"Oh, please, Mr. Powers. European-class. The world, it may stun you to learn, is predominantly black-haired. A plurality of those live without adequate shelter and would use The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp as a canvas roof patch if they could."
"And your Mozart?" I don't usually like cheap counterattacks, but the man asked for it.
He shrugged. "The piece happened to be handy. A small fraction of the available repertoire. Replaceable, I assure you." He stood and strode to my whiteboard. Without asking, he erased the text I'd written there and began to draw a matrix of hollow boxes. "All right. I'll grant you the pretty pictures and a few good tunes. But they've never amounted to much in the novel-writing department, have they?"
"That's the fault of translation."
"Not the limits of that expectorant Low German dialect? An orthography to write home about. And crikey! How do you deal with that syntax? An even by native speakers not until the ultimate grammatical arrival capable of being unraveled word order that one's brain in ever more excruciatingly elaborate cortical knots trivially can tie."
His burlesque was note-perfect. He tore it off, at tempo. It chilled me. How much homework had the man done? Could a cognitive linguist parody a language he didn't speak? I didn't want to know. I wouldn't have answered him in kind then, even if he switched over.
I still dreamed in that language. It ruined me for English. Cone for over half a year, I still saw the spire of the Utrecht Dom each time I walked under the Center's tower. I could not shake free from a place I never felt at home in. And all because of some dead Polish kid who attended the next grade school down from my father's. A kid who didn't know the Netherlands from the East Indies.
I'd formed an impression of the place in a dank Chicago suburban basement late in winter at age eight. A child's account of the flood that ravaged Zeeland shortly before I was born turned real in my head. That's what it means to be eight. Words haven't yet separated from their fatal content. For a week and a half, I saw people camped everywhere on top of step-gabled houses, island traumas in ever-rising water.
This was my unshakable image of a place I thought would never be more than an image to me. The word "Holland" filled me with autumnal, diluvian disaster. And this sense persisted, even after living for years as far inland as reachable, high up in the Dutch mountains.
On the day I read that book, sixty-seven blocks north of the Loop, C. was sixty-seven blocks south, lashing fast another imaginary Netherlands altogether. Everyone has a secret low country of the heart where they should have been born. C. missed hers by a year and an accumulation of ripples.
C. was more Dutch when I met her in U. than she became later, after she expatriated. At twenty-five, she learned that she could claim citizenship anytime before the age of thirty. It was as if Belonging lay in some ivory-inlaid credenza in the Hague, waiting to be opened before expiration date. Hers for free, by virtue of being born of Dutch parents. Even parents who had halfheartedly jumped the schooner of state. Once she claimed her birthright, displacement became total.
I could trace the chain of dislocation back to a nineteen-year-old Polish boy I didn't know from Adam. A South Side kid who should never have left home. His name clustered with lots of recalcitrant Slavic consonants. To me, it was unique. For all I know, the same surname takes up a column and a half of the Cicero phone book. The boy's own dislocation must have begun at least a generation before. But I did not know his particulars.
His home, however transient, was not Chicago per se but that emulation of Krakow that interwar Poles ran on the southwest side of former Fort Dearborn. When Armageddon reached as far as the Back of the Yards, the boy volunteered. His family sent him back to liberate a native land he'd seen only in imagination. Before he went, he married. One married young in those days, quick and willfully, to preempt just what happened to him.
The boy was called Eddie. I named my father and a hybrid me after him in my second book.
Eddie and his war bride lived together for two electric bills at the most. Then he vanished. He was killed in that extended tank battle that ran from the forests of eastern Belgium up through Limburg into Nijmegen and Arnhem. He never lived long enough to be anything but a story. This one.
He left behind only one possession. That is, his adopted government left it: one of those pristine stone crosses in one of those endless diffraction-pattern cemeteries that roll across the forgetting countryside. The Low Countries specialize in them.
When war abated again, someone had to care for all the crosses. Cemeteries had proliferated faster than babies, and it came time to adopt them. Village women throughout Limburg enlisted to tend to Margraten. A still-young woman who had stood on a hill and watched Charlemagne's capital burn, who had once run out into the lane with a carving knife at reports of a village horse being strafed, adopted Eddie.
Instructions were simple. Keep the area trim, and perhaps place flowers on history's birthdays. The woman did this and more. She struck up a correspondence with the widow and the bewildered Gold Star mother. God knows in what language. The widow — who knew all along she'd be left with nothing but unreadable letters from foreigners — spoke English and Polish. The mother spoke only Polish. The volunteer grave-tender spoke only Limburgs dialect and that imposed foreign language, Dutch.
The Netherlands was as mythical to the Americans as the States were to the Limburger. But somehow they communicated. Widow and mother visited the grave. They stayed with the grave's adopter, her husband, and their two babies. The Chicago Poles told the young family that if they ever wanted to emigrate to the blessed hemisphere, they had sponsors.
Limburg had never been generous, and war payments, as always, fell on the already destitute. The gravekeeper's husband, a railroad man, declared that he belonged to any country that would feed him. And so a basement room in Little Krakow became the family's country.
After a year, the immigrant wife could stand the New World no longer. She fled back to her beloved Limburg, her two young children in tow. The railroad man stayed, refusing to return home in disgrace. He wrote her letters, in his newly acquired, schoolboek English: "I'm here working. You know where you belong."
After six months, the woman dragged home to her basement nation. C.'s birth was her mother's consolation prize, the one good thing in an unlivable locale. They named C. for the dead boy's widow, who never remarried. After that first death, no room for another.
The family rented a house in a Lithuanian ghetto not far from the stockyards. Lives later, I stranded another, imaginary, Dutch immigrant family in that house. I built my written copy from the descriptions that C. fed me from memory. For two decades, C.'s family lived in that city, speaking to each other in secret phrases. You could say anything, anywhere, in those words. And no one but the displaced would understand you.
They kept themselves alive as exiles do: with rituals and recollections no longer recognizable to those who never left. C.'s mother raised the baby on accounts of a magic village called E. The nether-nether land that C. grew up on was peopled by scores of aunts and uncles and hundreds of cousins with archaic names and fairy-tale histories. Never tie your life to a woman with ten dozen first cousins. Never try to expatriate to a country where the currency is called a gulden.
C. tried. She had to. The image her mother wove of E. was more painfully imprinted in C. than any neighborhood she'd actually lived in. C. tried to reclaim that fabulous nation. And I tried to follow her.
"Oh, Beau!" she told me. "It's so beautiful there. It's like a balm on your heart to see it." And so it was, still. Bits and pieces, anyway. Here and there, isolated half-timbered villages poked out between new industrial terrains, like traces of fresco from under annihilating renovations.