The Dream Room Page 3

  I turned to the mirror and looked at the patches of steam that made everything seem hazy and far away.

  “Everything comes to an end,” said my mother.

  I drew my fingers through the film on the glass.

  My mother, her voice barely audible over the splattering of the water, began humming.

  That night I heard their voices again, but I was so sleepy I couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  THE NEXT DAY I came home from school, and my father was sitting alone at the table. The familiar display of finished and half-finished planes was gone. He sat up straight, in his usual chair, smiling absently into space. For a long time he didn’t even seem to notice me. It wasn’t until I had made tea and poured us each a cup that he snapped out of his trance. He held his head to one side and grinned a John Wayne—like grimace.

  “What are these?” he said, pointing to the dish I had set down in front of him.

  “Scones,” I said. “I baked them yesterday, but they’re still fine, I think.”

  “Scones…” he said. “What’s going to become of you?”

  “Where’s…”

  “Job-hunting.”

  “Job…”

  What had been the start of a grin now crinkled into a full-fledged smile. “She’s going to fly.”

  I stared at him. My mouth fell open.

  My father began laughing, as if he suddenly saw the humor in it. “She’s applied for a job as a stewardess.” He laughed harder and harder. I looked at him. I couldn’t help it, I started laughing too.

  “She’s going to fly!” My father slammed his hand down on the table. The teapot jumped and the candle flickered in the tea warmer. He howled with laughter. I howled with laughter. We lay facedown on the table, our heads buried in our arms, and laughed until we cried.

  And then, all at once, there was silence. I sat up, my cheeks damp from laughing, and as I stared at my father, who was still grinning and wiping his eyes, I suddenly remembered what my mother had said, that everything must come to an end, and there, at that moment, the feeling I had had for the past few weeks suddenly vanished, that sense that we were living in a bubble, that we had landed in a place in time where we were safe and sheltered, invulnerable to sorrow and woe…I looked at my father. The last trace of a grin faded from his lips, the sparkle in his eyes faded.

  MY FATHER AND I finished off the last few planes together. We sat at the table and silently passed each other parts. Now and then, whenever a new box was opened, my father would tell me something about the model, that the Messerschmidt 110 was a slow turner, for instance, but was dangerous to attack because of the tail gunner, and then we’d look at the picture on the box before we went on, sorting parts, filing wings, gluing, and painting. I gazed at the shrinking pile in the hallway like a prisoner who was counting the days that separated him from freedom.

  And then, one day, I came home from school and the pile was gone. As I peeled off my wet clothes next to the coat rack I heard a metallic rattling coming from the living room. I stood among my dripping things and listened intently. A bell tinkled. I lowered my jacket and schoolbag to the floor and walked carefully toward the living room door.

  My father was sitting at the breakfast bar. Before him, in a sea of crumpled paper, stood the old portable typewriter. A cigarette lay in an ashtray. Smoke curled up lazily to the ceiling. My father greeted me wearily and pointed to the teapot, standing over a flame. He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and continued typing. The bell tinkled and he pulled back the carriage, blew out smoke, and hammered away at the keys. After a while, he stopped. I sat across from him, on the other side of the typewriter. He had stubbed out his cigarette and drank large gulps of tea. It was a long time before either of us spoke.

  “We can’t go on making planes forever, boy.” He looked at the sheet of paper hanging out of the typewriter. “Though I must say, I think I’m better at building planes. When you have to describe your life in a few lines, it all seems like nothing more than chance and coincidence.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  My father looked up with an expression that bordered on amazement. “God,” he said after a while. Faint lines rippled across his forehead. There was a long silence.

  “I’m going to go do my homework,” I said.

  “Wait! Wait.” He frowned, then shook his head. “I…”

  Suddenly I saw him again as the flier, the model airplane builder, the engineer who invented machines that made him unnecessary. I was standing next to my stool, half turned away. Faces, each one slightly different than the last, slid in front of the other. One man, so many faces.

