Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  One Friday of that month, I found Vinay in a bad mood. He had, he told me, been asked to write a story about the eating places of taxicab drivers. The theory, apparently, was that here you had a class of men familiar with alien foods who freely exercised their choices from a vast selection of establishments, and had no stake in the bourgeois dining enterprise: men supposedly driven by unfeigned primitive cravings, men hungering for a true taste of homeland and mother’s cooking, men who would, in short, lead one to the so-called real thing. Of course, I could not help thinking it simple, this theory of reality. Vinay had objections of a narrower kind. “Cabdrivers?” he said. “Have you ever heard one of these guys express an opinion that wasn’t complete bullshit? I told my editor, Dude, I’m from fucking India. You think in India we take our fucking dining cues from cabdrivers? And then I’m like”—Vinay laughed furiously—“Yo, Mark, the name’s not Vinnie, OK? It’s Vinay.” Vinay buckled, as one must, and we found a taxi driven by a man from Dhaka who was prepared to take us to a place he liked. This exercise was repeated with several cabdrivers. We’d look at a menu, eat a mouthful of food, and head out again in search of another lurching ride. Before long the night had assumed the character of an evil black soup, sampled somewhere along the line, whose bitty, fatty constituents rose sickeningly to the surface before sinking back again into a spoon-deep dark. Just before midnight, a taxi driver took us to Lexington and Twenty-something and wordlessly pulled up at yet another accumulation of double-parked yellow cars.

  “This is the last one, Vinay,” I warned him.

  We entered the restaurant. There was a buffet counter, a willfully haphazard arrangement of chairs and tables and refrigerators, and framed, violently colorful photographs attached to the walls: schoolchildren, sitting under a tree, receiving instruction from a teacher pointing at a blackboard; an idyll in which a long-haired maiden perched on a swing; a city in Pakistan at night. At the rear was a further dining area where men, eating in silence, stared intently at a television screen. Almost all the patrons were South Asian. “Look at what they’re having,” Vinay said despairingly. “Naan with vegetables. These guys are on a three-dollar budget.” While Vinay examined the menu, I wandered off to look at the television. To my amazement—I’d never seen this before in America—they were showing a cricket match: Pakistan versus New Zealand, broadcast live from Lahore. Shoaib Akhtar, a.k.a. the Rawalpindi Express, was bowling at top speed to the New Zealand captain, Stephen Fleming. I settled ecstatically into a seat.

  Moments later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It took a second or two to recognize Chuck Ramkissoon.

  “Hey there, friend,” he said. “Come join us.” He was showing me a table occupied by a black man wearing a super’s shirt embroidered with the address of his building and his name, Roy McGarrell. I accepted Chuck’s invitation, and we were joined by Vinay, who arrived carrying a tray of gajrala and chicken karahi.

  I urged Chuck and Roy to eat the food. “Vinay here’s paid to eat this stuff. You’d be doing him a favor.”

  It turned out that Roy, like Chuck, was from Trinidad. “Callaloo,” Vinay remarked absently, and Roy and Chuck started chortling with delight. “You know callaloo?” Roy said. Addressing me, he said, “Callaloo is the leaves of the dasheen bush. You can’t get dasheen easy here.”

  “What about that market on Flatbush and Church?” Chuck said. “You find it there.”

  “Well, maybe,” Roy conceded. “But if you can’t get the real thing, you make it with spinach. You put in coconut milk: you grate the flesh of the coconut fine and you squeeze it and the moisture come out. You also put in a whole green pepper—it don’t be hot unless you burst it—thyme, chive, garlic, onion. Normally you put in blue crab; others put in pickled pig tails. You cook it and you bring out a swizzle stick and you swizzle it until the bush melt down into a thick sauce like a tomato sauce. That’s the old-time way; now we put it in a blender. Pour it on stewfish—kingfish, carite fish: mmm-hmm. You also eat it with yam, sweet potato. Dumpling.”

  Chuck said to Vinay, “He’s not talking about Chinese dumplings.”

