House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

All Nettie managed to say after several long seconds was: You’re in Amsterdam.

  All that Yoel managed to ask her was: Why didn’t you tell me?

  She remained silent.

  A large, heavy beer barrel was slowly lowered from the truck to the sidewalk.

  Why didn’t you tell me? he repeated. Bat-Ami and I went to the Jewish Museum here, and we saw… Why didn’t you tell me, Nettie? Why didn’t Mama tell me? How could you let me discover something like this by myself after so many years, and then only by chance?

  It pained him to hurt her like this. He hurt her. It pained him.

  But Yoel… Her voice hoarsened and her Dutch accent, which was always more pronounced when she was stressed, turned the “but” into “bot.” How… How did you find out?

  You mean it’s true? he shouted despairingly, as though until that moment he’d hoped she would convince him that he was mistaken. As though until that moment he still thought she’d tell him that they’d never had another sibling and that the boy in the film, the blond baby that their mother was clasping to her heart, was another woman’s child.

  You’ve got to tell me everything. He raised his voice as if in an attempt to be heard across the sea. You’ve got to tell me…

  But she remained silent.

  Eventually she ended the call assertively but gently: When you come home, Yoel, when you get home, come and visit me. I’ll tell you everything I know.

  * * *

  In a few minutes, thought Yoel, she’ll put on a thin sweater against the morning chill. She’ll pick up her square, orange-colored plastic basket, go out of her small apartment, and close the door behind her without locking it. She’ll go down the two low steps to the aging, cracked pathway, affix the basket to the handlebars of the old bicycle standing in the shade of the fragrant honeysuckle, mount the bicycle carefully, and pedal to the laundry behind the communal dining room. She’ll ride slowly, immersed in the light flowing down the hillside onto the kibbutz paths, the fields, the palm orchards.

  Across the street, the green truck was now loaded with the beer barrels that had been emptied during the night.

  The truck drove off.

  Bat-Ami woke up.

  Amsterdam was still shrouded in darkness.

  7

  Now he’s staring out the airplane window at the fields of cloud stretching, furrow by furrow of dense white foam, from horizon to horizon.

  He’s going back to Amsterdam only three days after he had sat on the old brown sofa in Nettie’s kibbutz apartment and had heard her tell him—hesitantly at first, but then in a continuous outpouring—what she knew about the first years of his life. As he took his leave of her at her door late that night, she was filled with remorse and sorrow and said, God help me, what have I done to you, Yoel? Why did I have to spoil what you’ve thought all your life? He looked into her eyes, always so light and clear, and said, Thank you, Nettie. Thank you, my sister, for agreeing to tell me the truth. Then he went down the two steps to the cracked pathway, passed the fragrant honeysuckle, and saw his dead brother-in-law Eliezer’s bicycle still standing next to Nettie’s in the rusted rack.

  Have a safe journey, she called after him. Have a safe journey.

  He took another look at her figure standing in the rectangle of light in the doorway, at her face that revealed her fear for him, and knew that her “Have a safe journey” meant “You are my brother. You are my brother and you are precious to me.”

  * * *

  He felt like a new, different Yoel as he walked surrounded by the singing of the cicadas and frogs, beneath the canopy of poplars and rosewoods, from Nettie’s apartment to where the previous, old Yoel had parked his car. Throughout the drive from the Bet She’an Valley back to Jerusalem, he told himself over and over what he had heard from Nettie and repeated aloud, How is it possible? How is it possible? He pressed down on the accelerator, speeding the car through the bends of the Jordan Valley road and following its headlight beams as they sliced through the mantle of ancient darkness as if illuminating the chapters of his life for the first time, bend after bend, fragment after fragment. How is it possible? he asked the night. How could they not have told me or hinted, how didn’t I suspect or imagine?

