by John Irving
There were many older prostitutes working in the red-light district in those days—some in their sixties—and a lot of them worked in the ground-floor rooms surrounding the Old Church. The older women in the district might have been more easily moved by church music than their younger counterparts, although Donker admitted that a few of the younger prostitutes became overnight fans of Bach and Handel.
“You mean the prostitutes came to hear him play?” Alice asked.
Frans fidgeted on the organ bench; he slid to one side, then the other, on the smooth leather seat. (There’s that baby-powder smell again, Jack was thinking.)
Years later, the smell of baby powder would remind Jack of the prostitutes; he could almost see the tired women taking their makeup off and hanging the costumes of their profession in their small closets. They didn’t wear high heels or short skirts when they went home—or when they came to work in the morning or afternoon. Their street clothes were blue jeans or old slacks; their boots or heavy shoes had no heels to speak of, and they usually wore an unflattering but warm-looking coat and a wool hat. They didn’t look like prostitutes, except that it was two or three in the morning and what other sort of woman would be out at that time by herself?
What was it about the organ music that arrested them and held them captive in the red-light district for an hour or two longer? Frans Donker explained that there would usually be a dozen or more women in the Old Church, and that many of them stayed until William stopped playing; this was often as late as four or five in the morning, when the Oude Kerk was very cold.
William Burns had found his audience—he was playing to prostitutes!
“They certainly appreciated him,” the boy genius continued—with the authority that only a child prodigy, or a lunatic, possesses. “I occasionally got up at that time to hear him play myself. Each time I came, more women were here. He’s very good—William knows his Bach and Handel cold.”
“Forget the music,” Alice said again. “Just tell me what happened.”
“It seems that one of the women took him home with her—actually, more than one of them did.”
But that wasn’t what happened, or all that happened. (This time, blame the baby powder for Jack’s loss of concentration.)
The administration of the Oude Kerk probably believed it was unsavory—that William should be playing to prostitutes, not to mention consorting with them. After all, it was a church. They must have fired him, or something like that. And the prostitutes—a few of the older ones, anyway—made a fuss. There was a protest. Amsterdam was always having demonstrations. From the Krasnapolsky, Jack and Alice had seen their share of demonstrations in the Dam Square. It was the time of the hippies. Alice was tattooing a lot of peace symbols, and (often in the genital area of both boys and girls) that insipid slogan of the times Make love, not war. Surely one or more of the protests they witnessed were anti–Vietnam War demonstrations.
Maybe the prostitutes in the red-light district took William’s side and they took him in. “They saw him as a persecuted artist,” Frans Donker said. “Some of them see themselves that way.”
As for where William was now, the boy genius looked at Jack, not at Alice, when he spoke: “You’d have to ask the prostitutes. I’d start with the older ones.”
Alice knew which prostitutes to ask. They were mostly, but not all, the older ones; they were the women in the district who’d been conspicuously unfriendly.
“Thank you for your time,” Alice told the junior organist. She got up from the bench and held out her hand to Jack.
“Don’t you want me to play something for you?” Frans Donker asked. Jack’s mother was already pulling her son to the narrow stairs. They were in a kind of loft at the rear of the Old Church’s great hall, above and hidden from the congregation; the towering organ pipes rose for twenty feet or more above them.
“Play something William plays, if you want to,” Alice told the young organist. She had no intention of staying to listen.
As they were leaving, Jack saw Donker sprinkle the leather bench with baby powder. It was baby powder! The seat of the prodigy’s pants was covered with it. The powder helped him slide sideways along the bench. He couldn’t reach from one end of the three-tiered keyboard to the other without sliding left to right, and back again, on the slippery leather.
A wooden pediment rose over the keyboard; the wood was riddled with screw holes where the old brass fittings had fallen or been stripped away. The organist’s only view, beyond his music, was confined to a panel of stained glass. Everything surrounding Donker was old and worn, but none of this mattered when he began to play.
