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.
“Don’t you want me to play something for you?” Frans Donker asked. Jack’s mother was already pulling her son to the narrow stairs. They were in a kind of loft at the rear of the Old Church’s great hall, above and hidden from the congregation; the towering organ pipes rose for twenty feet or more above them.
“Play something William plays, if you want to,” Alice told the young organist. She had no intention of staying to listen.
As they were leaving, Jack saw Donker sprinkle the leather bench with baby powder. It was baby powder! The seat of the prodigy’s pants was covered with it. The powder helped him slide sideways along the bench. He couldn’t reach from one end of the three-tiered keyboard to the other without sliding left to right, and back again, on the slippery leather.
A wooden pediment rose over the keyboard; the wood was riddled with screw holes where the old brass fittings had fallen or been stripped away. The organist’s only view, beyond his music, was confined to a panel of stained glass. Everything surrounding Donker was old and worn, but none of this mattered when he began to play.
Alice could not escape the Oude Kerk in time. The deep sonority, the perfect tone placement, the responding antiphony, and the resounding echo—Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor—hit them hard as they were going down the stairs. Jack would long remember the wooden handrail on one side of their winding descent. What served as a handrail on the other side was a waxed rope the color of burned caramel; the rope was as thick as a man’s wrist.
They staggered out of the stairway as if the great sound had made them drunk. Alice was seeking a hasty exit from the church, but she made a wrong turn. They found themselves in the center aisle, facing the altars; now they were surrounded by the enormous noise.
In the middle of where the congregation normally sat was a bewildered gathering of tourists. A tour guide appeared to have been struck mute in midsentence—his mouth open, as if the Bach were coming from him. Whatever lecture he’d been delivering would have to wait for the toccata and fugue to be finished.
Outside on the Oudekerksplein, in the failing early-evening light, the prostitutes in their windows and doorways could hear the music, too. It was evident that they knew the piece Donker was playing; doubtless they’d listened to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor many times in the early-morning hours. By the prostitutes’ critical expressions, Jack and his mother knew that William played this piece better than young Frans.
Jack and Alice hurried away. It was no time to make inquiries of the unfriendly women—not while the music was playing. The great sound followed them to the Warmoesstraat; God’s holy noise pursued them past the police station. They were more than halfway to Tattoo Peter’s on the St. Olofssteeg before the vast organ was out of earshot.
Was William’s career as an organist in decline? Was he merely tuning organs, practicing but not performing—or performing only at unsociable hours to an unrefined audience? Or was it actually a privilege just to hear that vast organ in the Oude Kerk?
It was a sound both huge and holy. It compelled even prostitutes, who are disinclined to do anything without being paid, to give themselves over to it absolutely—to just listen.
7. Also Not on Their Itinerary
On November 9, 1939, Leith suffered its first German air raid. No damage was done to the port, but Alice’s mother miscarried in an overcrowded air-raid shelter. “It was back then that I should have been born,” Alice always said.
If Alice had been born “back then,” her mother might not have died in childbirth and Alice might never have met William Burns—or if she met him, she would have been as old as he was. “In which case,” she claimed, “I would have been impervious to his charms.” (Jack somehow doubted this, even as a child.)
If the boy couldn’t remember the name of the Surinamese prostitute who gave him a chocolate the color of her skin on either the Korsjespoortsteeg or the Bergstraat, he did remember that those two small streets, between the Singel and the Herengracht, were some distance from the red-light district—about a ten- or fifteen-minute walk—and the area was more residential and less seedy.
As to what rumor of William led Alice to make inquiries there, it was either Blond Nel or Black Lola who told her to consult The Bicycle Man, Uncle Gerrit. Black Lola was an older white woman whose hair was dyed jet-black, and Uncle Gerrit was a grouchy old man who did the prostitutes’ shopping on his bicycle. He carried a notebook in which the women wrote down what they wanted for lunch or a snack. He objected to the girls who gave him too extensive a shopping list, and he refused to shop for tampons or condoms. (If there were a Tampon or Condom Man who did errands for the prostitutes, Jack and his mom never met him.)
The women teased Uncle Gerrit incessantly. He would stop shopping for a particular prostitute, just to punish her for teasing him—usually for only a couple of days. A rake-thin prostitute named Saskia was in the habit of asking Alice and Jack to buy her a sandwich. Saskia was a ceaselessly ravenous young woman, and Uncle Gerrit was always mad at her. She gave Jack or his mom the money for a ham-and-cheese croissant almost every time she saw them. When Jack and Alice passed by again, they would give Saskia the sandwich—provided she wasn’t with a customer.