The Invisible Circus (11 page)

ten

Dear Mom and Phoebe and Barry, Amsterdam is the be all end all. London was nothing compared to this. Wolf and I are crashing in an empty building where all these squatters have been living for months. The cops dont do one thing it’s the opposite, they’re our guardian angels. We’re like a family, everything is spiritual and when someone leaves maybe you won’t ever see them again but so what, even in that little time you can still love them. At night the stars are so pretty. Love, Faith

Phoebe stayed in London a week. But the longer she remained, the more the thrill of her surroundings seemed to fade. She began to fear that her own presence was erasing her sister’s, blurring it to vagueness. Simply to go where Faith had been was not enough, to stand there, flanked by other tourists, groups of singing children—not enough. Phoebe worried that her own hesitating nature had kept her from making some crucial leap, entering fully the danger and intensity of that first day, with the bomb threat. She left London determined to push herself harder.

She arrived in Amsterdam in the morning with two Australian sisters, Diana and Helen, whom she’d met on the overnight boat. They left their bags in the train station lockers—check-in time at the youth hostel was not until afternoon—and walked to the Dam, Amsterdam’s central square. Phoebe noticed a number of young people asleep on the shallow concentric steps surrounding the War Monument, a giant white cone that brought to mind a pillar of salt. She watched with interest as they shook themselves awake, coughing, rolling cigarettes, finally tottering to their feet and stretching skinny arms toward the sky so their tie-dyed shirts lifted up and their shrunken bellies met the sun. She felt a burst of excitement. These were hippies.

All morning Phoebe thought of the sleeping hippies while she trekked with Diana and Helen through the Rijksmuseum, looking at paintings of moist-eyed burghers in stiff lace collars. At two-thirty, when the sisters returned to the station for their backpacks, Phoebe seized her chance to escape them. The official youth hostel was rumored to fill up fast, and they wanted to be there when it opened.

“We’ll save you a place if we can,” said Helen, the younger sister, who was always offering kindness. “We’ll leave your name at the desk.”

“Great,” Phoebe said, nodding and smiling and wishing they would go.

Dear Mom and Phoebe and Barry, Wolf is gone but I dont miss him. I was made to live in Amsterdam. The craziness here is beyond anything. Maybe I’ll become a Dutch citizen. Just kidding Hee Hee. Love, Faith

The number of hippies in the Dam had grown since the morning. Phoebe paused at a florist’s stall, watching as they lounged against the War Monument and milled in groups, some entering and leaving the Dam in the brisk manner of drug dealers. One man with dreadlocks thick as wrists played a hoarse-sounding guitar; a blond girl leaned against him, her tangled hair glittering like cut wheat. Phoebe felt the same jealous awe she’d felt for the Haight Street kids who asked her for lemons. She wanted to be on their side.

Phoebe reached in her purse for Faith’s picture. It did not seem impossible that one of these people would remember her sister. But her own appearance felt too neat. The peasant skirt and huaraches were ludicrous, insufficient, and shyness tightened like a hand at Phoebe’s throat. The space between herself and these gypsies loomed, unnavigable.

The flower vendor eyed Phoebe inquiringly over his buckets of red tulips. She left the stall and crossed the Dam toward the group, Faith’s picture in hand. But at the last moment she lost heart, swerving away from the gypsies and out of the Dam altogether, down a narrow street leading toward the canal. Her heart was pounding; there seemed no room for air in her chest. She went to the canal and stopped on a bridge to regroup. Okay, she thought. Okay. In a minute I’ll go back.

A few feet away stood a guy Phoebe recognized as one of the sleeping bodies she’d watched come to life that morning in the Dam. She eyed him furtively. His profile was mostly obscured by hair, a wavy pale blond that might have been angelic but for its thinness. Two dirty strings were tied at his wrist. He was leaning over the bridge, staring at the water.

“Excuse me,” Phoebe said.

The man started so violently that Phoebe jumped, too. He began to laugh, a harsh, croupy laughter that sounded like coughing. His face seemed unnaturally small, shrunken almost, a child’s face on a man’s body. Yet he didn’t look young.

“Goh, wat hib ga me bang gemaakt!”
he said.

Phoebe was taken aback. She hadn’t fully registered the fact that these people might speak another language. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” she said.

“American?” He regarded her with interest. When Phoebe nodded, he said warmly, “American is best.”

“Thanks,” Phoebe said, quizzical.

