John Irving - Until I Find You

“We know about Amsterdam,” Alice interjected. She appeared fearful that Kari Vaara was about to reveal a terrible truth—something in the not-around-Jack category.

“Not just Amsterdam,” the organist intoned. Jack looked at the Walcker organ, half expecting it to issue a refrain. “He’s going to play in the Oude Kerk.”

The reverence with which Vaara spoke was wasted on Jack, but his mom was glad to know the church’s name.

“The organ there is special, I suppose,” Alice said.

Kari Vaara took a deep breath, as if he were once more preparing to stick his head out the window of that speeding train. “The organ in the Oude Kerk is vast, ” he said.

Jack must have scuffed his feet or cleared his throat, because Vaara again turned his attention to him. “I told your father that big is not necessarily best, but he is a young man who must see for himself.”

“Yes, he has always had to see everything for himself,” Alice chimed in.

“Not always a bad thing,” Vaara offered.

“Not always a good thing,” Alice countered.

Kari Vaara leaned over Jack. The boy could smell the soap on the organist’s clasped hands. “Perhaps you have talent for the organ,” Vaara said. He unclasped his hands and spread his arms wide, as if to embrace the Walcker. “Would you like to play?”

“Over my dead body,” Alice said, taking Jack’s hand.

They went up the aisle and out of the Johanneksen kirkko. The sunlight was shimmering on the newfallen snow. “Mrs. Burns!” Vaara called after them. (Had she told him she was Mrs. Burns?) “They say that in the Oude Kerk, one plays to both tourists and prostitutes!”

“Not around Jack,” Alice said, over her shoulder. Their taxi driver was waiting; the shipping office was their next stop.

“I mean only that the church is in the red-light district,” Vaara explained.

Alice stumbled slightly, but she regained her balance and squeezed Jack’s hand.

There was mention of traveling by ship from Helsinki to Hamburg, and then taking the train from Hamburg to Amsterdam. But that was the long way to go, and perhaps Alice was afraid she might stay in Hamburg; her desire to meet and work with Herbert Hoffmann was that strong. (Maybe they wouldn’t have gone back to Canada; Jack might never have attended St. Hilda’s, and all the rest.) She’d sent Hoffmann so many postcards that Jack had memorized the address—8 Hamburger Berg. If they had sailed to Hamburg—if they’d seen St. Pauli and the Reeperbahn, and Herbert Hoffmann’s Tätowierstube at 8 Hamburger Berg—they might have stayed.

But they found passage on a freighter from Helsinki to Rotterdam. (In those days, freighters frequently had passenger accommodations.) Then they took the train from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, a short trip. Jack remembered that train ride. It was raining; some of the fields were flooded. It was still winter, but there wasn’t any snow. Out the window of the train, it looked as if spring would never come. Alice rested her forehead against the pane.

“Isn’t the glass cold?” Jack asked.

“It feels good,” she replied. “Maybe I have a fever.”

Jack felt her forehead—she didn’t feel too warm to him. She shut her eyes and nodded off. Across the aisle, a businessman-type kept glancing at Alice. Jack stared at the man until he looked away. Even at four, the boy could stare anybody down.

Jack was excited about Tattoo Peter’s one leg, and he must have been trying to imagine the size of the vast organ in the Oude Kerk. But a question of a different kind popped into his head.

“Mom?” he whispered. He had to speak a little louder to wake her from her sleep. “Mom?”

“Yes, my little actor,” she whispered back; she hadn’t opened her eyes.

“What is the red-light district?”

Alice gazed without seeing out the window of the rushing train. When she shut her eyes again, the businessman across the aisle sneaked another look at her. “Well,” Alice said, with her eyes still closed, “I guess we’re going to find out.”

After Amsterdam, Alice was a different woman—one whose small measure of self-confidence and sense of moral worth had been all but obliterated. Jack must have noticed that his mother had changed—not that he would have known why.

On the Zeedijk, the northeastern-most street of the red-light district, there was a tattoo parlor called De Rode Draak—The Red Dragon. The tattoo artist in that shop, Theo Rademaker, was called Tattoo Theo. The nickname mocked Rademaker because, in Amsterdam, he was forever in the shadow of Tattoo Peter.

Rademaker’s second-rate reputation didn’t discourage William Burns, who’d had Tattoo Theo etch a cramped fragment from Samuel Scheidt, “We All Believe in One God,” in a crescent shape on his coccyx. The music was partially obscured by the words, “ Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott ”—it was William’s first tattoo in Amsterdam.

He was later tattooed by Tattoo Peter, who told him Tattoo Theo’s work was amateurish and gave The Music Man a Bach tat-too—“Jesu, meine Freude” (“Jesus, My Joy”). Tattoo Peter wouldn’t say where—only that the music and the words were, in this case, not at war with each other.

His real name was Peter de Haan, and he was arguably the most famous tattoo artist of his day. Tattoo Peter’s lost leg was one of the more tantalizing mysteries of Jack’s childhood; it was a gift to the boy’s imagination that his mom refused to tell him how it happened. What chiefly impressed Alice was that Peter de Haan had tattooed Herbert Hoffmann, and the two men were friends.

Tattoo Peter’s shop was in the basement of a house on the St. Olofssteeg—thus William was tattooed twice in the red-light district. William Burns was a man who was meant to be musically marked for life, Tattoo Peter said, but Alice would be marked for life because of him.

The basement shop on the St. Olofssteeg was very warm. Peter frequently took off his shirt when he tattooed a client; he told Alice that it gave the customer confidence in him as a tattoo artist. Jack understood this to mean that the client couldn’t help but admire Tattoo Peter’s own tattoos.

“In that case,” Alice told Peter, “I’ll keep my shirt on.” What Jack made of this was perfectly logical: since his mom didn’t have any tattoos of her own, the customer might lose confidence in her altogether.

Peter de Haan was a fair-skinned, bell-shaped man with a pleasant, clean-shaven face and lustrous, slicked-back hair. He usually wore dark trousers and sat with his one leg facing the entrance to the tattoo parlor—the stump of his missing leg half hidden on a wooden bench or stool. He sat with his back very straight; he maintained excellent posture sitting down. But Jack never saw him stand.

Did he use crutches or two canes; or, like a pirate, did he strap on a peg leg? Did he come and go in a wheelchair? Jack didn’t know—he never saw Peter come or go.

Jack would one day hear that Peter’s son was his apprentice, but Jack remembered seeing only one other apprentice at Tattoo Peter’s besides his mom. He was a scary man named Jacob Bril. (Possibly Bril made such an impression on Jack that he simply forgot Peter’s son.)

Jacob Bril had his own tattoo parlor in Rotterdam; he closed it on the weekends and came to Amsterdam, where he worked at Tattoo Peter’s from noon to midnight every Saturday. His faithful clientele would line up to see him; every fan of Bril’s was a dedicated Christian.

Jacob Bril was small and wiry—an austere skeleton of a man—and he gave only religious tattoos, of which his favorite was the Ascension. On Bril’s bony back was a depiction of Christ departing this world in the company of angels. In Bril’s version, Heaven was a dark and cloudy place, but his angels had splendid wings.