by John Boyne
From the start, Bastiaan spoke freely about his love life. He hadn’t slept with many people, no more than a dozen or so, but most of them had been boys with whom he had gone on to form some type of subsequent relationship, sometimes romantic, sometimes as nothing more than friends. A few still lived in Amsterdam and if they met by chance on the street, they would throw their arms around each other and exchange a kiss while I stood awkwardly by their side, still alarmed to witness such open public displays of affection between two men, always assuming that the people around us, who could not have cared less, might turn on us.
Despite how open he had been with me, for Bastiaan never lied or withheld anything, I found it much more difficult to be honest with him about my past. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of the large number of sexual partners I had had over the years, but I had come to realize that there was something rather tragic about my pathological promiscuity. For, yes, I might have fucked countless boys but when it came to romance I was still a virgin. Slowly, as I grew to love and trust him, I unburdened myself of the story of my once-obsessive love for Julian Woodbead, sparing him some of the more pitiful stories out of fear that I might scare him away, and a month after we started dating, when it was becoming clear that this was no passing fancy on either of our parts, I told him the story of my ridiculous three-hour marriage. Listening in amazement, torn between horror and hilarity, he finally shook his head in disbelief, unable to understand why I would have put myself and Alice through such incredible deceit.
“What’s wrong with you people?” he asked, looking at me as if I was clinically insane. “What’s wrong with Ireland? Are you all just fucking nuts over there, is that it? Don’t you want each other to be happy?”
“No,” I said, finding my country a difficult one to explain. “No, I don’t think we do.”
Standing up now, I took a pair of jeans and a denim shirt from inside the bedroom wardrobe and put them on. They hung a little loose on me, for Bastiaan had a bigger build and was more muscular than I, but it felt exciting to wear his clothes. Once, on the second occasion that I had slept at his flat, I hadn’t enough time to return home to change for work and he had offered me a pair of his own underwear; wearing them throughout that day had been such an erotic experience that I found myself masturbating in the toilets at work a couple of hours later to discharge my excitement, a shocking sacrilege considering where I was employed. Wearing his clothes now gave me a similar thrill, although I resisted any urge to lay hands on myself in case his mother marched in unannounced once again. We’d only known each other ten minutes, after all, and she’d already seen me naked. She didn’t need to see me jerking off too.
Making my way back down the corridor, I stepped inside the kitchen, where a man with a gentle expression sat reading a newspaper. He had deep, furrowed lines on his face and wore his overcoat, despite being indoors, but took it off with a sigh when he saw me.
“Edda tells me that you fell in the shit,” he said, folding the paper in half and placing it on the table before him. He wore his sleeves long, I noticed, despite the hot weather.
“I did,” I admitted.
“It happens,” he said with a shrug. “We all fall in the shit many times during our lives. The trick is pulling ourselves out again.”
I nodded, unsure if he was being philosophical or simply stating facts.
“My son should be here,” he said when I introduced myself. “I hope you don’t think we brought him up with such bad manners.”
“He must have been delayed,” I said. “He’s not a good timekeeper at the best of times.”
“He never has been,” said Arjan, asserting his primacy over me.
Edda came over and placed two mugs of coffee on the table, and I sat down, glancing around at the room. Although the Van den Bergh house was small, they had filled every nook and cranny with curiosities accumulated over the years. The walls might have been papered or painted, it was impossible to tell with the collection of family photographs that adorned them. The shelves were dipping with books while a stand next to a record player held an enormous pile of LP albums. It was no wonder, I told myself, that my boyfriend had left it such a calm and well-adjusted adult as opposed to the completely fucked-up creature that I had been when I started to make my way in Dublin. Nevertheless, it astonished me that a couple who had witnessed so much horror in the world could manage to find beauty in it ever again.
I knew their story, of course. On our fourth date, over pints of beer at our favorite bar, MacIntyre’s on Herengracht, Bastiaan had told me how his parents had left their wedding ceremony in 1942 with the words of the Sheva Brachot still ringing in their ears and within the hour had been rounded up by the Nazis, along with some three hundred other Jews, before being sent to the Dutch transit camp at Westerbork. They remained there for almost a month, catching sight of each other only once, when their paths crossed during a work detail, before Arjan was dispatched to Bergen-Belsen and Edda to Auschwitz, journeys and experiences that they somehow survived before being liberated by the British and Russian armies respectively toward the end of the war. It was 1946 before they found each other again by chance in that same place, that same bar, when it had been called De Twee Paarden. Their families wiped out, Edda had found work there as a waitress and Arjan happened to stop in one evening with his first week’s wages in search of oblivion. Almost exactly nine months later, their joyful and unexpected reunion had resulted in Bastiaan, their only child.
Although I’m sure that Bastiaan had told his parents where I had been working for the past two years, they feigned surprise when I mentioned it. I had rather dreaded the moment, being so conscious of their histories, but they seemed interested, despite claiming never to have visited the House itself, for reasons they did not explain. After moving on to completely different subjects for the next ten minutes, however, Arjan surprised me by returning to it, mentioning that he had been in the same class at school with Peter Van Pels during the late 1930s while Edda had once attended a birthday party with Margot Frank although she had never, to the best of her knowledge, met Anne.
