And your great-great-grandfather?
No idea, he replies. I don’t know anything about an attack. Was he a Resistance hero too? After this last question are three smileys with hopeful expressions.
I don’t think so, I respond.
Frowning smiley.
“Do you know what happened on the evening of December 5, 1946?”
“No,” he answers. All he knows is that as a baby, his grandfather’s hearing was damaged during a German bombardment. The house was on fire, he writes, and his great-grandmother jumped out the window with his grandfather in her arms.
A German bombardment. The Boer family’s telephone game has turned Bommenneef’s attack into an enemy blitz. No pigeon nets, no liquidation, no dossier in the Extraordinary Jurisdiction archive, but the victims of world history.
I thank François and close the chat.
The descendants of Boer’s daughter are easier to trace. She had a son and a daughter; both are still alive and live in the vicinity of The Hague. The son is on Facebook and accepts my friend request. I send a message, more circumspect this time. He’s a generation closer to the murder, which I imagine makes a difference. I tell him about my research, say I’m looking for the other side of the story. An hour later, he has read it. He does not respond.
Another email from Herman comes in: a link to the long, narrow family tree of an American professor, taken from a genealogy website. The tree is rooted in eighteenth-century Zeeland. On a branch of a branch is the small and lonely mention of Jacoba, followed by her dates.
I try to formulate my email to the professor as cautiously as possible.
Dear Mr. Van der Wal, I have recently been researching a bomb attack in 1946 that killed Jacoba Visser, a distant aunt of yours. A family member of mine was involved and I’m trying to find out more about the attack and its aftermath.
Again, no reply.
D shouts from downstairs that it’s time for us to go to the hospital. When I hear him coming up the stairs, I quickly snap the laptop shut. He is convinced that all this is bad for my blood pressure. I’ve told him about Herman, and that he’ll be taking over for me, which is partly true.
“You coming?” D is in the hallway, holding my coat. We look at each other briefly, then he averts his eyes, smiling nervously. I know what he’s thinking. I’m thinking it, too, I think it every time we drive to the hospital: this might be the last time we leave home without a baby. In the car, we fill the nervous silence with small talk. At the hospital entrance, we’re so giddy that we get the giggles when an elderly man’s slo-mo shuffling brings the revolving door to a halt.
At the obstetrics unit, Dr. Dukhi places a soft hand on my shoulder. “You’re doing well, you’ve come really far, but now we’re going to have to prepare for a different route than you’d hoped for.” For a moment I think he’s talking about Bommenneef, that Dr. Dukhi has been peering over my shoulder all this time and has come to the conclusion that I’ve definitely lost my way. “Let’s try to stretch it another three weeks.”
“Three?” I stare dumbfounded from Dukhi to D, whose blood has drained from his face. “But don’t I still have eight weeks?” Dr. Dukhi shakes his head. “I’m afraid not. I don’t want to take any risks.” He removes his hand from my shoulder. “I realize you have to regroup, but don’t worry about it too much. Everything will be fine.”
I want to say that I’m not so sure, that I’ve just started my pregnancy class, that we haven’t gotten any further than the labor dance and I have no idea what I have to do when the time comes. That I’ve still got deadlines and have a closet to clear out, and most importantly my son has to be given the right name, and to do that I have to have the right story, and since the story I had turns out to be inaccurate I have to at least come up with a good ending—all’s well that ends well—but at the moment I’m stuck in a cul-de-sac of unanswered emails and Facebook messages and I haven’t put anything right or even gotten my head around things, there are only questions that lead to more questions, I don’t even know anymore if this is about courage and justice, who knows, maybe now it’s about chaos and regret. I want to tell him that yesterday I took Bommenneef’s citation—the yellowed proof of his heroism—off the wall, and that the wall looked so empty and meaningless that I hung the thing back up, and then took it down again and then hung it back up, and so on and so forth for another fifteen minutes. I want to say that three weeks isn’t nearly enough, that I’m not ready, that I don’t know what to tell my son about life, that I’ll do everything wrong, that this is proof that I’m already a dud of a mother, not able to carry her child full term. But if I open my mouth now, I’ll cry, so I nod at Dukhi and Dukhi nods back, and for a moment, just a brief moment, I am reassured.
