Duke of Egypt

by Margriet de Moor

  “Which was not the case. Earlier that night, still a prince in his own bedroom, he had even knocked back a last glass with Bajka.

  “‘Listen, Bajka,’ he’d said. ‘There’s the bottle. Come on, man.’

  “And then he had rolled his eyes, looked around, and finally seen that in the corner next to the cupboard there was a completely unknown person.

  “‘There you are, Lajos.’

  “‘Thanks a lot, phral.’ He brought the glass to his mouth, took a good swig, and hiccuped. His eyelids trembled. With great effort, but without a spark of fire, he then looked from the shadows on the ceiling to the figure in the corner, who had the vague impassive appearance that outsiders simply always have.

  “At that moment Nenat Gian had come in.”

  “What!” cried Lucie, really surprised. “Was she still alive then?”

  “Oh yes,” said Joseph. “Why not? She must have been in her eighties by then.” He made a resigned gesture. “She’ll live to be a hundred.”

  And he bent forward to put the sound of the film back on, orchestral music, nasal American, and rifle shots. Lucie now pulled her chair up too. Together they followed the chain of events that after approximately ten minutes resulted with perfect logic in a happy ending.

  All peace and light, finally? Lucie smiled in the blue light of a last muslin dress. Probably she thought nothing else except, how nice, how sweet! Gerard yawned and pushed his chair back a little. His mind was still on the forgiveness, on the deathbed, which, with the wind and the rain at the windows, had somehow appealed to him. Did he see two men in front of him, just those two, because the third one was too vague for him? It really beats everything that’s happened between them all those years. A swearword — asshole, now, I ask you — a head with screws in it, and a ban on marriage. Gerard hooked his thumbs into his vest pockets. As an elderly man and a farmer he probably knew that this was a well-known chain: insult, crime, punishment. With the basically quite sensible idea of deathbed forgiveness. There’s always something nice about a happy ending.

  Yet there had been someone else sitting in the corner next to the cupboard. With a blind spot on one side of his heart. Gerard stood up. His face had resumed its surly expression. As an elderly livestock farmer and market gardener he might have little time for abstractions, but there are a few experiences that go on lingering in his head. Evil has produced a debt. Some things, in creation, go into the red. Then there is the settling of accounts. The debt is gone, evil is left by itself. As what? As a natural phenomenon? As a dark thing? The Devil only knows. At the dividing door he stopped as if he were hesitating about going to his bedroom across the hall. Then his eye caught sight of the clock. Let me say goodnight. Why should I stay up late tonight? Let me just take off my suit and crawl into bed. But as an embittered Twente farmer I should like to point out that there are some things that can’t be forgiven.

  Part Four

  1

  Mus one forgive deliberate acts of baseness? But that’s the last thing those acts of baseness need! Mrs. Nicolien Nieboer-Ploeg didn’t have an unhappy childhood. For a start. You could present magnificent excuses for her: Little Nicolien was savagely beaten as a child, humiliated and neglected, and here you have the consequences. But that just isn’t the case. The case is treachery. And the traitor is a young woman who at the age of twenty-seven has no need at all to be ashamed of her life story. A pity for psychology. A pity for science too, but informing on those who attacked distribution offices, from the summer of 1943 to the spring of 1944, can’t be traced back through rational examination. Resolute, vital evil is simply part of the system of the world. The woman who is prepared to name names does so with all her heart. There’s scarcely any question of self- interest. Can you call a glass of cognac at a party with foreign officers an interest? That same week, of her own free will and completely in her right mind, she tips them off about a house where a couple of residents, father and a son of scarcely twenty, will be put on the shooting range near the Twente airport. With blindfolds on. Look. Two life stories end at a stroke and a third, hers, continues for the time being. Imagine that she was still alive at this moment. How would she accommodate half a dozen dead people in her autobiography? It doesn’t clarify anything to ask yourself that.

