by Tessa de Loo
Bram’s bed was put in Koen’s room, the Frinkels took up residence in the nursery, from where dizzy runs and flageolet harmonics made the walls tremble. When the father stopped, the son took over with gypsy music and Slav dances. They were looked up by a friend from Germany whom they had taken into their confidence, Leon Stein. He had left his country at that time to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. After that he worked in Harlem for many years for his uncle, a manufacturer of barrels and crates, who was allowed by the Germans, for a lot of money, to get away to America. He had been able to take his horses but not his nephew, who had become stateless since his Spanish adventure. The New World, on the other side of the ocean, which was open to all nationalities, closed its borders hermetically to anyone who had no nationality. Stein needed to go into hiding urgently. But it was only from time to time, he said. The old flair of the Spanish anti-Fascists had not been extinguished in him and had driven him to the Dutch resistance – in his case it was a strong instance of contempt for death because he looked thoroughly Jewish, even when he wore a German uniform during a surprise attack on a distribution office and gave orders in his mother tongue.
A bed was put up for him in Lotte’s father’s office; he slept there like a soldier on a narrow wooden plank, feverishly devising plans, always nervous – only when he was in the greatest danger would a mild calm come over him, he confessed. He was elusive, his life hung together on secrets – at one point he would shelter with them for three weeks, then he disappeared for a month without warning.
One morning at dawn they were woken by rifle shots. People ran about the house in pyjamas, the Frinkel family desperately looking for a way to make themselves invisible. Koen went to see how the land lay – the allure of danger shone in his eyes. He wandered into the wood quasi-casually. There he came upon three Austrian soldiers, hardly older than himself, who were out hunting, to break the monotony of their daily rations. He was given a cigarette, they chatted about hares and rabbits. Later that day they would be starting a raid in the neighbourhood, they said carelessly, sometimes it was easier to catch a Jew than a rabbit. Koen led them to a hill on the other side of the wood which was riddled with tunnels and holes. They departed with fraternal shoulder-slapping.
Breathlessly he reported back. ‘They are only hunting hares and rabbits now but in a couple of hours they will be hunting for … for …’ He could not get the word past his lips; ashamed, he looked at his friend standing barefoot on the tiled floor, numb with cold. Shots sounded again in the distance. Max Frinkel massaged his fingers nervously. ‘The Noteboom ladies …!’ he cried. His wife nodded emphatically. ‘Two admirers,’ she explained, ‘they sat in the front row at each concert. If you get into difficulties, come to us, they had once offered. However, they are a bit eccentric …’ They were taken there at top speed. The ladies lived with forty-eight cats in a large ramshackle villa held upright by creepers and ivy. Although one was the mother of the other, there was great difficulty telling which of the captivating ladies was the elder, with their grey buns and Karl Marx glasses. They could take a hint. Of course the famous violinist was welcome – they took in all strays, whether they walked on two feet or four.
After the Frinkels had gone, the raid was awaited calmly. Lotte’s mother enjoyed the sudden peace of mind. Only now did she realize how much strain the Frinkels’ presence had caused. The continual fear of an unexpected visit, that the youngest children would let their tongues run away with themselves, the anxiety of a small, fatal slip, so insignificant that you overlooked it – the fear of reprisals that no one dared to imagine … a fear that went along with a sense of guilt: all that time she had been putting her children at risk. We won’t start that again, she decided. They are fine there, with the Noteboom ladies.
There was more than enough to be anxious about. If the Russians did not lose, for example, because then everything would be lost. During the Stalingrad period Jet sleepwalked through the house at night. Lotte woke up, discovered the bed next to her empty and found her sister bolt upright and pale as a statue in the living-room, where she slowly and dreamily negotiated the tables and chairs without colliding with anything. To prevent her falling down the stairs Lotte locked the bedroom door from then on, but the urge to walk had to find an outlet: one night Jet opened the balcony door and walked out into the rain in her night-dress. Lotte was woken by the wind blowing across her forehead. Not just the bed, the balcony appeared to be empty. Disconcerted, she peered into the night: had Jet got wings? Only when she looked out over the balustrade, into the depths, she saw her lying – soaking wet, in a bed of overblown asters that had been spoilt by the rain. For many weeks Jet lay in a darkened room with severe concussion. A persistent headache had taken the place of her somnambulism. Even so, she demanded to be kept up to date with the latest developments in the east – without sparing her.
