The Longest Night

by Otto de Kat

  People are dancing inside and Emma points out Bruno, who’s whirling around with a German woman on a dance floor surrounded by tables.

  “So he’s your new husband?”

  “Yes. Do you have someone?”

  “Not since Adam. It didn’t work, I couldn’t bear the touch of anyone else’s hands.”

  Hands: another word for life with a man. Carl’s hands, until the very end. Bruno’s hands, with those damaged nails, harbingers of decay. Hands, not eyes, are the mirrors of a man’s soul.

  Slowly Emma returns. With Clarita’s voice in her ears, everything that has not been said and does not need to be said. That turbulent time, those unfettered years together have resurfaced in the port of Hamburg, and their boat has not sunk, it calmly docks, and the moon casts its pale light over the gangway.

  Emma and Bruno stand on deck and wave. Clarita’s hand waves back. She does not turn around as she steps into the taxi.

  15

  “Judith, is your mother still alive?”

  “Yes, lucky for me, Mrs. Verweij. She’s still young, only fifty-one.”

  “Do you see much of her?”

  “Every week. She’s lovely. We sometimes go on holiday together. That’s if she can get time off work.”

  “So what does your mother do?”

  “She’s an office manager for a big firm of architects. They’re a bit like artists, these architects—she always says they might be great at designing buildings but that it would be chaos without her.”

  “And your father?”

  “He died ten years ago. I helped to take care of him until the end. Mother couldn’t handle it on her own.”

  “Is that why you became a nurse?”

  There was no reply. Emma understood and asked no more questions. Seeing your mother every week, going on trips together, what a luxury. Back in the prehistoric era she had traveled with her mother and father too. To Brazil, where they went to live, where there was no winter. Always together, always sun. Mythical prehistory, the smell of eternity.

  Then she had lost her mother. Was she really her mother? Emma had sometimes had her doubts—they had so very little in common—and she had rarely caught herself thinking fondly of her mother. The feeling had seemed to be mutual.

  Kate and Oscar, her parents—she searched her mind for the old days before the estrangement set in. Who had they been?

  “Was your mother there when your father died?”

  There was no reply. Nurse Judith was asleep, Emma could tell from her steady breathing. Now she was alone. And awake. She watched over the child.

  “Emma!”

  She recognizes the voice immediately, no one speaks her name as forcefully as her mother. This time there’s a good reason. She is standing down in the street and speaking on the intercom: Emma! It’s your mother.

  This is typical of her mother, returning from Africa un-announced, coming straight to Rotterdam, and now Emma has to tell her that her husband is dead. Could a situation be any more peculiar? She races downstairs to open the door.

  “I tried to reach you everywhere, Mother. But none of the embassies or consulates knew where you were. Where on earth have you been?”

  Her mother is shocked, of course, when she hears of Oscar’s death. She cries, briefly, not for long, and soon the questions start coming, along with a hint of indignation about the missed funeral.

  She had left for the Congo two months earlier, on some unexplained mission.

  “In the region where I was, Emma, they don’t have newspapers or telephones. I hadn’t even heard anything about the floods either, I only found out on the way back, and you’re right, there was no way to reach me. But I told you all that beforehand. You did get my letter, didn’t you?”

  Emma controls herself. Yes, yes, she got it, but did her mother not receive the messages she had left at her home in Barkston Gardens? No, she hasn’t been there, she flew straight from the airport in London to the Netherlands, she needed Oscar.

  “What was so urgent, Mother? You only saw each other once in a while.”

  “It was more often than that, darling. I needed his advice, I wanted to see him, and you too, of course, to discuss something that’s been on my mind for years.”

  Emma thinks everything her mother says is vague. Everything is covert, shadowy and a little sad. As a matter of fact, much about her parents’ lives has been evasive, enigmatic, without obvious affection. Parents are impenetrable creatures, people you think you know, but who often spend their lives in an entirely different reality.

  Emma knew all about that. What would her own children think later about Bruno and her? They knew absolutely nothing about Carl, even Bruno only knew a few simple, superficial facts. Vagueness piled on top of rumor and speculation, on dreams and suspicions: family history is a constant stream of knowing almost nothing, a scrap of insight here and there, an unintentional discovery. Those who find out and understand something do so by accident. The past is black, her parents’, and her own as well. No, it is not black, it is dark. Black suggests there is no solution, there is hopelessness in that word, maybe even dishonesty and deception. With “dark,” you cannot help thinking of a possible way out, that one day something might come to light.

  “What is it, then, Mother, what is it that’s been on your mind all these years?”

  She already suspects the answer.

  “Barbarossa, still?”

  The knife in the back of their life as a family. Barbarossa. Code word for the demarcation line between her father and her mother.

  16

  “Russians.”

  It is dark in the compartment, it is dusk outside, they have been traveling all that August day too, although the train was mostly at a standstill. For more than forty-eight hours, they have been sitting in a packed train on the way to Baden Baden, or Stuttgart, or as far as possible into the Black Forest. Escape from Berlin. Lots of children with mothers and without fathers, lots of old people, and a few lost soldiers. Hardly anyone speaks.

