by Bart van Es
Maybe I am projecting too much onto a single photo, but I do sense this aura of separation in the picture. The light falls differently on her. Lien looks almost as though she has been taken from another photograph entirely and then pasted in.
Lien’s “concrete story” describes an incident that occurred around the time the family portrait was taken:
I remember one time that I was darning socks by the stove. I thought it was really rather a fun little job. But at a certain moment I was sent directly to bed without my supper, something that was used as a punishment in the house. Ma’s point was that I had been looking so angry and disagreeable and that I had to learn that sometimes I had to darn socks and that was that. It didn’t matter that I said that I hadn’t minded darning socks at all. The punishment went through.
Ma also said to me quite often, “You are irritating me immeasurably, but I don’t know why.”
As I write this, memories are triggered and I think that I must have been deaf and blind to the signals that my presence was too much for the family. And the question is, did they love me?
Even then, I always had the feeling that they didn’t need me but I did need them. I was conscious that I probably loved them more than they loved me.
There are these moments when Lien feels separate from the family, when she stares into the distance and feels an oppressive sadness, but life is good, really, on the whole. The buzz of the house is a joy to her. Always there are people at the door who need to speak to Pa. And over dinner there are heated conversations, big important topics with principles at stake. Ma and Pa are completely honest. Though the house that they rent is quite large, they own almost nothing, and what they have they share. Come 1953, when the great flood (the Watersnood) drowns much of the country, they will, without a moment’s consideration, open their home to refugees.
As well as sisters and brothers, Lien has many friends around her. Girls still sometimes write in her poem book. She has a special pad of yellow paper, which she now uses for these extra entries, like the following verse:
Two clear eyes, the prettiest I’ve seen
I hope that you love me, my dearest Lien
It is Lien now instead of Lientje. One day in school a teacher tells her that Lientje sounds childish and this moment marks the change.
School is a pleasure. Though a year behind, she is soon again near the top of the class. She enjoys the stillness of homework. Numbers line up and resolve themselves as her pencil moves from square to square. In Dutch, she likes the gentle unpicking of sentences: the subject, verb, and object that are strung together on an invisible line. Best of all, there is geography, in which she traces the edges of continents, oceans, deserts, and jungles, and great sheets of ice.
There are friends at school, at the AJC, and in the street, and also at home where she can talk about Wim (whom she has seen quite a few times now) to Ali, do puzzles with Marianne, or read stories to little Henk. It is only with Kees that she has lost her connection. There is a wildness about him, in which she used to share but that now excludes her. He is always saying that she is odd. Lien wants him to like her again and maybe it is because of this that, one time, when walking through the fields in August, she tells him what happened in Ede and afterward in the woods outside Bennekom.
They have just come back from an AJC meeting and as Lien talks she looks down at her sandals and at her gray woolen socks.
“You know, when I was away, in the wartime, a man did things to me that I didn’t like.”
Kees slows his step.
“What kind of things?” he asks her, intrigued for once.
She hadn’t planned this and doesn’t have the language.
There is a word that has been whispered by wide-eyed girls in class.
Rape (Verkrachten).
“He used to rape me,” she says.
The phrase feels awkward in her mouth.
Kees stands still.
“Did he take your clothes off?” he asks.
As she looks up at him, Kees suddenly looks childish in his red neckerchief and his khaki AJC shorts. Turning away, she starts to walk.
He lags behind and then strides toward her.
“Hey, if you can do it with some stranger you can do it with me,” he puffs.
“I could make you,” he adds after a moment, mumbling.
When he speaks like this she is suddenly frightened and she begins to run.
“You are odd!” he shouts after her, without trying to catch up.
* * *
—
IT WAS AN EXCHANGE that took just a few seconds, and Kees, a fourteen-year-old with no understanding of his sexual feelings, perhaps hardly thought about it. Afterward, he told his parents, who did their best to talk the matter over with Lien. But there was no language for what had happened to Lien in Ede and Bennekom. In that postwar half decade there was barely a language for emotions at all. So the rapes that Lien suffered remained as a fenced-off part of her existence, never referred to but still sensed, perhaps by everyone, as a presence.
* * *
—
IT IS NOT LONG AFTER THIS that Lien finds herself on the broad tree-lined gravel path through Orange Park that leads to the Higher Burgess School (the HBS) on her way to sit for the entrance exam. This is the secondary school that teaches more difficult subjects such as geometry, sciences, Greek, and Latin; from here students can go on to a university, although Lien has not thought at all about that. Almost a year ago, after good reports in all of her subjects, the teachers told her that she should try for HBS admission. They even provided some extra lessons in preparation. Mostly, though, Lien feigned illness and did not turn up.
It is not the thought of the school itself that frightens her; it is the thought of what will happen at home. Once, when she brought an English book back from the library, Ma told her that she could not possibly understand it and she ought to be careful of showing off. That comment has stuck like an awkward piece of grit inside her. With Kees and Ali already at the MULO (More Advanced Lower Education College, where the subjects are easier), how would it feel if she were suddenly one of those boastful HBS girls?
