by Emuna Elon
From day to day his soul also connects with that of the mandolin player who always sits on the low stone wall at the northern entrance to Museumplein, behind the crowds of tourists of all ages and races who have their photographs taken morning, noon, and night against the backdrop of the sculpted I amsterdam logo at the head of the lawn. The mandolin player is brown-skinned and has a head of thick gray hair, and Yoel doesn’t know if he’s South American or Italian, and he doesn’t know if he knows that his soft playing isn’t heard in all the surrounding noise, but he sees his permanent smile and how his chubby body, always packed into jeans and a denim jacket that are too small for him, sways from side to side as he strums his melodies to himself, and as he does he sees Yoel and smiles at him as if they really are friends.
Since the sky has finally cleared after three consecutive days of rain, the people allow their bodies to move across the museum square slowly and absorb the warmth of the sun’s rays. Not far from here at the city high school where Anouk studied in her youth, and in whose big yard hundreds of bicycles are parked every morning, at this hour the farewell ceremony is being held for the seventy-four Jewish children whose deportation has been ordered by the Germans. The principal was dismissed after protesting against this order, and in another few weeks the whole building will be expropriated to house the occupying army’s troops in the classrooms, the storeroom will be used for raising pigs, and dog kennels will be put up in the yard.
But on the grassy slope in front of the Stedelijk Museum, dozens of people, most of them young, are sprawled in the sunshine, their faces to the sky, not knowing that the past is still here, not imagining how close they are to the German police headquarters that Sonia always passes quickly and cautiously. It’s good that in the covered walkway at the entrance to the Rijksmuseum there’s a string quartet playing Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor. Yoel allows himself to be immersed in the crowd of passersby gathered beneath the stone arches and lets the music calm his soul, even though the Israeli tourist guidebook claims that it is only the rare acoustics in the thick-walled space that turn each musical performance heard there into a pleasure worth being born for.
33
Today they heard that from now on, all the Jews registered as such in the Amsterdam census would be obliged to carry identity cards stamped with the letter “J.”
Sonia looks into Eddy’s eyes. Let’s ignore this order, she beseeches him.
Let’s decide that we’re not handing in our cards to be stamped.
Her heart tells her to ask for this even though she doesn’t know, because she can’t know, what the future may hold for Jews whose cards will be stamped. Jews have been persecuted in the past, in Poland and elsewhere, but not in Holland. Jews were never persecuted in Holland. Jews never suffered any sort of discrimination in Holland. And Jews have always been law-abiding citizens in Holland. Jews have always observed law and order like every other respectable Netherlander.
Eddy looks at her as if seeing her for the first time. His eyes narrow at her behind the thick lenses of his glasses. What are you thinking of, Sonia my dear? How can we ignore the order? How can we decide that we’re not handing in our cards to be stamped?
I’m begging you, she says.
It’s out of the question, he states. He speaks gently but decisively. If we avoid having our cards stamped and then we’re caught without the right documents…
It is evening and they are sitting on the fourth floor in Martin and Anouk’s apartment. The two doors—that of the hosts and that of the basement apartment—are open wide so that Sonia and Eddy can hear if Nettie or Leo wakes up and calls for them. Martin puts out four glasses on the table and pours the home-brewed beer he bought from a source known only to him. Sonia hasn’t seen such high-quality beer since Holland was occupied, but right now she doesn’t feel like drinking.
I told you, she shouts at Eddy, I told you right from the start that we shouldn’t have registered at the Jewish Council. Right from the start we should have ignored the orders and just got on with our life as usual.
We would have gotten into trouble, Eddy says.
Why would we have gotten into trouble? she replies heatedly. How would they have known we’re Jews if we hadn’t registered at the Jewish Council of our own foolish free will? And who could have known that now this damned “J” is actually supposed to appear on our cards?
Even Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita says that Jews shouldn’t register and have their cards stamped, Martin says, quoting his revered teacher, the black in his eyes gleaming. De Mesquita says that the surest thing is to ignore all these separatist orders.
You see? Sonia’s look tells Eddy.
But my father, Anouk interjects in the mollycoddled tone she uses, so Sonia thinks, whenever she mentions her father, my father says that so long as we all obey the authorities’ orders, it will be better for us in the end.
So as not to ask her how her dear father knows all this, and to what extent the rumors about him being close to those authorities are correct, Sonia takes a sip of her beer and points at a large oil painting on the wall above them and the stormy sea depicted in it that seems so tangible.
A beautiful painting, she says admiringly after swallowing the bitter beer.
Martin laughs. It’s obviously been a long time since you were last here, that painting has been there for ages.
Anouk joins in his laughter. Every morning, she says excitedly, when our sweet little Sebastian wakes up and I lift him out of his cot and bring him out of his bedroom, the first thing he does is point his darling little hand at this painting and say: Water, Mama, water!
That little one is certainly starting to appreciate art, Martin affirms with smiling pride. He particularly loves this painting, and the truth is, so do I. It should actually be in the shop, but I’m worried that as soon as it’s there someone will buy it and we’ll have to say goodbye to it.…
Anouk stands up to straighten her left leg that she’d folded under her bottom and then sits down again with her right leg folded under her instead. Eddy straightens his glasses on the bridge of his nose, examines the painting through his physician’s eyes, and inquires gravely, as if trying to diagnose an ailment by its visible symptoms: What style is this?
