NINA READ AND I tended the hearth and perused the collection of books around us. I walked back and forth between the walls of books and the chair, ran my finger down the pages, leafed through the brittle old volumes, scribbled a note here and there in the margins. I didn’t notice that Nina had left the room until she came back in. She was carrying a tray with a steaming teapot and a plate of biscuits.
‘Hungry?’
She put the tray on the floor between us and began pouring tea. ‘Found them in the cellar. A huge tin. McVitie’s digestives. Sound familiar?’
‘God, yes. McVitie’s … I’m Christopher Robin!’
She handed me a cup and sat down.
‘In the cellar, you said?’
She nodded.
‘You went down to the cellar all by yourself?’
‘Just like I did yesterday. I threw some more wood in the stove, too. You’re not going to tell me it’s dangerous, are you?’
‘No, but it doesn’t cease to amaze me.’
‘You certainly don’t give me much credit.’
‘Don’t I?’
She brought the teacup to her lips and sipped. When she had put it down again she looked at me sternly. ‘Listen, Mr Hollander, I’m not the helpless type, I don’t need some manly chest to bury my face in every time there’s trouble. Just because I ran away yesterday doesn’t mean I was scared. I just wanted to get out of here.’
‘Forgive me.’
She nodded. ‘Though I must admit, that cellar isn’t the most cheerful place I’ve ever seen.’ She picked up the pile of paper again.
‘Are you up to Zeno yet?’
‘No, not yet.’ Her face was set hard. She drank her tea, put the pile on her lap, and was soon lost in the text.
We sat like that for the rest of the afternoon, she, with the manuscript, and the part that would affect her most, me, strolling back and forth between the books and the chair. We had been sitting there for nearly four hours, when Nina put the manuscript aside. ‘That’s that,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘He’s your father, Nina.’
‘Exactly. What are you doing?’
It was a while before the question sank in. I bit at the air once or twice, then shrugged my shoulders and began explaining.
‘Are you saying that this library is so special that you’d have to travel all over the world to find these same books?’
‘Yes, and then you’d probably never find everything in one place, the way it is here.’
She thought about this. ‘So Uncle Herman knew what he was doing when he left you the house.’
‘Uncle Herman always knew exactly what he was doing. Uncle Herman thought I had a lot to learn.’
‘And did you? Have a lot to learn?’
‘What do you think?’
Nina got up. She stood with her back to the fire, tilted her head to one side, and looked at me. ‘What’s the purpose of this library, of this house, of …’
‘Of life?’
She ignored that.
‘Whatever you think of this family, always remember: we’re clockmakers.’
Nina looked away and sighed.
‘God, I’ve become so much like my father and Uncle Herman.’ Nina gave me half a glance, from under an almost imperceptibly raised eyebrow. ‘Whenever you asked Uncle Herman or my father anything, they always began their answer at the beginning. Genesis, our family is obsessed by the origin of things. Everything has to be told in the form of a creation myth.’
‘If that’s what your father and Uncle Herman were like, you’re just like your father and Uncle Herman.’
‘Nina,’ I said, ‘the point of such a remark is that you’re supposed to say it’s not as bad as all that.’
She knelt down in front of the fire and threw on more wood.
‘Are you cold?’
‘A bit.’ She got to her feet and looked at the fire. It had collapsed under the new supply of fuel, but hungry tongues were already licking at the sides of the chair legs and cracked boards. ‘Why did you say we had enough to heat up the bedroom as well?’
‘We’ve brought down a lot from upstairs, and there’s more where that came from.’
She stood before me, hands behind her back, and observed me pensively. ‘But not enough.’
‘There’s a whole glacier of chairs behind the attic door, and if the worst comes to the worst we can always burn the bed.’ I grinned when I said that, but I knew she wouldn’t grin back.
She went back to her chair and slowly sat down. ‘One day. I think we’ve got enough left for one more day.’
I was silent.
‘Why did you say before that we had enough?’
‘Because,’ I straightened up slightly so I could reach the cigarettes in my jacket pocket, ‘because we’ve always got the library.’ I took out the cigarettes, handed one to her, put one in my mouth, and gave us both a light.
Nina shook her head, very gently. I knew she had been expecting my answer. ‘You said less than an hour ago that it was a unique collection.’
‘Life is more unique than books.’
She said nothing. The fire in the hearth bloomed like a noisy flower. It was noticeably warmer.
‘Are these books you and Uncle Herman bought together?’
‘Some of them. Zeno collected most of them. He was a great authority on old books.’
‘How did he know what should be part of the collection?’
I laughed a laugh that even I myself couldn’t describe – a touch of pride (in my brilliant little brother, eccentric professor and false Messiah) and a touch of shame (because, in our eagerness, Uncle Herman and I had made list after list and rubbed our hands with glee each time Zeno came home with another box of old tomes).
‘He had quite an impressive library of his own. He was thinking of selling it, but turned it over to Uncle Herman instead. From then on Herman and I were always looking for possible additions to the collection and we let Zeno track them down. That is, until he had more important things to do.’
‘So what was the purpose of this library?’
I laid my head on the back of the chair and looked up at the ceiling, the ornamental grapevines, worm-eaten apples and laurel branches, half-visible in the dim light. ‘For Zeno? A sort of exorcism, I think. An attempt to reach a state of silence, one that couldn’t be affected by entropy. Besides that, he was probably just searching, like all bibliomaniacs, for the book.’
The fire crackled. The dry wood from the chairs and the piano cracked and snapped so loudly, it was as if someone were beating the flames with a whip.
‘What book?’
‘The book.’
She waited.
But what for? What could I possibly tell her about the ultimate book? What could I say to her about books that had changed, not the world, but people? Franny Glass, after reading The Way of a Pilgrim. Mr O. and the Bhagavad Gita. Danny Saunders and Freud’s case histories. Uncle Herman and Tolstoy’s Family Happiness.
‘It’s a kind of myth, Nina. Many, many people believe there’s such a thing as The Book. The book of Sinterklaas. The first version of Genesis. An undiscovered text by Aristotle.’
‘Without even knowing if it exists?’
‘Sometimes. There are certain texts of whose existence we’re quite certain. There must have been an original version of Genesis. It would tell us a great deal, if we ever got our hands on it.’
‘So what book was Zeno looking for?’ asked Nina.
