by Emuna Elon
* * *
The column falters and deep in Sonia’s consciousness she is punctured by the certainty that there is something, something specific and defined, that she is supposed to be thinking now. But she does not know what it is, she does not know what this thing she is supposed to be thinking about is, this step and the next step are the only things that fill her head at the moment, and her terror of the police, and how all this can possibly be happening. How can this be happening? And now here they are in front of the Concertgebouw, Van Baerlestraat is jammed with pedestrians and people in motor cars and in trams and riders in horse-drawn carriages and crowds of cyclists, and all these people, all of them, are just living their lives as usual and going about their business as though this strange little herd of doctors and nurses and patients is not being marched among them, right here on this actual sidewalk, people who in the space of one moment were torn from their freedom and their identity. From within this herd, Sonia tries to make eye contact with any of the passersby, but there is not even one pair of eyes that is willing to acknowledge her. And suddenly she knows what she should be thinking of. Like an arrow, swift and sure, the knowledge pierces through the clutter of thoughts-non-thoughts that encompasses her like a fog: She has two children. She has two children, and these two children have no one else but her.
The police encircle the column trailing along the sidewalk, separating with increasing annoyance the detainees from the commotion on the street. Sonia surprises herself too when she apologizes in her heart to the feeble patient whom she had been supporting, releases herself from the girl’s desperate grip, turns sharply sideways, and walks in the opposite direction, against the direction that this group of captured Jews is being marched. Halte! comes a sharp shout from behind her, as one of the police guards realizes what she is doing and stops in his tracks. But she continues walking. The world is filled with the baboom-baboom of her heart as she moves away, and again they are shouting to her, demanding that she stop, but she can only think: I must get back to Nettie. I must go back to Leo. And she continues to walk, careful not to break out into a run or to quicken her steps, even when she hears the cocking of a weapon behind her. Halte Halte Halte but Sonia holds her head high and says to herself, Do not look back. Her heart threatens to burst, but she just keeps saying, Do not look back, do not look back, and walk slowly, yes, like this, not like a Jewish prisoner escaping for her life but like any normal Dutch woman going about her own business or taking a pleasurable stroll toward the museum.
And now she has merged into the crowd, her back already looks like all the other backs on the street, and she walks slowly and hears how the policemen’s shouts falter, lose confidence, subside, and finally die. A few more steps and she has merged into the other pedestrians, merged completely, and as she walks, she reaches under her shirt, into the hollow between her chest and her left shoulder, opens the safety pin, and removes from herself the yellow cloth star.
* * *
Yoel feels pain in the hollow between his chest and his left shoulder. Could it be his heart? He does not recall how he returned to the Mokum Hotel entrance, but when he descends and enters the lobby, all sweating and panting, there is a woman with her back to him standing by the reception desk. The first thing he notices is her hair, which is similar to Bat-Ami’s hair, and her small, spotted trolley suitcase, which is similar to Bat-Ami’s small, spotted trolley suitcase, and the next moment this woman really is Bat-Ami, whom he could not have imagined how happy he would be to see, turning her smiling face to him and shrugging her shoulders in a kind of apology, one hand holding the suitcase handle and the other a transparent plastic pot with a beautiful mauve orchid.
* * *
It seems that Sonia has lost her mind after she extricated herself from the line of Jewish prisoners. Or perhaps the sane and reasonable woman she had been up to that moment was still obeying the police’s orders and allowing them to lead her to wherever the column was being led, while the woman who escaped and returned to her two children is some other woman. Because just before dusk of that day, when she looks through the tall window in her kitchen, she identifies the banker’s confident legs walking along the sidewalk as he returns home, and she bursts out of her basement apartment and rushes, frantic, to the entrance, waiting for him to enter the stairwell and close the door to the street behind him. And then, suddenly dropping herself to the floor, she is clutching his ankles and pleading, Save us, please, sir, save us, save my babies. But he just stands there, just stands there and his stony figure doesn’t budge. It doesn’t move until the door of the main apartment opens and his wife screams, Leave my husband alone. You’re crazy, Mrs. Blum, leave my husband alone! And immediately after, there’s also the sound of the door on the upper floor opening and the staircase rings with an urgent shriek of “Mar-tin,” and Martin quickly descends to detach the claws of the woman from his father-in-law’s ankles, to stand her on her feet that have turned into rags and to lead her, gently but firmly, down the stairs to where her children are waiting for her.
* * *
Bat-Ami meets the wonders of the Mokum Hotel. She is introduced to the yawning Achilles and his invisible love. She gets acquainted with the breakfast room, the groaning elevator, and the main entrance that closes from seven to seven. She goes into the little corner room on the fourth floor, detaches the front door from the cupboard door, and places the mauve orchid on the Formica table beside Van Gogh’s sunflower, which, miraculously, has not yet withered.
Bat-Ami: Oops, the wardrobe door has opened again.
Yoel: How is it that you brought me an orchid? You don’t like orchids.
Bat-Ami: But you do.
