He was staring at her, as excited by the way she looked as much as by what she was saying, until the import of her words really sank in and then he took hold of her elbow and said urgently, ‘What have you remembered? Oh, quick, Miriam! Before you forget again! What was it?’
She laughed, a high happy sound that was clear, even above the heavy noise of the plane’s engines. ‘It was the silliest thing to ask an historian. He wanted to know about the people dealing in diamonds in Amsterdam in the Forties. I ask you! As if Geoff would have had lists of such things as that! But that was what he wanted. So, of course, I sent him one of the cards, because I didn’t have the information he wanted. Does that help, Abner? Because I do hope so.’
He smiled at her and shook his head. ‘I don’t think it does, honey. But what the hell! You’ve remembered — and that means that at least we’ve got that out of the way. I guess it’s nothing important, and natural enough — just a money man looking to make a bit more. So it won’t help my film at all, will it?’
‘But, of course it could!’ she said. ‘I told you! It was diamond merchants in the forties he wanted to know about — not the ones there are now. If he was just wanting to make some sort of money arrangement now, he’d want people who were dealing now, wouldn’t he? But he was quite clear. It was the forties he was interested in and nothing more. So maybe it’s got something to do with our research after all.’
And he couldn’t be sure which made him feel better; the fact that she was, of course, perfectly right and Brazel’s interest could be worth following up after all, or that she had referred to ‘our’ research. Either way, here they were in Amsterdam, and her new excitement seemed to have banished all the hesitancy that had been so worrying him; they had nothing to do but enjoy themselves. And that was precisely what he intended they should do.
Twenty-nine
It was, he decided, wonderful. The city was all it had promised to be; busy, self-absorbed and yet welcoming, it lay beneath the wide opalescent skies of early March, glittering with water and the chrome of its myriad bicycles, smelling faintly of fish as well as marijuana — which was indeed well in evidence — and, of course, of flowers. They were spread out on the cobbles at the top of one of the most attractive streets, great banks of yellows and reds and blues, interspersed with exotic glowing plants with vast leaves, pots of decidedly obscene looking cacti and tubs of dried leaves and grasses; and when they came to it on their first long walk through the city, it made Miriam stand stock still and just stare.
‘Flowers are so corny,’ he said after a moment. ‘They always look the same, they always smell the same and yet every time they grab you by the collar and choke you with sentimentality. Look at those flaming things over there, see? I’m not sure I believe them. They look like an angry tannoy.’
‘Amaryllis,’ she said dreamily. ‘There are some there too, see? Lemon and orange and cream — ’
‘What are those, then?’ He pointed to a trough filled with yellow and green spikes and her lips curved.
‘Fritillaries,’ she said. ‘I used to think with a name like that they’d be able to fly away. Like butterflies. They’re sometimes called fritillaries, aren’t they?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Here, let me be corny too. Please let me be corny.’ And he darted towards one of the stalls and bought a small bunch of deep purple violets and came back to pin them on to her coat. ‘There. Now I feel like a real tourist. All we have to do now is eat pancakes over at that place there and we’re fully paid up members of the rubbernecking class.’
‘Then we’d better do it,’ she said gaily and led the way to the rickety row of iron tables on the pavement outside the eating house on the corner and plumped herself down. ‘I want coffee, a great big bowl of it, and one of those things over there.’ And she craned her neck towards the next table where a small child was ploughing her way systematically through a sugar dusted confection that was oozing cream.
‘We’ll make that two,’ he said and gave the order, and then they both sat staring over the crowded flower market towards the glitter of the canal that backed it, and which just showed in places between the slats of the stalls, comfortably aware of the agreeably cool air on their faces and the scent of coffee, which now added itself to the cocktail of smells around them.
‘When do you have to work?’ she said, turning to look at him. ‘You’re not just here for fun, like me.’
‘I hate you,’ he said cheerfully, and licked the last of the cream from his pancake off his upper lip. ‘Talking about work when people are eating this sort of thing is downright disgusting.’