  * * *

  But the night was silent, the car emerged from the hills to the open flatland, stretching from the north of the country to the south, and there was no orphanhood like Yoel Blum’s orphanhood from the blackening spine of the Samaria hills on his right to the ridge of the Mountains of Gilad flickering on his left, across the River Jordan flowing parallel to the road from the Galilee to the Dead Sea. It seemed to him that the land he was driving on was a living body, his own body, and that the Syrian-African Rift was a scar running across his skin: a long, old scar that had suddenly opened and was now bleeding afresh.

  * * *

  As he passed the approaches to Jericho and turned onto the road that climbs toward Jerusalem, his thinking started to clear. By the time he reached the Sea Level sign, he knew he must fly back to Amsterdam as soon as possible.

  And he knew he must do it alone.

  Wait, Bat-Ami urged him the next morning after he’d told her everything. Wait, don’t go back right away, give yourself time to calm down and digest what you’ve only just heard.

  But Yoel didn’t want to wait and he didn’t want to calm down. He hurried as if somebody was waiting impatiently for him in Amsterdam. Or as if he were capable of changing the course of the events concisely related to him by Nettie, if only he could quickly get to the place where those events had occurred.

  8

  He hadn’t left the house for the whole day before this flight, his second flight to Amsterdam. In fact, he hardly crossed the threshold of his study, where, at his desk, he had immersed himself in sorting through papers, notebooks, and documents, and arranging them in piles in drawers and in files after going through them one at a time as if he was searching for a clue. Between arranging and filing, he raised his head and looked out the window at the cars passing through the Valley of the Cross at the foot of the ancient monastery: appearing between the silvery olive trees on the slope and then disappearing behind them, and then visible again, then hidden again, and again.

  * * *

  Every now and then, Bat-Ami popped her head round the doorpost, peeping into the study as if she was afraid of disturbing him, and then she’d come in with a cup of herbal tea and a plate of granola cookies for him, or call him into the kitchen for one of their regular meals. She laughed, as she always laughed, at his custom of leaving his top-of-the-range laptop open in front of him, switched on and ready for action, even though he never used it. I’m sure, she said as she always does, that you must be the last writer in the world who still writes his books in notebooks, in actual handwriting.

  What was he to do if with all his amazement at the innovations of the time, and at what one could do with a shiny, compact laptop with all the bells and whistles like the one on his desk, he is still incapable of writing on it, neither articles nor pre–first drafts nor a first or second draft, but only uses a ballpoint pen in school notebooks like the ones he had in his childhood, forty pages single-line, with thin brown cardboard covers and multiplication tables printed on the back. He’s been promising himself for years that he’d try, gradually, of course, to get used to writing on a computer like everybody else. From time to time, he even exchanges his new laptop for a newer one in which, so he is assured, writing is even easier and more flowing. But again and again, he goes back to the old notebooks that he buys from the same old wholesaler in the same little old shop in an alley near the city center.

  Perhaps the day will come when he’ll train himself to use a word processor. Perhaps the day will come when he’ll even train himself to live, a day when he will walk the earth like everyone else without being overcome by the thought that in fact it’s odd, even ridiculous, to be a human being, a cluster of organs that wear out constantly as it runs here and there, wrapped in all sorts of
fabrics and making all sorts of sounds.

  * * *

  Toward evening, his study window seemed like a framed picture of the reddening expanse over the Valley of the Cross. Light illuminated from the rocks onto the white-gray cubes of the Israel Museum, which at this time of day seemed to him like the classic Mediterranean village described in the vision of the museum’s architects. On his last visit there, in the space inside one of those cubes, he had come across the painting by the Dutch painter Jozef Israëls titled Mother and Child Walking on the Dunes, undated, and understood, for one brief moment, what he had been looking for all his life. The realization flashed through his mind sharply, clear to the point of pain. But it faded immediately and left him speechless and lost, deeply yearning and not knowing for what.

  Now he could recall only the watery stains of paint gently merging into one another: the child walking beside his mother, a child-stain merging into a mother-stain who merges into a sea-stain and a sky-stain against a backdrop of a fishing-village-stain.

