I STOOD UP and leaned over to poke the fire. Nina sat in her chair, lost in thought.
‘I think I’ll stay and live here.’ She jumped, then looked at me questioningly. ‘I don’t want to travel around anymore. I don’t want to keep arriving somewhere only to leave again, I want to have a place where people can come if they want to see me. And I want to sit by the window and watch the sun rise and in the evening I want to wait for the night. And every so often, once a month, maybe once every three weeks, I want to have a profound thought about life, or woodworking, or ping-pong, doesn’t matter what, and then I’ll walk in here, to the table I’ve reserved for just that purpose, and I’ll sit down at that table and in the deep tranquillity of seclusion I’ll write, on a large sheet of white paper: Profound thought today.’
She smiled. ‘Have you ever, dear N, done anything else?’
I fished the packet of cigarettes out of my jacket and held it out to her. She got up, took one, and let me light it. We stood side by side, smoking in silence.
‘For as long as I’ve known you, you’ve lived the life of a fugitive. When the going gets tough, you run away. Uncle Herman gave you this house and you haven’t been back since. You were married once, but as soon as it became more than an idea, you took off.’
‘An idea?’
‘The marriage. To say nothing of why you ever got married in the first place.’
‘I loved Eve.’
‘For love you need submission, and that’s something you know nothing about.’ She spoke calmly, but in the even flow of her words lay something sharp. Her white hand reached out to pick up her wine glass by the stem and brought it to her lips, as if she were about to smell a tulip.
‘Nina,’ I said, in a cloud of grey and blue arabesques, crushing the barely smoked cigarette in the ashtray, ‘just as the Pope should keep his mouth shut about people who fuck, you’re better off keeping quiet about anything other than royalties. I know exactly what kind of submission you’re talking about and the mere thought of it makes me sick.’
She stood there opposite me, like an ice queen, her arms at her sides, back straight, face motionless and pale. I didn’t know what her stance was meant to express, inviolability or rage, but I didn’t care.
I gathered up the plates and went into the kitchen. I boiled water, scooped coffee into the filter, and stared at the black square of the kitchen window.
When I returned with our mugs, Nina looked up.
‘N?’ I put down her mug. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘Okay.’
‘But I don’t understand what you meant when you said you knew what kind of submission I was talking about.’
‘You don’t?’
She shook her head.
I sat down. ‘I thought you meant Zeno. That you were comparing my aimless rambling to Zeno’s fireworks.’
‘God, no. Of course not. Why would I even … God.’
‘Then I’m the one who should be apologizing.’ We drank.
‘About your memory …’ I looked at her. I knew what she was going to ask. ‘How can you remember things about Uncle Chaim and Cousin Magnus? You describe them as if you’ve seen them.’
‘That’s because they’re not memories. I have seen them. I still do.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Nina. ‘You have seen th …’ A wave of horror crossed her face. ‘What do you mean? You see ghosts?’
‘I don’t know if “ghosts” is the right word. But I do talk with Uncle Chaim and Cousin Magnus, yes.’ She made a sound I couldn’t quite identify. ‘Do you find that strange?’
‘Strange? People get put away for less!’
‘If you ask me, it’s a lot more harmless than, say, an army career.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ She was almost shouting. ‘You talk to people who’ve been dead for a hundred years?’
‘Three hundred years. Almost three hundred years.’
‘I don’t care if it’s three thousand!’
‘I used to chat with Abraham, too.’ A note of smugness crept into my voice. It did me good to pile on all the absurdities of my life, and those of the rest of the family. Liberating. In some way, it was liberating to finally tell all that nonsense to somebody else. Lord of the Universe, I thought, after fifty years, surely I’m allowed?
‘Which Abraham? No! Not … You’re not going to tell me that you …’
‘And Jacob. Never with Moses. But he stuttered, anyway.’
Nina stood with her back to the fire, her hands held out in front of her. She was rubbing them so vigorously, she seemed to be washing them.
‘Sit down, Nina.’
She shook her head.
‘I was an impressionable child.’
‘Impressionable.’
‘I read the Torah and I lived in those books. I fled Pharoah’s Egypt with the children of Israel and I travelled about with Abraham and Jacob. I heard the prophets prophesy and I saw King David leering at Bathsheba.’
‘Oh God.’
‘And one day, night, Uncle Chaim and Cousin Magnus appeared at my bedside.’
I had never seen the visits from my roaming relations as something that might reflect on me, probably because I couldn’t talk about them, but all of a sudden I felt rather pleased with myself. Nathan Hollander, the man who hung out with the dead as if they were members of his football team.
‘And you were the only one who saw them?’
‘They used to drop in on Uncle Herman, too, but he didn’t want any part of it.’
She shook her head. She had been shaking her head for some time now.
‘Sit down, child.’
She sat down. All the strength had ebbed away from her bearing, her back was bent, arms limp at her sides.
‘The past was always very much alive in our family. Travellers. All travellers. Our arrival in the Netherlands was the zenith, as my grandfather was fond of saying, the zenith of our history. A land much like us, preoccupied with time and future, a land with morals and modernity, a land that had created itself. Did you know that American democracy was based on the Dutch model? On the Batavian Republic? A guiding light. That’s how the Dutch have always liked to see themselves and that’s how we Hollanders regarded ourselves, too, as a family of guides. God’s guides.’
Nina clapped her hand to her mouth and went on shaking her head.
