Hannah slapped the celery onto the sink counter and turned to leave. “Nothing, Oma.”
Hilde followed her. “What did you see out there?”
“Nothing. Just children jumping off porches holding open umbrellas. Playing parachutes. They do it whenever they hear planes. Haven’t you noticed?”
She watched Hilde and Mother look at each other in puzzlement. No, of course they hadn’t.
That evening with the house darkened, after her parents hid ten pieces of hametz around the house, Tobias did the ritual final search for hametz by candlelight. Using a feather, he brushed the crumbs into a wooden spoon with a seriousness Hannah couldn’t remember from past years when it was more of a game.
“Where’d you get the feather, Toby?” Hannah asked.
“It’s Leo’s.” He held it up and twirled it. “Look how it’s purple on the edge. And wider on one side than the other. It came out in my hand as I was holding him. I didn’t mean to.”
No. He could never do the birds harm.
Father put the crumbs, the feather and the spoon into a paper bag to be burned the next morning. After Toby went to bed, when she thought he’d be asleep, she drew back the curtain that divided their bedroom and looked at him awhile. The boy in the street had the same curly hair as Toby. Bending to pull the blanket over him, she breathed the musty, innocent smell of rabbit and crayon and pigeon.
Before breakfast the whole family gathered on the porch, and Father struck a match and touched it to the edge of the bag.
“Two places, Sol,” Hilde said. “To give it a good burning.”
Hannah watched the black edge creep sideways across the bag, like the front line of an army, she thought, bringing a small wall of orange flame behind it until it touched the other black edge advancing to meet it. The Red Sea closing in instead of parting. Eventually the wooden spoon was a burnt bone of dying cinder on the bricks of the porch. Hannah stamped it out.
In the afternoon Father went walking with Toby, Hannah didn’t know where, but she knew they’d end up at the Rotterdam Cafe in order to bring home for Seder dinner two of the refugee families who were living upstairs.
Except for the slow rhythmic crunch-crunch of Mother chopping nuts for the charoseth, and the coos of the pigeons echoing down the open air vent, the house was quiet. With everything nearly ready for the holiday at sundown, it seemed to Hannah that the rooms breathed expectation, as before a death, or a birth. She thought about that for a while, feeling it settle as she sat sideways in her father’s chair at the dining table, fingering idly the scalloped edge of the white tablecloth.
Hilde wedged two candles in the silver candlesticks, arranged the Delftware basin and pitcher on the sideboard for washing the hands, dug a dust rag one last time into the sideboard carving and flicked it along the lower edge of the picture frame.
“You know what she’s looking at out the window, don’t you?” Hilde said. “Her future husband.”
Naturally she’d think that, Hannah said to herself.
“What do you think?” Mother asked from the kitchen doorway.
“Pigeons. Just pigeons,” Hannah said.
“Pigeons? What do you mean by that?” Hilde said.
“I mean it doesn’t matter what she’s looking at. Or what she’s doing, or not doing.” She looked Hilde dead in the eye. “It only matters that she’s thinking.”
“Is that why you like her?” Mother asked in surprise.
“And because I know her.”
Hannah stood up, went down the hallway and up the attic ladder. Leo was closest, dozing. She grabbed him first, and in a frenzied flapping of wings, twisted his neck until its tightness released under her fingers. Squawks of the others rang in her ears. She lunged to catch Henriette and skinned her knee. Two, three, four, each time that same soft popping underneath the feathers.
She came down the hallway staring straight ahead. Her hands trembled so much Mother noticed. Hannah looked down too and saw a wisp of feather underneath the nail of her forefinger, the smallest bit of gray breast down. She flicked it away. Mother and Hilde gaped at her, apparently unable to move. Hilde’s lips pinched into a purple wound.
“Go wash your hands,” Mother murmured.
