House on Endless Waters

Emuna Elon, Anthony Berris, Linda Yechiel, Anthony Berris, Linda Yechiel

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781911630586
• eBook ISBN: 9781760872892
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

'I read this book in excitement and wonder. It's not only a touching and fascinating book, but a sophisticated one as well.' Amos Oz Linda Yechiel's English translation is the winner of the 2023 Society of Authors' TLS-Risa Domb/Porjes Prize for Hebrew Translation Yoel has always known that his mother escaped the Nazis from Amsterdam. But it is not until after she has died that he finally visits the city of his birth. There, watching an old film clip at the Jewish Historical Museum, he sees a woman with a small child: it is his mother, but the child is not him. So begins a fervent search for the truth that becomes the subject of his magnum opus, revealing Amsterdam's dark wartime history and the underground networks which hid Jewish children away from danger - but at a cost. '[A] jewel box of a novel' - New York Times

THIRD NOTEBOOK

22

Sonia goes into the house without treading on the red autumn leaves piled in the doorway. Eddy had smiled when he noticed it this morning and suggested that he get a broom from their apartment and clear the way for her. But Sonia, also smiling, asked him to leave the leaves, and her, alone. This autumnal message makes me happy, she told him. And fallen leaves aren’t dirt, Edika. You have to admit that the threshold looks much lovelier with this colorful garb than without it.

She steers Nettie into the hallway, comes inside with the stroller, closes the door, and descends the steep staircase with both hands gripping the metal handle of the heavy stroller as it bounces in front of her, step after step. Nettie follows her down, counting the steps in English as her father had taught her only yesterday. Eddy is always teaching the child new skills, and Sonia thinks that it’s perhaps a good thing that he’s away from home so much. If he spent more hours with them, the little girl wouldn’t have time to be little.

Apart from this point she doesn’t find anything positive in the fact that Eddy works sixteen hours a day at the hospital and sometimes even more. They’d moved here a short time after she’d become pregnant with Leo, and she thought that the proximity to the Jewish hospital would give them more time together. The high rents in this area meant they could only rent this small basement apartment in Anouk’s parents’ house, and Eddy’s increased presence in the life of their small family was supposed to make up for the decline in the quality of their housing. But it quickly became clear to her that the proximity to Eddy’s place of work didn’t increase the amount of time he spent with her and the children, but ate away at it even more. It seemed that the news that the brilliant young doctor lived so close to the hospital, right round the corner in fact, led his employers to think that he should spend all day and all night in the internal medicine ward. Every new patient, or a change in the condition of a not new patient, was grounds for them to call him back to the ward, even when only a short time had elapsed since he had completed a long, fatiguing shift and had finally gone home. When she plucked up her courage and went to see the hospital director, Professor Sherman, to complain about it, he had looked at her pityingly. I most definitely understand you, he said. Though I’m sure that you of all people, dear Sonia, a former staff member here and who will apparently be one in the future too, are prepared for a degree of personal sacrifice for the success of our important hospital and for its good name. Especially in these times that are difficult for all of us.

Maybe we were mistaken, she thinks now as she takes off Nettie’s and her own coat. Maybe we shouldn’t have moved here.

She takes Leo’s coat off last, and only then the baby breaks his silence and lets out a weak wail.

You’re a good boy, too good, you know? she says as she takes him out of the stroller, clasps him to her bosom, and lays him down on the bed to change his diaper. You’re allowed to cry, she whispers into his blue eyes, which are gazing at her with complete trust, you’re allowed to, my treasure, especially when you’re as hungry as you are right now.

Nettie, who had hurried to her wooden dollhouse in the corner of the room as soon as they got into the apartment, comes over to stand next to her as she sits down to nurse Leo. I’m going to give my babies only breast milk too, she announces.

You’ll be a good mother. Sonia smiles at her. You’ll be a wonderful mother.

23

Yoel makes himself a cup of coffee and goes out onto the balcony again, back to the two rows of houses below, to them and their backyards. Daylight is slowly fading; in the windows electric lights come on and figures flit in the lighted windows.

In the big window to the right the restless psychoanalyst is still bent over her keyboard, over her mountains of papers and files and over the minds of her clients.

She types something quickly and leans back, stretching her tired arms sideways, reads what she has written on the screen and her shoulders reveal dissatisfaction.

There is now light in the closer window to the left, and he can see some of the framed paintings hanging on the wall there. He can also see that the low, wide piece of furniture under the pictures is indeed a stylized chest of drawers, and that exhibited on it are various statuettes and objets d’art, in the center of which, most surprisingly, still lies the same thin, light-colored dog, a dog that looks amazingly similar to a fox or jackal, its long tail folded beside its haunch and its look directed at the writer standing on the balcony of his hotel room and looking right back at it.

