House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

  Berta was trembling violently.

  I’ve never heard that story before, the old lady on her right whispered.

  Just a minute, said Hennie de Levi in amazement. So the little boy who was brought to her, her son without whom she wasn’t prepared to board the train, was you? It was you, Mr. Blum?

  Yoel smiled at her. It was already six thirty and the lively nurse came into the lobby wheeling an old lady whose eyes were shut and her mouth a gaping black hole. My dear ladies, the nurse announced, you’re invited for supper, and Yoel took his leave of his hostesses, who began slowly shuffling toward the lit-up dining room. He thanked Berta, who couldn’t stop twitching and contorting as Hennie de Levi wheeled her away.

  A picture of the suited and self-satisfied candidate for mayor flashed in front of him from a huge billboard as he went out into the garden and stood by the beautifully tended flowerbeds and the model windmill that was as tall as him. Noise came from the dining room windows and mingled with the sounds of a classical music radio program coming from one of the windows above him. From his inside jacket pocket, he took a notebook and wrote in it: “Those waters have already flowed onward.”

  Afterward he looked at this sentence and added a question mark to it.

  12

  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. He hadn’t known the truth about his mother, the soul closest to him. What does he know about other souls close to him?

  What does he know about Bat-Ami? He’d met her when they were students at university, and he remembers that he’d liked her, but he doesn’t remember if he was in love with her, and in fact he’s not sure he was ever in love with anyone. He’d never had a girlfriend and he didn’t expect that he’d have one, for he’d never even had a close boy friend, not in elementary school and not in high school. When he decided that it was time for him to marry, he reviewed all the girls he’d met during that period, at university and at the offices of the paper where he worked as a proofreader, and Bat-Ami Avni seemed to be the most suitable candidate. He liked the self-confidence she exuded, and he remembers, fatherless son of an immigrant that he was, that he was also charmed by the fact that she was the daughter of a big, salt-of-the-earth family that had been rooted in Jerusalem for five generations. He loved her name and he loved how everyone pronounced it in that direct, natural, sabra intonation: Batami. And he loved the family home in the Rehavia neighborhood that Bat-Ami’s father had built of Jerusalem stone and where Bat-Ami had lived since the day she was born. If only he could marry this nice girl, he knew that he too would be able to live in the handsome house that was surrounded by evergreen pines and cypresses, and from whose windows the Valley of the Cross could be seen like the sea from a beach house.

  * * *

  And what does he know about his three daughters? Bat-Ami conceived them, gave birth to them, and raised them, and it seems they are still connected to her by umbilical cords through which blood pulses to this day. Toward him, on the other hand, the girls are nice, full of admiration, yet restrained and deferent. Not one of them ever talks to him about her inner world and not one of them ever tells him about what occupies her or really excites her. His sons-in-law behave toward him with the same cautious affection, and the grandchildren also pick up on the family codes, and from the day they are able to think for themselves they open their arms to hug and kiss Grandma Bat-Ami, and then move to him and stand before him and say very politely, Hello Grandpa Yoel.

  * * *

  It was different only with his eldest grandson, Tal. Tal, a beautiful toddler with shining eyes, would burst into Yoel’s closed study, jump into his barren lap with joyous shouts, and shower him with hugs of unconditional love. Perhaps he did it, Yoel thinks, because as the first grandchild there was nobody from whom he could learn that you don’t hug Grandpa Yoel. Either way, of one fact he was convinced: nobody else had touched him so deeply, neither before this child nor after him.

  As Tal grew up he too discovered that his grandfather is a fortress whose walls are inviolable, and since he reached adolescence Yoel sees him only rarely and even then there is no closeness between them.

  13

  Daylight is starting to wane as the plane lands in the Low Country, where sea level is higher than land and the earth is webbed with veins of water and of blood. This is the earth that opened its maw and swallowed many of its lovers, and would have swallowed him as well had it not been for his mother, who rescued him from its jaws. Our life began on the day we immigrated to Israel, his mother repeatedly said throughout the years of his childhood and youth. Remember, Yoel, and never forget: You’ve got a mother and you’ve got a sister and you’ve got yourself. That’s all; nothing else matters.

  * * *

  Late that evening he gets out of the taxi that has brought him from the airport, takes his suitcase and heavy hand luggage from the trunk, and walks into the elegant lobby of the Hotel de Paris. He was here with Bat-Ami only a few days ago and now he walks in flooded with the excitement of someone who has come home, but the elderly receptionist regards him with a blank stare as if he had never set eyes on him.

  As the receptionist hands him a guest registration card, Yoel scans the familiar setting of the reception desk: models of windmills and brightly colored houses, porcelain delftware plates with blue decoration, wooden clogs of assorted sizes, and a large oil painting of an old sailing ship battling a stormy sea. When he completes his registration and goes to take a city map from the stand overflowing with piles of information brochures and tourist advertisements, his attention is caught by a stack of brochures about LGBT Amsterdam and next to it a bunch of leaflets advertising the Anne Frank House.

