by Emuna Elon
I do not know what I think about their cooperation with the Germans, Tal says.
And Yoel is silent, because what can he say?
It’s clear to me that you’re right, Grandpa, when you say we cannot judge them because what do we know, what do we know about them and what do we know about the situation they were in.
He is silent.
All they wanted to do was to just survive, Grandpa. It’s the most basic instinct there is.
True, Yoel thinks. Thank you, my dear grandson, for understanding this complexity. Later I may explain to you that many collaborators also believed, believed truly and naively, that their cooperation was minimizing the hardships of the entire population and sparing the lives of many Jews.
* * *
They ascend the little bridge over Prinsengracht and stand facing opposite the direction of the flowing water. The truth is, Tal says, that it’s really hard for me to avoid judging her. And Yoel asks, To avoid judging whom, even though it is perfectly clear to him about whom Tal is talking. And Tal replies: Grandma Sonia, the woman who raised you.
What is there to judge Grandma Sonia about?
I’m sorry, Grandpa, but I don’t understand what right she had to judge your biological parents. Not only did she judge them, but she also sentenced them to the most terrible punishment: that you, their son, would not know of their existence.
They are leaning against the railing of a small bridge over the water. Yoel sees a woman hanging towels out to dry on the deck of a houseboat. He sees the water running slowly in the canal. Sees a child’s face carried away in the current.
I am trying not to judge her, adds Tal, because what do we know and all that. But even if it’s possible to understand what she had against de Lange and even what she had against Anouk, why did she obliterate Martin from you as well? What did she have against Martin, her and Eddy’s best friend, who did whatever he could to save her and her two children?
* * *
At night, Tal sinks into a quiet, easy sleep on the folding cot that Achilles managed to squeeze into the small room for him. But the question he asked today is still wide awake.
What was Martin’s sin?
In fact, Yoel now realizes that this question was already on his mind even before Tal expressed it in words. It seemed to be constantly and secretly smoldering within him, and perhaps it was this burning that translated itself, in his subconscious, into that imagined fear of a fire that could destroy the Mokum Hotel.
If a fire would break out, he would escape from the hotel exactly the same way he and Bat-Ami escaped from that hotel in Istanbul on the night of the violent earthquake that, to their chagrin, had to happen precisely that very night they had stopped for a short Turkish holiday on their way home from one of his lecture tours in the USA. When, that summer night, they were suddenly flung from sleep and found their room rocking wildly from side to side, they burst into hysterical laughter and Bat-Ami shouted: What is this? How can the Turks live like this? As if a seven-point-four earthquake was something that happened there every night. At the end of twenty long seconds, the rocking stopped and a deathly silence ensued, followed by the colossal flapping of tens of thousands of birds that emerged in unison from all the trees in Istanbul.
They tried to turn on a light in the room, but the electricity was out, so they simply threw on the first articles of clothing they could lay their hands on in the gloom and hurried out of the room to the dark stairs, feeling their way along with all the other hotel guests who were fleeing outside and gathering in the narrow street, comforting each other and smiling at each other with relief. There was an elderly lady who had come down wearing only a transparent nightgown and holding her passport. There was a man who came down without his eyeglasses, without which he could not see a thing. And there was a pair of sisters from Rishon LeZiyyon, for whom this was their first trip outside Israel, and while their husbands dozed off on the hotel’s front steps, they did not stop castigating each other: You see what happens abroad? Didn’t I tell you that it’s better to stay in Israel? It was only two days later that the dimensions of the disaster began to unfold and they became aware of the multitudes—men, women, and children—who had been buried alive during those twenty seconds.
But what sin did Martin commit?
* * *
On Thursday, Tal announces that this is it, he is feeling strong enough, and that same night Achilles takes him to a deep house party in an authentic Dutch club, the kind of party not for tourists but only for local young people. (Achilles: It’s a good thing that tonight I don’t have classes. Yoel: Classes?! Achilles: I study four evenings a week. Law, second year, seven thirty to eleven thirty at night. You must have noticed, Mr. Writer, that because of my night classes I am almost always tired during the day.)
* * *
Too bad I’m flying back Saturday night, Tal says when he returns, giddy, from the party at the club. He enters the room just a few minutes after Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary rang her bell three times, as fresh as if it were three o’clock in the afternoon and not three in the morning, throws his coat into the corner of the room, and says, on Shabbat, I’d like it if you and I could go to the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue for services. What do you think, Grandpa?
56
On Saturday morning they exit the Mokum Hotel and all the Sabbaths, all the Sabbaths that Amsterdam has ever known, accompany them through the streets and pass with them over the Golden Crown Bridge on the Amstel River and across Waterlooplein toward the Esnoga. On Sabbaths as cold as this one, services are not held in the main temple because heating such a huge space is impossible. Rather, they are held in one of the other buildings in the ancient compound, in a small hall where Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the Ramchal, taught between the time he fled persecution in Italy because of his involvement in kabbalah and his immigration to the Land of Israel, where he and his wife and young son tragically died in a plague. Now they are here, singing, Blessed be He who gave the Torah to his people of Israel, and reading the weekly Torah portion. At the end of the third section of the Torah reading, Kastiel the beadle clears his throat, raises his voice, and sings out: And Yoel Sebastian, son of Martin, will stand up, fourth.
