Dutch T(h)reat
 
Chapter 4

Excitedly pumping my right hand, Rombach pulled me inside what turned out to be a combination office and information center, sat me down at a plain deal table piled with little booklets in a dozen languages, introduced me to his midnight-black cat Dropje with an explanation that the name was Dutch for Licorice, and didn’t settle into a chair of his own until he’d brewed a big pot of tea and set a steaming cup in front of me.

"It’s nice, isn’t it?" he nodded encouragingly, before I’d even taken my first sip.

So I sipped, and it was pretty nice at that. Even the smell was nice, rich and fruity, and the taste was delicately sweet, although I hadn’t added any sugar to the cup.

"Mango tea," Rombach said, pushing the plate of cookies at my elbow a silly millimeter closer.

I took the hint. The cookies were nice, too. Sort of gingerbready, although not quite. Speculaas, according to Rombach, who jumped up again to rummage through a messy old rolltop desk in the far corner of the room. "Dexter called me last week," he muttered, as he pulled out sheaves of papers and ruffled through them and shook his head at them and shoved them back again. "I wrote it down, I know I have it here somewhere."

Dexter?

The reference confused me, but then suddenly I got it.

Glitterdome Harriman was a Dexter?

I almost choked on my tea, and, for something to do instead of laughing, I found and opened the English-language version of the Begijnhof’s information booklet. Dropje padded over and rubbed against my leg, and I flipped pages with one hand and stroked her deep soft fur with the other.

"The Beguines, or Sisters of St. Begga," I read, "came in 1346 from a village near Amsterdam to found a community in the city, and to be near the site of the Miracle of Amsterdam. . . ."

"Waar is die verdomte papiertje nou gebleven?" Rombach huffed.

"The Begijnjof is a treasure-house of 17th- and 18th-century architecture, for all the well-known types of Amsterdam gables are to be found here: step-gables, neck-gables, clock-gables...."

Clock-gables? Well, frankly, my dear, I didn’t give a –

"Hebbes!" Rombach announced triumphantly, and he came barrelling back to the table with old Dexter Harriman’s message clutched in his chunky hands. He laid the slip of paper before me and stabbed a forefinger at it. "Here, look, he said me you would be here on donderdag – sorry, on Sursday – but today is already Sunday!"

So that’s what all the brouhaha was about. "Yeah, well, we thought at first I’d be coming in on Thursday," I explained, "but it took a few days longer than we expected to get my passport, so we had to change my ticket. I thought Professor Harriman called you to tell you about the delay, but – "

"Ah, I see. I see." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "But there has come up a problem, Mr. Farmer, an unexpected somesing. I have been asked to – how do you say it? – address, yes, I have been asked to address a conference at the university in Groningen, in the north of Holland. It’s a four-day meeting, it starts tomorrow morning, so I must go there today. I won’t be back in Amsterdam until Friday."

Ouch, that was a problem. I’d have to ring Dexter – Dexter! – and tell him it’d be most of a week before I’d be able to get started. Of course, if he was willing to spring for the extra expenses, that’d give me a couple days’ vacation time before I had to settle down to work. Things could certainly be worse.

"The committee only called me on Tuesday," Rombach was saying. "They had first another speaker planned, but he became – how do you say it? – hij is ziek geworden. He became ill, yes, so they asked me to replace him. I sought you would be here on Sursday and we would have time to make arrangements, so I — verdomme — I accepted, yes, but then it came Sursday and Friday and Saturday and you didn’t arrive, and it was too late for me to cancel from the conference, and – "

"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" I held up my hands. "What’s all this got to do with me?"

The hassled lines of his face cleared up. "Yes, of course, you don’t know it. I want you to come and stay in het houten huys while I’m away."

"Stay here? But – "

"I know, I know." He bobbed his head impatiently. "Dexter explained you it’s only old ladies who are allowed to live in ‘t Begijnhof. Even I have to have a woning outside, in the town."

