The Book of Jonah

by Joshua Max Feldman

  He had his hand on the door of the coffeeshop when he realized for the second time he’d forgotten about the cigarette he was smoking. Coffeeshops didn’t allow cigarettes—a rule the logic of which he could appreciate, but which in practice struck him as utterly absurd. He took a last few impatient puffs, and fat, cold raindrops began to fall on the cobbles at his feet, into the canal, down his nose. He lifted his arm to toss the cigarette away—was seized by the same ingrained reluctance as earlier. He let out an audible, frustrated growl—at, he supposed, the inescapability of being himself. The rain started to fall faster. He saw that a few doors down was the recessed entrance to a hotel, and he ran over to take cover.

  As he huddled into the alcove of the hotel’s doorway, the rain began to come down so heavily the water looked as if it formed a great unbroken stream from sky to street. Its spray still dampened his coat and face; he pressed himself more closely against the wall. Someone hurried into the alcove and stood by the glass of the hotel’s windows a few feet away from him: a woman, tall, with short blond hair, wearing a belted trench coat and carrying a blue purse that he recognized (from being dragged into Saks on umpteen Sundays) as being very expensive. She brushed some of the water from the top of this purse with the back of her hand, then opened it, took out a slender guidebook—its title, Amsterdam’s Museums and Galleries, written in English. She opened the guidebook to an illustrated map of the city’s larger streets, scrutinized it for several moments, then lifted her eyes, her brows knit ruminatively—as though trying to decipher something in the wall of rain before her.

  If not for the English guidebook, he would have assumed she was Swedish or Danish, as there was a precise, modeled quality to her features, which he associated with Nordic faces. When she looked back down to the map, he saw a black mole set on her cheek like a tiny flake of ash.

  It occurred to him that he was staring—and as it did, she noticed it, too—glanced briefly, unwelcomingly, in his direction. But then her gaze lingered—she looked over his face as though she suspected she knew him from somewhere. He realized it was this suspicion that had made him take an interest in her, too, though with her face’s various peculiarities—the scalp-short hair, the mole, the black eyes—he figured he’d have remembered her.

  She turned back to the map. Then, without looking at him, she said, “Ihre Nase war gebrochen.”

  “Sorry, I don’t speak . .,” he answered.

  She looked at him again for a moment. “Your nose was broken,” she said, with neat elocution and vaguely academic disinterest.

  It was undoubtedly an odd way to strike up a conversation—and maybe because it was so unusual, he replied with unusual frankness, “Yeah, about a month ago.”

  “Mine was, too,” she told him, studying the map again. He took this as permission to study her nose more closely, and as he did, she said, “I had rhinoplasty.”

  It was this nose, he deduced, that gave her face the prevailing synthetic look he’d observed: ruler straight, mathematically symmetrical. “How did it happen?”

  After hesitating a moment, she said, “Someone hit me with something.”

  “Yeah, me too,” he answered—finding this coincidence odd, as well. She had returned her attention to the street before them. “Where are you trying to get to?” he asked her. “I actually live in Amsterdam…”

  Again she hesitated—then reached into her expensive purse and handed him a torn piece of paper with an address written on it. “You’re on the wrong end of the city,” he told her.

  “I thought if I followed Herengracht…”

  “You must’ve followed it the wrong direction.” She nodded, looked back at the map with a certain antagonism. The rain had started to taper off a little, the cigarette had by now burned almost to the filter: He’d soon be able to head into the coffeeshop. But on the other hand—he had nothing urgent to do that day; had nothing urgent to do for the foreseeable future. And whether because she was American, or because of their noses, or because of the prevailing peculiarity of the whole encounter, he found he’d developed some affinity for her—though only, he thought, to the degree that he’d prefer not to smoke his first joint of the day while imagining her wandering around in the rain. “It’s not very far, if you want I can show you,” he offered.

  She glanced back and forth from street to map repeatedly, then pulled back the sleeve of her coat, as well, to check her watch: elegant, with an orange strap, also clearly expensive. He was about to tell her it was all the same to him whether she accepted his help or not, when she finally said, “Yes, that would be very helpful, thank you.”

