Authors: John Irving
But what about that little boy whose capacity for consecutive memory, when he was three, was comparable to that of a nine-year-old? What had happened to Jack’s retention of detail and understanding of linear time, which, when he was four, were equal to an eleven-year-old’s?
Not in Amsterdam, where Jack imagined he had lived with his mother for a couple of months before they ever set foot in the Oude Kerk and heard that
vast
organ. In reality, of course, Alice wouldn’t have waited a week to go there.
The Oude Kerk, the Old Church in the center of the red-light district, was probably consecrated in 1306 by the Bishop of Utrecht and is the oldest building in Amsterdam. The church survived two great fires—the first in 1421, the second in 1452—and the altars were badly damaged in the iconoclastic fury of 1566. In 1578, when Amsterdam officially became a Protestant city, the Oude Kerk was stripped of its Roman Catholic decoration and renovated to suit the Protestant religious service. The pulpit dates from 1643, the choir screen from 1681. Rembrandt’s first wife is buried in the Old Church, and there are five tombs in commemoration of seventeenth-century Dutch sea heroes.
The organ, which Kari Vaara correctly called
vast,
is also old. It was built by Christian Vater of Hamburg, Germany, in 1726. It took Vater two years to build the huge and beautiful instrument of forty-three stops, which went immediately out of tune the moment more than one register was pulled. The organ’s failure was also vast—for eleven years, it was out of tune. Finally, a man named Müller was assigned the task of dismantling the Vater organ to investigate the problem. It took him five years to fix it.
Even so, the organ in the Oude Kerk continued to be out of tune most of the time; it is tuned before every concert because of the temperature in the old building—the Oude Kerk cannot be heated properly.
It was cold in the Old Church that day, and Jack and his mom sat on the organ bench with the
junior
organist—a dough-faced kid who was too young to shave. He was a child prodigy, apparently. Alice said she was told all about the youngster’s talent by the
senior
organist, Jacob Venderbos, who’d been too busy to see her. (Venderbos also played the organ at the Westerkerk in Amsterdam, and at churches in Haarlem and Delft.) Alice got to talk to his fifteen-year-old apprentice instead.
The young genius’s name was Frans Donker, and he was as afraid of Alice as any boy that age could be. Like Andreas Breivik, he couldn’t look at her when he talked. As near as Jack could tell, what his mother learned from the frightened child prodigy was that Kari Vaara had been wrong to think that his father had been hired to play the organ in the Oude Kerk—he’d been hired only to keep it in tune. For this ongoing and demanding service, William was permitted to practice on the vast instrument. It was indeed a special organ, Frans Donker told Jack and Alice—“both great and difficult”—and William not only kept it in better tune than anyone could remember; his practice sessions were both famous and infamous. (By now Jack was distracted by the smell of baby powder and thoroughly confused.)
“I have the greatest respect for William—as an organist,” young Donker was saying.
“I thought he was just an organ
-tuner
now,” Alice replied.
Frans Donker let her remark pass. He solemnly explained that, from early morning through the evening, the Oude Kerk was a most active church. In addition to the religious services and choir rehearsals, various cultural events, which were open to the public, were scheduled at night—not only concerts and recitals, but also lectures and poetry readings. It simply wouldn’t do to have someone tuning an organ during the Old Church’s lengthy working hours.
“So when did he do it?” Alice asked.
“Well . . .” Young Donker hesitated. Maybe he said, “William wouldn’t start the tuning until after midnight. Most nights, he wouldn’t begin his practice sessions until two or three in the morning.”
“So he was playing to an empty church?” Alice asked.
“Well . . .” Frans Donker hesitated again. Jack was completely bored, his mind elsewhere, but he thought he heard Donker say: “The Oude Kerk is a very big church, a very
reverberant
building. The reverberation time is five seconds.” The child prodigy glanced at Jack and explained: “That’s the time it takes for the echo of what you play to come back to you.”
“Oh,” the boy said; he was falling asleep.
Young Donker couldn’t stop explaining. “Your father’s favorite Bach toccatas were written with the effect of a big space in mind. Space enlarges music—”
“Forget the music,” Alice interrupted him. “Was he playing to an empty church?”
