The Longest Night

by Otto de Kat

  Then she tells Lara about her years in Berlin, how she had cursed her father when he had not got in touch and had apparently done nothing with the news she had given him in Geneva. She had burdened him with Carl’s secret, that the Germans were going to invade Russia on June 22 of that year. Of course she had been overflowing with the terrible possibility of an invasion, and of course she thought Oscar should know, maybe he could warn someone. But afterward she had blamed herself for involving him. Such childish behavior, calling in your father, making yourself the center of his attention. She should have taken immediate action herself and done something with the information.

  Lara does not interrupt Emma even for a moment. Who knows, thinks Emma, maybe she can hear the sound of Oscar’s voice. Then a log rolls off the carefully built fire, but even before it can land on the parquet floor, Emma has snatched a poker and pushed it back into the hearth, fast, nimble. Smiling, she holds up the poker. Victory. A waiter dashes over, asks what he can do for them. He must have thought Emma was trying to summon him to place an order.

  “Oh, no, I wasn’t calling you over, but now that you’re here, I think we might well like to order something. Don’t you, Mrs. O’Brien?”

  “I do hope you’ll call me Lara, and yes, a whisky, please. No ice.”

  Emma has an Irish coffee.

  “Do you live in Switzerland, Lara?”

  “No, I left during the war, got a job in Ireland. Better a neutral Ireland, I thought, than a neutral Switzerland. But it was probably more to escape your father.”

  How long has Oscar been dead now? More than fifteen years. With all the hundreds of deaths in that disastrous year of flooding, it was easy to be buried unnoticed. Who would pay attention to a mysterious diplomat being committed to the earth in Driehuis-Westerveld? A few stalwarts, a handful of relatives, a war comrade or two, most had already passed away.

  Emma realizes that she has spoken freely about Carl, without hesitation. As if there were no Bruno, as if everything were as it once was. She and Carl in Geneva, in Berlin, in the all-encompassing grasp of the war and yet still in each other’s arms, living from day to day.

  “I’ve been here often since ’41, Emma, at this hotel, I mean. It’s incredible that we didn’t meet sooner. We could easily have walked past each other, in the village or here. As soon as the war ended, I started coming here to ski almost every year, and we generally stay at this hotel.”

  “Hotel Jungfrau? We’ve taken holidays in Wengen for as long as I can remember, and this hotel was the ideal place for afternoon tea after skiing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat out on the terrace with my parents, and then later with my husband and children.”

  Lara says nothing, then everything.

  “The first time Oscar saw me was here, at one of the tables outside. We met down in the village the next day, at Café Eiger. It didn’t stop snowing, and that kept us inside the café all day. I don’t know why or how it happened, but our lives suddenly slid together, out of nowhere. It was love, entirely unexpected, and a love that neither of us was looking for. The snow just went on falling. And, as lightly as snow falls, so mysterious and soft, that’s how it happened between us. One day, and then four months, almost enough for a lifetime.”

  Emma recognizes what she hears.

  27

  The first patches of light on the houses spread slowly upward and downward. A few birds tentatively begin to whistle, a surprised sound—for anyone who listened. Emma heard them, for years now she had fed the tits, sparrows, finches and pigeons on a small shelf just outside the window, with a view of Oudedijk. Her own little nature table, nuts, pieces of crust that she carefully cut to beak size.

  It was six o’clock, lines 16 and 17 were already running down Oudedijk, and some early cyclists were on their way to the center, briefcases on their racks.

  Bruno had once told her that, in November 1944, all the men between seventeen and forty had been called up to work in Germany. Everyone in the street had received the order in the post. They were told to stand in front of their houses and then march together to the station.

  In their street, no one had stood ready and waiting, but hundreds went marching along Oudedijk with suitcases and kitbags. A grim procession, at six in the morning. They were boys who had nowhere to hide, boys whose parents said, “Go on, it won’t be as bad as you think,” boys who wanted to go, for whom anything was better than sitting around at home. How many had made it through unscathed? Probably not one. Rotterdam had mobilized more than fifty thousand men. Fifty thousand, the biggest raid in Europe, one last convulsion. Now almost forgotten.

  Bruno and the men from the street, together with a few other local lads, had spent a number of days in the basement of the huge school building across the way. It was a poor hiding place, fifty of them in coalholes, there was singing and shouting, someone had waved a pistol. More overconfident than underground. Bruno thought it was a miracle that the Krauts had not searched the school.

  After that raid he stopped showing up at the office. The hunger set in, along with the cold. Maria was out of reach now, they must have been lonely months. The street at its lowest point, he had once let slip.

  How many times had she and Bruno stood on the flat roof of their building, looking out over the world, over the Rotterdam that he was helping to rebuild? And meanwhile he was destroying himself. Smoking, endless unhealthy dinners, in the car, out of the car, traveling, meetings, more meetings. That was how he had died, as unexpectedly as he had come: with an invitation to dance.

  A ritual dance as it later turned out, a promise. A love in peacetime.

  That last winter of the war, the coldest, in the hills of the Black Forest. Hiding from impending doom. Fog, snow, hail, the villages all dug themselves in more deeply than ever. The bombers flew over, high overhead, maybe on their way to Berlin, on their way to her friends, if they were still alive.

