Читать книгу In Babylon - Marcel Moring, Shaun Whiteside - Страница 12

IT ALL BEGAN with Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim Levi and his nephew Magnus. Uncle Chaim was a clockmaker, Magnus came walking all the way from Poland, his tool chest on his back, to build a new life for himself in the Lowlands. My great-grandfather, who was also a clockmaker, and my grandfather, the physicist, prided themselves on the fact that the men in our family, since the prehistory of clockwork, had all been people of time. Whenever my grandfather was holding forth and wanted to lend weight to his argument, he would bring up Magnus. Magnus Levi had learned the trade from Uncle Chaim, who had invented the pendulum clock, an innovation that made so little impression in seventeenth-century Lithuania that Uncle Chaim had flung it under his workbench, forgot about it, and was promptly forgotten himself. According to Uncle Herman, that pendulum clock was the first example of a familial talent to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Clockmakers, that’s what we were, even in the days when time was a rare commodity. Ragged tinkers who travelled from town to village and village to town, the clocks in a chest on their back, the little tools rolled up in canvas. Always on the road and always the tinkling of the bells of the wall clocks, the faint thrumming of the rods in the mantel clocks, the chickechickechick of the pocket watches. They carried time on their backs. Time travelled with them. Time was what they lived on. And for some, time was why they died. A distant ancestor once repaired a steeple clock, somewhere in the East, in a provincial capital on the edge of a Steppe. The clockwork had run riot and every few minutes you heard the sonorous chiming of the quarter hour or the rich blur of strokes that told the hour. The smith, at risk to his own life, had tried to disconnect the striking mechanism, but had got no further than muffling the sound with an old gunnysack. By the time the clockmaker arrived, he had nearly been beaten to a pulp. In the village, no one (except the deaf sexton) had slept for two days. Men, women, children, even animals had bags under their eyes and snarled and snapped at each other. Happy marriages threatened to dissolve, many women had fled to their relatives in other villages, the cows had stopped giving milk. There wasn’t a bird to be seen for miles around.

The clockmaker was received by a hoarse-voiced village elder. They shook hands, drank a glass of tea, and listened as the old man shouted out the details of what had happened. Then he plugged up his ears with wax and climbed the tower. The smith went with him. But when they reached the top, the clock would not be silenced. The two men climbed back down again, went to the village elder, and told him what was wrong. ‘We’ll just have to wait,’ the clockmaker said, ‘until the works have wound down.’ The village elder shook his head and said that wasn’t possible. Tomorrow was the annual fair and if the clock hadn’t stopped by then, the merchants would all go running. The village would lose such a large portion of their income that they wouldn’t be able to afford the sowing seed for the following year. The clockmaker looked at the smith, spread his arms, and climbed back up. There, between clock and clapper, he met his death.

Uncle Chaim was a taciturn man. He sat in his little wooden house, repaired timepieces, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘History,’ he told the young Magnus, ‘is like a clock. You think it’s getting later, but the hands are always moving in the same circle. What’s on top today, is on the bottom tomorrow.’ Magnus, who often came to see him in the little house at the edge of the woods and helped him out, or leafed through the old books that lay under the bed, Magnus would think back on what had happened, when a band of Cossacks had struck off the head of Chaim’s wife because she happened to be standing outside the door with a basket of washing when the horsemen thundered past. And he also thought of the village on the other side of the forest that, one day, was no longer there – burned to the ground.

Whenever Magnus was with his uncle, in the shaky wooden house, hidden among the trees at the edge of the forest, Chaim sat him down on the cracked bench beside the door and told him about the past, wading back and forth across the grey wooden floor, taking up clocks, picking up a screw here and there and putting it in one of the many drawers and boxes on the table under the window. Magnus sat down on the bench, which was so old it gleamed like dung, and listened. They drank tea out of glasses white with lime.

