Until I Find You (14 page)

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.

For the chest, Jacob Bril recommended Christ’s Agony—Our Savior’s head bleeding in His crown of thorns. Christ’s hands and feet and side were also bleeding; according to Bril, the blood was essential. On his own chest, in addition to Our Savior’s bloody head, Jacob Bril had a sacred text—the Lord’s Prayer. On his upper arms and forearms were a Virgin Mary, a Christ Child, and two Mary Magdalenes—one with a halo, one without. He’d saved his stomach for that most frightening figure of Lazarus leaving the grave. (Alice liked to say that the Lazarus tattoo was responsible for Bril’s indigestion.)

It was reasonable to hope that the two Mary Magdalenes might predispose Bril to forgiveness—especially in regard to those working women in their windows and doorways in the red-light district. But Bril made his disapproval of the prostitutes plain. From where he got off the train, at the Central Station, Jacob Bril could have walked to Tattoo Peter’s on the St. Olofssteeg without once passing a prostitute; in fact, the most direct route from the train station to the tattoo parlor did not go through the district. But Bril stayed in a hotel on the Dam Square, the Krasnapolsky. (In those days, the Krasnapolsky was considered quite a fancy hotel; it was certainly too fancy for Bril.) And whether leaving or returning to the Krasnapolsky, Bril made a point of walking every street of the red-light district—both to and from Tattoo Peter’s.

When he walked, Jacob Bril’s pace was as quick as his rush to judgment. Two canals divided the district; Bril patrolled both banks of the two, as well as the side streets. In the narrowest alleys, where the women in their doorways were close enough to touch, Bril hurried by at a frenzied pace. The women who saw him coming withdrew as he passed. (Jack used to think it was because Bril caused a draft.) One day, Jack and his mom followed Bril from the Krasnapolsky. They couldn’t match the little man’s speed; Jack would have had to run just to keep Bril in sight.

The Krasnapolsky was an overfancy hotel for Jack and Alice—not just for Jacob Bril—but they’d had a bad experience in a cheaper place. De Roode Leeuw (The Red Lion) was on the Damrak, just opposite a department store where Jack once became separated from his mother and managed to get lost for five or ten minutes.

At The Red Lion, Jack was fascinated by a rat he found in the hotel’s poolroom, behind the rack for the pool cues. Jack discovered that by inserting a cue in one end of the rack and wiggling it, he could make the rat run out the other side.

The Red Lion was a hotel favored by sales reps. A previous guest had left a sizable stash of marijuana in one of Jack’s bureau drawers. Jack discovered it while looking for his underwear, and used it to replace the bedraggled hay in a crèche his mom had given him at Christmastime in Copenhagen. Thus Jack’s Little Lord Jesus lay in a bed of pot, and Mary and Joseph and various kings and shepherds (together with an assortment of other crèche figures) were knee-deep in hemp, not hay, when Alice discovered them. She was led to the crèche by the smell.

De Roode Leeuw was not the hotel for them, Alice said, but Jack never saw her throw the marijuana away. They moved to the Krasnapolsky. Staying in a hotel above their means was becoming old hat for Jack and Alice, although being in the same hotel with Jacob Bril would never have been their first choice. The rat at The Red Lion was friendlier than Bril was.

As for trying to follow Jacob Bril through the red-light district, Jack and Alice tried it only that once. Not only was Bril too fast—he didn’t appreciate their company. Usually, when Jack and his mother walked through the district to and from Tattoo Peter’s, they liked to play a game. They tried to take a slightly different route each time; that way, they got to know all the prostitutes. Most of them were friendly. In a short while, they knew Jack’s name; they called his mom by her tattoo name, Daughter Alice.

The few women in their doorways and windows who were unfriendly to Jack and Alice were conspicuously so. Most of them were older women—to Jack, some of them looked old enough to be his mother’s mother—but a few of the younger women were unfriendly as well.

One of the younger ones was bold enough to speak to Alice. “This is no place to be with a child,” she said.

“I have to work, too,” Alice told her.

