In Babylon

They’re all dead. And all of them, I have known and loved. Uncle Chaim and his hazy nephew Magnus, too, even though, by the time I was born, they had been history for nearly three centuries. They’re the only ones who are still with me.

I used to be awakened by voices in the night, cries that were so clear and sounded so close that they echoed in my head long after I had sat up in bed. ‘Nathan!’ My name, clear as day. ‘NATHAN!’ But no matter how often I was jolted awake, looked around, turned on the light, or didn’t, I never saw a thing. For a long time I thought it was God calling to me across the black waters of darkness and sleep. I’m the sort of person who bears such possibilities in mind.

It wasn’t until I was about ten years old that I discovered why I was hearing those nocturnal cries. We were living in the camp on the Hill, in New Mexico. In our cramped wooden house, I shared a room with Zeno, who had just turned one.

I was awakened by a creaking sound. When I looked up I saw an old man sitting at the foot of my bed. There was a full moon and its bluish light bounced off the hard desert ground, through the curtainless windows, into my room. One side of the old man’s body was sharply defined and I could see that he was wearing a shabby black suit. His back was slightly bent. Something glistened in his eye, a small, gleaming tube that was aimed at his lap.

‘Bah,’ he said. A shard of moonlight shot across his stubbled jaw as he turned his head to me. He grinned broadly and raised his eyebrows. The tube fell out of his eye, he caught it without looking. ‘Too dark. Can’t see your hand before your eyes. Nice clock you’ve got there.’ He shifted his gaze to my night table. I looked sideways, at the green fluorescent arms of Mickey Mouse.

I didn’t have to ask who he was. He didn’t have to tell me. Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim, no doubt about it.

‘How are you, my boy?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Magnus here yet?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen him.’

‘Young people …’ He winked. Because he smiled at the same time, his face turned into a bluish white wad of paper, a ball of creases and shadows.

There was a shuffling noise in the receding darkness and out of the wall came the ghost of a wanderer. He emerged from what seemed, for a moment, to be a forest path, and all at once he was standing in the middle of the room.

‘Speak of the devil …’ Uncle Chaim said.

Magnus looked around and scratched his head.

Uncle Chaim pursed his lips, shook his head, and gave me a meaningful glance. ‘Young people,’ he said again.

‘I’m young, too, you know,’ I said.

He stared at me, and then smiled. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are the eldest.’ He turned to Magnus and raised his head. ‘Have the two of you already met?’

Magnus, who was busy winding up the propeller of the biplane hanging under the lamp from a piece of fishline, jumped. ‘Nathan, isn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘Magnus Levi,’ he said, ‘Currently going by the name of Hollander.’

Uncle Chaim chuckled.

I was now sitting straight up in bed, my hair, a wild shock, my face pale with sleep.

‘What are you looking at?’ Uncle Chaim asked.

I turned around and saw that I was still sitting in the same place, but that at the same time, I was standing in the room looking at myself. ‘Is that me?’ I asked. I looked back at the bed and saw the little boy sitting there and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Zeno lay in his own bed against the opposite wall, sound asleep.

‘Happens from time to time,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘They’ll think up a name for it some day. No doubt that joker from Vienna could explain it.’

‘Calling Freud a joker is not only unfair, it disclaims the great strides he made in …’

‘Oh, Magnus, shut up.’

‘Sorry.’

Here I was, in my room, surrounded by the things that made up my universe, the airplane with the rubber-band wind-up motor that my father had built, the Mickey Mouse alarm clock with radioactive hands, two fossilized sea urchins, a cupboard full of books, and a map of the world on which I kept track of the Allies’ progress with tiny flags, here I was and I was twice myself and in the company of ancestors who had been dead for three centuries.

‘We can go about this in two ways,’ said Uncle Chaim. He was fiddling with the copper tube that had fallen from his eye. It rolled between his thumb and forefinger, from top to bottom and back to the top and when it was on top it spun round on its axis and rolled back down again. Warm yellow patches of light shot across its surface, liquid stars that seemed to float between his fingers. ‘We decide on what this is and you tell us what you think of it, or we forget the explanation and pretend this is all perfectly normal.’

‘Uncle,’ said Magnus, ‘I don’t want to interfere …’

‘Have you ever noticed, Nathan, that people who are about to interfere always begin by saying that they don’t want to interfere?’

