by Peter Ferry
“Tom, I can’t guarantee—”
“I know, I know.” He wondered what there could be beyond eighty-seven, or eighty-six, for that matter, but wheel chairs and drool cups and daytime TV. No, he thought, perhaps he’d had about enough.
Tom was happy everyone had come to the picnic, and now he was happy they had gone, had left him alone with his thoughts, his memories, and his lake. He examined this contradiction, turning it in his mind as he might a pebble between his thumb and forefinger. Yes, he liked to be with other people but never as much as he liked being by himself. Had Tony been the only exception to this rule, or had Sarah once been one as well? He wasn’t quite sure. In fact he wasn’t sure at all. It occurred to him once more that he was drawing to an inside straight, gambling everything on a long shot. But what was everything? Very little, really. The residue of his life. “Not much skin in the game,” he said aloud. To his children, his friends, the world itself, even me, I suppose, he was only a diversion or a reference point or occasionally a consultant. “Dad, do you remember the name of that electrician we used to use?” He wanted to be important one more time. He wanted to be needed. He wanted to be essential. Maybe that was why Roger Daugherty kept on going to the office.
It occurred to him that he’d never see Roger again. But that’s okay, he thought. That’s okay. Time to say some good-byes. Finally he hoisted himself from the pink chair for the last time, went into the house, put on Schubert’s Mass in G, and listened to its soaring strings as he packed his bag.
Brabant, Summer 2007
Tom stood on the wide apron in front of the Eindhoven train station amidst a thousand parked bicycles, getting his bearings. Everything was different. There were a few old buildings, but he recognized none of them. Maybe one and a distant church spire. Otherwise the buildings looked like vacuum tubes in an old radio designed by the engineers at Philips who ran the town. Traffic flowed as if on circuit boards, and the engineers themselves went by on their tall bicycles, their briefcases bungeed behind them, their ties pinned to their shirtfronts.
Tom took a taxi to Veldhoven, but the rutted farmers’ lane that had once led across the fields and pastures and between the horse farms was now a highway and an overpass that quite suddenly deposited him in the center of the village in front of the church and across from the hotel. Both were still there even if the old, narrow road between them was now a wide street. These days the hotel was for pensioners and commercial travelers. He rented a plain, quiet room in the back, and the owner’s son brought his bag up. That afternoon he wandered around the town. He sat in the park. He walked along the little canals, crossing and crossing again the footbridges. He couldn’t find the café that had once been the town center. Very little seemed familiar.
In the morning there were fresh fruit, breads, meats, and cheeses, and the owner poured Tom a cup of tea. Tom asked him for directions to the tourist office and the public market, and the man came back with a tourist map and a pen. Tom asked if he could recommend a lawyer who spoke English.
“They all speak English,” he said but wrote down a name and an address. “This is a good one. Have you been here before?”
“A long time ago. During the war.”
“Are you American, then?”
“Yes. I was a supply officer. I spent some time here.”
Jan Dekker, the attorney, asked him the same questions. “You know,” he said, “on September 17 people show American flags. People have not forgotten, especially the old ones.” He smiled. He was a strikingly handsome man with a strong jaw, a thin nose, very blue eyes, and thick blond hair that was neatly parted on the side and swept back dramatically from his forehead. He had a bodybuilder’s shoulders and arms, but when he stood up he was surprisingly short. He looked like a small movie star.
“I’m looking for someone I knew back then. A Dutch woman. Her name was Sarah van Praag.”
Dekker wrote it down.
“She was a teacher of English, and she worked for me as a translator. This was her address back then. I don’t think the house is still there; at least, I can’t find it. I haven’t communicated with her since 1947. Also, I need some advice. I think I am being followed.” He saw doubt creep into the other man’s eyes. “I’m here, you see, against my children’s wishes. I imagine they’ll try to find a way to force me to return to the United States. I want to know if they can do that.”
