by Otto de Kat
“Our very own Sampling Officials,” says Bruno cheerfully, a reference to Rembrandt’s painting. “The man in that chair there is Imke’s father, a doctor, the others may have wanted to sit as well, but presumably there weren’t any other chairs in the studio. Look, there, to the left of the center, that’s old Dudok, Chris’ father, with the high starched collar.”
Emma looks up and realizes that the man must be her mother’s brother. She saw him a few times when she was young, but never since. She cannot remember her mother having much contact with the “rich branch” of the Dudoks. Feigning a serious expression, she studies the monstrously large painting.
“Isn’t your father in it, Bruno?”
“No, my father wasn’t one for clubs and societies and all those cliques. A mayor doesn’t have any friends, that was one of the things he liked to say. My mother ignored him, though, and regularly organized meals with her friends. He’d happily flout his own rules to join them, and then dominate the table.”
Sampling officials, cliques, societies, bowling clubs, bridge drives, the rowing association, a long list of ordinary things in a world that was strange: for much of her life, Emma had not been part of such groups. Far away from all the fun and the family stories, she had found herself in the Berlin of the late 1930s, the very opposite of conviviality. But it was where Carl lived, Carl Regendorf, the man who . . . Stop. Don’t do that, don’t think, not backward, not back there. Stand beneath the painting, and listen to the pleasant voice of someone she has never met before, but who is the first person since Carl that she finds interesting, maybe even attractive.
“May I take you home? I’m staying with friends not far from you, it’s more or less on my way.” The question sounds like an apology.
A little later, Chris and his wife Imke, and Bruno and Emma are crossing the marketplace toward Kattensingel. As they pass the town hall, Bruno points out the window of his father’s office. Even with its colored stained-glass window, it looks gloomy, a little prison cell.
“‘The command post’—that’s what my father called his room. He liked to speak telegram-style, military, abrupt. Used as few verbs as possible. He spoke like an officer to disguise his gentle nature—that’s what I always thought. God, I loved that man.”
Chris chimes in: “Your father’s already a legend in the city. Did you know that, Bruno?”
He nods, yes, yes, he knows. His father, the one-eyed officer, former soldier in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, wounded during a crackdown against rebels in the interior of Aceh.
“His main adversary in the council was a man called Staal. And Staal became an alderman last week. Your father must be spinning in his grave, Bruno. Staal, even the name of the man! Steel. A dyed-in-the-wool communist, made your father’s life as mayor a misery. That’s what did for him, Bruno, I’m telling you, that man hounded him until he became ill and then died. I’m not joking.”
Bruno does not reply. Chris is speaking more to Emma than to him.
“Emma, you know, where we’re walking now, it was packed with people eight years ago. The whole square was literally black, everyone was wearing mourning bands and ribbons. Bruno’s father was taken from the town hall to his ‘final resting place,’ as the newspaper put it. Resting place, a fine expression. It was incredibly quiet on the marketplace. I was there. But at one point a man cried out, in a furious, threatening voice: ‘Staal!’ It boomed over the square, and everyone became even quieter.”
Bruno glances at Emma. He touches the bandage on his ear, shifts it a little, starts to say something, but bites his tongue. Their footsteps echo across the almost-empty marketplace.
Then Emma asks him if what Chris said is right. She was already living in Berlin, she heard barely anything about the Netherlands and what was happening there, let alone in Gouda.
“Yes. Yes. Staal. The name was spoken as little as possible at home, because we all knew how he’d got under my father’s skin. My father, who was scared of no one, had to concede defeat to that streetfighter, Staal. It really rankles that he’s an alderman now. But he must have been on the right side during the occupation, eh, Chris?”
“Staal? During the occupation? To be honest, I don’t know.”
Good, bad, neutral, brown, black, weak, obedient, obliging, head in the sand, deaf. Emma has learned all the nuances in the descriptions of who to celebrate or condemn. But she herself is outside such language, outside all such distinctions, she is a category apart. She was married to a “good German,” whatever that might mean.
