“Herman.”
“Marjolijn.”
I’m expecting a conversation, a question, a follow-up after this exchange of names, but Herman opens his weathered attaché case, takes out a book, and starts reading. He shakes his head again, but slower than at the white table just now. From close by it looks entirely natural, like he’s rocking a baby. I try to guess his age. His face is a fine web of grooves and wrinkles. His medium-length hair has a metallic color, somewhere between black and silver. And yet he has something youthful about him. From my table I can see the title of his book: Gray Areas: The Netherlands and the Second World War.
I take out my laptop and read what I’ve just typed—the pigeons, the fish—the ridiculous pink Post-it above my notes makes it look even more amateurish.
I gesture to the barista, who is leaning, bored, against the coffee machine six feet away.
He shakes his head. “Self-service.”
I chuckle, but he’s serious.
“There’s nobody here!”
He shrugs wearily.
“There never is. Rules are rules.”
Herman looks up from his book and asks what I’ll have.
“Cappuccino, extra shot, please.”
“We call that a doppio,” says the barista, who is close enough to overhear.
Herman ambles over to the counter.
“A doppio and a coffee, please.”
“What kind of coffee?”
“Regular coffee.”
“Americano?”
“The kind I always drink.”
“Americano.”
Herman turns toward me with a faint smile, as if to apologize for the jerk behind the counter. While the coffee grinder wails, he sits down at my table and asks if I’m on the trail of something yet. He has to raise his voice over the din.
I tell him that what I’ve found doesn’t feel like a trail, more like a game of blindman’s bluff. Herman laughs: a clear, wide-open laugh that at once makes him seem like a brash teenager. “You’ve just started, if I’m not mistaken,” he says.
I feel like I’ve been caught out. Has he already figured out, after such a short time at that table, that I’ve never been in an archive before? Am I making beginner’s blunders?
“I’ve been at that table every day for a year,” he says. “I know all the faces. This is your first time.”
I ask what he’s spent a year looking for.
“My father.”
“Is his dossier that big?”
Herman hesitates, and I suddenly realize what those pink Post-its are meant for. Not to protect the privacy of the deceased, but of the survivors.
“Sorry,” I say. “You don’t have to—”
But Herman shakes his head.
“It’s not a secret, not anymore. After the war my father was suspected of collaboration. When it got brought to trial, he committed suicide. I was born five months later. The dossier only took me a few hours to read, but I’m afraid it’ll take a lifetime to understand.”
He takes a small carton of orange juice out of his jacket pocket, carefully pokes the straw through the small foil dot, and continues: “I try to sit there at that white table as someone who lived back then, without the ballast of seventy years’ worth of history lessons. That’s the only way to approach it. The hard part is to accept that history is made up of people from now, only a different now, that they thought the way we do, they did their best, that their life was one of difficult decisions, genuine suffering, real pain. That it was real and just as messy and chaotic as ours now.”
Herman sighs. “It takes time. Lots of time.”
I point to my belly, which sticks out visibly in my tight T-shirt.
“I’d like to wrap this up before the baby arrives. I don’t have time to sit here for a year sifting through dusty boxes.”
I only realize too late how unkind that sounds. But Herman doesn’t seem to be offended.
“I don’t have much to do,” he says matter-of-factly. “I’m divorced, retired, don’t have many friends, and my only child lives in Canada.”
How am I supposed to respond to this sad summary of his life?
Fortunately the barista shouts, louder than necessary, that the coffee is ready.
Herman saunters over to the bar. I glance over at his book, which lies open on his table. One sentence catches my eye: “First there was the war, and then there was the story of the war.”
Herman returns with our coffee, sets it on the wobbly table, and sits back down. He sees me eyeing his book. “There’s a lot of good stuff in it,” he says, “but that title is nonsense. The notion that everyone is half good, half bad—that says more about the way we look at things now than about mankind in general. Believing in gray areas back then means believing in gray areas now.”
I say I think it’s a nice idea, and again he laughs that buoyant, boyish laugh.
“Do you remember those historical prints we used to have back in grade school?”
I shake my head.
“Illustrations of the Ice Age, the Bronze Age, the Romans, the Middle Ages. I could spend hours looking at them. The figures were so beautifully drawn, they looked so much like us. History felt really close. Tangible. That Neanderthal could have been my neighbor. Much later I learned that the guy who drew them always used himself and people around him as models. So all those ancient and prehistoric figures were really what he saw in the mirror every day. We pretend we want to study and understand the past, but in the end, we look mostly at ourselves.”
Herman inquires about my dossier. Before I know it—a fraction of a second—it has happened: I’ve chosen the myth; well, I wouldn’t even call it a choice, it’s a reflex, an old habit.
I hear myself tell him about the rascal uncle, the bomblet, the collaborator, the heroic deed, my son’s name. As though I had not opened that cardboard box just now, had not read that the traitor maybe wasn’t a traitor after all, and maybe everything was different than I’d always believed.
