Claire's Head (19 page)

I
n Amsterdam everyone was talking, in excellent English, about soccer. The taxi driver who picked up Claire and her bags at Schiphol was lamenting the heartbreaking loss of the Dutch team to the Italians in the Euro 2000 semifinals the week before and admitting to the bittersweet pleasure of watching the Italians go down to defeat at the hands of the French in the final four days past. All the games had been played in Dutch and Belgian stadiums. The city, as they entered it, was still festooned with orange bunting, the Dutch team's colour. Without prompting, the young, bespectacled man at the reception desk of the Ambassade Hotel regaled Claire with stories of the night the Dutch had routed the Yugoslavs, and their brilliant playing against the Danes. Those nights, there was dancing in the streets and on the bridges over the canals, and young girls and their grandmothers bicycled safely home under a full moon at 3 a.m. All the way up the five narrow and neck-breakingly steep flights of stairs to her sloping attic room, the bellhop talked of nothing
but Overmars and Kluivert, the grace of Overmars, the swiftness of Kluivert, until Claire was nearly dizzy. The room struck her as instantly familiar, a mere three paces wide – as diminutive as the rooms in her house in Toronto, which helped ground the part of her that wondered what in heavens name she was doing here.

The glass in the windows at the front of the room was old, and moved, not quite solid. It had been falling slowly, perhaps for centuries, within its pane, which distorted its translucency and the view ever so slightly. Single-paned, the window opened with a clatter upon a scene that could not have made Claire happier. She was high above one of the city's canals. Steep rooftops, staggered like steps, rose across from her, some with hooks projecting beneath the eaves from which ropes and pulleys hauled goods that would not fit through the narrow doors, but only through the wide frames of the windows.

It was Thursday morning. She was to meet Ariel, the healer, the next day. Until then, she was on her own. Jet-lagged, drugged, she lay down on the bed, on its gold chenille spread, above a royal purple carpet, and listened to the sounds of the street rising up from below. The whirr and rattle of bicycles, the ping of their bells. The bleating of moorhens or – she couldn't yet tell which – the squeaking of boats, and ropes, against their moorings. The sounds that said Amsterdam, that made it clear she was not in Toronto or New York.

It had been a month, four days ago exactly a month, since Brad Arnarson had first called her.

Once before, she'd come to Amsterdam, a brief stopover in the middle of her rite-of-passage backpacking tour through
Europe at twenty-one. She and Gabrielle Rosen, a fellow cartography student from Windsor, Ontario, had arrived late at night on a Sunday train from Bruges, hungry and grimy and confident they'd have no trouble finding a room, an affordable room, only to discover the city booked up. From a phone booth by the information kiosk in the railway station they kept calling, with increasing desperation, hotel after budget hotel until they managed at last to snare, not an expensive room, but one already beyond their means, with floor-length red velvet curtains that drifted down from somewhere near the ceiling and a double mattress that sank into such a valley that there was nothing they could do to stop themselves from toppling towards each other all night. Two sweaty girls in their underwear. They barely slept for laughing. The next day they moved into a hostel and spent the evening stumbling wide-eyed through the red-light district. Yet Claire had no sense then of this being a city of canals, a city built on water.

Once the drugs had kicked in and her head began to clear, she roused herself. She scanned the street map of Amsterdam, which the hotel had provided, then folded it into her shoulder bag. With luck, given her ability to orient herself visually, even in places she'd never been before, and her knack for not getting lost (only London, once, with its ancient curlicues of streets, had got the better of her), she wouldn't need the map again.

Outside the hotel, she turned right and walked a little way beside the waters of the Herengracht until she came to the intersection of Oude Spiegelstraat, on her right, and, running left, over a little bridge, Wolvenstraat. She turned left, crossed the
bridge, and walked a block past a row of shops to Kelzersgracht, the next canal. She looked to her left and right, turned left and then, at the intersection of Huidenstraat, left again, entering a row of shops that sold comestibles. Here she found what she was looking for: a greengrocer, cheese shop, bakery. She bought olives, green apples, goat cheese, almond tarts, and in a tearoom-chocolaterie, as a present for Stefan, chocolates flavoured with Earl Grey tea. Dark chocolate, a tart and smoky ganache. She tried one herself, having never tasted tea-flavoured chocolate before. Her head felt light and fine now. Invincible. As if she were meant to be here.