The old man told him of the days when there weren’t any Cossacks and everything was green and fields of sunflowers bloomed just outside the village, green stalks as thick as your arm with heads as big as wheels and in those heads the black spiral that nearly sucked you in, right into the heart of the sun … Magnus listened and thought: It’s all nostalgia, regret for lost time.

Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim’s favourite story took place in the days when he was just a boy and lived in a town in the North, on the river harbour. His parents owned a modest house on the quay. At the end of the cart track that ran along the house, where the deep furrows branched off to the right and disappeared in the first hesitant overgrowth of the great forest, stood a small wooden structure that looked like a cowshed and was inhabited by a woodsman and his three daughters. Chaim spent nearly all his days in the woods behind that odd-looking house, where he and the eldest of the three girls would think up long, perilous adventures.

‘It wasn’t a very big forest,’ he said. ‘Maybe two days around, but when you’re ten years old you can wander about a forest like that for a week and think you’re in another country. We usually pretended we had to make a dangerous journey, on horseback, straight through the Carpathians, through the forests of Lithuania. Early in the morning I would come for Freide and we’d go to the kitchen and fill a knapsack with provisions: some bread and cheese, a bottle of water. Then we’d mount our horses, the ones we didn’t have – we were just pretending – and ride out. First a long way over the firebreak, but soon we were among the trees, where it was dark and quiet. Usually we wouldn’t be home until suppertime, when it started getting dark. I can’t remember us talking much. We rode and rode, and were especially careful when our horses had to go downhill. Such fun we had. But the best part about the forest was clearing the land.

‘At the end of the summer,’ said Chaim, ‘we’d all go into the forest. The woodsman, Freide and her sisters and I would spend the whole day gathering brushwood. We sawed down sick trees, cut back gnarled branches, cleared the paths … In the afternoon we ate in the open field, right next to the lane, and in the evening, when we were done, we brought our brushwood there and made a big fire. You mustn’t forget, it was getting colder by then. Late September. During the day the sun still shone brightly, but the evenings were cool. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and the woodsman and I built a campfire. First a pile of dry leaves, covered with twigs, then a sort of wigwam made of branches, and on top of that heavy, gnarled boughs, as thick as an arm and often still green. After a while we had a big cone of wood. We left a small opening at the bottom where we could stick in a dry, burning branch. The campfire began to burn from inside out, from little to big, from dry to wet. It usually wasn’t long before we had a huge fire, and we roasted potatoes in the ashes. Above us, and in the forest, it had gone completely dark and we sat in that clearing, lit by the flames. Shadows danced among the trees. The sparks from the fire flew up to the treetops and burst into pieces. We would sometimes feel a little scared. As we pricked our potatoes on sticks and held them in the ashes, the woodsman told us ghost stories. I wish you could have seen it.’

That’s what he always said, Uncle Chaim: ‘I wish you could have seen it.’

Magnus saw other things. One day when he arrived at Uncle Chaim’s house he found a bare patch with smouldering stumps of charred wood where the house had been. The clockmaker was nowhere in sight. Magnus walked among the half-burnt pieces of wood, through the ankle-deep layer of damp ash, but found nothing to remind him of the little house. The bench was gone, the table, the shaky wooden bed with the old books … He picked up a stick and poked around in the blackened mess. Just as he was about to leave, he saw something lying in the scorched coppice, under an oak. It was Chaim’s instrument kit, the chest he used to carry on his back when he travelled about the country repairing clocks in remote villages and towns. It had been cast aside, landed in the bushes, and been forgotten. Magnus slung the chest onto his back and set out on his journey.

‘Cossacks,’ said Uncle Chaim, when I asked him once what had happened. ‘Beware of Cossacks, my boy.’

‘There are no more Cossacks,’ I said. ‘Not here.’

‘There are always Cossacks.’

Here was America, where we were already living, the land where Uncle Chaim thought that people lit their lamps with a dollar bill and nobody ate potatoes.

