IT ALL BEGAN with Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim Levi and his nephew Magnus. Uncle Chaim was a clockmaker, Magnus came walking all the way from Poland, his tool chest on his back, to build a new life for himself in the Lowlands. My great-grandfather, who was also a clockmaker, and my grandfather, the physicist, prided themselves on the fact that the men in our family, since the prehistory of clockwork, had all been people of time. Whenever my grandfather was holding forth and wanted to lend weight to his argument, he would bring up Magnus. Magnus Levi had learned the trade from Uncle Chaim, who had invented the pendulum clock, an innovation that made so little impression in seventeenth-century Lithuania that Uncle Chaim had flung it under his workbench, forgot about it, and was promptly forgotten himself. According to Uncle Herman, that pendulum clock was the first example of a familial talent to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Clockmakers, that’s what we were, even in the days when time was a rare commodity. Ragged tinkers who travelled from town to village and village to town, the clocks in a chest on their back, the little tools rolled up in canvas. Always on the road and always the tinkling of the bells of the wall clocks, the faint thrumming of the rods in the mantel clocks, the chickechickechick of the pocket watches. They carried time on their backs. Time travelled with them. Time was what they lived on. And for some, time was why they died. A distant ancestor once repaired a steeple clock, somewhere in the East, in a provincial capital on the edge of a Steppe. The clockwork had run riot and every few minutes you heard the sonorous chiming of the quarter hour or the rich blur of strokes that told the hour. The smith, at risk to his own life, had tried to disconnect the striking mechanism, but had got no further than muffling the sound with an old gunnysack. By the time the clockmaker arrived, he had nearly been beaten to a pulp. In the village, no one (except the deaf sexton) had slept for two days. Men, women, children, even animals had bags under their eyes and snarled and snapped at each other. Happy marriages threatened to dissolve, many women had fled to their relatives in other villages, the cows had stopped giving milk. There wasn’t a bird to be seen for miles around.
The clockmaker was received by a hoarse-voiced village elder. They shook hands, drank a glass of tea, and listened as the old man shouted out the details of what had happened. Then he plugged up his ears with wax and climbed the tower. The smith went with him. But when they reached the top, the clock would not be silenced. The two men climbed back down again, went to the village elder, and told him what was wrong. ‘We’ll just have to wait,’ the clockmaker said, ‘until the works have wound down.’ The village elder shook his head and said that wasn’t possible. Tomorrow was the annual fair and if the clock hadn’t stopped by then, the merchants would all go running. The village would lose such a large portion of their income that they wouldn’t be able to afford the sowing seed for the following year. The clockmaker looked at the smith, spread his arms, and climbed back up. There, between clock and clapper, he met his death.
Uncle Chaim was a taciturn man. He sat in his little wooden house, repaired timepieces, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘History,’ he told the young Magnus, ‘is like a clock. You think it’s getting later, but the hands are always moving in the same circle. What’s on top today, is on the bottom tomorrow.’ Magnus, who often came to see him in the little house at the edge of the woods and helped him out, or leafed through the old books that lay under the bed, Magnus would think back on what had happened, when a band of Cossacks had struck off the head of Chaim’s wife because she happened to be standing outside the door with a basket of washing when the horsemen thundered past. And he also thought of the village on the other side of the forest that, one day, was no longer there – burned to the ground.
Whenever Magnus was with his uncle, in the shaky wooden house, hidden among the trees at the edge of the forest, Chaim sat him down on the cracked bench beside the door and told him about the past, wading back and forth across the grey wooden floor, taking up clocks, picking up a screw here and there and putting it in one of the many drawers and boxes on the table under the window. Magnus sat down on the bench, which was so old it gleamed like dung, and listened. They drank tea out of glasses white with lime.
The old man told him of the days when there weren’t any Cossacks and everything was green and fields of sunflowers bloomed just outside the village, green stalks as thick as your arm with heads as big as wheels and in those heads the black spiral that nearly sucked you in, right into the heart of the sun … Magnus listened and thought: It’s all nostalgia, regret for lost time.
Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim’s favourite story took place in the days when he was just a boy and lived in a town in the North, on the river harbour. His parents owned a modest house on the quay. At the end of the cart track that ran along the house, where the deep furrows branched off to the right and disappeared in the first hesitant overgrowth of the great forest, stood a small wooden structure that looked like a cowshed and was inhabited by a woodsman and his three daughters. Chaim spent nearly all his days in the woods behind that odd-looking house, where he and the eldest of the three girls would think up long, perilous adventures.
‘It wasn’t a very big forest,’ he said. ‘Maybe two days around, but when you’re ten years old you can wander about a forest like that for a week and think you’re in another country. We usually pretended we had to make a dangerous journey, on horseback, straight through the Carpathians, through the forests of Lithuania. Early in the morning I would come for Freide and we’d go to the kitchen and fill a knapsack with provisions: some bread and cheese, a bottle of water. Then we’d mount our horses, the ones we didn’t have – we were just pretending – and ride out. First a long way over the firebreak, but soon we were among the trees, where it was dark and quiet. Usually we wouldn’t be home until suppertime, when it started getting dark. I can’t remember us talking much. We rode and rode, and were especially careful when our horses had to go downhill. Such fun we had. But the best part about the forest was clearing the land.
‘At the end of the summer,’ said Chaim, ‘we’d all go into the forest. The woodsman, Freide and her sisters and I would spend the whole day gathering brushwood. We sawed down sick trees, cut back gnarled branches, cleared the paths … In the afternoon we ate in the open field, right next to the lane, and in the evening, when we were done, we brought our brushwood there and made a big fire. You mustn’t forget, it was getting colder by then. Late September. During the day the sun still shone brightly, but the evenings were cool. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and the woodsman and I built a campfire. First a pile of dry leaves, covered with twigs, then a sort of wigwam made of branches, and on top of that heavy, gnarled boughs, as thick as an arm and often still green. After a while we had a big cone of wood. We left a small opening at the bottom where we could stick in a dry, burning branch. The campfire began to burn from inside out, from little to big, from dry to wet. It usually wasn’t long before we had a huge fire, and we roasted potatoes in the ashes. Above us, and in the forest, it had gone completely dark and we sat in that clearing, lit by the flames. Shadows danced among the trees. The sparks from the fire flew up to the treetops and burst into pieces. We would sometimes feel a little scared. As we pricked our potatoes on sticks and held them in the ashes, the woodsman told us ghost stories. I wish you could have seen it.’
That’s what he always said, Uncle Chaim: ‘I wish you could have seen it.’
Magnus saw other things. One day when he arrived at Uncle Chaim’s house he found a bare patch with smouldering stumps of charred wood where the house had been. The clockmaker was nowhere in sight. Magnus walked among the half-burnt pieces of wood, through the ankle-deep layer of damp ash, but found nothing to remind him of the little house. The bench was gone, the table, the shaky wooden bed with the old books … He picked up a stick and poked around in the blackened mess. Just as he was about to leave, he saw something lying in the scorched coppice, under an oak. It was Chaim’s instrument kit, the chest he used to carry on his back when he travelled about the country repairing clocks in remote villages and towns. It had been cast aside, landed in the bushes, and been forgotten. Magnus slung the chest onto his back and set out on his journey.
‘Cossacks,’ said Uncle Chaim, when I asked him once what had happened. ‘Beware of Cossacks, my boy.’
‘There are no more Cossacks,’ I said. ‘Not here.’
‘There are always Cossacks.’
Here was America, where we were already living, the land where Uncle Chaim thought that people lit their lamps with a dollar bill and nobody ate potatoes.
‘Cossacks and potatoes,’ said Uncle Chaim. And he sang, to confirm his loathing for potatoes:
Zuntik – bulbes,
Montik – bulbes,
Dinstik un mitvokh – bulbes,
Donershtik un fraytik – bulbes,
Shabes in a novene:
– a bulbe-kugele!
Zuntik – vayter bulbes.
Sunday, potatoes. Monday, potatoes. Tuesday and Wednesday, potatoes. Thursday and Friday, potatoes. But on Shabbat, a special treat: potato pudding! Sunday, more potatoes.
‘The food alone should have been reason enough for me to leave that country,’ Uncle Chaim once said. I had reminded him that this would have made him an eligible candidate for the Hollander Top Ten List of Terrible Reasons to Make Drastic Decisions.
‘Pah!’ he said. ‘Don’t compare me to your father, who left Europe because he didn’t want to wear a tie. Or Magnus, who left because he was looking for a wife without a moustache.’
That was what Magnus had said, that all the women in their region had moustaches. ‘Moustaches and hairy legs.’ He had shivered at the thought. Uncle Chaim had looked at him sideways, his left eyebrow lowered. ‘Hairy legs? When did you see a leg?’ Magnus, inhabitant of the spiritual realm for nearly three centuries now, had blushed like a young girl. ‘Nu, Magnus, Nephew. Where in all those parts did you ever see a leg?’ Magnus had mumbled something about moustaches and that he had certainly seen them before and that you could only assume … His uncle’s eyebrow remained firmly lowered and it was a long time before he looked away. Finally he turned to me and shrugged.
But neither hairy legs, nor upper lips, were the reason for Magnus’s departure. It was the last Cossack raid, when Uncle Chaim’s house was burned to the ground. There, among the stumps of wood and lumps of charred straw, like rotting teeth in a blackened mouth, he had tightened his belt, knotted his puttees, and left.
The year was 1648.
Magnus Levi, as he was still called at the time, reached, after more than twenty-one years of travelling, the easternmost part of the Lowlands. And there he stayed. Not because he was tired, which he was, or sick of travelling, which he also was, but because he arrived in a town on Market Day. He wandered among the stalls looking at blushing apples, pears as big as a man’s fist, cabbages like cannon balls and bulky rolls of worsted. He could smell contentment in the air and he felt something settling inside him, going slowly round and round, the way dogs do when they have found a place where they want to lie down. Magnus tried to resist this unfamiliar feeling, but it was strong, almost overwhelming. He jumped when a cloth merchant called out to him.
‘What’re you selling, friend?’
He could vaguely make out what the man asked, because the dialect in which he spoke sounded much like the Plattdeutsch he had picked up along the way.
‘Clocks?’
Magnus nodded.
The man beckoned him to come closer and then gestured to him that he wished to see what was in the wooden chest. Magnus placed the chest on the merchant’s stall and opened it. Hanging among his neatly arranged tools was the little pendulum clock he had made. The man pursed his lips and nodded admiringly.
‘Schön,’ he said. He looked back at Magnus, his head slightly tilted, and asked, ‘Deutsche?’
‘Deutsche?’ Magnus shook his head. ‘Weiter östlich. Polen.’
‘Pol …’
Once again Magnus shook his head. ‘Da gewohnt. Nicht Polak.’
The merchant shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the pendulum clock. ‘Wieviel?’
Magnus named his price and the man on the other side of the stall began busily converting. Again he pursed his lips.
Meanwhile a small group of curious onlookers had gathered around them. People asked the merchant where the traveller had come from and the merchant, who suddenly felt like a true cosmopolitan, told them the story. Just as Magnus was taking the pendulum clock out of the chest so that they could see it better, the cloud of spectators parted. A lady and her companion walked through the space they had made. Magnus, who hadn’t noticed a thing, was busy letting the clock chime. The melodious cooing of the rods and the first four lines of the song Friede always used to sing rose up in the clear spring air. He had worked for months to get the eleven copper rods just the right length that they would produce the proper tones, and before that he had slaved many, many months to build a mechanism that would allow the tiny hammers to hit the rods at just the right tempo, and in sequence. He stared dreamily at the little clock. He didn’t notice that anything had changed until he saw the merchant give a deep nod. At first he grinned, taking the nod as a sign of appreciation and admiration, but when it remained silent and everyone appeared to have shifted their gaze, he looked sideways. Standing next to him was a young woman in a dress of midnight-blue. A black crocheted shawl was draped across her shoulders. She was in the company of a servant girl in a white lace cap.
‘What song is that?’
She had dark eyes, the colour of polished, gleaming walnut, and curly black hair, tied back in a ponytail.
He stammered out something that even he didn’t understand.
‘Deutsche?’ she asked.
The merchant explained to her where the clockmaker had come from and then Magnus told her that he had been on the road for twenty years now and had travelled through Poland and Bohemia and Moravia repairing clocks and in one big city had even built a timepiece for the mayor.
When he had finished speaking, the young woman asked how much he wanted for the pendulum clock. Magnus looked at the timepiece. The sloping sides were like the curve of a woman’s hip, the wood was the colour of … He named a price that was barely half what he had named earlier.
‘What?’ cried the merchant. ‘You told me …’
Magnus, who realized he had let himself get carried away and was about to be laughed at, picked up the pendulum clock and tucked it back into his wooden travelling case. He smiled unhappily, shrugged his shoulders, and said, in even clumsier German (if that were possible), something that was meant to explain his peculiar behaviour. The young woman leaned towards her maidservant and whispered something in her ear. Then she gave Magnus a nod and asked the merchant to measure off two yards of white linen.
