The Hormone Factory: A Novel

by Saskia Goldschmidt

  I got out of bed, threw on some clothes, hastened downstairs, and turned on the radio to hear confirmed what I’d already suspected: our country was at war. I rushed into the hall to try to reach one of my government contacts on the phone, and there I ran into Rivka in her nightgown, her hair in disarray and a worried look on her face, surrounded by the girls, gathered on the stairs like a bunch of white ghosts.

  “It’s war,” I announced. “I think we should try to get away.”

  “Away?” Rivka exclaimed, frowning. As if she hadn’t heard the part about being at war. “What do you mean, away, where should we go?”

  I explained that our little town lay not far from the Dutch army’s outermost, and probably very weak, line of defense, and that we’d have to try to make our way north, across the so-called Holland water line, where the big cities were. The closer we could get to The Hague, the better. Preferably The Hague itself, since, as the seat of our government, I assumed it must be the safest spot in the country right now; the royal family, the cabinet, and parliament would certainly be defended to the last. Once there, I would be able to call on my highly placed connections to help us escape from the country, should that be necessary.

  “Escape from the country?” asked Rivka. “Where would we go, then?”

  I sent the children upstairs, telling them to get dressed and pack a suitcase. The girls, led by Ruth, quietly tiptoed back up the stairs.

  I explained to Rivka that the firm and I were prime targets for the brownshirts, but that she and the children weren’t any safer, since seizing a large and profitable business would mean getting rid of inconvenient heirs. Rivka, apparently, had never thought of her own situation in those terms.

  “But what about Aaron?” she said, visibly reluctant, “and my parents? And Rafaël, and Sari, Rosie, and …?” She began naming others one by one. It was impossible for her, it seemed, to cut and run, leaving the whole mishpocha, everyone she cared for, behind.

  Aaron. I hadn’t thought of him at all. He was serving the last month of his sentence; in a couple of weeks he would be a free man. From time to time I’d hear news about him from Rivka, invariably along the lines that, unhappy and guilt-stricken, he was just sitting out his tedious incarceration and refused to give any thought to his future. Surely it ought to be possible in these extreme circumstances to spring him from prison—some kind of bribe might do it—so that he’d be able to leave with us.

  “We may be able to take Aaron,” I said. “I can certainly try. But your parents and Rosie live in Amsterdam; I don’t see how we’d get them out. It’s already going to be a hellish feat getting ourselves to The Hague. It’s every man for himself now. It’s unfortunate, but true.”

  Rivka looked at me coldly. “It has always been every man for himself as far as you are concerned, that’s nothing new. But what makes you think I’ll want to go with you? Why should I leave everyone I love behind, and follow you?”

  Something inside me snapped; I just lost it. “Because I’m not going to let you risk our children’s lives because of your pigheaded anger at me,” I shouted. “Do you think I’d allow you to put them in harm’s way just because you like to play the offended, betrayed spouse? You and your saintly airs and your stubborn lack of forgiveness! Okay, so you’ve been bearing a grudge against me all these years. But are you really prepared to drag your children into God knows what misery, maybe even death? I’m not giving you the chance. What you decide to do yourself is your business, but the children are coming with me.”

  The blood drained from Rivka’s face. She had never seen me like this. Nor, for that matter, had I; it felt like a huge relief to finally blow my top. But then I heard a sound above me. I turned and saw Ruth, holding Ezra’s little hand, staring at us wide-eyed with worry from the top of the staircase. “If we’re leaving, we’re all going together, aren’t we, Mama?” Ruth asked anxiously. “Otherwise I’m staying here, with you.”

  Rivka gazed up at her; her cheeks were now flushed bright red. She glanced at me, then back at Ruth, and sighed. “All right, fine,” she said, pursing her lips. She started up the stairs, the slap of her feet on the bare wooden treads unnaturally loud, shouting with forced cheerfulness, “Come on, Ruth, we’ve got to start packing.”

  “Rivka,” I said.

  Stopping halfway up the stairs, she turned around.

  “Thank you. Why don’t you call your parents; perhaps they can find some way to get to The Hague. I’ll run over to the factory, and then I’ll see about getting Aaron released.”

  She nodded and continued up the stairs.

