What do you do with a feeling you don’t want, Emily wrote in her notebook. Most of her feelings were unwanted. A letter intended for Christine was unfinished, one for Edith barely begun, and she’d written her own name and misspelled it, a funny thing to do for a proofreader, the only work Emily could find in Amsterdam, in a huge publishing company that produced English-language editions of medical texts. In German her job, she learned, was called corrector. The work brought her closer to Kafka, she thought, as she participated in every illness she proofread. The feeling was of being drawn to an older man with a wife and children. One child close to her age. It was obvious. It was something about his eyes. It was the way those eyes looked at her, as if they, or he, recognized her. Knew her already. It was a stupid attraction and she fell into it with longing and it kept her from writing letters; she kept on getting stuck at words like feel and fell being so much the same. She wanted to write to Christine and tell her, for at a distance Christine was an ideal friend, her best friend. Her feelings humiliated her, they were meant to embarrass her, and ever since she’d met him she couldn’t shake the sense of its being fated, as in a fairy tale, fated and doomed. It was more than being in love, she considered that childish. It was written somewhere and she was inscribed in it. It didn’t matter what she did, it couldn’t be helped or stopped, and it wouldn’t be. An immense sadness came over her that she knew was accounted for in the German language and not her own: It was different from depression, when you can’t get out of your bed. It was like learning the difference between a city that’s been occupied and one that never has been.
War on their soil, on their streets, the Dutch went about their business and cleaned the stoops and sidewalks in front of their neat houses, and no one would ever know from the outside what it was like. Being an occupied country obsessed Emily. One day an army walks in or marches in or shoots its way in and from that day to the next, lives are held hostage by an enemy. A real enemy, one that seeks to conquer and take over, not an imagined enemy, the psychic kind that Christine had become to Emily, someone who wanted to take her over, be her or not let her be. Love is like that, an occupation, being occupied by. He swept over me, she wrote, his body larger than mine, and I am helpless against him. I let myself be taken. Her own words unsettled her, marching in as they did from what, if she spoke it, might seem enemy territory. She couldn’t tell anymore, she didn’t speak it.
The aged mother, Anna, had been born in Vienna in its most exciting moment. Emily watched her frail, stooped body, bent almost in half, as Anna fed the cats that lived in their overgrown garden, a garden that Hilda might have loved for its chaos, and Emily for its naked symbolism. The wild cats were Anna’s, and each day she descended two flights of stairs to call them to her with her thin voice. Her fingers were gnarled, Emily wrote in her notebook, never having seen such old hands, though gnarled looked wrong on the page, maybe because it was a cliché, and maybe twisted was better, a little different, but could fingers be twisted. She was barely able to set a plate on the ground in order to leave food for her wild cats. The daughter, Nina, complained to Emily about Anna over many glasses of red wine in a big kitchen. Nina had long red hair that she pushed back from her face as she talked. Sometimes she looked sideways at Emily, from behind her hair, holding it back from her face and posing, giving Emily her best side. Years ago she’d been compared with Garbo. And when she was seventeen the Nazis entered Holland and her father, a Communist, hung himself in their bathroom, just upstairs, rather than be captured. Nina and Anna went to jail. Those were the facts that spoke of lives about which Emily knew nothing and which Emily heard like a play or saw like a movie; the drama made it seem unbelievable as real life. People going to jail, a suicide for political reasons, a whole nation in enemy hands. It might have been a late-night movie with handsome men and women acting brave and noble, except Emily had never seen one about the Dutch resistance, and there Nina was, sitting across from her in profile, a face once young and beautiful, a living witness to something called history. Emily decided that history is what happens to other people, always distant and unreachable. In the movies noble emotions would have triumphed.
Edith didn’t like her new tenant, a boy who was rarely at home and never lay on the bed with her as she watched TV and ate cookies. She had her privacy again. She felt unencumbered and unwatched. A watched pot never boils, she thought. If she boiled, who would see her. Emily made her laugh, staying in bed all day long. She’s not my daughter. They come, they go. The coffee cup was held in both hands, cradled tightly. She allowed that the sunlight on the floor was cheer l, and that you could think something like that and be in a somber mood, and the sun did make her feel better. She didn’t wonder that people who lived in Latin countries were happier, not wearing overcoats, not feeling cold. Maybe even in Texas. Poor but happy. Hoeing their land or whatever they did. Coffee from Colombia. Juan Valdez, the good life. The simple life. Nothing’s simple, Edith said out loud in the direction of Emily’s room.
Anna was struggling up the stairs, having fed the cats, while Nina and Emily sat in the kitchen drinking. The phone rang and Anna yelled that it was for the American because she sometimes forgot Emily’s name. It was Emily’s lover. He wasn’t a boyfriend after all, and she’d have to call him something, and lover was right in Europe if wrong in New York. For all sorts of reasons, but Emily wouldn’t think about that now, she’d think about tomorrow afternoon when they were to meet in the park. Emily didn’t wonder where his wife was. Nina looked with interest at Emily and talked about her mother. “Anna knew everyone who was important in Vienna, Fin de siècle. You understand — the artists, the intellectuals, the philosophers, she would meet with them all, in cafés, salons.” Nina paused to push her hair back and poured more wine into their glasses. “But you hardly tell me anything, and you don’t have to, of course.” This sentence functioned both as a digression and a progression, it could go either way, and Emily chose to let it hang there, until Nina returned to Anna and her life in Vienna. Anna, it transpired, was passionately in love with her Communist doctor husband, who was a bit of a philanderer. Anna passionate stooped cats twisted. The handsome doctor, an idealist, his devoted wife, occasionally betrayed. “There are many different kinds of betrayals and these tiny peccadilloes of men, it’s not that much, is it?” Nina spoke as if to make a point, or so Emily took it, being in the position she found herself. Or as others might see her, even if she rejected that position. Her mother used to say position was everything in life. And now Anna can barely move, Emily kept thinking. Nina wondered what this American girl, so rich and young, was making of all this and whether she grasped any of it, and Nina kept drinking, feeling warmer toward Emily. “I had many beaux,” Nina said, “the way you do now.” Emily moved in her chair, wondering if she should go along with the lie or argue for her faithfulness. Anna summoned Nina, who left the room annoyed by the interruption. And returning, Nina said, “She’s jealous of you, she’s jealous of anyone who has anything to do with me. She says you take too much of my time.” Emily wanted to run out of the kitchen. The drama now included her — she had become a character, against her will. Another position. Taken or given. Emily suggested that they all have dinner together. Nina said maybe, but it wouldn’t be that easy, there was a lot of history between them.