by René Appel
Gita didn’t say a word about Johnny’s condition.
Femke explained in turn that she was an independent financial consultant. She’d had an office in Utrecht for a while, but had recently relocated to Amsterdam: a month ago, she’d moved into one of the new apartment blocks by the water, and now she was eager to make some friends in the neighborhood . . . which answered a question Gita hadn’t dared to ask.
* * *
Over the next few weeks, Femke was a lunchtime regular at Café Mosplein. She usually hung out at the bar, chatting about the book she was reading or a movie Gita had to see, and more and more often about new clients she’d taken on, like the woman who kept fiddling with her phone during a consultation. “She was adjusting and readjusting the temperature in her house,” Femke laughed, “so her Bouvier wouldn’t be too cold—can you beat that?” Those were afternoons when, for the first time, Gita found herself glad that the café attracted so few customers.
One Thursday, Gita called in sick so she and Femke could take the ferry across the IJ to go shopping. That was one of the few times they left Amsterdam-North together. From the boat deck, Femke pointed out her apartment building as, giggling like schoolgirls, they brushed the windblown hair out of each other’s faces. In the city center, Femke steered Gita to stores she’d never even heard of. Femke decided on a long red evening gown that Gita thought suited her perfectly, and Gita bought a jacket Femke pulled off the rack for her. It’s on sale, she rationalized, handing her debit card to the sales clerk, a steal at this price. Tapping in her PIN, she felt a deep connection to Femke, who had just done the same thing herself. Pressing those little numbered keys was like sealing their friendship.
“Where’d you get the jacket?” asked Mireille that afternoon.
“Ordered it online,” said Gita, tugging Johnny away from the TV. “It was on clearance.”
She had by then told Mireille about Femke, there’d been no way to avoid it. “I think I’ve made a new friend,” she’d said. Talking about Femke gave her almost as much pleasure as talking with Femke. When she brought Johnny over to Mireille’s one Saturday evening, she’d explained away the almost-unheard-of occurrence by saying that she and Femke were going out.
“You look chic,” Mireille had said, admiring Gita’s black velvet sweater. Gita didn’t know if that was a compliment or a reproach, but she understood that she’d better not ask Mireille to take Johnny again on a weekend night.
The next week, when Femke mentioned a new restaurant she wanted to try, Gita suggested they wait till after Johnny’s bedtime.
* * *
That evening, Gita rummaged through the plastic crate in the bathroom for the nylon straps and metal leg braces Johnny’d worn to bed as a child—well, as a younger child. Back then, he’d sometimes had epileptic seizures during the night, and the straps and braces protected him from hurting himself. Over the years, the frequency and intensity of the attacks had abated, until the risk of an episode was outweighed by the discomfort the restraints caused the boy, not to mention the struggle it took to tie him down.
“Come on, now,” she said, “give me your arm.” Johnny was exhausted. She’d fed him a big bowl of mac and cheese for dinner, and that had filled him up and tired him out, so he didn’t put up a fight. He remembered the routine, the tightness of the straps on his wrists and legs, though it had been a long time since they had last used them.
“Mama,” he said, the word a question. “Ma?”
The moment Gita locked the apartment door behind her, she felt herself go limp. With every step she took, a shiver ran from her shoulders up her neck to her throat, and it wasn’t until she finished her second rum and Coke at the Butcher—the new hot spot by the water—that her arms and legs felt normal again.
When she returned home a few hours later, Johnny was sleeping peacefully, and she kissed him lightly on both cheeks.
* * *
Gita leans in to peer through the rooftop telescope, swivels it on its axis from left to right. Do the people down there realize it’s possible to peep right into their homes? The curtains on most of the windows of the apartment complex on the water are drawn, but she can see right into some of the illuminated living rooms, make out a shape here and there that could be nothing more than a houseplant but could just as well be someone’s husband or father or lover. Gita releases the telescope and reaches again for her phone, presses again on Femke’s name. Does a screen light up behind one of those windows?