‘… but perhaps it would be a good idea if we first told the boy how we got here to begin with.’

Uncle Chaim tilted his head to one side and looked at me expectantly.

I shrugged.

‘Do you think you’ve gone mad?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Do you think that other people will think this is normal?’

I shook my head.

‘Then that’s that,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Have you seen this?’

I stepped forward and saw, for the first time, what he had been working on when I awoke. In the palm of his left hand lay an open pocket watch. I came closer and looked at the jumble of cogs. A wisp of wire, fine as a hair, was sticking up through the spokes of a tiny slender wheel.

‘Overwound. Always the same. Scared to lose their grip on time, so they wind up their watches like they’re wringing out the laundry.’

Magnus bent over Uncle Chaim’s hand. ‘An anachronism,’ he said. ‘This is a waistcoat-pocket watch, late nineteenth century.’

Uncle Chaim turned to me and said, ‘Magnus is very particular about these things.’

‘Anachism …’

‘Anachronism,’ said Magnus. ‘That’s when something turns up in the wrong time …’

‘Like us,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘For example,’ said Magnus irritably, ‘if you read a story about the eighteenth century, and there’s a car in it.’

‘Anachronism,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ said Magnus. ‘And in a way, we are too, just as Uncle Chaim said.’

‘It all depends on how you look at it,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘Why are you here?’

Uncle Chaim snapped shut the hand holding the watch. He stretched his face into a broad grimace. ‘Well,’ he said.

‘To help,’ Magnus said.

‘Bah,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘To tell you how it all began and …’

‘Hm,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘We were there when Herman was a boy, too,’ said Magnus.

‘Herman,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Don’t talk to me about Herman.’

‘But Herman didn’t want us.’

‘Herman,’ said Uncle Chaim, ‘only believes that things exist if you can pinch them.’

Magnus laughed. ‘Your Uncle Herman,’ he said, ‘believes what he thinks, but he doesn’t think what he believes.’

Uncle Chaim shook his head.

‘Isn’t that true?’ said Magnus.

‘What?’

‘That Herman only believes what he thinks but doesn’t think what he believes …’

Uncle Chaim opened his hand and looked at the watch. ‘I’m not so philosophical,’ he said. He turned to me, the ‘me’ that was standing before him, not the little boy on the bed who sat, his hands on the sheets, staring straight ahead. ‘We’re here because we’re here.’

‘Ah. Old Testament!’

Uncle Chaim spread his fingers. The watch leaked out in copper-coloured droplets. ‘What do you mean, Old Testament?’

‘That’s what God calls Himself: I’m here because I’m here.’

‘Magnus. Nephew. God calls Himself something very different – I am that I am. Which can also mean: I’m here because I’m here. Or: I am who I am.’

‘Yes, Magnus.’ He shook his hand. The last few drops of the melted watch splattered about.

‘Talk about anachronisms,’ Magnus said to me, nodding towards Uncle Chaim’s hand.

‘We’d better hurry, Nephew. It’s nearly daylight. Nathan?’

I looked at him with, I would say now, the candour of a child with an overactive imagination. Uncle Chaim smiled and laid his hand on my hair.

Magnus came closer. ‘What did you want to say, Nuncle?’

Uncle Chaim kept looking at me. I saw his eyes grow small, then large and gentle. He shook his head. ‘What a life,’ I heard him mumble, ‘what a world.’ Magnus stood beside him, nodding gravely. Uncle Chaim sighed and stared down at the floor. Just as I was about to follow his gaze to see what he saw there, he straightened up and his face turned into the crumpled wad that it had been before, all grins and wrinkles.

‘You know what we do with firstborn sons, don’t you?’

I frowned.

‘Firstborn sons belong to God, says the Torah. That you know. You’ve read it.’

I nodded.

‘But parents can keep their children by redeeming them. The father pays five shekels, five silver rijksdaalers. His debt is settled, he no longer has to part with his firstborn son.’

‘In our family,’ said Magnus, looking appropriately solemn, ‘that has never happened. In our family, it’s become traditional not to settle the debt to God.’