Alice could not escape the Oude Kerk in time. The deep sonority, the perfect tone placement, the responding antiphony, and the resounding echo—Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor—hit them hard as they were going down the stairs. Jack would long remember the wooden handrail on one side of their winding descent. What served as a handrail on the other side was a waxed rope the color of burned caramel; the rope was as thick as a man’s wrist.
They staggered out of the stairway as if the great sound had made them drunk. Alice was seeking a hasty exit from the church, but she made a wrong turn. They found themselves in the center aisle, facing the altars; now they were surrounded by the enormous noise.
In the middle of where the congregation normally sat was a bewildered gathering of tourists. A tour guide appeared to have been struck mute in midsentence—his mouth open, as if the Bach were coming from him. Whatever lecture he’d been delivering would have to wait for the toccata and fugue to be finished.
Outside on the Oudekerksplein, in the failing early-evening light, the prostitutes in their windows and doorways could hear the music, too. It was evident that they knew the piece Donker was playing; doubtless they’d listened to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor many times in the early-morning hours. By the prostitutes’ critical expressions, Jack and his mother knew that William played this piece better than young Frans.
Jack and Alice hurried away. It was no time to make inquiries of the unfriendly women—not while the music was playing. The great sound followed them to the Warmoesstraat; God’s holy noise pursued them past the police station. They were more than halfway to Tattoo Peter’s on the St. Olofssteeg before the vast organ was out of earshot.
Was William’s career as an organist in decline? Was he merely tuning organs, practicing but not performing—or performing only at unsociable hours to an unrefined audience? Or was it actually a privilege just to hear that vast organ in the Oude Kerk?
It was a sound both huge and holy. It compelled even prostitutes, who are disinclined to do anything without being paid, to give themselves over to it absolutely—to just listen.
7
Also Not on Their Itinerary
On November 9, 1939, Leith suffered its first German air raid. No damage was done to the port, but Alice’s mother miscarried in an overcrowded air-raid shelter. “It was back then that I should have been born,” Alice always said.
If Alice had been born “back then,” her mother might not have died in childbirth and Alice might never have met William Burns—or if she met him, she would have been as old as he was. “In which case,” she claimed, “I would have been impervious to his charms.” (Jack somehow doubted this, even as a child.)
If the boy couldn’t remember the name of the Surinamese prostitute who gave him a chocolate the color of her skin on either the Korsjespoortsteeg or the Bergstraat, he did remember that those two small streets, between the Singel and the Herengracht, were some distance from the red-light district—about a ten- or fifteen-minute walk—and the area was more residential and less seedy.
As to what rumor of William led Alice to make inquiries there, it was either Blond Nel or Black Lola who told her to consult The Bicycle Man, Uncle Gerrit. Black Lola was an older white woman whose hair was dyed jet-black, and Uncle Gerrit was a grouchy old man who did the prostitutes’ shopping on his bicycle. He carried a notebook
in which the women wrote down what they wanted for lunch or a snack. He objected to the girls who gave him too extensive a shopping list, and he refused to shop for tampons or condoms. (If there were a Tampon or Condom Man who did errands for the prostitutes, Jack and his mom never met him.)
The women teased Uncle Gerrit incessantly. He would stop shopping for a particular prostitute, just to punish her for teasing him—usually for only a couple of days. A rake-thin prostitute named Saskia was in the habit of asking Alice and Jack to buy her a sandwich. Saskia was a ceaselessly ravenous young woman, and Uncle Gerrit was always mad at her. She gave Jack or his mom the money for a ham-and-cheese croissant almost every time she saw them. When Jack and Alice passed by again, they would give Saskia the sandwich—provided she wasn’t with a customer.
Because Saskia was a popular prostitute, Jack got to eat a lot of ham-and-cheese croissants. Alice didn’t mind buying a sandwich for Saskia with her own money. Like many women in the red-light district, Saskia had a story to tell, and Alice was a good listener—that is, if you were a woman. (Women with sad stories seemed to know this about Alice, probably because they could see she was a sad story herself.)
