The Cut Out Girl

by Bart van Es

  For anyone unfamiliar with the route, the journey to IJsselmonde demands a lot of concentration because the motorway wants to lead you onward, either to the docks or to distant cities where the trucks can distribute their loads. Hemmed in by lorries, I manage only just to find the right exit, which takes me, through a corkscrew of roundabouts, to the old village, which now stands in the shadow of a concrete flyover that carries twelve lanes of traffic to a double-arched bridge. The village itself, though, is surprisingly untouched and tranquil. It is made up of pretty gabled houses, some with dates on them: 1889, 1905, 1929. By the time I pull the little Peugeot into the car park on the outskirts of the old center it is 3:30 P.M. and the sun is already low on the skyline, which is dominated by the bridge and flyover to the west.

  Lien has almost no memory of the exterior of the house where she hid in IJsselmonde. Although she lived here for over half a year, she saw the building from the outside only once, on the day she came. She does know that it stood on the outskirts of the village, was rather farmlike, and was built against the dike.

  From the car park I climb up to the New Maas River, which is busy with trade. Great flat barges plow their way through the water, laden with coal and iron ore. On the opposite bank, three hundred yards away, there are four matching office blocks, each a sculpted triangle of glass, like a slice of cake on its side.

  In search of a building that might match Lien’s description, I walk along the top of the dike toward the flyover and soon its humming concrete hangs high above me, like the ceiling of a cathedral. The fat pillars that stretch up on all sides carry a quarter million vehicles each day. In other countries, a place like this would be threatening, but here everything is clean and well maintained. There is a set of neat recycling bins, and in the distance, still under the concrete, I can see a dog walker. Then a girl cycles past me in a bright blue Gore-Tex jacket while checking her phone. Village life continues, almost untroubled by the industrial sprawl.

  For about two hours I scan the surroundings, mostly walking through the postwar housing developments that now abut the old buildings, but sometimes still finding patches of rural land. It is on one of these, toward dusk, that I see something that fits with Lien’s memory: a white single-story house that stands a little beyond the eastern edge. It has a barn door at one end with four little square windows looking out from what is now a converted loft. A hedge of brambles and bushes shields it from the roadside and it is built against the dike.

  This all fits with how I envisaged the farmhouse and, as darkness falls around me, I can imagine Lien and Jo clambering up the heavy slope on which I stand. Through the bushes I peer into the black windows and take some photos. Then I move upward again toward the river, looking down on the roof tiles from above. I can see how Lien and Jo would move on from here toward the center, keeping to the dike edge near the river before crossing back again and heading inland. With growing certainty I begin to trace a possible route.

  But then, twenty minutes later, on the south side of the village I see a house that leans against a second, lower dike that might qualify almost as easily. It is also single story and it is also surrounded by a hedge. Taking another set of pictures, this time with glowing streetlights in the foreground, my faith in my imagination begins to ebb.

  With whose memory am I connecting? Lien’s or my own?

  A year later, when I show Lien the account I have written of her escape from IJsselmonde, she will be troubled by it, not because it is untruthful but because—unlike all the earlier parts of her childhood experience—there are so many blanks that she cannot fill. She remembers Jo carrying her in the darkness, she remembers the dike, she remembers moving among the houses; there was the resistance hideout, it was very dirty and it made her think of a drinking den. Upstairs there were beds and she lay in one with other people. There was a terrible smell. But how big it was, how long they walked to get there, whether they ran? None of this is clear. To her it seems somehow too active in my description. She was a spectator who barely registered what was going on.

  “You have written it as it could have been,” Lien tells me. “I can live with it,” she eventually says.

  It is fully dark now and my phone is out of battery so I can take no more pictures. A little downhearted, I make my way back to the car, which now stands in empty space. As I sit at the wheel planning my journey, the warm red and white of the dials on the dashboard is oddly comforting. After a bit, the heater clears the condensation from the windows and the interior begins to warm up. Without my phone’s Sat Nav I worry a bit about the route to my aunt and uncle’s house in Bennekom, in the center of the country. All the same, I drive up the ramp to join the motorway, edging my way in among the lorries, and head toward the bridge. The traffic is almost stationary. It will be a long time before I reach any junctions at which I need to make decisions, so I turn on Dutch radio for the first time today.

  Two men are in conversation, the program’s host and a guest. It takes me a little while to work out the subject, which is the culture of satirical cartoons in France. They mention what seems to be a magazine based in Paris. It is called Charlie Hebdo.

  “This was an editorial meeting . . . generally cartoonists work at home.”

  “Did you know the cartoonists?”

  “Not personally, but I was familiar with their work.”

  Something significant has happened. There is mention of depictions of the Prophet Mohammed and of the possible consequences for free speech.