  “Our dumpling different,” Roy said. “Chinese dumpling soft. We make our dumpling stiff.”

  “Callaloo,” Chuck said wistfully.

  “We used to eat it at Maracas Bay,” Roy said. “Or Las Cuevas. Maracas, the water more rough but the beach more popular. In Las Cuevas, the water calm. Easter time? Oh my Lord, it full. Sometime people walk for miles through the mountains to go there. You spend Easter Sunday and Easter Monday on the beach. You pack your bag with ingredients separate. You have your sweet drink—we call sodas sweet drink—and you pack your car and everybody take a bathing suit, and you go to the beach and spend the whole day eating, bathing. Oh my.” He shuddered with pleasure.

  “I nearly drowned in Maracas once,” Chuck said.

  “Them riptide there dangerous, boy,” Roy said.

  Chuck handed a card to Vinay. “Maybe you could come by my restaurant sometime.”

  Vinay examined the card. “Kosher sushi?”

  “That’s what we do,” Chuck said proudly. He leaned over to point at the card. “That’s where we are—Avenue Q and Coney Island.”

  “Business good?” I asked.

  “Very good,” he said. “We cater to the Jews in my neighborhood. There are thousands and thousands of them, all observant.” Chuck handed me a card, too. “I have a Jewish partner who has the confidence of the rabbi. Makes things a lot easier. But I tell you, getting kosher certification is a tough business. Tougher than the pharmaceuticals business, I like to say. You wouldn’t believe the problems that come up. Earlier this year we had some trouble with seahorses.”

  “Seahorses?” I said.

  Chuck said, “You know how you check nori, the seaweed you wrap the sushi in? You examine it over a light box, like an X-ray. And they found seahorse infestation in our supplier’s seaweed. And seahorses are not kosher. Neither are shrimps and eels and octopus and squid. Only fish with scales and fins are kosher. But not all fish with fins have scales,” Chuck added. “And sometimes what you think are scales are in fact bony protrusions. Bony protrusions do not qualify as scales. No, sir.” Roy and he laughed loudly at this. “What are we left with? Halibut, salmon, red snapper, mackerel, mahi-mahi, tuna—but only certain kinds of tuna. Which ones? Albacore, skipjack, yellowfin.”

  Chuck wasn’t going to stop there. He believed in facts, in their momentousness and charm. He had no option, of course: who was going to listen to mere opinion coming from him?

  “What about fish eggs, roe?” he said, showing off. “The eggs of kosher fish are generally shaped differently from nonkosher fish. Also, they tend to be red, whereas nonkosher are black. Then there are issues with rice, issues with vinegar. Sushi vinegar will often contain nonkosher ingredients or will be made using a nonkosher process. There are issues with worms in the flesh of the fish, with utensils, with storage, with filleting, with freezing, with sauces, with the broths and oils you pack the fish in. Every aspect of the process is difficult. It’s a painstaking business, I’m telling you. But that’s my opportunity, you see. I don’t mind complication. For me, complication represents an opportunity. The more something is complicated, the more potential competitors will be deterred.”

  “So you’re a restaurateur,” I said, moving my chair to let pass two dramatically bearded and turbaned men who had risen to their feet to face up to whatever night-toil awaited them.

  “I’m a businessman,” Chuck quibbled agreeably. “I have several businesses. And what do you do?”

  “I work at a bank. As an equities analyst.”

  “Which bank?” Chuck asked, filling his mouth with Vinay’s chicken. When I told him, he improbably declared, “I have had dealings with M——. What stocks do you analyze?”

  I told him, eyeing the television: Fleming had just punched Akhtar through the covers for four runs, and a groan of disgust mixed with appreciation sounded in the restaurant.

  �
��Do you think there’s much left in the consolidation trend?”

  I turned to give him my attention. In recent years, my sector had seen a rush of mergers and acquisitions. It was a well-known phenomenon; nevertheless, the slant of Chuck’s inquiry was exactly that of the fund managers who questioned me. “I think the trend is in place,” I said, rewarding him with a term of professional wiliness.

  “And before M——you worked where?” Chuck said. He was blithely curious.

