The Longest Night

by Otto de Kat

  The bowl has been removed, of course. She can still just about see the mark it has left on the thin film of dust on the desk, a scrap of evidence. The newspaper is a local one from Lübeck, she sees, from 1942, the year of the bombing—of the bombs all around her in Berlin, with Carl holding her tight.

  Dear Chris, stupid, lonely, loyal Chris, what were you looking for in that newspaper? You had already known for so long. I’ll find it for you: Julia Bender, died March 28, 1942.

  On Palm Sunday, the day of Jesus of Nazareth’s entry into Jerusalem. Louis had once given an excellent sermon on the subject. One week on the shoulders of the people, as hero and savior, the kingdom close at hand, the next week carrying a huge wooden cross through the streets, with the people splitting their sides.

  Julia Bender in a burning house, it is an image that is not hard to imagine. No one who was sleeping in the center of Lübeck escaped. The British later spoke of a precision-bombing attack. Emma had long been familiar with the term, she had seen the bombs falling so often, although they always seemed to be dropped at random. But Chris had despised the British for it. Even though he dressed like an English gentleman of leisure, and would rather read English books than Dutch ones, the way they had killed people, attacking in the middle of the night like thieves and destroying historic cities, Dresden, Lübeck, Weimar—he thought these were Nazi methods. Emma had once heard him fulminating against British crimes, without mentioning Julia, and even then she had been surprised by his cynical view of the war.

  Julia Bender, a name on that night’s list of victims. Only those few sentences that Bruno had heard about her and passed on to Emma, that was all that remained of her. A handful of words and an entry in an index of the dead.

  Emma sits at Chris’ desk, her hands on the green blotter, and automatically screws the cap onto the fountain pen. Then she spots an open book. A sheet of paper is sticking out from under it at an angle. She looks at what Chris was reading. Schopenhauer: “Fate shuffles the cards, and we play.”

  Chris’ favorite writer, a great thinker about the futility of everything and everyone. That book alone is a farewell, she realizes. No long letters with explanations, no apologies or blame, no dramatic words. An open book, a subtle handshake.

  As she picks up the book, the whole sheet of paper becomes visible. There are two lines on it, in Chris’ precise and precious handwriting. Emma knows the lines by heart, she does not even need to read them, she knows they are by Rilke, their poet. They did not agree about many things, always engaged in a kind of loving battle, but when it came to Rilke, there was no dispute.

  Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr. Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben.

  Whoever has no house now will never build one, whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time.

  A will after all, one last thought that he had written down for her, the last meal already prepared.

  Chris, cousin, brother, companion in adversity, knight in shining armor, her favorite sparring partner. Now she is the one who is alone and will remain so for a long time. She is sixty-seven, not even old, all things considered.

  Emma replaces the sheet of paper, even though she knows it is meant for her, the letter with no addressee. She does not want to disturb the order—or rather, disorder—of the desk. Everything must remain as it was, like evidence for a court, a dossier of helplessness.

  How old was Chris? Seventy-two. He looked sixty, back like a ramrod, but no purpose in life. What a dreadful deed, and yet what incredible courage.

  Wer jetzt allein ist, yes, that was right, alone, that was what she was now, no doubt about it.

  Four years before Chris, it had been Bruno who had left her behind and he, too, had wasted few words.

  “Call Michael and Thomas,” he had said in the ambulance.

  Bruno, her quiet husband, sick, caring, sporty, addicted to cigarettes, the beloved father. And then he had died, as they raced to the hospital at top speed.

  All she had been able to do was hold his hand, look at his damaged fingernails, see how gray his hair was, how ashen his face, his parted lips. His cardigan and shirt were torn open, the watch on his wrist twisted around, its strap broken. A man was pounding on his chest, she heard the sound of his ribs cracking. The neon lights in that claustrophobic space, the paramedic’s sweat, the siren’s wails.

