House on Endless Waters E-Book

Emuna Elon

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 460

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

‘House on Endless Waters is extraordinary—a vibrant, page-turning family mystery that not only carries us deep into Amsterdam’s little-explored wartime history, but into the fascinating, complex and often painful process by which history is crafted into story.’

Jennifer Cody Epstein, internationally bestselling author of Wunderland and The Painter of Shanghai

‘I read this book in excitement and wonder. It’s not only a touching and fascinating book, but a sophisticated one as well.’

Amos Oz, award-winning author of A Tale of Love and Darkness

‘Emuna Elon has given us an elegant, eloquent novel—a story in which time and language melt to reveal truths that could be told in no other way. House on Endless Waters is at once an Escher print of a tale and devastatingly, inescapably real.’

Rachel Kadish, bestselling author of The Weight of Ink

‘House on Endless Waters is a haunting and lyrical meditation on who we are and where we come from, on how our past shapes our present and our art. Emuna Elon’s gorgeously intricate novel is beautifully written and moving.’

Jillian Cantor, bestselling author of The Lost Letter and In Another Time

‘In House on Endless Waters, Emuna Elon envelops her readers in an intricately woven and lushly layered world. With achingly exquisite, delicate prose, Elon explores the creative mind’s power to reimagine a life and memory’s power to recognize truth. An unforgettable read.’

Lynda Cohen Loigman, author of The Two-Family House and The Wartime Sisters

ALSO BY EMUNA ELON

Beyond My Sight

Inscribe My Name

If You Awaken Love

Originally published in Israel in 2016 by Kinneret Zmora-Bitan DvirCopyright © 2016 by Emuna Elon

First published in English in the United States in 2020 by Atria Books,an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

English translation copyright © 2020 by Emuna Elon

Published by arrangement with The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew LiteratureSupported by: ‘Am Ha-Sefer’ – The Israeli Fund for Translation of Hebrew BooksThe Cultural Administration, Israel Ministry of Culture and Sport

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Allen & Unwin

The moral right of Emuna Elon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Allen & Unwinc/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

Phone: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 91163 057 9

Export trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 91163 059 3

E-Book ISBN: 978 1 76087 289 2

Interior design by Wendy Blum

Printed in

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FIRST NOTEBOOK

1

One after another the people are swallowed up into the plane to Amsterdam, one after another after another. Yoel is approaching the aircraft’s door but the flow of passengers is suddenly halted by somebody, a woman in an orange windbreaker, who has planted herself in the doorway of the Boeing 737 and refuses to step inside. Yoel’s thoughts are already with the new novel he has decided to write, and he thinks about this woman and asks himself which of his new characters would be capable of admitting to the primal, naked fear that besets every mortal on entering the flying trap called an airplane. Who would volunteer to disrupt with her body the “everything’s alright” façade and violate the sacred alrightness to which people clutch so they won’t have to admit that everything is truly chaotic.

From his place in the line, Yoel can see only the woman’s back. Even through the orange plastic of her windbreaker, he can see how tense her muscles are, and over the shoulders of the people in front of him he discerns the beads of perspiration breaking out on the back of her neck and around her ears. The line starts burbling irritably; people peek anxiously at their boarding pass for flight such-and-such, clutching the rectangular pieces of paper as if they were an assurance that the plane will eventually take off. Then from out of nowhere appears a man in a resplendent uniform, with gray hair and an air of authority, who introduces himself as the purser and puts a fatherly arm around the stricken passenger’s shoulders. As he gently takes her aside, the plane continues filling up, and as Yoel passes them he hears him telling her, Believe me, my dear, I have anxious passengers on every flight, and everything’s alright. I promise I’ll come and hold your hand during takeoff.

When he’s invited overseas to promote his books, he and Bat-Ami usually fly business class, thus sparing him from physical contact with the multitudes of other passengers and from being subjected to their multitudes of looks. Since this time he’s flying on his own, and mainly because he’s paying for his ticket out of his own pocket, he decided to fly economy and so now all he can do is slide into his seat as discreetly as humanly possible. Just look straight ahead and downward, he reminds himself, just straight ahead and downward. Don’t raise your eyes or look to the side lest your eyes meet those of somebody who might recognize you. And be very wary of people who have already recognized you and are trying to get your attention, and of the ones you can hear saying to each other, that’s Yoel Blum. Or, there’s that writer. Or, there’s that famous guy, the one with the cap. Come on, remind me what his name is.

It has been only a week since his first trip to Amsterdam and the reception, held in his honor by his Dutch publisher, that was attended by local luminaries from the fields of literature and the media. Only a week since he and Bat-Ami had wandered through the crowds of tall people in the city of bicycles and canals, and strolled through streets, squares, palaces, and museums. In the evening, exhausted and ravenous, they went to the publisher’s beautiful home on Apollo Avenue in the old southern part of Amsterdam, but had to make do with a meal of carrot and cucumber crudités: the fare on the tables was rich and varied, but here too, as at many festive events held in his honor all over the world, it was clearly evident that their hosts hadn’t imagined that in these enlightened times there were still civilized people who observed the ancient Biblical dietary laws.