Hannah turned, caught her foot on the hall runner, and lunged into the bathroom. She heard her mother’s voice. “This is one time, in your son’s home, you will say nothing, Hilde. Nothing.” Hannah turned on the water. She didn’t want to hear what would come next. She washed up to her elbows, and her skinned knee. After a while she slipped into her room and lay on her bed. When she heard through the air vent Mother sweeping the coop, she felt a trickle of moisture creep toward her temple. She waited for the chop-chop of the charoseth. Then she changed her dress and gave her hair a good brushing.
When Father and Toby came in, she couldn’t look directly at them. The two German families were awkward, not knowing where to put themselves. A boy younger than Toby stood wordless and clinging to his father. Mother had Toby introduce each guest to Hilde, had him pass out the Haggadahs, had him bring the white kittel to his father to put on. She had him arrange on the Seder plate the celery, the shank bone, the charoseth, a withered root of horseradish and a small peeled potato carved narrower at one end to look like an egg, and then she asked him to watch on the porch for sunset in the western sky. All this, Hannah knew, so he wouldn’t think to take the little German boy upstairs to show him the birds.
Mother rummaged in the sideboard and brought out the old Delftware candlesticks. “Here,” she said to Hannah. “These were your great-grandmother Etty’s, but tonight and forever, they’ll be yours. Wash them and put them on the table.”
And Hannah did.
“Sunset’s coming,” Toby announced from the porch. “The sky’s all goldy.”
Her mother struck a match and held it to an old candle stub until a flame rose, touched it to the two tapers in the silver candlesticks and handed it to Hannah. She did the same with hers. Watching her candlelight illuminate the girl in the painting, she knew why this night was different from all other nights. Real living had begun.
Adagia
Walking with his wife Digna along the narrow canal, Laurens van Luyken kept a discreet distance behind the young lovers, as if to give them privacy, but he watched their every move. Just beyond his neighbor’s oxcart, he saw his daughter lean, unnecessarily, on the young man’s arm.
The autumn air blew crisply and Digna drew close her cape. Laurens usually found wind invigorating, but this afternoon it made him feel as though a wall of gray sea were thundering toward him against which he had to brace himself. The breeze was crisp, the fallen leaves were crisp, everything was crisp. Johanna’s voice was crisp earlier that day when she told him, “Papa, Fritz asked me to marry him, and I told him yes.” Just like that. No prelude. No delicacy. Not even a nod to tradition. As if fathers needn’t even be asked anymore to give up their daughters to someone else’s love. Was this the way Amsterdammers did things? A herald of how life would be in the new century?
“We should give them a fine gift,” Digna said, taking Laurens’ arm just like Johanna had done with Fritz. “Something of ours she’s always loved and will always keep.”
“Does that mean you’re agreeing to this?”
“He’s a good fellow. And handsome.” He caught her playful smile. “Erasmus says if you must be hanged let it be on a fair gallows.”
“Gallows weren’t intended for the young and innocent.”
Up ahead their dog, Dirk, trotted right in Johanna’s way so that she almost stumbled, and then Fritz said something that made her laugh. Laurens watched her press herself against this man and kiss him lightly on his ear. Dirk barked what Laurens knew was an admonition. Laurens found a perverse pleasure in noting that Dirk did not take too keenly to the attentions Johanna was paying to this odd-smelling interloper in leather shoes instead of good, solid klompen, clearly not a resident of Vreeland. He was amused when Dirk, trembling with suspicion, had g
rowled something obviously insulting at Fritz when he arrived by coach at noon.
“Look at her, Laurens. Radiant.”
Instead, he glanced sideways at his wife. The happiness had traveled: His daughter’s wild, dewy bliss had freshened every pore in Digna’s familiar face.
“What could we give them?” she asked, a pleasant urgency in her voice.
“A broom and a butter churn?”
“We could give them the Digna Louise.”
“No. Fritz has an old smack boat. He told me he took it out last week to the Zuider Zee and nearly froze. No one in his right mind, outside fishermen, would go sailing there after September.”
Their neighbors’ skiffs were lined up stem to stern where the canal joined Loosdrechtsche Plassen. Laurens remembered how as a young girl Johanna called them wishbone boats, for the graceful shape of their prows. He wondered if she told Fritz that just now as they passed the skiffs along the bank.
