The Tree and the Vine

by Dola de Jong

  I was in the kitchen making tea. I listened in vain for the sound of Erica’s voice. Without a word, she steered her mother into her room and closed the door. I stood in the hallway, tea tray in hand, not sure what to do next.

  Later, I found myself sitting across from Erica’s mother, a robust woman with Erica’s mouth and shoe-polish-black hair. I kept the conversation going, which didn’t take a lot of effort. I found Ma (as I began calling her that afternoon) fascinating and hilarious. She was full of stories, eager to answer simple questions and showed interest in our lives. As usual, Erica was quiet.

  After she’d retreated to her room and shut the door, which, after a moment’s hesitation, I decided to just ignore, I assumed she was ashamed of her mother. But once again, I was wrong. She’d even smiled at Ma’s coarse, boisterous humor. We’d exchanged looks several times, and there hadn’t been a hint of embarrassment in her eyes. She even took her mother’s hateful, mocking remarks about “your Pa” in stride. She just sat there on the ground calmly smoking a cigarette with her arms wrapped around her knees. I have to admit there were moments when even I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed, when Ma’s laughter became just a bit too exuberant, her anecdote a bit too far-fetched, her confession a bit too frank. I tried to catch Erica’s gaze to see if she shared my feelings—to gauge how painful it was for her—but her face and posture remained completely passive. She doesn’t care, I realized in awe. She was objective and amused—not at all bored by her mother’s stories and jokes, which she must’ve heard hundreds of times. After Ma had left (she was meeting the colonel—the “General,” in Erica’s parlance—for dinner in the city), I went to the kitchen to cook a nice meal for the two of us. But Erica stopped me. In her hand were five guilders. “A present from Ma,” she said. “Come on, let’s splurge.”

  We had dinner at Kempinsky’s that night, but Erica barely touched her food. Later, I found myself reaching for my own wallet to pay off the rest of the bill. After two bottles of Bols, she’d kept right on ordering. I struggled to get her home and had to help her put on her pajamas. She leaned against me sleepily and kept saying I was a sweet bitch and kissing me on the neck. Despite her level of intoxication, she’d been able to carry on a rational conversation all the way back to our house. It was more of a monologue really, with Erica telling witty, entertaining stories of her job at the newspaper and funny descriptions of her coworkers.

  That night, I lay awake thinking about the five guilders. The gift had been dug out of her mother’s dowdy handbag on the street, boisterously carried up the stairs and delivered on the top step. “Here, this is for you!” I didn’t know who to feel sorry for: the mother or the daughter. It brought back memories of my birthdays back home, the yellow daisies on my chair and around my fork and knife at the breakfast table, elegantly wrapped presents around my plate, the cake with candles—one for every five years as I got older, my father’s quiet delight, it all came flooding back. At breakfast the next day, Erica joked about the bed.

  “Now that I have one, I can’t sleep!” she said.

  “Didn’t the Bols help?” I asked.

  “Yes, you would think. I was really putting ‘em back, huh?”

  “You could say that.”

  She shook her head. “See? It must’ve been the bed. And you know what occurred to me?” She gave me a look of comical despair, and I sensed an attempt to make amends for something.

  “You’re going to have to buy me bedsheets and pillowcases now, too.”

  “Sounds like a nice present for Sinterklaas,” I said, embarrassed to once again be playing her benefactor.

  “No need,” she replied, “Pa gave me ten guilders. You buy them, I don’t know the first thing about linens.”

  Later, before she left for the newspaper, she gave me the money.

  “What a waste,” she said, and on her way down the stairs, she shouted up, “Bea … I should have used the money to buy a dress!” She seemed to find this funny and walked out the door laughing.

  For the most part, those early days with Erica were a mystery to me. But every now and then, she’d get to talking. For no reason at all, she’d suddenly launch into a story about her youth, which gave me some peace of mind about the problems that were troubling me.

  Her stories were always depressing, tragic, but she didn’t see them that way, or so I thought back then—most of the time they made me laugh. But then I’d have trouble sleeping. From her experiences came certain phrases and expressions that we’d use among ourselves, which gave us a feeling of intimacy and solidarity. We repeated Pa’s lamentations to Ma, “You’ll be dancing on my grave,” and Ma’s catchphrases like, “We’re going to Grandma’s!” which she used to shout from the attic window whenever Pa disappeared into the bar across the street. There’d come a time when Erica wouldn’t be able to see the humor in all this anymore, but that wasn’t until much later.

