Testimony

by Scott Turow

  “We have decided that we need to tell you something,” my mother said. That clearly was her part. The hard line fell to my father.

  “We are Jews,” he said.

  The most important thing my parents were saying, of course, had nothing to do with religion or heritage. They were telling me that they had lied to my sister and me all our lives. In retrospect I was always proud of the way I responded: With nothing else, I began to cry, a man who had not broken down completely since my dog had been run over in front of me when I was thirteen.

  I called my sister on my drive back home, and merely from the way I said her name, she knew what was up.

  “They told you,” she said. “I’m so glad. I’ve been warning them I couldn’t keep this secret much longer.”

  “What the fuck,” I answered.

  For Marla, whatever the drama within, the practical adjustments were minimal. She had married Jer, a wonderful guy who happened to be Jewish, and she had raised her three kids in the embrace of the Jewish community in Lexington, Mass. Marla had lived the kind of contented suburban life—the kids, the country club friends, the committed acts of charity—that Ellen regarded as a form of early-onset morbidity, an opinion I more or less shared in those years. Only when my marriage ended another decade later did I tumble to the recognition that my sister was happy, far happier than many other people who arrive in their middle years, including me. Now Marla understood my shock and indignation, but the news had clearly not shaken her as deeply.

  When I reached home, Ellen absorbed what I had to say with a river of emotion flowing through her face, culminating in a smile. “Oh my God,” she said. “How fascinating. You know, I love them both, you know that, but there’s always been something not quite right. How many times have I told you, ‘Your parents are strange’?” She thought only a second longer and added, “They have to tell the boys,” who were then twelve and fourteen. I do not remember Ellen asking me for many days how this news had affected me.

  Although it may be what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance, my enduring reaction was that I was fairly pleased about being Jewish. I had grown up with many Jewish friends and had always felt some envy for their fierce ethnic pride, which contrasted with my parents’ reluctance—now far more understandable—about anything Dutch.

  On the other hand, I did not tend to talk about this discovery very often. I made no effort to keep it a secret and I don’t think I was ashamed to have lost my status as a Real White Person. The hard part was accounting for my mother and father.

  By the time they died eight years later in close succession, I had gone through many stages, but I had ultimately given them the benefit of the doubt. It was a considerable sacrifice to part with core elements of your identity.

  As for what had happened during the war, Marla eased more details from my mom in the last months of her life, after my dad was gone, when my loyal sister often came to town to sleep on a cot beside our dying mother.

  My father’s family, then named Bergmann, always distinguished watchmakers, had left Frankfurt for Rotterdam in the 1870s in response to one of the periodic waves of anti-Semitism that swept through Germany. My father’s uncles joined them in the 1890s when several proposals were offered in the Reichstag to limit the rights of Jewish citizens, laws that were ultimately adopted decades later once Hitler took power. When that began to happen, in 1933, almost two dozen more cousins came to Rotterdam, joining the diaspora of more than half of Germany’s Jews who left in the next few years. Unfortunately, the Nazis were not far behind the Bergmann cousins and rolled through the Netherlands in 1940, bringing their racial laws with them. The German-speaking relatives were a special burden on my father’s family, since their poor Dutch made them easily identifiable as Jews. My father knew that as a result, sooner or later, the entire family—now called ‘Bergman,’ having dropped an n to sound more Dutch—would be rounded up and sent to camps.

  In July 1942, Aart and Miep ten Boom of Leiden were killed when a tree collapsed on their car as they were driving through a fierce storm. The Ten Boom family were leaders of the Dutch resistance, which over time hid thousands of Jews from the Nazis through various means. Aart and Miep’s surviving relatives decided it would be a fit tribute to suppress all news of their deaths and to allow a young Jewish couple to assume their identities. The Ten Booms were jewelers, with need of a skilled watchmaker in their store. When the offer came, my father and mother left their lives behind—and dozens of doomed relatives. They hid in plain sight in Leiden, with the knowledge of hundreds of local residents who never betrayed them.

