The Cut Out Girl

by Bart van Es

  * * *

  —

  I AM THE LAST to leave the museum. Having retrieved my suitcase, I walk through the center of Amsterdam to Lien’s apartment, crossing little hump-backed bridges, looking into shops and cafés, and dodging bicycles all the way. When I get there Lien is busy in the kitchen. She sends me through to the seating area, where she puts out some bowls of snacks and a glass of beer. It will be our last evening together before I fly back to the UK.

  After dinner, Lien fetches a letter. It is a long one, from Ma to her, dating from the early months of her marriage. It responds to Lien’s worries about a growing distance between the affluent and Orthodox religious world she has now entered and the more basic values of the family in Dordt:

  Dear Lien,

  Oh, oh, sometimes a whole life does not make us any wiser I think. How uncertain and how vulnerable you are. And you so often take things differently from how they were meant! . . . You are worried, you say, about the distance between Albert’s family and ours when it comes to atmosphere and life view and that this will always be there.

  Look, Lientje, I see it like this.

  When you came to us in those years as a child and a growing girl we were often so grateful that you were with us.

  Perhaps you remember one time, when you’d come back from Bennekom, I said, “That Lien, now she is home again and luckily not at all changed.”

  And you said, “Unchanged? I’m so happy!”

  You were amazed, I think, that I said you were the same.

  Ma reflects on the war and its fear and hardships and also about her money worries. Then she says:

  Now I must tell you that our dear little Lord has blessed me very much in life in being unmissable for others. I was 28 and had four children to look after and only one of them was my own. You had all been shaped by others and sometimes you looked very critically on what I was doing. When you have a child yourself you must in all honesty imagine for yourself for a moment what it would be like to have three more, all dependent for everything on you.

  “But still,” she continues:

  I sometimes had this great feeling of joy because I felt so needed. What is there, I ask you, that a person could want in life more than that?

  She writes about the marriages of Kees and Ali and about Pa:

  Pa also needs support and he comes off worst with me because somewhere (and I tell you this in confidence) I do have a sense of resentment that he has left the care of you all pretty much entirely to me. But still, everywhere we go we are met with great respect and admiration and that did not come out of nothing. That has cost Pa a lot of effort and it has also taken a lot of sacrifices from me.

  She describes some of the pressures upon her: parents and a sick sister to look after, her own children, and then grandchildren as well.

  And who is there to comfort me amidst all these troubles? Everyone expects something from me. It is nice to be unmissable, but it is also very tiring.

  Ma paints a picture of a chaotic St. Nicholas evening a few days ago, where there were half a dozen children in her care:

  Anne screaming, completely exhausted. Anneke and Geert Jan fighting over a toy. A moment later, Anneke vomiting because she had swallowed far too large a piece of bread. And then Gerard was insulted because I dared to find it disgusting. Really it was like some comedy in the cinema. It was all easy enough to manage eventually, but you have to be used to it. Imagine your Albert in the midst of all that!

  And because of this my dear ’Pientje. For us you will always belong to us, but we want to protect you from being closed off to the outside world. You have to make choices in life. You will never lose the things you left behind that were valuable to you. We did so much in the past to make for happiness in life.

  Ma worries about some of the choices she made as a mother, that she sent her adopted or fostered children into the world too soon, that she pushed them away with a sense of release. Then she closes:

  Now, ’Pien, I’m going to stop here, there is no more to say. Try to come for Christmas for a few days. Maybe Albert can come and collect you afterward?

  Bye Lienepien. Love from mum who will always love you just as much as the others.

  This is a kind and loving letter, filled with a true and solid wisdom. Ma understands Lien and for all the trouble that lay behind them it is hard to see how the bonds that tied these women together could break. My grandmother could sometimes be hard and judgmental, but she was also someone with a deep sense of duty, especially toward her children. How could things go from such a letter to the one that severed contact for good?

  Twenty-four

  The newlyweds, Lien and Albert, buy their furniture from Bas van Pelt at 24 Leidsestraat in Amsterdam. Its enormous front window, more than three times her height, reveals an almost empty interior: a gray stone floor, white walls, and a white ceiling, all perfectly featureless and flat. For the first five yards beyond the glass there is nothing to look at. Then, set back at unconventional angles: a steel-and-glass table; a curving, bright orange armchair; and an inverted standard lamp. The shop smells of polished wood and leather and there is music playing. As they enter they receive a smile from the sales assistant, who wears a purple tie. She and Albert move freely, her heels clipping on the steps as they climb to the showrooms upstairs. The two of them lounge back on a sofa to try out its feel.

  They already have a flat in Eindhoven, assigned to them by Albert’s new employer, Philips. Its windows look out onto a helipad and several times a day Lien watches as the helicopter lands like a dragonfly on the yellow H that is painted on the concrete below her, its rotors crushing a neat circle in the surrounding grass.