“Well . . .”
If what followed was hard for Alice to understand, it was way over a four-year-old’s head. If the reverberation time
within
the Oude Kerk was five seconds, how long did it take for the echo of the organ in Bach’s most dramatic works—his D Minor Toccata, for example—to reach the prostitutes in their rooms on the Oudekerksplein, the horseshoe-shaped street that surrounded the Old Church? (Six or seven seconds, maybe? Or did the whores hear it in five seconds, too?)
Outside the church, the organ would have been muted, but at two or three in the morning, when the action in the red-light district was winding down, the cold winter air would have carried the sound well beyond the Oudekerksplein. The women working in the narrowest, nastiest alley—in the nearby Trompettersteeg—would have had no trouble hearing William Burns playing his beloved Handel or his favorite Bach. Even across the canal, on the far side of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, the prostitutes still standing in their doorways would have heard him.
“At that time of night, many of the older prostitutes are ready to go home—they stop working,” Frans Donker managed to say, with trepidation—as if this part of his story might be in not-around-Jack territory. (Donker didn’t know that Jack believed prostitutes were simply tireless advice-givers, trying to teach the most pathetic of men what they needed to learn about women.)
There were many older prostitutes working in the red-light district in those days—some in their sixties—and a lot of them worked in the ground-floor rooms surrounding the Old Church. The older women in the district might have been more easily moved by church music than their younger counterparts, although Donker admitted that a few of the younger prostitutes became overnight fans of Bach and Handel.
“You mean the prostitutes came to hear him play?” Alice asked.
Frans fidgeted on the organ bench; he slid to one side, then the other, on the smooth leather seat. (
There’s that baby-powder smell again,
Jack was thinking.)
Years later, the smell of baby powder would remind Jack of the prostitutes; he could almost see the tired women taking their makeup off and hanging the costumes of their profession in their small closets. They didn’t wear high heels or short skirts when they went home—or when they came to work in the morning or afternoon. Their street clothes were blue jeans or old slacks; their boots or heavy shoes had no heels to speak of, and they usually wore an unflattering but warm-looking coat and a wool hat. They didn’t look like prostitutes, except that it was two or three in the morning and what other sort of woman would be out at that time by herself?
What was it about the organ music that arrested them and held them captive in the red-light district for an hour or two longer? Frans Donker explained that there would usually be a dozen or more women in the Old Church, and that many of them stayed until William stopped playing; this was often as late as four or five in the morning, when the Oude Kerk was very cold.
William Burns had found his audience—he was playing to prostitutes!
“They certainly appreciated him,” the boy genius continued—with the authority that only a child prodigy, or a lunatic, possesses. “I occasionally got up at that time to hear him play myself. Each time I came, more women were here. He’s very good—William knows his Bach and Handel cold.”
“Forget the music,” Alice said again. “Just tell me what happened.”
“It seems that one of the women took him home with her—actually, more than one of them did.”
But that wasn’t what happened, or all that happened. (This time, blame the baby powder for Jack’s loss of concentration.)
The administration of the Oude Kerk probably believed it was unsavory—that William should be playing to prostitutes, not to mention consorting with them. After all, it was a church. They must have fired him, or something like that. And the prostitutes—a few of the older ones, anyway—made a fuss. There was a protest. Amsterdam was always having demonstrations. From the Krasnapolsky, Jack and Alice had seen their share of demonstrations in the Dam Square. It was the time of the hippies. Alice was tattooing a lot of peace symbols, and (often in the genital area of both boys and girls) that insipid slogan of the times
Make love, not war.
Surely one or more of the protests they witnessed were anti–Vietnam War demonstrations.
Maybe the prostitutes in the red-light district took William’s side
and
they took him in. “They saw him as a persecuted artist,” Frans Donker said. “Some of them see themselves that way.”
As for where William was now, the boy genius looked at Jack, not at Alice, when he spoke: “You’d have to ask the prostitutes. I’d start with the older ones.”
Alice knew which prostitutes to ask. They were mostly, but not all, the older ones; they were the women in the district who’d been conspicuously unfriendly.