‘We don’t know.’
‘We?’
‘I. Uncle Herman didn’t either. But we could guess, based on the collection.’
I got up from my chair, joints like splintering wood, clothes of lead, and turned my back to the fire. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t even a very exceptional book. No one knows for certain. We do have a vague idea what it was about, though.’ The heat from the flames reached my skin and began slowly penetrating into my bones. ‘It’s the same with books as with people: you know a person partly through his friends, through his surroundings. Haven’t you ever been inspired to read a particular book because you’ve read about it in another book?’
‘Nope.’
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t read.’
‘Everyone reads, child. Certainly you, you’re my agent.’
She looked at me haughtily. ‘I sell books.’
‘Which means you read. What do you think you were just doing?’
She shook her head and grabbed a candelabra from one of the tables.
‘We’ve got to make dinner,’ I said.
‘I’ve got to make dinner. If you insist on treating me as your under-age niece, I’m going to punish you with my cooking.’
‘No! No! Anything but that!’
She gave a malicious laugh and headed for the door.
‘Can I help?’
Nina glanced over her shoulder as she pushed down the door handle. ‘Not with the cooking. Not with anything else, either, come to think of it. Stay right where you are.’
‘I think I’ll go along with you to the kitchen, if you don’t mind.’
I was standing next to her, in the doorway, when she looked at me with a smile. ‘Scared?’ she asked.
At first I didn’t know what she meant. ‘Terribly. I don’t want to sleep all alone in that big dark bed tonight.’
We walked through the oily darkness of the hallway. ‘Shame on you,’ said Nina. ‘Dirty old man.’
‘It’s the cold,’ I said. ‘It’s affected my manners.’
‘Then come and sit down next to that nice warm stove.’
In the kitchen, she quickly began getting things ready. Then she picked up the candelabra and disappeared into the cellar. I slid more wood into the belly of the Aga and sat down on a chair. I closed my eyes, listened to the sounds Nina made when she had returned and began slicing, peeling, and stirring. The warmth of the stove glided over me like a blanket.
I haven’t had a house of my own since the early sixties, but I’ve always returned to this Mountain, hill, in the east of Holland, and each time I see the pine trees rising and, after the long journey down winding woodland paths, arrive at the house, it’s as if I have finally come home.
Here, in this spot, is where I grew up. I know exactly when I was here, whether the sun was shining, how long it rained, who came, and who stayed away, that Zeno bumped his head against the Victorian revolving bookcase in the library, how the blood ran down his face and what Sophie said. This was where I came alive. When I wasn’t here, I went from hotel to hotel, from spare bed to spare bed. I had a room in Manhattan, in the apartment my father shared with Uncle Herman, a monk’s cell at the house of an old girlfriend, a sofa at Zoe’s. I did actually live somewhere once, but that was long ago.
Home. House.
Five years since I was last here. Circled down like a stealthy buzzard. Alone. A weary traveller with nothing but his bag, a book, a newspaper from the country he has just left, the red of the evening sky before him, the dull blue of the late winter afternoon behind him, and below him, the lead-grey sea. The narrow strip of beach, the narrow strip of dunes, the orange glow of the greenhouse roofs, the toy-town landscape of Holland.
It was cold, that day, and I was tired, the way people are tired after a long trip: too little sleep, your mind both here, in your body, and there, somewhere else, it doesn’t matter where. Around me, the silent company of men in white shirts, Business Class, the Financial Times or Newsweek or an airport thriller on their lap, head against the papery headrest, mouth open slightly. Outside, under the wing lights, where the clouds grew thin, so thin that the giant Dutch scale-model glimmered through, I could see the tiny houses with their tiny gardens, the straight grey stripes of road, the floodlit well of a soccer field, wisps of white steam above chimneys. And I felt myself slipping into the comfortable coat of my native land. Half my life I had spent in other countries: I had left, as a child, with my parents and Uncle Herman, for America, returned and gone to secondary school here and then travelled the world like a man who was searching for something but didn’t know what or where, yet despite all that travelling and roaming – I knew it the moment the asphalt spaghetti around Amsterdam came into view – despite all that, I was a Dutchman. Not a feeling of national pride, the Golden Age simply a curious fact in the history books, not the faintest notion of national grandeur. Cheese, order, care, coffee, sturdy dykes, hesitant forests, straight canals, square meadows, potato fields under the summer sun, slopes they called hills, hills called mountains, long rows of yellow brick houses on long red brick streets and rectangular gardens with pruned conifers.
Sunset swept over this land, while down below, toy cars went shooting along the motorways, the runway lights of Schiphol lay in the fields like a fallen Christmas tree. I thought: This is where I want to die.
It was the exhaustion. Ten minutes in a taxi, behind a humourless grouch of a driver, were enough to sober me up.
In the train, I watched the colours draining from the landscape. A dense, wintry twilight spread across the vast Dutch sky and it was as if that grey haze were settling inside me, too. Mists rose from the fields and hung low above the grass, hiding a cow here, a fence there. It grew darker and darker. I didn’t wake up until the train pulled in at Rotterdam.
It was going on for seven when I met Herman in the lobby of his hotel. Each of us always knew when the other was in our home town, and the standing arrangement was that I first meet him for dinner at his hotel and then go on to mine. Herman was sitting in a big leather chair when I came in, reading. His dark brown eyes, fixed on a copy of the New York Times, glittered in their sockets like jet, the too-long, white hair stood out on all sides.
‘Nathan,’ he said, when I tapped him on the shoulder. He got to his feet and embraced me so firmly that I dropped my bags.
‘Nuncle,’ I said. ‘How are you?’
Herman tilted his head slightly and looked at me in a way that he himself would probably have described as ‘roguish,’ but which looked more to me like the expression of a blackbird disturbed while pulling up a worm.
We sat down at the table and, to my surprise, he ordered an appetizer of champagne and smoked salmon. When I asked him what the reason might be for this little splurge, he said that he was getting to the age when every encounter might be his last. He had resolved to devote more time to his family.
‘The last time you tried that, you had a fight with Sophie.’
‘I remember.’ He raised his right hand and bowed his head. I took the champagne out of the ice bucket and filled our glasses. ‘But this time I’m not talking about meddling, it’s too late for that anyway,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent three-quarters of my life roaming the earth, I’ve got to know people I didn’t want to know, I’ve seen places and things I didn’t need to see. Now I’d like to spend more time on you, for a change.’
