by Emuna Elon
* * *
To be a baby, he writes in his notebook, to be a Dutch baby whose mother carries him in front of her on her bicycle and the air of the world blows in his face. Leaves float down from the branches of the trees, yellow, brown, and orange, they float down onto the sidewalk and a cool breeze swirls them lightly.
Ah, and the sky slanting like a canvas. The light the Creator wears like a gown. And the depth of the splendor, the splendor that pulsed here then too…
He slows his pace even more as he passes the church with its great wooden doors and its two soaring spires. He reminds himself that these doors were also here back then. And then, too, the spires made the eyes looking at them gaze upward. And after the church here is the market square. The house, Nettie had told him from what she recalled from her childhood, stood in the narrow street running at a right angle to Jacob Obrechtstraat between the church and the neighborhood market square, Jacob Obrechtplein. Yoel stands in the center of the small square’s paved circle, which back then had housed a permanent farmers market, and now the sign says that the market stalls are set up only on Saturdays. Yoel looks at the flat paving stones that have not been replaced since then, at the sky through the thick foliage of the oaks that covers the square, and at the four picturesque streets leading into the square, creating four corners, on each of which stands a shop: today one of them is a pizzeria, and three are house Realtor agencies.
One of the four corner shops is the one Nettie told him about. It is Martin’s art shop.
18
How accurate Nettie’s description was: Just before the end of Jacob Obrechtstraat, at the end of a row of stylized, well-tended homes, he comes to a big building over whose wide gate two white-blossoming trees stand guard to its left and right. He stops. He is here. This is where the Jewish hospital was. This is where he was born. Now there is another kind of medical institution here, and seen through its glazed façade is a spacious, seemingly sterile lobby in which four wheelchairs stand waiting near an elevator door, their reflections silent on the polished floor.
Right near the hospital is the synagogue that was built only a few years before the war. The synagogue too is built of small red bricks, and its façade climbing upward is reminiscent of the church up the street. Unlike the church, the synagogue is encircled by a spiked iron fence and an iron gate blocks the way to the wide steps leading to its door. As if praying, Yoel reads the words inscribed over the door in block Hebrew letters: “I have surely built thee a house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in forever.”
He repeats them aloud, his voice trembling: I have surely built… for thee to abide in forever.
On the wall facing eastward toward Jerusalem are two stained glass windows, while on the south wall there is a stone tablet inscribed with the Hebrew letters of another biblical verse. “Blessed is the man that heareth me,” the letters promise, “watching daily at my gates.”
Yoel sighs. You can’t blame the Dutch for what happened because the Dutch are simply naturally disciplined, they’re simply used to observing law and order and doing what they’re told, and perhaps it’s not only them, perhaps most people are like that. Just as he and Bat-Ami had seen only last week as they crossed Leidseplein, when they saw three men, apparently Hungarian tourists, stop in the middle of the square and start performing headstands, walking on their hands, and doing forward and backward somersaults, and calling to all the passersby in broken English with the help of a primitive megaphone to gather round and witness a performance the like of which they had never seen, and within a few seconds people stopped and gathered round them, with more and more joining them, people who had seen the first small group and followed suit, and minute by minute the crowd grew, even though the three performers were doing nothing more than simple exercises and were wearing only jeans and faded T-shirts, and they didn’t sing or play instruments or put on a sketch or try to be funny, but they just told the audience to stand in a circle that one of them marked out with a length of rope while his friends went on jumping on the spot, and the unbearably disciplined crowd, men, women, and their children, stood by the rope, a huge crowd, patiently and quietly craning their necks to see between the heads of the people closest to the rope, the three threadbare nobodies continuing to stand on their heads and walk on their hands and do backward and forward somersaults like third graders in a gym class. And Bat-Ami tried to pull him away. What are you hanging around here for, let’s get on, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from what was happening there, he couldn’t not see it all, including the end of the performance, after which one of the three Hungarians took off his sweat-soaked hat and told the audience to fill it with money and they all took out their purses and wallets and stood in line to take out their coins and banknotes as if it were impossible not to.
* * *
One side of the synagogue almost abuts the Jewish hospital and the other adjoins a small park. It is an old park and the surrounding trees are now shedding yellow leaves. In it are recently installed ladders and swings, but also a very old circular sandbox whose low concrete wall is cracked from the weight of the years, beside an old iron carousel and a no-less-old iron slide.
Yoel walks slowly into the playground, which at this early hour is empty. He goes to one of the benches, brushes off the yellow leaves that have accumulated on it, and sits down. He sits there for a long time looking at the sandbox, then raises his eyes to the ladder of the slide, holds his gaze there for a moment, and slides his gaze downward. Finally his eyes wander to the abandoned carousel, which today is painted red and blue and who remembers what color it was decades ago.
He allows his heart another spin on the carousel and listens to the voices that have been waiting for him here since way back when.
