House on Endless Waters

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House on Endless Waters Page 22

by Emuna Elon


  * * *

  Reluctantly, Yoel purchases a ticket and follows Bat-Ami into the stream of visitors who are ecstatic to have finally reached the head of the line. He follows her from room to corridor and from corridor to a steep stairwell and from a steep flight of stairs to another room and another corridor, at whose end is a camouflaged cupboard and behind the camouflaged cupboard a door that opens into another, even steeper, flight of stairs. Day after day, men and women and children follow this route. They all go up and go down, and they all look into the rooms of the house and into the very depths of Anne’s soul.

  At the end of this pleasant tour, the hordes of visitors arrive at the museum’s modern and spacious souvenir shop, where they can purchase a copy of that mega-bestseller, The Diary of Anne Frank, in the language of their choice.

  They can also purchase a fresh, new notebook, one that is exactly the same as the checkered-covered notebook that Anne used for her diary. They can write their own bestselling diary in this notebook, especially if they get lucky and become entrenched in the middle of some war that breaks out and allows them the opportunity to hide away under similar remarkable and inspiring conditions. In addition, the shop offers a variety of Anne Frank House miniatures alongside other typical Dutch souvenirs, such as miniature windmills and wooden clogs. It is almost as if the entire story of the young girl’s imprisonment in this awful place, her exposure by a Dutch informer, and her arrest by the Dutch police, who sent her to her death, is nothing but an elaborate myth that should somehow make the Dutch people proud. Yoel tries to imagine what Anne and her family feel when they see the museum’s ultimate offer: a do-it-yourself kit for a charming dollhouse that is none other than a perfect replica of Anne Frank’s house with all its rooms and stairs and passages, both visible and secret. What does Anne feel when she sees boys and girls assembling the colorful cardboard model and playing with it, not to mention the captivating computer application—free on the Anne Frank museum website—where users can, to their amusement, virtually meander through the house’s convolutions, virtually go behind the revolving bookcase, and then virtually climb up into the annex and hide.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night, Sonia once again awakes from a brief nap in a panic. It was Eddy’s voice that woke her, and this time he not only called her name. This time he also said something to her. But what? What did he say?

  49

  In the morning Achilles looks tired and especially unkempt. Yoel goes into the dining room and finds the back door open and the tabby cat standing on the buffet table and modeling the shape of the Hebrew word for cat——with its head in the tray of sliced meat and its upright tail the perfect model of the lamed letter. Yoel takes for himself a small bowl from the stack of small white ceramic bowls next to the wrinkled apples and the yogurt at one end of the buffet. However, on the bowl’s rim, a thin black line curves, and because he cannot be sure whether it is a crack or a hair, he returns the bowl to its place and leaves.

  * * *

  It’s getting too dangerous. It’s getting more dangerous from day to day and from hour to hour. Many Jews already have nothing to eat, and the synagogues, including the Obrecht synagogue, are serving as soup kitchens. They are also selling yellow fabric stars at a subsidized price. Very soon, Anouk reveals to Sonia secretly, very soon we will be leaving for America. Sonia does not respond to her words because she doesn’t feel like reacting and because she doesn’t have the strength to talk to Jews who collaborate with the enemy.

  Yoel would have liked to write about the architectural significance of Amsterdam, about the implication behind the labor invested in the rows of tiny reddish bricks, about the stylized cornices above the windows and the artistic embellishments that adorn every single building. But early the next morning, Sonia is walking along the street, and across the road the police are evicting a Jewish family from their beautiful art-nouveau-design house. The members of the banished family are trying to walk proudly to the truck that has come to take them away, but the wailing little children, the heavy suitcase, the elderly grandmother who is having difficulty walking, delay them, which annoys the police, who end up shouting and forcefully dragging them away. Sonia knows she cannot wait a moment longer, and one evening, that same short, young girl, who may be Jewish and may not be Jewish, and for whom Katya may be her real name or her underground alias—who knows?—comes to her door.

  Sonia cannot control herself. She falls on Katya with animal-like howls: My baby! Where is my baby?

  Your baby is in a safe place, Katya tells her unsmilingly. I don’t know where he is, but as we promised you, we have given him to a good family in a village.

  When she notices Sonia’s trembling, her expression warms slightly and she adds: With his blond hair and blue eyes, you can be sure that this family won’t have any problem presenting him as one of their own.

  Nettie can see how Sonia is trying to keep herself from falling into pieces, and Nettie knows. Nettie lies in her little bed. She lies next to her brother’s empty bed and listens to the conversation between her mother and the woman, and she knows.

  The next day she is also handed over.

  * * *

  In the Museumplein, tourists are continuously being photographed in every possible variation next to, on, and around the sculpted I amsterdam sign. They crowd around the amateur acrobat street performers and enjoy leisurely impromptu concerts in the space beneath the stone arches. They are constantly photographing themselves and their loved ones, and Yoel thinks of the countless photographs in which he has been immortalized in the background as a bearded figure in a motorcycle jacket. From morning to night, the plump mandolin player sits on the fence and happily strums away. One day, a teenage boy and girl are standing in the crowd. They stand face-to-face in the rain, a shared umbrella over their heads. As Yoel approaches, the boy is saying something and the girl (in a purple coat, an orange scarf, and cheerfully colorful pants) is listening to him, trying to use her umbrella to hide her eyes, which are dripping tears.

