by Otto de Kat
“Call Maria,” Bruno says, “the four of us are going to buy it together.”
We’re in. Sight unseen, comes the reply.
It is the beginning of a rural idyll, one that lasts almost a decade. For Emma, the house in the crook of the dyke becomes her most prized possession, from the summer of that year, 1956, Carl retreats into a safe shadow, and she can occasionally even think of him without that intense pain.
A patch of land at the foot of the dyke, large bushes of gooseberries, elderberries, reeds and roses, two pear trees and a shed, the vast empire of four city dwellers.
Helmond meets Rotterdam, is the motto. Maria and Maarten from the south, Emma and Bruno from the big city. “East, west—Brakel’s best,” Maria has had these words painted on a ceramic plate. Brakel is the name of the village that they are an offshoot of, theirs is the last house before kilometers of uninhabited land. Beyond is Munnikenland, which sometimes floods, and where nature dictates the rules.
Versteeg, the eel fisher, becomes their friend. As evening approaches and they put out their table and chairs on the Nieuwedijk, cars are a rarity there, he usually appears just in time for a glass of old jenever.
“Wouldn’t say no.”
“Cheers, Versteeg!”
“Here’s to eternity, my friends.”
Years later, Bruno helps to carry him through the village. In his coffin on their shoulders, through the streets of his life. Versteeg, who had twelve children, all of them born in that house on the dyke.
Emma opened her eyes, and quickly closed them again when she saw Judith’s hand. She listened to the children going to school. Eight thirty, math or French, a class full of anticipation, reluctance and fun, the usual mutiny against incomprehensible teachers and stupid tests. All those classrooms full of children on a sunny morning, sunk in restless silence as the work lands on their desks—and then Emma in her bed, between heaven and earth.
Emma’s thoughts drift effortlessly across the canal to the classes twenty meters away. And to Michael and Thomas’ school years, the boys she had worried about all their lives, no matter how old they were.
Michael is acting. She is sitting in the auditorium of the Palace Theater, Bruno is not there, much to his regret. Ill at home. Michael has the leading role in a play by an English writer, scenes from the life of a dandy, they would settle for nothing less at that school. Slim and superior, he treads the boards at this ramshackle little theater, his acting transporting everyone to a London suburb in the 1950s.
Just before the interval he is sitting in a barber’s chair, with his legs jacked up by the barber, who is waving his scissors like a beak, pecking at his head and cheeks. And as the barber delivers his lines, he cheerfully nips Michael’s ear. A slow trickle of blood runs down his neck. From her place in the audience, in that bright illumination, it looks like a nasty wound. Is it real or is it a trick, berry juice artfully concealed in the barber’s hand? But Emma, in one of the front rows, sees that it is not berry juice and finds it hard not to leap to her feet.
“Keep going,” she hears him whisper to the barber. And they finish the scene, Michael and his torturer. The audience claps for minutes.
When Michael comes back on after the interval, a dark sticking plaster is poking up from beneath his roll-neck jumper, and before he can say anything, there is more applause. He looks at the spot where he thinks his mother is sitting, but she does not look back, as she is no longer there. Bruno cannot be left on his own for too long.
In truth, she has fled, at the sight of the neck and the blood in the neon light, and the sudden thought of Carl in the prison at Plötzensee. No blindfold, a camera was running and recording everything. A butcher’s hook, an ice-cold industrial building, his neck, his throat.
Michael’s star performance was soon followed by that other dramatic scene, the one in which she had lashed out at him in her fury. Emma’s pointless act of revenge for his mean and childish comment about Carl.
But Thomas, who had also seen his elder brother performing that evening, had been left with a lifelong sense of admiration for him, he had told Emma. As the years went by, his imagination had turned it into an increasingly perilous evening, blood dripping onto the stage, his fellow actor panicking, and his brother sitting up high in his chair, the unruffled hero who did not abandon his role for one moment. The way something grows, becomes giant, grotesque.
