Читать книгу Then Again: Travels in search of my younger self - Irma Kurtz - Страница 9

‘13 July 1954: Yesterday it was Blenheim, Oxford and Stratford. Blenheim was nice. Stratford was ghastly. And Oxford was divine. We met some charming Oxford boys, friends of Tony, who joined us to see a not awfully good Troilus and Cressida at horrible Stratford. Shakespeare’s glory is not in his birthplace, that’s for sure. Tony snoozed next to me on the way back and woke to chat to me. To me! We all went to eat out in of all places a Chinese restaurant! The same menu as at the China Clipper in Jersey City! Is there any city on earth without a Chinese restaurant? Is China really a place or a world-dominating cuisine? Tony called me “My dear Irma”! I love him. And I love London. I do so hope I return some day. This is where the language comes from. This is where the books were written. We arrived in Holland yesterday. Holland is sweet.’

A few years before my grand tour with Study Abroad, when I was just turning fourteen, I was yanked out of my expensive private school and plunked into a third-rate state school. Ostensibly, it was because I had used a profanity at the dinner table. But the deeper truth was that my brother was just finishing his own elementary education and I was transferred to Henry Snyder Public School in Jersey City in order to spare the family two sets of crippling fees, one of them, in the opinion of that time and place, wasted on a girl. The four subsequent years would have been a dead loss intellectually were it not for one beautiful and discerning woman, my English teacher, Sybilla Farrell. Not only was Miss Farrell alert, vibrant and in love with her subject; she was also rumoured to be conducting an affair with a married naval officer. And she drank sherry. And she smoked like a chimney. I continued to see her after I entered university. She died of throat cancer two years after my return from the Study Abroad tour. On my shelves now, and always, I have a copy of Frank Swinnerton’s The Bookman’s London. Miss Farrell was not one to scribble on flyleaves; tucked into the book is a yellowing card, printed in raised letters, ‘Miss Sybilla Farrell’, and inside is her message dated June 1954.

Dear Irma [she wrote],

I saw this in my browsing and I couldn’t resist sending it to you. Hardly a ‘travel book’ yet since you will soon be going to London some of its ‘lit’ry’ background may stand you in good stead and give you a bowing acquaintance with that great nation’s most important past. I envy you your maiden voyage. May it be a très bon voyage.

Sincerely,

Sybilla Farrell

I must agree with you, young Irma, about Stratford. I have been there a few times in the course of my London life and like you I prefer Shakespeare on a stage, not in souvenir shops. As for Blenheim, and Hampton Court, the Tower, and all the other distinguished attractions you toured with Study Abroad, they are too near home, too familiar now; I have seen them too often with visiting Americans; after so many years in residence, I have no desire to see them again as a tourist. Forgive me, I don’t care to try. In any case it is not among those courtly splendours I will find your trail. To this day, however, I still feel exactly as you did, moved and awestruck, whenever I glance up on a London street and discover a blue plaque in honour of Dickens, Blake, Hazlitt, H. G. Wells. You and I can thank Miss Farrell for that meeting of our minds.

The first school I attended from kindergarten through the sixth grade was the Demonstration School of New Jersey State Teachers’ College. Commonly known as the ‘Normal School’ to protect us white, bright, middle-class kids from being considered or considering ourselves in any way out of the ordinary or so it generally believed. We were guinea-pigs for elementary-school teachers in training, nine out of ten of them young women. In those days, when teaching the under-twelves was a profession for women, the most embarrassing gaffe a child could commit in the classroom was accidentally to call a teacher ‘mommy’. The trainees turned up regularly in groups of twenty or thirty to audit our classes from a platform that encircled the room, and occasionally one of them would be called upon to perform nervously a turn of her own in our little theatre-in-the-round under the critical eye of our teacher, Miss Carnes.

Miss Carnes embodied the very word ‘spinster’, its angularity and clump of sensible shoes, its suggestion of muddy colours, its industry, and selflessness, too, and purity, and devotion hardly seen these days; of course, she was also reactionary, and rigid of opinions. Decades later, when I learned that Miss Carnes, close to one hundred years old, was in a nursing home in California, I took my three-year-old son to visit the ancient teacher, who was drifting in and out of terminal fuddle. I must have turned away for a moment, for I did not see her slip him five crisp ten-dollar bills. He showed them to me later on the road home. ‘The old lady told me’, he said, ‘that five times ten is fifty and I must count on that.’

