by Emuna Elon
53
The first transport of Jews destined for the exchange had left a short while before Sonia got to Westerbork, and since then, four or five additional exchange transports had gone from the camp. At first, so people told her, the exchange prisoners didn’t even go in a freight train but in a real passenger train, with seats. The camp commandant permitted the deportees’ friends to escort them to the platform, where they parted singing “Hatikva.”
Martin told her that another deal would probably take place, and in the meantime, the things he heard while listening to the Western radio stations become more and more encouraging. Victory could already be seen on the horizon, he told Sonia, even though in anticipation of the war’s end, the enemy might resort to extreme measures of despair, and it is best to be careful. And so it was that the number of Jews sent out every Tuesday to Poland grew, and everyone witnessed the elderly, the children, and the sick being shoved into the cars to the barking of dogs and the commands of soldiers, and everyone understood that these people were certainly not on their way to do labor. And another train went out, and the countdown of the days and hours until next Monday began again: who will live and who will die, whose name will be on the next transport list, and how to avoid the list, one more week, and another one, and remain in Westerbork in the hope that each additional day on Dutch soil might be the day of rescue. Only those with official tasks and their families passed the days with the complacency of someone who does not fear their fate. And how selfish and despicable this complacency was to Sonia, how selfish and disloyal and despicable.
* * *
One day, Martin informed her that another exchange was about to take place. A few hundred more Jews would be sent from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen and from there to Palestine, and this time—his voice quavered—this time I have successfully arranged for you and your two children to be on the list.
She was frantic. What about my Leo? How will my Leo get here? But Martin calmed her. I’ve already taken care of that, he said. The student underground will bring the boy to you one of these days. Soon. In fact, the underground liaison has already set out to the village where Leo is hidden.
And Sonia’s soul blossomed with excitement after all her unbearable yearning for her son, who was being raised by Christian parents as if he were their own, her son, who surely didn’t remember her anymore and surely was calling someone else “mama” and speaking in a rural dialect that she herself does not understand.
And when she asked, But what about you? Why don’t you also get yourselves on the list for exchange, Martin explained to her that the fact that they were on the list of camp officials prevented them from joining another list. But there was no need to worry about them, he reassured her, because their privileged status protected them, and in due course, they, too, would leave.
* * *
A letter that arrived a few days later from the Red Cross confirmed that Sonia Blum, Nettie Blum, and Leo Blum were included in the next exchange deal between citizens of Palestine who were now on German territory and German citizens who were living in Palestine. The letter revealed the departure date of the exchange train, and, as if divulging a top secret, Martin told Sonia that he and Anouk and Sebastian would be coming to Bergen-Belsen in their wake, with other job holders, on a different additional train that would leave Westerbork a week later.
From the moment she was told that Leo was on the way to her, Sonia didn’t sleep and didn’t eat and barely breathed. She didn’t know if the underground emissary had safely reached the village south of Amsterdam and, if he had arrived, had found her little boy there. And if he had found him, if he had successfully gotten him out of hiding, and whether Leo, who had certainly forgotten her by now, would agree to return to her. And what. And how.
* * *
His phone rings in the middle of the night, in the middle of a fascinating dream, just as he is about to discover in this dream some vital secret that the ringing erases without a trace. Yoel wakes up in a panic: There’s a fire! I knew a fire would break out. How will I escape? But then he comes to his senses and answers the phone and the caller identifies himself as Tomer, Tal’s friend.
I hope I didn’t wake you up, says Tomer. I got your number from Tal’s mom. She said it would be okay if we called you.
Has something happened to Tal?!
We started out the evening in this coffee shop, Tomer explains, and someone invited us to a private party, and Tal was really thirsty and drank a lot of this juice they were serving there, except that after he lost consciousness we understood that it was an alcoholic drink, and the combination of marijuana and alcohol—
Tal lost consciousness!?
Yes. I mean sort of lost. Or passed out. At any rate, our hosts called for an ambulance and now we’re in the emergency room, and the doctor says he will be just fine. The problem is that someone needs to pay the bill here, and besides, we have to vacate the room we rented tonight and our plane is supposed to take off in a couple of hours, and to tell the truth, Tal is really out of it, he can’t stand on his feet, let alone fly. So we called his parents, and Ronit told us to ask you if you could…
* * *
The bell of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary rings out a lonely peal as the writer Yoel Blum bursts out the back door of the Mokum Hotel and runs to the Concertgebouw taxi station, and as he is running, he reminds himself that he might meet the taxi driver who was crushed and died, but he keeps running and rushes into a taxi driven by a middle-aged lady. Any other time, he would have made conversation and asked her what a woman, especially one of her age, is doing in this kind of work, especially at this time of night. But tonight he is thinking only about Tal. Tal is in trouble. Tal needs me. The Saint Luke Hospital is in the city’s west, and on no other than Jan Tooropstraat (Jan Toorop Street). Ido or Tomer is waiting for him at the main entrance of the modern white building and takes him into the emergency department, where Tomer or Ido is waiting for them and says that Tal vomited his guts out just a moment ago, and Yoel sees that Tal is lying motionless, his eyes closed, his arm connected to an intravenous drip.
