by Emuna Elon
* * *
The entire interior of the café is still covered with the same old wooden beams. It seems that the scarred wooden tables and worn wooden chairs have also been here since back then, although it’s possible that the original tables and chairs were confiscated for firewood in the winter of cold and hunger that beset Amsterdam toward the end of the war.
But there can be no doubt that the brown wooden counter is the same one. Back then did they serve the same roasted nuts with the coffee and the beer? Aside from the days of the winter of hunger, was there a bowlful of hard-boiled eggs on the counter back then too? And the bartender—a pleasant woman with broad shoulders and a smile that reveals horsy teeth—was there someone like her here back then too?
And if there was, how did she get through the war years?
On more than one occasion, so he had read in the Jewish Historical Museum library, Amsterdam’s brown cafés were the secret hideouts of the underground organizations active in the city.
* * *
It was here, in this brown café, that Sebastian burst onto the scene. That evening, like many others like it before the war, the two happy couples were seated at their usual corner table with beers and cigarettes and all sorts of friends and friends of friends who came and went, and as usual Martin was eloquently and enthusiastically propounding his ideas, while Eddy smoked in silence and occasionally interjected with a concise remark that undermined, in six or seven words spoken seemingly indifferently, the tower that Martin had built out of hundreds of excited sentences.
Between making a comment of her own and taking a deep drag on her cigarette and a resolute decision that it would be her last one that evening, because she had to start considering the baby growing in her womb, Sonia saw Anouk’s lovely face contort in pain.
She gave Anouk an empathic smile across the table and asked, just moving her lips soundlessly: Contractions?
And Anouk replied with a vigorous shake of her head. Why should I have contractions? she said angrily. I’m just at the beginning of the ninth month!
Sonia shrugged and looked away, but soon after that, a short scream escaped Anouk’s lips and all eyes were turned to her in concern as she stood up with a scrape of her chair and ran toward the privy in the café’s backyard. Sonia hurried after her. Wretched groaning came through the privy door.
Anouk, my dear, Sonia said to the closed door, are you alright?
I’ve got an upset stomach, came the choked reply.
I’m sure you know, Sonia said, that one can give birth at the start of the ninth month, and even earlier.…
It’s an upset stomach, Anouk groaned. Last night I ate some bad herring that Martin brought, and since early this morning I’ve had these terrible stomach cramps.
Maybe I can help you?
How can you help me? Can you rid my bowels of that damned fish?
All of Sonia’s attempts to convince her that perhaps, just perhaps, she was in labor were in vain.
Anouk was in such great pain she couldn’t walk. The three of them supported her all the way home, the two men carried her up the steep staircase, and when they reached the top floor she ordered Eddy and Sonia to go, and they went downstairs to their apartment to send Nettie’s babysitter home and go to bed.
Less than an hour later they were awakened by the sound of Martin’s fists banging on their apartment door, and when they opened it he was standing there paralyzed with terror, and Sonia ran upstairs in her nightgown and found Anouk curled up on the floor. While she bent toward her, the poor girl, who was soaked with cold sweat, continued screaming at the top of her lungs that she isn’t in labor, she’s not giving birth, it’s only a badly upset stomach as I’ve already told you, why don’t you understand ay ay ay what terrible constipation, aieee, and the gas pain, but Sonia, if you intend to carry on insisting that I’m having a baby then it’s best that you leave me alone and don’t do me any favors, aieeee.…
Quick, Sonia ordered Martin, who was so terrified he almost had a baby himself, we’ve got to be quick, we could deliver it here but I think the baby’s too big, I think maybe the head can’t pass through the birth canal and she needs an urgent caesarean section, and so Anouk was taken kicking and screaming to the Jewish hospital maternity department, suffering incessant labor pains as she sobbed: But I didn’t plan to have the baby like this, not now and not like this! Four people had to hold her down so the obstetrician could examine her, and she didn’t stop screaming with her ebbing strength that it’s not right. And that she hadn’t planned it like this, not like this.
* * *
The woman moving nonstop behind the brown wooden counter, preparing, serving, joking with her customers, and laughing, is the café’s owner and its beating heart.
