In Search of a Name

by Marjolijn van Heemstra

  My cell phone vibrates. It’s D. He calls every few hours. The first day he was furious; he screamed at me that only a lunatic would spend the last few days of her pregnancy alone in some deserted seaside village in a foreign country. I had to admit he was right. Only when the plane landed in Barcelona did it hit me what a dumb idea this was. Before I’d even gotten off the jetway I had looked up and saved all the Spanish emergency numbers and the addresses of two nearby hospitals. On the train to Vinaròs I dozed off, a sentence by Salinger banging around in my head: Mothers are all slightly insane, and with that same sentence I awoke when we reached the small, sunny station.

  For three days I’ve been in a continuous state of mild panic, but I don’t want D to be any more anxious than he already is, so I try to sound calm.

  “I’ll be home tomorrow.”

  “You should’ve told me.”

  “You wouldn’t have let me go.”

  “That’s right. I’m coming down.”

  “I’ll be gone before you get here.”

  By now he has resigned himself to it, mostly, I suspect, for the sake of the baby. Don’t add to the stress. He checks in a few times a day, to make sure I’m still alive, that we’re still alive.

  “And?” he asks. “Found out anything new about the Lord of the Ring?”

  I tell him I’ll be meeting Juan Carlos this afternoon. I gave myself three days to locate him, which must be enough in a small town like Vinaròs. But it turns out Juan Carlos has moved. And it was no easy job to find someone who had his phone number. His English is poor, so the neighbor (who I think takes pity on me, a woman on her own and with such a bloated belly) interpreted for us. “The captain’s niece is here and she’d like to talk to you.” Juan Carlos is wary, perhaps he’s afraid I suspect him of something. Nothing easier, of course, than to take a quick spin through the house of a dying man, let a wristwatch glide into your pocket. Via the neighbor I assure Juan Carlos that all I want is to find out about Frans’s final hours. What the captain said before he died. The old grocer agrees to take the bus from the village where he now lives, an hour away.

  D listens patiently to my progress report.

  “This morning I kind of enjoyed being on my own,” he says. “A few days of calm before the storm. So I can finally let it sink in what we’ve gotten ourselves into.” He painted the nursery, assembled a cupboard. He says he’s scared stiff, but in a good way. I’m here, he assures me, and I’ll always be. I say he’s the only person in the world I’d want to do this with. Funny how distance creates closeness.

  These days, the baby is more awake than ever. Maybe he feels that it’s almost time. Four days ago Dr. Dukhi said that he’s big enough to be delivered without too many complications.

  After D hangs up, I lie down and close my eyes, just for a moment. Two hours later I bolt awake. The sun shines blindingly into every room—a surplus of sunlight, and nowhere a shadow. I check my phone. My appointment with Juan Carlos is in half an hour. I struggle out of bed. My ankles have started to swell up; pretty soon they, too, will be swallowed up by the fluid that my body has been collecting. I see in the bathroom mirror that my chin has started to vanish, and that the excess water has now settled in my wrists. My fingers tingle, my hands feel heavy and weak: it’s the carpal tunnel syndrome the obstetrician warned about. Nothing to be done. There’s nothing to be done about anything, except just have the baby.

  Someone bangs on the door. The neighbor, holding his telephone. “It’s Juan Carlos,” he says. “He is sick.” He asks if we can’t just talk by phone. I look at the black iPhone. “Is he on the line?” The neighbor nods and switches to speaker mode.

  “¡Hola!” An elderly, tinny voice.

  “I’ll translate for you,” the neighbor says.

  I gulp back my disappointment. I had pictured it otherwise. Juan Carlos and me on an idyllic Spanish terrace, where Bommenneef’s deepest thoughts would be revealed to me. His guilt, his regret, the residue of his life: the coda of a new, satisfactory story. But I don’t have time to be critical. My plane leaves tomorrow. I have to get back to D; I have to have a baby.

  I nod at the neighbor.

  “Ask him about Frans’s final hours. What he said before he died. How he left life behind.”

  I listen anxiously as the neighbor translates the questions. We stand bent over the iPhone, the portal through which the oracle gives its answers in crackly, elderly Spanish.

