The Book of Jonah: A Novel

by Feldman, Joshua Max

  She stared down one end of the street, turned her head to look to the opposite end. Then she said to him, “You asked before what I did?” He nodded. “I work for a shell company that’s secretly buying property in downtown Las Vegas for one of the biggest casino developers in the country.”

  “So you buy out, like, bankrupt condo developments?” he asked after a moment.

  “Right now I’m buying out a church,” she said simply.

  Jonah frowned at this. “Why’d you tell me that?”

  “Because I wanted you to know what I was really like.”

  He studied her carefully composed face—and then he did understand something new about her, though he doubted it was what she’d assumed, or intended. Characteristics that had seemed so strangely incongruous in her—the aggressively styled hair, the luxury accessories, the remarkably unremarkable nose—suddenly fell into place. She was wearing a costume: She was dressed up as a Las Vegas real estate investor.

  It was getting later in the afternoon—the air was becoming colder, the mist thickening. He saw that she’d started to shiver a little in her trench coat. “You’re sure we’ve never met before?” he asked.

  “No, Jonah,” she said. “We don’t know each other.” She continued, “I have to go back to my hotel for my things. I’m leaving for the airport soon.”

  He supposed she’d be able to find her own way to her hotel. But then, why should he feel so reluctant to ask? Either way, she would be out of his life forever in twenty minutes. As she’d just said: She had a plane to catch. “You know which way to go?”

  She worked the fingers of the fist at her side. “My hotel is near the train station.”

  “If you want, I can show you.”

  And, after a pause, she said, “Okay.” (In later months, back in Las Vegas, she would wonder why she had agreed to this offer—which he had obviously been so reluctant to make, and she had been so disinclined to accept. She supposed, in the end, there had been some refusal with regard to each other that they had not yet been prepared to make—though that refusal would come soon enough.)

  Jonah led her to Prinsengracht, the outermost canal of the Canal Ring, and then they started back northward. It was not the most direct path to the train station—but he figured if he was walking her, he might as well take a route he liked. Trees, their foliage still green, lined both sides of the canal; brightly colored rowboats and tarp-covered speedboats were tied in long rows at the edge. They didn’t speak as they retraced their path back up the clock face of the city, though the silence was more comfortable now. He sensed they were both able to enjoy this stroll up a charming Dutch street on the most straightforward terms, and were capable of enjoying it this way because they both knew it would soon be over.

  They crossed Westermarkt, the western continuation of Radhuisstraat, and as they resumed their course northeast, Jonah’s nose started to hurt. It didn’t often anymore, except when the weather was like this: cold, and wet. He might have asked her if hers did, even after having had the surgery, but he didn’t think it was worth breaking their mutually sustained silence to find out. She walked, as before, with her face down, arms now folded across her chest—the one fist clenched tightly in the crook of the other arm.

  They went up a bridge arching over Bloemgracht, a canal that branched off to the west. Then, at the top of this bridge, Judy stopped; looking across to the opposite side of the water, she asked him, “What’s that?”

  He looked over. “The Anne Frank House.”

  It was a nondescript building—handsome, but in the same way as every other building on the street: three stories of dark brick, large black-and-white casement windows. It would have been difficult to pick out if not for the long line of tourists waiting outside—carrying guidebooks, umbrellas, a cluster near the front in matching rain slickers. Jonah had never been inside the house: hadn’t gone during his college trip, had seen absolutely no advantage to going now. It wasn’t far from the houseboat, though, and he passed it fairly frequently, usually without giving it much attention. He regarded it mostly as another place Max went to meet women. But Judy seemed to have taken an interest in it—moved up to the bridge’s metal railing to study it. He watched as her head followed the line of tourists stretching down the block, around the corner. “What do you think it is they’re looking for?” she said.

  He was inclined at first not to answer—but, finally, he knew what she meant. “You know how it is, half of tourism is just saying you’ve been there,” he said. “You go, you take a couple pictures, you cross the name off the list. I remember after 9/11, seeing tourists posing for photos in front of the rubble at Ground Zero before it had even stopped smoking. Smiling, even.”