‘And that’s why it wasn’t at all strange that we went to America, the new Holland. In 1939 it hadn’t even been that long ago that New York was dominated by Dutch families. If you walked through that city, you walked down Dutch streets: Broadway, Cortlandt Street, Beekman Street, Nassau Street, the Bowery, Brooklyn. The only true Protestant nation, apart from the Netherlands.’
‘But the Hollanders are Jews!’
‘Yes. Jews by birth, inescapable, Dutch by choice. When Cousin Magnus came here he left the name Levi behind, he left his tribe and called himself Hollander. And my father, his descendent, married a girl, my mother, who was also called Hollander, but was no relation. How Dutch can you get? Besides, you know what Spinoza said: “Holland is the only land where everyone is a Calvinist, even the Catholics and the Jews.”’
‘Hollanders. But when things became really bad, it didn’t help a bit.’
‘Ah, that. No, it didn’t help. But back then nothing helped, except fleeing the country.’
A spark leapt out of the hearth. Nina slowly rose from her chair and stamped out the glowing piece of wood. She remained standing in front of the fireplace, her back to me.
‘You’re doomed, all of you, with those grandiose ideas you have about yourselves.’
‘Child,’ I said.
‘Stop calling me “child”.’
‘Sorry. Niece …’ She spun round. ‘Your father,’ I said. ‘Zeno, wasn’t averse to … er … the world of the intangible, either.’ Her eyes flared. ‘Maybe it’s time you and Zeno made peace.’
She ran her hand through the long red curls, grabbed hold of them, and laid the whole bundle on her back. It was dark in the library, but in the dim light you could still make out her pale, even features. As fine and delicate as Zeno had been, so was she. For the second time since we had been together, I felt a surge of pride. A strong young woman, rebellious and sharp, a combination of Zeno’s agile mind, Zoe’s sense of beauty, and Zelda’s seriousness. And Uncle Herman. There was something about her that reminded me of Uncle Herman, too.
‘How,’ she said, ‘can I make peace with someone who’s no longer there? With someone who would have nothing to do with me? He didn’t even want me.’
I nodded. ‘But he is … was, your father. And it’s pointless to try and fight a fact. You don’t have to love him, but you are a Hollander, even though you don’t bear his name.’
She hissed like a cat. ‘Uncle,’ she said, ‘Uncle Nathan.’ She planted her feet slightly apart, as if to stand her ground. ‘I’m not fighting the family. You, Uncle Herman, Sophie, your sisters, you’ve all done your best. Especially you.’ I waved my hand dismissively. ‘No, it’s true, and I’ve always appreciated it. But he, he didn’t do a thing.’
‘He, Zeno, wasn’t there.’
‘He went away.’
‘Sometimes I think,’ I said, ‘that he was never there to begin with.’
She looked down at her shoes and said nothing.
‘You say you don’t know a thing about the family. But you know enough about me to claim that I’m incapable of submission.’ She frowned. ‘What about you? You’re the great unknown here. I’ve told you about us and about myself. I’ve never heard you talk about anyone.’ She turned away. I went on looking at her. ‘Quid pro quo,’ I said, ‘Something of mine for something of yours.’ She didn’t answer.
‘Come on,’ I said after a while. ‘We’ve got chopping to do.’
The house was on the verge of collapse when Uncle Herman presented himself as a buyer. It was in nearly the same shape it had been in at the turn of the century. There had never been enough money to install central heating, the windows were made of the same bumpy glass that had been set in the frames so many years before. The only modernization was the noisy boilers that provided the bathrooms with hot water. Because he wasn’t interested in the surrounding land, Uncle Herman was able to buy the house, and all that went with it, for a fairly reasonable price. Squire Van Henninck, who had stared back at me from his portrait behind the linen cupboard, had been the last remaining member of the Van Henninck family, and when he died, the foundation that administered the estate was more interested in the returns on their investment than in the house and the heirlooms within it. That was how Uncle Herman came into possession of a complete past. He slept in the squire’s bed, that rampant growth of wood, velvet, and brocade. Every morning, on his way to my bedroom, he passed an ancestral painting that was as foreign to him as a picture of a Tibetan mendicant. It threw him, he said, into a pleasant state of confusion. ‘You can’t feel more like a stranger than this. I live here like a country gentleman, in the house of a noble family, I’m surrounded by things that all say: We’re Lord and Lady So-And-So, we’ve been here for centuries, so long that we’ve become one with this region, rulers, plutocrats, leaders. It’s all mine and none of it’s mine.’
It meant nothing to him. That is to say: he didn’t have the slightest sense of nobility. As a sociologist, he knew where the aristocracy came from, what function it served, and to what degree it conformed to the clan structure with which ‘we’ were much more familiar.
‘Nobility?’ he cried one day, when I was swooning at the thought of all that rootedness, ‘Shall I tell you what real nobility is? We’re nobility. We’re the Levi family, Levites, priests, the Jewish nobility. And old?’ He had looked around him, we were sitting in the library. ‘For five, six centuries these people belonged to a clan, a group that distinguished itself from the dirt farmers by marriage, inbreeding, and meticulous property management. We’ve been the same for three thousand years. Nobility? Don’t talk to me about nobility.’
