Thirty-three
MAY
Amsterdam
A week after I get back from India, while I’m still camped out at the couch on Bloemstraat trying to get over my jetlag and figure out what my next move is, I get an unlikely call.
“Hey, little man. You coming to clear your shit out of my attic?” There’s no introduction, no preamble. Not that I need one. Even though we have not spoken in years, I know the voice. It’s so much like his brother’s.
“Uncle Daniel,” I say. “Hey. Where are you?”
“Where am I? I’m in my flat. With my attic. That has your shit in it.”
This is a surprise. All the years I grew up, I have never actually seen Daniel in the flat he owns. It’s the same flat on the Ceintuurbaan that he and Bram used to live in. Back then, it was a squat. It’s where they were living when Yael came and knocked on the door and changed everything.
Within six months, Bram had married Yael and moved them into their own flat. Within another year, he’d cobbled together the funds to buy a broken-down old barge on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht. Daniel stayed in the squat, eventually getting a lease for it and then buying it from the city government for a pittance. Unlike Bram, who went on to fix up his boat, floorboard by floorboard, until it was the “Bauhaus on the Gracht,” Daniel left the flat in its state of anarchist disrepair and rented it out. He got almost nothing for it. “But nothing is enough to live like a king in Southeast Asia,” Bram used to say. So that’s where Daniel stayed, riding the ups and down of the Asian economy with a series of business ventures that mostly went nowhere.
“Your ma called,” Daniel continues. “Told me you were back. Said you might need a place to stay. I told her you needed to come get your shit out of my attic.”
“So I have shit in the attic?” I ask him, stretching out from the too-short sofa and trying to digest my surprise. Yael called Daniel? For me?
“Everyone has shit in the attic,” Daniel says, laughing a huskier, smokier version of Bram’s laugh. “When can you come over?”
We arrange for me to come over the next day. Daniel texts me the address, though that’s hardly necessary. I know his flat better than I know him. I know the stuck-in-time furniture—the zebra-striped egg chair, the 1950s lamps that Bram used to find at flea markets and rewire. I even know the smell, patchouli and hash. “It’s how this place has smelled for twenty years,” Bram would say when he and I would visit the flat together to fix a faucet or deliver keys to a new tenant. When I was younger, the lively multi-ethnic area where Daniel lived, right across from the treasures of the Albert Cuyp street market, seemed like another country from the quiet outer canal where we lived.
Over the years, the neighborhood has changed. The once working-class cafés around the market now serve things with truffles, and in the market, alongside the stalls hawking fish and cheese, there are designer boutiques. The houses have smartened up, too. You can see them through picture windows, the sparkling kitchens, the expensive clean-lined furniture.
Not Daniel’s place, though. As his neighbors renovated and upgraded, his flat dug into its time warp. I suspect that’s still the case, especially after he warns me that the buzzer doesn’t work and instructs me to call upon arrival so he can throw down the keys. So I’m caught a little off guard when he opens the door to the flat and I’m ushered into a lounge, all wide-plank bamboo floors, sage-colored walls, low, modern sofas. I look around the room. It’s unrecognizable, except for the egg chair, and even that’s been reupholstered.
“Little man,” Daniel says, though I am not little at all, a few fingers taller than him. I look at Daniel. His reddish hair is maybe a little shot through with gray, the smile lines cut a little deeper, but otherwise he’s the same.
“Little uncle,” I joke back, patting him on the head as I hand him back the keys. I walk around. “You’ve done something to the place,” I say, tapping a finger to my chin.
Daniel laughs. “Oh. I’m only halfway there, but that’s halfway farther than no way.”
“True enough.”
“I’ve got big plans. Actual plans. Where are my plans?” Out the window, there’s the roar of a jet rumbling through the clouds. Daniel watches it, then he resumes his search, spinning around peering at the crowded bookshelves. “It’s a little slow going because I’m doing the work myself, though I can afford to hire it out, but it just seemed like I should do it this way.”
Afford it? Daniel has always been broke; Bram used to help him out. But Bram’s not here. Maybe one of his Asian business ventures finally hit. I watch Daniel skitter around the room in search of something, finally locating a set of blueprints shoved halfway under the coffee table.
“I wish he was here to help me; I think he’d be happy that I’m finally making this place mine. But in a way I feel like he is here. Also, he’s footing the bill,” he says.
It takes me a minute to understand who he’s talking about, what he’s talking about. “The boat?” I ask.
He nods.
Back in India, Yael barely spoke of Daniel. I figured that they weren’t in touch anymore. With Bram gone, why would they be? They never liked each other. At least that’s how it seemed to me. Daniel was flakey, messy, a spendthrift—all the things that Yael loved in Bram in less extreme form—and Yael was the person who swept in and upended Daniel’s life. If there wasn’t much room for me, I can only imagine how it felt for him. It made sense to me why Daniel moved half a world away a few years after Yael showed up.
“There wasn’t a will,” Daniel says. “She didn’t have to do that, but of course she did. That’s your ma for you.”
Is it? I think about my trip to Rajasthan, an exile that turned out to be what I needed. Then I think about Mukesh, not just canceling the camel tour and delaying my return flight at Yael’s behest, but also dropping me off at the clinic that day, when everyone seemed to be expecting me. I’d always assumed my mother was so hands off, taking care of everyone but me. But I’m starting to wonder if perhaps I misunderstood her brand of caretaking.
“I’m beginning to get that,” I tell Daniel.
“Good timing, too,” he says. He scratches his beard. “I didn’t offer you coffee. You want coffee?”
“I wouldn’t say no to a coffee.”
I follow him into the kitchen, which is the old kitchen, all chipped cupboards, cracked tiles, ancient tiny gas range, cold-water-only sink.
“Kitchen’s next. And the bedrooms. Maybe halfway was a bit optimistic. I’d better get on it. You should come live with me. Help me out,” he says with a loud clap of his hands. “Your pa always said you were handy.”
I’m not sure if I’m handy, but Bram was always drafting me for help with some home-improvement project or another.
He puts the coffee on the stove. “I gotta get into gear. I’ve got two months now, so tick-tock, tick-tock.”
“Two months until what?”
“Oh, shit. I didn’t tell you. I only just told your ma.” His face breaks out into a smile that looks so much like Bram’s it hurts.
“Told her what?”
“Well, Willem, I’m going to be a father.”
As we drink coffee, Daniel fills me on the big news. At the age of forty-seven, the perennial bachelor has at last found love. But, because apparently the de Ruiter men can never do things the simple way, the mother of Daniel’s child is Brazilian. Her name is Fabiola. They met in Bali. She lives in Bahia. He shows me a picture of a doe-eyed woman with a lit-from-within smile. Then he shows me an accordion folder, several centimeters thick, his correspondence with the various government agencies to prove the legitimacy of their relationship so she can get a visa and they can be married. In July, he is going to Brazil in preparation for the birth in September, and, he hopes, the wedding soon after. All going well, they’ll be in Amsterdam in the fall, and return to Brazil for the winter. “Winters there, summers here, and when he is old enough for school, we’ll reverse it.”
“He?” I ask.
Daniel smiles. “It’s a boy. We know. We already have a name for him. Abra?o.”
“Abra?o,” I say, rolling it over my tongue.
Daniel nods. “It’s Portuguese for Abraham,”
We both are silent for a moment. Abraham, Bram’s full name.
“You’ll move in, help, won’t you?” He points to the blueprints, the one bedroom that will be made into two, the flat that once housed the two brothers, and for a spell housed all three of them before it was just Daniel all on his own. And then, not even him.
But now we are two here. And soon there will be more. After so much contracting, somehow, inexplicably, my family is growing again.