Netherland (8 page)

I’d caught sight of a near-naked white man. He was on his own. He was walking through the trees wearing only underpants. But why? What was he doing? Why was he not wearing clothes? A horror took hold of me, and for a moment I feared I’d hallucinated, and I turned to my fellow passengers for some indication that might confirm what I’d seen. I saw no such indication.

I was relieved, then, at the appearance shortly afterward of Poughkeepsie. I’d visited the town, with its merry name that sounds like a cry in a children’s game—Poughkeepsie!—for the first time that summer. In its bucolic outskirts a colony of Jamaicans maintained a cricket field on a lush hillside. It was the only privately owned ground we played on, and the farthest north we traveled. The trip was worth it. There was a bouncy but true batting track made of cement; rickety four-deep bleachers filled with shouting spectators; and the simplest wooden shack for a locker room. If you smashed the ball down the hill it landed among cows, goats, horses, chickens. After the match—marked by an umpiring crisis, inevitably—every player went to the clubhouse in downtown Poughkeepsie. The clubhouse was a cabin with a small bar. Prominent signs warned against the use of marijuana. Presently women appeared with platters of chicken and rice. We ate and drank quietly, half-following a dominoes game being played with the solemnity that often marked the social dealings of West Indian cricket teams in our league. Our hosts were proud to take care of us, to offer us a territory of their own in this remote place, and we were grateful. The tilted pretty cricket ground, the shipshape clubhouse—such pioneering effort had gone into them!

Somewhere beyond Poughkeepsie I opened my briefcase to glance at work documents. Protruding from a pocket was Chuck’s gift. I opened the envelope and withdrew a booklet. Titled
Dutch Nursery Rhymes in Colonial Times,
the booklet was a reprint, made by the Holland Society of New York, of the 1889 original edited by a Mrs. E. P. Ferris. I turned the pages with some curiosity, because I knew next to nothing about the ancient Dutch presence in America. There was a song in Dutch about Molly Grietje, Santa Claus’s wife, who made New Year
koekjes,
and a song about Fort Orange, as Albany was first known. There was a poem (in English) titled “The Christmas Race, a True Incident of Rensselaerwyck.” Rensselaerwyck was, I surmised, precisely the district through which my train was now traveling. Stimulated by the coincidence, I gave the poem my closer attention. It commemorated a horse-race under “the Christmas moon” at Wolvenhoeck, the corner of the wolves. The owners of the horses were a certain Phil Schuyler and a gentleman referred to only as Mijnheer: “Down to the riverbank, Mijnheer, his guests, and all the slaves / went trooping, while a war whoop came from all the Indian braves…/ The slaves with their whale lanterns were passing to and fro, / Casting fantastic shadows on hills of ice and snow.” In addition to this poem there were hymns, spinning songs, cradle songs, churning songs, and trotting songs—songs you sang while trotting your child on your knee—apparently in use all over New Netherland, from Albany to Long Island to the Delaware River. One such song caught my attention:

Trip a trop a troontjes

De varkens in de boontjes,

De koetjes in de claver,

De paarden in de haver,

De eendjes in de water-plas,

De kalf in de lange gras;

So groot mijn kleine _____was!

You sang your child’s name where the blank was. Adapting the melody of the St. Nicholas song that every Dutch child hungrily learns (
Sinterklaas kapoentje / Gooi wat in mijn schoentje
…), I hummed this nonsense about pigs and beans and cows and clover to my faraway son, tapping my knee against the underside of the lowered tray as I imagined his delighted weight on my thigh.

