Hoofddorp recedes into the distance and we cross the A4, the road Bommenneef took to Brussels back in 1946 to fetch his sweetheart Nelly. I feel the angry fist in my chest relax, the bitter taste in my mouth slowly melt away.
If I don’t want to lose my hero, I need a new story. The true story.
And so, two days later, I reluctantly make my way back to B’s small apartment in The Hague.
17 WEEKS LEFT
WALKING FROM THE bus station to B’s apartment, I notice for the first time that the streets in her neighborhood are named after fallen heroes of the Resistance. On one of the public squares is a monument “To Those Who Died for the Fatherland.” A small sign says: Adopted by the Students of “The Ark” Primary School. An accompanying photograph shows a group of children standing in front of the monument, their arms laden with flowers.
I think back on what Frans asked Nelly: How long does a war last? Nelly’s answer—“until peace comes”—indeed misses the mark.
I got off to a slow start this morning. I spent the whole night carrying out electrocutions. Two days ago D hung up a mosquito net, but the bugs outsmarted us and found their way into the net anyway. What should have been a safe haven turned out to be a snare. The net is gone, the electro-rackets have returned. And the house once again stinks of charred insects.
B takes her time answering the door. I resolve to get straight to the point this time, and not waste half a day again on superficial chitchat. I want to hear from her if Frans was the kind of man who would sacrifice innocent lives for his ideals, whether he’d have still ordered the bombing if he had known there were people there who had nothing to do with the evil he was out to avenge. B knew him for half his life, she ironed his neckties, washed his hair, called him every week. She should know what he was capable of.
When she finally opens the door, she eyes me suspiciously.
“Well, if it isn’t Agatha Christie.”
She answers my smile with a dirty look. She’s obviously not amused by my digging around in newspapers and government archives.
B’s rigid body is packed into a light-gray suit. She sits upright in the chair like a radio antenna, the glistening knot in her hair a silver transmitter. She pours me a halfhearted cup of tea and asks what’s wrong with my eye.
“Mosquitoes,” I reply, as I place my hand on the lump. The skin is warm, my blood throbs under the swelling. An allergic reaction to the bite, or perhaps just fatigue; even after hours of electrocution, the maddening buzz kept me awake. Last night I was sure that one of the mosquitoes had laid her eggs in my ear, that I myself had become a breeding ground. The buzzing seemed to be coming from within me, from somewhere behind my eardrum. I looked it up, dead tired at my laptop, but read that only an extremely rare species of tropical insect uses the human ear as a repository for its progeny.
“Before you go telling me all kinds of things about Frans,” B says, “I just want to make it clear that it won’t change my opinion of him, ever. I knew him. I know who he was.”
Her voice seems thinner than the last time, and the words sound reedy and high-pitched.
I nod. “That’s why I’m here. You knew him. If Frans had known there were innocent people at home, if he had known that François Boer wasn’t a proven collaborator, would he have still had the bomb delivered?”
All she has to do is shake her head. A simple no would suffice to keep our hero intact. A careless, sloppy hero, maybe, but nonetheless a man who was true to his ideals. B’s eyes are still glued to the swollen half of my face. “Have you ever had the feeling that everything you believed in was slipping away?” she asks. “That life was turned upside down, and you had to hold tight to keep from losing control altogether? That’s how it was in 1946. Those newsreels of flags and festivities were just part of the story. The other part was chaos. Total chaos. It was as though everyone had lost the war, including—especially—the good guys.” Again, that exaggerated British accent.
I take a sip of tea in an attempt to stall for time. I’m afraid I already know what her next question will be. The question that World War II has saddled us with for good, the question asked every Memorial Day, every Liberation Day, in every history lesson at school, as though answering it can shield us from the next catastrophe: “What would you do?”
I shrug. B looks at me intensely and repeats the question. “If everything you always believed in slipped through your fingers, what would you do?”
Would I deliver a bomb to a house where children were present? Sacrifice another life for the sake of my own convictions?
