by Emuna Elon
Sonia.
Martin is standing in the doorway and she tries to say something to him but her voice is lost. Martin… those people you told me you know… the people from the student underground…
He looks at her intently.
From his place next to his improvised desk, Yoel also looks at her. He looks at her and at Martin and at this specific moment of theirs and sees everything that preceded this moment, everything that followed it, everything that could have happened had this or had that.
I am asking you, says Sonia to Martin. I am asking that they hide my children.
* * *
Leo is nudging the red rubber ball. He screams with joy and crawls on all fours after the slowly rolling underinflated ball. He grabs it between his two hands, sits on the floor with his legs crossed, utters an enthusiastic da-da-da-da, and again, with cries of joy, pushes the ball. He crawls after it quickly, then sits down again, looks up in wonder, calls ma-ma-ma, and when he smiles toward her he reveals two tiny emerging incisors.
* * *
Yoel stays in his room for entire days. He sits and writes, goes out to the balcony, and then comes back in again and sits and writes some more.
When he is sitting and writing, he sometimes hears the bagpipes of the plaid Scotsman from Museumplein, which is strange, since for a while now, he has not laid eyes on the man himself and was certain that he had gone back to his country.
His heart sinks each time he hears the rising-falling wails of a passing emergency vehicle. That’s it, he thinks, here come the police to arrest Anne Frank.
There are long hours when he doesn’t hear a thing.
Toward evening, he forces himself to drink a glass of water, to run a comb through his knotted hair and his Robinson Crusoe beard, and to take himself out for a walk the way one takes out a dog. While he is walking, his eyes wander to the windows he passes, into the apartments, some of which he is already familiar with their rooms, their objects, and their tenants. Are you alright? Bat-Ami asks him on the phone. And he answers, of course I’m alright, and smiles to himself sadly without telling her that at this very moment he is passing by the apartment where there is always a jar of tubes of paint waiting on the windowsill alongside another jar with six or seven paintbrushes in various sizes.
* * *
He usually takes himself out for his walk at the hour of the day when many cyclists are making their way home from work or school, alone or with their children who have finished school or day care. Yoel sees a father and his teenage daughter riding next to each other, sees a pair of parents, each of whom is transporting a child behind them, sees a family cycling together on bicycles of different heights.
As he is walking one day on the bank under Obrechtstraat, he feels that someone is watching him and he raises his head, and his eyes meet the grief-stricken, weary gaze of a large water bird with a long beak and mussed-up and faded feathers standing close to the water on long, thin legs. For a moment, Yoel and the bird are kindred spirits, united in body and soul. An elderly cyclist passes in the opposite direction, pedaling steadily while talking to a boy mounted behind him, a boy who may be his grandchild and whose face perhaps slightly resembles that of Yoel’s eldest grandchild. Thoughts of Tal send the faintest shiver down his spine, and his winged comrade also shivers slightly and lowers his beak. But it does not move from its place or change its focus, even as Yoel photographs it for a memento.
* * *
One day he is walking by the house when the mother arrives with her two children, and when the girl gets off the bicycle’s back seat, he sees that she is crying, and her mother stands at the edge of the sidewalk and pulls her daughter to her while stroking the head crowned with thin blond braids and saying comforting words. It seems that something happened to her in school. Maybe her little friends betrayed her, or maybe somebody—a boy, a teacher—insulted her, said something that hurt her tender soul and will never be forgotten, not even after many years.
* * *
He sits in his room and writes, sits in his room and writes, sits in his room and writes.
Sometimes he talks to himself out loud. Scolding, praising, listing urgent duties.
And sometimes it happens that he will suddenly utter Dutch words into the silence: Goedemorgen. Gracht. Ik spreek geen Nederlands.
* * *
Leo crawls on all fours around the narrow apartment, pushing his little wooden car with one hand.
Leo pauses, abandons the car, picks up an unidentified crumb between his thumb and forefinger, and lifts it up to his eyes for a good look.