  2

  WIES GREETED THE NEWS of our companionship with enthusiasm. She assigned herself the role of deus ex machina and made a big fuss about it. In her mind, we were two lonely wanderers who, thanks to her talent for bringing people together, had found salvation in each other. The fact that the hand of providence had played a greater role in it than anything—after all, my visit to Wies’s house that summer evening was completely unplanned—escaped her entirely, and I didn’t want to deny her the satisfaction. Naturally, I shared my feelings—or I should say my lack of feelings—for Wies with Erica, though somewhat hesitantly.

  “But I’ll probably have to go see her again at some point,” I concluded.

  “Why would you?” Erica replied.

  “She means well, and she took good care of me when I was sick.”

  “So what? And really, she did all that for herself. People like Wies are kind and caring for their own satisfaction.”

  With those words, not only had she summed up Wies’s character, she also (and much to the relief of my guilty conscience) shed some light on my visits to Wies’s house.

  As to why Erica occasionally visited Wies herself, I had no idea, and I didn’t ask. All she told me was that Wies used to work in the archives at the newspaper. But I was sure that, for some reason, she actually liked Wies. Erica was not someone who did other people favors to get them to like her. She had no problem making enemies. I couldn’t figure out what kind of people she liked, at least not in that first year. I didn’t see many people in those days and had very few visitors. I avoided my old friends because I was still nursing an open wound and certain encounters were inevitably painful. Whenever I did introduce Erica to people, she was friendly but reserved. Only after about six months or so (I don’t remember exactly when it started) did she start speaking her mind about my friends. Most of the time, her criticism was, even for her—and from an objective stand-point really—unreasonably harsh. This surprised me because up to that point, the only Erica I knew was tolerant by nature and deep down quite warm.

  Out of curiosity, I accompanied her on a visit to Wies’s house. I wanted to find out once and for all what attracted her to such a clingy creature whom I felt so indifferent toward, to someone I found so incredibly irritating but was still too weak to shake.

  When I told her I wanted to go with her, Erica raised her eyebrows in surprise but then replied, “How nice.” She slipped her arm through mine and insisted that we go on foot. Wies lived all the way on the south side of Amsterdam, but Erica said she wanted to enjoy the fall evening. We spoke very little. I was tired after a busy day at the office. Erica, who had surely had a hectic day at the paper as well, was not. But she was quiet. She didn’t say a word until we walked by Café Parkzicht, and she told me that her boss sat there at the same table every night. All of a sudden, her quietness exploded into a flurry of excitement, which startled me a bit. She dragged me across the street and ordered me to—without attracting any attention—take a peek inside.

  “Look, there on the left, you can see him sitting by the window. Tall and blond with glas
ses.” I didn’t see anyone and said so loudly. With the same unbridled excitement, she pulled me back across the street to the entrance of the park. As we crossed the road, she kept looking back over her shoulder in a way that was not at all inconspicuous. She was acting like a schoolgirl; I was completely taken aback by her behavior. She’d hardly ever mentioned her boss and talked about him much less than she did about her other co-workers. Later as I was trying to piece together everything that happened in my mind, I kept coming back to that evening.

  “We’re going through the park, aren’t we?” she asked unnecessarily.

  “Yes, of course,” I replied and went on to say how much I loved the smell of wet, rotting leaves, how it reminded me of my childhood in The Hague and riding my bicycle along the edge of the woods on my way home from school, but I was still thinking about what had just happened. It had already occurred to me on occasion that Erica avoided the topic of men. Her excitement that evening was out of character. But what on earth did she talk about with Wies then? Wies, as I knew from my weeks in the hospital with her, was constantly steering the conversation back to men. If you asked me, it was one of her worst qualities and one of the things I appreciated most about Erica.

  We walked slowly through the park, which was full of other people who, like us, were bidding farewell to summer and trying to find comfort in the arrival of fall. I couldn’t help but wonder whether this really was the best season of the year, when things die and decay, making room for new growth in the spring. Whenever the season forces itself upon me as strongly as it did that day, it has a way of making me feel sentimental, melancholic even. I was so moved by the memory of those daily bike rides home from school, of my father waiting for me with tea, that I couldn’t say much. But still, I wanted to help Erica by making small talk—she must have known that she’d behaved strangely, I thought, though she didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed. We strolled leisurely through the park toward the exit. All around us, the leaves were letting go of their tired branches and slowly falling to the ground. We shuffled our feet across the withered carpet, a more moderate version of the game from childhood.

