by Otto de Kat
With an ice-cold heart, she entered Limburg, a province that was even less Dutch than the country where she had lived with Carl. Carl. Even the thought of him could not warm her, she felt nothing now, she was chilled through. But her will not to go under was stronger than her desire to jump in front of a train. No matter how cold and frozen, she would live, as long as she could, against the odds, on top of the ruins.
After a day surrounded by that incomprehensible dialect, she had decided to head for Rotterdam, to Gouda, where the factory belonging to her mother’s family, the Dudoks, should be. Before the war they had shipped machines all over the world, but it would not surprise her to find the factory destroyed, bankrupt. She remembered a nice cousin. Maybe he still lived there. She had barely known her Dutch family. Her father’s parents had died young, and her grandmother on her mother’s side, a woman she had come to love more than she did her own mother, had not survived the war.
Emma had no idea who or what she would find in Holland.
4
“Bruno Verweij.”
For a moment the name hangs in the air. She listens, hears how modestly he pronounces it, or no, casually more like, as if his name does not matter, as if he is interested only in hers. Emma is standing in a small circle of people who are chatting away. The man, who is called Bruno Verweij, is not at its center, but Emma instantly senses that the group would lose its cohesion without him. He is nothing at all like Carl, and yet there is a vague resemblance.
“Emma Regendorf,” she says, with a German “g.” She has his complete attention.
The spring of 1946 is cold. Deep into March there are still remnants of snow lying in places the sun cannot reach. Other sources of warmth have to be found.
Emma has been taken to this club, De Reünie, by her cousin Chris Dudok and his wife Imke, with whom she is staying until she finds a house and a job.
It has been six months since she arrived on their doorstep with a suitcase in her hand and a cap on her head. A statue and a caricature.
Chris had answered the door. His welcome was strange and confusing. He had turned deathly pale, and it seemed as if he had been waiting for her, as if he wanted to take her in his arms.
“Do you recognize me, Chris? It’s me, Emma, Emma Verschuur.”
“Christ, Emma! For a moment I thought . . .” He took a step back as if to rewind, to undo his actions of a moment before.
Emma was welcomed like a long-lost daughter. She could stay as long as she wanted, there was plenty of room, no, really, she couldn’t be more welcome, Chris said happily. She was given two rooms with a view of the canal beside the house and, diagonally opposite, the large entrance doors to Chris’ factory, Dudok’s Machine Works. She had stepped into a book of fairy tales, a hazy negative of a pre-war photograph, but the real world was gone, nothing in any way resembled what she had seen in all those years of war. Standing at her window, looking and listening to the water, the passers-by, sometimes a barge that docked at the factory, the sounds of metal on metal drifting across during loading and unloading, nothing really reached her.
It is nice and busy at De Reünie. Groups cluster around the billiards table, new people keep arriving, bringing a blast of cold with them. There is a feeling that they have plenty to celebrate. Post-war reconstruction in a provincial town, so full of expectations, so almost naïve. Their little club has survived those foul years after all. The Krauts are gone for good, thank God. Prosperity is not yet here, but the band is playing this evening, like old times, the first songs of longing fill the parlor once again, the bridge tables are occupied, the cards are shuffled. Saturday night is the regular music night, and sometimes there’s dancing too. Just because, for no real reason, a respectable kind of mischief.
“Where do you live, Mr. Verweij?”
“Would you please call me Bruno? And may I call you Emma?”
She nods. His question is as simple as it is friendly. In Germany, where the path to familiarity can be endless, that question would have taken far longer to come.
“In Rotterdam, in a street where the war was only a rumor. And you?”
“More or less around the corner, Regentesseplantsoen, on Kattensingel, at Chris Dudok’s.”
“I know Chris very well, we grew up not far from each other, my father used to be mayor here, I’m afraid. But as for me, I feel more comfortable in Rotterdam than anywhere else. Six years in that city, in a perfectly ordinary street, and you’re sold. Well, I’m speaking for myself, of course—you might run a mile.”