The group of onlookers dispersed and Magnus slung the chest onto his back. He walked between two stalls and made his way to the large church in the middle of the market square. There, in the shelter of the buttresses, where it stank of rotting vegetables and old fish, he had a serious word with himself. How could he have been so stupid? To let himself be carried away by a pair of beautiful eyes? Imagine selling Reisele for a price that wouldn’t even cover the cost of … You’re in a strange land, Magnus Levi. You’ve got to keep silent and listen, instead of bragging and swooning. When he had gone past the church the sun came out again, and in the clear spring light he walked out of the market square, into an alleyway between two large white houses with stained glass windows. Behind the glass he saw a row of plants in white and blue pots. They bore red flowers, as big as apples. He had seen many things on his journey to the West: he had been in prosperous regions, but nowhere had he seen such abundance as in this place, nowhere had it been as clean, nowhere did the brass door knobs gleam as brightly as they did here. Behind the white houses was a cobblestoned street lined with clipped trees and tidy flower beds. As he walked among those little trees he heard the click-clacking of a woman’s heels. When he looked around he saw a servant girl, who had gathered up her skirts and was running towards him.
When she had caught up with him, she stood there for a while, panting. He waited for her to catch her breath, trying to look friendly. This wasn’t easy, because he was frightened. He had recognized her as the servant girl he had seen with the young woman who had been standing next to him at the market, and he was afraid she had come to tell him that he had behaved in an unseemly manner and that she would have him run out of town. That had happened to him before, somewhere in a Prussian village. He had never quite been able to discover what he had done wrong, but whatever it was, he had nearly been thrown in prison for doing it.
‘My mistress asks if you would be so kind as to repair the clocks in her father’s house,’ panted the girl.
He looked at her without quite understanding what she meant. She was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and she didn’t seem to find him at all threatening or strange. But that still didn’t set his mind at rest. ‘Ich geh weiter,’ he said. ‘Andere Stadt. Muβ gehen …’
The servant girl sighed and shook her head. ‘They’ll pay you well,’ she said. ‘She wants you to come, sir. She’s seen your clock.’
Pride is like the sun that peeks out from between two clouds. Magnus felt the agreeable warmth of recognition.
‘Die Dame ist nicht böse?’ he asked.
The servant girl shook her head. ‘You may come this evening, seven o’clock,’ she said. She told him the address and made him repeat it three times. Anyone, she said, could show him the way. Her master’s house was known to all.
For the rest of that day Magnus wandered about the town. He looked at shops, peered through the open doors of coffee houses, and stood for a long time gazing at mothers as they walked with their young children across a grassy field. Ducks waddled along the banks of a pond, deer stood poised on a hilltop, a jay skimmed carelessly over his head. Everything was small and clear and still. Magnus had arrived in a fairyland.
That night, in the little town in the east, Magnus was to meet the woman of his life. Her name was Rebekka Gans and she was the daughter of a prosperous cattle dealer. The shy clockmaker had moved about the house behind the Grote Markt like a cat walking on new-fallen snow. He didn’t dare sit on the brocade chairs, and he stood there clutching his travelling case for so long that the young lady finally asked if he wouldn’t rather put it down. Where? Magnus had thought, looking around the high-ceilinged room with the gleaming wooden floor. She had walked up to him, taken the chest, not flinching when she felt the weight of wheels and tools, and leaned it against the green-veined marble of the hearth. Then she had looked at him with her grave, impassive face and rung for the maid.
He had examined every clock in the house that night and as he did so, had drunk tea out of cups so thin that the light from the oil lamp shone right through them and had eaten almond curls so fine and meltingly sweet that they flitted about in his empty stomach like butterflies. When he left, after an hour or two, his head felt as light as those biscuits.
‘Eyes like a moon calf,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘In love. In love? Bewitched!’
That was how it felt, in any case. And Magnus knew just when it had happened. Not at the market, where he was ‘Smitten by the sight of her,’ as he himself once said. Not when he was in the house, nibbling on those fluttering cookies and watching the flicker of candlelight under the teapot. Not when he had placed the small black-lacquered clock before him on the table. ‘Salomon Coster, The Hague,’ it said on a silver plate behind the glass door. The young lady had stood beside him and watched as he studied the movement. It was a pendulum and, as far as he could tell, one of the first applications of that technique. He had asked three questions, enough to determine that the clock was about ten years old, that it was based on the theory of a certain Huygens, who had invented the pendulum clock. At that moment Magnus had realized that Uncle Chaim had invented the very same thing fifteen years earlier. He had looked up, young Magnus, stared into the lamplit twilight, and let his eyes wander. The waste of it all. The clock that Uncle Chaim, shaking his head, had flung under his workbench after Wolschke, the German forester, had informed him that the count had called it a ‘diabolical piece of rubbish’ and didn’t want it in his house. The capriciousness of an age that allowed two, maybe even more, to come up with the same invention, yet clasped only one of them to her bosom. If Uncle Chaim had been credited with the invention instead of Mr Huygens, the history of Chaim and Magnus, perhaps even of the entire continent, would have turned out differently. And then he had met her eyes, at the end of the journey his eyes had made around the room. The oil lamp lit them from the side and he saw tiny stars in the blackness, the veil of her lashes, the soft yet clear-cut line of her jaw, and he wanted to turn away but couldn’t. Her bound hair curled rebelliously at her temples, a few strands had come loose above her left eye and before he knew what he was doing his hand was on its way to … That’s when it happened. A shadow of a smile had stolen across her face (not just her lips, he remembered later that night, as he wandered through the town, brooding and pondering, it hadn’t just glided over her lips, that smile, but over her whole face, the … the memory of a smile, a barely perceptible ‘yes,’ an ‘if circumstances were different …’) and he had felt his hand clench, had, so slowly that it seemed to last for hours, called it back (‘Here! Here, you mongrel of a hand! Down!’) and the hand came back towards his own face and – by that time his neck was damp with sweat – suddenly the hand was coming towards him at full speed. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor. He had boxed his own ear. The lady tried to control herself, but even he felt relieved when, not two seconds later, she burst into peals of laughter.
Outside, under the spring moon, drifting from one alleyway to the next, he had wallowed in his shame like a pig in the mud.
‘The history of love. Write about that, a big fat book. Kings. Princes. Abraham and Sarah, ah … Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. David and Bathsheba. And one special chapter for the man who boxed his own ear,’ Uncle Chaim said. ‘And all because he was scared of hairy legs. Bah!’
By morning, Magnus had walked around the town three times and knew it as well as the village where he himself had grown up. The streets, the houses, the market square, the shooting grounds, they were all like the movement of a trusty clock. He bought bread at the baker’s and ate it on the bank of a ditch strewn with buttercups. The dew left the fields, birds flew up to the clear blue sky like tinkling bells. The smell of cow dung rose up from the ground and tickled his nostrils. A milkmaid came by with two wooden buckets on her yoke and saw him chewing his butterless bread. She put down her buckets, drew a dipper out of the milk, and gave him a drink. He thanked her in a mixture of languages he had learned along the way and she laughed like a man as she walked on. He gazed after her, the broad hips in the long striped skirt, the plump back, the full, rounded arms. A land of milk and butter. The milk he had drunk was nearly yellow with cream. He was no farmer, but even a layman could see how succulent and tender the grass was here.
Halfway through the morning he tugged on the copper bell at the merchant’s house and was let in by the servant girl. She gave him milk in a mug and set a plate beside it with a buttered brown slab. The milk was sweet and hot, the slab of brown was called koek and tasted of anise. After he’d eaten he was shown into the parlour – but no one was there. The table had been cleared and laid with a coarse linen cloth. He went and fetched, under the maid’s supervision, the clocks he had seen earlier, and set about his work. Although the clocks were a different shape from those he knew, he was familiar with the works, and by noon he had cleaned and oiled two of the four. Then the maid came for him and in the kitchen, where a portly cook was stirring a pot, he was given bread and cheese. It wasn’t until he had closed up the last clock that the lady of the house walked in. The maid followed her carrying a tray with a teapot, a blue and white plate of butter biscuits, and a little tower of porcelain. Magnus cleared off the table, cleaned his instruments, and packed up his chest. All that time the young woman watched him gravely. Then she removed the cloth from the table, set it, and had him sit down again.
‘Nu,’ she said. ‘Lomir redn.’
So. Let’s talk.
The maid left the room. Magnus, his mouth a carriage house, stared at the woman in amazement.
They spoke. They spoke like the tea that flowed, fragrant, from the spout of the teapot, like the biscuits that crumbled between their teeth and left a buttery film on their fingertips. They spoke until the windowpanes turned grey, blue, and finally indigo. They spoke, and it was, as Magnus would later say, as if he were emptying and filling at the same time.
Then the merchant came in.
‘A beard,’ said Magnus, many centuries later, ‘a beard like a cluster of bees. A head of hair – he was my future father-in-law but there’s no other way to describe it, I’m sorry – a head of hair like a witch’s broom. My heart didn’t just stop: it was no longer there.’
‘Becky,’ the giant had said. (‘A giant, Nathan,’ said Magnus. ‘I didn’t even know that Jews could be so big. A voice like the great clock in Worky.’) ‘Becky, I didn’t know we had guests.’
‘Tatele,’ she said. ‘This is the clockmaker.’
And Magnus had jumped up, knocking over his chair, clicked his heels (as he had learned in Germany), bowed from the hips, and cried, ‘At your service, Your Grace, Magnus Levi!’ And he thought, Tatele? Little Papa?
Becky and her father had laughed like the rain: he, a gusty cloudburst of deep, sonorous tones, she, a spring shower on a velvety meadow.
A clockmaker, even though he travelled about and carried all his wordly possessions in a chest upon his back, was good enough for Rebekka Gans. Her father, Meijer, a dealer in livestock, had also started from scratch. He knew that the Jews in neighbouring countries, and even in some parts of the Lowlands, lived by the grace of the good-naturedness of their local administrators. He had been in the North, where no more than three Jewish families were allowed to live in town, where Jews were only allowed to be butchers, tanners, or peddlers, and were forbidden to build synagogues. The tolerance in this region, and especially in the prosperous West, had made him a wealthy man, but he had never forgotten his own humble beginnings.
That was why, even though Magnus was poor and had no home, Meijer Gans looked at the character of the man who wanted his daughter and not at his position or means. He peered into Magnus’s soul, seeking ambition and a spirit of enterprise. He was pleased with what he found.
The couple were given Salomon Coster’s clock and a dowry in silver when, two months later, they left for West Holland. In Rotterdam, a cousin of Meijer Gans’s who dealt in grain helped them find a house. The widower himself – Rebekka’s mother had died of childbed fever shortly after her birth – remained behind in the East. He would miss his daughter the way a man misses an arm, yet he wished her happiness and good fortune, things that, in his opinion, were best found in the West. Magnus embarked on a new life and, as if to show how much he wanted to be and belong here, he changed his name to Hollander. He knew of no better way to stress his wholehearted devotion to this rich land of luscious grass, creamy milk, and golden yellow cheese.
A son was born, one, whom they named Chaim. He became a clockmaker and met a girl called Zipporah Leib. The son married the Leib girl. They had a son, who was named after Grandfather Meijer and, scarcely three years after his birth, died of galloping consumption. Chaim thought he had provoked the Lord of the Universe by not giving his firstborn son the name he should have had, and so, seven years later, when another son was born, he was called Heijman, the Dutch version of Chaim, which means ‘life.’ The boy was strong and healthy and, like his father, became a clockmaker. He married, as had every other man in the family, late. He took Chava Groen as his wife, and when they were nearly forty she had a son whom they called Heijman. He married Lenah Arends, and from their alliance, too, came one son: Heijman Three. He took Rebecca van Amerongen as his wife, who bore him Heijman Four. The nineteenth century was two years old by then. Heijman Four and his wife, Esther de Jong, had a child at the age of forty-three. It was a son: Heijman Five. This descendant of the house of Hollander, a clockmaker, married young. He was twenty-three when he met Anna Blum and twenty-four, Anna twenty-five, when they knew the joy of offspring: Heijman Six.
The tide of time (Magnus’s words) had driven the Hollanders to the West, to Rotterdam, that boisterously expanding merchant city on the North Sea coast, and there it seemed as if they had finally landed in a peaceful haven. Seven generations of Heijmans (if we count the first, who was called Chaim) grew up there. Magnus and Rebekka lived to see their children’s children, but could sense that the younger generation were ashamed of the family’s humble origins; embarrassed by Magnus’s old work-coat, the wooden chest Rebekka had hung on the wall and the modest trade in matzos, dried fruit and nuts that she and her friend Schoontje ran from a little shop in the Jewish quarter.
‘That’s the way it goes,’ said Magnus, in keeping with the analysis that my grandfather, the last Heijman Hollander, liked to make of The Journey to the West. ‘You start with a stone, a piece of rope and a threadbare coat, and you build a house so your children will have a roof over their heads, a safe place to live, but once they’ve grown, they say: Come, Father, throw away that stone and that rope and that old coat. Everyone wants a house, no one likes to be reminded of all the grief that came before it.’
The last Heijman in the series took Sarah van Vlies to be his bride. He didn’t succeed his father in the clockmaking business, but studied physics instead and eventually became a professor in Leiden. His parents had left him a jewellery shop and renowned repair studio, and enough money to enable him to take his doctoral degree. Heijman became a respected, though not exceptional, physicist. His greatest claim was the development of a standard formula for bridge construction. At a time when physics was becoming increasingly experimental, he was more of an engineer than a researcher, more of a clockmaker than a thinker.
