House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

  Leo’s head is heavy on her weary shoulder, and Anouk is talking and talking and going on about how much she and Martin want to see her more and want to spend time together like before. That is to say, not really like before, Anouk corrects herself, because without Eddy it is of course not the same, but still…

  I have to go down. Sonia smiles apologetically and is already stretching one leg forward toward the first step, when Anouk lowers her voice and says, You’ve probably already heard what happened to Garrett and Ulla Feinstein. Sonia stops and asks her what she means by that. She pictures pretty, introverted Ulla Feinstein, who lives with her husband and two daughters on the adjacent street. Her daughter, who had also been registered for the Montessori school, is Nettie’s best friend in the temporary classroom operating out of the Jewish teacher’s apartment. Because the girls are friends, the two mothers had begun to get friendly and Sonia liked Ulla.

  Anouk strokes Sebastian’s thin curls. He is pressed close to her legs, wearing his light blue sailor suit. Anouk clicks her pink tongue and says without batting an eye, They found them yesterday! Garrett and Ulla and their two children! In their beds! The gas valve in the kitchen was open—can you believe this?—and all the windows were fastened shut. Sonia finds it hard to breathe, but Anouk continues talking on in a sort of ecstasy: Garrett left a note, she reports. He wrote that he and Ulla had decided to do this because they realized what was about to happen here and believed that they were better off dying in the home they loved, dying together in their sleep, than to see themselves and their children experiencing that which the Jews in the countries to the east are going through.

  * * *

  Sonia’s hands are burning. Under Leo’s sleeping head, a stain of saliva mixed with sweat spreads onto Sonia’s shoulder, but Anouk doesn’t stop her rapturous chatter, even as Nettie is chirping from downstairs, Come, Mama, come! Even as Sonia is slowly, slowly descending toward her basement apartment, Anouk doesn’t let up, and now she is leaning toward her over the banister. It’s awful, she says, and her words spill over Sonia’s head from above. It’s just awful, how the Feinsteins, such intelligent people and so… so Dutch—just so Dutch, do you understand—could even imagine that here, in our beautiful homeland, here in our Amsterdam…

  * * *

  When the prayer service is finished, and the small congregation of worshippers goes out for the refreshments served at the kiddush, Yoel holds back inside the Esnoga’s sanctuary. He finds it hard to leave. Immediately, a jolly, rotund Jew comes to his side, introduces himself as Kastiel, the synagogue’s beadle, and proudly shows him the antique holy ark, the elegant velvet couch on which generations of Holland’s kings sat when they visited, and the wooden floor beams that can be raised to reach the water canal underneath the building. Yoel is astounded to witness with his own eyes the quantities of water that are actually flowing underneath the building, whispering in the dark like in one’s subconscious. He feels a sense of apprehension, yet he dares not ask his host how the congregation maintains the building’s foundation columns, planted as they are in this water over these hundreds of years. Dares not ask if it is possible that these wooden columns may eventually weaken, may eventually even rot away.

  As they leave, Kastiel closes the synagogue’s massive wooden door behind them, inserts a huge iron key into the keyhole, and turns it twice. That’s that, he says, passing a compassionate hand over the metal knob, which is covered with a fine network of scratches. I have locked it. Do you see? Now the synagogue is empty of living Jews, and the souls of the dead Jews are free to wander around inside at their will. In truth, the Esnoga belongs more to the departed than to the living, more to the souls than the bodies. That is why each time we living Jews want to open this door to enter, we first knock and scratch on the knob with this big key. This is our way to lovingly warn the souls that a living body is about to invade their territory.

  * * *

  Sonia breathes a sigh of relief when Anouk and her son go on their way and leave her to go down into the basement.

  She doesn’t know that after the prayer service in the Esnoga, Yoel will cross the wide street, enter the huge Ashkenazi synagogue, climb up to the Jewish Historical Museum with its historical display, and stand before the wedding scenes being screened in their never-ending loop on the opposite wall. He will wait until the image of the young woman holding the fair, unblemished baby in her arms flickers on the wall, and then he will say to her, Shabbat shalom, ima yekarah. A blessed Sabbath to you, my dear mother.

