by Emuna Elon
The couple eventually releases him and they hurry on their way, but not before hugging him again and wetting his cheeks once more with loving kisses. Yoel follows them with his eyes until they disappear round a bend, he looks here and there to verify that he is not being watched, and then he approaches one of the stalls selling cheap flashlights, key rings from which dangle a pair of tiny Dutch clogs, mechanical monkey drummers, and other cheap toys and gadgets made in China or thereabouts. Among all these treasures he looks for and finds a pile of black stocking caps, and he takes one, simple and black, pays two euros for it, and on the spot, he removes the casquette cap that has become author Yoel Blum’s trademark. He replaces it with the knitted stocking cap, pulling it down over his skull until the edges come down to his ears.
Yoel doesn’t wear a yarmulke. In his view, wearing a yarmulke—cloth or knitted, black or colorful, large or small—is to declare one’s belonging to one of the religious or social streams, and he doesn’t belong to any of them. He is a liberal and would actually prefer not to cover his head at all, but he began wearing a cap for his mother’s sake and continued to do so only because he didn’t want to cause her sorrow. After everything she’d been through and after she’d immigrated to Israel with him and Nettie, his mother had made a commitment to observe the precepts of the Torah, and heaven forbid that he cause her sorrow, heaven forbid that he let her see him with his head uncovered. Not even after her death.
Among all the people flowing hither and yon in the crowded street of the Albert Cuyp Market he stuffs his casquette into his pants pocket. Then he starts looking in the row of clothing stalls. He feverishly moves hangers back and forth until he finds a sort of biker’s leather jacket, and much to the stallholder’s surprise, he buys it for twenty-three euros. The jacket isn’t real leather but a sort of shiny metallic faux-leather plastic. But a jacket like this, he notes to himself with satisfaction, author Yoel Blum wouldn’t wear even if you paid him, even if you begged him. He removes his tailored jacket, folds it meticulously, and puts it into the plastic bag the stallholder had given him. Instead of his old jacket he puts on the faux-leather, faux-biker one, and now he is relaxed. So long as he’s dressed like this no one will recognize him.
* * *
Not far from the market, at this late autumn afternoon hour, Anouk is strolling along the Herengracht at Martin’s side as he carries little Sebastian on his shoulders.
Anouk, yes, Anouk, knows how to enjoy the beauty of each fleeting moment. This particular moment for instance, this moment of this late autumn afternoon, a special, onetime moment when she is strolling along the canal bank beside her Martin, who is carrying their little Sebastian on his shoulders, she sees how the touch of the light on the water on this particular stretch of this particular canal creates a onetime spectacle the likes of which have never been nor will be again. Look, she whispers to Martin, see how magical it is! And Martin sees her glowing face and feels how her happiness is overflowing and washing over and cleansing him too.
And he knows that without her, what is he. What.
31
Although life is hard for them, they’re still sure that this bizarre, inconceivable war will remain in Holland for six months at the most.
This morning the sky finally cleared after three consecutive days of rain. It’s Nettie’s birthday and Sonia is about to take her to school when Eddy arrives from the hospital for a short surprise visit. When the war is over I’ll buy you a proper birthday present, he says in that shy way of his, but in the meantime, dear Nettie, I’m giving you this gift with my love. He proffers a small parcel wrapped in used gift wrapping, and the child beams and takes the package, and her tiny fingers excitedly tug at the string because she loves presents, loves birthdays, loves her father, loves opening birthday presents from her father. She opens the wrapping and there is the present: a pear! Her father has bought her a real pear for her birthday! She puts the beautiful yellow fruit on the table and looks at him, beaming, for pears are unobtainable in occupied Amsterdam. It’s been a long time since anyone in Amsterdam has seen a pear. And how she loves pears! At this moment there is no present in the world that could make her happier.
* * *
This morning the sky finally cleared after three consecutive days of rain, and again Yoel finds himself fleeing and immersing himself in the three museums that stand facing each other so close to his hotel.
Vincent paints the vase of purple irises in the year of his suicide, against a yellow background and with a few stems already drooping. He also paints the landscape of the area where he is living, but instead of completing the sky he practices sketching faces, leaving behind entire canvases of started faces, and over the entire surface of an old painting in which he had once painted another vase with different flowers, he daubs a green-gray layer on which he creates a face whose shapes and bulges he marks by emphasizing the shadows. He paints a lot of potatoes: potato picking, potato meals, and, close to his death, a painting he calls Evening—a potato-picker couple resting in their house at the end of the day, the woman sitting mending an item of clothing, the baby asleep in its crib, a cat curled up by the blazing hearth.
