“And now?”
“Now we rinse it down the drain,” she said quietly.
She slowly walked over to the stainless steel sink in the corner of the surgery, turned on the faucet, and ever so carefully, almost lovingly (I hoped), let the blood and the blobs swirl into the drain along with the water.
An hour later, I stumbled outside. From the zoo across the street, an elephant stared at me. The enormous beast stood a few meters from the rush of traffic, its heavy head leaning against the fence of its habitat. I imagined the remains of that cardboard container ending up in the groundwater, permeating the moat surrounding her terrain.
“Soon you’ll drink my baby,” I whispered.
She moved her trunk back and forth over the fence, as though trying to caress me from a distance, as if she knew why I was standing there crying.
* * *
I cannot find a grave for Frans Jr., but I do come across a death notice in the archive of the Catholic daily De Tijd. It’s no more than half a line long. “Frans Julian Johan van Heemstra,” and after that: “1 d.” One day. He’s listed in between Marie, who died at eight months, and Lena, five months. He was born and died on November 26, 1936. I’m surprised at how hard that half a line hits me. Such a long name for such a short life. How much of the world do you experience if you only live for one day? The violence of your birth, some vague specks of light and dark, maybe some milk, a warm washcloth. A smaller universe is hard to imagine.
I wonder if my grandmother knew about Frans Jr. The fact that he existed adds weight to my promise to her. Frans was not just hoping for a namesake he could give the ring to. He was looking for a stand-in for that little boy who should have been given his only piece of jewelry. It was a last-ditch effort to get things to line up in his otherwise messy life.
14 WEEKS LEFT
IT’S STRANGE WHAT this counting down does to the weeks. They become their own little era, each with its own characteristics and constructs. Week 26 is the week of wild dreams and short nights. I am in a constant state of drowsiness. New complaints are added to the existing repertoire: a permanent headache, and the feeling that a belt is being pulled tighter and tighter around my midriff. Shortness of breath, seeing stars.
The autumn is warm and humid. To escape the mosquitoes, D and I drive up to the family bungalow in Friesland, a small white farmhouse surrounded by pear trees. D lies in the grass reading, I sit in the shade of the elder tree, staring at the sheep in the adjacent meadow. A few days of “real togetherness,” that was the plan, but since we’ve been here, we are revolving in different orbits. I don’t think D is bothered by this. I even suspect that for him, this is the optimal kind of “togetherness”: a minimum of conversation, a maximum of relaxation. Not my cup of tea. I should have brought my laptop so I could have continued combing the National Archive’s database. I want to read the summary of Frans’s court case. I want to know how he defended himself, what he said in the presence of his cohorts and the victims’ families.
Now a week has been wasted on sheep and grass, while I could have been in the coolness of the reading room, sitting across from Herman with a cardboard box full of new information. I know it’s childish of me, but it feels unfair that D is blithely engrossed in his book while I sit here gasping for breath. I’m struck by the maddening matter-of-factness of it being my job, that it’s my body that’s bloated with fluid and not his, that my organs are getting squashed together to make room for this new life. If this child is as much his as mine, if it’s going to get his last name and we’re to share all the rights, why am I the only one here who is fat and short of breath?
Why doesn’t he ask me how I’m doing every five minutes?
I always thought pregnancy brings a man and woman closer together. That’d be thanks to the overworked image depicted on all those baby websites, in women’s magazines, in folders at the gynecologist, on people’s mantelpieces: the beaming father-to-be standing behind his pregnant wife with his hands firmly clasped around her belly. The image propagated as a sign of solidarity. Only now do I see its true meaning: the man is hiding behind her, he clamps himself to that big ball of flesh because otherwise he’ll be standing there empty-handed. Aside from the moments when he can briefly share in the experience—an ultrasound, the first visible movement under the taut skin—he has nothing to hold on to. This whole pregnancy thing is the fast track to growing apart. The one swells up to whalelike proportions, becomes oversensitive and weepy; the one is no longer one but two, and has to continually deal with the sci-fi of an alien living inside her, complete with growing pains and sleeplessness, while the other one just stays himself.