‘Cossacks and potatoes,’ said Uncle Chaim. And he sang, to confirm his loathing for potatoes:

Zuntik – bulbes,

Montik – bulbes,

Dinstik un mitvokh – bulbes,

Donershtik un fraytik – bulbes,

Shabes in a novene:

– a bulbe-kugele!

Zuntik – vayter bulbes.

Sunday, potatoes. Monday, potatoes. Tuesday and Wednesday, potatoes. Thursday and Friday, potatoes. But on Shabbat, a special treat: potato pudding! Sunday, more potatoes.

‘The food alone should have been reason enough for me to leave that country,’ Uncle Chaim once said. I had reminded him that this would have made him an eligible candidate for the Hollander Top Ten List of Terrible Reasons to Make Drastic Decisions.

‘Pah!’ he said. ‘Don’t compare me to your father, who left Europe because he didn’t want to wear a tie. Or Magnus, who left because he was looking for a wife without a moustache.’

That was what Magnus had said, that all the women in their region had moustaches. ‘Moustaches and hairy legs.’ He had shivered at the thought. Uncle Chaim had looked at him sideways, his left eyebrow lowered. ‘Hairy legs? When did you see a leg?’ Magnus, inhabitant of the spiritual realm for nearly three centuries now, had blushed like a young girl. ‘Nu, Magnus, Nephew. Where in all those parts did you ever see a leg?’ Magnus had mumbled something about moustaches and that he had certainly seen them before and that you could only assume … His uncle’s eyebrow remained firmly lowered and it was a long time before he looked away. Finally he turned to me and shrugged.

But neither hairy legs, nor upper lips, were the reason for Magnus’s departure. It was the last Cossack raid, when Uncle Chaim’s house was burned to the ground. There, among the stumps of wood and lumps of charred straw, like rotting teeth in a blackened mouth, he had tightened his belt, knotted his puttees, and left.

The year was 1648.

Magnus Levi, as he was still called at the time, reached, after more than twenty-one years of travelling, the easternmost part of the Lowlands. And there he stayed. Not because he was tired, which he was, or sick of travelling, which he also was, but because he arrived in a town on Market Day. He wandered among the stalls looking at blushing apples, pears as big as a man’s fist, cabbages like cannon balls and bulky rolls of worsted. He could smell contentment in the air and he felt something settling inside him, going slowly round and round, the way dogs do when they have found a place where they want to lie down. Magnus tried to resist this unfamiliar feeling, but it was strong, almost overwhelming. He jumped when a cloth merchant called out to him.

‘What’re you selling, friend?’

He could vaguely make out what the man asked, because the dialect in which he spoke sounded much like the Plattdeutsch he had picked up along the way.

‘Uhren.’

‘Clocks?’

Magnus nodded.

The man beckoned him to come closer and then gestured to him that he wished to see what was in the wooden chest. Magnus placed the chest on the merchant’s stall and opened it. Hanging among his neatly arranged tools was the little pendulum clock he had made. The man pursed his lips and nodded admiringly.

‘Schön,’ he said. He looked back at Magnus, his head slightly tilted, and asked, ‘Deutsche?’

‘Deutsche?’ Magnus shook his head. ‘Weiter östlich. Polen.’

‘Pol …’

Once again Magnus shook his head. ‘Da gewohnt. Nicht Polak.’

The merchant shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the pendulum clock. ‘Wieviel?’

Magnus named his price and the man on the other side of the stall began busily converting. Again he pursed his lips.