  Until the summer of 1979 Gerard had never told his daughter how and by whom he had been betrayed. That summer he was to break his silence, but because he was not a talker, it’s doubtful whether Lucie, a receptive creature but also quite a simple soul, could deduce enough from his words. She listened to him while she sat at the stone table in front of the house filling jars approximately a quarter full with well-washed blueberries. Gerard sat watching. She would later pour as much sugar as berries through a bone- dry funnel. He was puffing at a cigar butt and for some unknown reason suddenly started in about the war. And she listened with half an ear. Well enough to understand who and what Jannosch Franz was? Anyone who tells his life story is bound to touch on that of others. Familiar passages from one autobiography are sometimes heartrendingly absent in the other. What a pair. Gerard tells the facts. They are enough for me at any rate to form a pretty good picture of what happened.

  Nicolien Nieboer-Ploeg was a woman with beautiful blond hair and a voice that on the telephone had a sharp edge to it. Men were attracted by her youth and her hospitality: She had been left alone with two small children when her husband had been transported to Aschersleben as a prisoner of war in May 1943. Now she gave amusing parties in the family holiday home at Benckelo. Gramophone music, Liebling, wir miissen uns wiederseh’n . . . on the edge of the woods. Thanks to the military people stationed nearby, she was never short of guests. There were plenty of devotees. Like the security police from the Dienststelle in Almelo, like those of the Prinsenstraat in Enschede. Kriminal-Assistent Jurgen L. also stood with her in her drawing room on more than one occasion downing strong drinks that made him cough. She liked it when he asked her where she’d learned to speak foreign languages so well. When a little while later he asked her, “Can’t you tell me anything interesting about the resistance here, Nicolien?” she liked that too, though she couldn’t have said why.

  One Saturday she noticed that the conversation in the Matenweg Bakery stopped when she entered the shop. Someone from the underground had been arrested, a fuel dealer against whom the Kriminal-Assistent had no proof, however — she knew about it. She broke the silence. “God,” she said. “Damn it. Esmeyer. What rotten luck. I heard about it.” She put exactly the right degree of understanding into her look and her voice, and in the afternoon the primary school teacher dropped by to see her. Could she possibly do anything to help? She glowed with willingness as she poured tea from her Rosenthal pot. A day later Esmeyer was released.

  Without doubt she had relished this, this feat, I mean, but what she really relished were the eyes. Those of a couple of farmers, a shopkeeper, civil servants at the town hall: a random assortment of people in the area began looking at her seriously, and sometimes, when she returned their looks, it gave her an exuberant feeling of success.

  Kriminal-Assistent Jurgen L. meanwhile kept visiting her. He brought her stockings and soap, played with the children before they went to bed, stayed for dinner, accompanied her to her bedroom for an hour or two, and one autumn night just before leaving asked her for a small favor he was sure she would do for him, infiltrating the Twente resistance.

  Since the end of July 1943 serious combat teams had entered into operations. Students, ex-soldiers, and workers wanting to avoid the forced-labor Einsatz in Germany had gone underground in large numbers and needed ration cards. Nicolien Nieboer pulled a sympathetic face that evening when L. told her about the security police’s concerns in Almelo and Enschede — there had been a sabotage incident on the railway, attacks on town halls and distribution offices, the annoying theft of cars and weapons, and the escape of prisoners from police stations. He couldn’t trust the municipal police in Enschede, he complained.

  She a
ccompanied him quietly to the hall. As he took his cap off the hat rack, he casually suggested the method of friendly infiltration. “All that is needed from you is a bit of effort, and they’ll trust you,” he said. It wasn’t the small fry he was after, he made clear to her, but the leaders, of course.

  She opened the door for him. With a mocking laugh she said, “What if I started by having someone in hiding come live with me?”

  She took someone in, a difficult case, a Jew, already elderly, with an appearance that spoke for itself. She negotiated the ransoming of two post office employees who had connected a clandestine telephone line. These were fast- moving times. The arbitrary system of death and terror was working without a break and anybody who wanted to fight it needed a quick intuition. Mrs. Nicolien Nieboer-Ploeg was trusted. She was soon able to report to the Dienststelle in what houses in the surrounding area meetings were held.