And there he sat, in his Chesterfield by the hearth, long after the fire had gone out: Herman Hollander, from the priestly lineage of the tribe of Levi, amid paraphernalia assembled by a family that had risen to prominence halfway into the millennium, flourished briefly and, the last two hundred years, gone plunging down like a wounded pheasant. The last squire, Uncle Herman told me, had never left the property. He never married, hardly ever collected the rent, and crept about his house like a mangy dog through the gutter. In 1910 he fell under the spell of spiritualism and, some years later, become a follower of Madame Blavatsky. The last five years of his life he spent under the illusion that he was living, not in a house on a hill that was called Mountain, but in a haven, an island in the sea of madness that the world was becoming. He holed himself up in the attic, in the wooden lookout that the local carpenter had built on the roof. In that pentagonal tower, with its peaked, slate-covered roof and high windows he had stood watch. He had let his gaze travel over the wooded hill, the fields below, the long, sinuous road that led to the town, the brook, which looked almost alive, and the railway, which was still being built, that would one day link the town with the West. About a week before his death he had severed his last ties with reality. He ordered ten farmhands to hoist a sloop up onto the roof and bind it to the lookout with a length of hemp rope. The squire’s final instructions were that a dovecote and a clay pot of woodland soil be placed under the canvas. The next day the forester found him, dead. A tenant, one of the few who still came round to pay his rent, had knocked at the door, but to no avail. He had walked round the back and was about to try the kitchen door, when he saw that a window had been smashed. The forester discovered the squire several hours later. He was sitting upright in the four-poster bed, his head drooping on his shoulder, his right hand on his chest like a frozen claw. The son of a local industrialist was arrested. He confessed to having broken in. On his foray through the house he had ended up in Squire Van Henninck’s bedroom. They had given each other a terrible fright, but the squire had the weaker heart and succumbed instantly.
I had done extensive research into the history of the house and the family that had lived there. I spent days on end in the Public Record Office and the museum library. The journalists at the local paper greeted me with ‘Nathan the Wise!’ whenever I came to ask permission to look through the files. The only obligation that Uncle Herman had felt towards the house was to be a responsible owner. He had kept it in good condition, yet never ruined it with unnecessary renovations. I was young and romantic and wanted to know the story of the house. I felt that people should always know the history of things.
But here I stood, my axe raised above the umpteenth piece of furniture that had been waiting all these years to become an antique and was now nothing more than firewood, a sacrifice to life, our lives. The left side of the barricade had been pushed back nearly to the end of the hallway. We could now choose from two doors, the door to my bedroom and the one that led to a guest room. The latter was fairly accessible, but locked. The door to my room was hidden behind a linen cupboard and, in front of that, a dresser. ‘Once we get through this,’ I said, pointing my axe at this new obstruction, ‘we can have a bath. Ready?’ Nina nodded. I pulled the drawers out of the dresser – they were all empty – and, with a few strokes of the axe, smashed it to pieces. We swept the chunks of wood into a pile. ‘Let’s move the cupboard away from the door,’ I said. ‘Then we can lay it on its side. It’ll make things easier.’ I put down my axe, and we began pushing against the cupboard. It wouldn’t budge.
‘God, it’s heavy.’ Nina leaned against the gleaming wood and rubbed her forehead.
‘It’s not that heavy. I mean: it’s an oak cupboard, but I should be able to move this thing all by myself.’
‘What’s in it then?’
‘Nothing special,’ I said. ‘Sheets, towels, a few blankets. It’s just a linen cupboard.’ I tried tugging at the doors, but they wouldn’t yield.
‘Locked?’
‘That’s not possible. In all the years I’ve been coming here there’s never been a key in this cupboard.’
We stood there and looked, silent, pensive, at the sloping lines of the cornice above the cupboard doors.
‘Should we smash it?’
I shrugged. I felt uneasy. Why couldn’t we move the bloody thing? What was inside that was making it so heavy?
‘Nathan?’
‘No. No more smashing. I’m going to try and lift the doors out of their hinges. A hammer. There’s a burlap bag around here somewhere.’
I walked down the stairs and tried to remember where I had left the bag. The first day, when Nina had run away, I had brought all sorts of things from the shed, including tools. Halfway down the stairs I closed my eyes and mentally retraced my steps, out the kitchen door, through the blinding storm. Into the shed. Rake, hoe, shovel, grindstone, sharpening the hoe, hammer, screwdrivers, chisel, pliers, burlap bag. I went back, the whorling snow between the trees and the house. Then I saw myself climbing the stairs, flinging the bag aside and … I turned round and walked back up.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m trying to remember where I left that bag of tools,’ I said.
‘That one over there?’
On top of a pile of cupboards and chairs, like an obedient puppy, lay the burlap bag.
The hinges of the linen cupboard were stuck fast, but after some effort the pins slid upward. The doors stayed in place, probably because the hinges were so tight. I had to jiggle my screwdriver between the cracks to loosen them.
The cupboard was empty.
‘How …’ I grabbed hold of the side panels and tried to move it again. ‘I don’t understand.’
Nina stepped into the cupboard and ran her finger along the back wall. ‘It’s nailed to the door,’ she said.
I opened my mouth, but it was a while before I could speak. ‘The cupboard is nailed to the door?’
She nodded. ‘Have a look.’ Her hand traced a vague oblong.
‘Okay. Pliers and light. We’re going to take it off.’
Nina came out of the cupboard. ‘Why don’t we just chop it up?’
‘It’s probably quicker to pull out the nails. Besides, if we chop we’ll have to go through the door. I’d rather keep something intact for a change.’