She puts the phone away and returns to the telescope, aims it straight down twenty-two stories to the street: the black asphalt jumps into focus before her eyes. There, 367 feet below, is where their plan began. It wasn’t much later then than it is now, though at that time of year it was still quite light out. It was cold, their summer jackets too thin for the crisp September evening.
* * *
“Oh no!” cried Femke.
“What?”
“It’s closed. We can’t go up.”
They’d talked about the Tower often, laughed at the crazy idea of the giant swing on the roof, visible from every café, every house and apartment in the area. It was big enough for two people, they could see that from the ground. But could you sit close enough to hold hands, and was it really safe? They weren’t going to find out, not that night—now that they’d finally talked themselves into the adventure, the Tower was closed.
A little old woman hurried past the shuttered doors, struggling to keep up with a dachshund on a leash. The dog trembled, as surprised by the cold as they had been. “An accident,” the woman told them. Femke shook her head sadly, but Gita didn’t understand at first. “A jumper,” the woman said quickly, as if she’d already told the story a dozen times today, and perhaps she had.
Gita and Femke stood there in silence, necks craned, looking up to the top of the Tower, the observation deck, ringed by a tall fence meant to prevent the sort of tragedy that had apparently occurred despite its presence.
“That fence is six feet high,” said Femke softly, and Gita visualized a man—it had to have been a man—reaching above his head, grabbing hold of the top metal bar, pressing the toe of his sneaker into one of the diamond-shaped openings in the chain link, and hoisting himself upward.
She can’t remember which she noticed first, the music—a piano being played beautifully somewhere behind them—or the shadow that suddenly fell across Femke’s face. Gita turned and saw the colossus: a ship, the AIDA, the biggest cruise ship in Europe, though she didn’t know that at the time. At that moment, the ship made her think of Mireille’s balcony, the only difference being that the people on the ship’s balconies seemed happy, little Playmobil figures who leaned over their railings and waved at them. And where was that heavenly music coming from?
“Three concert halls,” said Femke, reading her mind. “Two casinos, four pools, nine restaurants.”
As they watched the enormous craft glide by, Gita was reminded of an animated film she’d recently seen, Pinocchio. The movie was long and too difficult for Johnny. He’d begun to whimper impatiently, and she’d put him to bed and watched the rest of it alone in her dim living room. One moment in particular had stayed with her—the scene with the whale, a sea monster so huge that it sucked whole schools of fish, sea urchins, anemones, even poor wooden Pinocchio down its gigantic gullet, the whale’s jaws gaping wide and everything in its path disappearing between them. She imagined the prow of the cruise ship breaking open and inhaling her and Femke from the dock into its maw.
She felt dizzy. She might even have staggered a bit, and suddenly Femke’s arm was around her waist, supporting her. It was the first time Femke had touched her in such an intimate manner. She was a little taller than Gita; her slender arm slid easily around her back, her left hand came to rest on Gita’s hip and held her close.
“We should do that,” said Femke. “You and me, we should go on a cruise.”
“Yes,” said Gita, “absolutely.” And she laid her hand on Femke’s, and the
two of them stood there for a moment, until the ship and its music had passed out of their sight and hearing.
A cruise, they’d told each other several times that evening, we really have to do that, each time bursting out in peals of laughter—and when Femke laid a thick travel brochure on the bar the next afternoon, Gita assumed she was making a joke.
But Femke leafed furiously through the colored pages until she found what she was looking for. “This one!” she said, tapping her forefinger on a photograph of a sleek white ship with bright blue trim. “Leaves from Naples and goes all the way around the world!”
“That would be wonderful,” Gita sighed, and she tried to slide the brochure aside to make room for the glass of Macallan that Femke had ordered, but Femke held it in place with her finger.
“Look,” she said, “thirty thousand euros a person, all included. Around the world!” She drank down half her whisky and took an envelope from her purse.
Gita had seen similar mailings before. Every so often, one of them showed up with her bills and advertising circulars: Need extra cash for Christmas? or words to that effect.