* * *
Sonia comes outside with the two children, takes Nettie to the teacher’s house, and pedals back home with Leo. She parks her bicycle in the usual place at the curbside, takes the baby from the front carrier, and sees Anouk standing by the house, leaning on Sebastian’s stroller and sobbing loudly. Her doll-like body is trembling in her pink dress and her smooth honey-blond hair, cut in a straight line to the height of her tiny pearl earrings, falls onto her manicured hands with their red nails that are covering her face under her white hat.
Sonia hurries to her. What’s the matter, is the child alright?
Sebastian is sitting in his stroller and seems composed, but Anouk’s tears have smeared her eye makeup and she can hardly speak for sobbing and choking. It seems that earlier this morning, after she had dressed herself and Sebastian, she had gone, as she usually did, to the public playground adjoining the synagogue. But the other mothers playing with their children, women she meets on the playground benches almost every day, and Sonia sometimes meets them there too, had driven them away shamefully. They are usually glad to see Anouk and are friendly, and she usually sits and chats with them about babies and husbands and life, but today they gave her malevolent looks. You can read, can’t you? they shouted at her as she approached, and they pointed at the new notice that had been posted at the entrance to the playground on Jacob Obrechtstraat. When she gave them a friendly smile and sat sweet Sebastian on the carousel and turned it, the women shot her looks filled with hostility. Then, when she put him in the round sandbox he loves so much and sat down on one of the wooden benches, a murmur of deep shock passed between them. One of them had even run to call for help, so it transpired from the fact that after a short while, a policeman appeared on the scene.
* * *
He sees the picture of Van Gogh painting himself painting himself and realizes that in his new novel, he wants to also portray himself writing himself and longs to do it with the same precision with which Van Gogh painted, with the same sincerity, the same bungee jumps from which there is no return. To portray himself as a field of ripening wheat beneath storm clouds, to portray a band of crows circling above his head as if death has already come to him, to write his self until he too, like Vincent in his very last painting, will be nothing but twisted roots bare of bark and barriers.
* * *
The spring of Anouk’s tears flows even more freely.
A policeman? a shocked Sonia says. Why a policeman? What crime was committed?
Meticulous in his uniform, the policeman approached the bench she was sitting on and Anouk was stunned when she looked at the face beneath the resplendent cap and discovered that the policeman was none other than Henry van Duren, who’d grown up here in the street and had played with her in their childhood in the same park and built sandcastles in the same sand
box in which Sebastian was now playing. I think, she tells Sonia, that they posted him here because he knows everybody in the neighborhood and knows which of them are Jews.… I said, Hello, Henry, how are you? she sobs and brushes a lock of honey-blond hair behind a pearl ear. But he just stood there and told me, over and over with a kind of brutal forcefulness, that by law I must leave the park right away.
Oh, Sonia says, oh, my poor sweet, how embarrassing… And Anouk’s beautiful face is once more washed by a new flood of tears under the brim of her fine white hat.
He didn’t stop shouting and shouting, Anouk sobs, he said that under the new law he has to arrest me for this offense, but this time, just this once, he’s prepared to believe that I hadn’t seen the notice prohibiting me from going into the park, and that he wouldn’t arrest me, but only on condition that I get up from the bench right now, take my child, and not come back.
Sonia puts a hand on her arm and tries to soothe her. This is a temporary situation, Anouk my dear, don’t worry, the war will soon be over and you’ll be able to go wherever you want, just like you used to.
My father will fix it with them even before the war’s over, Anouk announces purposefully, and calms down for a moment, but then her head again starts moving from side to side, her bottom lip curls, a blue vein in her temple throbs, and she starts crying again.
But the humiliation, she sobs. I’ll never recover from the awful humiliation that Sebastian and I suffered today.
And Sonia stands there with Leo in one arm and her free hand stroking Anouk’s shoulder until the trembling and weeping subside slightly and her neighbor blows her perfect nose and announces: There are some Jews that I can understand why our neighbors don’t want them in our lovely clean playground. But to throw out Anouk de Lange? To expel me?
* * *
And how often Vincent paints his own portrait. How he tries and tries to capture this thing called a face, this thing that other people see and think: Here’s Vincent. The straight nose, the red beard, the windows of the eyes, once with a gray hat and once with a straw hat and once with a pipe, but always a stranger to himself, a stranger and an oddity. Perhaps his most accurate portrait, the one most faithful to the original, is the one in which he painted himself in the form of a bunch of wildflowers that had been torn off their roots and put in a vase.
* * *
In the afternoon Sonia picks Nettie up from school and sits both children on her bicycle—Nettie in the child’s seat behind her and Leo in the carrier attached to the handlebars. The weather has finally cleared up after three days of rain, and since today is Nettie’s birthday and Eddy is working late and won’t be waiting for them at home, she pedals eastward to visit her parents in the beloved Old Jewish Quarter across the river.