“Peter and I played football on the same team,” Arjan explained, looking out the window toward the fields beyond, where the dogs were chasing each other in another burst of energy. “He wanted to be a striker but our coach insisted on his playing in defense. He had no great skill but he was fit, so fit that he could run anyone off the pitch. My sister Edith came to watch the match every Saturday morning because she liked him, although she was too shy to say so. He was too old for her anyway. My father would never have allowed it. Peter was always late for training; it became frustrating to me. I decided one day to have it out with him but that, of course, was the day that he disappeared forever. Into the annex.”
I felt both moved and startled by this information, to know that the man seated opposite me had such a personal connection with someone whose picture I saw every day and whose story had become such a part of my life. I glanced toward Edda but she kept her back to me. Eventually, however, she turned around, clearing her throat but not making eye contact with me as she spoke, as if she was an actress on a stage reciting a monologue.
“Mr. Frank ran a spice company,” she declared. “Mr. Frank was a gentleman, a dear friend of my father’s. Whenever we stopped in, Mr. Frank always asked after my mother’s health, for she was frequently ill; she suffered with asthmatic attacks, and he kept a jar of toffees behind Miss Gies’s desk for children such as I. Years later, after the diary was published, I saw Mr. Frank once in Dam Square and wanted to approach him, to remind him of Edda, who had been in his office many times as a girl, but I hesitated. I watched as he passed among the tourists, unseen, jostled by some of them. A man wearing an Ajax T-shirt thrust a camera into his hands and asked him to take a photograph of him and his wife, and afterward he took the camera back without so much as a thank-you, as if Mr. Frank existed for no other reason than to do his bidding. I wondered what any of the people in the square that day
would do if they knew that here was a man among men. And then, his head bowed, he simply disappeared from sight. It was the only time I ever saw Mr. Frank in the flesh after the war.”
There were so many questions that I wanted to ask but I was uncertain how intrusive my curiosity might be. In the four years that I’d lived and worked in Amsterdam, I had met dozens of survivors of the death camps and formed professional connections with many of them due to my work at the museum but there was something more intimate to me about this moment, for here were two people who had gone through the worst of all possible experiences and survived it, and I was in love with their son and he, to my utter astonishment, appeared to be in love with me too.
“How can you bear it?” asked Edda, sitting down now and raising her voice, partly in anger and partly in bewilderment. “Working there, I mean? Spending every day in such a place? Does it not become painful? Or is it worse than that, have you simply become immune to it all?”
“No,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “It fascinates me. Growing up in Ireland I knew very little of what had taken place during the war. They didn’t teach us about it. And now I learn more every day. At the museum, our education plan is always growing. We welcome school groups all the time. It’s my job to help educate them about the things that happened there.”
“And how can you do that?” she asked, sounding genuinely perplexed. “When you understand absolutely nothing about it yourself?”
I said nothing. It was true that I could not possibly understand as they understood, could not feel as they felt, but since arriving in Amsterdam and finding work as a junior curator at the museum, my life had begun to hold meaning for me for the first time. I was thirty-five years old and felt that I belonged somewhere at last. That I was of use. The House mattered to me more than I could possibly say. It was a place steeped in historical danger and yet, perversely, it was also a place where I felt utterly safe.
“Of course it’s important,” she continued with a sigh. “I don’t dispute that. But to spend all day there with those ghosts.” She shivered and Arjan reached across to place his hand atop hers; his sleeve rode up a little now and when my eyes glanced toward it, he pushed it back down. “And why are you interested anyway? Are there no Irish Jews who you can patronize?”
“Not many,” I admitted, stung by her choice of verb.
“There are not many anywhere,” said Arjan.
“I know all about your country,” she said. “I’ve read about it. I’ve heard about it. It sounds like a backward place. A people with no empathy for anyone. Why do you let your priests decide everything for you?”
“Because they always have, I suppose.”
“What a ridiculous answer,” she said with an irritated laugh. “Still, at least you abandoned it. I think you were clever to do that.”
“I didn’t abandon it,” I said, surprised to feel unexpected stirrings of patriotism in a soul that I had always thought devoid of such parochial bullshit. “I left it, that’s all.”
“Is there a difference?”
“I think so.”
“You’ll go back someday, I expect. All Irish boys go home to their mothers in the end, don’t they?”
“If they know who their mothers are, perhaps.”
“Well, I couldn’t do what you do,” she said. “I don’t even like visiting Amsterdam anymore. I haven’t been near the Westerkerk in years and I loved climbing to the summit when I was a girl. It’s like…” and here she turned to her husband. “Elspeth’s son. What’s his name again?”
“Henrik,” said Arjan.
“Yes, Henrik. The son of a friend of ours. A historian. And he has spent the last two years working in the museum at Auschwitz. How can he do such a thing? How can he bear it? It baffles me.”
“Would you ever consider giving a talk at the House?” I asked, an idea coming half-formed into my head and translating itself into words before I had a chance to consider them properly. “Perhaps to some of the children who visit?”
