Peter marked the margin next to this passage with two exclamation points. He had seen the stone plaque many times. It dated from 1611 and commemorated the expansion of the city that started in that year. The image showed a scene from the Book of Numbers. When the Israelites reached the border of the promised land, Moses dispatched twelve spies to find out how many people lived there and how strong they were. The spies were told to bring back fruits as proof of the land’s fertility. When the spies returned, they brought with them a bunch of grapes so heavy that two men were needed to carry it.
The land of promises … Leiden as a promised land, Peter thought.
The sliding doors at the café entrance opened, and Judith walked in.
She was wearing her hair down, and it still looked damp, as though she had just showered. She was wearing a white sweater under her denim jacket, and, as usual, she was dressed in a flowing skirt and long boots. A Star of David pendant around her neck twinkled in the light from the fluorescent lamps above.
She sat next to Peter on the bench and gave him a sideways hug. As always, he buried his face in her hair for a moment. She smelled of shampoo, and of Magie Noire, the perfume she had worn since they’d met twenty years ago.
‘It’s so nice to be here,’ she said.
They ordered an espresso each and then said nothing more until the little cups had appeared on the table in front of them.
‘How did Fay react when you told her you were going to the States?’
‘She was fairly positive about it,’ Peter said. ‘I think.’
‘You don’t sound sure.’
‘Well, it did come out of the blue. And it’s very soon, just three weeks away, so she was taken by surprise.’
‘Yes, I imagine she would be. Mark was really pleased, by the way.’
‘Yes, he said that yesterday. I saw him when we went to the police station.’
‘Oh, yes, so you did.’
‘But actually …’ Peter sipped his coffee to give himself time to think.
Should I tell her about the emails to Coen that Fay was hiding from me? And is still hiding from me.
‘Actually?’ Judith probed.
It’s really nothing, Peter decided. Everyone has a right to keep secrets. Or at least the right to decide what other people know about them.
‘Actually, it’ll work out well for her,’ he decided to say. ‘She wants to finish that book, and the three of us are going on holiday together this summer, to Greece.’
‘Alena’s not going with you?’ Judith said, smiling mischievously.
‘No, Alena’s not going with us,’ Peter said. ‘She’ll love having the house to herself for three weeks.’
‘Have you heard anything else about Coen Zoutman’s murder?’
‘Not really. I haven’t heard much more about it. But they’ve found another body.’
‘I heard about that. The man in the Galgewater, right? Is it connected?’
‘I don’t know, to be honest. But two murders so close together, it’s easy to think that they must be connected. But maybe it’s just a coincidence. Who knows?’
A group of tourists came into the café and bought entrance tickets for the church at the counter.
‘Shall we go in too?’ Judith asked.
‘All right,’ said Peter.
Peter was a Friend of the Pieterskerk and had a lifetime membership that granted him free entry to the church whenever he wanted.
The church was accessed via a narrow passageway that brought the visitor out into a building that was always a breath-taking sight, no matter the season or time of day.
In this cavernous space with its colossal pillars, polished floor inlaid with tombstones, dazzling stained-glass windows, ornately carved wooden altar, and a golden pipe organ that almost covered an entire wall, everything indicated that this was hallowed ground and inspired a feeling of awe and reverence.
‘When’s Coen’s funeral?’ Judith asked.
‘Next Wednesday. Fay’s been selecting the readings for it this week with some of the other Ishtar members. They’ve got a wide range of holy books to choose from. Being Freemasons, they’re not restricted to following just one set of religious traditions. As far as music goes, they’ve decided on classical instrumental pieces and one of Bach’s cantatas.’
‘Nice choice.’
‘It is. Coen didn’t have any family. He never married, and he didn’t have children. And he was an only child whose parents were only children themselves. There wasn’t another soul on earth who was related to him. The Freemasons were literally his only family.’
They wandered into a corner of the church where a permanent exhibition about the Pilgrims had been set up around John Robinson’s grave. However, this wasn’t his actual burial site. He had bought a plot in the Pieterskerk and been laid to rest there, but nobody knew exactly where his grave was. This tombstone was a memorial to him rather than his true final resting place.
Another invented tradition, Peter thought.
‘Judith, do you ever wonder,’ he said, ‘what you would do if you could live your life all over again? Would you make different choices?’
Judith took some time to consider her answer. ‘I don’t think my choices would be very different,’ she said. ‘The finer details might change. Maybe I’d steer away from a certain boyfriend, or not go on holiday with a certain group of people. Maybe I’d go that Bruce Springsteen concert, after all. That sort of thing. But by and large, I’d make the same choices. Study history in Leiden, explore my Jewish background, be with Mark, live in the house I live in now. What about you?’
Even though he’d been the one to ask the question, Peter had to think before he could answer it. ‘The same, actually,’ he said after a pause. ‘I’d change some of the details, just like you. But ultimately, I’d study history, write, live here in Leiden …’
‘But sometimes …’
‘What?’
‘Sometimes I fantasise about starting all over again. Somewhere else, obviously, and with Mark of course, but somewhere far away from here, in a place where nobody knows me, where I wouldn’t have any history, where I could be a blank page.’
