In Babylon

‘I was far away.’ Uncle Chaim, Magnus, Herman, Zeno – they echoed in my mind, they were like wisps of smoke, slowly dissolving. ‘Very. Very far away.’ I shut my eyes and breathed deeply. ‘I’m back now,’ I said, when I had opened them again.

‘N?’ She left the manuscript for a moment and put her hands on my thighs. She looked at me closely. ‘Have you ever had this before?’

‘I’m a fairy tale writer,’ I said. ‘It’s my business to be far away.’

Nina jumped to her feet. ‘Why the hell can’t you Hollanders ever give a straight answer?’

‘Yes. You’re right.’ I reached for the pile of paper and began putting the pages in order. When I turned round Nina was sitting cross-legged, her arms folded, in her chair. ‘I’m sorry. Yes, I’ve had it before. Many times. But it’s got worse. Has its advantages, though.’ I picked up the bottle she had brought in and looked at the label.

‘What kind of advantages?’

‘Sometimes I get lost in a story.’

‘What kind of story?’

‘A fairy tale.’

She looked at me with the expression of a lab technician who can’t quite believe that this just came out of the test tube. ‘Are you telling me that you … that you drift off and then dream a fairy tale?’

‘Daydream.’

‘Daydream.’

I nodded.

‘I’ve always wondered where you got them from. Good thing you’re not married.’

‘What?’

‘Married, you know? To a woman?’

‘You mean that I wouldn’t make a very companionable husband.’

‘Companionable …’ she said. ‘No, I mean you’re just unconscious half the time.’

‘Where did you find this?’ I held up the bottle.

‘In the cellar. I spent a long time poking around. It was somewhere down at the bottom.’

The bottle was grey with dust, but I recognized it immediately. It was the red Aloxe Corton I had once given Uncle Herman for his birthday.

‘The corkscrew is still in the kitchen.’

‘I’ll go and get it.’

She was already at the door, when I called to her. ‘Aren’t you afraid, all by yourself?’

‘Of course I am, but there’s not much point in thinking about it. And I’ve just spent about half an hour alone in that cellar. I’ve already stood the test.’

I had thought that she had been gone for five minutes. Half an hour. I had lost half an hour of my consciousness. As if someone had thrown a switch and I had disappeared from ‘now’ and sunk away into my family’s past. The line between the world of the living and the dead, I thought, is growing thinner all the time.

When Nina returned with the corkscrew I cut the seal off the bottle and said, ‘This wine is nearly twenty years old. It might be past its best by now. The white …’ I began twisting the metal spiral into the neck. ‘… the white is renowned. One of the greatest …’ The cork was wedged in tightly. ‘… white wines. Charles the Fifth used to drink it, I’ve been told.’ It came out in one piece. Because the bottle had been lying in the rack for so long there was some deposit on the cork, but I saw no crystals. I picked up a glass and poured, the light of a candle behind the bottleneck. The wine was deep red in colour, not a trace of cloudiness. As I turned the glass around and looked at the liquid, I felt Nina’s gaze. I leaned over and sniffed. Then I took a careful sip. Somewhere in the distance a forest loomed up, with plenty of wood for chopping. I immediately thought of a story, ‘Blueberries’, by Tolstoy. Deep in the slow whirling of flavours and aromas I could clearly taste them: blueberries.

‘There is a God,’ I said.

‘N,’ she said, ‘you’re whining.’

Uncle Herman had good taste, completely unlike his brother, though I could certainly appreciate Manny’s preference for corned beef sandwiches with mustard and dill chips and a large glass of Budweiser. The difference was, I thought, as I drank my wine, that one sense of taste had a deeper richness, and the other, a more superficial one. When you got right down to it, I thought, that was probably the difference between America and Europe. We were accustomed to the struggle to reach the depths and, once there, to seek the things we were searching for. The Americans had brought that depth to the top and created a surface that was far richer and more complex than ours. For a moment I wondered what that meant for me, a product of both these cultures.

‘The tape is still running.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Should I throw more wood on the fire?’

‘Please. But be careful.’

She got a few bits and pieces and added them to the blazing pile in the hearth.