  * * *

  As noon approaches, Sonia tightens Nettie’s light-colored braids and pretties them up with some pink ribbons. She places the girl’s satchel on her shoulder. The satchel has been emptied of books and notebooks and has been packed with some clothes. Together, the two walk through the cold streets, across the boulevard, over the stone bridge, alongside a brick wall, and then pass over another bridge, a smaller one, connected to the canal’s bank. Young laborers are running along the bank, pushing flat-bottomed cargo barges. They are holding long sticks in their hands and using them to push the schuyts along in the water. Beyond the third bridge, the street is crowded with girls and boys who have just been let out of the municipal school and mothers who have come to take their young children home, and Sonia and Nettie are swallowed up between all the mothers and children. Presently, a woman on a bicycle emerges from the crowd, and sitting on the bicycle behind the woman is a child swathed in a plaid cape. A few more minute pass, and Sonia also leaves.

  On foot. Alone.

  50

  Of the approximately one hundred and forty thousand Jews of Holland, only about thirty-eight thousand survived the war years. Including children. Sonia, for example, has purchased for herself a false identity and found shelter and employment at the old-folks home in the city’s northwest. She feeds weary old people, washes shriveled bodies, and changes soiled diapers with clean ones. She does all these things quickly and quietly, without thinking about anything or feeling anything. Between shifts, she sleeps in the home’s attic, on a tattered straw mattress that she shares with the caregiver who works the other shift. It seems as if entire eternities have passed since she lived in the de Lange house. Entire eternities since she was Eddy Blum’s wife. Entire eternities since she was Nettie and Leo’s mother. She doesn’t know where they are. She doesn’t know if they are being properly cared for. And she doesn’t know if she did the right thing or if she should have perhaps kept them with her, no ma
tter what the consequences. Now she is sitting in the old-folks-home dining room ladling spoonful after spoonful of thin pea soup into the mouth of a gawping old woman. Now the other caregiver is supposed to be resting on the mattress in the attic, but here she is, entering into the dining room, coming close to Sonia until she is almost touching her, and whispering into her ear, You are a Jewess. Don’t think I don’t know that you are a Jewess. Sonia freezes for an instant but immediately recovers and dips the spoon into the bowl, recovers and raises the greenish liquid to the wrinkled mouth that opens to receive it like a baby bird.

  I have no idea why you suspect me, she says, but if you like, I can show you my papers and you can assure yourself that you are wrong.

  Your papers? The girl lets out a snort of disdain. What are your papers worth? You are Jewish, and I’m not sure that I’m willing to risk my life for you.

  * * *

  The church bell fills the air and Yoel counts five rings and goes out to the room’s balcony. It rained today and now the sky is covered with layers of dark clouds. They say tomorrow there’s going to be a storm, Achilles had told him earlier, but Yoel doubts the ability of a Dutch storm to be truly stormy. He stands on the balcony and sees that a drizzle has started and the birds are already gathering together into the trees for their night’s sleep, gathering and quietening, and only one chirp, croaky and anxious, repeats itself, getting croakier and more fretful, becoming more agitated and distressed the stronger the rain gets.

  Here and there a man or a woman appears in the windows facing the balcony, fragments of lives are revealed. But the psychoanalyst is not there, only her computer screen saver is alive and breathing in her abandoned room, and in fact, Yoel has not seen her today, or yesterday, and it’s hard to say that he is not concerned for her welfare. The electric lights have not yet been turned on in the windows on the left, the dancer has not yet returned from work, and the stuffed animal is merging with the growing darkness. But there is a warm glow from the lower apartment on the right, and in the window Yoel can see the end of a light-colored sofa, a section of a book-stuffed shelf, and some moving figures.

  What are they doing there inside? Talking, laughing, living. Maybe the mother is watching cartoons on television with her children, maybe they are stacking blocks into a tower or putting a puzzle together, and maybe the baby is hanging onto the chair on which the little girl is sitting preparing her homework, hanging on, rising up, and standing on his feet.

  Did the little girl cry again today when she got home from school?

  Now, perhaps, the girl has asked for a drink. Her mother makes mugs of hot chocolate for the three of them, and then she opens the radiator taps and turns up the heat because it’s getting cold outside. Then the apartment door opens and her husband, the lenses of his glasses all fogged up, returns from work and he swings the children up in his arms, up to the ceiling and up to the sky, and calls them and his wife by endearing nicknames, and his wife, laughing, gets up to also fix him a cup of hot chocolate. The apartment is warm and cozy, and they will spend a relaxing evening until it is time to bathe the children and put them to bed. Tomorrow is a new day. They say there’s going to be a storm.