I hoist myself out of my chair, loudly clap my hands a few times, startling both D and the sheep. Enough grass for now. “Let’s do something,” I say.
D gets up slowly, lays a warm hand on my cheek.
“What would you like to do?” Ashamed of what I was just thinking, I take his hand in mine.
“Something together. Go somewhere. For a drive, a walk, it doesn’t matter, as long as we move. How about Franeker? The planetarium built by Eise Eisinga, the astronomer.”
* * *
An hour later we’re standing in front of the small brick building. D smiles at the sight of the weathered stone tablet depicting a stork, way at the top of the gable. “Look,” he says. “Three hundred years ago a child was born here.”
It’s quiet inside. “Slow day,” says the woman at the ticket counter.
She gives us a folder with a short biography of Eisinga. The first thing that catches my eye is the part about the death of his son Jelte, who was meant to have followed in his father’s footsteps. The woman directs us to the annex and the attic. As we slowly make our way down the hall, I read about how Eisinga reconstructed our solar system in his living room. It took him seven years. He had a day job as a wool comber; at night he hammered away at his universe. And soon we’re standing directly under a gilded sun.
It’s overwhelming. The miniature planets, painted half gold (for daytime) and half black (for night), make their way in real time over tracks in the ceiling: the slowest, Saturn (a perfect wooden sphere!), takes nearly thirty years to make a single revolution. The walls are crowded with dials: a moondial, a sundial, week, day, and hour dials. Everything moves in bigger or smaller circles, in all manner of ways of dividing time. It works; it fits. The unfathomable darkness above us has been reduced to manageable, room-sized proportions. Planets that fit in the palm of your hand, driven by a slow-moving mechanism of gears carved out of oak, which in turn is kept in motion by metal counterweights in an old cupboard.
“It’s like a time machine,” D whispers, his voice full of wonder. I hear a sentence in my mind: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Maybe that is what Eisinga wanted, to harness time, to become unstuck like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a man who traveled back and forth between random moments in the past and the future.
I ask D which moment in time he would most like to travel to. “The near future,” he replies. “The first time I fall asleep with my son. That must feel great, spending the whole night alongside a tiny little body, knowing you’ll wake up next to each other. And you?”
“December 5, 1946.”
“Oh yeah. Of course,” D sighs. “Your hero’s tale. And which moment, exactly?”
“The moment Bommenneef writes out the hit list.”
No, earlier, I think as soon as the words have left my mouth: the moment he formulates the plan. Or earlier, the death of his baby son. Or of his mother. The moment when someone, his future niece, should have been standing next to him with a hand on his shoulder and the right words on her lips.
D interrupts my reverie with a knock on the wooden alcove bed. “You know what this is?”
I shake my head.
“The perfect nursery.”
From somewhere above us comes a soft, regular ticking. It is the clock, I read in the folder, that keeps everything i
n motion. We stand there for a few more minutes, silently gazing up at the planets on the ceiling. I get a lump in my throat. So it is possible to ward off chaos. With dedication, with love, with time. I want to impress D with my favorite quote by Immanuel Kant, but pregnancy dementia has gnawed away at my memory. I get no further than “the starry sky above me and the moral law within me” and something with “awe” and “admiration.”
Eise Eisinga lost his son, but he had his stars.
Bommenneef lost his son, but he had his moral law.
Only, that moral law did not earn him awe or admiration. A year earlier Frans would probably have been decorated. Instead he got a prison sentence. How long does a war last? Does the war revolve with us, like the earth around the sun? I try to imagine how Frans stood in the courtroom, how he faced the judge. Convinced of the rightness of his deed, not ruffled by collateral fatalities, because a single life is meaningless in the light of the stars and one’s own moral law.