Her heart fills with serenity as she reaches Waterlooplein, the Jewish market that is crowded day and night, and the pitiable and wonderful alleys, the alleys of her childhood. She passes between the stalls and carts whose owners are shouting their wares, takes care not to trample over the goods laid out on the ground, and finally turns right at the herring seller’s barrel.
She gets the three of them off the bicycle, leans it against the wall of the house as she did when she was a child, and skips up the narrow stairs as she did when she was a child, though now her son is in her arms and her daughter is skipping gaily in front of them. A moment after she goes inside her mother is already grating pumpkin and making a mixture for sweet cutlets. Only God—whose existence Sonia has long since denied, but in whom her mother believes—knows where this woman obtains pumpkin at a time like this, and only God knows what else she puts into her latkes and what gives them their sublime taste. She stands patting them into round patties and they chat in Dutch spiced with a little Yiddish, they chat about Sonia’s children and Eddy’s work but don’t say a word about the harsh situation or the increasing number of decrees or about the war itself. As they talk, Sonia’s younger brothers, Isaac and Herz, come into the apartment. Her little sister, Trudy, sits on the floor with Nettie, teaching her a game of singing and clapping, and the two girls sing together in their thin voices, clapping each other’s hands and laughing happily.
Only her father is silent, staring into space over the Gemara open on the table in front of him. An expression unfamiliar to her lengthens his face that has suddenly become old and sunken, and his fingers involuntarily stroke his beard that has become almost completely white. A moment before Sonia takes her leave, her mother prods him: Nu, Yoelisch! And her father shakes himself and stands up to lay his hands on his daughter’s head and the heads of his little grandchildren and bless them with an ancient blessing as his wife wraps up the latkes and says in her softest voice: Here, maideleh, take this mein tayereh kind.
Evening is falling on the city as Sonia pedals home from Waterlooplein with her daughter, her son, and the smell of the wrapped latkes that envelops her like compassion. Evening falls and in one blow, short and sharp, she is struck by the knowledge that this is not just another evening in the long chain of evenings she has lived through in the streets of this city since the day she was born. You’d better stop denying reality, she tells herself as she wends her way on her bicycle through the crowds of other cyclists, in the flow of carts and automobiles crossing the bridge over the river. Whether you accept the facts or deny them, the life you were used to is over. Over and done with.
* * *
And again Yoel goes up to the second floor of the museum and into the first hall on the left and stands facing the painting by Jan Toorop, ready to delve deep into its curvilinear design and in its depths seek the questions for his answers.
32
On the eve of Yom Kippur, Bat-Ami packed vegetable cutlets, a pasta salad, and lentil soup in her plastic containers and they went to Galia’s for the pre-fast meal. On their way back to Jerusalem from the mountain where Galia lives, they felt that they’d hit something and Yoel was shocked when they got out of the car and found the body of a beautifully bearded and horned billy goat that had apparently wandered off from one of the herds that graze in the area and he had killed it with his own wheels; with his own wheels he had cut off its magnificent life. What have I done? he asked, numb with grief. But Bat-Ami, who since her own traffic accident is frightened by the smallest incident involving cars, was overjoyed: It’s atonement for all of us; killing a scapegoat on Yom Kippur eve is a good omen! And since Yoel was ashamed to admit his sadness over the goat, especially as Bat-Ami is the vegetarian half of their couple while he regularly eats killed animals, he pretended that he was only in a bad mood because the car’s right-hand headlight was smashed by the force of the collision and the front fender was dented.
* * *
The sea in Toorop’s painting rages toward him. He thinks about the Hebrew letters of the Hebrew word for sea, : a closed, vessel-shaped mem beside a detached, hovering yod. He thinks that the sea is a huge, finite vessel containing infinite waters. He thinks: I know nothing; I know nothing; I know nothing.
In one of their telephone conversations, Bat-Ami quotes what she’d heard on the radio that morning about the Dutch government’s admission that on show in Amsterdam’s museums are no fewer than one hundred and thirty-nine works that were plundered from their Jewish owners during the war. I wouldn’t be surprised, she says, if that painting of the sea, the one you said you felt you knew from the past…
He sometimes goes to the painting twice a day. And sometimes he finds himself running to the Rijksmuseum for just a moment, even just a minute before closing time, just to hurry up the stairs to the second floor. And look.
* * *
In the space between the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum he encounters the Scottish piper, and from day to day the brotherhood he feels toward him deepens, despite the tartan kilt and the red-tasseled knee stockings and perhaps because of them, and despite or perhaps because of the strident sounds the piper casts over the wide square as he walks round and round, blowing into his chanter and every now and
then glancing from under the huge fur hat that almost covers his eyes, at the coins that people bend to drop into his open box on the lawn.