  The rain was still coming down heavily enough that they had to wait at least another minute or two before setting out. They stood side by side, watching the rainy street—as if waiting for elevator doors to open. “So is this an art gallery you’re going to?” he asked her.

  “My cousin has an art show here,” she told him. “I worked in art for many years, and there were other pieces I wanted to see while I was visiting.”

  “You don’t work in art anymore?”

  “I work in real estate in Las Vegas,” she answered, in a mechanical way—as though it was an answer she’d rehearsed.

  The reply was another surprise, though he wasn’t sure at this point what answer he’d expected. Somehow the details of her appearance, her behavior, weren’t cohering into a personality he could make sense of. But at the same time, there remained something ticklingly familiar about her.

  The rain had soon dwindled to a light drizzle. “Well, if you’re in a hurry, you want to get going?”

  “Yes,” she answered, “let’s.”

  “I’m Jonah, by the way.”

  “Judy,” she said in reply.

  He led them from the doorway, south down Herengracht. The air remained misty, the cobbles of the street slick beneath their feet. His companion kept her eyes down, walked in her high heels with a certain conscientiousness, neither clumsy nor graceful, her trench coat falling abruptly down the slope of her thin shoulders. Jonah still had the cigarette butt between his fingers—eventually stamped out the last of its embers on one of the metal posts demarcating the sidewalk, put the butt in his pocket. She watched him do this but didn’t comment. “Sorry, but I keep thinking I know you from somewhere,” he said to her. “Did you go to Vassar?”

  “Yale,” she replied, and seemed to observe how he would react to this. It was a tic he had noticed in many Ivy League graduates—Yale and Harvard alums in particular.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure you didn’t go to Jewish summer camp,” he continued.

  But here she smiled a little and answered, “Camp Ramah, as a matter of fact.”

  “No shit? I did three summers at Tel Yehudah.”

  “I was a BBG girl.”

  “I was in BBYO.”

  They had reached Raadhuisstraat, the major thoroughfare on the western side of the city. It was only two lanes of car traffic and a pair of tram tracks, but it was still the street in this part of Amsterdam that reminded Jonah most of New York. They waited for a tram to pass; then, as they continued along Herengracht, she said, “Did your rabbi ever tell those Yiddish folk stories? And no matter what else happened, they always ended in complete ambiguity?”

  “Yeah, my rabbi used to love those. ‘And then Rabbi Ben Shmuel looked at his donkey, and it was already sunrise. The end.’”

  She smiled more fully. “That stuff was fun, wasn’t it?” Jonah recalled climbing into a sleeping bag with Shira Friedburg at a BBYO initiation sleepover. Yes, he thought: fun. But from the pensive look that had entered her face, it was clear she had a different kind of fun in mind. “They make it simple, don’t they, when you’re young?”

  “Make what simple?”

  “Belonging, I suppose,” she said after a moment. “Belief. They don’t have to account yet for the fact that the most potent experiences in life end up making what they tell you less believable, not more.” She appeared to reconsider with embarrasm
ent what she’d just said. “Sorry. I don’t usually get the chance to talk to…”

  He guessed she meant “other Jews”—but the conversation was now approaching topics he had absolutely no interest in pursuing. They crossed a bridge where Herengracht was intersected by an east–west street, Huidenstraat—and Jonah saw they were only a canal east of an alley, halfway down, which was his favorite coffeeshop in the city: a three-tabled space with wooden floors, a vaulted wooden ceiling, dim lighting—the overall impression cozily reminiscent of a nineteenth-century inn. A few steps from this, at one end of the alley, was a bakery that made fresh Stroopwafels, thin, crunchy waffles enclosing a layer of caramel—a sort of gastronomically elevated Twix bar; the alley’s opposite end opened onto a small stone plaza, lined by shops and cafés, never crowded, with benches and pigeons and a bookstore that sold English-language magazines and newspapers. You could spend hours, entire days, even—and Jonah had—smoking in the coffeeshop, eating warm Stroopwafels, reading a magazine in the square, watching the pigeons, going back to the coffeeshop and doing it all again. The urge to do this now manifested itself as a physical tug, as though the alley had taken on the physics of a black hole. They were not far from the street she was trying to reach, it would be difficult not to find it from here; the rain had stopped, the light behind the cloud-domed sky had even brightened a little. This would, in other words, be a reasonable place at which to say goodbye.