When the lantern had shone its white light into the depths of the cupboard, the outline of the door was clearly visible by the trail of nailheads. As I lit her way, Nina got to work with the pliers.
It took her a quarter of an hour. Then we pushed against the cupboard and moved it with no trouble at all. We examined the door. By the look of the nail-holes, whoever had thought up this obstacle was a mighty good carpenter. He had nailed the cupboard neatly to the door frame. I put my hand on the handle and pushed down. The door was locked.
‘I’m getting so tired of this. All these obnoxious little pranks.’
Nina nodded resignedly. ‘And there’s no key, I bet?’
‘The key was always on the inside.’ I leaned down to look at the lock. The keyhole was dark. ‘And it still is, damnit. That’s impossible!’
Nina looked up in alarm.
‘What’s wrong?’
She took a step backwards. ‘If the key is on the inside, then whoever locked this door is inside, too.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
‘Perhaps? Oh no, wait. He might also have locked the door and then gone out through the wall and then bricked up the wall again and … Jesus!’
‘Would you hand me a screwdriver?’
She turned away abruptly and groped around in the burlap bag.
‘I’m going to look for a newspaper.’
As I walked down the stairs, I could feel Nina’s eyes in my back.
Up until now we had been working so hard, chopping, hauling, lugging, that the cold in the unheated part of the house had been bearable. Now, with one delay after another, it felt as if my bones were encased in ice. This couldn’t go on much longer. Not only were we exhausted by the cold, it also took too much time to gather firewood. At this rate we would have just enough to keep the fires burning, but we could never sit down and catch our breath, let alone cook.
When I returned, Nina was still standing there, hugging her arms. I slid the newspaper under the door and jabbed the screwdriver in the lock. I had hoped that the key wasn’t turned, so I could push it out and it would drop onto the newspaper. Then we could pull the paper back out, key and all. But nothing happened.
‘Should we chop it down?’
I shook my head. ‘Not yet.’ The hinges were on the inside, we couldn’t lift out the door. Chisel out the lock with the screwdriver? ‘Wire. Wire, or a bobby pin.’
‘What a shame I didn’t bring my vanity case.’
I ignored the edge in Nina’s voice. ‘Wait here.’
I was already on my way, when I heard Nina’s answer. ‘Don’t be long. If you’re not back soon, I’m off to the hairdresser’s!’
Uncle Herman had smoked a pipe and I thought there might still be some pipe cleaners in the library. I couldn’t find any, but my bag lay on the reading table and after rummaging around inside I found a couple of paper clips. I threw more wood on the fire and went back upstairs.
‘He’s going to play safecracker,’ said Nina. She brought her hand to her mouth and started chewing on her nails. I had never seen her do that before.
I squatted down in front of the lock and poked around with the largest paper clip. It took me a while to figure out which way the key was turned. Then I drew the piece of wire back out and stuck it in again at an angle, just above the bit, or so I hoped. My fingers were stiff. I had to blow on my hands to keep them moving.
‘In films,’ said Nina, ‘this is the part where the first man tries the handle just one more time, while the second man is fiddling with the lock, and the door flies open.’
‘Go right ahead. Make me happy.’
I pushed up the paper clip. ‘Why don’t you try and bang on the door?’ Nina leaned down and picked up the hammer. ‘No, harder. But not too hard. Here, right around where the lock is. And now keep on banging.’
While Nina hammered at the door, I tried to jiggle the key. It took me about a minute to push it out. When I pulled the newspaper towards me, it was lying neatly in the middle. A piece of kite-string was tied around either side of the ring, just long enough to turn the key from the other side of the door.
‘You amaze me, N.’
‘Fortitude, my dear. And boundless intelligence.’
She picked up the key, unlocked the door, and tried to push down the handle. ‘It’s stuck.’
I tried too. No luck. ‘Both of us. Come on, push.’ We leaned heavily. There was a faint scraping sound. Slowly the door gave way. When it was open about a foot, I looked inside. It was pitch-dark in the bedroom. I squeezed through the narrow opening.
Why does the dark always sound different? I stood there in the blackness and it was as if everything was very close by. The walls leaned in, the ceiling came down to listen. My bed used to be opposite the door. I walked slowly, gropingly, forward: a heron in troubled waters. I stepped on something soft, froze, and pulled back my foot.
A bar of light moved across the wall on my right. I looked around. Nina slipped through the door. The room turned dazzling white. At the same moment she screamed, so loudly that I stepped back in terror. She dropped the lantern, and as the room went dark again, I felt her body against mine. She shoved her head so hard into the hollow of my shoulder that the pain shot through my chest. We stood there in the void, the darkness around us almost palpable. Nina shook and sobbed. Her curls brushed my chin and without thinking I buried my face in her hair, as if I were too tired to go on any longer. I laid my hand on the back of her head and held her close. ‘Nina. Ninotchka. Shhhh.’ She was panting heavily, I felt her body swelling, shrinking and swelling. I took a deep breath and let her go. I dropped to my knees. Soft things with sharp edges along the ground. Paper. Paper? I felt the cool, smooth curve of the gas burner. I lit it. The floor was strewn with wads of paper. Nina was standing with her hands over her face. I put my arm around her shoulder and opened my mouth to say something. Only then did I see what had frightened her so. Across from us, where my bed had once stood, was a man, nailed to the wall.
