House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

  Last week in this museum he and Bat-Ami had tried in vain to find more photographs of his family members or documentation relating to their history. The librarians in the research library and then some administrative officials had searched the documents, shelves, drawers, and computerized records for them. They had promised to continue the search after the Israeli writer and his wife returned to Israel, and most importantly, they excitedly promised to try to find the full reel of the wedding film, excerpts of which are screened on the wall, and one of them shows the writer’s family.

  But now, after Yoel had seen Nettie and heard what he’d heard from her, he has no further need of either documentation or photographs. All he needs is one single scene from the wedding film screened on the wall: the one and only excerpt showing a father, a mother, a little girl, and a baby. They appear for only the blink of an eye, but in that fleeting moment they are breathing and moving as if in a transparent sliver of life that has crystallized and been preserved in the dimension of time.

  * * *

  Remember and never forget, his mother would tell him in his childhood. You’ve got a mother and you’ve got a sister and you’ve got yourself. That’s all; nothing else matters. They had no relatives. They had no friendly relations with other families, not even with families from Holland like themselves. Wherever he looked, Yoel the child saw families hosting and being hosted, dining in each other’s houses on Sabbaths and festivals and spending leisure time and vacation time together. Only he and his mother and Nettie weren’t part of the great human celebration, only the three of them regularly remained outside, that is to say inside, in the small, closed circle his mother marked out around them. We don’t need anyone, she told him each time he caught her declining invitations and rebuffing attempts at closeness by likeable neighbors or people who knew her through her work at the clinic. She didn’t have even one close friend, and he always thought she had chosen solitude because of her individualistic personality, because of her need for privacy and quiet, and apparently because of her critical character too, which made her judge people harshly and on more than one occasion tell them exactly what she thought of them.

  He realizes only now that his mother had isolated herself for his sake. Only now, after Nettie had revealed the secret of his past, he understands that to protect that secret his mother had avoided bringing any outside entity into their small family circle. And that she had been especially careful with Jews who had emigrated from Holland, for they were liable to remember her from the past and recognize the truth she was hiding. His heart lurched when he thought about the magnitude of her effort to protect the fragile balance in which he had been raised and grown up. And to what degree of devotion, to the point of self-sacrifice, she had blocked any disturbance that might crack the delicate shell of their family cell.

  * * *

  He has to tell stories: back in his childhood he did not stop at the tales he invented about his father, but told his friends in the neighborhood and at school about his large and vibrant family that included grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv, in the kibbutz and in the village. He told them about the special helicopter that nightly hovered above his house to protect him and his mother and sister against robbers and other pests. He told about the wild tiger his father had brought him from his travels, and how he raised and trained that tiger on their kitchen porch, and told about more and more exciting gifts his father brought for him from all over the world. And again about his extended family, a warm, happy family of dozens of loving relatives spread all over the country. Even Shiye Glazer, he heard himself boasting to a few children one day, even Shiye Glazer, the famous goal-scoring star of the national soccer team, is actually my cousin.

  And he never understood what the kids in class and the neighborhood wanted of him. Why they mocked him and got mad at him whenever one of them checked one of the facts he related and released the results of his investigation. Where’s your famous cousin? they teased. Liar, pointing at him, liar, liar, but he hadn’t meant to lie, he simply didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t want to know, how to separate the life in his imagination from reality, which to him was imaginary as well.

  16

  He planned to spend only an hour or two at the museum today. Right afterward, he thought, he’d carry on to the Old South of Amsterdam and find the Jacob Obrechtstraat area: the place where he was born and where, according to what Nettie had told him, the main part of the story he plans to write takes place.

  But instead he spends a long time watching the endless loop of the wedding film.

  And after detaching himself from the wall on which the film is being screened, he finds himself being drawn to the various objects displayed in the museum and becomes immersed in them, entirely swallowed up by the signs, the clothes, and the utensils, by the books, the documents, and the taped interviews. Swallowed up limitlessly, swallowed up as though he has no present apart from the past of the Jews of Amsterdam.

  * * *

  Exhibited in one of the glass cabinets in the museum hall are Etty Hillesum’s notebooks. He had read the book based on her diary a long time ago, but now there are her notebooks, her handwriting, and the figures she drew in the margins, and there is Etty, a brilliant young woman who loved life and who could have been saved through her connections in the Jewish Council, yet she chose to be taken to the place where all the Jews who didn’t have such connections were taken. To console God, as she wrote in one of the notebooks, at a time when His world is causing Him so much sorrow.

  * * *

  There is a cabinet containing copper tableware. In others there are ration coupons and packaging from staple commodities. An identity card stamped with a “J.” Issues of a daily paper. Table games. A child’s dress, and below its starched collar is sewn a yellow star bearing the word “Jood.” A large roll of yellow material with row after row of “Jood” stars ready for cutting out with scissors. A hard-studded suitcase bearing someone’s personal details, and the word “Holland.” A barrel for pickling herring. Children’s toys: building blocks, a locomotive, a doll’s bed, and a windmill, all made of wood. Theater playbills.

