The Longest Night

by Otto de Kat

  Emma listens to her mother’s voice, she listens in silence, with a respect she has never felt before. So that’s why she looks as if she belongs in that picture Emma has hidden away: she does belong. Matteous took her mother to that remote spot to ask his surrogate mother to be his children’s grandmother. A complicated way of doing things, perhaps an African custom, or maybe evidence of psychological insight: traveling back in time together to ask a question that would have sounded inappropriate at home.

  “We got out of the Jeep and walked to the edge of the jungle, where there was less wind. And a little deeper into the trees you could hear the storm only high up above. That’s where Matteous told me that the gunman who had got them had probably belonged to the same mob that had attacked his village. He’d realized that his mother was probably no longer alive, but this wasn’t confirmed until after the war. Rumors travel fast in the Congo, but the truth moves slowly.”

  She thought about how she had never met Matteous. He was a part of her mother’s life, which made him a part of her own.

  Was he still alive somewhere, with his children and grand-children? How old would he be? No, he must be long dead by now, people in Africa did not grow old, and she herself was already ninety-six. One more day, maybe a couple. It all depended on the team.

  19

  “It’s the world that’s old, not you.”

  A sentence blown in on the breeze, where did it come from, who had said it? Bruno?

  Carl. Her birthday in Berlin, she had turned twenty-nine and had asked Carl if he thought she was old now. Twenty-nine, an incredible age, a pivotal point in an excited, agitated life. In a world that could end at any moment.

  Berlin, 1941. Celebrating a birthday in a respectable suburb, dancing to forbidden music, getting dizzy on cheap wine and stories of hope.

  Time was transparent. Judith slept on peacefully. After all those nights she had spent half-awake, she could not keep her eyes open on this last night.

  “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch with me for just one hour?”

  Another sentence drifting in from nowhere. Jesus in Gethsemane, the hero of Louis, the man she had debated with for a year about faith and the lack of it. All the way into his arms. Louis Terpstra, a temporary refuge. Whatever had possessed her to let things go so far? What did he see in her, and what on earth did she see in him?

  Louis came to Rotterdam once a fortnight to teach a course in philosophy, theology and poetry. A man with crepe soles, cigar ash on his lapel, a wave in his hair, a faded raincoat, but with a voice you believed.

  In the end his infatuation began to bother her, but even so he had managed to carry out a good deal of successful missionary work. Because Emma’s fascination with Christ had remained, even when she no longer wanted to see Louis. “I believe, help my disbelief”—Psalms, the Song of Songs, the parables, miracles, those deadly pronouncements, each and every one had a sound that appealed to her.

  Tonight, everything came within her reach. Lines of poetry, prose, fictional characters from the books she had read, with whom she was sometimes on more intimate terms than with her friends. Strange how the ghosts from a writer’s head could come almost physically close to you. Including Jesus of Nazareth, a thirty-three-year-old man from Palestine, a teacher for Louis, and also for her, for as long as it lasted.

  Bruno also believed that Jesus had been a miracle in world history, but for him Jesus was not the beginning and the end. Emma remembered, word for word, what Bruno had said when he came home one Sunday morning. Michael and Thomas were still young, she had not gone with him that day to the church where they occasionally listened to sermons.

  He told her how the female pastor—it was a liberal church where they quoted more from world literature than from the Bible, and where women stood in the pulpit—had discussed the parable of the rich man. He had done all that Jesus said, followed all the Commandments, except for one thing: Jesus had told him to sell his belongings, give the money to the poor and to follow him. But he simply could not do it. “And he went away sad.” That sentence had rankled with Bruno.

  “Jesus let him go away sad, Emma. Leave aside the impossible command to sell everything you’ve built up in your life, it’s cruel to allow a man like that, a better man than most, to go away sad. That’s not right. What kind of Messiah makes such unrealistic demands?”

