Until I Find You

The young genius's name was Frans Donker, and he was as afraid of Alice as any boy that age could be. Like Andreas Breivik, he couldn't look at her when he talked. As near as Jack could tell, what his mother learned from the frightened child prodigy was that Kari Vaara had been wrong to think that his father had been hired to play the organ in the Oude Kerk--he'd been hired only to keep it in tune. For this ongoing and demanding service, William was permitted to practice on the vast instrument. It was indeed a special organ, Frans Donker told Jack and Alice--"both great and difficult"--and William not only kept it in better tune than anyone could remember; his practice sessions were both famous and infamous. (By now Jack was distracted by the smell of baby powder and thoroughly confused.)

"I have the greatest respect for William--as an organist," young Donker was saying.

"I thought he was just an organ-tuner now," Alice replied.

Frans Donker let her remark pass. He solemnly explained that, from early morning through the evening, the Oude Kerk was a most active church. In addition to the religious services and choir rehearsals, various cultural events, which were open to the public, were scheduled at night--not only concerts and recitals, but also lectures and poetry readings. It simply wouldn't do to have someone tuning an organ during the Old Church's lengthy working hours.

"So when did he do it?" Alice asked.

"Well . . ." Young Donker hesitated. Maybe he said, "William wouldn't start the tuning until after midnight. Most nights, he wouldn't begin his practice sessions until two or three in the morning."

"So he was playing to an empty church?" Alice asked.

"Well . . ." Frans Donker hesitated again. Jack was completely bored, his mind elsewhere, but he thought he heard Donker say: "The Oude Kerk is a very big church, a very reverberant building. The reverberation time is five seconds." The child prodigy glanced at Jack and explained: "That's the time it takes for the echo of what you play to come back to you."

"Oh," the boy said; he was falling asleep.

Young Donker couldn't stop explaining. "Your father's favorite Bach toccatas were written with the effect of a big space in mind. Space enlarges music--"

"Forget the music," Alice interrupted him. "Was he playing to an empty church?"

"Well . . ."

If what followed was hard for Alice to understand, it was way over a four-year-old's head. If the reverberation time within the Oude Kerk was five seconds, how long did it take for the echo of the organ in Bach's most dramatic works--his D Minor Toccata, for example--to reach the prostitutes in their rooms on the Oudekerksplein, the horseshoe-shaped street that surrounded the Old Church? (Six or seven seconds, maybe? Or did the whores hear it in five seconds, too?)

Outside the church, the organ would have been muted, but at two or three in the morning, when the action in the red-light district was winding down, the cold winter air would have carried the sound well beyond the Oudekerksplein. The women working in the narrowest, nastiest alley--in the nearby Trompettersteeg--would have had no trouble hearing William Burns playing his beloved Handel or his favorite Bach. Even across the canal, on the far side of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, the prostitutes still standing in their doorways would have heard him.

"At that time of night, many of the older prostitutes are ready to go home--they stop working," Frans Donker managed to say, with trepidation--as if this part of his story might be in not-around-Jack territory. (Donker didn't know that Jack believed prostitutes were simply tireless advice-givers, trying to teach the most pathetic of men what they needed to learn about women.)

There were many older prostitutes working in the red-light district in those days--some in their sixties--and a lot of them worked in the ground-floor rooms surrounding the Old Church. The older women in the district might have been more easily moved by church music than their younger counterparts, although Donker admitted that a few of the younger prostitutes became overnight fans of Bach and Handel.

"You mean the prostitutes came to hear him play?" Alice asked.

Frans fidgeted on the organ bench; he slid to one side, then the other, on the smooth leather seat. (There's that baby-powder smell again, Jack was thinking.)

Years later, the smell of baby powder would remind Jack of the prostitutes; he could almost see the tired women taking their makeup off and hanging the costumes of their profession in their small closets. They didn't wear high heels or short skirts when they went home--or when they came to work in the morning or afternoon. Their street clothes were blue jeans or old slacks; their boots or heavy shoes had no heels to speak of, and they usually wore an unflattering but warm-looking coat and a wool hat. They didn't look like prostitutes, except that it was two or three in the morning and what other sort of woman would be out at that time by herself?

What was it about the organ music that arrested them and held them captive in the red-light district for an hour or two longer? Frans Donker explained that there would usually be a dozen or more women in the Old Church, and that many of them stayed until William stopped playing; this was often as late as four or five in the morning, when the Oude Kerk was very cold.

William Burns had found his audience--he was playing to prostitutes!

"They certainly appreciated him," the boy genius continued--with the authority that only a child prodigy, or a lunatic, possesses. "I occasionally got up at that time to hear him play myself. Each time I came, more women were here. He's very good--William knows his Bach and Handel cold."

"Forget the music," Alice said again. "Just tell me what happened."

"It seems that one of the women took him home with her--actually, more than one of them did."

But that wasn't what happened, or all that happened. (This time, blame the baby powder for Jack's loss of concentration.)

The administration of the Oude Kerk probably believed it was unsavory--that William should be playing to prostitutes, not to mention consorting with them. After all, it was a church. They must have fired him, or something like that. And the prostitutes--a few of the older ones, anyway--made a fuss. There was a protest. Amsterdam was always having demonstrations. From the Krasnapolsky, Jack and Alice had seen their share of demonstrations in the Dam Square. It was the time of the hippies. Alice was tattooing a lot of peace symbols, and (often in the genital area of both boys and girls) that insipid slogan of the times Make love, not war. Surely one or more of the protests they witnessed were anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.

Maybe the prostitutes in the red-light district took William's side and they took him in. "They saw him as a persecuted artist," Frans Donker said. "Some of them see themselves that way."

As for where William was now, the boy genius looked at Jack, not at Alice, when he spoke: "You'd have to ask the prostitutes. I'd start with the older ones."

Alice knew which prostitutes to ask. They were mostly, but not all, the older ones; they were the women in the district who'd been conspicuously unfriendly.

"Thank you for your time," Alice told the junior organist. She got up from the bench and held out her hand to Jack.