Yoel looks to his right, to his left, and behind, as if he is checking if there might be another worshipper in the congregation named Yoel Sebastian, the son of Martin. Only when Tal pats him lightly on his shoulder and smiles at him with pent-up emotion does he realize that he is indeed the one being called up to the pulpit, and he hastens to fasten his prayer shawl onto his shoulders and rise. Under the soles of his shoes, the wooden floor trembles on its water-planted pillars, and he ascends to the pulpit on the very same steps that his forefathers ascended, touches the tip of his finger to the Torah scroll that has been touched by the fingertips of his forefathers, and chants, Who chose us, and gave us His Torah, exactly like his forefathers did. When Kastiel sings in the traditional Sephardic style, He who blessed our forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, shall bless Yoel Sebastian, son of Martin, Yoel feels alive more than ever before.
Later, from among the prayer shawls, cylinder hats, and handshakes, his grandson approaches him and they gather each other in an embrace of unconditional love.
* * *
That’s that, he tells himself, late at night after escorting Tal to the airport, puffing up the four flights of stairs, and returning to his empty room. That’s it, enough, soon you’ll be free to leave this place and return home. On the balcony, in the cold that is already the cold of early winter and has ceased to be simply the cold of the end of autumn, he searches beyond the blackening trees for the golden harp on the Concertgebouw’s roof and finds only clouds and darkness and expressionless windows. The house, too, seems to be deep asleep, though he thinks he notices two dim lights, one in a basement window and one in an upstairs window, and it seems to him that these two lights are winking to each other in the dark.
The memory of his aliya, his being called up to the Torah t
hat morning in the Esnoga, still fills him with exhilaration. And no less than the aliya itself is the fact that the one who arranged it for him was Tal, and that the boy knew, even before he himself imagined it, how much he longed to be called by his real name.
* * *
How did you know that was what I wanted, he had asked him earlier, at the terminal.
And Tal shrugged his shoulders and smiled. I didn’t know, but I hoped.
They were standing next to the El Al counter, which in Schiphol, just like in all the other airports in the world, is stuck in some remote ghetto at the end of the passenger hall, as befits the counter of a chosen people whom, because of their striped shirt of many colors, other peoples want to throw into the pit. Finally the two went together to the departures gate, and again they embraced each other in farewell.
Here, Yoel said to himself. Here is Anouk and Martin Rosso’s son embracing Anouk and Martin Rosso’s great-grandson. And all of a sudden the ten thousand pieces of the puzzle fell into place and he understood what he did not want to understand until now, and all his bones rattled and his knees trembled, and the boy, who felt this, tightened his embrace and held him in strong arms until he was steady again, and only then did he gently part from him and say, Thank you for everything, Grandpa, and he went toward his flight, and in a few days he will put on a uniform and become a soldier.
* * *
Is that true, Nettie? Is that what Mother told you Martin did?
I’m sorry, Yoel. I did not really want to tell you this part of the story.
What did she say about him, Nettie? What did she say about Martin?
She said what you said to me now, Yoel. What you, and probably your wise grandson, already understood by yourselves.
But what exactly? What did she say Martin did?
She said… she said that Martin deliberately switched the two children. That he exchanged them to save his son.
She said that to you exactly like that?
That’s what she said, Yoel, I’m sorry.… In the beginning she talked about it quite a lot.
What did she talk about? What else did Mother tell you about this, Nettie?
She thought that Martin must have known from all those radio broadcasts and from his other sources that his family was in danger. And that he decided to increase the chances for his child to survive by finding someone who would get the child out of the camp as fast as possible.
…
Yoel?
Yes, Nettie. I’m listening. I’m listening.
That’s it, that’s all she said. And when you grew up, she stopped talking about it out loud, but…
But what? What did you start to say?
Nothing special. I think I’ve already said too much.
Don’t hide anything from me, I beg of you.
The truth is that after many years, Yoel, Mother still told me that the more she thinks about it, the more certain she is that from the start Martin did not intend to bring her our Leo in time. That when he began to arrange for her to take one boy with her on the train, he did it solely so she would take his child, that is to say Sebastian, that is to say you.
…
Yoel, are you there?
I’m here, Nettie, I’m here, I just…
I’m sorry, Yoel, I’m really sorry you had to discover all this.
57
What does he want? What does he want and what is he doing on a Dutch bus on its way to the countryside south of Amsterdam? Who is he expecting to find there, as he does not, nor will he ever have, even the slightest idea of the name or whereabouts of the village where the boy Leo Blum was hidden. Nettie, with whom he has recently been speaking on the phone every day, sometimes even twice a day, says that Sonia also did not know the name of the village or the name of the family that hid Leo. There was a time, she reminded herself, after they had more or less become acclimatized in Israel, that Sonia tried to search for these details. But then it became clear to her that there were only two or three underground members who actually knew where her son had been hidden, only two or three young students, including that same little woman known as “Katya,” and none of these young people survived the war.
