ula with the children, and he would be leaving soon as well, as soon as he handed in his grades. Would I see Anneke in the next few days about the formalities of moving out of the flat she had found me: keys, deposits, and the like.
Cees’s voice radiated sincerity. There wasn’t a hint of ill will. Of course he didn’t broach the question of where I would be going after Amsterdam — cautious people don’t ask questions whose answers might bind them to something — but the whole time he held forth I had only one thought in mind.
“Cees,” I broke in, panic-stricken, “my visa is running out.”
“I don’t see how I can be of any help.”
“You can write a letter stating that as head of the Department you confirm that I will be teaching here next year.”
“But that would be unscrupulous. I couldn’t risk it.”
“The authorities don’t care about truth; they care about documents. There’s no risk whatever.”
“I don’t know…”
“I’ll come for the letter tomorrow,” I said in a voice I barely recognized. “You can leave it with Anneke.”
I left the office secure in the belief that the letter, departmental stamp and all, would be waiting for me the next day. Then I sailed down the stairs and into the café across the street. I reached the toilet just in time. Never in my life had I vomited with such vehemence.
Later I asked myself what I’d meant to accomplish with the letter and why I’d humiliated myself so to get it. What good was an extension when there was no job to go with it? I’d seen émigré fever symptoms in others — Goran, for example — but I thought I was immune to them. All that talk about “papers,” the willingness to go to any lengths for the proper “papers.” And then what? “Then we’ll see.” I’d watched faces change expressions in quick succession or combine cunning, condescension, and fear; I’d watched the tense, sad, half-criminal look that goes with the scramble for the last mouse hole. I’d heard lively conservations break off abruptly as an invisible shadow of despair descended, but people would snap out of it and conversations resume with the same intensity.
I am not an émigré. I have a passport in my pocket. Why did I humble myself before Cees, to say nothing of Ines, who would certainly hear of the incident immediately. (“I mean, we did everything we possibly could for her. You have to help your own, after all. It’s never so clear as when you’re abroad….”) Oh, Ines! All sweetness and light, all airs and graces, the Austro-Hungarian charm, the soft Croatian chauvinism, the warmth of the south, the complacency that comes of a house whose walls are resplendent with booty, the booty of the first marriage (“Something to show the Dutch that we weren’t beggars, know what I mean?”). They saw themselves in a solid, bourgeois bunker, while I saw them balancing on an ice floe, smiling all the while, babbling all the while, as they take down Grandmother’s silver. The silver and the naive paintings are their only weapon against fate, against eviclass="underline" they are sure signs that they belong to a class which no harm can befall. As for me, I’d find something. I had a doctorate and a big Slav heart. Slavs are natural-born teachers, aren’t they? I’d get the visa and a few crumbs from the table, and then what? Then we’d see….
After calming down a bit, I realized Cees hadn’t promised anything. Nor was he to blame for anything. I was without resources, inner or outer. I was vulnerable, up for grabs. Anybody could pick me up, toss me on my back, do what he wanted with me, and leave me battered and bruised. That’s why I was such easy prey for Ines’s babble, why I got stuck in the honey of her words. Nor was she to blame any more than Cees. I had lost my integrity. I had put on a mask as a means of defense, and it had merged with my face, made deep inroads into my person. I was no longer myself.
On my way out of the café, I passed Igor. He was in his usual pose: earphones on and book open. He didn’t notice me. Suddenly I thought of the Americans whose children I’d sat for in Berlin, the ones who never failed to introduce me to their friends. “This is Tanja, our babysitter. She comes from the former Yugoslavia. Tanja is wonderful with children. She really has a way with them.”
CHAPTER 10
“You one of us?” he asks with a shrewd look and a grin that shows a gold tooth. His pal has a moist cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Yes, I’m one of us,” I say. “Where are you two from?”
“I’m from Smederevo, and this guy here’s from Kumanovo. You?”
“Me? I’m from Mars,” I say.
Now both are grinning.
“There ain’t nothin’ like our guys,” the Gypsy said to his pal. “It’s the lip on them.” Then he turned to me. “Want us to play somethin’ for you?”
“Why not.”
“Somethin’ from home how’s ’bout. From Mars.”
“Great.”
He picked up his clarinet, and his pal slung his accordion around his shoulders and threw down his cigarette.
I pulled a hundred-guilder banknote out of my bag and dropped it in the hat.
The accordion player glanced down at the banknote and wailed, “For God’s sakes, sister. You crazy or somethin’ throwin’ away money like that? Keep it for a ’mergency, for one of them rainy days. Sure, leave us a guilder or two, but this? Aaaii! Don’t be crazy, man. Money don’t grow on trees!”
I dismissed his concern with a wave of the hand and moved off into the crowd, feeling the painful Gypsy shrapnel—“Set, O golden sun, go down. Make the sky dark for the moon…”—explode in my heart and lodge there. And suddenly my heart was bathed in blood, and the ice coating its walls started to melt, and I staggered through the marketplace dripping blood.
The Albert Cuyp Market is the largest and most famous in Amsterdam. It is located in the Pijp, a former working-class district. Its scales, of which there are said to be over three hundred, come out every morning and don’t come down until late in the afternoon. The idea of buying fish, fruit, or vegetables was only a rational cover for the vague magnetism that would draw me toward the market, engulfed as it was in a mist of pollen and the strong scents of spices from beyond the seas — cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg — shot through with wind and salt. The air fairly sparkled with the bolts of rich silk and thick plush, of exotic jewels, of gold and beads, of the mother-of-pearl of immodestly open shells, of the glittering silver of fresh fish. The apples in my marketplace had a golden luster all their own; each grape glowed like a tiny lantern; the milk was as rich and white as a Vermeer woman’s skin.
There were times, however, when the magnetism lost its force, when a dead fish lay heavy on the scales and the apples, though still red, and the lettuce, though still green, had lost their sheen. Not far from the scales were seedy vendors of cheap clothing, the air around them electrified by the synthetic fabrics; not far from the scales were vendors of bric-a-brac one would be hard put to find names for: cloths that might be dusters, plastic brushes of various shapes and sizes, nylon chignons in all colors, wooden backscratchers with plastic fingers, packaged snack foods. Not far from the scales were vendors of soap, shampoo, face cream, shabby handbags, artificial flowers, shoulder pads, patches, needles and thread, pillows and blankets, prints and frames, hammers and nails, sausage and cheese, chickens and pheasants, moth-eaten scarves…