Day 5: Osnabrück – Utrecht
Shopping in Lider, Hengelo — contact with my competition is made — a ride is hitched with a Morocco bound Dutch lad, then by an unemployed surveyor of museums — stranded in a service station — a ride is hitched with a charity van — pomegranate welcomes the late traveller
In the morning I went out for a walk, twenty minutes until I got Shrabani's emoji that testified she was awake, twenty minutes back, passing, again, the church affiliated organization Niels-Steensen Clinics Inc.'s hospital, this time recognizing the name which had been plated under a bust in the St. Marien Church, which, as it had happened, Shrabani made an inquiry about. Niels Steensen was a 17th century scientist, a graduated medical student who was putting into question established truisms and thus bringing forth discoveries in anatomy and geology until, at least, he put his own religion into question, converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism and became a priest. He became a bishop in Hannover where he argued with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the overseer of the ducal library (where he inaugurated library science) against the views of their mutual friend Spinoza — whom the one got acquainted with during his medical rotations and criticized, the other during a trip and admired. Steensen had already published an open letter to Spinoza, directly reproaching him for disturbing everything (omnia turbes, second person declined turbo; as a noun, “whirlwind”, as a verb “to agitate, unsettle”), leaving people who were not smart enough to comprehend his arguments in confusion; if he just put aside his prejudice, so Steensen, and opened his heart (the anatomist, who had already demonstrated that it was but a muscle, was of course writing metaphorically) he would see that, despite his assertions, miracles happened daily all around him, were observed in people who had for decades indulged their appetites and then abandoned all wickedness & became paragons of virtue (ha) — a collective miracle that culminated in the spiritual glory of the Catholic Church (haha). While an auxiliary bishop in Münster Steensen's ascetic proclivities clashed with the manners of the clergy, most of which came from noble backgrounds. A stint of three years was concluded when Steensen, himself having resigned before as dean of a monastery due to impostor syndrome, finally hung up his mitre in protest of the election of the next bishop, won by a hefty bribe to the diocesan chapter. So much for the Catholics. He came to Hamburg where he lodged with a Dutch anatomist, playing together cutting brains and spindling nerves —using a microscope made by Spinoza, no less— and serving the local catholic community, which rather rejected him as a foreigner. He was invited to Schwerin, where tension and loneliness found him again and his ascetic lifestyle brought about gallbladder disease and death. He eventually returned to the Italy he had long longed for only in a coffin, a delivery defrayed by his Medici sponsors. A bit of a mystery to me, Osnabrück's affection to Steensen. Hospitals here, a bust there, and it was in Osnabrück, in 1938, that the motions to canonize him started — all despite the fact that he was Danish, spent not that much time in Germany and never in Osnabrück. I suppose some missing piece has been left around.
About ten o'clock we both stepped out and crossed to the bus stop. The next foot of my traveling, westwards to Hengelo, included a section over Dutch land, that is, outside the 9 Euro Ticket territory. The train from Osnabrück left once an hour and the pressing schedule called for such special measures: Shrabani bought through an app I didn't have the ticket that I needed, sent me the pdf. I paid my dues and got on the bus.
∗ ❦ ∗
I rode west at 125 km/h on sinusoidal tracks: northish, southish, northish, southish, northish — then a straight west-southwest cut behind Salzbergen until & into Oldenzaal, the first station in the Netherlands, where the train whiled a little, bringing Dutch voices through the doors.
Hengelo, the next and my own final station, was yet another spacious, clean, at 14:30 that Sunday quiet, empty city. Hardly a soul around, seen or heard. I made my way on foot along the route I had delineated back at Osnabrück, north-west through the pedestrian zone of the city center, then out along Marskant, a road that impressed me with its dedication of close to half its width to the raspberry rose asphalt of the bicycles path. I had never seen such a wide bicycle path before. I entered a supermarket which at first disappionted me. As was seen on the map, it was called “Lider,” reminiscent of the German chain “Lidl,” my favourite in Berlin though I had long not been living at a convenient distance from any branch. Instead, as it were, Lider was a Turkish supermarket. For some half a decade a Turkish supermarket had been responsible for the bulk of my calories, but in my mind was a strong notion of what sort of things were to be gotten there, what sort elsewhere, which did not correspond to my present wishes. Or was it just a blow to my expectations? Adventure is when everything goes wrong, ha.
