House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

  * * *

  Earlier that evening he left the Jewish Historical Museum at Mr. Visserplein, a square named after a Supreme Court judge who was suspended from his position during the war because he was Jewish, and walked to the Dutch Theater building. This is where the Jews of Amsterdam are taken to, this is where they are collected before being sent onward. He had already visited the theater complex several times, but this time he wants to observe the area from the outside and to get an idea of what the two-way boulevard looks like at night when the theater and the children’s dormitory, one across the boulevard from the other, are deep asleep, and the trams are continuously moving along their tracks down the center of the boulevard, from east or from west and then back again, stopping at the tram stops adjacent to the entrance to the theater or the entrance to the dormitory, one on the north side of the tracks and one on the south, flickering their headlights as if to signal that all is well. He wants to know how all these appear when the dark cloak of night falls upon them: how they look in the gloom to those who have been forced here against their will, who have suddenly been plucked from the routine of a life to which they will never return. He stands and watches how Jewish families are being led inside. He sees the sentries, horrifying human robots, shouldering their long rifles at the doorway of the theater building and at the doorway of the dormitory building. He watches the boys and girls—small, terrified Jews—as they are rushed out of the theater and, in a faltering convoy, are driven across the street and into the dormitory. The children, he knows, would be housed in this narrow, yellow building under the attention of Jewish caregivers until, after a few hours or sometimes a day or two, they would be handed back to their parents and sent with them to the Westerbork transit camp. He knows that at night, under the cover of darkness, members of the Dutch underground would sneak into the children’s dormitory. They would access the dormitory’s backyard by way of its neighbors and risk their very souls to try to save even one boy or girl from their fate.

  From within the dark canals the ducks sound to him, tonight, like squeaking rubber duck toys. Yoel walks along the street where the Museumplein art shops are. The square is deserted this late at night, the museums are closed and silent, yet from the depths of the arched passage between the Rijksmuseum’s two wings emerge the boundless, soulful notes of a saxophone. He walks under the stone arches and there, on the sidewalk adjacent to the wall of the eastern wing, stands a lone musician in the dark, his tall, thin body wrapped in a long coat. He hunches forward and then arches his back with every breath he expels from his soul into his saxophone, its swan-like metal neck reflecting distant flashes of light, and the sound that emanates from it is the sound of complete loneliness.

  * * *

  Hunger has formed a crater in his belly by the time he enters the night door of the hotel. So immediately after ascending the four steep flights of stairs to his room, and separating the door from the wardrobe door, he must crouch down on the floor, attack the tiny refrigerator placed between the two incompatible doors, and pull out from its innards some smoked herring in a vacuum pack. He has no choice but to rip open the package and quickly devour its contents while still standing in his coat and scarf. Then he can calm down, but now the room is filled with the stench of dead fish that refuses to dissipate even after he has flung open the balcony door and gathered together the shreds of thin herring skin and the scraps of the package and sealed them into two plastic bags, a bag within a bag, and even after he scrubbed his hands and rinsed his teeth and mouth. At the end, he has no alternative but to descend the four flights of steep stairs, go out into the cold street, and throw the incriminating evidence into a public garbage bin. But the stench seems to seep through the inner plastic bag and then through the outer plastic bag, and then it wafts out of the garbage bin and the smell of death surrounds Yoel, diffusing itself around him in ripples that get wider and wider until it seems that the stench is filling Amsterdam from one end to the other and there is nowhere free of it.

  * * *

  In his dream he died too, but in the morning he knows he is still alive and that this is the morning of Sonia’s separation from her bicycle. She didn’t believe it when she heard that this, too, was to happen, but a few days earlier she saw the notice posted on the public bulletin board next to the Concertgebouw, and she read with her very own eyes that all Jews must surrender their bicycles to the authorities. She stood there and read the instructions a second time and then a third time, and she still couldn’t believe it. Now she is trying to convince herself that it is possible to live also without a bicycle. Possible. A bicycle is just a couple of wheels, like the wheels of a tram and the wheels of a bus, both of which she has been prohibited from using for a long time now, but nevertheless, she finds it hard to breath when she pedals her bicycle over to the Jewish Council headquarters on Obrechtstraat, and she chokes when she realizes that it will be a long time until she will again be able to do this most basic of activities, one that her body performs almost on its own, as if activated by some primordial instinct she has had since she learned how to walk on two feet and maybe even before then. And now, she and her bicycle are waiting, alongside many more Jews and many more bicycles, in a line that winds along the sidewalk in front of the Jewish Council entrance, so close to the entrance of the forbidden park. Everyone and everything are waiting silently. She also is waiting and silent, waiting and choking. And suddenly her body bends forward and she stretches out her hand to stroke, with trembling fingers, her beloved old bicycle: its wheels, its worn-out seat, its peeling silver-painted frame.

  When she staggers out of the Jewish Council offices stripped of her bicycle, the sky is not the same sky and the earth is not the same earth. She is drowning in the air as in slime.