  “Juan Carlos says he mostly swore,” says the neighbor. “He was angry about dying. They drank together, drank a lot. The captain said that the envelope on his desk still needed to be mailed.” That must have been the ring. “He said I could have the sardines in the fridge,” Juan Carlos continues, “and that he wanted to be buried without socks. We had a good laugh about that, because of his legs. He asked if I would sprinkle him with perfume after he died. He didn’t smell so nice—like mushrooms and manchego—because he refused to be washed those last weeks.”

  I interrupt. “Tell him he can skip the details. I want to know about the real things, the big things.”

  The neighbor gives me a surprised look, and translates. Juan Carlos hesitates, asks something. “What do you mean by ‘big’ things?” says the neighbor.

  “If he had any regrets,” I sigh. “I want to know if he was sorry about anything from the past, something he might want to get off his chest, apologize for, make good.”

  The neighbor repeats this to Juan Carlos.

  The tinny voice falls silent. “He asked me to put his wheelchair out on the street,” he says. “He thought someone might come along that needed it. The thing sat there on the sidewalk for a month, then I brought it to the garbage. It was rusted through.”

  The neighbor asks something with más. I know that word, más: “more.” Whether there was anything more.

  “No,” says the oracle. “Nada más.”

  * * *

  Twilight on the beach. A chill wafts in from the sea. I shiver. I should have brought my jacket, but it’s back in the apartment, packed in my suitcase. No need to worry about Bommenneef; he’s tucked snugly in his wheelchair, a warm rug draped over the stumps of his legs. He breathes heavily; every now and then he lets out a soggy smoker’s hack and spits into the sand. I had expected to find him sitting at the window, where the children used to see him looking for ghosts, but he was on the beach, facing the sea, the wheels of his chair sunk into the coarse sand. As though someone brought him here long ago, and then forgot him.

  When I sat down next to him, he looked up briefly and then stared back out into space.

  His face is fuller than I had expected, fat and gray like an elephant’s.

  “So here you are,” I say.

  For one perfect moment, we sit silently next to each other amid the sound of the waves and the traffic on the boulevard behind us. But there’s no time to lose. Once the sun has set it’ll only get colder, and my plane is leaving in a couple of hours.

  Where should I start? At the most important part. “You have to tell me something honest. End things with the truth.”

  He looks at me, his eyes are deep and watery, a hint of a smile on his mouth.

  “I’ve disproved lies,” I continue, “but I’ve lied too. I named your best friend ‘B,’ even though her name doesn’t start with a B. I’ve fudged the chronology of my search because it works better not to discover everything at once. I’ve ascribed my questions and answers to others; I’ve pretended you were given speeding tickets in the 1930s when I don’t even know for sure if there was such a thing as speed limits back then, but it looked good for the character sketch; I said we ate cocktail nuts at Jacoba’s family’s house in Maassluis when we really ate pie, but I needed an image to go with the grief that got passed around the circle. You only pass a slice of pie once, and you don’t share it, that’s why I changed it to nuts, and there are so many more things, too many to name. But most of all I’ve kept things to myself, which is the worst form of lying. I’ve kept to mysel
f that you were involved in that horrible abduction of an innkeeper in Renkum who your gang was planning to crucify, I mean really crucify, to let him bleed to death, with a wooden sign above his head that said ‘This Is How Holland Rebuilds.’ I kept quiet about an item in the Utrechts Dagblad that said you put your army superiors Goedewagen and Drost on your hit list because of a conflict about your smuggling activities—in this light the bombing, too, looks more like a payback than some ethical, righteous deed. Nowhere did I mention that several articles refer to you as ‘St. Nicholas of Death.’ I’ve covered for you, because I wasn’t prepared to just give up the myth. You were a dangerous man, a lunatic murderer, but for twenty-five years you were also my hero. You don’t erase something like that so easily. I wanted to peel the myth down to its core, but a myth is an onion and has no core. And yet I don’t want to end up with nothing, I need a name and a story, so I invented new, better layers. But this isn’t something I can turn into fiction: you killed people, real people, ruined real lives, and I need something as real as Jacoba’s ruined eye.