Meanwhile a small group of curious onlookers had gathered around them. People asked the merchant where the traveller had come from and the merchant, who suddenly felt like a true cosmopolitan, told them the story. Just as Magnus was taking the pendulum clock out of the chest so that they could see it better, the cloud of spectators parted. A lady and her companion walked through the space they had made. Magnus, who hadn’t noticed a thing, was busy letting the clock chime. The melodious cooing of the rods and the first four lines of the song Friede always used to sing rose up in the clear spring air. He had worked for months to get the eleven copper rods just the right length that they would produce the proper tones, and before that he had slaved many, many months to build a mechanism that would allow the tiny hammers to hit the rods at just the right tempo, and in sequence. He stared dreamily at the little clock. He didn’t notice that anything had changed until he saw the merchant give a deep nod. At first he grinned, taking the nod as a sign of appreciation and admiration, but when it remained silent and everyone appeared to have shifted their gaze, he looked sideways. Standing next to him was a young woman in a dress of midnight-blue. A black crocheted shawl was draped across her shoulders. She was in the company of a servant girl in a white lace cap.

‘What song is that?’

She had dark eyes, the colour of polished, gleaming walnut, and curly black hair, tied back in a ponytail.

He stammered out something that even he didn’t understand.

‘Deutsche?’ she asked.

The merchant explained to her where the clockmaker had come from and then Magnus told her that he had been on the road for twenty years now and had travelled through Poland and Bohemia and Moravia repairing clocks and in one big city had even built a timepiece for the mayor.

When he had finished speaking, the young woman asked how much he wanted for the pendulum clock. Magnus looked at the timepiece. The sloping sides were like the curve of a woman’s hip, the wood was the colour of … He named a price that was barely half what he had named earlier.

‘What?’ cried the merchant. ‘You told me …’

Magnus, who realized he had let himself get carried away and was about to be laughed at, picked up the pendulum clock and tucked it back into his wooden travelling case. He smiled unhappily, shrugged his shoulders, and said, in even clumsier German (if that were possible), something that was meant to explain his peculiar behaviour. The young woman leaned towards her maidservant and whispered something in her ear. Then she gave Magnus a nod and asked the merchant to measure off two yards of white linen.

The group of onlookers dispersed and Magnus slung the chest onto his back. He walked between two stalls and made his way to the large church in the middle of the market square. There, in the shelter of the buttresses, where it stank of rotting vegetables and old fish, he had a serious word with himself. How could he have been so stupid? To let himself be carried away by a pair of beautiful eyes? Imagine selling Reisele for a price that wouldn’t even cover the cost of … You’re in a strange land, Magnus Levi. You’ve got to keep silent and listen, instead of bragging and swooning. When he had gone past the church the sun came out again, and in the clear spring light he walked out of the market square, into an alleyway between two large white houses with stained glass windows. Behind the glass he saw a row of plants in white and blue pots. They bore red flowers, as big as apples. He had seen many things on his journey to the West: he had been in prosperous regions, but nowhere had he seen such abundance as in this place, nowhere had it been as clean, nowhere did the brass door knobs gleam as brightly as they did here. Behind the white houses was a cobblestoned street lined with clipped trees and tidy flower beds. As he walked among those little trees he heard the click-clacking of a woman’s heels. When he looked around he saw a servant girl, who had gathered up her skirts and was running towards him.

When she had caught up with him, she stood there for a while, panting. He waited for her to catch her breath, trying to look friendly. This wasn’t easy, because he was frightened. He had recognized her as the servant girl he had seen with the young woman who had been standing next to him at the market, and he was afraid she had come to tell him that he had behaved in an unseemly manner and that she would have him run out of town. That had happened to him before, somewhere in a Prussian village. He had never quite been able to discover what he had done wrong, but whatever it was, he had nearly been thrown in prison for doing it.

‘My mistress asks if you would be so kind as to repair the clocks in her father’s house,’ panted the girl.

He looked at her without quite understanding what she meant. She was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and she didn’t seem to find him at all threatening or strange. But that still didn’t set his mind at rest. ‘Ich geh weiter,’ he said. ‘Andere Stadt. Muβ gehen …’

The servant girl sighed and shook her head. ‘They’ll pay you well,’ she said. ‘She wants you to come, sir. She’s seen your clock.’

Pride is like the sun that peeks out from between two clouds. Magnus felt the agreeable warmth of recognition.