  That is what brought her close to Gerard. No small fry, she’d been told. I don’t know if Gerard and Jannosch were small fry, they broke in and stole distribution documents, that was one thing. Then, the other thing was that the airplane crews shot down sometimes had a way of disappearing without a trace in Twente. L. found it hard to accept that those airmen should return to their units in England and Canada as if nothing had happened. So when she told him one fine day that the leader of the escape route was a greengrocer from Hengelo, he laughed. Laughing too, she said, “He’s called Jules. He talks with a French accent.” She then added that Jules had organized a meeting for that Saturday in a given farmhouse.

  It turned out to be her first failure, what a pity. The leading figure they were looking for didn’t show up, sick, she heard later. And so, Gerard’s farm had been surrounded for nothing. A week of planning, then a second failure, something to do with prisoners who were to be freed by the underground around Nijverdal, a nice ambush had already been laid, but who showed up? Not a soul. The situation was becoming intolerable. L. was no longer prepared to wait. Attacks were now being carried out on a weekly basis in Twente and Salland. At the end of January he decided to attack the few hitherto undisturbed addresses in Borne, Wierden, Markelo, Goor, and Enter about which he had been tipped off by Nicolien Nieboer. When he told her, she nodded. She’d like nothing better. She too felt impatience and, deep in her heart, an unreal kind of adrenaline. She had this desire to see things for herself. Leaning forward, she placed her warm, dry hands on L.’s desk.

  “My dear, I’d like to see things close up for once.”

  That is how one evening in January she became part of the difficulties at Gerard’s home. Cars had stopped in the front yard. Doors had been pushed open and dogs leaped in. In the farmhouse kitchen three men and a woman had jumped up from behind the table. In a fraction of a second they realized what the pandemonium outside meant. A fraction of a second — no more.

  But still long enough for the men and the woman to look at each other for a moment in the smoky room.

  Gerard was the first to run out. Ignoring the clear eyes of Nicolien Nieboer, he grabbed the weapon under his coat. But they were already inside. Before Netty, Gerard’s wife, had even drawn the front door bolt, five or six men with machine pistols had forced their way through the rear of the house. The suspects were disarmed and hit from all sides. One of them, a dark rogue, leaned forward and gave such a swipe with his elbow that a youngish sergeant of the Home Guard began gasping heavily. Only the woman was treated with some respect, although she also had to put her hands behind her head and had fast-moving fingers frisking her whole body.

  Then outside. Wind. In the darkness were the cars. The four who had been arrested were pushed to the right. One of them felt a tingling in her breast. With her eyes wide open she walked past the black, wide-branched linden trees. We don’t know what her thoughts were at that moment, she probably couldn’t understand them herself. That same evening she would be back home, and that was that. Nicolien Nieboer-Ploeg, one of those cases that occur in every war, and not only there. But what about the others?

  Gerard was the kind of man whose only ambition was to keep his business and his family on track. At the time he was thirty-three years old, and married to a woman from Friesland, a woman with a clear head, proud, good-natured, who supported him fully in his dangerous activities. They had a daughter of two who slept a great deal and couldn’t yet speak. He was thrown into the car under a shower of blows, his nose broken, his mouth cut to pieces. He felt no regret. Until recently, he had never allowed his life to be dominated by any ideology whatsoever. His decisions were those of a congenitally conservative farmer. He didn’t want to go to any extremes, certainly not to be a hero, and so one may wonder where he got his courage from. The backseat of the car was soft. He crashed on the velvet. Licking the blood from his mouth he certainly feared the immediate future but didn’t think of death. And indeed he was to eventually return to his family.

  The number two man was also to see his loved ones again. The police sergeant, who had been living underground for a few months, was a practicing member of the Calvinist Church. At the beginning, like many of his colleagues, he’d always “seen nothing” when they had to hunt for people in hiding. His religious conviction told him that terror wasn’t his department. One day a remarkable young leading member of a resistance group from Meppel landed in the guardroom of his station. The sergeant found him sitting writing a letter of farewell at an iron table — one of those tables that are screwed to the floor. A moment later a police pistol was placed on top of the letter to his mother. That evening the doors were unbolted, the resistance man escaped, and the police sergeant’s cover was of course completely blown. Can one assume that that winter, in the name of his strict faith, he had used illegal force, subject to severe penalties? Handcuffed to Gerard and also badly beaten, he too fell into the car.