30
Thomas would be taking off any minute, it was an hour’s flight, she calculated for the umpteenth time. The countdown had begun. She found Thomas hard to fathom, but strangely that did not bother her, she had loved him and let him go his own way. She did not even feel the need to get any closer, she was not sure why. They knew each other inside out, he knew her better than perhaps anyone.
Emma had placed her ultimate fate in his hands, with complete confidence and with eternity already in her bones. The night was over at last, the day had been set in motion.
Emma in her bedroom, at first sight it looked like a still life, everything in order from A to Z, not one object too many, the curtains closed, the door to the balcony on its hook. Bruno’s portrait, the pile of books, the dark mirror.
Jerusalem. A few years after Bruno’s death, Thomas had asked her to go with him to the country her pastor had always talked about.
They arrive late in the evening, the sherut taxi takes the travelers to their addresses, one by one. Among them is a man with a beard, a skullcap and ringlets, and a long black coat. They stop for him in Mea Shearim, the neighborhood of the heavyweights, the orthodox Jews. It feels like landing in another century. Out on the streets they can see fires surrounded by shadows, dark figures with books under their arms, swaying, half singing, an opera without women, which they watch and listen to from their taxi, with respect and incomprehension.
They are relieved to arrive at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, close to the Damascus Gate to the Old City. A hotel out of a book, their book.
Like lovers, they walk together through the tragic city built from ancient myths, lies and revelations. Wherever you look, you see an armed dream, a vision firmly fenced in.
Within the walls of the American Colony, East and West have found a kind of balance. Arab architecture and Irish whiskey. Flowers climb high over the four walls of the courtyard. At its center, lemon trees stand around a small pool, it smells like a forest. There are a few tables, with linen tablecloths, and Emma and Thomas sit there for hours in the evening, talking.
Or rather, Emma talks. She talks as never before, as though she has only just met the man in front of her and needs to tell him all about her life, urgently and completely. Her confession.
Until now she has only ever given Thomas a few vague hints, annoying puzzle pieces, scraps of conversations, but Emma’s history suddenly makes an appearance, there, in the hotel courtyard, an unstoppable flow of stories, enough food for thought to fill him for decades, as Thomas later told her.
Bricks for a family cathedral, or a bunker, or a ruin. A little bit of everything. Her confession is a self-examination. There is so much that she has seen and not understood, she has fled her constantly repeating past for so long, she has been so afraid of the unknowable nature of everything, of the journey back. Now Emma is finally looking over her shoulder.
Berlin and the Black Forest are the hardest things to talk about. Yet that is what Thomas really wants to know. And about his father and his grandparents, mainly about his father, of course. But she notices how he keeps looking for an opportunity to come back to his mother’s bricked-up past, the time before Bruno and the fury that exploded from it on that one unfortunate occasion.
Now and then the call from a minaret booms out, Allah must not be forgotten, prayers at the command of a hoarse metallic voice. Metal voices from loudspeakers, she knows all about that, Berlin had been infested with them.
And she tells her story, that old anger flaring up. She sees that Thomas is wondering whether to stop her, whether he really wants t
o know all of this, it is not what he intended, his curiosity has its limits. But she pulls him along with her, over that boundary, into the abyss of Germany, the filthiest years of the century.
No one has dared to speak Carl’s name since Emma’s fight with Michael. That name had become the black hole in their house, Emma was obviously aware of that, too. Now she says his name, naturally, as if she had not always kept it hidden away.
The slow encirclement, the growing isolation, the increasingly silent family, the loss of old friendships, her mother’s unspoken disapproval, her father’s concern: her life in Berlin had gradually become an exercise in loneliness. Carl’s love was all that kept her going.
“How could you love a German, Mother?” he asks in an apologetic tone.
“It was impossible not to love him.”
How do you explain why you fall in love with someone? How do you come up with an answer to such a simple but pointless question?