“Well,” said Jan Dekker carefully, “not really unless you commit a crime. Not unless you have not enough money. If you live by the conditions of your visa, well, then, ja, you have most of the legal rights and protections of a Dutch citizen.”
Tom told the young woman in the tourist office that he was looking for a room to rent for several weeks. She gave him two leads. Dickie Druyf lived on the top floor of an apartment block on the edge of town. His flat was spacious and airy with big windows that overlooked the farms and fields. Tom’s room would be small but clean and bright. Dickie was a genteel man with Einstein hair and an improbably deep voice who talked too much but did so in perfect but dated public school English, as if he had learned every bit of it by watching old David Niven movies. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a garden, and he seemed a little too eager.
Mrs. Waleboer had a large, fastidiously kept garden behind her row house, which Tom’s second-floor room would overlook and in which he noticed a brown-and-white spaniel asleep on its side in the sun. Mrs. Waleboer was a shy, plain young woman of about thirty who wore an apron and worked in a nearby frites stand. She spoke almost no English. She and Tom toured the house and garden, communicating by smile and pantomime. In the living room she picked up a framed photograph of two little girls in pigtails. They were perhaps seven and five. She pointed toward the children’s bedroom that they had looked into upstairs. She did not show him a photograph of a man, although she was wearing a wedding ring. Tom liked Mrs. Waleboer and her house but thought he would need someone who spoke at least some English. The next morning he wasn’t as sure. He realized that he’d have the house to himself much of the day. Also, he had dreamt of waking up in the room that would be his, of stepping through a door the room didn’t have right into the garden, of sitting in a lawn chair he hadn’t seen, reading and listening to an Albinoni oboe concerto.
He went back to the young woman in the tourist office and asked questions about Mrs. Waleboer. “Her husband was a soldier. He was killed in an accident. Very sad. As for her, she is a countrywoman. She grew up on a farm. She is uneducated but neat and clean, and she needs the money.”
He asked the young woman to help him write a series of questions in Dutch:
“May I cook?”
“May I sit in the garden?”
“May I listen to music a little loud, for I am hard of hearing?”
“May I do laundry?”
“May I bathe each day?”
“May I drink beer and wine?”
Mrs. Waleboer stood in her doorway still wearing an apron and read the list of questions. “Ja,” she said. “Ja, ja, ja, ja, ja.” Then she clapped her hands once and laughed aloud. Tom liked that. He moved in that afternoon. He cranked the windows in his room open as he unpacked and listened to the Albinoni piece he’d dreamt of. Then he sat on his bed and smelled the spicy, fresh garden scents. He felt some satisfaction. He wanted to tell someone that he had an address and a phone number, but there was no one to tell. The lawyer. He called the number on Jan Dekker’s card and left the information. Soon Tom would e-mail me.
Tom’s reverie was broken by the sound of the children coming home. He went downstairs to meet them, to shake their small hands. Ilse was a beautiful child with big brown eyes and perfect skin. Nienke was a fireplug with pudgy arms, cropped hair, and thick red plastic glasses.
The market began to appear early Monday morning near the city center. It came out of caravans and car trunks: tables, tents, display cases, boxes and bags of merchandise. The process was nearly soundless and perhaps automatic, as if, like so many things in Hollan
d, Tom remembered, it had been done over and over again for generations. If everyone in the country didn’t quite know everyone else, they at least knew the rules: where to stand, what to bring, when to show up, what to say.
There was an aisle of clothing, an aisle for the truck farmers with piles of peppers, tomatoes, carrots, onions, peaches, pears, and plums. There were cheese vendors with their big rounds of belegen jong to oud. There were tables of tools, others of CDs and DVDs, others of bike accessories: bells, mirrors, seats, locks. There was a caravan that sold little cardboard boats of fried fish and frites, and one that sold deep-fried Vietnamese snacks with lines of tangy red sauce squirted across them. There were gypsies selling inexpensive jewelry and Ukrainians selling tie-dyed t-shirts.