“Thank you for your time,” Alice told the junior organist. She got up from the bench and held out her hand to Jack.
“Don’t you want me to play something for you?” Frans Donker asked. Jack’s mother was already pulling her son to the narrow stairs. They were in a kind of loft at the rear of the Old Church’s great hall, above and hidden from the congregation; the towering organ pipes rose for twenty feet or more above them.
“Play something William plays, if you want to,” Alice told the young organist. She had no intention of staying to listen.
As they were leaving, Jack saw Donker sprinkle the leather bench with baby powder. It
was
baby powder! The seat of the prodigy’s pants was covered with it. The powder helped him slide sideways along the bench. He couldn’t reach from one end of the three-tiered keyboard to the other without sliding left to right, and back again, on the slippery leather.
A wooden pediment rose over the keyboard; the wood was riddled with screw holes where the old brass fittings had fallen or been stripped away. The organist’s only view, beyond his music, was confined to a panel of stained glass. Everything surrounding Donker was old and worn, but none of this mattered when he began to play.
Alice could not escape the Oude Kerk in time. The deep sonority, the perfect tone placement, the responding antiphony, and the resounding echo—Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor—hit them hard as they were going down the stairs. Jack would long remember the wooden handrail on one side of their winding descent. What served as a handrail on the other side was a waxed rope the color of burned caramel; the rope was as thick as a man’s wrist.
They staggered out of the stairway as if the great sound had made them drunk. Alice was seeking a hasty exit from the church, but she made a wrong turn. They found themselves in the center aisle, facing the altars; now they were surrounded by the enormous noise.
In the middle of where the congregation normally sat was a bewildered gathering of tourists. A tour guide appeared to have been struck mute in midsentence—his mouth open, as if the Bach were coming from him. Whatever lecture he’d been delivering would have to wait for the toccata and fugue to be finished.
Outside on the Oudekerksplein, in the failing early-evening light, the prostitutes in their windows and doorways could hear the music, too. It was evident that they knew the piece Donker was playing; doubtless they’d listened to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor many times in the early-morning hours. By the prostitutes’ critical expressions, Jack and his mother knew that William played this piece better than young Frans.
Jack and Alice hurried away. It was no time to make inquiries of the unfriendly women—not while the music was playing. The great sound followed them to the Warmoesstraat; God’s holy noise pursued them past the police station. They were more than halfway to Tattoo Peter’s on the St. Olofssteeg before the vast organ was out of earshot.
Was William’s career as an organist in decline? Was he merely
tuning
organs, practicing but not performing—or performing only at unsociable hours to an unrefined audience? Or was it actually a privilege just to
hear
that vast organ in the Oude Kerk?
It was a sound both huge and holy. It compelled even prostitutes, who are disinclined to do anything without being paid, to give themselves over to it absolutely—to just
listen.
7
Also Not on Their Itinerary
O
n November 9, 1939, Leith suffered its first German air raid. No damage was done to the port, but Alice’s mother miscarried in an overcrowded air-raid shelter. “It was back then that I should have been born,” Alice always said.
If Alice had been born “back then,” her mother might not have died in childbirth and Alice might never have met William Burns—or if she met him, she would have been as old as he was. “In which case,” she claimed, “I would have been impervious to his charms.” (Jack somehow doubted this, even as a child.)
If the boy couldn’t remember the name of the Surinamese prostitute who gave him a chocolate the color of her skin on either the Korsjespoortsteeg or the Bergstraat, he did remember that those two small streets, between the Singel and the Herengracht, were some distance from the red-light district—about a ten- or fifteen-minute walk—and the area was more residential and less seedy.
As to what rumor of William led Alice to make inquiries there, it was either Blond Nel or Black Lola who told her to consult The Bicycle Man, Uncle Gerrit. Black Lola was an older white woman whose hair was dyed jet-black, and Uncle Gerrit was a grouchy old man who did the prostitutes’ shopping on his bicycle. He carried a notebook in which the women wrote down what they wanted for lunch or a snack. He objected to the girls who gave him too extensive a shopping list, and he refused to shop for tampons or condoms. (If there were a Tampon or Condom Man who did errands for the prostitutes, Jack and his mom never met him.)