‘Herman,’ I said, ‘you sound like a father who feels guilty because he was always working. You’re my uncle. You’re under no obligation whatsoever.’
Uncle Herman choked on his champagne and coughed, loud and long. ‘Damn bubbles,’ he said, when he was able to speak again.
‘The drink of the ruling class,’ I said.
‘Sometimes, Nathan, I wonder whether you ever take me seriously.’
We smiled at each other.
‘But I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘It’s the weather. The plane was landing, and I suddenly thought: This is where I want to die. It’s these melancholy Dutch winters.’
Herman turned the stem of his champagne glass between his fingers and stared over my shoulder into space. ‘Birds of passage, but then in reverse. We come home in the winter and suddenly feel what it is to have a house and what Holland means to us.’
‘We had to get this old to find that out?’
The waiter came and cleared away our plates. He asked Herman if he might recommend a Cahors with the leg of lamb. Herman nodded absently. ‘Yes, I think we did have to get this old before we could understand. We’re all nomads, Nathan, from the day we’re born.’
‘We, the family?’
‘We, the entire country. I’ve only just realized that all my theories about urban society are derived from my perception of Holland as a city state. A country too small for strong nationalistic feelings. A country that has to send its people abroad to seek work and earn money. Banking began in the Italian city states, then came the German merchant cities, and finally the Dutch took up the idea. Dutch investors, insurance companies, for instance, are the biggest foreign investors in America today. They simply can’t get rid of their money here in the Netherlands. In a certain sense this country hasn’t changed since the days of the Dutch East India Company. We send out ships to do trade, because we can’t earn enough within our own borders. It’s not a country. It’s a city state.’
‘A harbour,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
The plates arrived and dishes of potatoes and vegetables were set down. Herman tasted the wine, thought for a moment, then smiled at the waiter. ‘Good choice, Johan. This lamb did not die in vain.’
As we ate, Herman remained pensive. ‘A harbour,’ he said after a while. ‘You’re right. It’s a delta, Holland. Not much more than a delta, with a bit of surrounding land. And we’ve used that delta to the best possible advantage. We turned it into one big harbour, and when the age of aviation dawned, we expanded the harbour by adding a top-notch airport.’
‘You ought to write about this place,’ I said.
Herman straightened up and looked at me, his left eyebrow slightly raised, the barest trace of a smile on his lips. ‘Perhaps I’ll just leave that to you.’
I took a sip of my Cahors, a full-bodied, deep red wine that made my insides glow. I shook my head. ‘I’ve never lived here long enough to have a clear view of the country. I’m even more of a nomad than you are.’ As I put down my glass, it occurred to me that I actually meant something else. ‘The only place I could ever truly write about is the house. It’s what I know best. For me, the house is Holland.’
‘Fine,’ said Herman. ‘Sounds fine to me. And Israel?’
I was dumbfounded. ‘What do you mean, “And Israel?”’
‘A country in the Middle East.’
‘What, you think I’m supposed to be longing for Eretz HaKodesh in my old age?’
He shook his head in annoyance.
I had been there as his secretary, sometime in the mid-sixties, between two wars, when he was sent there by the UN to do research on what was already being called ‘the situation.’ He spoke with ministers, army commanders, left and right-wing politicians, union leaders and professors. And I sat beside him, with my memo pad, pretending to take notes and wishing I were somewhere else. One evening we were having dinner in an outdoor cafe on Ha’atzmaut Square in Netanya. We were drinking beer and dissecting an animal that, according to the waiter, was called Saint Peter’s Fish. When, after a thin layer of dry white flesh, I ended up at the bone, I pushed away my plate and swore.
‘Nathan,’ Uncle Herman had said, ‘am I right in thinking you’re not having a very good time?’
I smiled wrily.
‘What’s wrong?’
I ordered coffee and stared at the little square across the road, where the hope of the nation was folkdancing. ‘It’s not my country. They have no cheese, no decent coffee, not one slice of wholewheat bread, and they serve cucumbers and red peppers for breakfast, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Gastronomically speaking it may be a bit, shall we say, simple, but that’s not the point.’
‘That is the point. Everything here is geared towards grand and heroic survival in a hostile world. It’s completely unrealistic. That century-long accumulation of superstition in Jerusalem, all those damn trees they keep planting, all those men walking around day and night with uzis over their shoulder. Believe me, I can do without it.’
‘You don’t think it’s necessary to plant trees and walk around with an uzi over your shoulder?’
The coffee arrived. I stared into the gloomy black liquid and dropped in a lump of sugar. ‘A necessary evil is still evil. I’m starting to get the idea that symbols are more important in this country than life itself.’
Herman had taken a cigar out of his inside pocket and was carefully lighting it.
‘Be honest, Herman. Be the critical atheist you were on the boat to America. And before that. And afterwards. We’re talking about a pile of stones called the Wailing Wall. We’re talking about an empty cellar they call David’s Tomb. And a hole in the ground called the Holy Sepulchre. Around here, it’s things that are holy.’
‘And you think they’re not.’
‘A city, Jerusalem, or a wall, even the tomb of the greatest king, isn’t holy. You know that. In Judaism things have no special meaning, nor can one person be holier than another. Everyone has just as much access to God, or holiness, or whatever you choose to call it, as anyone else. But here in Israel, they defend inanimate objects, while humanity goes down the drain.’
We had disagreed before, Herman and I, but on other issues. Now he exploded like a bomb in slow-motion: I was a spectator, someone who was quick to criticize, but remained safely on the sidelines. I was totally egocentric, indifferent to the welfare and norms of others, yet fascinated by my own short-sighted, solipsistic views.
I listened to Herman’s unexpected outburst, the torrent of pent-up impatience, unspoken accusations and disappointments that he now, after so many years, let fly.
‘Don’t you feel anything for this country, for God’s sake?’ he shouted. ‘Aren’t you the least bit proud?’
‘Proud?’
‘Yes, proud. Of what we’ve accomplished here. Look around you!’
‘The Jewish deltaworks,’ I said.
Herman had opened his mouth, as if to say ‘yes,’ but nothing came out. Then he shook his head.