“I don’t think so, Cyril,” said Arjan, shaking his head. “What could I say anyway? That Peter Van Pels was a good footballer? That my sister, like Anne Frank, had a crush on him? This is almost forty years ago, remember. I don’t have anything to say that would be of interest to anyone.”
“Then perhaps you could talk about your time at—”
He stood up, pushing his chair back with such force that it screeched across the tiled floor, making me wince at the sound. Looking up, it struck me how big he was, how hard he had worked to keep himself in shape. Physically, he had a similar build to the man who had beaten up the boy outside my apartment a few days earlier but his heft belied his gentle nature and I felt ashamed to make the comparison. No one spoke for a few moments until Arjan turned around and made his way slowly toward the sink, turning on the taps as he began to rinse out the teacups.
“You shouldn’t lose touch with your home,” said Edda finally, reaching out and taking my hand in hers, her tone softening now. “It’s where all your memories were made. Perhaps you should bring Bastiaan sometime. Does he want to see it?”
“He says he does,” I said, glancing at the clock and hoping that he would arrive soon. “Maybe someday. We’ll see. The truth is, I’m happy in Amsterdam. Holland feels more like home to me than Ireland ever did. But I’m not sure if I could ever go back. The truth is, when I left—”
And then, to my relief, before I could reveal too much of myself, I heard footsteps ascending the steps outside to the front door. There was a quick triple tap on the woodwork before the sound of the latch being pulled and there was Bastiaan, red-faced from rushing to get there, marching in and hugging both his parents in a display of family love that was utterly foreign to me, before turning and smiling at me in a way that said there was no one else in the world he wanted to see more at that moment than me.
By Rokin
I was seated in the window of a bar on Rokin waiting for my friend Danique to arrive. The woman who had originally hired me as a junior curator, she had left her job at the Anne Frank House a year earlier for a position at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., but was back in Amsterdam for a week or two to attend a family wedding. I had forgotten to bring a book with me and was staring out the window, my eyes drawn to the bar across the street. It was a popular hangout for rent boys, a darkened hovel full of easy trade, lonely middle-aged men with wedding rings in their coat pockets, half-finished bottles of beer and instantaneous pick-ups. In my first months in the city, at my lowest depths following my exile from Dublin, I had found myself there once or twice, in search of the oblivion of uncomplicated sex. Looking across now out of prurient interest, I saw two men emerge through the front door, one who looked familiar to me, one who did not. The first was the man who had punched the boy on the street outside my apartment a few weeks earlier. I knew him from his girth, his fur-trimmed overcoat and his ridiculous deerstalker. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it quickly as the other man, a forty-something with sallow skin and a Manchester United T-shirt, returned a wallet to his back trouser pocket. A moment later, the door opened again and somehow it didn’t surprise me at all to see that same boy emerge from inside, his hair bleached into some unnatural hybrid of brown and blond. Deerstalker laid his hand down on the boy’s shoulder in a paternal gesture before shaking Man Utd’s hand, and when he raised his arm in the air a taxi appeared immediately and the boy and his client climbed into the backseat before driving away. After they departed, he glanced across the street and our eyes met for a moment. He stared at me, cold and bellicose, and I turned away, happy to see my friend walking toward me now with a smile on her face.
The Anger of the Exile
When I first became familiar with Amsterdam, I found myself increasingly drawn to those parts of the city that offered art galleries and curiosity shops, book stalls and street artists. I attended concerts, bought tickets to plays and spent long afternoons in the Rijksmuseum, studying
exhibition after exhibition in an attempt to broaden my mind. With almost no knowledge of the history of art, I didn’t always understand what I was looking at, nor did I have the capacity to contextualize a particular painting or sculpture, but the work began to move me and any loneliness I felt soon became tempered by a developing interest in creativity.
It was one of the reasons, perhaps, why I found my work at the Anne Frank House so stimulating, for inside the museum lay the stories of others and the words of one, a combination that had an unpredictable effect on every visitor who walked through its doors. I had never led a particularly cultured life in Dublin, despite the fact that I had spent my formative years in the home of a novelist and her husband. Knowing how books had formed the bedrock of Maude’s life, it began to strike me as strange that she had never shown any interest in encouraging my own interest in literature. There were books in Dartmouth Square, of course, books beyond number, but not once had Maude walked me around the shelves, pointing out the novels or story collections that had first inspired her, nor had she ever thrust any of these works into my hands, insisting that I read them so we could discuss them afterward. And once I left that house to begin the deeply private and depressingly fraudulent existence that would characterize my third decade I intentionally ignored anything that might draw me back to the complicated years of my childhood.
The canal area between Herengracht and the River Amstel was my favorite part of the city and I would often stop at MacIntyre’s pub for dinner as I made my way home from work. During my nomadic years in Europe, I had studiously avoided Irish bars, but there was something about the blend of Dutch and Irish traditions there that appealed to me, the decor reminding me of home but the food and atmosphere being firmly rooted in the culture of somewhere entirely different.