  “I’m losing him, I’m losing him,” the medic had mumbled, more to himself than to her.

  22

  “Bruno!”

  The nurse beside her was instantly awake.

  “Do you need some help, Mrs. Verweij?”

  “No, I don’t believe so. Did you think I said something?”

  “I heard you say ‘Bruno.’”

  “I need to call Michael and Thomas, Judith.”

  “You already phoned them, yesterday evening. Thomas is on his way.”

  “And Michael?”

  “I’m sure he’s coming too. He’s not very well, remember?”

  “What time is it, Judith?”

  “Four o’clock, it’ll be a while before it gets light. Try to get some more sleep, it’ll do you good.”

  The lamb, the dear little lamb, she meant it so sincerely: “It’ll do you good.”

  The light would come, without a doubt. The sun would shine upon her room, her balcony, the objects in her house. Suddenly she felt amazed at the existence of light, something that made it possible to see. How many times had she wandered around her flat at night when she was unable to sleep? Fumbling to open the curtains, which she always shut every night, as if the war were not over. An old habit from Berlin.

  On some snowy nights, a few streetlights still shining, not a soul around, she would watch, the world all to herself, as the snow fell, calm and steady. Layer by layer, it changed the view, as the street narrowed and became a freshly made bed. Snow was just about the simplest form of happiness, snow was her father in Switzerland, the skating trips in Friesland, going out with Bruno and Michael and Thomas through the white streets.

  In the Black Forest, the snow falls in huge quantities. It is December 1944 and Emma is living with the Rupert family, the father is a brother of Elka Wapenaar’s, in Korntal, a village like an open-air museum. Houses in delicate shades, a square with a pub, a school and a church. And, all around, farmland, corn fields, spruce woods, cows and horses, pigs and goats.

  It is indecently peaceful, the war seems far away. But the tranquility is deceptive, as there are hardly any young men around, just children and women and old men. A village without muscle, nice and quiet. The Wapenaars managed to get Emma onto a train, which, after more than two days, had come to a halt at a godforsaken station on the edge of the Black Forest. Away from Berlin, city of murderers, where the zoo is open as usual, and the football matches go on and the films still play in the cinemas. It turned her stomach.

  Snow just before Christmas, she would have taken a sledge out onto the street before, but Emma cannot afford to think about before. The memory is more painful than hunger and cold. In the village the old men talk about the Ardennes, where their grandsons have been sent, in one last all-out effort against the enemy. It would work, it had to work. This is the offensive they have been hoping for. The women know better, they milk the cows, slaughter their last pigs and wait.

  Emma is tolerated. She is an outsider, and people in the village suspect she was the wife of a traitor, the kind that wanted to murder the Führer. But Rupert is a decent man, they respect him, and he has said that Emma is part of the family and that they have to treat her decently.

  The months at the Ruperts seem to last forever, first the autumn, then a harsher winter than any she can remember. When Christmas comes in Korntal, the Ruperts are the only family in the village who do not go to church. Not because they do not want to, but because there is an idiot in the pulpit, a full-blown Nazi. Emma goes anyway, on her own, leaving the Ruperts confused.

  December 24, Christmas Eve, Heiliger Abend, the snow refuses to let
up. A female choir that they have scraped together is singing as she comes in and finds a place in one of the rear pews. Emma has never been inside the church before. A few candles are burning in the almost-dark space, but it is bare and damp. The windows are covered with black paper. Dusty bags containing songbooks hang at intervals along the benches. And there are brass plaques screwed onto the backs of the pews. Everyone appears to have their own seat. She recognizes the names of some of the villagers, the baker and the vet. His place was at the back, of course, he had to be able to slip away if needed.

  Emma braces herself for what is to come. She could not bear it in her little room, she had to get out, and she did not care where to. So she automatically joined the people who were heading to church. Something different for a change, a little time away from her doom-laden thoughts.

