Authors: John Irving
The women teased Uncle Gerrit incessantly. He would stop shopping for a particular prostitute, just to punish her for teasing him—usually for only a couple of days. A rake-thin prostitute named Saskia was in the habit of asking Alice and Jack to buy her a sandwich. Saskia was a ceaselessly ravenous young woman, and Uncle Gerrit was always mad at her. She gave Jack or his mom the money for a ham-and-cheese croissant almost every time she saw them. When Jack and Alice passed by again, they would give Saskia the sandwich—provided she wasn’t with a customer.
Because Saskia was a popular prostitute, Jack got to eat a lot of ham-and-cheese croissants. Alice didn’t mind buying a sandwich for Saskia with her own money. Like many women in the red-light district, Saskia had a story to tell, and Alice was a good listener—that is, if you were a woman. (Women with sad stories seemed to know this about Alice, probably because they could see she was a sad story herself.)
Saskia had a two-man story. The first man to hurt her was a client who set fire to the poor girl in her room on the Bloedstraat. He tried to squirt her in the face with lighter fluid, but Saskia was able to shield her eyes and nose with her right forearm; she was badly burned, but only from her wrist to her elbow. When the wound healed, Saskia adorned her burn-scarred arm with bracelets. In the doorway of her room on the Bloedstraat, Saskia would extend the arm into the street and jingle her bracelets. It got your attention—you had to look at her. Saskia attracted a lot of customers that way.
She was too thin to be pretty—and she never opened her mouth when she smiled at a potential client, because her teeth were bad. “It’s a good thing prostitutes aren’t expected to kiss their customers,” she told Jack, “because no one would want to kiss me.” Then she grinned at the boy, showing him her broken and missing teeth.
“Maybe not around Jack,” Alice cautioned her.
There was something wildly alluring about Saskia, with those jingling bracelets all on one arm—her left arm, the unburned one, was bare. Maybe men thought she was a woman who would lose control of herself; possibly her aura of a damage more internal than her burned arm attracted them. You could see, like a flame, the hurt in her eyes.
The second man in Saskia’s two-man story was a client who beat her up because she wouldn’t take her bracelets off. He’d heard about her burn and wanted to see the scar. (At the time, Jack assumed this was a man in even more need of advice than the prostitutes’ usual customers.)
Saskia made such a wail that four other women on the Bloedstraat and three girls who worked around the corner on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal heard her and came to her rescue. They dragged the man in acute need of advice out on the Bloedstraat, where they whipped and gouged him with coat hangers and hit him with a plumber’s helper—all this before one of the women got a clean shot at his head with the metal drain plug of a bidet, with which she beat him bloody. He was senseless and raving, and no doubt still in need of advice, when the police came and took him away.
“That was what happened to your teeth?” Jack asked Saskia.
“That’s right, Jack,” she said. “I show my burn scar only to people I like. Would you and your mom like to see it?”
“Of course,” the boy replied.
“Only if we’re not imposing,” Alice answered.
“You’re not imposing at all,” Saskia said.
She took them into her small room, closing the door and the curtains as if Jack and his mother were her customers. Jack was astonished by how little furniture there was in the room—just a single bed and a night table. The lighting was low—only one lamp, with a red glass shade. The wardrobe closet was without a door; mostly underwear hung there, and a whip like a lion tamer would use.
There was a sink, and the kind of white enamel table you might expect to see in a hospital or a doctor’s office. The table was piled high with towels, one of which was spread out on the bed—in case the men in need of advice were wearing wet clothes, Jack imagined. There was no place to sit except on the bed, which was an odd place to give or get advice, Jack thought, but it seemed natural enough to Saskia, who sat down on the bed and invited Jack and Alice to sit down beside her.
One by one, she took her bracelets off and handed them to Jack. In the red glow from the lamp with the glass shade, the boy and his mom examined the wrinkled, raw-looking surface of Saskia’s scar, which resembled a scalded chicken neck. “Go on, Jack—you can touch it,” she said. He did so reluctantly.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“Not anymore,” Saskia replied.
“Do your teeth hurt?” the boy inquired.