Before the second part of the literary event began, the Israeli guest was asked to sit on a carved chair in the center of the Dutch living room next to the stylized Dutch cabinet on whose shelves Dutch delftware of white porcelain decorated in blue was arranged, and facing the large, wide Dutch window overlooking a canal scattered with flickering reflections. His audience sat facing him, waiting for him to answer his red-cheeked host’s question on the difference between Israeli writers categorized as writers of the generation of the establishment of the State of Israel and those known—like Mr. Blum, and I hope it’s alright if we simply call you Yoel—as writers of the new wave.

The past cannot be hidden. Yoel pronounced the reply he always provides to this question as he crosses his legs and looks pleasantly at his audience. I believe it’s impossible to write Israeli literature without referring either directly or indirectly to the archeological tell on which the State of Israel flourishes, the shores of which are lapped by its new and old waves alike.

Attentive faces nodded their understanding and perhaps even empathy.

Attentive faces always nod their understanding and perhaps even their empathy.

However, he emphasized in the dramatic crescendo to which his voice always rises at this point, contemporary Israeli writers are first and foremost contemporary Israeli writers. I myself hope that my writing does not wallow in the mire of the past, but carries my soul and the souls of my readers to what is the present and to what will be in the future.

The game went on. In the way that people ask him everywhere, the Dutch asked if the characters populating his books are typical Israelis. And he replied, the way he replies everywhere, that in his view, his characters are universal.

For a moment, he thought about deviating from his custom and telling them, this particular audience, how hard he works in his writing to refine his characters so that each of them is Everyman. In each movement to capture all the movements which have ever been and will ever be. To formulate the core of the words, their very core.

Like every writer’s characters, he said as he always does, my characters, too, live and act in a reality I am closely acquainted with. As a writer who lives in the Israeli reality, it is only natural that my characters are connected with that reality as well. But the stories I tell about these characters tell about Man wherever he breathes, about Man wherever he loves, about Man wherever he yearns.

The publisher’s red cheeks flushed even more deeply as he read to his guests from the New York Times book review: “It is hardly surprising that Yoel Blum’s books have been translated into more than twenty languages and that he has been awarded some of the most prestigious literature prizes. Yoel Blum is a magician, the wave of whose wand turns every human anecdote into the nucleus of every reader’s personal story.”

The color of the Dutch cheeks turned a deep purple as he continued reading: “You pick up a Yoel Blum novel and are assured of it revealing your deepest secret: the secret whose existence you weren’t even aware of.”

A few more familiar, unavoidable questions, and Yoel already estimated that the evening was drawing to its expected conclusion.

But then he was asked an unexpected question by a man introduced to him earlier as a local journalist by the name of Neumark, or maybe Neuberg.

If I’m not mistaken, called the questioner from his seat at the right-hand edge of the circle of chairs. If I’m not mistaken—Mr. Blum, Yoel—you were born here, in Amsterdam?

A stunned silence engulfed the room. Yoel too was shocked, since to the best of his knowledge, this fact did not appear in any printed or virtual source dealing with him and his history. He tried to recall the journalist’s name. Neustadt? Neumann? Is he Jewish?

As he did so, he heard himself calmly answering: That is correct. Technically, I was indeed born in Amsterdam. But my family immigrated to Israel when I was a baby, and so I’ve always regarded myself as a native Israeli.

Afterward he managed to divert the talk from his personal history back to the collective Israeli one and say a few more words about Hebrew literature in these changing times. But it seemed that the matter of his Dutch origins had been placed in the center of the circle and that none of those present could ignore it. Yoel presumed that they expected him to provide further biographic details, aside from the one already provided by Neuhaus, or Neufeld, according to which the famous Israeli writer is a scion of an old Jewish-Amsterdam family uprooted in the wake of the events of World War Two.

They couldn’t have imagined that the Israeli writer himself knew no further details about it either.

2

Several times a year he flies to places where his books are published in various languages, but until last week, he hadn’t flown to Amsterdam, neither for the first translation of one of his books into Dutch nor for the second. In early fall, when a third Yoel Blum novel was about to be published in the capital of the Netherlands, Zvika, his literary agent, urged him to go this time and promote sales of the book. Send me anywhere you want, Yoel told him, just not Amsterdam. I can’t go to Amsterdam. But Zvika continued pressing him: You can’t ignore a publisher, you can’t disrespect your readers. And when Yoel told Bat-Ami about it, she decided that he couldn’t refuse. We’re going, she said. We’ll be there just for a short time.

He tried to protest. My mother, he said, demanded that I never set foot in Amsterdam.

Your mother’s dead, Yoel.

The words hit him as if it had just happened.

In fact, his mother had left him long before she finally left this world. Ever so slowly she went out of her mind, then out of her soul, and finally out of her body, loosening, stage by stage, her grip on reality. Unpicking, one after the other, the stitches that bound him to her; stitch by stitch, thread by thread, until she detached herself from him completely and departed.

