After the fifth ring she answers with a sleepy voice, and sighs when she hears my name.
“Do you know what time it is?”
“Sorry. Should I call back later?”
“Never mind. Haven’t you finished your scavenger hunt yet?”
“I haven’t found what I’m after.”
I ask her about Frans’s end. “What were his last words? Was there a letter?”
“If you really want to know,” she says, irked, “it was dreadful. The marine corps man who cared for him said he was impossible. The last few months he was a disheveled mess. At night he was a ghost on wheels. He cursed, he scratched the legs he no longer had. He died while the marine was back here for a few days. The man from the corner grocery kept an eye on things and brought supplies. Juan Carlos. He sat next to him when he died.”
“Did this Juan Carlos ever say anything about it?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Just that he died. In his wheelchair.”
“But nothing about last words? A message? A declaration of some kind?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Nothing about the ring he sent to Holland?”
“No idea.”
I picture Frans in his wheelchair, sleepless and swearing. It must have been his conscience keeping him awake. A ghost from the past that goaded him through the house. But even if B knows anything, she’s not going to talk.
The road to Frans’s final, honest moment is a dead end. For a moment I consider going to Spain, looking up Juan Carlos, asking him how it went. But I stop myself. Out of the question. What if the Spanish sun pushes up my blood pressure further than it already is, that my water breaks there in Vinaròs, that our son is born on the very spot where Bommenneef died. Besides, D wouldn’t let me go. I look up Vinaròs on my iPhone. It’s not far from Barcelona. I also check the airlines’ rules about flying when pregnant. Depending on the airline, it’s either thirty-two or thirty-six weeks. I look up fares. Just to see if it would even be possible, I tell myself. As the vacation website calculates the fare, another cramp shoots through my calf. I try to repeat what D did—massage, stay calm—but my hands aren’t as warm or as big as his, and the pain bites into my muscles. All I can do is wait. Slowly, ever so slowly, the cramp recedes. The tickets are affordable. The vacation site gives the weather in Vinaròs an 8.8 out of 10. I move the cursor to the icon in the middle of the screen: “Book Now.” Even if I did dare, D would flip out at the very idea. And not only him: my sisters, my parents, my friends would unanimously forbid it.
I scroll through the photos of the History of the Dutch Domestic Security Services. Reopen the emails from the psychiatrists and again get mired on the word “terrorist.” I have to find a new route, one that runs straight through the white area on the map, otherwise I won’t make it on time.
The doorbell rings. Startled, I look up from my phone. Eight thirty. At the door are two men, one tall and one short, wearing thick rubber boots and carrying something that resembles a giant pump.
“Pest control!” the tall one cries. D appears at the top of the stairs, his head still clouded in sleep. “Shit … forgot. I’d asked new exterminators to come.” While D gets dressed and I make coffee, the men inspect every corner of the house and conclude that there are indeed a lot of mosquitoes. I tell him about the last, failed, attempt to get rid of them.
“You’ve got to tackle the source, not the bugs,” the tall one says. He wants to inspect the crawl space. “Where there are mosquitoes, there’s water,” he continues, “and vice versa.” The short one nods earnestly at everything his tall colleague says, as though he is proclaiming great philosophical truths.
I yell up to D: “Do we have a crawl space?”
“Of course,” he shouts back.
“Look under the doormat,” says the one.
“I’ll do it,” says the other, eyeing my belly.
He pulls the mat aside, revealing, to my surprise, a hatch I’ve never seen in the two years we’ve lived here.
I bend over and pull on the metal ring. There’s not much to see down there—a dark, low cavern under the floor—but still, it’s weird that I’ve lived here for two years without any idea it even existed. “Does this run under the entire house?”
Instead of answering, the men sink to their knees and—as though they’re following some predetermined choreography—simultaneously stick their head in the opening. “There’s water,” the small one says. “Lots of water,” adds the tall one. “And lots of mosquitoes,” says the small one in turn. Bert and Ernie. I look at the two headless bent-over bodies. If you were to dig a tunnel straight through the earth from our kitchen, a friend told us at the housewarming party, you’d come out in the South Pacific. It made me dizzy, that deep-blue antipode of our house. Water, sun, and sharks opposite our tidy, quiet life. But first there’s the crawl space, a buffer zone filled with bugs and damp.
The men hang a rubber hose into the opening and hook up the pump. The short one pushes a button.
“And now?” I ask.
“We wait,” says the tall one.
I go upstairs to my desk, open Google Maps on my laptop, and zoom in on Vinaròs. The street view images show a surprisingly empty cityscape. I drag my little virtual yellow man to the seaside boulevard: Avinguda de Francisco José Balada. The beach, too, looks forsaken. A bright-blue sky, light-gray waves. Right up near the boulevard, a family (Germans, I automatically assume) sits in a large hollow eating sandwiches; otherwise the place is deserted. If I scroll the viewer to the left, I see a group of people, their pant legs rolled up, walking along the high-water mark. On their side, the sky is overcast—the photos were clearly not taken on the same day, and maybe these people weren’t ever really on the beach at all, but photoshopped into the picture by Google to make the beach scene complete. I click away from the coast, wander past light-pink villas and low-rise white vacation apartment complexes. Twice, I pass a corner grocery, and in one of them I notice the silhouette of a man behind the window.