A young man dressed in black comes trippingly into the gleaming white kitchen on the lower floor. His slim body moves as if in a graceful dance as he fills a white kettle and, with the same dance movements, picks up the white bowl that was upside down on the white drainer, places it on the white work surface, and piles some vegetables next to it. From a white drawer he takes a white knife and starts chopping a perfect red tomato on a white cutting board.

The church bell chimes six times. In the right-hand row of houses, Yoel tries to locate the house whose door had swallowed the woman who had earlier been walking in front of him with her little girl and her baby. He thinks she went into the house in the middle of the row, so he stands on his balcony and looks as hard as he can at the middle house and says to himself quietly: That’s the house. That’s the house. Slowly and painstakingly, his eyes glide over the small red bricks that the five stories of that house are built of and pass over its white window frames. They reach the chimney rising from the corner of the roof, its plume of smoke curling into the endless sky.

Bathed and sated, Leo had fallen asleep a short time after the bell of Our Lady chimed six times. Sonia wants to read Nettie a bedtime story and get her to sleep too before the nightly argument between the enemy’s antiaircraft batteries and the British bombers begins.

It looks like Eddy won’t be coming home tonight either. It was good that she’d managed to pop into the hospital while Nettie was in school, leave Leo with one of her friends in the surgical unit, and drag Eddy away from his work for a short while. They didn’t waste this precious meeting on talk but simply sat together at the far end of Eddy’s department, smoking their cigarettes quietly and stealing a few minutes of intimacy as if they didn’t have a common roof under which they could meet, as if they didn’t have two beautiful children he’d given her in love, and as if they were still the same youngsters struck by mutual attraction that they’d been when they first met.

Now she and Nettie are sitting in the kitchenette of the basement apartment, chatting amiably about the day that was and the day that will be and eating their supper of thin lentil soup and potatoes. In the long, low window that meets the ceiling above the dining table and their two heads, every now and then they see the feet of passersby on the sidewalk.

A door slams on the top floor of the building and right away mother and daughter exchange the amused smile of people sharing a secret. After the sound of the slam comes, as expected, the delicate pitter-patter of feet hurriedly descending the stairs, down and down until they come to a stop on their floor. A knuckled knock on the door and Sonia gets up, opens it, and pretends surprise as she calls out: Anouk!

Anouk bursts in. Her face is pale and in her arms she is carrying a rolled woolen blanket from which a tiny pair of feet is dangling.

Och, dear Sonke, she pants. I’m so sorry to disturb you again in the middle of your family meal. . . .

Why is she saying “family meal”? Sonia thinks. Can’t she see it’s just me and Nettie?

It’s alright, she replies, you’re not disturbing us, and right away, as if an automatic mechanism has been activated in her, Anouk bursts into sobs. I’m so frightened, she explains, and all at once a cascade of tears covers her lovely porcelain cheeks. I think that this time Sebastian’s dangerously ill. . . . Martin tells me to calm down, he doesn’t consider my feelings at all . . . but I’m so worried. I don’t know what I’d do without you. . . .

Sonia unrolls the blanket and takes her neighbor’s son in her arms. She feels, as she does each time she holds him, how bony and stiff his body is compared with the soft and pliant body of her beloved Leo. And a familiar feeling of compassion for little Sebastian rises in her because of the anxiety with which his mother constantly surrounds him and also because of how he looks: Sebastian Rosso, she thinks, seems to be the least cute child in the world, and without doubt the least cute child she has ever seen. Babies, like the helpless young of other animals, usually have sweet, rounded faces that arouse an instinctive feeling of sympathy and a desire to protect them and care for them. Only Sebastian Rosso has a long, pinched face, a large nose, and small, grave eyes. His face actually looks to her like that of an old man and remarkably similar to the face of Anouk’s father, the banker de Lange. At this moment his pinched face grows paler, the little eyes darken as they look at her, the narrow lower lip curls, and Sebastian—even though he ostensibly knows her well from his frequent visits with his hypochondriac mother—fixes her with his little eyes and bursts into horrific screams that make Nettie jump up from her chair and from her plate of food, and wake Leo from his sleep.

Eddy and Martin had met at medical school and remained friends even after Martin quit medicine in the middle of his third year and transferred to philosophy studies.

Martin would visit Eddy and Sonia after they got married and Sonia loved listening to his original thoughts on the meaning of Man’s existence in the midst of the great chaos. She tried her hand at matchmaking between him and the smartest and most profound of her friends, but Martin found no interest in the girl. And how surprised Sonia and Eddy were when he knocked on their door one evening and with him was the beautiful, cheerful daughter of wealthy parents: Anouk de Lange.