Leo continues his wanderings and finds his mother’s net basket on the floor and in it are three potatoes. He yanks at the edge of the basket and knocks it over, sits back on his diaper-padded rear end, and peers at the basket, which is now lying on its side. Then he takes a potato that has rolled out of the basket onto the floor and crawls, one hand holding the potato, to the next room, to his crib. He pushes the potato between the bars of the crib, lays it down, and immediately turns around and crawls swiftly, with rapturous cries of da-da-da, to convey the remaining two potatoes.
* * *
Yoel wanders all the way to the De Pijp area, passing Etty Hillesum’s house, and south of the city market he goes into Sarphatipark, another large public park that Jews were forbidden to visit during the war. He walks on a thick carpet of rotting leaves, while looking down at him from the center of the park is the statue of Samuel Sarphati, the Jew this garden was named for, who was a doctor and businessman but primarily known as the designer of Amsterdam. Once he leaves there, Yoel searches for the synagogue on the road above the market, where three or four other Jews hid in the niche of the holy ark during the war. He hunts along the street a number of times, back and forth, until he notices a Star of David engraved on an iron plaque at the top of a staircase of a narrow building, and beneath it, in Hebrew letters worn with age, are the words: “Arise, be our help, and redeem us for Your mercy’s sake.”
* * *
Sonia walks along Market Street, as they instructed her.
She is dressed in long, dark clothing and a black hat, as they instructed her. She pushes the baby carriage in front of her, as they instructed her.
In the low wooden carriage sits her son, whom she loves.
A few days ago, a member of the student underground came to her apartment, a short girl who introduced herself as Katya. Katya stayed with her and the children for a bit as she observed the children closely.
The next day, another underground member, a man, came and informed her that they had an address for Leo.
He gave her instructions and told her that Katya would be her liaison.
And now it is happening.
Leo sits in the carriage, his back straight. It is hard for him to move because he is wrapped in his checkered coat, and under the coat he is wearing three layers of clothes, and under the three layers of clothes he is wrapped in three diapers. Other clothes and diapers are folded on the bottom of the carriage, as many as she could hide under the blanket he is sitting on. Surrounding him, stuffed between his body and the carriage sides, are his decorated tin plate, the orange tin cup that he is used to drinking from, the underinflated red rubber ball, and the small wooden car. Leo loves outings, and even now he is watching the world with interest and delight, his eyes swallowing up the market street sights—its stalls and colors and the multitude of people filling it, all of them preoccupied with their own affairs.
Sonia pushes the baby carriage in front of her. She pushes deep within the market, near the food stalls that are at this hour ensconced by busy crowds, and suddenly, at the right of the carriage, she catches sight of Katya, the short underground activist who had visited her just a few days ago. Katya’s appearance is not supposed to be a surprise for Sonia, because this is exactly the way they told her it would happen.
But she is nonetheless surprised.
Katya, that Katya is perhaps not her real name, walks next t
o Sonia. She is also wearing long dark clothes and a black hat. Katya does not resemble Sonia, if only because she is especially short and Sonia is tall, but, nevertheless, their black clothes create a certain resemblance.
Katya walks next to Sonia without looking at her, and Sonia continues pushing the carriage in front of her and walking straight ahead. She walks into the throng without turning her head to the left or to the right.
Sonia’s mind is empty of all thought.
As they are walking, as the two of them are walking side by side without looking at one another, Katya reaches out a hand, a small, thin left hand, and rests this hand on the carriage’s metal handle. Sonia, as she has been instructed beforehand, removes her right hand from the handle.
Another few steps, and Katya also places her right hand on the carriage’s handle.
Now the carriage is being pushed by Katya’s two small, short-fingered hands, and just one of Sonia’s large, long-fingered hands.
Sonia commands her left hand to let go of the handle. It lets go.
Now only Katya is pushing Leo’s carriage.
