I. St. Nicholas (Sinterklaas) and his helper Piet are said to come from Spain.
25 WEEKS LEFT
THE BABY IS now about four and a half inches long; mom blogs show avocados and pomegranates as points of reference. They inform me that the ears are now in the right place, and that he is covered in down. My nails grow so fast that I have to clip them every couple of days. Long dark hairs are growing around my navel. Masculine hormones, says the obstetrician. D calls me “werewolf” and pretends to get a fright when I walk into the bedroom at night. Or maybe he’s not pretending.
My belly swells up—a week ago I looked like I’d just put on some weight, but now I’m very obviously pregnant. This should be, according to all the books and blogs, the best time of the pregnancy: the second trimester, when the nausea has passed and your belly is not yet gigantic. But every morning it’s like I have to hoist myself out of a swamp before I can function normally. My limbs feel bogged down and soggy, as though my blood is more viscous than usual. I cry over the stupidest things—yesterday, over a squashed avocado on the bike path that just lay there, green and soft and defenseless in the rain. Four and a half squashed inches.
Since a few days ago I think I feel the baby move. Going by what the books and websites say, it should be something like “a butterfly painting the inside of your belly” or “gentle tickling under your navel,” but this has nothing to do with tickling, it’s the rumbling of a volcano: small, restrained explosions and ominous gurgling. Postnatal care has to be arranged, the bed needs leveling, the insurance company notified; there’s something absurd about it, all these chores for four and a half inches of person.
When the obstetrician brings up pain management during delivery, I want to tell her that it’s all one big misunderstanding, that I’m only pregnant with an idea, that there’s really not a person growing inside me. The gurgling below my navel can’t possibly be a portent of real-life legs that will one day roam our planet, that will turn left or turn right, follow wrong paths in a huge, messy life. I want to tell her that should something come out of me and into this world, it will be simpler than all that. Something with a heart and maybe some human features, but beyond that a purely temporary presence. Something soft, no more than form and warmth, which will then disappear.
But the only thing that disappears is me. Slowly but surely, I am making way for the baby. A layer of fat is enveloping me, my breasts are being swallowed up by larger breasts, my feet by larger feet.
* * *
The slug trail glistens on. An elderly uncle tells me that in the 1930s Frans was in the cigar business and bought his tobacco leaves at an auction house on the Nes.
I ask him which number.
“No idea,” he replies, “but they called it ‘the Hell of Frascati,’ because it was hot and smoky, and the traders were cutthroat when it came to getting their hands on the best leaves.”
Frascati! The building that, in the seventies, was renovated into the theater where I now work.
After a performance about the forgotten heroes of the Resistance, I tell a colleague, a woman in her seventies, about my search and this crazy Frascati coincidence. She looks at me, dumbstruck.
“Bomb attack? Sinterklaas Eve?”
I nod.
“You mean the guy who swam across the river with a knife clamped in his jaw?”
“No, or yes, maybe … I’ve never heard anything about that knife part.”
“Could be just an urban legend.”
“What legend?”
“Did that attack really happen?”
I take her hand, drag her to the theater café, and sit her down. “Tell me what you know.”
“There was a boy at school who used to brag about his uncle during recess,” she says. “It wasn’t his blood uncle, I don’t think, but the brother of an aunt by marriage, or something. He told us that during the war, the man swam across a river with a knife in his mouth to pick up some folks who had fled to England,I and when he got to the far side he realized they’d been ratted on, and that after the war, dressed up like St. Nicholas, he murdered the man who betrayed them. On Sinterklaas Eve, with that same knife, and a bishop’s miter on his head. Nobody believed him, because the kid was such a braggart. We teased him about it for years. If you want, I can find out where he lives now.”
“Yes, please,” I say. “That would be great.”
The next morning she phones me with the number of a nephew of Elize, Bommenneef’s eldest sister.
K receives me a few days later in his small service apartment in Baarn. His father’s brother had been married to an Elize. K only met Frans twice—Frans and his sister, he says, didn’t really see eye-to-eye. All he remembers about Frans was that he was tall. “But maybe,” he corrects himself, “that was only because I was still little.”