In those days, most of the women in the red-light district were Dutch—many of them not from Amsterdam. If a woman from Amsterdam wanted to be a prostitute, she might go to The Hague; women from The Hague, or from other Dutch cities, or the country girls, came to Amsterdam. (Less of a scandal for the family; not so much shame.)

This was around the time families came to Holland from their native Suriname. To see a brown-skinned woman in the red-light district in 1970 was increasingly common. And before the Surinamese, there were the brown-skinned girls of a lighter hue from Indonesia—a former Dutch colony.

It was one of the darker-brown women from Suriname who gave Jack a present. What surprised him was that he’d never seen her before, but she knew his name.

She was in a window, not in the red-light district but on either the Korsjespoortsteeg or the Bergstraat, where Jack and his mom went to make some inquiries about his dad. Jack thought the Surinamese woman was a mannequin—she was sitting so still, and she was so statuesque—but she suddenly came out on the street and gave him a chocolate the color of her skin.

“I’ve been saving this for you, Jack,” she said. The boy was too surprised to speak. His mother reproved him for not thanking the woman properly.

Most weekday mornings, when Jack and his mom walked through the red-light district on their way to Tattoo Peter’s, not many women were working—they went to work earlier on the weekends. At night, of course, every red light was on and the district was teeming; sometimes the prostitutes who knew and liked Jack and Alice were too busy to say their names, or so much as nod in their direction.

Even before the spring came, when the weather was still cool, the women were more often in their doorways than their windows; they liked to talk to one another. They wore high heels and short skirts, and blouses or sweaters with low necklines, but at least they wore clothes. And their friendliness—to Jack, if not always to his mother—enabled Alice to mislead her son about the nature of prostitution.

In those days, one saw only men visiting the prostitutes; Jack observed that the men looked most unhappy to be seen doing so. And when the men left, they were always in a hurry, which stood in sharp contrast to how slowly they had walked in the district (and how many times they’d passed a particular prostitute’s doorway or window) before they
finally
made up their minds about which woman to visit.

Alice explained that this was because they were unhappy and indecisive men to begin with. A prostitute, Jack’s mom told him, was a woman who gave advice to men who had difficulty understanding women in general—or one woman, such as a wife, in particular. The reason the men looked ashamed of themselves was that they knew they should really be having such an important and personal conversation with their wives or girlfriends, but they were inexplicably unable or unwilling to do so. They were “blocked,” Alice said. Women were a mystery to them; they could pour out their hearts only to strangers, for a price.

Jack didn’t know who paid whom, until his mom explained that the men did the paying. It was an awful job to have to listen to these miserable men, his mother said. She clearly took pity on the prostitutes, so Jack did, too; she had contempt for the men, so he also had contempt for them.

But Jack and Alice’s contempt could never measure up to that of Jacob Bril. Bril had a palpable scorn for the prostitutes
and
their customers. He was full of contempt for Jack and his mom, too. It was because she was an unwed mother and Jack was an illegitimate child, Alice told her son.

Bril also disapproved of Alice because she was a tattoo artist; he said that it was not a decent woman’s business to touch half-naked men. Bril himself would not tattoo a woman—except on her hand or forearm, or on her foot or ankle. Any higher up her leg was “too high,” he said; any other part of a woman’s body was “too intimate.”

Women seeking religious tattoos on either too high or too intimate a part of their bodies were told to see Daughter Alice, although Bril disapproved of her giving religious tattoos. She was not religious enough to do them sincerely, he said.

Alice did a small, pretty cross with roses, which young women liked to tuck in their cleavage—as if the cross were an overlong necklace with an invisible chain. She did a Christ on the Cross that was shoulder-blade-size. (It lacked some of the agony and much of the blood of Bril’s dying Jesus.) And she did Our Savior’s head in His crown of thorns, usually on an upper arm or thigh, which Bril criticized because he found her Christ’s expression “too ecstatic.”

“Maybe my Jesus is already entering Heaven,” Alice explained.

Jacob Bril dismissed this with a violent gesture. He drew his forearm across his chest, as if he were about to give Alice a whack with the back of his bony hand.

“Not in my shop, Bril,” Tattoo Peter told him.

“Not around Jack.” (Alice’s usual refrain.)

Bril looked at the two of them with a venom he normally reserved for the prostitutes.