  “What do you want to be, when you grow up?” he asked.

  “A cook,” I said.

  “I thought as much. Do you really want to be a cook? Is that the only thing you really want?”

  “I do now,” I said. “But perhaps it’s not what I imagined.”

  “Nothing is,” he said. “It never is.”

  We looked at each other for a while.

  “Nothing ever is all that great.” He raised his hand, as if to stop any objections. “But that’s not the point. You have to hold on. If you really want something, you have to hold on to it. That’s at least as important as talent.”

  “But…”

  He took out a cigarette and lit it. In the cloud of smoke that poured from his mouth, he said. “Did I ever tell you what I did after the war?”

  He had come back and started flying for spray companies. And then he had had that accident.

  “No, before I came back. I stayed in England for a while.” He beckoned. “Sit down a minute.”

  I poured fresh tea and he told me how, in those days, victory had come, an end to the war, and how he had discovered that his life, from one moment to the next, was no longer a path paved by circumstances outside himself. “It was,” he said, “as if there was an empty plain in front of me, and I knew that I had to go out into that emptiness. At least, that’s what I supposed life was: an expedition to the South Pole, but before Amundsen and Shackleton had set foot there, New Zealand before Tasman, South Africa before Van Riebeeck.”

  Like so many exiles, he reported weekly to the Dutch embassy, in the hope of getting news of his parents. Most of the others were Engelandvaarders, men who were often somewhat older and who, during the war, had crossed the North Sea in anything that could float, determined, hell-bent on driving out the enemy. Whenever he sat among them on a bench, waiting his turn, he felt as if he were the complete opposite of them.

  In the months that followed, the row on the bench in the stately white embassy building grew smaller and smaller. Finally, he and a chain-smoking playboy in blue blazer and silk scarf were the only ones left. They sat across from each other, in silence.

  One day the other man opened his mouth and said, nodding at the book in my father’s hand: “Writer?” My father shook his head: “Reader.” The man laughed. “A strange bunch, we exiles. Writers, adventurers, war-horses, and weaklings, but not a normal person among us.” My father knitted his brows and tried to think whether he knew a writer living in London. “I, personally, am one of the weaklings,” said the playboy. He stood up and held out his hand: “Paul van Zevenbergen ter Borgh.” My father got to his feet and returned the handshake. The man nodded when he heard his name. “So, not a writer, but not an adventurer either. Not a warhorse, I assume. You are like me: you fled because you had something to fear.” He paused, then continued. “I myself fled because the new ideology had a bit of trouble with the notion that one could love a member of his own sex.” It was a while before my father understood what the man meant. “The fundamentals of Grecian culture,” Van Zevenbergen explained. “That’s what my father used to call it. I’m hoping they can tell me what has happened to my dear friend Charles van Dongen. He was an actor. I am…was…an antique dealer. I happened to be here on business when all the trouble began. Cigarette?”

  They smoked.

&
nbsp; “I didn’t actually flee,” said my father. He told him of how he had left. Van Zevenbergen listened, smiling. When my father was finished, he crossed his arms and looked at the young man before him. “Dear fellow,” he said. “You may not have fled intentionally, but you knew, just as I did, that you were better off getting out of there. Listen. It makes no sense to sit here waiting. If your parents, like so many others, have been transported east, it may be quite some time before they show up on the lists. As far as the Dutch government is concerned, they’re displaced persons. Sometimes they aren’t even treated as Dutchmen. I’ve heard stories…Go to the Netherlands and look for them. Here…” Van Zevenbergen drew a small card out of his pocket, found a pen, and scribbled something. “Take this. There’s a booking office, I’ll jot down the name and address, a friend of mine works there. He’ll help you.”

  “But what about you? Why don’t you go back?”

  Van Zevenbergen smiled. “Let’s just say I’m a bit of a fatalist. But if you ever hear anything about an actor named Charles van Dongen, I hope you’ll…”

  My father nodded and shook his hand.