No.
Unless …
It depends on your definition of life. And of sacrifice. The pregnancy I broke off after eight weeks felt like a sacrifice, not so much on account of a specific conviction—or maybe yes, after all: the conviction that my life was not one where a twenty-one-year-old gets pregnant by a Rotterdam bartender; the conviction that my life was about to take a sudden, very wrong turn. So I made an about-face. It was the first time I felt that if life did not conform to my self-image, then I would adjust life and leave my self-image intact. The first time I experienced the devastating potential of expectations.
You can’t compare an abortion to a bomb attack, but it’s the only blood sacrifice I can come up with on short notice. Only thing is, it doesn’t seem a befitting response in this decent little apartment.
My stomach rumbles. I don’t know if it’s me or the baby, or maybe a hungry baby—does our hunger coincide? The hole in Jacoba’s intestine flashes through my mind. Her maimed eye. B notices my discomfort and changes her tone. “Apple pie,” she says, quite a bit friendlier now, and goes into the kitchen. Keep questioning her. Don’t be satisfied with her half answers and useless anecdotes.
“What do you think drove Frans to do it?” I ask B when she returns with the plates. She slowly walks to the table, more measured than necessary, sets them down in slow motion, and then shuffles back to her chair. She leans back and heaves a deep sigh.
“Where to start? Frans always wanted to be a hero, I think. He’d always been a loner. He never really got over his mother’s death. In some ways he stayed a lonely little boy. Someone who wanted to be noticed and admired, even though he would never admit it.”
As I eat her oversweet apple pie, B talks about Frans’s solitude, his yearning for the affection and security he had missed as a child. She tells of his strong sense of justice, his drive, his humor. I feel myself settle back into the old, comfy song whose lyrics I know by heart. The tidy, wrinkle-free myth, boontje and his loontje. The belief that his intentions were honest, that he couldn’t possibly have known there were innocents in harm’s way and that François might not have been the devil he took him for.
“Frans was an old-fashioned hero,” B says. “He didn’t waste words on what had to be done, he just did it. There’s so much talk these days, so much agonizing over the pros and cons. All it does is sow doubt. Frans never had doubts.”
“Not even when he heard there were other victims?”
“Probably not. He knew he was in the right. Not just anybody gets a certificate from Montgomery.” She says that last bit with such certainty that I don’t dare ask any further.
On the way to the kitchen for fresh tea she lays five red-painted nails on my shoulder.
“Maybe he not only missed having a mother, but a child too.”
“I know. That’s why I got the ring.”
“No, not in a general sense. I mean a specific child. There were rumors about a baby with his first wife. That she couldn’t find a wedding dress big enough to conceal it.” I think of Nelly’s story about the mumps that made Frans infertile. But maybe that was only later.
“If there had been a child, why did he send the ring to my grandmother? And why haven’t I ever heard anything about it?”
“They say it was a son who died right after it was born.”
The combination of the words “dead” and “son” gives me a jolt.
Before I can say anything, she shakes her head and says, “I don’t know anything. I’m just repeating what was whispered.”
“A dead mother. A dead son. A war,” I sum up. “I’d call those extenuating circumstances.”
B throws her long arms in the air. “What else is life but a series of extenuating circumstances?”
16 WEEKS LEFT
FRANS LIGHTS HIS last cigarette, inhales deeply, and considers that he could just as well have left it in the pack: the corridor of the maternity ward is already dizzyingly thick with smoke. After all, what else do the men have to do than inhale and exhale tobacco smoke and pace in silence?
The yuletide decorations on the walls are the worse for wear, the paint chipping off the angels and stars. From the ward comes the cries of babies and mothers. Occasionally a door opens to this din, a man gets called in; the ones left behind watch him with a combination of envy and pity.
His cigarettes finished, Frans strolls down the Herengracht. The water is as black as the sky. The city is like a ghost town.