Like when he was a child and she’d taught him to swim, and she’d stand in the shallow end of the municipal pool holding him on the surface, her sturdy hands supporting his belly and chest while, on her instructions, his skinny arms and legs straightened and bent in swimming movements. And then, millimeter by millimeter, so gradually that he didn’t even feel it, she’d withdraw her large hands from his body. Little by little, she withdrew them, little by little, until she folded her arms and only stood next to him, watching but not touching. And the first time he noticed that she wasn’t holding him and that he was actually swimming on his own, he lost his balance and began thrashing around and sinking, swallowing great gulps of water until it seemed he would drown.

Afterward he got used to it.

His first trip back to the city of his birth passed mainly with pangs of remorse for having consented to go in the first place. I should have stuck to my guns, he repeatedly griped to Bat-Ami in the taxi from Jerusalem to the airport. All in all, what did my mother ask of me? She asked so little. I should have respected her wish.

What was she so afraid of? Bat-Ami asked.

What do you mean?

Why didn’t she want you to go to Amsterdam? What was it she was afraid you might find there?

Nothing. What could there be after so many years? She simply didn’t want me or Nettie to have any connection with the place where she lost my father, her parents and siblings, the life she might have had.

At the Ben Shemen interchange he realized he’d left his phylacteries at home and he decided to cancel the trip right then and there. Forgetting my tefillin is a sure sign, he explained to Bat-Ami in excited shouts, and ordered the driver to make a U-turn and drive back to Jerusalem. A Jew’s tefillin are his self-identity, and it’s a fact that I travel so much yet have never forgotten them until this forbidden and unnecessary journey.

It was only with much effort that Bat-Ami managed to soothe him. We’re not in an Agnon story, she said, and at this point you haven’t lost any self-identity. Following her precise instructions, the driver proceeded toward the airport while calling the taxi station and asking for another Jerusalem driver to go to the author’s apartment building, get the key of their apartment from Bat-Ami’s sister, who lives on the ground floor, get the phylacteries from their apartment, and bring them to Ben Gurion Airport as quickly as possible. Bat-Ami stayed on the line as she and Yoel reached the airport and as they wheeled their cases into the terminal, and even through security and check-in. She meticulously guided the phylactery courier through each stage of his complex mission, and once it was successfully accomplished and the driver informed her of his arrival at the main entrance with the embroidered velvet bag, she quickly went out to meet him and tipped him handsomely while Yoel waited for her in the departure lounge, his stomach churning.

His first structured memories begin at the kindergarten in Netanya. As he grew up and started to wonder about what had come before the kindergarten, his mother would look away, pretending she was immersed in a vital task that brooked no delay, and declare loudly and clearly: Whatever was, was. Those waters have already flowed onward.

On more than one occasion he said that he still wanted to know about the place where he was born, but his mother said: Anyone who immigrated to Israel as an infant is considered a native-born Israeli. It’s like you were born here in Israel, Yoel.

His big sister, Nettie, would explain to him that that’s how it is with the Dutch. They don’t talk about what they absolutely don’t have to talk about, and they certainly don’t talk about waters that have already flowed onward. In general, she always added with the seriousness characteristic of her to this day, being Dutch is no simple matter.

In an attempt to end the meeting at the publisher’s home on a pleasant note, at the end of the evening Yoel chose to relate, as a sort of encore in a different, lighter tone, one of the jokes with which he sometimes spiced his lectures abroad.

God summons the leaders of the three great faiths, he said, and announces that in forty-eight hours he is going to bring down a great and terrible flood on Earth. The three leaders hasten to gather their people—one in a church, the second in a mosque, the third in a synagogue—and prepare them for the worst. The bishop calls upon his flock to repent and utter the deathbed confession, and the imam tells the Muslim faithful more or less the same thing. The rabbi, however, mounts the rostrum in the center of the synagogue, slams the lectern with the palm of his hand, and announces: Jews, we have forty-eight hours to learn how to live underwater!

That’s an anti-Semitic joke, you know, Bat-Ami murmured late that night as she curled up in their hotel bed.

She fell asleep as soon as she completed the sentence, and Yoel was tired too, exhausted as if he’d been walking the length of Amsterdam’s canals for generations.

3

And now, only a week after that night, he’s flying to Amsterdam again. He’s going in order to start working on a new novel, after discovering, in the few days since his last trip, what he must write about. It’s hard to say he isn’t apprehensive about the long stay in his foreign homeland.

It’s hard to say that he has no doubts about his ability to gather the necessary material, fill his notebooks with notes and interviews, and then find the strength to return home and turn those notes into a book.

But something inside tells him that if he succeeds in all this, this book will be the novel of his life; that it was for this novel that he had become a writer in the first place.

This time Yoel is flying to Amsterdam on his own, and everything he does or doesn’t do there will depend on him alone. But on his first visit to this forbidden city he was terror-stricken because of his desecration of his mother’s last request, and Bat-Ami took his hand as one would take the hand of a wayward child and led him to where she had chosen to lead him.

Their hosts had booked them into the Hotel de Paris, one of the many small, elegant hotels in the city’s entertainment district around Leidseplein, and Bat-Ami contended that it was one of the more charming hotels they had ever stayed in. From the moment they touched down at Schiphol Airport, she hadn’t stopped admiring and enthusing over Amsterdam’s picturesque architecture, the charm of the canals, the bridges, the boulevards and buildings, the multitude of colors and forms, and of course the well-built, pleasant inhabitants flowing by on their bicycles in the open air.