‘Die Dame ist nicht böse?’ he asked.

The servant girl shook her head. ‘You may come this evening, seven o’clock,’ she said. She told him the address and made him repeat it three times. Anyone, she said, could show him the way. Her master’s house was known to all.

For the rest of that day Magnus wandered about the town. He looked at shops, peered through the open doors of coffee houses, and stood for a long time gazing at mothers as they walked with their young children across a grassy field. Ducks waddled along the banks of a pond, deer stood poised on a hilltop, a jay skimmed carelessly over his head. Everything was small and clear and still. Magnus had arrived in a fairyland.

That night, in the little town in the east, Magnus was to meet the woman of his life. Her name was Rebekka Gans and she was the daughter of a prosperous cattle dealer. The shy clockmaker had moved about the house behind the Grote Markt like a cat walking on new-fallen snow. He didn’t dare sit on the brocade chairs, and he stood there clutching his travelling case for so long that the young lady finally asked if he wouldn’t rather put it down. Where? Magnus had thought, looking around the high-ceilinged room with the gleaming wooden floor. She had walked up to him, taken the chest, not flinching when she felt the weight of wheels and tools, and leaned it against the green-veined marble of the hearth. Then she had looked at him with her grave, impassive face and rung for the maid.

He had examined every clock in the house that night and as he did so, had drunk tea out of cups so thin that the light from the oil lamp shone right through them and had eaten almond curls so fine and meltingly sweet that they flitted about in his empty stomach like butterflies. When he left, after an hour or two, his head felt as light as those biscuits.

‘Eyes like a moon calf,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘In love. In love? Bewitched!’

That was how it felt, in any case. And Magnus knew just when it had happened. Not at the market, where he was ‘Smitten by the sight of her,’ as he himself once said. Not when he was in the house, nibbling on those fluttering cookies and watching the flicker of candlelight under the teapot. Not when he had placed the small black-lacquered clock before him on the table. ‘Salomon Coster, The Hague,’ it said on a silver plate behind the glass door. The young lady had stood beside him and watched as he studied the movement. It was a pendulum and, as far as he could tell, one of the first applications of that technique. He had asked three questions, enough to determine that the clock was about ten years old, that it was based on the theory of a certain Huygens, who had invented the pendulum clock. At that moment Magnus had realized that Uncle Chaim had invented the very same thing fifteen years earlier. He had looked up, young Magnus, stared into the lamplit twilight, and let his eyes wander. The waste of it all. The clock that Uncle Chaim, shaking his head, had flung under his workbench after Wolschke, the German forester, had informed him that the count had called it a ‘diabolical piece of rubbish’ and didn’t want it in his house. The capriciousness of an age that allowed two, maybe even more, to come up with the same invention, yet clasped only one of them to her bosom. If Uncle Chaim had been credited with the invention instead of Mr Huygens, the history of Chaim and Magnus, perhaps even of the entire continent, would have turned out differently. And then he had met her eyes, at the end of the journey his eyes had made around the room. The oil lamp lit them from the side and he saw tiny stars in the blackness, the veil of her lashes, the soft yet clear-cut line of her jaw, and he wanted to turn away but couldn’t. Her bound hair curled rebelliously at her temples, a few strands had come loose above her left eye and before he knew what he was doing his hand was on its way to … That’s when it happened. A shadow of a smile had stolen across her face (not just her lips, he remembered later that night, as he wandered through the town, brooding and pondering, it hadn’t just glided over her lips, that smile, but over her whole face, the … the memory of a smile, a barely perceptible ‘yes,’ an ‘if circumstances were different …’) and he had felt his hand clench, had, so slowly that it seemed to last for hours, called it back (‘Here! Here, you mongrel of a hand! Down!’) and the hand came back towards his own face and – by that time his neck was damp with sweat – suddenly the hand was coming towards him at full speed. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor. He had boxed his own ear. The lady tried to control herself, but even he felt relieved when, not two seconds later, she burst into peals of laughter.