“Then comes Australia, New Zealanders, then South African. Oh, and Israeli also is great.”

“You know them all?”

“Sure,” he said. “Everyone comes to Amsterdam.”

He turned back to the water, gazing at the canal as if some worry lay hidden there. “So … you live here?” Phoebe asked.

“Yes. I am living here.”

A pause fell. The man looked up and down the canal. Phoebe thrust Faith’s picture before him. In it, her sister was laughing, her mouth open, a string of white shells hanging crookedly around her neck. The shells were from Fiji; their grandparents had sent them each a set.

“Did you ever know this girl?” Phoebe asked.

The fellow took the picture and studied it. His fingernails seemed unusually long for a man. He looked at Faith, then at Phoebe. “Is you?”

“No, my sister. She came to Amsterdam eight years ago.”

“Eight years,” he said, laughing his gritty wet laugh. “Come on, eight years ago I am this.” He flattened a hand at his thigh, indicating the height of a child.

“Oh,” Phoebe said. “I thought you were older.”

“Everybody thinks,” he said rather proudly. “Actually, I am eighteen.”

“Me too,” said Phoebe.

There was an awkward pause. The guy turned back to the water. Phoebe restored the picture carefully to her purse.

Suddenly he turned to her. “You have some minutes?” he asked, twisting his forearm as if to consult a watch. But there were only the two dirty strings.

Phoebe hesitated. “What for?”

“We can make a visit to Karl. He is staying in Amsterdam more than ten years. He knows everybody coming here.”

“Sure,” Phoebe said. “Yes, I’d like to meet him.”

“Some little walk,” he said. “Is okay?”

She felt a shadow of anxiety. “All right.”

“So. Please come.” He flicked his gaze along the canal a last time, then began walking swiftly away from the center of town. Fighting her reluctance, Phoebe fell into step.

“Nico,” he said when she asked his name.

Phoebe’s anxiety eased as they walked. Along glistening greenish canals the narrow houses sat unevenly, as if floating. Boxes of bright flowers hung in their windows. The day was warm, bits of white fluff poised delicately on the water.

Nico walked in silence. Twice he and Phoebe passed groups of other young people clearly from his world, and both times the strangers behaved identically: they muttered something to Nico, eyes brushing Phoebe as they passed. She had an uneasy sense that her situation was recognizable to them in some way. “Who were they?” she asked after the second encounter.

Nico just shrugged. “You know. People,” he said.

After a baffling series of turns, they reached what appeared to be a student neighborhood. Layers of torn posters were pasted across buildings, and outside corner bars young people sat cross-legged on the pavement, drinking beer from dark bottles.

“Not so much more,” Nico assured her.

They turned onto a quieter street. Garbage floated on the canal, plastic bottles, soaked sheets of newspaper. An upside-down doll, pink legs groping up from the murky green. The houses here seemed more drastically uneven than those nearer the Dam, as if they were bobbing directly on the water. Phoebe had to trot every few paces to keep up with Nico. Again the anxiety seized her; how would she find her way back?

They turned again and the canal disappeared. The street narrowed. Abruptly Nico stopped. “Okay,” he said.

“I hope he’s home,” Phoebe said.

“Yes, I am hoping also.”

They walked up a few steps to a red wood door with a pane of glass at its center. Nico rang the bell. He rang it in a particular way: two short rings, one long, then another short. Each ring followed a pause, like something landing a long way down.

Phoebe heard a sound overhead and glanced up, catching a flash of dark hair from a high window. A moment later the front door jerked open as if released by a hook. Nico pushed it wide into a cool, dusty foyer. The floor was a coarse-looking marble covered with dry leaves.

“So,” Nico said, leading the way up a cramped staircase. Phoebe followed, nervous yet determined. There was no stopping now; if she lost this opportunity, she would despise herself. At the second landing Nico stopped, breathing hard. “Please,” he said, motioning Phoebe ahead.

Landings came and went. Finally, on what seemed a sixth or seventh floor, the staircase ended. Nico seemed virtually undone by the climb. Drops of sweat glistened through the hairs of his eyebrows, and he breathed in quick, shallow gasps. Phoebe decided he must be unwell in some way.

“Okay,” he breathed. “So we meet Karl.”

“Fine.” Phoebe was looking forward to different company.