Rain in the Netherlands was snow in Russia. It seemed as if an unusually large amount of rain fell that autumn. One evening even Lotte’s mother’s good intentions were rained off. The bell rang; two men had braved the rotten weather. The face of one of them was hidden behind heavily framed glasses misted over from the rain. The other seemed to be Lotte’s father’s barber; he did not immediately recognize him as he was – what was left of a barber without his customary entourage of knives, razors and mirrors? Authenticating themselves by dropping Leon Stein’s name, the barber asked for temporary hiding for his companion who was in great need. It would only be for a couple of days. No one said anything. Lotte held her breath. The silence was heavy with tension that was not so much the result of doubt as of inevitability. The possibility of a free choice was only apparent – in actuality it had already been decided, at a suprahuman or even primarily human level. It was impossible to say no, go back outside into the storm, the rain, make sure you find a roof over your head. ‘We aren’t taking people any more,’ she heard her father saying, ‘it’s too risky.’ ‘The Frinkels’ bed is still there,’ her mother proposed. Her hands began to fiddle with the unwelcome guest’s coat; she took the wet thing from him and hung it on a clothes hanger next to the stove. She offered him a chair, took his glasses, dried them with a piece of her skirt and put them back on his nose. ‘So, at least now you can see where you have ended up.’
Ruben Meyer discovered that there was a sleepwalker bored stiff in one of the rooms upstairs. He sat on her bed and began to read aloud to her; he brought her tea and improved on the news from the front for her. After six weeks, when still no other address had been found for him, he admitted that he was suffering from sleeplessness because of anxiety about his family. The baker in an Utrecht village with whom they had been hiding had been blackmailed by his sister-in-law, who had noticed that in the store behind the oven it smelled not only of bread and currant buns but also of cold sweat. Ruben had been smuggled to the Gooi region by a laundry in a basket of dirty washing, to search for a safe place they could go. ‘The barber was going to organize it …’ his eyes darted back and forth behind the thick lenses, ‘I don’t understand …’ ‘We can’t wait for that,’ said Lotte’s mother.
She sent Lotte out on the job. The train rode through a barren landscape beneath a drab, joyless sky. The woods, the hay were not themselves any more, they had lost their innocence under the marching of strange boots, they had become hiding place and tragic scene simultaneously. That she could calmly ride through there, while Ruben could not, distorted the landscape into something that never again, just like that, could be called beautiful. Absurd, senseless movements were being made in it, she was on the way to his family, he had settled with her family – everything was an expenditure of energy, a fundamental disorder. No one could follow the rhythm of their own lives.