“Fill this out and sign it,” said Femke. “We’ll be on our way in three weeks.”
Gita looked up from the envelope and couldn’t tell from Femke’s expression if she was serious or trying to be funny. “That’s a loan application,” she said. “How am I supposed to pay it back?”
“We’ll split the payments,” Femke replied cheerfully. “Sixty euros a month each, that’s doable, isn’t it?”
Gita shrugged, and then Femke did something she’d never done before. She slid off her stool and came around the bar. From behind, she put her arms around Gita and hugged her. Femke was so close that Gita could feel her heart beating against her back, could smell the familiar musk of Gauloises. All at once, she felt truly happy.
Femke put her chin on Gita’s shoulder and nodded at the brochure. “Look,” she said, “that woman in the straw hat is me, and the one holding the cocktail is you.”
* * *
It all went as smoothly as Femke had predicted. A week after Gita signed the application, the money was deposited into her account.
She worried that people could smell it on her. When she hunched down in the supermarket to pluck the cheapest brand of tomato soup from the bottom shelf, she felt like she’d been caught red-handed: was this the behavior of a woman in possession of so much wealth? Femke proposed that they open a special vacation account—putting it in Femke’s name would get her a significant break on her taxes, she explained, and she was a financial consultant, so she ought to know what she was talking about—and Gita was relieved to see the enormous sum disappear from her own account, as if she’d taken off a heavy fur coat that had never really fit her in the first place.
Johnny seemed especially irritable those days, and Gita went through twice as many prepackaged pancakes as usual. He often wept when he awoke in the mornings, and at night he was anything but cooperative. When she finally got him settled beneath his Grover blanket, he stared up at her fearfully. She knew what was bothering him. The leg braces. The straps. But she never used them more than once a week, only when she went out to eat with Femke and then never longer than a couple of hours. That frightened look of his annoyed her. She was his mother, she had always taken care of him, had never hurt him. Didn’t that count for anything?
Meanwhile, she had to figure out what to do with him when they went off on their cruise, an entire month. For just a moment, she considered taking him along, but she couldn’t do that to Femke, she decided, or to Johnny either. He’d be terrified of the waves. What was meant to be a vacation would only make his mood swings worse.
And besides, Gita thought, she hadn’t had any real time off in fourteen years. For fourteen years she’d taken care of Johnny, spent every weekday and many Saturdays on her feet in the café. In fourteen years, she’d withered from a promising young lady determined to make the best of things to a middle-aged woman who’d accepted that she wasn’t entitled to the best of anything, that the future she had once dreamed of had turned out not to be a pretty pink house and a dog, but a swamp. Didn’t she have the right, just this once, to enjoy herself?
She asked Mireille to take Johnny in, offered to pay her for the trouble. Mireille had been offended by the idea of payment, but she hadn’t said no to looking after the boy.
Until two days before their departure, when Mireille had called her. “I’ve talked it over with Bor,” she said, “and he won’t have Johnny here for a month.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“To be honest,” Mireille said at last, “I don’t think I could handle it, anyway. I haven’t got the energy. You understand, don’t you?”
* * *
So she’d had to make other arrangements.
On the afternoon of their flight, she and Femke had agreed to meet across from the airport Burger King at five. Femke had to see a client in Utrecht at noon, but their flight didn’t leave until 6:30, so she’d have plenty of time to get there. Femke would bring the tickets.
At 5:05, Gita lifted her suitcase onto a baggage cart and hurried through the arrivals hall to the Burger King. The smell of frying meat made her hungry, but she couldn’t stop to eat and risk missing Femke.
She waited for five minutes and watched a somber young couple take their place in the line approaching the counter. She waited ten minutes and watched the couple settle at a table with a tray piled high with burgers and fries. She waited fifteen minutes and watched the couple revive over their meal: the girl’s face became animated, the boy laughed at something she said.