  When we got to Wies’s house, Erica plopped right down on the couch. She propped a pillow under her head and lay there, completely at home, exactly as I’d found her the first time we met. Wies was thrilled. She did everything she could to make us comfortable, which created an atmosphere of uneasiness that kept me on the edge of my seat. (“No, no, I’m fine here, Wies, really. Yes, tea is fine. No, nothing else for me. No, it’s not too hot in here. I don’t feel a draft at all. No, thank you, I’d really rather sit in this chair.”) Erica watched in silence and didn’t take her eyes off Wies.

  “What do you think of my dress, Erica?” Wies asked, and I noticed with irritation how the girl who wore sports blouses and wool socks, whom I’d never heard utter a serious word about clothes or fashion, called the ensemble “darling.” She gushed over the Chinese collar and asked Wies if she had done something different with her hair. Did she get a perm? How much did it cost? The conversation that evening exceeded all limits, I thought. Inane chatter about clothes, men, Wies’s stubborn cleaning lady, and, of course, Huib, Wies’s ex-husband, whom I’d come to know intimately from all her stories in the hospital, as if I had witnessed him twirling around in front of the mirror in his underwear every night myself. I was annoyed, and at the same time bothered by how annoyed I was because, as far as I could tell, there was no reason for a deeper or more interesting conversation. But no matter how hard I tried to fit in, I just couldn’t, which made me feel self-conscious and awkwardly reserved. What a snob I am, I thought.

  We took the tram home and discussed our plans for the next day, which was a Sunday. Erica was completely herself again. We decided to take the steam tram to the coast and go for a walk in the dunes. But the next morning, Erica wouldn’t get out of bed. She said she was tired and asked to be left alone. She told me to go about my day and not worry about her.

  This started happening more often. She spent entire Sundays in bed. If I stayed home, I’d hear her stumble into the kitchen or the bathroom a couple of times, but otherwise the house would be completely silent. During the week, she slept very little. Often, she’d stay up reading late into the night or she’d write—what she was writing, or about whom, I had no idea. But all my worries that she’d keep me up at night turned out to be for nothing. She was always quiet. The only reason I even knew she stayed up all night was the vertical strip of light between the sliding doors. That she slept through an entire Sunday every once in a while seemed understandable to me, and the logic behind her behavior was somewhat comical. I always tried to be as quiet as possible, though she’d never asked me to do so.

  I guess you could say I found the fact that Erica spent entire days in bed amusing that first year; later, however, I began to attach a certain significance to them and could predict when she was going to disappear under the covers.

  There were so many times when I thought I’d finally figured her out, but looking back on it later, I could only smile disparagingly—a little sadly even—at my own self-proclaimed “insight.” Even now, with my broader understanding of humanity, I wonder whether what I took to be a tree growing off in the distance wasn’t in fact a lifeless trunk, its own leaves strangled by the vines growing up around it.

  Shortly before Christmas, Erica inherited three thousand guilders—or rather Ma had received the money as an inheritance from a childless uncle and given it all to Erica. She went to visit her at the newspaper and shoved the envelope of cash into her hands. As soon as I heard Erica coming up the stairs, I knew something out of the ordinary had happened. She was singing a silly tune from her vast repertoire of old Dutch folk songs—to my great amusement she knew them all by heart. Whether the song had two verses or ten, Erica could sing every word. And they were always twice as entertaining when she sang them. She tapped the envelope against the wall as she made her way up the stairs, clip-clop, clip-clop, “… and no, no, we’re not going home …” I could tell right away she’d been drinking. She tossed the envelope in my direction, sank down in a kitchen chair, and, with her head on the table, began laughing loudly.

  “Ma, the benefactor!” she said finally, wiping tears from her eyes. “Three thousand guilders for Erica!”

  Exactly what Ma had said, she didn’t say. Erica walked out of the kitchen with the envelope pinched between her thumb and forefinger like a rag, and I drained the potatoes. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I became aware of the rigid smile on my face.

  Erica didn’t come back to eat until I was peeling an apple for my dessert. She scooped herself a heaping portion of sauerkraut and ate with gusto. Every now and then, I saw her shake her head ever so slightly and suppress another fit of laughter. I peeled her a tangerine and carefully placed the pieces around the edge of her plate. As I did, she suddenly looked at me and her eyes filled with tears. “Bea, Bea,” she said, and using Grandma’s expression declared: “Life’s just full of surprises.”

