House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

  26

  The child Yoel didn’t eat a thing, nothing, unless his mother spoon-fed him.

  One day she declared: There’s no such thing as a child who doesn’t want to eat. There’s only a child who is spoiled.

  And she announced: That’s it, I’m not feeding you anymore.

  When mealtime came she sat him down at the table in their apartment in Netanya and put in front of him a plate with pieces of boiled chicken, slices of sweet carrot, and mashed potatoes. She and Nettie also sat down and started eating, and when she looked up from her plate and saw that the child was not moving, she said: You don’t want it? So don’t eat! And the two of them went on enjoying their meal while he sat on his chair, on his booster cushion, and looked at them sorrowfully.

  Thus one meal went by, and more after it. Whole days passed and little Yoel didn’t eat or taste even a morsel. His mother saw how his skin was graying, his eyes sinking into their sockets, and his tongue whitening. He grew so weak he could hardly stand.

  Until that lunchtime when the three of them again sat down at their modest table and Yoel was again sitting there in complete silence, blackening capillaries under his sunken eyes and his lips cracked. His mother looked at him, and looked, and suddenly slid her chair toward him in a sharp movement and with that same resolute sharpness picked up his spoon, loaded it with potato puree from his plate, and brought it toward him, and Yoel opened his dry mouth to the spoon. One after another his mother brought him spoonfuls of ground meat and mashed potato, one after another like heartbeats of love, and the boy opened his mouth to the spoon, raking in the food with his lips and tongue and chewing and swallowing with gusto, his eyes fixed on his mother’s and on the tear that glistened in one of them and slid down her cheek.

  From that day forth to the end of second grade, or maybe even the middle of third, his mother fed him all his meals. Spoonful after spoonful. Beat after beat. All his meals.

  * * *

  Anouk. Her thin, doll-like figure.

  Her beautiful face that remained beautiful even when it frequently displayed bitterness and insult.

  Her honey-blond hair cut in a straight line at the level of her cheeks.

  The way she tucks one leg under her body when she’s sitting.

  And the graceful movement of her finger that is constantly brushing a lock of hair from her face to behind her ear.

  * * *

  Anouk’s Martin continues to spend his days in his shop in the little market square. Like all the Jewish-owned businesses the shop had been expropriated long ago. But the banker de Lange, who had given the shop to Martin in the first place, managed to transfer its ownership to one of his non-Jewish friends and register Martin as the friend’s employee, just until the storm passed and this absurd occupation finally ended and life in Amsterdam returned to normal. The banker has great affection for his talented son-in-law, and even the hardships of the war do not prevent him from continuing to give Martin money to develop the exceptional collection of art for which the shop is famous. Enthusiastic art lovers come from far and wide knowing that a serious lover of art should not purchase a work of art in Nieuwe Spiegelstraat, the street of art shops that runs down from Centrum to the Rijksmuseum, before making a detour of a few hundred meters to the south, to this enchanting shop in Jacob Obrechtstraat.

  Martin loves discussing works of art, especially those of Dutch artists and particularly the ones who touch upon the infiniteness within reality. He loves enamoring his customers with the works he loves, though it seems that as far as he is concerned managing his successful shop is just a way to provide for his family while he immerses himself in what he loves more than anything else: studying. Since he dropped out of medical school he had managed to start studying architecture and philosophy, excelling in both fields, and then terminate his academic studies because he wanted to continue studying on his own, according to his personal taste. In the end Eddy decided that his dear friend is an incorrigible autodidact. De Lange, who would have given his daughter the moon had she asked for it, gave him the shop in the square and suggested that he trade in whatever he chose. And Martin, of course, chose to trade in the object of his great passion, art. Between customers he delves into his books and his studies, and of late he is reading everything he can find on the study of infinity, which enthralls him from the mathematical aspect as well as philosophical thinking and artistic expression. It is no secret that he longs to engage in art practically too, and that in his youth he studied painting and planned to become a painter. But many years have passed since he last held a brush in his hand, and in the recesses of his shop a splendid easel that Anouk bought him stands waiting in vain. I’m not good enough, he tells anyone who asks him why he doesn’t paint, the world doesn’t need another mediocre painter.

  A perpetual flame burns in Martin, burning him from the inside and igniting in him an aspiration for beauty, for truth, for connection with all things all the time. He is a scion of one of the distinguished families of the Spanish-Portuguese community that is steeped in both wisdom and material assets, and which has lived in Amsterdam for centuries. His father wanted him to be a doctor, but the soul interests Martin more than the body, the spiritual more than the material, and whenever a battle rages between his wife, Anouk, and his son, Sebastian, over the food she cooks and cooks and the little one refuses and refuses to put into his mouth, until sooner or later they both burst into tears, Anouk because Sebastian doesn’t eat, and Sebastian because his mother tries to force him to eat, then along comes Martin and lifts the exhausted toddler from his chair at the table strewn with dishes of pureed food in a variety of colors and textures. He sends his wife to rest in her bed, and stands, his son in his arms, facing one of the works of art hanging on the walls of their apartment, and he talks about it and the artist that painted it until the sobbing stops and Sebastian, his nose dripping and his breathing still uneven, points at the painting on the wall and smiles contentedly.