I picked impromptu a coffee drink off a shelf that was at me at the very entrance. There were employees doing their bits and pieces; I felt uneasy, perhaps embarrassed, that I couldn't communicate with those around me, at least not in their native language, or, anyway, in the local one. Just before entering I had confirmed on a Telegram chat with Yami and Shaked, using Hebrew transliteration, how to say ‘I don't speak Dutch’ in Dutch, getting just one syllable wrong — the only one that deviated from a simple sound mapping of the corresponding German expression, ‘ich spreche kein Niederländisch.’ No, not the only one, but I had already happened to know that “Dutch” in Dutch was Nederlands, from one of the few “Easy German” videos I had repeatedly watched some years earlier, where among the passersby interviewed on the streets of Münster was a Dutch family. The adults spoke German but when the interviewer asked the little brother if he did too he negated it enthusiastically, so the former asked him to greet the camera in Dutch, a request that was repeated to him, in Dutch, by his mother. Nuts, which I sought, occupied several tall shelves close by. I picked a pack of walnuts and indulged myself with a pack of spicy crunchy coated peanuts.
I now briefly speculated that the English vocabulary was a testimony of the historical anti-popish sentiments of its users, but I find that “indulgence,” the Catholic one, is derived straight from the Latin — that is, a proper term rather than an exonym. By itself, the idea behind it is not foreign or outrageous. It's the kind of restitution rendered by a fine: I have infringed, and by paying money justice is restored; I have taken and I give accordingly. But it indeed must strike someone taking the Christian creed seriously as inconsistent. I have sinned before God, the fate of my soul in the heavenly realm of the beyond is at stake, and I can make up for it by paying money, earned —or, as it were, unearned, if I'm of the privileged— by the labour of my body?1 And I wonder if it was not indeed the loose thread, for Martin Luther, whose pulling unravelled the whole fabric, like yet another experiment at the beginning of the 20th century —when physics had been taken to be a completed theory that needed further measurements merely to determine mathematical constants— like another experiment which joined others that contradicted classical physics and thereby prompted the suspicion that the whole theory was, to put it bluntly, wrong.
On the other side of the store, at the dairy fridges, I found butter. I don't know why and how I had decided that Turkish dairy was not worth my regard. At the very least I can say that I had become a connoisseur of butter, and that as far as flavour was concerned, one slab was not like any other, and that my favourite brand was Swiss. But I didn't leave the house to eat as I did at home, did I?
There was no queue by the cashier. The bill was €10.05. I had a habit of paying not just with exact cash, but with a such a combination as to minimize the small change I would have by the end of the transaction. I had indeed successfully spent two mugfulls of copper given to me by my anxious flatmate. As I handed my money, before I had once opened my mouth, the cashier addressed me in English. I asked her at the end how she knew I was not Dutch. In the Netherlands they did not use the ¢2 coins. This was reminiscent of the situation in Israel: the single agora, the NIS's cent, had already been out of circulation when we immigrated, and the 5 agoras coin went out during my lifetime, in 2008.
From Lider I continued my route as planned to a nearby large wedge of green on the map, where I set myself against a tree to have my brekker. Though there was a driveway separating my grass from it, an overlooking mansion gave me the slight feeling I was eating at somebody's lawn. A man walking a dog blessed me with the Dutch version of guten Appetit. The plan was, once I finished eating, to thumb a ride to Utrecht. I made a sign, ‘UTRECHT’ with two marginal decorative hearts (one looking more like a liver) with a black marker I had brought with from Berlin and a piece of cardboard salvaged from the paper recycling bin of Shrabani's dorm. Incidentally I found out —I thought it was at the end of the month— that it was Rosalía's birthday, Noemí's own preceding it by a couple of days, and I wrote them my best wishes. In response I received a diptych, captioned with ‘nudist beach in Croatia’; the left photo a duo-selfie that exposed tan-lines but nothing that would have solicited a reprobation from the Motion Picture Association of America, the right an empty scene of jade turning at a distance to aquamarine waters and horizontal ultramarine mountains beyond, above — sky and a conifer branch sticking in from the very top, below — a khaki stony beach, a black crag like the gaping head of a seamonster bobbing out of the water at its edge. My diptychical response had mostly green: green grass, green backpack at the corner, green bark of the the trunk framing the photo from the left and of another tree opposite at a distance, their maple foliage covering much of it, with a donut of greyish blues and purples, some brick red, of the urbanity outside my wedge, holed by the green canopies of an artificial wood diagonally across the road.