  But instead, Jonah decided to keep walking with her—and before he could ask himself why, he reminded himself he didn’t need a reason.

  The canal they followed began to loop gently to the east, turning like a second hand sweeping the wrong way down the bottom of a clock. “What do you do in Amsterdam?” she asked him.

  “Well, right now I’m sort of—taking a sabbatical,” he told her, settling on the term he’d used to explain what he was doing here to his parents.

  “You’re a professor?” she asked.

  “Uh, no, I’m a lawyer. I mean, I was a lawyer. Well, it’s not like I got disbarred or anything, I mean I used to be a corporate lawyer, in New York. But now I’m … on a sabbatical.” He recognized how uncomfortable he sounded—but if the answer struck her as strange, she didn’t show it. And so, almost as a test—to see if he could—he told her, “My life got pretty fucked up a little while ago. My job, too. It was the same day my nose got broken, if you can believe it.”

  “I can believe it,” she replied matter-of-factly—as though the question hadn’t been rhetorical, as though he’d really been asking.

  And he didn’t break out in a cold sweat, he didn’t feel compelled to make a beeline for the coffeeshop in the alley. It was a good sign that he’d been able to share this, he told himself, even if only with a stranger. It showed he was—settling into things. But he’d risked as much as he was prepared to risk, and as they turned down Nieuwe Spiegelstraat—the street written on the paper she’d shown him—he felt prepared to return to his accustomed comforts.

  The designated door was metal, unmarked, stood among a line of shops and galleries in the colonnade of a brick building, stretching almost the length of the short block. They stopped before the door, not speaking. By rights it was an awkward moment, though it did not feel exactly awkward to Jonah—more that they couldn’t quite find a way to resolve it.

  “Thank you for walking me,” she said at length.

  “Yeah, it was nice talking to you,” he told her sincerely. He didn’t really talk to anyone in Amsterdam, he recognized, not in any meaningful way: certainly not to the expat crew, and his interactions with Max were in many ways the opposite of real conversation. But this lack was hardly accidental, he reminded himself. “Good luck with everything in Las Vegas.”

  “Thank you.”

  And that, he figured, would be that. Whatever was to be gained or lost by never seeing her again, he would gain or lose it now. He would head to the coffeeshop in the alley—and, he thought without much enthusiasm, he would go to the botanical gardens. The only consequence of their meeting would be that he’d want to be sure to get high before going to sleep tonight.

  “I don’t suppose you like art,” she blurted out. And to his greatest surprise yet, she blushed—blushed through her determinedly neutral expression, through the makeup he now noticed covered her cheeks.

  He was struck by the bravery this blush suggested had been required of her to make this half offer—and, in a rush of sympathy, he leapt out to meet her the rest of the way. “Of course, who doesn’t? I’d love to see your cousin’s stuff.”

  And they went inside.

  Immediately behind the door was an alcove of heavy curtains, and beyond this the room was dark—the lights lowered to an indistinct glow, the walls painted black. All around the dim space were hung Polaroid photographs, each one illuminated by a single spotlight. A female voice spoke over a sound system in hushed tones, and after a few moments Jonah recognized that this voice was reciting biblical verses. Looking closer, Jonah saw that on the Polaroids were drawn graffiti-style renderings of religious iconography: halos, crosses, a caricature Jesus, and so forth. The first picture he studied closely showed a group of young women smiling as they danced on a table at a club, each adorned with a pair of angel’s wings.