  Emma had cheerfully replied that she could think of another gem from Jesus on the same subject: “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  Bruno had started earning more at that point and had become a member of the board at cousin Chris’ factory. Wealth beckoned, or at least poverty had been averted, and the Kingdom of Heaven placed at a safe distance.

  Chris Dudok’s factory was flourishing. Emma and Bruno also profited from that success, as the shares she had inherited from her mother increased in value every year. It was only after her mother’s death, exactly seventeen years after Oscar’s, that Emma had understood why she had been able to travel so easily and to help all those Africans. She had been rich. The Dudoks had been accumulating wealth for a century, they were people of independent means, and entrepreneurs to boot. Emma had never wondered how her mother was able to keep a flat in London and her father a house in Switzerland. And then there was that enormous house in Leeuwarden, where her grandparents had lived. She did not want to know, she had never been interested in money.

  That was just as well, because in their street everyone was equal, they all had the same number of rooms, a balcony, a fireplace, a cellar and a bicycle shed. Wealth did not count. The cars out on the street did become bigger, though, as the years went by, and the bicycles had more gears.

  Then the time came when the street’s veterans moved to detached houses surrounded by gardens, some distance away, over the border, out into the world. One by one, they left until finally only Bruno and Emma remained, and Bruno was the only resident who had lived there throughout the war. The street had been a fortress where the residents were safe. It was an armor-plated group of friends who looked after one another’s children, ate together, fell in love time and again, hid out at one another’s houses when the Krauts made their raids, who shared the food that fell from the sky onto their flat roofs in ’45, organized parties, children’s birthdays, celebrations for Queen’s Day. The street of their life, and the end would never come. But it did.

  Now Emma was the only one left, her house was still just as it had been when she came here for the first time and Maarten had put his head around the balcony partition and said, “Welcome to the street, Emma!” Maarten and Maria, their neighbors and best friends, a gang of four until death did them part. First Bruno, then Maarten, then Maria and soon Emma herself.

  Judith slept soundly through all of Emma’s thoughts. It was pleasant, Emma listened to her breaths, and to the silences between. The sleeping girl was a great source of peace.

  20

  The factory’s board meeting was always held in an upstairs room at De Reünie. Bruno was early, which was not like him. But he did not mind, as the empty club had a soothing effect. Light streamed into the room through the high windows, filtered by net curtains. Bridge tables stood ready and waiting for a competition that never seemed to end, the reading table gleamed, the barman was the only one around. The meeting would not begin for another hour.

  The barman brought him tea.

  “Mr. Dudok is already upstairs, Mr. Verweij.”

  Bruno stood up, took his tea and headed upstairs. Exactly as he’d later told Emma, who had listened to the story, pale and rigid.

  “Huh, fancy you already being . . .” Then not another word.

  Bruno, in the doorway, his hand on the doorknob, sees Chris sitting at the long conference table, head bowed, hands over his eyes, still in his coat and hat. He is crying, almost silently. Chris, all starch and stiff creases, as Bruno and Emma sometimes said to each other, a man who never made a fuss about a
nything, and who would be the last to reveal his emotions, is sitting there, overwhelmed by sadness, lost within himself. He jumps when he realizes someone is watching him.

  “Bruno!”

  In a few strides, Bruno is with him, taking him by the shoulders.

  “She’s dead. She was killed back then, in the bombing. I always thought as much, but I didn’t know for certain. And now I do. She no longer exists. And I wish I didn’t exist either.”

  Bruno lets him speak, asks no questions, even though he does not understand much of what Chris is saying, he just holds him.

  The tears passed, but what Chris told Bruno remained with him forever.

  Emma had not interrupted Bruno even once, but he must have noticed how she had listened, frozen, to his story. Her old life had suddenly returned, as a mirror image, in Chris’ story she recognized her years with Carl.