  But Van Zevenbergen wasn’t the only one who was a bit of a fatalist. My father just couldn’t bring himself to make the crossing and return home. He feared both his parents’ reproaches and their possible fate, and he convinced himself that he wasn’t avoiding the one but awaiting the other and that, as long as his letters were left unanswered, he’d be better off in London.

  Through someone at the embassy who was in charge of trade he came in contact with Dutch companies that were trying to restore their business relations in Great Britain, and from then on he continued to visit the embassy for his work, meanwhile casting his weekly glance on the lists of missing persons and victims. Van Zevenbergen, however, never showed up again.

  One morning he presented himself at a seedy little office in the Edgware Road. He was shown in by the secretary, a woman in her late fifties, who gave him a mug of tea and cleared off a few piles of paper from a little wooden bench so he could sit down. She herself sat down, with a weary smile, at her overcrowded desk and began pecking nearsightedly at the keys of her typewriter. The walls were covered with yellowed posters showing what must have been every cogwheel and bearing that Morris & Sons had manufactured since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Among the posters were a map of the Middle East and another of the Continent. Here and there, little red flags had been stuck into the map of Europe. Many people had kept track of the Allied armies’ progression on maps such as these. My father stood up, teacup in hand, to get a better look. There were a surprising number of flags and they were stuck in awkward places. The British and American armies had never advanced that far. The secretary had stopped typing. He looked at her, about to ask something, when the door of the office swung open. There stood a heavyset man with bushy eyebrows and the wild remains of what must once have been a striking head of hair but was now a corona of gray flames around a gleaming bald pate. He leaned his left hand against the doorjamb and looked at my father with a gaze so intense that he shrank back slightly. The secretary bent over her typewriter again to search for a new letter. With a nod of his head the man beckoned, and they entered the office.

  The mass of paper on the rolltop desk against the wall was so huge, and, judging from its discoloration, so old, that it seemed highly unlikely, or at least not for a good ten years yet, that Morris & Sons would ever be eligible for the title “Most Efficient Company in England.” The man with the wide wreath of hair sat down at an empty wooden table, spread two plump hands on the tabletop, leaned back, and regarded the visitor from under his heavy eyebrows.

  “Godawful mess in here,” he said, without averting his gaze.

  “Well…I don’t…”

  “An internal mess.” The man turned halfway around, toward the cluttered rolltop. “On the left are notes and letters from over a hundred correspondents. All still need to be typed out.” He turned back to his visitor. “Mrs. Singer is not, as you may have noticed, the fastest typist in the world.” He moved to the other side. “This pile here, this is the finished material and over there…” He was facing his visitor again. “…there, behind you, against the wall, in those files, are the company records. All our cogwheels and bearings and God knows what rubbish. I’ll be honest with you, Mr….”

  My father told him his name.

  The man was silent for a moment. “I’ll be honest with you. This company is a joke. We exist…We survive, I should say, thanks to the generosity of a few old buyers, customers who were always treated well by my father and his brother and who’d be ashamed to turn their backs on us now.”

  My father, who was still holding his mug, began to feel uncomfortable, and took a sip of his cold tea.

  “My mind is not on it anymore. Nearly everything we earn, and that isn’t much, goes into the investigation.”

  “Investigation?”

  The man got up from his chair, leaned heavily on the table, his face stony, and said: “The map you were looking at. What do you think it was about?”

  My father tried to look the man in the eye, but had to turn away. “The Allies,” he said. “The Allies’ progress.” He thought for a moment. “But the flags are in the wrong places.”

  The man jerked upright and pulled open the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. He took out a bottle and two smudged glasses. Without asking his guest if he drank—and at this hour of the day no less—he poured three fingers of whiskey in each. He set one glass down on the table and took a swig of the other. “The Germans’ progress, rather,” he said. “Each flag stands for a camp, a concentration camp. Interesting name, when you think about it.” He sat back down and swirled the whiskey around in his glass. “What did they concentrate there? Perhaps we should interpret the concept of ‘concentration’ the way it’s used in chemistry: a process by which a substance is stripped of all its diluents and extraneous material, until only the essence…no, the soul…until only the soul of that substance remains.” He drank. He drank calmly and controlledly. Not the drinking of a drinker, my father thought. “So. Every flag is a camp, where European Jewry was concentrated down until nothing remained but its soul.”