  • • •

  It wasn’t yet eight a.m., but those members of our staff who lived locally were already at their desks, wan from lack of sleep and all in a tizzy about what was happening. We held a short meeting and decided the team being dispatched to man the emergency facility up north should leave as soon as possible. A pickup truck leased from a shipping company was to ferry this group, twelve girls and two supervisors, on their perilous journey. Many of them had never been away from home, but all had declared themselves ready and willing to give it their best shot. A great many of the young men in our employ were volunteering for the front; we decided to pay the entire workforce half a month’s salary. As the morning went on we heard that all German nationals were forbidden to go out, so several employees had to be sent home immediately. I ordered all manufacturing blueprints and other important documents to be destroyed; as it turned out, this was never done, because an employee with Nazi sympathies countermanded my directions. I also spoke to Levine on the phone, to inform him I was planning to leave. He was quiet for a moment and then said, “I hope, Motke, that it turns out you are jumping the gun, and that we’ll see each other again very soon.” Then he quoted two lines from Schiller’s “The Invincible Fleet”:

  Gott der Allmächt’ge blies

  Und die Armada flog nach allen Winden.

  God the Almighty blew

  And the Armada flew to every wind.

  “I’m afraid, Rafaël,” I replied, “that the Schiller is not applicable here. Farewell, and good luck. Please say goodbye to the Dauphine for me.”

  I took leave of the staff and walked out of the new building, which we had inaugurated to such fanfare just a few months earlier.

  • • •

  I drove through the bright, early-spring morning to the house of corrections, where I found the warden very resistant at first, until I pushed some bills into his hands, persuading him to at least permit me to speak with Aaron, which was very much against the rules. I waited in a bare, airless room for my brother to be brought to me. The moment he entered the room and caught sight of me he froze, gazing at me stone-faced. There was nothing left of the stocky build, the full cheeks, or the paunch that had defined him after years of excessive alcohol consumption. His ashen face was gaunt, with protruding cheekbones; his emaciated limbs were lost inside the baggy prison overalls; his eyes were hollow, sunk deep in their sockets. He looked drawn and exhausted, as glum as ever. The guard at his back prodded him to go in and ordered him to sit down in the chair across from me. Evidently accustomed to following orders, he did as he was told. The corrections officer stationed himself by the door, and Aaron gazed at me, showing no emotion. His expression did not change when I explained the situation we were in—namely, war—and told him I was going to try to get across the Holland water line with my family, and wanted to take him too. It wasn’t until I mentioned the last part that his eyes flew wide open. With unreasonable ferocity he declared, exactly as he had two years earlier when I’d offered to find him a good lawyer, “Out of the question. What you do is your affair. It’s got nothing to do with me. We are no longer brothers, Motke, and no war, no dictator, will ever change that.”

  “Aaron,” I said emphatically, “now is not the time to stand on your principles. In a few days, a few weeks at most, they’ll be the ones in charge here. Our army is a joke, hopelessly outnumbered, they’ll never hold out against that ho
rde. Right this minute, thousands of Huns armed to the teeth are busy hacking our amateurish troops to pieces. By the end of today they’ll have barged through our outer defenses. We’ve got to get ourselves out of here, as far away as we can. I don’t know if you’re aware of what they’ve been doing to our people in Germany. I, for my part, have been reading the papers all these years, listening to the refugees’ stories. I even tried plowing through that asshole’s book, because you have to know your enemy. I can get you out of here. Once we’re out of that motherfucker’s reach, you can go wherever you want, you won’t have to have anything to do with me ever again. Just give me a chance to get you to safety.”

  It came out sounding more pleading than I had intended.

  He gave me a look of contempt. “You haven’t changed one bit,” he said coldly. “Still busy saving your own skin, as usual. Have you spared even a single thought for all the people you’re leaving behind? What about all your employees, what about the young girls and their families? You think it’s okay to just make a run for it, do you? Is what happens to them suddenly not your business?”

  He hadn’t changed one bit either.

  “Staying here waiting to be slaughtered won’t do my employees much good either. There’s much more I can do for them once I’m ensconced somewhere safe.”

