The Devil's Playground (14 page)

much about.

Jon had never had a bar mitzvah, never eaten chicken

soup except out of a can, didn’t learn Hebrew or fast on the

Day of Atonement, ate pork all his life, went out with a

Catholic girl and never once thought of visiting Israel. He’d

hidden behind the fence of his name and had effected a

passable imitation of an English gentile for most of his life.

Of course, his father had achieved more than a passable

imitation and Jon, in this at least, had his father as a role

model for the years to come. The word ‘Jew’ did not come

into the Reed household, as if even the mention of it might

infect the child and cripple him in what was gradually becoming

a harsher world.

As he walked across the crowded squares of Amsterdam,

so filled with bustle and steam, the crisscrossing of trams

and bicycles, the small runnels gouged into the road, Jon

remembered the incident when his father, being questioned

as to whether or not he was a Jew by Polish officials at a

remote border post, had replied ‘Absolutely not.’ Until then

Jon hadn’t really thought about such things; his relatives had

strange accents and even stranger foods but that seemed a

throwback to some time before the year zero, or so his father

had always insisted.

That day at the border crossing, the young Jon found

himself surprisingly shocked at his father’s reply, so much

so that he quickly rolled down the Mercedes’s window and

blurted out ‘He is a Jew’ at the border guards. His father had

subsequently been taken into a small hut where, he later told

his son, the guards had stripped and searched him. He would

never let Jon forget that moment, saying ‘I hope this teaches

you a lesson’ many a time after recounting the horrifying

events that occurred within the customs shack. Jon was sure

that the incident had taught him a lesson, but as to what the

lesson was or whether there was a moral to glean from it, he

didn’t know, and in the following years he made sure not to

allude to this mysterious part of his heritage that had caused

his father such undue punishment and humiliation.

Jake’s story had awakened in him a long lost sense of, well

he couldn’t really call it Jewishness, never having experienced

or been taught what that was, but more a feeling of a curious

membership of some esoteric group. He remembered that

the only time he’d felt any Jewish identity was when he was

being abused. Called a Yid or a miser, watching the other

boys rubbing their noses and singing the praises of Adolf

Hitler. It was no more than if they’d mocked the colour of his hair or the way he slouched, there was nothing behind the naming but the will to hurt, yet it still rankled and made

him wonder why there was so much hate directed against this

attribute that he’d unwillingly received at birth. Consequently

he’d never considered himself Jewish. Though the insults

still hurt, he knew that they really weren’t directed at him,

that the kids had somehow got it wrong, had got him mixed

up with someone else.

The rain stopped as he wound through the thin, clasping

alleys of the red-light district, avoiding the hustlers and

early-morning wrecks. Out of an alley he emerged into the

sudden explosion of space that is Nieuwmarkt. He had to

stop, take in the space, the open vista stretching across the

square. Out of the dark huddle and into the light. He lit a

cigarette and stared at the Waag, the weigh-house that looked

like a medieval castle, almost arbitrarily located at the centre

of the square. He looked around. It was early, the city, sleepy

and slow, was still shuttered and shrouded in the aching

movements of waking. The cobblestoned and unadorned

square was empty, stretching beyond the Waag and to the

tall buildings on the other side. The castle with its round

medieval towers, its slitted windows and garrets, seemed an

afterthought, as if to compensate for the massive emptiness

of the square. Here he could breathe, see the sky as more

than a strip painted between roofs. He enjoyed standing

around, no one to hassle him here, only a few feet from the

district but also in another world.

The Jewish quarter lay to the east of the Waag, a long

boulevard that wound down to the museum. He sat in a cafe,

only just opening, the waitress bleary-eyed and tired, and

ordered an espresso. He wanted to delay things for a bit. He

knew the museum was waiting for him. It was the only link

he had left to Jake. And though the detective had been pretty

clear, he knew that this was something he had to do. Besides,

it was a museum, he could be going there for a thousand

other reasons and by late afternoon he would be on a plane,

heading back, the detective none the wiser. He sat and smoked quietly, watching the people slowly passing by and feeling no desire to return to London.

Back home, his days always started exactly the same, a

slow trudge to the bathroom, coffee and a cigarette, a CD

playing. Then he’d go downstairs, check the mail, back

upstairs, boot up the computer, download his emails, browse

the web, maybe buying a book or CD and by then it would

be time for lunch. So the days disappeared in a pleasant

routine that masked any surprise or shock, making them go

quicker, filling up with things that didn’t matter. The last

year had gone by frighteningly fast. Was that just getting

older, he wondered, time telescoping down into number of

years left, or something altogether different? It scared him

that he’d begun to worry about time running out. He’d always

thought that would come after his fiftieth birthday.

He got up, paid and crossed the great, empty square.

Checked his map and headed down St Antoniebreestraat.

Jake had stretched out the days they’d spent together,

filling up the usually vacuous time with silences and gestures,

smiles and mysteries. Why hadn’t he missed all that before?

Or had he and just not realized it? The latter was probably

more accurate, some things are so essential a part of your

life that you never pause to think about them until they’re

gone. And even then, for the first few months, years, you

just feel the hollowness of something lacking and you ascribe

it to other things that are missing in your life — your wife,

success, self-confidence, money. It takes a long time to realize

it isn’t anything as earth-shattering as that, that it is in fact

something very small and easily replaceable. It was good to

be nudged out of those old patterns and routines that he now glimpsed might actually be the cause rather than the symptom of his malaise. And yet, when the old man had left,

he’d slipped right back into the same old habits like an

alcoholic remembering the sound of the cap breaking open.

