As I sign, Marjolein keeps looking at me.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s just I forgot how much you look like him.”
I pause, the pen poised over another line of legalese. Bram always used to say that though Yael was the strongest woman in the world, somehow his mild mannered genes clobbered her dark Israeli stock.
“Sorry,” Marjolein says, back to business. “Where have you been staying since you got back? With Daniel?”
Uncle Daniel? I haven’t seen him since the funeral, and before that only a handful of times. He lives overseas and rents out his flat. Why would I stay there?
No, since I’ve been back it’s almost been like I am still on the traveler circuit. I’ve stuck to the tight radius around the train station, near the budget youth hostels and the disappearing red-light district. Partly this was a matter of necessity. I wasn’t sure I’d have enough money to last the few weeks, but somehow, my bank account hasn’t hit zero. I could’ve gone to stay with old family friends, but I don’t want anyone to know I’m back; I don’t want to revisit any of those places. I certainly haven’t gone anywhere near Nieuwe Prinsengracht.
“With a friend,” I say vaguely.
Marjolein misreads it. “Oh, with a friend. I see.”
I give a half-guilty smile. Leaving people to jumped conclusions is sometimes simpler than explaining a complicated truth.
“Be sure this friend doesn’t have an angry boyfriend.”
“I’ll do my best,” I say.
I finish signing the papers. “That’s that then,” she says. She opens her desk and pulls out a manila folder. “Here’s some mail. I’ve arranged for anything that goes to the boat to be forwarded here until you give me a new address.”
“It might be a while.”
“That’s okay. I’m not going anywhere.” Marjolein opens a cabinet and pulls out a bottle of Scotch and two shot glasses. “You just became a man of means. This deserves a drink.”
Bram used to joke that as far as Marjolein was concerned, every time the minute hand of the clock passed twelve, it was cause for a drink. But I accept the shot glass.
“What shall we toast?” she asks. “To new ventures? A new future.”
I shake my head. “Let’s drink to the accidents.”
I see the shock in her face, and I realize belatedly that this sounds like I’m talking about what happened to Bram, though that wasn’t so much an accident as a freak occurrence.
But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about our accident. The one that created our family. Surely Marjolein must’ve heard the story. Bram loved to tell it. It was like a family origin myth, fairy tale, and lullaby all wrapped together:
Bram and Daniel, driving through Israel in a Fiat that broke down constantly. It was broken down one day outside of the seaside town of Netanya and Bram was trying to fix it, when a soldier, rifle slung over the shoulder, cigarette dangling, ambled over. “Scariest sight you could ever imagine,” Bram would say, smiling at the memory.
Yael. Hitching her way back to her army base in Galilee after a weekend’s leave spent in Netanya, at a friend’s house, or maybe a guy’s, anywhere but at the apartment she’d grown up in with Saba. The brothers were driving to Safed, and after she reconnected their radiator hose, they offered her a ride. Bram gallantly offered her the front seat; after all, she’d fixed the car. But Yael, seeing the cramped backseat said, “Whoever’s shortest should sit in back.” She claimed to have meant herself, and to not have known which brother was taller, because Daniel had been in the passenger seat, rolling a joint with the Lebanese hash he’d bought off a surfer in Netanya.
But Bram had misunderstood, and so after a needless measuring decided Bram was taller by about three centimeters, Daniel took the back.
They drove the soldier back to her base. Before they parted ways, Bram gave her his address in Amsterdam.
A year and a half later, Yael finished her military service and, determined to put as much distance as she could between herself and everything she grew up with, took what little money she’d saved and began hitching her way north. She lasted four months and got all the way to Amsterdam before she ran out of money. So she knocked on a door. Bram opened it, and even though he hadn’t seen her in all that time, and even though he didn’t know why she was there, and even though it wasn’t really his way, he surprised himself and he kissed her. “Like I’d been expecting her all that time,” he’d say in a voice full of wonder.
“See how funny life is,” Bram used to say as the epilogue to their epic love story. “If the car hadn’t broken down just there, or if she’d run out of money in Copenhagen, or if Daniel were the taller one, none of this might ever have happened.”
But I knew what he was really saying was: Accidents. It’s all about the accidents.
Six
Two days later, one hundred thousand euros appears in my bank account, as if by magic. But of course, it’s not magic. It’s been a long time since I was kicked off my economics course, but I’ve since come to understand that the universe operates on the same general equilibrium theory as markets. It never gives you something without making you pay for it somehow.