Her name is Vij, and Yoel has already made up his mind that when he writes the novel, he’ll put her in this brown café during the war too. In the novel she’ll be the age she is now. And she’ll look like she looks now, including that laugh of hers and the short hair, the masculine trousers, and the apron whose strings go over her shoulders and are tied at the back, and also when he writes Eddy and Sonia and Martin and Anouk sitting here with their glasses of beer and nuts and hard-boiled eggs, that is, so long as she’s able to obtain beer and nuts and eggs despite the war. He’ll describe Vij as a proud, brave Dutch citizen who helps the Dutch underground and places her brown café at their disposal as a meeting and hiding place. And as the story develops, and Sonia will be in desperate need of help, it is Vij who will help her.
* * *
Now Sonia sees Anouk and Martin less and less. She has no interest in socializing with Jews like them who only worry about themselves in times of such horrifying rumors about the fate of the Jews in Germany and Poland and about what is happening here in Amsterdam to the east of the river.
* * *
Vij finds out that Yoel is a writer collecting material for a book about her country, and she enjoys teaching him a little about the Dutch way of life. She greets him with three kisses on his cheeks the way she greets all her regulars and the way, so it seems, that every Dutch person greets his friends and family. When he asks if they can’t make do with less than three, Vij gives her toothy laugh and stresses that the answer is no: One kiss doesn’t do the job at all, and you mustn’t stop after two either. But there’s no need for you to worry, she adds in a low voice, the Dutch are fastidious people who don’t really like feeling someone else’s spit on their face, so in most cases the kisses don’t include actual contact between lips and cheek, they’re just air-kisses given at a distance of a few millimeters away from the skin. And beware, she cautions him aloud, shaking an admonishing finger, you’ve got to kiss in the right order: Kiss number one toward the right cheek, number two to the left, and number three to the right cheek again! Any deviation from this order is liable to end up with a painful collision of faces!
Vij doesn’t know that she’s going to be a character in his novel. When the idea popped into his mind, he took out his notebook to get it down on paper before he forgot it. When he couldn’t find his pen and asked Vij if she could lend him one, she laughed: What’s the hurry? Have you decided to write her a love letter?
* * *
One day last week Sonia passed through the street and saw that the door of Martin’s shop had been boarded up. Next day she went into the brown café where she still visits her friend Vij and heard one of the non-Jewish neighbors saying that it was the Jewish Council that had boarded up the corner art shop. Before the shop was sealed, the man said, they took out all the valuable paintings and all the rest of the rare treasures but promised that they wouldn’t be sent to Germany as had happened in similar cases. The shop had been emptied under the personal supervision of its Jewish owner, the neighbor added. And it seems that the guy’s got connections because they said that all the important objects would be put into storage and wait there for the owner until the war’s over and he’ll be able to reopen his shop.
* * *
* * *
As Sonia rides her bicycle she hears the commotion of the waters storming and bubbling under the paved roads and sidewalks. She hears how, beneath the surface of the city, the primeval abyss is raging in a torrent and seeking to burst out and flood everything. Like every Dutch elementary school pupil, she learned about the history of the water that had covered Holland in the past. More than forty percent of this unique country’s area is polders, areas that once belonged to the sea until they were taken from it, and since then have been drained by the Dutch by means of a complex system of dams and canals and windmills. A colored poster that was permanently on the wall in the entrance to her school proclaimed: “God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.” For years this poster greeted the child Sonia every day. Her heart swelled with pride at being a daughter of the diligent and daring Dutch nation, the splendid Dutch nation, the Dutch nation chosen to be God’s partner in the Creation and thereafter.
But now, she thinks to herself, the strength of the legendary boy who stopped up the hole in the dike is exhausted. Soon the hole will widen and the water will rise, the depths will again cover the land, darkness will enshroud it. Only the Divine Spirit will hover over the water, if there will still be, in this world, a Divine Spirit.
42
In the dead of nights Yoel stands on his balcony, his eyes on the basement apartment of that same house, and his heart is with Sonia, who remains awake and tense all night. If she lies down in her bed, she does it fully dressed, including shoes. She may fall asleep for a while, but even then, she hears every noise and every murmur. If her ears pick up any suspicious noise, she leaps out of bed before she is fully awake.
* * *
When they were already living in Netanya, she still continued this constant vigilance. At night, while asleep, if she heard even the least unfamiliar sound, she immediately leapt out of bed and stood in the hallway.
Only then would she open her eyes.