Tom spent the day in the market and was in the café across the street when the market began to be disassembled late in the afternoon. Had he really thought that he would see Sarah van Praag? The very notion suddenly seemed absurd. But of course he hadn’t. He had never really thought that—not even years ago, not even before Tony’s death, certainly not before Julia’s. No, he had told himself from the very beginning that she would not be there. She would be dead. She would be lost in time, forgotten, living in Rotterdam or England or Boise, Idaho, for all he knew. Or if she were here, she’d be happily married to someone like Dickie Druyf and have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Or she would be very fat with sour breath.
Or, and this was much more likely, upon seeing her he would instantly know in his heart why they had quarreled that day and why they could never be together. Then what would that mean? That he had spent his whole life waiting for a moment that had long since passed or, perhaps, never been? That he had really been the fool and dreamer Julia had always thought him to be, that the real illusion was that he could not find a way to love Julia? That she had been waiting all through the years for him to turn to her and smile, to touch her cheek with the back of his fingers, to push her hair aside and whisper something in her ear in just that way he could never find that would make her eyes smile, her head nod, her hand touch her mouth? He could have sold cars. Why not? Other men did. Whatever made him think that he was too good for that life? He could have played golf and laughed at bad jokes. He laughed at Mike McIntyre’s, for God’s sake; he laughed at Tony’s.
“How many cow tails does it take to reach the moon?”
“One if it’s long enough.”
He had laughed at that one very hard. What was the difference? And what in the world after all these years could ever have tempted him to think she would be doing the same thing in the same place on the same day of the week?
Then he saw her, or thought that just maybe he did. Maybe he wanted so badly to see her that the slim woman who had strode past the open door, whom he glimpsed in profile for no more than a second or two, looked like her in his mind or looked like he had dreamt she would look. “Sarah!” he blurted out. “Sarah van Praag!,” loud enough that people at the other tables looked at him. So did the passing woman, if only for a moment, before disappearing into a bank of shoppers. No. She was moving much too fast or at least purposefully to be browsing, to be Sarah’s age, to be someone who wasn’t hell-bent on something. But yes, certainly; it was that last twitch of her hips before he lost sight of her that fired a sixty-year-old synapse somewhere in his brain.
He left money on the table and quickly stepped outside, but it was still too late. His exhilaration turned to frenzy as he hurried up and down the aisles of the market, chasing one woman after another whose hair was also in a bun, jacket also dark, pace also quick, and then to utter fatigue as his adrenaline waned and he realized he had lost her. In fact, he could barely make it home; his legs were heavy, his feet leaden. He stumbled and almost fell. He thought again that he should probably get a cane; he would be done if he broke his hip. How ironic would that be just now?
Of course he’d thought he’d find Sarah van Praag. Whom was he kidding? He’d counted on it. He’d counted on it for years, no matter how many times he’d told himself he wasn’t counting on it. And by God, he’d found her; he refused to entertain the notion that it had been too easy, that it was too good to be true. Instead he focused on what to do next. His mind spun with ideas.
Absently he cooked for the first time that evening. The day before, he had gone with some trepidation to the Albert Heijn grocery store near the center of the town. He would just look, he told himself. He would push a cart around and look, get a feel for the place. But the carts were all hooked together by short chains. He tried to separate two carts. Hmmm. “Why is everything so damn hard?” he asked himself. Then he moved a few feet away and stood against the wall, waiting for the next shopper. A woman hurried up and slipped a half-euro piece into a slot on the cart, freeing it and pushed it into the store. He looked around to see if anyone was watching and shook his head, dug a coin out of his pocket, and freed the next cart. A lot of money to use a shopping cart, he thought. Later, when he returned it and reattached the chain, he didn’t see that the coin had popped free until the next shopper caught him by the arm and handed it to him. “Oh,” he said.