And so, eight generations of the family started by Magnus and Rebekka had been born in Rotterdam. They had lived, prospered, prayed, sung, and died there. They had seen the fishing village grow to become the second merchant city of Holland and ultimately – after the Nieuwe Waterweg had been dug and another Jew – Pincoffs – had founded the Rotterdamse Handelsvereniging and had the harbours built on Feijenoord – the largest harbour in the world. They had prospered, the Hollanders, just as the city had prospered, and, like the city, had set their sights on the West, on all that was modern and new. Together, they had opened themselves to the world, yet felt deeply and firmly rooted in that land of Holland. When, in 1939, the eighth and ninth generations stood on board the ship that was to take them from Rotterdam to New York, their departure was more than the leaving of a place. It was the resumption of the journey, the loss of the place that had allowed them to take root in the world. It was the loss of a place that was just like them, a city that, unlike Amsterdam, had never boasted about her tolerance for the Jews, yet was often more tolerant. Rotterdam had become their heart and they had felt cherished in her arms. Moving on was second nature to the Hollander family, yet for eight generations, from Magnus’s son Chaim to the last Heijman, they had been Rotterdamers, born and bred. They had all but forgot where they began.
1648 was the year Magnus slung his pack on his back, turned round, and left the region where he had been born, raised, and expected to die. Twenty-one years later he arrived in the Lowlands.
‘Twenty-one years to walk from Poland to Holland?’ I once asked him, amazed at the duration of the journey.
‘He lost his way,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Didn’t know he was going to Holland. Knew he was headed West. Took a wrong turn.’ ‘I … Things were different then,’ said Magnus.
‘I understand that. But twenty-one years?’
‘Magnus,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Dear dear dear … nephew. Worthless boy scout.’
So for twenty-one years Magnus was on his way and what he did in all that time no one really knew. He himself said that he worked a bit here, stayed for a while there, turned South when he thought he was going West. A journey … If you were to try and draw the route, you would end up with a tangle of wool.
Two and a half centuries later, in Rotterdam, my father and mother met.
‘The Lord of the Universe, whether you believe in Him or not,’ was Uncle Herman’s version, ‘decided in 1927, or, God knows, perhaps even from the genesis of creation, to bring together the light and the darkness, and that He would do this in the form of a marriage. That is why – pay attention! – He arranged for your parents to fall into each other’s arms during the fireworks on Midsummer Night. Good fortune, some people would call it, bad luck say those who know better. Others (by that, Uncle Herman was referring to himself) call it a disaster. He came from a family of clockmakers and physicists, she was old money. He was a promising engineer, she, a young lady who had life figured out long before life understood her. He lived in the shadow of his father, your grandfather, who placed physics above all else, and she thought that physics was merely re-inventing the wheel. She was a free spirit.’
Uncle Herman had the tendency to devote quite a bit of attention to the setting in his stories, the backdrop against which a particular event took place. Perhaps this is something peculiar to sociologists. Whatever the case: ever since he first told me his version of the downfall, I was impressed by the way in which he linked the fate of our family to the history of this century, particularly because he proved to be right.
It was Midsummer Night, 1929 (not 1927, Uncle Herman wasn’t very good at dates) and above the park, rockets were flaring and fading in chrysanthemums of red, yellow, green and blue sparks. The upturned faces of the spectators and passers-by shone in the light of the fireworks, and the tall oaks and chestnut trees looked lovelier than ever. Outside the little white inn at the edge of the park, men stood with a glass of beer in one hand, the thumb of their other hand hooked in a waistcoat pocket, legs slightly apart. Women hung on their arms or whispered to one other. Each time a rocket exploded, their dresses flashed white in the darkness.
‘Hollander! Hollander!’ someone shouted. His voice was half lost in the booming of the fireworks, but my father had heard it and looked around, searchingly. He met the equally searching gaze of a young woman standing nearby. They looked at each other, turned away, and continued hunting.
‘Hollander!’
Once again my father and the young woman looked at each other. Then she frowned, cast one last glance behind her, and marched up to my father.
‘My name is Hollander,’ said my mother. In her voice, my father told us later on, was a touch of indignation. As if she had meant to say: Why are you responding to my name?
‘Mine, too,’ said my father.
‘Ridiculous,’ said my mother. (She had already become a Socialist by then and had learned to dispense with bourgeois formalities. These had been replaced by a directness that made most people blush.)
‘Emmanuel Hollander,’ said my father, hurt. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
My mother shook her head and crossed her arms.
At that moment a man came walking towards them. He had large brown eyes in a full, oval face. With his short, thick curls and round metal glasses he looked much younger than he actually was. ‘Hollander,’ he said. Only now did my mother hear that her surname was being pronounced with a German accent. ‘Wie geht’s?’ My father bowed lightly to the man and introduced him to my mother. ‘Frau Hollander,’ he said. Then he turned to her and introduced the stranger, ‘Mr Paul Ehrenfest.’
‘I didn’t know you were married, Hollander,’ said Ehrenfest.
My mother stamped her right foot on the ground. (Always her right foot. Zeno once asked why she never used her left foot, which baffled her for days afterwards; it was the sort of question you ask someone with a long beard, whether he sleeps with it above or below the blankets). My mother stamped her foot and let the light of the fireworks glitter in her eyes. ‘I have nothing to do with this man,’ she said. Ehrenfest looked at her in confusion.
‘She just came up and started talking to me,’ explained my father, who didn’t have much of a knack for social intercourse.
My mother stamped her foot again. ‘How dare you!’ she cried. She raised her right hand and soundly boxed my father’s ear.
Ehrenfest, who was a colleague of my father’s and had lectured at the University of Leiden for the past seventeen years, watched her as she disappeared into the flickering darkness.
Heijman and Sarah Hollander, my grandparents, had always befriended the foreign professors who taught at the university. The young Enrico Fermi, during his three-month stay in Leiden, had been one of the family. He had aroused Sarah’s interest in Italian food, not by cooking for her, but by talking about the delectable dishes his Mama used to make. Heijman, who wasn’t at all pleased about his wife’s sudden interest in such exotic cuisine, said that Fermi wasn’t staying long and there was no reason to pamper him: the national Dutch meal (potatoes, overcooked vegetables, and leathery meat) was good enough. But that wasn’t what mattered to Sarah. Uncle Herman, who was the same age as Fermi and spent a lot of time with him, said that his mother was fascinated by the passion with which a grown man like Enrico spoke of his Mama’s cooking. That, said Uncle Herman, was how Sarah wanted to be remembered, too. (And she was. According to Herman, no one had ever roasted a chicken like his mother, golden yellow, with a crispy crust and succulent, piping hot meat underneath. Her cakes, he said, were so delicious that once, in the kitchen, he had run his finger along the swirls on a mocha cream cake and not stopped until he had polished off the whole wagon wheel. It had cost him a night of indigestion and three weeks’ house arrest.)
Ehrenfest was older than the Hollander brothers. That night, in the park with the fireworks, he was forty-nine years old, at the peak of his career and, according to Albert Einstein, ‘the best teacher I know of in our field.’ He stood there before Emmanuel and didn’t quite know what he had said wrong. The son of his host had introduced someone to him as ‘Frau Hollander’ and the young lady in question had walked off in a huff. Dutch etiquette could be extremely complicated.
‘Excuse me, Mr Ehrenfest,’ said my father. ‘I have to put something right. I’ve made a stupid mistake.’ He held up his hand and went racing after my mother’s cotton dress, leaving Ehrenfest behind under a shower of yellow drops of fire, victim of a misunderstanding that would never be resolved. Not long afterwards, grief-stricken by the developments in Germany, he took his own life.
‘They met again,’ said Uncle Herman, ‘your father and your future mother, at the ice cream vendor’s cart, in that field on the east side of the park. I was standing there, too. I saw Manny grab a woman by the arm and I was greatly surprised. He’d never been much of a ladies’ man. She turned round and said something – nothing very nice, that much was clear even from a distance, and he started talking with his hands, turned halfway round and pointed into the darkness, towards the restaurant, and talked and talked and talked. At first I thought: I didn’t even know Manny had a girlfriend, and then: I certainly didn’t know he’d had a girlfriend for so long that they’re already fighting.’
Uncle Herman moved as inconspicuously as possible towards his brother, but hadn’t gone ten steps when his name rang out in the darkness.
‘Herman Hollander! Where were you?’
My father looked up. My mother looked up. Herman bowed his head and tried to become invisible.
‘It was a woman,’ he said. ‘Let’s just say: a woman I was trying to avoid.’
‘She was the wife of one of my father’s colleagues,’ said my father, ‘and she and Herman had had a fling. Probably started out for him as an exciting little game, but when the fun was over for him, it had only just begun for her. She chased him all over the place! I think your grandfather was even more upset by the whole thing than either Herman or the woman’s husband.’ After that my father would always fall silent for a moment, and then conclude with: ‘Beautiful woman. A really good-looking woman.’
They ended up, Herman and his ladyfriend, one avoiding, the other pursuing, right next to my father and mother. Herman took a deep breath and said, ‘May I introduce …’ He looked at my mother. She sighed and said, ‘Sophie Hollander.’ Herman’s lady looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know you had a sister, Herman.’
‘No …’ said my father.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ said the lady. ‘Your wife …’
‘I think I’m going mad,’ said my mother. She looked around and then sank down onto a post.
The light and the darkness, said Uncle Herman, but he meant: his light, his darkness. That night in the park, my father fell for my mother (she, discerning as always, hadn’t yet fallen for him), but Uncle Herman was the one who felt the earth move under his feet. That was the difference in the Hollander Brothers’ feelings for Sophie. One fell in love, the way many people fall in love, the other lost his heart. The first few months everything was fine. The three of them spent a lot of time together, so much that it soon became impossible to imagine them as anything but a threesome. They strolled down the Binnenweg, under the trees, past Hoboken. They sat in the grass of Zocher’s Park and held heated political discussions (that is, Herman and Sophie did; Emmanuel, in the meantime, would be building something out of twigs and Herman’s pipe cleaners) or walked along the Boompjes and looked at the slow, wide river, the Wilhelminakade on the other side, where the great American-bound ships moored and unmoored and which was often swarming with emigrants.
My father and my uncle were not the only young men who wanted her. Sophie was a real catch. She was pretty and proud and came from a family of wealthy stockbrokers and merchants. Sophie was involved in politics, had been active in the Socialist movement ever since she was a girl, something her family had never thanked her for. (‘What are you trying to do?’ her father had asked after hearing from a colleague that his daughter had been seen with the Reds. ‘Make us poor with our own money?’ She had answered him calmly and confidently, and was so convincingly eloquent that, a month later, her father went to a meeting himself and, less than six months after that, joined the party). Although her leftist tendencies were a blemish on the otherwise excellent reputation of her family, Sophie Hollander was considered by many families to be a fine match. She did paint, of course, but that was an innocent enough pastime for a young lady. Most of the mothers were certain that these strange fancies, that Socialist claptrap and that painting of hers, would end once she was married to their son and had children of her own. Sophie disagreed. She took the things she did seriously. She was a socialist, because she couldn’t see how the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac was making the world any better. She painted … because she was a painter. If she were to marry – and at the time she ran into the Hollander Brothers she was extremely doubtful that this would ever happen – it would have to be a man who regarded her as his equal and thought it only normal that a woman should have her own opinion, her own work, and most of all, her own life.
So the young Messrs Hollander both courted this headstrong woman and it was Herman who decided whom Sophie would choose.
‘There have been a few moments in my life,’ Herman said later, ‘when I should have kept my mouth shut. This was one of them. If I hadn’t been such an arrogant know-it-all, who had to blurt out everything that popped into his mind, I’d have won her.’
‘If,’ I said. ‘Everything in this family is “if”. Manny says: If I’d only been able to cash in on the drill that wasn’t a drill, I’d be filthy rich. Zelda says: If I’d only been able to take care of Zeno, what happened never would have happened. Zeno says … Hang on a minute: won her? Your mistake was in thinking she could ever be won.’
He had muttered something unintelligible, Uncle Herman, his eyes fixed on the horizon.
‘The point is,’ he said after a while, ‘I’ve travelled the whole world over, met more people than most, but I’ve never met anyone like your mother.’
‘Thank you.’
He looked at me from under a bushy frown. ‘Do you find that inappropriate, Nathan?’
I shook my head. I knew how fierce the battle had been between my father and my uncle, and how Uncle Herman had lost.
One evening we were sitting in Café Loos. Sophie and Herman were discussing the situation in Germany, where the Weimar Republic was crashing down. Herman, who had just raised his hand for two more glasses of beer and tea ‘for the lady,’ said: ‘Man is the offal of Creation.’
‘The what?’ said Sophie.
‘The excrement of Creation,’ said Herman, who was being slowly borne along on the stream of his metaphors. ‘Stupid, selfish, and bad to the core. A creature that imagines itself to be moral, but only ever uses morality to account for so-called “good” deeds, or to justify “necessary evil.” If you ask me, we’re better off without it.’
‘Without what?’ asked Sophie, bewildered.
‘The human race,’ said Herman. And in one and the same breath he gave the waiter his order.
‘How,’ said Sophie, ‘can you be a socialist if you don’t believe in the goodness of man?’
‘Dear girl,’ said Herman, ‘socialism, contrary to what you and your fanatical friends might think, is not a surrogate religion. It’s a scientific approach to the problem of social inequality.’
‘Dear girl?’ Sophie snorted.
‘Underground transportation,’ said Emmanuel. ‘Now there’s something you can believe in.’
Sophie and Herman both looked at him. Then they turned back to each other and Sophie said, ‘Dear girl? What do you think I am, Herman Hollander? Some romantic little twit who runs around with socialists to burn off excess energy?’
‘Most people would just call it charity.’
‘Why you arrogant …’ Sophie couldn’t quite think of the word that characterized Herman at that particular moment.
‘It was a serious mistake in judgement. I thought that Sophie had been looking for a social life and ended up doing charity work because it suited her character.’