* * *
How long does childbirth take?
Maybe he’s already a father by the time he reaches the next bridge; in the space of one footstep he’s been moved up a generation. He always thought the transformation from son to father would be marked by some spectacle—a ceremony, a cloudburst, at least a flash of lightning—but in fact you just sit around and wait, and everything changes except yourself.
At the bridge he suddenly knows for sure: the child, his child, has been born. He turns back.
Does he hope for a son, a daughter? What he hopes for is warmth. For something to hold on to that he’ll never have to let go of.
He rushes through the entrance, up the stairs, to the ward. From Carolina’s room comes a muffled whimpering. A nurse stands in the doorway—in the semidarkness she looks like a heavyset white angel. She beckons him, her face somber. He looks into the corridor, tries to make eye contact with his fellow fathers-to-be, but they have turned away.
His heart skips a beat. Something’s wrong. He hesitates, but now the angel addresses him. “Sir, your wife needs you.”
She leads him into the room. Carolina is as white as a sheet, her eyes are closed. Your wife. My wife. It sounds much too intimate for someone he has known so briefly. He would never have married her if she hadn’t gotten pregnant that one night. For two months now, he wakes up startled every morning alongside that strange, oversized body. He tries to look into Carolina’s eyes, but she keeps them shut. There is nothing between them except the child in the white wooden cradle next to her bed. He hears it whimper, a soft, lamenting sound. It does not bode well: he had expected vehement, vital cries. The nurse nudges him toward the baby.
He resists. His legs are weak, he can barely budge, but the hefty angel is firm. “Your son,” she says. He repeats the words to himself. My son. It sounds softer, easier than my wife.
The son is a wrinkly, purple baby, half hidden under a woolen blanket. His head is as round as a full moon and seems too big for the wispy little neck it is attached to. One arm is lying on top of the blanket; it’s so thin he doesn’t dare touch it. The fingers clasping the blanket are like tiny blue claws.
“My son.” He had imagined him chubby and rosy-cheeked. A burly thing with a booming voice, not this anemic little bird.
The angel is standing on the other side of the crib.
When he looks at her, she shakes her head. Carolina still has not yet opened her eyes. He cautiously wriggles his pinky into the fragile little hand, feels the smooth, cold fingers on his skin.
Everything about his son reeks of deficiency. He is too skinny, too purple, too quiet. Frans cannot give him what he needs. Kilos, color, voice. He just stands there, with his pinky in the crib and a head full of darkness.
A name, he thinks, all I can give him is a name.
The name that had been waiting for him since before his birth: his name, his father’s name, his father’s father’s name. He says it out loud in the otherwise noiseless room, half expecting that the skies will clear and fate will be reversed. But all remains still in that terrible darkness.
How long does Frans stand bent over the crib with those weightless hands in his? Years, centuries, half a second. He feels the skin gradually go cold, the tiny arm blue, the face ashen. A black ebb tide sucks his son deathward. The little fingers sink back into the crib, the birdlike chest stops moving. He looks at his son’s eyelids, two soft, white almonds in an expression of infinite sadness. “He is dead,” the nurse says, but Frans doesn’t hear her. There is a thick pane of frosted glass between his head and the world.
* * *
No, this isn’t working. I’m trying to write myself a way into the brain of a little boy who has lost his mother, of a resentful adolescent raised in a loveless environment, of a man who has lost his son. In my fictionalized world, Frans always gets the short end of the stick: with his father, his social class, world politics—but Jacoba’s maimed eye keeps drawing me back to the facts. December 5, 1946. An explosion, three deaths. It really did happen. You can’t go inventing things around this.
And yet I do. Invent. Or should I say: devise. B, for instance, does not live in the neighborhood named after Resistance heroes; she lives alongside it. My friend does not rent an atelier in Frans’s garrison. She does rent an atelier, and the base where Frans once served is now an artists’ colony, so it could have been. But it wasn’t. I shift things around, invent a show-and-tell presentation. Not for the standing ovation and the best marks in the class, but because otherwise it doesn’t tally. Because I need roads to connect the various regions that are starting to appear on the map. But now I’ve spent days wandering aimlessly among extenuating circumstances, in the fiction of a new myth: Bommenneef and the dead son.