At home I’m sent off to bed, cared for, lectured, cooed to sleep as if I’m the baby. My parents drop by, sisters and friends bring good soup and bad magazines. They urge me not to think of anything else, just let my mind go blank. The baby wriggles under my skin; its jutting limbs form weird bumps on my belly.
D lays down next to me as soon as he can, his head down near my abdomen, where he seems to be talking more to the baby than to me. Of course we’re ready, he says, and pointing to the empty spot in between us on the bed he says he can’t wait until our baby is lying there. “It can’t be that difficult, hon, the whole world does it.” I run my hands through his thick hair and would give anything in the world to change places with him.
3 WEEKS LEFT
I AM DISORIENTED BY the gap in our countdown. I keep opening my digital datebook. The full-year overview, then the separate months, days, the individual hours, as though I might unearth those five lost weeks among the white pixels in between the time divisions. I’m tempted to phone someone up—Dr. Dukhi, Kant, God—and demand the return of the missing weeks. But the only thing responsible for this leap in time is my own body, which does not measure time in weeks but in the velocity of my blood.
This morning, after yet another sleepless night, I was prepared to let it go. I’d drop the search and just wing it when the baby arrived. No more googling, phoning, emailing, speculating, slogging through dossiers and books. In my mind I folded up the map of Antarctica. Mission not accomplished. It gave me a vague sensation of liberation. But fifteen minutes later, Herman emailed. He had found the name of the family where one of Jacoba’s sisters had been taken on as an au pair in 1946.
“It was a heck of a search, but I found the phone number of the girl she babysat. Who knows, maybe she kept contact with the sister.”
I tap in the number, and they answer after a single ring. I’m startled by the old voice on the line. I had foolishly expected a small child, but the little girl of then is now probably in her late seventies.
I tell her the reason for my call.
“You’re a year too late,” the woman says. “Greetje died last year.”
“Greetje?”
“The sister.”
Greetje, the same as François’s wife. It’s starting to become a confusing name game: pretty much every name has an echo on the opposite side of the story.
“Do you think she would have wanted to talk to me, a relative of her sister’s killer?”
“Maybe. And then, maybe not.”
“Did she ever talk about the bomb?”
“No, but she did talk about Jackie.”
“Who’s Jackie?”
“Jacoba. But Jackie suits her better, or at least the Jacoba I knew.”
I want to say that she couldn’t possibly have known Jacoba, but she corrects herself: “Not really knew, of course, but—how should I say it?—she had the starring role in my childhood stories. I was an only child and my parents were often out of the house, so Greetje and I were together every day. She talked a lot about her sister. They had grown up together in an orphanage in The Hague. Greetje told me how during the war, Jackie used to show up with food with the story that their dead mother had put it out for them. Greetje believed her, until the day Jackie g
ot a beating because she’d been caught raiding the larder. She told me about Jackie’s soft hair, and what they used to sing together in bed whenever one of them cried at night because they missed their mother so much. In Greetje’s stories Jackie was a brave, beautiful girl; a combination of Cinderella and the Good Fairy. I used to beg her for more stories. Greetje had a vivid fantasy and thought up the funniest things: Jackie and the toothless apple, Jackie and the hundred frogs, Jackie and the meat-eating woods.” The woman—the girl—laughs. “In fact, it was always the same story, just told differently. The world was threatened by a big bad something, and Jackie saved the day.”
I asked if the bombing ever figured in the stories.
“No. I knew Jackie was dead, but it didn’t mean much to me until one day—maybe it’s not so nice to tell you this—well, there was a Van Heemstra Lane where we lived. It ran through the woods. A dark, windy path between the old trees. One day Greetje and I were walking there, and she saw the street sign and froze. I thought she was joking around, but she was really frozen stiff. When I pulled her arm, she didn’t budge. She’d gone white as a sheet and her forehead was sweating. It lasted, oh, about twenty seconds, she didn’t move a muscle, she just stood there looking at the name on that sign.”