She never talks about it, even though she has told Chris and Imke, as she had no choice. Chris had been extremely interested in her story. He kept coming back to the bombings, to everyday life in Germany, asking her again and again how it was possible for so many people to emerge alive from the rubble. And if she had known anyone in Hamburg or Dresden or Lübeck.
Lübeck? No, Carl had always lived in Berlin, or abroad, his family came from the south.
8
Up five flights of granite steps, past doors with a light-brown varnish, to the top floor, flat 6. B. VERWEIJ is written on a business card loosely tucked into the corner of a small mirror in the middle of the door.
“Mister?” Emma says, pointing at the card.
“Meester, Master of Laws, but it’s not serious or contagious. Come on in, you got up here faster than I thought, I saw you coming and I was just about to go down to open the door.”
“Someone was coming out, so I slipped in. Funnily enough, the man who held open the door said: ‘Are you here to see Bruno Verweij?’ Did you warn everyone I was coming, Bruno?”
“We always have a meeting beforehand to discuss whether a new person is allowed into the street. Our front door is the closest to the border with the rest of the world, so we take the first hits. But no one spoke out against you, they said you could come in. Someone did ask what you did in the war though. But I didn’t know, and luckily they turned a blind eye.”
Comic act for two uncertain people.
A few weeks after the dance night in Gouda, Bruno had plucked up the courage to invite Emma to his home. Unexpectedly, she had said yes. And so here she is. In the place where he has lived alone for six years now, a flat of sixty square meters at most, on the third floor and on a corner, with a view of a school, a patch of grass, a canal covered with duckweed. There are sailing boats on a lake in the distance. Light enters the rooms on three sides. When the sun is shining and the shades are down, everything seems to be bathed in gold.
That is how it is in May 1946 as he leads the way to the balcony, where he has put out coffee and cups and biscuits.
“Did you bake them yourself, Bruno? You don’t need a wife!”
He laughs, soft, infectious, and she joins in. A small table, two chairs, that is about all that will fit on the balcony. There is also a ladder leading up through a hatch onto the flat roof.
“An escape route for rejected women,” he says, maintaining the same humorous tone, when she asks what the hatch is for.
“Oh, then shall I just . . . ?”
“Not before trying this delicious coffee and a biscuit I bought with coupons I saved up myself.”
The tone, the atmosphere, the masquerade of nonchalance and jokes, suddenly Emma recognizes the early days with Carl—that is how it was then, that is how it is now, it is good and will remain so.
“So no future wife, then?”
“The only visitor who’s ever gone up through that hatch was a man from the Resistance, certainly no women. Frits Rauwenhoff was his name, a neighbor who had come round to see me. I didn’t even realize he was in the Resistance until the police rang the doorbell and he zipped up onto the roof and vanished. The raid was a failure, they never caught him. Clever chap, he knew very well that I was the only one in this block with a ladder up to the roof. After liberation, he came round to thank me. Nonsense, I said, I’m the one who should be thanking you. Turns out he was an important squad leader.”
The
n Bruno apologizes for bringing up the war.
“So, to get back to your question, no, no future wife, not yet. But I’ve been working on it for the past few weeks. Constantly. Day and night. It’s a tough job.”
A curious declaration of love. Emma cannot help laughing out loud. The way he said it, it was so awkward and yet so funny. The grinning face of a neighbor pops up from the next balcony.
“Clear off, Maarten, get back in your hole. Yes, this is a woman. Yes, she’s laughing—and no, it’s no business of yours.”
“Welcome to the street, Emma!” the man says and is gone.
Something that has begun so well has to end well too, he thinks, he hopes, he tells her later.
“How does he know my name, Bruno?” she says.
“I talk in my sleep, and the walls are thin.”
The witticisms tumble over one another, dancing between them, as Bruno and Emma keep each other at a distance, for as long as it takes.
