by Scott Turow
One striking thing about Esma—Emira—was how deeply invested she was in the lie about her Roma roots, which had required concocting those false Internet entries about herself and her make-believe organization, and the substantial effort involved in learning Romany. By Wednesday morning, it had struck me that might be a way to force her out of hiding.
I texted: Tried to reach you at Bank Street with puzzling results. No Esma Czarni???? Returning to Bosnia and still desperate to speak to Ferko one more time.
Even so, I was surprised late Friday afternoon when my cell lit up with her brief reply. Withdrew Bank Street while this case goes on and on in New York. Efforts to reach Ferko futile. Very sorry. All best E
The art—and deceit—of this bare answer after weeks of silence drove me into another spiral of rage. I went out to run by myself and carried in dinner, drinking more wine than I should have as I struggled to make sense of Esma. I understood that the Roma cause was far more righteous and appealing than the legacy of a Persian expatriate whose family history was inevitably entangled in dirty work of the Shah. But how could you start every morning with an inner recap of the long list of lies you needed to tell again today?
I was still sloshing in anger while I was rinsing my dish, when the dam broke and I thought of my father. I sank to a beaten backless kitchen stool, suddenly too flattened even to bother shutting the tap, which continued splattering in the sink. Of course. It was just like a dream when a figure turns around and now has the face of someone else. My father. The difficult seething fury that had been boiling around my heart now cooled into a glop of sadness. Since the moment atop the water tank, I’d wondered occasionally why I was more angry with him than my mother. But knowing the old-fashioned nature of my parents’ relationship, I was sure who had driven all critical decisions. In fact, my mother had acknowledged to Marla that my father overruled Mom’s desire to return to Rotterdam.
Comparing them to Esma, there were, naturally, differences, distinctions. Lawyers loved distinctions. My parents lied to survive. At first. But in the end, like Esma, they chose what seemed to them a more agreeable life.
Eventually, I migrated upstairs. Every day since I’d left Leiden, I’d thought briefly about a question that, in the same cagey game of unconscious avoidance, I’d never gotten around to trying to answer. The Ten Booms were still in business in Leiden. What about my father’s real family, the Bergmans?
Searching the net on my tablet, I found no store by that name, but there were a number of listings in Rotterdam for Bergmans. Eventually, Googling around, I found an article, basically an advertising flyer for local jewelers that referred to a ‘Meester Horlogemaker’—master watchmaker—at the shop in Rotterdam of a fancy international jewelry chain. The store was open Saturdays, and no more than three-quarters of an hour by train. I felt a fateful weight when I decided that would be my destination tomorrow.
I woke late and was ready to depart for Rotterdam, when Narawanda came through the door, evenly balanced with a small bag of groceries in each hand. We stared across the living room.
“I thought you were at work,” I said. It was the kind of stupid obvious remark you make when you can’t think of anything else.
“I was. I had to finish a motion. But once I sent the draft to Bozic, he called to tell me to go home. He says I will burn out if I keep working at this pace.”
“He has a point.”
“Yes,” she said.
Neither of us had taken a further step.
“Are you on your way out?” she finally asked.
“There’s an exhibit at a museum in Rotterdam whose name I can’t pronounce.” I tried anyway. This was not quite a lie, since I’d figured I’d stop in there for whatever refuge I needed after seeking out my father’s relatives.
“Boijmans Van Beuningen. The Bosch show? I’d love to see that.” She was suddenly alight, but that reflected her vulnerability to impulse, which in this case sprang from her joy in art. I also imagined that after several days, her embarrassment was starting to slacken. “Would it be all right if I come?”
“Please.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
We walked to the train station. The day I arrived, I’d briefly thought I was hallucinating when I caught sight of the massive bike-parking structure outside Den Haag Centraal, a double-tiered network of steel that stretched most of a block and housed thousands of bicycles. It was now a familiar sight.
The weather was fabulous, bright, warm, with lighter wind than normal, part of the brief season when The Hague actually became a beach city. Nara said we should walk down to the sea if there was time once we got back. Goos and I had meant to go to the shore when we left Kajevic, but had taken a wrong turn. I agreed with Nara, trying not to wonder about her assumptions.
Aboard the Intercity, I faced her.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
“Of course.” Her eyes fluttered with anticipation.
“It’s about why I want to go to Rotterdam.”
“Oh.” But she put her chin on her hand as she listened to me, her big eyes warm with feeling.
“That is very complicated,” she said, when she had heard the whole story. “It has been extremely hard on you,” she added, a deep truth I’d never been willing to say to myself.
“It’s been difficult to process,” I said, “much worse than I anticipated at first. It turns out that it messes you up to find out at age forty, when you finally think you’ve settled into yourself, that everything beneath you, your foundation as a person, isn’t really there and never was. I’ve been shocked to discover how angry I am with my parents. Not for the choice—which I don’t judge. But for not trusting their children with the truth when we had a chance to grow up with it.”
She reached over and took my hand for a second.