“We’re done!” A loud voice from downstairs startles me out of my Spanish ramble. “All taken care of!”
They leave the hatch open when they leave. D sends me back to bed, but as soon as he’s left for work, I’m back at my laptop.
I spend the morning rereading the notes I’ve taken since the beginning of my search. I wander, word by word, toward the dead end where I’ve now arrived. And gradually a new strategy unfolds.
Until now I have invariably approached the case from the same perspective: that of the culprits, and the route that led them to Prinsengracht 266. How about if I open the door? Inspect what was behind it? The staircase, the lost lives? I open the document with the list of injuries and Maria Johanna’s statement. There must be family members, children, and grandchildren of the victims who have some knowledge of the incident. The other side of the story has surely been passed in the same game of telephone through their families. They’ll remember what my family has forgotten. Maybe a distant niece on their side has also delved into the bombing. We only have to meet to fill in the blanks and reach the correct conclusions. I need a family tree, names, addresses. I need the help of someone who is better and quicker at this than I am.
9 WEEKS LEFT
I SEE HERMAN SITTING in the coffee nook as I pass through the revolving door. Before I can call out to him, he glances up—a calm, dry look—and waves both hands above his head—I’m not waving, I’m drowning—what song is that from again?
As I waddle toward him, he goes over to the counter and orders a coffee and a doppio. The barista, having spotted me, puts on the Buena Vista Social Club, just to be on the safe side. “You’ve changed,” Herman says when I sit down next to him.
“Fatter,” I say.
“A tiny bit.”
“A huge tiny bit. Three and a half pounds in four days. My body sucks up every drop of fluid that crosses its path.”
Herman laughs, and I laugh along, rel
ieved that our reunion is going so smoothly.
“Are you okay?” he asks. Now he sounds worried.
I nod. I don’t feel like bringing up my blood pressure; I have to make good use of the little time I’ve got left. In three hours D will come home and my mother will show up with a pot of chicken soup. If I’m not back in bed by then, they’re likely to put me under house arrest until the delivery.
My entire body tells me what a bad idea this was; even that short walk from the station has worn me out. But I didn’t know how else to reach Herman, and without him I’ll never round this off on time.
“I need you,” I say.
Herman nods, as though he expected it.
“And I apologize for … ,” I add. “I’m …”
“Never mind.”
The barista cautiously—I’ll bet he’s afraid of riling me—sets our coffees on the counter.
Herman leaps up, returns with the cups. For a few seconds we sit in silence. Then he starts to talk. His voice is quiet and melancholy.
“After you walked off last time, I drove down to Margraten, to the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial. To the grave I adopted: Johnny, an American kid who’s been lying there in the Limburg hills for seventy years. He was seventeen. Seventeen. And standing there among all those white crosses, I …” His voice trails off, and he looks at me with watery eyes.
I’m afraid he’s going to cry, and that I’ll start crying, too, because I cry over everything these days. But Herman does not cry. He looks in silence at his coffee. I want to touch him, comfort him, but I don’t dare.
“Maybe you should adopt something else,” I say. “A tree. Or an Oxfam goat. A foster child, if need be. Adopting a grave is so … so …”
“Sad?”
“So desolate. Adoption’s supposed to be about hope, about the future. Investing in a new life.”
“In a pan-dimensional world, Johnny could have been my son. I stood there among all those headstones and thought: this war will never, never, never be over.”
I reach out my hand, unsure of where to place it. On his shoulder? His cheek? It lands on his elbow, where it awkwardly remains.
“It’s been seventy years,” I say. “Pretty soon that war will be ancient history.”
Herman glumly stirs his coffee. “You have no idea. Officially I didn’t experience it firsthand, but the war was still going when I was born, it was in my mother’s milk, it was in my diapers. It’s got nothing to do with exact dates or with how much time has passed.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He chuckles. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know. It’s the best I could come up with.”
Herman bends over and picks up the worn attaché case from the floor under his chair. “Here, I’ve got something for you.” He places a sheet of paper, a photocopy, on the table. It’s got two columns, on the left a list of the names of the Boer family: François, Greetje, their son, and a daughter I haven’t yet come across in the archive. The right-hand column gives their date and place of birth.
“Exactly what I was looking for,” I say, surprised.
“I thought so,” Herman replies. “Boer’s children might still be alive, otherwise you could use their data to trace the grandchildren. It’s taking a bit longer to find Jacoba’s family tree without her birthdate.”
Herman gives me a guilty look and laughs in that irresistible adolescent giggle of his.
“If you think it’s too much, just say so, but I’ve got one more thing for you.”
He digs under the little cartons of orange juice and pulls out a small stack of crinkled papers. On the top is a photo of Prinsengracht 266, just after the bombing. It’s smaller than I remember when my grandmother showed it to me. On the ground floor is a narrow garage. “Prinsengracht Autos Motorcycles Bicycles” is painted in block letters on the brickwork. Two men in trilby hats crouch on the sidewalk, inspecting a large pile of glass. Next to them are two other men, one of them a uniformed policeman. The door to number 266 is open, offering a glimpse of the entrance hall, with its white tiles with a thin black border. It’s what the two passersby saw when, the previous evening, they put their deadly package on the stairs. A half-charred curtain flaps from an upstairs window.