He couldn’t understand how one could get one’s bearings in this strange city that is almost entirely contained within a semicircle delineated by its four main canals. For example, if the Keizersgracht begins at the western end of Amsterdam and ends after a semicircle at the eastern end, then when you see a sign saying “Keizersgracht” you know you’re on the bank of that canal, but how are you supposed to guess if you’re in the center of the city or in its west or east?

Still, right away and without any difficulty, Bat-Ami learned to find her way through the maze of strips of dry land running between the canals. She marched him along through that maze energetically and confidently, as she constantly praised the universal spirit of freedom and was excited even by blatantly touristic gimmicks like the floating flower market or by the dangerously steep Dutch staircases.

She told him, her eyes shining, that because their staircases are so narrow and steep, the Dutch move furniture and other large items into or out of their homes through the windows.

She was also captivated by the Dutch custom, which he found incomprehensible, of leaving their big windows exposed to full view and not hiding their private life behind shutters or curtains. This blatant exposure shocked him profoundly, but the happy Bat-Ami didn’t stop saying to him, Look, look at this, and Look at that, and mainly, See how nothing’s changed here in Amsterdam since Holland’s Golden Age. What hasn’t happened to us Jews since then, while here, throughout all those long years, the same buildings, the same streets, the same water, and the same people. Just look at this guy, for example, she whispered as they went into their hotel and the elderly, suited clerk handed them their room key over a counter filled with Dutch clogs, miniature windmills, and pictures of sailing ships. I’ll bet he hasn’t moved from that counter since the reign of Philip the Second.

It seems that it’s easier for Bat-Ami on their trips abroad than it is in Israel. When she’s in Israel, she shoulders all matters pertaining to the family, the home, the State of Israel, and the human race. But the moment the aircraft wheels detach from the runway at Ben Gurion Airport, Bat-Ami detaches herself from her perpetual duties and lets the world go on its way. When she’s abroad, she even frees herself of the burden of her big bunch of keys. She is still always armed with her large purse and her cell phone but can finally be seen without her silvered hamsa ornament inset with a miniature family photograph, on which hang and jangle at all times their front door key, the key to the storeroom, the key to the garden gate, the key to the door to the roof, their mailbox key, the key to the gas cylinder cage, her car key, his car key, emergency keys to her brother’s and sisters’ apartments, a key to each of their three daughters’ apartments, and more large and small keys to padlocks known to her alone.

4

The day after the literary evening at the Dutch publisher’s home, between a visit to a museum across the River Amstel and a whirlwind tour she’d planned of the Rembrandt House Museum and the Waterlooplein flea market, Bat-Ami decided that they couldn’t possibly pass through the Old Jewish Quarter without taking a look at the Jewish Historical Museum. And so Yoel found himself in a dim exhibition hall, the length of which were illuminated glass cabinets displaying mezuzahs torn from doorposts, a faded wooden sign warning in black lettering “Voor Joden verboden”—Jews prohibited—photographs and documents and various utensils. He thought he’d better get out of there; he thought he should respect his mother, who had wanted so much for him not to see these things. He looked around and couldn’t find Bat-Ami and was gripped by panic until in the dim light he saw her sitting on one of the benches, and he made his way over to her through the knots of visitors moving around quietly, passing a group of Dutch youngsters who were following their teacher.

Bat-Ami appeared not to have noticed him and when he touched her shoulder she didn’t raise her eyes to him, but with muted excitement gestured for him to sit down beside her. When Yoel sat down, he saw that she was watching old black-and-white film clips screened onto the length and breadth of the wall facing them.

Why, Yoel wondered, were his wife’s eyes glued to these silent images? When he looked at them, he saw people celebrating at a wedding festivity, the men in tuxedos, their hair gleaming with brilliantine, and the women in splendid evening gowns and elegant hairdos. He turned to Bat-Ami but she didn’t turn her face to him. Her eyes were still glued to the flickering images, but she sensed his look and gestured imperatively: Look at the wall, look at the film, and he turned his head as she instructed and saw a shot of the bride and groom, and then a close-up of their parents, and a shot of the bridesmaids walking behind the bride, reverently bearing her train. Then there was a shot of a woman holding a baby girl, pointing at the camera and trying to get the indifferent infant to smile, and then one of two bow-tied young men waving at the camera, and Bat-Ami pinched his arm and tensed, and the shot of the young men was replaced by one of a young family: a man and a woman, him holding a little girl in his arms, and she a baby boy in hers. The image flickered on the wall for just a heartbeat, but even in that fleeting second, Yoel managed to discern that the woman in the picture was his mother: his mother in her early years, his mother in the days that preceded the compass of his memory, but his mother.

He stopped breathing.

Wait, Bat-Ami whispered, relaxing her grip on his arm, it’s screened in a loop. It’ll be on again soon. As she said the word “loop,” she drew an imaginary circle in the air with her finger. Yoel swallowed saliva and nodded, but apart from the shape of the loop he didn’t understand a thing.

