by Dola de Jong
“I have to work the night shift again next month. I talked to Betsie,” she said and then cut to it. “She wants two weeks to find another apartment and then we can move back in. We’ll cover the moving costs.”
“You’re out of your mind, you’re crazy.” Those were the only words I could find. It was unbelievable. How could she accept no responsibility whatsoever? Where did she find the nerve to ask Betsie, an office acquaintance of mine who had taken over our lease in Amsterdam, to give us back the apartment after only two months? And Betsie was no pushover either. A fairly aggressive woman in her forties, she’d been very firm and business-like about our first transaction and even insisted on drawing up a sublease agreement. And now, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, Erica had persuaded her to clear out because Erica wanted to go back. Another victim had succumbed to her whims. And I was simply at her disposal. The anger boiling up inside me was so intense that I couldn’t take it lying down. I threw off the blankets and reached for my kimono on the chair next to the bed. But Erica was quicker than me. She pulled the covers back up and pushed me back with her hands on my chest. I looked at her smiling above me, inhaled that familiar aroma of lavender soap and cigarette smoke I’d always liked so much. But suddenly I couldn’t stand it. The pressure of her strong hands brought me outside myself. I kicked her off me with my drawn-up knees and began shouting uncontrollably—curses, swears, every abuse I could think of. She let go of me immediately and returned to the foot of the bed. The outburst calmed me, and I sank back into the pillows ashamed of my rage.
“You really know how to push someone to the edge,” I said, as if I’d prepared the phrase beforehand. “You do whatever you want with no thought whatsoever about me.”
At first, Erica didn’t say anything. She studied her fingernails, and I couldn’t see her face. Then, all of a sudden, she threw herself onto the bed with her face in the blankets. She didn’t cry, she just lay there motionless for what seemed like an eternity. I didn’t know what to do. Then I felt her hands on my hips and her head against my loins.
“Bea,” she said, her voice smothered against me. “Bea, don’t you get it?”
The tears came moments later in an explosion of anger, hate, and disappointment. She accused me of misleading her, of driving her to confess, of letting her have her way and then humiliating her with my rejection. There was nothing for me to say. How innocent, no, how blind and stupid I’d been. I thought of Bas, of his accusations toward Erica on his last visit. In an effort to save myself from the chaos of my own thoughts, no, from my very existence in that moment, I concentrated all my emotions on Erica. Poor, twisted Erica. But I couldn’t bring myself to touch her, to comfort her. Never again, I thought with revulsion. Or was it fear? Despite what had happened, I didn’t really feel repulsed by her, because even then, in that moment, I knew I hadn’t stopped her advances, that I’d let her—as she put it—have her way. It came as a terrifying surprise, because even then I felt for her, I felt her humiliation and would’ve liked to have comforted her, to have laid my hands on her shiny boyish head as she stood there sobbing against the leg of a chair in helpless misery.
“This is the way I am!” she screamed. “This is the way I am!” She turned toward me, her face wet with tears and contorted into an expression of equal parts pain and triumph. “And it’s the way you are too. Yes, you, Bea. Admit it! Just admit it!” Gasping between sobs, but with a sense of triumph in her voice, the triumph of a world conqueror, she repeated the injunction over and over again. I sprang out of bed, my whole body shaking, and ran (looking back it all seems so ridiculous) into the kitchen, the only hiding place within reach.