  I found myself telling him about my years in The Hague and London.

  “Give me your e-mail address,” Chuck Ramkissoon said. “I have a business opportunity that might interest you.”

  He handed me a second card. This read,

  CHUCK CRICKET, INC.

  Chuck Ramkissoon, President

  He said, as I wrote down my own details, “I’ve started up a cricket business. Right here in the city.”

  Evidently something showed in my expression, because Chuck said good-naturedly, “You see? You don’t believe me. You don’t think it’s possible.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “I can’t say any more.” He was eyeing the people around us. “We’re at a very delicate stage. My investors wouldn’t like it. But if you’re interested, maybe I could use your expertise. We need to raise quite a lot of money. Mezzanine finance? Do you know about mezzanine finance?” He lingered on the exotic phrase.

  Vinay had stood up to leave, and I also got up.

  “So long,” I said, mirroring Roy’s raised hand.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Chuck said.

  We stepped into the night. “What a crazy son of a bitch,” Vinay said.

  After the passage of a week or so, I received a padded envelope at my office. When I opened the envelope, a postcard fell out.

  Dear Hans,

  You know that you are a member of the first tribe of New York, excepting of course the Red Indians. Here is something you might like.

  Best wishes, Chuck Ramkissoon

  Smothered by the attentiveness, I put the envelope back in my briefcase without further examining it.

  A few days later, I caught the Maple Leaf Express, bound for Toronto, to Albany, where a group of investors awaited. It was a brown November morning. Rain spotted my window as we pulled away into the tunnels and gorges through which the Penn Station trains secretively dribble up the West Side. At Harlem, the Hudson, flowing parallel to the track, came into view. I had taken this journey before, yet I was startled afresh by the existence of this waterside vista, which on a blurred morning such as this had the effect, once we passed under the George Washington Bridge, of canceling out centuries. The far side of the river was a wild bank of forest. Clouds steaming on the clifftops foxed all sense of perspective, so that it seemed to me that I saw distant and fabulously high mountains. I fell asleep. When I awoke, the river had turned into an indeterminate gray lake. Three swans on the water were the white of phosphor. Then the Tappan Zee Bridge came clumsily out of the mist, and soon afterward the far bank reappeared and the Hudson again was itself. Tarrytown, a whoosh of parking lots and ball fields, came and went. The valley slipped back into timelessness. As the morning lightened, the shadows of the purple and bronze trees became more distinct on the water. The brown river, now very still, was glossed in places, as if immense silver tires had skidded there. Soon we were inland, amid trees. I stared queasily into their depths. Perhaps because I grew up in the Low Countries, where trees grow either out of sidewalks or in tame copses, I only have to look at New York forests to begin to feel lost in them. I drove upstate numerous times with Rachel, and I strongly associate those trips with the fauna whose corpses lay around the road in great numbers: skunks, deer, and enormous indecipherable rodents that one never found in Europe. (And at night, when we sat on a porch, gigantic moths and other repulsive night-flyers would thickly congregate on the screen, and my English wife and I would shrink into the house in amazement and fear.) My thoughts went back to a train journey I’d often made, in my student days, between Leiden and The Hague. The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent local municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague. Here, in the first American valley, was the contrary phenomenon: you went for miles without seeing a house. The forest, filled with slender and thick trunks fighting silently for light and land, went emptily on and on. Then, gazing out of the window, my eye snagged on something pink. I sat up and stared.

  I’d caught sight of a near-naked white man. He was on his own. He was walking through the trees wearing only underpants. But why? What was he doing? Why was he not wearing clothes? A horror took hold of me, and for a moment I feared I’d hallucinated, and I turned to my fellow passengers for some indication that might confirm what I’d seen. I saw no such indication.