  At seven o’clock there is a news summary. Eleven people have been gunned down in the offices of a satirical weekly, which has a tradition of mocking religion, including Islam. A car has been hijacked and a policeman (himself a Muslim) has been shot dead on the street. The perpetrators—who brandished guns and said they had enacted vengeance—are still on the run. It emerges that they left an identity card behind them and that they are terrorists linked to a branch of al-Qaeda based in Yemen. Huge crowds are gathering in public places around Europe. Tens of thousands stand in silence and carry homemade placards all bearing the same slogan: Je suis Charlie.

  As I inch forward with the little car in the red of the taillights, news anchors discuss the situation. They canvass the opinion of pundits and hold conversations with reporters on the ground. Few further details emerge in the course of the evening so the talk becomes more historical in its perspective and, at eight thirty, there is an interview with the former mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen. He describes his reaction, ten years earlier, to the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

  Van Gogh (a descendant of the famous painter’s family) was an award-winning film director and free-speech activist who made a point of pushing all possible boundaries. He made graphic jokes about the Holocaust, for example, and called Jesus “the rotten fish of Nazareth.” Then, in 2004, he made the film Submission, whose title played on one possible translation of the Arabic word for Islam. It showed the bodies of Muslim women who had been violently abused by their husbands and families, and on those bodies Van Gogh painted Koranic verses pertaining to the treatment of wives. The film was shown on national television by the VPRO, by origin a Protestant Christian broadcaster, and three months later, while cycling to his office at nine in the morning, Van Gogh was shot eight times and then had his throat cut in the street. His murderer, a Muslim extremist who also wounded two bystanders, left a message of vengeance addressed to the film’s author, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, pinned to Van Gogh’s chest with a knife.

  The radio plays a section of the speech that Job Cohen delivered as mayor that evening to a crowd very similar to those in Paris and elsewhere now. In it he speaks of “the Dam, the symbol of our freedom,” and of how progress is to be made “through discussion, through the pen, and—as a last resort—through the courts, but not by taking the law into our own hands.” His words are tolerant and inclusive, and they are cheered by the crowd.

  Yet even in November 200
4, they were idealistic. The norms around freedom of expression that Cohen called upon at that moment were far from universally shared.

  At one time the Netherlands really was a country where even the prime minister cycled to work in the morning unprotected. But then, on May 6, 2002, came the assassination of Pim Fortuyn. He was, like Van Gogh, a kind of extremist: a peculiarly Dutch combination of the left and the far right. Fortuyn was an openly gay man who was against political correctness, against immigration, and, above all, against Islam, which he called “backward” and incompatible with modern life. As a candidate for a localist movement, he achieved 37.4 percent of the vote in Rotterdam. After this he set up his own political party: the List Pim Fortuyn. Then, riding high in the polls, on the eve of the general election, as he left the national media center at Hilversum, Fortuyn was shot five times in the back of the head. As it happens, his murderer was not a jihadi but instead a fanatical opponent of factory farming who considered Fortuyn’s views on such subjects as Islam and immigration a threat to societal norms. But this detail (like the shooting of the Muslim policeman in Paris) is easily lost.

  Gradually the traffic clears and I follow the signs for Utrecht. The interview with the former mayor of Amsterdam closes and the radio shifts to a panel discussion in which the phrase “Islamic fascism” recurs. Tomorrow there will be new developments in Paris: a siege at a kosher supermarket that ends in more killings, this time directly targeting Jews. As I pick up speed in the darkness I am struck again by the obvious overlap between the present epoch and the last one: absurd conspiracy theories, economic recession, and a loss of faith in moderate politicians, who seem to many people to be irrelevant and corrupt. The little car pulls past container lorries that carry goods into Europe: fridges, televisions, furniture, plastic shoes. From the look of these roads, nothing is left of the old Europe, but its ghost remains.

  Thirteen

  It is warm in the church. Bright light comes in from the arched windows and the circle of stained glass above the pulpit shines yellow and blue. There is a clean, mothball smell from the people around her, all in their Sunday best, standing and sitting in unison, half singing the same words.

  Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

  Lien says the words with the others. Occasionally, when she is a little too quick or too slow, she catches the sound of her own voice, which feels unfamiliar in this space. It is nice here with so many people around you, making the same movements and saying the same things.

  Her legs do not hurt now. Though the memory is fading, she can still picture the top of the doctor’s head, with just a thin down of hair upon it, as he bent, dabbing her with something sharp, when she first came here a few months ago. It was very clean in the surgery. On the wall there was a diagram of a person opened up so that you could see their insides.

  The visiting preacher is climbing the stairs now to go up to the pulpit. He has come from Arnhem this morning on his bicycle to speak. But first it is the turn of the lay reader:

  And Jesus said unto him, I must work the works of him that sent me . . .

  His voice is deep and the words have the rhythm of a poem.

  the night cometh, when no man can work . . .

  They are doing poems now at school, including the psalms, which they learn by heart.

  he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay . . .

  Will they have mashed potatoes again like they did last Sunday? She did not like them. They tasted of soap.

  but the Jews did not believe concerning him, that he had been blind, and received his sight . . .