I ask him about the story of the river and the knife. “We heard that from Elize, once,” he says. “The only time I ever heard her talk about her brother. Just a few sentences, and that was it. She got angry when I pressed her for more.” He admits making up the part about Bommenneef going to the Prinsengracht dressed up like St. Nicholas. “I figured it was good for the story.” All he knows is that it happened, and that Bommenneef went to jail, no more than that.
K has brought out a stack of ancient photo albums and lays them on the coffee table. There’s not a single photo of Frans. For nearly an hour he regales me with prewar class pictures and five decades of vacation snapshots. I try to stay patient and focused, albeit with the dwindling hope that anything useful about Frans will emerge.
After we’ve sifted through all the albums, K serves scalding-hot tea and sets down a dish of After Eights. He fixes his watery gaze on me. “You look like him,” he says. “Same eyes, same mouth.”
I’m taken aback by his observation. In my fantasy, Frans always has the typical hero looks. Full lips, chiseled jaw, scarred face—not my narrow, unmenacing features. It never occurred to me that the shared gene pool might reveal itself in my own face.
I ask if he can remember how Frans spoke and moved, how he dressed, his expression. K just shakes his head. He has no answers.
If he has nothing to offer, I can just as well leave. I take a gulp of tea, burn my mouth. Another gulp. I really want to get out of here. But K is clearly not planning to let me go. Just before I’ve drained my teacup, he refills it and launches into a monologue about his life. The more he talks, the less likeable he becomes. He refers to women his age as “sucked-out oysters”: dry and gray and stinking of fish. He grumbles that everything that went wrong in his life was because of someone else’s stupidity.
When I get up from the sofa and say I mustn’t keep him any longer, he says I haven’t seen the most important thing yet. He walks to the cupboard next to the window, takes out a small stack of paper, and places it on the table. “Elize’s life story. She typed it herself before she died.” Why only bring this up now, I want to ask him, but I realize he probably saved it for last on purpose. I sit back down and, my hope rekindled, slide the sheets toward me.
Seven pages, single-spaced. Elize begins by describing her early youth in the aloof aristocratic circles that I recall having heard about from older generations. High expectations, scant affection, a hermetic world of nannies and a few carefully selected playmates. She describes how in the 1910s she and her younger brother Frans went to school in Zutphen on a donkey cart, how her parents were always busy fulfilling social obligations, leaving the childrearing to English governesses. She writes about playdates with Princess Juliana at Noordeinde Palace, and about a castle belonging to an auntie in Doorn where all the cousins would get together in the summer, until in 1919 they sold it to Wilhelm II, the last German kaiser, who lived there until his death. She goes into great detail about the war, the Hunger Winter, and the years thereafter, when she had to take on all manner of jobs to make ends meet because her husband’s business went bankrupt. She writes about her travels, her children, grandchildren, and step-grandchildren,
and their vicissitudes. She writes about everything except that fateful Sinterklaas Eve. Not a word about Frans as an adult.
All I’ve got is that boy on the donkey cart. I picture a narrow, serious face, a sailor’s suit, sharply parted hair, an absent expression. A privileged, neglected little boy.
With my eyes and my mouth.
I. Engelandvaarders (literally: England-seafarers) were men and women who attempted to escape from the Netherlands across over 100 miles of the North Sea to reach England during World War II. Only about one in ten were successful in the crossing; a large number of them were either killed or arrested en route or died at sea. Of those who did reach England, many joined the Allied forces or served with the Dutch government-in-exile.
24 WEEKS LEFT
NEWS OF MY quest has spread to the farthest branches of our family tree. A distant aunt calls me to report that her son-in-law, a collector of old books, bought a box full of stuff belonging to Frans at an auction last month. “He walked past it, had no idea what was inside, but saw ‘Van Heemstra 1945’ on the box, so he took it. And guess what was inside!” She waits. I don’t want to guess, I want to know. “No idea. Tell me.”