19
Three Realtors’ offices surround the small market square, their windows covered with photographs of apartments for sale or rent in the nearby neighborhood. He looks at the photographs showing the interior of the apartments and knows that most of the kitchens are renovated and modern, and most of the furniture is modern too, but the walls have been the same for many years. And the apartments are the same apartments.
This is where the story unfolds, he tells himself, in an apartment like this, in a building like this, in one of these streets.
His eyes wander, and on a narrow building adjoining the Realtor’s office that was Martin’s shop he sees a small, faded sign he had missed. Hotel, the sign says. Mokum Hotel.
How excited Bat-Ami had been last week when she discovered that the Dutch refer to Amsterdam as “Mokum,” that is, the Hebrew word “makom” (place). That a “haver,” friend, in Dutch vernacular is “haber” and a lunatic is a “meshugge.”
* * *
Yoel goes through the door beneath the sign, along a narrow passageway, and down three steep Dutch steps, and comes to a glass sliding door opening onto a small, shabby lobby. The place seems deserted, there is nobody behind the old wooden counter that is gouged with scratches, and it is only after several long minutes that a side door opens and a dark-skinned young man appears yawning hugely, stretching his wrinkled shirt over his chest, puts a paperback with an illustrated cover on the counter, and with a surprisingly pleasant smile and in excellent English introduces himself as the Mokum Hotel receptionist. They quickly fall into conversation. Yoel hears himself telling the young man that he’s a writer doing research for a novel set in Amsterdam and that he’s thinking about renting a room in this hotel on a monthly basis. A writer! his interlocutor exclaims in earnest excitement. A real writer! Their talk continues and it emerges that the receptionist’s name is Achilles and that he too writes and loves writing. Still, the truth is, he confesses, pointing at the book on the counter, that he mainly loves reading and he and his girlfriend are continually reading the biographies of leaders from all periods and analyzing the biographies they read, because they think that the most enthralling thing is deciphering the latent motives of the figures they read about, getting be
hind the scenes of the historical events and understanding what really happened. She’s been his girlfriend for a long time, he says with a happy smile, and they’ve already read and deciphered the stories of Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller, Mahatma Gandhi, Moshe Dayan, Marilyn Monroe, and many more. In fact, they’ve been in love since their childhood, but before he marries her he wants to save a lot of money. My father’s British and my mother’s Indian, he says with a sort of British-Indian smile. I give all my wages to my mother because if I keep the money the chances are I’ll spend it without noticing.
Yoel glances at the upside-down cover of the book on the counter. He can’t identify the portrait on it and wants to ask if it’s a biography too, and if so, whose. But a deafening metallic pealing suddenly fills the air followed by more and more peals and Achilles stops talking, shuts his eyes, and counts the peals one after the other on his fingers. When silence falls again, he says: It’s eleven o’clock! And his expression is one of wonderment and surprise as if until he heard the ringing of the bell he wasn’t sure that eleven o’clock would arrive today too.
That’s the bell of the church across the street, he explains reverently. The church of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary.
Achilles goes on talking about his relationship with his parents, about his wonderful beloved and the books in which she and he love to search for hidden layers and riddles, until Yoel takes advantage of a brief pause between sentences to inquire if there’s a room he can rent by the month, and Achilles slaps his forehead and apologizes for chattering, stifles another yawn with the same hand while the other smooths his shirt, and invites his guest to choose a room from the hotel’s offerings himself.
The rooms here are quite small, he apologizes with another yawn in the faltering elevator, whose stops and starts are accompanied by groans and grunts, but I hope we’ll be able to find us one that will be suitable for our literary writing. Yoel nods his thanks and wonders if there is any such a place in the world that is suitable for literary writing. He also wonders if Achilles’s use of the first person plural means that he intends to share with Yoel the responsibility for the said writing, and perhaps even to labor with him, shoulder to shoulder, on quarrying the words out of the rock. The first room he shows Yoel has four ascetic beds, one for each of the four whitewashed walls. Like two stony-faced sentinels looking into the room through its only window are the twin spires of the church across the street. Yoel looks at the table under the window, imagines himself writing under the constant supervision of these two, and thinks that perhaps he’ll be able to draw from them a supreme literary inspiration of a kind he hadn’t experienced so far.
Standing in the next room in a straight row are eight identical beds. You can choose whichever bed you want, Achilles says, and chuckles. But Yoel thinks that if he takes this room he won’t choose one of the beds but all eight. He’ll sleep in a different bed every night, he thinks, and dream a whole different dream every night. Perhaps he’ll even move from one bed to another during the same night, and have a completely new dream every hour in each one.
From time to time his eyes light on wallpaper whose edges are curling or on a layer of wooly dust, but he decides to keep quiet, and eventually Achilles takes him up to the fourth floor in the groaning, grunting elevator. I wanted to show you one more room, Achilles says as they walk down the corridor, it’s a smaller room and is at the back of the hotel with a less beautiful view, but maybe you should take a look at it anyway. And at the end of the corridor he yawns and opens the door of a corner room the size of the bathroom in Yoel and Bat-Ami’s apartment in Jerusalem.