  * * *

  That same morning, Yoel is walking along the bank of the canal behind the Obrecht synagogue. He walks south and goes to the weekday-morning prayer service in a small synagogue near Beethovenstraat, which was founded by Jewish businessmen in a regular ground-floor apartment. Every time he comes here, he studies the apartment’s structure and enjoys imagining how a typical Dutch family might conduct its life in an apartment identical to this one: in a kitchen like this one, in a corridor like this, in a living room like this one with huge windows facing the street. Most of the worshippers who stop here for morning service on their way from their homes to their places of business in the city’s center are of the generation that grew up in Holland after the war. However, as expected, there are also among them a few Israelis who immigrated to Holland, and one of them tells Yoel, simply because he must tell somebody, that he returned just yesterday night from Jerusalem after sitting shiva for his father. May the Almighty comfort you, Yoel says to him in consolation, and the man continues to relate how he traveled to be with his ailing father just a little more than two weeks ago, and that for ten days and ten nights he didn’t budge from next to his father’s bed in the Jerusalem hospital. But finally he had to travel home to Amsterdam because he couldn’t continue his absence from work, but the moment he landed in Schiphol, he received the message that his father had died, and so the very next moment, he turned around and got on a plane back to Israel. But when he arrived at Ben Gurion Airport, he discovered that he had missed the funeral. You must have been very disappointed, Yoel said to him, and thinks about Bat-Ami, whose father passed away years ago when they were in London.

  They cut short their plans and immediately returned to Israel and, after landing, rushed as fast as they possibly could to Jerusalem, where they were told that the funeral had already taken place without them. And Bat-Ami, hurt and dripping with rage, burst into the circle of her mourning brother and sisters, shouting, What did you do to Daddy? Into what hole did you throw him like thieves in the night, hurrying so to cover the blood? But this ex-Jerusalemite, who seemed to be so totally Dutch already, so much so that the stubble on his unshaved face, his sign of mourning, seemed to be growing following a precise regimen, responds that he had
no reason to be upset since it is well known that the custom in Jerusalem is to bury the dead the same day.

  * * *

  After the service, he goes into the Starbucks branch next door and orders a tasteless international cappuccino topped with the international heart made out of white cream, and he sits down at a small, round international table. It is almost eight o’clock in the morning, and through the café’s glass front wall he watches Dutch high school students descending from the tram-cars and crossing the street on the diagonal. Many cyclists are zooming along on their bicycles on their way to school or work. Two strapping, sleek police horses are trotting along the sidewalk, and in the saddles are two gallant policewomen, their blond hair gathered into ponytails that exactly resemble the tails of their mounts. In the rushing river of bicycles, Yoel discerns a beautiful woman and watches as her little daughter, seated behind her, turns her head to watch the mounted police and their horses. He notices bicycles carrying varied loads, bicycles with an assortment of devices for carrying toddlers, bicycles whose drivers hold the handlebars with one hand only while their other hand presses their mobile phone against their ear. This natural, easygoing way of riding a bicycle belongs only to those who become familiar with bicycles from the moment of birth: erect of back and neck, hair flapping in the wind, they seem to have been created expressly for riding this two-wheeled vehicle. As if only for this is their body structured, are their limbs shaped, do their limbs bend. He sees how they dash across the intersection, cutting through car and bus lanes, cutting over the tracks of an approaching tram, and, in a wide arc, making their left turn. Only Jews are forbidden to ride a bicycle, only Sonia is now trudging along on the next street.

  And like every time that he sits in this Starbucks branch, he sees a hunched old woman pushing a tiny dog in a baby carriage. When the old woman sits with her coffee-and-cake, she places the dog on the table beside her plate and serves him a saucer full of cream. When she shuffles to the counter, she carries her doggie close to her heart, and a tuft of its gray fur protrudes from behind her arm. Yoel looks at them and thinks that she is probably one of the older Amsterdam-born Jewish women who had been featured in the documentary film he watched last week at the Jewish Historical Museum library. If this is really the old woman in the film, then she is the same age as Sonia and, like Sonia, lived here, in the Beethovenstraat area, in the years before the war.

  * * *

  He sits and writes, trying with all his might to capture in words the impossible-to-say, looking for letters with which to compose his words but seeing only eyeglasses, a giant mountain of spectacles tossed and piled one on top of the other: spectacles of every prescription, spectacles of every size, spectacles with frames of every color and every shape, men’s glasses and women’s glasses and children’s glasses, hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands, piled up and stacked, one on top of each other, one within the other. And among these countless spectacles, one particular pair, one specific pair which Yoel recognizes by their thin silver frame and by their thick lenses.

  45

  It is a radiant late morning, and the jolly, plump mandolin player is sitting in his permanent place on the fence outside the Rijksmuseum, except that today, a skinny, bald accordion player is sitting next to him. Together, they are playing—one on the mandolin, one on the accordion—a melancholy melody whose refrain, over and over, sounds to Yoel similar to that of “A Yiddishe Mama.”