It’s by Jan Toorop, Martin replies, and pours himself another half glass of beer. It’s difficult to attribute it to a specific style because Toorop worked in all the styles. He leans back, takes a sip of beer, gives the painting an affectionate look, and adds: Toorop called it The Sea at Katwijk.
Why Katwijk of all places? Sonia asks. The sea can look like that from any beach in the world.
Her question pleases Martin. You’re so right, he says enthusiastically. I also think that the words “at Katwijk” don’t refer to the sea but to the painter. The sea can look like that from any beach, but the painting shows how Jan Toorop actually felt when he was in Katwijk.
Eddy straightens his glasses again as he leans forward to take a closer look at the painting. But in this painting, he remarks, confused, you don’t see the painter but the sea.
Martin smiles. Every painter evidently knows how to depict only himself, he says.
Sonia looks at the painted sea and sees not only the artist but herself. There she is in black, there in red, there she is borne from wave to wave, from wave to wave, moving in the infinite. Like the figures in the lithograph by M.C. Escher, Martin’s friend from the time he studied with de Mesquita, that move in a building with numerous walkways and stairs and it’s impossible to tell if they are descending or ascending, entering or exiting, and whether it makes any difference and why.
* * *
The bell of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary chimes ten times and Yoel writes Sonia rising from her chair and departing. We should go to bed, she tells Eddy. Don’t forget that as respectable, law-abiding Dutch citizens we’ve got to get up early in the morning and go to have our cards stamped with that “J.”
34
Ever since he’
d replaced his famous cap with a black stocking cap and his tailored jacket with the shiny biker’s one, he feels like any other passerby. Israeli tourists strolling around the Dutch capital no longer notice him, they don’t ask him questions or compliment his writing, and they don’t exchange remarks about him. Not only that, he’d stopped shaving and his features are changing from day to day so that even he finds it hard to recognize himself.
There is no doubt that something in this anonymity allows him to concentrate properly on his research. He can stand undisturbed even in the most crowded places, anonymous to the point of transparence, to take photographs with his small camera and simply to observe and listen and record in his notebook scenes, events, and thoughts. Anonymous to the point of transparency he enters the folds of the city, seeing but invisible, present but nonexistent. As if he is free of any external definition and open to the spaciousness of an inner experience, a heart-of- the-matter experience in which all is one and there is no division between one person and another, between reality and imagination, between time and time.
* * *
In the last few days, sometimes late at night, he has been hearing through the walls of his room loud young voices speaking and laughing in Arabic and arousing in him a yearning for the Middle East common to them and him. And in the afternoon the sun comes out between the clouds, and Sonia and Anouk take advantage of the temporary warmth to play with their children in the backyard. After the public park incident, banker de Lange swiftly equipped the yard with a small sandbox and swing, and now Sebastian is sitting in his private sandbox engrossed in filling a red tin pail with handfuls of sand while Nettie swings herself back and forth on the swing hanging from a branch of the sycamore, and Leo, shouting triumphantly, crawls up the five steps leading from the yard to the de Langes’ back door as Sonia’s long arms keep him from falling backward or sideways.
* * *
He comes back in the afternoon from a few hours of data gathering in the Jewish Historical Museum library, passes through the acoustic space beneath the stone arches just as the spring flutes of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons hang in the air, and comes out into the square to the mandolin player who smiles at him while moving to the rhythm of his unheard strumming.
A little farther on, perched on scaffolding on the wall of a structure bordering the lawn, a few workers are busy putting together a huge portrait of Vincent van Gogh composed of the cut heads of sunflowers.
As part of this project, two beautiful girls stand there smiling at the passersby and handing out fresh sunflowers from pails. Yoel is filled with compassion for Vincent, who would doubtless be unhappy to see his flowered and unreal face on public display, but one of the girls approaches him and proffers a tall sunflower with a fleshy stem and a large yellow head, and Yoel hesitates momentarily but then thanks her and takes the flower. In his hotel room he fills an empty beer bottle with tap water, puts the sunflower in it, and stands it on the table next to the vainly switched-on laptop.
* * *
Sonia my dear, Anouk says in her spoiled-little-girl voice as she sits on the edge of the sandbox with one leg folded under her, maybe you’ve still got a nice hospital story left for me? One you haven’t already told me, or one you wouldn’t mind telling me again?
Anouk loves hearing real-life stories, especially stories of Sonia’s experiences from the years she worked at the Jewish hospital. Good for you, she says to Sonia, that before you had children you learned a profession and worked in it. I haven’t done anything, she grumbles, because with parents like mine it was clear I wouldn’t have to work for a living. They sent me to learn dance, and truly, there’s nothing that gives me greater pleasure than dancing, but nobody, me included, ever thought I’d suddenly work as a professional dancer. Her eyes sparkle as she toys with the notion that she’ll go to work sometime in the future, perhaps as a chic saleswoman oozing style in the prestigious Hirsch fashion house on Leidseplein. There was even a time when I began taking private lessons to improve my French, she recalls, because the Hirsch saleswomen have to speak to the customers only in French, and no connections can help you get accepted there if you’re not completely fluent in that complex language. But in the end, of course, I got pregnant with Sebastian and instead of learning how to speak French with customers in diamond-studded evening gowns I was consigned to bed with terrible nausea. I felt so awful I couldn’t lift my head from the pillow and all my plans changed.
