by Emuna Elon
51
Little by little, in the last months of her life, his mother’s consciousness had dimmed. Little by little, his mother departed from him. Sometimes when he came to visit her in the nursing ward of the rest home, he found her drowsing sitting up, her head slumped on the back of the armchair and her mouth turned upward like the beak of a thirsty bird. Soundlessly he would approach her. Silently he would sit in the chair next to her. Sometimes he would find her book of Psalms in her lap and he would read the verses and find in them new meanings. And sometimes it happened that her eyes opened and stared straight ahead until they homed in on the figure sitting next to her, and then her wrinkled face glowed at him with a smile, and her voice, now softer than ever, murmured to him: Eddy. My Eddy. And sometimes more animatedly: How I have missed you, my Edika.
When she was hospitalized, he did not stray from her bed day or night, did not stop fretting whether they were doing everything possible to relieve the intense agony tormenting her body, her tall, broad body whose huge strides had conquered the earth and all the seas, and even now clung to life with some mysterious force, refusing to leave this world and refusing to let the soul depart. When the struggle was almost over, just a moment before the curtain came down, a moment before she left him entirely, he saw her lips moving as if she was trying to tell him something. So he bent down at her side, between the bed and the monitor on which the rhythm of her heartbeat and the levels of oxygen in her blood had nearly leveled out, and brought his face close to hers, trying to catch this last utterance that she so wanted to bestow on him, but he could find no meaning in the two syllables that he heard her whispering over and over again and he thought that perhaps she was trying to call him, and the letters of his name were getting all mixed up.
He contemplated this over and over again in his mind throughout the entire seven days of mourning, reconstructing these last moments to everyone who came to console him. Nettie and Bat-Ami tried to hint to him that he should change the subject, that he should talk about his mother’s life and not just about the moment of her death, but again and again, as if obsessed, he heard himself repeating this story-not-story to the ever-changing procession of comforters, as if he expected one of them to solve the mystery for him.
And yet now he is recalling the movements of her tongue and the sounds that faded in her mouth, and he understands that the name his mother was trying to call out, in her final breath, was Le-o. Leo.
* * *
At night Sonia huddles in the desolate, silent house in which even the chimes of the church bell are no longer heard because all the bells of all the churches in Amsterdam have been confiscated and are gone.
Over the following nights, Vij smuggles in to her a blanket, a piece of soap, bits of food. Sonia looks at these gifts and wonders why her kindhearted friend thinks that a dead woman would want to cover herself, that a dead woman would wish to bathe, that a dead woman is able to chew and swallow.
Vij says to her that she has managed to contact the Dutch student underground group. I’ve informed Katya, Vij says, that you aren’t working in the old-folks home anymore, and from now on, any messages to you can be relayed through me at the café.
* * *
On the days following the great storm, the row of trees east of the Museumplein are standing totally bare of leaves, and broken branches are scattered over the lawn that has been colored a grayish brown by the murky runoff.
Even though the psychoanalyst has returned to her post and to her patient reports, Yoel is still worried about her. He can’t see her face, but he does see the sad angle at which the delicate nape of her neck is leaning, the disappointment locked up in her shoulders, and the curve of her back that expresses a yearning that cannot be contained.
He takes care to avoid passing the taxi stand at the Concertgebouw so that he will not have to search for the bearish figure of his driver and will not need to determine if he survived that day of the storm and if he is alive or dead.
And each and every morning he battles with the three knobs that adjust the shower, trying in vain to control the water temperature. Shivering with cold, frustrated—perhaps even furious—his body hunches under the cracked shower head where the water—one moment a barrage of ice, one moment a cascade of fire—spills and splashes onto him until he gives up and exits, defeated, into the murky sea pooling on the bathroom floor, in which dead body cells, especially hairs whose lengths and colors testify that they are not his hairs, are floating around the soles of his embarrassed feet.
* * *
The days pass. No matter what happens, the days always pass. Winter returns to Amsterdam, the daylight hours diminish, snow covers the beautiful streets and evokes memories of families gathering in their homes in the evening, warming themselves next to charcoal stoves and eating Dutch pea soup or a dish of sauerkraut with potatoes and sausage. And then again comes spring, and again summer, and again.
On the television in his room, Yoel zaps between tepid American dramas, pausing occasionally to watch a Dutch television show in which a bearded man—not wildly bearded like himself but with a beard that is well groomed—helps his ever-changing guests to research their ancestors. Yoel has no idea what the people searching for their family roots are asking and doesn’t know what the bearded man answers them, but he enjoys looking at the ancient manuscripts with brown letters curling on yellowing parchments and enjoys when they compare old landscape drawings of different Dutch places to contemporary photographs of the same sites. He doesn’t understand their language, but he is somehow fascinated by the authoritative host, who sits with his guests on soft armchairs before a table heaped with archival documents and in front of piles of firewood logs. Yoel guesses that they are mainly focusing on the Dutch Golden Age, when their country was a powerful and influential empire, and he understands that every scrap of information they acquire fills them with satisfaction. Sometimes he even recognizes familiar words in their conversation, such as “ancestors” or “archive.”