Almost all its floor space is taken up by a sagging bed, a narrow double bed or perhaps a wide single one, that crouches in the middle of the room as if the room belongs to it, and by one of the walls is a sad, thin chair pushed up against a Formica-topped table with an old TV set on it. Yoel takes all this in skeptically, but then he notices that instead of a window the room has a sliding glass door leading onto a small balcony. He goes out on the balcony, whose width he can span with his legs apart, and whose railing is rusted and perhaps even slightly unsafe, and he looks over the railing and is amazed to find that down below, like in a living picture, he can see the backyards of the two rows of houses running at right angles to the market square.
I’ll take this balcony, he announces quickly. I mean this room.
20
Yoel is standing in the pristine lobby of the Hotel de Paris, on the other side of the display of clogs, the model windmill, and the rest, and saying goodbye to the elderly receptionist who seems as indifferent to his departure as he had been to his arrival. After a short taxi ride from Leidseplein to Jacob Obrechtstraat, he walks, his bag heavy on his shoulder as he pulls his suitcase behind him, to the narrow entrance of the Mokum Hotel, carefully descends the three steep steps, and enters the lobby.
Achilles joyfully emerges from the side door, places before him a registration form, and ceremoniously proffers him a pen, and Yoel takes it and tries to fill out the form, but immediately replaces the pen on the scratched counter and from his shirt pocket takes a pen that writes. It’s a great honor for us at the Mokum Hotel to have a real writer staying with us, Achilles tells him, and it turns out that the book he is so immersed in is a biography of Napoleon, the third one he’s reading about this enigmatic conqueror, this time in French. It’s a great honor for us, he repeats with a white-toothed smile, and Yoel again wonders about his use of the plural and on whose behalf he is speaking, for it seems that apart from the two of them there’s nobody else in the hotel.
I thank you, he says.
At your service at all times, says the young receptionist, but immediately qualifies this statement: That is, at your service from seven in the morning till seven in the evening.
So at seven in the evening someone comes to relieve you?
Not exactly. From seven in the evening till seven in the morning there’s nobody at the reception.
And what happens if a new guest arrives during that time?
Nobody does, because during that time the front door’s locked. And by the way, from seven in the evening till seven in the morning the elevator doesn’t work either.
You mean that from seven in the evening till seven in the morning one can’t come into the hotel or leave it?
Achilles bursts out laughing. Of course you can come and go! What put that into your head?
But you said that the front door’s locked, and the elevator…
Yes, but there’s a back door. And of course you can use the stairs.
* * *
When Yoel tries to get into his new room there’s something inside that’s stopping the door from opening. When he pushes against it he discovers that what’s blocking it is the door of the wardrobe standing close to the doorway. Both doors are scratched and dinged, apparently from previous collisions, and once he’s inside he shuts them. He locks the door, but when he tries to put on the safety chain to ensure his privacy all he finds are a few links of what was once a whole chain. He drags his suitcase inside and puts his shoulder bag on the bed, which is either a wide single or narrow double, he still can’t decide, but which actually looks comfortable, and he opens the bag, takes out his brand-new laptop, and places it on the Formica-topped table. He pushes the clunky old TV set to the edge of the table, disconnects its cable from the wall socket, and replaces it with his laptop plug, lifts the computer’s lid, runs two fingers over the shiny black keyboard, and presses the power key.
And he goes out onto the balcony.
The two rows of houses stand beneath the railing, tangible and teeming with life. Each row has its back to the other one, and between the two rows, beneath the apartments’ back windows, are the backyards. Parts of the yards at the far end are hidden by trees and bushes, but he can see the ones closer to the hotel in their entirety and he starts scanning yard after yard. He makes a note of every plant he sees and of each piece of garden furniture, a child’s tricycle, a swing strun
g from a branch, a rubber ball that has rolled under a bench, and a doll forgotten on a square of lawn.
Through one of the second-floor windows of the third building in the row to the right he sees the profile of a curly-haired woman sitting in front of a computer screen. All around her, covering the entire area of the wide table, are mountains of papers in bundles and loose, and the woman is shifting restlessly on her chair, her hands moving over the keyboard and halting every now and then in a gesture of despair or surrender.
As he passed in the street Yoel had seen a psychoanalyst’s clinic shingle on the building’s façade, and so he now decides that the restless woman at the computer is a psychoanalyst. She’s writing her reports on today’s sessions in the clinic and is restless because she’s not sure about her diagnoses and her reports are liable to affect her clients’ lives and even seal their fate.
Through one of the windows closer to his balcony, in the first building in the row on the left, he sees a wall covered with framed pictures. The dim light doesn’t allow him to see any details, but beneath the pictures he sees a sort of wide chest of drawers on which there are various objects, apparently small sculptures and other pieces of artwork. Between the sculptures and objets d’art is an animal with light, spiky fur, apparently a pet, apparently a dog.
In another window that is lit up he sees one side of a kitchen: a work surface, a sink, a stove. Everything is white, meticulously arranged, squeaky clean. To the right of the stove there is a white salad bowl.