Outside, under the spring moon, drifting from one alleyway to the next, he had wallowed in his shame like a pig in the mud.

‘The history of love. Write about that, a big fat book. Kings. Princes. Abraham and Sarah, ah … Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. David and Bathsheba. And one special chapter for the man who boxed his own ear,’ Uncle Chaim said. ‘And all because he was scared of hairy legs. Bah!’

By morning, Magnus had walked around the town three times and knew it as well as the village where he himself had grown up. The streets, the houses, the market square, the shooting grounds, they were all like the movement of a trusty clock. He bought bread at the baker’s and ate it on the bank of a ditch strewn with buttercups. The dew left the fields, birds flew up to the clear blue sky like tinkling bells. The smell of cow dung rose up from the ground and tickled his nostrils. A milkmaid came by with two wooden buckets on her yoke and saw him chewing his butterless bread. She put down her buckets, drew a dipper out of the milk, and gave him a drink. He thanked her in a mixture of languages he had learned along the way and she laughed like a man as she walked on. He gazed after her, the broad hips in the long striped skirt, the plump back, the full, rounded arms. A land of milk and butter. The milk he had drunk was nearly yellow with cream. He was no farmer, but even a layman could see how succulent and tender the grass was here.

Halfway through the morning he tugged on the copper bell at the merchant’s house and was let in by the servant girl. She gave him milk in a mug and set a plate beside it with a buttered brown slab. The milk was sweet and hot, the slab of brown was called koek and tasted of anise. After he’d eaten he was shown into the parlour – but no one was there. The table had been cleared and laid with a coarse linen cloth. He went and fetched, under the maid’s supervision, the clocks he had seen earlier, and set about his work. Although the clocks were a different shape from those he knew, he was familiar with the works, and by noon he had cleaned and oiled two of the four. Then the maid came for him and in the kitchen, where a portly cook was stirring a pot, he was given bread and cheese. It wasn’t until he had closed up the last clock that the lady of the house walked in. The maid followed her carrying a tray with a teapot, a blue and white plate of butter biscuits, and a little tower of porcelain. Magnus cleared off the table, cleaned his instruments, and packed up his chest. All that time the young woman watched him gravely. Then she removed the cloth from the table, set it, and had him sit down again.

‘Nu,’ she said. ‘Lomir redn.’

So. Let’s talk.

The maid left the room. Magnus, his mouth a carriage house, stared at the woman in amazement.

They spoke. They spoke like the tea that flowed, fragrant, from the spout of the teapot, like the biscuits that crumbled between their teeth and left a buttery film on their fingertips. They spoke until the windowpanes turned grey, blue, and finally indigo. They spoke, and it was, as Magnus would later say, as if he were emptying and filling at the same time.

Then the merchant came in.

‘A beard,’ said Magnus, many centuries later, ‘a beard like a cluster of bees. A head of hair – he was my future father-in-law but there’s no other way to describe it, I’m sorry – a head of hair like a witch’s broom. My heart didn’t just stop: it was no longer there.’

‘Becky,’ the giant had said. (‘A giant, Nathan,’ said Magnus. ‘I didn’t even know that Jews could be so big. A voice like the great clock in Worky.’) ‘Becky, I didn’t know we had guests.’

‘Tatele,’ she said. ‘This is the clockmaker.’

And Magnus had jumped up, knocking over his chair, clicked his heels (as he had learned in Germany), bowed from the hips, and cried, ‘At your service, Your Grace, Magnus Levi!’ And he thought, Tatele? Little Papa?

Becky and her father had laughed like the rain: he, a gusty cloudburst of deep, sonorous tones, she, a spring shower on a velvety meadow.