‘You,’ I had added, ‘talk about pride and necessity and “the situation” and that everything will get better soon, but now try contradicting yourself. You taught me to do that. Since we’ve been here all we’ve seen are government agencies and officials. Where’s the man in the street? Where’s the terrorist?’
‘I take it I’m supposed to be impressed to hear you describe them as terrorists?’
‘We,’ I said, ‘were terrorists, too. We blew up the King David.’
He sniffed.
‘Herman,’ and at that moment, there in that cafe, I had realized that I sounded just as desperate and imploring as he had, on that night in 1939, when the rest of the family refused to understand why we had to leave Europe. ‘Herman, why do we have more right to this country than they do? Why are they any different from us? And since when did you start believing in a homeland?’
He had jumped to his feet. None of the other guests seemed surprised by Herman’s fury. ‘Those people,’ he said, pointing wildly about him, ‘those people are out for our blood. This is the last refuge for the survivors of the camps, and you want to deprive them of it?’
That wasn’t what I had said. I was merely trying to find reason in the midst of so much sentiment.
‘And what are we talking about anyway?’ shouted Herman. ‘Palestinians. They’re not even a people, they’re a group of nomadic Arabs.’
‘Well, then. Obviously, they deserve to die.’
‘Your grandparents could have been here!’
But they weren’t here and that explained a lot. I was tired of being reasonable. I didn’t hold my tongue, even though the moment had come to do so. ‘They,’ I said, ‘will say the same about us.’
‘What? They’ve never had to live through a massacre like World War II. They …’
‘Goddamit!’ I’d shouted. ‘You act as if they’ll never be worth talking to until they’ve suffered enough. They live here, they lived here and, I can assure you, they’re going to keep on living here. You’d better get used to it, Professor Hollander!’
After that he had stormed off and I had drunk my undrinkable coffee, paid the bill, and gone down to the dark beach to watch the sluggish foaming of the night surf.
In spite of that argument, Herman was asking me now, at this very table, what I thought of Israel. Did he expect that what had happened to him would happen to me? That the older I got, the more I would long to be among “my people”? That I wanted to go home and that my home was there?
‘I feel no differently about it now than I did twenty-five years ago,’ I said.
He slid his wine glass forward and looked at the tablecloth. ‘You’re going to be all alone. There will come a day when I won’t be here anymore. Do you think you don’t need anyone?’ He looked up. His gaze was sharp, but there was a glimmer in his eyes that hinted at something gentle, almost compassionate. ‘Do you think you’re the only person in the whole world who doesn’t need anyone?’
‘Nina’s younger. There’s a good chance she’ll outlive me.’
Herman picked up his glass and drank. ‘She’s got better things to do in this lifetime. Besides, we don’t even know for sure whether she really is family.’
Although he had never treated her that way, quite the contrary, he had always been sceptical about her origins. ‘Every one of that boy’s half-cracked followers can claim she’s the mother of his child,’ he had said, when Nina’s mother first tried to get in touch. Sophie thought he was wrong. Zeno didn’t seem to her the type to have hordes of lady friends. ‘But that’s not the point,’ said Herman. ‘For God’s sake, woman, don’t you know that a missing young man like Zeno is the perfect opportunity for unwed mothers to give their child a father? They were followers! They would have loved to bear the son of the Messiah!’ Sophie had replied that she thought it was too crazy for words, all this suspicion, and took both mother and child into the family circle as casually as if she were taking in a lodger.
After dinner Herman and I climbed the four flights to his floor (we were both terrified of elevators) and walked in to the chaotic mess I had expected. Herman slalomed, like a skier with back trouble, past suitcases, chairs, trays with the remains of various meals, and piles of books and newspapers. He always had his post sent on, including the New York Times. As soon as he arrived in Holland, an endless stream of books and newspapers began pouring in, all of which were stripped of their bubble-wrap and converted into piles.
‘I’m going to the countryside for a few days,’ he said, when I looked at the bag of clothes and books standing prominently on the bed.
‘The house, you mean.’
‘No: The Countryside. You know, forests, plants, meadows, birds? Did it ever occur to you that there are some people who see nature as more than just a fringe around the city?’
‘I’m not the one who’s always going on about urban society,’ I said. ‘The sublimation of the human pursuit for organization.’
He grinned.
I had heard him say that once during one of his lectures, in some community centre up North, where twenty elderly members of the Sociological Society sat drinking coffee and eating pound cake in anticipation of what promised, in those circles, to be a colourful evening. After he had given the audience what they came for, he set about re-educating the assembly of old men. He switched over to the social implications of his work and was able to twist it in such a way that Karl Marx would have found in him, Herman, the ideal advocate. On a wave of almost euphoric pre-war socialism, he had given a description of the city as the cultural and technological highpoint of western civilization and socialism as the only feasible ideology within that society. I have always, as far as that goes, suspected him of the same nostalgia as my father. While Emmanuel never stopped believing in the world as a machine that worked better the longer you fiddled with it, Uncle Herman had rendered his pursuit for Paradise, because that was what it was, into a scientific theory of civilization and group dynamics. Once, when we were travelling back in an oven-warm, first-class compartment, I had asked if it wasn’t just a bit too much of a good thing, dangling that flashy scientific life in America in front of a bunch of ageing sociologists and then serving up marxism as the pièce de résistance.
‘If, politically speaking, you don’t know whether you’re coming or going, you’d better just keep your mouth shut,’ he had said. ‘Stick to writing fairy tales.’
I was used to the disparaging view he took of my work.
Herman packed a few shirts in his half-full bag and then sat down on the edge of the bed. I drew up one of the white leather chairs. When we were sitting opposite each other, he shook his head.
‘That work of yours, Nathan,’ he said, ‘how long do you plan on doing it? Haven’t you ever stopped to think that there might be more to life than the same old melancholy phrases, year in, year out? Once upon a time … Long ago in a far-off land … And they lived …’
‘Herman,’ I said, ‘what do you care how I organize my life, or don’t organize it? Look at your own life. Has the revolution ever come? I sometimes wonder which of us believes most in fairy tales.’
‘I’ve never been a revolutionary,’ said Herman. He looked at me intently.
‘… and socialism has landed half the world in camps,’ I said, ‘and the other half is capitalist and one half devours the bread of the other …’
‘You could be a socialist, do you know that?’ said Herman.