  * * *

  You’re going to die, one of his little grandchildren had told him recently, and the boy’s mother had raised her beautiful eyebrows beneath her white turban and asked reproachfully, What’s the matter with you, Chesed? Why are you speaking to Grandpa like that? The boy didn’t reply, and Galia smiled uncomfortably at her father. It seems to me, she suggested in a didactic tone, that Chesed simply thinks that anyone who’s a grandfather must be terribly old. But our Grandpa Yoel is still young, Chesed sweetie, our Grandpa Yoel—

  Not true, the child interrupted her. I didn’t say he was going to die just because he’s old.

  Why then?

  Her son hung his head with its curled sidelocks and didn’t reply. A while later, after Yoel had ensconced himself in his study and was immersed in his papers, he sensed a look searing him and saw the boy standing at his desk, his eyes black flames and his nose just about level with the desktop. I’m going to die, Yoel told him quietly, and the child confirmed this fact with a nod, and they gazed at one another unblinking as Yoel reached into a drawer, took out a licorice candy, and proffered it to the small outstretched hand, even though it was clear to both of them that no offering could lighten the sentence.

  * * *

  He still hadn’t recovered from the humiliating welcome he’d been given earlier at Schiphol Airport. Why have you come back to Holland so soon? the huge passport control officer asked him, his voice dripping with hostility. What are you doing here?

  Yoel tried to explain that Amsterdam is so lovely that on his all-too-short previous visit he hadn’t managed to enjoy everything the city has to offer. Then he told the angry giant that he was a writer and that his books had already been published in Dutch and sold very well here. An armed security officer quickly appeared at the passport desk and ordered Yoel to accompany him to a side room, where he had to wait for a long time, and then be trampled to dust in a prolonged and rigorous interrogation, and wait for another eternity until his passport was eventually returned and he was allowed to go on his way.

  Thinking about it now, he has to admit that logic indeed dictates a check of every foreigner entering Holland twice in the same week. But still, he was hurt as if he’d been done an injustice. Logic is on their sid
e, but he can’t free himself of the feeling that they had behaved toward him this way simply because he’s an Israeli Jew.

  14

  In the morning he says his morning prayers by the window overlooking the pub across the street and then goes down to the breakfast room. He’d reached the hotel exhausted last night and had sunk into sleep even though he was starving, but now he looks for and finds his regular kosher menu at the buffet—plain yogurt, bread and butter, hard-boiled eggs—and he enjoys a relaxed breakfast as he scans the other diners and counts the Israelis among them. Afterward he crosses the square between the hundreds of empty tables and chairs standing outside the cafés in straight lines, awaiting the human bodies that will come in the evening and fill them with content and meaning. In the street running alongside the Keizersgracht he stops, takes the city map from his jacket pocket, opens it to study it, then refolds it and starts walking eastward along the canal bank.

  Seventy-six thousand trees are planted on the banks of Amsterdam’s canals to draw into their roots the water on which the city is built. So the tour guide said on the canal cruise he’d been on with Bat-Ami, and Yoel had made a note to find out the Hebrew names of these trees, but now he decides he won’t do it. In Israel he calls each tree by its name and writes about the cypress and the poplar, the oak and the pine and the olive, the fig and the willow. But here he doesn’t mind calling each tree a “tree,” simply “tree,” for what have they got to do with him?

  * * *

  I could have been him, he thinks as a Dutchman who looks about the same age as himself passes by, riding straight-backed on an old bicycle. Or I could have been that man who somewhat resembles me in build and in his combed-back hair, sitting with a good-looking woman outside a café on the opposite bank of the canal. I could have breathed all my breaths in this air under this Dutch sky, so gray and unpretentious, from which the shafts of light shine soft and undemanding. I could have been a Dutch writer: a writer who writes his soul, that is, my soul, in the birthplace of my ancestors, and of my parents, and of myself.

  Everything is beautiful here and everything is precise. Had he lived here all his life perhaps he too would be as light as those white gulls gliding over the canals, dropping to the water and immediately soaring upward again. Perhaps he too would know how to sit in one of the pubs or coffee shops opening up to the street wherever one looked, how to have a drink, to have a smoke, to stare. What would he have been had it not been for the war, who would he have been if his family had not been uprooted from this fertile soil? And had he lived here from the day he was born until this moment, and if it had not been for the secrets at the foundations of his existence, which he had only recently discovered, would he have come to be engaged in writing at all? Would he have suffered this uncontrollable compulsion to seek his words in the void of the world, would he have been compelled to tell and retell his story, would he have become a writer?

  * * *

  On many of the small balconies of the apartments there are crates of Heineken beer, and through the windowpanes he sees in many of the apartments, on many of the windowsills, orchids in their pots. Bat-Ami can’t stand orchids. She loves the abundant plants she cultivates in plant pots, in old enamel pans and clay pots inside their apartment and on the veranda where she devotedly tends the geraniums and begonias and petunias and Mandevillas, fostering personal relationships with each leaf, each bud, and each petal, but she has never introduced a single orchid among them all. Orchids are coquettish to the point of kitsch, she says, their life span is too short, and there’s no justification for the prestige attributed to them and the hard work that for some reason people stubbornly invest in nurturing them. Yoel, on the other hand, is usually less connected to pot plants and is more excited by the wild chrysanthemums yellowing on the Israeli roadsides at winter’s end, and by the stands of hollyhocks blooming pinkly between spring and summer. But what can he do if he thinks that orchids are magnificent and full of mystery.