In the bakery, squeezed together in a small oppressive room, she discovered his mother, brother of ten, sister and brother-in-law, emaciated and beside themselves with fear. The mother clung to her: ‘Please take my boy with you, take him out of here!’ ‘We’ll come and fetch you as
soon as possible,’ Lotte tried to calm her, ‘but it has got to be properly organized.’ ‘My little boy, my bubele’ the mother pleaded, ‘take him along with you …’ A boy was standing somewhat to the side with an exercise book in his hand. It seemed as though he was consciously distancing himself from her, in masculine shame at his mother’s pleas. He looked much too Jewish to be able to travel in the train. ‘Sums?’ she asked, buying time. ‘I am writing a story,’ he said with dignity, ‘about shipwrecked people washed ashore on an island in the Pacific Ocean.’ ‘And what else?’ she encouraged him, feverishly asking herself what she ought to do. She was not equipped for such a dilemma; she was no more than a pawn who had been pushed out to start exploring the situation. This was not a decision that she could just take on her own initiative … ‘They think it is uninhabited and they will be able to live there safely, but there are cannibals who hunt them with spears and …’ ‘Here,’ the mother ripped a diamond ring from her finger. Lotte shook her head, an unbearable heaviness pressed on her temples. ‘It is not a question of money … The Germans will just pick him off the train, it would be irresponsible, but we’ll come and fetch you … we’ll come and fetch all of you as soon as possible …’
That same evening contact was made again with the laundry boss via the barber. He could take no more than three people, at the end of the week. Because Mrs Meyer looked the least Jewish of the four of them, Lotte’s mother decided to fetch her straight away by train the following day. She took a broad-brimmed hat with her. They travelled back together like chatting women friends. The nervous tics on the face of the one, because she had to leave her children behind for a few days, were camouflaged in the shadow cast by the hat. The laundry boss came punctually as arranged; so did foresight: the Germans had been there just before him – all three were picked up the night before.
‘My little boy, my bubele, take him along with you …’ Lotte had to hide her desperation; she felt she was being judged by an invisible tribunal. If she had known that the child would be carried off she would certainly have taken the risk of the train journey. If he had been picked up on that occasion she would definitely have been guilty, but less so than now: now she hadn’t even tried. This was a lacerating, dead-end thought that went back and forth like a diabolo between guilt and guilt. She was being confronted with an intrinsic, subtle cruelty of existence that offered her no possibility of a choice. She had not been prepared for life to become so serious. What made it even worse was that no one thought of blaming her at all and she was seemingly struggling with a luxuriously self-indulgent problem in comparison with Ruben Meyer’s legitimate sorrow and loneliness. It was decided to be silent about it in front of his mother: what could they come up with for a Jewish mother who was beside herself? They led her to believe that her children had been taken to another address that evening. Every day she complained: ‘But couldn’t they write a letter all the same?’ ‘That’s still much too dangerous,’ her son mollified her with a breaking heart, ‘the post is also being intercepted. No one must know where they are.’ He walked about the house with drooping shoulders; it exhausted him to lie to his mother every day.
David’s father came over carrying a box. Although he had not received any more news from his son he had regained something of the old indestructibility that had characterized the mood of his songs. ‘We are also going into hiding,’ he said, ‘I’ve got some knick-knacks here … some bits and pieces …’ He tapped the box. ‘We would be very sorry if they were lost. Would it be all right with you if we buried it here in your garden or in the wood?’ ‘It’s fine with me,’ said Lotte’s father casually, ‘but not in the garden because every inch of it is in use now.’ He was alluding to the tobacco plants that he had sown and for which he would also have sacrificed a large part of the kitchen garden if his wife had not set limits. Lotte leaned on the balcony and watched the two men walking into the wood with a shovel – it made her feel uneasy, although she did not know why.
‘You are still as angry as ever,’ Anna remarked, assessing Lotte accurately, ‘you have been hoarding your rage for almost fifty years. Get it out! I am the obvious person, I offer myself, I’ve certainly stood in hotter fires before in my life. You have every reason to be angry!’
‘I’m not angry at all,’ Lotte’s hands were clenched into fists on the table. She spread her fingers out hastily. ‘I am merely telling you what happened.’
‘Why deny you are angry? You have been projecting all that rage onto me for days now, selbstverständlich.’ Anna leaned back contentedly. ‘I am offering myself. Go on, blame me!’
‘But I have been doing that continuously,’ Lotte sighed, ‘and you keep shooting back in defence.’
‘I won’t any more, come on. You must first blow off steam …’
Lotte looked at her sceptically now that they were onto the therapeutic tack, in this coffee house with big-city allure, among business people and housewives who were calmly sipping their coffee.
