by Emuna Elon
She told him, her eyes shining, that because their staircases are so narrow and steep, the Dutch move furniture and other large items into or out of their homes through the windows.
She was also captivated by the Dutch custom, which he found incomprehensible, of leaving their big windows exposed to full view and not hiding their private life behind shutters or curtains. This blatant exposure shocked him profoundly, but the happy Bat-Ami didn’t stop saying to him, Look, look at this, and Look at that, and mainly, See how nothing’s changed here in Amsterdam since Holland’s Golden Age. What hasn’t happened to us Jews since then, while here, throughout all those long years, the same buildings, the same streets, the same water, and the same people. Just look at this guy, for example, she whispered as they went into their hotel and the elderly, suited clerk handed them their room key over a counter filled with Dutch clogs, miniature windmills, and pictures of sailing ships. I’ll bet he hasn’t moved from that counter since the reign of Philip the Second.
* * *
It seems that it’s easier for Bat-Ami on their trips abroad than it is in Israel. When she’s in Israel, she shoulders all matters pertaining to the family, the home, the State of Israel, and the human race. But the moment the aircraft wheels detach from the runway at Ben Gurion Airport, Bat-Ami detaches herself from her perpetual duties and lets the world go on its way. When she’s abroad, she even frees herself of the burden of her big bunch of keys. She is still always armed with her large purse and her cell phone but can finally be seen without her silvered hamsa ornament inset with a miniature family photograph, on which hang and jangle at all times their front door key, the key to the storeroom, the key to the garden gate, the key to the door to the roof, their mailbox key, the key to the gas cylinder cage, her car key, his car key, emergency keys to her brother’s and sisters’ apartments, a key to each of their three daughters’ apartments, and more large and small keys to padlocks known to her alone.
4
The day after the literary evening at the Dutch publisher’s home, between a visit to a museum across the River Amstel and a whirlwind tour she’d planned of the Rembrandt House Museum and the Waterlooplein flea market, Bat-Ami decided that they couldn’t possibly pass through the Old Jewish Quarter without taking a look at the Jewish Historical Museum. And so Yoel found himself in a dim exhibition hall, the length of which were illuminated glass cabinets displaying mezuzahs torn from doorposts, a faded wooden sign warning in black lettering “Voor Joden verboden”—Jews prohibited—photographs and documents and various utensils. He thought he’d better get out of there; he thought he should respect his mother, who had wanted so much for him not to see these things. He looked around and couldn’t find Bat-Ami and was gripped by panic until in the dim light he saw her sitting on one of the benches, and he made his way over to her through the knots of visitors moving around quietly, passing a group of Dutch youngsters who were following their teacher.
Bat-Ami appeared not to have noticed him and when he touched her shoulder she didn’t raise her eyes to him, but with muted excitement gestured for him to sit down beside her. When Yoel sat down, he saw that she was watching old black-and-white film clips screened onto the length and breadth of the wall facing them.
Why, Yoel wondered, were his wife’s eyes glued to these silent images? When he looked at them, he saw people celebrating at a wedding festivity, the men in tuxedos, their hair gleaming with brilliantine, and the women in splendid evening gowns and elegant hairdos. He turned to Bat-Ami but she didn’t turn her face to him. Her eyes were still glued to the flickering images, but she sensed his look and gestured imperatively: Look at the wall, look at the film, and he turned his head as she instructed and saw a shot of the bride and groom, and then a close-up of their parents, and a shot of the bridesmaids walking behind the bride, reverently bearing her train. Then there was a shot of a woman holding a baby girl, pointing at the camera and trying to get the indifferent infant to smile, and then one of two bow-tied young men waving at the camera, and Bat-Ami pinched his arm and tensed, and the shot of the young men was replaced by one of a young family: a man and a woman, him holding a little girl in his arms, and she a baby boy in hers. The image flickered on the wall for just a heartbeat, but even in that fleeting second, Yoel managed to discern that the woman in the picture was his mother: his mother in her early years, his mother in the days that preceded the compass of his memory, but his mother.
He stopped breathing.
Wait, Bat-Ami whispered, relaxing her grip on his arm, it’s screened in a loop. It’ll be on again soon. As she said the word “loop,” she drew an imaginary circle in the air with her finger. Yoel swallowed saliva and nodded, but apart from the shape of the loop he didn’t understand a thing.
* * *
Time after time Yoel and Bat-Ami watched the shots in the old wedding film. They sat on the bench in the center of the museum hall and saw the bride and groom, and then the couple’s happy and concerned parents, and the girls carrying the train in deadly seriousness, and then the woman with the baby and her pointing finger, and the happy boys in their bow ties waving to the camera, and then—now, Yoel said to himself, pay attention now—and he stared with all his might, and on the tenth time that he saw the fragments of the film, like on the twenty-second time and the thirtieth time, he was utterly convinced that the woman flickering before him was indeed his mother. The image was grainy, but without question it was her image: the height, the massive hands, the posture. And the face, which displayed, without doubt, her broad features he loved so much, and which in the film could be seen full face and in profile as she turned her head to the right and smiled at her husband, his father. He was only a baby when his father was taken, and in time, all the photographs of his parents, together with the rest of their property, had been lost. But now he was sure that the slight, bespectacled man in the film was his father, mainly because of the warmth and admiration in his mother’s eyes as she stole a glance at this man whose height was shorter than hers.