‘Still and all,’ she said and grinned wickedly. ‘You have to work and I don’t. Did you see that bit on the notice board by the concierge’s desk at the hotel? About Keukenhof.’
‘I did,’ he said and made a face. ‘Flower gardens. I want to go there in the worst way. Maybe we could — ’
‘I thought I could do that while you were working,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly capable of making a trip like that on my own, you know.’
‘I’m sure you are. I’m not worrying a tuppenny damn about you — how do you like that? A “tuppenny damn” — I’m learning English as she is spoke from the cameraman. He’s Dutch, so, of course, he speaks it really well and, naturally, perfectly idiomatically. Like I say, I’m not worried about you making trips. I’m worrying about me missing ’em.’
‘Well, you can’t do everything I do,’ she pointed out reasonably enough. ‘You do have to work, don’t you? Your advert.’
‘Tomorrow and the next day. That’s the deal. And you could come with me. All I’m doing is filming pairs of lovers. I could do with a spare pair of eyes to share the spotting. Why don’t you come and — ’
‘Trying to find me a job again?’ she said, and he heard the tightness in her voice and threw up both hands.
‘There you go again, coming the old porcupine! OK, so don’t come with me. I just thought we could manage the flower gardens — where is it again?’
‘Keukenhof.’
‘Yeah — well, I thought we could do some work there. It’s sure to have lovers leaping around. And then in the evening, one of the tours in the canal boats. That’ll give me some nice atmo shots, water reflections — the whole bit. And then the next day we could — ’
‘The next day I’m going to the Rijksmuseum,’ she said firmly. ‘And the Van Gogh and any other art gallery I can find. And I don’t want to go with a TV camera hanging around.’
‘You’re on,’ he said at once. ‘Come with me to the flower place and on the canal boat, and then I’ll get on on my own.’
She thought for a moment, and he watched her as she did it, enjoying the shape of her mouth and chin and the way her hair fitted her head so well now. I’m a goddamn fool, he thought, digging my hole deeper every minute, and I love being that way. I love it. Dammit all to hell and back.
‘All right,’ she said then. ‘You’re on. But don’t expect me to take the job as seriously as you will. I’m here to have fun.’
And they did. Next morning, the camera crew, a small bustling Dutchman in a battered leather jacket on camera and the most taciturn of sound men Abner could ever remember working with, arrived to prove themselves efficient and agreeable, not fussing whatever Abner asked for, and coming up with useful suggestions of their own (or at least Willem, the cameraman, did) and they got good stuff in the can early in the day just from walking along the canal sides, and over the little humped bridges. Amsterdam seemed alive with photogenic couples who posed in obliging postures against the best backgrounds and then wandered off, seemingly unaware of their important roles as film extras, and Abner was exceedingly pleased with himself when they stopped for a casual lunch at one of the roadside stalls, eating matjes herring and chips with mayonnaise (‘Disgusting!’ said Miriam and ate them greedily and with great gusto) and said so to Miriam.
‘If this is all there is to film making, I’m not surprised you like it,’ she
said, and licked her fingers for the last of the salty fishiness left by the herring fillets. ‘I can’t imagine why so many people make a fuss about it. It all looks very simple to me.’
‘The art that disguises art,’ Abner said, refusing to rise to the bait. ‘Listen, Willem says he can get us all in his car. It’s a battered old Volvo estate, I have to tell you, and the back of it’s littered with cameras and gear, but it’ll get us to Keukenhof. OK by you?’
‘It’s better than paying for a bus,’ she said. ‘We go now?’
‘We go now.’
‘No time to go somewhere else first? I want to see — oh, I don’t know. So much. I don’t want to waste a moment.’
‘Glad you came?’
She threw him a glance, looked sour and he knew it was meant to hide her shyness. ‘You know bloody well I am. And if you dare come the I-told-you-so bit, I’ll — ’
‘You’ll what?’ he said, because she had stopped and was staring across the canal, but she shook her head.
‘I’ll think of something. Look, must we go to the Keukenhof right away? Can’t we go to a museum or something now? I really do want to see something — well, solid.’