That’s how it is, Sonia says, and Anouk goes on to say that a week or two ago Martin had told her that the Hirsch building and everything in it had been expropriated—plundered to its foundations, Martin said—so it turned out that in any case she wouldn’t be able to work there until Amsterdam had rid itself of this unnecessary war and its sanity was restored.
Well, at least I’ve got this sweet little angel, she sums up with a sigh, and strokes Sebastian’s sparse curls as he crouches over his pail, because without him what would I do with myself all day long.
Gently, Sonia takes Leo away from the steps he won’t stop climbing. Leo protests but he seems pleased when she sits him down next to Sebastian in the sandbox and she sits down on the nice bench that de Lange has installed there. To comply with Anouk’s request she tells her how, when she was a nurse in the Jewish hospital’s internal medicine ward, she was passing from bed to bed administering the routine morning medication when she came to a bed whose occupant, a young man, paled as she approached and adamantly refused to allow her to give him an injection. All her importuning was to no avail; he simply drew his blanket up to his chin and wouldn’t submit. When she asked why he was suddenly afraid of the needle today since the chart on his bed showed he had been given an injection every morning for a week, the young man lowered his eyes and confessed that it hadn’t been him who’d been given the morning injections and that he wasn’t the patient who’d been hospitalized for a week. He was a completely healthy friend of that patient, who’d agreed to take his place in the hospital bed for one night so the real patient could go out and have a good time.
The church bell peals five times and Anouk’s laughter also rings out as she asks Sonia to tell her another story.
* * *
The church bell peals five times and from the scratched mirror above the tiny sink in the small bathroom adjoining his room in the Mokum Hotel a man who hasn’t shaved for weeks looks back at Yoel. A man whose eyes look out from two narrow slits beneath his eyebrows and Yoel looks into these slits, moves his face closer to the mirror until his forehead touches the forehead of the man in the glass, and in the doleful depths of his eyes he sees the child he is seeking.
* * *
Sonia! Martin shouts agitatedly from the top of the steps descending from the de Lange apartment to the backyard.
Anouk turns her pretty head toward him. My dear! What are you doing home so early?
The Old Jewish Quarter, he says to Sonia. This morning. I’ve just heard.
What have you heard, Anouk shouts, Mar-tin?
Sonia quickly glances at Leo, who has found his way out of the sandbox and has crawled rapidly to the steps and now has his hands on the bottom one, ready to commence the climb again. Look after the children, would you, she says, her eyes moving from Martin to Anouk and back. I’ll be as quick as I can.
Anouk puts on one of her disgruntled expressions, angry that nobody is telling her what’s going on.
Don’t go there, Martin pleads with Sonia. It’s dangerous now and they’re raising the bridges.…
But Sonia is hurrying up the steps and into the house. Without a word she passes the cook busy preparing the de Langes’ dinner, rushes past Mrs. de Lange reclining in her armchair in the sitting room, and runs through the front door to the vestibule and out of the house.
She knows it’s beyond her powers. She knows there’s no point. She knows that her father, her mother, her brothers, her sister… But after a couple of minutes she is on her bicycle, crossing the avenue between the Concertgebouw and Museumplein, dra
wn eastward.
* * *
At night, from the balcony of his room, Yoel sees the dark, empty backyard of the house. Dim light is cast onto the five steps leading from the yard to the house and a breeze moves the swing hanging from the sycamore branch.
The psychoanalyst’s piles of papers are scattered around her computer like a choppy sea, yet her chair is empty. The dancer, too, cannot be seen in his sterile white kitchen, but there is a bluish light on in the window to the right of the kitchen and there is the black-garbed dancer sitting on a white couch, apparently facing a TV set that cannot be seen from here, and curled up on his knee is the huge white cat that Josephine has to occasionally remove from the hotel, and then there’s evidently a commercial break on the TV because now the dancer is standing up, the cat jumps from his lap and lands softly on the floor, and he exits the living room with perfect dancer’s steps and a moment later appears in his kitchen window. Yoel is riveted to the elastic-like limbs of the subject of his observation, his precise, springy movements, his unblemished loneliness. But then a light comes on in an upper window and Yoel’s eyes are drawn to the wall with the paintings, to the chest of drawers, and to the unidentified pet lying among the objets d’art this evening too.
From his place on the balcony Yoel examines the sharp-nosed animal and it examines him back. What, he wonders, brings a fox or jackal or even a dog to lie on a piece of furniture as if it’s a decoration among other decorations? And suddenly he is hit by the realization that the thin, furry animal lying immobile on the chest of drawers, its head to the window and its tail folded along its haunch, always in the same position, is… a stuffed animal, a fine example of a taxidermist’s art.