While the paths of arrival that led to a new place – the bus from Newark airport, the Piccadilly line from Heathrow, the van ride into Basseterre – were often seared with pain, the settling in, after that first spasm, could provide sudden release. Sometimes the spell lasted for days, a week, even two weeks. Fourteen days without a twinge or pang of migraine was possible,
and
a kind of miracle. In some sense, Claire surmised, you chemically jump-started your system – cut its ties, cut it loose, cut the familiar treading of certain neural pathways. The brain was forced to recreate itself by breathing different air and eating different food and walking different streets. There was always a point at which you allowed yourself to believe that this time you were home-free, you had liberated yourself from whatever ailed you, a true transformation had taken place. If you stayed, you might remain pain-free forever.

She wondered if Rachel felt this, too. Perhaps it was the lure of the city – any new city or specifically Amsterdam, city of gurus and dope-smokers and asylum-seekers and hidden rooms – that
had brought her here, as much as the promise of treatment by a man who spoke to angels. Rachel had arrived in Amsterdam on March 17, four days before seeing Ariel on the twenty-first. What had she been up to during that time, days when she could have been in Toronto visiting Star? Or had she been so ill, so driven to see Ariel that she'd dropped everything and come here as soon as she could?

It was Ariel who had given Claire the name of the Ambassade Hotel – not real luxe, but no budget hotel, either. He had offered to provide the name of a budget hotel or even a hostel if she needed. She'd asked if he knew where Rachel had stayed in Amsterdam – the same hotel? No, he thought she'd stayed with someone. A friend. (Claire had not uncovered any business cards with Amsterdam addresses in Rachel's apartment.)

What if by chance Rachel had called in and picked up the first message from Amy Levin, the one left on her voice mail, which Claire couldn't access? What if she were on her way to Amsterdam even now? And yet if Rachel had set up her own appointment with Ariel, surely Ariel, or Amy, would have let Claire know.

She kept walking.

The transformation a new place afforded was not simply the release from pain. The place itself was transforming. The streets Claire walked along moved from her feet up into her body. At the place where she and the city met, as the city entered her and became part of her, she herself was changed. An orange-canopied bar on the Prinsengracht would remain in her forever. The view from the Leidsegracht across the Keizersgracht through a second-storey window to an abstract painting on a white wall.
A city linked not just by roads but by water offered more fluid possibilities of travel: a city built on blocks not gridded but curved. Her limbs, her brain felt lissome, calmed, now, like the water and tall houses under bright sunlight. In the future, the meeting of the Leidsegracht and the Keizersgracht would surface in her, encoding this calm.

Ariel had given Claire an address. She asked the concierge if she could reach the place on foot or if she needed to take a taxi. He said she could walk if she wished but to follow his directions closely – he pulled out a map of the city and drew a route on it – because all the streets looked the same. She would have to walk
here
, through the red-light district.

The weather was warm and sunny, once again hazy but not too hot.

This morning, once again, Claire was headache-free.

The street she entered at last was narrow, nondescript, not on water. The same tall brick houses rose towards the sky, the old interspersed with the new, all accented with window boxes. The building she wanted was an old one. A male voice greeted her and she was buzzed up. She ascended a white, wooden staircase, passing a woman in a trim red jacket who was descending. On the fourth landing, the door to apartment three stood ajar. Claire knocked, perhaps too softly, waited for a response and, receiving none, pushed the door open. To her left, in a small kitchen, stood a man clothed all in white. White jeans. White T-shirt. Barefoot. A man of perhaps fifty, not tall, neither thin nor plump, solidly built and of middle height, with a suggestion
of feline suppleness, waited for a kettle to boil above a ring of blue flame on a gas stove.

“Hello,” Claire said, “I'm Claire Barber.”

The man swept her, startled, into his arms. “Ariel. I am so happy to see you.”