Time after time Yoel and Bat-Ami watched the shots in the old wedding film. They sat on the bench in the center of the museum hall and saw the bride and groom, and then the couple’s happy and concerned parents, and the girls carrying the train in deadly seriousness, and then the woman with the baby and her pointing finger, and the happy boys in their bow ties waving to the camera, and then—now, Yoel said to himself, pay attention now—and he stared with all his might, and on the tenth time that he saw the fragments of the film, like on the twenty-second time and the thirtieth time, he was utterly convinced that the woman flickering before him was indeed his mother. The image was grainy, but without question it was her image: the height, the massive hands, the posture. And the face, which displayed, without doubt, her broad features he loved so much, and which in the film could be seen full face and in profile as she turned her head to the right and smiled at her husband, his father. He was only a baby when his father was taken, and in time, all the photographs of his parents, together with the rest of their property, had been lost. But now he was sure that the slight, bespectacled man in the film was his father, mainly because of the warmth and admiration in his mother’s eyes as she stole a glance at this man whose height was shorter than hers.

The little girl the man was holding in his arms was Nettie. He had no doubt it was her: the facial features, the expression, everything. But who is the strange infant? his heart asked. Who is that strange baby boy nestled in your mother’s arms?

The baby must be you, Bat-Ami whispered as if she’d heard the question.

But it’s not me, he whispered back.

How can you know?

It isn’t me. Look at the shape of his head, the eyes, the hair. It isn’t me.

Then perhaps, she suggested after the figures had reappeared and vanished again, perhaps, just as they were filmed, she was holding someone else’s baby?

Yoel wanted to embrace this assumption. He wished he could. But the loop completed its cycle again, and again the same image appeared on the wall, and again he saw his mother holding the unknown baby the way mothers hold their own children. Not only that: he saw—for it was impossible not to—how much the unknown baby resembled her, especially in its wide cheeks and clear eyes whose corners turned slightly downward, and how there wasn’t even a hint of resemblance between the face of the unknown baby and his own, dark-eyed and bony, in the photographs from his childhood taken after they immigrated to Israel and which his mother stuck, using tiny mounting squares, onto the rough black pages of the beautifully arranged album that sat on the sideboard in the living room of their apartment in Netanya.

As soon as they got back to their hotel room from the museum, Yoel took out his cell phone and brought up Nettie’s number. He looked at the line of illuminated digital numbers and thought about his sister sitting at this twilight hour in her small apartment in the kibbutz located between the River Jordan and Mount Gilboa. Her face is serene, on her knees is an open book, and her old radio is playing classical music on the station to which it is permanently tuned. Her husband, Eliezer, awaits her in the kibbutz cemetery at the foot of the mountain. He is buried there next to Yisrael, their handsome, tousle-haired firstborn, who had fought in the Yom Kippur War and the First Lebanon War, but was killed not in battle but in the kibbutz date palm orchard. Yoel had never managed to picture the day the police, accompanied by kibbutz officials and the local doctor, had come to tell Nettie and Eliezer and their daughter that the power ladder they used in the orchard had hit an electric cable and that Yisrael was dead even before his strong body in its blue work clothes folded inward and hit the ground with a thump.

Nettie will soon put her book aside, sigh, and turn on the TV to watch the early edition of the evening news.

Yoel turned off his phone.

Through the window of the building opposite their hotel room he could see a kitchen in which a woman was standing washing a stainless-steel jug, and he was fascinated by her movements as she soaped and scrubbed the outside and inside with a long-handled brush and then rinsed it thoroughly in tap water. Over the past day, he had discovered that the woman lived in a two-room apartment with only a brown-and-white dog and the plants she tended in a window box. She was a good-looking woman, her straight blond hair cut short, and when she came into the kitchen, she put a floral apron over her slender figure. In the morning he’d seen her making herself a cup of coffee before leaving for work, in the middle of the day he’d seen the short-legged, floppy-eared dog waiting for her forlornly on the armchair in the living room, and at six in the evening she had come home and turned on the light, and at a distance of only a few meters from her, he’d watched her bend to put food into the dog’s bowl that was evidently on the floor under the kitchen window. He wondered if she knew she was being watched and whether she cared. Afterward he was compelled for some reason to watch her beating eggs, slicing vegetables, mixing them in a deep bowl, tasting. He could hear the rattle of her dishes and kitchen tools, and almost the sound of her breathing. Almost the sound of her breathing.

Thanks to his friends at kindergarten and in the neighborhood, he had learned to make up stories at an early age.

Say, Yoel, how come you don’t have a dad?

I do so have a dad! My dad’s at work. My dad’s in the army. My dad’s on a secret mission far away from here.

Throughout his childhood, the plots his brain had woven around the figure of his absent father were filled with mystery and magic. They endowed his father with a multitude of daring roles in the military forces and in the secret services, a wide range of groundbreaking scientific studies, and vital missions across the sea.

Every time he was asked about his father and invented a new reply, he believed it with all his heart. The story his mother told him about a young man who had died in a distant and incomprehensible war was, in his eyes, only one possible answer to the question of where his father was. Only one story, which held no advantage over all the others, and Yoel saw no reason not to replace its sparse plot with more interesting ones, depending on his desires and flights of fancy.