On all sides children are heading in the same direction, some with their parents beside them offering last-minute advice. The building is enormous: row upon row of high, blank windows staring out across the park. The muted crowd is gathering around a side door, digging holes in the deep gravel with their shoes. After twenty minutes the door opens and a man with whiskers invites them in.
It smells of chalk, chlorine, packed lunches, and damp clothes. Rows of wooden benches are lined up opposite a lectern and a clock. On them there are little stacks of printed sheets, facedown, evenly spaced. These are the exam papers. The big room echoes with the squeaking and scraping of wood.
And now it is really happening. When the whiskered man calls out there is a frantic rustle. Beside Lien, a girl starts writing immediately, her tongue edging in and out to the ridge of her teeth.
Part I is mental math, with no rough working allowed. Lien turns her paper:
88 -. . . . + 8 = 70
3⁄25 =. . . .
The girl beside her is working fast.
What would it be like to be here? Lien looks up above the paneling to the white wall and the clock.
88 -. . . . + 8 = 70
Is it true that the girls who go here are mostly snobs?
88 -. . . . + 8 = 70
If she gets in, how will the news be greeted back home? The thought gives Lien a shiver. In her imagination, she can see Kees scoffing at some “Burgess School expression” that she will pick up here, and Ali, though supportive, inwardly hurt, as if by an act of betrayal. And then Pa? Almost every evening he sits at the dinner table at his studies. What will happen if Lien brings home books about geometry, Greek, and Latin? Thinking of Pa and Ma, the idea fills her w
ith shame.
Lien decides that she does not want it. She does not want to stand out as a HBS girl. And so, after five more minutes, she starts to guess at the answers almost at random, her figures crossing the dotted lines.
A few weeks later she gets the news of a disappointing performance in the examination. Admission, the letter says, is permissible, but it is not recommended in her case. The decision to go to the MULO instead comes to Lien as a relief.
* * *
—
AND SO LIFE GOES ON as before in the household, with Lien in the class below Kees at the MULO, where he rises with distinction to become head boy. And life really is happy. After Henk there is another baby brother, Geert Jan. There are holidays to the seaside and long visits to the grandparents in Strijen. And there is Wim from the AJC, who becomes her fiancé, though in the end they break up.
Of course there are family tensions. Pa is, to be honest, a man with a temper, and Lien too has a passionate side. At rare moments Lien can boil over, hot with fury at some injustice, defiant of consequence, railing in her anger. On these occasions Pa will hit her, hard. This, though, also happens with Kees (with Ma just the same, screaming and desperate to stop the beating), and on the street these rages from fathers are far from unique. Lien has nothing to complain of. Her lot is far better than most.
When the time comes, Ali leaves home to go to nursing college and Kees, the star of the MULO, goes on to train as a flight engineer and then to work for Fokker in aircraft design, quickly rising through the firm. And Lien? She would like to work with children. There is a place in Amsterdam that would suit her: a residential nursery. She can live there and get training and return to Dordrecht most weekends. Then, after a year, she would progress to Middeloo College in Amersfoort to complete a qualification in social-educational care.
So in 1950, aged seventeen, she takes the train to the big city and then the tram to a grand villa with gates around it, where she gets her uniform: a white apron over a blue dress. The evenings are lonely because few of the other girls stay over, except to do the night shift, and she never goes out. But the work appeals to her. They take children with behavioral problems and work with them, giving them confidence, drawing them out. As she follows her course of studies, Lien takes a special interest in organizing little concerts, with the children playing their recorders all in a line.
On Fridays Lien will pack her bag and head out to the bus stop, looking forward to Ma’s cooking and to seeing everyone at home. She will sleep in her old bedroom and chat, maybe, to Ali, if she is also back for the weekend. Downstairs Pa will be smoking and reading, first the work papers from his briefcase and then his books on politics and history and science. It is all so comforting, and because of this it hurts her that Ma, feeling that the house gets crowded, says sometimes, “You know, you don’t have to come.”
At work they are developing new approaches. It is a matter of understanding the child as a whole person, with a specific background and a character of his or her own. The idea is to give children the freedom to develop not only as individuals but also as part of a social world. To help them with this, there are methods such as counseling, setting child protection guidelines, home visits, and play therapy, which change the old routines.
After a year, Lien moves, as planned, to Amersfoort to continue her studies. Then, another year on, she must fix on a placement. The director asks Lien to come to his study to look at the options for where she might go. There is a new children’s home called Ellinchem that, he suggests, would suit her. The establishment is based on innovation. It is the first to mix boys and girls together, from babies to the age of twenty-one. With a humanist ethos, it sets out to tackle issues such as loneliness and bereavement. He has spoken to the management. Might Lien take up a position and continue her education there?