  He laughed scathingly. “You go ahead, Motke,” he said, “but leave me out of it. I’m going to finish serving my time in here. And after that, I may still be able to be of some service to someone. Times like these call for people who no longer have any illusions. Being able to do something to offset my guilt—now that’s something that appeals to me. There are plenty of people who are far more deserving of life than me.” He stood up. “Give Rivka my love,” he said. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to you. For her sake I’m glad you’re getting out of here. Take good care of her.”

  Then he gave the guard a nod to show he was ready to return to his cell. I got up and, once outside, lit a cigarette to try to shake the feeling that I had just been in a brawl—and lost.

  39 …

  When I got home I found the whole house in an uproar. In spite of the general panic, most of the household staff had faithfully shown up for work and were busy packing our suitcases under the supervision of Rivka and our housekeeper, Marieke. The radio was blaring the news of the war throughout the house, lauding the brave resistance of our heroic troops with immoderate optimism, from which one might conclude the enemy must be sustaining heavy losses. It did make me start second-guessing myself, wondering if we weren’t being a bit precipitous about leaving; maybe it would make more sense to wait calmly at home until the invaders were defeated. Besides, the government was telling everyone to stay home, to prevent noncombatants from getting in the way of the fighting. A quick phone call to the government official who was my crony, however, was enough to confirm my worst fears: the situation was dire. He urged me to try to cross the Hollands Diep estuary to our north as soon as possible, in case the final showdown wound up taking place there.

  I informed Rivka that Aaron had refused to be sprung from prison. She shook her head and sighed. Then she told me, in a meeker voice than I was used to hearing from her, about her phone conversation with her parents. They were not going to try to get away.

  “We have been on the run too often, sweetheart,” her father had said. “We are old, they’ll leave us alone. Why would they bother with a pair of old fogeys?” He had tried to sound unconcerned, but Rivka knew her father well enough to know it was his way of making it easier for her to say goodbye.

  “I asked them to look after Rosie and Chana, and they promised they would. And we vowed that we’d see each other again, alive.” She said it grimly, to conceal her obvious despair. She gave a helpless shrug.

  I emptied the safe in my study, which I’d been stacking over the past several months with cash, checks, and some of the rarer ingredients needed for our most important products, and stuffed the lot into my briefcase. We loaded the car with as much as it could carry, and said goodbye to Marieke and the rest of the staff. I gave them each a few months’ pay on the condition that they look after the house. Then we drove off, Rivka next to me in the passenger seat, the girls and their squirmy little brother squished into the back. Tense with apprehension and excitement, we drove for the last time through the streets of our little town—the place I’d kvetched about all my life, but which I was now leaving with a deep sense of nostalgia. The girls made little Ezra wave at all the familiar sights as we passed: “Bye-bye church and ding-dong-bells, bye-bye baker’s-wife, bye-bye milk cow, bye-bye school …” and so on. Hearing their enthusiastic exclamations, you’d think we were on an innocent outing. Ruth was the only one who seemed to be aware of our true predicament, but she gamely played along as her little brother’s caretaker.

  We weren’t the only ones on the move; the road was a sea of humanity—in cars, on heavily laden bicycles, and in horse-and-wagons packed to the brim with household goods. We saw whole families loaded onto handcarts, on motorbikes, or on foot, all eager to get as far away from the front as possible. The trip took ages, and we kept getting caught in endless traffic jams, having to stop to make way for the columns of grim-faced soldiers bound for the front or, far more worrisome, returning from the opposite direction with panicked looks on their faces.

  It was night by the time we crossed the Hollands Diep, on a ferry without running lights, praying the boat wouldn’t hit one of the mines that had almost certainly been planted there by our army to stop the enemy from getting across the wide estuary of the Rhine and the Meuse rivers. But, despite fearing the worst, we came through unscathed.

  We were forced to abandon the car outside The Hague and make our way through the Scheveningen Woods on foot; the outskirts of the city had become a battlefield, where the last brave Dutch troops—those who hadn’t yet run off with their tails between their legs—were slugging it out with squads of ferocious German parachutists.

  My contacts turned out to be either unreachable or else unprepared to help. All of my supposedly great connections in the Dutch government, the top brass who used to come to me for advice on the meat industry or on hormonal issues, were all too busy saving their own skins. By the time the Netherlands capitulated, they were already nicely settled across the North Sea, safe and sound in the only country that was still bravely putting up a fight: Great Britain.