  The end of the war was trying in its own way. My mother, an only child whose parents had died in their forties, wanted to return to Rotterdam to seek the possible remnants of their community. My father apparently regarded it all as better left behind, given the near-certain capture and annihilation of his family. He convinced her that the greatest safety for them and, far more important, their children was in remaining Aart and Miep rather than chancing the vagaries of history’s roulette wheel, in which the Jews’ number, along with several other perennial losers, was always coming up black.

  The Dutch neighbors who had hidden my parents throughout the war were confused by my father’s attitude and even somewhat critical. They had risked their lives because my parents were Jews, not converts, and so for the new Aart and Miep the best choice was to apply to emigrate. In 1950, because of the need for skilled tradesmen in the US, my parents were granted visas.

  By now, Esma and I had taken a seat on a concrete bench in a brick plaza called Beestenmarkt. A large old-fashioned windmill, with its white canvas sails, turned a few hundred feet away, while the masonry was wetted by a strange fountain, dozens of piddling streams that shot straight up from buried piping. Several tow-headed children were frolicking on a day that was finally mild enough to be welcomed as spring. They dared the water with small hands, splashing while their parents remonstrated, and after soaking themselves, sprinted away with exhilarated screams.

  “This is a more familiar story to me than you may know,” said Esma. “There are thousands and thousands of Gypsies, especially lighter-skinned Gypsies in the United States, who have simply melted into the American population without looking back on their Rom ways.”

  I stared at her, wondering why it was I was so attracted to women without much native empathy. If I ever went back to therapy, I had to put that question near the top of the list.

  We began wandering back to the hotel.

  “Wars are horrible,” said Esma. “They do horrible things to everyone.” This seemed a more comforting response and I took the hand she had customarily lapped over my arm. “That was how I died the last time,” Esma said. “During World War I.”

  I stopped. “You’re being euphemistic?”

  The dark eyes scolded. “Far from it. I was an Ottoman soldier, a poor private from Ayvalik, a tiny town, and not quite eighteen years old. I died of the infection from a shoulder wound at Gallipoli.”

  I was far less ruffled by this declaration than I might have expected, perhaps because I’d been struggling with my parents’ two lives, or because I had already accepted Esma’s warning about potential disappointment as meaning that there were important facets of her character I didn’t yet know. Discovering these beliefs was a little more complicated than finding out Esma bit her nails, and probably not a good sign for the long run. But for the near term, I was willing to attempt tolerance, since it was part of the journey to foreign terrain I’d started when I let her into my room in Tuzla. Besides, I recognized an opportunity to gather intelligence on the greatest unknown.

  “And was death terrible?” I asked her.

  “Not so terrible, no. Lonely. Cold. But I was glad to pass beyond pain. I didn’t enjoy the feeling of distance. But I realized almost at once that it was temporary.”

  “I see.”

  I found myself in an even, if somewhat resigned, mood processing all of this—my parents, Esma, the
fundamental unreliability of humans, and the fact that for me there was, in all likelihood, more searching yet ahead. We returned to the hotel and the world of sensation one more time before I walked her to the station.

  16.

  The Lab—April 29

  The following Wednesday, Goos called me from the crime lab. Several results were now available, which, he suggested, would be easier to absorb if I came out there.

  “Am I going to have to look at bones?” I asked.

  “’Fraid so.”

  I grumbled, largely for show.

  In the milder weather, I’d started using Lew Logan’s old bike to get to work, and by now I was up to the forty-minute ride to the outlying neighborhood of Ypenburg. I’d grown accustomed to the eye-rolling and pointing of the local kids when they saw my helmet. Nothing seemed more quintessentially Dutch to me than their scoffing at protective headgear while remaining the world’s leaders in training neurosurgeons.

