Turbulence

by Annette Herfkens

  I go the Italian way. The white makes the food stand out, and I love food. On a business trip to London, I buy the entire Wedgwood china set at Harrods and an Old English silver set in a wooden “military case.” Both at half price. I arrange for it all to be sent to Madrid. Then I walk over to Harvey Nichols and buy some fancy charger plates, which I carry on the plane.

  Now I am all set.

  Reflection: Fear of Flying

  People always asked how I kept on flying after the accident. How I dared enter a plane at all.

  Truth is, I didn’t. But what was my alternative? Stay in Holland? Give up on my life and my apartment in Spain? Give up on my career? On what was left of my life?

  Flying was an important part of my job. A means to experience what I had always enjoyed most: other cultures and viewpoints. Traveling put things in perspective for me; it gave me a different perception of myself. Luckily, the same job that compelled me to travel also allowed me to travel in a way that made it just about bearable. Our travel agent always booked me a seat in the very first row. On European flights, that meant flying business class. On intercontinental flights, it was first class.

  And Jaime was there. On the very first flight from Singapore, the first flight to Madrid, and the first flight back to Amsterdam. He accompanied me on those flights with such compassion that it eased my pain and fear. Just seeing the outline of a plane would make me nervous. Jaime would describe the type and make of the plane and normalize the situation. I was fortunate to have Jaime around.

  Even today I need legroom on a plane. I have long legs and still have difficulty when I feel the seat in front of me against my knees. I immediately associate it with that seat on top of me, weighed down by that dead body.

  My first flight alone was from Amsterdam to Hamburg, to the 1993 Inter-American Development Bank meeting. Something had gone wrong with my reservation. The seats in the first row had been assigned to the directors of ING Bank, of all people. I was sitting behind Pasje’s bosses!

  I was too proud to ask them to swap with me. I chose to eat myself up instead. Not only was I uncomfortable with my knees against the seat in front of me, but I was also consumed by anger and envy. They were all alive and kicking, and Pasje wasn’t. Pasje, who had so much more to give to this world than all of them together, I thought. They were relaxed and cracking jokes among themselves, oblivious to my grief-fueled thoughts.

  After that “solo” flight, things got better. Once we are gliding through the air, I actually like flying: reading The Economist and having a real bird’s-eye view. The few times that a flight has been bumpy or we have had to circle for hours, a friendly fellow passenger has talked me through it—like the time we couldn’t land in New York and we circled for more than an hour after an eight-hour flight from Amsterdam. An elderly board member of ABN AMRO offered to hold my hand. He held it the entire time until we ended up landing in Boston. I learned that people are always willing to help. I just have to ask.

  ONLY A SEED

  It is Christmastime again. A year has passed since the crash. Jaime knows I have no idea what to do with myself. I do not want to be anywhere. For thirteen years, I spent every Christmas vacation with Pasje in whatever place we happened to be. Last year I was in a hospital bed at my parents’ house, and the night passed in a blur. So it really feels like this is the first time without Pasje. Jaime understands. “Come with me and the boys to Aruba,” he offers. I accept. The Caribbean climate, looking after his boys, and the fact that they all are Jewish makes it easier to keep my emotions in check: I can pretend it isn’t Christmas at all.

  After Christmas I go on to Curaçao by myself. I stay with a school friend who has lost her first husband, our childhood friend. It is good to be with someone who has gone through the same experience. Then a friendly ING banker invites me to a New Year’s Eve party at his house. He was Pasje’s boss in Amsterdam. We all used to go out together in those days. Now he is managing ING Curaçao. I know the party is going to be difficult, that the whole atmosphere is going to take me right back to the past. But I feel I shouldn’t avoid the confrontation. Face reality. So I force myself to go. It turns out to be an informal get-together with many of my ex-colleagues.

  When the clock is about to strike twelve, the pain hits me. So hard that my stomach contracts. I feel like I am drowning, like a giant wave is sweeping me off my feet and I am choking. Drowning in pain and choking on fear. Pain for Pasje, fear for all the Christmas holidays and New Year’s Eves to come. That throbbing pain, the feeling of amputation I have been living with, is taking me over completely. With such a sharp edge, it is as if Pasje is dying in front of me again, here and now. I go outside into the garden and sit down on the edge of the pool. I put my feet in the water to cool down the painful scars. The scars on my feet and the scars on my heart. I start sobbing.

  “If you have loved once, you’ll love again,” I hear. It is a pleasant voice, with a German accent. My host’s elderly mother sits down next to me. I look up. Her eyes are full of compassion. She knows. She has been there; I can see it. I put my head on her shoulder and cry.

  BIG SHOES

  When my good old friend decides it is time to get married, I am his obvious choice. We used to go out in college and we had been really good friends ever since. We both happen to be single, and we can still give each other a thrill.