He did not give her now, nor did he ever mention a surname. His accent was as pronounced as on the telephone. He hugged, then released her. Stepping back to the stove, he poured boiling water from the kettle into a white teapot, from which rose an aroma like straw, and asked Claire if she wanted a cup. When she said no, he motioned her out of the kitchen and asked her to take off her shoes. Then, mug in hand, he led her into a room that must ordinarily have been a living room, five by six paces, only all the furniture (sofa, armchair, end tables) had been pushed to the walls and draped in white sheets. In the middle of the room, a futon mattress with a sheet over top of it lay on a rectangle (1.8 by 2.4 metres) of Turkish carpet. Like a bed. It made Claire uneasy. She wondered who the apartment belonged to. A woman. There remained something female about it, decorative touches. The carpet. A mirror over the mantelpiece, and on the mantelpiece, dried flowers in a vase, a china bell. Ariel seated himself cross-legged on the floor in front of a low table covered with small brown dropper bottles. He set his tea on the table, and beckoned Claire to sit in front of him. “Already I see something of Rachel in you,” he said. But Claire felt no trace of Rachel, had no intimation that Rachel was about to appear through the door or from anywhere else.

“You haven't heard from her, have you?” she asked. “Since the last time we spoke?”

He shook his head. “I do not think Rachel is coming to see me this time.”

He told her that he travelled regularly to New York, to Amsterdam, sometimes to London, Geneva, other places. For fifteen years he had done so. He did not seem to find it unusual that people travelled the world to see him, to heal themselves. For the rest of the year, he lived in Israel, half the time in the desert in El Alat and the other half in Tel Aviv.

“Can you tell me why Rachel first came to you?”

“Sonya Lang told her about my work.”

“Who's Sonya Lang?”

“She plays the violin. She has trouble here.” He laid a hand over his abdomen – which meant, what, her digestive tract, her uterus, Claire couldn't be sure.

“If she's a friend of Rachel's, do you think you could give me her number?”

“Amy will give it to you.”

“What did Rachel say was wrong with her when she came?”

Ah, he said, he did not so much listen to what people told him as to how their bodies spoke. He treated the whole body, and the body and spirit together. When Rachel first came she was like many people he saw, her body and spirit worn and stressed, because her spirit did not have a proper home in her body, and how could the body heal itself if the spirit was not in the body but loose and wandering the world? Most people when they first came were very ill, although their true sickness might not yet have revealed itself. If Rachel had not come to him, twice in New York, the last time in Amsterdam, in the future she would have been very ill. Much worse.

Where other people's gazes skimmed, his lingered. Unabashed, he stared at Claire though his stare did not feel sexual. There was a presumption of intimacy, however. She wondered if Rachel had responded to his gaze as sexual. She had to listen closely because of his accent. He spoke with an authority that bordered on impatience, a self-assurance that doubled as bluntness, but this might also have something to do with his incomplete and idiosyncratic command of English.

“How did she seem when you saw her in March?”

“Better. There is still much work to do.”

“She was complaining, before she disappeared, that her migraines kept getting worse.”

“This problem goes very deep. These are old wounds.”

It was strange, if Rachel really believed that Ariel's treatment was helping her, that she had said nothing about him to Claire, that she had not, for instance, urged Claire to come to New York to see him.

“How exactly do you work with people?”

“I will show you. There is no charge this time.” He laid a hand on Claire's shoulder. “This is my gift.”

He stood and beckoned Claire towards the futon. He asked if she would mind taking off her clothes. The first thing he had to do, he said, was find her wound. Then he could begin to heal her.

She could, even now, decide that this was not for her, despite having come all this way. And yet surely that would be a failure of nerve. She had tried some unusual things in the name of searching for a cure, if nothing as unusual as this. And she trusted Rachel, who would surely not have returned twice more to see Ariel if she considered him a complete hoax.

Claire removed her cotton dress and, in bra and underwear, seated herself cross-legged on the futon while Ariel crouched in front of her. He asked her to close her eyes. His hands began to move the air around her. He did not touch her, however. For a few moments he was silent, moving. Then he said he had found her wound. Nearly everyone who came to him had a wound, and it was his job to locate it. Then he had to find the wandering spirit in the world and bring it home to the body. When the body and spirit are separated, the body calls out for attention. He must show the spirit how to enter and inhabit the body. Heal the wound. Her wound was at the back of her head. (Where was Rachel's?) Her blood did not flow properly. Not in her head, not to her organs or muscles. Her liver was tired from overwork. She suffered from a problem of circulation. Of energy. Energy did not flow smoothly through her body. There was a block. The energy was blocked because she was frightened. Once the spirit was back in her body true healing could begin. Before the wound was closed, nothing would stay in her body. The spirit was lost. He cupped the back of her head and her forehead in his firm hands, his very warm hands, and held her like that, supported for a moment, before lowering her, slowly, to the mattress.