When she asks how he possibly manages to write with all those ringing bells cutting off any lines of thought every half hour, he realizes that he must have become so used to the chimes that he no longer hears them. But come and see what I have here, he says to her, and takes her out onto the room’s balcony to show her the backyards, the windows, and the figures.
Yoel: And now. Look into the left window, above the dancer’s window. Do you see that animal sitting on that bureau?
Bat-Ami: It’s stuffed, isn’t it?
* * *
Later she meets Josephine and tells her she’s beautiful, and their first conversation ends with a warm embrace-plus-three-kisses-to-the-cheeks. Her first meeting with Vij also quickly reaches the three-kiss stage. From the brown café she walks alongside Yoel to the Albert Cuyp Market, walks with him along the market stalls, and eats a vegetable salad and falafel balls with him at the Maoz counter. I am not at peace with this novel, he tells her, and I fear that, like me, my readers will not understand how this issue is connected to an Israeli writer of my generation. The tahini could stand improvement, she replies, wiping her lips with a napkin.
When darkness falls, she walks with him along Rokin to Dam Square and sits with him with a beer at his regular Irish pub, at his usual table. If this is a subject that you are concerned about, she says, there can be no doubt that it is connected to you. And if you feel it, your readers will also feel it. And late at night, she returns with him to the Mokum Hotel through the back night door, climbs with him up the four flights of steep stairs to the room, and smiles indulgently as the room door and the closet door again insist on colliding with and wounding each other. She moves his tote bag to make room for her suitcase and discovers the puddle of wax stuck to the carpet.
Bat-Ami: It’s not very clean here.
Yoel: The candle dripped when I made the havdalah.
Bat-Ami: So why don’t you remove it?
She connects his iron to the power outlet, spreads a sheet of newspaper over the stain, and passes the iron on the paper back and forth as if she were ironing the main headlines. After five or six passes, the wax parts way with the carpet and clings to the paper, leaving the carpet wax free.
Yoel: You’re a witch. There’s no question.
Bat-Ami: You should talk! Will you perhaps reveal to me
the spell by which you changed my husband, an upstanding, clean-shaven gentleman, into a wild motorcyclist who spends his time in pubs and hangs around with stuffed animals?
46
Sonia never again returns to the Jewish hospital.
People are constantly being taken, arrested, disappearing. Yesterday, on the central boulevard, between the concert hall and the museum square, a man who tried to escape from a different column of Jewish detainees was shot dead. It could have been me, Sonia thinks. Maybe I actually didn’t escape from the column. Maybe my bullet-ridden body is the one lying on the sidewalk with that dark, almost black blood oozing out of it and spreading under passersby’s feet and between bicycle wheels that are passing and passing.
* * *
Bat-Ami stays with him in Amsterdam for only three nights and three days because he did not ask her to come, and when she came, he did not dare ask her to stay.
He introduced her to the house where his story was taking place, and she was touched as if Sonia and her children were actually there, inside. Look, she said, pointing to the climbing ivy, which just this morning had begun pushing out fresh, tiny red leaves on its bare branches. Just to think, she had whispered, her eyes moist, just to think that Sonia also, this morning, sees these new buds…
They went into the Rijksmuseum to visit Jan Toorop’s painting and into the Van Gogh Museum to visit Vincent and finally, also, into the museum of modern art to see an exhibition of works by avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich. Avant-garde, shmavant-garde, said Bat-Ami, wrinkling her forehead as she pondered the scattering of geometric shapes through which the Russian artist had chosen to express himself. But Yoel stood before the piece Black Square on White Background, and knew that this is the way he yearns to write.
* * *
Reddish leaves are budding on the ivy climbing up the front of the building, and Sonia wants to think that this new growth is a sign of good things to come, but at midmorning there is a knock on the door and it is Bett, who has come to say goodbye. Her face is ashen: This is it, my dear Sonia. I am about to dive. I’ve sold my jewelry, including my wedding ring, and used the money to buy a forged identity card and arrange the details of my dive. She lets out a nervous giggle as she shows Sonia the document where her photograph appears under the name and personal details of another woman, a Dutch Christian, who, according to the birth date, is a number of years older than Bett. They found me an address in Utrecht, Bett continues, and Sonia knows that in underground jargon, “address” means a hiding place. She sees the fear in her good friend’s eyes. She sees the brown coat, which is too large for her and which she keeps on even as she sits down with her in her apartment. She tries to imagine how it feels to be someone who has been stripped of her husband and of her child and is now being stripped of everything she has ever known, even her name and birth date. It seems the woman in the large coat is not even the real Bett, and that the person sitting here across from her is actually that strange Dutch woman, the Christian, whose name appears on the identity card Bett bought with her wedding ring. The only reason I am diving, whispers Bett, is to stay alive for my little Hennie. But what if someone who hides me panics and turns me in? And how do I know that sooner or later, I and the person hiding me won’t be betrayed by someone else? How did I get into this situation, Sonia? How can it be?
After the two friends stand facing each other and sharing the silence for a while, Bett moves slightly back to look into Sonia’s face: Do you think we’ll see them again, Sonia? Do you think I’ll ever again see Hennie and Yop, and that you will find your Eddy?