Every Christmas Miss Carnes directed her ‘Festival of Many Nations’, a day-long shindig for which we were required to dress in costumes that reduced the ancient nations of Europe to their most adorable elements, never mind that vast chunks of them had been recently smashed to smithereens. Tiny Frenchmen in berets, lacking only miniature Gauloises hanging from their lower lips, pretended to be painting canvases; diminutive señoritas clacked in circles swirling their mantillas; wee leprechauns leapt about, and infant Somethings in the City, wearing little bowler hats, served iced tea. Is memory being sardonic when it sends me the image of classmates in mini-lederhosen dishing out sausages and sauerkraut? There was no television yet to glue Americans to the screen as they would later weep and cheer over instalments of the war in Vietnam. Beyond our parroting of jingoistic folderol, we baby Yanks were absolutely uninformed about the storm across the water. Dutifully, we collected and flattened empty tins for the war effort, though precisely why was anybody’s guess. Every once in a while sirens summoned us to air raid drills, practically indistinguishable from peacetime fire drills, and mild rationing was in place. Families who had city lots or summerhouses such as our own in nearby countryside were encouraged to cultivate ‘Victory Gardens’ and good little Americans ate every horrid boiled carrot put in front of us because children were starving in Europe.

‘But that doesn’t make any sense …’

‘Don’t argue. Clean your plate.’

A banner with a silver star hanging in the window meant a man from the household was overseas; a gold star meant he had been lost in action, so much we knew. How, or why, or even exactly where were our menfolk risking their bones and leaving them? Most of us little Americans were spared that knowledge. We Jewish children, girls in headscarves and boys in adorable little black hats standing behind our candles and twisted loaves at Miss Carnes’s festival, knew a little more than the others. The unnatural tears of our grown-ups, their whispers, the anguish in their eyes when they watched us silently and didn’t think we were noticing, told us something very, very bad was out there and aimed at us. But God forbid anyone should tell us precisely what was the snarling terror or how it had been unleashed, often with the acquiescence of neighbours, clients, tenants, patients and even old friends in the big and small places where our people had settled and lived for centuries. We were the lucky Jews, the safe Jews, American Jews, transplanted in the course of our race’s history, always in the nick of time. We had not merely survived; we had thrived and we lived well.

Sure, anti-Semitism was abroad in the States. Where has it not been? It is the quintessential racial prejudice of the West. In certain universities, country clubs, on some American streets including my own we were excluded, taunted, on meaner streets than mine we were beaten up. My father carried visible and invisible scars from his childhood on Manhattan’s lower East Side; mother would have been in greater danger still, her small town in Indiana supported an active branch of the Ku Klux Klan, except that her family was isolated and discreet about its origins, and besides, the Klansmen were too stupid out there to recognise a Jew who wasn’t wearing horns and a tail. All in all, far and away the heaviest burden American Jewry has had to bear is the guilt accruing to good fortune.

‘Hitler is a psychopathological maniac,’ my mother coached me to say as a tautological party turn when I was barely four. He had a silly moustache, too, and, it was said, only one ball. Whatever that meant. My best friend, Judy Brenner, thought it probably meant that Hitler grew up poor without many toys. But salacious quivers wake early in bright children and something told us not to bother asking Miss Carnes or any other adult. By the time I was in the fifth grade and it was the turn of my class to present the Festival of all Nations, the Führer had been dead for eight months and the number of balls rotting in his grave was academic.

‘So Hitler has killed himself. Folks, we gotta mourn the loss of a hero!’ one of the Catskill comics started his shtick that year at the hotel where my grandparents used to holiday. ‘If only a Jew had got him first!’ he cried, and slapped his forehead. ‘What a hero that Jew would have been!’

Children raised within hailing distance of New Amsterdam, in a city with its most posh street called Van Nostrand Avenue, in a nation headed for as long as they could remember by a man named Roosevelt could be expected to take Holland seriously. However, of the Normal School’s fifth-grade cute displays, the cutest by far was Dutch. Wooden shoes and windmills and little white hats with turned-up flaps, tulips and round red Edam cheeses: how sweet!

‘July 1954: The crossing to the Hook of Holland was quite rough. Poor Evelyn was sick for the entire journey. I never get seasick. The Dutch dockers were pink and well-scrubbed, and were real flirts.’