The week before, Jake and I had played in his grandparents’ garden. I raked leaves into piles and he helped me bag the leaves. The leaves were dry and marvelously light. I added armloads to the red and brown and gold crushed in the plastic sack; Jake picked up a single leaf and made a cautious, thrilled deposit. At one point he put on his superhero frown and charged a hillock of leaves. Wading into its harmless fire, he courageously sprawled. “’Ook, ’ook!” he screamed as he rolled in the leaves. I looked, and looked, and looked. Fronds of his yellow hair curled out from the hood’s fringe onto his cheeks. He wore his purple quilted jacket, and his thermal khakis with an inch of tartan turnup, and his blue ankle boots with the zip, and the blue sweater with the white boat, and—I knew this because I had dressed him—his train-infested underpants, and the red T-shirt he liked to imagine was a Spider-Man shirt, and Old Navy green socks with rubbery lettering on the soles. We gardened together. I demonstrated how to use a shovel. When I dug up the topsoil, I was taken aback: countless squirming creatures ate and moved and multiplied underfoot. The very ground we stood on was revealed as a kind of ocean, crowded and immeasurable and without light.

Blocks of color stormed my window for a full minute. By the time the freight train had passed, the sky over the Hudson Valley had brightened still further and the formerly brown and silver Hudson was a bluish white.

Unseen on this earth, I alighted at Albany-Rensselaer with tears in my eyes and went to my meeting.

S
ometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day. It was into one such dreamlike, double-dealing evening in January 2003, at Herald Square, that I stumbled out of the building occupied by New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles. After years of driving rental cars with a disintegrating and legally dubious international license issued in the United Kingdom, I had finally decided to buy and insure a car of my own—which required me to get an American driver’s license. But I couldn’t trade my British license (itself derived from a Dutch one) for an American one: such an exchange was for some unexplainable reason only feasible during the first thirty days of an alien’s permanent residence in the United States. I would have to get a learner permit and submit to a driving test all over again: which entailed, as a first step, a written examination on the rules of the road of the Empire State.

At the time, I didn’t question this odd ambition or my doggedness in relation to it. I can say quite ingenuously that I was attempting to counter the great subtractions that had lessened my life and that the prospect of an addendum, even one as slight as a new license and a new car, seemed important at the time; and no doubt I was drawn to a false syllogism involving the nothingness of my life and the somethingness of doing. All that said, I didn’t let Rachel know what I was up to. She would have taken my actions as a statement of intent, and maybe she wouldn’t have been entirely wrong. It would not have helped much to point out that, if I was indeed embracing an American lot, then I was doing so unprogrammatically, even unknowingly. Perhaps the relevant truth—and it’s one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I’m sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me—is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.

Carried along, then, by the dark flow of those times, I approached the Department of Motor Vehicles. The DMV was in a building coated in black glass and chiefly identifiable by a large sign for Daffy’s, an entity I took to be somehow connected to Daffy Duck but which turned out to be a department store. I avoided Daffy’s—and Modell’s Sporting Goods, and Mrs. Fields Cookies, and Hat & Cap, and Payless ShoeSource, other occupants of the eerily unfrequented mall known as the Herald Center—by taking the express elevator to the eighth floor. A bell for the benefit of the blind burped at intervals as I rose. Then the elevator door halved and slid away and I stood before the DMV premises. There was a static turnstile like a monster’s unearthed skeleton, and there was a set of glass doors in constant use. Approaching these, I was barged into by a middle-aged woman making her exit.

“Get out of my way,” she sobbed.

I joined the line to the reception desk, where two sweating men furiously gave directions. “I’m here for the written test,” I said. “You got your social security card? ID?” “Yes,” I said, reaching for my pocket. “I don’t want to see it,” the man snapped, thrusting forms at me.

I entered the main administrative area. The low ceiling was supported by an extraordinary clutter of columns; so many, in fact, that I could not avoid the perverse impression that the room was in danger of collapsing. An enormous counter ran around three-quarters of the office like a fortification, and behind it, visible between crenellations made by partitions and computer terminals, were the DMV employees. Two of them, women in their thirties, screamed with laughter by a photocopying machine; but as soon as they reached their positions at the counter they wore faces of sullen hostility. One could understand why, for assembled before them was a perpetually reinforced enemy, its troops massing relentlessly on the hard pewlike benches. Many of those seated were hunched forward with hands clasped and heads bowed, raising their eyes only to follow the stupendous figures—E923, A062, C568—that randomly appeared on screens with the purpose, never achieved, of moderating the agony of suspense in which visitors were placed.

