House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

  * * *

  The air raids continue. Sonia is lying in bed between her two children, staring at the ceiling and praying to the God of her forefathers in whose existence she has long stopped believing. She tries not to fall asleep because as soon as she closes her eyes, even for a moment, she dreams that Nettie and Leo are falling, drowning…

  * * *

  You’re scared of living, Bat-Ami teases him affectionately, though not without disappointment, every time he opts to remain in the confines of the known and familiar rather than taste new experiences. When she was here with him she’d tried in vain to persuade him to go into one of the many inviting coffee shops from which a sweetish aroma floats into the public domain. It’s completely legal, she reminded him, what can possibly go wrong if we sit inside awhile? For my part, just have a cup of coffee or even a glass of water, and don’t consume anything, God forbid, that your mother didn’t acclimate you to in your childhood. But he refused her and in the end they didn’t go into a coffee shop even once. There may be Israelis there who might recognize me, he tried to explain, but she dismissed his excuse with a laugh: You’re scared of living, my dear, you’re simply scared of living.

  What does he want, and what is he afraid of? What could possibly happen if he sat in a coffee shop? And what could possibly happen if he went behind the display window illuminated with red lights and the woman standing there—the same woman he’d seen only out of the corner of his eye, and only in a flash, but the sight of her figure won’t leave him—draws the red curtain behind them both. There were times when going to a hooker had featured on his list of extreme adventures, like bungee jumping or hang gliding from a cliff top, experiences which could shake a man out of his chronic nothingness and inject a feeling of living flowing inside him. At the time the thought of a red-lit window such as this could arouse in him, together with the feeling of disgust, a sort of body-soul tumult. Whereas now he thinks about the unfortunate woman standing inside the square of dusty lights and waiting, one hand on her hip and her private parts on display, and he can feel only revulsion, repulsiveness, wretchedness, and he continues drifting and flowing with the crowd filling Dam Square and the alleys leading from it, until on one of the corners he is drawn to a sign saying “Irish Pub” and into a large space filled with flashing blue, yellow, red, purple lights and bursting at the seams with beat music and three levels crowded with people partying. He takes off his coat, finds himself a small vacant table next to the wooden balustrade that fences off the upper level, orders a beer, and relaxes in his chair beneath a bunch of black and yellow balloons hanging from the ceiling, relaxes in the midst of all the human bodies sitting or standing or going up and down the stairs from one level to another. A young waitress brings him a small green bottle, and he empties its bitter contents down his throat and immediately raises his hand to order another.

  Not far from him there is a happy racket, a group of young people are apparently having a sort of drinking contest because there’s a boy standing in the middle, tilting his head back and opening his mouth while the whole crowd is chanting encouragement and another young man holds a big bottle of vodka and pours it into the open mouth as if into a decanter.

  Yoel drinks another beer and gazes at the green bottle in his hand.

  * * *

  In the last autumn of her life his mother told him she had decided to knit him a bottle-green sweater.

  On each of his visits to her she’d tell him happily about the wonderful bottle-green wool she’d buy and the unique sweater she’d knit him out of it, and on every visit she’d measure him for this new sweater. The color will suit you, Yoel, she’d promise each time she got up heavily from her chair, and every time she’d take her yellow tape measure from the sideboard and place before her the adult man who was once her little boy.

  Lift your arms to the sides, she’d order him, and now I’ll take your measurements, Yoel, so don’t move.…

  How many times had he stood like that in her room at the old-age home, between the sliding door of the bathroom that was wide enough for her walker and the old armchair that had wandered here from the apartment where his mother had lived for so many years? How many times had he stood, his back straight, chest out, and arms outstretched sideways, and felt the tape measure stroking his nape, stretching across his shoulders and the length of his arms, encircling his biceps, and sliding down his back? How many times—and not once had he attempted to remind her that she’d already taken his measurements yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and every day last week and the week before. He just did what she told him, submitting completely, not moving a millimeter, looking at the framed family photographs on the wall beside the institutional metal fan and hearing his mother moving around him, groaning and panting but satisfied and perhaps even happy. He never got tired standing like that, his raised arms motionless like the wings of a grounded bird, as she remeasured lengths from his armpit to his waist, from his right shoulder to the left one, from his neck to his wrist, over and over again.

  * * *

  A giant screen on the pub wall is showing sporting events that Yoel doesn’t understand. On the bottom level, which he can glimpse through the balustrade next to his seat, wooden balls are being shot into the pockets of a colorful pool table. How I enjoyed those repeated measurements my mother took for the sweater that would never be knit, he thinks. I wish I could go back and stand in front of her, go back and feel the touch of her precious fingers gliding over my body and lovingly counting each centimeter. Now the members of the vodka gang behind him burst into applause as the winner of their drinking contest is announced. In the meantime the music from the sound system changes; now it is drumbeats, and Yoel’s heartbeat adjusts itself to the rhythm.