∗
Deldenerstraat, a thick white line on the map, headlonging into the yellow highway towards Delden and beyond, was a mere two-lane road (one forth, one back) in reality. I walked along westwards, hopeful; it began lined with cottages, a narrow strip for parallel parking between the road and the side walk, fully occupied but for the occasional single vacant lot. There was nowhere for even a wellwishing car to pull over. It continued, as I discovered with each step, as it had began. One spot, parallel to a little park, seemed adequate but for the fact that it immediately followed a curve in the road such that drivers would not be able to see me in advance. I dropped my backpack and frolicked into the bushes, replete with the anxious excitement of a mute foreigner who does something improper, and walked on. I made short tentative stops along, jerking out my sign beyond the parking file. Towards the highway the sidewalk turned into a path and cleft from the road, bushery rising between them. I started back east, lowering my standards for hitchhiking spots, stood at the further end of a single empty parking slot and cantilevered my sign. It was a little too hot. What I knew of hitchhiking until then was derived from little experience and from watching videos in Berlin while making my mind about the kind of trip I wanted to go to. The ride I had picked up to Prague from the forest was my second, and last. The first was in the US, on graduation, on commencement day. I had to return to college from the next town, and imbued with the excitement of the day I decided, on the fly, to hitchhike rather than wait for the shuttle. I assumed it would be one of the many parents who must have been driving through to campus that day, but it was a farmer who stopped for me, within scarcely a minute, the bed of his pickup truck full of cherries. In Hengelo some drivers, though they didn't stop, made acknowledging gestures that uplifted my spirit. After a quarter of an hour I decided it was not working and moved further back eastwards. I didn't get very far before a car on the opposite lane waved, found a place to make a U-turn and stopped. The driver, alone in the car, said he had spotted me earlier. I threw my backpack in the back, sat down next to him. Stijn (“Stuh-in”) was a handsome blond lad, and besides a good ambassador of his people. I had had, perhaps still do, a not too serious prejudice against the Dutch. Before arriving to Berlin I held the country and its people in high esteem. All the Dutch I knew in college, three gals, were pleasant people. As I surveyed in Israel the countries of Europe, dreaming up potential futures, The Netherlands were judged favourably by their at the time low Gini coefficient and short average working week. Their rating dropped after I came to Berlin. First, through the account of a Berlin friend, a German who had done his bachelor's in Utrecht (it was infamously difficult to get into psychology programs in Germany), managing it, according to him, by only using the infinitive case of verbs when he had to talk. I only remember one concrete example for what had affected his own opinion — might have been the only one at all, I suppose; isn't it often a single incident that leads us to derive generalizing conclusions? He went into a demonstration, I don't remember for or against what, perhaps climate related, an event he had expected to have large numbers in Germany, but in Utrecht (or perhaps Amsterdam?) only a handful of people showed up.
And then I was acquainted with a Dutch in Berlin. My long habit of keeping an open window, incidentally, goes not so much against the German culture grain with its Lüftung, airing of the indoors, as it is a radical example of it. At the dead of winter each office-mate has dealt with the issue I present differently. In the room where I was writing my master thesis, whose official plate designated it a ‘HiWi Dungeon’ (HiWi for Hilfswissenschaftler, or research assistant), suggesting not all was lost with the Germans, in that room our peacoat wearing Dutch antagonist turned in his chair at the other end of the room and asked ‘do we have to keep the window open?’ in a nasty tone. Dutch directness? He was both the only Dutch I had known in Berlin and the smarmiest individual in our institute, an opinion, as gossip revealed, I shared with others; I spoke of this incident after experiencing another that served as strong of a contrast as there could be in a fairy tale with a Good and Evil Queen. Weeks after Smarmycoat was gone I shared the room with, variably among others, Changbin, a Chinese student that likewise worked on his thesis. One day, when it was only the two of us, I caught him from the corner of my eyes slowly and sneakily draping his sweatshirt over a shoulder. My callous heart, impervious to the feelings of my peers, moved me no further than to note that slight movement. When I returned from the printer-room both shoulders were draped. I was touched by his discretion, remarked that he was cold and suggested to close the window. He objected and said he liked having fresh air. I suspected that it was an instance of Eastern harmony-loving manners, but as we got into a friendly argument where each, or so I thought, defended the other's cause, I was left with seemingly no choice but to keep the window open, at least initially.