‘You’d take yourself with you, though.’
‘Yes, naturally, you can’t really be a blank page yourself, but if you were in a new environment … And I … Hey …’ she stopped mid-thought. ‘I’ve never actually read this before.’
Next to John Robinson’s grave, the story of the Pilgrims and their connection with Leiden, and in particular with the Pieterskerk, was set out on large display boards.
REASONS TO EMIGRATE 1
For a small minority like the Pilgrims, it was difficult to maintain their own language, religion and habits. There were several marriages with Walloons, who had similar religious viewpoints. After many of the Pilgrims left for America, it proved impossible to remain a clearly defined community. After their own preacher Robinson died, the people left behind in Leiden joined Dutch churches, and after 1630, the English Reformed Church. Finally, the group merged into the Leiden population.
‘Maybe you can compare it to the Pilgrims,’ Judith said pensively. ‘I’ve always felt an affinity with their Puritanism. Rejecting material possessions, focusing on the spirit and on what’s good, focusing on God. The idea that life is a journey, a pilgrimage. What they did, going to a new world to start all over again, is sometimes a very tempting idea.’
‘That’s true,’ Peter agreed.
They walked down the central aisle of the church towards the exit.
‘But the world they went to wasn’t empty,’ Judith said. ‘The Pilgrims’ so-called new beginning was the end of the world for the indigenous people who already lived there. Just like when the tribes of Israel arrived in Canaan after wandering in the desert for forty years. That land wasn’t empty either. You know, that’s a part of the Bible that I have a lot of trouble with. All those massacres, hundreds of thousands of people killed at once. Absolute barbarity. And when Joshua
’s men disobey him by sparing some of the men in a city, he orders them to push all their prisoners off a cliff to their deaths. Only the virgin girls were allowed to live. There’s a bit in Deuteronomy, the first verses of chapter twelve that describe such unbelievable bigotry. I’ve read it so many times that I know it by heart now.’
That was precisely what those texts they found in Coen’s pocket were about, Peter thought. And the three stories at the end … They were all about the atrocities committed by the people of Israel when they conquered the promised land. Exodus seems to have been an important topic for him. But why?
‘“You shall surely destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess served their gods, upon the high mountains and upon the hills and under every green tree”,’ Judith recited from memory. ‘“You shall tear down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and burn their Ashe′rim with fire; you shall hew down the graven images of their gods and destroy their name out of that place.”’
‘I suppose it was like a caliphate. Anyone who didn’t follow the one true faith had to be killed,’ Peter said. ‘We’re seeing something like that again now, aren’t we? With ISIS? It’s like you just said: they destroy all the images and idols from other religions and churches and take the women as sex slaves.’
‘But it’s happening in modern-day Israel too. Look at how they treat the Palestinians. Not that people are being shoved off cliffs of course, but they’re increasingly being denied space. There are all those illegal settlements on the West Bank, and the entire Gaza Strip is like an open prison. And the Christian communities in Jerusalem’s Old City are being put under more and more pressure … Christians being spat at by Orthodox Jews … There’s less and less room for other faiths. That’s something that … Well, I’m finding it hard to reconcile myself to it all.’
They had arrived back in the café now, where Peter picked up his bag before they left the church.
‘I’m going back to my office for a while,’ Judith said. ‘What about you?’
‘I’m going to walk home.’
He took a moment to look at the memorial plaque for the Pilgrims that had been set into the wall.
During the Pilgrim Fathers’ Leiden exile,
more than thirty family members died.
Many were buried in the Pieterskerk along with
their Leiden neighbours.
‘BUT NOW WE ARE ALL, IN ALL PLACES
STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS, TRAVELERS
AND SOJOURNERS …’
Robert Cushman, Pilgrim Leader, 1622
Strangers and pilgrims, Peter thought. Travelers and sojourners.
Chapter 24
Peter, Fay, Judith and Mark sat around a table at the back of La Bota, a cosy ‘brown café’ in the Herensteeg, near the Pieterskerk. Peter had been a regular at the pub since his student days. The food was simple but good, and the prices were reasonable. The menu that was chalked on the wall had changed very little over the years. The garnish on every plate had always been the same too – a slaw of red or white cabbage with sultanas – but Peter had always found its predictability comforting. Your whole world could collapse around you, the years could fly by before you knew it, your life could be turned upside down or creep along with stupefying, quotidian dullness, but here, at least, you knew what to expect.
The owners greeted him like an old friend, even though they knew nothing more about each other than what they had gleaned from their brief chats over the years.
Shortly after Fay had sent Peter the text saying ‘We need to talk’, they’d had a long conversation.
In the end, it hadn’t been about the – now vanished – email exchange between Fay and Coen Zoutman as he had been expecting.
Instead, Fay had told him that she’d realised that the murder had affected her so much that she felt she needed more time and space for herself. Naturally, the discussion had included the classic ‘It’s not you, it’s me’, which didn’t just allow Fay to pre-emptively take all the blame herself; it also left Peter completely disarmed because now there was nothing left to discuss.
Fay’s house was so tiny that she, Agapé and Alena felt like they were always on top of each other. It was entirely understandable that she needed space.