He’s not saying anything special, but what she hears sounds strangely familiar. There is an intimacy she has not experienced for a long time. For almost two years she has been living in a daze, her body has become a strange object in which she has barely any interest. But right now she can feel how Bruno is looking at her, as only a man can. Now and then. Without intent, as a kind of greeting, with a certain awe of the unfathomable.
The music begins. He bows. Does she want to dance? She hasn’t danced since her birthday party, in the blacked-out past of Berlin. June 1941, she still remembers it in detail and yet she wants to forget. She returns his bow, places one hand on his arm, and he leads her to the dance floor, which extends between the tightly packed tables and chairs like a hole in the ice. Their feet slide incredulously across the parquet. She has not been this close to a man for years.
“Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss”—are they really playing that song? Just like before, when Carl whirled her round and round, the windows covered with black paper, the gramophone with its big horn high up on a bookcase, the voice of Marlene Dietrich in a room full of friends. The warning sounded, the adrenaline raced as they listened to that forbidden song by that forbidden singer. No song had ever sounded like this in the land of the enemy, in the land of her husband.
Here, at De Reünie at least, everything is friendly and civilized. Emma feels no threat, the windows are open to allow in a little fresh air. Then she and Bruno dance past an enormous mirror and Emma sees herself. She is moving, apparently dancing, holding someone she does not know, and she herself is someone who is being held. As if she has come home, found herself, there in the mirror. Bruno seems to notice her bewilderment and stops dancing.
“Shall I take you back to Chris now, or would you like something to drink?”
Why do his innocent sentences affect her, even move her, so much?
“Yes, please, I haven’t danced for a long time. This calls for a glass of wine. Red.”
Bruno puts his arm around her waist to guide her through the throng. Carefully, without any suggestion of insistence. She glances sideways at him, and sees that his ear is wrapped in a thin gauze bandage. She had not noticed it before, but finds it disarming. The imperfection of his face does not put her off at all, on the contrary.
They stay at the club until late. It is one of those evenings that imperceptibly turns into night and then almost touches morning. Emma is asked to dance a few more times by her cousin’s friends. Chris will not set foot on the dance floor for anything, he watches the group from the sidelines. And Emma keeps trying to find her way back to Bruno. She feels that her behavior is irrational, they do not know each other, she does not even want to attract his attention, solitary as she has become.
Bruno asks her one more time. When the bandleader announces the last dance, everyone chooses a partner, even Chris ventures onto the dance floor with Imke. Bruno, the announcement taking him by surprise, is just in time to steal Emma away from the advances of a rather tipsy man. She sees him making his way across the floor toward her at a surprising speed, acts as if she has not been watching him and says she would be happy to dance again. But they do little dancing. A forest of elbows and shoes and constant little collisions forces them almost to a standstill. Their hands fixed, his on her hip, hers on his shoulder, in slow motion. Laughter and chatter around them, stumbling and apologies on all sides, the music can scarcely be heard above it all, they do not know how late it is, how tired the heart.
For one brief moment, their heads touch. She feels her ear brush against his bandaged ear, and a sensation from a long time ago stirs within her.
Emma is back in Holland.
5
Now it really was getting cold. The nurse had already come a few times to ask if she needed help, but Emma had just shaken her head. She wanted to sit there a while longer, listening to the night and to Oudedijk slowly falling silent. Her carer had once confessed that she thought it amusing and a little old-fashioned to be addressed as “nurse,” you could picture the starched caps and aprons. But there was also something soothing about “nurse,” a word that warded off doom. Was that what was approaching? Her doom?
“When exactly did I have my fall, nurse?”
“It was four months ago now. In the kitchen.”
“And how long have you been here, Judith?”—sometimes she called her Judith instead of “nurse.”
“Almost three months.”