  It had been two and a half years since the accident, and I had not consciously thought about filling Pasje’s shoes. Yet, as girls do, I discussed it with my good old girlfriend. She said, “Yes, he would be the only one who could.”

  And I started thinking: “Hey! Why not Jaime? What’s wrong with Jaime?”

  HOTLINE

  Once Jaime started working in Madrid, he didn’t enjoy business travel anymore. He’d done his fair share of it. I had liked his stories of trips to Scandinavia and Switzerland. How a senior Swiss banker had taken his arm when crossing the street and invited him to his house to meet his family. How he had shown Jaime the big vaults with all the gold, right under the head office in Zurich.

  He only wanted to travel to the developed world anyway, and definitely not to meetings, so I would go. By myself. To all the countries we traded, to the conferences, the forums, and the big bankers’ meetings. Jaime let his world shrink and mine expand.

  The IMF/World Bank and regional development bank meetings are held alternately in Washington, London, and elsewhere. Thousands of senior bankers and government officials come together to give or ask for loans. A lot of the wheeling and dealing is done in the hotel lobbies and at the parties.

  While other bankers travel in groups and coordinate their meetings, I am always operating on my own. It is part of the divide-and-conquer policy of our bosses: the different groups within the bank compete with each other and do not share information, let alone their contacts.

  I fly first class, take taxis to the hotels, have a few meetings, and dress for the parties where the bankers share wine, delicacies, and information. The parties are often held in galleries and museums. What is there not to like: walking around holding a glass of champagne, seeing the country’s renowned art, chatting with friends from the market, meeting the key officials of the countries, and picking up information to trade on in the process.

  It is an indulgently privileged way to see the world: Eastern Europe, Latin America, Russia, the Far East. The poorer the country, the more lavish the parties. I feel a pang of guilt seeing the ice statues in Bangkok, the mountain of caviar in St. Petersburg, steaks in Buenos Aires, goose liver in Budapest. Especially when we bump into demonstrators. In Prague they throw stones at our buses. But I felt a bit exonerated since we were offering solutions for these countries’ debt burdens by selling the debt back to their governments at a steep discount and making the banks take a loss . . .

  Jaime is always with me—virtually, so to speak. I call him all the time. Before the event, sometimes during the event, and definitely after. I tell him about the Jewish cemeteries in Prague,
swimming in the Dead Sea, the paintings in the Hermitage, or the Peruvians doing buybacks. But I also call him to whine that I left my favorite scarf on the sightseeing bus during the ladies’ program—what was I doing there anyway? Or because I cannot sleep in the hotel I was assigned to—in then-communist Moscow—because of the noisy industrial refrigerator.

  Jaime can see the enormous changes in Russia through my eyes. On every visit to Moscow I report on them, from the first McDonald’s to brand-new shopping malls, wondering out loud how much longer five-year-olds will sit through operas and chess matches or taxi drivers will quote literature. I walk across the Large Moskvoretsky Bridge from the newly built Kempinski hotel, listening to Jaime’s thoughts about the markets. At the Red Square I describe Lenin’s body to him.

  I successfully corner some new Russian bankers and central bank officials and tell Jaime the results right on the spot. He talks me into the night on the train from St. Petersburg to Moscow, the one on which passengers are often drugged and robbed of all their belongings overnight. The alternative is a Russian plane—something I am reluctant to try again. When I wake up the next morning with my clothes still on, I call Jaime immediately. He is my first thought in the morning and my last at night. We share everything with each other.

  Our line is hot, indeed.

  PART II

  * * *

  THE RETURN

  1993–2006

  “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘universe,’ yet we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires, and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion, to embrace all living creatures in the whole of nature and its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”

  —Albert Einstein, letter of 1950, as quoted in the The New York Times

  4

  * * *

  MOVING ON

  “Ana, it has been three years now since my boyfriend died, and the inevitable has happened.” She is sitting behind her desk, working her way through a pile of memos. Our boss is now in an ivory tower. I have to make an appointment to see her and need to punch several codes to get into her office.

  “What?” She sits up, alarmed.

  “I want to marry Jaime.” She looks shocked, if not horrified. “But we want to keep on working together,” I add quickly.

  She remains quiet

  “It is your fault, really,” I joke. “I did not get to meet anyone else. I am always with him, working.”

  Finally she smiles and asks, “Have you been planning a big wedding to which you want to invite the whole bank?”

  “No,” I answer, “not at all.”

  “Then it is OK,” she says “Don’t make too much noise about it. It’s fine. Congratulations.” In the old days, when she was still working on our floor, she would have kissed me. Now she remains behind her desk.

  I am thrilled, but I linger.

  “Is there anything else?” she asks.

  “Yes, we would really like to move our trading desk to New York. I am getting older, and we want children. It would all be so much easier if we could work normal hours.”