I couldn’t move. I stood there in that empty room, Nina pressed against me, and I wanted to hold her and disappear into her, a frightened child in its mother’s skirts. My mouth was open, but I didn’t breathe, didn’t speak. Breathless. Lord of the Universe. Speechless. The lantern in my hand was shaking so hard that the light was a buzzing white tremor across the bare walls, the paper-strewn floor. What kind of Hell is this, oh Lord of the Universe? Where am I, and why me, we, she and I?
I swallowed. A ball squeezed its way through my larynx, down through my gullet. Clutching the lantern, I breathed deeply, frozen air, stepped forward, and saw that the man on the wall had my face.
‘It’s.’ I cleared my throat. ‘A dummy.’
I heard Nina moving. The rustling of paper.
‘It’s a dummy, love. A dummy.’
She came closer. A hand clawed at my jacket. She leaned against my back and peered, half hidden behind me, at the wall.
‘He’s got my face.’
She was breathing heavily. I reached into my pocket, took out the cigarettes, put two in my mouth, and lit them. She took one and inhaled as if I had just given her fresh oxygen. Her eyes shot back and forth, from me to the ground and from the ground back to me.
It was a long time before either of us spoke. It was Nina who broke the silence. ‘The bastard. Shit! Shit!’ She stamped her foot. I could feel her tugging at my jacket. ‘I’m leaving. I’d rather bloody well die in the snow than stay here and … God!’
But she didn’t turn round. I said nothing. I drew on my cigarette. The smoke sank down inside my chest and with it, a sadness that filled me like a jug. Zeno, I thought. And: What a life, what a disaster. My eyes grew damp. I looked at the floor, and as I began shaking my head, trying to fight off the wave of misery, I felt something wet trickling down my nose. I thought: I’m crying, Lord of the Universe. Not that, anything but that.
By the fire, in the glow of the impassive orange flames, we drank the Lacrima Christi. Nina couldn’t sit still. She wriggled in her chair, crossed her legs, uncrossed them, sipped at her wine, wriggled, crossed her legs. I smoked and stared at the blaze in the hearth. A vague feeling of responsibility was turning round and round inside me, but I thought: I can’t do this anymore, I can’t protect her, not against this.
‘He hated you.’
I turned my head towards her, but slowly. I had trouble focusing my eyes on her.
‘He hated you,’ she said, her voice toneless, hard as sheet iron, ‘more than anything in the world.’ I nodded. ‘He hated you with everything he had.’ She looked at me. Her eyes were dull. ‘I hope he burns in Hell.’
‘There’s no such thing as Hell.’
She sniffed. ‘What do you call this?’
‘Nina,’ I said. ‘Don’t hate him. Don’t fall into his trap.’ My God, I thought, that is the trap! It’s all meant to ruin our lives, my life, just as his was ruined. And I thought: Zeno, wherever you are, I’ll play your little game, but it won’t change me. I’ll do your labyrinth, the dungeons and the dragons and your clever imitation of Dante’s Inferno. But I won’t let it get to me. And I’ll do everything I can to keep her safe.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the back of the chair. A house, I thought, a fire in the hearth, a wife, and peace. No more travelling. Home. I want to arrive. And at that moment I realized that this prison in the woods, Zeno’s carefully constructed system of traps and special effects, already had changed me. It had made me long for a life I’d never led.
We had lost a good deal of time, up there in my bedroom, and the expedition had yielded us very little fuel. Next to the hearth was just enough wood to make it through the rest of the evening. We’d even be able to light the stove the next morning, but after that we’d find ourselves in the predicament I had feared earlier: no time to rest, forced to gather wood to keep ourselves alive.
When I said this to Nina, she stood up resolutely. ‘Then let’s go get some more.’
‘After what we just found?’
‘I want wood, fire, and a good night’s sleep. Come on.’ She held out her hand and motioned with her head for me to follow.
We’ve changed all right, I thought, on the stairs. And how.
In the bedroom, without another word, we ripped the dummy off the wall. It was made out of an old suit of Uncle Herman’s that had been stuffed with wads of paper, scraps of the wallpaper that had adorned this room since time immemorial. The face was a photograph I remembered. It had been taken when I married Eve. I looked young, and slightly sceptical. I pulled it off the ball of paper wrapped with twine that served as the head and ripped it to shreds. Nina watched me, saying nothing. In the bathroom, everything was as it had always been. Even my shaving things were still beside the sink.