  “That’s why we’re sitting here on this deserted beach, you and I, and that’s why I’m giving you the last word. I don’t care what you say, as long as it’s honest. No, that’s not true either. I already know what your last words should be. And if you don’t say them yourself, I’ll put the words in your mouth. ‘I’m sorry.’ Go on, say it. And make it sound like you mean it.”

  The old man stares stoically into space.

  I wait. I wait until I can’t wait anymore. Then I go. I turn a few times as I walk up to the boulevard, but the man does not look back.

  * * *

  D picks me up from the airport. The house smells like fresh paint and laundry detergent. It’s quiet in the rooms, like somebody holding their breath. The cradle is standing in the middle of my office. Its side panels—dark red before I left—are now ice blue.

  There’s an oblong case on the windowsill with a pink ribbon around it.

  “For you,” D says. He points at my belly. “For us.”

  It’s a small telescope.

  D laughs and gestures around the blue-and-white room. “If we ever want to make this into a planetarium, we’ve got to start somewhere.”

  I inspect the lenses and the ocular and get choked up at the idea that soon I’ll have a son who one day will look at the stars, who will wonder how far away the planets are, and where light comes from, and all that darkness.

  1 WEEK LEFT

  IT’S GOING TO be a Christmas baby. The date is fixed, even what time they’ll hook me up to the labor-inducing IV. “It’s time to deliver,” Dr. Dukhi said during our last visit. What a strange way of putting it: “deliver.” Like a package.

  It’s so strange to know exactly when he’ll come, attaching a date to the unimaginable.

  I send the photos to Herman with the note: “For your web.”

  The next day, he emails back.

  A friend of mine is an archeologist. He spent forty years digging in a mound in Syria, peeled back a thousand years of history, and sorted it into boxes. I asked him once what the best thing was that he found in all those years. He answered: sometimes a skeleton is more than an archeological find. Suddenly the outline of a person fills out the space around the bones. And that’s what you do it for. For the moment that you can say to a skull: “I’ll rescue you from the past, I’ll bring you back from limbo. Even though you’ve been lying under this rubble for a thousand years now and everyone has forgotten your name, I will give you a human face.” Cheers, H.

  3 DAYS LEFT

  I TRY TO RECONSTRUCT how you got here, in this plastic wheeled crib. There was a start—they put in a balloon catheter (“we’re going to inflate a balloon in your cervix”—this sounds more festive than it was) to induce labor.

  Then there was half a day and a full night in which we anxiously waited for the water.

  And then it broke.

  I remember a mishmash of images, sounds, and smells. There was screaming—from me, from the gynecologist, from your father, from women in other rooms—screaming everywhere and an awful internal cracking, as though bones had to make way for your head. There was dimmed lighting that made me feel as though I was in a kind of limbo, a ghoulish world into which we could vanish at any moment. I wanted the lights on full blast, to see and be seen, but every time I started to ask, a new contraction wrenched me and I heard myself growl and roar, a deep, raw, caked-on sound, and through all the contractions I was ashamed of that roaring—this isn’t me, I cried, this isn’t me—but I kept getting drowned out by an old and angry woman in my throat, someone said just one more push and you’re there, and they kept repeating and repeating it, until I knew for sure I couldn’t anymore. I remember being emptied, like a blown-out egg, you were dangling above me, dark purple, covered from head to toe with a slimy film, and the first thing that came to mind was the overripe plum I once found at the bottom of my backpack, months after I’d put it in there and forgotten about it. I remember your father’s astonished face and a sudden burst of laughter—from him? from me?—because of the absurdity of it all, this purple thing, this prehistoric plum that was supposed to be the symbol of our love. And then four rubber gloves lifting you above my belly, up toward my breast, I look at your head, an attempt at recognition, at feeling something as this primeval pate comes at me, crinkled and angry, a bloody glob, more wrinkle than skin. All nineteen inches of you lands with a sucking noise on my breastbone, and the only thing I can think is: Who is this? And then, immediately, the answer: this is me.