  Eindhoven is a high-tech city. As well as being the home of Philips, it houses the Technical University, the Design Academy, and Brabantia, a firm that makes sleek pedal waste bins and other stainless steel household products. Near the center of town there is, since 1966, a huge concrete flying saucer called the Evoluon, which sits alongside a clock tower with rocketlike fins. People from all around the country come just to gaze at it, like crowds do in films when the aliens land.

  Albert is a chemist, but he works in the Physics Laboratory, which for him is like a playroom with its wires, switches, tubes, and screens. He has always loved this. Even in the war, while his family hid during the night in the ceiling of a house that was attached to a small factory, he built his own radio from scrap equipment and conducted experiments with chemicals that he found lying around. They are making such amazing things, he tells her: small stereos that you can carry and that run off batteries, magnetic tape that stores images as well as sound. Each morning he cycles off like a schoolboy, eager for the day ahead.

  Soon there are children to complete the picture. They appear one by one in Lien’s photo album. First a baby girl in white in the arms of her proud mother; then two children seated between the couple on the sofa, with mum holding an arm to keep the little boy straight; then three, all laughing, squeezed together, with the youngest, another boy, holding hands with his brother in the middle. Batja in 1960, Daan in 1964, and finally Arjeh in 1970. They are happy. The boys do judo and play football and Batja is a great debater at school. Reports from the teachers say that they are doing well. The final photo in Lien’s album of the family together is perfect: three beaming childish faces, Albert above them with a gawky grin, and Lien smiling blissfully with her eyes cast down at her lap.

  Time passes. It is not right for her to work now that she is married with children. She sits as a volunteer on various committees and, in her spare time, mixes with other housewives, who are mostly also Jewish and whose husbands also work long hours at impressive-sounding jobs. Life could hardly be better. They host dinner parties or invite families over so that the children can play. In the holidays they fly or take the sleeper train to pretty cottages in Austria, or Italy, or southern France. And really she is not all that busy, at least not in the
way that it was at home with Ma and Pa. There are all those modern conveniences—the fridge, the washing machine, the dryer, the vacuum cleaner—and there is also a lady who comes around to clean. Because of this, quite often she finds herself at the edge of some playground, or at home when the children are sleeping, with hours to spare. In the large modern kitchen of the house they buy a few years later, Lien feels like a cut out picture of a perfect wife from a magazine.

  Those hours of spare time are a luxury for her, but she tries her best to fill them with social engagements and charity work. This is partly to be useful but it is also because the spare time brings questions and she has never asked questions before. They are inconvenient and sometimes frightening. Who is she really? Where does she belong? What is it that she believes?

  Along with the questions there is, over the years, a new anxiety over the answers. Once, at Daan’s nursery, they asked her to put a baby book together (a few little facts about the family that he could learn), but when they explained the idea it sent a sudden wave of panic through her and she had to leave. The past, which was once so easy to hide from, now looms ever darker, like a vast shadow that she knows lies behind her but that she dare not face. So she keeps on going to the coffee mornings and she keeps on smiling at the playground’s edge.

  All the same, as the decade passes—as Kennedy is replaced by Johnson and Johnson by Nixon, as history moves from the Cuban Missile Crisis toward defeat in Vietnam, as the Prague Spring is crushed, as Paris riots, and as people march to ban the bomb—at night the questions creep in upon her, even though the doctor has given her pills to help her sleep. Aunt Roza told her how it happened: Lien’s mother and grandmother, together, hand in hand.

  She has never looked into it, but her mother must have been younger when she died than Lien is now.

  “I ought not to be here.” It is the sentence that she cannot get out of her head. Like drumming, it sits there in the background growing ever more loud. And as it gets louder she feels that she does not belong to the world around her. She does not belong to the lovely house, to the lovely furniture, and to the lovely kids. She brings a darkness with her. It becomes an effort to smile.

  Albert goes to the synagogue but the synagogue has stopped working for her. The potions and the conjuring—Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah, Pesach, Yom Kippur—they feel like husks with no content at all. And it frustrates her that Albert continues to follow these rules that have no purpose. He has no time for the questions she is asking and he tells her simply to be happy and to carry on. But his mildness is now a kind of nothing, just like the words in the synagogue are nothing. Inside she feels that she is changing: a new being—fearsome, demanding, hungry—opens inside her like a seed.

  Up to now in life, she feels that she has made no choices, that she has had no real opinions, and that somehow this is all because she has not dared to look behind her at the past. But then, when she sees that past in glimpses, she is frightened and she hears the sentence in her head that tells her that she should not be here, that she should have died in Auschwitz alongside all the others.

  After a happy decade, once the 1970s start she is again free-falling, listless but fretful, cut out from the world. And with Albert she cannot even start to share this, because while she sits frozen full of hidden turmoil, he is quite unchanging, tied to old conventions, keeping all his daily habits, kind but rigid, without understanding for her inner life.