Yes, that was what it had been, impossible. She had not hesitated for a moment, almost from the first time she had met him she had wanted to protect Carl, to embrace him, to hold him tight. So very timid as he had asked if they would see each other again, and yet focused entirely on her, willing her to say yes. And she had answered without even having to think: “Yes, please. How about tomorrow?”
As she talks about her love for Carl, her pent-up rage is almost palpable. But she does not say everything, she holds something back, and Thomas can sense it.
“So when did he disappear, your Carl?”
A question his brother Michael could not have asked. Emma falls silent, time is getting on. A group of late guests drifts through the garden, pointing out the stars and the bright white moon. Suddenly there is the scent of jasmine, the scent of Berlin-Dahlem, of panic, a truck full of corpses being driven away down a road lined with bushes.
Her son, the doubting one, sits opposite her. With a question like a knife. Not again, Thomas, not back into the tunnel, with my heart that never became warm again. Nothing has disappeared, who and what was there has remained, been covered up, tenderly buried, rendered harmless, camouflaged until further notice. Carl became Bruno and Bruno became Carl, and my body forgot how and where. The arms around me—whose were they?
Emma does not reply, asks no question in return, she has become as quiet as the night above the hotel, her dress is sticking to her skin—she does not know if it is delayed grief or unexpressed anger, or just the heat in the courtyard. Watch with me for just one hour.
One of the guests approaches their table.
“Do you know, I met Lawrence of Arabia on this very spot,”—a small, rotund man with a thick American accent watches triumphantly as his remark cuts through their silence. Thomas does not react, Emma smiles.
“Peter O’Toole, or the real one?”
At that moment she remembers going to the cinema with Bruno and thinking that the man who played Lawrence was rather attractive. Bruno had been annoyed.
“The real one, of course.”
The little man slinks off at this lack of respect. But his interruption was welcome.
“We’ll go to the Old City tomorrow, and walk the Via Dolorosa. The real one.”
Emma at her sharpest.
Their rooms open onto the courtyard, ivy around the doors, jasmine and wild geranium up the walls. It smells like her garden in Dahlem, her house in Brakel, like the Black Forest in late summer. Emma is sixty-nine years old, she still has years to go. At the door of her room she turns around and sees Thomas standing there, his room key in his hand. He gives her a wave, and then walks slowly on.
Since Bruno has been gone, Carl has been far away too, thinks Emma. No one disappears though, Thomas, but if only that were true.
31
The curtain in front of the balcony door moved, spring had begun in the street. The trees on the grass outside the house were blossoming pinkish red, cow parsley lined the banks of the canal, the first sailing boats were out on the lake. Just another Tuesday. A day to be born.
“Is there someone on the balcony, Judith? I thought I saw the curtain twitch.”
“No, Mrs. Verweij, it’s just the wind, there’s no one out there.”
“We always used to sit there, nurse. There’s a ladder you can climb, through the hatch, onto the roof, it’s so high that you can see the Waal, and Gouda. And, if you know where to look, the Black Forest.”
Was this rambling, one of the signs of approaching death? Or lines of poetry? All Judith could do was straighten the blankets a little. They were Emma’s first words since waking, a prophetess on the third floor, the lucid director of her final act. Caught between hunger and memory. But it was not actually hunger. A week of fasting banished the hunger in fact, the mind took charge of the body, Emma had become a sound chamber for her past. Everything tumbled over everything else, and if she could have sung, she would have.
“Was that the bell, nurse?”
“I don’t think so, but I’ll go and look.”
It was the bell. Emma heard whispering in the hallway. It must be Little Lenie, who could iron so beautifully and who had helped her for years.
“Take care of Emma!” he had called, Bruno told her. She had been surprised and had not really understood why he had said that to Bruno. Three months after Rob’s leaving party, a letter arrives from Cape Town with his death notice, along with details about the urn, an invoice for the cremation, and a statement of his assets—in the form of debts.