  “Russians”—a voice in the silence, flat and resigned. Those who are sitting by the window, pressed up against it, look over at the other side of the station, where, for three hours now, they have been waiting for permission to move on. A troop of men in dirty black jackets is sheltering there, in a semi-circle, like cows in a storm, silent, their faces turned to the train. A few soldiers with guns stand close to the rails. The rest of the platform is empty.

  Even though Emma is by the window, she keeps her eyes closed. Carl had told her about the Russian prisoners of war being dragged across the entire country, executed for the lightest, slightest offense. She and Carl had spent so much time talking about Operation Barbarossa. Adam had heard from Carl when it was going to happen, they had known about the impending attack on Russia and had done absolutely nothing about it. The secret was too vast—how could they have influenced the Wehrmacht, or Stalin for that matter? Emma had warned her father, though, and later Mr. Wapenaar.

  Sandwiched between two wide women on the train seat, she reluctantly remembers her trip with Carl and Adam to Geneva, more than three years ago now. Her father was living in Switzerland at the time. It had been a neutral and indifferent paradise, with people shopping and strolling along the promenade beside a lake full of sailing boats. She is still embarrassed at the thought of it.

  The secret of Barbarossa has been overtaken by Carl’s death, she does not even feel any regret or sorrow inside that stiflingly hot train compartment. The old terror has evaporated, her fury and disappointment about her elusive father are forgotten, the man who helped refugees to cross the border between France and Switzerland by night, and played the obedient diplomat by day.

  The Wehrmacht had marched, Russia was crushed, Germany won on all fronts. Until Stalingrad, until there. Now they were beating a hasty retreat across scorched earth.

  Emma is nudged by the old woman beside her, who points at the men outside. But she does not want to look, the men on the platform should
not be stared at so shamelessly. She does not see the boy fall, she has her eyes closed, she presses her hands to her ears and barely hears the shot. Everything washes over and around her, every day of the journey, every new hour of the war.

  “The way that soldier shot that Russian down,” her neighbor says, with the steady voice of an experienced bystander who has seen a good many people fall.

  17

  “It’s twelve years ago now, Emma, and you can’t tell me a day’s gone by when you haven’t thought about it. I was convinced your father had passed on your message, he flew to London specially. Carl had received accurate information from von Trott. But he didn’t do it, and that drove a permanent wedge between us. It wasn’t just because of that Lara woman that your father and I separated, you know.”

  “That Lara woman? What do you mean? I never heard Father mention anyone called Lara.”

  So yes, there had been another woman.

  How long did it go on? Her mother speaks about it in passing, as if it is generally known, a thing of the past. Yes, it is certainly a thing of the past. Her father is dead, and she stood by his grave talking about someone she apparently did not know as well as she had thought. She could kick that Lara woman. Her mother too, for that matter.

  “Did your father keep it from you? I don’t think there was anyone he trusted more than you.”

  “He never said a word about it, but it’s not the kind of thing you talk about to your daughter.”

  Kate laughs. The conversation is taking a turn she does not like.

  Her mother seems to be on the warpath. Suddenly she feels free to talk about things that show her husband in a new and dismal light. Dark clouds, shifting shadows, Oscar Verschuur revisited.

  Is it the shock of his passing that has made her mother open up? Why are these issues coming up now, after all those years of silence? Should she be talking like this to her mother barely a fortnight after her father’s funeral? It feels as if she has to defend herself and her father, as if they are being called to account.

  And yet, looking back on it later, much later, she had felt more empathy for her mother, a woman walking her own path, a brave and lone crusader against injustice, wherever she encountered it.

  For Emma, the whole nightmarish Barbarossa episode has grown less important over the years, her own role becoming faded and hazy. But it seems that it changed her parents’ life for good.

  “The only reality is one’s own past.”

  Which pessimist had said that? Emma could not remember, but she had to admit that it was true. In the silent night, her life was only recollections, her memory as clear and fluid as water. It spread out endlessly over an infinite area in which she was suspended.

  Her bed, the bell by her hand, the gently billowing curtains, the sleeping Judith, the unseen objects that she had treasured for so long, the photograph of Bruno on her bedside table.

  She was a butterfly on its last flight, flitting, fleeting.

  Oscar Verschuur and Kate Dudok were so close that she could touch them.

  Conversations with her mother almost always teetered on the brink of argument. Their words rarely converged, rarely alighted on common ground. What did they really know about each other? Had her mother ever wondered?

  In 1939 Kate had gone to live in London. She and Oscar were scared of Germany and bought a house where they thought it would be safe. He had been transferred to Bern, and Kate found work in a London hospital. She lived instinctively, without a plan and without Oscar.