5

He couldn’t sleep that night. Bat-Ami was snoring lightly as he released himself from the confining quilt and the foreign hotel bed whose previous occupants he wondered about: had they been sad or happy, lonesome or loved? He quietly tried to find a place for himself, trying not to bump into the furniture and other objects that filled the small room, until by one of the walls he found a free area of carpeting where he was able to sit cross-legged. He needed some fresh air; he wanted to get out of the crowded room and out to the street, but he didn’t go down and didn’t go out because he was afraid that Bat-Ami would wake up while he was gone, and he knew that if he’d woken up in the middle of the night and seen that she wasn’t there, he’d have been overcome by anxiety for fear that something bad had happened to her, that she’d left him, that he’d never see her again.

On second thought, he said to himself, would Bat-Ami indeed be worried if she woke up and didn’t find him in the room? He shifted his position on the carpet and straightened his back against the wall, placing his hands on his crossed legs and looking around. How different the walls and corners of the ceiling seemed from this angle. How different the wardrobe, the bed, the woman sleeping in the bed. He heard her mumble something in her sleep and he thought: What do I know about her dreams, what do I know about her? I’ve always thought I know how to write people because I know how to see them, yet today I discovered that I’ve never really succeeded in seeing even my own mother. I thought I was close to you, my beloved mother, I thought I knew you well, and now it turns out that all the time you were carrying a missing child in your heart—and I didn’t feel it and would never have guessed.

Darkness crept up to him from the four corners of the room, closing in on him, its black particles climbing over his body and penetrating his skin through its pores until he was forced to stand up, dress quickly, and flee to the street. Bat-Ami isn’t me, he repeated to himself as he bent to tie his shoelaces. Bat-Ami is Bat-Ami. If she wakes up and sees I’m not there, she’ll understand that I’ve gone out to get some fresh air and immediately close her eyes and fall back asleep.

Colored lights were flickering in a small, crowded pub across the street from the hotel entrance. A giant of a man, whose bare, heavily muscled arms were covered with tattoos, went into the pub and was swallowed up in the crowd.

Yoel moved on.

On the day that Yoel rose from the seven days of sitting shiva for his mother and went out of his house, he realized he didn’t know how to walk in a world in which his mother was no longer present. Very slowly, he taught himself to walk again, and since then, it had seemed to him that he was walking properly. But at this nocturnal hour, alone in the city of his birth, where he had first learned to walk, he felt as if he had to instruct his body to execute the requisite actions again: Raise the right foot, there, excellent. Now move the right foot forward and place it on the sidewalk. Well done, Yoel, and now lift the left foot, move it forward . . .

He pulled his coat collar up round his ears, hunched his head into his shoulders, and proceeded, step by step, his eyes on his feet and the flagstones beneath them. At the end of a row of houses, the sidewalk took an upward curve, and he looked out from inside his coat and saw he’d come to an arched bridge over a canal. He saw a bench on the canal bank and let his body collapse onto it, exhausted.

The waters of the canal flowed dark and silent along their ancient course, dark and silent and all-remembering. Yoel sat on the bench and gazed at the water as if seeking to pluck from it even a fleeting shadow or an echo left in it by his lost brother, who, by his calculations done mainly based on Nettie’s estimated age in the museum film, was somewhat younger than him. His little brother.

What happened to him, to the light-skinned baby? Where had he, Yoel, been when the wedding photographer immortalized his little brother with his parents and his sister, Nettie? Did the things that happened to his little brother almost happen to Yoel too, and could that explain the early memory in which he was cast into a corner, abandoned, and his body, the body of the small child he was then, was trembling from wetness, cold, and fear? All his life he had told himself that this early memory of his was nothing but a figment of his fertile imagination; all his life he had tried to submerge this memory in the depths of his subconscious, and yet the memory had resurfaced, drawing him into the torment of a toddler that did not yet know how to put its feelings into words. Whether he experienced this anguish in reality or in his imagination, he cannot forget the hard touch of the surface he was lying on. He cannot forget how the surface seemed to rock and shake beneath him while he cried until his strength ebbed away, nor can he forget how he wanted his abandoned soul to die, to die and to exist no longer. And he is unceasingly haunted by the strange part his mother plays in this memory, his mother, who, while he lay there suffering, sat beside him helplessly.

A knot of half a dozen young people crossed the bridge near his bench, filling the night air with shards of joy and laughter, while in the canal, the dark water continued on its never-ending way, pulling with it the day that had just ended and remembering all the many sights ever reflected in it and all the many sounds.

6

As dawn began breaking, with Amsterdam still shrouded in darkness so that he could not yet put on his phylacteries and say the morning prayers, Yoel again turned on his cell phone. Bat-Ami was still asleep and appeared not to have noticed him leaving the room in the middle of the night and returning a short time ago. He stood by the window and brought up his sister’s number, resolved to catch her before she left for her job in the kibbutz laundry.

In the light cast by the streetlamps, the first cyclists of the day passed by below. One, and then another, and after them two or three more. Outside the pub there was a green truck bearing the legend “Heineken,” and two men in green coveralls were unloading green crates of beer bottles.

