In Babylon

He looked at her without quite understanding what she meant. She was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and she didn’t seem to find him at all threatening or strange. But that still didn’t set his mind at rest. ‘Ich geh weiter,’ he said. ‘Andere Stadt. Muβ gehen …’

The servant girl sighed and shook her head. ‘They’ll pay you well,’ she said. ‘She wants you to come, sir. She’s seen your clock.’

Pride is like the sun that peeks out from between two clouds. Magnus felt the agreeable warmth of recognition.

‘Die Dame ist nicht böse?’ he asked.

The servant girl shook her head. ‘You may come this evening, seven o’clock,’ she said. She told him the address and made him repeat it three times. Anyone, she said, could show him the way. Her master’s house was known to all.

For the rest of that day Magnus wandered about the town. He looked at shops, peered through the open doors of coffee houses, and stood for a long time gazing at mothers as they walked with their young children across a grassy field. Ducks waddled along the banks of a pond, deer stood poised on a hilltop, a jay skimmed carelessly over his head. Everything was small and clear and still. Magnus had arrived in a fairyland.

That night, in the little town in the east, Magnus was to meet the woman of his life. Her name was Rebekka Gans and she was the daughter of a prosperous cattle dealer. The shy clockmaker had moved about the house behind the Grote Markt like a cat walking on new-fallen snow. He didn’t dare sit on the brocade chairs, and he stood there clutching his travelling case for so long that the young lady finally asked if he wouldn’t rather put it down. Where? Magnus had thought, looking around the high-ceilinged room with the gleaming wooden floor. She had walked up to him, taken the chest, not flinching when she felt the weight of wheels and tools, and leaned it against the green-veined marble of the hearth. Then she had looked at him with her grave, impassive face and rung for the maid.

He had examined every clock in the house that night and as he did so, had drunk tea out of cups so thin that the light from the oil lamp shone right through them and had eaten almond curls so fine and meltingly sweet that they flitted about in his empty stomach like butterflies. When he left, after an hour or two, his head felt as light as those biscuits.

‘Eyes like a moon calf,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘In love. In love? Bewitched!’

That was how it felt, in any case. And Magnus knew just when it had happened. Not at the market, where he was ‘Smitten by the sight of her,’ as he himself once said. Not when he was in the house, nibbling on those fluttering cookies and watching the flicker of candlelight under the teapot. Not when he had placed the small black-lacquered clock before him on the table. ‘Salomon Coster, The Hague,’ it said on a silver plate behind the glass door. The young lady had stood beside him and watched as he studied the movement. It was a pendulum and, as far as he could tell, one of the first applications of that technique. He had asked three questions, enough to determine that the clock was about ten years old, that it was based on the theory of a certain Huygens, who had invented the pendulum clock. At that moment Magnus had realized that Uncle Chaim had invented the very same thing fifteen years earlier. He had looked up, young Magnus, stared into the lamplit twilight, and let his eyes wander. The waste of it all. The clock that Uncle Chaim, shaking his head, had flung under his workbench after Wolschke, the German forester, had informed him that the count had called it a ‘diabolical piece of rubbish’ and didn’t want it in his house. The capriciousness of an age that allowed two, maybe even more, to come up with the same invention, yet clasped only one of them to her bosom. If Uncle Chaim had been credited with the invention instead of Mr Huygens, the history of Chaim and Magnus, perhaps even of the entire continent, would have turned out differently. And then he had met her eyes, at the end of the journey his eyes had made around the room. The oil lamp lit them from the side and he saw tiny stars in the blackness, the veil of her lashes, the soft yet clear-cut line of her jaw, and he wanted to turn away but couldn’t. Her bound hair curled rebelliously at her temples, a few strands had come loose above her left eye and before he knew what he was doing his hand was on its way to … That’s when it happened. A shadow of a smile had stolen across her face (not just her lips, he remembered later that night, as he wandered through the town, brooding and pondering, it hadn’t just glided over her lips, that smile, but over her whole face, the … the memory of a smile, a barely perceptible ‘yes,’ an ‘if circumstances were different …’) and he had felt his hand clench, had, so slowly that it seemed to last for hours, called it back (‘Here! Here, you mongrel of a hand! Down!’) and the hand came back towards his own face and – by that time his neck was damp with sweat – suddenly the hand was coming towards him at full speed. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor. He had boxed his own ear. The lady tried to control herself, but even he felt relieved when, not two seconds later, she burst into peals of laughter.

