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  • Of Lace and Limitations
  • Claire Polders (bio)

Outside the Rembrandt café was a tramp, a woman with the haunted look of the long-term unlucky. She was wrapped in layers of flannel and wool and sat hunched on the stoop, smoking a cigarette, blowing her breath against her bare fingertips in short-lived clouds.

It was winter cold. Wanda and I had gotten drunk that night to forget about life’s brevity, its trickster ways, but by the time we left the café, we were sober again. As usual, we had been too earnest to forget and had talked about regrets instead. Honesty had always been our glue.

We were in the midst of wrapping scarves around our necks and pulling down hats when we saw her, the tramp on the stoop, and in a reflex, I looked away. Wanda, however, stepped up to the woman. There was a silent moment of exchange between them—as if the present winked at me, Wanda would later say.

Without taking off her mittens, she freed a twenty-euro note from her wallet and handed it to the woman.

“Thank you,” the tramp mumbled in a blur of smoke. She took the money and stashed it in a pocket of her ashen coat.

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen Wanda donate cash to a homeless person after a guilty night of rich food downed with alcohol, and I thought nothing of it; Amsterdam has its fair number of drifters. I was, in fact, already moving away from the scene, thinking Wanda would follow, when I heard her voice behind me, clear and demanding in the dark.

“Come with us.”

I turned around to find Wanda with her arm stretched out toward the tramp, offering the woman a hand.

“Come with us,” she repeated. This time her words sounded more like a plea. I had no idea what she was thinking.

The tramp seemed equally confused and looked at me as though asking permission. I estimated she was about sixty, twice as old as Wanda and [End Page 80] me. The grooves in her forehead seemed etched. Only when I nodded, did she clasp Wanda’s hand and let herself be pulled to her feet.

Later I would wonder, What did I agree to at that moment?

Wanda asked the woman her name: Elif. A strange name that seemed too elegant for the grimy bulk of her. A name that didn’t stick.

“We’re Wanda and Bo,” I said, pointing out who was who. I didn’t extend my hand for her to shake.

Secretly, embarrassingly, I was suspicious of the homeless. I lived in a country where good people in bad circumstances received help, so how severely had this woman screwed up her life?

The three of us walked away from the Rembrandt café and climbed the bridge over Herengracht. Our soles slipped on the cobblestones that centuries had polished smooth. Above us in the cold hung a sliver of moon.

________

I hardly smelled the woman during our walk along the canals, the frost numbing my nose. Inside Wanda’s heated apartment, however, the stink was horrendous, overwhelming, reminding me of everything dead and dying.

The hallway was cramped and Wanda hastened us up the stairs to the second floor. Inside her living room, she and I removed our hats and scarves and wriggled out of our parkas, tossing all our winter gear on a chesterfield in front of the radiator. Wanda gestured for the tramp to follow our example.

The woman took off her ashen coat and considered the chesterfield. Then, denying herself that option, she folded the dirty wool thing over her arm.

Wanda reached for the woman’s coat. “Please. You can have mine when you leave.”

The woman read our faces and accepted the deal, but before she gave up the coat, she emptied its pockets. I fetched a plastic bowl from the kitchen and held it out to her. One by one, she placed her possessions in the bowl: coins and a few crumpled bills, cigarettes, a folded postcard from Brussels, a dog-eared paperback (Notes from the Underground), lip balm, a metal...

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