For the first time, I’m aware of the rhythm and the melody of the story. I quickly, superficially, slip the word “bomblet” by, while the word “collaborator” gets drawn out with a sneer. And I know for sure that I always tell it this way, exactly the way I always heard it, as though it’s not a story but a song anchored on music staves, an old melody whose sound is more important than its lyrics.
Herman’s rapt attention makes me uncomfortable. Is it sincere, or does he hear what I hear? If so, he doesn’t show it.
I extend my hand, the way I always do after performing my hero number, but this time it looks as if the hand belongs to someone else, it’s swollen and covered in red bug bites. Herman brings the finger with the ring right up under his nose, takes his reading glasses from his breast pocket, and studies the stone. For the first time I’m aware how unwieldy the ring is.
“Family crest?” Herman points to the carving in the stone: three royal eagles, their beaks wide open. I nod, suddenly ashamed of these aggressive raptors that sealed the letters and documents of my family these past couple of centuries.
“Big, isn’t it.”
“It’s a man’s ring, I have to wear it on my middle finger.”
“How old is it?”
“I guess a little more than a hundred years.”
“That’s amazing,” Herman says. “Two world wars, a century of history, and no more than a few tiny scratches.”
I pull back my hand, inspect the unblemished gold that has been pinching my finger this last week because of the buildup of fluids. I imagine it remaining shiny for the rest of my life, while my hand swells, shrinks, ages. It makes me sad. Gold’s unfair advantage over skin.
Herman says that I’ll start to recognize faces at the white table if I come here regularly. “Those twins, for instance, are trying to figure out why their mother was found floating dead in the Maas at the end of 1945. The police report called it a liquidation. There had been rumors that their mother was a collaborator. She’d had cl
ose contact with several German officers, but according to the daughters this was a decoy, and she was actually in the Resistance. They’ve spent years looking for proof.”
I wait for more, but Herman has fallen silent. He stares, lost in thought, out into the empty foyer, alternately sipping coffee and orange juice. Just when I think he’s forgotten me, he springs back into action. “Let’s go,” he says. “The dead await us.”
I say I’m only going back to pack up the box.
“Finished already?” Herman asks, surprised.
“It’s not what I was looking for.”
He smiles kindly, or perhaps solicitously, opens his mouth as though he’s going to say something, and then closes it again. His meddling is starting to get on my nerves. My body feels heavier than ever. I want to go home, to bed.
We return to the reading room, past two deserted counters and the Afghan hound, to the white table. Herman’s back is already hunched, as though assuming the posture in advance before delving back into that same dossier about his father.
The folder is exactly where I left it, with the papers in a sloppy pile alongside it. I hastily scoop everything together, already trying to recall the train timetables to Amsterdam. I can’t wait until I’m home and can finally pull the covers up over my head. But as I’m about to replace the folder, I see that there’s a second one at the bottom of the box. How did I manage to miss it the first time around? I feel my cheeks flush. I’ve let my impatience get the better of me in front of all of them: Herman, the Afghan hound, the security guy whom I had wanted to snap at earlier, everyone who is sitting so professionally and purposefully around the table. I slowly open the folder. It contains three loose sheets of paper. On the first, at the upper right, is a date: 10 December 1946. And below that: “Report, drawn up and signed by Dr. R. R. Rochat, anatomic pathologist and Dr. P. M. Bakker, head of the anatomic pathology laboratory at the municipal hospital on the Zuidwal.”
It is the report of the autopsy performed on the three victims of the bombing. Three lists.
François Boer (52 years old)
bones in the left hand crushed
multiple injuries on the front of the body
several holes in the pericardium and myocardium
approximately one liter of blood in the left chest cavity
various injuries to the left lung
four broken costal cartilages on the left side
various holes in the small intestine, the omentum, and the mesothelium
injuries to the liver
partial tearing of both testicles
injuries to the left femoral artery and the aorta
two perforations in the wall of the pharynx
Injuries were caused by shards of metal propelled with great force; these were direct and fatal.
Greetje Boer-van Dijk (50 years old)
multiple wounds on the front of the body
perforation of the abdomen in three places
two large tears in the stomach wall
one large tear in the liver
a hole in the small intestine
a hole in the omentum
blood and digestive tract contents in the abdominal cavity
Injuries were caused by shards of metal propelled with great force; three of these shards penetrated the abdominal wall.
Jacoba Visser (17 years old)
a hole in the small intestine
general infection of the peritoneum
various injuries to the front of the body, the mutilation of the left eye and burn wounds on the face and arms.
Injuries were caused by shards of metal propelled with great force; one of these penetrated the abdominal wall and perforated the small intestine; infection of the peritoneum was the cause of death.
On the second page is a statement confirming that François’s eldest son identified the bodies. The son was not at the house at the time the bombs exploded. His wife, Maria Johanna, was present, and her sloppily typed statement reads as follows:
The Hague, 5 December 1946.
We were all sitting in the living room. My mother-in-law Greetje sang songs for my son, and I accompanied her on the piano. My father-in-law lit the heating stove and Jacoba set the table.