A clockmaker, even though he travelled about and carried all his wordly possessions in a chest upon his back, was good enough for Rebekka Gans. Her father, Meijer, a dealer in livestock, had also started from scratch. He knew that the Jews in neighbouring countries, and even in some parts of the Lowlands, lived by the grace of the good-naturedness of their local administrators. He had been in the North, where no more than three Jewish families were allowed to live in town, where Jews were only allowed to be butchers, tanners, or peddlers, and were forbidden to build synagogues. The tolerance in this region, and especially in the prosperous West, had made him a wealthy man, but he had never forgotten his own humble beginnings.

That was why, even though Magnus was poor and had no home, Meijer Gans looked at the character of the man who wanted his daughter and not at his position or means. He peered into Magnus’s soul, seeking ambition and a spirit of enterprise. He was pleased with what he found.

The couple were given Salomon Coster’s clock and a dowry in silver when, two months later, they left for West Holland. In Rotterdam, a cousin of Meijer Gans’s who dealt in grain helped them find a house. The widower himself – Rebekka’s mother had died of childbed fever shortly after her birth – remained behind in the East. He would miss his daughter the way a man misses an arm, yet he wished her happiness and good fortune, things that, in his opinion, were best found in the West. Magnus embarked on a new life and, as if to show how much he wanted to be and belong here, he changed his name to Hollander. He knew of no better way to stress his wholehearted devotion to this rich land of luscious grass, creamy milk, and golden yellow cheese.

A son was born, one, whom they named Chaim. He became a clockmaker and met a girl called Zipporah Leib. The son married the Leib girl. They had a son, who was named after Grandfather Meijer and, scarcely three years after his birth, died of galloping consumption. Chaim thought he had provoked the Lord of the Universe by not giving his firstborn son the name he should have had, and so, seven years later, when another son was born, he was called Heijman, the Dutch version of Chaim, which means ‘life.’ The boy was strong and healthy and, like his father, became a clockmaker. He married, as had every other man in the family, late. He took Chava Groen as his wife, and when they were nearly forty she had a son whom they called Heijman. He married Lenah Arends, and from their alliance, too, came one son: Heijman Three. He took Rebecca van Amerongen as his wife, who bore him Heijman Four. The nineteenth century was two years old by then. Heijman Four and his wife, Esther de Jong, had a child at the age of forty-three. It was a son: Heijman Five. This descendant of the house of Hollander, a clockmaker, married young. He was twenty-three when he met Anna Blum and twenty-four, Anna twenty-five, when they knew the joy of offspring: Heijman Six.

The tide of time (Magnus’s words) had driven the Hollanders to the West, to Rotterdam, that boisterously expanding merchant city on the North Sea coast, and there it seemed as if they had finally landed in a peaceful haven. Seven generations of Heijmans (if we count the first, who was called Chaim) grew up there. Magnus and Rebekka lived to see their children’s children, but could sense that the younger generation were ashamed of the family’s humble origins; embarrassed by Magnus’s old work-coat, the wooden chest Rebekka had hung on the wall and the modest trade in matzos, dried fruit and nuts that she and her friend Schoontje ran from a little shop in the Jewish quarter.

‘That’s the way it goes,’ said Magnus, in keeping with the analysis that my grandfather, the last Heijman Hollander, liked to make of The Journey to the West. ‘You start with a stone, a piece of rope and a threadbare coat, and you build a house so your children will have a roof over their heads, a safe place to live, but once they’ve grown, they say: Come, Father, throw away that stone and that rope and that old coat. Everyone wants a house, no one likes to be reminded of all the grief that came before it.’

The last Heijman in the series took Sarah van Vlies to be his bride. He didn’t succeed his father in the clockmaking business, but studied physics instead and eventually became a professor in Leiden. His parents had left him a jewellery shop and renowned repair studio, and enough money to enable him to take his doctoral degree. Heijman became a respected, though not exceptional, physicist. His greatest claim was the development of a standard formula for bridge construction. At a time when physics was becoming increasingly experimental, he was more of an engineer than a researcher, more of a clockmaker than a thinker.

