He nods. “Maybe it’s that unknown factor that I’m looking for. I might be reading the dossier of a perfect stranger whose story is only obliquely related to my father’s, and suddenly something will click.”
“Don’t you lose track of cause and effect?”
“You can’t tell these stories chronologically. They need to be approached differently to get the complete picture.”
“But that doesn’t do justice to what happened.”
“A story doesn’t do justice to the dead anyway. In fact, it shortchanges them.”
Herman stirs his coffee. The barista thumbs through a magazine. Outside, commuters rush to and from the station. Out there, the present moves toward the future. Here inside, all there is is space and coffee, a barista of few words, and two people in search of completeness. The foyer is a hinge in time. The revolving door is still, the counters are unstaffed. Beyond the barrier gates farther up, in the coolness of the reading room, are the boxes full of history.
Herman asks me the name of the man whom Bommenneef blew up. “François,” I reply. “François Boer.”
He repeats the name, as though to learn it by heart, which gives me an uneasy feeling. Then he leaps up out of his chair. “The dead await us.” As we head to the reading room, I notice how strangely he walks. There’s no regularity in his gait; he takes big steps, then small ones. He’s marching out of step—but out of step with what? With the way things tally.
The dead who await me today are the ones who killed last time’s dead. Those said to have been on the “right” side of history, who left behind commendations, medals, and names that will be passed from generation to generation. The heroes of the Resistance, the Bommenneefs.
Today the Afghan hound is wearing a gold choker around his skinny neck. When he slides the box across the counter, I notice how long and dirty his fingernails are. This dossier has not come from the Extraordinary Jurisdiction archives. Accordingly, I’m allowed to sit wherever I want, but I still gravitate toward the big white table, I think out of some guilty conscience, but in regard to whom, I can’t say. As before, there is just one chair free, my chair. In addition to Herman, across from me, and the twins next to him, I recognize a few other faces.
The box contains a well-thumbed folder that I presume was once red but is now a faded orangey color. At the upper right, in scrawled handwriting, is a brief description of the contents. Report of hearing regarding bomb attack on 5 December 1946.
The report is five pages long, although “page” is a rather big word for the yellowed sheets covered in stains and smears (there’s even an edge burned off one of them—the cigarette of a duty detective? An attempt to destroy evidence?). I carefully place them side by side on the table, open the Facts folder on my laptop, and begin typing.
The report begins with the plea by Frans’s lawyer, Ponte. He appeals to the court’s empathy: “Whoever wishes to understand my client must understand that he is a man of his time. One cannot understand the man without understanding his time; cannot understand his time without understanding his war; this case goes beyond the question of the guilt of a single person; this case is about us all, the entire postwar society.”
“Nonsense,” snarls a voice under her breath from across the table. It’s one of the twins. The other is glaring angrily at the sheet of paper lying in front of her. Their whispering has turned into a hissing is-so-is-not that gradually envelops the table. People glance up, clear their throat, shoot them dirty looks. Only Herman stays engrossed in his dossier. The sister who started the palaver scuffs her chair back and marches out of the reading room. Quiet returns. I reread what I’ve just typed and try to imagine Ponte speaking these words. Finger raised, stately posture, voice at full volume. I wonder if his listeners were receptive to his argument. I am, at least. Probably because of that rhetorical repetition of the word “understand.”
You cannot understand a man without understanding his war. Do I understand Bommenneef’s war? What do I know about it? A hand minus a thumb is my first and most vivid association. Specifically, the hand belonging to Mrs. Koopmans, who used to clean for us. “Chopped off by the Krauts,” she replied when, after years of sneaking looks at it, I mustered up the courage to ask. The Nazis were after her brother—a wanted Resistance figure—and tried to coerce his hiding place out of her, but Mrs. Koopmans refused. She considered it a fair deal, a thumb in return for a life. She let me touch it, that dimple in her old hand. Under the soft skin was an unseen stump, it felt hard and rough, made me think of the base of a chopped-down tree.
Ponte continues his plea with an accusation against Corporal De Boer. “My client, who contributed substantially to the Resistance, was drawn into this scheme by his subordinate Ate Tekele De Boer. Witnesses confirm that the captain changed after De Boer was assigned to his regiment, a man with a reputation as a loose cannon and who had been involved in racketeering during the Hunger Winter of ’44–’45.”
I quickly retype this as I read, shortening a word here and there, curious where it’s all headed. Maybe this is what B meant when she said Frans had been “duped into it.” Maybe it wasn’t Captain van Heemstra after all, but Corporal De Boer who had masterminded the attack, and that Frans had been dragged into a sinister plot cooked up by another. Another new twist in the story: Bommenneef the fall guy.
But right underneath Ponte’s accusation, De Boer’s counsel claims just the opposite. It was Captain van Heemstra who had manipulated the corporal. He calls Frans an “untrustworthy fellow” and says there had been rumors about him, as head of the motor vehicle facility, running an auto-parts smuggling operation from France. His team is said to have also made off with some eighty vehicles and a large number of tires. The men felt that their role in the Resistance justified earning a little extra cash on the side. Captain van Heemstra, says the lawyer, was an “egocentric automobile fanatic” who was a master in exploiting his subordinates. “My client wanted to do the right thing, as he had always done, and assumed that Van Heemstra was leading him along an enlightened path.”