  * * *

  In the Jewish hospital, Sonia is attending to a woman about to have her seventh child.

  When Eddy didn’t return and the money he had left her ran out, she told her friend Bett about her predicament. Bett said there was a severe shortage of nurses at the Jewish hospital and that she thought they would be happy to hire Sonia to help out in the various units as need arose. Sonia told her that going out to work was out of the question, because she had no one with whom to leave Leo, but Bett, wonderful Bett, pointed out that she herself was only working the night shift at the moment, and there was no reason why she could not mind Leo the two or three days that Sonia worked. Sonia protested: But during the daytime you have to sleep, Bett. But she insisted: I’ll sleep when Leo is taking his afternoon nap. And so, Sonia agreed to the arrangement because she had to make a living.

  Thus, on this fine, sunny day, Nettie is in school, Leo is in the house with Bett, and Sonia is working in the delivery room. The patient, a devout Jewish woman from Amstelveen, arrived at the hospital after midnight with strong contractions at the rate of every three minutes. In the morning, when Sonia began her shift, the birth seemed imminent. But as the hours pass, the mother’s contractions get farther and farther apart, fading away, as if the baby has reconsidered his plans and changed his mind about emerging into this complicated world.

  The woman’s heavy limbs move uneasily on the narrow delivery bed. Sonia thinks of her own empty pantry and that too many days have passed since the last time she went out to the farms outside Amsterdam to get food. She will soon have to take her life in her hands and head out there again, but in the meantime she just has to hope that today, between the end of her shift here and the beginning of Bett’s, she will be able to pass by the brown café. Since Jews are now forbidden to buy fruit and vegetables in non-Jewish shops, Vij occasionally gives her four or five onions or potatoes from the café’s limited supply. Sometimes she throws in a few apples or two or three carrots. Sonia is grateful to Vij and ashamed that she has become a beggar. The Jewish hospital has also deteriorated, becoming more neglected and impoverished than anyone could have ever imagined. Some of its departments are in a state of total neglect and destruction and other departments, those departments that continue to operate, are suffering from a severe shortage of medicines, basic medical equipment, and of course bedding and towels.

  Again and again she asks herself why they complied in the first place. If we had not obeyed the orders, she scolds herself, if we had not gone of our own free will to register as Jews, Eddy might not have been taken. Perhaps we could have continued our lives as usual, perhaps we could have remained undetected among the city’s non-Jewish residents without drawing any special attention. Perhaps.

  * * *

  Yoel greets the mandolin player, nods to the doleful accordion player, and enters the museum. He goes past the classic portrait paintings and death stares at him from each and every painting. It stares at him from the portraits of Dutch noblemen with white lace collars, it calls out his name from the portraits of women with puffy cheeks powdered in bright pink and with hair tucked under traditional cloth caps, and it flashes at him from the portraits of babies and children. I am death, death announces to him from the paintings. I am the death of every human being, the death that is conceived in him from the very moment of his creation, that accompanies him into this world and walks with him wherever he goes.

  * * *

  I’m not having any contractions at all, says the woman whose baby refuses to be born. She sits up on the delivery bed, defeated.

  I will go call the doctor, Sonia says to her.

  On her way from the delivery room to call the gynecologist for the woman whose birth seems to be fading, she sees police bursting into the hospital building. She cannot believe that this is what she is seeing. She cannot believe that what she sees happening is really happening, that it is happening right here and right now, and that she is part of it. But after a terrifyingly brief time, which is also the longest time she has ever experienced, she finds herself in a group of thirty or forty Jews, some doctors and nurses, some patients who are mobile, and this group is being led out of the hospital building and into the sun-drenched street. Among those being taken is the gynecologist, the one she was on her way to call for the poor mother.

  They are all being marched forward by eight or nine immense, faceless policemen, who with hollers and rifle blows are shoving them, frightened and hunched, with a yellow cloth star on each and every chest, along Obrechtstraat and toward Van Baerlestraat. Some patient
s find it difficult to walk this fast. Sonia is doing her best to support a young patient who underwent abdominal surgery just yesterday and is too weak and too frail to manage on her own. It is difficult for Sonia to think about what is happening to her and to understand that this is actually happening to her, because her thoughts are entirely on each step she is taking together with this pale, trembling woman who is leaning on her and on wondering whether they will survive the next step.

  Yoel feels a need for fresh air and he closes the briefcase in front of him, rises up from his chair, and leaves the study room in the Jewish Historical Museum library and the museum building itself. He walks rapidly, but the suffocating feeling won’t leave him, and when he passes through Rembrandt Square he can hear the dead painter calling to him from inside the stone monument, begging him for light. But he cannot fulfill this request because in the meantime the police are shouting and striking at Sonia and the others as the column of prisoners from the Jewish hospital stumbles along the avenue under the blazing sun.