Under sail one dark and stormy night in the Bay of Biscay decades thereafter, foolhardy child, you will remember and regret your early hubris on open water. To boast about never being seasick is like saying ‘I don’t often lose my temper, but when I do …’ or ‘I’ll see your twenty and raise you twenty …’: commonplace pretensions that court disaster. Believe it or not, my little neo tar, I envy you the historical roll and pitch of your first Channel crossing. William the Conqueror’s challenge, Napoleon’s mistake, Hitler’s hurdle has these days been Disneyfied into a sort of ‘English Channel Experience’: a penny-ante casino and aquatic mini-mall catered by McDonald’s and Burger King. The monstrous cross-Channel vessel that carried me to the Netherlands offered but one outside deck and it was barely the size of an urban bathroom. Instead of sea air and billow we were given a choice of Hollywood movies people of taste would cross water to avoid.

While the graceful masts of Harwich were receding into our widening wake, I found a seat in one of the bars near a porthole blurred by salt spray and tried to read, for once a book most apposite: Embarrassment of Riches. Simon Schama’s dissertation on Holland is brilliant, but awfully heavy in the literal sense, a kilo at least. Announcements were being made in English and in Dutch, an incomprehensible language for me except I recognise its tone of common sense and cajolery: ‘Please listen – to know the location of life preservers is for your own good. You can understand that, can’t you?’ At a table nearby a bunch of balding cockneys were getting drunk, shouting and laughing in the early afternoon. Behind them a couple of young Goths, pierced, tattooed, both with heads half shaven and dressed in black leather, held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes. Television screens suspended overhead showered us with rubbish and bad music. Screaming, hyperactive children thundered past, trailing mothers behind them like limp security blankets. Evenly spaced on the far horizon five container ships processed at a stately speed towards the English coast, and watching them through a porthole, I gave in to a melancholy that had been threatening me since my departure from Liverpool Station. Why does an old woman travel? No change will ever again be for the better.

The big blonde next to me in the shuffling queue of disembarking foot passengers introduced herself as Chrissie from Liverpool. Without preamble, as if continuing a weathered conversation, she told me she’d had her first baby at fourteen, a girl, who at sixteen is now pregnant.

‘Are you pleased?’

She shrugged.

‘She’s awfully young,’ I said.

‘So was I. And I survived.’

Chrissie could never travel alone like me; she said she’d be too scared.

‘Of what?’

‘Dunno. Just scared.’

Her sister, who was waiting for her in the port, had lived in the Netherlands for twenty years. As a woman grows old, her intuition becomes more and more difficult to distinguish from experience: one or both – call it wisdom – told me not to ask why her sister had become an expatriate; it was not an edifying story, I was sure, and nothing I needed to know. Chrissie was on her way to meet a Turkish boyfriend, also a Dutch resident, whom she expected to make husband number three. A few months earlier Chrissie had been in a serious car accident; she told me that she’d nearly died. Suddenly her face knotted and she drew back, as confessional Englishwomen almost always do sooner or later. Why was she telling this nosy American her life’s story? It had to be the strong painkillers; she’d been taking them ever since the car crash and they’d loosened her tongue.

‘You’re not supposed to mix that stuff with drink,’ I said.

She held her paper cup under my nose as we shuffled towards the exit: ‘It’s only lemonade! Smell it!’ she said so aggressively that I figured the contrary must be true and the lemonade I was reluctantly smelling was mixed with odourless vodka.

‘July 1954: From first sight, Holland was neat and clean.’

Prodigal child, those few words are pretty much all you left as your first impression of the Netherlands. Too young to step away from the mirror’s view of yourself, were you? Still too scared to look around and see more than what lay directly behind you. Or were you saving adjectives for the more vivid Latin sites ahead on your itinerary? Fair enough, an ignorant kid could not mark the quirks of topography reclaimed from the sea by the blistered hands of men, or note the way birds fly a long straight line against a horizon made abstract by flatness of the land. But how could you fail to comment on the curious liquidity of daylight in Holland? The way it flows around every tree and steeple, and makes even industrial cranes and chimneys stand as proud as dry things at sea. Except for Rotterdam, reconstructed after the war in sky-scraping canyons of glass and steel, thanks to its unearthly levelling and light Holland offers few places to lurk even in built-up areas. Alleys are plentiful and give a special charm to strolling in Dutch cities, rather like the lure of footpaths in a forest; the narrow ways are far from sinister, however, they are too well peopled by pedestrians trying to avoid the wider streets and boulevards hectic with trams and cyclists.