  9

  He had already packed a pile of new, empty forty-page, single-line notebooks for the journey, and as he enjoyed their smell, which he loves, Bat-Ami again poked her head into his study. Galia and Zohar have come to say goodbye, she told him happily, and he put on the most paternal smile he could muster at that moment and got up and went into the living room to meet his daughters, who had probably come less to say goodbye to him and more to calm their mother, who worries about him whenever he travels without her.

  Even so many years after his middle daughter, Galia, became a disciple of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, Yoel’s heart lurches every time he sees her with a sort of white turban wound around her head and her long, buttoned-up clothing. She usually comes to see them with her bearded husband and their flock of children, one of whom, a little Breslover with curled sidelocks and a fringed skullcap, had come over to him during their previous visit, fixed him with his burning black eyes, and told him: You’re going to die. On this occasion, she had come with her younger sister, Zohar, and as he entered the living room he found the three women bending over Zohar’s little baby and making all manner of gurgling noises. His entrance made them straighten up and strike up a banal conversation on subjects that were of no real interest to either him or them. The conversation quickly moved into the dead end known as a debate on the news of the day, and there, as expected, Galia and Zohar turned it into another political argument. This was the point when Bat-Ami, who had continued gurgling at the baby, got up as always to fetch more coffee and cookies from the kitchen, and Yoel, as always, asked them to leave politics out of it. He made this request in the same semi-authoritative tone in which he used to ask them when they were kids to return to the kitchen table the chairs they had dragged into the living room to play “train,” and as always Galia replied that she wasn’t talking politics at all, she was simply trying to understand why her dear sister preferred to delude herself rather than recognize reality, while Zohar laughed bitterly and said that she too wasn’t talking politics, all she wanted was the possibility of living a normal life in this country at long last.

  They were joined a little later by his eldest daughter, Ronit, and Zohar’s baby began making small bleating noises until it fell asleep in its mother’s arms. As though from outside, Yoel looked at the circle in which he was sitting in his living room with his wife and daughters, who were drinking more coffee and eating more butter cookies and talking and talking, and he inhaled a lungful of air and thought: But I’m alive. But I’m alive.

  * * *

  And even after everything he had just learned, it was still his mother who had taught him to be loved, taught him to be. She had protected him against the nights of his childhood when he was deathly scared of going to bed and falling asleep and wouldn’t go to bed unless she was sitting on the low stool at the foot of his bed, sitting there for hours night after night until he closed his eyes and fell asleep. And if he woke up in the small hours and could see only dark and empty air over the low stool, he would give a loud and bitter shout, and only a moment passed until she came into his room, her hair in disarray and her eyes blinking at him through the web of sleep, and without a word she would sit down by his bed as if to say, I won’t leave you, my child, I won’t ever leave you.

  10

  It was going to be only a few hours until the taxi came to take him to the airport, but before he goes to sleep each night he has to rest his mind awhile. So tonight he took a sheet of paper from the package on his desk and began doodling on it.

  He wrote: “Mother and Child Walking on the Dunes undated undated”

  Then he scribbled the Hebrew word , cat, several times, since he had recently discovered that the word actually looks like a cat, with the last letter, , resembling a cat’s upright tail.

  The word , tree, looks like a tree too, he thought as he doodled, with roots planted in the ground and spreading branches.

  He scribbled some more words that look like their meaning:

  , mountain

  , field

  , house (the word, he thought, has a floor and a ceiling and enclosing walls)

  And also:

  , roof

  , deterioration

  , gentleness

  * * *

  The nocturnal silence was suddenly shattered by a burst of eerie howling. The sound of these howls had recently been besieging his windows night after night, emanating from the abyss of the darkness like the cries of grief-ridden keening mourners refusing to be comforted. Bat-Ami claimed that the howling of jackals has been heard in Jerusalem at night since time immemorial, but Yoel was sure that they have never sounded so desperate nor come so close to human dwellings. He managed to think about it less in the hours when daylight reigns in the world, but at night he was convinced that vast packs of huge wild jackals had taken over the paved paths of the Valley of the Cross and invaded the well-tended lawns of Sacher Park and that they would shortly be swarming over the neighborhood streets and maybe its buildings too.