And that is a long time, a few weeks already, with months still to go.
The contours of Emma’s life remain vague, she fends off everything to do with the war years, and, even before that, with her childhood. Bruno has found out little more than that she was married to a German, lived in Berlin and fled because of something connected to her husband, but she does not tell him any details, avoids the subject.
Berlin, marriage, betrayal and escape, these are ghostly concepts that make Bruno’s own history pale into insignificance.
Being in love with Maarten’s wife for nearly three years, and their underground relationship that took place in cellars and closets, in the wood and on the little islands in the lake, suddenly feels childish, almost infantile, even though having to give her up in the last year of the war threw him off balance for many months. The emptiness without her. He does not tell Emma anything about that either, she finds out only much later.
Their stories are full of holes, and yet they like what they hear more and more each time.
9
“It’s Monday today, isn’t it, Judith?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So he’s coming tomorrow.”
“Mm, at eleven o’clock, he said.”
Asking over and over what day and time it is—the mantra of a woman who is rapidly running out of time.
A week before, Emma had stopped eating, stopped taking her medication, and she was drinking less and less. The euphemistic term was “letting go of life,” a method of dying that was as old as humankind. Had her grandmother not done much the same? She remembered her father once telling her about it. How he had supported his mother, who had threatened to throw herself out of the window if he did not help her, and how it had haunted his dreams. Assistance with letting go of life. Now, it was Emma’s son Thomas’ turn to come from Germany, where he had been living for years.
Her father. A ghost in a realm from which there is no return. Her father, Oscar Verschuur, had been a lifelong diplomat and a lifelong fugitive, forever traveling to far-off capitals. Without a photograph, Emma had difficulty bringing his face to mind, and she certainly could not recall the sound of his voice. And yet, even with all his mystery, he did not escape her memory for a moment.
There had been times when Emma could hardly bear him, as he was so far beyond her reach. But, despite all his evasion, she had loved him terribly, almost excessively, or at least helplessly. That love remained, he was a distant compass, and yet still so close.
Even now, in her final days, he was there. Emma was aware of his approval or disapproval, and when she made her decision to stop eating she wondered what he would have thought. Emma’s father watched over her shoulder, but that was never a problem.
“That’s fine, Emma,” he would likely have said.
Fine, fine. Everything that received the stamp of approval was “fine.”
But what exactly made it fine, what invisible guidelines from which unknown god? Decency, indifference, complacency, tolerance. The fineness of mediocrity or impotence? It was an unfathomable criterion: something was either “fine” or it was not.
Emma’s father had died very suddenly at the beginning of February 1953, and with no obvious cause. Dying during the disastrous floods of ’53 was anything but “fine,” your death notice was lost among so many others. Martinus Nijhoff, another of her heroes, had died in the same week. Emma had asked for one of his lines to be printed on Oscar’s mourning card: To live is to dream, and death, I think, is what awakens us.
There were not many people at the funeral. Oscar’s friends were scattered all over the world. And Emma’s mother Kate was not there to bury her husband, she was traveling in Africa, Emma had been unable to contact her. It was only when she returned to the Netherlands that she heard Oscar was dead and buried.
A gray morning at Westerveld cemetery, dunes full of distinguished gravestones, family crypts almost the size of houses, statues among weeping willows. The strong wind has blown the flowers from the graves, the potted plants and wreaths and ribbons brought by visitors are scattered all around, the gardeners are busy tidying up. Emma walks at the front with Bruno, who is holding Michael and Thomas by the hand. A small procession follows behind.
It is as if she has to be both wife and daughter.
The small children find it interesting, they whisper and Thomas even sings occasionally. The walk through Westerveld takes a long time, too long for her liking, up the dunes, down the dunes. Emma has not yet seen who is walking behind her. She does not look around until they are standing beside the grave, in a circle as best they can. She sees unfamiliar faces, recognizes a few old friends, retired diplomats, some distant relations, Chris and Imke, of course. And then, directly opposite, on the other side of the circle, the most distant from her, her father’s most trusted friend. Emma has not seen him since the war. Mr. Wapenaar, Adriaan Wapenaar. Wherever did he come from? Emma nods at him, he does the same back at her.
