House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

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  FIRST NOTEBOOK

  1

  One after another the people are swallowed up into the plane to Amsterdam, one after another after another. Yoel is approaching the aircraft’s door but the flow of passengers is suddenly halted by somebody, a woman in an orange windbreaker, who has planted herself in the doorway of the Boeing 737 and refuses to step inside. Yoel’s thoughts are already with the new novel he has decided to write, and he thinks about this woman and asks himself which of his new characters would be capable of admitting to the primal, naked fear that besets every mortal on entering the flying trap called an airplane. Who would volunteer to disrupt with her body the “everything’s alright” façade and violate the sacred alrightness to which people clutch so they won’t have to admit that everything is truly chaotic.

  From his place in the line, Yoel can see only the woman’s back. Even through the orange plastic of her windbreaker, he can see how tense her muscles are, and over the shoulders of the people in front of him he discerns the beads of perspiration breaking out on the back of her neck and around her ears. The line starts burbling irritably; people peek anxiously at their boarding pass for flight such-and-such, clutching the rectangular pieces of paper as if they were an assurance that the plane will eventually take off. Then from out of nowhere appears a man in a resplendent uniform, with gray hair and an air of authority, who introduces himself as the purser and puts a fatherly arm around the stricken passenger’s shoulders. As he gently takes her aside, the plane continues filling up, and as Yoel passes them he hears him telling her, Believe me, my dear, I have anxious passengers on every flight, and everything’s alright. I promise I’ll come and hold your hand during takeoff.

  * * *

  When he’s invited overseas to promote his books, he and Bat-Ami usually fly business class, thus sparing him from physical contact with the multitudes of other passengers and from being subjected to their multitudes of looks. Since this time he’s flying on his own, and mainly because he’s paying for his ticket out of his own pocket, he decided to fly economy and so now all he can do is slide into his seat as discreetly as humanly possible. Just look straight ahead and downward, he reminds himself, just straight ahead and downward. Don’t raise your eyes or look to the side lest your eyes meet those of somebody who might recognize you. And be very wary of people who have already recognized you and are trying to get your attention, and of the ones you can hear saying to each other, that’s Yoel Blum. Or, there’s that writer. Or, there’s that famous guy, the one with the cap. Come on, remind me what his name is.

  * * *

  It has been only a week since his first trip to Amsterdam and the reception, held in his honor by his Dutch publisher, that was attended by local luminaries from the fields of literature and the media. Only a week since he and Bat-Ami had wandered through the crowds of tall people in the city of bicycles and canals, and strolled through streets, squares, palaces, and museums. In the evening, exhausted and ravenous, they went to the publisher’s beautiful home on Apollo Avenue in the old southern part of Amsterdam, but had to make do with a meal of carrot and cucumber crudités: the fare on the tables was rich and varied, but here too, as at many festive events held in his honor all over the world, it was clearly evident that their hosts hadn’t imagined that in these enlightened times there were still civilized people who observed the ancient Biblical dietary laws.

  * * *

  Before the second part of the literary event began, the Israeli guest was asked to sit on a carved chair in the center of the Dutch living room next to the stylized Dutch cabinet on whose shelves Dutch delftware of white porcelain decorated in blue was arranged, and facing the large, wide Dutch window overlooking a canal scattered with flickering reflections. His audience sat facing him, waiting for him to answer his red-cheeked host’s question on the difference between Israeli writers categorized as writers of the generation of the establishment of the State of Israel and those known—like Mr. Blum, and I hope it’s alright if we simply call you Yoel—as writers of the new wave.

  The past cannot be hidden. Yoel pronounced the reply he always provides to this question as he crosses his legs and looks pleasantly at his audience. I believe it’s impossible to write Israeli literature without referring either directly or indirectly to the archeological tell on which the State of Israel flourishes, the shores of which are lapped by its new and old waves alike.

  Attentive faces nodded their understanding and perhaps even empathy.

  Attentive faces always nod their understanding and perhaps even their empathy.

  However, he emphasized in the dramatic crescendo to which his voice always rises at this point, contemporary Israeli writers are first and foremost contemporary Israeli writers. I myself hope that my writing does not wallow in the mire of the past, but carries my soul and the souls of my readers to what is the present and to what will be in the future.

  * * *

  The game went on. In the way that people ask him everywhere, the Dutch asked if the characters populating his books are typical Israelis. And he replied, the way he replies everywhere, that in his view, his characters are universal.

  For a moment, he thought about deviating from his custom and telling them, this particular audience, how hard he works in his writing to refine his characters so that each of them is Everyman. In each movement to capture all the movements which have ever been and will ever be. To formulate the core of the words, their very core.