Outside, under the spring moon, drifting from one alleyway to the next, he had wallowed in his shame like a pig in the mud.

‘The history of love. Write about that, a big fat book. Kings. Princes. Abraham and Sarah, ah … Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. David and Bathsheba. And one special chapter for the man who boxed his own ear,’ Uncle Chaim said. ‘And all because he was scared of hairy legs. Bah!’

By morning, Magnus had walked around the town three times and knew it as well as the village where he himself had grown up. The streets, the houses, the market square, the shooting grounds, they were all like the movement of a trusty clock. He bought bread at the baker’s and ate it on the bank of a ditch strewn with buttercups. The dew left the fields, birds flew up to the clear blue sky like tinkling bells. The smell of cow dung rose up from the ground and tickled his nostrils. A milkmaid came by with two wooden buckets on her yoke and saw him chewing his butterless bread. She put down her buckets, drew a dipper out of the milk, and gave him a drink. He thanked her in a mixture of languages he had learned along the way and she laughed like a man as she walked on. He gazed after her, the broad hips in the long striped skirt, the plump back, the full, rounded arms. A land of milk and butter. The milk he had drunk was nearly yellow with cream. He was no farmer, but even a layman could see how succulent and tender the grass was here.

Halfway through the morning he tugged on the copper bell at the merchant’s house and was let in by the servant girl. She gave him milk in a mug and set a plate beside it with a buttered brown slab. The milk was sweet and hot, the slab of brown was called koek and tasted of anise. After he’d eaten he was shown into the parlour – but no one was there. The table had been cleared and laid with a coarse linen cloth. He went and fetched, under the maid’s supervision, the clocks he had seen earlier, and set about his work. Although the clocks were a different shape from those he knew, he was familiar with the works, and by noon he had cleaned and oiled two of the four. Then the maid came for him and in the kitchen, where a portly cook was stirring a pot, he was given bread and cheese. It wasn’t until he had closed up the last clock that the lady of the house walked in. The maid followed her carrying a tray with a teapot, a blue and white plate of butter biscuits, and a little tower of porcelain. Magnus cleared off the table, cleaned his instruments, and packed up his chest. All that time the young woman watched him gravely. Then she removed the cloth from the table, set it, and had him sit down again.

‘Nu,’ she said. ‘Lomir redn.’

So. Let’s talk.

The maid left the room. Magnus, his mouth a carriage house, stared at the woman in amazement.

They spoke. They spoke like the tea that flowed, fragrant, from the spout of the teapot, like the biscuits that crumbled between their teeth and left a buttery film on their fingertips. They spoke until the windowpanes turned grey, blue, and finally indigo. They spoke, and it was, as Magnus would later say, as if he were emptying and filling at the same time.

Then the merchant came in.

‘A beard,’ said Magnus, many centuries later, ‘a beard like a cluster of bees. A head of hair – he was my future father-in-law but there’s no other way to describe it, I’m sorry – a head of hair like a witch’s broom. My heart didn’t just stop: it was no longer there.’

‘Becky,’ the giant had said. (‘A giant, Nathan,’ said Magnus. ‘I didn’t even know that Jews could be so big. A voice like the great clock in Worky.’) ‘Becky, I didn’t know we had guests.’

‘Tatele,’ she said. ‘This is the clockmaker.’

And Magnus had jumped up, knocking over his chair, clicked his heels (as he had learned in Germany), bowed from the hips, and cried, ‘At your service, Your Grace, Magnus Levi!’ And he thought, Tatele? Little Papa?

Becky and her father had laughed like the rain: he, a gusty cloudburst of deep, sonorous tones, she, a spring shower on a velvety meadow.

