House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

  35

  And before dawn breaks Yoel wakes up to find himself in his childhood room in the apartment in Netanya. The blue wardrobe, the desk, and the shelves above it on which his storybooks are arranged beside the volumes of the illustrated children’s encyclopedia and the old table games, are all familiar to him from way back when. And when he sits up in his narrow childhood bed the door opens and his mother comes in, young and vigorous and more beautiful than all the women in the world.

  A sharp happiness fills Yoel’s heart in that he is a child once more, that his mother is again young and healthy, but then she looks at him and instead of smiling and wishing him good morning, she is assailed by horror and bursts into terrified screaming. Who are you? she shouts into his face. Who are you and what are you doing here, and how dare you sleep in my child’s bed?

  He quickly goes to the window to raise the shutter and let more light into the room so his mother can see that he’s her child, he and none other. But the shutter is too big and heavy for his small, weak child’s hands. And when he finally manages to pull down on the shutter strap and open the window of his childhood room, he is stunned to see the almond tree that had grown over many years in the yard of his and Bat-Ami’s home in Jerusalem. Like a gift of love, at the end of every winter this stirring tree would extend posies of delicate, sweet-smelling white blossom to their bedroom window, and Yoel turns his head and sees that he is indeed in his and Bat-Ami’s bedroom on the second floor of the family’s stone house in Rehavia. But a sense of mild amazement pervades him, for on one of the last occasions that he and Bat-Ami were abroad, her sister, who lives on the ground floor, called in a gardening firm to cut down the almond tree. He and Bat-Ami had returned from an exhausting literary trip and were shocked to find beneath their bedroom window only a mute stump. When they asked what had happened to the tree, his sister-in-law-neighbor had shrugged. It was choking the garden with its awful shed leaves, she hissed angrily. And anyway, it was a bitter almond, and who needs a tree here that just accumulates dead leaves and whose fruit is worth nothing?

  And while Yoel stands at the window in Jerusalem seeking an explanation for why the almond tree is growing in their yard even though it’s been chopped down, his eyes open and there he is in his bed in the Mokum Hotel in Amsterdam, and it’s still dark outside.

  What time is it? he asks aloud, and the church bell answers him with four metallic peals.

  36

  In the morning Sonia crosses Jacob Obrechtplein through a thin, incessant drizzle. Leo is asleep in his stroller covered with the hood, and she decides to go into Martin’s shop and ask him about his father-in-law’s connections with the Amsterdam Jewish Council.

  Through the shopwindow she sees Martin moving paintings from one side of the shop to the other, from the floor to the display table, from the table to the window and back to the floor. The number of customers visiting the shop is dwindling daily, and Sonia can see how Martin is dwindling too. Especially since that rainy day when the police raided the neighborhood adjacent to the ancient Spanish-Portuguese synagogue and most of the Spanish-Portuguese community’s families, including Martin’s, were arrested and taken to the collection point for Jews at the Dutch Theater on Plantage Avenue.

  * * *

  At the time they have absolutely no idea about what is happening to the Jews taken to the Dutch Theater, where they are being taken from there, and for what.

  There are rumors.

  But nobody really knows.

  In the meantime Yoel sits in the Jewish Historical Museum library almost every day.

  He goes through books, scans documents, watches filmed interviews, and reads written testaments, while the librarians are only too glad to fulfill the noted writer’s requests, provide him with more and more material, and whenever necessary translate information from Dutch to English for him.

  On his way to and from the museum, as on his walks close to the hotel, he looks into the apartments he passes. In fact, he can’t avoid looking into them: in spite of himself the big windows are exposed to him, revealing the lives of the people who live in the illuminated spaces beyond them, especially when they’re the windows of ground-floor or basement apartments.

  He looks into the apartments and sees that in each one there is a living room with seating and entertaining arrangements, and in each one there is a kitchen with a sink and faucets, a worktop, various utensils, and one sort of table or another and chairs for sitting around it. He observes these signs of life in wonderment, learning them like an archeologist trying to trace a lost culture through them or like a prophet seeking meaning and morals.

  * * *

  Up until the day they took his family, Martin thought they were taking only Jews who had recently immigrated to Holland or only poor Jews. That’s what he understood from the information he gleaned from his constant listening to distant radio stations, but it transpired that his listening was flawed and his understanding inaccurate, for they had come and uprooted the wealthiest and most highly respected Jews too, privileged Jews of good lineage who had been rooted in Amsterdam since the Jewish expulsion from Spain. Martin’s family was sent out of Amsterdam in one fell swoop, before he could exploit his father-in-law’s influence to extricate them from the Dutch Theater.

  All is not yet lost, he said after he heard that his parents and sisters had been taken out of Amsterdam; I’m sure that Papa de Lange will be able to bring them back. And Sonia saw the hope gleaming in his eyes and thought: And what of my family? Why didn’t you suggest that I ask for help from the omnipotent Papa de Lange when it was perhaps still possible to bring back my mother, my father, my young brothers, and my little sister, Trudy?