  Then the last one. Jannosch lived in a caravan in the woods between Benckelo and Driene. It was six feet wide and twelve feet long and accommodated himself, his wife, and their three small children. Besides this room on wheels there was another, in which his brother lived with his family. It was illegal. The head of the German police in the Netherlands had decreed that summer that absolutely no one could travel around anymore. All caravans had to go to one of a number of large camps that could be easily guarded. To think that this was exactly in accordance with the ideas of the senior Dutch civil servants! Much to the liking of the Director of Social Services who in May 1940 had found the new circumstances useful in at least one respect — The caravans must go — and had written as much in a government brochure.

  But quite a few remained, certainly in the initial period. Next to garbage dumps, by cemeteries, and at the edges of fallow fields you could see the caravans, complete with their wild, strange occupants who, according to the Welfare Department, belonged to the antisocial type.

  Jannosch too refused to be interned. Why should he? He was a headstrong man, and in a certain sense innocent, he’d been used to police ordinances all his life. So he continued to travel with his family and the families of his brother and cousin from Gaasterland to the Hondsrug, and then on to Twente, the Achterhoek, and back to Salland, because all his life he’d been used to roads and horses and the ratde of wheels. Accustomed to the contours of villages toward which you drove in the early morning. The markets, the addresses of your regular customers for grinding and blacksmithing work. The blue sky full of starlings above the cherry orchards in the Betuwe, when the ladders have been placed against the trees. The picking season, the harvest, the fires on the emptied potato fields when everyone feels like telling a story. The pubs where a farmer taps you on the shoulder because the following morning he needs you to go out in the fields with the deep plow with eight or ten horses in front of it. The spring rains. The trade in umbrellas. The summer nights when your feet stick out of the back doors. The horse dealing. The brown November sky with the stars out very early between the branches of the trees. Peddling yarn and ribbon. The snowed-in villages and the women shiv
ering in the doorways inspecting your baskets and mats. All that work, that gap in the market that demands not order but flexibility. But the policymakers can’t stand you. Your nomadic behavior is a personal challenge to them. The Dutch government regards the tendencies of your kind as a mental defect. You give them the shivers and they talk about antisocial behavior.

  He was thrown onto the floor of a truck with his arms tied behind him. Troops on either side of him. They lit up cigarettes and carried on cursing a little, still intoxicated by their triumph. The cars bumped their way out of the farmyard. Jannosch recognized the road with its potholes and bends, but didn’t feel that he was in fact heading steeply downhill. There was the village, the shop, the pub where no one would ever see him again. He lay with his ear against the wooden floor. Past the crossroads a right-angled turn. He recognized the road to Hengelo and far away in the woods felt the warmth of Gisela and the children, but not the awfulness of farewell.

  How can a man who is so crazy about his family and his relatives, a show-off who has the knack of avoiding conflicts with authority, have got himself into such a mess? Perhaps out of loyalty with Internal Affairs, which wanted to segregate the annoying vagrant population from the rest of the nation behind a huge iron fence or else an earthwork barrier? It’s not easy to find an answer.

  It had all got very difficult by 1943 .Jannosch had asked the police no less than three times to waive the ban on traveling, using the argument of the pursuit of his occupation, and three times the answer was no. He and his brother went underground with their families in the woods near Benckelo, their cousin and his family sneaked into a hovel in Zutphen. Their entrepreneurial flair was no longer any use. People had become scared, and often hostile. In Wierden complaints were made. In Benckelo they said, “They’re still in the woods, beyond the path to’t Stroof,” but went no further than that. A few people helped. “Listen, Jannosch,” said Gerard in the early autumn. “Better put that nice horse of yours in my stable. Then he’ll keep dry and we can feed him.”