Stijn was outerly reminiscent of Mr. ‘do we have to?’; same body frame, head-shape and pretty-boy haircut. With the English the Dutch are famous for, he said he was always happy to pick up hitchhikers, in such a way that made it sound as if anybody would, making me think of the while not heavy but still quarter of an hour long traffic that preceded him. I suppose it's one thing to pick up someone when is convenient, and another to go out of one's way, making two U-turns, to do so. I told him of my present travelling, somewhat embarrassed by that backyard exploration. He mistakingly thought I must have been all over.
Stijn was on the way to his mother. She had booked a trip to Morroco, a country he had known nothing about, for herself and his younger brother, an organized 15 days group trip around the country. By the time Stijn had looked over the first items on the program he got enticed and asked to join. He drove in the direction of but not all the way to Utrecht, said he would drop me at a better place for hitchhiking. It was a service station outside Holten, in which I was dropped at quarter to five. He told me it should be easy from there, that I'd get to Utrecht in two hours, if not earlier. I thanked him, wished he fared well, went to piss in a convenient ditch and made a quick survey of the spot.
∗
The service station was a long, airfield-like multilaned affair with several centers: a gas station, a lifeless electric charging station, a restaurant. I settled on a piece of mowed grass by one of the exits of the gas station. I was not yet quite hitching; I stood and vaped my e-cig when a man with a lit cigarette in hand awkwardly approached, not forthcoming but routing like an asteroid caught in the gravitation of a planet, like the shy boy who espied his since fifth grade crush without her girlfriends and summoned on the move the nerve to ask her out to the movies. I can't remember which of us spoke first.
Pier had a serious lung problem, which explained his faltering speech. It was somehow related to an issue with the brain, which gave me a two seconds long alarm before regaining my peace of mind thinking that if he was driving it must be ok, that driving on the highway was relatively straightforward & that it was unlikely that of all opportunities it would be on my ride that he got into an accident. The problem was serious enough to qualify him as fully disabled, bequeathing him with an exemption from work which he used to visit each of The Netherlands' museums. When I asked him of his favourite, he mentioned the MORE Museum, in the tiny village Gorssel whose name I needed him to write me down to comprehend. The one in Gorssel, as well as the MORE Museum in Ruurlo Castle, had a good modern realist paintings collection. He laughed readily, but evidently didn't always understand what I had said. Nor I him. He repeatedly pronounced the plan: in Apeldoorn, his destination, he would drop me at a big service station that had the advantage of lying at the intersection of A1, going west, and A50, going south to Arnhem where I could catch a ride on the A12 that went straight to Utrecht.
It was twenty to six when I was dropped at the service station which was more compact than the last one and thereby more challenging. It did not lie directly on the highway, and it was a while before I realized, reconsidering the map, that what I took to be the correct direction was the wrong one. It had a gas station with a shop on one end, a McDonald's on the other, much parking lots in between and at least three exits. For an hour I went to stand with my sign, switching back, forth, back and forth between the smaller exit by the gas stands and the bigger one in the middle that many of the parkers used, being wide enough to be engaged from different angles and distances. On the one side drivers who still had a driving momentum, on the other side drivers who were fed and therefore benevolent as I reasoned based on that TED talk about judges in prison granting parole more frequently after lunch time. When I passed from one to the other, some lads by a distant carwash station seemed to mockingly laugh at me, I think they once shouted a jeer which I ignored. Quite a few drivers addressed me through their open windows, commenting why they couldn't pick me up, whether because they were full or because they were going in a different direction. Initially I found them encouraging, but gradually these fomented resentment in me — whether towards them or towards the silent ones, who I suspected had room and drove in my direction, I didn't know. A few times I solicited people directly as they entered their parked cars, but mostly I stood by the bigger exit.
