House on Endless Waters

by Emuna Elon

  Since handing Nettie over for diving and stripping herself of her identity, she had been certain that a day when she can return home and have her children back cannot be far away. In her imagination she sees herself alongside her two children welcoming Eddy, and sometimes she dares imagine the four of them setting sail for Palestine.

  But she has never pictured a situation like the one she finds herself in now. And she never imagined that so much time could pass with no end to this nightmare. With no end to this nightmare.

  From a distance the house looks strange, and only when she gets closer does she realize why: all the front windows are open wide, and the wind is raging through them to the rear windows, which are also open wide. Through the open windows she can see that the house’s interior is bare of furniture and objects.

  Completely stripped. The heavy velvet curtains that once hung in the central apartment’s windows are gone. Mrs. de Lange’s elegant chandeliers are gone. All the paintings are gone; all the interior walls exposed. When she bends down to the long, low window at sidewalk level and looks into her and Eddy’s apartment, nothing looks back at her except empty space, the gloom of a grave.

  Sonia stands on the sidewalk, paralyzed. The wind is whistling within the walls of her heart. Her mind refuses to absorb what her eyes are seeing, but when she finds the strength, finally, to make herself move and to draw nearer the house, her heart leaps within her when she notices that despite it all, the entrance is awash—like last autumn and like all autumns—with the reddish leaves of the ivy ascending the front wall.

  But then she notices the iron chain that strange, evil hands have wound round the door handle and fastened with a heavy, unequivocal lock.

  * * *

  The entrance to Raphaels’s kibbutz-like house is blocked by some sort of large, thick rubber strip, and while Yoel languishes in the cold wind and wonders how to surmount this obstacle, Raphaels himself appears at the door, smiling from ear to ear and shouting syllables that the wind immediately snaps up and sends in the opposite direction. Finally he motions to Yoel to go around the house and enter through the huge window that he opens for him from the inside, and inside the house he welcomes him joyfully and introduces him to a smiling woman by the name of Regina, who has been his neighbor for decades, but just lately, thanks to those meetings he told Yoel about, he found out that she is also a Jew who had been hidden as a child. It’s simply amazing, he says with a laugh, and adds with a kind of exuberant joy that about an hour ago the storm blew off his roof, and that thing that is blocking the path to the house is simply a part of the roof.

  The man is wearing a bright yellow turtleneck sweater and looks totally different from how he looks when they meet on Shabbat at the synagogue. It turns out that of all the professions in the world, he spent the majority of his years as a railway engineer, and when he retired, he allowed himself to devote himself to his great love: miniature electric trains. In fact, his entire tiny apartment is crammed with model trains of every type, and pressing on this or that button gets them going, together or individually, along lengthy tracks that pass over hills and between water canals, alongside cities and villages, and through tunnels and over bridges. At the moment, he is in the middle of setting up a miniature zoo next to one of the tracks and he invites Yoel to help him construct the monkey cages while his neighbor Regina is creating a nice little pond for the water animals. Raphaels never married; neither has his neighbor. It’s better this way, says Regina, as she leans over a grove of tiny plastic trees. Many of us Jews who were children during the war chose not to have families of our own.

  Raphaels: Tell him. Tell him the story about your name.

  Regina: I am not sure if the gentleman is interested in hearing it.

  Yoel: Of course I would like to hear it, if it is not too great an imposition for you.

  * * *

  So, while the three of them are hunched over a world that Raphaels has created, and while outside the storm is shaking up the world that God has created, Regina relates the story of her war-year tribulations and how she found herself, after the war, in a Jewish orphanage where the people who had hidden her brought her to when nobody came searching for her at their place. She had no idea who she was, no idea what her name was. Yoel connects minuscule plastic branches to minuscule plastic trunks and thinks how awful it must be not to know who you are, how awful not to know your name. But one day, Regina continues, actually one evening, when I was all alone in the orphanage garden, I heard a voice. Are you following me? Yoel looks at her and nods, and she continues. I am not a mystic, and I don’t believe at all in mysticism, but the fact is that I heard a voice, and this voice said to me, Chaya Malka. Chaya Malka Goldmintz. She pronounces this name that the mysterious voice called out to her in a whisper, as if she is revealing a deep, dark secret, and then she is silent. Amazing, says Raphaels proudly. No? What do you say about that, Mr. Author? And Yoel answers: What can I say… And was this really your name? And Regina: After the phenomenon repeated itself a number of times, meaning I had heard, over and over again, the same voice calling me by this same name, I went to the orphanage director and told him that I thought I had discovered my name. The director checked and found that a Jewish family by the name of Goldmintz, who had a daughter named Chaya Malka, had lived in Holland before the war, and so on and so forth. All the details were consistent.

  * * *

  The storm intensifies. A furious wind is whipping the world and Sonia tries to look onward, but the wind only allows her to look down, and she is pushed to the corner of the street and is pressed, so weak, into the back door of the brown café. Perhaps she fainted there. Or perhaps she just slept for a bit. But Vij finds her and groans, Oh jee, a wicked steamroller rolled over you, my poor child. You are unrecognizable.