I bring the yellowed paper right up to my nose, study the sloppy typography, as though the letters themselves will reveal which of the two opposing stories on the page is true. It smells like moss, or no, like basement: dampness and stale air. Frans the victim or Frans the culprit: I find both choices equally unappealing.
The next page starts by stating that following his account, De Boer’s lawyer reads a poem “that his client, in deepest despair, wrote while in detention.” The poem follows:
And now I humbly beg your honor,
Relieve me of this cross of shame,
I cannot bear it any longer,
for it has ruined my good name.
I read and reread the lines. So this is where De Boer ended up: no boontje and loontje but shame and name. The childish rhyme irritates me. I’ve already chosen sides in this case, and as far as I’m concerned, De Boer is brazenly playing the court. He hopes that with a cheap ditty he’ll be able to manipulate the following rhyme word: “blame.”
I skim further, hoping for some sign of remorse from Frans, preferably more eloquent than the corporal’s. But all I see are brief witness statements from fellow military men, none of whom appears to be well-disposed to Frans. “The captain operated as though the whole world were his enemy,” says one of his subordinates, “so everything was justified.” He tells the court that Frans spread the word around the motor vehicle facility that a clandestine organization was being set up to punish political offenders. Frans hinted that the highest echelons of the military stood behind this initiative, but never named names. Although no one was privy to the ins and outs of the organization, everyone wanted to join it. “It was precisely that secrecy that attracted us,” says a sergeant. “That mysterious hit squad was on everyone’s lips.”
Then Johan Peterse’s lawyer takes over. Peterse is the man who delivered the bomb to the Prinsengracht and subsequently tossed the remaining two bombs into the canal. He, too, accuses Frans of b
eing the instigator. I reluctantly retype his statement: “My client is a man bound by loyalty, as this country expects of its sons. A solid, balanced man and an exemplary soldier. My client was decorated in 1945 for his wartime bravery. This bombing tragedy was a fateful accident. My client believed that all four potential targets were traitors who, through this secret mission, would receive the punishment they had thus far evaded.”
Once I’ve retyped that second sheet, I file it away, irritated. This is not what I was hoping for. I want to read how Frans testified in his own words that the mission went differently than planned, that he was shocked to hear there were innocent victims, that he’d been searching for the right words ever since to express his regret to the survivors.
I turn to the next page and sigh as I wrestle through yet more statements painting Frans as a vindictive authoritarian. Just as I am starting to suspect that the court stenographer had ignored his words or that there’s a page missing, I reach this passage: “Captain van Heemstra remained silent during the hearing. He always maintained his innocence, even after all the evidence had been presented. When, during his arrest, he was asked how he felt about the death of that girl, who in no way whatsoever was involved in the affair, he replied: ‘These things happen.’ ”
My stomach contracts when I read those last words. I skim the rest of the page in search of any other statements from Frans. An answer, an explanation, a retort. But not a word. I’m going to have to make do with “These things happen.” Collateral damage. I hope none of the victims’ family were in the courtroom. And if they were, I hope there was no eye contact when those words were read aloud. I look around the white table, wonder how often the others feel disgust when they read their dossiers, and how they all appear to maintain their self-control amid so many upsetting revelations.
Limbs push against the inside of my belly. The baby’s stretching. I place my hands on the lump that might be his head but could just as well be his backside. There’s no getting around it. Frans was unscrupulous. Guilty. An outlaw.
I wearily take the last crumpled page from the table, and within a few sentences I stumble onto yet another perspective on the events.
Two and a half hours before the court reached its verdict, a certain Major Baak holds “an emotional speech” that is taken down as witness testimony. “Major Baak,” writes the stenographer, “describes, with great empathy and drama, in both bearing and voice, the qualities of these men and the tragedy of their lives.
“This is a matter” (says the major) “on the edge of resistance and on the line separating the old days from the new. Where does resistance begin, and where does it end? Does it end at the moment of liberation? Shouldn’t there be a distinction between actual and psychological resistance? For these men, the Resistance was far from over, and seeing as they were the Resistance all those years, we could say that if they felt it was not over, then for them it indeed wasn’t over. And if it was not over, how deserving of punishment is an act that a year earlier would have earned them a commendation?
“Can war turn into peace from one day to the next?
“Can a man turn from a hero into a murderer in a single night?”
Directly underneath are the results of the psychiatric examination Frans underwent while in custody. The diagnosis: “Resistance psychosis.” What the symptoms or indications of such a condition are, no one says.
And then there is one last witness. According to a sergeant from Frans’s barracks, the captain had been in contact with several men from the Dutch security services who had similar views on bringing unindicted war criminals to justice. They complained at the impossibility of prosecuting “these folks” due to lack of direct evidence of treason. They discussed setting up a national network of vigilantes and fantasized about “large-scale military action.” Ex-Resistance men versus the traitors. The sergeant claims to have heard from a reliable source that the security services themselves supported the attack. “Captain van Heemstra will decline to tell you anything about it himself,” he says. “It was a strictly confidential mission.”