‘Politics is nothing but … powerlessness. You’ve all got a severe case of megalomania. Who the hell can assume he knows what’s best for the world?’
‘Listen, Nathan,’ said Herman. ‘That’s all very well and good, but the point is, you’re throwing away your talent. I’m sure you can still do something other than write the five hundredth variation on Cinderella. You’re not that far down the road.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘So what am I supposed to do, in your opinion?’
He got up. ‘If I tell you that,’ he said, ‘nothing will ever come of it.’ As he finished packing his bag, he said, ‘You don’t have to listen to me. I’m not saying that I live an exemplary life. But look at yourself. You go from hotel to guestroom, you’ve got no wife, you’ve got no children, you’ve got work that …’ He looked at me for a moment. ‘How do you want to end up? Alone in a hotel room, in a cheap hotel room?’
We stood there, face to face, in silence.
‘Just who are we talking about?’ I said after a while. ‘You’ve got no wife or children either, you travel all over the place. If you don’t die on a plane, there’s a damn good chance it’ll be in a hotel. Besides: we’re old, both of us. Why are you giving career counselling to someone on the verge of retirement?’
‘Maybe I just want to warn you about the loneliness. We’re the last two. Soon I’ll be gone and then you’ll have no one.’ Uncle Herman closed his suitcase and looked at me.
‘Everyone’s alone.’
‘Yes,’ said Herman. He had sighed deeply. Herman was, that day, the day he was going to die, but we didn’t know that yet, even more melancholy than I was. ‘Yes.’ Then he leaned over his bag and picked it up. I put on my coat.
‘How long are you staying?’
‘Until after New Year,’ I said.
‘What are your plans? Are you going up to the house?’
‘I don’t know yet. I was thinking of taking Nina out to dinner one night. Care to join us?’
‘I’ve arranged to see her at the house. She might even be there already.’
‘She might be there already?’
‘I gave her a key. She’s our only remaining relative, as you just said.’
I grabbed hold of the door handle.
‘Nathan? You know why I tell you these things, don’t you?’
‘You can’t stand waste.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That, too.’
Except for the unimaginable things he had said after that (I, at least, can’t imagine the conversation that must have taken place in the final hour before his death) those were Uncle Herman’s last words: ‘That too.’
‘Maybe I just want to warn you about the loneliness. We’re the last two. Soon I’ll be gone and then you’ll have no one,’ he had said. Not until deep in the night, when I was standing at the window of my hotel room with a glass of whisky in my hand, looking out over the river and the city, did his words come back to me. Could he have sent up for a woman because … Was he lonely?
The day on which I, in a surge of wistfulness, had felt more at home than ever before and thought that I wanted to die here, in this land, was the day Herman died under a call girl. Zeno, I said, as I gazed out at the tiny lights, Zeno had been right when he said that our family was like a timetable. Arrival and departure. All that travelling back and forth, that constant from here to there and from the end to the beginning and back again, where had it led? Now only Nina and I were left, and when I was gone, she would be all alone in a world in which none of the Hollanders had ever truly belonged.
I thought of what had happened on the way from Herman’s hotel to mine. For the second time I walked that route, only now, I was joined by Uncle Chaim. He had his head drawn down between his shoulders and held both hands under his arms. ‘This is going to be a cold, cold winter,’ he said.
‘Uncle Chaim.’
‘Nathan …’
‘I remember a winter like this in Bialystok,’ said Magnus, who had come walking up on the other side.
‘Bialystok? You’ve never been in Bialystok. I was in Bialystok and it was so cold that your breath fell to the ground and broke in a million pieces.’
Magnus shook his head and furrowed his brow. ‘But … I was … I remember …’ he mumbled. ‘Saw a man freeze to death. He felt hot. Started seeing things. When you freeze to death you see things, some people even tear off all their clothes.’
‘It’s terrible having so many memories,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘If you’ve been walking around as long as we have, everything begins to look like everything else. After a while you start believing you’ve seen the things you’ve heard about. Very dangerous.’
‘Herman is dead,’ I said.
‘I know,’ said Uncle Chaim.
‘We’re sorry,’ said Magnus, who was still brooding about Bialystok.
‘A call girl,’ I said in a cloud of steam that flashed red in the glow of a hamburger ad. ‘At his age.’
‘Yes, that Herman!’ said Uncle Chaim.
‘It’s true,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s true! I’ve never been in Bialystok.’
A road-cleaning lorry loomed up in the distance. It sniffed, waggling like a stray dog, along the gutter. The tall houses seemed to sway in its flickering orange light.
‘He would have appreciated it, dying like that.’
I looked at Uncle Chaim and opened my mouth.
‘I’ve never been in the East at all,’ said Magnus. ‘I mean: never farther east than …’
‘Would you once and for all stop that whining about Bialystok, Magnus?’
Magnus mumbled something and looked over his shoulder at a drunken man in evening dress standing in front of a cash dispenser. He was weaving back and forth, back and forth. A black blazer lay across his shoulders like a cape.
‘Praying at the Wailing Wall,’ I said.
Magnus smiled sadly.
The street ended in a tangled maze of zebra crossings, tram tracks, and bicycle paths. We had reached the river. Across the water stood the hotel, in a pool of yellow artificial light. In front of us, half a bridge was suspended over the Maas. An enormous floating crane lay below it with a slab of roadway in its rigging. Blue welding light sputtered in the darkness and was reflected in the black water.
‘Left?’ asked Uncle Chaim.
We crossed the street and walked along the wide river to the other bridge, a slow, reddish arch that hung in the glow of its own lights. In the middle of the water was a patrol boat. Its searchlight pierced through the darkness and glided over black ripples. Below us, on the quay, stood fire engines and police cars. An ambulance was trying to wriggle its way through the crowd. A pair of divers were standing up to their waists in the water, guiding a steel cable on a winch. We had nearly gone past, when the headlights of a car emerged from the river. Halfway across the big red bridge I looked back and saw the ambulance scuttling along the quayside like a fat white beetle.