Hours later we found each other back in my room, calmer, avoiding each other’s gaze. Erica talked until the sun came up. It wasn’t a plea, why would she defend herself? The fact that she was suffering from what I, with all my superiority and compassion (really just forms of self-preservation), referred to as an abnormality was even more evident that night than during the weeks when she’d been so tormented by the discovery of her wrongness. Wrong, that’s what she called it that night. It was catharsis that compelled her to try to reconcile herself with her wrongness. After that night, she never referred to herself that way again. She resigned herself to a nature that couldn’t be changed, accepted the consequences and enjoyed her life. I’ve always admired that. But that night I stood at the window with my back to her—how could I ever confront her openly again? I stared blindly at the moonlit sea and saw nothing but scenes from Erica’s unhappy childhood. Her experiences over the past year, of which I’d suspected little or nothing until that night, were suddenly so clear that it was as if I’d experienced them myself. My immediate powers of observation failed me until I suddenly became aware of the morning mist on the water and the gray, deserted beach. Now I knew everything. But for what? Erica’s confession and the accusation against me had driven us irrevocably apart, I thought. We were now forced to go our separate ways, living together had become impossible. But less than a month later I came to the equally irrevocable conviction that we were bound together for life, that our short year together had been, at least for me, decisive. I could no longer live without her, and with her there was nothing but the strange existence that had been predetermined for her by her miserable youth, in which I could only participate in as a witness.
8
THE NEXT MONTH I was alone in Egmond, more alone than I’d ever been in my life. After that night, Erica packed a suitcase and left, where to I didn’t know. As soon as the door closed behind her, I took a bath. I scrubbed away the caresses of her authoritative hands, her compelling mouth, the scent of lavender and cigarette smoke that lingered on my skin. I changed my bedsheets and left for Amsterdam. But when I got off at Central Station, I realized that the entire world had changed, I couldn’t go back to the office. As someone who’d always had a strong sense of duty, I tried to convince myself that I had to go to work, that the normalcy of my job would do me good, better than doing nothing, but I couldn’t. Still, I forced myself to go, even got on the tram, but then I got off halfway.
The stop was near the Rijksmuseum, so I went in. Why do we do these things to ourselves? Was I trying to make myself even more bitter? Was I searching for the deepest misery I could find? This time the museum was quiet. The only people there that early in the morning were the copyists and a few ambitious tourists. After a while, I wandered into a gallery where a group of girls from the countryside were sitting with a woman who was presumably their drawing teacher, soaking up the dose of culture that schools feel called on to provide. I watched them for a moment, clinging to the distraction they offered me. Most likely, the giggling and whispering had already started that morning, when they woke up at the boardinghouse for Christian women. After several fits of stifled laughter over breakfast in the cafeteria, about a goofy waiter or snippety waitress, they were temporarily brought to order by a calming, pedagogical speech from their teacher. Now that they were in the museum, they’d lost control again—everything seemed strange and ridiculous, and there was no other outlet for their excitement. Even Rembrandt’s masterpieces, which seemed so foreign compared to the reproductions on their birthday calendars at home, gave rise to uncontrollable giggling. It reminded me of my own field trips to Amsterdam when I was in school. And Erica? Now I knew what kind of youth she’d had. Of course she hadn’t joined in on the giggling, because her breathless excitement was fixated elsewhere—on the young female director who had unexpectedly chaperoned the school trip. Furious about the other girls’ childish horseplay, Erica would have stayed at the director’s side, consumed by the rigid attentiveness and complete absorption that comes only from love. For Erica, ever the serious tomboy, school had always been a refuge, and in the last year it became her haven. There, she finally found the love she’d been missing. There, at least for most of the day, she was safe from her mother’s selfishness, grudges and hysteria, from the woman she’d be powerlessly handed over to af
ter her father walked out.
Things aren’t fairly distributed in this world. The relationship between Erica and her parents was a bitter farce, a sinister joke of fate—especially in the years before her father left, when the only way he could stand his wife was by escaping to the corner bar. That was back before their child could find shelter at school. Erica was either trapped in a house full of violence and hateful voices or she was dropped off at Grandma’s in the middle of the night because it had become too dangerous for her at home.
“Still, I was always happy when Ma came to get me,” Erica had told me the night before. “I thought my grandma was awful, though she did take good care of me. Do you get that, Bea? Kids are strange. I still would’ve rather been at home.”