After a while, his grandson’s two friends part from him with firm handshakes, tell him that they will leave Tal’s bag with the landlady, and go on their way.
Yoel talks to the doctor, pays for the ambulance and for the treatment, and bright and early in the morning, he is helping the unsteady teenager to exit the taxi that has brought them from the hospital to Obrechtstraat. Since the hotel gates will open only in another hour and a half, he takes his grandson in through the back door and supports him up the steep steps, that is to say, he actually lifts him in his arms and for part of the climb heaves him onto his back in a fireman’s lift. He has no idea where the strength to do this came from, but he carries his heavy load up the four flights of stairs and along the length of the fourth-floor corridor. The moment that he staggers into the room, Tal begins to twist and to retch once more, and Yoel rushes him over to the lavatory and cradles his cold forehead with a supportive hand while he vomits and vomits.
Then come the long hours during which the grandfather sits on the only chair, his back to the narrow table where he usually writes and his eyes on his grandson, who is fast asleep. Beyond the glass door the night is retreating slowly. A pale dawn is outlining the buildings and the trees against a reddish-gray background and the houses’ windows look into the little room like numerous eyes. The room is the same room but now, in the sagging bed (which might be a narrow double bed or a wide single bed) lies a person whose life is still not worn down and frayed but is laid out before him, fresh and clean and full of possibilities. Yoel listens to the boy’s breathing. The substances coursing through his blood are probably what are making him snore and sound troubled. He looks at the body covered by a thick blanket and dressed in the warm fleece tracksuit that Yoel himself pulled out of the closet at the break of dawn and helped his dazed grandson put on after he had also helped him remove his soiled clothing. How can it be that this tall, sturdy body ly
ing here is that of the lithe child who used to leap into his lap and shower him with such sweet hugs? And why did Tal love him so much in those far-off days?
Every hour or two the teenager’s eyes open and stare, lost and lifeless in the room’s expanse, and Yoel hurries to the head of the bed, supports his grandson’s shorn head in the hollow of his elbow, and holds a glass of water to the parched lips. Tal takes a little sip, says a few incoherent syllables as if he is trying to ask or answer, and immediately his eyelids flutter closed, his head drops into the pillow, and he sinks again.
* * *
All that long train ride. That child’s wailing. The mother’s sobbing.
The end of the war is complicated and dangerous and they reach Bergen-Belsen only after a night, and a day, and another night, and another half a day. All those meant for exchange are imprisoned in a compound called the star camp, named after the yellow stars on the chests of all the prisoners locked up there.
Sonia’s spirits fall when she learns that there are Jews who have been waiting here for their exchange to take place since last autumn.
From the moment they step down from the train, poor Sebastian Rosso clings to Sonia like an infant monkey to its mother. He allows her to take off his soiled clothes, scrub his body clean from the filth that has stuck to it, and dress him anew, but otherwise he is pressed to her bosom, his skinny limbs locked around her neck and around her waist, and he won’t allow her to detach him from her for a moment. At night she, he, and Nettie squeeze together on the pallet, clutching one another.
Additional human transports arrive and depart daily, but a train with Martin and Anouk Rosso and Leo Blum does not appear: not after a week and not after two weeks, and not after three weeks either.
54
When did Sonia realize they would never show up? Tal asks.
The grandfather and grandson are strolling leisurely in the hotel’s immediate vicinity at the request of the grandson, who has read his grandfather’s notebooks and asked to see the front of the house, Martin’s shop, and other settings around which the story happens.
Little by little, Tal wakes out of the fog in which he had been scattered. Slowly, slowly, he wakes up and reclaims reality together with Yoel, who had never imagined that he could spend so many days simply being with someone else, simply being, without feeling the need to write a word, without clouding the fact of his existence with even a touch of guilt over the fact that he is watching his grandson instead of creating, sitting next to him instead of working, breathing free air that was not earned with labor.
Like Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and Rabbi Elazar, his son, in the Galilean cave, so Yoel and Tal hid away on the Mokum Hotel’s fourth floor, concealed from the world pulsating on the other side of the walls of their room, but seeing it in sharper resolution than ever before. And like a worried aunt, Josephine came up to them three times a day, carrying pitchers of fruit and vegetable juices she went to the trouble of preparing in the hotel kitchen, and standing by the bed, her coal skin glowing with satisfaction, while Tal drank her health potions down to the last drop.
Achilles also came to see how the new guest was and it very quickly came out that both Tal and Achilles are crazy about a musical style called deep house, and they sank into a secret-language conversation apparently understandable only to those crazy about deep house music, ignoring Yoel when he asked what is so deep about this particular house, and didn’t stop sharing their exciting experiences on the topic—not to mention the fact that they both not only love the music but also play it: Tal on bass guitar and Achilles on drums. And while Yoel was astounded that he hadn’t known any of these facts till now, his laptop seemed to be even more astounded when the two young men suddenly shook it out of the perpetual slumber it had been in until now and began to race it all over the virtual world to search out musical performances and play them at deafening volume. Yoel looked over their heads, and instead of his letters and words on the computer screen he saw masses of dancers bouncing to the rhythmic electronic music while drinking, smiling at the camera, and hugging each other in what appeared to be pure bliss.