Eye contact with passing strangers in the streets of Amsterdam lacks the edgy side of glancing contact in London, or the quick assessment and totalling of sum parts that happens in Paris and New York. Even-handedness and limpidity seem to have entered the very bones of Netherlanders. The shock of a European political assassination soon after my journey was compounded for the world because it took place in Holland, of all places! And though the victim, Pim Fortuyn, stood to the far right in that level land, anywhere else in the world his tenets would barely have tipped the ideological see-saw.

Whatever nastiness Netherlanders got up to in the days of their mercantile empire, these days at home they show tolerance that is benignly totalitarian: it allows no rebellion. Against what? Legislation is designed to accommodate and control rather than outlaw. Kids smoking pot? Let them. That way you can keep an eye on them and track infiltrations of hard drugs. Bicycle theft on the increase? Try putting licensed state-owned bicycles into circulation, to be borrowed then left outside unlocked for the next needy passer-by to borrow and leave unlocked, and so on. Squatters squat. Why not? Allow the terminally ill and incurably sad to pass away in peace. And give minority groups time and space in media to put across their messages, or semblance of messages; is there a more sensible way to keep quiet in the streets than to credit the metropolis with the principled friendliness of smaller communities? Contrary to most cosmopolites who boast of their urban roots, it is very hard to find a Netherlander even in Amsterdam or sky-scraping Rotterdam who does not proudly claim to have come originally from a small town. As refreshing as Amsterdam is in many ways, it is too even-minded, too upfront, too downright wholesome to be sexy. Darker, madder cities are sexier.

‘Guys always end up at the Banana Bar. The strippers there do something weird with bananas,’ said Flavia, a young Italian woman also a guest at my bed and breakfast. Flavia had been resident there for many months: postcards were pinned up on the wall of her little room, her toiletries were permanently installed on the shelf in the communal bathroom, and she sat down for her evening meals in the kitchen with the Indonesian Buddhist couple who owned the place. They seemed bewildered, not to say a little frightened, by a guest who took ‘family run’ so literally. It was early morning, our quiet home on a residential street near the Museumplein had just been descended upon by eight tough, streetwise Glaswegians on a weekend stag party in the charge of a frantic and despairing older man, the father of the groom-to-be, and Flavia was explaining to me why Amsterdam was the destination of stags’ choice. Strong beer and marijuana aside, I had seen the strip clubs and red-light district of Amsterdam where prostitutes are proudly displayed in every window, like butterflies in cases. Flavia’s whispered disquisition on Amsterdam’s clean-shaven underbelly was interrupted by the arrival of eight well-dressed young women, who turned out to be medical interns from London on a hen party. Stags and hens commingled for a while at the hotel reception.

Humankind does not merely eat; we restaurate, marinate, celebrate. Other creatures drink, we ferment and inebriate. Breathe? Certainly. Of course. But first, aerate and fumigate, if you please. Right to the end we decorate, complicate and obfuscate animal functions. Die? If we must. But let us obliterate with dignity and incinerate in style. As for the way we fuck, in default of automatic lust and a regular mating season, we alone among animals have contrived institutions, aids, agencies, fashions, fantasies, romance, big, big business, even so-called experts to keep us at it. What a song and dance to renew our tribe’s residency on earth! Necessity no longer pertains. We do it for love, for fun, for money, for vengeance and for fame. Procreation? Not right now, thanks. We prefer recreation. Sometimes with bananas. Only late that night when I was awakened by a loud knock on my door and a slurred drunken voice said, ‘Let me in. It’s the Scottish man …’ did the sheer, exuberant absurdity of human sexual appetite manifest itself to me in Amsterdam.

‘Oh, go away!’ I told the befuddled stag.

Vaguely wondering for which roost the jerk had mistaken my room and which posh hen was going to miss out on her bit of rough, I went straight back to sleep.