“I feel like a stranger everywhere, except for in eternity.”
“What did you say?”
“Vroman, it was Vroman who wrote that, Leo Vroman, a poet. As if he knew how I feel, everything about that line is exactly right.”
It had been a bad fall. She had fetched the stepladder and had struggled up it to get a tin from a high cupboard, a tin she did not really need. It was foolish. A woman of ninety-six should not be climbing ladders and risking her neck. Of course Emma had come a cropper. The stepladder had slipped and the crash had brought a neighbor rushing upstairs. She found Emma on the kitchen floor, bent double with pain. A bone was sticking out from her wrist at an angle.
She went from hospital—“we’re going to have to splint it, my love”—to the rehabilitation center and, from there, back home. It was all a matter of slowly disappearing. About four months it took, and then off came the splint and the sling, her feet were useless, and her soul was transformed. Demons appeared from every nook and cranny. Emma was rehabilitated until finally she vanished.
Judith pushed Emma through to the bedroom, in a narrow wheelchair, through a home from which all the obstacles had been removed.
“To bed, to bed, said Sleepyhead, tarry a while, said Slow. Put on the pan, said Greedy Nan. Let’s sup before we go!”
Emma laughed. The nurse looked at her, dumbfounded.
“Are you hungry?”
“I certainly am, nurse. Aren’t you?”
“But you’re not going to eat anything, you discussed this with the doctor, you were going to stop eating, remember?”
“I remember everything, Judith. And that agreement still stands, but I’m ignoring it, just for now. Would you bring me a cracker with jam? I’m sure it won’t kill me.”
It sounded funny and that was how she had intended it. A cracker with jam, a small nod to eternity.
A little reluctantly, Judith brought her a cracker with jam and three raspberries on it, Emma’s favorite fruit. She had bushes full of them in her garden in Dahlem, the memory had not gone, a stubborn image that had persisted throughout the years. Her raspberry bushes, they were probably still there. How old did those bushes get, as old as people? As old as a tortoise or an elephant? Mysterious fruits, you had to pick them with respect or the blood would soon drip all over your fingers. She had made them into jam, boiled them and bottled them, she had a cellar full of mismatched pots and jars.
Carl used to love it.
6
“Adam can walk into the trap without you, you know. You don’t really have to go to that meeting, you do realize just how dangerous it is, don’t you?”
One last time, she tries to convince Carl. But it is a rear-guard action, a brief skirmish between hope and fear. Emma actually agrees with Carl, he can’t abandon Adam, his friend in good times and bad. One for all, all for one—all for nothing? Adam is married too, he and his wife have two children.
The night of July 24 was the most difficult one. It is a night that looms up later, at unguarded and unwanted moments, a night in which Emma becomes lost.
“What’s going to happen to our children now?”
Emma and Carl are lying naked, next to each other, on their backs, eyes open, hand in hand, it is four o’clock, just before the first birds wake. Carl turns to her and repeats her words, confused. “Our children?”
“I mean that they’ll never exist.”
“So you don’t think I was doing my best just now?”
He snorts with laughter, and so does Emma, in spite of the leaden weight of her words.
They will never exist, it is a threat of the worst kind, a vision of the end. A last-ditch attempt to change fate? Something like that, yes.
Emma’s sense of abandonment is bigger than the bed they are lying in, bigger than their house, it extends over the year when she lived with Carl and back into her childhood, to the days when her parents left her with her grandparents, all on her own. Carl beside her, Carl on top of her, inside her, Carl who loves her but is unable to protect her from these times of destruction and persecution. Who will soon go to Adam’s meeting, there is no escaping it.
As a last resort, she asks if that means he does not want to become a father. It is almost an indecent proposal, it sounds like disapproval, and she knows he cannot answer. But why doesn’t he say anything at all, why doesn’t he say anything else after his little joke, why doesn’t he give a sign, a sigh, even tears if need be, or a protest, or a question for her, just something, anything?