∗ ❦ ∗
It was a while before anything happened, just long enough to say a few words about Yami and Shaked, whose house I was trying to reach and with whom I was acquainted, that is, with each one of whom, since high-school days.
Yami and I were in the same class, the “gifted class” (how I myself got there is another story), the smallest in the grade, mostly boys. We were merely twenty altogether, and yet I believe I had scarcely ever spoken to him until after the conclusion of these three years of classmateship. It's natural that the literally out-standing kids would first come to mind as I look back, but even if I methodically recall each of my classmates, it seems they all possessed, or were possessed by, an energetic outspokenness: some brash, some unrestrained, one eloquent, another confirming the neoteny theory that human intelligence was gained at the expense of slowed development, another quirky, another megalomaniac. Yami was an exception. I remember him sitting at his desk at the back corner of the room, by the windows. Or standing with a slightly slouched head, always quiet.
There are a few educational admonitions against common speech phenomena. One is the disapproval of filler words such as “like” which I, too, dislike, though a corner in my heart is touched by this admission that words somehow cannot catch fully the meaning one strives to communicate. Another is the disapproval of hemming, supposedly because it, likewise, carries no syntactic content. This reproach overlooks however the meta-conversational function of hemming, necessary for the unavoidable fact that it often takes time to formulate thoughts: thereby one communicates that he is still speaking. People vary on this parameter, but it seems to me that altogether they are rather uniform in how much silence they expect from their interlocutors before assuming their turn to speak. Some have very short turn-switching intervals and therefore they blabber away, a group's center of attention, not because they have much to say —indeed, they might circle around one point— but because, as it were, nobody else says anything, as if spurred by a fear of awkwardness. Yami, however, would wait such a long time before speaking that I found myself often embarrassed, especially on the phone. During my email inbox scan described below, I came upon a piece of text Yami had sent me. I remembered other, shorter pieces of his, but this one I had completely forgotten about. Titled ‘One day I'll be reborn’ and containing only a ‘first chapter,’ this 2010 first-person narrated text is a piece of fiction, but seems nonetheless revealing. My hurried translation:
[...]
I glanced at my watch and immediately drew the newspaper from the coat pocket to cover against small talk.
“Excuse me, young man, does the bus reach the townhall?” “No,” I answered without interest, but within a second I added “you must go to the stop across the road, but I don't recommend that line, it makes an unnecessary detour. You'd reach faster if you walk two streets from here and take line 209.” “Thank you very much, have a good day!” I was answered. I don't know how this advice found its way out of my mouth. My intention was to be satisfied with a “no” but something in me drew the sequence of words as if from hiding. I felt that my tone of speech changed and that I didn't observe as I usually observe. I put this exciting episode behind me and got on the bus that had already arrived.
What's the point in a thought or an idea if they do not find their way from the depths of the consciousness to the external world? The advice about the bus I could have kept to myself, for I make a great use of it. But what about all the things I do not execute? If I'd die tomorrow, with my body a laden consciousness would be buried which doesn't have even a single expression upon the face of the earth.
[...]
Francois, for example, I understand. Oh understand so well that it afflicts me. It would have been much preferable if he had stayed an enigma for me, but this is not possible. Francois spills out his inner truth and spreads it all over. I can't see myself behaving like him. I always have a need to hide something from the complete truth. Perhaps because of the illusory sense of power that it gives me. [...] I enjoy looking at the present, like a natural investigator who looks at ants' response after a crumble of food had been thrown at them.
A doubt is cast on my memory. Has our friendship really started forming only after graduation? For one thing, there was scarcely any time between my graduation and my draft to the army, in which I assumed it would have had to happen, but which scarcely was enough time for anything to start developing. But how long do two really need? Sometimes just a bump. Looking for him in the inbox he occurs only among class-wide email exchanges until his first direct email appears more than a year after my draft (when I had been all but officially discharged from the army), at the end of 2008.