* * *
And now Sonia imposes on herself an automated routine. Every day she arises when it is still night and goes to clean the brown café; with sunrise, she is again concealed inside the house. She is not living, but she is keeping herself in a state of not dead. You have children, she reminds herself with every breath in and every breath out. You have children. You have children. One day, a man from the student underground comes and instructs Vij to arrange an emergency night meeting between Sonia and Katya. They meet under the Muntplein clock tower, and Katya says, Come with me. Come with me and don’t ask questions. They walk quickly, a tall, broad-shouldered figure and a small, thin figure, hugging the buildings’ walls until they climb onto a tram. Sonia cannot remember the last time she rode a tram. It is late, and the car is almost empty except for a few tipsy German soldiers, and Sonia does not breathe. Katya sits next to her and says to her, Come, we must look like two girlfriends on their way back from a nice party, and now I will tell you something and you will respond with a nod and smile. Okay? But just with a nod and a smile! Someone informed on where your daughter was, and there was a raid, and your daughter was caught and taken to the Dutch Theater and from there to the children’s home on Plantage Avenue. We will find her another address, but in the meantime we have to get her out of the dormitory. We have to get her out of there before it is too late, and therefore, you will take her now with you, and hide her with yourself, until we find her a new place.
Sonia responds with a nod, with an outward smile and an inward prayer. What can she do except to pray inwardly? We have to try to get her out of there, Katya says to her, to the glances of enemy soldiers sitting next to them in the tram’s car. We have to try. Do you understand what I am telling you, Sonia? We have to try, even if there is only a slight chance that our people will be able to get the child out of the dormitory tonight, and an infinitesimal chance that you will be able to safely get to your house with her. Sonia nods and smiles, nods and breaks into pieces and smiles.
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* * *
A short while later, Sonia finds herself standing all by herself at a tram stop on the tramway in the middle of Plantage Middenlaan. To her right side is the entrance to the children’s dormitory and to her left, across the street, the door to the Dutch Theater. Both buildings are packed with women and men and children who are due to be sent tomorrow morning to the Westerbork transit camp and from there to Poland, meaning that tomorrow morning they are about to be sent to whatever happens to those who are sent to the Westerbork transit camp and from there to Poland. She sees an armed sentry standing at the entrance to the theater, and when she turns her head, she sees an armed sentry standing at the entrance to the dormitory. Once every few minutes, a tram stops at the station, once at the station in one direction, and once at the station in the other, and every tramcar conceals one of the sentries: the tramcars that stop at the station to her right hide the tense, nervous sentry at the entrance to the dormitory, and the tramcars that stop at the station to her left—the tense, nervous sentry at the entrance to the theater.
And Sonia is waiting. Katya has disappeared somewhere, and Sonia has been waiting a long time. And now two tramcars are stopping at the very same instant at the two stops, concealing, for just a fraction of a second, both the doorway to the theater and the doorway to the dormitory, and in that fraction of a second, when both sentries are hidden, somebody appears next to Sonia and presses into her bosom something warm and shivering that turns out to be her little Nettie, and at once the mother and daughter are in the electric tram leaving the station and there is no way to describe it. No way.
* * *
Again he stops writing before sundown, lifts himself up from his chair, and takes himself out for a needed walk like a man taking out his dog. A twilight wind welcomes him with its perpetual caress as he emerges from the hotel’s entrance, and the beauty—the stylized buildings, the flower boxes, the glowing water under the stone bridges, and, above, the treetops against the background of the sky—the beauty is unbearably painful. He walks along Obrechtstraat, goes down to the Vinkeleskade, and tries to think only about the similarity between the Dutch word “kade” and the Hebrew word “gadah,” both of which mean “riverbank,” or “quay.” And about the fact that it requires at least three adults holding hands to encompass the giant trunk of each of the trees growing along the bank, their dense branches shading it along its entire length.
He walks slowly and sees the water flowing along the wide canal, reflecting the sparkle of the sunbeams that gently dip into it. He walks slowly and listens to the birds getting ready for their nightly slumber in the treetops. Cyclists pass him nonstop: dozens of cyclists pedaling their way home from another day at work or study, boys and girls riding from school in pairs or in groups, and young children mounted on their parents’ bicycles or riding alongside one parent on their own bicycles. They are all chatting with each other while pedaling, talking and laughing and asking questions and answering and exchanging experiences and thoughts in their language, which sounds to him like a jumble of mud and gravel. Some of the utterings that the cyclists toss from one to the other are suspended in the space between their bicycles, remaining there even after the utterers themselves have glided forward on their way. And Yoel observes the syllables hanging between heaven and earth and thinks about bygone days when he must have understood Dutch, not to mention also have spoken it, even a little. Now these words are foreign to him, but this doesn’t add or detract from anything because none of the speakers are trying to converse with him, nobody knows him and nobody notices him as he walks along, seeing but unseen, among the speaking people, the real people.
* * *
I am Yoel Blum, he says silently, in Hebrew, to a cyclist who bends forward toward the handlebars of his bicycle to kiss the head of the little boy riding in front of him.
