John Irving - Until I Find You

“You didn’t like the lawyer?” Jack asked. He remembered how Saskia and Els had screamed at Femke; how he’d thought that Els and Femke had come close to having a physical fight.

“Femke was as much of an asshole do-gooder as your fucking father, Jack. On the one hand, she was this outspoken advocate for prostitutes’ rights; on the other hand, she wanted us all to go back to school or learn another profession!”

“What was the deal that she offered Mom?”

“Femke told your mother to get off the street and take you back to Canada. Your dad wouldn’t follow you this time, Femke promised. If your mom would put you in a good school—if she kept you in school—your dad would pay for everything. But your mother was tough; she told Femke that your father had to promise he would never seek even partial custody of you. And he had to promise that he wouldn’t look you up, not even when you were older—not even if Alice was dead. ”

“But why would my dad promise that ?”

“He opted to keep you safe, Jack—even if it meant he could never make contact with you,” Nico Oudejans said.

“If your mom couldn’t have your dad, then he couldn’t have you,” Saskia said. “It was that simple. Listen, Jack—your mother would have slashed her throat and bled to death in front of you, just to teach your fucking father a lesson. ”

“What lesson was that?” Jack cried. “That he should never have left her?”

“Listen, Jack,” Saskia said again. “I admired your mom because she put a price tag on his leaving her—a high one. Most women can never be paid enough for the terrible things men do to them.”

“But what terrible thing did he do to her ?” Jack asked Saskia. “He just left her! He didn’t abandon me; he gave her money for my education, and for my other expenses—”

“You can’t get a woman pregnant and then change your mind about her and not have it cost you, Jack,” Saskia said. “Just ask your father.”

Nico hadn’t said anything since telling Jack that his dad had opted to keep him safe. Saskia, like Alice, had clearly chosen revenge over reason.

“Do you cut men’s hair, too?” Jack asked her. “Or just women’s?” (He was trying to calm himself down a little.)

Saskia smiled. She’d finished her coffee. She made a kissing sound with her lips, and the Yorkshire terrier sprang out of Nico’s lap and into her arms. She put the tiny dog back in her handbag and stood up from the table. “Just women’s,” she told Jack, still smiling. “But now that you’re all grown up, Jackie boy, if you ever want someone to cut your balls off, just ask me.”

“I guess she didn’t learn the castration part in beauty school,” Nico Oudejans said, after they’d watched Saskia walk away. She didn’t once turn to wave; she just kept going.

“What about Els?” Jack asked Nico. “I suppose you know what’s happened to her, too.”

“Fortunately for you,” Nico said, “Els has a somewhat sweeter disposition.”

“She’s not cutting hair?” Jack asked.

“You’ll see,” the policeman said. “Everyone has a history, Jack.”

Nico led Jack past the Damrak, away from the red-light district. They wound their way through streams of shoppers—across the Nieuwendijk to the tiny Sint Jacobsstraat, where Els occupied a second-floor apartment. Her window with the red light was a little uncommon for a prostitute’s window, not solely for being outside the district but because her room was above street-level. Yet when Jack considered that Els had taken an overview of her life in prostitution—she’d grown up on a farm and took an overview of life on a farm as well—he thought that Els in her window above the street was where she belonged.

During the day, she greeted passersby with boisterous affection, but Nico told Jack that Els was more judgmental at night; if you were a drunk or a drug addict pissing in the street, she would turn her police-issue flashlight on you and loudly condemn your bad manners. On the Sint Jacobsstraat, Els was still a prostitute, but she was also a self-appointed sheriff. Drugs had changed the red-light district and driven her out of it; alcohol and drugs had killed her only children. (Two young men—they’d both died in their twenties.)

Jack had been wrong to think that Els was about his mother’s age, or only a little older. Even from street-level, looking up at her, he could tell she was a woman in her seventies; when Jack had been a four-year-old, Els would have been in her forties.

“Jackie!” Els called, blowing him kisses. “My little boy has come back!” she announced to the Sint Jacobsstraat. “Jackie, Jackie—come give your old nanny a hug! You, too, Nico. You can give me a hug, if you want to.”

They went up the staircase to her apartment. The window-room was only a small part of the place, which was spotlessly clean—the smell of all the rooms dominated by the coffee grinder in the kitchen. Els had a housekeeper, a much younger woman named Marieke, who immediately began grinding beans for coffee. As a former farm girl, Els hated cleaning chores, but she knew the importance of a tidy house. She shared the prostitute duties with another “girl,” she explained to Jack; the women took turns using the window-room, although Petra, the other prostitute, didn’t live in the apartment.

“Petra’s the young one, I’m the old one!” Els exclaimed happily. (Jack didn’t meet Petra, but Nico told him she was sixty-one.)

Els, who claimed to be “about seventy-five,” said that most of her regular customers were morning visitors. “They take naps in the afternoon, and they’re too old to go out at night.” The only customers who visited her at night were the ones off the street—that is, if they happened to be passing by when Els was sitting in her upstairs window. For the most part, she let Petra sit in the window. “At night, I’m usually asleep,” Els admitted, giving Jack’s forearm a squeeze. “Or I go to the movies—especially if it’s one of your movies, Jackie!”

Els had always been a big woman with an impressive bust. Her bosom preceded her with the authority of a great ship’s prow; her hips rolled when she walked. She was massive but not fat, although Jack noticed how her forearms and the backs of her upper arms sagged—and she walked with a slight limp. She had a bad heart, she claimed—“and perhaps an embolism in the brain.” Els pointed ominously to her head; she still wore a platinum-blond wig.

“Every day, Jackie,” she said, kissing his cheek, “I take so many pills, I lose count!”

Els had landlord problems, too, she wanted Nico to know; maybe the police could do something about the building’s new owner. “Like shoot him,” she told Nico, with a smile, kissing him on the cheek—then kissing Jack again. There’d been a rent dispute and a tax issue; the new landlord was a prick, in her opinion.

Els was a longstanding spokesperson for the prostitutes’ union; she regularly spoke to high school students about the lives of prostitutes. The students, many of them only sixteen, had questions for her about first-time sex. Years ago, she’d had a husband; she’d been married for three years before her husband found out she was a whore.

She had a bruise on her face. Nico asked her if she was getting over a black eye—perhaps something one of her off-the-street customers had given her.

“No, no,” she said. “My customers wouldn’t dare hit me.” Els had gotten into a fistfight at a café on the Nes, just off the Dam Square. She’d run into a former prostitute who wouldn’t speak to her. “Some holier-than-thou cunt, ” she said. “You should see her face, Nico.”