If I'm indeed right that it hasn't started at the short interval between graduation and draft, it seems I was wrong to think it must have preceded it. A defining event was a jam that took place at the basement of his home, where I pretended —they humoured me well— that I can play music. With second thoughts I scrutinize one photo from that day which has long bannered my Couchsuring.com page as a profile picture, trying to decide whether my forearms and face were already bootcamp suntanned or not, overlooking the much more obvious indicator: my long hair was gone. I think that had it not been for the few photos taken, I would not have remembered anything of what transpired below, and I think it's significant that the only moment of the day I otherwise remember, with these here words first ever recording it, took place after we were done, the fourth participant already gone: Yami, Gil and I standing upstairs around the kitchen counter, chatting, I can't remember what about, it was sunny. Thereafter, I went out with them and a few others on my army leaves, as well as after I was discharged and until I left Israel for my studies abroad, when an epistolary bond, or the contemporary version thereof, was formed between the three of us.
I came to interact with Yami through Gil, himself somebody whom I befriended only on our last year of high-school, and so not without a reason. Towards the end of the preceding summer my girlfriend and I broke up. We were together for two years, since when I had just barely joined the class, one among a couple of new kids. She and Gil had been close friends before I at all appeared, and as soon as our last academic year began, she hooked up with him. All over him during our class venture to Bonn. It was hard for me not too see it as done out of spite. Gil and I were on friendly relations before, but it was that move of my then ex-girlfriend which drew me nearer to him. I wanted to prove, first and foremost to myself, that a woman, as it were, could not thus destroy a friendship between two men.
∗
Shaked studied in Thelma-Yellin high-school, into whose film department I failed to get admitted, but into which Alex, my then closest friend, successfully did. I first met her when she was already Alex's girlfriend, on an exhibition night of the visual art department to which she belonged.
I don't remember seeing them together those years, and therefore her, though I might have simply forgotten I had had. They were still together while in the army, I recall Shaked's laments about serving as a tutor for drone operators. They broke up before they were discharged.
I got to associate with Thelma-Yellin's art kids from high-school on, but I suspect that it was another dramatic turn that made me keep in touch with Shaked. It happened some time before I left Israel for my studies; I sat at a little table on the ground floor pub of Levontin 7 before Alex and another close friend. They informed me that Alma had an eye on me. I now suspect they made it up, giving a go at playing matchmakers à la Amélie Poulain, which had its effect, rendering the attraction that female attention can evoke.
I had never used the Couchsurfing platform for its intended purpose, having lived with my parents and not traveling anywhere, but I had started through it a years long correspondence with a member of the "Peace in the Middle East?" group, Isis (a not too uncommon given name in the Low Countries until 2014), who would visit Israel and the West Bank during my first year of college. She wrote me an account that winter of her travels in Bethlehem, Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron that was a true eye openner for me. For all my criticism of the state & the army's actions, of the occupation, I still imagined the cities of the West Bank to be terrible and dangerous places, and the account of this Flemish gal contradicted the image. I wanted to see for myself. Independently of that, during the first year of college, through my then girlfriend, I got uncommitally involved with one group that organized to do volunteer work in the summer in a West Bank village wherefrom came one of the students.
Both Shaked and Alma, back then best friends, had been at my farewell party, and I met them again on my first summer visit. From one of the volunteer work students I was informed per SMS that a tour of Hebron was organized. It so happened that Alma was driving that day with Shaked to Jerusalem for a graduation exhibition in Bezalel, the school of arts, an opportunity I seized. I did not inform my parents of my plans. It was a simpler lie to say I was going with friends to Jerusalem than taking a bus alone for whatever reason. Alma and Shaked, too, I first informed of my plans, shyly, from the back seat of the car, unsure what my peers might think of them. Alma slowly answered that it sounded more interesting than Bezalel and discussed a change of plans with Shaked. However, before we had reached Jerusalem I was notified by another SMS that, after all, there was no more space on the tour, so it was I who aligned my plans with the gals'.
I can tell that it was through Alma rather than their greater art students circle that I kept in touch with Shaked since when at the end of June 2013, the summer after my own graduation, Shaked organized an exhibition in the space where she was renting a studio, it was Alma who invited me to it, and when I met there the rest of the circle it was a surprise appearance, for me and for them.