I don’t know if Frans Jr. existed. And if he did, I don’t know what he died of, or if Frans Sr. was there when it happened. I don’t even know what a dying baby looks like. I picture the dead baby in W. F. Hermans’s The Darkroom of Damocles. With eyes closed in “an expression of infinite sadness,” which the father stared at “as if a thick pane of frosted glass were being held before his eyes.”
15 WEEKS LEFT
I SEARCH THE BOX Aunt S gave me for hints of a child. The divorce papers give Frans and Carolina’s wedding date as October 16, 1936. He was twenty-seven, she a year older. If B was right, if the marriage took place shortly before she gave birth, then it was most likely, in those days, a hasty, hush-hush event. Formalities at city hall, drinks with some friends, and then off to the brand-new house in Nieuwer-Amstel—now the suburb of Amstelveen—to the address on the divorce certificate and on various letters in the cardboard box.
A few days later I have an appointment in that part of town, so I cycle past the house.
It is still there. A sturdy, red specimen in an impeccable neighborhood, the picture of decency. Space, light, backyards full of well-brought-up children. The perfect place to raise a family. Behind the picture window alongside the front door, a woman sits at the table; next to her, a toddler is hunched over a drawing pad. Between them is a large teapot on one of those warmers with a small candle underneath. It is the kind of house you’ll feel nostalgic for later, that you’ll remember as a place where there was always a pot of tea on the table, kept warm above a little tea light. The toddler points to something on the paper, the woman smiles and kisses the child’s forehead.
I consider ringing the bell, but what for? Frans and Carolina only lived here for a short time. The marriage fell apart and Frans, according to the divorce papers, moved to the city center. What if Carolina and Frans had raised a son in this house? Would Frans’s life have taken a different path? Would he have ever become Bommenneef?
Back home, I phone all the cemeteries in that neighborhood, but nowhere is there a baby’s grave from 1936.
I ask my father, a retired pediatrician, if he knows what happened in those days to babies that died at birth.
Until the 198
0s, he says, it was assumed the parents had no emotional bond with a stillborn child or one that died soon after birth. “They were often whisked away. You were supposed to forget about it as quickly as possible. The babies were usually cremated.”
“And the ashes?”
“They got scattered somewhere near the hospital.”
I think back on that morning in the abortion clinic, installed in a large, cold chair with my legs spread and my gaze fixed on the world map on the wall. I had opted for a local anesthetic; I wanted to be present, not let myself dodge the reality of this blunder.
The doctor, a small, thin woman, placed a hand on my arm and pointed to the world map. “It’s going to hurt for a moment. Just focus on which countries you’d like to visit.”
On the table next to me was a suction pump with a flexible tube attached.
Somalia, I thought. Uzbekistan. Chile.
As she inserted the tube, I did my very best not to think of the being that was growing unawares inside me, getting bigger by the second, forming a skeleton this week. “I’ll count to three,” the doctor said. Greenland. Russia. Canada. A gurgling sound, everything in my body resisted, would not let go of that small unwanted life. A sharp pain flashed somewhere in my abdomen—so there’s my womb, I thought.
She removed the tube from my body, leaving behind a stinging, tingling emptiness.
I asked if I could see it. She hesitated. “There’s nothing to see.”
I very much wanted to see that nothing.
She reluctantly held up a gray cardboard container, filled to the brim with thick, dark blood with flecks floating in it.
“Are those limbs?”
She shook her head.
“There’s nothing left.”
She was uncomfortable, I could tell, with my look, my questions, but I couldn’t do otherwise. I had to look, keep looking, at that pulverized prospect of life.
In Search of a Name Page 7