* * *
In the morning, Yoel dons a white shirt, walks the distance to the river’s east bank, and goes to pray the Sabbath shaharit morning service in the ancient Spanish-Portuguese synagogue, the Esnoga. He is dazed and even somewhat overwhelmed as he enters the awesome, so solemnly splendid sanctuary, amass with pillars of marble, whose design, by the Jews who arrived in Amsterdam following the Spanish expulsion, was influenced by the First Temple. Its foundations are built on columns submerged deep into the water, and its wooden floor is covered with sea sand to protect it from the dampness permeating from below. Here, generations upon generations of the Rosso family came to pray. In one of these rows of ancient benches, a young Martin Rosso stood alongside his father and grandfather and uncles. Perhaps he returned here in adulthood, perhaps with his wife, Anouk, perhaps with their child, Sebastian, and certainly, at the very least, on Yom Kippur eve, when all the hundreds of seats in the synagogue’s sanctuary and the women’s section were filled, and in honor of the occasion, hundreds of wax candles were blazing in the huge brass chandeliers hanging from the lofty ceiling of the historic building that, to this very day, does not have electrical lighting.
* * *
Does this feeling—that this Spanish-Portuguese synagogue is familiar to him—suggest he was here in his infancy? Or does the place look familiar because when they are in New York for the Sabbath, he likes to go pray at the Shearit Israel Spanish-Portuguese synagogue on 70th Street off Central Park, which, just like the Esnoga, is an old and beautiful building established by Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal, built in exactly the same period and in exactly the same style as the Esnoga, and where the cantor and the heads of the congregation, just as in the Esnoga, honor the Sabbath services by wearing the same impressive cylinder hats?
Or maybe it is just the opposite? Maybe the reason that he always loved to pray in the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue in New York was because, in his subconscious, it recalls to him the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam?
* * *
At the very same moment that the honored congregation members, led by the cantor and the rabbi in a festive procession, are returning the Torah scrolls into the Esnoga’s lofty holy ark, when the splendor of the generations is framing the worshippers’ top-hat-clad heads, and the grains of sand are scrunching under the soles of their shoes, Sonia and her children are returning from a Sabbath outing to where Jews are still allowed. She parks her bicycle on the sidewalk in front of the house, lowers Nettie onto the sidewalk from the seat behind, and lifts Leo, who has fallen asleep on the way, out of the front basket. When she enters the house’s stairwell she meets Anouk, who is on her way out with Sebastian. Fresh and glowing, her honey hair curving next to her meticulously made-up face, wearing a polka-dotted spring frock, Anouk appears as if she is not at all aware of what other Jews in the city, at these very moments, are going through. Sonia cannot control the feeling of animosity mounting in her toward Anouk, and also toward little Sebastian, who is dressed in his cute little blue sailor suit and smiling joyfully as he descends the stairs step by step. He is the epitome of spoiled, she mutters to herself silently, wondering if he too is being fed these days, like her children, just with the bits of vegetables and lentils that the food coupons allow. She recalls that he is a finicky eater, and she realizes that he is merely a baby without sin, but she cannot find in herself the power to restrain the almost-loathing that engulfs her toward him. He is merely a baby, but she feels that every one of his movements comes at the price of her own baby’s. He hasn’t sinned, but his brown curls seem to bear witness to the danger threatening her blond-haired son.
* * *
Yoel lifts his gaze to the magnificent brass chandelier, imagining it brimming with burning candles during the Day of Atonement’s Kol Nidre prayer and imagining Martin Rosso the child lifting his eyes to look at them from his place between his father and grandfather. He tries to find familiar notes in the melodies that the cantor and the congregants are chanting, the strains to which the carved doors of the holy ark are opened and the Torah scrolls draped in their exquisite vestments are placed.
Before he sits down again, he checks if the individual compartment under his seat can be opened. Built into each wooden bench in the Esnoga is a compartment that can be locked with a key, and Bat-Ami, when they were here together, was thrilled when she heard that most of these compartments have remained locked for many years. I wonder when they might have been locked, she had said to him. And when he asked her why she thought that was interesting, she said, What do you mean, why is it interesting? If there are compartments that haven’t been opened since the war, maybe there are things hidden in them that the Jews left before they were arrested and taken away. Hidden until today.
* * *
Finally we meet! Anouk’s voice rings out, totally void of fear. Sonia is forced to stop and stand in the stairwell, on the small landing between the house’s main door and the stairs leading down to her apartment, Leo’s somnolence weighing down her arms. Why have you been avoiding me and Martin recently, dear Sonia? We so much want to stand by your side during these trying days, and you are not letting us!
I’m fine, Sonia mumbles grudgingly. She looks at her neighbor and cannot help but think that even that yellow sta
r sewn onto the front of her polka-dot dress looks like jewelry attached for decoration.