  “You were in New York then?” she asked, still looking across the water.

  “Yeah, but, y’know, fifty blocks away,” he said. “Still, it was shitty. Where were you?”

  “College,” she answered.

  She was young, then—or not even young, only younger than him. He’d been just out of college himself, dating Zoey for the first time—by September, breaking up with Zoey for the first time. She’d lived on Christopher Street then, and that far south you could smell it in the air: electrical burning and God knew what else. Outside her subway stop, one of the vendors who had appeared in the city as if by spontaneous generation to sell bullshit gewgaws and commemorative bumper stickers would set out his wares every night. “Remember! Remember! One dollar! Remember!” the vendor would repeat, sing-song, as Jonah came up the subway steps. And then he and Zoey would spend the next five hours fighting and crying, while on television they showed as if on a loop the towers burning, the towers falling—or else people jumping, some holding on to sheets, like they hoped they could just sail away. Here was another set of thoughts he didn’t like to revisit—not now, and even less when he’d been sitting at his desk on the twenty-ninth floor of 813 Lexington. Yes, he thought: shitty.

  He began to study the line of tourists himself: the rowdy college students, possibly or probably high; the Chinese tour group ranged behind a woman holding up a purple umbrella. Maybe the point of visiting these places was so that you didn’t have to remember—or rather, it made the memory manageable—finite. You paid your visit, you spent your thirty minutes, and then you were allowed to head to the next site—you lived your life as though these things didn’t happen anymore: belonged to some other time, some other place.

  He spotted him!—in the back of the line!—grinning—tapping his nose—

  But it was just a man in Hasidic garb—a normal Hasid, as it were—shuffling forward to fill a gap in the line ahead of him. Jonah saw that he had grabbed onto the railing—as if he might leap over the side, or he feared a wave was coming to sweep him off. He’d dropped the cigarette he was smoking, too—fumbled in his pockets for another, dropped the box, and the cigarettes spilled out into the canal, floated away.

  He could sense Judy’s eyes on him. But he felt so distressed and ashamed by what had just occurred he couldn’t look back. He waited for what she would say. All she said, though, was, “Why don’t we keep going?” Then she headed off the bridge. After a moment he followed her—the line of tourists still shuffling one by one into the Anne Frank House.

  Regular gusts of wind had started up—blowing water from the trees, shaking the boats in the canal against the side. She was shivering again. “It isn’t too much farther,” he told her. “We cross over at Herenstraat, and then the train station’s right up the street.” She nodded. “Look, about what happened on the bridge,” he began, suddenly identifying something—unwanted, in their silences. “It’s just, I have bad dreams sometimes.”

  “What about?” she asked.

  He heard her teeth chattering behind her lips. “There’s someone chasing me.”

  “Freud said we’re everyone in our dreams.”

  Jonah thought about this. “I think Freud and I had very different experiences of puberty.” And she laughed, fully, for the first time
since he’d met her: clear, surprisingly light, mezzo-soprano, like her voice.

  They passed a bench at the edge of the canal, before which no boats were tied. “Can we sit for a bit?” she asked.

  “You don’t need to get to the airport?”

  “I have a few minutes.”

  They sat down, the wind driving ripples up the canal before them. He could still hear the faint clicking of her teeth. He unbuttoned his coat and put it around her shoulders. She hesitated, then pulled the lapels closed around her, pinching one with the thumb and forefinger of her closed fist. “Thank you,” she said. But then she seemed to feel the need to compose herself—sat up a little on the bench, pulled the coat straighter over her chest. “You’re probably disappointed we won’t have time to fuck,” she said tersely.

  He stared at her, startled—offended, even. “You think that’s what I wanted? Is that what you wanted?”

  “What more could this have been?” she replied.

  He thought of what her cousin had said about her, about never getting over it; he thought of it like a warning. But he asked her anyway, “How did you end up in Las Vegas?”