I hold my breath, hoping she’ll say something about the attack, new facts that Greetje might have shared with her.
“When Greetje snapped out of it, she bent over and picked up a pinecone and hurled it at the street sign. On the way home she cried and told me how terribly she missed her sister. She said it was as if she’d lost an arm or a leg. And after that she said, ‘If it were only my leg.’ ”
The woman pauses. Now it’s my turn to say something, to react to this story, but my throat is clamped shut, my voice falters: the hormones, the fatigue, Jackie in the meat-eating woods. I think of Mrs. Koopmans’s missing thumb. The stump in her rubber glove. A thumb for a life. I can’t think of anything else to say but a raspy “Thank you.”
“If you’d called a year earlier …”
“I know, I’m too late.”
“It’s okay.”
“Well, goodbye, then.”
I text Herman, thank him for the number, and let him know Greetje is no longer alive.
Soon after I push send, he calls. “I’ve got something better. The Bos family in Maassluis.”
“The family who?”
“Bos. Jacoba’s eldest sister.”
After the story of Greetje and her storytelling, I am reluctant to call the Bos family out of the blue. Who knows what kind of Jacoba stories they grew up with, what kind of wounds I might reopen. I decide to send them an email, and I weigh my words carefully, keep it as neutral as possible. In the end the message consists of two dry sentences in which I introduce myself as Frans’s niece who is trying to piece together the complete story of the Sinterklaas bombing.
* * *
Two days later I’m sitting in a living room in Maassluis, way down on the other side of South Holland. Across from me are Jacoba’s eldest sister, Annie’s, five children. They are seated in a tight semicircle: two sisters and a brother on the sofa, another brother and sister in chairs on either side. I am installed in a large green armchair opposite them; in between us is a coffee table with an assortment of cocktail nibbles.
It’s warm for this time of year, I’m overdressed and sweating. Even though I took plenty of time getting on the train—breathe calmly, no stress—and got a lift from the station, I’m exhausted now.
A mood of anxious expectation is hanging in the air. Cautiously smiling at these five faces across from me, it’s the first time I sense I’m looking the story straight in the eye, that here in this living room, history is breathing and armed with questions. Something has been opened up: time, maybe.
The conversation gets rolling without difficulty. I tell them what I know, the siblings take turns sharing memories of Jacoba. They are secondhand memories, passed on by their mother and aunts. They call her Coby, not Jackie. And even though it’s the same girl, the name Coby brings to mind someone different: an older, more sober person. They tell me that when their grandmother died, their grandfather remarried and placed seven of the ten children in an orphanage. Jacoba, still a baby, was raised by the nuns of the House of Mercy in The Hague. The regime was depressing and decidedly unmerciful; the children mostly sought succor from one another. The nuns forced the younger orphans to eat their own vomit if they were sick. If you raised your voice, you’d be shut in a dark cupboard. Jacoba lived there until she was sixteen, at which time she was placed in a family as a housemaid. After two years’ service she would be allowed to leave. She almost made it: in December 1946 she only had a few more months to go until, at last, her life could begin.
“But she wasn’t badly off at the Boers’,” the eldest brother says. His mother, Annie, had told them later, much later, how pleased she had been that Jacoba had found work there. Decent people who treated her well. The fact that she was there that Sinterklaas Eve showed she was part of the family.
One of the sisters, Coby, is named after Jacoba. Her grandfather spoiled her with gifts and attention, as though to make up for what his own daughter had been denied. I almost blurt out my intention of naming my son after my great-uncle, but I catch myself, afraid of causing offense. Coby was the one who heard the most about her deceased aunt. Her mother told her about sitting at Jacoba’s deathbed, how long it all took, and how upset she was at the terrible injuries she had suffered. “The older she got, the more our mother talked about her,” Coby says. “She said that the longer ago it was, the closer it felt.”