Johanna and Fritz turned at Ruyter’s mustard mill to walk the lakeshore wagon road, and looked back for Laurens and Digna to follow. Something of their expectancy, the feeling that they were sailing forth into an adventure in an untried craft, awakened in Laurens a vaguely competitive warmth, and he slipped his arm around his wife’s supple waist. “You cold?” he asked, half hoping that she was.
“I could give her my mother’s opal ring, but that’s not very much. And it should be something from both of us. For both of them.”
To Laurens, everything about the couple ahead bore the conspicuous marks of euphoria. Too soon blooming, he thought, too soon coming in to seed. They had not suffered long winter evenings of soulful contemplation, but were careening ahead as if it were already tulip time.
So now she would go. She would leave Vreeland where she knew every pathway, every plank of every bridge, every family’s horse and wagon, where he’d taught her to skate right here on Loosdrechtsche Plassen, where he’d watched her play every summer under the willows at their canal edge, happily pouring buckets of canal water into a cracked and chipped Delftware tea set that had been his mother’s. She would leave the town of her birth and ancestry, and go to Amsterdam, nearly half a day’s carriage ride over the dike roads.
Laurens was amused that Dirk made such a show of his distrust of this wolf in sheep’s clothing, this mountebank with the queer smell, by plunging his way between Fritz and Johanna’s legs, but Laurens did not gloat. Something moved him about the way they paid homage to each other with their eyes, Johanna shining with the intoxication of the unknown, and he wanted them to have a moment’s peace. Only a thrown stick, well aimed along the narrow bank, would tear Dirk away from his self-appointed office of protecting Johanna. Laurens called to Dirk, threw the stick and missed the grassy bank. Dirk bounded into the lake to chase the splash, and Digna laughed, making it all worthwhile.
She squeezed his arm. “I know! The painting. Girl With a Sewing Basket.” Her bright expectant eyes and open-mouthed smile shot through him. “She’s always loved it.”
“No.”
Dirk brought him the stick but he did not take it.
Digna turned to him, a look of bafflement on her sweet ivory face. He watched a breeze blow strands of her chestnut hair out from her chignon, waving like sea grass in a current. She pulled him along, laughing through her words. “What makes you so ungenerous? She’s our only daughter.”
“I’m sure we can think of something else.”
“Why not the painting?”
“Because I gave it to you.”
“But it would be a touch of our home in theirs.”
“No, Digna.”
“Why not?” She put her hand in his, urging his agreement.
“I wouldn’t want to be without it.”
“I never knew you were that attached to it. It isn’t worth much, though I do like the way it mimics a Vermeer.”
He grabbed on to that. “More like a de Hooch. The dealer said de Hooch painted floor tiles the same way.”
She smiled a teasing reprimand, a smile recognizing the transparency of his diversion. He felt foolish and exposed. She knew him too well. No doubt she had some adage from Erasmus to warn about people who try lamely to change the subject. Digna rendered favorite epigrams from Erasmus’s Adagia as embroidery samplers, sometimes keeping the Latin if she liked the way it sounded, like “Tempus omnia revelat.” So earnest there by the fireside, over the years she stitched onto stretched cloth as if onto her heart Erasmus’s religion of rational thought: Trying got the Greeks to Troy. An ill crow lays an ill egg. No one is injured save by himself.
“Why don’t you give them an embroidery adage?
Her smile turned to scornful laughter. “Why don’t you want to give them the painting?”
He looked ahead toward the osier beds along the lakeshore. In the veiled atmosphere of a light fog blowing in, the osier heads bending and rustling seemed to him like ghosts beckoning.
“It… I bought it to commemorate a period in my life, and for that reason I can’t let it go.”
“I thought you bought it for me? Our anniversary. Remember?”
She pulled away and wrapped herself in her cape. A slight tremor passed through him.
“I did. I—” He was losing her now, but held onto the belief that they’d always trusted each other with truth. “It reminded me of someone I knew once.”