This fresh take on Frans’s silence renews my hopes of heroism. Loyal to his mission until the very end. This is how I have always pictured Bommenneef: steadfast of character, dedicated to the fight for justice, ready to take the fall rather than betray his comrades.
But the judge is not swayed by the possible involvement of the security services, nor by Major Baak’s plea.
Frans is deemed a “danger to the state, and unfit for continued military status—unfit to the degree that he must be permanently prohibited from serving in the armed forces.” He is sentenced to thirteen years’ imprisonment, minus time already served. Ate De Boer gets eleven and a half years, Johan Peterse seven.
As far as the judge is concerned, the war is over, and thus the Resistance as well.
I gather up the yellowed sheets of paper. Even though I have retyped them all, it feels wrong to put them back in the box and abandon them to the indifference of that cavernous depot.
Would anyone notice if I just slid them into my bag? I pick up the stack, glance cautiously around the table, and see that the security man has his eye on me.
I briefly consider ignoring him, jamming the papers into my bag and walking off. What does it matter? What’s the point of wasting storage room for another seventy years with a dossier that interests no one except me?
But the security guard casts me a cautionary glance. I look at my tablemates, silently bent over their stories. Suddenly the white table has become a prison, the security man the warden, and history our punishment.
I place the papers back in the box, turn it in to the Afghan hound, and walk toward the security gates at the exit. I turn to wave goodbye to Herman, but he gestures that I should wait for him. I shake my head. Fatigue is streaming through my body. I do not want to wait. I want to find evidence that supports that last testimony, confirmation that the assignment came from some higher-up, and that Frans kept quiet out of allegiance, not callousness.
I ask at the counter if there is a dossier on the National Security Services in the 1940s. I have to start somewhere.
“What year?”
“1946.”
She types something in, clicks a few times with her mouse.
“No dossier, but there’s a book.”
She gets up and walks over to the low bookcase across from her counter. Her finger skims along the rows of books, and she pulls a gigantic square tome off the shelf. History of the Dutch Domestic Security Services. “You can’t take it with you,” she says, “but I can hold it for you at the counter for as long as you need it.”
12 WEEKS LEFT
EVERY MORNING AFTER D closes the door behind him, I shuffle off to the station, board the train to The Hague, and then pant my way the last hundred meters to the National Archive. I’m now one of the regulars. Every morning the same empty chair is waiting for me at the big white table. The days follow a regular pattern. I collect the book at the counter, smile to the Afghan hound as I walk to the reading room, nod briefly at the twins and then to the security guard, who points with raised eyebrows at his Post-its, to which I respond by shaking my head and showing him the book: no “extraordinary jurisdiction.” I read, and if I’m too tired, which is often the case, I take pictures of the pages with my phone so I can read them later at home. At 11:30 sharp Herman slides his chair back and we take a break, usually still going through our reading material, at the coffee bar. I leave at three o’clock so that I’m in bed when D gets home. To make it look plausible I put a mug with an inch of tepid tea and a plate with crumbs next to the bed.
I wrestle my way through the first half of the book in three days. I read about the formation of the Dutch intelligence service in 1919, after Pieter Jelles Troelstra, the dreaded socialist leader who had called for a revolution following World War I, had managed to rustle up three thousand communists for a demonstration. I read about the “red scare” and the “German threat.” I get distracted, do
ze off. The pages are too big and the type too small; I wander past dates and facts that have nothing to do with my story, but I don’t dare skip anything for fear I might miss that one paragraph about the secret plot.
Only on day 4 do I encounter names I recognize from the dossier. Military men who testified at the trial, the ones mentioned as being involved in the potential conspiracy. I read about the tangle of clubs and organizations who claimed to belong to the postwar secret service. The “Resistance Council,” the vigilante units, the intelligence wing of the “Stoottroepen,” the “Dutch Secret Service.” Various groups of men who felt that their role in the Resistance gave them the right to determine the direction of the postwar Netherlands. I meander through pages and pages of wiretapping, conflicts, offshoots, and subgroups—who knew what a messy business peace could be? And then, halfway through the book, there it is in black-and-white: the name “Frans van Heemstra.” I take my cell phone, photograph the entire chapter to be able to refer back to it at home, and start reading.
It describes a “Special Missions Committee” with which Frans was in contact in the period preceding the bombing. “A secret organization for combatting communism.” Their plan was ambitious: to consolidate all the vigilante units as a show of strength against the “leftists.” If this is true, then the aim of settling the score with Dutch traitors was no more than a ploy to rouse the vigilantes and revive ex-Resistance heroes’ combativeness. But nowhere do I find any proof for this theory. What I do find are descriptions of extravagant but never-executed plans, rumors, failed shadow armies. And then the paragraph that takes me so by surprise that I have to reread it three times before the reality of it sinks in.
Frans was said to have been part of the founding, in late 1945, of a “neue Abwehr,” a right-wing terrorist organization bent on joining forces with ex-Nazis to combat the left-wing danger. One of their plans, I read, was to spring him from prison so that he could go to Germany and work for a Nazi spy.
In Search of a Name Page 9