Six
After ground zero it is just a matter of crossing the bridge and then
there it is: the other world of Brooklyn. An oasis of green and quiet after the
busy and noisy Manhattan. Houses in a well to do English style, with wide front
stairs made of stone and windows looking out from the basement on the flowers
in the front yard. The cars, buses and yellow cabs are replaced by baby buggies
and rustling trees, the ‘street canyons’ of the business district give way to
parks with a view over the Hudson. Jody’s mother is starting to make a little more
sense to me.
Compared to Brooklyn our East Village looks more raggedy than ever when
we get home, with the greasy looking dog of our neighbor peeing against a tree,
the owner of the 24-7 supermarket scratching his naked belly and a, by now,
almost familiar Chinese woman pushing an iron cart full of nondefinable plastic
items across the sloping paving stones.
Yesterday evening, when I sat in the park after dinner amongst biking,
jogging, playing and eating people from the neighborhood working on my notes
about the world of before, she sat next to me. Out of her oversized iron
shopping cart, from underneath her cargo of battered PET-bottles and empty
cans, a choice of excellent food arose. With a plastic knife and fork and a
napkin on her lap she first ate a more than half full tray of noodles, then
from the next tray about three quarters of a fried chicken, after that a
plastic cup full of rice and for desert a slice of strawberry pie, still fresh
and unharmed in its original supermarket wrapping. As soon as she had eaten
enough of each of these courses, she scattered the leftovers over her shoulder
in a small flowerbed behind the bench where we were sitting. The birds and
squirrels apparently knew the ritual and hopped into their places as soon as
she pulled the first tray out of her cart. ‘What a day for a daydream’, someone
a few benches further down played on a saxophone. Two boys rode their
skateboards to the sound.
I stayed for about another week in my grandmother’s apartment. During
the day I did chores for the ‘housemother’ in the ashram and asked the ‘general
secretary’, who was in charge, when I could move in. Mornings and evenings I
meditated with a cloth over my head and bowed afterwards to the picture of the
guru. I didn’t get a clear answer to my question, so after a while I just
packed my rucksack, brought Granny’s key back to my Mom and simply announced in
the ashram that I was there to stay. The housemother, an American follower who
cooked for about thirty residents, showed me without further questions a half
shelf where I could put my clothes and a place on the ground where I could roll
out my sleeping bag at night. No mattress, no pillow. And, just to be clear:
“No sex, no drugs, no alcohol, no meat, no contacts outside the ashram except for
in service to the guru, no books, no newspapers, no TV, no radio, no
possessions except your clothes”, she counted off the ashram rules on her
fingers one by one. She smiled. I nodded. Whether my Carl Denig rucksack was
allowed as a possession, I didn’t know. In the attic should be some space to
put it away, she said. I stored it out of sight as much as I could, behind some
boxes and old suitcases. Everything I was still attached to had now come
together in this perfect rucksack and I couldn’t let go yet. At the bottom of
it was the Lord of the Rings, a thin paperback edition, three volumes in one
binding, read to pieces and taped together again. The only book I hadn’t been
able to part with. I held it in my hand and hesitated. Shove it between my clothes
hoping nobody would notice. Or put it with the few holy books in the ashram
cabinet, which would pretty much show my lack of understanding and devotion. Or
hand it over, as everybody who entered the ashram had to do with all his money
and other belongings. I tucked it under my shirt, mumbled that I still had to
do something and left the once grand but now kind of crummy mansion at the
Sarphatistraat that housed the ashram to go back into town.
My brother lived nearby, just behind Frederiksplein.
“Can this stay with you for now?” I asked when I reached his floor.
“Why is that?” he asked.
“No why’s. Just like that. Keep it for me.”
He shrugged. “Okay, just put it in the cupboard.”
Grimm’s Fairytales, the Tales of Hans Christian Andersen and four
volumes of 1001 night stories were already there. Brought over after the big
clean up of my room, since I couldn’t donate them with the rest of my stuff to
the Salvation Army. I leafed a bit through the drawings of Anton Pieck in one
of the 1001 night volumes. My brother had already written his name in the
front, I saw.
“I didn’t say take it”, I said and pointed at the letters at the bottom
of page two.
“Oh, well. I thought you didn’t want them anymore. It was all nonsense,
wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna live there.”
“Where? At this guru place?”
I nodded.
I descended the stairs from his floor, so steep you almost fell over
going down.
Outside the sun was shining. It crossed my mind to drop by Janny’s. A
few months before I had told her after years of love that I had to continue on
my own. To be able to take this step, I only realized at that moment. And I
walked back to the ashram.