Good morning, Nettie. His voice faltered.

Yoel! she exclaimed happily. Yoel, how are you? And how’s Bat-Ami?

We’re in Amsterdam, he told her without further ado.

Silence. All that could be heard was the rattle of beer bottles from across the street as the men in green wheeled the crates into the pub and then began loading the empties onto the truck.

A book of mine, he explained, trying to steady his voice, a book’s been translated into Dutch and . . . Bat-Ami and I flew to Amsterdam.

All Nettie managed to say after several long seconds was: You’re in Amsterdam.

All that Yoel managed to ask her was: Why didn’t you tell me?

She remained silent.

A large, heavy beer barrel was slowly lowered from the truck to the sidewalk.

Why didn’t you tell me? he repeated. Bat-Ami and I went to the Jewish Museum here, and we saw . . . Why didn’t you tell me, Nettie? Why didn’t Mama tell me? How could you let me discover something like this by myself after so many years, and then only by chance?

It pained him to hurt her like this. He hurt her. It pained him.

But Yoel . . . Her voice hoarsened and her Dutch accent, which was always more pronounced when she was stressed, turned the “but” into “bot.” How . . . How did you find out?

You mean it’s true? he shouted despairingly, as though until that moment he’d hoped she would convince him that he was mistaken. As though until that moment he still thought she’d tell him that they’d never had another sibling and that the boy in the film, the blond baby that their mother was clasping to her heart, was another woman’s child.

You’ve got to tell me everything. He raised his voice as if in an attempt to be heard across the sea. You’ve got to tell me . . .

But she remained silent.

Eventually she ended the call assertively but gently: When you come home, Yoel, when you get home, come and visit me. I’ll tell you everything I know.

In a few minutes, thought Yoel, she’ll put on a thin sweater against the morning chill. She’ll pick up her square, orange-colored plastic basket, go out of her small apartment, and close the door behind her without locking it. She’ll go down the two low steps to the aging, cracked pathway, affix the basket to the handlebars of the old bicycle standing in the shade of the fragrant honeysuckle, mount the bicycle carefully, and pedal to the laundry behind the communal dining room. She’ll ride slowly, immersed in the light flowing down the hillside onto the kibbutz paths, the fields, the palm orchards.

Across the street, the green truck was now loaded with the beer barrels that had been emptied during the night.

The truck drove off.

Bat-Ami woke up.

Amsterdam was still shrouded in darkness.

7

Now he’s staring out the airplane window at the fields of cloud stretching, furrow by furrow of dense white foam, from horizon to horizon.

He’s going back to Amsterdam only three days after he had sat on the old brown sofa in Nettie’s kibbutz apartment and had heard her tell him—hesitantly at first, but then in a continuous outpouring—what she knew about the first years of his life. As he took his leave of her at her door late that night, she was filled with remorse and sorrow and said, God help me, what have I done to you, Yoel? Why did I have to spoil what you’ve thought all your life? He looked into her eyes, always so light and clear, and said, Thank you, Nettie. Thank you, my sister, for agreeing to tell me the truth. Then he went down the two steps to the cracked pathway, passed the fragrant honeysuckle, and saw his dead brother-in-law Eliezer’s bicycle still standing next to Nettie’s in the rusted rack.

Have a safe journey, she called after him. Have a safe journey.

He took another look at her figure standing in the rectangle of light in the doorway, at her face that revealed her fear for him, and knew that her “Have a safe journey” meant “You are my brother. You are my brother and you are precious to me.”

He felt like a new, different Yoel as he walked surrounded by the singing of the cicadas and frogs, beneath the canopy of poplars and rosewoods, from Nettie’s apartment to where the previous, old Yoel had parked his car. Throughout the drive from the Bet She’an Valley back to Jerusalem, he told himself over and over what he had heard from Nettie and repeated aloud, How is it possible? How is it possible? He pressed down on the accelerator, speeding the car through the bends of the Jordan Valley road and following its headlight beams as they sliced through the mantle of ancient darkness as if illuminating the chapters of his life for the first time, bend after bend, fragment after fragment. How is it possible? he asked the night. How could they not have told me or hinted, how didn’t I suspect or imagine?

But the night was silent, the car emerged from the hills to the open flatland, stretching from the north of the country to the south, and there was no orphanhood like Yoel Blum’s orphanhood from the blackening spine of the Samaria hills on his right to the ridge of the Mountains of Gilad flickering on his left, across the River Jordan flowing parallel to the road from the Galilee to the Dead Sea. It seemed to him that the land he was driving on was a living body, his own body, and that the Syrian-African Rift was a scar running across his skin: a long, old scar that had suddenly opened and was now bleeding afresh.

As he passed the approaches to Jericho and turned onto the road that climbs toward Jerusalem, his thinking started to clear. By the time he reached the Sea Level sign, he knew he must fly back to Amsterdam as soon as possible.

And he knew he must do it alone.

Wait, Bat-Ami urged him the next morning after he’d told her everything. Wait, don’t go back right away, give yourself time to calm down and digest what you’ve only just heard.