* * *
I imagine, Yoel tells Tal, that when they did not arrive a week later, Sonia understood. But even when she realized that they would not be coming with Leo to Bergen-Belsen, she probably still hoped they would be waiting for her in the Netherlands. The last of the Jewish prisoners who managed to evade the transport lists and remain in Westerbork were liberated from the camp at the war’s end. But Jozef de Lange and the Rosso couple were not among them, and it eventually became clear that they had been on the very last train that the Germans managed to send from Westerbork to Auschwitz.
Yoel and Tal stand by the window of Martin’s shop, which is covered with photographs of apartments for sale or rent. Tal swallows. And the child, he asks. What happened to the child?
Nettie told me that Sonia’s hopes that Leo might have nevertheless survived were shattered when eyewitnesses told her that Martin and Anouk Rosso boarded the train to Auschwitz with their little son. And years later, this was confirmed when she saw the list of names of Dutch Jews who perished, among them Martin Rosso, Anouk Rosso, and Sebastian Rosso. But she must have already mourned Leo even before she set out to sail to Eretz Yisrael. And she decided, already then, that the real Sebastian Rosso, the living son, would be her son.
Tal’s beautiful face wrinkles with concern when he asks, So for her, you were a kind of substitute for the child she’d lost?
There was a moment, Yoel admits, that I thought so too. But there’s no such thing, Tal. There is no substitute for a child.
* * *
They get to Jacob Obrechtplein, sit on the bench under the ancient oak, and raise four eyes to the sky peeking through its thick branches.
It would have been much more convenient for her if she would have gotten rid of me, Yoel tells Tal and also tells himself. She could, after all, have searched for Anouk’s or Martin’s relatives, handed me over to them, and carried on with her and Nettie’s lives without me. She could have remarried, could have had more children.… I only hindered her recovery. Because of me, she even gave up her right to grieve for her son.
* * *
He has no one in the world, says Sonia to Nettie on the deck of the ship sailing to Eretz Yisrael. He has no one, but from now on he will have me and he will have you.
The girl nods with understanding and compliance. Sonia places one hand on Nettie’s head and one hand on the head of the child who is implanted in her lap as if in an external womb. We’ll call him Yoel, she says. Those people gave him the name of a Christian saint but we will call him Yoel, after your righteous grandfather Yoel, and also… and also in memory of our Leo, since this name was supposed to be his. From now on this is our Yoel. Yoel Blum.
Yoel Blum, Nettie repeats after her.
And never, Sonia whispers, never must he know his former name. Do you understand, Nettie? He must never know how he got to us, and he must never know that we had another child, because the main thing—you understand, my clever girl, don’t you—the main thing is that he must never know that he came from those people.
The ship they are sailing in is a fleeting dot in the infinite space where the sun is sinking as red as blood. If there is a God, Sonia says, looking up at the horizon, perhaps he will forgive them. If there is atonement, perhaps their suffering will atone for what they have done.
55
A picture: A grandfather and his grandson sitting at noon in an inner room of a small coffee shop on Keizersgracht. In the room facing the street, which, if not for the sweet smell, one might think is a room in a regular café, there are about ten customers sitting at the bar or around small tables, and in the inner room, which is veiled in a pleasant darkness, only the two of them are relaxing among the soft cushions of a corner sofa. Quiet rhythmic music plays in the background, spectacular predator animals are moving on a big plasma screen, and the world is a smoky cloud wafting in the distance, althoug
h they only ordered two cups of coffee and only came here so that Tal could introduce his grandfather briefly and superficially to the concept of Dutch coffee shops.
The thing is, sums up Tal, after explaining to him the details of the menu offered in the place, to be able to free yourself. To lose control, Grandpa. To relax, you understand? It’s like releasing yourself from the limits of knowledge in order to be able to believe in God.
Yoel tries to remember how this happened, how recent events have brought him to this scene in which he is sitting in such proximity with his grandson from whom he had been so disconnected.
The truth, Yoel confesses, is that I am not so good at losing control and at relaxing.
Tal shrugs and smiles. I’m not really good at it either. The friends who I came to Amsterdam with got high and let go easily, but I needed more time and more effort until I finally began to feel something.
It doesn’t matter, Yoel decides. It doesn’t matter how it happened. Cats have more cats, fish spawn more fish, and intimacy gives rise to more intimacy. It was the condition of intimacy imposed on us that brought us closer together.
Was it because of that, he asks the boy in a low voice, that the cannabis wasn’t enough for you that evening and you thought you had to consume the alcohol as well?
And Tal smiles and says, You found me out.
What a charming smile he has, and how much can a heart swell with love?
* * *
They walk up Spiegelgracht. To their right a tourist is examining a shopwindow full of objets d’art, pointing at something with an excitement that makes Yoel jealous because he wishes he could get excited like that. To their left, a single duck is swimming in the center of the canal, all black, with a white stripe crossing its body from head to tail.