  Like every writer’s characters, he said as he always does, my characters, too, live and act in a reality I am closely acquainted with. As a writer who lives in the Israeli reality, it is only natural that my characters are connected with that reality as well. But the stories I tell about these characters tell about Man wherever he breathes, about Man wherever he loves, about Man wherever he yearns.

  * * *

  The publisher’s red cheeks flushed even more deeply as he read to his guests from the New York Times book review: “It is hardly surprising that Yoel Blum’s books have been translated into more than twenty languages and that he has been awarded some of the most prestigious literature prizes. Yoel Blum is a magician, the wave of whose wand turns every human anecdote into the nucleus of every reader’s personal story.”

  The color of the Dutch cheeks turned a deep purple as he continued reading: “You pick up a Yoel Blum novel and are assured of it revealing your deepest secret: the secret whose existence you weren’t even aware of.”

  A few more familiar, unavoidable questions, and Yoel already estimated that the evening was drawing to its expected conclusion.

  But then he was asked an unexpected question by a man introduced to him earlier as a local journalist by the name of Neumark, or maybe Neuberg.

  If I’m not mistaken, called the questioner from his seat at the right-hand edge of the circle of chairs. If I’m not mistaken—Mr. Blum, Yoel—you were born here, in Amsterdam?

  * * *

  A stunned silence engulfed the room. Yoel too was shocked, since to the best of his knowledge, this fact did not appear in any printed or virtual source dealing with him and his history. He tried to recall the journalist’s name. Neustadt? Neumann? Is he Jewish?

  As he did so, he heard himself calmly answering: That is correct. Tech
nically, I was indeed born in Amsterdam. But my family immigrated to Israel when I was a baby, and so I’ve always regarded myself as a native Israeli.

  Afterward he managed to divert the talk from his personal history back to the collective Israeli one and say a few more words about Hebrew literature in these changing times. But it seemed that the matter of his Dutch origins had been placed in the center of the circle and that none of those present could ignore it. Yoel presumed that they expected him to provide further biographic details, aside from the one already provided by Neuhaus, or Neufeld, according to which the famous Israeli writer is a scion of an old Jewish-Amsterdam family uprooted in the wake of the events of World War Two.

  They couldn’t have imagined that the Israeli writer himself knew no further details about it either.

  2

  Several times a year he flies to places where his books are published in various languages, but until last week, he hadn’t flown to Amsterdam, neither for the first translation of one of his books into Dutch nor for the second. In early fall, when a third Yoel Blum novel was about to be published in the capital of the Netherlands, Zvika, his literary agent, urged him to go this time and promote sales of the book. Send me anywhere you want, Yoel told him, just not Amsterdam. I can’t go to Amsterdam. But Zvika continued pressing him: You can’t ignore a publisher, you can’t disrespect your readers. And when Yoel told Bat-Ami about it, she decided that he couldn’t refuse. We’re going, she said. We’ll be there just for a short time.

  He tried to protest. My mother, he said, demanded that I never set foot in Amsterdam.

  Your mother’s dead, Yoel.

  The words hit him as if it had just happened.

  * * *

  In fact, his mother had left him long before she finally left this world. Ever so slowly she went out of her mind, then out of her soul, and finally out of her body, loosening, stage by stage, her grip on reality. Unpicking, one after the other, the stitches that bound him to her; stitch by stitch, thread by thread, until she detached herself from him completely and departed.

  Like when he was a child and she’d taught him to swim, and she’d stand in the shallow end of the municipal pool holding him on the surface, her sturdy hands supporting his belly and chest while, on her instructions, his skinny arms and legs straightened and bent in swimming movements. And then, millimeter by millimeter, so gradually that he didn’t even feel it, she’d withdraw her large hands from his body. Little by little, she withdrew them, little by little, until she folded her arms and only stood next to him, watching but not touching. And the first time he noticed that she wasn’t holding him and that he was actually swimming on his own, he lost his balance and began thrashing around and sinking, swallowing great gulps of water until it seemed he would drown.

  Afterward he got used to it.

  * * *

  His first trip back to the city of his birth passed mainly with pangs of remorse for having consented to go in the first place. I should have stuck to my guns, he repeatedly griped to Bat-Ami in the taxi from Jerusalem to the airport. All in all, what did my mother ask of me? She asked so little. I should have respected her wish.

  What was she so afraid of? Bat-Ami asked.

  What do you mean?

  Why didn’t she want you to go to Amsterdam? What was it she was afraid you might find there?

  Nothing. What could there be after so many years? She simply didn’t want me or Nettie to have any connection with the place where she lost my father, her parents and siblings, the life she might have had.

  * * *

  At the Ben Shemen interchange he realized he’d left his phylacteries at home and he decided to cancel the trip right then and there. Forgetting my tefillin is a sure sign, he explained to Bat-Ami in excited shouts, and ordered the driver to make a U-turn and drive back to Jerusalem. A Jew’s tefillin are his self-identity, and it’s a fact that I travel so much yet have never forgotten them until this forbidden and unnecessary journey.