* * *
Realistic writing—to describe things exactly as they look. Surrealistic writing—to describe things not the way they look but the way they actually are.
* * *
I think I understand your mother a bit better now, Bat-Ami says to him. Her toughness, her obsession for order and cleanliness, and why every time I tried to embrace her, she thwarted my plan: “Don’t come close to me. I haff a cold.”
On Sunday Bat-Ami said her goodbyes and flew back to Israel, to her patients waiting for her, but the day before, that Shabbat, Yoel made a point to take her to the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue and introduce her not only to this noble community’s dead but also to some of its living members. I already have a sense of belonging here, he heard himself proudly saying, as he walked her to the stairs leading to the women’s section. Her face beamed out toward him, and during the entire service he realized how happy he was that she was at the Esnoga with him and found it difficult to restrain himself from frequently raising his eyes to the balcony to verify that she was still there. After the prayers, he waited for her at the exit, excited and impatient to hear what she would have to say. Moments later, he saw her coming toward him from the exit of the women’s section and for the first time in his life he noticed that she did actually walk with a slight limp, the almost imperceptible limp of a person with one leg slightly shorter than the other. And a wave of sorrow washed over him when he realized that she is right when she says that the years and life events have changed her, and she is right when she alleges that his obliviousness to these changes—to the point where he refuses to even acknowledge the limp she got from her car accident—is because he does not really see her. From within this wave of sorrow he stretched out his hand to greet her as she moved toward him in the ancient synagogue’s courtyard, he stretched out his hand to the faint limp that only a loving eye notices, he stretched out his hand and gathered his wife to him in a sort of clumsy, side-long embrace. And Bat-Ami smiled at him, slightly amused and slightly puzzled, but willingly folded herself into his embrace.
* * *
That night she sat in his room in the Mokum Hotel, on the bed that might have been a wide single bed or a narrow double bed, and read everything he had written since his return to Amsterdam.
These are just sketches, he warned her when she picked up his pile of forty-page notebooks. It’s not even a first draft of a novel, just some scribbles, a sporadic collection of reminders and ideas, some wild experiments from which I might, just might, be able to, eventually, create the book that I believe I want to write.
Alright, alright! She waved her hand at him. Please don’t distract me. So he sat down on the chair, sat down next to the sunflower in its bottle and the orchid in its pot, and watched her read, searching for clues in the fluctuating expressions on her face, his heart leaping every time she smiled or moaned or even simply turned a page, and relaxing each time she finished reading one notebook and opened another.
* * *
He looked at her figure, sprawled on the bed in her baggy pajamas and blue-framed reading glasses, and he thought about their embrace today in the Esnoga’s courtyard and wondered if, years before, he really comprehended the significance of that serious car accident on this woman, his wife. Had he really, but really, comprehended how critical her condition had been then? How the doctors had already almost given up? He had stayed, of course, at her side in the hospital. He had done everything that was expected of him. But he did not scream. He did not go to pieces. He did not tear the heavens to shreds with prayers for her recovery. He probably hadn’t even admitted to himself that he might lose her, just as he had never admitted to himself that he loves her. Yes. Not merely feels attached to her but loves her. Loves.
47
Toward evening Sonia climbs the stairs to the house and she is bereft of strength and emotion, so hollow she feels the wind whistling through her with every breath. She goes up the stairs of her house and each and every step rises before her like an insurmountable wall. When she gets to the second story, she furtively passes the apartment of the banker and his wife, whom she has not seen since that day when she extricated herself from the column of prisoners taken from the Jewish hospital to who-knows-where.
* * *
Yoel is alone again. The rain is ceaselessly falling onto the sad canals, pedestrians are struggling against the merciless winds, and on the street corners,
trash bins are collecting the skeletons of umbrellas that the winds bent and broke.
In the museums, death reappears to him from each and every masterpiece. He sees the death of the subject, the death of the painter, the death of the observer. He sees the finality of all things.
* * *
Was Rembrandt van Rijn successful in capturing the secret of his own enigma in even one of the eighty self-portraits he painted throughout his life? Did Vincent van Gogh, who painted self-portraits in winter and in summer, in his youth and in his maturity, with and without the pipe, the hat, the ear?
And what unacknowledged mystery is solved for Yoel in Marc Chagall’s self-portrait, which, for some reason, he often visits on the Stedelijk Museum’s first floor, where Chagall is sitting in a typical Chagallic setting, painting a self-portrait in which his head floats above a neckless body, and his hand, the hand with which he holds his palette of colors, is a hand with seven fingers.
* * *
Now she mounts the stairs. The stairs are slippery cliffs and she climbs up them to the top floor and knocks on the door.
Anouk opens the door, and the freshness emanating from her smacks Sonia in the face. Och! Finally you’re here, Sonia dear! Come. Come in.
Sonia does not enter. Where is Martin? she asks.
Anouk hurries inside to call her husband, and Sonia tries to steady herself.
She looks at the painting by Toorop, which is still hanging on their living room wall, its waves still breaking.