  * * *

  A filmed interview: A beautiful elderly lady (white hair, thick gray eyebrows, lively black eyes, a string of pearls round a graceful neck) is seated in a fine house whose window overlooks a flowering garden on the shore of a blue lake. My family was arrested, she says, because another family on the list wasn’t at home and the police had to fill their quota. We didn’t think, she says, that things like this could happen in Holland. Of course, if you knew about what was happening in Germany, and you knew that the Germans had occupied Holland, then you could guess what would happen here. But you still didn’t believe that they might possibly arrest you, you didn’t believe that you’d be taken from your home and imprisoned in a camp. No, not in Holland.

  * * *

  A filmed interview: An elderly man is standing in Waterlooplein in front of the two spires of the Moses and Aaron Church, which Yoel had seen across the street when he went into the museum. The man is talking about the bustling Jewish market that was right here in the square. And how, in his childhood, his father, who was a shoemaker over there (he points), would send him every day to buy him a fish from the herring seller whose barrel stood right here on this spot.

  * * *

  We didn’t believe it. We didn’t believe it. We didn’t believe that such things could happen in Holland.

  * * *

  A scene from a short film: A train from Amsterdam arrives at a concentration camp. The sliding door of a cattle wagon opens and looking from within it are men in tailored suits, women in fox furs and high heels, children in sailor collars. They slowly start clambering down from the wagons, carrying suitcases and various other items, blinking in the sunlight and shading their eyes as they look around them.

  * * *

  And all this time, without stopping, the enlarged scenes from the wedding film are flicker
ing on the hall’s north wall, while on two of the other walls additional scenes of everyday life in prewar Amsterdam are being screened: Young families enjoying a picnic in the countryside. Boys in singlets playing volleyball on a lawn. Middle-aged men and women coming out of a building, taking leave of one another with handshakes, mounting their bicycles parked on the sidewalk, and pedaling off. A toddler in a swimsuit standing in a tin bath, bending to fill a small pail with water that comes up to her ankles, and then straightening up and emptying the pail over her head, smiling at the camera as the water drips from her hair onto her happy face.

  * * *

  Yoel glances at his watch only when the PA system announces that the museum is closing, and is reminded that time is something that passes.

  As he comes out into Waterlooplein it is already almost dark, and he decides that it’s enough for today and that he will postpone his visit to the south of the city until tomorrow morning. He walks to the tram stop to take a tram back to his hotel on Leidseplein but is halted as though by an invisible barrier: it’s odd, but he knows, and the knowledge hits him like a hammer blow, that he must avoid traveling on public transportation. There is no reason why you shouldn’t, he tries telling himself, but he is sure that as a Jew he has no choice but to return to his hotel on foot. And he’s sure that great danger is hovering over him: that they, all the people passing by in the street right now, can see he’s a Jew and they’re determined to murder him. Maybe it’s hunger, he thinks. I’ve hardly eaten all day. Maybe it’s physical exhaustion, in the last couple of days I haven’t slept for more than two consecutive hours. Nevertheless he starts shortening his steps and stays close to the walls as he looks around fearfully.

  * * *

  On the curb, at the edge of the busy street separating the Jewish Quarter from the golden bridge over the river, he is afraid of stepping off the sidewalk. He is sure that the drivers of the cars and buses want to run him down. The cyclists too, who at this hour are on their way home from their work or studies and are flooding the street, seem to him as though they are threatening to intentionally hit him. What’s happening to me? he asks himself. He knows it’s illogical but he is sure that eyes filled with hate are glaring at him from all sides. That they are all pointing at him, showing him to one another, and calling to each other in Dutch: There’s a Jew, there’s a Jew, kill the Jew, destroy him.

  He recalls that he had read, apparently in a pseudoscientific American magazine, about Jewish paranoia syndrome. The sense of persecution is a genetic Jewish instinct, it said. An innate instinct that Jews develop based on Jewish collective memory, not in accordance with their personal reality.

  But that explanation doesn’t help to steady his heart rate.

  You’ve been taken over by an imaginary fear, he tells himself. A phantom fear like the phantom pain a person feels even long after a limb has been amputated. But phantom or not, the fear paralyzes him, preventing his body from stepping off the sidewalk and crossing the busy street. He knows he can’t possibly be in danger, and he tells himself three times: Everything’s alright everything’s alright everything’s alright, but he understands that this time the alrightness won’t really help him.