  43

  It has been years since there have been any small children in Yoel’s life. Bat-Ami is correct, he thinks now, when she complains that he is missing the gene that allows one to discern human beings shorter than a meter. It seems that children tend to pass under his conscious radar, and it is no wonder that there is no boy—or girl—also in the latest novels he has written and published. His stories are always populated by mature adult characters who have long ago managed to work out their early lives and to distance themselves in all contexts from their immature early years and from all the helplessness and inconvenience wrapped up in living those years, which so many other authors, for some reason, tend to wistfully write about and return to in their works time and time again. Yoel is aware, of course, of his small grandchildren’s existence, and is aware, of course, of the exuberance with which Bat-Ami and the girls discuss them, their nutrition and their eliminations. But he doesn’t see his grandchildren, that is to say, he doesn’t actually perceive them, until they have reached that age when they can communicate like real people. And even if he once did have a special kind of connection with his eldest grandson, Tal, so much time has passed since then.

  But here, in Amsterdam, he cannot stop noticing all the little children.

  Especially babies. Especially babies and their mothers. He cannot stop seeing all the mothers riding bicycles with their babies: sometimes the baby is sitting in a little seat attached to the inner side of the handlebars, his back pressed into his mother’s bosom, the wind blowing into his face, and the vistas opening before him at the pulse rate of the bustling city all around. Then there is the baby carried on his mother’s bicycle in a sort of triangular basket made of wood or hard plastic and attached to the outer side of the handlebars. He also sees babies and toddlers in the parks and museums, in tramcars and in shops, in the hotel elevator and in the breakfast room. He observes the movement of their miniature limbs. He observes the changing expressions on their soft faces. And he marvels at their skill in manipulating adults to get what they want.

  * * *

  That’s it, Anouk says to Sonia. Soon we will be going to America. Daddy is already taking care of all the details, and it won’t be long before we will be sailing away from here. It is Sunday, and the bells of the church of Our Lady begin to clang at a quarter to eleven in the morning. They clang and clang and their thunderous clanging continues for many long minutes. Yoel crosses the street to the church, goes up to the double gate, and peeks into the majestically echoing nave. A tall priest in glistening liturgical vestments comes out to meet him. He radiates cleanliness and peace, and every hair lies on his head just so. With a broad smile, the priest invites Yoel to enter and take part in the mass that is just about to begin. At that moment, three or four blond children gleefully burst forth from the church, racing through the narrow space between Yoel and the priest, who watches them with affection.

  * * *

  Cold. The sky is a muddy puddle and as he passes the house, he is suddenly accosted by a piercing, wounding onslaught of hail.

  He is cold. The ruddy ivy climbing up the front of the house is also cold. Its two thin trunks twine together, clinging with all their might to the shivering bricks, passing above the entrance level and terminating between the second-story windows in an intricate knot of melancholic branches.

  * * *

  Sonia spends the early afternoon hours ceaselessly rearranging the apartment, while Nettie imposes her own order on
her dollhouse, and Leo rolls a red, slightly deflated rubber ball along the floor and then chases after it in a joyful crawl. On their way home, they had been struck by a sudden onslaught of hail and Leo panicked. But with the same suddenness that it began, the barrage has ended, the sun has come out from between the clouds, and sounds of laughter and merriment are heard from the building’s backyard. Nettie gets up from her dollhouse, drags a chair over to the wall underneath one of the back windows, and then climbs up and stands on it to better watch Anouk as she pushes Sebastian back and forth on the hanging swing.

  Mama, let’s go out to the backyard.

  No, Nettie, my sweet. Today we aren’t going out to the backyard.

  But Anouk and Sebastian are outside, Mama. There’s no rain now.