‘Now,’ she said, when she was sitting down again. ‘The story.’

‘What would you like to hear? Everything, from the very beginning, or would you rather I choose something?’

‘Something about yourself, then. Don’t you think that would be appropriate?’

‘I don’t really play a part in the story of my family. I was there, that’s all. That’s my second talent: I’m always there.’

‘Then tell me where you’ve been.’

‘The atom bomb, for instance.’

She looked at me, and when our eyes met I saw that a trace of fearful doubt had crept into her gaze.

‘I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was there at the first test explosion.’

‘In Japan?’

‘No, that wasn’t the first. In the desert, near Alamogordo, New Mexico.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Supposing … no, I believe you, but … would you please begin at the beginning?’

‘The problem is, you never quite know where the beginning is, in this family …’

‘Somewhere,’ she said, louder now. ‘Begin somewhere, anywhere, and work your way forward. Chronologically. All this jumping back and forth is driving me mad.’

I drank my wine and tried to forget Tolstoy’s blueberries. Nina sat curled up in her chair, head bowed, the heavy red hair like a hood around her face and over her shoulders. I filled our glasses, we drained them. We smoked another cigarette. Outside, the wind grabbed hold of the shutters and ran its hands along the house looking for chinks, holes, some way to get in. It wailed and moaned like a restless spirit. Around us the darkness bowed over the glow of the flames and it was as if we were sitting in a cave: the storyteller and the last member of his tribe, waiting until the fire, and finally they, too, turned to ashes.

A Land of Milk and Butter

IT ALL BEGAN with Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim Levi and his nephew Magnus. Uncle Chaim was a clockmaker, Magnus came walking all the way from Poland, his tool chest on his back, to build a new life for himself in the Lowlands. My great-grandfather, who was also a clockmaker, and my grandfather, the physicist, prided themselves on the fact that the men in our family, since the prehistory of clockwork, had all been people of time. Whenever my grandfather was holding forth and wanted to lend weight to his argument, he would bring up Magnus. Magnus Levi had learned the trade from Uncle Chaim, who had invented the pendulum clock, an innovation that made so little impression in seventeenth-century Lithuania that Uncle Chaim had flung it under his workbench, forgot about it, and was promptly forgotten himself. According to Uncle Herman, that pendulum clock was the first example of a familial talent to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Clockmakers, that’s what we were, even in the days when time was a rare commodity. Ragged tinkers who travelled from town to village and village to town, the clocks in a chest on their back, the little tools rolled up in canvas. Always on the road and always the tinkling of the bells of the wall clocks, the faint thrumming of the rods in the mantel clocks, the chickechickechick of the pocket watches. They carried time on their backs. Time travelled with them. Time was what they lived on. And for some, time was why they died. A distant ancestor once repaired a steeple clock, somewhere in the East, in a provincial capital on the edge of a Steppe. The clockwork had run riot and every few minutes you heard the sonorous chiming of the quarter hour or the rich blur of strokes that told the hour. The smith, at risk to his own life, had tried to disconnect the striking mechanism, but had got no further than muffling the sound with an old gunnysack. By the time the clockmaker arrived, he had nearly been beaten to a pulp. In the village, no one (except the deaf sexton) had slept for two days. Men, women, children, even animals had bags under their eyes and snarled and snapped at each other. Happy marriages threatened to dissolve, many women had fled to their relatives in other villages, the cows had stopped giving milk. There wasn’t a bird to be seen for miles around.

The clockmaker was received by a hoarse-voiced village elder. They shook hands, drank a glass of tea, and listened as the old man shouted out the details of what had happened. Then he plugged up his ears with wax and climbed the tower. The smith went with him. But when they reached the top, the clock would not be silenced. The two men climbed back down again, went to the village elder, and told him what was wrong. ‘We’ll just have to wait,’ the clockmaker said, ‘until the works have wound down.’ The village elder shook his head and said that wasn’t possible. Tomorrow was the annual fair and if the clock hadn’t stopped by then, the merchants would all go running. The village would lose such a large portion of their income that they wouldn’t be able to afford the sowing seed for the following year. The clockmaker looked at the smith, spread his arms, and climbed back up. There, between clock and clapper, he met his death.

