The Longest Night

by Otto de Kat

  It is a miracle that she is released, still just under the protection of Adam von Trott from Foreign Affairs, Carl’s boss and their friend.

  She forced herself to leave that episode alone, the time she was taken in for questioning because she and Carl had gone to Geneva with Adam and had spoken to her father. She had been locked up for only a few hours, but that afternoon had taken years to shake off.

  The letters, back to the letters, she could feel that she was slipping away. Back now, back to Thomas, he was waiting for her.

  “Thomas?”

  “Yes, Mother, I’m here, go on. You were talking about Grandfather and someone called Watse, I think, where did you suddenly disappear to? You stopped, you seemed a long way away.”

  “Berlin, I was in Berlin. Will you look up Adam and Clarita’s daughters?”

  It was all going too quickly for Thomas now, she was flying back and forth, her past was emerging from all over, and he could barely make sense of it. Daughters? Yes, yes, he would look them up, did she know them? No, only as a little girl and a baby.

  She had rehearsed everything so thoroughly, endlessly repeating it to herself on those evenings at her window. Where everything was that Thomas had to take with him, the ten boxes at the back of her wardrobe, her diaries, the drafts of the letters she had written, the locked desk drawers full of stories never told.

  She had torn up the letters from Louis years ago and thrown them into the fire. Fire that blazed, like the words themselves. He had worshipped her, as only a believer can.

  Thomas would not have to read them, he would not have understood. Who would? Who understands his own life? Who hears the song of another’s heart? Nothing lasts, nothing catches fire that was not born of fire. Out of how much ash is a bird reborn?

  Where did those lines come from, her head was glowing, her bed had narrowed to a furnace of ancient poems and thoughts.

  “Hold my hand if you like.”

  Thomas, the nurse.

  “Take care of Michael, Thomas.”

  Echo, echoes. Doubled sounds, too many, piercing music. She had lived for this morning with her son. Now that he was finally here, it was all happening so quickly. The dykes were breaking, her tough resistance and the last remnants of control were melting away.

  “He’s so terribly alone. So lost, and I haven’t been able to help him. I sent him to the barber’s, his hair was rather long. Do you remember, Thomas, that barber and the blood running down his neck?”

  “Yes, Mother, I remember everything, I’ll take care of him, I’m his brother.”

  “There’s a letter from a woman called Lara van Oosten. But don’t read it, just throw it away. I didn’t tear it up, as it was written with such great love for my father. Long story, too long for now, rubbish bin. Do you hear me, Thomas?”

  Lara’s letter had been written not long after their meeting in the mountains, Emma had chanced upon it again just after she had resolved to stop eating. In the giddiness of those first days without food, she had found Oscar once more, and remembered the conversation with Lara, the morning after they first spoke in the lobby.

  It is brilliant weather, the mist has lifted, the mountains look freshly washed. It is so warm, in fact, that they can have breakfast outside. Lara’s husband has taken the little train into the village and left them together on the terrace, like the discreet diplomat he is. An early November day that feels like summer, with soft light on the Jungfrau, the kind of day when everything is self-evident, transparent, free.

  Lara is talking, she is speaking about Oscar so very differently than the evening before, when her husband had been watching from a distance and, almost feverishly, at full speed, she had made a sort of confession. But now, the next morning, in this state of weightlessness, her months with Oscar are coming to life and she sketches dream-like days with him.

  Emma has rarely heard anyone talk about love like this, so unselfishly, so naturally. Bern in May in the war years, in the depths of that criminal era, alongside tourists who deny everything, and soldiers who maintain a semblance of readiness. Their days together, their lives slowing down. The turmoil over, time seems to dissolve, every question has become redundant, and so there are no more answers either.

  “Love there seemed like death, so absolute and so still.”

  It was a sentence from Lara’s letter.

  Whose voice is speaking that morning? Lara’s? Or Emma’s?

  Change Bern to Berlin and swap Oscar for Carl, and you have a similar story of an exceptional love. Startling and strange and enough to last a lifetime.

  36

  “Maria’s letters.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Don’t go away . . .”

  “I can’t hear you. Speak up.”

  Had she nodded off, was she asleep? She heard Thomas from a distance, as if he were not sitting beside her but floating somewhere above her in space.

  “Stay there, Thomas. Don’t fly off again.”

  “You were talking about Maria’s letters. Where are they?”

  “They’re all together, in labeled boxes at the back of my wardrobe. Go and take a look—I’ve bundled them together, you can’t miss them.”

  Inheritor of old paper, gatherer of old histories, Thomas was supposed to make something of this kindling for the memory. His mother’s chronicler, that was more or less what Emma had in mind, that was what she had repeated to herself so many times, rethought, revised.

  Thomas returned from his journey through her wardrobe, she had heard the doors slide, and then the rummaging through her clothes. He said he had found the boxes and would take them with him.

  Maria’s letters. Reading letters was the only thing that still mattered, all that remained and would be left behind. Fence around a life, access to hidden secrets and cherished lies. God’s ways may be mysterious, but Emma’s paths had not been exactly straightforward either. That was how she saw it.

  She lay there, red-rimmed eyes looking upward, away from Thomas, who had sat back down on her bed.