‘But Sophie wasn’t like that.’
He had shaken his head. ‘No. Socialism was her form of … the way in which she hoped to make the world a better place.’
‘So it was a surrogate religion.’
A finger stabbing in my direction. ‘But that’s where I was wrong! I didn’t see the sincerity of it. I was an atheist. There wasn’t a single form of religion that I took seriously. And Sophie was a true believer. She simply chose the twentieth-century version.’
In later years he would write an article about this, ‘The Tradition of Progressive Thinking’, in which he described an unbroken line that ran from the Torah, by way of the prophets and the various messianic movements, to socialism. It was, he said, a development that had its origins in the primitive amazement at ‘a world that wasn’t good’ and had led to increasingly practical and pragmatic methods of making the world better. Socialism was, my grandfather would have said, the zenith of that development.
Emmanuel stayed out of the discussion altogether. He sat by the window of that strange, round cafe, gazing out at the traffic, and imagined a world in which all transportation was underground and people whizzed about in stainless steel capsules propelled by compressed air. At times his abstractedness had had a negative effect on our history, but that night his musings about new, smaller, better machines had been the start of our family.
‘Emmanuel,’ said my mother, when I myself was about twenty, ‘may have been a worthless husband, but he was just the man I needed.’
‘Because he was a worthless husband,’ I said.
She had shaken her head. ‘No, because he knew what it meant to start out with nothing and to make something out of it. And because he knew, without ever even having thought about it, that making something is equally important to both men and women. He knew the passion of creation. A person who truly devotes himself to his task, N, will have total respect for another person who does the same. Herman isn’t a creator. He’s …’
‘A dissector. An analyst. You think it’s the difference between synthesis and analysis?’
‘Yes.’
And so, describing my father in the past tense, because she had long since stopped seeing him as a creator, my mother accounted for her ultimate choice, for a man who focused all his attention on nuts and bolts, and smaller things still.
Emmanuel Hollander worked at, and believed in progress, but progress was not a religious notion for him, as it was for his future wife. He was an engineer and knew that every machine began as a rickety prototype, held together with paper clips and string, but gradually improved, little by little. His mistake was in concluding that the world was no different: a huge, exceedingly complicated machine perhaps, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t make it better. It just took a bit longer.
Progress, to Emmanuel’s way of thinking, was the art of making things smaller, and he could still clearly remember when The Realization had hit him.
Walking down the Binnenweg in Rotterdam, somewhere near Hoboken, which was bathed in the dazzlingly bright light of the high summer sun, he had heard his father talking with Professor Lorentz. ‘Smaller, Hollander,’ said the Nobel Prize laureate. ‘Smaller is the future.’ They were strolling under the trees at the edge of the field, the two gentlemen in their black suits and the little boy – my father in his knee-breeches. He watched the ladies parading past the tall houses with the turrets. The grass smelled sweet. Herman was running around with a couple of other boys and, in the distance, a lap dog was sniffing at a German shepherd three times its size.
That night, when the professor had gone home and his father was about to retire to his study, Emmanuel asked who Smaller was.
‘Smaller?’
‘Mr Smaller. The one who’s the future.’
Heijman Hollander laughed and tousled his son’s hair. ‘Not Mr Smaller, Manuel. The professor means that the future lies in making things smaller. He means that we can now invent all sorts of things, but that they’re all too big and require too much energy. The first internal-combustion engines were so big and heavy that they had to spend an enormous amount of energy on themselves, just to drag themselves along. It wasn’t until they were smaller that we could we use them for boats and cars. That’s what Professor Lorentz means. He thinks that everything can be smaller. Smaller and smaller and smaller. Smaller is a sign that things are getting better.’
‘Smaller,’ my father was to say later, years later, ‘that’s what it’s all about. This is the age of miniaturization. Some people say communication. But communication only became profitable when we found a way to build such small appliances that the ordinary consumer was able to use them. Miniaturization is a sign of progress.’
That was why my father became an inventor instead of a scholar, because he was fascinated with making things smaller, not with the way they worked.
‘Why,’ Uncle Herman once said to me, ‘do you think I went to so much trouble to get Manny to come with me to America? Yes, we were brothers. Good answer.’ (I hadn’t even given him an answer.) ‘But we weren’t all that close. Perhaps I thought he would be a comfort to me, in that far-off land of America. Fine. But that would hardly explain why I went to him night after night to try and persuade Sophie to leave. Well? Do you have any idea?’
I didn’t need to have any idea. When Uncle Herman asked a question in this way, eliminating the undesired answers by first listing them all and then asking what I thought, it was clear that the only one who could possibly have any idea was him.
‘I wanted your father to come,’ said Uncle Herman, ‘because I saw, knew, that he would do something. How did I know that, you’re thinking.’
I wasn’t thinking that at all (I was sure Uncle Herman would think it for me) but I nodded vigorously, because I was certainly curious.
‘Your father,’ said Uncle Herman, ‘could have been one of the greatest physicists of his generation, if he wasn’t so fond of tinkering. He has an inimitable mind. But!’ Up went the bony old finger. ‘I don’t mean that he’s consciously original, or uncommonly brilliant. No. Your father never thinks. That’s why he could have done important things.’
Can a person be a great physicist because he doesn’t think? Uncle Herman believed so: ‘Schliemann discovered Troy, or whatever it was, because he had a dream which told him exactly where to find it. Einstein assumed that a good proof was elegant. Fermi was called “the quantum-engineer” because he – mistakenly, I might add – was seen as a brilliant amateur mechanic, but a poor thinker. Leo Szilard, remember him, that skinny little fellow? Szilard’s first achievement was taking out a patent for something to do with refrigerators.’
If that were true, and it seemed to be, my father could indeed have done great things. Because he hardly ever thought about his work, and if he did, it inevitably led to contraptions and inventions that he regretted long afterwards.
‘In other words,’ said Uncle Herman, ‘you might think of genius as being proof of an extremely orderly mind, but such a mind is merely the reflection of something that lies deeper, and that “something”, Nathan, is sheer chaos: premonitions, dreams, the human tendency to impose order, or to see it, when it probably isn’t there. Your father, I’ve always thought, could have made optimal use of the chaos in his mind, if only he hadn’t thought at all about what he did and worried more about the consequences.’
But my father, at crucial moments, had done exactly the opposite: he regarded his work as a game, and those rare occasions when he did take it seriously had led to catastrophes of historic proportions.
That man, an inventor who didn’t think and relied on half-digested theories and wrongly heard remarks, and that woman, who had a gift for Messianism and opted for the Socialists, those two unequal quantities, Emmanuel and Sophie, had come together, and they married.
After the long line of Hollanders who had produced no more than a single child, and always a son called Herman, Emmanuel and Sophie exploded in a household that was out of proportion in more than one respect. Less than a year after the marriage, Zoe was born, two years later, Zelda, two years after that, me, and finally, after nine years, as a sort of reminder of something that had nearly been forgotten, Zeno.
Manny, who was still called Emmanuel at the time, earned his living as a mechanical engineering draughtsman for a crane factory. Although he had fixed up a small workshop in a shed behind the house, he hardly invented anything anymore. Sophie ran back and forth between the nappy bucket, the kitchen counter, the stove and the children’s beds. Party meetings were a thing of the past. At night when the children were finally asleep, she could barely keep her eyes open. Her painting supplies, which she had carefully cleaned before storing away, lay in a cupboard gathering dust, between Zoe’s and Zelda’s dolls and my cars and boats.
No one was particularly happy, no one was noticeably unhappy. Inside the house the hearth blazed, the coloured glass tea light cast a warm red glow, there was challah and chicken soup on Friday, Manny made apple fritters on New Year’s Day, and when the weather turned and summer settled over the land, the young family spent every Sunday on the Noordzee Beach. Herman nearly always went along. Manny often said that Sophie had got two men for the price of one.
But outside, darkness was falling. New Year’s Eve 1938 was a quiet affair. There were the traditional apple fritters, which were carried on a huge platter to Herman and Manny’s parents’ house, and there were even fireworks, but the memory of Kristallnacht, which had raged in Germany not long before, was still fresh in their minds. Just after midnight Herman, Emmanuel, and their father stood outside watching the arrows of fire that fell from the sky. All three smoked a cigar and let the old year pass them by. And although none of them had reason to be dissatisfied, the cigars had lost their taste and the fireworks looked too much like the reflection of burning German synagogues in pools of broken glass.
The decision to leave came several months later, on a Sunday evening at Heijman and Sarah’s house. A wintery dusk hung in the parlour. There was only one light on, the standard lamp next to Uncle Herman, who sat with a half-closed newspaper on his lap and had long since stopped reading. In the back room, the stars from the tea light danced and the pale yellow cloud from the hanging lamp floated above the big round table. Sophie and her mother-in-law sat there, sliding sheets of white paper back and forth across the tabletop. Under the table, Zoe and Zelda were making their dolls fight out an argument that they themselves had begun. There was a horrible noise coming out of the radio. It sounded as if there were a kobold inside, a small, hideous creature hopping up and down on skinny little legs, steaming with rage. Every few minutes the voice coming from the Comedia would reach a shrill crescendo and the gnome would bite off the words that rolled out of his mouth. As if he were spewing out a long string of sausages and every so often, ranting and raving, would snap one off.
Outside a late winter rain began pouring down. The water streamed down the windowpanes and it grew even darker. Heijman Hollander got up from his chair and switched on the lamp on the sideboard. He paused at the window to look out at the rain. The street was already flooded. It was raining so hard that the water in the gutter looked as if it was boiling. Heijman sighed and sat back down.
Behind the tea-coloured linen of the Comedia the kobold had reached fever pitch. They were no longer words coming out of his mouth, not sausages either, but rough, grey-black cinders. Now and then his voice broke, hacked into the blackest ore, jagged chunks went flying. Then, as a surf of applause began rolling through the half-lit room, the gnome burst into his grand finale, a coloratura of grating and grinding and gnashing and …
‘A ridiculous little man, that Hitler,’ said Hollander senior. He leaned forward and pressed the ivory-coloured off-button on the radio. He sank back, sat with his legs slightly apart and frowned deeply at the fading green eye. The table lamp illuminated his balding crown and the wreath of white hair that stood out all around it. He stuck his thumbs into the pockets of his waistcoat and shook his head.
‘If only that were true,’ said Uncle Herman.
‘What?’
‘I said: If only he were just a ridiculous little man and nothing more.’
Grandfather muttered something. He leaned sideways and took a curved pipe out of the rack standing on a small table next to him. ‘What do you mean: If only he were nothing more?’ His hand glided over the tabletop, found the tobacco pouch, and stuck the bowl of the pipe into the leather muzzle.
Uncle Herman got up from his chair and folded his newspaper several times over. Grandfather lifted his head and looked at him, his left eyebrow slightly raised. Herman stared at him for a moment and then remembered the newspaper. He opened it out again and said, as he folded back the pages, ‘This ridiculous creature is the spume riding on the tidal wave, he’s the flotsam that washes ashore before the rest …’
The old man lit his pipe and disappeared in a ring of smoke. ‘Don’t romanticise,’ he said, when he had reappeared. ‘Analysis! Images only confuse the issue.’
‘… hate incarnate, a demon evoked by the seance that the people have been conducting for years and years …’
‘Images, stories …’ said the cloud around my grandfather’s head. ‘Just like that pseudo-science you say you study.’
‘Every new science is a pseudo-science,’ said Herman.
He laid the newspaper on the seat of his chair, put his hands in his pockets, and looked down at the floor. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘It’s raining.’
‘Father!’ cried Uncle Herman. ‘Listen to me! Leaving. Leaving! The country. Anyone who has any sense is leaving the country.’
Grandmother appeared between the sliding doors. With the light behind her she was a figure consisting of three dark ovals, a large one on the bottom, then a smaller one, the smallest on top. ‘Herman, I will not have shouting in my house.’
‘Mama, come in for a minute.’
‘Mama … The edification of the diamond cutter can wait. I’ve got something important to tell you.’
‘I must say, Herman,’ said Grandfather, ‘it hasn’t improved your manners any, studying with those scatterbrains.’
‘I was the only one in our whole damn family who saw that Europe was a sinking ship,’ Herman was to say later, years later. ‘As early as March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, I asked them to go with me. Begged them to go, threatened them …’
I had answered – we were sitting in the lobby of his hotel, he was over again from the States – I had answered that I knew that. After all, I had been there.
‘Nathan,’ said Herman, bending forward to pour the tea, ‘I realize that your imagination knows no bounds and that this is how you earn your living, but what I’m talking about took place when you were a baby.’
‘Four. Four and a half. I was four and a half years old. No milk.’
‘Very foolish.’
‘Foolish? I know exactly what happened. Would you like a complete run-down?’
‘I meant the tea. Milk neutralizes the tannin.’
‘It’s like having a spoonful of warm butter in your mouth.’
Herman had poured the tea, pushed the plate of biscuits perfunctorily towards me and, when I didn’t take one, made his selection. The plate would remain in front of him until it was empty.
‘Fine,’ he said, brushing biscuit crumbs off his jumper. ‘Fine, you know exactly what happened then and then, at such and such a time. Congratulations. You have the perfect memory. You’re blessed. But I’m not talking about registration. Insight, that’s what matters.’
‘I can remember Grandfather saying the very same thing.’
‘Jesus.’ Uncle Herman shook his head, grimacing. ‘It’s sick. A curse, that’s what it is.’ He grabbed another handful of butter biscuits and, distractedly, began to consume them. ‘Analysis,’ he said, ‘analysis, no images.’