  It was only with much effort that Bat-Ami managed to soothe him. We’re not in an Agnon story, she said, and at this point you haven’t lost any self-identity. Following her precise instructions, the driver proceeded toward the airport while calling the taxi station and asking for another Jerusalem driver to go to the author’s apartment building, get the key of their apartment from Bat-Ami’s sister, who lives on the ground floor, get the phylacteries from their apartment, and bring them to Ben Gurion Airport as quickly as possible. Bat-Ami stayed on the line as she and Yoel reached the airport and as they wheeled their cases into the terminal, and even through security and check-in. She meticulously guided the phylactery courier through each stage of his complex mission, and once it was successfully accomplished and the driver informed her of his arrival at the main entrance with the embroidered velvet bag, she quickly went out to meet him and tipped him handsomely while Yoel waited for her in the departure lounge, his stomach churning.

  * * *

  His first structured memories begin at the kindergarten in Netanya. As he grew up and started to wonder about what had come before the kindergarten, his mother would look away, pretending she was immersed in a vital task that brooked no delay, and declare loudly and clearly: Whatever was, was. Those waters have already flowed onward.

  On more than one occasion he said that he still wanted to know about the place where he was born, but his mother said: Anyone who immigrated to Israel as an infant is considered a native-born Israeli. It’s like you were born here in Israel, Yoel.

  His big sister, Nettie, would explain to him that that’s how it is with the Dutch. They don’t talk about what they absolutely don’t have to talk about, and they certainly don’t talk about waters that have already flowed onward. In general, she always added with the seriousness characteristic of her to this day, being Dutch is no simple matter.

  * * *

  In an attempt to end the meeting at the publisher’s home on a pleasant note, at the end of the evening Yoel chose to relate, as a sort of encore in a different, lighter tone, one of the jokes with which he sometimes spiced his lectures abroad.

  God summons the leaders of the three great faiths, he said, and announces that in forty-eight hours he is going to bring down a great and terrible flood on Earth. The three leaders hasten to gather their people—one in a church, the second in a mosque, the third in a synagogue—and prepare them for the worst. The bishop calls upon his flock to repent and utter the deathbed confession, and the imam tells the Muslim faithful more or less the same thing. The rabbi, however, mounts the rostrum in the center of the synagogue, slams the lectern with the palm of his hand, and announces: Jews, we have forty-eight hours to learn how to live underwater!

  That’s an anti-Semitic joke, you know, Bat-Ami murmured late that night as she curled up in their hotel bed.

  She fell asleep as soon as she completed the sentence, and Yoel was tired too, exhausted as if he’d been walking the length of Amsterdam’s canals for generations.

  3

  And now, only a week after that night, he’s flying to Amsterdam again. He’s going in order to start working on a new novel, after discovering, in the few days since his last trip, what he must write about. It’s hard to say he isn’t apprehensive about the long stay in his foreign homeland.

  It’s hard to say that he has no doubts about his ability to gather the necessary material, fill his notebooks with notes and interviews, and then find the strength to return home and turn those notes into a book.

  But something inside tells him that if he succeeds in all this, this book will be the novel of his life; that it was for this novel that he had become a writer in the first place.

  * * *

  This time Yoel is flying to Amsterdam on his own, and everything he does or doesn’t do there will depend on him alone. But on his first visit to this forbidden city he was terror-stricken because of his desecration of his mother’s last request, and Bat-Ami took his hand as one would take the hand of a wayward child and led hi
m to where she had chosen to lead him.

  Their hosts had booked them into the Hotel de Paris, one of the many small, elegant hotels in the city’s entertainment district around Leidseplein, and Bat-Ami contended that it was one of the more charming hotels they had ever stayed in. From the moment they touched down at Schiphol Airport, she hadn’t stopped admiring and enthusing over Amsterdam’s picturesque architecture, the charm of the canals, the bridges, the boulevards and buildings, the multitude of colors and forms, and of course the well-built, pleasant inhabitants flowing by on their bicycles in the open air.

  * * *

  He couldn’t understand how one could get one’s bearings in this strange city that is almost entirely contained within a semicircle delineated by its four main canals. For example, if the Keizersgracht begins at the western end of Amsterdam and ends after a semicircle at the eastern end, then when you see a sign saying “Keizersgracht” you know you’re on the bank of that canal, but how are you supposed to guess if you’re in the center of the city or in its west or east?

  Still, right away and without any difficulty, Bat-Ami learned to find her way through the maze of strips of dry land running between the canals. She marched him along through that maze energetically and confidently, as she constantly praised the universal spirit of freedom and was excited even by blatantly touristic gimmicks like the floating flower market or by the dangerously steep Dutch staircases.