We heard the motorcycle approach; there was no other street traffic. We heard the motorcycle stop in front of the house and ask something of a passerby. Then the doorbell rang and we heard someone shout, “From Saint Nick! From Saint Nick!” Greetje went downstairs with my son. They came back up with a packet and said, “We didn’t see who it was.” No one was suspicious; it was December 5th, after all, everyone expects surprises. Greetje handed the packet to François and we gathered around him, curious. He tore off the paper and opened the lid. That’s all I can remember.
Underneath her statement was the rest of the story, which Maria Johanna could not or did not want to remember.
The daughter-in-law ran to the back of her house with her baby, where she jumped out of the window. She landed, slightly injured, in the downstairs neighbors’ backyard.
Boer was killed instantly. After the explosion his wife staggered to the bedroom doorway, where she bled to death.
Housemaid Jacoba Visser was hit by shrapnel on the front of her body. She dragged herself to the stairs, where she was found. She died three days later of her injuries.
Appalled, I retype the three pages. I am sick to my stomach and taste the bitterness on my tongue that I remember from the first weeks of pregnancy. Saliva fills my mouth. I’m afraid I’ll throw up. I try to focus and breathe calmly. It helps, the nausea recedes. But the bad taste remains.
I try to gesture to Herman that I’m leaving, but he is already concentrating on his own history, his head bobbing again. I place the folders back in the cardboard box, more carefully now, all the pages in the right order. In the back of my mind is the absurd thought that I mustn’t leave any trail behind, as if that might be able to undo what I’ve seen. I quickly slip out of the reading room: outdoors, fresh air.
* * *
On the train, the lists of injuries keep thumping through my head. Torn liver, perforated stomach wall, crushed hand. Mindful of Herman’s words, I try to imagine what it was like that evening. Not the way I usually picture it—in black-and-white, and with a well-ordered story line—but with real shrapnel tearing through real flesh; warm, sticky blood; choking smoke; the screaming, gasping, wailing of dying people; Jacoba fighting for her life on the stairs; hysterical shrieks of Maria Johanna’s baby as he plummets in his mother’s arms into the backyard. I swallow, but the bitter taste won’t go away. Until I saw that list, I could convince myself that the other two victims were probably collaborators too—boontjes getting their loontje—or else it was, like D said, collateral damage. But now they have names, ages, mangled bodies. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I don’t know where to draw them in on the map. Perhaps everything is different than I thought, and the reassuring story I grew up with no more than a mishmash of skewed facts.
The list of injuries has the effect of a blizzard. The points of reference I had collected these last weeks vanish under a heavy, white chill. I’m back at square one. A frigid expanse.
Maybe I should call it quits, right here and now. Send the ring to Nelly, finally concentrate on the work that’s piling up, find a nice name on one of the millions of baby websites—Zane, Zach, Zeke—and then quietly slip into maternity leave.
Bommenneef was no hero, he was a murderer, and you don’t name your son after a murderer. End of story. But what about the liver, the stomach, the burn wounds? The names whispered out of the dossier? They were first murdered, then hushed up. I reach for my phone. I want to call someone, everyone, who has supported me in my Bommenneef bubble these past weeks. I want to read them the list, make sure Jacoba’s maimed eye is given its rightful place in the narrative so that there’s at least some justice to this story.
I look outside. Hoofddorp. Even in midsummer the gray office blocks res
emble a prison complex. Did Frans think about the victims during his time in jail? Did Jacoba’s ghost waft through the bars on his window at night?
Jacoba. It’s her death that bothers me the most.
Because she put up such a fight.
Because she was the youngest. Seventeen. A child.
Because she might still have been alive today. What a crazy idea. She would be eighty-seven. A woman with a whole life behind her, instead of having evaporated into history during that cold, wet week in December at age seventeen. And here’s me having spent twenty-five years bragging about the man who was responsible for it. Again I feel myself blush, my heart race, an angry fist pound my chest. How could I have been so naïve? Even if I wanted to, I can’t throw in the towel now. If I don’t find out what really happened that night, no one will. The myth will remain intact, and Jacoba invisible. I cannot do what people have been doing for seventy years: leave out the parts they don’t like. This story is the first thing I’ve promised my son. What am I supposed to say when he asks me about the ring? About the certificate? About the name I had in mind for him? Sorry, I broke my very first promise to you before you were even born, because the truth put me off? It seems to me a bad start: half a story, a box of traffic fines, and a list of injuries. No way.
And what if Frans didn’t know there were others in the house besides François Boer? What if it’s true after all that Boer turned twelve Dutch escapees over to the Nazis? The fact that it wasn’t proven does not mean it didn’t happen. Does it matter? In my confined, sheltered reality, murder is murder. But this didn’t happen in my peaceful microcosm, it happened in the aftermath of a devastating war.
Aside from noble motives—justice for the victims, keeping my promise to my son—I know of another reason not to stop. And, to be honest, it’s the most pressing. To quit now would be to lose Bommenneef forever. Now that his myth is crumbling, there’s nothing left to carry him through time. For a name to survive, it has to be embedded in a story. A word won’t stand the test of time on its own. There has to be context. Form. A song with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the only insurance against oblivion.
In Search of a Name Page 6