Saskia had a two-man story. The first man to hurt her was a client who set fire to the poor girl in her room on the Bloedstraat. He tried to squirt her in the face with lighter fluid, but Saskia was able to shield her eyes and nose with her right forearm; she was badly burned, but only from her wrist to her elbow. When the wound healed, Saskia adorned her burn-scarred arm with bracelets. In the doorway of her room on the Bloedstraat, Saskia would extend the arm into the street and jingle her bracelets. It got your attention—you had to look at her. Saskia attracted a lot of customers that way.
She was too thin to be pretty—and she never opened her mouth when she smiled at a potential client, because her teeth were bad. “It’s a good thing prostitutes aren’t expected to kiss their customers,” she told Jack, “because no one would want to kiss me.” Then she grinned at the boy, showing him her broken and missing teeth.
“Maybe not around Jack,” Alice cautioned her.
There was something wildly alluring about Saskia, with those jingling bracelets all on one arm—her left arm, the unburned one, was bare. Maybe men thought she was a woman who would lose control of herself; possibly her aura of a damage more internal than her burned arm attracted them. You could see, like a flame, the hurt in her eyes.
The second man in Saskia’s two-man story was a client who beat her up because she wouldn’t take her bracelets off. He’d heard about her burn and wanted to see the scar. (At the time, Jack assumed this was a man in even more need of advice than the prostitutes’ usual customers.)
Saskia made such a wail that four other women on the Bloedstraat and three girls who worked around the corner on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal heard her and came to her rescue. They dragged the man in acute need of advice out on the Bloedstraat, where they whipped and gouged him with coat hangers and hit him with a plumber’s helper—all this before one of the women got a clean shot at his head with the metal drain plug of a bidet, with which she beat him bloody. He was senseless and raving, and no doubt still in need of advice, when the police came and took him away.
“That was what happened to your teeth?” Jack asked Saskia.
“That’s right, Jack,” she said. “I show my burn scar only to people I like. Would you and your mom like to see it?”
“Of course,” the boy replied.
“Only if we’re not imposing,” Alice answered.
“You’re not imposing at all,” Saskia said.
She took them into her small room, closing the door and the curtains as if Jack and his mother were her customers. Jack was astonished by how little furniture there was in the room—just a single bed and a night table. The lighting was low—only one lamp, with a red glass shade. The wardrobe closet was without a door; mostly underwear hung there, and a whip like a lion tamer would use.
There was a sink, and the kind of white enamel table you might expect to see in a hospital or a doctor’s office. The table was piled high with towels, one of which was spread out on the bed—in case the men in need of advice were wearing wet clothes, Jack imagined. There was no place to sit except on the bed, which was an odd place to give or get advice, Jack thought, but it seemed natural enough to Saskia, who sat down on the bed and invited Jack and Alice to sit down beside her.
One by one, she took her bracelets off and handed them to Jack. In the red glow from the lamp with the glass shade, the boy and his mom examined the wrinkled, raw-looking surface of Saskia’s scar, which resembled a scalded chicken neck. “Go on, Jack—you can touch it,” she said. He did so reluctantly.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“Not anymore,” Saskia replied.
“Do your teeth hurt?” the boy inquired.
“Not the missing ones, Jack.” One by one, she let him put her bracelets back on; he was careful to do it in the right order, biggest to smallest.
Who could refuse to bring that thin, hungry girl a sandwich? Jack despised Uncle Gerrit, The Bicycle Man, for being so mad at Saskia that he refused to shop for her. But the cranky old prostitute-shopper had his reasons. He’d often parked his bicycle outside the Oude Kerk in the early-morning hours; he had more than once slipped into a pew in the Old Church and listened to the elevating music. Uncle Gerrit was a William Burns fan. Maybe Saskia wasn’t.
“You should talk to Femke,” The Bicycle Man said to Alice. “I was the one who told William to see her! Femke knows what’s best for the boy!”