  In the end the banker was unable to save his beloved son-in-law’s dear ones. Martin’s parents and sisters were taken from Plantage Avenue to who knows where, and in all probability they’re going through what her family had gone through or still were. And Martin, all that remained for Martin was to rearrange his beautiful shop.

  * * *

  When he hears the shop door opening he straightens up, startled over the large, heavy-framed painting he has just placed on the floor against the wall. Ah! he exclaims, smiling at Sonia with relief, it’s you! She parks the stroller to one side, looks at the paintings all around, and tries to pluck up the courage to ask him what she has come to ask him about his father-in-law. You know I don’t really understand these things, she says as her opening gambit, but ever since you explained to us the painting in the entrance to your apartment…

  Martin nods. The Toorop, The Sea at Katwijk.

  Yes, she says, yes, the painting of the stormy sea, and you told us that it’s actually a painting of the artist’s soul. Ever since that evening I’ve been thinking a lot about it.

  Martin smiles sadly.

  And what, she asks, pointing at the painting he has just placed against the wall, what does this one express?

  They both step back and look at the large oil painting in which there is a table covered with a light silk cloth and on it shiny copper utensils, a torn loaf of bread, and a crystal decanter of dark red wine. You could say, he replies thoughtfully, that this painting expresses the same dilemma reflected in the Toorop work.

  Sonia looks into his face and at the painting, and into his face again. A dilemma?

  To be or not to be, he says, that is the question and that’s the dilemma. Everything is covered in water—or there’s dry land, and on the land there’s a table and on the table dishes and bread and wine…

  And some of the old glow returns to his black eyes as he shows her more and more paintings, more and more psychological situations, more and more expressions of the dilemma of existence. But she is already incapable of talking to him about the subject that brought her here in the first place, she can’t ask him about the nature of those famous connections his father-in-law has, that is, exactly to whom or what the banker is connected, and whether he does, as is said of him, hold a central position on the Jewish Co
uncil and is able to halt the disaster spreading among the Jews of Amsterdam like an epidemic.

  * * *

  His mother, the authoritative nurse who everyone in the clinic where she worked, even the doctors, respected and feared as she towered over them in her white shoes and the heavily starched white nurse’s robe she always wore over a simple, straight-cut dress. During school vacation time he would sit in her white room and watch admiringly, shuddering, as she inserted sharp needles into people’s arms and drew their blood into mysterious test tubes. And she didn’t stop working when they were home either; she always had something to cook or mend or clean, especially to clean, and only on rare occasions he would see her standing immobile at the kitchen sink holding some dish she was in the middle of soaping, and it was as if her eyes were locked, through the window above the sink, onto the tiny patch of sea that peeked at her between the buildings.

  To this day Bat-Ami loves telling anyone prepared to listen how one time, when his mother was already old, they had gone to the old-age home to bring her to their home for some holiday or other, and she had gone out to the car with them, pushing her walker as they carried her bags, when suddenly, when they had almost reached the parking lot, she halted and said, Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten something, and she simply left the walker on the path, turned round, and walked back to the building quickly, almost running, to fetch whatever she had forgotten.

  It was only toward the end of her life that she confessed to him about the dream she had dreamed many times throughout her life in which she was crawling on her knees in a narrow tunnel, crawling and feeling her way in viscous darkness, and was unable to get herself out. And every time I have this dream, she told him with a shy smile, I wake up crying terribly. I always closed my bedroom door at night so you and Nettie wouldn’t have to hear me crying like that.

  * * *

  Rain shrouds the city in a gray veil. Yoel is sitting in a Starbucks café at a small round table and watching the raindrops slide down the glass wall overlooking the street. He thinks about the innumerable small round tables identical to his own that are standing in innumerable Starbucks cafés all over the world. He thinks about innumerable cups of coffee identical to his own which at this very moment are steaming on these innumerable tables in front of the innumerable people sitting on chairs identical to his own beneath ceilings identical to the one over his head. And about the smiling young workers in their uniforms behind the counter who are completely identical to their colleagues who are presently serving the same beverages and pastries from behind identical counters in every city and country.

  Perhaps there is actually only one single Starbucks that is incessantly distributed by copy-paste. And perhaps it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’ve come from because the bottom line is that you’re just another coffee drinker standing at the counter, moving forward as if on a conveyor belt to the ordering station and from there to the cashier, then waiting till your name is called and finally getting your cappuccino with the whitish layer of foam dripped onto your cup in the shape of a heart. The rain intensifies and Yoel would have liked to think that he is just another coffee drinker in another rainy city. But like the viceroy who goes in search of the king’s daughter in Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s tale, he too must not forget the objective on whose trail he has embarked, and he too must look around incessantly and ask, Where am I in this world? Where am I?

  Beyond the misted glass a tram climbs the narrow street paved with small brown stones that have become eroded and rounded with the passing years, and another tram goes the other way. The shiny trams glide soundlessly along their tracks, soundlessly, and people tread over the wet stones with rapid steps, their bodies wrapped in coats, hats, and scarves, leaning forward to shelter their faces from the heavy rain. Rabbi Nachman doesn’t relate—either because he doesn’t know or because it’s not what’s important—how the viceroy managed to find the princess and bring her back to her father’s palace. But he ends the story with a promise: “In the end he found her,” and Yoel knows that this is how his own story must end, the story in which he is the king, he is the viceroy, he is the lost princess, and he is the narrator.