A similar thing happened the first time he used the washing machine. Mrs. Waleboer had pantomimed the procedure in the upstairs closet where the machine was located: one, two, three, four. She did it again. “Ja,” he said, “ja.” But the next day he went through the steps and the machine didn’t start. He was kneeling helplessly in front of it when Ilse came by and said something he didn’t understand but recognized as a question. “Ja,” he answered. She reached over his shoulder, pushed a big red button the size of a quarter, and skipped away. The machine began to churn. Then he couldn’t get up. He had to walk on his knees down the hall to the staircase, work himself into a sitting position, slide his legs around and down the steps, and use the handrail to hoist himself back onto his unsteady feet. Good Lord.
Now, after Mrs. Waleboer and the girls had eaten, he boiled pasta, fried bacon, mixed them with egg and cheese, and ate dinner with two big glasses of wine he hoped would put him to sleep. They didn’t. All night he thought or dreamt of Sarah. In the morning he sat in the garden, absently rubbing the ears of the dog, whose name he still didn’t know. “Good boy.” He looked at the tag on the dog’s collar. “Leo. Is that your name?” The dog cocked his ears. “Leo, how would you like to help me find Sarah van Praag?”
For two days he followed Leo all over town. He looked at everyone he passed. He looked in every car that passed him. He looked through doors as they opened and as they closed. He sat on benches in busy places while Leo lay at his feet. On the third day they passed into a broad green park that separated one housing block from another. There was a children’s playground. There were chessboards stenciled on molded concrete tables and some men clustered. One of them said in a deep voice, “De oude Amerikaan,” as Tom passed him, and he understood and a few paces farther on realized it was the man with thick white hair in the modern flat from whom he’d thought of renting a room. On his way back, he said, “The old Dutchman.”
Dickie Druyf looked up and grinned at him. “You speak Dutch, old boy.”
“No, no.”
“You know, that’s what they’re calling you: the old American.”
“Who?”
“People. Everyone. It’s a provincial town, you see. You’re quite famous. There are rumors about you.”
“Really?”
“Rather. They say you were here in the war. They say you’ve come to look for a lost love, old boy.”
Tom was alarmed, not that people would know but that they could know. Was he so transparent? He felt invaded and embarrassed. The next afternoon Dickie Druyf was in the park again, this time with his own dog. He was tossing a stick. The two men nodded to each other. After a while Tom said, “Let me ask you something. Why did you say what you said yesterday?”
The man shrugged.
“I mean, isn’t it unlikely that I’d come looking for someone after sixty years?”
“I suppose.”
“And that she’d still be here?”
“Yes, but then we don’t move about like you do in the States, you know. I’m sure more than half the people who live in Veldhoven were born here. The old ones, at least.”
Then maybe this wasn’t so far-fetched after all. “Do you, by any chance, know a woman named Sarah van Praag?” Tom asked.
“Sarah van Praag? No,” Dickie answered. “No one by that name.”
Tom didn’t want to let the man go quite yet. “May I ask you a question? Are you English?”
“No, no. Hundred percent Dutch, but I studied in England, and I worked as a translator and editor.”
A week went by, and Tom’s search slowed. Sarah was a watched kettle. He knew she was here. He knew she would reappear. And he knew he had to look away. He must be patient. In the meantime, he began to look for Dickie in the park; it was nice to speak his own language with someone who seemed like a native speaker. He fancied that the other man began to look for him, too. “Do you play chess?” Dickie asked one day. They agreed to meet the next day for a game, but when Tom got home, there was a note bearing the lawyer’s name and a phone number that Mrs. Waleboer had left taped to his door. It was too late to call. He went to bed but not to sleep. In the morning he was at Dekker’s door before it opened. When he was shown into the office, the lawyer came around his desk and shook Tom’s hand.
“And how is your living place?”
He said he liked it. He asked if Dekker had any information.
“Ja. I am afraid you are to be disappointed. I am afraid Sarah van Praag died long ago. Only a little after the war. I am very sorry.”
Tom was flabbergasted. “But I’ve seen her. She’s here. I know she is.”