  Chris met her before the war, in Lübeck, where he had gone to work for a year. Her name was Julia. A German woman. She took everything he had always thought true and possible and turned it upside down. That one year, when he had been able to see her and to love her, had thrown him entirely off course. He wanted to shake off his existing commitments and not return home, all he wanted was to be with Julia, and to do whatever he could to get her out of that damned, doomed country. But she said no.

  “Julia opposed the regime, Bruno, she was carrying out her own personal guerrilla war. She was completely independent, with such a clear conviction and her brother in a concentration camp. Kristallnacht changed everything. Julia forced me to leave the country as soon as possible, she said I’d be putting her in danger if I stayed. She didn’t want to go with me, she had to take care of some friends and to try to get her brother released. She was determined, she said she loved me, but she wouldn’t let me talk her round. She promised she would follow me, and I left. I was cowardly enough to leave. I’ve never felt at home anywhere since.”

  Emma suddenly had a clear recollection of how strangely Chris had reacted when he opened the door to her that first time, after she came back from Germany. For a split second he had seen Julia, that must have been it.

  “Christ, Emma! For a moment I thought . . .”

  Julia. Carl. Both of them German, both faithful to an unknown God, to an ingrained notion that you do not abandon a friend, or a brother, or a country. Better to die than to betray yourself. Emma knew all about that, the unbending seriousness, the steely courage, the unshakable morality that would not be seduced, not even by love.

  Chris had struggled with it for another twenty years: Julia and his regrets and his powerlessness. Emma and Chris had become a kind of brother and sister. Over time, they had come to imagine that they really were siblings. Chris called Emma “sister,” and she referred to him as “brother Chris.” Cousins, brother and sister, what difference did it make? Their innocent fantasy was in keeping with their sense of kinship. They were strange allies, that was true, the cynic and the searcher, the childless arch-pessimist and the dedicated mother of two.

  Dedicated, yes, she was certainly that. From the moment Michael was born, she wanted nothing more than to be with him, to look at him, to play with him and carry him around, to push him along through life. In a pram, on a sledge, on the front of a bicycle, on the tram into town and quickly back again. He who leaves his room will perish.

  Emma became entirely and exclusively a mother, and she did not look back. She mothered Thomas, who came along a year after Michael, even more, if that were possible. No one needed to know what had happened in the country she came from. She would live, have children, and love fearlessly.

  She had done all three, and here she was, exhausted, with one more night to go.

  21

  The shock at his suicide is overwhelming.

  On the day before Chris’ funeral, Emma enters his big, frozen house. She sits at the window overlooking the pond. They have sat there so often, Chris on one side of the long table, she on the other.

  He never gave anything away. At most Emma noticed only that the sense of emptiness, every time she saw him, seemed to have grown larger, the loneliness stronger, the unspoken aversion to a soulless existence more intense. Emma always remained his sister, certainly. The incorrigibly optimistic mother, someone who goes to church, reads poems, knows the Bible, a sweet innocent knocking on the closed doors of his armored universe.

  “I wish I didn’t exist either” and “I’ve never felt at home anywhere since”—those two sentences echo in her mind. Sentences she had never forgotten. A warning? A veiled threat?

  A prediction of his end—always feared, never acknowledged. So it had finally come to this. Van Dijk, Chris’ left- and right-hand man, who drove him around, cooked, did the shopping for him, called her to pass on the unfathomable news, the world spun around her, she had to sit down, the telephone on her lap. The telephone, that venomous, elegant and seductive tool, bearer of tidings good and ill.

  “I just wanted to let you know that . . . ,” “Thank goodness I’ve got hold of you . . . ,” “Sadly . . . ,” “You’d better sit down . . .”

  Carl, Rob, Oscar, Kate, Bruno, and now Chris: atomized in one telephone call. The same bell that rings for everyone, about everyone, news announced by a shattered voice or a composed one.