‘No romanticising.’
‘No romanticising … That too. Lord of the Universe! No romanticising, that’s what he said.’
We drank our tea, the First Flush Darjeeling that Uncle Herman had brought with him and given to the hotel manager for safekeeping. It was a delicate, aromatic blend that, with each sip, evoked the image of rows of bowed tea-pickers in long, colourful garments, moving across the endless slopes of the Himalayas.
He was right, Uncle Herman. March 1939, and he had told his parents that he was leaving, even if they stayed behind. His father had laughed in his face and called Herman a half-cocked worrywort. ‘Germany and the big four have divided up Czechoslovakia,’ he said, ‘because it’s disputed territory. That invasion has nothing to do with us.’ Herman’s reply, that Hitler was depriving the Jews of their rights and locking up Socialists and Communists, fell on deaf ears. He had stood there in the middle of the room, Herman, a man, hardly more than a boy, and pleaded for the life of his parents. The horrors he depicted loomed up like phantoms in the darkening parlour. The Teutonic Hordes, as he called them, appeared in the clouds of smoke that rose from his father’s pipe, disappeared, and were followed by new ghosts which, in turn, also disappeared, and were replaced by even more abominations. He conjured up a maelstrom of apocalyptic images. There, in the low light of the Dutch sitting room, the light of Rembrandt and Hals and Heda and Vermeer, there, in that light, observed by his silent parents, Zoe, Zelda, my mother and me, he had evoked his demons, and as he talked and talked and talked, he lapsed into the impassioned rhetoric of an Old Testament prophet. It would have come as no surprise if he had raised his right hand and said, in an imploring bass: ‘Verily, I say unto you, in the name of the God of Israel, whose name is One: the day will come when you shall no longer be able to walk through your streets, you shall be hunted at every turn, like wild beasts, and if you seek comfort from your neighbour he shall betray you, he shall not know you. Those days shall come. The sun shall rise, the sun shall set, and in the light of day the people shall be crushed like ants!’
Perhaps he ought to have said that. They would have told him – they were doing that anyway – that he was getting carried away by his own romantic image of reality, but at least then he would have had the satisfaction of prophecy.
But he controlled himself, he was reasonable, he pleaded and begged and lamented.
‘Never again,’ he said in the lobby of the Memphis Hotel, ‘never again. When it was all over, in ’45, I made up my mind never to control myself like that again. I’ll preach, I’ll prophesy, I’ll sing, by God, if I think it’ll do any good. But no more reasonableness when the world around me is being so unreasonable.’
The seance had ended with the front door slamming and Uncle Herman’s footsteps receding down the street. We, my grandparents, my mother, Zoe, Zelda, who was crying, and I, remained behind in silence. It was a long time before my grandmother opened her mouth.
‘Chaim,’ she said. We all looked up. She never called him that. ‘Chaim,’ she said, ‘would you ring for coffee?’ My grandfather stared at her for a moment and then reached behind him, for the bellpull. He gave it a tug. In the distance we heard the little bell that alerted the maid. The silence in the parlour was solid marble. As we waited for her footsteps, I saw an amorphous army of sinister figures marching out of the shadowy corner of the room. Eyes flared in the darkness, the slow tread of the menace came thundering closer.
Although the past lived on in my family (my grandfather, a physicist who worked with the greatest minds of his day, without being a great mind himself, felt, above all, that he was the descendant of a long line of clockmakers, the zenith of an evolution that had taken place within our small circle of kinsmen. ‘Clockmakers,’ he always said, ‘travelling hagglers who carried everything they owned upon their backs. That’s what we were. Now we’ve reached our apex. We no longer wander, we dwell. We no longer do, we think.’) – although that past of departing, arriving, and travelling on was still very much alive, the announcement of Uncle Herman’s departure came as a shock. In my grandfather’s eyes our forefathers had built a Tower of Babel, a work that reached to the heavens, and here was the last builder, the one who could finish the job, saying he was going down, leaving the tower. Here we were, in a land that was a zenith unto itself, the zenith of European civilization, the land for which we had named ourselves, where Huygens had invented the pendulum clock, here we were, risen, together with that land, from the murky waters of suspicion and mistrust, reaching for knowledge and understanding, and Herman was pulling on his coat to leave.
And he wasn’t going alone. He walked out of his parents’ house and marched resolutely to ours, where my father was sitting in the shed tinkering with a kind of mechanical hammer, a vicious-looking blue steel point that was forced down by a weight. When Herman walked in, the point had just shot through a sheet of iron and was stuck fast in the workbench. My father was trying to pull the thing out with a pair of pliers.
‘Manuel,’ said Herman, ‘I’m leaving.’
‘Leaving?’ said my father. ‘You just got here.’
‘Lord,’ said Herman. ‘Why me? The country, Manuel, I’m leaving the country.’
My father put a piece of metal pipe under the pliers to make a lever. ‘Holiday,’ he said. ‘Have fun.’ He clamped the head of the pliers around the steel pin and pushed down hard on the other end.
Herman closed his eyes and tipped his head back. ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘listen. Listen and use your brains.’ And he told him what was going on ‘outside.’ By ‘outside’ Herman didn’t only mean Germany. ‘Outside’ was the whole European world. ‘Things are going wrong,’ he said, ‘and this time, it’s serious. This is a sinking ship.’ He talked of Carl van Ossietsky, how the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize had died in a camp. He told my father what German Jewish refugees had told him, that their shops had been plundered and their synagogues burned to the ground. ‘But Herman,’ said my father, licking the knuckles of his left hand, ‘that’s hundreds of miles away from here.’ Herman had taken a good, long look at his brother. Then he said: ‘Man is bad. That’s terrible. Man is stupid. That’s a shame. Those two traits make a dangerous combination, especially if it’s rewarded. And that’s what has just happened. The Germans have been given Czechoslovakia. The Germans aren’t satisfied with Czechoslovakia. Soon they’ll want Poland and after that they’ll want everything on the other side of their country. If you don’t leave now, you’ll be putting yourself at the mercy of the barbarians.’
But my father, the engineer, was barely listening. In his world of machines, things always got better the longer you fiddled with them. The German machine wasn’t running very well at the moment. That would take care of itself. He didn’t pay attention until his brother began depicting the possibilities to him of Life in the New World.
‘We,’ said Herman, ‘are free men. You, as an engineer, just as much as I. Here, everything is fixed. If you happen to wear the wrong tie one day you can forget about ever becoming a professor or a manager. But in America everyone can be what he wants. Even if you never wear a tie in your life. There it makes no difference who you are or what you are, but what you do. What exactly are you doing?’
My father pushed down the pliers again and said, groaning, ‘A way to make smooth holes. Without a drill.’
‘Why?’
He let go of the pliers and rubbed his forehead. ‘Drills make burrs. For some machines you need perfectly smooth holes.’
‘What’s the matter, you never heard of a file?’
‘Herman,’ said my father, picking up the pliers again, ‘you take care of the state of world affairs, I’ll make sure things work. With a file, a hole always ends up bigger than you meant it to be. I’m looking for a way to get just the right hole on the first try.’
Herman shrugged his shoulders and stared at the makings of my father’s latest invention. ‘Fine. But if I’m going to be responsible for the state of world affairs, I’d advise you to listen. The biggest and roughest hole you’ve ever seen is going to form right here, in Europe. If you and Sophie and the children don’t leave, that hole will swallow you up.’
With Herman’s help my father pulled the point of his mechanical hammer out of the workbench, and then they both went inside. They drank a bottle of wine and Herman told him once again about the New Homeland.
‘So, in America you don’t have to wear a tie and you can still be whatever you want?’ Herman had nodded, without quite understanding. A country where what mattered was what you did, not who or what you were.
‘So, no ties?’ Emmanuel asked again.
‘No ties,’ Herman assured him.
‘May the angels strike me down,’ said Uncle Herman, his face in the fragrant steam that rose from his First Flush Darjeeling, ‘your father left because he hated ties. It’s taken me half my life to figure that out, but it’s true. If I hadn’t started blathering about ties that day, you wouldn’t be sitting here now.’
I knew that Herman wasn’t exaggerating. Once I had spent a summer holiday with my father and, tired and grumpy after the long journey, I’d asked him why the hell he had stayed in America. He didn’t have to think twice before answering. He turned round, pointed in the direction of what he assumed to be the Atlantic Ocean and, beyond that, Europe, and said: ‘Over there, everything is fixed. If you wear the wrong tie, just once, you can forget about ever becoming a professor or a manager. Here,’ he said, with a wave of his arm, as if he were sweeping together his apartment, Manhattan, the entire continent, in one gesture, ‘here you can be whatever you want. Even if you never wear a tie.’
My father may have been convinced, but my mother still had her doubts. A visit from three German refugees, arranged by Herman, made the necessary impression. Arjeh Pinkus, Josef Bamberger and Wolf Krohn had sat quietly at the big table in the living room, drinking Sophie’s coffee, nibbling her assorted biscuits, and smiling uncertainly. Until Emmanuel put the bottle of gin on the table, poured out four brimming glassfuls, and asked them how they’d been. Sophie, who, since her early youth, had never been easily shocked, had spent half the evening with her hand over her mouth. That night Emmanuel received her permission to go to his parents and inform them that he and his family were leaving with Herman.
Heijman helped his sons with the travel expenses. Not because he agreed with Herman’s ranting about ‘Teutonic Hordes’, but because he was a firm believer in the boundless opportunities awaiting his sons in America. He still considered Herman a deserter, about to drag his brother’s family along in his romantic vision of evil, but after ‘so many years of schlepping around,’ what was one more westward-bound generation? All things considered, he said to my father when he came to tell him we were leaving, it hadn’t done us any harm so far, that seemingly endless journey west.
There’s a photograph showing the six of us posing in the traditional configuration of the emigrant family: Emmanuel and Sophie in the middle, Zoe and Zelda beside them, Uncle Herman, crosslegged, on the ground. I shine like a young prince in the Big Chair, Uncle Herman’s lap. There are suitcases and trunks all around us. We must have just boarded. We look well-dressed and well-fed, privileged people in every respect. My father is wearing a dark grey, slightly crumpled suit, the thumb of his right hand hooked in his waistcoat pocket. My mother, in her dark red dress, is standing silently beside him, her face set in the serious frown still so fashionable in the thirties when people had their pictures taken. Zelda and Zoe are watching something out of camera range, and Uncle Herman, in a dark tweed jacket, his left arm around my stomach, is laughing at the photographer. I am peering nearsightedly, though no one knew that at the time, at the vague smudge in front of us. A fraction of a second later, after the magnesium flash had blinded us and the bluish cloud of smoke was clearing, I was to burst into tears.
The descendants of a family of clockmakers? You can’t tell by looking at us. Anyone happening to go through the ship photographer’s archives wouldn’t even have noticed us: the umpteenth family on its way to the new Promised Land, not rich, not poor, not carefree, not desperate. The desperate went Third Class, in the belly of the ship, where it stank of hot iron and oil and the ceaseless pounding of the engines shook the walls. They were Jewish refugees from Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Austria, who waited four, five, six, and sometimes more to a cabin, until that goyish hunk of steel had finally anchored and they could start once again on what they and their forefathers had done so often already: building a new life. Above them, way, way above them, those with hope and expectations and money travelled First Class. Industrialists, politicians, film stars, and singers paraded across the sun deck and spent their evenings in the dimly-lit lounge, wondering whether to round off the last few hours of the day with a Nuits Saint George or a whisky. We were in the middle, Second Class, too poor for the rich, too rich for the poor. Jews, yes, but the sort that no longer felt they had any connection with their forefathers – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, those archetypal emigrants. None of us stopped to think that, if the truth be told, we had far more in common with those desert patriarchs than those leading the life of Riley on the deck above. None of us would ever have thought that we, like our mythical forebears, were characters in a never-ending story of arrival and departure.
Uncle Herman was the only one who still had a vague feeling of solidarity with the wailing, puking third class, but that was more the result of the socialism he had acquired during his sociological studies than any religious or ethnic affinity.
This was also the reason why, one night after dinner, we found ourselves sitting in the dreary Third Class dining hall. Herman and my father were drinking beer, my mother, tea from a lime-coated glass, my sisters and I, grenadine. Around us, men, women and children were sitting at the half-cleared tables.
‘That fellow over there,’ said Herman, pointing to a big dark man sitting on the other side of the hall, ‘was important in the Bund. Fought against the Poles, against the rabbis, against the bosses, against everything that restrained him. He is the future. He is a free man.’
My parents and sisters looked over at the giant. He sat hunched forward, as big men do, slow and placid. They saw him as the incarnation of the New Man, the Man Who Fought Back.
‘Free …’ my father mumbled.
‘Free,’ said Herman. ‘Free from religion, from the commandments of God and the rabbis, from the rest, the people around us. And there’s more freedom on the way. You’ll see, the world will change completely after the war.’
‘What war?’ said my mother.
‘The one that’s about to begin,’ said Uncle Herman.
‘There have been other wars,’ mumbled my father, who had closed his eyes and was kneading the bridge of his nose, the way he always did when he was thinking something up.
‘But none like this one. In ten or twenty years people will say that it was a war of absurd extremes, and that’s probably true, but most of all it will be the division between the Old World and the New, between the heavy and the light, the shallowness and the depth.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said my mother.
‘I’m talking about the end of the world as we know it, a world in which society is governed by tradition and morality, in which the classes are divided by knowledge and power and possibilities, and therefore, money.’
‘Do you really think that socialism is going to take hold after this war?’