Amsterdam had blasted all that, exploded those cigarettes

and mail checks into pieces, so that although he’d been away

only for a couple of days, it already felt like years and those

routines almost the movements of another man.

He lit a cigarette and watched as a couple of teenagers

walked past him, holding hands and smiling as if the world

didn’t exist. Or maybe it’s exactly because it does, he thought,

maybe that’s it. He continued walking, waiting for the Jewish

Quarter to appear in all its imagined old-world grandeur and

seediness. But it was gone. The street was lined with small

shops selling cuddly toys, books, magazines, small items that

you know you don’t need but kind of want anyway. Above

lay apartment blocks, the whole street one long promenade

of sixties’ pastel-coloured buildings. Balconies and small

windows. Clotheslines and TV aerials. People slowly emerging

into the day. He remembered reading how the whole

quarter had been torn down. Replaced by this prefab apartment

complex that stretched from Nieuwmarkt down to the

Waterlooplein. He’d been hoping for clotted doorways, old

grimy steps, the smells of cabbage and coffee, bullet holes in

the stonework. But, staring up at the cool, calculated planes

of these dwellings, he could have been anywhere and he tried

to not let this disappointment cloud his day.

There was no reason to go back for the moment. None at

all. London always depressed him in the autumn with its grey

skies and grey people trudging through the clogged and sticky

streets. He knew that he needed a change and, in London,

ensconced in the cocoon of his flat, he could never drag up

the sufficient amount of will and excitement to make such a

decision, to say ‘Fuck it’ and get on the next plane out of

there. There were always reasons for not doing it, for putting

it off or ruling it out.

He remembered the building opposite his flat, the dole

office, and how he would sometimes watch the glum men

and women queuing up, slowly wasting their time, inching

forward, knowing that if it hadn’t been for his father’s death

and the resultant inheritance, he would be just like them,

waiting his turn even now. Sometimes at night they forgot

to turn off the led signs and he could see from his window,

as he sat on the sofa, the clear red illumination that said

please wait. For months he had seen the sign lit up in

that empty hall across the street and if he’d needed any

confirmation for the life he was leading, he would stare at it

for a few minutes. Now that he was finally away, he knew

that the waiting was over, that you can delay and defer your

life only for so long.

He checked his watch. The flight was getting closer. But

first he had debts to pay. To the old man and perhaps also

to the religion he’d been born into. What had happened to

Jake? Over and over again, it rang through his head. What

the hell could have caused a man like that to do such things

to his own body? It seemed almost unimaginable to Jon, a

shocking reversal of all that he thought was given. The

bloody tissues on the floor. The scars and skin, like something

out of a horror flick. And he thought about what the

detective had said. Snuff films. Torture. Sex. Wondering if

Jake really did all that to himself, if it wasn’t something else,

someone else.

He crossed the canal and headed towards the museum.

Everything around him was new, the demolished medieval

buildings of the Jewish Quarter nothing but unremembered

ghosts. Everything modern and shiny. The massive buildings,

the streets uncobbled now, the great white expanse of the

Operahouse. He came to a stop by the black granite monument

that stood at the edge of the land, almost dangling

between the confluence of the wide, raging Amstel and the

quiet Zwanenburgwal, the place where the city spills open.

He stared up at it. The inscription in Hebrew and Dutch.

The way the black reflected the scuzzy sun and the swirl of

the canals behind it. It looked like a monolith from the film 2001. Some pre-natural signifier stranded here in another empty square, the sterile, dead concrete fields of the Opera

house stretching out in every direction, bounded only by the restless canals and the memory of what used to be.

The Jewish Historical Museum had once been four separate

synagogues, greatly frequented by the many Jews of Amsterdam.

After the war, there being not many Jews left, the

buildings lay empty until the 1980s when they were converted

into one composite structure that now served as Amsterdam’s

memory of its Jews. Four synagogues, from the ancient

stone of the Grote, built in 1671, to the stark brickwork of

the Nieuwe, built a hundred years later, to the functional

spaces of the extended gallery appended in 1987. All together

now. Linked by a feat of architecture even more impressive

for the fact that it was almost invisible. Four synagogues,

merged and buttressed, under one roof, a sort of homogenizing

of past and present, the kind of thing this city was so

good at.

He remembered Jake telling him about the place, animated,

the closest he’d got to enthusiasm. After learning

about his father’s will, the old man had come here to see

what records he could find about his family, his real family,

and he’d described it to Jon with all the reverence of a new

husband describing his wife’s body. Jon wondered whether

the detective had already been there, already questioned the

people. It didn’t matter. As long as he didn’t bump into him

… and even then, he could just say he was sightseeing. He

had his own investigations to make, parallel but not congruent

with the detective’s. He felt a hot buzz of expectation

shoot through him, a quiver of curiosity, now that his search

for Jake was becoming less abstract.

Jon entered the museum. An old man, positively Metiluselean,

sat at the counter, collecting fees and handing out guides

and brochures.

‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ Jon said, surprising

himself. He’d meant to lead up to it, start talking about

something in general and narrow it down. The old man