  Vij wants to take her into the café. To warm her up and give her something to eat and to drink and to hear what she has gone through since she gave away her two children and dived. Sonia hesitates to go in, hesitates to endanger this dear woman, wants only to ask if she knows where the de Langes are, where they went with the contents of their house, and what they did with the contents of her little apartment.

  It is really strange, says Vij. The two heads of the Jewish Council are still living with their families in their homes as usual, but de Lange and his wife, along with Martin and Anouk and the little one, simply disappeared from here one day. It was quite a while ago. Just a little bit after you dived.

  Maybe they found a way to get to America, Sonia wonders out loud. Anouk was always saying this is what they would do.

  I hope that’s the explanation of their disappearance, even though you know, Sonia dear, that they have arrested Jews who you wouldn’t believe—Martin would be crushed if he knew that they arrested and took away Samuel de Mesquita, his respected teacher whom he admired so much, along with his charming wife, who had nurtured a greenhouse of cactuses in their house. Escher, the artist, who still comes by here sometimes when there aren’t any German soldiers around, told me that after the couple was taken, he succeeded in getting into their house and saving some wonderful works by de Mesquita, some of which were almost completely trampled.

  Sonia follows her friend’s quick, precise movements as she checks the condition of the beer fizzing in the row of small barrels in the café’s back room. These days I serve mainly homemade beer, Vij explains apologetically, because on the one hand, they have almost totally halted the supply of factory-made beer, and on the other hand, every evening all these officers show up and expect me to pour them rivers of drink. The day before yesterday I used up my sugar supply and I have no idea where I will find any sugar for my next batch of beer, not to mention that it is only through a miracle that I manage to get the yeast and the malt on the black market.

  It’s amazing, Sonia says, how they probably did manage to organize for themselves a way to leave here for America.… But what about all the things that were in the house? Did you simply just come one day and see that th
e house was empty of people and contents? And why would they take with them what belonged to Eddy and me?

  Vij straightens up behind her barrels and looks at her. The truth is that it was strange, she says. A few days after they disappeared, one of those huge modern cranes appeared, the ones the police use to empty out the homes of the Jews. From morning till night that crane rose up and came down, rose up and came down, and from morning till night they removed and removed from that beautiful house all the furniture, all the books, all the paintings, everything.…

  * * *

  The three of them are sitting and drinking tea next to the white-and-blue-delft-plate-filled cabinet that seems to be mandatory even in an apartment as small and as crowded with trains as Raphaels’s. Regina elaborates on her decision not to have a family of her own, on the difficulty of trusting others, on the fear of loss. Raphaels says that he feels exactly as she does, that for years he tormented himself for never marrying, whereas today he understands what a miracle it is that he has actually chosen life after what he went through in his childhood. He phones to check when they are coming to fix his roof, and when he is told that weather conditions force them to postpone the repair till tomorrow, he expresses concern for his beloved trains, which by then will have been exposed to the dampness seeping through his roofless ceiling.

  Toward the end of their visit, Yoel rings the taxi driver who brought him over and the driver promises him in his cumbersome heavy English that he is setting out now and should get there in about twenty minutes. Soon after, Yoel takes leave of Raphaels and Regina and goes outside, and the wind blasts him with amazing force and he must summon up all his strength to remain on his feet. The trees in the woods are bending to and fro, the storm has already broken and knocked over three or four massive trees, and one huge tree is lying across a lawn, its crown spread on the ground like a hand with extended fingers.

  It is only with great effort that Yoel reaches the curb between the houses and struggles to walk to the corner where he has arranged to meet his sad-eyed driver.

  But twenty minutes pass and the taxi does not appear. Yoel is chilled to the bone. Rain mixed with hail is pelting him and the wind is thrashing him as he clutches his coat and his hat and his scarf, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk and trying to imagine what Sonia must be doing in this piercing cold. What.

  Another twenty minutes pass and the taxi still doesn’t arrive, still doesn’t arrive. In the woods behind the houses a broken trunk lies on a slant and a group of boys are climbing on it like on a bridge to nowhere. Yoel takes his cell phone out of his sodden pocket and dials the driver again. Except that this time, the driver doesn’t answer. He just hears the automatic voice mail saying something in a spirited guttural Dutch. Yoel dials again and again hears the recorded announcement. The cold is getting worse. In the distance a man is running along a path with a large dog, and right behind the man and his dog, without warning, another tree falls. Yoel looks up, his body frozen inside his clothes and the layers that all the rain in the world has seeped into. At any moment, a nearby tree could fall on his head and kill him, and how miserable it would be to end the story of his life with such an awful metaphor.