Actually, Dexter hadn’t explained me any such thing. In fact, he hadn’t explained me much of anything: in his inimitably pompous style, he’d told me he wanted me coming into the place without any preconceived ideas about it. Sounded sort of dopey to me, since I was only here to do historical research, but, hey, he who pays the piper calls the tune, right? As long as Harriman remembered to fork over the second half of my 1000 clams, I didn’t care what he told me or didn’t tell me about the living conditions.

"But for five nights it’s no problem," Rombach went on. "Upstairs is a little room with ‘n bed, sometimes I take a nap in the afternoons if it’s not so busy. You can sleep up there, and there’s ‘n douche and a little kitchen in the back. I’ll leave all my keys with you, so you can do your work, and when I come again on Friday you can go back in your hotel."

"Well, that's very kind of you, Mr. Rombach," I stammered, "but – but you don’t even know me."

"Mr. Farmer," he said, tapping the prof’s message significantly, "I have known Dexter Harriman for more than 20 years. If he trusts you enough to send you here in his place, then I can trust you, too, I sink."

"Well, I – "

"And someone has to take care of Dropje," he added. "It’s impossible to go away for so long and leave her here alone."

"Yeah, well, I – "

He played his trump card. "Dexter is paying your expenses, isn’t he? So if you stay here, instead of in the hotel, you can put away the money you’re saving in your pocket." He tossed me a conspiratorial wink. "If you don’t tell Dexter, I won’t."

The crafty little bastard!

"Mr. Rombach," I said, "you just bought yourself a catsitter."

It didn’t take me long to repack my pack and check out of the Nova. They made me pay for a night’s lodging, although I hadn’t spent more than 20 minutes in the room altogether, but they agreed that at least that entitled me to drop by in the morning for breakfast.

I was back at the Wooden House by 2:30, and the first thing Gerrit Rombach wanted to do was run me next door and introduce me to the Wicked Witch of the West. "She’s ‘n – how do you say it? – an invalid, yes," he said. "She spends most of her time by the window, watching the people come and go. She’ll worry if she sees you coming in het houten huys after business hours; it’s better if we go there for just a few minutes and I explain her you’ll be taking care of Dropje for me."

The second-floor window was empty when we knocked at the dark-green door of #33, though, and it was the blonde in the sexy leotard who opened up for us. She had a fat textbook in her hand and a studious frown on her face when she came to the door, but she brightened up some when she saw us. Maybe she had a thing for short, burly, balding gentlemen in their fifties, but I’d like to think it was me who brought the smile to her lips, not Rombach.

They exchanged a few sentences in Dutch, and, listening to her speak that unfamiliar language, I noticed for the first time how musical it could be.

"The sister says Mevrouw Moen is sleeping," mine host translated, "but she will tell her everysing when she wakes up."

So this was the old lady’s sister, and not her granddaughter? No way, I thought, that does not compute: there had to be 50 years’ difference in their ages. And, anyway, Rombach had called her the sister. Was she supposed to be one of those St. Begga nuns, or what? She didn’t look nunnish in that shapely leotard and those tight jeans, but what do I know about European nunsmanship, you know?

"If you’d like to come back later," she said, and the way she tilted her head and let her voice ride up on the penultimate syllable punctuated the sentence with a question mark and turned it into an invitation. Her English, I was happy to hear, was flawless.

"Sure, I’d love to come back later," I nodded. "See you later." I waggled my fingers at her, and she remembered and waggled back and eased the door shut with a sparkle in those luminous sapphire eyes.

"What is she, a nun?" I asked, latching the green picket gate behind us.

"A nun? No, no, she’s a nurse, she takes care of Mevrouw Moen. Why do you – ? Ach, ja, natuurlijk! You don’t call them sisters in your country, do you?"

"Uh-uh. We don’t let ‘em dress like that, either."

He chuckled. "Yes, I’ve seen it on the American television programs. Your nurses always wear those awful white uniforms with too much stijfsel – how do you say it? – too much starch, yes, and those heavy white shoes and white stockings. Terrible, terrible."