  “Everyone ends up somewhere, don’t they?” she answered after a moment. “How did you end up in Amsterdam?”

  And Jonah wanted to tell her the whole story—not the despairing, truncated version he’d told Max: He wanted her to know all of it, fully. But then it seemed too much to begin, he wasn’t sure there’d be enough time—he worried she wouldn’t believe him. His nose was aching by now, his hands nearly numb. He shoved them into the pockets of his jeans. He could see Judy, even in his coat, still shivering—as if even between the two of them there wasn’t warmth enough for either one. He leaned forward, and she slid from out of the corner of his eye. What was he waiting for? he asked himself. What was he hiding from?

  He turned around to look at her and was struck by how small she appeared: her blond head poking above the coat, bulging in empty folds around her torso. A faint blueness had entered her lips. Behind the bench up the street, he saw a bakery, not unlike the one on Lindengracht he visited. “How about I go get us some coffee?” he offered. “Help warm us up a little bit for the rest of the walk?” She nodded, and Jonah hurried across the street.

  * * *

  When he had gone, Judith tucked her elbows closer against her sides, crossed her legs at the ankles, pulled them underneath her on the bench. It seemed to her like some strange indictment that she’d traveled so far from where she now lived and only here met someone so easily recognizable. He was intelligent, he had gone to a good liberal arts college, he was a Jew who had been raised in the Northeast. He was familiar. More than that: She liked him. But then, who was she kidding? she thought. He had been nice to her—and these days, that was all it took.

  She took her fist out of the coat—she unfolded the balled-up Polaroid that she’d pulled from the wall of Margaretha’s exhibit, smoothed its creases as best she could over her thigh. Margaretha probably assumed she’d taken the picture and stormed out because she was offended that the photograph had been included as part of the show. But it hadn’t been that. The shock of it had been that when she first saw this image of a young girl in a white dress, standing on a grassy lawn—to which Margaretha had seen fit to add a crucifix in the background, a crown of thorns around the girl’s head—she hadn’t recognized that the girl in the picture was her.

  Now looking at it a second time, there was a second, passing disbelief, like a momentarily obscuring cloud. But she knew—this was her: standing on the lawn of the house she’d grown up in, at the party on the day of her graduation from high school. There was the unflattering white dress she’d worn, the garland of gardenias in her black, wiry former hair, her overlarge, unbroken former nose—all of it as it had been when Margaretha had pulled the camera out of her knit purse that afternoon in June 2001.

  She thought of the hotel room in New Jersey, where she’d gone after leaving Princeton—the compromises she had made, had been so deliberate in making, in order to leave that room: The Septembers passed now without her noticing; she didn’t suffer so much from the lack of companionship in her life; she had even made a fine career for herself, first sitting behind desks in Los Angeles art galleries, lately engaged in far-different activities. It was to that girl’s credit all she had managed to leave behind in that room. She only wished she had held on to the journal she’d kept then. She would have liked to encounter that girl, at least one last time. She knew there were not many of these revenant Judiths left for her to run into.

  She licked her thumb, and tried to wipe away Margaretha’s dumb embellishments. She succeeded only in smudging the colors of the forehead beneath the crude crown of thorns. But even so: In the face of this girl—formal, somewhat self-conscious, looking back at her from across an ocean of years—she could see, could feel in the texture of the memory it elicited, not just the immediate pride of the moment, or the luxurious gratitude the girl felt for everything in her life, but most potently of all, the promise she sensed in everything to come: the unquestioned faith that ahead of her, beyond this afternoon, beyond the passing discomfort of posing for this picture—was so much more—

  * * *

  Jonah came out of the bakery, carrying two cups of coffee; he had packets of sugar in his pocket, in case that was how she took it. As he approached the bench, he saw she was shaking violently—at first he thought with chills, but then he recognized with sobs.

  Here it was, then: everything she had never gotten over. And wasn’t it like this for everyone? Scratch beneath the barest surface, and you found it—could see it: that gaping need.