  SECOND NOTEBOOK

  11

  Now there is only the monotonic drone of the plane’s engines, now there are only the fields of white clouds as far as the eye can see. And how hard it is to believe that life, complex relationships, a world, are stirring somewhere below that layer of foamy whiteness.

  He didn’t know the truth about the soul closest to him, his mother. He didn’t know the truth about her even after he met her childhood friend Berta Solomon, whose existence he discovered only from a short, laconic letter of condolence she sent them when his mother died. Nettie, so he discovered, had always known about Berta, but he was nevertheless excited about the prospect of meeting someone who had known his mother before they immigrated to Israel, and so after receiving the letter, he went to meet Berta at the Dutch immigrants’ retirement home not far from his native Netanya. On a wintry afternoon, he arrived at the home, which was situated in the heart of a quiet, beautifully landscaped neighborhood, which at the time was decorated entirely with local election posters. His heart was racing as he entered the building whose gate bore the name of the queen of the Netherlands, and which was fronted with Dutch-style flowerbeds around a model windmill. With the help of a lively nurse with a Yemenite accent, he found Berta, a delicate old lady with white-blond hair in a girlish haircut with a side parting, who was sitting in the lobby with a few of the other residents who had gathered there for afternoon tea. Berta was in a wheelchair, her face contorting and her limbs twitching with Parkinson’s disease. Speaking was difficult for her but she somehow stammered her happiness on seeing that her friend’s son had come to visit her, and she introduced him to the other elderly ladies, one of whom, an erect and pleasant-faced woman called Hennie de Levi, said: Yoel Blum? So you’re Yoel Blum the writer? It’s an honor to meet you, I’ve read all your books! And as they shook hands Yoel noticed the number tattooed on the inside of her forearm.

  He joined the circle for tea, a custom his mother, too, had always
insisted on at five in the afternoon. Your mother, Berta told him, didn’t really want to keep in touch with me. When he asked her what she knew about what had happened to his mother in the war years, her delicate features froze while her hands continued twitching in her shrunken lap. Another elderly lady sitting on her right grumbled: They never talk about anything else in this place, every conversation is only about the war, the war, the war! In the war, she volunteered, I was hidden with some Christians. After the war my mother came to take me and nobody knew where I was, so she had to search a lot until she found me.

  It was only just before six thirty, the time his new companions had warned him that they would have to say goodbye and go to the dining room for supper, that he managed to elicit from Berta some fragmented answers to his questions. When he put them all together he realized that although Berta and his mother had grown up together in Amsterdam’s Old Jewish Quarter, when they reached adulthood their ways had parted. They had only met again on the “exchange train,” she told him with mounting excitement, and Yoel didn’t know what train or what exchange she was talking about, but he didn’t dare interrupt the flow of Berta’s story that she had suddenly begun to relate. I remember, she said, how all the people were already on board the train and only she, your mother, refused to get on. I hadn’t seen her for a long time, but I recognized her right away: tall, stubborn… Her little daughter was at her side, and she stood there on the platform and said she was waiting for them to bring her son to her. The train was about to leave and everyone was shouting at her, save yourself, save your daughter, but she didn’t answer and she didn’t move, and some people got off the train and tried to drag her onto it, but she was stronger and continued standing there. The police were already shutting the doors, and a few people in our car held on to our door from the inside so it wouldn’t close. I also shouted her name at the top of my voice. I shouted, Get on! But she didn’t respond, and the train started to move. Suddenly—suddenly I saw someone running from a distance, running so fast it was unbelievable. When he got closer I saw he was carrying a little boy, and he ran straight to your mother and handed the child to her, and she finally got onto the train. And we left.