  Today we are not going out to the yard.

  Oh, but, Mama. It has been such a long time since we went to play outside!

  … Fine, my child, okay. If you want to go out so much, bring me your and Leo’s coats, and your hats and galoshes, and we will dress up nice and warm and go out. But we won’t go into the backyard. Instead we will take a little walk along the street.

  … Mama?

  … Yes, Nettie, my soul.

  … You are not Anouk and Martin’s friend anymore, Mama. Right?

  * * *

  The Dutch treat their birthdays with paramount importance, Vij says, laughing, and points to the tray of cupcakes that today has been placed on the brown counter next to the basket of hard-boiled eggs. Today is my birthday, so all my customers must indulge me. When Yoel wishes her a happy birthday, she ceremoniously selects and holds out to him a paper liner with a chocolate cupcake topped with white icing and a cherry stuck in the middle. Here, I especially recommend this one. And while he is hesitating, considering whether to explain to her about the laws of Jewish kashrut or simply to take the cupcake and not eat it, she shouts, Mr. Writer, what a bore you are! Do you think I have time to wait for you to decide to do me the favor of taking what you are offered? She immediately laughs, reaches out to pat him affectionately on the shoulder, and says, Hey, no fear! I’m just really blunt. This is also typically Dutch. And while he is still holding the cupcake in the palm of his hand, she tells him about Dutch forthrightness and how Dutch people have a habit of telling a stranger straight to his face exactly what they think about him or his haircut or about some outspoken phrase that the stranger just uttered. Yoel remembers his mother’s direct, unconcealed frankness, how she always seemed to be insulting everyone and how he always thought that she did it to distance people from her and to ward off anyone who might be a friend. Nettie and he were also not safe from her tongue-lashings, and he recalls how distraught he had been the day he first brought Bat-Ami to meet his mother, who after listening to what her young guest said, commented: Och. I hope you are not really as silly as you sound. On their second meeting, she received a discomfited Bat-Ami with a sour expression as she declared: That dress really doesn’t suit you. How lucky that his wife remained stoic all those years when her mother-in-law, almost every time they met, pointed out: You put on some weight, you know?

  * * *

  The cold seems to intensify the loneliness. To be alone in a strange city, especially in a city where the language is incomprehensible to you, is to be as alone as a human possibly can be. You are the most you. Just you. A man walking through a crowd. No one knows him. No one pays attention to him. No one notices that he is there. All around him the city’s residents are talking in their stiff guttural language, their heavy language that sounds as clumsy as their traditional wooden clogs.

  Everyone is talking to everyone, calling to each other and responding, asking and answering, shouting and whispering and laughing. Only he alone does not belong; only he alone is outside the circle of human brotherhood created by a common language; only he alone is alone. So transparent and voiceless that he often thinks that he doesn’t really exist. Today he introduced himself to the reflection of his bearded face in one of the canals. I am Yoel Blum, he had said. The water was dark with drifting dead leaves, and a green-feathered duck floated idly by, dipping its beak here and there after bits and pieces of flotsam.

  I am Yoel Blum, said the Yoel above the water to his underwater reflection.

  I am Yoel. Do I yet live?

  Suddenly, the duck dove into the murky stream and pulled out something, perhaps a fingerling that had survived among the waste.

  * * *

  He looks into the basement kitchens. He cannot pass without peeking in. He sees an oven, a stove, a sink, drying dishes, a stand full of knives, spoons and forks, cookbooks, a countertop, a bowl of fruit. He sees a table and some chairs. He sees that sometimes there are chairs for only one person, and sometimes for a couple or for a family.

  Storekeepers, whom he addresses in English, answer him without seeing him. It seems that even the Jewish Historical Museum staff do not see him, even though they meet him almost daily and often help him in his studies and research.