“Not the missing ones, Jack.” One by one, she let him put her bracelets back on; he was careful to do it in the right order, biggest to smallest.
Who could refuse to bring that thin, hungry girl a sandwich? Jack despised Uncle Gerrit, The Bicycle Man, for being so mad at Saskia that he refused to shop for her. But the cranky old prostitute-shopper had his reasons. He’d often parked his bicycle outside the Oude Kerk in the early-morning hours; he had more than once slipped into a pew in the Old Church and listened to the elevating music. Uncle Gerrit was a William Burns fan. Maybe Saskia wasn’t.
“You should talk to Femke,” The Bicycle Man said to Alice. “
I
was the one who told William to see her! Femke knows what’s best for the boy!”
While this made no sense to Jack, he could tell that Uncle Gerrit was mad at his mother, too. Jack and his mom were standing on the Stoofsteeg as The Bicycle Man pedaled away. He turned the corner and pedaled past the Casa Rosso, where they showed porn films and had live-sex shows—not that Jack had a clue what they were. (More advice-giving, for all he knew.)
The prostitute in the doorway at the end of the Stoofsteeg was named Els. Jack thought she was about his mother’s age, or only a little older. She had always been friendly. She’d grown up on a farm. Els told Jack and his mom that she expected she would one day see her father or her brothers in the red-light district. And wouldn’t they be surprised to see her in a window or a doorway? She would not ask them in, she said. (They were somehow beyond advising, Jack assumed.)
“Who’s Femke?” Jack asked his mom.
Els said: “I’ll tell you Femke’s story.”
“Maybe not around Jack,” Alice said.
“Come in and we’ll see if I can tell it in a way that won’t offend Jack,” Els said. As it turned out, either Els or Alice would tell Femke’s story in a way that totally confused the boy.
Els always wore a platinum-blond wig. Jack had never seen her real hair. When she put her big arm around Jack’s shoulders and pulled his face against her hip, he could feel how strong she was—like you’d expect a former farm girl to be. And Els had the bust and the announcing décolletage of an opera singer; her bosom preceded her with the authority of a great ship’s prow. When a woman like that says she’ll tell you a story, you better pay attention.
But Jack was instantly distracted; to his surprise, Els’s room was very much like Saskia’s. Once again, there was no place to sit except on the bed, on which there was a towel spread out, and so the three of them sat there. Alice needn’t have been concerned that Femke’s story was not-around-Jack material. The boy was mesmerized by the prostitute’s room and her gigantic breasts. Jack couldn’t comprehend what Els had to say about Femke, who he thought was a relative newcomer to the advice-giving business. Confusingly, Femke was also the well-heeled ex-wife of an Amsterdam lawyer. Maybe they’d been partners in the same law firm—all Jack heard was something about a family law practice. And then the plot thickened: Femke had discovered that her husband made frequent visits to the more upscale prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg and the Bergstraat. She’d been a faithful wife, but she made Dutch divorce history in more than the alimony department.
Femke bought a prominent room on the Bergstraat, on the corner of the Herengracht; it was unusual for a prostitute’s room in that it had a basement window and the door was at the bottom of a small flight of stairs. Both the doorway and the window were below sidewalk level, so that pedestrians looked down at the prostitute, who was also visible from a passing car.
Was Femke so enraged that she would actually
buy
a room for prostitution and rent the space to a working prostitute—thus, eventually, making a profit from the sordid enterprise that had wrecked her marriage? Or did she have something more mischievous in mind? That Femke herself appeared in the basement window or the doorway on the Bergstraat, and that a few of her first clients were business associates of her former husband—including some gentlemen who had known the couple socially—was certainly a shock. (Apparently not to Femke—she was aware that she was attractive to most men, if not to her ex-husband.)
She was met with mixed reviews from her fellow prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg and the Bergstraat. Her very public triumph over her former husband was much admired, and while it was appreciated that Femke had become an activist for prostitutes’ rights—after all, she was a woman whose convictions, which were so bravely on display, had to be respected—she was herself not a
real
prostitute, or so some prostitutes (Els among them) believed.