  Maria, Maria Steinz, Maria Mandemaker as she was called as a girl. There was no name more suitable. A maker of baskets woven from dreams, to catch you, to rock you. The Pied Piper of Gorkum, where she grew up along the same river as Bruno, although they had never met each other there. She was a little older and mixed with a different crowd.

  They did not meet until so many years later, in their street, in a time of war and enchantment. How they would get together, in those years of danger, after a raid, with beer and wine, and spend the night, filled with relief, in a tangle of past fear and emerging love. Their street, twenty buildings long, bordered by a canal and a school. They had all been healthy but poor, and filled with reckless optimism. That was how she had described it to Emma in the many letters that came from all over, wherever the wind or the train had taken her.

  After Bruno and Maarten had died, she was forever on the move, increasingly reluctant to stay put. When she was not traveling, she began to think, and to worry, and soon felt cornered. Traveling ahead of her memories, like the bird that flees the storm and serves as a warning. Her motto: “I put my head in the sand to keep my head above water.” Humor. She also liked to quote Chris Dudok, who said that it was impossible to be too deaf in this world. It was not humor. He meant it. So did Maria, in fact.

  Should she perhaps ask Thomas to throw away Maria’s letters? He would read about his father, how the two of them had gone through the war together. He might suspect Maria had meant much more and had been his lover for far longer, maybe always. Was that the case? No, not always, Maria had sworn it was not, only during the war. But yes, the war went on, it had never stopped, not for anyone. Not for Maria, not for Emma, not for Bruno, and not for Chris and Clarita, Oscar and Kate, and Rob and Helmut Wachter.

  God, Helmut Wachter, that sweet veterinary surgeon with his story about the walker on the beach. Emma would like to glance back for footsteps in the sand. But who would be able to pick her up? She was as heav
y as death—no God was a match for that.

  The bell rang in the hallway, twice. The appointment with the doctor.

  37

  The sun was shining in on all sides, the windows reflecting the light. The school was about to empty, nothing at all to alarm anyone walking past, or cycling, or parking a car alongside the wide pavement in front of the building.

  Half past three. Emma drowsed a little, now and then, the doctor’s visit had tired her out. They had inserted a catheter, much against her will, but she had eventually allowed herself to be persuaded that it was necessary and that otherwise the sedation team would do it. The humiliation had already faded, there was only surrender to what was to come. Chosen for herself, prepared and managed down to the last detail.

  The doctor had asked again if she consented to the next steps: sedation, unconsciousness and slow, painless death.

  Painless? My dear doctor, my dear woman, what are you talking about? These hours are the pain, everything in me and around me is loss and abandonment. The world is contracting with old wounds and wasted time and regret. It has grown cold and bare, empty, completely still. Painless—if only. True enough, nothing is burning, no knife is stabbing, no nerve is twinging, no one is pulling at me with hooks, although physically the anesthesia may be perfect, I know your drugs will make sure of that.

  Between waking and sleeping, Emma on her final journey back, talking to the doctor, who has left, waking and falling back to sleep, dreaming and waiting. The afternoon hours. She had told Thomas to go into the dining room until they came.

  “You have to eat properly”—the mantra of her motherhood. Lenie had laid the table for lunch. She wanted to be alone for a little while.

  Strange, to want to be alone now, it felt like the sea retreating before the tidal wave hits the shore, the language of the condemned. To be alone, and then to be no more.

  Displaced, alienated, leaving home, the street, the countries where she had been, everything was empty, there was no railing, nothing to hold on to, endless space, no horizon in sight. Flat out, she lay between clean sheets, with a tube snaking across her lap to catch the last drops of liquid. The paraphernalia for the end.

  “Why Canada, Bruno? I’ve no real objections. Of course I’ll go with you, and the boys are young enough. But we don’t know anyone there and how on earth are we going to run a farm? You’re even less of a farmer than I am. And the others don’t have a clue either, they’re all fingers and thumbs.”

  In Emma’s spirit realm, everything is piled up together, millions of words and conversations. The smallest things suddenly become large and vivid.

  “But there are four families going, Maarten and Maria are the only ones who don’t want to come.”

  Is he unwittingly running from Maria? By the winter of 1954, the street has almost lost its magic, the first dissidents have left their houses and gone out into the world. Bruno and three of the other men have come up with the idea of emigrating. A temporary confusion, a restricted focus, a dissatisfaction with the order they want to leave behind, rebels on a small scale, but equipped with the right connections and with ambitious plans.

  Becoming a farmer in Canada, creating a small settlement for four families with room for more. They have read too many books, it would seem, too many rural idylls. It is a sorry attempt to break away from—yes, from what? From a life all planned out. Later they laugh about it and tap their foreheads. They must have been mad. Out of their minds. God, what were they thinking?

  God, the three-letter word, which Louis bandied about and Emma borrowed from him for as long as she was able.

  Where was He now, where were His footprints? Nothing moved.