* * *
The little girl the man was holding in his arms was Nettie. He had no doubt it was her: the facial features, the expression, everything. But who is the strange infant? his heart asked. Who is that strange baby boy nestled in your mother’s arms?
The baby must be you, Bat-Ami whispered as if she’d heard the question.
But it’s not me, he whispered back.
How can you know?
It isn’t me. Look at the shape of his head, the eyes, the hair. It isn’t me.
Then perhaps, she suggested after the figures had reappeared and vanished again, perhaps, just as they were filmed, she was holding someone else’s baby?
Yoel wanted to embrace this assumption. He wished he could. But the loop completed its cycle again, and again the same image appeared on the wall, and again he saw his mother holding the unknown baby the way mothers hold their own children. Not only that: he saw—for it was impossible not to—how much the unknown baby resembled her, especially in its wide cheeks and clear eyes whose corners turned slightly downward, and how there wasn’t even a hint of resemblance between the face of the unknown baby and his own, dark-eyed and bony, in the photographs from his childhood taken after they immigrated to Israel and which his mother stuck, using tiny mounting squares, onto the rough black pages of the beautifully arranged album that sat on the sideboard in the living room of their apartment in Netanya.
* * *
As soon as they got back to their hotel room from the museum, Yoel took out his cell phone and brought up Nettie’s number. He looked at the line of illuminated digital numbers and thought about his sister sitting at this twilight hour in her small apartment in the kibbutz located between the River Jordan and Mount Gilboa. Her face is serene, on her knees is an open book, and her old radio is playing classical music on the station to which it is permanently tuned. Her husband, Eliezer, awaits her in the kibbutz cemetery at the foot of the mountain. He is buried there next to Yisrael, their handsome,
tousle-haired firstborn, who had fought in the Yom Kippur War and the First Lebanon War, but was killed not in battle but in the kibbutz date palm orchard. Yoel had never managed to picture the day the police, accompanied by kibbutz officials and the local doctor, had come to tell Nettie and Eliezer and their daughter that the power ladder they used in the orchard had hit an electric cable and that Yisrael was dead even before his strong body in its blue work clothes folded inward and hit the ground with a thump.
Nettie will soon put her book aside, sigh, and turn on the TV to watch the early edition of the evening news.
Yoel turned off his phone.
* * *
Through the window of the building opposite their hotel room he could see a kitchen in which a woman was standing washing a stainless-steel jug, and he was fascinated by her movements as she soaped and scrubbed the outside and inside with a long-handled brush and then rinsed it thoroughly in tap water. Over the past day, he had discovered that the woman lived in a two-room apartment with only a brown-and-white dog and the plants she tended in a window box. She was a good-looking woman, her straight blond hair cut short, and when she came into the kitchen, she put a floral apron over her slender figure. In the morning he’d seen her making herself a cup of coffee before leaving for work, in the middle of the day he’d seen the short-legged, floppy-eared dog waiting for her forlornly on the armchair in the living room, and at six in the evening she had come home and turned on the light, and at a distance of only a few meters from her, he’d watched her bend to put food into the dog’s bowl that was evidently on the floor under the kitchen window. He wondered if she knew she was being watched and whether she cared. Afterward he was compelled for some reason to watch her beating eggs, slicing vegetables, mixing them in a deep bowl, tasting. He could hear the rattle of her dishes and kitchen tools, and almost the sound of her breathing. Almost the sound of her breathing.
* * *
Thanks to his friends at kindergarten and in the neighborhood, he had learned to make up stories at an early age.
Say, Yoel, how come you don’t have a dad?
I do so have a dad! My dad’s at work. My dad’s in the army. My dad’s on a secret mission far away from here.
Throughout his childhood, the plots his brain had woven around the figure of his absent father were filled with mystery and magic. They endowed his father with a multitude of daring roles in the military forces and in the secret services, a wide range of groundbreaking scientific studies, and vital missions across the sea.
Every time he was asked about his father and invented a new reply, he believed it with all his heart. The story his mother told him about a young man who had died in a distant and incomprehensible war was, in his eyes, only one possible answer to the question of where his father was. Only one story, which held no advantage over all the others, and Yoel saw no reason not to replace its sparse plot with more interesting ones, depending on his desires and flights of fancy.
5
He couldn’t sleep that night. Bat-Ami was snoring lightly as he released himself from the confining quilt and the foreign hotel bed whose previous occupants he wondered about: had they been sad or happy, lonesome or loved? He quietly tried to find a place for himself, trying not to bump into the furniture and other objects that filled the small room, until by one of the walls he found a free area of carpeting where he was able to sit cross-legged. He needed some fresh air; he wanted to get out of the crowded room and out to the street, but he didn’t go down and didn’t go out because he was afraid that Bat-Ami would wake up while he was gone, and he knew that if he’d woken up in the middle of the night and seen that she wasn’t there, he’d have been overcome by anxiety for fear that something bad had happened to her, that she’d left him, that he’d never see her again.