Uncle Chaim was a taciturn man. He sat in his little wooden house, repaired timepieces, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘History,’ he told the young Magnus, ‘is like a clock. You think it’s getting later, but the hands are always moving in the same circle. What’s on top today, is on the bottom tomorrow.’ Magnus, who often came to see him in the little house at the edge of the woods and helped him out, or leafed through the old books that lay under the bed, Magnus would think back on what had happened, when a band of Cossacks had struck off the head of Chaim’s wife because she happened to be standing outside the door with a basket of washing when the horsemen thundered past. And he also thought of the village on the other side of the forest that, one day, was no longer there – burned to the ground.

Whenever Magnus was with his uncle, in the shaky wooden house, hidden among the trees at the edge of the forest, Chaim sat him down on the cracked bench beside the door and told him about the past, wading back and forth across the grey wooden floor, taking up clocks, picking up a screw here and there and putting it in one of the many drawers and boxes on the table under the window. Magnus sat down on the bench, which was so old it gleamed like dung, and listened. They drank tea out of glasses white with lime.

The old man told him of the days when there weren’t any Cossacks and everything was green and fields of sunflowers bloomed just outside the village, green stalks as thick as your arm with heads as big as wheels and in those heads the black spiral that nearly sucked you in, right into the heart of the sun … Magnus listened and thought: It’s all nostalgia, regret for lost time.

Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim’s favourite story took place in the days when he was just a boy and lived in a town in the North, on the river harbour. His parents owned a modest house on the quay. At the end of the cart track that ran along the house, where the deep furrows branched off to the right and disappeared in the first hesitant overgrowth of the great forest, stood a small wooden structure that looked like a cowshed and was inhabited by a woodsman and his three daughters. Chaim spent nearly all his days in the woods behind that odd-looking house, where he and the eldest of the three girls would think up long, perilous adventures.

‘It wasn’t a very big forest,’ he said. ‘Maybe two days around, but when you’re ten years old you can wander about a forest like that for a week and think you’re in another country. We usually pretended we had to make a dangerous journey, on horseback, straight through the Carpathians, through the forests of Lithuania. Early in the morning I would come for Freide and we’d go to the kitchen and fill a knapsack with provisions: some bread and cheese, a bottle of water. Then we’d mount our horses, the ones we didn’t have – we were just pretending – and ride out. First a long way over the firebreak, but soon we were among the trees, where it was dark and quiet. Usually we wouldn’t be home until suppertime, when it started getting dark. I can’t remember us talking much. We rode and rode, and were especially careful when our horses had to go downhill. Such fun we had. But the best part about the forest was clearing the land.

‘At the end of the summer,’ said Chaim, ‘we’d all go into the forest. The woodsman, Freide and her sisters and I would spend the whole day gathering brushwood. We sawed down sick trees, cut back gnarled branches, cleared the paths … In the afternoon we ate in the open field, right next to the lane, and in the evening, when we were done, we brought our brushwood there and made a big fire. You mustn’t forget, it was getting colder by then. Late September. During the day the sun still shone brightly, but the evenings were cool. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and the woodsman and I built a campfire. First a pile of dry leaves, covered with twigs, then a sort of wigwam made of branches, and on top of that heavy, gnarled boughs, as thick as an arm and often still green. After a while we had a big cone of wood. We left a small opening at the bottom where we could stick in a dry, burning branch. The campfire began to burn from inside out, from little to big, from dry to wet. It usually wasn’t long before we had a huge fire, and we roasted potatoes in the ashes. Above us, and in the forest, it had gone completely dark and we sat in that clearing, lit by the flames. Shadows danced among the trees. The sparks from the fire flew up to the treetops and burst into pieces. We would sometimes feel a little scared. As we pricked our potatoes on sticks and held them in the ashes, the woodsman told us ghost stories. I wish you could have seen it.’

That’s what he always said, Uncle Chaim: ‘I wish you could have seen it.’