13 WEEKS LEFT
WHAT A RELIEF to see the sheep and the lindens disappear in the rearview mirror. No more time to lose. Uneasy about my persistent physical complaints, D insists I call the obstetrician’s office from the car. I get their voice mail, which probably means they’re in the middle of a delivery. I leave a message that I’m dizzy and seeing stars, and ask if I can move my appointment up.
Back home, I go straight upstairs, sit down at my desk, and flip open the laptop. The National Archive website soon gives me what I’m after: there is a written report of Frans’s court case. I send an email asking to see it, and within ten minutes I have an answer: the box will be ready for me today.
On my way to the station, the obstetrician calls back. “I just heard your message. It doesn’t sound good. I want to see you right away.”
I curse and turn back.
Sitting in the stuffy waiting room, I look with horror at my bare legs. Blue veins wind their way up my calves to my knees. No idea how this riverscape got there. I follow the thick meanders with my finger, try in vain to press them back into my flesh. An archipelago of mosquito bites has formed among the rivers. We had hoped that a week’s absence of human blood in our house would have driven them to look for new feeding grounds, but when we got back from Friesland this afternoon, they were sitting there on the walls, waiting for us. With his bag still on his back, D called the pest control. “There’s got to be a nest here somewhere,” I heard him say, “and we have to get rid of it.” I thought: mosquitoes don’t build nests. The only nest in the house is me. And I imagined them coming to fumigate me with their spray canisters full of poison. The man on the phone promised to come as soon as possible.
In the examination room, the concerned obstetrician listens to the summary of what’s ailing me. She winds the blood-pressure sleeve around my left arm, pushes the start button, and watches the counter shoot up, tick back down, and eventually settle on a score: 150/98.
“I was afraid of that,” she says. “Far too high. Could be preeclampsia. We’ll have to do a blood test. The best thing would be to go straight to the hospital, I’ll call and let them know you’re coming. We don’t want to waste any time with this.” I phone D, who arrives within five minutes and races to the hospital as if I’m already in labor.
Once inside, he grabs the first available wheelchair. “Here, sit down.” I want to resist; I can walk just fine, but D pushes me into the chair and wheels me at top speed toward the elevator. I’m brought to a small white room in the obstetrics ward and made to lie down on a strangely high bed fitted out with all manner of bars, wheels, and handgrips.
A nurse hurries in, takes my blood pressure again, repeats what the obstetrician said: “Too high.” A cartful of needles and tubes is pulled up alongside me, I’m jabbed, I pee in a little jar, I answer questions. Then a man comes in, introduces himself as Dr. Dukhi, the duty gynecologist. Everything about Dr. Dukhi is soft: his hands, his voice, his hair that dances in dark locks around his face. He looks at me first before speaking; it is a nice kind of being looked at, like he wants to make human, nonmedical contact before we start in on blood counts and risk factors. Now that he’s here, a sense of calm has finally descended over the room. I can breathe again.
“It’s hypertension,” he says gently.
“Hyper what?” D asks.
“Tension, hypertension,” replies Dr. Dukhi. “Pregnancy poisoning, although the term is misleading. It’s probably an overactive immune response to the placenta, which holds foreign substances from the father.”
“So she’s allergic to the baby?” D asks with half a grin.
“To the father’s half, at least,” Dr. Dukhi replies amiably. He pats D on the shoulder. “Not your fault.” I can’t tell from his expression whether he’s joking or not. He turns back to me and says, “We’ll take it from here. We want to keep the baby inside for as long as possible. Your job is to get plenty of rest and come by every other day for a checkup.”
I look around the room, my eyes follow the bare walls decorated with the occasional sticker of a large pink flower, peeling loose around the edges. Every other day: this throws my whole timetable into disarray.