‘I could get this stuff back and into the system,’ Willem offered. He had been watching them with a benevolent smirk on his face that Abner tried not to see. Was his obsession with this girl so visible that it made total strangers smirk indulgently at him? A dreadful thought. A great thought. A thought not to be thought at all. ‘And if we don’t go to Keukenhof for another couple of hours that’ll still be time enough. You could go back to Prinzengracht, go to the Ann Frank house before we leave, if that is what Miss would like — ’
‘Miss would like it very much,’ Miriam said abruptly and turned to leave. ‘I’m going anyway, Abner. You don’t have to.’ And she began to walk swiftly up to the bridge which led to the Prinzengracht.
‘OK, Willem,’ Abner said hastily. ‘Where do we meet?’
‘Pick you up in Dam Square, by the Royal Palace, three o’clock,’ Willem said. ‘Go, run after your bird. She’s escaping.’
‘She’s not my bird,’ he called back over his shoulder as he ran after her, needing the man to understand, but he just grinned more widely than ever and waved, and Abner, irritation moving in to flatten the morning’s euphoria, tried to pretend he hadn’t seen it.
They walked in silence along the canal side, her heels rattling on the stones, and his own trainers flapping against them in a regular padding rhythm. He tried to talk to her, but she was silent, gone away into one of her sudden darknesses, and he sighed and gave up. She’d be back, eventually. She usually was, after all; and it was odd to realise, he thought then, that he could think of what she ‘usually’ did. They hadn’t known each other long, but it was all beginning to feel like a real relationship, the sort where you cope with each other in all sorts of moods; and then he grimaced at himself. Such a word, relationship. It meant everything or nothing, he hated it.
The bells began a deep humming as the Oude Kerk’s and then the softer sound of the Nieuwe Kerk’s lifted on the midday air, and then other bells came singing in. At once his heart lifted; a joyous place, this city, ringing and glittering in the spring sunshine like a happy dream. And he glanced at the girl beside him and the moment of happiness shrivelled and died, for she was scowling furiously and he couldn’t understand it. And said more roughly than he meant to, ‘For Christ’s sake, Miriam, what is it? One moment you’re fun and then — what the hell’s biting you?’
She took a sharp breath in through her nose so that her nostrils flattened, giving her face a drawn middle-aged look. ‘I don’t know,’ she said after a long moment. ‘It suddenly seemed — ’ And then she stopped. ‘It was the old man and the woman there, by the stall where we ate lunch. You saw them?’
He was puzzled. ‘There were lots of people there. I saw no one special.’
‘They must have been — oh, I suppose, eighty, maybe. I’m good at judging ages, because of Geoff. After looking after him, being old is something you understand. And I saw them and suddenly, it was not now any more but the way it must have been then — in the war. They were young and the Germans were here and I thought — did they collaborate? Were they the ones who helped the Germans shift the Jews out of here? Did they shoot them or were they the other kind? Did he work on the docks and go on strike with them, the others, did she support them, take them food?’
He shook his head, mystified. ‘Miriam, I can’t see where you’re going — or where you’re coming from. The docks? What’s all this about docks?’
She stopped walking and turned abruptly to lean on the railing beside the canal as a loudly ringing set of bicycles flashed past, bearing young men in football strip off to some remote playing field, shouting at each other about football scores and goals, as far as Abner could tell. It didn’t matter what they were saying, of course, but he needed to hear and listen to them as their high young voices receded into the traffic din, knowing all that he was trying to do was blot out the way Miriam was behaving. She had been so different for so long, he’d thought the sharp and angry Miriam had gone for ever. Yet here she was again.