  He would have found all this more uncomfortable if he had not regarded it as so thoroughly bad. He had no pretensions about understanding modern art—he figured it was possible that this show was actually brilliant by some aesthetic principle he had no idea about. But as far as he was concerned, it just wasn’t any good—and this opinion provided him a kind of safety as he moved around the space. He passed an apple orchard with snakes drawn around the trees, a haloed Taylor Swift playing guitar onstage.

  Judy moved more slowly through the room, giving each Polaroid more attention. If it had been his cousin’s artwork, he figured he might have done so, too. But now he was stung by another group of thoughts he tried to avoid: He’d sent Becky a dozen emails since he’d left New York, called her as many times. She hadn’t responded to any of it. His father told him that, from what he knew, she was doing fine—whatever that meant.

  A young woman in a navy dress now approached him—dyed cherry-red hair piled on top of her head, a mélange of brightly colored tattoos running up and down both arms. “Do you want some wine or anything?” she asked him in accentless English, evidently guessing he was not a Dutch native.

  “No, I’m all right,” he answered.

  “Okay. Thanks a lot for coming,” she said, with a light, sincere smile.

  “Oh, you’re like a…”

  “I’m the artist. Margaretha Klein van Dijk.”

  “Oh, cool. Yeah, this is all … really impressive.”

  She shrugged good-naturedly. “It’s no big deal. The sublime and the mundane or whatever. My dad paid for it. He feels guilty about everything.”

  Jonah didn’t know how he was meant to respond to this, so he told her, “I came here with your cousin, Judy.”

  She looked puzzled for a moment—then parted her lips in comprehension. “She told me people call her that. It didn’t really register as something that could actually happen.”

  “Right,” Jonah said.

  “I can’t wrap my mind around her hair, either. Like, what that whole process must have been like.”

  “I only just met her.”

  She looked at him kindly. “I’m glad. You have a really nice aura.”

  “No, no,” he clarified quickly, “we really only just met, we’re not—anything.”

  But she had turned to look over to where Judy—or whatever she ought to be called—was studying one of the Polaroids. “She never got over what happened to her parents. That’s why her hair is all fucked up.” She looked back at Jonah. “Don’t tell her I said that, okay?” He nodded. He wanted her to think he knew what she was talking about so that she wouldn’t tell him what she was talking about. “The one thing I learned in rehab is that it’s the people who have their shit together
who take that stuff the hardest. Have you noticed that?”

  “Yup,” he said, again hoping agreement would preempt any elaboration.

  “I know you guys can’t stay long. I’m going to go say goodbye. But I’m going to tell her what a good aura you have.” Then she smiled again, and walked over to her cousin.

  He watched them exchange a few words; Margaretha gave Judy an eager, full-bodied hug, which was returned stiffly. If there was a family resemblance, it was difficult to see, even assuming the noses had been a closer match pre-rhinoplasty: They seemed so starkly different in disposition, in mannerism. Margaretha, for instance, would have fit in well with the expat crew—while Judy—who the fuck knew where she would fit in? He began coughing his smoker’s cough. How had he ended up in this art gallery? He headed to the door to save everyone this disruption of the show’s atmosphere.

  “Is it nothing to you, all who pass by?” the disembodied voice said over the speakers as he went out.

  There remained a general dampness to things outside. Water dripped from the front of the colonnade, tiny rivulets flowed into puddles at the edge of the street. Jonah’s coughing petered out. Then he lit a cigarette, because—because he fucking wanted to. He leaned against one of the colonnade’s pillars as he smoked. He felt tired in a nonspecific way—tired of all of everything.

  A few minutes later he heard the door open behind him, and Judy appeared. One of her hands was balled in a fist at her hip, and, makeup or not, her face had taken on a perceptible pallor. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She turned and looked at him as though she’d forgotten he might be there and, reminded, wished he wasn’t. “You didn’t have to wait,” she said coldly.

  And Jonah found he was ready to return this coldness. “Yeah, well,” he said, and held up the cigarette.

  The silence that followed was awkward—and it was too bad their encounter would have to end this way, he thought. Something sterile and amicable would have been preferable—what they would have had if they’d parted at the alley, after all.