I spent the rest of the day wandering the city and thinking about Erica, the stories from her childhood, her teenage years. Despite my desperate attempts to suppress the memory, I kept reliving the moments before her outburst, when I’d given in and let her take me into her arms. Why hadn’t I made it clear that I didn’t want that love? Why didn’t I jump out of bed right away? Every time that thought came to mind, I sought salvation in the stories that came afterward. I’d come to terms with myself later, at that moment I couldn’t, I didn’t want to.
At five-thirty, I found myself standing in front of the newspaper offices. From the other side of the street, I gazed up at the modern façade, an unrelenting wall of translucent glass behind which I knew Erica was sitting. It was the same way I’d stood across the street from the hotel in Paris. Was this how I’d recognize the milestones of my life? With the last bit of willpower I had left, I tore myself away from that spot and sprinted toward the station. I ran away and hid in Egmond. The next day, I sent a letter of resignation to my job, citing health reasons.
Around the middle of the month, I slept with the young painter a few times after running into him on one of my walks on the beach. It was absurd—all I can say is I was trying to regain my balance.
After three weeks, I was nearly out of money and was forced to think constructively. I sent out letters of application and soon found myself having to explain myself at job interviews in Amsterdam. I was hired at an accounting firm and, ironically enough, still managed to move up in salary. It was a small office in Amsterdam South, so I could easily avoid the city center and running into Erica. I kept my desire to see her under control. My life was travel, work, travel, sleep. I was on my own and told myself that I liked it better that way.
Shortly before Christmas, I decided to take a later train home so I could do a bit of shopping in the city for a Christmas party my new colleagues were organizing. It wasn’t by chance that I happened to walk by the newspaper around five-thirty. I wasn’t trying to fool myself; I was simply counting on fate to respect my weakness. I didn’t run into Erica there. A half-hour later, however, on the bustling Kalverstraat, she walked up to me with her bike. The first thing I noticed was that she was wearing a hat, a felt hat, like the ones men wear, with a little dip in the top. Then I saw, in the shadow of the pulled-down brim, that one side of her face was swollen, and her eye was embedded in a dark shade of purple and green. She was limping a bit, too. The smile she’d tried to give me seemed painful for her, and she retracted it into a comical grin.
“Did you fall?” I asked. Her rough state made things a bit easier for me in that moment. She gave me a meaningful look followed by that half-cheerful grimace.
“Dolly’s a little sadistic,” she said in an attempt to shock me.
The ostentation of the statement caught me off guard.
“Really.” I said, hoping that the one-word answer would come off as both sarcastic and neutral.
She slipped her free arm through mine and pulled me close.
“Let’s go have a cup of tea,” she commanded warmly and gave my arm a pinch. “No excuses, the last train isn’t leaving for a while.” She’d thus assumed I had stayed in Egmond, or maybe she was keeping tabs on me. We sat across from each other at a café table and Erica, loud and in good spirits, ordered an assortment of pastries, which was placed between us.
“Here, custard for you,” she whisked a cream puff onto my plate. “Or would you rather have a croquette, Mademoiselle …” she roared.
“No, this is fine.” Only then did my heart start pounding and the emotions hit me. But I had to save what was left to be saved. I looked at my watch.
“I still want to catch the seven o’clock train. Someone’s coming over tonight.”
“Cut the act,” Erica said. “When are you coming home?”
Home. Where was that? On the Prinsengracht? Or with her, wherever she happened to be living?
“Never,” I said. In my desperate attempt to sound firm, the word came out so shrill that the people at the next table looked over at us.
Erica laughed. “Shhh … no need to shout it from the rooftops, now.”
She wolfed down the pastries with pleasure, but I couldn’t help but notice her hand tapping nervously on the table, the way she avoided my gaze, the drops of sweat forming on her forehead, that she was also unsettled by our encounter.
“It’s too hot in here,” she said irritably as she pulled off her coat and hung it over the chair. “Well, now’s your chance,” she continued. “I’m about to move again. Dolly pushed me down the stairs.” She pointed to her eye. “That’s the third time she’s attacked me. I’m crazy about her, but enough is enough.”