Magnus saw other things. One day when he arrived at Uncle Chaim’s house he found a bare patch with smouldering stumps of charred wood where the house had been. The clockmaker was nowhere in sight. Magnus walked among the half-burnt pieces of wood, through the ankle-deep layer of damp ash, but found nothing to remind him of the little house. The bench was gone, the table, the shaky wooden bed with the old books … He picked up a stick and poked around in the blackened mess. Just as he was about to leave, he saw something lying in the scorched coppice, under an oak. It was Chaim’s instrument kit, the chest he used to carry on his back when he travelled about the country repairing clocks in remote villages and towns. It had been cast aside, landed in the bushes, and been forgotten. Magnus slung the chest onto his back and set out on his journey.

‘Cossacks,’ said Uncle Chaim, when I asked him once what had happened. ‘Beware of Cossacks, my boy.’

‘There are no more Cossacks,’ I said. ‘Not here.’

‘There are always Cossacks.’

Here was America, where we were already living, the land where Uncle Chaim thought that people lit their lamps with a dollar bill and nobody ate potatoes.

‘Cossacks and potatoes,’ said Uncle Chaim. And he sang, to confirm his loathing for potatoes:

Zuntik – bulbes,

Montik – bulbes,

Dinstik un mitvokh – bulbes,

Donershtik un fraytik – bulbes,

Shabes in a novene:

– a bulbe-kugele!

Zuntik – vayter bulbes.

Sunday, potatoes. Monday, potatoes. Tuesday and Wednesday, potatoes. Thursday and Friday, potatoes. But on Shabbat, a special treat: potato pudding! Sunday, more potatoes.

‘The food alone should have been reason enough for me to leave that country,’ Uncle Chaim once said. I had reminded him that this would have made him an eligible candidate for the Hollander Top Ten List of Terrible Reasons to Make Drastic Decisions.

‘Pah!’ he said. ‘Don’t compare me to your father, who left Europe because he didn’t want to wear a tie. Or Magnus, who left because he was looking for a wife without a moustache.’

That was what Magnus had said, that all the women in their region had moustaches. ‘Moustaches and hairy legs.’ He had shivered at the thought. Uncle Chaim had looked at him sideways, his left eyebrow lowered. ‘Hairy legs? When did you see a leg?’ Magnus, inhabitant of the spiritual realm for nearly three centuries now, had blushed like a young girl. ‘Nu, Magnus, Nephew. Where in all those parts did you ever see a leg?’ Magnus had mumbled something about moustaches and that he had certainly seen them before and that you could only assume … His uncle’s eyebrow remained firmly lowered and it was a long time before he looked away. Finally he turned to me and shrugged.

But neither hairy legs, nor upper lips, were the reason for Magnus’s departure. It was the last Cossack raid, when Uncle Chaim’s house was burned to the ground. There, among the stumps of wood and lumps of charred straw, like rotting teeth in a blackened mouth, he had tightened his belt, knotted his puttees, and left.

The year was 1648.

Magnus Levi, as he was still called at the time, reached, after more than twenty-one years of travelling, the easternmost part of the Lowlands. And there he stayed. Not because he was tired, which he was, or sick of travelling, which he also was, but because he arrived in a town on Market Day. He wandered among the stalls looking at blushing apples, pears as big as a man’s fist, cabbages like cannon balls and bulky rolls of worsted. He could smell contentment in the air and he felt something settling inside him, going slowly round and round, the way dogs do when they have found a place where they want to lie down. Magnus tried to resist this unfamiliar feeling, but it was strong, almost overwhelming. He jumped when a cloth merchant called out to him.

‘What’re you selling, friend?’

He could vaguely make out what the man asked, because the dialect in which he spoke sounded much like the Plattdeutsch he had picked up along the way.

‘Uhren.’

‘Clocks?’

Magnus nodded.

The man beckoned him to come closer and then gestured to him that he wished to see what was in the wooden chest. Magnus placed the chest on the merchant’s stall and opened it. Hanging among his neatly arranged tools was the little pendulum clock he had made. The man pursed his lips and nodded admiringly.

‘Schön,’ he said. He looked back at Magnus, his head slightly tilted, and asked, ‘Deutsche?’

‘Deutsche?’ Magnus shook his head. ‘Weiter östlich. Polen.’