  * * *

  Anouk is the only daughter of Jozef de Lange, his delight, the apple of his eye, and his ally. De Lange frequently fires insulting remarks at his wife, or simply ignores her, but his admiration of his only daughter is boundless. And perhaps it is such admiration that Anouk also expects from her husband, Martin, because Sonia often hears her complaining that Martin doesn’t devote enough attention to her. Mar-tin! She raises her spoiled-child’s voice. Mar-tin, bring that here already, and, Mar-tin, take that away, and, Mar-tin, where have you been, and, Mar-tin, why don’t you answer me, and, Mar-tin, how many times do I have to ask something from you, and Mar-tin-Mar-tin-Mar-tin.

  From the day Sebastian was born the flow of her complaints swelled and turned into a real torrent. Added to her routine complaints were more and more displays of envy. The foolish girl wept frequently that she was no longer beautiful in Martin’s eyes, that Martin was no longer interested in her, and that her heart told her that he’s got a lover, and maybe not only one. And Sonia whispered to Eddy: Poor dear Martin, why does he have to suffer all this? But wise Eddy smiled. Don’t worry, my Sonia. Everyone gets exactly what he chooses, and chooses exactly what he needs.

  * * *

  I dam my soul, Yoel writes in his notebook, with a resolute finger I stop up each hole that opens in my dike. He’s finishing off a third bottle of beer when, as if out of nowhere, a man and woman smiling from ear to ear appear at his table and in excited Hebrew introduce themselves as Danny and Ofra from Tel Aviv, who are presently on vacation in Amsterdam and simply must tell him how much they love his books. And he, who always responds to compliments like this with a big shy Thank you, is astounded to hear himself reply to Danny and Ofra: I’m glad you like my books, because I, for instance, don’t like them at all. And as the two stand facing him slack-jawed, their excitement replaced by wondering if the highly respected author is being serious and how they should react, he points at the stairs beneath the balustrade and informs them that he’s sorry but he simply must, after all the beer he’s drunk, cut short their exhilarating conversation and immediately go downstairs to the toilets on the middle level.

  * * *

  In the meantime the air raids continue shaking the house and the world. Nettie
and Leo are fast asleep in the way of children who trust in their mother’s power to protect them simply because she is their mother. Sonia gently detaches them from her body, lays her daughter down on one side of her and her son on the other, and lies on her back between their calm breaths. Since she can’t rely on the God of her Fathers after deciding that He does not exist, she reminds herself that it is not Amsterdam and its inhabitants that the bombers are trying to hit, but the occupying army’s bases near the city. She thinks about her Eddy, who is almost certainly busy treating the wounded and sick. And about how she clung to him when they said goodbye this morning, burying her face in his chest through his doctor’s white coat that filled her nostrils with the pungent smell of antiseptic. When she looked at him closely she saw his eyes red with exhaustion. And even behind the thick lenses of his glasses she could see the sorrow seeping into the light gray circles around his pupils.

  What, my heart, what’s the matter?

  Eddy shook his head without replying and she understood that he had received more news about what was happening in the countries to the east of Holland. Aside from his many other talents, Martin knows how to tune in to distant wireless stations and it is he who gives Eddy these disturbing updates. At first Eddy would tell her about what he had heard but had recently stopped, and she had stopped asking. Since the occupation their life is complicated enough without being overburdened with what is going on in other places. And she raised her hand to Eddy’s sad face and stroked his cheek that was covered with two-day-old stubble.

  * * *

  Now, in their bed in the basement apartment, she is lying between their two sleeping children and staring at the ceiling. Above that ceiling in their apartment, spread over the three middle and main floors of the building, live Anouk’s parents: the Jewish banker Jozef de Lange, a short, fat man whose square shape is usually encased in a well-cut gray suit in whose waistcoat pocket is a gold watch and chain, and his wife, who looks like a bitter, aging version of her daughter, Anouk. The banker frequently takes out his gold pocket watch and looks at it importantly, but it stays in his pocket as he climbs the steep stairs to his apartment, as he has to hold on to the banisters with both hands in order to pull his heavy body from step to step.

  And in the top-floor apartment, above the de Langes’ ceiling, live Anouk and Martin and little Sebastian. Even though some danger might be hovering over the heads of the Dutch Jews, Sonia says to herself, she and Eddy and their children are safe and protected by virtue of their being the subtenants of one of Amsterdam’s wealthiest and most respected Jews, who is well connected with the municipal and political corridors of power and influence. She has no doubt that if the need arises, Jozef de Lange would offer them his protection both by virtue of the fact that they live under his roof and, perhaps most importantly, by virtue of the fact that they are the good friends of his only daughter, Anouk, and his beloved son-in-law, Martin.

  Either way, she soothes herself, letting her eyes close, there’s no cause for worry. It’s common knowledge that harsh and frightening things, like those that are reportedly happening in certain other countries, can never happen in Holland.

  25

  In the morning Yoel has difficulty deciphering how the hot water system of the shower in his room at the Mokum Hotel works. The shower is operated by three taps regulating the heat of the water and the force of its flow, and each tap is opened by turning it in a different direction, and whichever way he turns them—all three together, or two, or each one separately—all he gets is either a few drips of ice-cold water or a full blast of scalding water. However hard he tries he can’t convince the taps to produce shower water of a sane temperature. And the shower head is cracked in several places as well, so that the water doesn’t flow downward but spritzes in every direction. When he finally manages to turn off all the taps and exit the shower stall, he discovers that the bathroom floor is flooded up to his ankles.