I filled out my application form and stood in the queue of those waiting to be photographed. After my photograph was taken, I was told to sit on a bench and wait: my green card, which I’d handed over as proof of identity, would have to be checked by the Department of Homeland Security. An hour or so later, approval was forthcoming. I waited another twenty minutes and then shuffled with a handful of others to the test area, which was furnished with that heart-sinking grid of desks and chairs familiar to examinees everywhere. There were requests for test sheets in Chinese, French, Spanish. I rapidly answered the multiple-choice questions and handed my sheet to the invigilator. It gave me a childish satisfaction to have finished before anyone else. I returned to my desk and waited for the examination period to expire. The invigilator, an obese Hispanic woman, marked erroneous answers with superb strokes of her pencil. When she came to my paper, the pencil hovered and hovered; then she scribbled twenty (out of twenty) and handed it to me with a frown. I experienced a rush of happiness. Now, at last, I could collect my learner permit.

I received a ticket—say, D499—and further instructions to wait. So I waited. Perplexed and rebuffed Chinese men wandered everywhere. I listened to 106.7 Lite FM and watched a television screen on which “Entertainment News,” rather than actual entertainment, was broadcast. I studied driving safety posters:
YOU SNOOZE, YOU LOSE
, it was said. At last my number came up. A balding man in his fifties inspected my paperwork all over again. It fell to applicants to produce proof of identity worth six points: a green card scored three points, an original social security card two points, and a credit card or a bank statement or a utilities bill a single point. The man shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, unapologetically pushing my documents back to me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t take the credit card. It’s got somebody else’s name on it.”

I looked. My name, which by a miracle of typography was fully spelled out on my social security card, is Johannus Franciscus Hendrikus van den Broek. My credit card, for obvious reasons, identified me merely as Johannus F. H. van den Broek—exactly as my green card did.

I said, “That’s my name. If you—”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Go see the supervisor. Counter ten. Next.”

I went to counter ten. There were three people already in line. Each had an argument with the supervisor; each went away in a rage. Then it was my turn. The supervisor was in his late thirties, with a severely shaved head and a little goatee and an earring. He wordlessly extended his hand and I passed him my documents of identification. In exchange he passed me a notice:
ALL FORMS OF IDENTIFICATION MUST SHOW THE SAME NAME
.

He quickly compared my papers. “You got to show me documents with the same name,” he said. “This Con Ed bill is no good.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. I pulled out a bank statement I’d brought along in case of difficulty. It, too, was in the name of Johannus F. H. van den Broek, but it contained copies of checks I’d written. “You see?” I said. “The signature on those checks is exactly the same as the signature on my social security card and green card. So it’s obviously me in both cases.”

He shook his head. “I’m not a handwriting expert,” he said. “I need the same name.”

“OK,” I said calmly. “But let me ask you this. The green card’s good, right? And the name on the Con Ed bill and the bank statement is the same as the name on the green card.”

The supervisor reexamined my green card. “Actually, you got yourself another problem,” he said with a smile. “See this? The name on the green card is not the same as the name on the social security card.”

I looked: on the green card was typed “Johanus.” I’d never noticed it before.

I said, “Yes, well, that’s just an obvious clerical error made by the INS. The photograph on the green card is obviously me.” The supervisor looked unmoved, so I added, “Either that, or there’s somebody out there who looks exactly like me and has exactly the same name, and I happen to have stolen his green card.”

“Not exactly the same name,” the supervisor said. “And that’s where we have a problem. You want me to give you a learner permit? OK, but who are you? Are you Johanus”—he pronounced the last two syllables as an obscenity—“or are you Johannus?”

“Come on, let’s not play games,” I said.

“You think I’m playing a game?” He was actually baring his teeth. “Let me remind you, sir, you seem to be in possession of somebody else’s green card—either that, or somebody else’s social security card. I might just get suspicious about that. I might just have to start looking into that.”