‘Probably,’ Uncle Chaim took his hand off my head and stared somewhere into the half-light of the room, ‘one of our forefathers was just too stingy, or he forgot, or, even more likely, he was too stubborn. A stubborn family, that’s what we are, Nathan. The sort of Jews that say: Yes, but …’

‘Whatever the case, we don’t do it,’ said Magnus, ‘and that means that we, firstborn sons of the house of Hollander …’

‘Levi, we’re Levites as well, priests …’

‘… that the firstborn sons of the house of Hollander belong neither to themselves nor to their family.’

‘They belong …’ Uncle Chaim hesitated. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at Magnus, then wriggled his eyebrows and leaned towards me. ‘They belong … to God.’

Magnus’s eyes rested on me expectantly. I looked around, at the little boy in bed. He looked like someone who wasn’t there.

‘Okay,’ I said.

Uncle Chaim placed both hands on my shoulders, then kneeled down heavily so his face was on a level with mine. ‘Nathan,’ he said, ‘Nathan. Don’t say “okay”. It’s not “okay”. It’s not nobility. Not a privilege. Highly dubious privilege, at best. You can go back. You can ask your father to redeem you. He won’t know what it means, but if you ask him he’ll do it for you. It’s possible, you’re allowed. Think about it.’ His face was a white-grey-yellow haze. I smelled his breath, a whiff of thyme.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, after a while.

Uncle Chaim shook his head.

Magnus shuffled closer. They were both standing so close now that it was as if I was lying under the blankets and sawheard-smelled nothing but the hollow I had made in the bed. Magnus was hay, fresh hay. ‘We’ll be back, if that’s what you decide,’ said Magnus.

‘We’ll be back,’ said Uncle Chaim.

They stood there all around me and I shut my eyes in the scent of thyme and hay and the heat of their bodies, the feathery touch of their hands on my shoulders and head and …

‘Nuncle,’ I said to Uncle Chaim.

‘Yes, child,’ he said.

‘Can you see the past?’

‘Yes.’

A cloud slid in front of the moon. It grew dark in the room and then light again, lighter than before. It was nearly morning.

‘And the future?’

There was a very long silence.

‘Yes,’ said Magnus, ‘we can see the future. But we don’t know if what we see is right.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay.’ The heat from their bodies was so intense that I felt myself gliding away in the paper boat of sleepiness.

‘God,’ said Uncle Chaim, ‘why this child?’

‘Shhh,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s okay. He’s right.’

Just before I reached the land of slumber and my body went limp, I heard Uncle Chaim sigh, ‘Oh, Magnus …’

Not that I had an image of God. Not that I even believed in such a thing as God. I was a child who read the Old Testament with the thirst of a desert traveller and the hunger of a fasting penitent. At night, when the Hill was swathed in velvet darkness, no wind, no voices, now and then the scuffling of a lizard on the roof, the crackling of stones in the desert, at night I lay in bed and looked at the green hands of Mickey Mouse, who kept the time in my alarm clock. And through my bedroom, in the space between Zeno’s bed and mine, the Old Testament caravans trekked from Mamre to Canaan. On the Indian rug that covered the wooden floor, Jacob fought with the angel and lay in his well, staring up at the starry night. I believed in stories. I was a believer of stories. The question of whether or not God existed didn’t interest me. God was the least of my worries.

A family of travellers, yet I never told anyone where I went each night with Uncle Chaim and Magnus. Life was confusing enough as it was. Manny worked day and night on something we knew nothing about and when he came home he fell asleep at the table. Sophie sat during the day with the other wives at Mr Feynman’s calculators, and my sisters, Zoe and Zelda, had reached the age when they were turning from girls into women and were practically unapproachable. And so I kept silent. I kept silent and I listened and as I listened I lost the distinction between then and now, here and there, reality and fantasy. That wasn’t so bad. Later, much later, I would make it my profession to be of another time, and as a child, in an environment where no one paid any attention to me, it wasn’t so bad to be considered a dreamer.

And so I became a fairy tale writer, all because of Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim and Cousin Magnus. Hand-in-hand, we travelled through the forest of stories. ‘The only way to understand the world,’ Magnus once said, ‘is by telling a story. Science,’ said Magnus, ‘only teaches you the way things work. Stories help you understand.’

The only person in the family who ever opposed my choice of career was Uncle Herman. I can vividly remember the moment when he first heard what I wanted to do with my life. That was in Holland.

I was about fifteen and Herman, who had come to visit, asked my mother, his sister-in-law, whether she had found a school for me yet.

