John Irving - Until I Find You

Saskia made such a wail that four other women on the Bloedstraat and three girls who worked around the corner on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal heard her and came to her rescue. They dragged the man in acute need of advice out on the Bloedstraat, where they whipped and gouged him with coat hangers and hit him with a plumber’s helper—all this before one of the women got a clean shot at his head with the metal drain plug of a bidet, with which she beat him bloody. He was senseless and raving, and no doubt still in need of advice, when the police came and took him away.

“That was what happened to your teeth?” Jack asked Saskia.

“That’s right, Jack,” she said. “I show my burn scar only to people I like. Would you and your mom like to see it?”

“Of course,” the boy replied.

“Only if we’re not imposing,” Alice answered.

“You’re not imposing at all,” Saskia said.

She took them into her small room, closing the door and the curtains as if Jack and his mother were her customers. Jack was astonished by how little furniture there was in the room—just a single bed and a night table. The lighting was low—only one lamp, with a red glass shade. The wardrobe closet was without a door; mostly underwear hung there, and a whip like a lion tamer would use.

There was a sink, and the kind of white enamel table you might expect to see in a hospital or a doctor’s office. The table was piled high with towels, one of which was spread out on the bed—in case the men in need of advice were wearing wet clothes, Jack imagined. There was no place to sit except on the bed, which was an odd place to give or get advice, Jack thought, but it seemed natural enough to Saskia, who sat down on the bed and invited Jack and Alice to sit down beside her.

One by one, she took her bracelets off and handed them to Jack. In the red glow from the lamp with the glass shade, the boy and his mom examined the wrinkled, raw-looking surface of Saskia’s scar, which resembled a scalded chicken neck. “Go on, Jack—you can touch it,” she said. He did so reluctantly.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“Not anymore,” Saskia replied.

“Do your teeth hurt?” the boy inquired.

“Not the missing ones, Jack.” One by one, she let him put her bracelets back on; he was careful to do it in the right order, biggest to smallest.

Who could refuse to bring that thin, hungry girl a sandwich? Jack despised Uncle Gerrit, The Bicycle Man, for being so mad at Saskia that he refused to shop for her. But the cranky old prostitute-shopper had his reasons. He’d often parked his bicycle outside the Oude Kerk in the early-morning hours; he had more than once slipped into a pew in the Old Church and listened to the elevating music. Uncle Gerrit was a William Burns fan. Maybe Saskia wasn’t.

“You should talk to Femke,” The Bicycle Man said to Alice. “ I was the one who told William to see her! Femke knows what’s best for the boy!”

While this made no sense to Jack, he could tell that Uncle Gerrit was mad at his mother, too. Jack and his mom were standing on the Stoofsteeg as The Bicycle Man pedaled away. He turned the corner and pedaled past the Casa Rosso, where they showed porn films and had live-sex shows—not that Jack had a clue what they were. (More advice-giving, for all he knew.)

The prostitute in the doorway at the end of the Stoofsteeg was named Els. Jack thought she was about his mother’s age, or only a little older. She had always been friendly. She’d grown up on a farm. Els told Jack and his mom that she expected she would one day see her father or her brothers in the red-light district. And wouldn’t they be surprised to see her in a window or a doorway? She would not ask them in, she said. (They were somehow beyond advising, Jack assumed.)

“Who’s Femke?” Jack asked his mom.

Els said: “I’ll tell you Femke’s story.”

“Maybe not around Jack,” Alice said.

“Come in and we’ll see if I can tell it in a way that won’t offend Jack,” Els said. As it turned out, either Els or Alice would tell Femke’s story in a way that totally confused the boy.

Els always wore a platinum-blond wig. Jack had never seen her real hair. When she put her big arm around Jack’s shoulders and pulled his face against her hip, he could feel how strong she was—like you’d expect a former farm girl to be. And Els had the bust and the announcing décolletage of an opera singer; her bosom preceded her with the authority of a great ship’s prow. When a woman like that says she’ll tell you a story, you better pay attention.

But Jack was instantly distracted; to his surprise, Els’s room was very much like Saskia’s. Once again, there was no place to sit except on the bed, on which there was a towel spread out, and so the three of them sat there. Alice needn’t have been concerned that Femke’s story was not-around-Jack material. The boy was mesmerized by the prostitute’s room and her gigantic breasts. Jack couldn’t comprehend what Els had to say about Femke, who he thought was a relative newcomer to the advice-giving business. Confusingly, Femke was also the well-heeled ex-wife of an Amsterdam lawyer. Maybe they’d been partners in the same law firm—all Jack heard was something about a family law practice. And then the plot thickened: Femke had discovered that her husband made frequent visits to the more upscale prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg and the Bergstraat. She’d been a faithful wife, but she made Dutch divorce history in more than the alimony department.

Femke bought a prominent room on the Bergstraat, on the corner of the Herengracht; it was unusual for a prostitute’s room in that it had a basement window and the door was at the bottom of a small flight of stairs. Both the doorway and the window were below sidewalk level, so that pedestrians looked down at the prostitute, who was also visible from a passing car.

Was Femke so enraged that she would actually buy a room for prostitution and rent the space to a working prostitute—thus, eventually, making a profit from the sordid enterprise that had wrecked her marriage? Or did she have something more mischievous in mind? That Femke herself appeared in the basement window or the doorway on the Bergstraat, and that a few of her first clients were business associates of her former husband—including some gentlemen who had known the couple socially—was certainly a shock. (Apparently not to Femke—she was aware that she was attractive to most men, if not to her ex-husband.)

She was met with mixed reviews from her fellow prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg and the Bergstraat. Her very public triumph over her former husband was much admired, and while it was appreciated that Femke had become an activist for prostitutes’ rights—after all, she was a woman whose convictions, which were so bravely on display, had to be respected—she was herself not a real prostitute, or so some prostitutes (Els among them) believed.

Femke certainly didn’t need the money; she could afford to be choosy, and she was. She turned many clients down—a luxury unknown to those women working in the red-light district and the prostitutes in their windows or doorways on the Korsjespoortsteeg and the Bergstraat. Furthermore, the customers Femke turned down were humiliated. The first-timers might have thought that all the prostitutes were as likely to reject them. A few of Femke’s fellow sex workers on the Bergstraat claimed that she hurt their business more directly. Not only was Femke the most sought-after of the prostitutes on the street, but when she spurned a client—in full view of her near neighbors in their doorways and windows on the Bergstraat—the ashamed man was sure to take his business to another street. (He didn’t want to be in the company of a woman who’d seen Femke turn him down.)