They never heard anything about the perpetrators. The family probably just wanted to move on, says the eldest brother. “The war was over. There was no discussion about who was right and who was wrong. Too painful, maybe. And they had other things on their mind.” But, he adds, “moving on” did not really work either. “There’s still a hole, a wound. Part of the family had been amputated.”
Occasionally the siblings get choked up, and then one has to take over from the other. But it’s just a cracked voice or watery eyes—nobody really cries, it’s secondhand grief, inherited from the previous generation. It gets passed around like a bowl of cocktail nuts, it gets stuck in my throat and I swallow it back.
I ask them to describe Jacoba’s looks. The youngest brother leaves the room, returns with three photographs, and places them on the table. “I’ll scan them and email them to you.”
The largest one is a portrait. A serious girl with a pretty, full mouth and small, round glasses. The second one is of Jacoba and her sister Greetje, the sister that had made her into a fairy, a hero, a princess. They smile at the camera, their heads cocked close together. The last photo is blurry and taken from a distance. In it, a girl sits on a chair, alone, in a large, spartan dormitory. She does not look at the camera, her gaze is aimed downward at her small, bare feet. Her dress hangs crookedly and the bow in her hair looks rumpled. Everything about this picture exudes loneliness.
I look at the circle of siblings, at the bowls of nuts, and the photos of Jacoba. She might still be here if that bomb hadn’t gone off. I want to say something, put things right, make amends. But everything that comes to mind sounds trite compared to that desolate dormitory where Jacoba counted the days until her life could begin.
“Say Frans was still alive. Is there anything you’d want to hear from him?” I ask. They hesitate. “What do you think could bring this story to a satisfactory conclusion?”
“Regret,” says the youngest brother. “I would like to hear him say he regrets it. That would be the only satisfactory ending.”
* * *
That evening I lie, fat and dopey, in the semidarkness of my bedroom, looking at the blood specks on the palm tree wallpaper. I almost told them this afternoon that on his deathbed Frans said he was sorry. I felt I had to offer them something in the way of recompense, to give the affair some kind of closure. I so wanted to set things right—for
them, for myself, for my son, for that girl in the dormitory. But I couldn’t lie, not about this. I have to know for sure. And there is only one person I can ask: the man who sat at Frans’s side shortly before he died, at his most honest moment.
If Juan Carlos is still alive, then surely he’ll remember. You never forget a person’s last words.
2 WEEKS LEFT
THE AIRBNB LISTING is too good to be true. An old villa in Bommenneef’s neighborhood. One last-ditch effort to tie up the loose ends: the very spot where Bommenneef himself ended. From my room I would look out onto the courtyard and at the window behind which he slept and died back in 1987.
At least that’s what the neighbor says. He came around yesterday, curious about what I was doing here in low season. He has only vague memories of “the old captain,” as Frans was known in these parts. He remembers Frans being rather a loner, and that the local children were afraid of him. “He would sit for hours in his wheelchair staring out into the courtyard.” At what? Neighbor doesn’t know. “We thought he saw ghosts.” He laughed, pointed to the palm in the middle of the courtyard. “Maybe he was just looking at that—it was there then too.”
I have named the tree Methuselah, after the biblical patriarch. Or actually after the Israeli date palm I’d read about in National Geographic back in 2005 that was named after Methuselah. The tree had been cultivated from two-thousand-year-old seeds they had found on Masada. “Could Jesus have sat under this Methuselah tree?” asked the block-letter photo caption. That’s a tricky one. It depends whether the potential tree, the seed, is the same thing as the real tree that eventually grows. No, I conclude at first. But Jesus (the historical one) and the seed did exist at the same time, so if you look at it that way, then you come out with a yes. But then, who says this palm tree, which has grown out of that seed, is the same palm tree that would have sprouted back then? It makes me dizzy, just as I get dizzy from the notion that Bommenneef could have seen me sitting here at this window, or I him, were it not for those intervening years.
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