  Kate’s nomadic existence, which she continued after the war, with London as her base, foiled any attempts at reconciliation. For Michael and Thomas, their grandmother was something like a story, they saw her once or twice a year at most, more or less by chance.

  Kate traveled mainly in Africa, where she knew and helped many people. Letters, the few she wrote, came from Élisabethville, Congo, where at least she had a postal address.

  She had once sent a photograph of herself from there, with a black man and his wife and three children, all strangers to Emma. Kate had one of the children on her lap, the man was wearing a hat, his wife was smiling, the children were looking at Kate. Black idyll with white woman, a scene from Kate Verschuur’s mysterious life. They were strange signals from a strange world. Feeling uncomfortable, Emma had stored the photograph away. There was a message encrypted within it that she preferred not to decipher. And she also felt a little envious, for you could see that her mother knew the children in the photograph better than she did her own grandchildren.

  18

  “Do you know where I was when your father died?”

  One day, years later, Kate had, of course, told her anyway, even though Emma had never asked. The story lay at the bottom of her memory, a sunken tale in which her mother had revealed more about herself than ever before. Tonight, that story resurfaced.

  Kate had taken a trip with a man called Matteous Tunga, along the River Congo, a thousand miles northwards toward Ethiopia. Matteous wanted to return to the jungle of his childhood. He had once been recruited as a soldier in an army that was going to liberate Ethiopia. Even before they got there, his platoon had walked into a trap and came under fire. His officer was seriously wounded and, when Matteous had picked him up and carried him out of the line of fire, he was himself shot in the back.

  After a long search, he and Kate had found the scene of the ambush. Scene of the ambush, but also the site of a new beginning. By repeating his journey, Kate said, Matteous had wanted to exorcise his horror of the war, his disgust for the Belgian officers who commanded black battalions and marched them to face the Italian army, which was occupying Ethiopia. After the ambush he had been transported to London, to a friend of the wounded Belgian, a surgeon at the Richmond Royal Hospital, where Kate worked. She had nursed him and helped him through his recovery.

  Matteous had returned to the Congo in the middle of the war. He wanted to take back the life that had been stolen from him. Kate, his temporary pseudo-mother, did not expect to see him again. The sea crossing alone was very risky. Hoping against hope, she had given him twenty postcards addressed to her. He sent her all of them over five years. Every few months a postcard would drop through her letterbox, signed in a kind of hieroglyphics. And each time there were more words in English, written phonetically.

  Kate knew the contents of the cards by heart. She had found her destination: Africa.

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘Africa,’ Mother?”

  Irritation in every syllable. Kate’s answer is simple: “We’ve lost sight of Africa. We need to find it again. The people need our help.”

  These are bold phrases, rather empty, and yet Emma finds them moving. Her mother, the little bulldozer, is preparing to go into battle again. For five years she lived in a city under fire, and now that peace has broken out she is looking for another front. She has given her husband as much freedom as possible, even though they are still married, for the sake of what once was, and perhaps the love they once shared gives them some indefinable sense of comfort.

  “What kind of man is this Matteous? And why did you go with him on his journey?”

  Kate finds it hard to explain. It was the first time she had seen him again. For eleven years, she had thought about him every day. The journey was already mapped out, he left her no choice, his wife and children knew exactly who she was when she finally arrived, and that she and Matteous were going to make the journey together. A trip inland, into the dreaded past.

  “He had to go back there. I didn’t really understand it at first either. Why return to a place where you were shot? But he was determined, it was something he was going to do, no matter what, and I had to go with him. He’d got hold of an old army Jeep, a cat on wheels, we jumped from one pothole to the next. You don’t get anywhere out there without that kind of vehicle. A week later, when we eventually found the spot where he so very nearly died, there was a gale blowing, as hot as a fire. The River Congo was close by, and there were a few clum
ps of bushes and trees scattered on a bare strip of land all the way to the jungle, which rose up like a wall. Matteous looked around. He seemed composed, and yet somehow absent. He was there, yes—but he wasn’t. Then he showed me the route his platoon had taken, as precisely as if he had been there only the day before and his fellow soldiers were now resting somewhere beneath the trees.

  “He told me what had happened that afternoon in early 1941, when the sun was already low in the sky. As they were looking for a place to spend the night, shots had been fired at the group from various directions.

  “When Matteous told the story, he didn’t look at me. Everything he said was filled with unfathomable grief and loss. For his fellow soldiers, for his own life. Then he began to talk about his mother. He had last seen her when he was a boy of seven, before she was taken away by a gang of thugs, so-called freedom fighters, who had just murdered his father.

  “‘Miss Kate’—he always calls me Miss Kate—‘after I had taken my officer to safety, in those trees over there, I collapsed and fell to the ground. I hoped I’d never wake up again. Then I would go to my mother. But they rescued me, they moved me halfway around the world and when I woke, you were at my bedside. You were the one who got me through it all. Without you, I wouldn’t be here and I wouldn’t have a wife and children. Miss Kate, will you be the grandmother to my children?’”