  So, we move to New York City from Madrid in the summer of 1995. Jaime wants to live on the conventional East Side. I prefer the more relaxed West Side. I bluff that I will only move to the East Side if he cuts his hair. People in the market once collected and offered $70,000 to get rid of his mane, and he has notoriously refused. He calls my bluff and we settle in an East Side co-op. The hair grows back, slowly but surely.

  Reflection

  “Love is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”

  —Plato

  Several people asked me how it was that Jaime and I got together after the accident: “How did you know he was the right one to fill Pasje’s shoes? Did it feel like betrayal? Did you feel guilty?”

  The truth is, I dared him. I dared him with all my heart, body, and spirit.

  A spirit I had met in the jungle. A spirit that had taught me to get over myself and to go beyond myself. A spirit that only shows itself in surrender.

  The ultimate bliss is in the surrendering itself. Any self-awareness or self-consciousness gets in the way. As Einstein describes it in a letter to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium: “When one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies, when one gazes in amazement at the profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable: life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only being.”

  So that is how it was to love Jaime after the accident. It was beautiful. Like la petite mort as the French call it. The little death, just like in the jungle, where the big death took my hand.

  FORWARD CONTRACT

  NEW YORK, 1996

  I have to focus on the “terms” of my agreement with Ana Botín. Specifically, how to keep my pregnancy under the radar at the office. Getting pregnant, however, is different than a typical assignment. No forward delivery on this or that date. My years of professional training are rendered useless. It is also a different type of surrender of control. A painful surrender, as it turns out: I have three miscarriages.

  Ana asked us to keep it all a secret, so I feel compelled to plan how to do so. My first step is the clothing. I buy the same suit in different sizes, so as I grow in size, my suit will fit me the same. But I miscarry. Three times. The season changes: A suit I bought for a summer pregnancy will not work for winter, and vice versa. My planning gets all messed up.

  I must have bought at least twenty pregnancy tests. “Relax,” I am told. “That is the only way.” Relax? Really? I am obsessed! Trying to become and stay pregnant is all-consuming. First having to wait for the date until I can do the test. Then waiting, praying, with anticipation, to make it to three months, the “safe” date. After eight weeks, I start—hardly daring—to have hopes. Every time I go to the bathroom I expect to see blood again.

  What I like about being pregnant is the effortless bonding with other women. A real, equal connection. Nobody is rating. Once born, children are rated on various scales of success—intelligence, athleticism, sociability . . . But when you’re pregnant, you are united in uncertainty. You share expectations; you don’t rank them. There is purity in the pregnancy connection that is not quite there when you compare the final product.

  I enjoy that connection. Women from both the West End and East End of London, Spanish women, Dutch women, multiracial American women, and women who would normally stereotype me and stay distant now look at my bump and ask me when I am due and share their own experiences.

  The third time I lose my baby, I am at work. I have just passed the thirteen-week mark, and I am so happy that we have made it—third time’s the charm! I am about to call everyone with the good news, when I start bleeding. In the office.

  Jaime takes me to the hospital, where I have a procedure to remove what was going to be our child. But my body keeps on producing hormones and emotions as if it is still there. I am heartbroken. Jaime desperately wants to comfort me. Helplessly, he says that he will buy me “anything, whatever I want.” I look at the many strollers in our street and start sobbing, “A baby. I just want a baby.”

  The loss feels enormous, and the prospect of going through the same anxiety again is daunting. But then I remember the jungle, and I just stay still—stay still with the loss. Lean into it even, and feel the pain. I do not move on immediately. I let the loss absorb me first, completely.

  With Jaime off to the Stuyvesant Ball, New York, 1996

  Nine months pregnant and celebrating my 36th birthday with my brother, New York, April 1997

  After that, I can stand up and go on liv
ing.

  When we finally tell our subordinates that not only are we a—happy—couple, but also that I am seven months pregnant, their jaws almost split. The trick with the suits has worked.

  GARDEN OF EDEN

  Creation derives from opposites. Having children must be the highest form of duality—if only for the most excruciating pain combined with the greatest joy. The ultimate creation.

  When I finally manage to stay pregnant, I assume my jungle pains have seasoned me. That giving birth should be easy. I wouldn’t really need to do the breathing or the pain control. Even my gynecologist says it would be “peanuts” for me, so during our Lamaze classes I focus much more on my classmates than on my breathing. Luckily, Jaime pays attention, and when the moment comes, he holds my hand with his typical tenderness and care.

  But he cannot take care of this for me. It isn’t like doing a deal ticket or my tax return. I have to do this myself. Or rather, I just have to let go . . . and surrender. In the jungle I disconnected from my body, whereas in childbirth the mind-body connection is essential. In the jungle I had a collapsed lung, forcing me to really breathe. Now, I just can’t do it! After eleven hours of suffering and holding in my breath, and my baby, I am told to have either an epidural or a cesarean. I choose the first.