And so, eight generations of the family started by Magnus and Rebekka had been born in Rotterdam. They had lived, prospered, prayed, sung, and died there. They had seen the fishing village grow to become the second merchant city of Holland and ultimately – after the Nieuwe Waterweg had been dug and another Jew – Pincoffs – had founded the Rotterdamse Handelsvereniging and had the harbours built on Feijenoord – the largest harbour in the world. They had prospered, the Hollanders, just as the city had prospered, and, like the city, had set their sights on the West, on all that was modern and new. Together, they had opened themselves to the world, yet felt deeply and firmly rooted in that land of Holland. When, in 1939, the eighth and ninth generations stood on board the ship that was to take them from Rotterdam to New York, their departure was more than the leaving of a place. It was the resumption of the journey, the loss of the place that had allowed them to take root in the world. It was the loss of a place that was just like them, a city that, unlike Amsterdam, had never boasted about her tolerance for the Jews, yet was often more tolerant. Rotterdam had become their heart and they had felt cherished in her arms. Moving on was second nature to the Hollander family, yet for eight generations, from Magnus’s son Chaim to the last Heijman, they had been Rotterdamers, born and bred. They had all but forgot where they began.

1648 was the year Magnus slung his pack on his back, turned round, and left the region where he had been born, raised, and expected to die. Twenty-one years later he arrived in the Lowlands.

‘Twenty-one years to walk from Poland to Holland?’ I once asked him, amazed at the duration of the journey.

‘He lost his way,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Didn’t know he was going to Holland. Knew he was headed West. Took a wrong turn.’ ‘I … Things were different then,’ said Magnus.

‘I understand that. But twenty-one years?’

‘Magnus,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Dear dear dear … nephew. Worthless boy scout.’

So for twenty-one years Magnus was on his way and what he did in all that time no one really knew. He himself said that he worked a bit here, stayed for a while there, turned South when he thought he was going West. A journey … If you were to try and draw the route, you would end up with a tangle of wool.

Two and a half centuries later, in Rotterdam, my father and mother met.

‘The Lord of the Universe, whether you believe in Him or not,’ was Uncle Herman’s version, ‘decided in 1927, or, God knows, perhaps even from the genesis of creation, to bring together the light and the darkness, and that He would do this in the form of a marriage. That is why – pay attention! – He arranged for your parents to fall into each other’s arms during the fireworks on Midsummer Night. Good fortune, some people would call it, bad luck say those who know better. Others (by that, Uncle Herman was referring to himself) call it a disaster. He came from a family of clockmakers and physicists, she was old money. He was a promising engineer, she, a young lady who had life figured out long before life understood her. He lived in the shadow of his father, your grandfather, who placed physics above all else, and she thought that physics was merely re-inventing the wheel. She was a free spirit.’

Uncle Herman had the tendency to devote quite a bit of attention to the setting in his stories, the backdrop against which a particular event took place. Perhaps this is something peculiar to sociologists. Whatever the case: ever since he first told me his version of the downfall, I was impressed by the way in which he linked the fate of our family to the history of this century, particularly because he proved to be right.

It was Midsummer Night, 1929 (not 1927, Uncle Herman wasn’t very good at dates) and above the park, rockets were flaring and fading in chrysanthemums of red, yellow, green and blue sparks. The upturned faces of the spectators and passers-by shone in the light of the fireworks, and the tall oaks and chestnut trees looked lovelier than ever. Outside the little white inn at the edge of the park, men stood with a glass of beer in one hand, the thumb of their other hand hooked in a waistcoat pocket, legs slightly apart. Women hung on their arms or whispered to one other. Each time a rocket exploded, their dresses flashed white in the darkness.

‘Hollander! Hollander!’ someone shouted. His voice was half lost in the booming of the fireworks, but my father had heard it and looked around, searchingly. He met the equally searching gaze of a young woman standing nearby. They looked at each other, turned away, and continued hunting.