by Bart van Es
I look again at the photo of my grandfather, framed by maps three times his size. Given his experiences before and during the war, the answers were obvious: central planning, a clean slate, education, cars and parking lots, more train lines, and bigger roads. Such improvements would bring shared prosperity and decent provision for the sick and the old. And it could all be paid for from the profits of the factories. The war, for all its horrors, had shown what government and industry, working in partnership, were able to achieve.
* * *
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AT LUNCHTIME I head out for a sandwich. The town center outside the library was left almost untouched by 1960s renewal, although there had been plans for demolition even here. Leaning on a wrought-iron railing, I gaze at the medieval city hall, which is built, with gorgeous lopsidedness, half of brick and half of stone, across a low-arched bridge. On either side there are Renaissance merchants’ houses with stepped gables glinting in the sun. This, though, is just an island in a sea of modern construction. Two hundred yards away, down the street, I can see the discolored gray-brown brick of the C&A building, the white paneling on which has buckled over the years.
Before this morning I never understood how town planners, here and throughout Europe, could have demolished ancient tenements to construct such buildings, but their actions can be traced, at least in part, to the confidence in improvement, the wish to be rid of the old history, that came in those frantic decades of reconstruction after the war. When I think of my grandfather and his wartime experiences I start to see how all this could come about.
* * *
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RETURNING TO THE LIBRARY in the afternoon, I read on into Dordrecht’s history in the next decade, when almost overnight the good news disappeared. On January 1, 1970, Bekkers, the metalware factory, shut its doors with the loss of 220 jobs, and a few months later, the pharmaceuticals company Chefaro also announced it would close. All of a sudden there was competition from Asia; the United States undid the link between gold and the dollar, making Dutch exports more expensive; and then the oil crisis hit. Dordrecht, which for a short time had been so new and full of promise, was now old-fashioned, polluted, and too small to pull its weight. Its great companies—Tomado, the steelworks, the leather factory, Victoria Biscuits, the shipbuilders, the brewery—went bust or moved production elsewhere. Steadily, from 1975 onward, the city, whose population was still only 100,000, lost 2,700 jobs a year. Unemployment brought crime and drug addiction and also a degree of racial tension with the Moroccan guest workers who had been invited to come to Dordrecht at precisely the moment when the job losses began. By that point my grandfather was no longer on the city council, having been elected to parliament’s First Chamber (the rough equivalent of Britain’s House of Lords). The family moved for a while to Brill, a small town in the west, where he served as mayor, but his bid to get a seat in the Second Chamber (the main national parliament) did not meet with success. He had been an impassioned modernizer, and the troubles of his city must have hit him hard.
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THAT NIGHT I stay in a dockside hotel, a converted building that once housed the offices of the Electrical Motors Factory, the place where my grandfather used to work.
The EMF went bankrupt in the 1970s. A color photo of it taken a decade after the closure shows a steel skeleton surrounded by garbage and stagnant pools. By this time the whole docks area, once thronging with laborers, was derelict, and to the thousands of men who had worked here since their school days the place must have felt like a grave. Once in my room, which looks out onto a smokers’ terrace with rubber matting, I think back to my grandfather, who spent so many years here and who did so much to shape this town.
I was seven when my grandfather died. I remember the news of his death with perfect clarity. My dad picked the phone up in the living room and after a few moments began to cry. Beyond this I have just two snatches of memory related to him: my grandfather’s anger when I broke a window of his greenhouse, and his relentless, determined winning when we played a game of cards. In both cases I recall the sharp smell of cigar smoke (we collected the boxes that the cigars came in and these still carried a deep, sweet, leafy scent). I also remember the sharpness of his eyes. There was a sense of greatness about him, an aura of command that came from his heroic war years (which were never talked about) and from his decades of political work. My father recalls that in Dordrecht it was always quite something to be known as his son.
My grandmother, who died when I was twenty-three, is much more vivid to me. Love came from her especially through the kitchen, which she kept perfectly tidy with a small wall-mounted spice rack and a set of hanging stainless steel pans. On the fridge there would be news from the Labor Party stuck on with magnets, and I also remember a few wise sayings (such as “The days are what we make them”) around the house, painted on wooden signs. She was great with young children. When we traveled on buses she could make pressing the “stop” button on the handrail an act of immense power. On current affairs, which we enjoyed discussing together as I grew older, she was pessimistic. People’s lack of appreciation for the good things that the welfare state gave them made her angry, and this was especially true when she talked about women. They got up too late, served too many ready-made dinners, drank beer, and sunned themselves on foreign beaches when they should have been thinking about their children. As she grew older I think my grandmother’s life was colored by a feeling of disappointment that the paradise that she and her husband had thought they were building proved unreal and unloved. My mother quotes a letter that Grandma wrote in the mid-1990s in which she mentions my brother and me:
And then my two lovely grandsons. In dark moods I think “it was all pointless,” but then I see Bart and Joost in front of me and I think, yes, it did have purpose after all.