A weighty silence hangs in the air, echoing dread, judgment will come soon. It is a night that is not a night, but an exercise in waiting.
She looks at Carl’s silhouette, dark against a blacked-out window, impossible for the enemy to find, in that remote corner of Berlin. Ministry at eight, meeting at nine, that is what is planned, and that is what will happen. It is, of course, nonsense to think that everything will work out fine, as he has sworn to Emma.
His words sounded resigned. Adam is not crazy, he is prepared, he has explored all the escape routes, has all the excuses ready, every connection with the conspirators against Hitler has been erased. Emma, believe me, they won’t dare to take anyone from Foreign Affairs, not Adam, not me.
Emma lays her hand on his chest. Her fingers briefly drum on the place where his heart is, lightly, softly. Then, very carefully, she lies on top of him. She tucks him in like a child, nothing remains but his eyes and his breath. And hers. Five o’clock, six, six thirty, hours of a life that is over. Emma and Carl get up, put on their clothes mechanically, hear the sounds of the street, sounds of a degenerate day.
“Tell Adam to come and visit again soon, I’ve kept his favorite jam for him.”
A sentence from a little stage play, empty and without context.
Carl nods. “Indeed I will.”
From the front door to the street: garden path, raspberry bush, gate, turn left. Emma watches him go, like a puppet disappearing behind a curtain, controlled by an invisible hand. Through Dahlem, down into the U-Bahn, underneath the ruined city, up the stairs to the meeting room, where Adam looks up from his papers.
Their handshake, the questions on their faces.
7
“Judith?”
She felt the nurse’s hand on her shoulder and saw a ring on one of the fingers.
“A ring at the end of his nose, his nose, a ring at the end of his nose.”
Judith gave her patient a look of concern. What she was saying certainly sounded confused. She seemed young yet old at the same time, lucid yet troubled, a boat adrift.
Emma deftly dabbed the cracker crumbs from her plate with a wet finger. As happy as a little girl, to look at her.
The nurse had no idea.
What had Bruno said about the street where he had spent the war? That there had been a fence around it, that the rules that applied there were unknown elsewhere, and of no use. Sometimes a rumor of war drifted down the street, but there was little reaction.
The street was surrounded by roads and alleyways, a sailing lake, a s
chool, a wood nearby, and it looked insignificant, a street like so many others. All in all, that little street was no more than an elongated block of flats, three stories high, with maybe eighty or ninety people living there. Most were young, with small children or babies or some on the way. But insignificant, no, not that. Ferry, the womanizer, lived there with his wife, Dietje; Henri, the local hero, and his wife, Pauline; Hein, the judge, and his wife, Ank; Erik and his wife, Ruut, who had hidden people during the war; Jan, the lawyer, married to Anneke; Maarten, the philosopher, and his wife, Maria; René, the homosexual, and his boyfriends. And Bruno. The blank, the man on his own, who cycled to the offices of the Peterson Shipping Company every morning, to a life outside this sheltered idyll.
Step by step, the details of his street had made their way into Emma’s life. Bruno did not talk about those years easily, or often. But at the dance night at the club he is quite open with her.
With a degree of haste, he tells Emma stories that will remain with her, about that peculiar, closed-off little world, five years under a bell jar of illusions and repression. She just listens, makes no comment, why would she? She knows all about illusions and repression, her years in that well-to-do neighborhood in Berlin were just the same.
Emma listens as if her future depends on it. The music the band is playing is from before the war. Everything that is reliable, everything that still works, seems to be from before the war. Almost a year has passed since liberation, and people are actually beginning to get used to peace.
As the evening comes to an end, Chris Dudok and his group are among the last to leave. The musicians pack up their instruments, a cover goes over the piano, the barman announces the last round, the room becomes emptier and emptier. Bruno and Emma stand slightly to one side, beneath a giant painting of a group of men around a table looking sternly into the room.