Uncle Chaim, Magnus and I walked across the island in the middle of the river. It grew colder and colder. We crossed the old stone bridge to the opposite bank and turned right, under a walkway, past a huge office building under construction, onto the pier. In front of the empty, rust and grease-stained warehouses lay the quay where ships once waited for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses with their canvas travelling bags and cardboard suitcases. We, too, had set sail from here, Uncle Herman, my parents, my sisters and I. In the old Holland-America Line building, a stone fortress with copper-roofed turrets, there was now a hotel. It stood at the tip of the pier. If you sat at the window in the spacious dining hall, you could look out over the water, to the sea, England and, beyond that, the ocean and America. At the time of the great emigration, there had been a hotel for refugees on this stony protuberance in the Maas, where the price of a glass of beer hung on the wall in eight different languages. Across the ocean lay a similar place, an island where people arrived and a city that was the mirror image of this one. Just as New York was the funnel of America, in which Europeans mingled and were poured into a new life, Rotterdam was the funnel of the Netherlands, through which Russians, Poles, Czechs, Germans, Austrians, Bulgarians, Hungarians and Rumanians streamed into the ships that would take them across the Atlantic. I had come to know both cities, I had arrived and departed and never settled in either one. Here, in Rotterdam, I stayed at Hotel New York, and in New York, in a room in the apartment where Uncle Herman and my father lived. Had lived.
‘I have to call Nina,’ I said.
Uncle Chaim nodded. ‘Don’t forget to make a little rip,’ he said.
‘A rip?’
‘Sign of mourning.’
‘I won’t forget, Nuncle.’
He nodded at Magnus and disappeared behind him into the midnight-blue above the river.
With the mottled city darkness on the windowpanes, the Maas a slow, tar-black stream that emptied out somewhere beyond the horizon, in my room at the front of Hotel New York, the multicoloured lights of the city to my right, the television babbling on behind me about the American stock exchange, the weather forecasts for Asia and Africa, and the latest round of European terrorist attacks, I dialled Nina’s number.
‘Nina? Nathan.’
‘How are you, N?’ She sounded almost elated.
‘There’s something I have to tell you. Uncle Herman …’ In the background was the sound of … happiness. Voices, glasses, barely audible music. I don’t know why, but it suddenly did me an awful lot of good that my niece, Zeno’s daughter, had a social life, friends who laughed and drank. ‘Herman is dead.’
‘He’s what?’
‘D-e-a-d.’ Died, passed on, breathed his last, I thought to myself. Gone to meet his Maker, pushing up the daisies, he’s a late uncle …
‘What happened?’
‘He … how shall I put it …’
I found it rather hard to explain the circumstances. I talked about a ‘young lady’, saying she was ‘very possibly a close friend of Uncle Herman’s.’ When I was finished, there was a long silence.
‘So,’ she said, ‘he died in the act.’ On the other end of the line I heard a snicker, barely suppressed. ‘My God,’ said Nina at last. ‘What do you mean, “young lady”? Just how old was she?’ Another half-muffled giggle.
‘Nina, we’re talking about your great-uncle.’
‘Yes. It’s … Sorry.’ A brief silence. Then she said, ‘Somehow it suits him, don’t you think?’
‘What? Herman and women? I’ve never actually thought of him in that light.’
‘Nuncle …’
‘I’d rather you didn’t call me “Nuncle” tonight.’
‘I understand. But you’re wrong if you think Uncle Herman didn’t associate with women. He was a charmer of the first degree.’
‘A … No. I wouldn’t know. I’m going to make the funeral arrangements tomorrow. You’ll be there, won’t you?’
‘Yes, of course. But, Nathan …’
‘What?’
‘He wanted to be cremated.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘He thought burial was unhygienic and sentimental. Told me once.’
‘And we’re not big on sentiment.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll call you to let you know where and when and …’
‘Okay. Sorry it’s so noisy here.’
‘Are you having a party?’
‘It’s my birthday today.’
‘God, Nina. Sorry, I …’
‘It’s okay, N. We’re not big on sentiment.’
‘Yes. No. I’m sorry.’
‘Listen, I’ll come to Rotterdam tomorrow to help you out. Maybe I can arrange the funeral and you can close accounts and notify the authorities.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘No, but would you like me to?’
‘Yes. Er, Nina?’
‘Yes?’
‘Happy birthday.’
When I had hung up and was standing at the window with a new whisky in my hand, the absurdity of Uncle Herman’s death finally hit me. The man who had fled the Netherlands, that ward for compulsive neurotics in ‘Hospital Europe,’ as he called it, and spent the greater part of his life in the USA, his ‘new homeland,’ had returned here to die, in the Hotel Memphis, under a hooker from an escort service dressed as a petulant teenager. I put my left leg on the windowsill and stared out at the river and the city. So much life, so deep in the night. As if death didn’t exist, as if no one knew that Uncle Herman had reached the end of the end.
Five days later Nina and I heard the reading of the will. Afterwards we drank coffee at my hotel. We sat in the lounge in two easy chairs, and stared wearily in front of us.
‘A biography,’ I said.
Nina opened her bag and took out a lipstick and a folding mirror. As she painted her lips red, she said, ‘And within five years. Thank God he didn’t say how long the biography had to be. You can probably get away with thirty thousand words.’
I shook my head.
‘What do you mean, “no”?’
‘If it were anyone else, yes, but not Uncle Herman.’
Nina curled her lips inward and a cherry-red mouth appeared. ‘N,’ she said, ‘your work is going so well. Pavel’s film will be out soon and the Germans are already nagging the Scandinavians about the rights to the series. That’ll only lead to more and more translation rights. What you really should do is write a new collection of fairy tales.’
‘I want the house, Nina.’
She looked at me for a long time. ‘Can you contest it?’
‘The will? That particular term?’ I shrugged. ‘Do I really want to contest it?’
Nina ran a hand through her hair and narrowed her eyes. ‘Hm. Maybe I could even sell a biography of Uncle Herman.’
‘You,’ I said, ‘could sell the Devil a wristwatch.’
‘Why that house? It’s too big for you. Why don’t you rent something in Amsterdam?’
Because I grew up there. I had spent my whole life travelling about. I hadn’t had a bed of my own since I was twenty. I had the clothes on my back and suitcases here, there and everywhere. I’m tired, I thought. As Nina was summing up the advantages of the big city and describing a series of opulent flats in desirable neighbourhoods, my thoughts strayed to Uncle Herman’s house. I could see it before me.