Next door at the Wooden House, a stoop-shouldered old feller in worn but neatly mended work clothes was waiting by the front door. He seemed annoyed about something, and the second he saw us he pulled a battered pipe from beneath his bristly gray mustache and commenced to growling. I stood there like a bump on a log while they went at it, and, when Rombach finally had the old codger calmed down, he introduced him as Henk Kleijwegt, the Begijnhof’s caretaker and general handyman.

Some tourists had apparently eaten a picnic breakfast smack in the middle of the central green that morning – the bleaching green, he called it – leaving a mess behind, and Kleijwegt was agitating for larger and more numerous "Keep off the Grass" signs in a greater variety of languages. Rombach promised to take care of it as soon as he got back from the north of Holland, and explained that I was going to be in residence for the rest of the week. Kleijwegt didn’t seem any happier about that prospect than he’d been about the picnickers.

Back inside het houten huys, Rombach spent maybe 90 minutes familiarizing me with his archives, so I’d be able to locate the material I needed, and another quarter of an hour filling me in on Dropje’s idiosyncracies and showing me where her food was stashed. Once all that was taken care of, he handed over a ring of keys, and wrote down the phone number of the hotel where he’d be staying, and wished me luck, and was gone.

The cat mewled softly when he left us, and it was that sad sound more than anything else that brought home to me how very all-alone I suddenly was. I looked around the room at the masses of books and pamphlets that surrounded me, and it was sobering how empty the place felt without Gerrit Rombach fussing busily amidst the clutter.

Something brushed my leg, and I jumped about a third of a mile in the air – no, wait, make that a half a kilometer.

Dropje.

She miaowed, then arched her back and pressed up close again. A deep-throated purr rolled around inside her. I laid a hand on her side and felt her ribcage vibrate.

"You hungry, baby? Well, listen, it’s you and me against the world, here, Licorice. C’mon, I’ll fix you some dinner."

I gave her a bowl of munchables and some water, and she dug right in. Watching her gobble, I realized it was well past four and I hadn’t had anything but tea and cookies all day, not since the yellow stuff they’d identified as scrambled eggs on the plane this morning. I was beginning to crumble – I mean, except for a couple hours’ rack time in the air, I’d been up around the clock – but my stomach was letting me know that it was ready to have some attention paid to it.

What did people eat, here in Holland, though? And where did they go to get some?

I fished a windbreaker out of my pack, locked up the Wooden House, and set off in search of my first European meal.

I got as far as the inside entrance to the time tunnel, then stopped and turned around and looked back.

Mrs. Moen had not yet returned to her duty station.

Hmm, I thought.

There was no answer when I knocked at #33, though, and I had the unhappy thought that maybe the sister had gone home for the day. But then at last I heard footsteps, and the door swung open and there she was. She’d taken her hair out of the ponytail, and it danced around her shoulders and framed her face in honey.

"Hi," I said. I’ve always been known as a rather scintillating conversationalist. Keep the girls back home in stitches, I do. "I was just wondering if – "

"Yes, of course, come in!" A mischievous smile played across her lips. "I told Mevrouw Moen you’d be back. She’s awake, now, and I’m sure she’ll be very happy to meet you."

"No, well, you see, I – "

But I was stuttering at her back. I followed her down a hallway and up a narrow flight of stairs and back up the corresponding second-floor hallway to the bedroom at the front of the house.

"I came to see you," I whispered, as I edged past her into the room.

"I know," she whispered back, and, though she kept her face quite properly composed, there was laughter in her eyes.

I’d only anticipated finding one old woman lurking in the bedroom, but it turned out there were four of them: Mrs. Moen herself was in bed, propped up to a sitting position by about a half-dozen fat pillows, and the lady I’d seen earlier with the white bicycle and two others I didn’t know were ranged around her in matching wooden chairs. It was just like the Queen of Hearts and her court, and, the way she was glaring at me, I expected Mrs. Moen to start yelling "Off with his head!" at any moment.

Behind me, my lovely guide murmured a few words of Dutch and withdrew, leaving me to face the music on my own.

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