‘Socialism,’ said Herman, ‘will be the only justice. After this war, no man who has fought for another will ever again accept that others are superior to him simply because they’re superior to him. And the world can no longer afford the lazy life of the aristocrats. There will be a major redistribution of knowledge and power and money.’
My mother looked at my sisters who, in turn, looked at a couple of other children.
‘Sounds like everything’ll be fine once we get this war out of the way,’ said my father absently.
‘It will be an inferno,’ Uncle Herman continued, ‘the likes of which we’ve never known. What’s about to happen over there …’ He pointed towards the continent, invisible for nearly a week now, of Europe. ‘… will evoke demons that will live forever.’
My mother shuddered.
‘All these ideas of yours, Herman, does this mean you don’t believe a word of what we were taught?’ asked Emmanuel. He drew a line through a circle and joined it to a parallelogram.
Herman smiled. ‘God and Creation and us as the storm troopers of that Old Testament liege?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with religion,’ said Sophie. ‘And it’s not fair to present it as some childish fairy tale. You could say the very same thing about socialism.’
‘Yes,’ said Herman, ‘yes. But at least then it’s a fairy tale we’ve made up for ourselves.’
‘That’s probably what they thought back in the desert, too,’ mumbled my father.
Herman stared at him for a long time, then frowned.
We sat there, my mother talking to Herman, my father scribbling all over the menu and occasionally letting a few words fall from his lips that no one paid much attention to, Zoe and Zelda quietly drinking their grenadine in the hope that they would go unnoticed and not be sent to bed, and me, slumped against my mother.
In the distance, Schlomo Minsky’s gaze travelled over the hall. When he saw me, his face broke into a smile. I waved, and he held up one of his huge hands and waved back. Beside him, small, almost transparent, red-haired Reisele was staring fixedly at me. My mother looked down and gave me a nudge.
‘Who are you waving at?’ she asked.
‘At Schlomo Minsky,’ I said.
‘At …’
‘Schlomo Minsky,’ I repeated.
‘How do you know …’ said Uncle Herman.
My mother gave me another nudge, and another, until I had no choice but to look up at her. ‘Nathan?’ There was a question in her eyes.
‘I was down below,’ I whispered.
‘Below? Alo …’ She looked over at my father, who was drawing something unrecognizable on the menu.
‘Emmanuel,’ said my mother, so calmly that he looked up with the frightened expression of someone being called to account for a horrible deed he knows nothing about.
‘What? What?’
‘Nathan was down below, all by himself.’
‘Hm?’ He glanced at me quickly and smiled, relieved. ‘Don’t do that again, son.’ He returned to his menu. My mother’s gaze remained so firmly fixed that he looked up again almost immediately. ‘What …’
‘You promised to keep an eye on him. How can I mind three children at the same time?’
‘Schlomo Minsky,’ said Uncle Herman, pensively. ‘How do you know his name, Nathan?’
I looked from my father to my mother. My father and my mother looked at me.
We had paid a visit, my father and I, to the ship’s engineer, who always set great store by my father’s coming. Not only did we bring cigars, the traditional Dutch way of breaking the ice, but both men also shared the same animal passion for machinery. Mr Ladenius was a small, immaculately dressed fellow from Groningen. His boiler suit may have been stained with grease and oil, but it always looked as if it had been washed and starched when he put it on in the morning. The red rag that always hung out of his pocket would shift, at the slightest provocation, from his right hand to his left and then to an up-and-down or back-and-forth-moving brass rod with a smidgen of grease on it that no one saw but he.
Ladenius was rather irritable that morning. Shortly before we arrived, he had detected a sound that he couldn’t identify. He took the cigar my father offered him and put it in his breast pocket (usually they would give each other a light, sit down on the steel stairs that led to the droning machinery, and disappear in a nauseating cloud of smoke).
‘Yes,’ said my father, when the engineer had explained what was bothering him. ‘I hear it, too.’ He tipped his head to one side and listened for a while. ‘The gasket.’
‘You’re not supposed to hear that at all.’
‘No. Unless …’
Soon they were lost in a half-mumbled colloquy. I wandered up and down the staircases, from top to bottom and bottom to top, and when the two men disappeared into the hold, where the piston rods were sliding in and out of the pounding engine, I slipped out the door and began my quest through the labyrinth of the ship.
In the steel corridors, the chilly light of feeble bulbs glimmered along walls and ceilings. I stopped outside a steel door, open a hand’s-breadth, and tried to make out the quarrelling voices from the room within. I had been standing there for a while listening when I heard footsteps heading in my direction. Without thinking, I ran off. Several doors down, I no longer knew where I was. Shadows leaped up in the long iron tunnel behind me, while in front of me the tunnel tapered off in a haze of strange sounds, muffled echoes and pale light. Somewhere, at the end of a long passageway that led to the crew’s quarters, I ran straight into the legs of a young officer. Shrill screams rang out in the corridor. It was a while before I realized that I was the one who was screaming. The man in white, who smelled strongly of pipe tobacco and linen, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and plucked me off the floor like a baby rabbit.
‘Easy, lad. What’s going on here?’
‘… th-the too-hoo-tonni …’
‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘Polack?’
I shook my head.
‘Czech? Ruski? Deutsche?’
I was out of breath, my chest heaved. ‘… th-the too-hoo …’
The man picked me up and carried me on his hip to a door. Behind it was a large room with linoleum-covered tables. Right at the back was a kind of sideboard. Large chrome kettles stood on one end, and at the other, a man in chef’s attire was stacking plates. The officer set me down on one of the tables and called out to him. ‘Freddy! How about a nice glass of cold milk for this young fellow?’ There was a clatter, the tinkle of glassware, and then the cook came walking towards us.
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘A stowaway.’
They laughed.
‘Jew?’
‘Whatever he is, I can’t understand him.’
I drank the cold milk and stared at the cook’s stained apron. Now and then a dry sob welled up from my chest, but the fear that I had felt moments before was gone.
‘Hollander,’ I said. ‘My name is Nathan Hollander, Captain.’
‘Nathan Hollander. And by the way, I’m just a plain, ordinary seaman. Now then, what are you doing down here all by yourself, Nathan Hollander?’
I looked at my shoes, which were dangling a long way above the floor. ‘I thought they were coming to get me,’ I said. Another shiver ran through my chest.
‘Who was coming to get you?’
‘The Teutonic Hordes.’
‘The …’ The officer began laughing so hard that I shot back with fear. The empty glass slid across the table and the cook grabbed it just as it was about to go tumbling over the edge. ‘The Teutonic Hordes.’ They were both laughing now, though the cook was looking rather uncertainly at the other man. ‘Where did you learn words like that?’
I explained that my Uncle Herman was always talking about them, that he had said Thank God we were at sea and headed in the right direction because otherwise we’d be crushed by the …
‘Teutonic Hordes,’ said the officer.
I nodded.
‘So you’re trying to escape?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And on which deck is your family travelling?’
I had no idea. I could find my way there from the dining hall and the promenade deck, but what it was called, what number it was, and where it was if you were coming from some other part of the ship, I didn’t know.
The officer lifted me up off the table, beckoned, and led me back to the corridor where he had found me earlier. We hadn’t gone more than sixty feet, when I put my hand in his. Way ahead of us I saw other figures in the dim light and behind us a faint echo made ready to follow in our wake.
After endless walking, downstairs, upstairs, and through so many corridors that I began to feel tired, we arrived in the working-class district that was Third Class. Laundry hung on lines that had been strung between the ceiling lamps. Men, women, and children sat in their cabin doorways, talking and quarrelling. There was a pungent smell of bodies, damp clothes, and onions. Voices shot up, doors slammed shut and swung open as we walked past, and running through that whirlpool of images and sounds was the swirling stream of words from the Diaspora. There, in that underworld, I was left behind. The officer patted me on the head, told me not to go wandering about the ship anymore, and disappeared behind a line of washing. Not long afterwards, Schlomo Minsky came home. The first thing he noticed was a group of excited children. When he came closer he saw that they were standing around a small boy from one of the upper decks and asking him questions in three or four different languages and, when he didn’t answer, began jeering at him.
‘Schtil,’ said Minsky. He didn’t need to raise his voice, there was instant silence. He laid a hamlike hand on the door, pushed his key into the lock, and let me in. The children who had waylaid me remained standing in the doorway and watched, their eyes wide. ‘Gejh,’ said Minsky. The little group of onlookers dispersed.
He set me on top of a chest and seated himself on the only chair, an unpainted wooden thing that looked as if it were hurled down the stairs twice a day, thrown around the room, and then put back in place.
‘Schlomo Minsky,’ he said, laying his hand on his chest. ‘Schlomo Minsky.’ He pronounced his first name as ‘Schloime.’
‘Nathan Hollander,’ I said, my hand on my chest.
‘Nathan,’ he said. There was a silence. Then he brought his huge hand to his mouth and made a drinking motion. I nodded.
He made tea on a small primus stove. His large body moved slowly, almost cautiously, around the cabin. He picked up a dented tin mug as tenderly as if it were a teacup of the finest china. After a while he brought me the mug. He put it down on the chest and said, ‘Trink, majn Kind.’ I picked up the mug by the handle and blew on the steaming black liquid. It took a long time for the tea to cool off, so I just kept blowing and looking around, smiling at Schlomo Minsky, who followed my movements and, each time our eyes met, nodded and made faces.
‘Reisele! Rivka!’ In the doorway stood a woman and a girl my age. They both had red hair. ‘This is Nathan, he has lost his way.’
The woman nudged the girl inside and looked me over, as Minsky kissed her on the hair. He nearly had to bend double to do so. They exchanged a few words in a language I couldn’t understand, but when the woman began to laugh I realized that he was telling her what had happened. The girl stood behind her parents and watched me. Her large brown eyes shone softly and before I knew it I was lost in her gaze. It wasn’t until Mrs Minsky clapped her hands that I returned to my senses. The girl, Reisele, sat down on the edge of the berth, still looking at me. I could do nothing but look back.
When I had finished my tea, Minsky brought me upstairs. Somewhere in the long corridor between the dining hall and our cabin he left me to continue on my own. He patted me on the back and said something I couldn’t understand.
‘So you’ve been to see Minsky …’ said Uncle Herman. He looked at me thoughtfully.
‘You were supposed to watch Nathan,’ said my mother accusingly.
My father looked up in alarm.
‘Do I have to do everything by myself? While all you do is sit around and daydream?’
‘He just walked off,’ said my father.
‘All children walk off. Parents are there to make sure they don’t get very far.’
‘Stop it,’ said Uncle Herman. ‘The boy has a spirit of adventure.’
My mother hissed like a cat.
‘And who’s that pretty girl who keeps staring at you?’ asked Uncle Herman.
‘Reisele,’ I whispered.
I could hear Uncle Herman smiling. ‘Don’t you think maybe you should go over to her?’
‘Herman!’
Uncle Herman turned to my mother and gave his voice the implacable head-of-the-family tone that he had been adopting for some time now. ‘Sophie. Give the boy a chance to see something more of life than our own sheltered little world. The Minskys seem like extremely respectable people.’ He laid his hand in the hollow of my back and, giving me a gentle nudge, said, ‘Go, Nathan. Try and learn something.’ My mother sniffed. I took a step forward, hesitated, and then headed for the Minskys.
The rest of the evening I played with Reisele. Minsky and his wife sat around a table with several other Poles, while the two of us stood around an empty chair and played our own ocean voyage with two bottle caps and a burnt match. We couldn’t understand each other, except for the occasional word, but we knew exactly what we meant. Now and then Minsky or his wife leaned over us to see what it was we were doing so quietly, then returned to the table and resumed their lively discussion.
When it was way past my bedtime, Uncle Herman came to get me. He stood there for a moment looking at Reisele and me, and when Minsky turned round, he nodded, held out his hand, and introduced himself. They spoke a language I didn’t understand. Every now and then they laughed. After a while Uncle Herman laid his hand on my head and said it was time to go.
We had just returned to our table, when a man stormed into the dining hall. He stood in the middle of the aisle and shouted, ‘Germany has invaded Poland!’
‘When?’ cried Herman. ‘When did they invade?’
‘Last night,’ said the man. ‘They’ve already reached Warsaw. The Poles can do nothing to stop them.’
My mother drew Zoe and Zelda close, my father pushed the menu he had been scribbling on a bit further away and looked at it with satisfaction. Somewhere in the room, but I couldn’t tell where, a woman was murmuring ‘Bubba, bubba’ – endlessly, tonelessly. My mother stood up. She took a deep breath. ‘Sit down, Sophie,’ said Uncle Herman. ‘We can’t do anything on this ship.’ She shrugged her shoulders and jerked her head to one side, as if she were trying to jolt herself awake. ‘War,’ she said. ‘Not yet,’ said Herman, ‘but it won’t be long.’ He looked at my father, who was adding something to the pattern of lines on the menu. ‘What the hell are you doing? What is that? A message to the Almighty?’
My father shook his head in a distracted, pensive way. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it sounds crazy, but I’ve thought up something I can’t believe is even possible.’
‘All right, what is it?’ asked Herman.
My father looked up from the piece of paper. ‘A way to make holes without a drill.’
Uncle Herman didn’t move. He stared at his brother and waited. Nothing happened. ‘Manny,’ he said, ‘we’re out here in the middle of the ocean, on a ship, on our way to America, fleeing from Hitler. The Germans have invaded Poland and you’ve invented something to drill holes?’
‘Without a drill,’ said my father. ‘The advantage is that you …’
‘I don’t want to hear it! I don’t want to hear it! The world is caving in around your ears and you’re messing about with a drill?’