I knew the house like my own body. From the moment Herman had bought it, Sophie, Zoe, Zelda, Zeno and I had gone up there nearly every year. Me, the most. The women usually stayed only a week, Zeno was still too young to be without Sophie, so I spent all my summers with Uncle Herman, which was not always to Sophie’s liking. When I returned, they all, without exception, found me highly maladjusted. ‘You’re developing the same egocentric bachelor habits as Herman,’ Sophie once said, when I told her after one of those long summers that I preferred to eat breakfast alone, with the morning paper.
I played in that rambling garden, crept along the stairways, through the rooms and under the tables and sat for hours in the broiling sun in the little tower on the roof and looked out over the treetops to the valley, far, far below me, behind the sun-baked forests and the glistening ribbon of the brook that Uncle Herman and I called the River. Behind the brook: rolling fields, covered, in spring, with a paper-thin film of tender green, in the summer, a sea of golden wheat. Around every plot of land, wooded banks. From my vantage point I could see the wheat standing tall in the fields, a farmer in a swaying tractor going laboriously about his work. I was there and yet I wasn’t. A stowaway.
When I got older, I used the house to work in. Every so often Uncle Herman would arrive, fling his suitcase under the table in the great hall, throw his coat at the hatstand (and miss the hook), and sleep and eat and walk until it was time for him to leave again. And I would sit at the heavy oak table in the library and leaf through my papers, in winter, the crackling hearth fire at my back; in summer, the lawn behind the open windows, the brook, the fields.
Herman had once said, when he thought that I was old enough to have my own key, that it really should have been mine, because I was the only one who had any use for it. But I could never have afforded a place like this. Uncle Herman, on the other hand, was rich, and lived on his estate as if it were a hotel.
The library was his pride and joy. Year after year he had added to the collection along the walls, until the flow became too great and the newest additions had to be distributed between tables and small mobile bookcases. The enormous room, thirty feet wide, nearly seventy feet long, consisted of pure paper and wood. On either side of the hearth, in the middle of the long wall, there wasn’t an inch of empty space: books from floor to ceiling. The short wall adjacent to the hallway was lined with bookcases that reached the ceiling and ran along the top of the doorway, which was no more than a niche in the towering cliff of leather, linen and paper spines, a dark tunnel to another world. The other short wall: books, books, books. The only blank surfaces were the heavily beamed ceiling, which disappeared twelve feet up in a nest of twilight and shadows, and the long wall that formed the front of the house and was set with four large double windows, which, at night, were hidden away behind thick green velvet curtains inside and green wooden shutters outside.
Herman had made the whole house liveable, but he himself lived just on the ground floor. He ate in the library, slept in the hunting room. My bedroom was on the first floor and I was usually the only one there. I wasn’t too pleased about that. Whenever I was alone in the house, before I went to bed at night, I checked all the doors twice, felt at the espagnolettes, pulled the curtains closed and walked backwards up the big staircase, peering warily into the darkened hall.
I had a large room. There was a wooden double bed, an imposing linen cupboard, a chest of drawers and a secretaire and chair. A solid oak door led to the bathroom, with a large cast-iron bath on lion’s paws and two sinks big enough to bathe a baby. The floor was laid with marble, old, yellowed, with the soft lustre that only time can give to stone. At the foot of the bath hung a prehistoric boiler that always went on with a bang. Chrome, white-glazed tiles along the walls, punctuated by a band of gleaming black. A huge mirror above the sinks, a rectangle nearly four feet high and eight feet long.
Sometimes we would spend long evenings together in the library, drinking, saying nothing, perhaps the occasional word, Uncle Herman with his head in a creaky old book, me, bent over a white sheet of paper. But nine times out of ten I was alone, so alone that I could hear the silence rustling through the rooms and, in the evening, would walk through the hallways in search of sound. Later, as I lay in my bed, in the small circle of light from the reading lamp, I felt as if I were suspended in the middle of the universe. I had an involuntary and unpleasant image of the house at night: a huge, three-dimensional labyrinth of darkness, with me in the middle, floating in a feeble pool of light. Usually I made sure I had drunk enough wine to fall straight to sleep.
‘Are you listening to me, Nathan?’
I nodded. Nina had got out her address book and was listing the names of friends and acquaintances who were about to move or who might be interested in Uncle Herman’s house. I smiled and made the gestures people make when they listen to someone without really listening.
Six months after Uncle Herman’s cremation and Nina’s attempts to put an end to my nomadic existence, I returned to the house for the first time. I had the key, I was allowed in, but something inside me resisted when I came walking out of the forest and saw it before me, on the other side of the field. Everything was the same. Everything was different. The house was a memory of a time when voices still echoed there. It was the beginning of spring and weeds were growing through the gravel. Sorrel spread its fingers over the grass, and under the aged, heavy conifer, which had always been carefully pruned and was now a frayed dark cloud, the moss had begun winning the fight that it had seemed, for so long, to be losing. No peeling paint, no saplings shooting up in the gutters, the roof still clean and secure. But that was only a matter of time. Before long the first cracks would appear. The windows would break, withered autumn leaves would tumble through the rooms, and the old floor, polished by so many generations, would grow dull, then bulge, and finally, crack and splinter. In the end, I thought as I stood there, everything goes to ruin. I turned round and walked into the forest. It was my last visit.
‘Nathan?’
My neck ached. When I opened my eyes, I saw Nina standing by the stove with her hands on her hips.
‘Ah. Sorry.’
‘That’s okay. I was just wondering if you had any particular cooking taboos.’
I didn’t know what she meant.
‘You know, like no milk and meat, that sort of thing.’
I scratched my head. ‘Not if it’s really obvious. But I refuse to fry steak in oil.’
She blew a curl out of her face. ‘Hollander clarity.’
‘We were a rather confused family,’ I croaked, ‘culinary-wise.’
Nina turned round and went on cooking.
‘Zeno was a vegetarian.’ She looked over her shoulder. The candlelight glided across her face and for a brief moment it was as if I saw my brother’s face before me. ‘And Zelda, for instance, was kosher. So: there was Zeno the vegetarian. Sophie, normal food. Zoe was always on a diet.’
‘And you?’
‘I went along with Zelda.’
‘You, kosher?’