  “Let’s go to the movies,” she said, “or how about the theater? I’m rich! What time is it? We can just make it.”

  The mad dash to get cleaned up and dressed came as a relief to me. We saw some kind of American comedy and drank coffee at intermission. On the way home, Erica suddenly dropped my arm. “I’m going to walk on a bit,” she said and turned down a side street. She didn’t come home until the next morning.

  The money disappeared like snow in the sun. We had an English Christmas that year with a tree and presents—a wristwatch and a new radio for me. Erica bought herself expensive dresses and shoes, which she never wore, piles of books, a gramophone, and more records than we had room for in the house. Quartets and piano concerts, Greta Keller and The Threepenny Opera reverberated across our entire floor all evening long. At Erica’s insistence, we ate out in restaurants, went to concerts, and didn’t miss a single premier at the theater. She was in a feverish hurry to get rid of that money. At first,
I was against all the luxury because I didn’t have the means to contribute, but soon enough I was letting myself be treated without protest. It was as if she needed to be rid of the money as quickly as possible, I thought. And if that was her goal, I wasn’t going to try and stop her. Don’t judge, for the love of God, don’t judge! That was one of my major convictions in those days. Live together, but don’t try to censure each other. Hopefully, it would all blow over soon. I couldn’t stand her feverishness, her inflated sense of happiness.

  On New Year’s Eve, our house was suddenly full of people. Erica’s colleagues came stomping up the stairs—overgrown boys who masked their insecurity with a pompous air. They limited themselves to ready-made phrases recited in a snobbish accent with raised eyebrows: a helpless “Right, right” or a friendly “Oh really? I wasn’t aware of that!” Most were aging bachelors, weighed down by years of disappointment in journalism and the endless race for the last paragraph. The type of men who know everything and speak in a condescending tone (“I’m tellin’ you, sweetheart, time sure does fly”) and they proved extremely helpful when it came to preparing the cold supper. I counted two couples: one that seemed mildly amused by our little ladies’ apartment, and the other consisting of a loud old gentleman, who had clearly just escaped a boring family get-together, and his unwilling wife. She was wearing an enormous cameo on her blouse and an ivory-bead necklace that hung down to her waist, and by her second glass of warm wine, she’d already started complaining about her fate as the wife of a journalist. And there was a nice girl, secretary to “the boss,” who, as the evening progressed, was burdened with all kinds of candid messages to pass on to her employer. I hadn’t invited anyone. It was Erica’s evening, and I was still avoiding my friends.

  “I’m going to give a little soirée.” Erica had announced two evenings prior. How she ever found all these people to come at the last minute was a mystery to me, but after having spoken to all the guests within the first fifteen minutes, I realized that what she was really doing was providing the lonely and least popular with an opportunity to celebrate the New Year. It was the type of evening where you find yourself cleaning ashtrays and sticky glasses at the end of the night and wondering what the point of it was—why you even bothered having a party in the first place. And how self-conscious it all makes you feel, as if you can never live up to people’s expectations. The guests milled around desperately searching for something, anything they could latch on to, and if that didn’t work, if a conversation didn’t offer the satisfaction they were looking for, they’d circulate through the small apartment, from Erica’s room to my room, and end up at the kitchen table trying to make small talk with me as I busied myself with the refreshments. It was the kind of evening where the most idiotic banalities were flung around with bravado in the hope that they might attract attention and, in doing so, make up for the awkwardness of it all, where even the more profound observations shriveled against the ceiling like balloons slipped from children’s hands. At first, Erica didn’t quite know what to do with herself in this situation she’d created. I’d picked up on the shyness of her smile, the constant smoking and the restless, aimless way she drifted from one group to the other; all of this compelled me to try to put her guests at ease. I left no glass unfilled, brought the sandwiches and meat pastries out a whole hour earlier than planned and chatted incessantly. By midnight, however, Erica had had so much to drink that she didn’t even notice the forced atmosphere and barely concealed boredom. I know for a fact that she considered the entire soirée a smashing success, and her toast to the new year was candid and long. Around two o’clock in the morning, the bottom of the punchbowl was in sight, and I was running out of stamina. I silently prayed that someone would stand up to leave and suddenly everyone would notice the time. But just then, the doorbell rang.