Since there was no wood to be found in the bedroom, I chopped up the linen cupboard that had been blocking the door. Nina gathered up scraps of wood in the dummy’s jacket and bound together another pile in its trousers and then we went downstairs. We distributed the harvest among the library, the kitchen, and the hunting room. By that time it was so late we decided to go to bed. Our shoulders were hunched with cold. I made a roaring fire in the hunting room hearth, while Nina prepared two hot water bottles. We huddled between the icy sheets, our teeth chattering. I lay on my back and watched the firelight dancing on the blanket. The dry wood from the linen cupboard crackled and snapped. ‘Warm me up, Nathan,’ said Nina. She slid over to my side of the bed and turned her back to me. I didn’t move. ‘Warm me up,’ she said again. ‘Please.’ I rolled over on my side, so that I was lying behind her. ‘Closer.’ I moved up, until she lay in the hollow of my body. She took my hand and put it on her stomach. It was several minutes before we began to feel each other’s warmth. I smelled the scent of her hair and felt the slow rising and falling of her belly. I tried to think about Zeno and, when that didn’t work, about my bedroom in the wooden house on the Hill, long ago and far away in New Mexico. I listened to the crackling of the wood and thought of the crackling of rocks, at night in the desert, the creaking of the walls as they cooled, the soft voices of Sophie and Manny in the next room. My hand moved up and down, together with Nina’s belly. I felt the soft curve of her buttocks against my thighs and blinked my eyes to dispel the image of her naked white body. I saw the long red curls hanging down along her face, as she leaned over me and looked into my eyes. My hand on her breast, the gentle swell of her breast, my fingers across her nipple, the barely audible gasp. And the sudden warmth …
I was sitting in bed with Molly; we were drinking Uncle Herman’s champagne. She took a sip and when she kissed me I felt the wine flowing into my mouth. Our tongues glided around each other, the champagne fizzed. I drank, and kissed her nipples. The champagne ran down her breasts. I licked them until she grabbed my head and pushed it down. Across her belly, she shivered when my tongue circled her navel, and farther down. Her hands lay on my hair. She guided me gently over the landscape of her body. The inside of her thighs. She tugged at my hair, I resisted. The place where the groin begins. Her hands wanted me higher, but my tongue drew a silvery trail along her groin, to her belly, around and around and then, suddenly, I licked her. Her back arched, her legs gave way. ‘Eat me.’ I’d never heard her say it. I ran my tongue over her labia. ‘Fuck. Mhhh.’ Her clitoris. Just barely. Round and round and round. And again. She pushed my head down and I licked her, no longer teasing and unexpected. When she came, I felt her belly tighten. ‘Oh. Fuck.’ She pulled me up. I lay on top of her and she guided me in. She opened her mouth and nipped at my face. Her tongue had become a separate entity, an obscene, wet thing that entered me, licked my eyes, my throat. She bit my neck as we surged and rolled on the waves of lovemaking. When I raised myself up on my hands, she opened her eyes. She looked me full in the face. I couldn’t turn away. I wanted to see her, caress her. I saw her breasts, her body, the place where I had disappeared into her and then her eyes again, that penetrating gaze. She said something, without making a sound. Her lips moved and she directed her silent words towards my eyes. I looked at her mouth and suddenly lust washed over me like a tidal wave. ‘I want you,’ I said. ‘God … I want you.’ She went on speaking without a sound. My head began to spin. ‘I’m yours,’ she said, suddenly loud and clear, and as I melted into her I felt like two men: one that wanted to take her like a beast, even now, and one that recoiled at so much submission.
I woke up when Nina sat bolt upright in bed. She stared straight ahead, seemingly impervious to the cold. When I touched her arm, she looked at me in annoyance. ‘What’s wrong?’
She made an impatient gesture with her hand. She seemed to be listening. I leaned on my left arm and looked at the dark smudge that was all I could see of her. ‘I thought I heard something. I woke up because I …’ She hesitated.
‘You’ll catch a chill.’
She shook her head. ‘I heard voices.’
‘You heard voices.’
She lay back down and turned to me. Her face was close to mine. ‘A man’s voice.’ She was quiet. Then she said: ‘This fucking house.’
‘What did he say?’
It was a long while before she answered. ‘He said: I want you.’
‘That was me.’ My dream about Molly still echoed. I knew exactly what I had said in that dream, when she had looked into my eyes and spoken in silence.
‘Who were you talking to?’
Nina turned over and nestled up against me. ‘I’m listening, but I’m getting cold, so I’m afraid I’ll have to use you as a heater. Who was Molly?’
‘My first wife.’
‘Good Lord. So Anna was your second?’
‘Eve.’
‘Eve.’
‘Eve Barlow.’
She shook her head. ‘Can we keep this brief?’ she asked. ‘The Nathan-and-his-women part?’
‘We don’t have to do it at all, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘No, tell me about it. I didn’t even know you were married twice.’
‘I hardly knew it myself.’
‘Tell me.’
‘There isn’t much to tell. I’ve been married twice, the first time to a chorus girl named Molly, the second time to Eve, who ran a tourist office in Wales.’
‘What have you got against Dutch women?’
‘Nothing, only there weren’t a great deal of them outside Holland.’
‘A chorus girl.’
Molly had danced in the chorus of a terrible musical I saw in London. She was American, had red hair, and a waist so slender that I sometimes wondered how there could be a complete digestive system inside.
I had gone to stay with Uncle Herman. He was, that year, 1968, I think, a visiting professor at one of the London universities and lived in a flat on Torrington Square. We only saw each other in the evenings, and so it happened that one afternoon, alone and bored, I ended up at a musical that was more like a glorified campus riot. It took me no more than five minutes to figure out that the show was worthless, but I sat there all the same. There were two reasons for this: the fact that the exit was blocked by an usherette, and the light that, after the first few minutes, fell on Molly’s hair.
She was part of the group that filled up the space, dancing and singing, behind the lead players. But once my gaze had settled on her, she was all I saw. For the next two and a half hours I stayed in my seat, even during the interval, and stared at the stage. When she danced with the rest of the company, I followed her as if I had strings coming out of my pupils that were tied to her hair.
It was a coppery, gleaming, upswept abundance of hair that, every now and then, in my imagination, seemed to take on a life of its own. The skintight costume with the tiny skirt slipped off her, melting like spun sugar, the hair floated upwards and burst into a fine cloud of pale russet smoke.
