House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

  28

  A Van Gogh painting: the garden of the asylum where the artist was an inmate in the last year of his life. Trees encircle the asylum building but their tops are not visible in the painting. Neither is the sky. And a bent man in dark clothing is walking alone in the garden, one foot stepping off the paved path.

  * * *

  Anouk was in the final months of her pregnancy when the basement apartment in her parents’ home was vacated by the subtenants who had lived there for many years. Martin suggested that it be rented to his friends Eddy and Sonia Blum, who were looking for a place to live in the vicinity of the Jewish hospital, but the banker’s wife was afraid of taking in a couple with a young child, and the banker preferred that his wife give up this meager supplementary income and not rent out the apartment at all. It was only after Anouk explained to her parents how much she needed—in her condition—a doctor and nurse close by that Eddy and Sonia moved into the house with their daughter, Nettie, and their embryonic son.

  * * *

  On Saturday morning Yoel goes to the synagogue in Jacob Obrechtstraat. In Jerusalem he prays alone at home on weekdays and the Sabbath. On Saturday mornings Bat-Ami enjoys wearing a long skirt and a fine hat, and tip-tapping along in festive shoes to one of the big synagogues on King George Street or to one of the small old synagogues in the Shaarei Chesed neighborhood. Yoel prefers to stand wrapped in his prayer shawl by one of their apartment’s windows, usually the one overlooking the Valley of the Cross, but here he is, in Amsterdam, in front of a synagogue built before the war by Jews whose financial status enabled them to move from the Jewish Quarter to the Old South. A synagogue whose exterior red-brick wall is inscribed with the words of King Solomon: Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates. The entrance to the synagogue is blocked by two young men wearing white silk yarmulkes who introduce themselves to Yoel as community security personnel. Since they do not recognize Yoel as one of the regular worshippers, they ask him to identify himself by means of the Jewish password, in other words to give them the name of the Torah portion of the week.

  Now he is inside and only three and a half quorums, some thirty-five people, occupy the two floors of the big synagogue, under the magnificent crystal chandeliers and the stained glass windows bearing the symbols of the twelve tribes of Israel. His mother left the tradition of her parents’ home and returned to it due to the war, and none of his daughters share the same level of observance as him and Bat-Ami: Ronit is less religious than them, Galia is more religious than them, and Zohar isn’t religious at all. She had recently brought that child of hers into the world, a child without a father, and Yoel can’t understand how she will raise her over the years, and what she needed this burden for. He looks around and thinks it entirely possible that the synagogue’s dark oak benches are also the benches of the Jewish worshippers of prewar times, facing the carved holy ark that is apparently the same one. He knows that both Eddy and Sonia and Anouk and Martin are not regular worshippers but thinks that perhaps they might attend the synagogue infrequently. And as he tries to locate them in the rows of benches, the cantor begins the prayer for the State of Israel and the congregation rises to beseech Our Father in Heaven to bless the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces and also King Willem-Alexander; his mother, Queen Beatrix; and the Netherlands.

  * * *

  On Saturday afternoon the banker de Lange and his wife entertain their Jewish friends, the wealthy industrialist Van Leeuwen and Justice Visser and their wives.

  A pleasant atmosphere prevails between the three couples as they sit in the grand drawing room on the ground floor of the building, right above Eddy and Sonia’s basement apartment. A pleasant atmosphere, though today as well, and in front of their guests, the banker frequently reminds his wife that she doesn’t understand a thing and suggests she shut up while he and his friends discuss the worrying events taking place at this time in their occupied city. Recently, all the Jews had been required to register in a special census, and in the Jewish Quarter there was a roundup in which scores of them were arrested. The labor unions in the city declared a strike in protest and identification with the arrested Jews, but it was quelled after only three days and since then the occupation laws in Amsterdam have been enforced, mainly by the Dutch Green Police.

  They all agree, and Mrs. de Lange joins the consensus with a cautious sidelong glance at her husband, that the Jewish elite, of which they, of course, are part, must do everything possible to calm the atmosphere and preserve, and even strengthen, the equal status enjoyed by the Jews of Amsterdam from time immemorial.