  It is half past three in Chris’ house of death, where Emma is sitting at the table. At home, school is finishing for the day, the bell usually drifts through the open windows toward her. She knows the scene so well, the throngs of bicycles and scooters, the boys and girls with rucksacks, pushing and shoving one another as they race outside. It makes her glad, every time she sees it. The world could end, disasters occur all over the world, but school empties with the heedlessness of a new-born baby. An explosion of happiness, children leaving a school. Free! Emma has watched it hundreds, thousands of times, the sounds hitting high against the walls of her house in this daily ritual. Often she opens her window for a little while, to let in the shouts and the laughter.

  A clock in the hallway strikes four times. A smaller one on the window ledge mimics it. Even without its occupant, everything in the house retains its regularity: the fridge hums, the clocks tick, the barometer works, the garden sprinkler reacts to the weather, the lights go on automatically when it gets dark, the meters in the cupboard whir.

  Emma feels the house moving inaudibly, breathing in and out, the daily routine. Chris is lying in a building at the crematorium. Van Dijk has avoided the house since he found his boss dead in the study. She collected the key from him and now she is just sitting there. How in God’s name could anyone want to say goodbye to such a perfect view? A lawn beside an old pond, groups of trees with squirrels playing in them. Moorhens darting from lily pad to lily pad, fish popping to the surface every now and then. Crows high in the sky, rhododendrons, a sundial, a deck with wicker chairs, croquet hoops in the grass, the flagpole, an apple tree. A dome of tranquility: here lives a man who has inherited paradise.

  But apparently not. It seems that in the end all this made no impression on him, nothing did. The ground became rock where nothing could grow.

  Emma never spoke a word about what she had heard from Bruno about Julia. Chris did not even allude to the incident at any time. Old stories should be allowed to rest in peace, that is what she has always done.

  Let the dead rest, and love the living.

  Was it really because of Julia that Chris could see no way to go on? She can scarcely believe it. So he had been walking around with a dead woman for almost forty years, who had grown heavier and heavier, year after year after year.

  She stands up, the room has windows on every side, the sun shines in on cupboards and tables, the dried flowers on top of the piano. The varnish gleams on the paintings, whisky glasses on a silver tray reflect the light. On the corner of a desk she sees a photograph frame lying face down, its stand in the air. Fallen over, a disruption of all that Van Dijk’s hand has so strictly ordered and arranged.

  Emma takes the frame, st
ands it upright and looks into her own face. It is an old photograph, taken when she was still staying with Chris and Imke. A lifetime ago. Chris had asked her to pose for him, he wanted to try out his new camera.

  Julia, she must always have reminded him of Julia, from the day she returned from Germany. That was why he had photo-graphed her.

  Emma does not want to look any longer, and puts the photograph back down flat. Had Chris perhaps done the same, deliberately? As a gesture of farewell, apology for what he was going to do—you don’t have to look, you can’t see anything, you don’t exist anymore, everything is dark.

  Emma walks slowly around the room. She passes the piano on which no note was ever played, its sheaf of yellowing sheet music never used. Into the kitchen, down the hallway, up the stairs into the study and the bedroom. For a moment she wonders if she is allowed to walk around Chris’ house like this, like a detective tracking his final movements, because that is what she is doing. She is walking in his footsteps, following the trail to the study where he swallowed his pills.

  Nothing seems to have been touched, the room looks as if Chris might return at any minute to continue with whatever he was working on. On his desk are books and papers, an envelope with a piece of string tied around it, an old newspaper—a German one, she notices immediately—a fountain pen with its cap beside it, a few rubber bands and stamps. Work in progress, he has just been called away by Van Dijk, he will be back soon.

  Emma hesitates, and then sits down at the desk. Van Dijk told her that he had found Mr. Dudok close to his desk.

  “The door was half open, Mrs. Verweij, he was lying with one hand through the doorway.” Details she does not want to know.

  And on the desk there had been a bowl with remnants of porridge, a napkin on one side and a silver spoon on the other. Refinement to the bitter end.