‘Sort of. No pork, no oysters, mussels, eels, eagle, and kangaroo.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, maybe kangaroo …’
‘I don’t know a single thing about the family,’ said Nina. She paused. ‘And when you’re not around anymore, I never will.’
I shifted in my chair.
Nina looked sideways. ‘What’s wrong? Do you think it’s so strange, my saying: When you’re not around anymore?’
‘Uncle Nathan,’ she said. She put the colander in the sink and poured hot water over it.
‘Please …’
‘Uncle Nathan!’
‘Okay.’
‘You are, as you yourself are so fond of saying, an old man.’
‘Yes, I think I’ll just hobble off and …’
She wasn’t joking. Her eyes didn’t betray the slightest trace of irony. ‘An old man. The rest of the family is gone.’
‘No.’ The image of Sophie was suddenly crystal clear. I saw the curve of her cheek, the way she would offer it to me and my lips brushing the soft skin, tasting and smelling at the same time: Arpège.
‘For years, I haven’t wanted to be part of the family.’
‘I can’t blame you.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘But now I’m …’
‘Older,’ I said.
Her gaze was stern, but softened after she had looked at me for a while. ‘Older. If you don’t finish Uncle Herman’s biography, you won’t only not have this house. I won’t have a history.’
‘Sometimes it’s not so bad not to have a history. I could have done without one.’
She turned back to the sink, slightly bowed. ‘That’s like a billionaire saying that money isn’t everything.’
I stared at the orangey-red-lit figure before me and realized that I was nodding. When Nina looked sideways again, I smiled, in spite of myself.
‘What?’ she said.
‘You probably won’t want to hear this, but sometimes you look so much like your father.’
She sniffed disdainfully, but I could see the hint of a smile. She looked over her shoulder. ‘Don’t forget to set out the wine, will you?’
‘What shall it be? Red, white? Full-bodied, light?’
‘Red, on the light side.’
I got up, grabbed hold of the chair, and waited until the blackness had cleared from my eyes. In the cellar, shivering and breathing out clouds, I spent half an hour reading labels, swatting away memories of long, long ago like mosquitoes.
I chose a Barolo, about ten years old, a Barbera d’Asti and, just to be sure, a Lacrima Christi.
‘How do you know all that stuff you write?’ asked Nina, as we sat in the library eating her pasta: penne rigate with tuna, olives, peppers, and anchovies.
‘Hearsay.’
‘You were around for some of it, but you were just a child. How can you know all those things?’
‘That’s what Uncle Herman always used to say.’
She looked at me expectantly.
‘Uncle Herman was the great saviour. I’m the one who saw it all and remembered it, all of it.’
As we ate and drank the Barolo, I told her about my ‘aberration.’
I am, where the history of my family is concerned, what a person with a photographic memory is to a mutual support group for Alzheimer patients. I know everything. Even things I can’t possibly know. What I don’t know, I find out. I’m a mnemonic wonder. Uncle Herman once asked me how the hell it was that I could remember him telling some story or other three years earlier. I told him I saved his stories on the gallery, on the side with the scaffolding. I was seven at the time. He had stared at me like a heron at a goldfish.
‘I saved it in the tower,’ I said.
‘What tower, Nathan?’
‘The Tower of Babel.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I was walking along the gallery.’
‘The gallery …’
‘Yes, that’s what it’s called.’
‘I see. And now would you mind telling me what that has to do with it?’
And so I had told him about the colour plate of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel in one of Sophie’s books and that I had sat there staring at it and after a while I found that I was walking around in the painting.
I looked at Nina, filled up her glass when she nodded, and praised the pasta. ‘Don’t get off the subject,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll be totally lost. What did that tower have to do with it?’
‘In ancient times, when they didn’t yet have the means to file things away, people developed mnemonic systems, devices to aid and expand the memory. As a child, I had accidentally devised such a system. I discovered one day that I was walking around in The Tower of Babel by Bruegel and as time went on I was able to call the tower to mind and store things there.’
Her eyes were wide. ‘You mean that you could remember more than other people, because you had a kind of … a kind of warehouse …’
‘The Tower of Babel by Bruegel,’ I said. ‘It’s here in my head. I can climb up into it and put things in niches. Every gallery has its own characteristics.’ I stood up and got a few more pieces of wood. As I arranged them over the layer of glowing chunks, I walked into the tower, up the first gallery, and ran my eyes over the still lifes that stood there, frozen in time, waiting to be used.
‘Is there anybody in this family,’ said Nina, when I had sat back down again, ‘anybody at all, who isn’t completely barmy? Is there one normal person?’
‘Child,’ I said, ‘normal people …’
She picked up her glass and stared at me over the edge. ‘You can remember stuff about …’
‘Nearly everything,’ I said.
‘May I test you?’
I shrugged.
‘When you and your family were on board that ship. A conversation. Between people you didn’t know.’
‘That’s easy. Someone told a joke. Two German Jews who had spoken to us when we embarked at Rotterdam. They were standing at the railing and when we walked past one of them said to the other: “America … Gott. Moses was a blockhead.” And the other one stared. “What are you saying? Moses … he led us out of Egypt!” “If only he hadn’t done,” said the first, “then I would have had a British passport!” Good enough?’
Nina took a sip of wine. ‘So, I’ll bet this house is packed, too, huh?’
‘No, just the tower. I’m not crazy. What you’re talking about is someone like the man in that book by Luria, Mind of a Mnemonist. Someone who remembers compulsively. I simply have a photographic memory, only not for text, but for events. This house is a feeling, more than anything else. I’ve always thought that my whole life was contained within the summers I spent here, as if everything that had to and ever could happen was concentrated within those days and weeks. A time of great clarity, a time of awakening. I’ve never felt as strongly since then that life … had meaning.’
She shook her head. ‘Meaning,’ she said. There was a long silence. Suddenly she turned to me. ‘Damn. I just remembered, you once wrote a fairy tale about the Tower of Babel.’ She grabbed the candelabra and went to the wall of books. ‘Which one was it? Which collection, Telltales?’
‘Don’t bother.’
‘I want to know.’ It took her a while to find what she sought. ‘Here. “The Tower.”’ She walked slowly back to her chair. She put down the candles and handed me the book. ‘Read.’
‘Read?’
‘Please?’
‘If you really want me to.’
She smiled the smile of a pixie who knew she had her victim hanging by a thread.