A clockmaker, even though he travelled about and carried all his wordly possessions in a chest upon his back, was good enough for Rebekka Gans. Her father, Meijer, a dealer in livestock, had also started from scratch. He knew that the Jews in neighbouring countries, and even in some parts of the Lowlands, lived by the grace of the good-naturedness of their local administrators. He had been in the North, where no more than three Jewish families were allowed to live in town, where Jews were only allowed to be butchers, tanners, or peddlers, and were forbidden to build synagogues. The tolerance in this region, and especially in the prosperous West, had made him a wealthy man, but he had never forgotten his own humble beginnings.

That was why, even though Magnus was poor and had no home, Meijer Gans looked at the character of the man who wanted his daughter and not at his position or means. He peered into Magnus’s soul, seeking ambition and a spirit of enterprise. He was pleased with what he found.

The couple were given Salomon Coster’s clock and a dowry in silver when, two months later, they left for West Holland. In Rotterdam, a cousin of Meijer Gans’s who dealt in grain helped them find a house. The widower himself – Rebekka’s mother had died of childbed fever shortly after her birth – remained behind in the East. He would miss his daughter the way a man misses an arm, yet he wished her happiness and good fortune, things that, in his opinion, were best found in the West. Magnus embarked on a new life and, as if to show how much he wanted to be and belong here, he changed his name to Hollander. He knew of no better way to stress his wholehearted devotion to this rich land of luscious grass, creamy milk, and golden yellow cheese.

A son was born, one, whom they named Chaim. He became a clockmaker and met a girl called Zipporah Leib. The son married the Leib girl. They had a son, who was named after Grandfather Meijer and, scarcely three years after his birth, died of galloping consumption. Chaim thought he had provoked the Lord of the Universe by not giving his firstborn son the name he should have had, and so, seven years later, when another son was born, he was called Heijman, the Dutch version of Chaim, which means ‘life.’ The boy was strong and healthy and, like his father, became a clockmaker. He married, as had every other man in the family, late. He took Chava Groen as his wife, and when they were nearly forty she had a son whom they called Heijman. He married Lenah Arends, and from their alliance, too, came one son: Heijman Three. He took Rebecca van Amerongen as his wife, who bore him Heijman Four. The nineteenth century was two years old by then. Heijman Four and his wife, Esther de Jong, had a child at the age of forty-three. It was a son: Heijman Five. This descendant of the house of Hollander, a clockmaker, married young. He was twenty-three when he met Anna Blum and twenty-four, Anna twenty-five, when they knew the joy of offspring: Heijman Six.

The tide of time (Magnus’s words) had driven the Hollanders to the West, to Rotterdam, that boisterously expanding merchant city on the North Sea coast, and there it seemed as if they had finally landed in a peaceful haven. Seven generations of Heijmans (if we count the first, who was called Chaim) grew up there. Magnus and Rebekka lived to see their children’s children, but could sense that the younger generation were ashamed of the family’s humble origins; embarrassed by Magnus’s old work-coat, the wooden chest Rebekka had hung on the wall and the modest trade in matzos, dried fruit and nuts that she and her friend Schoontje ran from a little shop in the Jewish quarter.

‘That’s the way it goes,’ said Magnus, in keeping with the analysis that my grandfather, the last Heijman Hollander, liked to make of The Journey to the West. ‘You start with a stone, a piece of rope and a threadbare coat, and you build a house so your children will have a roof over their heads, a safe place to live, but once they’ve grown, they say: Come, Father, throw away that stone and that rope and that old coat. Everyone wants a house, no one likes to be reminded of all the grief that came before it.’

The last Heijman in the series took Sarah van Vlies to be his bride. He didn’t succeed his father in the clockmaking business, but studied physics instead and eventually became a professor in Leiden. His parents had left him a jewellery shop and renowned repair studio, and enough money to enable him to take his doctoral degree. Heijman became a respected, though not exceptional, physicist. His greatest claim was the development of a standard formula for bridge construction. At a time when physics was becoming increasingly experimental, he was more of an engineer than a researcher, more of a clockmaker than a thinker.