‘No, not a drill …’
‘Manny!’
And so we sailed on, over the ocean that had seemed so peaceful and calm when we first set sail but had suddenly become the hideout from which The Enemy leered at unsuspecting travellers to the New World. There were frequent boat drills now and the crew didn’t rest until everyone was in the lifeboats well before the required time. The atmosphere on board changed. Those who still had property in the Old Country, or shares in the New, stood in line outside the radio operator’s cabin. Others, who had left family behind, pored over every news bulletin, however brief, and worried themselves sick listening to the rumours. And to make matters worse, the weather turned. Three days after the invasion of Poland the gentle swell, to which everyone was accustomed by now, changed to restless, choppy waves. They headed up into the wind, but once the storm finally reached us, even that no longer helped. The deck rose and fell. Emmanuel got so seasick that he was confined to his bed, Zoe and Zelda and I lay, green, in our berths in the adjoining cabin. Uncle Herman crawled along the floor of his cabin, groaning that he was going to die and wanted to make his will. Only Sophie remained on her feet. She had the time of her life. During the day she lolled in the sumptuous armchairs in the First Class lounge, at night she drank champagne and Aloxe Corton in the empty restaurant. She ate at the captain’s table with a few of the officers, an American steel magnate, and a member of the Senate. In those wild, tempestuous days – the stewards were sometimes stranded on their way to the table when caught unawares by a particularly high wave – she was the ship’s mascot. Her eyes sparkled. Every night when she walked into the dining hall, her hair smelled of salt and iodine. She opened her oysters as if she had never done anything else. For the first time in her life she learned the difference between eating and tasting. The steel magnate, an old man who drank in her vitality as if she were a walking elixir, let her taste a Petrus from before the phylloxera disaster – a deep red wine, nearly black.
‘Madame,’ he had said, when the head steward had placed the basket on the dazzling white damask, ‘you are about to be among the few people of this century to have partaken of this drink. This is remembrance in a bottle. Remembrance of a time when the world still held promise.’
And he had told her about the disaster that had laid waste the French vineyards in 1863 and how it had taken nearly twenty years for the French to accept the only possible solution: grafting indigenous vines onto American rootstock. He told her that wine from before the disaster was still considered the best that the industry had ever produced. The Petrus, which was eighty years old when she drank it, transported her, that night, to a world of fragrance and hushed voices. At midnight she danced with the senator across the empty floor, as a puking orchestra played a waltz. Afterwards she stood in her rain-drenched coat in the doorway of the upper deck. She clung to the brass rails of the gangway and bathed her face in the salty spray. She could feel every fibre in her body – there was life inside her, pure, irrepressible life. It was a feeling that filled her with guilt and hope, both at the same time. As she stood there, her face to the wind and the ink-black Atlantic night all around her, she decided that she was going to paint again. No more housewife-nanny-lover-cook. She would have a life, a life with the same obligations, but the same privileges, too, as Emmanuel.
The storm moved on, towards Europe, the ship sailed on, to America, and one by one the other passengers emerged from their berths. Once again, the kitchens began steaming, baking and roasting. The deck chairs were occupied by pale men and women who lay shivering under their blankets and blinking in the sun that broke through the clouds. Herman claimed that he had felt wonderful all along, he had just been a bit tired, and what a fine opportunity to catch up on his reading! Emmanuel scribbled over so many menus that the steward came and complained. Zoe and Zelda ran around the sun deck, played shuffleboard, and hid in the endless corridors in the bowels of the ship. I made my way below, where the air smelled of vomit and urine, to visit the Minskys. I played for hours with Reisele in the cramped cabin. Sometimes, when we were tired of playing, we would sit on her father’s lap, she on his right thigh, I on his left, and listen to the stories he told. What Uncle Herman had hoped would happen – that Schlomo Minsky would show me a glimpse of the world of inequality and oppression and how a truly free man might cast off that yoke – did not. That didn’t matter. The poverty, the hustling and haggling I saw in the overcrowded Third Class corridors, was enough to convince me for the rest of my days that life was not inherently just, and that it was up to us to bring justice into the world. So in a certain sense, I did receive the education that Uncle Herman had in mind for me. But at the same time I also drank from a well he would have preferred to keep hidden. Schlomo Minsky, however free and socialist, however much he resembled the square-jawed heroes of the revolution in those socio-realist paintings and posters from Russia, Schlomo Minsky, the ‘New Man,’ told us tales from the Talmud and Midrash and a whole new world opened up for me. Kabbalistic wunderrebbes flew through the air towards a God for whom they bore an almost physical love. Bearded tsaddikim stole out of the house at night disguised as farmhands and chopped wood for Polish maidens. There were golems, dybbuks, giants and horned men, the Angel of Death, the Archangel of the Countenance, a host of mystical beings from the Realm of Darkness. Somewhere, deep down, I must have known that Uncle Herman didn’t appreciate this. Each time he asked me how it had been at the Minskys, I told him I had played with Reisele. Sometimes I said that Schlomo Minsky had told us about wicked noblemen and pogroms. But the world of Kabbalistic amulets, miracle workers and sages, I kept to myself. A stowaway began growing inside me and he looked like a hunched Talmud and Torah Jew who had been raised on herring and blintzes, borscht and kreplach, black tea and Rashi.
And then, one bright, sunny day, the coast of the Promised Land appeared on the horizon and after a while we saw the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty against the white and blue marbled sky. Amidst a swarm of small barges and boats, our ship steamed up the Hudson.
We had, for the umpteenth time in our family’s history, gone west to escape our fate and, for the umpteenth time, it looked as though we had made it.
When Emmanuel announced that he was going to America, his father saw his chance to intervene in the course of events. ‘If you insist on going along with that pigheaded brother of yours, fine,’ he had said. ‘I’ll pay for you both, but on one condition: that you continue with your studies.’ Emmanuel had groaned when presented with this choice. He loved his work, and what’s more he wasn’t cut out for theory. But he was a good son, at a time when sons obeyed their fathers, and so, shortly after arriving, he went off to enrol at the nearest university. He started off at the front desk, was referred to someone else, and as he wandered around a university that was bigger than any he had ever seen, he got lost. Corridor after corridor passed him by, auditorium after auditorium appeared when he opened yet another door, but what he sought, he didn’t find.
Or perhaps he did.
Somewhere in the depths of the building he met a man who looked strangely familiar. He began walking more slowly and noticed that the other man did the same. They gave each other an uncertain nod and were just about to walk on, when the stranger ran a hand over his balding head, squinted, and cried, ‘Emmanuele Hollander!’ He spoke with a slight Italian accent. My father, who, until that moment, had had no idea why he thought he knew the other man, suddenly realized who was standing here before him. It was Enrico Fermi.
‘Emmanuel. Funiculi, funicula! What brings you here?’
My father explained that his wife and brother were refugees and that he was on his way to enrol as a physics student.
‘And your father, where is your father?’
‘He wouldn’t come. He thinks it’ll all blow over.’
Fermi shook his head. It would blow over, he said, the way a hurricane blew over: leaving countless victims in its wake. ‘You must try to persuade him, once again. He’s a Jew, and as a physicist he’s far too useful to the enemy to sit out the storm in the cellar.’
Fermi took Emmanuel by the arm and led him to his office. He sent for tea and asked him about his plans.
Years later, many years later, my father would tell us how he had felt that day, across the desk from the great Enrico Fermi, who sat there and talked with him as if they were old friends. ‘Like Moses on Mount Sinai,’ said my father. ‘You know that part, Herman always quotes it when he wants to show that the Jews are on such good terms with God: And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend. That’s how I felt.’
They drank their tea and talked, those two, about my father’s father, about Ehrenfest, about Dutch coffee, about Herman, who was already moving in sociological circles, and about my father’s ambitions and plans.
‘To be honest,’ said Fermi, ‘I don’t really think your talent lies in theoretical physics. I’d be happy to help you, but why should we waste our energy if you already know that you would rather be an engineer than a physicist? What were you working on before you came?’
Emmanuel mumbled something about a drill that wasn’t a drill, which Fermi didn’t find particularly interesting, but which did convince him that my father could make far better use of his talents as a technician, an instrument maker. ‘Our problem,’ he had said, ‘is that we’ve entered a field which is still completely unknown and we’re studying phenomena we can only visualize in our minds. All our equipment has to be specially built, because we’re steering a course that has never been steered before. I believe you could make a valuable contribution.’
Emmanuel thought so too. A week later he started work as instrument maker-engineer for Enrico Fermi.
What was this drill that wasn’t a drill, the instrument in which Fermi had not been interested, but which would ultimately be so closely associated with his work? Manny told me once, when I was visiting him in New York. It was a broiling hot summer and we had sought relief in an air-conditioned movie theatre, where we saw An American in Paris, with Gene Kelly. We were both big Kelly fans. After the film we were on our way to a delicatessen for a bite to eat, when I asked him what it was exactly, the drill that …
‘When we boarded the ship to America,’ he said, ‘they were still busy loading up, so I went out on deck to watch, and that’s when I saw the big winches turning. One of the axles was all worn down and wobbling like crazy, and I wondered how you could prevent that. I mean, I knew it was a question of forces being exerted on a static object and all you had to do was reduce or neutralize those forces, but it suddenly occurred to me that you could also use those forces. Imagine, I thought, if you could make a hole, not by eating away at the material, which is what a drill does, but by creating friction. You mustn’t exert too much pressure, of course, or you’d destroy the material you’re trying to drill. Friction, that was the main thing. And that’s how I came up with the fire thorn.’
That was what he called the drill that wasn’t a drill: the fire thorn. It was a triangular point that was placed on a sheet of metal and began turning at high speed. Under the point the heat became so intense that the metal started melting. The point then pushed the tiny puddle of melted metal onto the still solid layer of metal below it, gradually forming a hole that was extraordinarily even. ‘If you’ve got the right material,’ said my father, ‘you can work with a point the size of a pin and make minuscule holes.’
I can’t remember where we were walking, it wasn’t all that often that I visited Manny, but I do remember the peculiar sensation of a night sky that refused to grow dark, the streaks of neon and splotches of headlight against the backdrop of the city.
‘Sophie danced with him, you know,’ said Manny suddenly. ‘With Kelly.’
I turned my head sideways and looked at him, and when he didn’t seem to notice, I asked him to repeat what he had just said.
‘Sophie. She danced …’
‘My God,’ I said. ‘Have you been seeing things? Am I hearing things? Where are we, anyway?’
‘No idea.’
‘At a party?’
‘Huh?’
‘Sophie. Did she dance with Gene Kelly at a party?’
‘For a minute I thought you were asking if we were at a party.’
‘I’m not that far gone.’
‘She danced in Ziegfeld Follies.’
‘Sophie danced in Ziegfeld Follies …’
‘She’s not in the credits. She was one of the scenery painters. That movie had a cast like you wouldn’t believe. Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Esther Williams …’
‘You said she danced with him …’
‘One of the chorus girls was sick and she took her place at a rehearsal. But we knew him. He came to the house once or twice.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘Didn’t he have something going with a friend of Sophie’s? God, what was her name: Flo, Jo, Betsy … I can’t remember. A very modest man. Crazy about Dutch coffee.’
‘Gene Kelly is a very modest man and crazy about Dutch coffee.’
‘He said: Soph, you make the best java I’ve ever tasted.’
‘I’m definitely hearing things …’
‘Your sisters thought he was God. I was pretty impressed myself.’
‘Did he used to dance when he came over?’
‘What, you think every time that man gets a cup of coffee he starts dancing?’
‘For God’s sake.’
‘Funny you don’t remember him. You must’ve been at least … oh, ten years old. You should ask Herman about it sometime. He thought the world was never the same after “Singin’ in the Rain”. He told him that, too. But that was later, I think.’
‘And?’
‘What?’
‘What did Kelly say?’
‘Nothing. He just kind of laughed. Herman knew that whole rain scene by heart. He knew exactly how many takes they did before it was done. Five, I think, something like that. Anyhow, great stuff. Herman thought it was basically an apocalyptic scene. He said that that long dance down that rainy street was actually a kind of rain dance, only the other way around, that somebody wasn’t asking for rain, but already had it, was soaked to the bone in fact, and in spite of all that, was dancing and singing about being in love. That was just about the strongest indication of the end of a culture that Herman could imagine.’
‘Isn’t that a love song, “Singin’ in the Rain”?’
‘Yes, but according to Herman it was really the end of an era. “Singin’ in the Rain,” he used to say, was the moment when traditional notions of love and happiness were abandoned. Sun, smiling faces, beautiful countryside … In the movie it’s pouring with rain, there isn’t a tree in sight, some guy is dancing through puddles up to his ankles, a policeman arrives on the scene, but lets him do what he likes. Society bids farewell to her traditional mores. Er … The ultimate romanticization of urban society as inverted reality. Something like that.’
‘Sounds like Uncle Herman, all right. A bit far-fetched.’
‘Herman was pretty far-fetched himself in those days.’
‘In those days?’
‘Maybe he still is.’
‘So, where did we have to turn left?’
‘I, er … Here. Or maybe it was there, at that intersection?’
Finally we came to a deli, Sol’s or Sal’s, somewhere on 78th Street, I think. Manny had obviously been here before, because he greeted the waiters with the casualness of a regular and called out his orders to the boy in the white apron standing behind the counter. We sat down by the window and stared out at the city lights.
‘That drill,’ said my father, ‘could’ve made me rich.’