She considers for a moment. The place is quite near Bennekom, which spooks her a little, but she agrees.
* * *
—
SO IN 1953 SHE IS TWENTY and working in another villa, this time in a rural village rather than in a big town. Less than a decade back, Ellecom, where the institution is based, was the home of the Dutch SS training college, but to most people that now feels like a long time ago. And the director was right; it does suit Lien. She is expanding her contacts, becoming more of a leader, finding a mission in life. But still, like all young people, she wants a home to go to, and she feels the pull of the Frederikstraat.
It is on a Monday there in late autumn that she is dozing on the sofa at the end of a weekend visit, having been a bit under the weather and planning to go back by train the next day. Rain slants across the window. The objects in the room are so familiar: the clock, the armchair, and the cabinet of polished wood with its china teapot and matching unused cups. For once, the house is peaceful. Even Ma is out. Only Pa is to be heard in the kitchen, clinking crockery as he brews his coffee.
She drifts off, well now but still tired, and only wakes when the door opens and Pa asks if she’s okay. It is not like him to ask. Lien lies there, confused and dozy for a moment, and then answers that she’s fine.
Then something strange, frightening, and unexpected happens. As an event it is fleeting, and what actually occurs is open to interpretation, but the consequences will be profound. Pa is there beside her as she lies on the sofa, his breathing unsteady. Before she knows what is happening he is kissing her and stroking her hair. This man, whom she thinks of as a father, seems excited by her as a woman.
Lien stands up and laughs a little, her heart running incredibly fast. He stands close by her, his hand touching her arm.
“I’m not so well, I’m going upstairs to bed,” is what she thinks she says.
As she rushes up, her mind is scrambled, unsure what has happened. She paces and looks out onto the rain-slicked balcony, trying to calm down. Her hands are trembling, more from shock and confusion than from fear. After ten minutes of silence in which her hearing buzzes, she curls up on the bed and lies there under the covers staring in the half-light at the door.
And then the handle turns and he is there again, to get something from the cupboard, he says. He’s gone within a minute, but then he’s back and standing by her bed. Pa bends to kiss her and she hears that heavy breath.
Perhaps she screams? She really doesn’t know.
And then he’s gone and it’s over and nothing happened. But for Lien, the world has altered and it can never be the same. For her, Pa is no longer her father; he is just a man.
She writes a note to say that she needs to be alone for a while and then she leaves the house.
* * *
—
IN MY HOTEL ROOM a sharp smell of cigarette smoke is pushing through the closed vent above the window from the terrace. I head through to the bathroom, where my skin looks blue in the mirror under the tile-reflected light.
* * *
—
SOME MIGHT SAY THAT LIEN, her perception distorted by the rapes she endured at the hands of Uncle Evert, imagined intentions that were never there. The circumstances—the empty house, the trusted older man who seems at first to comfort—have something in common. Perhaps they triggered an association that had long been latent in her mind?
In the end, though, I do not believe that what Lien experienced was a projection. Her testimony in the typescript “the concrete story of my relations with the van Es family” is straightforward:
Suddenly he came toward me, breathing very fast, and began to kiss me. I can still feel the shock and the fear of it. Pa, the stern father, the uncompromising moralist, who was suddenly so tactile and excited. . . . He saw me as a woman.
Later, Lien and I will discuss her recollection of those moments. Aware of the danger of a false accusation, she has played the incident again and again in her memory, but her judgment has remained the same. In the end, I must write my account of these few minutes from her perspective, aw
are that it could color my grandfather’s reputation, risk distorting the legacy of a life of courage and ideals.
Tomorrow I will go to the Frederikstraat to look onto the balcony and to walk around those rooms. After that I will take the train to Amsterdam, where I am meeting Lien. She wants to show me the Portuguese Synagogue, the place where she got married.
Twenty-two
Sunshine pours in through the windows of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam and under my feet I feel the grains of the sand strewn on the floorboards to dampen sound. Above my head, golden chandeliers float against the dark timber of the vaulted ceiling while stone walls and columns rise all around me, massive and honey white. It is all so simple and restrained. At the time of its completion in 1675 it was the world’s largest synagogue, and aside from its temporary closure in the 1940s, it is still the oldest in continuous use. Even now, there is no electricity or heating. It is lit for the great services by nearly a thousand candles, which shine from holders on the plain wooden benches as well as from high up in the three-tiered chandeliers.
Lien smiles proudly as she stands beside me. We are on a walk a round Amsterdam’s old Jewish Quarter and will head on to the Jewish Historical Museum after this. As we wander across the courtyards and peek into prim little rooms and offices, she tells me about her wedding, which took place here on December 20, 1959.
By that time her connection with the Van Es family had been reestablished. She stayed away for a year, living rather miserably in institutional accommodation, but then Pa came to see her. They met on neutral ground in the bar of a hotel in Arnhem, not far from where she worked. He told her that nothing had happened and that she had better come home.