It was Shaked who called me a few days later. I picked up my phone to call Alma, I wanted to run away to her in Jerusalem, where she then lived, when I saw the missed call. Shaked and I chatted some and I suggested meeting. Later that day I took the bus to her place, more exactly, to the studio apartment where she was house-sitting a cat in Florentin, a neighborhood at the south-western end of Tel Aviv, nearby Jaffa of which it was a part until 1948. I expressed to her my difficulty of returning to live with my parents after four years of living away, and she offered me to stay with her for the time being. I came in with my bags a few days later.
∗
At the time, Yami and Gil lived together in an apartment in Florentin. I went out one evening to meet Yami at a bar, and Shaked joined me. As Shaked and I walked back home, she asked me about him. Perhaps even asked explicitely if he had a girlfriend. And so it began. I don't remember how it proceeded. When I met Yami alone in the middle of July —Shaked had been away in her studio when I woke up and I saw her first late at night, returning home— he told me about a recent trip of his to Germany and of a Norwegian gal he had met there.
But an email from me to Shaked two weeks later read:
[...]
Other than that, Yami has a birthday tomorrow, and it will be celebrated at the Uganda.
Gil called me earlier today and asked if we need to bring him some gift.
After stormy brain storming, the idea was brought up that you would be there, drunk (that is, at a certain point of the evening), and that would be the gift.
hehehe.
Stam.2 But in short, you are invited.
Will you come?
Mark
By then I had already returned home to my parents. On my last full day in Florentin I came to Yami and Gil's after breakfast. After Yami had left to therapy Gil and I sat to eat salted fish with the bread Yami had baked, discussing God and the world, as the Germans say: college, people, Yami's sexuality, books, himself, that is, Gil. When Yami returned home he asked whether I had been there all that time, said he would have returned earlier had he known, and went directly to bed. Soon thereafter Gil departed to some kibbutz, to his girlfriend, and I slept in his room. The next day, Shaked already abroad, I left the keys behind me in the cat's apartment.
∗
In August 3rd I talked with Shaked on the phone. She told me she was seeing Yami. Four days later Yami invited me to dinner. I expected Shaked, maybe his sister, to be there, but it was just the two of us. However, as he laid the table he made three seats. He didn't say anything and I didn't ask. While he was showering Shaked arrived. We had a pizza made from scratch by Yami and red wine. I did most of the talking. Towards midnight I announced I needed to catch the bus and scrammed. When I left a year later for my studies in Germany they had already beat me to leaving the country. Shaked was admitted to an art's program in Utrecht and the two of them moved there.
I had long forgotten that I had anything to do with their acquaintance when a few years back, on a phone call, Yami invited me to their planned wedding. They wanted something calm, not even inviting family members, but they wanted me to be a witness, having played the part in their union. It was during the plague and there were difficulties in setting an appointment with the townhall. Still they have not married.
∗ ❦ ∗
After an hour of no success, I entered McDonald's, not so much out of hunger as out of recidivism, having been corrupted, as it were, by KFC. It had such a symbolic status in culture that I felt, or convinced myself so, that I must see what it was like. Just inside, seated at one of those miniature square tables next to a couple of friends, an astoundingly beautiful young woman was staring unflinchingly at me. And once again, after I had gone and returned. I felt inhibited by not knowing Dutch, though surely it scarcely mattered either way. Perhaps I should have asked her if she was driving to Utrecht.
I sat down with my burger and fries at the other end of that same row of square tables. When I was done, already on the way out, I changed my mind and headed back — to the queue; to order what in Israel was known as the 1.90 NIS ice-cream, the soft serve cone that then and there cost 1.20 euro, so much inflation in twenty years. I ate it on the go, the taste was as remembered, walking towards the highway, convinced that the station was to blame for my lack of luck. The crossroad discouraged me, and after a brief attempt of hitchhiking on the sidewalk opposite the station I started striding at half past seven.