  * * *

  From the balcony of his room in the nearby hotel Yoel looks at the de Lange house and knows that the respected group sitting in the drawing room at this Sabbath afternoon hour does not yet know that the day will soon come when there will be a need for Jewish children to be taken from their parents and hidden. The banker and his friends are also unaware that more and more Jewish businesses in Amsterdam will shortly be expropriated. Severe restrictions will be imposed on Jewish-owned property. The authorities will confiscate from Jews money, furniture, works of art, and so forth. The day is not far off when Jews will be forbidden to mix with members of non-Jewish society in public places, schools and labor unions will be closed to them, and Jewish students will be unable to study at the universities. The occupation authorities will order the establishment of a Jewish Council in Amsterdam. The banker Jozef de Lange will be appointed a member of the council. His friend Van Leeuwen will be among the council’s leaders and his friend Justice Visser will employ all the means at his disposal to preserve the honor of Holland and minimize the damage caused by the German occupation. Autumn will come, followed as always by winter, and one morning Justice Visser will come, as he does every morning, to the Supreme Court, and awaiting him there will be a notice informing him that he has been dismissed from his post because he is a Jew.

  * * *

  On this pleasant Saturday afternoon the three respected friends and their wives decide to come to the aid of the Dutch homeland in these difficult times, to harness the best of their powers for its sake and hope for the best.

  And on his balcony in the hotel Yoel sees how the warmth of the autumnal sun cradles the backyards and fills their gardens with the chirping of birds and the flight of butterflies. In one of the yards in the right-hand row two blond children are kicking a ball around. In a yard to the left a woman is weeding her garden while the big striped cat dozes on the ground beside her, its paws spread. A young man is sitting at the top of the stairs descending to another yard on the left, his finger flicking the screen of the smartphone he is holding while a longhaired young woman, apparently his wife, is playing with their little child at the foot of the stairs. This yard and the next are separated by a hedge that prevents Yoel from discerning the figure emerging from the house into the yard at this moment, the figure of a man or a woman. Before he makes up his mind which of them it is, the figure walks to the edge of the yard and then back to the house, disappearing through the door that closes behind it with a soft click.

  29

  Earlier, at the kiddush that followed the morning service in the synagogue, Yoel was standing at the edge of the foyer where tables had been set up for drinks and the cloyingly sweet sponge cakes, when one of the worshippers who was also on his own started a conversation with him. He introduced himself with his surname, Raphaels, and was happy to hear that Yoel was from Israel and was interested in the history of Dutch Jewry during the war. I don’t know if I can help you, he said, since the war years were the years of my early childhood and I can only remember that I was hidden with a Christian family, and that I was happy there. I’ve only started going to synagogue in recent years, he confessed, and it’s important for me to attend this particular one because my father used to pray here before the war, that is before he was taken and didn’t return. I come by tram from the New West part of the city every Saturday morning, he added with an apolo
getic smile, and at first I didn’t know that Jews are forbidden to travel on Shabbat, but I still do even after it became known to me because it’s important to me to be here.

  They carried on talking, and in reply to Yoel’s questions Raphaels told him that he had been born in Amsterdam and hidden in one of the southern villages. I don’t remember the day I arrived at my parents’ who hid me, he said. But I remember well the dreadful day when I was taken from them and returned to my biological mother.

  The two no-longer-young Jews stood facing each other amid the commotion of the kiddush, each with a disposable plastic cup in one hand and a slice of cake in a paper napkin in the other. Until that day I was a happy child, Raphaels sighed. I didn’t imagine that I wasn’t really the son of the father and mother who raised me with so much love, nor that I wasn’t really the brother of their four happy children.

  He fell silent and so did Yoel. What could he say?

  I was angry, Raphaels went on, gazing into his plastic cup. I was angry with my biological mother for taking me away from my family, and I was no less angry with the parents who raised me and then allowed that strange woman to take me away from them.

  Raphaels bit into his cake, ate it all, and with a finger brushed the crumbs into a little pile on the napkin and ate them too. Perhaps he and I had met in the streets of this neighborhood when we were babies, Yoel thought. Perhaps our parents had known each other before the war. And if they hadn’t, perhaps Raphaels’s biological father had met Eddy Blum on one of atheist Eddy’s rare visits to this synagogue.