  And then Jonah saw the street before him—Amsterdam—engulfed in scorching sunlight—felt the furnace heat of it on his face—the sun burning the moisture from the air—heat rising in waves from the cobbles, the shingles on the rooftops smoldering—the canal dry, its stone bed cracked—the boats tipped sideways into it, ropes tying them impotently to their moorings. And she sat there in the midst of it—eyes sunken, tongue swollen, lips parted and cracked—her hair abuzz with flies—so thin the coat seemed to fold shapelessly against itself—shaking with tearless sobs. He sensed there were others—hidden in attics, huddled beneath the bridges—but he saw only her—the undulating waves of heat rising from the cobbles thicker, faster—distorting what he saw—she was there, she was gone—she was white as a pillar of salt—and before he could take another breath she had vanished—became indiscernible among the rising heat, the searing sunlight. Then the light became duller, weakened into the gray of the clouds—the canal grew placid and darkly green, and he saw people walking into the bakery behind him, carrying umbrellas across the half-moon bridges over the water. And there was Judith, crying.

  He remembered her—he knew her. He had seen her before, in the photograph on the bookcase in Becky’s apartment, the night of Becky’s party. She was the woman he had thought of when it all began. This was Judith.

  He knew it could have been anyone: an apocalypse could occur in any life, any two lives could meet in a doorway. But she was the one he had seen, she was the one sitting on a bench, crying—waiting for him. Go there, he thought. Go there and offer—something. Was she not, in her way, soaking wet, just like him?

  He recognized he had come to this point again—was faced again, with this leap. He dropped the coffees and ran away up the street.

  And in the only instance of moral judgment in the entire period of what might be called his prophecy, Jonah would conclude that if such a thing as sin existed, then this had been it.

  * * *

  It had started to rain again by the time Jonah arrived back at the houseboat. He heard music from below as he descended the steps at the bow, sounds of laughter. He came down into the main living area—a rectangular room with a low ceiling, filled almost to the walls by a great central table of rough-hewn wood. Max was seated at this table with two young women Jonah didn’t recognize—and even if one of them hadn’t been abs
ently leafing through a copy of Lonely Planet Europe, even if they hadn’t both been wearing North Face jackets (red and blue, respectively), he believed they would have been easily identifiable as American tourists. He detected a distinctly American freshness, an eagerness, in the frank prettiness of their faces, in the practicality of their pulled-back hair, even in the cheerfully colored Post-its sticking out of the guidebook.

  “Rabbi!” Max cried amiably. He and the young woman nearest him at the table—round-faced, her hair brown with blond highlights, wearing the red North Face jacket—were playing a card game, an ashtray with two burning joints between them. An iPod dock on the table filled the room with something light and poppy. “Joints and Uno, Rabbi,” Max said. “What could be better? Deal you in?”

  The woman in the red North Face jacket regarded Jonah with amusement. “He’s not actually a rabbi, though, is he?” she asked.

  Max frowned at Jonah with concern. “You didn’t do any ritual bathing in a canal, did you? And what happened to the Battleship Potemkin coat?”

  Jonah looked down at himself. His sweater and jeans were soaked; he touched his beard and felt water dripping from it. It must have been raining harder than he’d noticed. “I…” he began, but didn’t know what he was trying to say. He saw that his hands were shaking. He sat heavily in a chair at the table, shoved them under his thighs.

  “He’s not actually a rabbi, though?” he heard the red North Face repeat as he stared down at the grain of the wood table, the undulations and swirls of the darker lines across the surface.

  “Not technically,” Max answered. “But he suffers from a rare affliction. He believes in God.”

  “I believe in God,” the red North Face said.

  “No, no,” Max corrected her. “He doesn’t believe in the warm feeling you get after you do yoga. He believes in God in the old, obsolete way: old white man, long white beard.”

  “Okay, so he’s just, like, really traditional,” the red North Face said, satisfied. Then she added, singsongy, “Draw two, skip you.”