I made a motion to stand. I couldn’t tolerate the vulgarity of her life and the arrogant way she talked about it. I felt dizzy and nauseous and needed fresh air. What had those few weeks since our separation done to her? When I got up, she grabbed me by the wrist, and forced me back down into my chair with her small, strong hand. She was as white as a sheet and the contrast with her black eye was disconcerting.
“Admit it, Bea,” she said. They were the same words she’d said to me that night, but this time there was no triumph, no drive in her voice. I knew I would succumb to her insistence, to the supplication in her tear-filled eyes, her treacherously trembling mouth.
I tore myself away from her, fled from the café and into the street. I ran all the way to the station, unable to control my sobs.
That evening I wrote her a long letter. I took three bromide tablets so I wouldn’t get emotional and would be able to tell her matter-of-factly that I belonged to a different world than she did. Paper is patient—that’s what they’d always told me when I was a girl.
The next morning on the train, I tore the pages to shreds and let them flutter out the window. It offered momentary relief, but all I’d done was rinse away the bubbling, foaming surface; I didn’t dare disturb the dark craters of my soul. I’d simply bought myself peace of mind by ignoring who I was. Because of my attitude—which I myself didn’t understand at the time, but which stemmed from the decision that Erica and I inhabited two different worlds—she never tried to squeeze my real feelings out of me again. She, too, understood that I’d closed the gates and taken refuge on the other side of the border, safe behind the barbed-wire fencing I’d put up around myself. She accepted the consequences and respected my decision. I went to the devil one last time to confess, but after this “slip-up” I was healed forever.
Our reconciliation came as a result of the war, which ultimately penetrated my self-imposed isolation. I started to worry about Erica’s safety. First of all, she was half-Jewish. I’d overheard a lot of conversations among my Jewish colleagues and was thus able to see through the delusions of most Dutch Jews, who had too much faith in their country to fear Hitler’s racist insanity. The accountant I worked for was Jewish and so were most of his clients; the bookkeeper and I were the only gentiles on staff. This environment opened me up to new perspectives, and naturally Erica was at the center of my new worldview. I also thought of Van der Lelie, whose tactics I’d feared since the night Erica confessed. My boss had told me all about the paper’s political views, and he didn’t mince words. The only reason he kept gett
ing the newspaper was to stay up to date on Nazi sentiments in the Netherlands, and you could read a lot between the lines. Just like when Erica was in France, I was tortured by the thought of what might happen to her. This time, my concern offered no pretext for my desire. My anxiety was real and stronger than my own self-interest. I wrote her another letter, which I planned to send to her to at the paper, but when I read through it, it seemed overly alarmist: What are your plans? Don’t you know how dangerous it is? I ripped it up and wrote another one in which I insisted we meet for special reasons. She called me at the office and suggested a bar where we could meet. Remembering how our last meeting went, I invited her to Egmond on Saturday afternoon instead. This hadn’t been my intention, but when I heard that familiar presumption in her voice, I imagined another scene and decided it was better not to meet in public. We agreed to meet at Central Station at one-thirty.
That Saturday, I waited at the station for her for an hour and eventually went home, where I waited for several hours more. She finally showed up around dinner time. Of course, I was so annoyed from all the waiting by then, and all the indignation, doubt, disgust, and regret that came with it, that my carefully prepared speech degenerated into an accusation … Was she just sitting around waiting for the Germans to invade? Was she completely incapable of facing reality? Did she think the Krauts were going to make a detour to save Holland? Did she really think that the Dutch Jews—or half-Jews for that matter—would be treated any differently than the ones in Poland and Germany? Didn’t she know that the director of the newspaper was a known Nazi? And his crony, Mr. Van der Lelie? As if she could count on him for protection! If I were her, I’d be packing my bags. More important people than she had already left the country.