  It’s strange, eh? Raphaels smiled as he wiped his lips with his now empty napkin, rolled it into a little ball, and stuffed it into his empty cup, which he put on the table. Strange that I’m telling you all this after meeting you such a short time ago.

  I find it very interesting, Yoel replied encouragingly.

  You have to understand, Raphaels went on, that for years and years I didn’t tell a soul about it. In fact, I haven’t even told this story to myself!

  Yoel put his cup and the slice of cloyingly sweet cake on the table on which mainly empty bottles and crumpled napkins remained. Going by Raphaels’s brown suit, his shiny brown shoes, and the furrows around his eyes whose color matched his suit and shoes, Yoel tried to guess if he was single or married, loved or lonely.

  The congregation started to disperse and the two of them turned to leave.

  I’ve started talking about my past only lately, Raphaels confessed, thanks to a Jewish organization that began bringing hidden Jewish children together, I mean Jewish adults who were hidden in their childhood. At the meetings I saw that there are more people like me, you understand? And I began… they help me to open everything that was closed, you see? They help me to understand that anyone who experienced things like that, especially the ones who were passed from hand to hand, it has a complicated effect on them.

  And Yoel thought about the three of them, him, his mother, and Nettie, sitting at the table by themselves, always by themselves, on weekdays and Sabbaths and festivals. And how once, when his mother had relented in the face of his urging and pleading, she had agreed to accept an invitation to a Rosh Hashanah Eve meal from neighbors whose son was his classmate, so they brought their hosts a splendid box of chocolates and excitedly entered an apartment filled with light and gaiety, and his classmate’s talkative mother seated them at the festive table with lots of jovial, shining relatives and bowls of apples and honey for the New Year to be good and sweet, and pomegranate seeds so our merits might multiply like the pomegranate, and moist dates, tamar, so those who hate us be tam, extinguished, but the fish, that is the fish head, placed on a platter in the middle of the table so we should be heads, not tails, fixed its dead eye on Yoel, on Yoel of all of them, it glared and glared until Yoel couldn’t stand it any longer, and when they all rose for kiddush he fled the table, the family, the gaiety, and went to the stairwell, where his mother found him sitting on the top step waiting for her.

  I started to understand my life, Raphaels said as he and Yoel stood on the Jacob Obrechtstraat sidewalk. Now I’m trying to become reconciled with all my dead parents, biological and nonbiological alike.

  * * *

  It’s good that his city pass gives him free access to the museums, and Yoel can find refuge in these protected havens on the Sabbath too. In the last week, the Jewish Historical Museum, and especially its library, had become his principal place of work, and the three museums of art in Museumplein that are so close to the Mokum Hotel are where he thinks and breathes. This time he decides to go to the Van Gogh Museum first, where on the floor he will perhaps find a fragment or two of his heart that broke when he was there yesterday, but on the west side of the square he sees a quiet line of weekend tourists waiting by the entrance, a line that stretches for hundreds of meters along the sidewalk. Fat raindrops start falling and from one end of the line to the other umbrellas, scarves, coats, and anything that comes to hand are opened over heads.

  So he goes back to the Rijksmuseum, and as he has done since the incident of the dead babies, he skips the first floor and quickly goes up to the second. There, on the main wall next to the stairway, are paintings by the Dutch-Jewish painter Jozef Israëls, and Yoel doesn’t find the undated one of the mother and child walking on the dunes, a painting which when he saw it at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, a closed door in his soul was opened for a moment, just for a moment, and it was a closed door of whose existence he was unaware until then. But he enjoys seeing here several of Israëls’s other seascapes in which figures of simple fishermen and their families are done in clear, almost transparent waves of watercolor that blend with the sea and sky as if they are all truly one.

  His eye is drawn to a painting of a stormy sea on the right-hand wall close to the exit. Thick layers of oil paint tumble onto one another in strong brushstrokes and it seems that the painter worked with broad body movements and at breakneck speed and shaped the waves with a sharp knife. Yoel looks closer at the title and sees it is The Sea at Katwijk by Jan Toorop and is surprised that the painter’s name is foreign to him even though the painting itself seems familiar.

  30

  How to write the first time that Sonia encounters one of those wooden signs imprinted with the words “Voor Joden verboden” in black letters. How to describe what she thinks and how she reacts. And where does it happen? At the entrance to the municipal market? A tram stop? The entrance to a museum? The public library?