‘July 1954: I’m surprised to see so many women out scrubbing their front stoops! Is it a kind of community service, I wonder, or are the Dutch terribly house-proud? And every window has something interesting in it so they look like framed pictures along the street. Walking around Amsterdam without the rest of the mob, Ev and Midge and I went in and out of enticing little shops on pretty shady streets with bridges and canals looking for a gift for Ev’s mother. In one shop window she saw a teapot she said her mother would like. The door was standing open so we went in to browse around. Only it turned out not to be a shop! We had wandered into someone’s house! The woman was very understanding when she found us in her living room, picking up her candlesticks and saucers, looking for price tags! She laughed when we made her understand our mistake. In New York she would have called the cops.’

Enticing shops are thin on the ground everywhere in Europe nowadays. They have been overtaken by souvenir shops stocked for a Normal School sensibility, in Amsterdam with tulip bulbs and wooden shoes. And, of course, everywhere are installations of the huge chain stores that are strangling self-expression in low- to middle-income shoppers and preempting the inspiration of artisans everywhere in the swelling Western world. Arise, prisoners of obesity, conformity and insecurity! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Not that having lots of money encourages originality or taste. Like every other city, Amsterdam has a few streets where toffee-nosed salesgirls purvey trademarks just as banal as the others, only they are pricier and harder to pronounce. At least the domestic windows of Holland continue to frame verve and style that misled Evelyn and Midge and me all those years ago. Set out on practically every ledge are prize pieces of china, oriental gewgaws, carvings, dolls, toys and flowers in beautiful vases, all arranged with taste that transforms residential streets into galleries. If there turns out one day to be a painterly gene, then it will be found in abundance among the Dutch.

‘1954: Amsterdam – Marjorie always says I don’t know how to look at paintings. Maybe she’s right. I am looking for a glimpse into another life or way of life. I want a painting to tell me a story. Will the sick child survive? Will the cat have that cloth off the table? Why is one man scowling at another? What games could children play, wearing such clothes? For me, paintings are like windows or open doors. Marjorie says that’s all wrong. I am supposed to feel things about a painting, not think about its content. She says I think too much. I say there is no such thing. But in the Rijksmuseum today, I sort of knew what she meant. Looking at paintings feels more like reading stories than looking at pictures.’

You and me both, young I; we are not connoisseurs but voyeurs in the galleries. I remain as deficient as you were in whatever is the quality that makes a great viewer of great pictures, and thus the classic Dutch painters have always pleased us both simply because their greatest pictures are as scenes glimpsed through a stranger’s door. In the 1970s my son’s father, a painter of Dutch extraction as it happens, used to take me along to exhibitions of art that was modern then. I wasn’t sure how to respond to what I was seeing except for thinking that somehow, like going to the ballet, it must be doing me good and making me more sensitive to subtle and sensuous levels of beauty. Thinking about it now, I wonder if I was right. About art exhibitions, not about ballet. I continue actively to dislike the athletic posturing and the thump of stubby feet off the beat, mucking up music. But it would surprise you, child, as it surprised me to find myself equally delighted in Amsterdam by Malevich, Newman, Stella, especially Rothko, and others at the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art as I was by the tale-telling paintings of the Rijksmuseum. Have we grown up at last, you and I, and learned to look through image to meaning? Past signs to significance?

‘July, 1954: I can see why rich men hire art thieves to steal masterpieces for them. There are always so many people surrounding me at museums. I’d love to know how it feels to stand in front of a Vermeer or a Rembrandt all by myself.’

Sweetheart, I am glad to tell you that by a fluke of demographics you will be privileged one future day – just the other day – to stand alone, all by yourself, for a full three minutes in front of the self-portrait of young Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum. What fun! I took out my pad and pen to jot down a few words about his eyes, evenly spaced, ever so slightly Mongoloid, and the tussling copper filaments of his hair.

‘Excuse me,’ hissed an angry American woman’s voice behind me. ‘Do you speak English?’

‘Yes, I speak English. Can I help you?’

‘Your bag is open,’ she snapped, outraged that an Anglophone tourist could so let the side down as to tempt foreign pickpockets.

‘And so is your mouth,’ I thought. But I said ‘Thank you’, slipped the pad back into my bag, zipped up and hurried away from young Rembrandt’s seeing face.

Every city is big to itself. As impressive as the unfolded street map of Amsterdam may be, practically everything I wanted to see was in easy walking distance for someone used to London’s patchwork sprawl, and that was as well because I could not get my head around the ticket system for local trams. The way Flavia’s fine English dissolved when she tried to explain the routine made me think the problem was not just due to my own senile obtusity; she herself did not seem all that sure just how to fold the travel card over to the correct date and distance before inserting it into the franking machine. Transport police frequently board trams to parade down the aisle imposing stiff and immediate fines, generally on hapless tourists. I felt safer entering by the front and paying the driver directly with coins.