  * * *

  Night. Sonia is lying, dressed and alert, on the straw mattress in the old-folks-home attic. Her body burns with fatigue, but she does not allow her eyes to close. Perhaps the other caregiver, the one whose shift it is now, has already gone and informed the police. Not because she is mean, but because she is a law-abiding Dutch citizen, and because she wants to live. When the decrees against the Jews had just begun to gather momentum, Amsterdam’s laborers had gone on strike and demonstrated in the city streets for a few days to protest these decrees. But today, Amsterdam is a place where anyone hiding a Jew or helping a Jew in any way is risking his life. The building is deep in slumber, but Sonia can hear coughs, sighs, and the shuffling of old feet from its many corners. Outside the rain is pouring down. The wind is beating the windows. They say there’s going to be a storm soon, and by all the signs, Sonia predicts that this will be a severe one.

  After midnight there comes strong knocking at the main door, strong knocking and orders: Open! Police!

  That’s it, it’s all over, Sonia says to herself. They’ve come to take me away. It’s over. She jumps up from the mattress, quickly does up her coat and her shoes, and at the same time thinks Nettie and thinks Leo and asks herself if there is a chance that she can escape or hide. She hears the other caregiver opening the main door. The police shout, and from their shouting she gathers that they are here to arrest a couple who just recently came to live in the home, a man and a woman.

  Sonia had been awed by the respect and tenderness that these two elderly people have expressed toward each other, and now it turns out that they are Jews and that the police have come to this old-folks home to take them away to the place where they take old Jews.

  Sonia hears shouting, and the sounds of dragging and shoving, and wailing and sobbing. She hears and she wants to die, to die she wants, to die.

  * * *

  How, before it was cut down, those branches of the almond tree in their yard in Jerusalem (bare, save for the smattering of bitter fruit still clinging to them) used to beat against their bedroom window on winter nights, scratching against the windowpane as if asking to enter.

  * * *

  Before dawn, the other caregiver ascends into the garret. You must go down now to work, she mumbles, embarrassed, when she sees Sonia dressed in a coat instead of her pressed white work uniform.

  Sonia replies: I have to leave.

  They say, the girl warns her with genuine concern, that there’s going to be a huge storm today, and Sonia looks her straight in the eye, says thank you, and immediately picks up her skimpy bundle and descends, almost sliding, down the steep stairs.

  The office of the old-folks home’s director is still empty so early in the morning. She passes it. If he were here, she could have asked him for her final salary, but she cannot allow herself to wait until he arrives.

  As she leaves the building, a barrage of hailstones smacks her face.

  * * *

  It’s only since I have begun taking part in these meetings, said Raphaels when they were again chatting in the synagogue after Sabbath service, only since I have spoken to other Jews who were also hidden in their childhood, that I have become aware of the anger hiding within me all these years. It turns out that all of us—anyone who was passed from hand to hand, from one parent to another at a young age—suffer, even today, from similar problems, and especially have difficulty forming emotional relationships.

  After their latest conversation, Raphaels invited Yoel to visit him in his home in the northwest of the city, and they’ve arranged Yoel’s visit for today. At breakfast, Josephine tells him that public transportation has been canceled for the day in anticipation of the forecast storm, but this meeting at Raphaels’s is important to Yoel, and he decides he will take a cab. He bundles himself up well and goes out to discover a reasonably benign autumn day outside, opens the top button of his coat, and says to himself, storm, shtorm. These Dutch people exaggerate, probably because, other than the weather, they have nothing to occupy themselves. He goes to the taxi station at the Concertgebouw, gets into the first taxi in line, and the driver, a bearlike man with grim eyes, sets out.

  For a long time, the taxi navigates the half-empty streets. Here and there, the wind is generating large and small whirlwinds of leaves or trash. The distant neighborhood where Raphaels lives was built after the war and reminds Yoel of an Israeli kibbutz, maybe Nettie’s kibbutz in the Bet She’an Valley: rows of low, single-story houses, plonked down on the edges of wide lawns, separated by tiled paths and surrounded by green woods as far as the eye can see. The house numbers have been arranged in some impossible-to-understand method, and for almost an hour the taxi meanders among the houses until they find the number they are looking for. A fierce wind batters Yoel as he steps out onto the path. Droves o
f dead leaves are galloping from one side of the lawn to the other. Behind the rows of houses there are only a few people out walking their dogs, riding bicycles at the woods’ edge, or jogging. The taxi driver, his sad eyes peering through a small crack that he has opened in the window next to him, holds out his business card and promises to return here later to take Yoel back to Obrechtstraat.

  * * *

  Sonia drags one leg after another with great effort, pressing against a wind that is growing stronger from moment to moment and threatening to push her over once and for all. How strange it is to return here, after all this time to pass through the arched space at the entrance to the Rijksmuseum. How strange to come back and cross the green square and Van Baerlestraat to the Concertgebouw building. Both strange and dangerous. It must have been force of habit that led her here from the old-folks home even though she has nothing to look for here: de Lange won’t help her, and Martin and Anouk also won’t lift a finger. Maybe, she thinks, maybe she can carefully slip into the house and go down into her apartment to take a few small things. Maybe she can sneak in for just a moment, despite the tremendous danger of approaching the house of a Jewish Council member who is collaborating with the Jews’ persecutors.

 

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