Shocked, Bruno read out the letter to Emma. Early evening, they are sitting on the balcony, the rain falling in sheets. It is not cold, and they do not want to be inside, this letter needs space.
Bruno answers her in a voice she does not know, so sad, when she asks why Rob actually left as a young man. His face is white, a sorry sight.
“It was to do with our father. It’s a shame you never met him. We all looked up to him, admired him, but rarely showed him any affection.”
The story of Rob and their father, who kept five or six spare glass eyes in the drawer of his bedside table. It had been March, Rob’s birthday, his eighteenth. Their mother had laid the table for a party, Bruno and Rob were still at home, their older brother Hendrik was already studying. Rob spent more time out than at home too, a restless young man on a motorcycle, which he had earned and paid for himself, sometimes spending days riding across the Netherlands and Germany, with no reason or destination. A magical brother who was scared of no one. Not even their father.
The blow fell on the evening of his birthday, while the candles were burning and he was sitting on the chair that his mother had decorated with crepe paper. Out of nowhere, Rob accused his father of being a murderer in the jungle of Aceh.
“So how many Acehnese did you murder before they shot you down?” he had asked from his festooned chair.
Bruno could still hear the echo of his cold and heartless tone, as if Rob were not himself. Who was it who was saying such hurtful things, things that could not be unsaid—and why?
“Yes, I killed men who had just raped and strangled women and children. I wouldn’t exactly call that murder. Maybe you’ll be in a situation one day where you have to shoot or be shot. But I suspect—and hope—that you won’t be.”
The helpless, toneless answer and the beginning of the withdrawal. The silence between Rob and his father had never been broken.
“Do you know exactly what your father did in Aceh?”
“He left for the Dutch East Indies as a young officer, I have no idea why. The same need for adventure as Rob, perhaps. I still have letters from him and a few diaries from that time. He was writing about a completely forgotten war, the fighting and killing was atrocious. I’ve thought about Rob’s outburst so often. But there’s no way of telling if he was right or wrong, we don’t know enough about the facts.”
But he knew a good deal, as Emma discovers later, when she finds piles of books about Aceh after Bruno’s death, filled with Bruno’s notes and question marks. The confusion
of wars and skirmishes, the mass murder. Her century, the years of fear.
Emma had also begun to read Bruno’s father’s diaries, and had become lost in them. It was the era of her own parents, of an outdated colonial world on the verge of collapse.
Bruno’s father had been shot straight through the eye by a giant of a Sumatran when he entered a village with a small squad. He had climbed the stairs of a hut, it was silent all around, the locals must have fled. Suddenly a monstrously huge figure had appeared in the doorway, shouting something at him in a language he did not understand and pulling out a gun—not a klewang—from behind his back, and promptly shooting him. End of his military career. Back on a stretcher across the jungle he had fought his way through in the previous year, hurrah for peace, hurrah for the Netherlands, hurrah for the queen.
He had written so vividly about his journey inland, still with both eyes intact, armed to the teeth, ready to fight and prepared for ambushes, booby traps and snakes, that Emma saw his life as it must have been: absolutely dedicated to the army, to his men, to the greater idea that Aceh belonged to the Netherlands, that it was a dark hole to which light must be brought. Tales of derring-do contained between the black covers of an officer’s report. But what was he doing in that jungle, she wondered. Fighting strangers, on the orders of strangers. Aceh, they had no business being there.
Emma had spent days in those notebooks, which Bruno had left for her. Bruno, her husband, had also tried to restore some kind of unity, always in search of connection and harmony. Mission failed—Rob had left, and his father had never been the same again.
32
“It’s Little Lenie, Mrs. Verweij, you were right. And Big Lenie’s here too.”
Emma waved for the Lenies to come in. The little one in tears, the big one silently regarding the woman who had employed them for thirty years, who wanted to see them one last time, to hold their hands, hand in hand in hand.