Yes, Nettie said to Yoel. Yes.
And so Mother gave up on getting any information about the last days of Leo’s life. And Yoel heard her words and thought of the Sonia of his childhood and youth, of Sonia walking upright along Herzl Street in Netanya and declaring to him from up on high: Whatever was, was. Those waters have already flowed onward.
* * *
Actually, how do we know that he did not survive, he asked his sister the next time they spoke. Maybe he is alive to this day?
Who is alive? Nettie did not understand. Who are you talking about?
Leo. I’m talking about Leo. Maybe Martin never sent anybody from the resistance to bring him, and he just remained in the village?
Nettie was shocked. Yoel, what’s gotten into you? When she scolded him, her voice resembled Sonia’s, not Sonia’s loving voice with which she spoke to him, but the sharp, blunt voice that she used to distance herself from other people and to deter them from liking her and wanting to make friends with her. Nettie got angry. How could you ask such a question when you already understand (she was so excited that it came out “ven you understand”) that poor Leo was murdered. Didn’t people report seeing Martin and Anouk Rosso getting into the transport with a boy? Also, according to the official records they died together with a little boy.…
He heard her through the telephone receiver, saw her window overlooking Mount Gilboa and the date groves, and was speechless. But here he is, going from Amsterdam to the villages, traveling along the city’s outskirts, past large industrial and factory buildings, across clusters of tall, balcony-filled apartment buildings, and then rows of trees towering alongside the road and beyond them fields and water canals and polders, where here and there stand an old-style windmill or a group of modern wind turbines.
* * *
My parents, Raphaels had told him, had to search a long time before they found me. It turns out that I had passed through several addresses, and they finally located me only by chance. My mother, he says, was sure from the very first moment that I was their son, but my father doubted it. Perhaps he continued thinking that I was some other people’s child all his life.… Raphaels also told him about Jews who returned from the war broken in body and soul but immediately set out on bicycle or on foot to search for their hidden children all across Holland. Many families who hid children never registered them with any proper authority, and many became attached to the children they had hidden and tried to hide them from their own flesh and blood so that they would stay with them.
Remember, Yoel, and never forget, his mother would tell him as a child: You’ve got a mother and you’ve got a sister and you’ve got yourself. That’s all; nothing else matters.
* * *
He gets off in the first village that the bus stops in and wanders here and there. The boy Leo lived in this place, or in a place like this place. His blue eyes saw these wide-open vistas, or wide-open vistas like these. He played on the banks of this canal, or on the banks of a canal like this one. And he returned through these picturesque alleys or ones like these to this shack, or to a shack like this one, where people like the people here raised him, through these picturesque alleys or ones just like them.
Is it not possible—unreasonable, perhaps, but still—is it not possible that one of these people is Leo himself? And he stares at every village man who seems to be at the age that Leo, if not dead, would be today. He searches the faces of each one for features similar to those of Sonia or Nettie. In the grocery store, where he goes to buy himself bread and yogurt, he recalls the words of the Talmud about the frequent similarity between a son and his mother’s brother, and it seems to him that the grocery-store owner is of the appropriate age and that he resembles Yisrael, Nettie’s deceased son. So he begins to interview the perplexed man in English, asking him about
the number of residents in this beautiful village, and if he was born and raised here, and does not relent until his interviewee gets tired of him and turns to converse in Dutch with the next customer in line.
* * *
Stop hallucinating, he tells himself as he exits the grocery store’s gloom into the glittering afternoon. There are dozens of villages in the immediate vicinity like this village, and many men of this age in them. Not to mention that there is no guarantee that Leo, if he lived, did not leave the village when he grew up and head to the city, where he may have walked, without even knowing it, in his biological father’s footsteps to become a doctor in a big hospital. Or he might have joined a traveling circus, why not, or emigrated from the Netherlands to another country. Or perhaps he did indeed die in childhood, perished with Martin and Anouk Rosso or perished separately from them, perished like so many other Jewish children.
58
He shaved his face. He got a haircut. He wore his tailored jacket and put on his cap.
Soon he will board the plane.
Soon he will return home.
* * *
On his last day in Amsterdam, he went to Vondelpark to say goodbye to the fallen tree. Then he bid farewell to the museums and communed at length with Jan Toorop’s sea, with Marc Chagall’s seven-fingered hand, and with Vincent van Gogh. As he passed through the space under the arches for the last time, a Bach partita for violin was playing as if especially for him. And in Obrechtstraat he saw, as the sun was setting, the young mother pedaling her bicycle with her daughter sitting in front of her, and he saw the girl saying something and the mother sliding her large hand over the child’s small head while riding slowly.