“You’ll have to make some adjustments,” Dr. Dukhi says. He probably noticed my startled look. “But it’s for a good cause.” I nod. Of course. A good cause. The cause that is taking over my life, slowly but surely, without sacrificing anything of itself. The cause I can’t quite get a grip on, and for which I can’t prepare myself except to give it a name and a story. Which requires me to go to The Hague today.
But first a nurse attaches me to a large machine. “We’ll measure the fetus’s heartbeat and register its movements, and check the uterine activity,” she explains. I nod absently, still taken aback by Dr. Dukhi’s pronouncement. Two straps are attached around my belly, and we hear the rapid heartbeat of our son, the gallop of a tiny horse. D looks shaken, and I feel a childish satisfaction that my body is now also his problem.
For half an hour we listen, hand in hand, to the muffled white noise.
Looking through the window into the corridor, I see the birth announcements on the wall: Kees, Mo, Fien, Ajouad, Marieke, Marijn.
D follows my gaze. “We should also start thinking about the birth announcement,” he says.
I nod.
I once read about a nomadic tribe in Australia whose custom it is to name the child after the place where the mother first learned she was pregnant. A forest. A lake. A rock. Like in the olden days, when foundlings were named after the place where they were discovered. Perhaps it’s more logical to name a child after a place than after a person. A place gives the new life room to grow, whereas a person already occupies that space, suffocating you with his or her past and pratfalls.
We could name the baby after the small park in front of our house, where I finally dared take the pregnancy test out of my bag, half an hour after I peed over it. Or after the slender blossoms I was sitting under when I called D with the news, or after the flock of starlings that took off, screeching, the moment he answered.
D drives me home, installs me on the sofa, and leaves for work. As soon as he shuts the door behind him I get up, take my bag, and cycle to the station. I do my best to move as calmly as possible. No hurry, no stress. I know exactly what D would say if he saw me get onto the train to The Hague right now. I know what everyone would say, but lying in bed brooding isn’t doing my blood pressure any good either. No, if there’s one place I’m at ease, it’s in a warm train that will take me to the dossier I need. The court report of Bommenneef’s trial.
When the revolving door spits me out, I spot Herman in the coffee corner with his book open in front of him. This time, instead of orange juice, he’s got a minicarton of Fristi, a sweetened milk drink. I watch him as he slowly turns a page. There is something light and dreamy in the way he moves, as though his limbs are almost weightless, as if he’s not an almost-elderly man with gray hair and a hunched back.
He looks up and breaks into a big grin w
hen he sees me. I return the smile and slowly make my way over to him. I feel light-headed; with every step, a row of stars dances around my field of vision. He’s at the counter ordering me a cappuccino before I’ve even reached his table. Two minutes later he plonks it down in front of me. “Extra shot. Good to see you again.”
I sit down next to him and jab him with my elbow. “Haven’t you got that dossier memorized by now?”
He gives me a quizzical look.
Stupid and insensitive of me to start right in about his father. I feel the blood rush to my cheeks.
“The dossier,” I stammer. “Isn’t that the same one as before?”
Herman laughs. “What kind of old fool do you take me for?”
My cheeks burn.
“So what have you spent a whole year reading?”
“I’m following the threads.”
“Threads?”
“It’s a web. My father’s dossier leads to the dossiers of the men he betrayed, and their dossiers in turn lead to other ones. This way I’m exploring all the stories surrounding my father’s.”
“How many stories are thrashing around in your web, then?”
Herman thinks for a moment. “About 450, I think. Of victims, perpetrators, a little bit of everything.”
Herman sips his coffee, and then some Fristi, and chuckles at my surprise.
“With every new dossier,” he begins hesitantly, “I move farther away from my father, and yet it still feels like I’m getting closer to him. For a long time I thought I had to figure him out, but more and more I’m realizing that a person is part of a web, and understanding that web and its structure is the only way to really get to know the person.”
“But isn’t that a roundabout method? There will be people in that web who have nothing to do with your father.”
In Search of a Name Page 8