  Church, she has scarcely a notion of what it means, she has been maybe once or twice, with her grandmother on Christmas Eve, in Leeuwarden, aeons ago in an age of fairy tales.

  A man steps out of a side door and walks to the front. He is wearing an ordinary smart suit, presumably the one he wore to get married, which only comes out of the wardrobe on special occasions. Emma recognizes him, it is the vet. He climbs into the pulpit and says calmly that the pastor will not be coming, he has been called up to fight in the Ardennes. No one reacts. Then this rustic man, who has the good fortune to be over fifty and indispensable, raises his hand, as if to call a halt to something that cannot be seen.

  “Peace be with you.”

  Emma looks around. Every head she sees is bowed and silent. This man is asking the impossible, but they listen with wondrous intent.

  Packed in together, their names in brass, they sit there, worn to the bone, their sons and grandsons dead or who knows where, all of them impoverished, afraid and without hope.

  This is how people are sitting all over Germany now, thinks Emma, in blind devotion. The windows blacked out, the candles lit.

  The vet reads the story of the Nativity, as told by Luke, another medical man. A primitive account of a child born in a stable, but the story captivates her. To a vet, a birth in a stable is nothing special. The perfect setting, nice and warm.

  The rural accent and the steady tones of the stand-in pastor’s voice are so pleasant that Emma forgets time and place. As long as he is reading, talking, as long as the choir sings those age-old songs with their unintelligible words in archaic German, she forgets the war. She does not think about anything else, not Carl, not her parents, not herself.

  Christmas in the Black Forest, in a dilapidated church on a hill not all that far from liberated France. Pseudo-mysticism, perhaps, but the voice of the veterinary surgeon and the hoarse choir of women and the draft that almost blows out the candles and the squeaking and wheezing of the little organ above her head—it is almost enough to make her believe. Peace be with you. If only that were possible, bitte.

  The vet prays, the people around Emma mumble along. That a kingdom might come, and bread, and trespasses be forgiven and that they themselves might forgive those who trespass against them.

  Such warm and friendly people. Murmuring. The sounds of an unknown lament, a flurry of words she can barely make out, led by the man in the pulpit. Helmut Wachter is his name, and he watches over them all.

  23

  Four o’clock, Judith had said. The end of the graveyard shift, the deepest moments of the night were over. It would soon be light, and Tuesday. Thomas would take matters in hand, final round, kingdom come.

  Emma listened to see if the nurse had fallen back to sleep. Yes, she could hear the soft, regular breathing, the coast was clear. Centimeter by centimeter, she moved to one side of the bed, took hold of the sticks that were leaning against it and, trembling with the effort, she slipped silently out of her bedroom, pausing every so often to listen. A light was on in the hallway. The door to the living room was open, her chair was by the window, untouched.

  As tired as if she had been walking for a day, Emma reached her lookout post.

  “System, friend who takes everything from me, and soon the rest of my time—I feel like a stranger everywhere, except for in eternity.”

  The lines of poetry returned to her, like homing pigeons to their coop. They were still there, the pigeons across the way. The old pigeon man was dead, but he must have passed on his hobby to his son, as the creatures continued to fly their rounds every evening, and a man high up on the roof put his hand in the air and whistled.

  His father had been waving at his birds in the same way when Bruno had asked her to stay.

  “I feel like a stranger everywhere, except for in eternity.” Every day she repeated that sentence. Words could not come closer to what she was experiencing. They coincided perfectly with the sense of dissolution in her body as she was lifted up, paper thin, to become a memory.

  Emma hoped Judith would not wake up yet. She wanted to wait for the light here, like this, in her chair, to sit through the night, or what was left of it.

  The nurse had said it would be May in two days’ time and that she was looking forward to it. Emma had not responded. She liked May, but she would always have preferred to skip the first week. Remembrance Day, the commemoration of the dead, liberation, thoughts of Carl on a butcher’s hook, Adam before a screaming judge, Emma on the run. Images she had struggled to suppress.