‘I’ll help you a little bit. We’ll order another cup of coffee and then I’ll tell you something I’m still as deeply ashamed of as ever.’
Martin’s letters were coming from deeper and deeper south. That mobility stopped just before the Caucasus – he had caught a dangerous intestinal infection; Anna received letters written by his comrades. She did not allow herself to be misled by their blatant attempts to disguise the seriousness with anecdotes and pleasantries; the anxiety made her throw herself into her work with monomaniac industry. Then one day his writing was on the envelope again. The crisis had been averted with a diet of milk and tomatoes; they were crossing the Ponto-Caspian plain towards Taganrog. Anna received several letters in close succession: defects in the lorry were dictating the pace, the vehicle was weary of travelling, Russia was too large. Eight days too late they reached the town on the Black Sea from where they would have to fly to Stalingrad for the grand finale. They had not been expected, had been given up for lost, so the lorry’s crew stood outside the Grand Plan – they were officially sent on leave. One year after the dress rehearsal Martin obtained permission to get married.
‘Anna, Anna, come here, there’s a telegram for you.’ Frau von Garlitz’s voice resounded through the passages. One of the cleaning women from the village, who had been keeping a fattened goose at the ready for the postponed marriage, hastily slaughtered the main course of the wedding feast. A pigskin suitcase was packed full of provisions, another with the wedding dress, necessary papers and other bits of the trousseau. ‘You don’t really think it’ll really happen now?’ Herr von Garlitz smirked. Ottchen, the old butler, took her to the station with the last remaining horse.
The crowded train was about to depart. Ottchen grabbed the cases from the cart and shoved them inside over the bellies of the soldiers who lay asleep on the platform. ‘Go to the devil with a capital D!’ they protested. Anna exhausted herself apologizing, stepping carefully between them. After a trek along crowded corridors she found a space in a first-class compartment. The train roared through the night like a maniac; they halted in the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, orders were yelled, and then they continued as far as just before Vienna, where the train had to wait four hours for an air raid alarm to end.
On arrival the pigskin suitcase seemed to have disappeared. A soldier remembered that someone with a suitcase had got off in Bohemia, perhaps he had scented the goose. In the commotion about the lost item Anna did not realize that it was Martin touching her discreetly, accompanied by his father. She shrank back. Thousands of kilometres lay between them; for weeks he had only existed in his comrades’ handwriting; he had been a concentric point drawing all her feelings to it, a magnet for anxiety and longing … now he was standing there, it was somewhat banal. They greeted each other formally – not here, in front of everyone. In the tram on the way to his father’s house, his clean-shaven neck fascinated her, a vulnerable, timid neck, so complete despite snow, illness, inhospitability – despite the war.
They were ma
rried in the Karlskirche. The bridegroom had made a final attempt to get his mother’s approval and to persuade her to be present. ‘The day of my life!’ he cried, giving her a good shaking. ‘It is the day of my life!’ She pressed the tips of her fingers to her temples and screwed her eyes shut tight. So he left her behind for ever in her domain, where now she only had herself as victim of her domination. Overwhelmed by the scale and excess of the interior of the domed church, Anna let herself be led to the altar. Pillars, wall panels and galleries of pink, brown, sandy and black marble. Behind one of the pillars, she assumed, her future mother-in-law had positioned herself under cover, with a great sense of timing waiting for the critical moment to spring out and perform a tragic drama that would make the bedroom scene of a year ago pale in comparison. But the paintings on the ceiling in the dome distracted her, as did the golden rays that came out of a triangle with a Hebrew inscription and angels floating between them, above the altar, a window with golden glass through which a bronze glow shone and enveloped the small bridal procession – somewhere in the heavenly spheres there had to be a higher organization, a secret plan laid out in detail, delineating their lives from moment to moment, with a deeper, unfathomable purpose. She looked sideways at the bridegroom’s profile – his Adam’s apple went up and down as the organ, much ornamented with gold, began a hymn.