  “I…”

  “Yes, I know what it is you want to say. You have no business here. Your Dutch clients are looking for professional, reliable companies that can deliver on time and according to specifications. And you’re absolutely right: you have no business here. My sons had no business in Germany, either. I tried to talk them out of it. But my wife’s family was still living there, somewhere in Frankfurt, and they were going to get them out. Who would hurt an Englishman? We weren’t even at war yet.”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “Drink your whiskey, Mr. Speijer. It’s not every day that I open this bottle, and as far as I know it’s a good one.”

  My father drank his whiskey, without finding out if it really was, as Mr. Morris said, a good one.

  “They arrived at the house of my wife’s brother when the…riffraff…was throwing the furniture out the windows and carrying off the valuables in pillowcases. And before they knew it, they got carried off themselves. They were rowers, my boys, Adam and David, though they weren’t allowed on the university team. Muscular young men. They were up against a kind of hostility they’d never known. And what do they do? They roll up their sleeves to…to drive out that scum. But these weren’t just a band of hooligans, sir. They were the official representatives of the German government and they did what they’d been told: purge a Jewish home. My sons were arrested, beaten, and Lord knows what else and taken off to a camp where they were concentrated, until all that was left was their soul. And that is what keeps this company busy. We’ll sell a box of cogwheels—for a song and dance, if we have to—and pay our correspondents to find out everything they can about concentration, how it all worked, the technical side, the where and when and how. Not the why—no. That’s the easiest answer of all. And now, if you’ve finished your
whiskey, you may leave.”

  But my father did not leave. He stayed and listened to Mr. Morris. He stayed until the sun sank and orange light shone through the dusty windowpanes and the blood pounded in his temples. He stayed until it gradually dawned on him that he didn’t know what kind of a war he had fought in until he knew of the terrible world in which he had left his family behind seven years before. He stayed until all he could do was leave. The next day when he visited the embassy to make arrangements for his journey home, the names of his parents had appeared on the Red Cross list.

  We sat side by side at the bar, where the typewriter stood and the ashtray with the cigarette butts.

  “And then I came back. You know the rest.” He poured tea and handed me my mug. We drank in silence. I felt an endless weariness settling down on me.

  “So if you ask me what I do for a living, I’d say I’m still looking for something as powerful as Mr. Morris’s need to find out everything he could about concentration.”

  I nodded.

  “Something real,” he said. “One has to do something real.”

  I didn’t know if cooking fell into that category. I began thinking about that.

  “On your feet,” said my father. “You’ve homework to do.”

  I was standing by the door when he called out to me again. I turned around. He sat there behind the bar, his hands on the keys of the typewriter, looking like the kind of writer you saw in Hollywood movies. “Career,” he said. “How do you spell career?”

  I DIDN’T KNOW IF I would ever become a cook, and I didn’t have the faintest idea if it was real, or even important, but one thing was certain: nearly all my thoughts revolved around cooking and eating. My mother, who observed my fussing about in the kitchen with a mixture of admiration and concern, claimed that it was all Humbert Coe’s fault, and although he had undoubtedly had something to do with my culinary fervor, I knew there was another reason.

  There are people who think in three dimensions, who immediately see objects in relation to their surroundings: they might become architects. Other people are good at breaking down objects and images, visually, into their various components. Alberto Giacometti once described such an experience. He had been desperately searching for the right way to paint eyes, and one afternoon, tired of thinking, he went to see a Laurel and Hardy movie. At a certain point he realized, to his amazement, that the image on the screen had broken down into black and white segments and that he was no longer seeing figures and backgrounds, but compositions of light and dark planes. After that he was able to paint his famous portraits.