‘You are rich,’ I said. ‘You’re the Mattress King.’
‘I mean really rich,’ he said. ‘Rich beyond your wildest dreams.’
‘But …?’
‘But out there,’ he nodded his head towards the southwest, ‘anything you thought up was government property. Somewhere there must be cupboards full of unused drawings and plans and sketches just waiting for an archivist with technical insight. All of them invented out there,’ he nodded again.
‘How old did you say I was, when he came to visit?’
‘Who?’
‘Kelly. Ten? Eleven?’
Manny blew upward, into the air, as if he were blowing a lock of hair out of his face. ‘When was that, Ziegfeld Follies … ’45, ’46 … About ten. No, eleven. End of ’46. You even sang for him.’
One of the waiters brought us our sandwiches and bottles of beer. My father tapped the forefinger of his right hand against his temple, in thanks. He opened the jar of mustard and began painting his corned beef yellow. ‘Whoom wid a whew,’ he said, when he had bitten into his sandwich and, staring out at the passers-by, began to chew.
‘What?’
‘“Room With a View.” That’s what you sang for him. At Uncle Herman’s request. I think he even taught it to you. “Room With a View.” Noel Coward tune, isn’t it?’
I had sung “Room With a View” for Gene Kelly. Ten years old and I had, at the insistence of my entirely unmusical uncle, who had asked what I was really going to do with my life when I had told him I wanted to be a fairy tale writer, at his insistence I had sung that number for the God of the Song and Dance Act.
‘Listen,’ I said to my father, my bottle of Budweiser half raised. ‘There seems to be some sort of misunderstanding. I thought I just heard you say that I’d sung a song for Gene Kelly and that Herman had taught me that song.’
Manny looked at me in amazement. ‘That’s what I said. Didn’t I?’
‘You mean it’s true?’
He picked up his bottle and drank. ‘Yep,’ he said.
I grew posthumously nervous. ‘What did he say? Kelly? What did he think of it?’
Manny shrugged. He picked up his sandwich and was about to take a bite when I laid my hand on his arm and gave him a piercing look. ‘Nice, I think,’ he said. ‘Great tune. Something like that.’
‘About me,’ I said. ‘What did he say about me?’ I hadn’t sung for years, but at that moment an answer to the question of what Kelly had thought of me seemed more important than anything else in the world.
Manny put down his sandwich and gazed into the restaurant. Laughter rose from the group of men sitting at the counter. Manny turned his face towards them and grinned. ‘Your voice hadn’t even broken yet,’ he said. ‘It was hard to tell, I guess. No, wait. I do remember something. The boy’s got a voice. That’s what he said. The boy’s got a voice.’ He looked down at his plate, but showed no signs of continuing with his meal. When he turned his eyes to me, I nodded absently. He reached for his sandwich again.
A mother who had danced in Ziegfeld Follies, a father who invented the drill that wasn’t a drill, an uncle who was a world-famous sociologist and analysed a Gene Kelly movie in apocalyptic terms and … Suddenly I remembered the story of how Manny had run into Enrico Fermi at Columbia University and that Fermi had recognized him because he and my father used to sing Funiculi, Funicula together. Banality, I thought, is the backbone of history.
‘Have you ever seen him since?’ I asked.
‘Kelly? No, when we went back to Holland he sent us a card and after that … not a word. Maybe we should’ve sent him a packet of Dutch coffee now and then.’
I grabbed my sandwich and started eating. Outside the traffic moved through the streets, men in shirtsleeves and women in light blouses glided along the sidewalk. In the distance, at the intersection, the traffic lights showed a slow succession of red and green flecks. My name is Nathan, I thought. I’m a Hollander in New York. My mind began to wander. Banality is the backbone of history. Or perhaps not banality. The insignificant, that which we forget, the inconsequential. What’s visible, and what we regard as History, are the stories of kings and generals and archdukes and terrorists. But what supports those stories, the foundation, is the awkward side of life, someone who invents something to do with mattresses, a child stealing a guilder from his mother’s wallet, the new boy at school, the failed marriage … There’s a visible world, which we see in the papers and hear on the radio, which dominates film and TV, and a hidden world, the world that sees the visible world and thinks: that’s where real life is.
‘You’re not eating,’ said my father.
‘I’m eating.’
‘That’s not eating, that’s noshing.’
I bit into my sandwich and chewed. A vicious circle of seeing and being seen, of the awareness, or ignorance, of one’s own import. That which is visible, I thought, believes itself to be of great consequence, while that which sees, yet is invisible, doesn’t believe that it’s of any consequence whatsoever. Except that what you can’t see – just as with an iceberg – is weightier than you’d think. It’s like what we Europeans say about America, that it’s a land of banalities, of overstatement and superficiality and lack of culture, whereas our own gravitas – which we’re so proud of – is nothing but the dead weight of past history. Since the Americans persist in believing that we’re the core of their civilization, they confirm the notion of their own lightness, while Europe is true lightness, it’s empty and motionless and … Europe, I thought as I drank my Budweiser, is a kind of historical Disneyland: if you don’t believe in the fairy tale, there are only buildings and stories.
‘Wow,’ I said.
My father looked up.
‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I just ran my own continent right into the ground.’
My father made his eyebrows dance and then went on eating, the jar of bright yellow mustard at his elbow. ‘That drill,’ he mumbled, ‘was the best idea I’ve ever had in my whole life.’
Every idea that had steered the course of our history, with the exception of Emmanuel’s mattress invention, had led us farther from home and deeper into trouble. The last idea, the one that took us so far west that we were nearly back east, was that of a man from Budapest, a man whose life was as much of a journey west as ours.
He had fled Hungary when Bela Kun’s Communists came into power, headed for Berlin, where he and Albert Einstein applied for various patents in the field of refrigeration technology, and left for England when the brown scum began flooding the streets of Germany. There, while waiting for a traffic light, he thought about what he had read in that morning’s paper. It seemed that Lord Rutherford, during a meeting, had discussed the possibilities of nuclear energy in highly sceptical terms, calling the very idea ‘moonshine.’ As he, Leo Szilard, watched the traffic light change colour and stepped off the kerb, he thought that Rutherford might be wrong if, say, one were to find an element that, when split by neutrons, absorbed one neutron and released two. Such an element, provided one had enough of it, would be able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. Under certain circumstances one could not only generate energy, but even make bombs.
Leo Szilard had this flash of inspiration in 1933. He didn’t think of it again until he heard that Germany had placed an embargo on uranium from Czechoslovakia. That was in 1939. Evidently, he deduced, Germany had set up a secret atomic project. He went to Albert Einstein – they were both in America by then – and proposed to him that they try and beat the Germans at their own game.
Szilard’s idea reached our family in the spring of 1943, when Manny, as Emmanuel had begun calling himself, came home one Friday and announced that we were moving the following week. Sophie, who was having an attack of Yiddishkeit (we were living in Brooklyn, among more Jews and certainly more Orthodox Jews than we had ever seen) had made gefilte fish and chicken soup with matzo balls, and was busy filling bowls from the big white tureen. Zoe, Zelda and I were looking suspiciously at the yellowish brown liquid with oatmeal-coloured lumps, and heard nothing. Sophie, waiting for her efforts to be acknowledged, didn’t either. Only Uncle Herman responded.
‘We?’ he said.
‘Chicken soup with knaidelach,’ said Emmanuel approvingly, as Sophie set a bowl down in front of him. ‘No, not you.’
Sophie sat down. Zelda and I looked at Zoe, who was slowly bringing the spoon to her lips.
‘Not me …’
Manny tasted the soup and smiled contentedly. Zelda and I paid no attention to him. He ate anything, as long as it was on a plate. Zoe looked straight ahead, then let the soup glide carefully into her mouth, and shrugged.
‘You can’t come,’ said Emmanuel.
‘Can’t …’
‘What are you two talking about?’ asked Sophie.
‘Nothing. We’re moving next week,’ said Emmanuel.
Sophie began eating. Zoe, Zelda and I stared at her from across the table. Three spoonfuls later, it hit her. ‘What!’
‘Leaving. I’ve got to go somewhere else.’
‘“I’ve got to go somewhere else”? “Next week”? Are you …’
Emmanuel tightened his lips and looked at her sharply. ‘I can’t talk about it. I’m not even allowed to say where we’re going. It’s government business.’
Sophie’s mouth opened and closed. Manny and Herman began discussing something in low voices and very cryptic language. Sophie stared at the wall. Zelda, Zoe and I seized the opportunity to make our soup disappear.
A place ‘somewhere in America,’ said Emmanuel, that was where we were going. On the way there, our name would be De Vries.
‘De Vries?’ asked Sophie.
‘De Vries.’
‘Would you mind telling me what all this is about? We’re moving to some godforsaken place, we have to change our name? What in the world have you been up to?’
‘It’s government business,’ said Emmanuel wearily. ‘A secret project.’
‘But could you at least tell me which direction it is? And what about the post? How are we supposed to get our post?’
‘We’re going to New Mexico. All our post will be sent to P.O. Box 1663 in Santa Fe.’
Sophie looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time in her life.
Herman sat at the table and stared broodingly ahead. ‘Further west,’ he said. ‘Again.’
Manny shrugged.
A few days later Sophie went to the library to see where New Mexico was and what kind of place it might be. She came home later that afternoon with a frown on her face. ‘It’s very strange,’ she said that night at the table. ‘I’d taken down one of those WPA-books from the shelf, and on the borrowing slip were all names I knew, people I’ve heard you mention.’
‘We’re not the only ones who are going,’ said Emmanuel.
Herman listened quietly.
‘People I used to hear you mention,’ said Sophie, ‘who found new jobs. At least, that’s what you told me.’ Emmanuel said nothing. ‘And then I ordered those train tickets, the way you asked me to, under the name of De Vries, and they gave me a very peculiar look. One man said, “What the hell’s so special about Santa Fe? Why’s everybody going there these days?”’
Emmanuel bent over his plate and stared at the omelette lying next to the bread. ‘Nathan made supper,’ said Sophie. ‘I didn’t have time.’ He raised his head and smiled. He picked up his knife and fork and began eating as fast as he could.
At the end of that week we left with a huge pile of suitcases and two bulging backpacks. Herman, who had taken us to the station in a taxi, stood on the platform as we hung out the window calling out the sort of things people call out when they’re about to leave.
‘Yes, I’ll write,’ he said to Sophie. ‘Goodbye, De Vries children. Take good care of yourselves, and each other.’
We waved and waved and then the train started moving and we pulled out of the station, on our way to the most westerly place we would ever go. All across the country Zoe and Zelda and I sang a song with only one line: ‘We’re going to Somewhere, we’re going to Somewhere …’
The train took us to Lamy, a small town with a tiny whitewashed station on a double track. As the locomotive slowed and we got an extra good look at the scenery, Manny said, ‘It’s a cowboy movie, it’s a goddamn cowboy movie.’ The station was a simple little building with a red-tiled roof and a wooden loading platform. When the train stopped and we got out, we could smell the dry, dusty scent of the desert. Behind us lay the sloping landscape, covered with scrub grass and sage. Further on was a mountain that looked like a giant molehill.
We started lugging suitcases, but before long a young soldier came over to help us. He loaded our bags into the pickup truck that was parked at the end of the platform. One of his fellow soldiers was busy helping other people.
‘Sorry for the inconvenience,’ he said, when he was finished and the other family had come over to join us. ‘But we haven’t got too many trucks at the moment. Folks are coming in every day and the roads are lousy, so a lot of the trucks break down. Why don’t you sit up front, the kids can go in the back.’
In an office in Santa Fe, a woman gave us passes, food stamps, and instructions. Then we went up, to the Hill, as the woman in the office called it. After the train journey, which had taken more than a day, it took us another hour to reach the foot of the Hill. It was a table mountain, a mesa, which stood in the landscape like an altar. The climb was one long twist over a badly paved road where, around almost every bend, a truck stood waiting to give us right of way. The hot, stuffy air grew cooler and clearer. Finally, at the top, we saw the town: sheds, barracks, wooden huts, a water tower, people everywhere, the din of generators. After our passes had been checked, the truck drove the other travellers to their destination and then dropped us off at a low, rectangular building. It contained four apartments, was much too small for a family our size, and we were to live there until the day we left.
We lived in a camp, without Uncle Herman, and were never allowed outside the fence. During the day the sun hung in the sky like a piece of broken mirror and at night the rocks crackled with the cold. And then Zeno was born and it was as if I were standing in the wind and everything around me was moving and flying about but I didn’t get hit, as if no one could see me anymore. For days on end I walked among the barracks. But no one spoke to me. The men in their khaki uniforms and white lab coats ran to and fro, women hung out the washing and played with their children, but no one saw me. When I came home Sophie would be leaning over the cradle, or staring so absently into space that I could walk back and forth across her field of vision and she wouldn’t even blink. I was no longer put to bed, I was no longer read to. Every morning the alarm clocks jingled and everyone got up, but no one came in to tell me what clothes to wear that day, so I washed my face, put on two different socks, two-day-old underwear and a baggy shirt, ate a sandwich with an inch of peanut butter, and went outside, leaving behind a void that was filled with people who were no longer mine. When Uncle Chaim came to visit and told me I didn’t belong to myself, but to God, I understood why everything was the way it was.
We were in Los Alamos, the place where a few thousand people were changing the course of history, most of them people who, like us, had fled the Old World. Here, on a flat-topped mountain in the desert of New Mexico, the bomb was being built that would end the war and burden the world, for the rest of the century, with guilt and fear. It was the farthest we had ever come.