“Bommenneef’s pictures and papers!” she exclaims. “I’ll be in Amsterdam this week, so I can bring it along. Just give me your address.”
Still reeling from her announcement, I stammer out our street name.
The aunt carries on enthusiastically, telling me that the box had been in the attic of a collector of old documents, and that it’s probably the contents of Frans’s desk drawers. I have so many things to ask her, but don’t get any further than shell-shocked mumbling. Frascati, the colleague, now this box. Aunt S says she’ll come by the day after tomorrow, then hangs up.
“Creepy,” D says when I tell him. “How’s this much coincidence possible?”
In fact, I find these implausibilities reassuring. It’s as though the history of Bommenneef has attached itself to me like a barnacle, like the story chose me, rather than the other way around. It’s sneaking into my life, bit by bit, validating itself, making itself jibe.
Two days later, Aunt S places the cardboard box on our kitchen table. The block letters on the lid are sloppily written but legible enough: Van Heemstra 1945. She carefully removes the lid and shows me the envelopes into which she has separated the contents. Taxes. Insurance. Traffic tickets. Photos. “Just to get you started. It was complete chaos, as if somebody had just dumped the entire contents of the desk drawer into the box all at once. Maybe after his arrest, or when he was in jail. There must have been someone looking after his affairs.” But who it was, she doesn’t know.
My fingers glide over the envelopes. Deep down I was prepared for this to turn out to be some kind of joke, but the box looks old and battered, and my aunt is just as amazed as I am at the find.
She replaces the lid and says that now I have an obligation to history to fill in the gaps. For the first time, it occurs to me what a nice expression it is: that history is a living presence you can be obliged to.
As soon as she’s gone, I lay the contents of the envelopes side by side. I quickly skim the dates on the letters and receipts: they go up until December 1946, just before the bombing.
It’s bizarre to see dates that one usually equates with war and concentration camps in run-of-the-mill letters from the city council. Even in October 1944, taxes were paid and traffic tickets issued. I have always associated the occupation of the Netherlands with anarchy and chaos, with dysfunctional institutions. But in November 1941, Frans took out a life insurance policy for f71.30. The box also contains twenty-eight traffic tickets. Apparently, the prewar speed limit was 60 kilometers per hour; Frans often drove 80. There are no speeding tickets during the time of the occupation, but he did park illegally seven times, and once drove the wrong way down a one-way street.
Aunt S is probably right—someone must have emptied out his desk after his arrest, intending to save the contents until Frans was released. The handover apparently never took place. Maybe there was a falling-out, perhaps the keeper of the documents lost contact with Frans during his jail time. I can’t imagine that a person would deliberately save inconsequential letters and traffic fines. They were probably simply forgotten; this was one of those boxes that sits at the back of a cupboard for years and gets moved from one address to the other because nobody bothers to look inside. Until one day, when those mundane, everyday things suddenly become historical documents.
Underneath the envelope with traffic fines is a white folder on which my aunt has written “Photos (1911–1946)” with a black felt-tip pen. I hesitate. This will be the first time I see him. I gingerly open the envelope and lay the contents on the table.
On top is a family portrait dating from 1911. Frans must be the chubby toddler in a white lace dress sitting on his mother’s lap. She is a small woman with an attractive but stern face. His two sisters stand next to them, and alongside them, their father: tall and thin, with a large handlebar mustache. In the course of nineteen photographs, Frans progresses from a toddler to a dark, surly little boy, a teenager, a young man. The older he gets, the more distant his expression, almost unfriendly—or is that my imagination?
In addition to the family photos, there are dozens of pictures of landscapes, men in military garb, and cars. Lots of pictures of Frans as an adult posing as a dandy behind the wheel of a car, each time with a different woman next to him. From a distance you’d say he was good-looking: dark hair, ditto expression, a natty dresser. From close-up—for instance, on his driver’s license, also part of the trove—his looks are just average: not homely, not handsome. A man you wouldn’t notice without the cars and the outfits.