After the show I did the unthinkable. I walked out of the auditorium, went to a local pub, and phoned the theatre to make an appointment for an interview. My request, not one of the leads, but a girl from the chorus, was thought to be rather odd, but once I had explained my plan – an article about the life of a chorus girl and how much a musical like that demanded of the entire team, not just the lead players – the artistic director suggested one of her colleagues. I told her I’d rather have Molly.
‘Why?’
‘She’s American, isn’t she? In the Netherlands, where I come from, “American” stands for professionalism, flair, that sort of thing. If I write about an American girl in an English musical the article will receive more attention.’
The appointment with Molly Gelernter was set for two days later. When I left the phone booth, I was sweating like a horse.
That night Herman and I ate dinner in a local bistro. He tried to dissect his steak, while asking me what I had done that day. I told him I had been to see a musical. He stopped cutting and looked up.
‘Hair,’ I said.
‘You’re not feeling lonely, are you?’
‘I’m bored.’
He returned to his plate and drew the knife across the greyish brown slab of meat that was floating in a puddle of blood and grease. ‘So?’
‘So: how was it?’
‘Without lapsing into four-letter words?’
‘Preferably not. This is England.’
‘Let’s see: a plot I could write in … mmm … ten to fifteen minutes. A day or two, maybe three, and I’d have the complete text, score included. Worthless, less than worthless. Not even the suggestion of depth. But performed to perfection …’
‘… all that worthlessness.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not really British, you know. That whole musical business is a twentieth-century American concept. They simply imitate it here, with all their British theatrical know-how, but you can take it from me: in ten years time all those musicals will be written by Englishmen and packed with hordes of unemployed Americans.’
I was blushing. A grown man, early thirties, and I was blushing.
‘Did you know,’ said Uncle Herman, ‘that you’re turning red? Is it too hot in here?’
Molly belonged, had belonged, to those unemployed hordes. She had gone to dancing school in the hope of getting famous, but by her second year she had already discovered that she and fame were two different things. She was good, good enough, but not the type that would make it to the top. That was why she had gone to London. Here, she would have little trouble meeting the requirements.
She sat opposite me, in a tiny office in the cryptlike basement of the theatre, a yellow-plastered room without daylight or fresh air, and spoke in the matter-of-fact tone in which only Americans can speak about their dreams of a lifetime. Twenty-three, born in Brooklyn, the daughter of parents who had earned their living in the second-rate Jewish theatre world, her father, as a song and dance man, her mother in farcical comedy. In those days her father was working the nostalgia circuit: evenings for Jewish pensioners, in Newark and Florida, where the music was pre-war and the memories as much American as they were European.
I asked her how it was possible to combine the life of a chorus girl, all that staying in shape and rehearsing, with a private life.
‘I don’t have one.’
‘What …’
‘I don’t have a private life. I sleep, I wake up, I go shopping, I go to work, I sleep, I wake up. That’s it.’ She looked me straight in the eye, and I swallowed.
‘How would you like to go out after this, for a drink and a life?’
Was that question part of the interview …
Definitely not.
We looked at each other for a long time and although I begged, pleaded that she would look away, that I would look away, we went on staring.
‘God,’ I said at last.
That was what Uncle Herman said, too, when he stood in the doorway later that afternoon and found us in the big bed, Molly astride me, my hands on her breasts, groaning under the sweet weight of her hips as they glided back and forth. ‘God. You could at least have closed the door.’
I grabbed the sheet and tried to pull it over us, but it wasn’t easy. ‘This,’ I said finally, ‘is Molly Gelernter. Molly, this is my Uncle Herman.’ By that time she was lying next to me, the sheet up to her chin, and she waved over the edge of it with her left hand.
‘How do you do,’ said Uncle Herman.
They got along very well together, so well that Molly, just before we got married, six months later, was spending more time at Uncle Herman’s than in her own bedsit. Nevertheless, Uncle Herman was opposed to our union.
‘N,’ he said one night, when I had arrived from Holland for a long stay. ‘Molly’s a wonderful girl. If you make her unhappy, I’ll break both your legs.’
‘Why …’
‘You’re going to make her unhappy. No doubt about it. And I’ll tell you something else: you’re going to make every woman you ever meet unhappy. I don’t mean to sound like the bad fairy from one of your silly stories, but you’re the sort of man women should avoid. They fall for you, they even grow to love you, but until you learn to love them back, you’ll always make a mess of things.’
‘But I do love her. I pretended to be a bloody journalist just so I could meet her.’
‘And, the Lord of the Universe be praised, she forgave you. That’s how much that woman already loves you. Would you get that through your head? She loves you so much, she forgives you for getting to know her under false pretences.’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, Nuncle, but in an opera, a scene like that would have been the great romantic climax.’
He had looked at me, Uncle Herman, and shaken his head. ‘That’s the problem,’ he said. ‘To you, everything is a story.’
I had lost my temper. ‘I sat there at that fucking musical and watched her for three whole hours! I didn’t see anything but her, nothing …’
‘Hair,’ said Uncle Herman dryly.
‘Yes. No!’
‘Hair. That’s what you saw. Red hair.’
‘So?’
‘Reisele’s red hair.’
Reisele’s red hair. ‘Doctor Spielvogel,’ I said, ‘spare me your analysis.’
Less than a year after the wedding, in New York, in a rented hall where we were married by a rabbi who looked like Rock Hudson and Molly’s father sang a version of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ that would have soured sugar and one of his colleagues rounded off the evening with an unintelligible ‘Hava Nagila,’ less than a year later, Molly was in Manhattan with Uncle Herman, crying her eyes out, and I was on the Hill. Uncle Herman, who, shortly after my arrival, had phoned me in the middle of the night, said I was the biggest bastard he had ever met. ‘It’s time you started asking yourself,’ he roared down the phone, ‘why you fall for someone, before you make any more victims!’