‘You call yourself a researcher,’ she said now, her voice scathing. She didn’t look at him, staring down instead into the murky water below the railings. ‘I made sure before I left that I read up all I could about what happened here, from Geoff’s notes, but you, you’ve done nothing to find out. The dock workers, here in Holland, were the only people in all occupied Europe who stood up to the Germans, and you should have known that. In the other countries the workers knuckled under and did as they were told, but here, they went on strike. You hear me? They actually went on strike. They were complaining about something to do with shifting out Jews by train. They wouldn’t do it — so some said. Not all agreed that was why, but enough said it. Anyway, they went on strike. And the Germans just turned guns on them. Can you see them? Can you hear it? They were shot. Not all, of course, but enough. And now there’s a great statue to them, the Dock Worker. Maybe we’ll see it, maybe we won’t, but you ought at least to know the bloody thing is here.’
‘Well, I didn’t and there’s an end of it if I didn’t. I’m grateful to you for the history lesson and now can we go and see the Frank house? Then you can give me another lecture about what I didn’t know, and didn’t have the wit to find out in advance, and you can feel good.’
She threw him a blistering look, but straightened her back and turned to start walking again, and they were striding side by side along the road like strangers, her hands deep in her pockets, and he, equally grim, marching alongside her.
The house, when they found it, very near their hotel, in fact, was quiet. ‘Lunchtime,’ Abner said and looked at her, almost hopeful. Perhaps the energy of the walk had softened her? ‘People are eating. We’ll have it to ourselves, maybe.’
She said nothing, just staring up at the house. It was like any one of the hundreds that lined the canals. Tall, rich in windows and generously gabled, but very narrow, with a front door that looked as though it would barely admit one body moving sideways, let alone two side by side. High up beneath the gables was a great iron hook and tackle, ready still to haul up goods and chattels that couldn’t make it through the door. The place looked innocuous, dull even, and after a moment Abner walked to the door and pushed it open.
Ahead of them a narrow staircase climbed uncompromisingly in a steep cliff face, and an old woman sitting at a table in a little booth to one side peered at them over her embroidery and held out her hand for their fees. Abner paid and was given a pair of tickets and the woman jerked her head at the stairs and went back to her stitching. And they began to climb.
At first it was all rather dull, silly in a way. A narrow house with rooms once full of furniture for the people living and working in them, now containing only ugly glass-fronted display cases full of sheets of paper bearing in many languages accounts of what happened to Holland in the War and during
the Occupation; the sort of material designed to bore you into a state of shuffling quiescence. For all that, there were children in one of the rooms, running about and making a good deal of noise, and Abner looked at them and at their ineffectual teacher who was trying to hush them and thought — why shouldn’t they make a noise? What possible meaning can this house have for them? Nothing here is meant to remind them, to move them, to be anything at all really. It just makes a gesture to the past, not a real homage to it.
But then, as obediently they followed the terse instructions pinned on the doors that took them from room to room and ever higher in the house, pausing to read and stare at the exhibits as they passed them, awareness began to creep over him. It was in this very house that those Jews had hidden. It was here, and only here, that it had all happened, those events in that book he’d been made to read in the ninth grade — who was the teacher who’d given it to him? He couldn’t remember, but he could remember the book. Oh, he could remember the book, and now, as they climbed the last set of rickety stairs to the attics in the annexe where the Frank family and their friends had hidden for so long, it all seemed to move into place at last. And he was as silent as Miriam and as locked inside himself as they stood and looked.
Pale faded wallpaper. A small sink in a corner. Markings on a wall, near the jamb of a door, faint pencil marks that showed where they’d measured the children’s growth. Ann’s and her sister’s and the boy Pieter’s. And without looking for Miriam or for anything else he turned and went, stumbling a little, back towards the exit, away down the stairs and out through the big room below, following the carefully organised one-way system, until he stood outside in the chill light of the early March afternoon, watching the boats move along the shifting canal waters and not knowing when he would be able to speak again.
He hardly noticed she was beside him, hardly realised when he started to walk that she was keeping him company until, after they’d gone a few yards, she slid her hand into the crook of his elbow. Together they walked the long way back to the Dam Square where they stood, their backs to the Royal Palace, watching the changing throng and the traffic and the people and waiting for Willem. And at no point did they say a word to each other.
Postscripts Page 32