‘But that works out much more expensive than a travel card,’ said my Dutch friend, Annette, who had travelled in from the country to lunch with me in Amsterdam. ‘It’s a waste of money.’

I pointed to what was translated into English on the menu as ‘Dutch Pee Soup’. ‘In for a penny, Annette,’ I said, taking advantage of an earlier observation that the Dutch are so pleased to laugh that even the feeblest joke or most glancing innuendo is hilariously received.

Four days alone in a strange city is a little lifetime. Patterns are formed, routines established. Within an hour or so I had sniffed out my Amsterdam bar, a big one with a terrace, and my restaurant, a small one with seafood on the menu and windows on the street. My hotel room was so narrow I could span it with outspread arms; it was soon familiar, even welcoming, to return to Simon Schama and the absence of a TV set after sightseeing and an early dinner. Every morning before going down to breakfast I stood at my window to watch the woman across the street see her boy off to school on his bike; I knew – I remembered – how she was going to wait in her doorway, looking in his direction for a few minutes after he was out of sight. My penultimate morning in Amsterdam I awoke from a dream of comfort and found a phone number, 743–3874, floating at the front of my mind. It took a moment to recollect that it belonged to the first home I had owned in London, a terraced house in Shepherd’s Bush I sold nearly twenty years ago and the place where my son grew up. Then I made the daily walk to the underground supermarket at the Museumplein to buy my usual bottle of chilled water. Around me Dutch women shopped briskly, from memory. Outside, clouds, rain, faint sun and bright shifted constantly over the Museumplein so the vast plain seemed to unroll through several seasons in the twenty minutes it took to stroll across it.

On my last full day in Amsterdam, returning to the hotel in the late afternoon, I stopped on a bench to watch Dutch children at play. Some of them showed ethereal beauty that would be swallowed by adolescence. A little boy, whose mother was not in evidence, danced in and out of the fountain oblivious to the chilly north breeze; he was laughing and water was pouring from the yellow sleeves of his jacket. Tourists from Japan took pictures of him, others carrying ubiquitous bags and boxes decorated with Van Gogh’s sunflowers stopped to smile. Earlier while rambling around town near the station I had come upon a street redolent of marijuana where someone was singing ‘I’d rather be a hammer than a nail …’ I could not stop humming the silly tune softly. On a bench near me sat a woman dressed in flowing layers of thin weave, mainly salmon pink. She wore strings of beads, her grey hair was straggling out of a tousled chignon. Now, there was a gal who could explain why it was better to be a hammer than a nail, a preference that has always eluded me. The sun came out and suddenly I remembered an outing to Amsterdam more than thirty years ago with Tony.

‘July 1954: After lunch today Tony gave me a gin. It was vile but I pretended to like it. I love Tony. In an English sort of way …’

No. No. Not that Tony. You will discover, child, there are many more than one Tony on earth. I am referring to another sort of English Tony who was going to be our son’s father. I’ll confess to you that on our trip to Amsterdam he and I were caught and fined for inadvertently fare-dodging on the very first tram we took. Otherwise, I could not recollect that we did anything special except be in love. And Tony bought himself a black leather coat at the market in Rembrandtplein. That must have been at the end of the 1960s; it remains a jolly street market. I had browsed it that very morning on my way to the Jewish Museum, chosen over the Anne Frank House with its discouraging queue of tourists, including many nuns and clerics. The house where that poor child suffered has become a big, glossy memorial to her martyrdom that simplifies the event and makes it too sentimental for my taste. An image that kept returning on the boat bus back from the Jewish Museum and for hours thereafter was of two yellow stars of cloth exhibited in a cabinet; why was one bright and unused, the other ragged and faded? Had one belonged to a father and the other to his child? A woman, laughing and scolding, appeared at last to pull the little boy out of the fountain. He was drenched to his skin and left wet footprints on the path when she dragged him away. I tried to feel in love again, I knew the words; I could not remember the tune. Clearer, sharper, I remembered Tony’s coat. My son’s father is not a Jew: had he been one in the open season, however, it would have been awfully hard to stitch a yellow star on to a garment as tough as that coat. I wondered if he still had it. A coat like that was made to last a lifetime.