Children, especially her grandchildren, were a constant pleasure to her, and she loved Lien’s children, when these arrived, as passionately as the rest. But those “dark moods” were something that came in later years to haunt her. In the diary that she kept for some of the postwar years she mentions a “long-lasting spiritual depression” that was connected in part to global politics and in part to problems closer to home. She writes of “ungratefulness” from the children that she took in and rescued and of how “the duty to care for children in addition to your own should be wished on no one because it is such a heavy burden to bear.”
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ON THE DESK in my hotel room lies a second sheath of papers. They were given to me by Lien last night along with the dossier from Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled. There are eleven typed pages of narrative, which she wrote as part of a set of therapy sessions in February 2001. They bear the title “This will be for once the concrete story of my relations with the van Es family.” Lien’s “concrete story” will be one important source for how I understand the row between her and my grandparents.
In the middle of page 4 she starts a new section, dealing with her return to Dordrecht in 1945. It begins as follows, with her reception by Auntie van Es:
The welcome was very warm. She embraced me, called me Lienepien, and said that it seemed as if I had never been away. But for me it was very different.
I read further into the document, which presents a picture of life in the Van Es family from Lien’s perspective in the postwar years.
Twenty-one
Not long after returning to Dordrecht, Lien switches from saying “Auntie” and “Uncle” to saying “Ma” and “Pa” like everyone else. It first happens one evening as she sits at the table doing her homework, shading a map of Holland. “Ma,” she calls out, and the word shocks her when it comes out of her mouth. But Ma just answers with “Yes, Lienepien,” which is the pet name that she always uses, and after that the change becomes fixed. No word is spoken—the family does not really talk about feelings—but it feels normal, which makes sense because Kees and Ali, who once
had a different mother, must also at some point have said “Ma” instead of “Auntie” for the first time.
At least on the outside, life at the Frederikstraat is just as it was at the old house. After school she plays kick the can with children in the street. The tin can is put on the pavement at the corner where the field starts and you can creep up to it in different ways. One way is through the bushes, crouching among the prickles, inching forward, feeling the cold through the soles of your shoes. Or you can edge along the fence. You can also dodge in and out of the hedges on the Emmastraat, risking an angry word from Mrs. Peters, who does not like you bending her plants.
If someone calls out your name and your position then you are out.
“I see you, Lientje, behind the postbox!”
“I see you, Kees, in the hedge on the Emmastraat!”
Kees is not really her friend now. He joins in with the big street games, but alone together, he does not like to play with girls. She has plenty of friends, though, such as Rieka Maasdam, who writes in her poesie album on one of a growing collection of loose sheets tucked in at the back:
1946, 11 March
Dear Lientje,
What shall I write on this page?
I have been thinking for an age!
Hey, Lientje, I know what,
Just be happy with what you’ve got!
For the remembrance
of your friend
Rieka Maasdam
Crosswise at the bottom of the page Rieka writes: “the 29th of November, that’s the day you must remember.” When that day comes Rieka will be twelve. Though they are schoolmates, Lien will be thirteen already because she has gone back a year in school after all the lessons she missed during the war.
Some friends, like Rieka, are from her class and some are from the streets around them, and still others are from the Socialist Youth Club, the AJC, which is where she spends almost all of her weekends. Lien still remembers when the material arrived for her uniform: a rough, brown rectangle of Manchester cloth for the skirt and a blue cotton one for the blouse, plus a red neckerchief, all tied together as one packet with string. Ma cut and sewed it for her. Now, early on Saturday mornings, she, Kees, and Ali will head out to a park, to town, or to the station, collecting others on the way. At the AJC they play rounders, hold quizzes, practice dancing, or do gymnastics. There are also lectures with serious titles like “Women in World History” or “Life on a Collective Farm.”
The big event for the AJC is the annual gathering, where young people from all over the country join together. For this they travel to Vierhouten, four hours away by train. Lien’s group is called the Migrant Birds and they do sound like birds all squeezed together in one carriage, squealing and laughing, making promises about who will sleep where in the tent. The group leader tries to keep order by starting singing practice, but after a while she gives up. At Utrecht the train stops, and through the window they see another youth group waiting in line on the platform, Catholic girls in purple velvet capes.
After two more hours the train stops at a station with no roof and a wooden platform. There the doors open onto a sea of brown, blue, and red. She keeps an eye out for the Migrant Birds flag so as not to get lost in the crush of people as they worm their way through the crowd to find their camping field. Inside the big white tent the light is weirdly hazy and it smells of grass and earth. Lien puts her bag down next to her friend Maartje’s. Through the shining, moving canvas she can hear the camp announcements from the speakers, slightly deadened: there is news of the nature knowledge lecture, the forest hike, the campfire, and the arrival of a group of visitors from France.
In the morning, after a night of secret whispering, they eat their breakfast in the sun. It is porridge from an enormous pan. Seated on hay bales, cradling the hot metal of their bowls, they look across at the neighboring group of boys. Then there is exercise, in long lines facing a big stage that has microphones on it and a woman in a kind of swimming costume who shows them what to do: things like bending, stretching, and doing star jumps on the spot. Later there are running races, which she loves. She glows with inner pride when she wins her heat.