Femke certainly didn’t need the money; she could afford to be choosy, and she was. She turned many clients down—a luxury unknown to those women working in the red-light district
and
the prostitutes in their windows or doorways on the Korsjespoortsteeg and the Bergstraat. Furthermore, the customers Femke turned down were humiliated. The first-timers might have thought that
all
the prostitutes were as likely to reject them. A few of Femke’s fellow sex workers on the Bergstraat claimed that she hurt their business more directly. Not only was Femke the most sought-after of the prostitutes on the street, but when she spurned a client—in full view of her near neighbors in their doorways and windows on the Bergstraat—the ashamed man was sure to take his business to another street. (He didn’t want to be in the company of a woman who’d seen Femke turn him down.)
Yet she had her allies—among the older prostitutes, especially. And when she discovered those other music lovers assembled in the Old Church in the wee hours of the morning, Femke established some fierce friendships. (Was Jack wrong to imagine that it might have been an easy transition for both choirgirls and prostitutes to make—namely, to love the organist as a natural result of loving his music?)
To judge Femke by her revenge against her ex-husband, one might have thought she would have been more possessive in her attachment to William Burns. But Femke had rejoiced in his music, and in his company. In her liberation from her former husband, she’d discovered another kind of love—a kinship with women who sold sex for money and
gave
it away selectively. If more than one of the music lovers in William’s audience at the Oude Kerk had taken him “home,” how many of them had given him their advice for free?
Jack would wonder, much later, if those red-light women were his father’s greatest conquest. Or were women who gave advice to men for money inclined to be stingy advice-givers to those rare men they
didn’t
charge?
To a four-year-old, it was a very confusing story. Then again, maybe you had to be a four-year-old to believe it.
Confusing or not, that was Femke’s story, more or less as Els told it—altered (as everything is) by time, and by Alice’s retelling of the story to Jack over the ensuing years. When the boy and his mother went to see Femke in her room on the Bergstraat, it was clear she’d been expecting them.
Femke didn’t dress like a prostitute. Her clothes were more appropriate for a hostess at an elegant dinner party. Her skin was as golden and flawless as her hair; her bosom swelled softly, and her hips had a commanding jut. She was in every respect a knockout—like no one Jack had seen in a window or a doorway in Amsterdam before—and there emanated from her such a universal disdain that it was easier to believe how many men she turned away than to imagine her
ever
accepting a customer.
What a sizable contempt Femke must have felt for Alice, who had ceaselessly chased after a man who’d so long ago rejected her. Femke’s evident contempt for children struck Jack as immeasurable. (The boy may have misinterpreted Femke’s feelings for his mother; Jack probably thought that Femke disliked
him.
) He instantly wanted to leave her room, which, compared to the other two prostitutes’ rooms he’d seen, was almost as pretty as Femke—it was also lavishly furnished.
There was no bed, just a large leather couch, and there were no towels. There was even a desk. A comfortable-looking leather armchair was in the window corner, under a reading lamp and next to a bookcase. Perhaps Femke sat reading in her window, not bothering to look at the potential clients passing by; to get her attention, the men must have had to come down the short flight of stairs and knock on her door or on the window. Would she then look up from her book, annoyed to have had her reading interrupted?
There were paintings on the walls—landscapes, one with a cow—and the rug was an Oriental, as expensive-looking as she was. In fact, Femke was Jack’s first encounter with the unassailable power of money—its blind-to-everything-else arrogance.
“What took you so long?” she said to Alice.
“Can we go?” Jack asked his mom. He held out his hand to her, but she wouldn’t take it.
“I know you’re in touch with him,” Alice told the prostitute.
“ ‘. . . in touch with him,’ ” Femke repeated. She moved her hips; she wet her lips with her tongue. Her gestures were as ripe with self-indulgence as a woman stretching in bed in the morning after a good night’s sleep; her clothes looked as welcoming to her body as a warm bath. Even standing, or sitting in a straight-backed chair, her body appeared to loll. Even sound asleep, Femke would look like a cat waiting to be stroked.
Hadn’t someone said that Femke chiefly, and safely, chose virgins? She picked young boys. The police insisted that Femke require them to show her proof of their age. Jack would never forget her, or how afraid she made him feel.