Sonia continues walking next to Katya without holding the handle of the carriage at all.
This whole process did not take longer than ten or twenty seconds.
When they reach an intersection, Sonia turns sharply to the left. Without the carriage, without her baby, she turns into a side street and disappears into the crowd.
Katya continues walking straight ahead. Pushing the carriage in front of her.
Taking Leo away.
Sonia walks a few steps. And then a few more. Then she collapses and falls to her knees, screaming soundlessly.
* * *
Once, at the end of a family picnic in the Jerusalem Forest, they had returned to where they had parked the cars and near the Subaru’s front right wheel lay a starved, injured Siberian husky. What a beautiful dog, exclaimed Bat-Ami, even though the dog was nothing but skin and bones and dirty fur. Who knows what dangerous ticks this dog may be carrying, what germs, Yoel warned, but Bat-Ami put the dog into the back seat of the car and brought her home and fed her and bathed her and took care of her, and Zohar immediately declared that she wanted to adopt the dog. Then, after four or five days, Bat-Ami took the dog to a veterinarian to scan for the electronic identification chip that must, by law, be implanted in every dog so she could find the dog’s legitimate owners. The veterinarian carefully passed his scanning device behind the dog’s ears and along the back of her neck and finally declared that the dog didn’t have an electronic chip. But Bat-Ami did not let up and insisted that he keep looking. She had no doubt that this beautiful, clever dog belonged to someone who was missing her, and she wouldn’t allow the vet to give up until he had scanned the entire length and breadth of the huge Siberian husky’s body—every single millimeter. All the while, the dog was lying on the examination table without moving, her blue eyes looking at Bat-Ami with gratitude as if she understood everything, until finally the chip, the size of only a grain of rice, was discovered in one of her hind legs, where it had wandered under her loose skin, and the vet checked the registration on the veterinarian’s association website and gave Bat-Ami the owner’s details, so that very same day Bat-Ami dialed the telephone number that the vet had given her and the man who answered the phone almost choked when she told him that she had his dog. They’ve found Blue! he shouted to his background voices, and Bat-Ami heard the voices changing into cries of joy, and the man told her that the dog had been stolen from them over a year ago when they were hiking in the north, near Rosh Hanikra, and they had already given up any hope of ever seeing her again, and when he asked if he could come and get her, and Bat-Ami asked when he wanted to come, he sounded as if he didn’t understand the question. We live in Gush Etzion, he said, we are leaving this very moment, and a light-colored Ford Transit stopped outside the house less than an hour later, all its doors opening in one fell swoop, and a religious family—a father and mother and seven or eight kids—poured out of the van, all of them crying with joy and hugging the dog, who was leaping excitedly on each one in turn, and hugging them, and laughing out loud too. Yoel had never imagined that dogs knew how to laugh like this.
48
There is a stretch of time, a short one as long as eternity, when Sonia continues taking Nettie to the temporary class in the Jewish teacher’s apartment. Sonia hasn’t slept since she gave up Leo into the hands of the underground. She does not sleep and she does not eat. In the mornings, she leaves the house before daybreak to clean the brown café. I won’t agree to anything that may endanger your life, she had said to Vij when the woman implored her to hide with her daughter at her place. But I am willing to work for you for whatever you are able to pay me. Until the sun begins to illuminate the day, she has time to wash and dry all the wooden tables and wooden chairs, to lift the wooden chairs and place them upside down on the tables, to place all the previous day’s empty beer bottles into the wooden crates, to take out the trash, to wash the glasses and plates and ashtrays, and to scrub the wooden counter and the wooden floor.