  37

  There are tens of thousands of stolen bicycles lying on the bottom of the canals. It’s so easy to pick one out of the thousands parked on every street and every corner, ride it to wherever you want to get to, and there drown it.

  At the bottom of the Herengracht, too, there is an invisible heap of rusting bicycles at the particular moment when Yoel is standing on one bank and Sonia with her son, Leo, are standing on the other. Leo is sitting in his little seat on his mother’s bicycle and pointing excitedly at the water where four flamboyantly colored ducks are squabbling loudly. Yoel sees Leo and sees Sonia and sees the ducks, which are apparently fighting over the favors of a brown-gray female floating nearby. The four males are paddling in rapid circles, pecking at one another, squawking and flapping their gleaming wings, while the brown-gray female swims calmly as if all this uproar has nothing to do with her.

  * * *

  Yoel calls his agent Zvika in Tel Aviv. He asks Zvika to inform his Italian publisher that he won’t be able to travel to Italy next week.

  But your new book’s already on the shelves there, Zvika protests. And your lectures in Rome, Milan, and Florence were arranged a long time ago.…

  I’m sorry, Yoel says, and he really does regret being unable to keep his word. I’m sorry, but I’ve no choice other than to cancel all the rest of the literary trips arranged for the next two or three months as well.

  Zvika is stunned. You can’t do this to me, he says, his voice strangled. You can’t do this to yourself.

  That’s exactly what you told me, Yoel reminds him with a smile, when I refused to fly to Amsterdam. Remember? So I listened to you and went to Amsterdam, and now I can’t leave!

  What d’you mean, you can’t leave? Don’t tell me you’ve decided to stay there permanently.

  Yoel laughs. Not permanently, just until I finish the research for the novel I’m going to write.

  You’re going to write a novel that takes place in Holland?

  Yes, no, I don’t know yet. But I’m gathering as much material as I can and writing all sorts of notes and comments. I don’t intend to leave this place until I’m sure I understand my story here, and until I’m capable of coming home and sitting down to write that story from start to finish.

  * * *

  In midmorning, a short time after Sonia gets home from a walk with Leo, Martin comes from his shop to inform her that once again the police are planning a raid on the city’s Old South to hunt down Jews. The raid will begin in the afternoon, he warns her, and Sonia presumes that he got the news from his clandestine radio stations. Not long ago he told her and Eddy that the enemy needed doctors, which meant that Eddy might be arrested shortly and sent eastward.

  Before noon she quickly takes the children upstairs to the top floor and leaves them with Anouk, as she usually does in cases like this. From there she runs to the Jewish hospital to get Eddy, and they hurry to the closest and safest place of refuge: the Rijksmuseum.

  * * *

  They have to walk through the museum’s galleries straight-backed and casually, their faces showing nothing but the pure pleasure of seeing the art treasures all around them. Sonia is particularly troubled on this occasion since today Leo is sick and coughing, he has a high temperature, and she can’t trust Anouk’s childcare abilities. Not only that, but so as not to rouse suspicion, Martin has stayed in the shop. It’s hard for Sonia to imagine Anouk managing on her own with her spoiled little Sebastian and Leo as well, whose barking cough is shaking his little body, and with Nettie, who also looked a little pallid earlier and perhaps she too is harboring a virus.

  But despite all this she links her arm with Eddy’s, inclines her body as if she is leaning against his shoulder, which is lower than hers, and walks with him through the various galleries.

  Ordinary, non
-Jewish people are walking beside them and looking at the exhibits, breathing with equanimity, and Sonia tries vainly to remember what it’s like to be ordinary like these people. What it’s like not to be persecuted. What it’s like going to the museum because you feel like enjoying fine art, and not because this is the only place where you have a chance of not being arrested, the only place where almost certainly nobody will ask you to present your papers and identify yourself.

  Yoel searches the Rijksmuseum galleries until he finds Sonia and Eddy standing and looking, or pretending to look, at the interaction between the light and the objects in the works of the Impressionists. He stands behind them, looking at her arm linked with his and the way she leans slightly toward him as if leaning against his shoulder.

  The sounds of the Scottish bagpipes insinuate themselves into the magnificent exhibition rooms from the lawn outside as Sonia and Eddy walk on, and Yoel sits down on the bench facing Rembrandt’s vast The Night Watch and takes a folded notebook from his pocket. Relate a few scenes from Sonia’s work at the Jewish hospital, he writes. Describe how she loved being a nurse, how she enjoyed exercising her strengths and skills to alleviate people’s suffering. And the bounty of appreciation she enjoyed from the hospital during that period, and how she sterilized and bandaged and injected and cared so gently and precisely. And the patients’ families for whom her steadfast presence was a source of confidence.