Do I really look like him, as K claimed? If I look closely, I do see certain likenesses. The same straight nose, the same narrow mouth. In most of the photos, Bommenneef appears to be on vacation: a suitcase tied to the roof rack, a snowcapped mountain or deserted beach in the background.
Underneath the photos is an envelope of divorce papers. In 1938, the marriage between Frans and a certain Carolina was annulled. They had only been married for two years. He got the sideboard, she the Persian rugs.
It’s a strange sensation, going through this entirely unique and yet utterly unimportant find. How big was the chance that after seventy years, this very box would end up in my possession, the only person interested in the history behind the legend of Bommenneef? And yet, what on earth am I supposed to do with a pile of traffic tickets? What can his insurance papers tell me about the bombing? What good is a tax return when what I’m really after are the details of an act of heroism?
This box, all these papers, the hollowness of a humdrum life, make me uncomfortable. It’s too intimate, too trivial, too disappointing. Where are the letters from the Resistance? Where are the medals? The proof of courage, sacrifice, and allegiance?
I try to trace the box’s history. Who packed up his things shortly after the war, and why? Aunt S doesn’t know; her son-in-law promises to look into it, but the trail runs dry with the collector who had bought the box at an auction but cannot remember from whom.
I recall something a historian friend once told me: less than 0.001 percent of everything that has been written down in the course of history survives. There are two things you don’t find in historical documents: that which, at the time, was common knowledge, and that which no one wanted mentioned.
23 WEEKS LEFT
FIVE DAYS NOW with no news about Bommenneef. The grapevine has gone quiet, the elderly have returned to their bridge evenings, and I sit here with stacks of traffic tickets and vacation snapshots.
I try to concentrate on the deadlines I need to meet before the baby arrives. Following the advice of friends with children—pretty soon you won’t have any time for each other!—D and I do things together. It’s a weirdly indeterminate togetherness. We treat each other like ex-lovers. Friendly, careful, with the understanding that nothing will ever be as it was. Sometimes we talk ab
out the baby, but these are brief, routine conversations. What is there to say about someone who doesn’t exist yet? Sometimes people ask me if I already love my child. I don’t know how to respond. The thing that’s growing inside me does not feel like a child. More like a restless organ. It’s like being asked if I love my liver. So the honest answer is: no, but I wouldn’t want to live without it either.
The news lapse on Bommenneef makes me fidgety. The traces of information I saw dotting the empty white map these past weeks made me feel in control. But now, the empty landscape is once again encroaching on my thoughts. D says I should concentrate on the life that’s on its way, rather than on a life that has passed. But I no longer seem to be able to separate the two.
My quest is starting to irritate him. Our quibbling invariably ends up at the same bone of contention: D says it’s “just a name.” To which I reply that a name is always more than a name. A memory, for example, the first and biggest one you’re given.
“It’s a word,” D says.
“It’s a foothold,” I say.
“It says nothing about who he’ll become.”
“It says everything about what I want him to become.”
We ping-pong back and forth like this until D throws his hands in the air, as though beseeching some higher entity, and, shaking his head, throws in the towel. Not because he admits I’m right, but because he has read somewhere that there’s no point arguing with a pregnant woman.
* * *
I try to link up the snippets of information I’ve collected so far; I seek out the most logical route from the little boy on the donkey cart to the man who orchestrated a bombing. They are all dead-end roads.
Just when I’m starting to lose faith, I get a telephone call. The woman on the line identifies herself as B, “the best friend Frans ever had.” The grapevine was apparently not entirely dormant: this morning she heard about my search via an acquaintance who was a friend of a nephew of a cousin, et cetera. B has a thin, high-pitched voice, and she gasps after every sentence, as though she’s climbing a staircase as we talk, but she’s sitting down—at least, that’s what she says when she calls: “I’ve been sitting here in my chair thinking, ever since I heard that a niece of Frans was looking for information.” I should come see her in The Hague as soon as I can, she tells me.
In Search of a Name Page 2