  But it always proved difficult on those two days, with Bruno participating enthusiastically in the events of commemoration and celebration on May 4 and 5. He hung the flag out of the side window, at half mast, or fastened it to the balcony facing the street, glaring at the drivers who did not pull over for the minute’s silence at eight o’clock. Even though he had not in fact lost anyone during the war. On the second day, they went out early, Michael and Thomas wearing orange hats, the flag raised high in the school playground, a lantern procession through the neighborhood. Bruno was in his element.

  He seemed to have been liberated, but Emma sometimes wondered if that was really the case. Over time, his skin complaint had worsened, and the local chemist became a wholesale supplier of an endlessly changing list of medication. Experimental treatments, weeks in hospital, year after year.

  The after-effects of that wartime winter of starvation, was the diagnosis. But was that true? Bruno had never said much about starvation. In fact, he had remained silent about that last year of the war.

  Emma now knew why. Maria, who had become her best friend, had told her. By then, Bruno had been dead for about a year.

  Emma and Maria were walking by the lake on a path close to the water, past tall reeds and paddling ducks. Not far from the shore were a few little islands. Crumbled away from the land, and overgrown with bushes and small trees. Large enough for a secret rendezvous, if you had a boat.

  “That was our island.” Maria points out the green strip of land in the water.

  When Emma asks who she means by “our,” she says: “Bruno’s and mine.”

  “You and Bruno?”

  “But surely you knew!”

  Emma shakes her head. Maria grips her arm and steers her to one of the benches beside the path.

  “In the war. It didn’t last any longer than a year, maybe eighteen months. Two years at most.”

  That probably means twice as long, throughout the war, thinks Emma, but she does not say so.

  Maria’s story is fragmented, full of gaps and contradictions, it is a story awash with embarrassment and old desire. Maria does now what Bruno never wanted to do: she talks about the war years in their street, the oasis they designed and dreamed up themselves, their bastion of self-confidence, humor, love and recklessness. There were raids and hunger there too, they came from outside, they were unavoidable. And there was also fear, and a stillborn child, and parents who died, and a brother who was executed by the Germans.

  “Most of us were between twenty-five and thirty-five, about twenty young families, a few elderly people, two female friends who lived together, and one friendly member of the Natio
nal Socialist Movement, who never hurt anyone but himself. We lived in a street that was two hundred meters long at most, with broad pavements, a few streetlights, six young trees. The street was our life. Looking back, it was madness to be so happy in those years, a little criminal, in fact. Bruno was the only man without a wife, but that didn’t seem to be a problem for him. Quite the opposite, I’d say.”

  “How did it begin between the two of you, Maria?”

  It had been when they were sailing. Bruno sailed until late in the autumn. And when everyone else had already prepared their boats for winter, he was often still out on the lake. One day in November, when it was sunny and unusually warm, he had asked Maria to go with him. At parties in the street they had often spoken to each other, he saw her, and she saw him, it was effortless, they danced together, they had never danced so much as during the war.

  “I had the children, and Maarten—we only met occasionally, it was an air-raid-shelter kind of love, far from the real world, there was never any suggestion that we would ever get together. But it gave my days an extra sparkle, and his too. And then there came a point when we had to choose, people in the street were becoming suspicious, someone warned me that we’d been seen on the island.”

  Once again she points at that strip of land, which seems little more than a large clump of soil with a few bushes on it, and then is silent for a while.

  When Maria continues, Emma has stopped listening, she is wandering through Bruno’s life. He was lonely and gentle. She loved him without looking back. Maria’s story does not shock her, not at all, in fact. She is glad that he was not alone in those dark years.

  It had ended in the summer of ’44, is that what Maria said?

  Bruno and Maria had been to their island for the last time, the reeds were head-height, they had agreed on a retreat to their homes, with feelings of emptiness and of circumstances beyond their control. Is that how it had happened?