‘Reisele,’ said Nina, ‘was that the little girl on the ship?’
‘Uncle Herman had a rather Freudian outlook on life. He believed that a man spends his whole life searching for one woman and if it’s not his mother, it’s his first great love.’
‘… my first great love. Oh, yes.’
She looked over her shoulder. In the darkness, I couldn’t make out her face. ‘How far does it go, this fascination of yours with red hair?’
‘I’m not at all fascinated by red hair. That’s what Uncle Herman thought. Eve was as blond as can be. Besides …’ I lowered my voice. ‘… if it were that bad, you’d have woken up bald this morning and I’d have added your hair to my collection.’
‘Okay, so tell me about the blond,’ she said after a while. ‘It’ll take my mind off things.’
‘I’m not in the mood.’
‘Who says A …’
‘I’m not in the mood, Nina.’
There was a silence. Outside, the wind moved through the trees, gently and peacefully. I felt the weariness curling up inside me.
‘Nathan?’
‘Hm?’
‘Do you still want her? Molly?’
‘No. Yes, when I dreamed about her. We had great sex. Sorry.’
‘Why “sorry”? Do you think I can’t imagine you having a normal sex life?’
‘We were never happy, Nina. I was no good for her. She deserved better. We were two strangers, I was a stranger. The only time we ever met was when we …’
‘Fucked.’
I was a yo-yo. I woke up and drifted off and each time I thought I was really going to fall asleep, I woke up again. Now and then I heard Nina’s voice, I felt the warmth of her body and then I was here, in the hunting room, and then it went quiet again and I slipped away.
‘Uncle Herman had quite a way with the ladies,’ said Nina.
I drifted through the water of sleep and sighed. ‘Yes.’
‘Not you.’
I didn’t answer.
Her voice sounded slow and heavy. ‘Nathan?’
‘Why couldn’t you ever stay with anybody?’
‘You want to know that now?’
‘Hmm.’
‘I don’t know if I can really …’
‘More or less.’
I closed my eyes and walked into the tower.
I know two different versions of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. In the smallest of the two, the tower is at an advanced stage of construction. An apocalyptic red hue washes over the building and the surrounding land. It’s as if the light of the setting sun is brushing this cloud-high colossus just one more time, before the earth shakes and the galleries crumble and stones roll down from the heights, taking rubble, wooden sheds, and people down with them. The tower stands on the edge of a bay, or the sea, in the lower right hand corner of the painting. There are several ships lying at anchor, another ship is headed, sail billowing, to the coast. No two galleries are alike. One has high portals, another, low, there’s a row of four here, two there.
In the larger painting, the tower is much lower. It only barely reaches the clouds. The construction looks sturdy and shaky at the same time. The galleries are evenly spaced, the buttresses heavy and solid. But there are entire pieces missing, as if some God has pounded his fist into the side, the right side, where the tower juts out onto a quay. The waterfront is bustling. Several ships are moored there, others lie at anchor in the bay. A large raft is floating in the greenish-blue water. The inside of the tower is visible, a spiral of increasingly smaller and narrower corridors with windows and archways. On the side of the tower directly facing us is a half-collapsed, almost boulder-like incline, maybe thirty or forty yards high. There are houses and huts on top, just as there are in parts of the gallery. Elsewhere, the gangway is blocked by enormous pulleys, winches, and cranes.
I walked into this tower, across the mountain of sand and rubble that reached to the third gallery. Because I had been stowing memories in the tower ever since I was a child, I had to go a long way up before I came to the section where I kept my stories. They lay, not only because I had stored them away at a later date, but because the spot appealed to me, in the innermost system of spiralling corridors. It was visible from the outside, like the fragile shell of a derelict building. What were they for, all those crypts and niches? Who needed those endless corridors that wound, tunnel-like, through the stone colossus?
I did.
I climbed from gallery to gallery, until I reached the place where the heart of the building pierced the sky. It was the seventh circle, on the right was a section in scaffolding, on the left, a steep stone incline that led to several portals. I went through the middle one and turned left. Darkness hung between the damp walls. A couple of workers were standing next to a pillar with a trough of mortar. I passed them and went right, deeper into the depths. An empty corridor, swathed in flickering torchlight, lay before me. Along the walls, on the dusty stone floor, pale flecks glimmered. I looked at them as I walked past. They were miniature still-lifes, about the size of the Nativity scene I had once seen at Eve’s parents’ house. My first fairy tale: ‘Bread for God’. A man in a caftan and yarmulke, and his wife. He was carrying two challahs, braided white loaves, in his hands. Next to that: a man on top of a mesa, looking down, where another man had built a squarish woodpile and was about to set it alight. I hurried through the corridor, the dark curve with the red-lit walls. Our family portrait, the faces frozen in black and white. Zeno in Switzerland. In a room deep within the tower, the women in my life were sitting side by side. When I saw them, I felt myself filling with emptiness. ‘Nina? Are you still there?’
She mumbled something.
‘Do you still want to hear it?’
‘Crime and punishment,’ she said suddenly, very clearly. ‘Nothing has changed.’ Then there was silence. I heard the trees around the house, though I knew the wind was still.