‘He’s been at school since he was six,’ Sophie had answered.

‘University,’ said Uncle Herman. ‘Have you given any thought to what the boy should study?’

Sophie had looked at him in amazement. ‘Herman,’ she said, ‘young people decide for themselves what they should study. Who they marry, too.’

At that last remark, Uncle Herman had gone slightly red in the face. He turned to me and asked what I had in mind. I said that I had nothing in mind.

‘You’re not the only one,’ he said. ‘But the question is: what do you want to be when you grow up?’

‘A fairy tale writer.’

We were sitting in the sun lounge. It was the middle of summer. The doors were open and from the garden came the sound of late birds who were letting other late birds know where they were.

‘Fairy tale writer,’ said Uncle Herman.

‘Fairy tale writer,’ I said.

‘Lord of the Universe,’ said Uncle Herman.

‘I’m good at writing fairy tales,’ I said.

‘Just how do you intend to do this?’

‘What?’

‘Become a fairy tale writer! What are we talking about here?’ The subject made him rather hot under the collar. He slammed his hand down on the armrest of the wicker chair in which he was sitting, his lips pressed firmly together.

I looked at my mother.

‘N,’ said Sophie, glancing worriedly at Uncle Herman, ‘I think what you’re supposed to do now is tell him what you’d like to study.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

Uncle Herman closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the chair. He took a deep, slow breath. After a long while he straightened up again and after another long while he opened his eyes and looked at me wearily. ‘All right,’ he said hoarsely. ‘What do you plan to study, Nathan? Are you going to university?’

‘To become a fairy tale writer? I don’t think that exists,’ I said.

‘No, of course it doesn’t exist!’ he shouted.

‘Herman,’ said Sophie. Her mouth had settled into a disapproving frown. ‘If you can’t behave yourself, go back to your big house so you can play lord of the manor.’

Uncle Herman bowed his head and nodded. There was a brief silence, and when he looked at me again it was as if he were seeing me for the first time. I turned around on Sophie’s painting stool and tried to look interested in a charcoal sketch on the easel. ‘Nathan,’ he said finally, ‘you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, but if you do something, then do it well. What I mean is that you shouldn’t just piddle around and see if it works. Think up your own course of study, your own training, so that you can choose from different skills and won’t be restricted by some accidental talent.’

‘Hold on,’ said Sophie, ‘talent is no small thing, I mean …’

‘Talent, Soph, is the curse of anyone who really wants to do something. Talent is the greatest handicap you can have. Why do you think you’re giving painting lessons to frustrated housewives instead of exhibiting at the Stedelijk? All you’ve got is talent.’

Sophie looked at him with an expression that gave new meaning to the word freeze-dry.

I didn’t understand what Uncle Herman was talking about. I wanted to be a fairy tale writer, because I had discovered that I could do it. What more did he want? That I should first be unable to do it so that I would want it all over again?

As I thought this, I slowly began to realize the significance of Uncle Herman’s words.

That was probably the most important day of my life. Not only did I learn that you had to mistrust talent if you truly wanted to discover anything, I also realized that I had stumbled upon an outlook on life which may or may not have been Uncle Herman’s, but which certainly seemed worth a try.

And so I wrote my fairy tales and the longer I wrote, the deeper Uncle Herman’s strange paradox sank in and the harder it got. By the time I was eighteen I couldn’t do a thing. If I had to make a shopping list – the household chores had been divided up and I was the cook – I spent an hour at the kitchen table mulling over the correct sequence of butter, cheese, and eggs. It was the year when we ate almost nothing but omelettes and pasta with red sauce. I had long since stopped writing fairy tales by then. I cooked, stared at the pans on my stove, the sauce bubbling, the eggs setting, the garlic browning and the blue steam rising from the slow-warming olive oil, while inside me, the words formed mile-long caravans that trekked through the desert of my authorship.

The fact that it turned out all right in the end, I owed to Uncle Chaim. One night I was sitting in my room, reading, when he stepped out of the bookcase and posted himself next to my chair.

‘Kabbala …’ he said after a while, breathless.

‘The Zohar,’ I said.

‘Forbidden,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Not until a man is forty.’

I rubbed my sandy eyes and bowed my head. ‘Nuncle,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you once tell me I was the eldest?’