‘Pol …’

Once again Magnus shook his head. ‘Da gewohnt. Nicht Polak.’

The merchant shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the pendulum clock. ‘Wieviel?’

Magnus named his price and the man on the other side of the stall began busily converting. Again he pursed his lips.

Meanwhile a small group of curious onlookers had gathered around them. People asked the merchant where the traveller had come from and the merchant, who suddenly felt like a true cosmopolitan, told them the story. Just as Magnus was taking the pendulum clock out of the chest so that they could see it better, the cloud of spectators parted. A lady and her companion walked through the space they had made. Magnus, who hadn’t noticed a thing, was busy letting the clock chime. The melodious cooing of the rods and the first four lines of the song Friede always used to sing rose up in the clear spring air. He had worked for months to get the eleven copper rods just the right length that they would produce the proper tones, and before that he had slaved many, many months to build a mechanism that would allow the tiny hammers to hit the rods at just the right tempo, and in sequence. He stared dreamily at the little clock. He didn’t notice that anything had changed until he saw the merchant give a deep nod. At first he grinned, taking the nod as a sign of appreciation and admiration, but when it remained silent and everyone appeared to have shifted their gaze, he looked sideways. Standing next to him was a young woman in a dress of midnight-blue. A black crocheted shawl was draped across her shoulders. She was in the company of a servant girl in a white lace cap.

‘What song is that?’

She had dark eyes, the colour of polished, gleaming walnut, and curly black hair, tied back in a ponytail.

He stammered out something that even he didn’t understand.

‘Deutsche?’ she asked.

The merchant explained to her where the clockmaker had come from and then Magnus told her that he had been on the road for twenty years now and had travelled through Poland and Bohemia and Moravia repairing clocks and in one big city had even built a timepiece for the mayor.

When he had finished speaking, the young woman asked how much he wanted for the pendulum clock. Magnus looked at the timepiece. The sloping sides were like the curve of a woman’s hip, the wood was the colour of … He named a price that was barely half what he had named earlier.

‘What?’ cried the merchant. ‘You told me …’

Magnus, who realized he had let himself get carried away and was about to be laughed at, picked up the pendulum clock and tucked it back into his wooden travelling case. He smiled unhappily, shrugged his shoulders, and said, in even clumsier German (if that were possible), something that was meant to explain his peculiar behaviour. The young woman leaned towards her maidservant and whispered something in her ear. Then she gave Magnus a nod and asked the merchant to measure off two yards of white linen.

The group of onlookers dispersed and Magnus slung the chest onto his back. He walked between two stalls and made his way to the large church in the middle of the market square. There, in the shelter of the buttresses, where it stank of rotting vegetables and old fish, he had a serious word with himself. How could he have been so stupid? To let himself be carried away by a pair of beautiful eyes? Imagine selling Reisele for a price that wouldn’t even cover the cost of … You’re in a strange land, Magnus Levi. You’ve got to keep silent and listen, instead of bragging and swooning. When he had gone past the church the sun came out again, and in the clear spring light he walked out of the market square, into an alleyway between two large white houses with stained glass windows. Behind the glass he saw a row of plants in white and blue pots. They bore red flowers, as big as apples. He had seen many things on his journey to the West: he had been in prosperous regions, but nowhere had he seen such abundance as in this place, nowhere had it been as clean, nowhere did the brass door knobs gleam as brightly as they did here. Behind the white houses was a cobblestoned street lined with clipped trees and tidy flower beds. As he walked among those little trees he heard the click-clacking of a woman’s heels. When he looked around he saw a servant girl, who had gathered up her skirts and was running towards him.

When she had caught up with him, she stood there for a while, panting. He waited for her to catch her breath, trying to look friendly. This wasn’t easy, because he was frightened. He had recognized her as the servant girl he had seen with the young woman who had been standing next to him at the market, and he was afraid she had come to tell him that he had behaved in an unseemly manner and that she would have him run out of town. That had happened to him before, somewhere in a Prussian village. He had never quite been able to discover what he had done wrong, but whatever it was, he had nearly been thrown in prison for doing it.

‘My mistress asks if you would be so kind as to repair the clocks in her father’s house,’ panted the girl.