But Peter still had the feeling that Fay was holding something back, that there was something else going on, something to do with her emails to Coen. But to ask her about it might risk damaging everything they had built together. He didn’t dare. And, if he was honest, the prospect of having more time and space for himself was appealing.
This didn’t mean that their relationship was over in any way; they were simply pressing pause. When the dust had settled, they would be able to press play again.
All in all, his spontaneous decision to visit Judith in Boston had worked out perfectly.
The food arrived, and the table filled with steaming plates.
Judith raised her glass for a toast.
‘L’chaim,’ she said.
‘L’chaim,’ they all replied.
To life.
For a while, the only sounds were of metal cutlery tapping on plates, ice cubes clinking in glasses, and pop music drifting from the speakers in the background.
‘So you’re just going to let him go?’ Mark blurted to Fay.
Fay put down her knife and fork.
Peter gave her a sideways look, his fork hovering halfway between his plate and his mouth. Red wine jus dripped from the meat and splashed onto his plate, like drops of blood.
‘We’re not joined at the hip, you know,’ she said. ‘That’s what I like about our relationship.’ She picked up her knife and fork again and sliced off a piece of salmon. ‘We’re a couple, but that doesn’t mean we need to know what the other person is up to every minute of every day.’
Peter smiled and nodded in agreement,
No, you’re absolutely right, I don’t know what you’re up to, he thought.
‘And it suits me, in a way,’ Fay continued. ‘I’ve been working on that book about Etruscan art forever and it’s actually in its final stages now.’
Peter dunked a piece of steak into the jus, then ate it, relieved that they had avoided a potentially awkward scene.
‘Has there been any news about that awful tragedy at the Freemasons’ lodge?’ said Mark, changing the subject.
‘I don’t think they’ve made much progress with the case,’ Peter said, and he told them about the conversations he and Fay had had with the detectives, and about the body in the Galgewater. ‘And what about that tattoo?’ he asked Mark. ‘Has anyone in your network been able to come up with anything?’
‘No, nothing at all,’ Mark replied. ‘Most people suggest it’s something to do with the All-Seeing Eye.’
Peter glanced at Fay.
But maybe you know what it is, he thought.
‘We’ve all had an email about it,’ Fay said. ‘All the members of Loge Ishtar and Loge La Vertu, I mean. But nobody recognised the tattoo. And nobody knew the other man, either. Nobody has a clue why Coen Zoutman was carrying that summary of Exodus around with him. It’s not a topic that’s come up recently, so …’
‘It’s just all so strange,’ Judith said.
‘I’ve been giving a lot of thought to those notes that Coen had with him,’ Mark said, ‘but I still don’t understand why he chose to write about those particular stories.’
‘It’s just a very brief history of the Jewish people. Nothing more, nothing less,’ Peter said. ‘From Abraham to the Israelites’ conquest of Palestine.’
‘You know what’s funny?’ Mark said. He put down his knife and fork and looked around the table as if he was about to tell a joke. ‘I’ve never really thought about it, but that story about baby Moses being put in a river in a basket sealed with pitch …’
‘It’s an exact copy of a much older Babylonian story about the king of Sargon, isn’t it?’ Judith said. ‘Is that what you’re thinking?’
‘Yes, it is. Sargon’
s mother puts him in a basket and entrusts him to the waters of the Euphrates more than 2300 years before the birth of Christ. A gardener finds him and decides to raise him. Then the boy became the king’s cupbearer, and he eventually manages to become king himself. But that’s not actually what I was about to say. The funny thing is that if Moses’ mother had really put him in the river in the place where the Bible says the Israelites lived, he would have drifted towards the Mediterranean Sea. The pharaoh lived in Memphis, and that was upstream. A little basket would have gone with the river’s flow and not against it.’
Judith smiled.
‘But that’s what’s so wonderful about the Old Testament, of course,’ Mark said, in full flow now. ‘We know the stories weren’t written down until the sixth century BCE. Their authors borrowed liberally from other traditions and then added their own elements, creating something that was a mix of fact and fiction. In 587 BCE, the Babylonians occupied Judah under Nebuchadnezzar II. They destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the Temple, took the Jews captive and deported them to Babylon. Half a century later, the Persian king Cyrus conquered the Babylonian Empire. He returned all the exiles to their homes, including the exiles from Judah. When the Jews returned to Judah in 538 BCE, they discovered that it wasn’t an “empty land”, as they might have expected, but a land populated by all sorts of people. That’s when they started to write down the stories we find in the Old Testament. They used them to forge a mutual bond among the Israelites by creating a shared past. They took old folktales, historical sources and Babylonian myths and turned them into an epic saga about a people led by God that was brought out of Egypt and into the promised land – just like the people of Judah returning from exile in Babylon – and had to deal with the people who were already living there. You can see the similarities between the Jews’ years as slaves in Egypt working on the pharaoh’s huge building projects, and what the Jews freed by Cyrus had been through in Babylon: seventy years of exile and slavery working on huge construction projects for King Nebuchadnezzar. And then there are the similarities between the so-called Exodus from Egypt and the return of the exiles from Babylon.’
The Pilgrim Conspiracy Page 24