Digna stopped.
“The way the girl is looking out the window,” he said. “Waiting for someone. And her hand. Upturned, and so delicate. Inviting a kiss.”
Digna turned. “Let’s go back.”
He looked ahead at his daughter and her man. “What about them?”
“They’ll come.”
When they headed back toward the house, Dirk ran before them, bounded back, and sprang forward again, knowing that at home he would be fed. Laurens felt a mild annoyance at his wild, glad movements.
Digna did not question him anymore, but slowed her pace, waiting. He looked out to the pewter-colored lake, agitated into peaked claws by gusts of wind, where he had courted danger many times, skating before the ice was ready.
“Her name was Tanneke. It was when I was working at the Haarlemmermeer pumping plant back in ’74.” He knew he should give this to her right then, to set the time, so long ago, years before he met Digna. “She lived in Zandvoort. I met her at The Strand, at the poffertjes stand. I elbowed my way ahead of her and bought a bagful, spun around and popped one in her mouth.” He chuckled softly. “Powdered sugar stuck on her nose.”
He longed to steal a glance at his wife, to see if she could imagine the scene to be as sweet and innocent as he remembered it.
The flow of memory as they walked kept him thinking out loud. “We used to go out walking. Along the dunes and in the heather. In the woods too. She loved Haarlemmer Hout, knew its paths as well as Johanna knows the lanes of Vreeland. I kissed her palm once, in those woods, under a fir tree where we’d gone for shelter from a rain.”
“Were you in love with her?”
He’d said too much. He was sorry he’d mentioned anything.
“With her I was… I was like Fritz.” He turned from her so she would not see on his face the happiness he had with Tanneke so long ago.
A gust of memory shivered him. “I was foolish. I didn’t keep a rendezvous with her, so that I would appear independent, I suppose. To make her long for me, when it was really I who longed for her. When I went to see her some time later, she had left Zandvoort, and had told her parents not to tell me where she’d gone.” A pang at his own stupidity, his passivity or lethargy, shot through him with surprising sharpness which he hoped his voice had not revealed.
Staring ahead, he felt rather than saw Digna move away.
And now, stupid again, to hurt his wife. They went the rest of the way in silence, and he felt her trying to imagine her way into his past.
They passed the train of skiffs, and the wishbone shapes, inverted now, were to him only his neighbors’ old rowboats. They
passed their neighbor’s vegetable garden and he had to call Dirk back from trampling through the rows of purple cabbages sitting in enviable order. They passed the windmill of Vreeland, turning faithfully, grinding water out of the soil to keep their tiny island of the universe afloat forever. And they passed a place in their lives, he thought, where all these things—skiffs, gardens, dry land, love—could be maintained without conscious effort.
Dirk ran in wide circles around them, leaping, splashing through seeping puddles. When they got back to the house, his paws would be muddy and would have to be cleaned. Digna usually saw to that. Today he’d do it.
It was strange: When you reduced even a fledging love affair to its essentials—I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered—it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it’s only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.
He wanted to remind Digna of some moment from their life together equally tender as the kiss in the woods, equally important. There’d been many, as when they skated far out on Loosdrechtsche Plassen, so that voices of the other skaters were only rustlings of thrushes and they were swirling alone in a white, pure universe, and he had told her he had now known her half his life, twenty two years, his breath heralding that miracle with clouds of fog, and he had kissed her there on the ice, twenty two times, in gratitude. He longed to have her think of this, but how she walked, so erect and self-contained, staunched his throat.
As they approached the house he saw that before they’d left she had lit an oil lamp in the parlor for their return. The warm yellow light through the window beckoned them to a cozy house. She always thought of things like that. If he mentioned it now, or the skating memory, it would seem propitiatory.
In the house they stayed out of each other’s way while knowing precisely each other’s every move. The air between them felt charged.
He wanted her to come to him so he could stroke the smooth skin of her temple, a favorite part of her, right there by her hairline, hold her by the shoulders first, then draw her close to him, and say he was wholly hers and ever would be all his life.