Martin and Anouk married and lived on the top floor of her parents’ house. When Sonia and Eddy told them they were financially unable to rent an apartment near the Jewish hospital, Anouk suggested that they take the newly vacant basement apartment at particularly low rent.

By the time Sonia manages to quiet Anouk and her son and reassure Anouk that her son isn’t dying but just has a slight chill, Leo is wide awake. The soup on the table is already cold. And after Anouk finally wraps her screaming bundle in its blanket and goes back up to her own apartment, the nightly air raid starts to fill the city with explosions and flashes of flame. Sonia snuggles under the bedclothes with her two children and hugs them to her with all her might, clasping their little bodies to her as if trying to fuse them into herself and turn the three of them into one.

24

Yoel goes out into the night, walks to the nearest tram stop, and gets on the first tram that comes along. After six or seven stops, in a flash decision, he gets off at Dam Square and finds himself standing outside the Royal Palace, on whose roof stands a sculpture of Atlas bearing the weight of his eternal burden. He wants to be swallowed up in the crowds of people in the square, most of whom are youngsters walking or standing in couples or small groups, laughing and talking, and as they pass him he hears fragments of their conversations, many of them in Hebrew. That was really something, someone says to someone else in Hebrew. We’ve already been to Van Gogh, says someone to someone else in Hebrew. And one voice in a group of youngsters crossing the square in the opposite direction asks in Hebrew: How can you know? And the question goes off with that group but continues resonating in Yoel’s ear, for truly, how can you know. How.

He approaches the somber National Monument in the middle of the square and he doesn’t feel good, he doesn’t feel good. He can’t remember if he ever felt good, and in the dark he can’t find the numerals that, according to the Israeli tourist guidebook, should be engraved on the back of the monument in commemoration of the years that Amsterdam was under foreign occupation. He looks at the stone lions crouched heavily on both sides of the monument, and it seems to him that they are opening their huge stone mouths not in a terrifying roar but in a wide, tired, dreary yawn.

He wants to be swallowed up so he flows along with the crowd from the square into one of the alleys leading off it and drifts onward until he is stopped in panic by a display window encircled with red light bulbs and his face flushes as if he is an adolescent boy. Of course he had read and heard about Amsterdam’s red light district, but he is totally shocked in that fleeting moment when he sees—just out of the corner of his eye, but sees—that it really is the figure of a woman standing in the window surrounded by red lights, standing like a product for sale, and this window is only one of a series of more red windows like it, and in that same blink of an eye Yoel hurries away and flees and now he’s at the door of a small, dimly lit bar, and a waiter hands him a flyer with a menu, and Yoel glances at it and realizes that the small, dimly lit bar is a local coffee shop, a place for smoking drugs, and he lays the flyer on a table, stammers an apology, and flees.

The air raids continue. Sonia is lying in bed between her two children, staring at the ceiling and praying to the God of her forefathers in whose existence she has long stopped believing. She tries not to fall asleep because as soon as she closes her eyes, even for a moment, she dreams that Nettie and Leo are falling, drowning . . .

You’re scared of living, Bat-Ami teases him affectionately, though not without disappointment, every time he opts to remain in the confines of the known and familiar rather than taste new experiences. When she was here with him she’d tried in vain to persuade him to go into one of the many inviting coffee shops from which a sweetish aroma floats into the public domain. It’s completely legal, she reminded him, what can possibly go wrong if we sit inside awhile? For my part, just have a cup of coffee or even a glass of water, and don’t consume anything, God forbid, that your mother didn’t acclimate you to in your childhood. But he refused her and in the end they didn’t go into a coffee shop even once. There may be Israelis there who might recognize me, he tried to explain, but she dismissed his excuse with a laugh: You’re scared of living, my dear, you’re simply scared of living.

What does he want, and what is he afraid of? What could possibly happen if he sat in a coffee shop? And what could possibly happen if he went behind the display window illuminated with red lights and the woman standing there—the same woman he’d seen only out of the corner of his eye, and only in a flash, but the sight of her figure won’t leave him—draws the red curtain behind them both. There were times when going to a hooker had featured on his list of extreme adventures, like bungee jumping or hang gliding from a cliff top, experiences which could shake a man out of his chronic nothingness and inject a feeling of living flowing inside him. At the time the thought of a red-lit window such as this could arouse in him, together with the feeling of disgust, a sort of body-soul tumult. Whereas now he thinks about the unfortunate woman standing inside the square of dusty lights and waiting, one hand on her hip and her private parts on display, and he can feel only revulsion, repulsiveness, wretchedness, and he continues drifting and flowing with the crowd filling Dam Square and the alleys leading from it, until on one of the corners he is drawn to a sign ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• First Notebook
• Second Notebook
• Third Notebook
• Fourth Notebook
• Author’s Note
• About The Author
• Acknowledgments