Nico pounded on the door, calling out something in Dutch. It opened quickly, and Phoebe glimpsed a set of striking, almost womanly features before their host about-faced without a word, leading the way down a narrow hall. Nico and Phoebe followed him into a room that struck her immediately as a place where one person had lived for many, many years. At the focal point of the room stood a large black sewing machine on a table, surrounded by bright, jumbled fabrics piled so high that they seemed on the verge of overwhelming the machine itself. The remainder of the room was overgrown with plants, ivy around the windows, lily pads floating in a shallow tub, long vines dangling from hanging pots. A breeze pulled the algae smell of the canal inside and made the leaves and stems shiver gently.

“Welcome welcome” said their host, smiling broadly. He was beautiful, olive-skinned with an Asian lilt to his eyes. He wore a pair of loose Turkish pants belted with a cord of brightly colored yarn and a short-sleeved black T-shirt. “Please,” he urged Phoebe, “take a seat.”

Oriental carpets covered the floor, a kaleidoscope of golds and crimsons and blues overlapping crazily, disappearing near the windows beneath a heap of pillows piled like a kind of bed. Phoebe chose a cushion at the edge of this mass and folded her legs underneath her.

Karl spoke to Nico curtly in Dutch. With military swiftness the boy turned on his heel and disappeared through a curtain of beads into another room, where Phoebe heard cupboards being opened, a running tap.

Karl seated himself at the sewing machine. “You are visiting Amsterdam the first time?” he inquired politely.

Phoebe told him yes. Slivers of muscle flicked in Karl’s arms as he poked through his mountain of fabrics. His hair fell to his chest, heavy and dark as an Asian’s hair, but wavy. Phoebe guessed he must be forty.

“What are you sewing?” she asked.

“Everything,” he said. “I am a tailor.”

His accent was strange to Phoebe, clearly not Dutch, for it was nothing like Nico’s. His English sounded British, in fact, but underneath that a deeper accent leaned at the words.

Karl pried a green velvet vest from the heap, threaded a needle and began sewing a square yellow button on it. Nico returned to the room holding three beers, wisps of steam rising from their throats. Karl addressed him sharply in Dutch and the boy answered meekly, then seemed on the verge of returning the third bottle to wherever it had come from. But Karl waved a hand and grinned, suddenly easy. Nico sank onto the cushions near Phoebe, cupping both palms protectively around his bottle.

“You are traveling alone?” Karl asked, finishing with the yellow button and snapping the thread with his teeth.

“No,” Phoebe said instinctively. “My friends are at the museum.”

Nico began prattling in Dutch. Karl listened with more patience than he’d shown his friend thus far, nodding over his sewing, asking occasional questions. Phoebe listened, too, hoping for some familiar word, some clue to what they were saying.

Finally Nico pushed at her arm. “Show him,” he said. Phoebe looked at him. “The photo.”

She’d forgotten it. Hastily Phoebe produced the picture of Faith and brought it to Karl at his sewing machine. He glanced at it briefly and nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I remember.”

“You do?” Phoebe cried.

“She was here some years ago, yes?”

Her heart flinched. “Eight years.”

Karl pressed the pedal that operated the sewing machine and began coaxing a piece of blue fabric under the needle. The machine was an old black Singer, curved like a woman’s waist, the name in gold lettering.

“So … you knew her,” Phoebe prompted him.

“Knew her, no, I did not. I remember her,” Karl said. “There were people coming, people going all the time, but that one I do remember.” After a moment he added, “Dead?”

Phoebe stared at him. “How did you know?”

“If she is alive, then why you are coming to me with a picture in your hand?” He flashed a white grin, his needle greedily gobbling the fabric. “OD?”

“Oh no,” Phoebe said, but stopped short of divulging the truth. “So,” she said, at a loss, “I mean, what did you think of her?”

Karl turned the fabric under the needle to pull it through in another direction. “You know, there were so many people,” he said. “She was a nice girl. Fun, a little crazy? Beautiful,” he said. “Lots of boyfriends.”

“Did she ever come here?”

Karl worked the pedal, prompting the machine’s rhythmic mutterings to increase in speed and pitch until they seemed to verge upon speech. When he lifted his foot from the pedal, a hush fell over the room. Karl shut his eyes. “Yes. I think yes,” he said, opening his eyes again. “I can remember her there.” He pointed to the cushions beneath the windows. Turning, Phoebe was surprised to see Nico, whose presence in the room she’d entirely forgotten. He sat erect and pale. Karl laughed at him, muttering something in Dutch.