And so, eight generations of the family started by Magnus and Rebekka had been born in Rotterdam. They had lived, prospered, prayed, sung, and died there. They had seen the fishing village grow to become the second merchant city of Holland and ultimately – after the Nieuwe Waterweg had been dug and another Jew – Pincoffs – had founded the Rotterdamse Handelsvereniging and had the harbours built on Feijenoord – the largest harbour in the world. They had prospered, the Hollanders, just as the city had prospered, and, like the city, had set their sights on the West, on all that was modern and new. Together, they had opened themselves to the world, yet felt deeply and firmly rooted in that land of Holland. When, in 1939, the eighth and ninth generations stood on board the ship that was to take them from Rotterdam to New York, their departure was more than the leaving of a place. It was the resumption of the journey, the loss of the place that had allowed them to take root in the world. It was the loss of a place that was just like them, a city that, unlike Amsterdam, had never boasted about her tolerance for the Jews, yet was often more tolerant. Rotterdam had become their heart and they had felt cherished in her arms. Moving on was second nature to the Hollander family, yet for eight generations, from Magnus’s son Chaim to the last Heijman, they had been Rotterdamers, born and bred. They had all but forgot where they began.

1648 was the year Magnus slung his pack on his back, turned round, and left the region where he had been born, raised, and expected to die. Twenty-one years later he arrived in the Lowlands.

‘Twenty-one years to walk from Poland to Holland?’ I once asked him, amazed at the duration of the journey.

‘He lost his way,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Didn’t know he was going to Holland. Knew he was headed West. Took a wrong turn.’ ‘I … Things were different then,’ said Magnus.

‘I understand that. But twenty-one years?’

‘Magnus,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Dear dear dear … nephew. Worthless boy scout.’

So for twenty-one years Magnus was on his way and what he did in all that time no one really knew. He himself said that he worked a bit here, stayed for a while there, turned South when he thought he was going West. A journey … If you were to try and draw the route, you would end up with a tangle of wool.

Two and a half centuries later, in Rotterdam, my father and mother met.

‘The Lord of the Universe, whether you believe in Him or not,’ was Uncle Herman’s version, ‘decided in 1927, or, God knows, perhaps even from the genesis of creation, to bring together the light and the darkness, and that He would do this in the form of a marriage. That is why – pay attention! – He arranged for your parents to fall into each other’s arms during the fireworks on Midsummer Night. Good fortune, some people would call it, bad luck say those who know better. Others (by that, Uncle Herman was referring to himself) call it a disaster. He came from a family of clockmakers and physicists, she was old money. He was a promising engineer, she, a young lady who had life figured out long before life understood her. He lived in the shadow of his father, your grandfather, who placed physics above all else, and she thought that physics was merely re-inventing the wheel. She was a free spirit.’

Uncle Herman had the tendency to devote quite a bit of attention to the setting in his stories, the backdrop against which a particular event took place. Perhaps this is something peculiar to sociologists. Whatever the case: ever since he first told me his version of the downfall, I was impressed by the way in which he linked the fate of our family to the history of this century, particularly because he proved to be right.

It was Midsummer Night, 1929 (not 1927, Uncle Herman wasn’t very good at dates) and above the park, rockets were flaring and fading in chrysanthemums of red, yellow, green and blue sparks. The upturned faces of the spectators and passers-by shone in the light of the fireworks, and the tall oaks and chestnut trees looked lovelier than ever. Outside the little white inn at the edge of the park, men stood with a glass of beer in one hand, the thumb of their other hand hooked in a waistcoat pocket, legs slightly apart. Women hung on their arms or whispered to one other. Each time a rocket exploded, their dresses flashed white in the darkness.

‘Hollander! Hollander!’ someone shouted. His voice was half lost in the booming of the fireworks, but my father had heard it and looked around, searchingly. He met the equally searching gaze of a young woman standing nearby. They looked at each other, turned away, and continued hunting.

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