  Now that the reading is over the preacher looks down at them from the pulpit, fixing her interest with his silence and his serious face. Beside her, Mother van Laar shifts her position, tilting her head up farther, hands locked together, all attention for what will come.

  “Jesus spits,” the preacher says. “He spits on the dry earth and he makes mud of that earth and he puts that mud into the eyes of a blind man.”

  He makes you think about it and she can imagine the scene—the dust of the desert and the crowd of people wearing rough cloaks and the white disk of the sun burning down. She likes the images of the sermons. It is the same when she reads from the Bible to the family after dinner. She enjoys the sense of togetherness and the singsong rhythm of each line.

  Lien has always been a dreamer and at night the pleasures and frustrations of the day come back to her, made strange by her imagination as she lies there beneath the stiff, laundered sheets. In school she is not allowed to run at playtime. This is because she has been unwell and needs rest. When she is dreaming, Lien kicks out at this rule with impatience, wanting to move, but she still floats there, unable to catch up. As she sleeps, she does the sums and the spelling tests that she is so good at and tries to connect with the girl who is sitting on the school bench next to her, but that doesn’t quite work.

  Then comes the part of the dream that is fearful. She can feel it happening but she is unable to make it stop. Walking down the school corridors with their high ceilings, through the bustle of other children, the urge becomes stronger with each step. She needs to pee. Finally, when she is safe in the cubicle, she lets go. There is a warm wetness, which is pleasant at first. But now it grows cold.

  * * *

  —

  HEAVY WITH DROWSINESS, she calls out.

  It is completely dark around her and then suddenly very bright as she steps dizzily, eyes scrunched, away from the bed.

  There is a fuss around her. Sheets are pulled free from their corners and then bundled onto the floor. Arms up, her nightdress is lifted, trailing on her skin as it goes. For a second she is tented, and then, straight after, there is the scent of soap and the touch of a flannel, wetted, cold, at the sink. She awakens in full to self-awareness, standing naked in the light. While Mother van Laar is efficient and says nothing to blame her, there is still the pain of embarrassment. There is no blame, but also no word of comfort or gentleness of touch.

  Ten minutes later she is in bed again, clean in the absolute blackness, and scared now of sleep.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE PHOTO IN LIEN’S album she stands with the Van Laar family in their garden among wintery flower beds that are marked out with white painted stones. The house behind them, number 33 Algemeer, is new, attractive, and semidetached. It stands on the edge of Bennekom, a village in the center of the Netherlands, and looks out over a field and, beyond this, a wood. The gathering in the picture is rather formal: all five people (the fifth, behind Lien, is unknown to me) stand with their arms at their sides in the same pose, as if ready for inspection.

  Father van Laar and his son, Jaap, on the left, look neat with their neckties, close-shorn haircuts, and gleaming shoes. In the middle of the picture stands Mother van Laar who, from the look of it, is their leader, with her high collar, tightly buttoned jacket, and firm, assured smile. All of the family face the camera. It is only Lien who looks downward and a little to the side. Her short-sleeve dress appears too light for the weather and it is blown by a wind that nobody else in the picture seems to feel.

  * * *

  —

  THE REFORMED (HERVORMDE) PROTESTANT CHURCH, which the Van Laars in the photograph look dressed to attend, stands half a mile away at the center of the village: a solid redbrick building that was begun in the eleventh century, with a square tower and smallish clear windows near to the ground. Its walls were long ago stripped of their statues and frescoes and now resound to plain sermons that are delivered to an audience of the elect. Theirs is the Calvinist denomination that has its origins in the Synod of Dordt. It is the great national institution that once buried Baruch Spinoza in splendor and then demolished his grave for nonpayment of fees. Practical and worldly, the Reformed Church has played it
s part in giving the Dutch their national character: direct, house proud, and determined to offer a respectable exterior to the outside world.

  With some notable exceptions, the Reformed Church has not been quick to come to the aid of its Jewish neighbors. While its elders, of course, disapprove of the occupation and are loyal to the House of Orange, they also have a dislike of grandstanding, activism, and of making a fuss. Law and order are the mainstay of their civic values and that belief sits uneasily with any resistance to Nazi plans.

  Back in July 1942 there had been a plan to read out a clear statement of disapproval in all Christian churches about the mass deportation of Jews. A joint text, agreed to with the Catholics, was even prepared. In the end, however, the elders at the Reformed Church synod had retreated, persuaded by a promise that, if no objection was made in public, Jews who had converted to the Protestant faith would be spared. Rather than expressing outrage, the synod had instead issued a declaration describing the “bitter trials” that God set for the “folk of Israel” who stood out against conversion to the Christian truth.

  There had been a real choice here. When the Catholics went ahead and read out the original statement of opposition, over two hundred Jewish members of their congregation were arrested as a consequence and sent straight to the camps, where, among others, the philosopher-nun Edith Stein met her death. Even in the face of this action, the Catholic archbishop had chosen to stick to his position, hereafter diverting thousands of guilders of collection money to the resistance cause. The Reformed Protestant state church, in contrast, still refused to speak out.