  I had no problem finding the immense Netherlands Forensic Institute, a black square of glass built into a grassy hillside that somehow reminded me of Darth Vader’s headpiece. It was a vast enterprise with nearly six hundred professionals on staff. Once inside, I experienced the place as a world of white, with lab coats and microscope lenses and confounding machines visible through the laboratory windows as Goos strolled me down the corridors.

  I asked where we were headed.

  “Little hard to do this in order,” Goos said. “But we have results in five different labs—DNA, Path, Microinvasive, Ballistics, and Fingerprints.”

  “What’s Microinvasive?”

  “You’ll see. But they have a special microscope here. Developed to look for trace fractures in the engine block of race cars.” Goos shook his head about the priorities. “We’ll start with your favorite.” He gave it an Aussie pronunciation, so that the last syllable came out ‘right.’

  In the chill Forensic Pathology lab, we donned shower cap–like head coverings and surgical gowns. Goos steered me over to a stainless steel table on which the pieces of three largely complete skeletons had been laid out, the remains of Boldo and his son and brother, if Ferko were to be believed. There were special tungsten bulbs in here that gave the lab an optic clarity that seemed to exceed daylight.

  “Okay,” said Goos, “so let us remind ourselves of what we are trying to accomplish.”

  “I’d hope, one, to corroborate Ferko’s testimony and two, to find out as much as I can about who killed these people.”

  From the slow pace at which Goos nodded, I didn’t think I’d get much better than a C on the quiz. I’d missed some of the sub-issues, specifically the age of these bones and the causes of death.

  “Now how much pathology you familiar with, Boom? Don’t want to yabber on, if there’s no need.”

  “Yabber your heart out, Goos. I’ve been a white-collar guy my whole career. Crimes of greed, not violence. I haven’t spent much time in places like this.” My one trip to the path lab, while a prosecutor, had come when the Black Saints Disciples had killed a young man who’d agreed to testify for the government. The agents on the case wanted me to see what had been done to our guy, which wasn’t pretty.

  Goos withdrew a laser pointer from under his gown and showed me various points on the pelvis used to discern both the gender and age of the decedents. In the lab, Goos was expansive and wonky about the scientific refinements in his field since his time as a grad student. DNA had established that these remains were those of three males, while statistical analyses of the changes that occurred over time in the pelvis, legs, and teeth of a broad population (including, per Goos, “the density of blood vessel canalations”) allowed for near certainty in determining the men’s ages. For all the forensic advances, the result was close to Goos’s original estimate by naked eye. Two men were in their forties—forty and forty-five roughly—and the third was an adolescent of about fifteen.

  Goos had snapped on plastic gloves as he handled the skeletons. The bones held a soft sheen now, the product of a layer of protective plastic Goos had applied to prevent further degradation. He tilted the top of one skull at me.

  “Notice anything about this fella?” There was a hole, almost perfectly round, through the center of his forehead, as well as a network of fine fractures beside it. At the rear, a far larger hole had been blown away.

  “Bullet?”

  “Yay, counselor, it would be my expert opinion that this poor devil got shot in the head. And at fairly close range.” He pushed his pointer into the eye socket so I could see the light through the front bullet hole. “We’ve a punched-in surface, small pieces of bone missing, and beveling in the outer table.

  “Now, we have a larger hole here.” He was indicating two ribs on the same skeleton. “So pretty sure he got shot first at longer range. Bullet wobbles more the further it travels, makes a bigger hole.”

  He highlighted the examinations of the other two skeletons. The ‘youngster,’ as Goos put it, had been shot first in the hand and then through the chest, where the small entrance wound suggested the bullet had shattered. The third set of bones—apparently those of the brother who’d bled out—showed no bullet holes, which would be consistent with entry wounds through the softer tissues and organs.

  “Last thing that’s relevant”—Goos tilted open the jawbone on the middle skeleton—“I see some missing teeth on all three, even this young fella. So I’d say these folks had very little dental care.”

  “Meaning they were poor?”

  “Or didn’t like the dentist. But let’s say poor.”