  At night, after spending the evening with Anouk and Sebastian, and sometimes with Anouk’s parents or his neighbor and good friend Eddy Blum, Martin goes back to the shop. Until recently he and Eddy would go out with their wives, who would dress up and put on makeup for the occasion, to the theater or a concert or just some nice place where they could sit and enjoy a drink. Then came a long period when they didn’t dare go far, and they only went to the brown café on the corner of their street. He and Eddy deep in theoretical conversation at the bar, or the four of them—he, Eddy, Sonia, and Anouk—at their favorite corner table, where they were sometimes joined by their friend Vij, who owned the café, and other friends too, and they drank beer, chewed roasted nuts and hard-boiled eggs, and talked about the local and world situation until they cried from laughing as if this life were one huge joke. Now they spend the evening hours in a heavier atmosphere and stay within the five floors of the house. Martin rarely sees Eddy, whose free evenings are few and far between because of his workload at the hospital, and even when he’s at home he doesn’t have much patience for their friendly chats. And late at night, after Anouk has gotten Sebastian to sleep and fallen asleep herself, Martin walks down the dark, empty street and steals into his shop without turning on a light. He passes carefully between all the pictures and objects standing in the dark, ignores the easel staring at him sadly, and goes into the storeroom at the rear whose door is covered with a heavy curtain. There, his thin body disappearing among his secret wirelesses, Martin sets sail into the vastness of infinity in his search for remote radio frequencies.

  27

  A pathway as straight as a ruler, paved with light-colored marble, crosses the perfect lawn of Museumplein as far as the façade of the stylized building of the Rijksmuseum, which looks like a fairy-tale royal palace. The lawn gleams, a light breeze ruffles the row of trees lining the grounds, wooly clouds graze in the blue sky, and Yoel is one of the many tourists visiting the famous site on this pleasant day.

  As he stood outside the Concertgebouw wai
ting for the traffic light to change and following the traffic flowing in perfect order along the wide avenue, with the soaring Concertgebouw on one side and Museumplein spread out on the other, through the street noise he heard the monotonic thrumming of a Scottish bagpipe.

  He looked at the orderly flow of trams, buses, cars, and crowds of cyclists of all ages, and didn’t understand what Scottish bagpipes were doing here, but now, on the verge of the marble pathway, there’s the piper: a large, broad, elderly Scot wearing traditional Scottish dress—a pleated kilt of red-and-black tartan, a matching cloak, a tall fur hat with a white feather, shiny white boots, and checkered knee socks decorated with red tassels. The man is walking in small circles, blowing into the chanter of his cumbersome traditional instrument the traditional Scottish notes, which, at this moment, are filling the grassy square to which—as Nettie had told him in her apartment in the kibbutz at the foot of Mount Gilboa—Sonia and Eddy would flee every time Martin warned them of a police raid and they had to get out of the house, leave the children with him and Anouk, and find refuge within the Rijksmuseum’s walls, walking through the exhibits as if they were just two ordinary art lovers and hoping no one would ask for their papers.

  * * *

  He would have to weave the story of his life with the few torn threads Nettie handed him. I’m sorry, Yoel, she told him, I can only tell you what I remember, and it’s not a lot.

  When he asked if she could describe Martin and Anouk’s apartment for him, she replied that she doesn’t remember. I was only a little girl, she said, her eyes moving around her modest room, lingering on the framed photograph of her firstborn son, who had been electrocuted in the date plantation at the foot of the mountain, and moving on to the window that opens onto the same mountain and the same plantation. And after we left Amsterdam I went through so much, she added apologetically, the newer memories suppressed the old ones.

  But when he’d called her from Ben Gurion Airport to tell her he was going back to Amsterdam, she told him that the day after his visit with her she was sitting in her usual place in the kibbutz laundry mending hems on the members’ work clothes, and suddenly the picture of Martin and Anouk’s apartment had appeared in her mind in all its tangibility.

  I remembered, she told him excitedly, how we’d go up to them, up more and more steep stairs that seemed to be unending, and when we got to the top and their door opened, on the wall facing the door I’d see a big painting of the sea. Their walls were covered with oil paintings. How could I have forgotten?

  On the first evening of their first trip to Amsterdam, only a few hours after they’d landed, Bat-Ami had seated them in a low, enclosed canal cruise boat and they had sailed along canals, passed under bridges and through narrow canals where the sides of the vessel had almost touched the walls of the buildings, until they emerged into the river and thence to the sea, bathed in the lights of the port and drinking beer and chewing peanuts as the boat returned to the city, and their guide, a tiny, not young woman in a tiger-striped jacket, talked incessantly into her microphone and explained in English that “canal” in Dutch is “gracht,” that at Anne Frank House there is a long queue day and night, that at the bottom of the canals there are tens of thousands of stolen bicycles, and that anyone staying in the Ice Museum for more than ten minutes freezes and turns into an exhibit.