  * * *

  —

  MEANWHILE, as Lien looks ever closer inward, Ma van Es looks outward and places her worries there. In the diary that she kept up for around a decade, Ma writes of how she cannot understand the way that people all around her seem to exist in isolation, free from duty and appreciation of the good things they have. Though she often mentions her fondly, Ma thinks that Lien, like all of her adult children, is too introspective, asking unnecessary and pretentious questions while the world is under threat. Also, in her darkest hours, Ma is haunted by a fear of returning war:

  Last night I was hit by a terror. I hope that if something like this happens again I will be able to fight it because for the whole of last night and for the whole of this day I have seen in front of me what would happen if a third world war broke out. Pa would be the first to be taken by the Russians, or worse. And you all (meaning her children), I have never found you so lovely and all consuming. And Marianne, if I should not be able to see her growing older, and Henk, such a fine young healthy boy, and Ali, who is expecting her second baby, and little Anneke. And all the others. Oh, what a terrible thing.

  As she grows older, Ma feels that time moves ever faster, and yet in the midst of her global worries, she still takes new people into her care. When her sister, Bep, gets divorced, for example, and arguments are raging that might be harmful for the children, Ma takes in her nephew and niece for half a year. It all takes its toll on her psyche. She knows that she is getting fatter but she can never stick to her diets. As always, Ma worries that she is not an attractive woman, that she is not the right match for her strong and active husband.

  In the end it is really with little children that Ma is in her element: she feels their illnesses intensely and she glories in their small moments of triumph. Seeing her foster daughter and stepdaughter—Lien and Ali—pregnant gives her intense pleasure, and at the birth of Lien’s “gorgeous little girl” Batja she writes of overwhelming expectation and joy. Motherhood for Ma is a defining purpose in life.

  The note on Lien’s role as a mother, though, is among the last entries in Ma’s diary. “I am thinking of stopping with this book,” she writes a few pages later, “I am writing so irregularly and it is not interesting I think.” Run-down and feeling less purposeful without young children, Ma is, she admits, increasingly prone to grumbling in spite of her best efforts to keep her spirits up.

  By the start of the seventies Ma and Lien are quite distant from each other. They meet at birthday parties and perhaps at Christmas, but the contact between them rarely runs deep. When Lien calls on the telephone, Ma answers “I’ll call you back” but she rarely does.

  * * *

  —

  THEN ON THE EVENING of the Day of Atonement in September 1972 it is Albert’s turn to give a talk at the synagogue. Lien will not join him. As so often, she instead sits at home watching the rain as it runs in tracks down the windows, her head fogged by the sentence she cannot escape.

  At 9:30 she hears Albert’s key in the door.

  “How was the talk you gave?”

  “If you’d have been there,” he answers, “you would have known.”

  His irritation is not unexpected, but when he says this, something strange happens inside her. It is as if a magic word has been spoken, as if a switch has been flicked. Lien gets up from the sofa and heads upstairs, her feet heavy, then crosses the carpeted landing, enters the bathroom, and opens the cabinet that hangs above the sink on the wall.

  To her at this moment it is the perfect solution. She almost smiles at its brilliance. What if, in an instant, she just wasn’t there?

  She normally does not like to swallow pills and can’t really do it. They just sit there on her tongue, the water washing over them, leaving a bitter taste in her mouth. That is why she has taken so few. That is why there are so many left. But this time it is easy. It is all so efficient. In no time at all the white plastic rectangles are empty and there is nothing left to push through the foil. With slow, deliberate movements, she puts the packet of sleeping pills back in the cabinet and walks down the stairs.

  Outside it is still raining. She sits down on the sofa. The sound of the rain is a comfort because it helps her to sleep.

  Twenty-five

  There is a photo of Ben Spiero, Lien’s cousin, that was taken at her wedding in 1959. It is the first image that I have of him since those baby snaps from the Pletterijstraat, where he sits, thumb in mouth, round-faced, on his mother’s lap, with Lien beside him
in her checked dress with a white bow in her hair. On the photograph at the wedding he is in his midtwenties, seated at a table just after the dinner has finished. My grandfather is in shot directly behind him, looking animated in conversation with a group of other guests. Ben’s face is a shock to me. A thick, ugly scar runs from one corner of his cheek to the other and the eye farthest from us stares out blankly at an odd angle, hooded and blind. The damage to his face was the result of a motorbike accident that happened years after the war had ended, but the way he drove was connected to a sense of abandonment, which Lien also felt. Like Lien he was handed over by his parents to the resistance. Like her, he suffered horrors during the war. A short while after this photo was taken, Ben Spiero succeeded in hanging himself.

  * * *

  —

  FOR SOME DAYS it was touch and go whether Lien would survive the overdose. Albert rushed her to the hospital, where she stayed for over a week. Then, in celebration of her homecoming, he organized a little party. “The unhappiness is over,” he wrote on the cards that he sent to their circle of friends. As much as anything, the fact that these cards were written in all sincerity showed the distance between them—that he had failed to understand her, or perhaps that she had failed to explain.