I am Yoel Blum.
The branches of the trees bow to him gently.
* * *
Nettie tells her things. Oh, what she tells her! How can such a small child tell her mother things such as these that she is too young to comprehend? Things about the autumn-winter-spring-and-summer when she was in a totally different world, in the hands of totally different adults, in places that she knew not what they were. How can she describe the events that were responsible for her arrival at the children’s home on Plantage Avenue, about the children that she had time to make friends with there and the babies she witnessed being smuggled out of the children’s house: one in a knapsack and one in a laundry basket. The caregiver, who conveyed her out in the middle of the night through a back window of the house, to the man, waiting in the yard, who passed her over the fence to another man who smelled just like Daddy does and brought her to her mother.
* * *
It is only when he gets back to Obrechtstraat, crosses the small square, and enters the Mokum Hotel that he can feel real. Sometimes he loiters in the lobby doing nothing, waiting for Achilles to appear at the door next to the reception counter, and sometimes he wanders the hall searching for Josephine’s short, beaming figure. Just to meet someone, just to ascertain that he is visible, that he is present, that he exists.
This morning Josephine told him that her daughter, an economics student at the University of Amsterdam, won a municipal kickboxing contest and received a trophy. My daughter will remain here, she told him, and for the first time he saw her without a smile. But I, after my dad leaves this world, I am going back to Curaçao.
I am tired of the cold here.
* * *
Days come in which Sonia and Nettie are hiding together inside the empty house. Depending on each other, resuscitating one another, keeping each other alive. Nettie is still of tender years, but she is no longer a little girl. Maybe, Yoel thinks, maybe she is, after all, telling her mother just a bit of what she went through in the many long months of separation. Sonia does not pressure her, but he should probably write and tell about how she was passed from hand to hand and from place to place until she got to a family that introduced her to everyone as a Christian child from Rotterdam who was orphaned as a result of the bombing. He should write about how her non-Jewish appearance allowed her to enjoy relative freedom and even to attend the local school with children of her own age, but that in the house she had to deal with disconcerting harassment, the manifestations of which she was too young to understand. And how this abomination was revealed to the members of the underground, who then transferred her to another family hiding other Jews, and how she stayed there until the police raided the place and all those in hiding were arrested.
On the one hand, Yoel is drawn to develop Nettie’s story. On the other hand, he is aware that the time has come to proceed with his notes to the next part of the story. He understands that his desire to detail the particulars of his sister’s dive is for no other purpose than to postpone the end and delay having to deal with the story’s continuation: the part he is most afraid of writing, the part that is impatiently and restlessly waiting right behind the part in which Sonia and Nettie were snuggling inside five deserted floors of a house that once was their home.
* * *
He gazes at the multiplication table printed on the back cover of his notebook and accepts that he will have to make do with only a succinct account of the mother and daughter, who are at this moment holding each other over the whirlwind of hunger and cold and despair. They are barely nourished by the morsels of food that Vij manages to get them from time to time, and they never turn on any form of light in the house. At night, through the low, wide kitchen window above their heads, they see on the sidewalk the walking legs of more and more Jews being taken from their homes. And after all their lip biting, the day comes when they are also taken. Their hideout is exposed. The iron chain on the front door is severed, and they are both led along Apollo Avenue to the Green Police headquarters next to Beethovenstraat and sent north to the Westerbork transit camp and Yoel rises from his seat, goes out to the balcony, scans the house across from him wind
ow by window and floor by floor, and then he goes inside, closes the closet door and opens the door to his room, and a moment later he is outside, hurrying along, panting. He veers into the bicycle lane and is almost run over, passes under the arches of the Rijks exactly when the violins reach the crescendo in Brahms’s first symphony, and keeps going, passing the galleries and the antique stores of Spiegelgracht, crossing Prinsengracht and then Keizersgracht and Herengracht. The entire city is pounding in his head, all its water is flooding his heart, and he breaks left and heads down the Leidseplein and escapes into the open spaces of Vondelpark, where traces of the great storm are still evident. The fallen tree is alright, but the wind had wrecked quite a few upright trees, and in various corners of the park, municipal work teams are still laboring to saw off giant limbs that have been severed and to load the sawn-off chunks onto a truck with a huge yellow crane.
Soon everything will be fixed up and cleaned up, and the park will look as perfectly perfect as always, the way it also looked when Sonia and her children were prohibited from walking in it or even looking into it from the outside. A woman with a beautiful face and amputated legs drives along the path on a sort of tricycle that she pedals with her hands; another lady is leading two large dogs on leashes, ordering them in harsh Dutch. There are also a group of Israeli cyclists on red rented bikes, a man sitting withdrawn on a bench off to the side, huge pigeons pecking in the lawn, and an azure dome of a sky in which a jet plane is stretching out along its breadth a long, white unmistakable contrail. And still his head is pounding but he has no choice. And here he is back in his room, sitting again at his narrow desk, and the orchid is watching him with compassion. And it is not without a sigh of relief that he opens a new forty-page, single-line notebook and begins to write the next part of the story.