  Now he’s striving to remember what else that tiger-woman had said, but he mainly recalls the whisper of the water as the boat sliced through it and the pain that the city’s beauty roused in him through the boat’s glass walls. At the time he did not yet know that there had ever been a couple called Martin and Anouk Rosso and he did not yet know about their son, Sebastian. But Amsterdam’s beauty had wounded him even then, as only the beauty of a treacherous city is capable of wounding.

  He presents his museum ticket at the entrance and goes inside, between the historical walls of the Rijksmuseum and beneath its high ceilings. He walks slowly, like the seemingly excited tourists from all over the world, between medieval Dutch four-poster beds and carved Dutch sideboards and portraits of chubby, self-important Dutch nobles choking in their high, starched lace collars that don’t allow their heads to move. He wants to get to the classical paintings, which, according to the museum map, are waiting for him on the second floor, but he finds himself lingering on the ground floor, drawn to a comprehensive exhibit of Christian icons, and another step or two and he is surrounded by paintings and sculptures of mother and infant, mother and infant, mother and infant. All these painted and sculpted mothers and infants of course depict Jesus and his mother, Mary, but before they depict Jesus and Mary they are first and foremost real infants in the real arms of real mothers, and it is not difficult to see how each of the real mothers loves her real infant with real love and keeps him close to her real heart, even though some of the painted infants look less like infants and more like miniaturized old men.

  Walking slowly Yoel moves from mother to mother, infant to infant, love to love, lingering for a long time at each pair until he is finally rooted to the spot in front of a black marble stand on which there is a glass cabinet containing a wood statuette about forty or fifty centimeters tall of a delicate young mother smiling lovingly at an innocent babe radiating chubby sweetness who is playing with the bunch of grapes in her hand and nestling against her body in total devotion, in the total faith of one who is assured that he is loved and protected, loved and protected. It is hard for Yoel to leave this statuette and the sign on the black marble stand which says that it was fashioned by the Dutch artist Van Veggel. And he stands there for an eternity and another eternity, his eyes on the infant’s devoted repose, the mother’s embrace, her feet peeping from beneath the folds of her long skirts, their tread so delicate and so confident.

  * * *

  When he eventually moves on, deciding it is time to look for the stairs to the second floor, he is stopped by an oil on canvas in which dozens of frightened women are trying to save their babies from the drawn swords of brutal soldiers. They stand no chance: most of the babies have already been slaughtered. Some are still clinging, bleeding, to their helpless mothers’ arms, and the small plump bodies of others are strewn on the ground. One of the soldiers is grasping the leg of a baby whose mother is trying to shield him; another mother is trying to ward off a spear raised over her child. The explanatory sign says that the etching depicts the Massacre of the Innocents, inspired by the New Testament story of King Herod, who, in an attempt to kill the infant Jesus, sent his soldiers to Bethlehem to kill all the infants under the age of two. Yoel presumes that this is fiction, but still his heart goes out to the slaughtered baby whose mother is bent over him in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting, bringing her face to his as if still believing she can breathe life into him.

  And he can take no more—he hurries outside to escape the gloom of the museum and all the infants and their mothers come out with him, clinging to him with all their might and refusing to let go. Outside he is blinded by the light, the wailing of the Scot’s bagpipes pierces his ears, the vast lawn of the square is unbearably green, and he realizes that he had spent a long time in the museum, for beyond the long marble pathway cutting through the lawn in a line as straight as a ruler, the sun has moved to the west, dropping behind the buildings across the avenue, its rays shattering against the golden harp on the roof of the Concertgebouw as if kindling it with flames. People, all of whom were once their mothers’ babies, walk on the grass alone or in pairs or with their children or their dogs, some sit down to rest on the molded metal benches spread out along the pathway, while others carry paper bags from the museum shop holding a poster with a print of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid or a mug with a reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride or a silk scarf on which Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom is printed. Yoel quickens his pace. He reaches the end of the pathway and makes a sharp turn into the winding street to the left, and walking quickly alongside the tram tracks, he walks and walks until the grasp of his mother’s lost
baby on his coattail weakens and it stops pursuing him, and there is the row of beautiful houses which, like all the buildings in this city, have not changed for hundreds of years, and there are Dutch people of his age who have lived in them since they were born and to this day, and he walks and walks until he comes to a little bridge over a canal, beyond which start the stalls and shops of the municipal market, and only then he stops walking.

  Only then he stops walking, and he stands on the bridge, leans against the iron railing between some parked bicycles, and feels the raindrops falling on him and falling. He stands, leaning on the rail under the water of the rain and above the water of the canal, and looks, looks for a long time, at what isn’t there. Like in the Zen garden in Kyoto that he and Bat-Ami had visited years ago: a garden in whose center are fifteen stones, but from every angle at which you observe these stones, you can see only fourteen of them, and the idea, as their tour guide explained, is not to look at the fourteen visible stones but at the fifteenth hidden one.

  He stands above the water of the canal, above his own upside-down reflection between upside-down buildings and upside-down trams and upside-down clouds, he stands in time between water and water and between infinity and infinity and strives with all his might to look at what is hidden, at what isn’t there.