15

Our Dear Lord in the Attic

The day after the trip to Aachen, Lola has found a spare couple of hours in her busy schedule and we are due to meet at the hidden church just up the canal from our house. She sent a bad-tempered text to arrange it without the usual little string of x’s in it. The coincidence of the location in view of what I’ve seen at Aachen the day before would make my heart leap if it wasn’t for the tone of that text. What can I do?

Stay calm. Let the buildings speak. The hidden church is a Catholic chapel called Ons’ Lieve Heer op Zolder. ‘Our Dear Lord in the Attic’. It was built into the top three floors of a big merchant’s house in the sixteen sixties because at that time it was illegal for Catholics to practice their faith. A hundred years earlier it was being a protestant that could get you thrown on a bonfire, but by the time this church was secreted into its attic, the shoes were on the other feet, and the Catholic mass had to be held in hiding. Hence the construction of the hidden church. Hidden is hardly the word for it now, however – the place is a popular tourist destination curated to the hilt by zealous historians. The whole house has become in their hands an anteroom to the church, in a complete reversal of its seventeenth century function. A reversal that its beauty survives.

Buildings have an inside and an outside. Dom. But what this place adds is that in between the inner lining and the outer shell, there is a strangely configured space that is not one or the other. In medium and small sized buildings, there are cellars and staircases as well as roof spaces that are too inconveniently shaped to have habitation, and so get used for storage or for games of hide and seek or are commandeered by vermin – and this last is one little mentioned reason why the modern age, in which hygienic science figures strongly, and in which every function has to be accounted for the sake of efficiency, tries to eliminate the difference between outside and inside, and squeeze out undesignated space.

Out on the Polders, the new Dutch lands reclaimed from the sea in the middle of the last century, there is a model village built to house the new modern peasants. The village, Nagele, is arranged round big rectangular greens, full of sun and health, but it is made up of little flat roofed, cubic houses, with tiny rooms. The designers strongly disapproved of the old peasant habit, cravenly hierarchic, of using the kitchen as a family room and keeping a front room for “best”, and so made the kitchens as efficient – for which read small – as possible. But there, in the village museum, you can see photographs of the inhabitants, families of six or seven, crammed into those little two by two kitchens trying to live life as they knew it. It’s hilarious! Today, the village has heritage status and its little houses are occupied by the middle classes, who have a lot more possessions than those peasants ever had. Where to put them? In the attic, maybe? No. There are no pitched roofs and therefore no attics; and the heritage status of the place means no alterations. This is modern life. Everything must be accounted for. There is no slack in it.

In big old buildings, by contrast, the spaces in between the inner lining and the outer shell are big enough to be places in their own right. The configurations of the outside of the inside against the inside of the outside make extraordinary shaped rooms, technically useless and also hidden in the sense of hardly ever seen. Beneath the pitched roofs of the old Cathedrals you will find big dark rooms with undulating stone floors made by the tops of the nave arches, and, hanging from the rafters, chains suspending chandeliers into the interior of the church far below that pass through holes in this curving floor, little eyes through which warmth and the echoing sound of prayers and the glitter of candles seep. Astounding atmospherics, all made out of slack. It is the secret that visitors to the Aachen Dom passing through that ticket office do not see. This house that holds the hidden church in Amsterdam is not cathedral sized, but the top two floors have been partly removed to expand the in-between, and leave a high tiered space full of icons and bleeding figures and the silver rayed monstrance of the Catholic sect. And it is in this elaborate, gilded place that I find Lola standing, frowning, impatiently thumping the audio guide she has hired at the front desk on the back of a chair.

“What have I done?” comes out of my mouth. Get it over with. No time like the present.

“I don’t know. Perhaps Katrina could tell me,” with a blast of frost, “if you introduced us.”

Lola doesn’t keep stuff inside for long. Down the canal from here is the building in which Anne Frank hid from the Nazis. She too was secreted into a piece of slack space. Lola’s own family, Jews like the Franks, was sliced in half by the same terror, but I think if Lola had been Anne Frank she would have given the game away, she would have had to explode and burst out of hiding. The last time a conversation ran up about the brutality of the state of Israel phosphor-bombing Gaza, she reacted: she won’t stay quiet. She refers to the astonishing survival of Jewish culture as unequalled in humanity. “The escape from the Pharoes was three and a half thousand years ago – we’re still here, where are the Pharoes? The Assyrians and the Babylonians overran us but we’re still here – where are they?” She holds that while the Jewish diaspora maintained, as it did in spite of successive persecutions over thousands of years, the Jews were part of the complexity of the world, part of everything. It was that complication that the Nazis tried to simplify by separating Jews out of the mix and concentrating them into camps, in order to carry through their extermination. The Final Solution was intended to make “a better world”, says Lola, and look what happens when you try to make the world a better place. That’s the irony of the concentration that the state of Israel has become. She says the problem is not just a moral problem, it’s also an aesthetic one. Because this imagined better place is always static. It’s a picture. It’s picturesque. The world, she says, is dynamic, alternately warmed and cooled by its proximity to the sun, Spinning through space, tugged this way and that by the moon, the sexual activity of its occupants perpetually recasting the genetic permutations of life; etcetera. Dynamic: as is the diaspora.

I love this woman. I call her the Featherweight Nietzsche because she knows that every being is its own miracle. She allows her thoughts to be buffeted by nature and history but not by convention. I love Katrina, too, which is difficult to explain – I take a deep breath and try to anyway, try to articulate how she has a lover – lovers – how yes I’m jealous, how my jealousy of them could be Platonic, if there is such a thing as Platonic jealousy, probably not, and find myself floundering, exactly as I should have expected.

“Listen,” she says, breaking cover. “You may be able to like everything. But it’s a whole other thing to love everybody. When you’ve worked your way out of the labyrinth, let me know. But have it done by this evening.”

AT BLENHEIM PALACE in Oxfordshire there is a secret garden known as Rosamond’s bower where Henry the Second kept his mistress Rosamond Clifford. It was accessed through a labyrinth to keep her safe. Or was she a prisoner? The building was locked with a maze instead of a door, to which you had to know the combination as a sequence of left and right turns. The slack I am looking for here is the dead end of the maze. I need to see Katrina.

And as I’m making my way across town on the swerving, clanking tram, I find myself sitting behind a woman with no arms, who is loudly telling the man she is with about her life as an actor. One of her points is how, as an actor, she can play anyone. Hedda Gabler, Beatrice, Barbarella, you name it, she’ll do it. The problem is the prejudice of the audiences, who can’t see beyond the cripple they see. This prejudice extends, she says in the very next sentence – apparently unable to see the contradiction – to disabled characters being played by able bodied actors: no one would think now of black-facing a white actor to play a black character, so why let an able body play disabled?

“But you just said actors can play anyone!” I want to yell at her.

The baby is delivered from the material constraint of the womb – which has just got too damn small, great as it is – and laid to rest in his cot of contracts. He howls at the discomfort of the release. He gets used to it. Turns fifteen, perceives the crooked structure of the world, howls against it. Gets used to that, too. Grows to manhood. Comes to think of political structures as a workable alternative to freedom. Bribery, nepotism, democracy – whatever works, works. Until it’s delivered – then he howls.

I pull out my phone and call Katrina. I tell her about the trouble I’m in. Marital strife!

“Did you tell her about Bamba? She says.

“I couldn’t bring myself to say his name.” And I didn’t add, she knows about him already.

“Something’s happened. He’s gone missing. I’ve got to find him.” And then it begins to snow all over again.