“From The Hague photo bank,” Herman says. “They tore down the house in 2002, by the way.” I take the next paper from under the photo: a ground plan of the street. Herman points to a small orange peaked-roof icon.
“Now it’s a shopping center with underground parking.”
I look at the little orange roof. Do you suppose that there’s anything left under the concrete? A splinter that didn’t get swept up, and then got washed into the ground by the rainwater? Tiny bits of François’s or Jacoba’s DNA? How much of you stays behind in the place where you die?
I touch the photograph, the shattered glass. “Did you know that Boer wasn’t such a criminal after all? There were rumors, but nothing was proven.”
Herman nods. “Fish and birds. I’ve read the dossier. But that bird-catching isn’t as innocent as it sounds. Carrier pigeons were the forgotten heroes of World War II. They flew through barrages and conflagrations with information strapped to their feet, they were on board airplanes and submarines. They were spies, soldiers, freedom fighters. Did you know that after the war, thirty pigeons were given a commendation? That’s why the Germans sent people out to catch and kill them. People with bird-catching skills, like François. So no, nothing was proven, and maybe nothing did happen, but maybe it did. The question is, which pigeon got caught in his net?”
This new information throws me off. Just as I was getting used to the idea of an innocent François sacrificed on the altar of belligerence, this crops up.
“My god,” I sigh, “what is it going to take to reach the right conclusion?”
“Everything.”
My telephone vibrates in my bag. It’ll be D, or one of my sisters or parents; someone is worried because I haven’t returned their call quickly enough and will worry even more when I do answer and am clearly not in bed. I check the screen: seven missed calls. Three from D, three from my mother, one from my sister. I scribble my contact information on the Prinsengracht street plan and tuck it back into Herman’s bag.
“I have to go.”
Herman nods. “How much longer now?”
“Nine weeks.”
“I’ll make sure you get what you’re looking for.”
Back home, I take out the blood pressure meter my father gave me, strap the sleeve around my upper arm, push the button. The machine’s hum makes me think of the mosquitoes. With the water pumped out of the crawl space, the mosquitoes gradually disappeared, and for some strange reason I miss them, because it’s suddenly so quiet in the bedroom and without the distraction of the buzzing I’m free to agonize to my heart’s content. In twenty-three short beeps the meter counts down to today’s reading. I’m surprised by how low it is: lower than yesterday, lower than even this morning. So the search is not the cause of my stress; in fact, it’s a kind of medicine. I lie down on the bed, call D, my mother, and my sister, and reassure them all.
8 WEEKS LEFT
HERMAN IS A man of his word. That same evening he emails me a batch of new information. After the bombing, he writes, François’s son emigrated to a village outside Cape Town and started a family. He attaches an Excel document he found online: a list of the estates of deceased South African farmers. About halfway down is the name François Guillaume Jacques Boer, who died in 2007. “I’m guessing this was Boer’s grandson,” Herman writes. “He had children, but I can’t locate them right now.” Boer’s seventeen-year-old daughter stayed in the Netherlands and married a man from Zaandam. She, too, says Herman, is deceased.
On Facebook I locate a South African student named François Boer. From his profile picture I’d say he’s about twenty, so it would have to be the great-grandson, or even the great-great-grandson. I send a friend request—he accepts it immediately�
�and a few minutes later François the 3rd, or 4th, or 5th, initiates a chat with me.
François: Hi!
I’m startled by the small window at the bottom of my screen. That name, the bouncing ellipsis that indicates he is typing. What am I supposed to write to François Boer’s namesake? Does he know who I am? Is he aware of the story?
François: Are we related? My family is from the Netherlands.
Me: I know.
For a moment nothing happens, no ellipsis. He’s waiting for more but I don’t know how to begin.
François: Mysterious …
Help. Pretty soon he’ll think I’m flirting with him.
Me: Are you the great-grandson of François Boer, son of François Boer from Holland?
François: Add one more François, and that’s me!
Me: I’m writing you because …
My hand pauses above the keyboard. I should have thought this through first.
François is getting impatient.
François: ?? …
Okay, don’t chicken out now. Kick in the door, march up the stairs, grab history by the hair, and look it straight in the eye. I don’t know what you call your grandfather’s cousin in English, so to make it easy I call him an uncle: “Because my uncle was responsible for the bomb attack that killed your great-great-grandparents.”
Too direct? Maybe. But how does one casually bring up a generations-old murder in a Facebook chat?
For a while it’s quiet in the southern hemisphere.
Then he answers with four question marks.
I ask François the 3rd or 4th or whatever if he knows anything about the wartime history of the Boer family. The ellipsis dances, he types, erases his message, and starts again. It pops up five minutes later. I don’t know much, he writes, except that my great-grandfather’s brother was in the Resistance. In 1943 he killed a Nazi and went into hiding after that.
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