  Bitterly disappointed, we jumped into a cab and rushed over to the port of Ijmuiden, where we managed to get on board a ship. Here I wasn’t the royal merchant, here I was just one of the clamoring horde of rich men prepared to part with huge sums of cash in the hope of persuading a captain to get us out of our doomed land. After spending an endless, chilly night huddled together on an overcrowded foredeck, we found out that the ship wasn’t seaworthy and that the crooked skipper had absconded with our money. There was nothing for it but to return, a few thousand guilders poorer, to The Hague, where we were finally offered shelter by the Uruguayan ambassador, the only one of my many connections who came through for me in the end. We camped out in the elegant town house for several months, Rivka quiet and withdrawn; the four cooperative girls, timid and sweet, trying their best not to get in anyone’s way; and a fidgety Ezra, who drove everyone crazy with his temper tantrums and ear-splitting howls. The North Sea, our ticket to the free world, was just a stone’s throw away, but tantalizingly out of reach. The days and weeks crept by as we waited anxiously, cooped up among the metal filing cabinets, with consular officials darting around us trying to save what was still salvageable.

  Uruguay was a fairly important export market for us, and Christobal Carballo, the envoy of that South American nation, had made it his mission to hustle me and my family out of the country. Once Seyss-Inquart was installed as Reich commissioner of the Netherlands, Carballo seized his chance. Since the royal family and practically the entire cabinet had fled right after the invasion—they were now sitting pretty in London—there was nothing to stop th
e brownshirts from taking over our country and turning it into a branch of the Third Reich. There was no one in authority left to object. The day our nation ceased to exist, the continued presence of foreign embassies or consulates on Dutch soil was no longer required, and so all foreign diplomats were to be expelled: nosy aliens no longer welcome! And that is how I, Mordechai de Paauw, who never finished school and didn’t speak a word of Spanish, came to receive the title of consul of Uruguay. This adventitious appointment meant that we were hastily issued diplomatic passports, with exit visas authorized by Berlin.

  On July 16, 1940, a train left The Hague’s Hollands Spoor Station jam-packed with foreign diplomats and persons pretending to be such. A representative of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reich minister of foreign affairs in Berlin, came in person to see us off. I took great pleasure in shaking the man’s hand in my diplomatic role and, once inside the compartment, bestowed my most charming smile on the sour-faced bureaucrat through the closed window while wishing him, using the crudest profanities I could come up with, a speedy demise courtesy of some British bomb.

  It still gives me a thrill to look back on the moment, weeks later, when we finally crossed over into Portugal. The first part of our journey had taken us to Estoril, a lovely seaside resort just outside Lisbon. There we had time to restore ourselves a bit before setting out for England, arriving on September 24, 1940.

  40 …

  Our little family found a safe haven in the picturesque Berkshire village of Wargrave. There were good schools for the girls, who adapted amazingly well and, in no time at all, picked up their lives right where they’d left off, soon becoming fluent in English, making new friends, and, in the case of Ruth, having her first experiences with boys. Summertime swimming idylls along the river, horseback riding in the Berkshire hills; they didn’t waste any time thinking about what they had left behind. Rivka, on the other hand, spent most of her time at home brooding about her relatives and all the other people she cared about, from whom she was now totally cut off. As more and more ghastly rumors reached her ears about what was happening on the Continent, stories so horrific that people simply refused to believe them, her anguish grew. In England Rivka lost her previously merry, optimistic disposition, growing dispirited and morose. She hated the long days stuck at home with Ezra, who was turning into a temperamental toddler: demanding, impatient, noisy, and, in Rivka’s eyes, taking up altogether too much room. My youngest was growing into a little macho prince, an obstinate, ornery troublemaker and, young as he was, not only slippery as a tadpole but stiff-necked as a mule. Seeing the never-ending struggle between him and his increasingly estranged mother, we decided to hire a nanny to deal with the boy. Rivka had as little to do with him as possible after that. She frequently went for walks in the rolling hills, pored over the newspapers, and listened to the radio for hours on end to follow the progress of the war. To Rivka, those five years in Wargrave were five years of heartache, five years of time standing still as she waited for life to resume, which would not happen until she was reunited with all the people dear to her. I, of course, no longer fit that description.