  * * *

  When Yoel thinks “Bat-Ami,” he thinks first of her scent, which when they first met he identified with the scent of the garden around her house, especially the scent of Jerusalem pines like in the Naomi Shemer song that was popular at the time. Then he thinks about her voice, and then her movements, like the way she comes into the apartment and throws her bunch of keys onto the table before she sits down. And only after the scent, and after the voice and the movements, he sees her image that has remained unchanged since they were young. Unchanged? Bat-Ami grumbles when he tells her so, I don’t know if you’re saying it because you think it’s what I want to hear, or because you don’t really see me. And Yoel defends himself saying, Of course I see you, but she points at the mirror. Just look at how my cheeks have sunk, look at my eyelids, my chin and neck. My face has fallen, it’s as simple as that, not to mention the ravages the accident inflicted on me. Ever since the accident I stand differently, I walk differently, my look is different. I’m different, Yoel, I’ve changed, and I find it hard to believe that you don’t see it.

  And Yoel stands his ground. In my eyes, he says, you’re the same girl you were when I first met you. Even that injury hasn’t left a mark on you.

  * * *

  The map he is holding tells him to turn left from the Keizersgracht past the Municipal Archives building and continue to Muntplein. From the top of the clock tower in the middle of the square come musical bell chimes, and Yoel thinks of his forefathers who also hear this tune as they pass by this tower.

  Tourists from all over the world are walking through the square in couples and groups, talking in their different languages and voicing their wonderment at the architecture and the canals as they hurry toward the floating flower market. Yoel, too, shifts his bones along the crowded pier overflowing with tulips of every size, tulips of every possible hue, and tulips of every impossible hue. He also sees various species of lilies and he sees orchids, roses, giant sunflowers, and dahlias, but mainly tulips, open tulips and closed tulips and tulip bulbs for planting, tulips and tulips as though the Dutch aren’t aware that the origins of this beautiful flower are in the Mediterranean region, that it migrated to the Netherlands from Persia through Turkey and was given the name “tulip” due to an ungraceful corruption of the Persian word “turban.”

  How long has it been since he saw Tal, and what was the color of Tal’s hair when he last saw him? There was a time when the boy’s head glistened grassy green, another time it shone deep blue, and for a very long time he had hair that was carrot red. At the last Sukkot festival, Ronit had visited them with her family, but Tal hadn’t come with her. And when Yoel and Bat-Ami visited her in midsummer, Tal was just leaving the house with a few of his friends and with hair as white as snow, as white as the hair of an old man.

  He must learn to find his way through the maze of Amsterdam’s canals and streets, he must look and see, he must remember both what he will see and what he won’t see. Flocks of tourists pass him, chattering away in their multifarious languages, standing amazed and taking photographs. They have all come here in search of attractions, whereas he has come in search of a dead child. Murder investigations usually focus on seeking the identity of the murderer, whereas he knows who the murderer is and he is seeking the identity of the victim.

  15

  His entire life is geared toward expectation of that one moment: the moment when he will feel he is alive. In the past he had deluded himself that it would happen only if he galloped on horseback, parachuted from a plane, or sliced through sea waves on a Jet Ski, his face to the wind. But he had never even thought about learning one of these skills, and even in his youth, when his friends clambered down rope ladders into deep caves, scaled cliffs, or raced in sailboats, he had always preferred to stay on terra firma and tell everybody it was because he had to consider his mother, who indeed was anxious even when he went on a routine school outing, but the truth is that it wasn’t because of her but because of himself that he always avoided physical challenges and i
t wasn’t because of her but because of himself that he chose military service in a home front intelligence unit. There was a period when he did think he wanted to bungee jump, his heart pounded just with the thought of his body being hurled into the void and freeing itself of the force of gravity, of earthliness, but in the end he gave up on the idea. All that trouble, of taking his cluster of organs off to the end of the world just to have it raised to some high point and be harnessed to some kind of rope and bounced into a chasm like a yo-yo, seemed too much.

  * * *

  In Rembrandtplein tourists are gathered round the exalted, lonely statue raised in honor of the man who revealed to humanity how light is created, a miracle that until the advent of Rembrandt van Rijn only the Creator could have worked. Yoel wends his way through the tourists and their cameras, and a bolus of sadness chokes him as he looks up at the stone image in whose stone hand is a huge stone palette and whose stone head touches the sky. Then he crosses the Amstel over the wide royal bridge whose pillars are decorated with flamboyant golden crowns, and now he is already inside the Old Jewish Quarter, and on his right is the building that once housed the four Ashkenazi synagogues that is now home to the Jewish Historical Museum. A green-blue billboard welcomes visitors and Yoel goes to the ticket office, purchases an Amsterdam City Pass for all the city’s museums, and goes inside, hurrying in leaps and bounds up the spiral staircase leading to the exhibition hall.