  My parents come in, and when my mother sees me, she bursts into tears—there’s something wrong with me, I can see it on her face. The pediatrician comes in next, inspects your little insect-legs, your skull, she runs her fingers along your back, and then nods. You get a score. Something with a seven, I think out of ten. Not bad, but not good either. Too low for what has just happened. The pediatrician looks at me, and for a fraction of a second I see her grimace.

  How terrible do I look?

  For now we’ll have to stay in the hospital for observation, she says. My blood pressure is still too high. She talks some more, I see her mouth move but nothing sinks in, I only hear you cry, the pediatrician’s head dissolves into blotches, then gels back together, someone comes in to say stitches are required, someone else says something about a vacation on Tenerife, and someone says that a child leaves behind an internal wound that takes a long time to heal.

  Child, wound—those words echo inside my head, which is now entirely empty, the words ricochet off the walls, bounce against my skull. A child, a wound.

  “What’s his name?” someone asks. And I almost say the name I gave you fifteen years ago. Back when you were just a fantasy, a prospect. Back when I still believed my heroes were heroes, and the story could be passed on without objection.

  “I don’t know,” I mumble. A chubby nurse wheels us down to the farthest room on the ward.

  * * *

  In the parking lot under my window, among the cars, is a decorated Christmas tree. Its tiny lights flicker in the wet snow. Families walk down the corridor of my ward carrying oversized balloons and platters full of food. The smell of chicken and garlic mingles with the chemical odor of a hospital room and a strange, sweet stench that reminds me of a zoo. The reptile habitat, or no, the monkeys. The visitors in the corridor whisper so as not to wake the babies, but their wet shoes make a loud, sucking noise on the floor, like a herd of heavy animals in a swamp.

  Behind every blue door on the long, white corridor is a new mother. Like storks, big and weak on their white beds. Next to them, a plastic nest on wheels with the egg they just laid.

  Your crib is higher than my bed, and I see only the top of your blue-and-pink hospital cap. You whimper. A midwife tells me you’re feeling queasy, and probably will be for some time yet. Of all the sensations being born might elicit, queasiness is probably the last one I’d think of. It sounds like a minor, temporary inconvenience. The result
of a bad mussel or a hangover, not the violence of the past twenty-four hours, in which we have been torn from a single creature into two.

  Outdoors, the streetlamps jump on, and for a moment I consider flipping on the bedside lamp, too, but it feels like an intrusion. I’m pleased with the early darkness and our dim togetherness. I don’t quite dare look at you in full light yet.

  Your father is out in the corridor, on the phone.

  He reports your weight, your length. “No,” I hear him say, “that hasn’t been settled yet.”

  The door slides open. It’s the nurse. She wants to know if we’ve made up our minds. I shake my head.

  She nods patiently. But the system is not as patient as she is.

  A person has to be mapped, defined, and encapsulated in a name within three days.

  She takes a pen from her breast pocket and writes “Baby” on a form. Baby—this is how the system will recognize you for the time being, a generic designation, capitalized to make it look more like a name. I look at your bald head with its remaining splotches of blood and amniotic fluid, the name Baby doesn’t suit something that looks like something that has been around for centuries. “We’ve got two days,” the nurse says, “to change Baby into a proper name.” She takes my blood pressure and nods, satisfied. “Getting there.”

  2 DAYS LEFT

  ACCORDING TO THE clock, six hours have passed, but where they’ve gone, I haven’t the foggiest. Have I slept? You’re lying on my chest, groaning: Did I take you out of your crib? I don’t dare move. Why isn’t there anyone in here with us? They’ve left me in here with this exotic animal that will die soon without professional care. It’s irresponsible, leaving you and me alone in this room. Somebody with the proper diplomas should come who can make you stop groaning. I reach out to press the red button, call for help, but something happens with you, you squeak and whimper and then shift, or squirm—something in between slink and crawl, like a worm or a mole—upward over my belly, your eyes are shut, you explore my skin with pursed lips, inch by inch upward toward my breast. I don’t help you, I don’t call out to you, I just lie there motionless and watch this subterrestrial wriggling. I don’t know where you get the strength or your sense of direction, but you make a beeline for my breast, claw your fingers into my flesh, grope for a grip and find it, clamp your toothless mouth onto my nipple, and, with amazing strength, start sucking.