* * *
On second thought, he said to himself, would Bat-Ami indeed be worried if she woke up and didn’t find him in the room? He shifted his position on the carpet and straightened his back against the wall, placing his hands on his crossed legs and looking around. How different the walls and corners of the ceiling seemed from this angle. How different the wardrobe, the bed, the woman sleeping in the bed. He heard her mumble something in her sleep and he thought: What do I know about her dreams, what do I know about her? I’ve always thought I know how to write people because I know how to see them, yet today I discovered that I’ve never really succeeded in seeing even my own mother. I thought I was close to you, my beloved mother, I thought I knew you well, and now it turns out that all the time you were carrying a missing child in your heart—and I didn’t feel it and would never have guessed.
* * *
Darkness crept up to him from the four corners of the room, closing in on him, its black particles climbing over his body and penetrating his skin through its pores until he was forced to stand up, dress quickly, and flee to the street. Bat-Ami isn’t me, he repeated to himself as he bent to tie his shoelaces. Bat-Ami is Bat-Ami. If she wakes up and sees I’m not there, she’ll understand that I’ve gone out to get some fresh air and immediately close her eyes and fall back asleep.
Colored lights were flickering in a small, crowded pub across the street from the hotel entrance. A giant of a man, whose bare, heavily muscled arms were covered with tattoos, went into the pub and was swallowed up in the crowd.
Yoel moved on.
* * *
On the day that Yoel rose from the seven days of sitting shiva for his mother and went out of his house, he realized he didn’t know how to walk in a world in which his mother was no longer present. Very slowly, he taught himself to walk again, and since then, it had seemed to him that he was walking properly. But at this nocturnal hour, alone in the city of his birth, where he had first learned to walk, he felt as if he had to instruct his body to execute the requisite actions again: Raise the right foot, there, excellent. Now move the right foot forward and place it on the sidewalk. Well done, Yoel, and now lift the left foot, move it forward…
He pulled his coat collar up round his ears, hunched his head into his shoulders, and proceeded, step by step, his eyes on his feet and the flagstones beneath them. At the end of a row of houses, the sidewalk took an upward curve, and he looked out from inside his coat and saw he’d come to an arched bridge over a canal. He saw a bench on the canal bank and let his body collapse onto it, exhausted.
The waters of the canal flowed dark and silent along their ancient course, dark and silent and all-remembering. Yoel sat on the bench and gazed at the water as if seeking to pluck from it even a fleeting shadow or an echo left in it by his lost brother, who, by his calculations done mainly based on Nettie’s estimated age in the museum film, was somewhat younger than him. His little brother.
* * *
What happened to him, to the light-skinned baby? Where had he, Yoel, been when the wedding photographer immortalized his little brother with his parents and his sister, Nettie? Did the things that happened to his little brother almost happen to Yoel too, and could that explain the early memory in which he was cast into a corner, abandoned, and his body, the body of the small child he was then, was trembling from wetness, cold, and fear? All his life he had told himself that this early memory of his was nothing but a figment of his fertile imagination; all his life he had tried to submerge this memory in the depths of his subconscious, and yet the memory had resurfaced, drawing him into the torment of a toddler that did not yet know how to put its feelings into words. Whether he experienced this anguish in reality or in his imagination, he cannot forget the hard touch of the surface he was lying on. He cannot forget how the surface seemed to rock and shake beneath him while he cried until his strength ebbed away, nor can he forget how he wanted his abandoned soul to die, to die and to exist no longer. And he is unceasingly haunted by the strange part his mother plays in this memory, his mother, who, while he lay there suffering, sat beside him helplessly.
* * *
A knot of half a dozen young people crossed the bridge near his bench,
filling the night air with shards of joy and laughter, while in the canal, the dark water continued on its never-ending way, pulling with it the day that had just ended and remembering all the many sights ever reflected in it and all the many sounds.
6
As dawn began breaking, with Amsterdam still shrouded in darkness so that he could not yet put on his phylacteries and say the morning prayers, Yoel again turned on his cell phone. Bat-Ami was still asleep and appeared not to have noticed him leaving the room in the middle of the night and returning a short time ago. He stood by the window and brought up his sister’s number, resolved to catch her before she left for her job in the kibbutz laundry.
In the light cast by the streetlamps, the first cyclists of the day passed by below. One, and then another, and after them two or three more. Outside the pub there was a green truck bearing the legend “Heineken,” and two men in green coveralls were unloading green crates of beer bottles.
Good morning, Nettie. His voice faltered.
Yoel! she exclaimed happily. Yoel, how are you? And how’s Bat-Ami?
We’re in Amsterdam, he told her without further ado.
Silence. All that could be heard was the rattle of beer bottles from across the street as the men in green wheeled the crates into the pub and then began loading the empties onto the truck.
A book of mine, he explained, trying to steady his voice, a book’s been translated into Dutch and… Bat-Ami and I flew to Amsterdam.