There is a boy called Wim who likes her, Maartje says. By the third day they are exchanging nervous glances and then, in the evening of the fourth, during the maypole dancing, their fingers touch and stay in place. After this, on hikes, they often walk together. She likes the funny stories that he tells her and the way he wears his collar flipped right up against his neck. Wim is also from Dordrecht, so they plan to stay in touch.
The journey home feels shorter. She leans against the girl beside her as the carriage jolts along. For the final roll call at Dordt station they answer weakly through a fog of sleep. After this, she, Kees, and Ali trudge back to the Frederikstraat. Though Ma has dinner waiting, they are too tired to eat it and can barely speak.
* * *
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IN THE MORNING the curtains shine bright orange. Downstairs Marianne is running and calling out. Ali stretches in the bed beside her.
“I have slept soooooo well!” she yawns.
Lien points her toes and fingers, making her body as long as it will go.
Then they play the game that they call tickling, scratching, rubbing, which has a precise order to it. One girl lies flat on her stomach while the other tickles and then scratches, gently, down her back. And finally there is the rubbing, with hands flat and warm in circles, which is bliss.
At this point Marianne bounds in and orders them to breakfast.
“You must get up!” she chants, bouncing and repeating “up” with every bounce.
Tousle-haired, the two girls are shooed down to the table, where Ma is seated with a stack of washing, sorting items into different piles. Their three blue shirts are already hanging in a line across the window, darkening the room.
“You girls have slept a hole in the day,” Ma tells them, smiling. “What you need is a bit of healthy sunshine and then tonight you’re off to roost with the chickens. It’s school again tomorrow.”
“Off to roost with the chickens” means going to bed when it gets dark. Ma likes these funny expressions. It is one of those differences between the talk of the Van Esses and what she was used to at the Van Laars.
“If we go to bed with the chickens then we can lay our own eggs in the morning!” Lien answers, but as she says this she knows all of a sudden that her joke has not fallen right. In Bennekom such language of the farmyard was common, whereas here the idea of people laying eggs is somehow dirty, and Lien feels she has caught this infection in her way of speaking and that, because of what she has said, the mood in the room has changed. Ali smiles in her loyal, kind way, but Lien senses an edge of pity. Ma continues sorting the laundry piles.
Feeling downcast in the silence, Lien adds this error to her secret mental list of mistakes. Last week, for example, Ma called her a fusspot for cleaning, as Mother van Laar taught her, with two separate cloths. And then there was the bike trip where she called out “Hooray for the Liegemen!,” which Ali told her afterward was all wrong. The Liegemen, apparently, were the bad ones, not the good ones. The Van Esses, the Labor Party, they were on the Patriot side, whereas the Liegemen, that was the side of the church, which is the side of the Van Laars. So all of her dreams of castles and towers and princes and princesses, which she got from those books that she read in Bennekom and Ede, they were wrong.
Lien sits there scowling.
“Hey, Lienepien,” says Ma not unkindly, “enough now of those dirty looks!”
* * *
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THERE IS A GROUP PHOTO of the five children—Ali, Kees, Lien, Marianne, and my father—that was taken around 1948. Lien, who is now fifteen and who sits to the far left of the picture, is for the first time too old to have a bow in her hair. My dad, the baby of the family, sits directly in front of her, his sister’s arm holding him st
eady. Blond and smiling, he looks exactly like my own son did when he was that age. Ali, in an armchair with a wicker back, sits crosswise at the center, already looking like a grown woman in her long skirt and white blouse with a brooch at her neck. By the time I was old enough to remember Aunt Ali she was over fifty, but it is easy to recognize her sweet-natured, timid, serious expression.
Marianne, who is eight and stands behind her older sister, is still more familiar. She looks self-possessed and not at all childish in spite of the big white bow that she wears.
The Van Esses are a good-looking family, but the most striking is Kees, already dressed in a suit and tie, who smiles in a roguish, confident manner. You can see the man in him: the handsome and kindly big brother my father so fondly remembers, for whom everything seemed to come easy, and also the family patriarch of later years.
In the picture there is a big empty space between Kees and his foster sister. The gap looks awkward, yet the two of them had first been such close friends. It is not just from him, though, that Lien seems to be separated. In spite of the physical closeness, she looks somehow set apart from her siblings, and this is not just on account of her darker complexion and differently textured hair. There is a brooding quality to her, at once dreamy and fierce, which matches with Lien’s own account of her feelings at this time.
In the hotel room in Dordrecht, shifting from Lien’s “concrete story of my relations with the van Es family,” I look back at the report by Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled, which I studied this morning. The report makes mention of “a break in the girl’s emotional engagement” and states that “the child gives the impression of not having fully developed.” “The delay in her spiritual growth,” it concludes, “is noticeable.”