By the time we arrived in Rotterdam, I was anxious and aswim, with the worst kind of anxiety, which is always about more than you can name. We exited the train station, a triumph of sleek angles, into the swarming center of the city, which was an architectural showplace. A few older buildings remained, but skyscrapers dominated, many seemingly erected in an experimental spirit. I admired the intrepidness of a business community willing to support those kinds of innovations, but several of the results invited laughter. One place had a facade of sheet metal joined by enormous rivets, as if the architect was inspired by a heating duct.
The address of the jewelry store where Bergman worked was in my hand. Feeling like somebody off the boat, I followed the navigation app and led Nara down a classy old street with trees in full leaf and century-old buildings with limestone faces. The store was easy to spot because a round clock with a gold rim, a Rolex, hung over the doorway.
A young man in a rayon short-sleeved shirt and a tie was behind the display cases. I asked for “Meneer Johannes Bergman.”
The fellow looked up, thought about that, and extended his palm. It took me more than a second to realize he was asking for my watch, and rather than explain myself, I removed it from my wrist. It was a Patek Philippe that my father had given me for my twenty-first birthday, a vintage model called a Calatrava. I had always enjoyed wearing it because of its unaffected appearance, with its round face and black leather band. Over the years, when I’d had the watch cleaned, I’d learned it was quite valuable, a model that dated to 1932. For me, however, the meaning in the gift lay entirely in the fact that I’d seen my father wear the watch almost daily during my childhood. He had told me a thousand times that Patek Philippe was the world’s first maker of watches. Thus when he opened the band and fastened the timepiece to my wrist, it felt like he was passing along something essential.
A few seconds after the young fellow went to the back room with the watch, a man of at least eighty swept through the curtains that screened off the rear area. On first impression, he seemed too tall to be a member of my family. He was probably close to six foot three even now, his bald scalp framed by a springy moss of long white hair.
He had emerged without removing his jeweler’s headpiece. The monocular lens, with multiple rings, was embedded in a leather eyepatch that was secured around his head in a scuffed band that bespoke generations of use. My father had worn a similar device, which, when I was a very young child, had made him seem as terrifying to me as the Cyclops. My watch was in the man’s hand and there seemed to be incredulity both in his expression and the hasty way he’d emerged from the back.
“This is yours, sir?” His English was spoken with a heavy Dutch accent.
Even with half his face concealed, I could suddenly see the resemblance—my father’s long nose and long chin and the same faint blue to his one visible eye, even though this man was handsomer than my father had ever been.
“This reference number is quite rare,” he said, meaning the watch model. “But it appears to be working quite well. Is there an issue?”
“The watch was my father’s. I believe he may have been your older brother. Daan Bergmann?” When I had awoken this morning, I couldn’t even remember my father’s birth name and had texted my sister.
“Daan Bergmann?”
“Yes.”
He repeated the words, then looked behind himself to a bar-height chair and sank upon it. He removed his headgear. His mouth was parted and he looked outward for a second without appearing to be focused on anything here. He still held my watch delicately in one hand. He woke to that first and looked down, as if to assure himself it was still there. Then he spoke to me again, beginning in Dutch before repeating himself in English.
“Your father?” he had asked.
“Ja,” I answered. After that, he spoke only Dutch, with Nara once or twice whispering translations beside me.
“And what name do you take?”
I told him.
“Yes, ‘Ten Boom,’” he agreed. Years swam behind his eyes. “They asked my father first,” he said. “To go to Leiden? But he would not abandon his family. So your father went instead. Disappeared without a word to anyone. And the Nazis took us all. All the Bergmans.” He gave himself a second to consider what else to say, and then transferred my watch to the fingers of his left hand. With the right, he removed the link from his left cuff and turned up his sleeve. I knew what he was going to show me, but my heart still felt as if it had been halved by a cleaver when I saw the hand-printed numerals the Nazis had tattooed on the forearms of the inmates at Auschwitz.
I nodded once to indicate I understood.
“My mother lived and I lived,” he said. “No one else. No one. I remember them every day. Twenty-two people, five children. But I try not to think of your father.” He had now gathered the strength of conviction. He stood and pulled himself straight before reaching over the counter to return the watch.
“It is good to know you,” he said. “But please do not come back.”
We retreated to the museum, as I had planned, but I was in no state to look at anything. Nara and I sat on an upholstered bench inside the entry, just beyond the ticket kiosk at the foot of a contemporary open stairwell that led up to the exhibits. I rested my head against the wall and Narawanda held my hand.
As I had told Nara only a few hours ago, I had always exercised a strict discipline against judging what my parents had done. Yet as is inevitably true of children, I had seen all of this solely from my own perspective, out of an eagerness to understand theirs. I had been pained imagining what it was like for my father or mother when something—a musical note, a Proustian taste, a painting, a fragment of spoken Dutch—provoked a poignant memory of Rotterdam. It had to happen now and then, no matter how much will they exerted. Did they feel sorrow that they couldn’t share with Marla or me what they’d once valued? Or shame about hiding their true selves? I was certain they ultimately set aside their momentary anguish with the same mantra: This was for the best.