  * * *

  Late at night Sonia studies the house from the outside. The storm has abated a bit, and she steals along the back of the road and squeezes herself between the fences into the neglected yard, and she creeps silently between the bushes and the red-brick wall, checking the handles of the low windows and pulling at the bars. Finally she climbs up the five steps in the back and presses on the door handle at their top. To her surprise, the handle responds and, despite the heavy lock that is also chained around it here, she manages to open a narrow gap. She crouches under the iron chain, squeezes between the door and the frame, and now she is in the de Langes’ kitchen. The dark is so thick at first that she can actually feel it—and then, in one fell swoop, the absolute desolateness of five stories of empty house strikes her in the face like the breath of death. I expected more from you, Martin, she says, and the echo of her voice bounces back to her from the wall. But she immediately regrets this. What power, actually, did Martin have? What could he have done for her and her children? And had she been in his place, would she have given up the chance to escape and save herself and her family? Nevertheless, when she descends the dark stairs into the barren, yearning space of the apartment that had once been hers and Eddy’s and Nettie’s and Leo’s, she cannot deny the seething rage almost blowing her up from inside herself when she thinks that perhaps, at this very moment, Martin, Anouk, and Sebastian are enjoying themselves in some other place, a free place, a place where they are allowed to breathe without fear. Don’t hate them, she advises herself. Especially, don’t hate their annoying baby, who is lucky not to have to part from his parents for even one day, while at the same time my children…

  * * *

  And she fumbles her way back up the stairs to the banker and his wife’s apartment on the three middle floors, then continues to the apartment on the building’s top floor. The lives that were lived in this house unfold before her eyes; the words that have been spoken in it flutter around her like transparent butterflies. People lived here, people spoke and loved and laughed, but now they are all gone; they are all gone. Only she is here. Only she.

  If this is indeed her.

  Like a ghost she floats from floor to floor, from apartment to apartment, and from room to room. The house has been desecrated, shaved, exploited of any signs of the human existence that flowed in it, and she drifts through its empty spaces, scanning, feeling, calling out the names of those who had lived here until she can no longer, no longer, and she stumbles into the niche where the beds of her two children once stood, and there she collapses, there she allows her body to drop, limb by limb, onto the wooden floor. Her eyes close.

  * * *

  And to think that Bat-Ami has lived her entire life in that one stone house in the middle of the Rehavia neighborhood in Jerusalem. Her father, who was a Torah scholar and a land merchant, built the house before she was born, and he was also the one who planted the cypress and pine trees that surround the house and isolate it from the world to this very day. When Bat-Ami and Yoel married, her father gave them a small apartment that adjoined the house, and when they became parents to the three girls, he upgraded them to a large front-facing apartment. Later, Bat-Ami inherited this apartment, and her two brothers and two sisters inherited the apartments to the left, to the right, and below.

  Thus it has transpired that Bat-Ami has never experienced residing permanently in any other place, and all her life has been spent in this one house. Maybe this is the reason she renovates the apartment so often, and every few years, as if to move without moving, she hires a renovations contractor and has him tear down most of the interior walls of the apartment and move the rooms from one place to another based on the design of some wonderful, up-to-date architect which this time, she always promises Yoel, will improve the quality of their life beyond recognition, will give them plenty of light and air and will expand their minds. Yoel is reluctantly forced to suffer long weeks of hammering and drilling, and chaos and bedlam, until one day he comes home to find a new apartment: the space where the kitchen used to be is now the new hallway, the former hall is now a new bathroom adjacent to the new bedroom, and in the area of the former balcony, a modern, upgraded kitchen now gleams. However, Bat-Ami and her squad of dusty handymen are strictly prohibited from touching his office for any matter whatsoever. His private territory is strictly off-limits for them, and since Bat-Ami abides by his wishes every time she destroys and rebuilds the apartment, Yoel knows that he will always be able to sink into his familiar armchair that is positioned next to his familiar desk that is standing between his familiar bookshelves, and he will always be able to look out from his familiar window and see the familiar trees and concentrate on his work.

  * * *

  In the end he returned to his hotel in another cab that Raphaels ordered for him
after he had waited for the first cab for over an hour. This time, the driver was a cheerful Indian immigrant who chattered, nonstop, all the way and who said “too many” and “too much” instead of “many” and “much.” Once, maybe they had been in Hong Kong, he and Bat-Ami had had a driver who spoke exactly the same way, and they couldn’t stop laughing and delighting in the “too many tourists” that he had driven and the “too much money” that he earned in his job. But now this seemingly charming mangling of the language depressed him. The man went on and on about “too many canals” and “too many museums” but Yoel felt nameless and homeless, and stormy Amsterdam looked like something after an apocalyptic destruction, all fragments and gashes, its roads covered with fallen trees that have surrendered and will never rise again.

  The next day when he went down to breakfast, Josephine and Achilles told him how worried they had been about him yesterday. Many pedestrians had been injured during the storm, Josephine told him. One tree broke and killed a woman who was walking in the city center, and another tree fell on a houseboat and it was a miracle that the residents weren’t injured. A taxi driver was a lot less fortunate, she sighed as she arranged the slices of sausage on the buffet table. A taxi driver? Yoel jumped. Yes, she said, a taxi driver was crushed and killed when a tree fell on the taxi he was driving.

  Later, Yoel also heard the news from a yawning Achilles: there were two killed in the storm—a woman and a man; a tourist and a taxi driver.

  He did not dare ask which taxi station the dead driver was associated with. Or where the tree fell on him. And at what time.