But Yoel didn’t want to wait and he didn’t want to calm down. He hurried as if somebody was waiting impatiently for him in Amsterdam. Or as if he were capable of changing the course of the events concisely related to him by Nettie, if only he could quickly get to the place where those events had occurred.

8

He hadn’t left the house for the whole day before this flight, his second flight to Amsterdam. In fact, he hardly crossed the threshold of his study, where, at his desk, he had immersed himself in sorting through papers, notebooks, and documents, and arranging them in piles in drawers and in files after going through them one at a time as if he was searching for a clue. Between arranging and filing, he raised his head and looked out the window at the cars passing through the Valley of the Cross at the foot of the ancient monastery: appearing between the silvery olive trees on the slope and then disappearing behind them, and then visible again, then hidden again, and again.

Every now and then, Bat-Ami popped her head round the doorpost, peeping into the study as if she was afraid of disturbing him, and then she’d come in with a cup of herbal tea and a plate of granola cookies for him, or call him into the kitchen for one of their regular meals. She laughed, as she always laughed, at his custom of leaving his top-of-the-range laptop open in front of him, switched on and ready for action, even though he never used it. I’m sure, she said as she always does, that you must be the last writer in the world who still writes his books in notebooks, in actual handwriting.

What was he to do if with all his amazement at the innovations of the time, and at what one could do with a shiny, compact laptop with all the bells and whistles like the one on his desk, he is still incapable of writing on it, neither articles nor pre–first drafts nor a first or second draft, but only uses a ballpoint pen in school notebooks like the ones he had in his childhood, forty pages single-line, with thin brown cardboard covers and multiplication tables printed on the back. He’s been promising himself for years that he’d try, gradually, of course, to get used to writing on a computer like everybody else. From time to time, he even exchanges his new laptop for a newer one in which, so he is assured, writing is even easier and more flowing. But again and again, he goes back to the old notebooks that he buys from the same old wholesaler in the same little old shop in an alley near the city center.

Perhaps the day will come when he’ll train himself to use a word processor. Perhaps the day will come when he’ll even train himself to live, a day when he will walk the earth like everyone else without being overcome by the thought that in fact it’s odd, even ridiculous, to be a human being, a cluster of organs that wear out constantly as it runs here and there, wrapped in all sorts of fabrics and making all sorts of sounds.

Toward evening, his study window seemed like a framed picture of the reddening expanse over the Valley of the Cross. Light illuminated from the rocks onto the white-gray cubes of the Israel Museum, which at this time of day seemed to him like the classic Mediterranean village described in the vision of the museum’s architects. On his last visit there, in the space inside one of those cubes, he had come across the painting by the Dutch painter Jozef Israëls titled Mother and Child Walking on the Dunes, undated, and understood, for one brief moment, what he had been looking for all his life. The realization flashed through his mind sharply, clear to the point of pain. But it faded immediately and left him speechless and lost, deeply yearning and not knowing for what.

Now he could recall only the watery stains of paint gently merging into one another: the child walking beside his mother, a child-stain merging into a mother-stain who merges into a sea-stain and a sky-stain against a backdrop of a fishing-village-stain.

9

He had already packed a pile of new, empty forty-page, single-line notebooks for the journey, and as he enjoyed their smell, which he loves, Bat-Ami again poked her head into his study. Galia and Zohar have come to say goodbye, she told him happily, and he put on the most paternal smile he could muster at that moment and got up and went into the living room to meet his daughters, who had probably come less to say goodbye to him and more to calm their mother, who worries about him whenever he travels without her.

Even so many years after his middle daughter, Galia, became a disciple of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, Yoel’s heart lurches every time he sees her with a sort of white turban wound around her head and her long, buttoned-up clothing. She usually comes to see them with her bearded husband and their flock of children, one of whom, a little Breslover with curled sidelocks and a fringed skullcap, had come over to him during their previous visit, fixed him with his burning black eyes, and told him: You’re going to die. On this occasion, she had come with her younger sister, Zohar, and as he entered the living room he found the three women bending over Zohar’s little baby and making all manner of gurgling noises. His entrance made them straighten up and strike up a banal conversation on subjects that were of no real interest to either him or them. The conversation quickly moved into the dead end known as a debate on the news of the day, and there, as expected, Galia and Zohar turned it into another political argument. This was the point when Bat-Ami, who had continued gurgling at the baby, got up as always to fetch more coffee and cookies from the kitchen, and Yoel, as always, asked them to leave politics out of it. He made this request in the same semi-authoritative tone in which he used to ask them when they were kids to return to the kitchen table the chairs they had dragged into the living room to play “train,” and as always Galia replied that she wasn’t talking politics at all, she was simply trying to understand why her dear sister preferred to delude herself rather than recognize reality, while Zohar laughed bitterly and said that she too wasn’t talking politics, all she wanted was the possibility of living a normal life in this country at long last.

They were joined a little later by his eldest daughter, Ronit, and Zohar’s baby began making small bleating noises until it fell asleep in its mother’s arms. As though from outside, Yoel looked at the circle in which he was sitting in his living room with his wife and daughters, who were drinking more coffee and eating more butter cookies and talking and talking, and he inhaled a lungful of air and thought: But I’m alive. But I’m alive.