  I was relieved, then, at the appearance shortly afterward of Poughkeepsie. I’d visited the town, with its merry name that sounds like a cry in a children’s game—Poughkeepsie!—for the first time that summer. In its bucolic outskirts a colony of Jamaicans maintained a cricket field on a lush hillside. It was the only privately owned ground we played on, and the farthest north we traveled. The trip was worth it. There was a bouncy but true batting track made of cement; rickety four-deep bleachers filled with shouting spectators; and the simplest wooden shack for a locker room. If you smashed the ball down the hill it landed among cows, goats, horses, chickens. After the match—marked by an umpiring crisis, inevitably—every player went to the clubhouse in downtown Poughkeepsie. The clubhouse was a cabin with a small bar. Prominent signs warned against the use of marijuana. Presently women appeared with platters of chicken and rice. We ate and drank quietly, half-following a dominoes game being played with the solemnity that often marked the social dealings of West Indian cricket teams in our league. Our hosts were proud to take care of us, to offer us a territory of their own in this remote place, and we were grateful. The tilted pretty cricket ground, the shipshape clubhouse—such pioneering effort had gone into them!

  Somewhere beyond Poughkeepsie I opened my briefcase to glance at work documents. Protruding from a pocket was Chuck’s gift. I opened the envelope and withdrew a booklet. Titled Dutch Nursery Rhymes in Colonial Times, the booklet was a reprint, made by the Holland Society of New York, of the 1889 original edited by a Mrs. E. P. Ferris. I turned the pages with some curiosity, because I knew next to nothing about the ancient Dutch presence in America. There was a song in Dutch about Molly Grietje, Santa Claus’s wife, who made New Year koekjes, and a song about Fort Orange, as Albany was first known. There was a poem (in English) titled “The Christmas Race, a True Incident of Rensselaerwyck.” Rensselaerwyck was, I surmised, precisely the district through which my train was now traveling. Stimulated by the coincidence, I gave the poem my closer attention. It commemorated a horse-race under “the Christmas moon” at Wolvenhoeck, the corner of the wolves. The owners of the horses were a certain Phil Schuyler and a gentleman referred to only as Mijnheer: “Down to the riverbank, Mijnheer, his guests, and all the slaves / went trooping, while a war whoop came from all the Indian braves…/ The slaves with their whale lanterns were passing to and fro, / Casting fantastic shadows on hills of ice and snow.” In addition to this poem there were hymns, spinning songs, cradle songs, churning songs, and trotting songs—songs you sang while trotting your child on your knee—apparently in use all over New Netherland, from Albany to Long Island to the Delaware River. One such song caught my attention:

  Trip a trop a troontjes

  De varkens in de boontjes,

  De koetjes in de claver,

  De paarden in de haver,

  De eendjes in de water-plas,

  De kalf in de lange gras;

  So groot mijn kleine _____was!

  You sang your child’s name where the blank was. Adapting the melody of the St. Nicholas song that
every Dutch child hungrily learns (Sinterklaas kapoentje / Gooi wat in mijn schoentje…), I hummed this nonsense about pigs and beans and cows and clover to my faraway son, tapping my knee against the underside of the lowered tray as I imagined his delighted weight on my thigh.

  The week before, Jake and I had played in his grandparents’ garden. I raked leaves into piles and he helped me bag the leaves. The leaves were dry and marvelously light. I added armloads to the red and brown and gold crushed in the plastic sack; Jake picked up a single leaf and made a cautious, thrilled deposit. At one point he put on his superhero frown and charged a hillock of leaves. Wading into its harmless fire, he courageously sprawled. “’Ook, ’ook!” he screamed as he rolled in the leaves. I looked, and looked, and looked. Fronds of his yellow hair curled out from the hood’s fringe onto his cheeks. He wore his purple quilted jacket, and his thermal khakis with an inch of tartan turnup, and his blue ankle boots with the zip, and the blue sweater with the white boat, and—I knew this because I had dressed him—his train-infested underpants, and the red T-shirt he liked to imagine was a Spider-Man shirt, and Old Navy green socks with rubbery lettering on the soles. We gardened together. I demonstrated how to use a shovel. When I dug up the topsoil, I was taken aback: countless squirming creatures ate and moved and multiplied underfoot. The very ground we stood on was revealed as a kind of ocean, crowded and immeasurable and without light.