  Seven thirty in the morning, it is still dark outside, and behind the windows he can see from his balcony, light bulbs are being turned on. In the sky to the east pale sunbeams are spreading, painting a pinkish strip, as if with the stroke of a thin brush, above the outlines of the trees and houses and the smoke rising in two thin plumes from two smokestacks distant from one another. He stands in his big glass doorway until the world becomes clearer; new light rises into a soft blue sky with scattered clouds.

  In the ground-floor lobby he catches Achilles in the middle of a wide yawn which, when the young man sees him, becomes a wide good-morning smile. Yoel asks him how he is, and Achilles smoothes his rumpled shirt and tells him that last night he and his beloved finished reading the Napoleon biography and again realized that the point is always the story behind the scenes, the untold story that holds the key to what really happened.

  Yoel goes into the breakfast room and sees that he’s not the Mokum Hotel’s only guest: in the middle of the room are four corpulent ladies seated at a table loaded with food and speaking loudly in Italian. All four are actually talking at the same time, not one of them is listening to anyone else, and to the sound of this raucous chorus he approaches the modest buffet laid out along the wall, passes a tray with slices of salami of various colors, a tray of slices of hard cheese, a tray of croissants, and a basket of white rolls, and finally puts on his plate a wrinkled apple and a dry tangerine that he takes from the fruit bowl that had probably been sitting on the buffet table for quite a few days. After some slight hesitation he fills himself a bowl of cornflakes and milk, makes his way to the far side of the room, and sits down by a glass door overlooking the hotel’s backyard that adjoins, so he notices, the end of the row of backyards overseen from the balcony of his room.

  The quartet of Italian ladies is eventually joined by one of their husbands. The group is then joined by a young woman and a little boy, and later on the young woman’s husband, and another young couple, and two youths, and a thin girl who refuses to sit down, and finally an older rotund gentleman who looks like the husband of another one of the members of the founding group. All of them—except for the girl who refuses to sit—chew slices of salami and cheese and croissants, shout loudly at one another, and only stop chattering in their melodic language to burst out now and then, and in unison, into loud, happy laughter.

  Sniffing among the garden furniture in the backyard are a white cat and a striped one, both huge and furry and bearing colorful collars. When one of the young Italians goes outside for a cigarette, the two cats leap toward him, mewing demandingly, as if it is clear that he has come outside with the sole purpose of feeding them delicacies. The white one lays its forepaws on the young man’s thigh as if trying to climb up his jeans, and the striped one jumps up onto the garden table, almost dislodging the lighter from his hand, while the young Italian expels a jet of smoke without even bestowing a glance on the two furry beggars.

  Yoel gets up, passes carefully behind the vibrant Italian enclave, and goes to the buffet to pour himself a cup of coffee. Unlike the Hotel de Paris breakfast room, which has a cutting-edge machine that knows how to make five different kinds of coffee, here there is only a simple thermos jug—and right now the jug is empty. He can make himself a cup of coffee in his room, but he doesn’t feel like dragging himself up to the fourth floor in the elevator, and he looks around, and in the kitchen adjoining the breakfast room he finds the aproned hotel worker, a thickset woman with gleaming coal-black skin and hair braided into long dreadlocks. When she hands him the filled jug he sees that her eyes are deep set and warm, and that in the depression below her lower lip shines a tiny silver drop.

  The happy, loud Italian keeps ringing out, and Yoel makes his way back to his corner table, where he finds Achilles standing by the glass door, his face ashen.

  They’ve come inside, he says to Yoel in a voice replete with tension.

  Who has?

  The cats! Somebody left the yard door open and the ca… the damn cats ca… came inside!

  And you…?

/>   Yes, sir, I hate them.

  Hate them?

  They nauseate me. I… well, the truth is I’m scared of them.

  So why do you keep them here?

  Keep them? No, they… they just come here from the other yards, they belong to people in the neighboring houses, and I just can’t bring myself to…

  The black worker comes out of the kitchen laughing and in her arms is the white cat, its back clasped to her bosom and its paws flailing in an attempt to free itself from her grip. Achilles backs off in trepidation as she passes him, and she throws the disgruntled animal into the yard, closes the glass door, and turns, still laughing, to drag out the striped cat that is still sniffing around under one of the tables.

  Och, Josephine! Achilles calls out with tremendous relief now that his territory has been cleansed of the two invaders. What would I do without you, dear Josephine?

  Josephine smiles, her round face shining like a black moon.

  In the coming days Yoel would learn that Curaçao, the region from where Josephine had emigrated, is located on an island rich in cacti and flamingoes in the southern Caribbean Sea. He will learn that Curaçao was a Dutch colony which to this day belongs to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Kingdom of the Low Countries, that is, to Holland. And he will try to understand the matter of the Dutch colonies, the Dutch perception of themselves as the chosen people, and how the great economic success of Amsterdam in its golden era, coupled with the Protestant philosophies of the time, had strengthened in the Dutch the belief that they had been destined to fulfill a divine mission in the world.