Slowly, the brown café is flooded with glowing sunlight. When the sun has risen, Vij arrives, and the two women peck at each other’s cheeks three times and look into each other’s eyes and say, Now, another day begins. Then Vij places some money into Sonia’s hand and puts some scraps of carrot, onion, and parsley, and sometimes also an apple or two eggs, into her basket. Housewives are already opening their apartment windows when Sonia passes on the street, shaking out their bedclothes, beating carpets. When Sonia enters her house, her little girl is already awake and dressed. Don’t give me away, Nettie’s eyes beg her. Don’t give up on me too. Look how independent I am; look how easy. Look how I don’t bother you. Don’t give me away to strangers like you gave away my baby brother. Sonia plaits some fine braids into Nettie’s hair and they leave on foot. Hand in hand, they go forth into streets that have become the streets of a strange city.
* * *
On the road that leads to the market there is a store with colorful wooden toys in the style of bygone days. Yoel goes in, wanders between the jam-packed shelves, and studies the toys. With great care, he plays the music boxes with the rotating mechanisms, touches colorful cubes, and pushes along wooden trains whose cars can be dismantled and rebuilt. Then he pulls the strings of the hanging Pinocchio doll, and it moves its wooden hands toward him and looks at him above its long nose as if they have once both met.
* * *
He didn’t want to visit the Anne Frank House. It was enough for him to see the line that stretched from the famous building’s entrance on Prinsengracht all the way along the bank of the canal, every day of the week, every hour of the day, and in every type of weather.
But Bat-Ami, when she visited him, said that it was impossible for him to write a novel about the war years and about hiding Jews without seeing Anne Frank’s house from within.
This isn’t even Anne Frank’s house, he told her. It is the factory building in which the Frank family tried, but failed, to hide.
So what? Bat-Ami asked.
In fact, they emigrated from Germany and lived in a different neighborhood entirely, he tried to explain to her. They lived on a lovely boulevard not far from Sarphatipark, and up until the time that all the Jewish children were expelled from their schools, Anne had studied in a Montessori primary school. The same school, you know, that Nettie was registered for and had started in grade one. The one you and I passed on Shabbat when we returned from services at the Esnoga.
They arrived at the Anne Frank House in the late morning, when the line stretched out to the sidewalk, turned ninety degrees to the left, and filled the entire length of the street parallel to the canal. Most of those waiting looked young and not Jewish, and the weather was fickle: one moment it was raining, and umbrellas in an array of colors soared above the line; the next moment the skies cleared, and the umbrellas were folded. Yoel shivered, perhaps because of the cold wind, and watched the falling
leaves whirl over the people’s heads.
Look at that, Bat-Ami said to him, pointing to a sign warning those standing in line about the dangers of pickpockets. It’s really a fabulous idea, she said, and grinned.
Instead of standing uselessly here in line, you can make good use of your time to do a little pickpocketing. But Yoel found it hard to smile. His thoughts were weighed down because of the gravity of the events that were happening at this very moment to Sonia and her children as well as to poor Anne Frank. When Bat-Ami showed him that her cell phone was suggesting that she connect to the Anne Frank House Wi-Fi, he became totally confused: If the Frank family hideout is connected to the net, why don’t those hiding use it to tell the world of their plight? Why are they not using the internet to call for help?
* * *
They were nearing the head of the line. On either side of the building’s entrance, photographs of Anne Frank’s life and quotes from her diary were being screened. “A day will come and the war will end,” said one of the quotes, “A day will come and we will again be people, and not just Jews.” Here, too, he hears the neighboring church’s bell clanging away. Yoel knows that the Frank family members hiding behind these very walls, which he and Bat-Ami are standing next to at this very moment, can hear the bell’s clanging every quarter of an hour. And he knows that they will continue hearing it until each and every metal bell in Amsterdam had been appropriated to feed the German arms industry.
* * *
Anne dreams of becoming a great writer. Through the almost completely sealed front office window she watches dirty children playing along the canal and expresses her desire to reel them to her with a fishing pole, to bathe them, and to mend the rips in their clothes. She enjoys the sights of the cars, the boats, the rain. She finds a funny dimension in the squeals of the electric tram’s wheels, and she affixes to every woman who passes on the street a résumé and a husband.