His presence upsets Emma’s carefully composed equilibrium of grief and responsibility. She wants to commemorate her father without too much emotion. Out in the open air, with wind gusting through the bushes and trees, it is already a challenge, but Wapenaar constitutes an actual threat. He is connected to the most devastating years of her life, the part she has always kept silent about. She wants to say something, but no sound comes from her throat. Wapenaar gives her a nod of encouragement. No one seems to notice, not even Bruno.
Then Emma speaks, briefly, intensely. She mentions her mother, whom she was sadly unable to reach—no one seems to think that strange, although it certainly is, even though her parents had been separated for so long. Now and then she looks at Wapenaar, who is listening, motionless, his head gently tilted. Should she refer to him as her father’s brother-in-arms? That is what she had been planning to do, not suspecting that he would be present.
She does so and, within a few sentences, the lost, loathed city of Berlin penetrates their circle, along with the love and friendship that she experienced there in spite of everything.
Oscar Verschuur and Adriaan Wapenaar, two of a kind, before the war, during the war and after. Two drifters, always on the move. What remained was their alliance, their respect for each other’s secrets. Her father had considered their friendship a sort of life insurance. Rightly so.
Wapenaar stares at the ground.
“They took him to . . . Emma, he was . . . he . . .”
Wapenaar puts his hand on her shoulder, his wife Elka holds both of Emma’s hands. At the table in the conservatory, the blood freezes in her head, she feels nothing, her eyes are shut, her body is closed, in the garden a dog barks and barks. Where are her father and mother, they are never there when you need them.
They are nowhere, just like now, just like here, on a bare and windy Wednesday morning in this godforsaken cemetery by the North Sea. Emma is terrified that she will have to stop speaking. Wapenaar in her field of vision, struggling with his tears, is simply too much to bear.
Bruno lets go of t
he boys’ hands and puts his arm around her, just in time. She thanks everyone for coming, invites them all to have a drink with the family, walks to the coffin beside the open grave, lays her hand on it for a moment, turns to face Wapenaar and nods.
He waited until the line of people offering their condolences had dissolved. Bruno has taken the boys outside, the sun is coming out.
“Hello, Emma, your father would have been proud.” Wapenaar hugs her, something he has never done before.
“Mr. Wapenaar, I wasn’t expecting you to come. I hope it was alright, what I said about my father and you.”
“Oscar has the status of a hero among diplomats, Emma, you probably never realized. I heard on the diplomatic grapevine that he’d died. While most of us stayed at our desks, he was helping people over the border into Switzerland, which was unspeakably dangerous. He never said much about it himself, but after the war all kinds of stories came out about his clever and successful missions in the mountains. Your father was an exceptionally courageous man, Emma. I admired him tremendously.”
“But you did the same in Berlin, Mr. Wapenaar. You may even have been in greater danger than my father. You must be at least as much of a legend.”
A contest in fame and bravery. Wapenaar brushes it off.
“I see you’ve remarried and have children now. What wonderful news. Elka will be delighted.”
“How is she, Mr. Wapenaar? Would you send her my warmest greetings?”
“She sends hers to you too. She’s seriously ill, or she would certainly have been here.”
Wapenaar says it in a flat voice. Emma takes his arm, he lays his hand on hers. The same move repeated, hand on shoulder on arm, but this time without Elka.
She is back in Grunewald, in the Wapenaars’ conservatory.
Emma asked the nurse to take her to bed. The cracker had been digested, the cavity inside was expanding. She was beyond hunger, and she felt barely any thirst. Now and then she raised a glass to her mouth, but she did not drink, just moistened her lips.