While this made no sense to Jack, he could tell that Uncle Gerrit was mad at his mother, too. Jack and his mom were standing on the Stoofsteeg as The Bicycle Man pedaled away. He turned the corner and pedaled past the Casa Rosso, where they showed porn films and had live-sex shows—not that Jack had a clue what they were. (More advice-giving, for all he knew.)
The prostitute in the doorway at the end of the Stoofsteeg was named Els. Jack thought she was about his mother’s age, or only a little older. She had always been friendly. She’d grown up on a farm. Els told Jack and his mom that she expected she would one day see her father or her brothers in the red-light district. And wouldn’t they be surprised to see her in a window or a doorway? She would not ask them in, she said. (They were somehow beyond advising, Jack assumed.)
“Who’s Femke?” Jack asked his mom.
Els said: “I’ll tell you Femke’s story.”
“Maybe not around Jack,” Alice said.
“Come in and we’ll see if I can tell it in a way that won’t offend Jack,” Els said. As it turned out, either Els or Alice would tell Femke’s story in a way that totally confused the boy.
Els always wore a platinum-blond wig. Jack had never seen her real hair. When she put her big arm around Jack’s shoulders and pulled his face against her hip, he could feel how strong she was—like you’d expect a former farm girl to be. And Els had the bust and the announcing décolletage of an opera singer; her bosom preceded her with the authority of a great ship’s prow. When a woman like that says she’ll tell you a story, you better pay attention.
But Jack was instantly distracted; to his surprise, Els’s room was very much like Saskia’s. Once again, there was no place to sit except on the bed, on which there was a towel spread out, and so the three of them sat there. Alice needn’t have been concerned that Femke’s story was not-around-Jack material. The boy was mesmerized by the prostitute’s room and her gigantic breasts. Jack couldn’t comprehend what Els had to say about Femke, who he thought was a relative newcomer to the advice-giving business. Confusingly, Femke was also the well-heeled ex-wife of an Amsterdam lawyer. Maybe they’d been partners in the same law firm—all Jack heard was something about a family law practice. And then the plot thickened: Femke had discovered that her husband made frequent visits to the more upscale prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg and the Bergstraat. She’d been a faithful wife, but she made Dutch divorce history in
more than the alimony department.
Femke bought a prominent room on the Bergstraat, on the corner of the Herengracht; it was unusual for a prostitute’s room in that it had a basement window and the door was at the bottom of a small flight of stairs. Both the doorway and the window were below sidewalk level, so that pedestrians looked down at the prostitute, who was also visible from a passing car.
Was Femke so enraged that she would actually buy a room for prostitution and rent the space to a working prostitute—thus, eventually, making a profit from the sordid enterprise that had wrecked her marriage? Or did she have something more mischievous in mind? That Femke herself appeared in the basement window or the doorway on the Bergstraat, and that a few of her first clients were business associates of her former husband—including some gentlemen who had known the couple socially—was certainly a shock. (Apparently not to Femke—she was aware that she was attractive to most men, if not to her ex-husband.)
She was met with mixed reviews from her fellow prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg and the Bergstraat. Her very public triumph over her former husband was much admired, and while it was appreciated that Femke had become an activist for prostitutes’ rights—after all, she was a woman whose convictions, which were so bravely on display, had to be respected—she was herself not a real prostitute, or so some prostitutes (Els among them) believed.
Femke certainly didn’t need the money; she could afford to be choosy, and she was. She turned many clients down—a luxury unknown to those women working in the red-light district and the prostitutes in their windows or doorways on the Korsjespoortsteeg and the Bergstraat. Furthermore, the customers Femke turned down were humiliated. The first-timers might have thought that all the prostitutes were as likely to reject them. A few of Femke’s fellow sex workers on the Bergstraat claimed that she hurt their business more directly. Not only was Femke the most sought-after of the prostitutes on the street, but when she spurned a client—in full view of her near neighbors in their doorways and windows on the Bergstraat—the ashamed man was sure to take his business to another street. (He didn’t want to be in the company of a woman who’d seen Femke turn him down.)