After twenty minutes, Gita sat on the edge of her baggage cart. She watched the couple rise, watched the girl playfully order the boy to clear their table, watched him stick out his tongue at her.
While she waited, she sent Femke a text, then another. She asked a security guard if there was a second Burger King elsewhere at the airport. She called Femke’s cell phone three times, maybe four, but no one answered.
At 6:20, Gita wheeled her cart into the departures hall. She approached the customer service counter for the airline on which they were ticketed, and asked the agent if it was possible to get a refund.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “we don’t process refunds here. I can cancel your reservation, though. Would you like me to do that for you?”
Gita hesitated, then nodded.
“What’s the name on the booking?” the girl asked.
“Femke,” said Gita, “Femke de Waal.”
The girl typed the name into her computer, then asked Gita to spell it. “I am sorry,” she said at last, “but I don’t show a reservation under that name.”
* * *
Gita’s fingers tighten on the cool chain-link fence. It would be so easy to hoist herself upward, to climb, to perch on the crossbar at the top. From that vantage point, the view of the city would be even better: the passenger terminal across the IJ to the left, the Prinseneiland to the right . . . and below? She closes her eyes and imagines falling forward. As she falls, her velocity will increase—one of the few things she remembers from her science classes in school.
“Ma’am?” says a voice behind her.
She opens her eyes and turns around. The boy in the red jacket is pointing at the swing. “Last chance. Do you want to ride?”
The roof is deserted. The drizzle has strengthened into rain. With her hands in her jacket pockets, Gita approaches the swing. Her fingertips glide across her phone, a cool black brick that remains stubbornly silent.
Now that she is beside the swing, she realizes for the first time just how tall it is: the steel pyramid stretches far above her head.
“Have a seat,” says the boy, and Gita settles onto a flat red wooden board that reminds her of the ski lifts she’s seen in the movies.
“Now fasten your safety belt, please.”
She pulls the black bar up between her legs, fumbles with the locking mechanism, and the
n she sees them. Two terrified eyes, pupils darting back and forth as if they’re following a bumblebee in flight. She clicks the tongue into the buckle and sees the windmilling arms, the kicking legs, the thin wrists she wrestles with difficulty to the mattress. She pulls the belt tighter, feels the nylon press into her thigh. She can hear him screaming now, whimpering like a cornered dog. Johnny’s pajama bottoms are suddenly wet, she can smell the urine, but he’s finally secured, so she pulls his blanket over him, over his pajamas. She sets the iPad on the night table next to his bed and points at Elmo, who is laughing gaily.
The ski lift jolts upward. Gita’s legs dangle in the darkness.
“Here we go,” says the boy beneath her, and the swing begins to move, first back, then forward, and Gita looks down at the city spread out beneath her. There are houses to the left and cars to the right and boats in the water, all pinpoints of light, glowworms that wriggle across the earth and mean nothing at all to her.
Look, she hears Femke say, that woman in the straw hat is me, and the one holding the cocktail is you.
SILENT DAYS
by Karin Amatmoekrim
Oosterpark
It was early autumn when they began to cut down the trees. The wind was aggressive, the rain thin but steady. I sat at my window and looked out at their balding crowns, and then I watched them fall. It happened in silence, as if the trees were fainting, dropping to the ground without the least resistance.
The park seems wounded now. But I’ve lived here long enough to know that even this will pass. The gaps left behind by the fallen trees will close, the park will heal itself, and people will say they can’t imagine it ever being any different.
I’ve lived in this neighborhood for eighty-two years. I’ve seen it change: the city itself, its inhabitants, their faces, even the language they speak. But at heart the neighborhood remains the same. Amsterdam-East was never flawless. It’s the side of town where the Jews lived before the Germans came and took them away. Their empty homes were immediately repopulated. We all worked hard but remained poor. No one had time for sentimentality. In the summers, the heat fanned our discontent, and we invented turbulent celebrations, throwing old furniture out of upper-floor windows to the streets below. We built bonfires of the shattered remnants, the flames so high they tickled the underbellies of the clouds.
