unclear.

  “Anyhow, you heard me make my declaration with Hans as my witness,” Chuck said. “I’ll put it in writing, so there’ll be no confusion.”

  Anne said provocatively, “The graveyard in the city all full up. It full up in Brooklyn, it full up in Queens. You want to be buried in this country, you be buried in Jersey.”

  “Who told you that?” Chuck cried. “There’s space at Green-Wood Cemetery. I know this for a fact. I made inquiries.”

  Anne said nothing.

  “What is it? You think I should spend all eternity in Jersey?”

  Anne started laughing. “I just thinking of them parrot. You and them parrot.”

  I said, “Parrots?”

  Chuck, smiling at his wife and shaking his head, didn’t reply immediately. “There are parrots at the cemetery,” he said. “Monk parakeets. You sometimes see them around here in the summer—small green birds. Actually, you hear them,” Chuck said. “Squawking in the trees. It’s quite unmistakable.”

  I must have looked doubtful, because Chuck insisted, “There’s another colony a few blocks from here, at Brooklyn College, and another one down in Marine Park. Years, they’ve been here. Why not? You get wild turkeys in Staten Island and the Bronx. Falcons and red-tailed hawks on the Upper East Side. Raccoons in Prospect Park. I’m telling you, one day, and it won’t be long now, you’re going to have bears, beavers, wolves, inside the city limits. Remember what I said.” Chuck, wiping his mouth, added, “Anyhow, you’ll see the parrots for yourself.”

  Anne said, “He don’t want to be tramping round a graveyard.”

  “It’s not a graveyard,” Chuck said. “It’s a historic cemetery.”

  We got up and went out for a drive.

  That is, I drove and Chuck talked—incessantly, indefatigably, virtuosically. If he wasn’t talking to me he was talking on the phone. An intercontinental cast of characters passed through the old Cadillac. From Bangalore there came calls from a man named Nandavanam, who, in association with the Mr. Ramachandran I’d met at Antun’s, apparently was in the process of finalizing a million-dollar sponsorship deal with an Indian corporation. From Hillside, Queens, there was George el-Faizy, an Alexandrian Copt who had produced preliminary drawings of the arena and the rehabilitated hangars for next to no money and still drove a taxi four days a week and indeed had first met Chuck when the latter had hopped into the said taxi on Third Avenue. And, from a private jet to-ing and fro-ing between Los Angeles and London, there was Faruk Patel, the guru on whose top-secret multimillion-dollar participation the further expansion of the cricket venture depended. Even I had heard of Faruk, author of Wandering in the Light and other money-spinning multimedia mumbo jumbo about staving off death and disease by accepting our oneness with the cosmos. I couldn’t quite believe Chuck had this mogul on the line (and in fact Chuck usually spoke to Faruk’s associates); but he had, because it was Chuck Ramkissoon who’d found out that beneath the mystical Californian quackery was a cricket nut with millions of dollars to play with, and who’d tracked down Faruk in Beverly Hills and cornered him and sold him on the idea of the Cricket World Cup coming to New York City and extracted from him a letter of comfort which he proudly showed me. And then there were strictly local characters—lawyers and realtors and painters and roofers and fishmongers and rabbis and secretaries and expediters. There was an official from the Bureau for Immigrant Sports and a man at Accenture and Dr. Flavian Seem of the angel fund. He, Chuck, talked all these people into being—and, if necessary, nonbeing: when Abelsky called, which he repeatedly did, Chuck invariably ignored the call. “I’ve made this man this rich,” he once said, “and this is what I have to put up with. You know when I met him he was driving a limousine? A bum from Moldova who couldn’t wipe his own caca-hole.” If his phone, instead of buzzing, gurgled a few bars of “Für Elise,” he rarely answered, because this was Eliza’s ring tone. “Limits,” he told me. “These things must have limits. But not business. Limits in business are limitations.” He liked nothing better than to put bare feet on the dashboard and hit me with an aphorism. Or a fact. Chuck was a know-it-all on everything from South African grass varieties to industrial paints. His pedagogic streak could be gratuitous: he wouldn’t hesitate, for example, to in
form me about Holland’s history of flooding, or to draw my attention to the importance of some pipeline under construction. Best of all, though, he loved to give speeches. I began to understand how he’d been able to extemporize an oration that first day we met: because he was constantly shaping monologues from his ideas and memories and fact-findings as if at any moment he might be called upon to address the joint houses of Congress. As early as June he told me of his preparations for his December presentation to the National Park Service in support of his application to build the cricket arena (“Phase Two” of his great scheme, Phase Three being the operation of the facility). The precise content was top secret. “I can’t tell you anything about it,” he said, “except that it’s going to be dynamite.” Dynamite? Clueless Chuck! He never quite believed that people would sooner not have their understanding of the world blown up, not even by Chuck Ramkissoon.

  “What were his politics?” Rachel asks one day.

  When we have this exchange, she is going through a phase of eating sticks of celery, and she crunches on just such a stick. I wait for her to finish crunching, and then I think carefully, because on this kind of subject, indeed on almost every subject, my wife is invariably on the money. It is my favorite of all her traits.

  “We didn’t really talk about politics,” I say. I decide against mentioning the pointed, possibly opportunistic, remarks he made at that fateful first cricket match, because he never said anything similar again—which didn’t matter to me. The decisive item, if I’m going to be honest about this, was that Chuck was making a go of things. The sushi, the mistress, the marriage, the real estate dealings, and, almost inconceivably, Bald Eagle Field: it was all happening in front of my eyes. While the country floundered in Iraq, Chuck was running. That was political enough for me, a man having trouble putting one foot in front of the other.