  Only when he returns from his wanderings back to the little square, walks past the real estate agency that once was Martin’s art shop, turns into the passage under the faded sign, goes down the narrow stairs and into the Mokum Hotel’s lobby, does he feel a little more like an actual person: here he has a name, here he has a face, here they speak to him. How happy he is when Achilles meets him with his grinning smile, tells him about some hidden layer he and his lover have discovered in the biography they are currently reading, or shows interest in the progress of his own work of writing. How comfortable he feels when Josephine stops in the middle of her kitchen or serving or cleaning duties to chat with him about the volatile weather or about her poor father, who thinks he is in their village in Curaçao, or about her son, whose medical studies in Hungary she is financing by working from dawn to dusk.

  In his room, after opening the door which, again, has collided with the wardrobe door, he closes both doors, greets his sunflower, takes off his shiny jacket, and checks the condition of the havdalah candle wax stain hidden under the bag.

  Then he goes out onto the balcony to greet the houses and the backyards that can be seen from it and adds a greeting to their residents, both visible and concealed—to the dancer and to the psychoanalyst, to the families that he sees from time to time and to the taxidermied animal that never leaves its post on the bureau in the apartment on the left.

  Sometimes he plummets into a night’s sleep but later wakes up in unexplained panic and can’t fall asleep again. When this happened in his childhood, he would summon his mother, who would instantly appear to protect him from all evil. When Bat-Ami started sleeping by his side, her self-assured breathing was what relaxed and soothed him. But now Bat-Ami is not here—in fact he misses her, he really misses her a lot—and that long-standing panic completely fills the tiny room where he lies alone in the middle of the night, in the middle of Amsterdam, in the middle of the universe. From time to time he hears the wails of fire engines as they pass outside, getting closer and closer and then fading away.

  What will happen, he wonders, if a fire suddenly breaks out here at the Mokum Hotel? Everything here is made of wood: the floors, the elevator, the stairs, the furniture.

  Everything is made of flammable wood. It will all turn into one giant conflagration.

  How can a man like himself escape from a fire? Will he have to flee onto the balcony and then leap from the fourth floor to the cats in the yard?

  * * *

  And Sonia hears Eddy’s voice. She hears him calling to her, hears him when her children are asleep after she has managed to survive another day with them. From vast distances she hears his voice rising toward her, from the very end of the world, and she has no doubt: it is Eddy’s voice. He is calling to her, and she can hear him calling her.

  She can hear him calling even as the church bell rings and rings.

  44

  And despite everything: the beauty. He walks along the street, and without any warning, the beauty floods him
with an agonizing, heartbreaking elation. Every two or three days he phones Bat-Ami, and her voice allows the life force to flow into him, although he is not always successful at visualizing her face before him. He tells her about his experiences and about the people he meets. He tells her about his notebooks, which are filling up with the notes he intends to use to write his new novel. And he tells her about how he sometimes stands, simply just stands, in front of a particular painting in the museum or on the edge of a particular section of the canal or in front of a house on whose front wall a crimson shrub climbs, its falling leaves pooling like a red puddle on the doorstep.

  He doesn’t know how to tell her that this usually so punctual, usually so well-organized husband of hers now frequently loses track of the days. And that this lack of structure does not bother him, does not bother him at all, since he discovered that there is really no difference between past, present, and future. That there really is only one time. And that everything is one.

  He admits to himself that sometimes he calls her only to see if she still recognizes him. To make sure he is still who he once was. To confirm that he is real.

  * * *

  Tonight he was walking around Jordaan, the artists’ and students’ area, between lit-up apartments with shutterless and curtainless windows as huge as shop display windows. All his life he has been imagining and inventing lives happening behind windows that are not his own, imagining and inventing, and here everything is visible and exposed; he can observe human beings like a zoologist studies a rare species of monkey or termite, learning how they prepare their food and put it into their bodies, investigating how they organize and clean their places of habitation and hunt their prey, following their courtship practices and how they raise their offspring, and perhaps even trying to comprehend their motives in all that they do, that is, to discover why human beings carry out these activities day after day and generation after generation.