  “Like the people in Barupra?”

  “Or most of the people on earth, but Barupra, too.”

  He plunked the skull back on the table so it made a dull knock.

  “Done here now,” he said and removed his cap.

  We walked down the hall to a stairwell. As he passed, Goos greeted several people in lab coats. I suspected a PhD got a lot more respect in these precincts than the usual humble cop. On the second floor, we entered a door labeled TOOLMARKS AND MICRO-ANALYSIS INVASIVE TRAUMA LAB.

  “This is the place with the special microscope?”

  “Infinite Focus Microscope it’s called.” Inside, the first thing I saw was a vast light table for the display of X-rays and other slides. Overhead vents hung down, inverted bells of clear plastic used to whisk away unwanted vapors. A piece of one of the long bones, whose absence I’d noticed from the first skeleton, was vised below the hot-shit microscope.

  “Now this here is my domaine royal.” Goos turned with his long hands raised somewhat grandly. “Taphonomy, basically the study of bodily degradation. Without embalming, a body is skeletonized in about six weeks. So trying to figure if the bones have been in the earth five years or five hundred requires looking to other factors. Bones decompose more slowly than the flesh, but they do decompose. Tricky thing in this case is, as you know, there’s lots of salt in the earth thereabouts near Tuzla. That’ll degrade the bone surface more quickly, meaning you might think the remains are older than they are. Which is where our friendly microscope comes in. The interior of the bones, once we’ve sawed them open, shows decomposition unrelated to contact with the earth. All told, I’d say these were in the ground ten years give or take, and Dr. Gerber here at NFI, dog’s bollocks in this field, he agrees.”

  I took a second to reflect on what Goos had shown me thus far.

  “Overall, I’d say Ferko’s doing pretty well.” The Monday after we’d returned from Tuzla, I’d told Goos about Ferko’s sudden recall of Kajevic’s threats. Goos had reacted largely as I had. It was not a huge problem in itself, but it meant we had to probe Ferko’s story with even greater caution. It was heartening, therefore, that the lab results seemed to corroborate him.

  “So far,” said Goos. “But it’s about to get a little thick. Let’s talk about the DNA analysis, because that’s where our first troubles appear. I can call up the report from this computer.” He batted at a keyboard.

 
; I was better versed in DNA than pathology, because that science had proved revealing throughout the entire universe of crimes. You could extract DNA, for example, from a smudged fingerprint on a cashier’s check, as had happened to an unfortunate client of mine who’d bribed a county zoning officer by paying a college tuition bill.

  “Now, DNA with buried bones is tricky. That’s because there’s always little critters in the soil who nibble on these bones and leave their own DNA behind.” He got a little deep for me in describing the extraction methods that had been developed to reduce soil contamination, but I followed well enough. A comparison between samples from the bone’s interior versus its surface helped isolate microbial effects.

  “We performed Y-STR and mitochondrial DNA analysis,” Goos said.

  “Mitochondrial is mother’s side and less subject to contamination?” I asked.

  “Right you are, Boom. Mother’s side shows more than seventy percent of the genome in each man is consistent with Indo-Aryan origins.”

  “That’s what you’d expect if they were Roma, right?”

  “That’s what the experts here say. Now, the Y-STR, that was a lot more complicated. The good news is that all three exhibit a common Y chromosome, which you’d expect if they were truly father, son, and uncle. But even getting that result was quite the bitzer because of our contamination issues.” The classic contamination problem, even in a lab setting, arose from the fact that there was no way to tell the origins of the DNA you were examining. It could be blood or bone or skin from the subject, or a dandruff flake that had scaled off one of the investigators.

  “Here, Boom, even when we isolated the microbial effects, the bone crystal cells from the surface showed much more human contamination than the bone crystals from the inside. And if these bones were in the earth for ten years, there’s no way that should be the case, unless my blokes and I were a lot less careful with the exhumation than I thought.