But my sympathies hadn’t run to anyone else. I had never even wondered what their choice had meant to their relatives. And so I had learned something excruciating today. My mother and father had clung so assiduously to their identity as the Ten Booms not just for the reasons I’d long understood—so that US immigration wouldn’t discover that they’d entered the country under a false name, or to ensure that they were always taken as gentiles when the next Inquisition began. It was also the final unapologetic renunciation of their families, a way to tell themselves that they had learned the lesson of Lot’s wife and would never look back. They were no longer Bergmans and would not accept blame. At last, I fully understood why they had spurned all things Dutch.
I was grateful to have had my time on earth, although that, like death, is so elemental that it is difficult to ponder the alternate state. But it had never dawned on me that there was an entire shattered community in Holland that regarded my father and mother with scorn.
“That was why they didn’t want us to know,” I told Nara.
“I’m sorry?”
“My parents. It wasn’t that they were Jews—that wasn’t what they wanted to keep from us.”
“What was?”
“They didn’t want us to realize they had betrayed their families.” I faced Narawanda as I said that. “I never thought of them as cowards.”
“Nor should you,” she said without hesitation.
“He does. Johannes.”
“He is bitter—that he suffered, that those he loved suffered, and that your parents did not. But if he spoke to you longer, I suspect you would also find that some of his anger, whether he could stand to say it or not, is with his father, for making a choice that inflicted such pain on him and the rest of his family. And that is what your parents understood. What would it have accomplished, Boom, if your parents refused that chance? Do you think it would have helped anything if the Nazis counted two more victims?”
She was making sense. But there was reason behind Johannes’s indignation as well. There are no rules, no order, no civilization if everyone is simply out for himself. I told her that.
“This is the same conversation we had a couple of weeks ago,” she answered.
I’m sure my expression in response was completely blank.
“When I told you that I have never known what I would do in wartime?” she asked. “People do horrible things, but often because they face horrible choices. We can admire heroes who put principle over peril to themselves. But their behavior is not normal. He—Johannes—might wish to believe that if your parents had stayed, they could have helped avoid what happened, but we both know that is magical thinking. The will of millions was not enough to stop the Nazis. To me, saving two lives was the best your parents could accomplish. And many people, starting with your sons and including me, are grateful they did that and that you are alive.”
She looked at me fearlessly as she added the last thought, her chin raised, eyes clear. There was no flirtation intended, just facts.
We walked back to the station, without saying much. Once we were on the Intercity, I reached over for Nara’s hand and held it for the half an hour plus it took to again reach The Hague. Aboard the train, we agreed we would take the tram out to Scheveningen and the beach, a ride of no more than ten minutes, which felt to me like a good place for continued reflection.
During the winter, life in The Hague goes on as if this neighborhood was far inland, but with the arrival of summer, the huge sandy beach was bustling, with restaurant tables set up outside the seaside cafés, and families playing at the edge of the cool water. The North Sea, usually a leaden green, had turned blue in the sun and rolled in calmly in the soft wind.
We sat on the sand. Nara had worn a long dress and rolled it up and extended her pretty brown legs in the sun. Eventually, we removed our shoes and walked at the water’s edge, hand in hand again.
What is happening? What are you doing? I wondered. But I was caught in the unfolding of time. Given what I’d experienced in Rotterdam, and Nara’s unhesitating comfort, I was impelled by a momentum I felt no will to control.
Still barefoot, we walked up
to the yellow tables of one of the cafés for a simple meal. We both drank wine, which sharpened my appreciation of the sea light and the sheer pleasure of breathing.
Around four, as it started to turn cooler, we took the tram back to the Fred and walked home, communicating in isolated words. I entered the dimmer light of the apartment feeling the weight of all that had transpired since we departed a few hours before. I plunged down on the sofa and Nara sat on one of the little square coffee tables, so she was directly in front of me with her knees against mine. She reached forward and took my hands between hers and fastened on me with her immense dark eyes.
“May we please get this done with?” she asked.
I laughed for the first time in hours. I had not been completely sure whether Nara had been holding my hand only to offer consolation as a good friend. I was grateful and I felt far closer to her than when we’d walked out the door seven hours ago. Yet in my imagination, we were going to return home and find some separation. Our coming together, if that was to happen, would require more thought and more time. But Nara was herself, sweetly subject to impulse, and impossibly direct in her communications, and I was glad she wanted to make this easy on both of us.
So our moment came, and again, as in Tuzla, I experienced the drama and definitiveness of a first kiss. Whatever it is that will occur between a man and a woman is more than half done the first time their lips meet in earnest. The wall that separates us from everyone else dissolves, and from then on, the two stand on different ground. And so we did.
About ten that night I woke with Nara layered against my side in my bed. Well spent, we had dozed for an hour. The shade was up and I could see flecks of stars in the black sky, a rare sight in The Hague, where nightfall so often brings clouds. From the pace of her breath on my neck, I could tell she was awake, too.