  In the end he hurries back to the hotel in panicky flight. He refuses to believe that this frightened Yid is him, but he can’t stop looking sideways and backward and only crossing streets with groups of tourists or passersby, hiding among them as if hiding behind a protective wall. When he sees policemen or any other uniformed persons, he stops his flight and hurries, his body trembling, to seek cover behind buildings, cars, or tree trunks. And by the Keizersgracht the sidewalk running alongside the canal seems too exposed, and he bypasses it through one of the more crowded streets running at right angles to it, thus lengthening his route and getting himself so lost that he doesn’t know where he’s coming from or going to.

  * * *

  He only gets back to Leidseplein in the late evening, sidling breathlessly through the busy square and slipping into an opening in a building wall to hide from a passing policeman. When he gets his breath back he sees that his hiding place is one of the entrances to the splendid, stylized commercial building with a copper cupola prominent on its roof and the name “Hirsch & Cie” in huge metal lettering that can be seen from every point in the square and the streets leading off it. Today at the Jewish Historical Museum he had learned about Leo Hirsch, the Jewish businessman who had purchased this plot of land when the entire area was desolate swampland. Hirsch and his partners drained the area, erected the building with its impressive copper cupola, and in it opened a fashion house which in those days was more modern and prestigious than any other fashion house in Western Europe. Yoel shrinks, sharpens his senses insofar as he is able, and cautions himself: Take care, syndrome or not you’ve got to save your skin you’ve got to flee you’ve got to run, run, run.

  And he runs, runs, runs, borne like a leaf on the wind, borne, borne, borne, and he doesn’t calm down even when he sees the neon sign of the Hotel de Paris from afar. Anxiety grips him lest he not be admitted into the hotel, lest he not be allowed to go back to his room, where he has left his belongings when he went out at the start of the day.

  17

  In the morning, after standing under the sharp needles of a hot shower for a long time, and another long time bound up in the straps of his tefillin, he admits that apart from Jewish paranoia syndrome, and apart from phantom fears, he had experienced something else yesterday. He doesn’t believe in mysticism—he definitely leaves that entire field and its odd derivatives to Bat-Ami—but there can be no doubt that there is another explanation for what happened to him after the visit to the Jewish Museum. If Bat-Ami was here now she’d certainly say that on his way from Waterlooplein to Leidseplein last night he’d been accompanied by the tormented souls that still inhabit the streets of Amsterdam, and particularly the Old Jewish Quarter; the souls of those who had been persecuted in that place and were helpless to do anything about it, of those who were tormented and tortured and whose pleas went unheard. Those masses of Jews were here and are no longer, she would probably have said, but their grief remains in this place, all the suffering and terror remains, and on whom could those painful energies settle if not on a sensitive soul like yours?

  Either way, the new novel is taking shape in his mind. He has a growing feeling that all the stories he has written throughout his life were nothing more than preparation for the writing of this one. And his confidence grows that he will indeed find the letters of his story here in Amsterdam and join them into words. Nettie can relate only the little she knows and remembers, but he will gather up the tangle of broken threads she gave him and weave them into a whole tapestry.

  * * *

  The sky above is clear and blue as he emerges from the hotel into the street, and he stands under that sky and studies his city map. Then he folds up the paper map, slips it into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, and crosses Leidseplein unhurriedly. At an easy pace he passes the five stories of the handsome Hirsch building, walks southwest, and goes into the big city park, Vondelpark. Its paths are lined with trees, shrubs, and flowers and pass between lakes and sprawling lawns, and even at this late morning hour on a normal working day they are crowded with people walking their dogs, with seemingly carefree cyclists, and with people running or walking and radiating fitness, health, and efficiency.

  Here is his young mother riding her bicycle along the park’s main path. What is she thinking about? How did she sleep last night and what did she dream about? Does he know her—his young mother in the days before she became his mother—to the extent that will enable him to write her as a character in a novel? Does he know how she moves and talks, does he know what she thinks, does he know what she wants?

  * * *

  At the park’s fourth exit, just as the map shows, Jacob Obrechtstraat begins, along whose wide, paved sidewalk, like the narrow streets leading off it, rows of typically Dutch-style terrace houses are arranged. Som
e have four narrow stories, some have five, and many have basement apartments with windows at sidewalk level. All of them are built of small red bricks and adjoin one another. At the front of each one there are two doors opening onto the street, and each story has a row of three or four high, wide windows opening onto the soft light outside and the foliage of the tall trees.

  Everything is clean, everything gleams, everything is precise, and Yoel paces out Jacob Obrechtstraat step by step. A man in shorts and colorful running shoes passes him, and it seems that he’s about his age and on his way home from his daily hour of jogging in Vondelpark, and that he’s lived in this street ever since both of them were born here. The man turns into a house with black art nouveau ironwork framing its doorway, and Yoel thinks that perhaps it’s the house where this carefree runner was born and grew up, though it’s entirely possible that the house belonged to Jews, but anyway he slowly and painstakingly steps on each of the sidewalk’s gray paving stones as if he is letting each house see his face, see his face and recognize in him the baby he was here so long ago.