Jack and Alice never saw Jacob Bril leave Tattoo Peter’s, which he did every Saturday at midnight, when the red-light district was overflowing in the relentless pursuit of its principal enterprise—every girl was working. Jack would wonder later how long it took Bril to get back to the Krasnapolsky, passing every prostitute in every window and doorway.

Did his pace never slow? Was there ever a woman who made him stop walking? Did the fire and brimstone only leave his eyes when Bril was asleep, or did Hell burn even more brightly in his dreams?

Many Saturdays, because Alice disliked sharing Tattoo Peter’s otherwise warm shop with Jacob Bril, Peter would propose that she take her talents over to the Zeedijk and see if she could teach a thing or two to Theo Rademaker at The Red Dragon.

“Poor Tattoo Theo,” Peter would say. “I’ll bet he could use a break today. Or a lesson from Daughter Alice.”

The much-maligned Tattoo Theo was not in the category of a scratcher; he simply had the misfortune to share the red-light district with a tattoo artist as good as Tattoo Peter. Rademaker was by no means as bad as Sami Salo or Trond Halvorsen—it was judgment that he lacked, Alice said, not ability. And Alice liked Tattoo Theo’s young apprentice, Robbie de Wit. It was well known in the neighborhood that Robbie doted on her.

Jack and Alice skipped Jacob Bril’s company whenever they could. (Bril hardly missed them; he wanted them gone.) De Rode Draak was a welcome change of scenery for Jack and his mom—lots of tourists went there, especially on a Saturday. Some of those Saturdays, if Tattoo Peter had more clients than he and Jacob Bril could handle, Peter was generous enough to send his customers to The Red Dragon—cautioning them to ask for Daughter Alice.

Rademaker must have been grateful for the extra business, though it may have caused him some inner pain to hear a new client request Alice. Tattoo Theo liked Alice, and she liked him. For Jack and his mother, their life had a pattern again; their first weeks in the red-light district were not unlike their happiest days in Copenhagen with Tattoo Ole and Ladies’ Man Madsen.

Like Lars, Robbie de Wit made an effort to win Alice’s affection by being nice to Jack. While Alice liked Robbie, that was as far as it went. She shared Robbie’s fondness for Bob Dylan; they both sang along with the Dylan songs that drowned out the sound of the tattoo machines in De Rode Draak. Rademaker liked Dylan, too. He called Dylan by his real name, which he always said in the German way—as it would turn out, incorrectly.

“Shall we listen again to der Zimmerman?” Tattoo Theo would say, winking at Jack, who was in charge of playing the old albums. (In German, one listens to
den
Zimmerman.)

Jack liked the wisp of whiskers on Robbie de Wit’s chin, which reminded him of Ladies’ Man Madsen’s efforts to grow a beard in the same place. Because Jack’s crèche figures, including the Baby Jesus, still smelled like pot, he recognized the sweet scent of marijuana in Robbie’s hand-rolled cigarettes, but the boy didn’t keep count of how many times his mother might have taken a toke. She said it helped her to follow the tune when she sang along with Bob.

Rademaker had worked on a fishing boat one summer off the coast of Alaska; an “Eskimo tattooer” had given him the tattoo of the seal on his chest and the one of the Kodiak bear on his back.

Relatively speaking, Jack and his mother were happy—or so it seemed to Jack.

His mom sent another postcard to Mrs. Wicksteed. At the time, Jack didn’t know that Mrs. Wicksteed had sent them money; that they continued to stay in hotels above their means was, in part, Mrs. Wicksteed’s idea. She was a good Old Girl, all right. (Maybe Mrs. Wicksteed believed that a good hotel was as much a safeguard of Alice’s future as losing her Scottish accent.)

The postcard was of one of Amsterdam’s narrow canals; of course you couldn’t see the prostitutes in their windows or doorways in the picture. “
Jack sends his love to Lottie,
” Alice wrote. Jack wouldn’t remember if there was more to the message. He drew a smiling face next to Lottie’s name; there was just enough room beside the face for him to write the initial
J.

“Lottie will know who it is,” his mom assured him.

Off to Toronto went the postcard with Jack’s happy face.