  “Lord God, we have become strangers by listening to Your voice.” Louis is standing in a pulpit high above her in a dark church in the city center, one that happened to have been spared by the German bombers. Emma has indeed become, for a time, a very brief time, something of a stranger to herself by listening to Louis’ voice, to his stories and poems, with its gigolo charm. It was he who had introduced her to Nijhoff and to Vroman and Rilke and all the others.

  But she had never felt more of a stranger in the world than she did now. Or nearly home, awakened, back to the beginning, at the edge of the world. Whoever has no house now will never build one. Chris, Chris, you’re not answering the phone, you’re avoiding me, I was supposed to be coming to stay.

  Was it Julia, or was she merely an excuse because he did not want to go on? She had been dead for forty years, you went into the depths with a big iron ball on your feet, you denied her, you thought you were faithful to her, but you betrayed her free spirit. You are my faint-hearted brother, my ally, your death touched no one more than me. Chris Dudok, where are you, I’m drowning here, my head is about to switch off like a lamp.

  Emma opened her eyes, and felt how dry they were. The moisture had seeped away, as if there were no point to sadness now, as if tears were in the past.

  She listened. To no one, there was no one, there was no sound that seemed familiar. But yes, there was, it seemed she could hear Thomas’ voice through her bedroom door. Maybe he was on the telephone, or talking to Lenie. Or was the team already there?

  Sun over Texel, with sheep as far as the eye could see. Their tent is just behind the dunes, Den Burg is within walking distance but there are no people around. It is early in September, and Bruno has asked Emma if she—he would not make a habit of it—would like to go camping with him on Texel, the island where he was born, where his father had his first post as mayor. He had played there for seven years, and the scent of the dunes and the sand had never left him. Maybe his farming fantasy, the idea of going to Canada, had something to do with it, a big child missing the wide open spaces and the sea and the surf. He shows Emma everything he still remembers, they cycle across the island and stand in front of the old mayor’s house, where nothing has changed and every brick is familiar.

  “There was a crowd of beachcombers in morning coats waiting for my father when he first arrived at the town hall. They’d heard that he was a retired officer and had been expecting an older man with a mustache and sideburns and a cigar in his mouth. Then a lad of twenty-eight stepped into the council chamber, with only one eye and a beautiful wife and two small children. Apparently his response was to say: ‘At ease, men—and coats back in the cupboard.’”

  Their tent with airbeds and a primus stove, everything for the first time, everything still wide open, no child on the way as yet.

  She heard the bathroom door open, various unfamiliar footsteps, then the bedroom door. Thomas, a woman she did not know, a man she did not know, it was like a little procession.

  She and Bruno walk at the back, the streetlights are on, windows are illuminated here and there in the dark rows of houses. Ahead of them, in a large group of children, they see Michael and Thomas, they are carrying lanterns on sticks. Carefully, they have to hold their candles upright, and keep their hands over the openings of the lanterns to protect them from the wind. One false move and the whole thing could go up in flames.

  A procession of lights and children’s eyes, Emma and Bruno following behind. The children’s crusade moves on, with mothers and fathers dropping out along the way. At home, the candles burned out, the lanterns are folded up and put away for the following year.

  Goodbye, queen. Goodbye, winter. May is nearly here.

  “Mother, here are the people who have come to help you.”

  Quiet voices, children’s feet, rustling, coats off, it is cold out. Stay up for a moment, boys, stand at the window and look out. They gaze into the night, at where they just walked with their flickering lanterns, dancers on their way to bed.

  It is late, perhaps nine already, their eyes and legs are suddenly heavy with sleep. Emma picks them up, first one, then the other, carries them to their room and closes the curtains.

  “Mother, Mother.”

  Very slowly Emma turned her head to the side. She struggled to remember where she was, to w
ork out who the people were around her bed. Lined up to provide help, moral support. Motionless, alert and even friendly, to a degree. She tried to nod at them, to reassure them.

  “Yes, Thomas. I can hear you, what is it?”

  “Here are the people who have come to help you.”

  They said their names, politely and as if it mattered. Greeting and farewell in a name, in a brief nod of the head.

  The team, bags in hands, velvet gestures and inaudible actions. Silently at work. Words were the enemy, silence their best camouflage. The only sound was the humming of the electric bed as they raised Emma’s head a little higher. Tubes were rolled out, a device hung on the railing of the bed, the end could begin any minute now.

  Emma watched as if it were nothing to do with her. And indeed it was nothing to do with her, she was not there, she was everywhere, but not there.

  Escaped, far beyond the reach of any snaking tubes, on the lookout. Up the ladder, across the roof, to their chimney. Clouds fanned out, racing across the city. She has never been embraced like this, Bruno’s mouth on hers, his hands cupping her face, the sensation that she will never come back down to earth, forever fugitive, nowhere to be found, moved on, freed from the old days.

  Sounds of the street, seagulls, the school erupting, sailing boats on still water, the trees in full blossom in the depths. And would she like to stay, with him and in the street below.

  She is awake, finally awake.

  OTTO DE KAT is the pen name of Dutch publisher, poet, novelist and critic Jan Geurt Gaarlandt. His award-winning novels have been widely published throughout Europe. The Longest Night draws together elements from three previous novels published by MacLehose Press: Man on the Move (2009), Julia (2010) and News from Berlin (2014).