A name—I have to get moving on your name, but I dissolve into a white mist, I lie stock-still in bed with a purple worm attached to my breast, a bloody mole, a human-fleshed fish.
* * *
It is seven o’clock—a.m. or p.m., I have no idea—and there’s furious screaming coming from the corridor, another birth. I’m reminded of the rhino baby that I watched being born in the zoo in Rotterdam. It’s what the dinosaurs must have sounded like, the habitat’s attendant said. In the next room a baby howls nonstop. Rubber soles squeak hurriedly along the linoleum floor, rain slams against the windows.
Our door opens, it’s D with the nurse in tow. D gingerly lifts you off the bed, cradles you in his arms, kisses you, kisses me. The nurse checks my blood pressure. It’s gone down some more. She says I can take a shower. “The chance that you’ll faint now is pretty slim,” she says.
D rocks you in his arms. It looks so natural, you and he, that motion.
The nurse sets a chair in front of me.
“Lean on this.”
I try to lift myself up, but cringe with pain. It’s like someone has put a knife between my legs that digs deeper into me with every move.
“I can’t do it.”
She goes out into the hallway and comes back with a stack of three more chairs, and lines them up leading to the bathroom.
“Go on, walk, lean on them.”
I drag myself from one chair to the next, and with each movement the knife makes me gasp for air. There’s a fourth chair in the shower stall, but I don’t want to take a shower, I don’t want to move anymore; I’ve dragged myself here so that I can look in the mirror. I want to see what alarmed the pediatrician, why my mother burst into tears.
The mirror is to the left of the door. A small, square thing. I glance at it, and my first reaction is that it’s a small window and on the other side is a huge, crazed woman. It’s the classic horror scene: woman looks in mirror and sees a deranged version of herself. My face is so swollen that my nose and mouth are almost entirely sucked into it, a hideous hunk of flesh with two red holes: my bloodshot eyes. My shiny skin is a landscape of burst veins branching out across my face. My neck and shoulders are riddled with small pink pimples, like a subdermal rash, my lips are peeling and dehydrated. Only my hair, my hair is more beautiful than it’s ever been: it hangs full and glossy in thick brown waves over my shoulders.
Half in shock, I shuffle over to the shower. Why not? I sink into the chair, let tepid water run over my body. Again that cloying animal smell. It’s me. The smell of the monkey cage wafts up from between my legs, it’s the wound, a sweetish, sickening combination of blood and amniotic fluid.
A child, a wound.
I want to stay here forever, never go outside, I’ve done what I was supposed to do, I’ve brought a new person into the world, and now I just want to disappear—no, I’ve already disappeared, sacrificed myself for the baby. I am not this wreck that’s been left behind.
D calls my name. The nurse knocks at the door.
They help me back out, dress me in clean clothes, tell me I look better than yesterday. Jesus. I cry. The nurse strokes my hair.
“You’ll see how fast it goes. Pretty soon you’ll have forgotten all this, and all you’ll be is happy with your handsome little man.”
“Two handsome little men.” D smiles his Mentos smile and for a moment, a very brief moment, the pain is gone.
D helps me into a wheelchair and places you on my lap. We roll out into the corridor.
“Family outing,” he says jovially. “Get our baby a nice clean diaper.”
Our baby. It sounds good, but I know it’s not true. You’re mine, you’re me. There are two more storks at the communal changing table, their oversized pajamas hang over their puffy, empty bellies. We smile at one another, we whisper vowel sounds at our babies—ooh, aah—it all just happens, this collective cooing, without me really being aware of it.
When they ask your name, I give them your temporary one. Baby. They’re taken aback. “That’s too bad,” says the stork with the biggest pajamas.
D laughs. “We’ll have a name tomorrow.”
We sleep. You drink. D and I eat lasagna; it’s the best lasagna we’ve ever eaten. When we ask a nurse to give our compliments to the kitchen, she chuckles. “The recipe is tomato sauce, a week in the freezer, and childbirth.”
1 DAY LEFT
I ASK D TO bring a mirror from home so I don’t need to keep staggering to the bathroom to see if I’ve started looking like myself again.
When he gets back, he sets Bommenneef’s ring on the nightstand. “I thought you might want to wear it again.”
I hesitate, look at my hands, which in two days have shrunk to almost their normal size. Then I slide it onto my middle finger. The gold feels cool against my skin.
Family comes to visit, they bring you clothes and a set of dishes. You get picked up; the first time, it feels like I’m the one sailing through the air and lying against the torso of a grandma or grandpa, but the distance grows by the hour, as though the process of being born keeps on going, and, slowly but surely, you slip ever farther out of me. I miss you.
Everyone asks for your name.
* * *
That evening the ward is quiet for the first time. No births, only the voice of Mariah Carey coming from a distant radio. You lie on my stomach and make strange, high-pitched sounds. I reply in kind, a fish-to-fish sonar conversation, one of us is breathing heavily. There is a heart beating fast and furiously. Yours? Mine? Ours.
My blood pressure is stable and has dropped sufficiently. We can go home tomorrow. I had wanted to say we are not ready, that we’re not prepared for this new situation, this being two people. I wanted to ask if they’d put you back in, so I could walk around forever with a fat belly and only the prospect of new personhood, rather than this huge, open life we now face.