Already before McDonald's Shaked, responding to my reported failure in Apeldoorn, suggested I took a bus and got in a few minutes to them. It was a single straight stretch of a main road to the Apeldoorn central station, and I began following it. It should have been a piece of cake, I thought, but none of the few passing cars stopped to my new ‘Station Apeldoorn’ sign. A look at my map on the next intersection explained why: I was walking 90° off course. I corrected my path, walking northwards along a canal —no takers here either— until a foot bridge that brought me to the road I thought I had been walking earlier.
It wasn't long before a sliding-door kind of van stopped. At the wheel was a young mother, her child seated next to her. I stepped into the back, shoving clear sterile-sealed medical supplies off the seat. Shirley was transporting medicine dispatched for Ukraine and collecting refugees fleeing the ongoing war. She talked about being kind to one another. It occurs to me now that none of the drivers who picked me up were on a routine drive. One was on the way to a trip in Morocco, if not yet in the car then already in his mind, imbued with the spirit of adventure. The other irreparably unemployed and with plenty of time on his hand to meet the world was on a tour. The last was on a charity drive.
She was a driver, she told me, and not familiar with the train station. We stopped outside one of its fence's entrances —on Laan van de Mensenrechten, “Human Rights Avenue,” as it happened to be called— the station itself unseen from the road. There was a drive-in that climbed upto an elevated parking lot, bushery obfuscating the view. She told me she would wait until I wave back that it was ok. Trusting that it was and not wanting to overextend her generosity, I reached a point where it would satisfying seem like I could tell it was the case. She drove on. When I came to the heavily gated entrance I found that it could be passed only with a ticket. No ticket machines were around. Luckily when I turned around a bunch of people was approaching and, now desperate, I addressed one of them. Tickets could be bought elsewhere, I was pointed over. I went back downhill and across the wide avenue.
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The train to Utrecht was as wobbly as all Dutch trains, I would find out. In Utrecht's large train station I turned first, as usual, towards the wrong exit. Outside the right one was a long flight of stairs before a broad square, young people sitting on it, chatting, listening to music. Beautifully the sun was setting into a horizon of houses, washing everything in pale orange. It was nine o'clock.
Yami's idea was to pick me up with a bike, get me a rental and ride together home. I loved the idea but said that I could not ride the bike with my backpack. The alternative, then, was a bus. ‘Better not line 8 because it makes a long detour’, Yami wrote me. Ha. Goes around and comes around.
It took me a while and much walking to locate the stops. Thinking too of the Paris airport and the Tel Aviv central bus station, I swear that only the German consistently make signage that caters to its intended audience: people who don't already know where they need to go.
Though my visit was long overdue, this was not the first time I saw them since they left Israel. I saw each of them on their respective visits to Berlin. I sat and walked around Kreuzberg with Shaked on a free evening she had during a trip with her art department; had Yami over for an evening, baking fish & chips with Efthalia while I napped, and toured together Sanssouci where he bought us ice-cream. And a second time I saw both of them, on Passover the previous April, when the three of us visited Israel.
I arrived at twenty to ten. The poor lot had been waiting for me at home the entire Sunday. I take off my hat again and apologize. We sat at the living room. Shaked got up to fetch from the kitchen on the other end of the room a pomegranate she had gotten for the occasion. I was already gladdened when still in error, having heard limon, “lemon,” instead of rimon, pomegranate, which makes the adage that it was not the gift itself but the intention behind it that mattered ring true. It was her idea that pomegranate was going to be a tradition between us. I felt ashamed because I had planned, before my journey got so protracted that any additional delay would have been insult to injury, to pick up a gift on my way, and instead arrived empty handed.
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On the other hand, if labour is a kind of punishment afflicted on the body, and sin finds its source in the unholy material body, then in a manner the transgression and the punishment are of one kind. And then again, if the offense is against God and the reparation is made to God, or at least to its representatives on earth, then the matter is squared — assuming the Church was indeed holy and representative, a point which might have gone counter to Luther's, a Catholic priest, intuition.
Stam is a word in Hebrew I left transliterated because it's somewhat hard to translate. Literally it means "mere", as in denoting that something is nothing beyond what it is; that it is simply that, normal and not special. When used to describe why something was said or done, it means that there was no ulterior motives behind it, that it was said or done for no other reason than immediately apparent. It is often said after someone is kidding, suggesting ‘I didn't mean what I just said’.