He tore himself away from the book in my lap and looked at me. ‘A good memory,’ he said, ‘can be a blessing. And a curse.’

I closed my book and let my head sink down onto the back of my chair. ‘I know, Nuncle, I know. But it’s there and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘The head,’ he said. ‘Must be covered. With Kabbala, always covered. Always.’

I nodded.

Uncle Chaim waited while I stood up and got my yarmulke from the shelf of Jewish books.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘But now: why?’

‘Why Kabbala?’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m just looking for the path to enlightenment.’ I realized that I sounded somewhat bitter. Uncle Chaim had heard it, too.

‘Write, child. Don’t read. Write.’

There was a stumbling noise behind us. When we looked round, we saw Magnus standing by my bed.

‘You’re still awake,’ he said.

I spread my arms.

He walked towards us. When he was standing next to Uncle Chaim, he cast a quick glance at the book in my lap. He pursed his lips and looked at his uncle.

‘Write,’ said Chaim again. ‘A writer writes, he doesn’t read.’

‘Cooks eat, too,’ I said.

Uncle Chaim shook his head. ‘To keep from starving. To taste. To know. But not to while away an evening.’

‘He can’t write anymore,’ said Magnus. ‘He’s searching for True Writing.’

‘Isn’t any,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Just stories.’

Magnus drew himself up. ‘Flaubert said …’

‘Shah! That’s after your time, Magnus. And before his. Nathan only has to worry about himself. He has to do, not think. Listen. Two men are on their way from one town to another. Just happen to meet. One rich. One poor. Time for the evening prayer and one of them recites the Shemona Esrei, from memory. Long. Very long. The other man puts his hand over his eyes. Recites the alphabet. The first man laughs at his companion: “You call that praying, you ignorant fool?” The other man says: “I can’t pray, so I give God the letters and he makes a prayer out of them.” That night the first man falls gravely ill. As if his life is pouring out of him. Cries out to God: “What have I done to deserve this?” He hears a voice that says: “This is because you mocked my servant.” The sick man says: “But he couldn’t even pray!” The voice: “You’re mistaken. He could pray, for he did it with all his heart. You know the phrases and words, but you’re all mouth and no heart.”

He’s right, I thought. The motivation is important, too.

And so, by way of a detour through the Kabbala, which I read because there was nothing more I could do, I dug out my old stories and got back to work. Two years later my first collection of fairy tales was published.

The beginning.

There are so many beginnings.

Beginnings?

Beginnings.

Six. All six, somewhere else. All six, at a different moment. And for a clear understanding of our history I shall have to tell them all at the same time.

Uncle Chaim’s beginning began in the spring of 1648, that of his nephew, Magnus, in the autumn of that same year. My father began in 1929, midsummer night. Uncle Herman’s beginning, I’d place in 1945, in the springtime. Zeno began when he ended, in 1968, and I myself have only just begun, this morning. Out of the plane, blinding snow everywhere, the pier a white catafalque, and the travellers shuffling, groping their way inch by inch through the wind-driven curtains. This is Holland, but the wind is Siberian and the snow, from distant polar regions. Cold, my children, cold as a terrible dream about explorers lost in the wilderness. Roald Amundsen travelling on foot to the South Pole. Nobile, stranded with his dirigible. Scott and his starving, frozen men, waiting to die. We lean into the wind, our coats held closed at the throat, and struggle through the snowstorm. Come. Come, we’re off. To the beginning.

‘I don’t know what sort of bottle this is,’ said Nina, ‘but it looks intriguing.’

It was as if my chair had suddenly shot forward, like someone sitting in the car of a roller coaster, the long-drawn moment of motionlessness at the top of the rails and then, bang! down he goes. A tremor coursed through my body, so violent that Nina ran to my side. The manuscript lay around my feet like a landscape of ice floes.

‘N?’ She laid her hands on my shoulders and bent forward, her face close to mine. ‘What is it? Everything all right?’

‘Huh.’ I couldn’t speak. The breath sank in my chest and I leaned my head on the back of the chair. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was lost in thought. I …’

‘For a moment I thought you were sleeping.’ She put the bottle on the table between our two chairs and crouched down in front of me. ‘You were sitting here, completely limp,’ sliding the papers together, ‘but I could see you had your eyes open, so …’