I think of Frans and Carolina, of the baby who was sucked into the cosmos after just one day, and I’m so sorry that you have to become someone, are someone, that I can no longer protect you from life, or protect myself. I want snow. I want a white, muffled world, but it’s raining and storming outside, things shake, make noise, glisten with wetness. I’m sorry that one day I will disappoint you, and you me, that soon I’ll no longer feel your heart beating in my own chest, that already you’re drifting away from me, that D and I will saddle you with photos, stories, myths, and expectations, with families, and with deep, undefined fears that plague our reptilian brain. I’m sorry that one day you’ll come home and ask why there’s war, and who’s good and who’s bad—and this is if all goes well, if you yourself don’t get caught up in the violence we now fear. I’m so sorry that one day you might have to make the decision I never had to make (at least not yet), to go with the flow or to resist, I’m sorry that you’ll learn that no one gets to the finish line with entirely clean hands, that this is a world where we tend to downplay what’s good because we know too much and don’t dare hope enough.
You were born looking upward: just as I went into labor you did a half twist, they call it a “stargazer,” and I think of those wooden gears in that attic in Franeker, that small, overwhelming backroom universe, the Kant quote, the moral law in me and in the starry sky above me.
The stars.
I wake D up, who is sleeping on a cot next to our bed.
“I’ve made up my mind.”
He lays a drowsy hand on mine.
“Good,” he mumbles, “that’s good,” and slips back to sleep.
THE DAY
D PACKS OUR BAGS while you lie asleep on my belly. When I studied my face in the mirror just now, for the hundredth time, I recognized a tiny hint of myself. D goes down to the cafeteria to get us breakfast.
A nurse walks in. “Let’s wash the baby so he’ll be nice and clean to go home.”
She gently wipes your head with a washcloth, the last bits of blood, the last traces of my insides. The skin underneath is lighter than I had expected, seve
ral tints lighter than mine: your father’s color.
She rinses the washcloth in the bathroom and comes back to do your hands. She points out your long nails.
“Maybe you should bite some off, otherwise he’s liable to scratch himself.”
“Bite?”
She nods. “They’re too small for a nail clipper, so for now, biting is best.”
She lifts you up, holds you with your fingers up near my mouth, and nods encouragingly.
I take your tiny thumb, cautiously put the hard ridge of the nail between my teeth, and bite. The nail gives; there’s a sharp sliver on my tongue, and, surprised, I swallow it. Finger by finger I nibble off the edges and make your fingers soft and safe, until the nurse approvingly inspects your hands.
“He’s ready.”
I don’t ask what for. Being cuddled. Shaking hands. A date. Love.
D is back. “Everything’s packed. The kitchen’s stocked, there’s a blanket on the sofa … anything I’ve forgotten?”
The nurse carefully puts the hospital cap on your head and informs us that Dr. Dukhi will be along any minute for one last check. Then we can go.
“When we get home,” I say to D, “can you go upstairs and take down that certificate?”
D nods. “I’ll go get the car,” he says before disappearing into the corridor.
The nurse lays you back on my lap. “I wish you all the best.” She walks to the door. I press you against me, feel how warm and firm you are, feel how fast your heart beats, faster than mine. I kiss your clean head. Here we go.
I kiss you again and clear my throat.
“He has a name.”
My voice sounds strange. Low and husky.
The nurse turns, her hand on the doorknob.
“Sorry?”
“He has a name,” I repeat. Louder this time.
“Just in time,” she laughs. “I’ll go get a pen and paper.”
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without all the fantastic people who provided me with information, and who may or may not recognize themselves in the story I have created from the story.
I am extremely grateful to Maarten Biermans for having bought the box of Frans’s documents, and to Sonia Eijkman for sorting the contents and bringing me the box. Many thanks to the van Santen family, who provided me with information about Elize; to Sylvia de Vlaming, who put me in touch with the van Santens; and to the mysterious Mr. Madarasz, who steered me onto several right tracks. The hours spent with Mrs. Rijshouwer-van Wely and Mrs. Gatsonides were invaluable, as was the extensive Geschiedenis van de Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst by Dick Engelen, which perhaps is not the ideal book to read when you’re dog-tired and pregnant, but under any other circumstances is highly recommended reading.
My thanks to the Bos family for information regarding their Jacoba, to Hajo Wildschut for the gynecological feedback, to Otto Nelissen’s afternoon naps, which made it possible for me to get this book finished at all, and to my dear uncle Frans, for whom this ring was actually intended, but that’s another story.
Deep respect for Liet Lenshoek, whom I could always bother with my questions and doubts, and bravo to Matin van Veldhuizen for her keen eye and cheese sandwiches. Then a big kiss for the whole Das Mag team, and especially for the indispensable Marscha and Daniël.
The men and women at the National Archives were extremely helpful, with my special thanks to Peter Wijnmaalen, who assured me that the entrance hall has changed in recent years, and that my recollection of it was more or less correct (as far as memories can be correct, that is—but enough about that). Except that the revolving door was a sliding door, Peter said. But the choice between revolving and sliding seems to me an easy one.
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About the Author
The Dutch poet, novelist, and playwright Marjolijn van Heemstra holds a master’s degree in religion. Her first poetry collection, If Moses Had Been More Persistent, won the Jo Peters Poetry Prize. She debuted as a novelist with The Last of the Aedemas. Her latest novel, In Search of a Name, was nominated for multiple national prizes and has been translated into nine languages. She currently writes for The Correspondent, Harper’s Bazaar, and several newspapers.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Marjolijn van Heemstra
Translation copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Reeder
Originally published in the Netherlands in 2017 by Das Mag Uitgeverij B.V. as En we noemen hem
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Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe
Jacket design by Laywan Kwan
Photograph of Amsterdam by Getty Images
Pattern and night sky © Shutterstock
Author photograph by Bowie Verschuuren
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-1-9821-0048-3
ISBN 978-1-9821-0050-6 (ebook)
In Search of a Name Page 14