  The second time she encounters such a sign.

  The third.

  * * *

  My mother, Raphaels told him on Saturday, always said that from the day she handed me over to be hidden, she lost all emotion. In order to hand me over she had to detach herself from herself, and afterward she never managed to get back inside herself and continued, long after the war ended, living outside herself and observing her life without any emotion. Without any emotion? Yoel asked. And Raphaels nodded. She looked after me and the two additional children she had after the war, but she was never happy and never sad.… When my younger sister yelled at her that she’s a block of ice she didn’t get upset, she just nodded and said, Yes, you’ve got an ice-block mother.

  * * *

  Yoel goes into the Albert Cuyp Market, where among the shops and stalls he is glad to find a small branch of the Maoz Vegetarian chain with which he is familiar from his trips to New York and other places. He orders a falafel with tahini and salad and then, sated and calmer, he takes an afternoon stroll through the market’s streets. Gently, gently, as if repressing his pain, he walks between the stalls and the people, many of whom are probably tourists like himself; he passes great piles of gleaming fruit and garishly colored vegetables; he passes the cadavers of unidentified fish and various types of seafood; he passes stalls laden with bags and dishes and clothes of all sizes and colors.

  They come here, he thinks, here they walk, here they buy. The market hasn’t changed since then, the stalls haven’t moved from where the
y were, the sky hasn’t been replaced by another sky. Am I a block of ice too? he asks himself, for according to studies quoted by Raphaels, in many cases the emotional neutering of the parents had also adhered to their children, passed down to them like a genetic defect even though during the war they were babies and didn’t remember anything about what had happened to them. I, for example, don’t know how to get excited, Raphaels had told him, it seems to me that I live more or less on one uniform level.

  Let’s buy some almonds and nuts, Yoel tells them silently, stopping at the nut stall, and they stand with him, Martin and Anouk on one side and Eddy and Sonia on the other, but suddenly a woman who’s not in the story pushes between them and says to him in Hebrew, What an honor, what a great honor it is to meet you here, Mr. Blum, and Yoel nods courteously and flees, trying to become swallowed up in the crowds of people but almost colliding with a big, well-built man he recognizes as a former member of the Knesset or maybe a retired IDF general, who is striding toward him with his wife, a well-known socialite or perhaps a TV news presenter, that is, Yoel is sure he’d met them both somewhere in the past, perhaps he’d even been quite close to them, but right now he has no idea who they are and under what circumstances this close acquaintanceship had been formed.

  Yoel Blum! the man roars in the voice of a TV game show presenter, and Yoel wonders if in fact the man is the TV presenter and his wife the former member of the Knesset, but he has no idea, and meanwhile both of them, first the man and then his wife, are embracing him warmly and strongly in the middle of Amsterdam’s crowded market and planting wet kisses onto his cheeks. What are you doing here? they ask him in tremendous surprise, as if it is a well-known fact that only they, whoever they are, are allowed to wander pleasurably through the markets of the world, whereas he is not supposed to leave Israel’s borders, perhaps not even the borders of his study, unless it’s for a worthy official objective. Public relations, eh? the man roars, slapping Yoel on the back. That’s what you’re doing here, you winner, you! You think we don’t know? Yoel politely declines their invitation to spend some time with them either today or tomorrow at the charming coffee shop they’d found right beneath their hotel, but he doesn’t manage to take his leave of them, or rather doesn’t manage to get them to leave him alone until after he’d heard about all their Dutch experiences, the coffee shops, the windmills, and the wonderful cheese market in Alkmaar, oh, the cheese market, and until he’d been asked to help them make a decision: the man, who Yoel is almost certain is a former member of the Knesset or a retired general, or a former member of the Knesset who is also a retired general, feels that before they return home he and his wife should visit the Jewish Historical Museum; his wife, on the other hand, says there are enough historical Jewish sites in the world, and one goes to Amsterdam not for Jewish history but for the fun. We’re interested in what you think, they tell him with pleading looks, and when Yoel replies that it’s hard for him to decide, the man capitulates and admits that the Jewish Historical Museum is apparently not one of this city’s main attractions. Quite so, his wife concurs, especially since the Dutch were always good to us and the Jews here didn’t really suffer.