  Emma rarely went outside, the Ruperts were not entirely certain that no one would give her away, the wife of a traitor. Months of isolation, they passed mechanically, mutely.

  Judith was still asleep. The sleep of the innocent, the dreams of an exhausted nurse who would soon wake up startled to find the bed beside her empty, and the night over. Not yet, Judith, wait just a little longer.

  She kept returning to the Black Forest that night. It had been the vacuum of her life, the interval, Carl dead, Bruno nowhere as yet, and Emma hidden away in the Black Forest. The symbolism of the name and place were not lost on her.

  Helmut Wachter, whatever became of him? The Americans had taken him early one morning. What on earth did they want with a veterinary surgeon? From her room at the top of the house, Emma had seen them leading him away. She had knocked on her window, waved at him. He had waved back, calm, serious, almost polite, and without fear. She had found out later that they needed him as an interpreter, he knew some English. Since Christmas Eve, Emma had briefly spoken to him a few times. The story he had told that night in the church—none of Louis’ stories was a match for it, no tales, or parables, or sermons.

  If only it were true, that story, if you could truly dare to believe it at the end of your life. She had never forgotten Wachter’s words, they fluttered in and out of Emma’s head until the very end.

  Hesitantly he begins, the veterinary surgeon among the churchgoers, farmers, soldiers on leave or no longer able to fight, women without men, grandmothers, old men still hoping for a miracle, a few sleeping children. Vet and stand-in pastor, he is not a natural speaker.

  “A man was walking along the beach, but it could have been a woman, I’m not quite sure. A person. Thinking about his life, maybe he didn’t have much time left to live. He walked and he thought and, after a while, he turned his head and saw two sets of footprints in the sand—God was walking beside him. But whenever he remembered bad times, and times when he had been sad and despairing, he saw just one set of footprints.

  “‘Why weren’t you there when I needed you most?’ he asked
God. And God replied that he had been walking with him all along. ‘But why not in my times of greatest misery, when I missed you and needed you so much?’

  “‘Those were the days when I carried you.’”

  And so the farmer and the mother and the soldier and the postman and the nurse and the schoolteacher and the woman in hiding were all united by a vet, thought Emma. How long it was before peace finally came.

  28

  After the light came the first sounds. Across the road, the grocer rolled up the iron shutters of his shop, the rattling of a new day. Seven o’clock, it was about to begin. The machinery was in motion, the members of the team were getting dressed, the pilot at the airport in Hamburg was checking his cockpit, Little Lenie, her cleaning lady, was dreading the morning when she would have to iron her employer’s nightgown, her attire for the long night.

  “Mrs. Verweij, what are you doing?!” Judith just about tumbled into the room, pale with shock.

  “Nothing much, nurse, I didn’t want to wake you, and I walked through here, there was no one around to carry me, as far as I could see.”

  Emma smiled, still half in the Black Forest, in Helmut Wachter’s cold, damp church.

  “I’ll take you back, I’ll get the wheelchair. You just stay there.”

  The angel, the caring soul. So young and so concerned about an old woman, a woman who dreamed and wandered and issued oracles in the form of proverbs and poems. Emma thought of the synonyms for her condition, they came to her easily, she was not mad, never had been, tired though, unspeakably exhausted.

  The nurse expertly steered her back to bed. She arranged two pillows behind her back and put up the rails around the bed. Ready to set sail, and the pale pink blankets almost created the impression that it was pleasant. Judith would not move from her side now, that much was clear.

  “What time is it, nurse?”

  “Almost eight o’clock.”

  The clock as the final thing to hold on to at a moment when time was nearly out of sight. Everything was intertwined, past and present had become interchangeable. Sometimes Emma even had the feeling that she was beginning to overlap and coincide with the people she had lived with and loved.

  She thought about Maria.

  Maria Steinz, friend, neighbor, actress—admittedly manquée, but even so. Her laughter echoed over the balconies, worried neighbors looked up, pigeons fled the roof.

  “Maria, quiet! The children are asleep,” people shouted.

  Which only increased the laughter. There was something exotic about her, she did not belong in the Low Countries, was impulsive and curious, and warm and welcoming. Maria conquered everyone she met. As she had Bruno. And Emma and so many others. Michael and Thomas too. The whole Verweij family had marched with her band. Year in, year out, carried along by her music. Viva Maria! How long had she been dead now? Emma tried to put the years in order, like the hours. It was almost impossible.

  She was on a big, dark chessboard, being pushed back and forth, up and down.

  She saw a tower, the tower of Loevestein, the magic word for boundless happiness, she thought of the little beaches along the Waal, where they swam in the summer.

  They take the ferry from Vuren to Brakel. Sunlight flashes on the river, the ferryman steers clear of the heavily laden barges on their way to Germany. Bruno, hat on, hands in his pockets, spots the towers of the castle, far in the distance. Points at them, beckons Emma to get out of the car and to come and look. There! Look, there! With a grating sound, the ferry’s ramp slides onto the shore, the cars cautiously make their way onto dry land, the captain on the bridge waves at everyone to hurry, he has to go back, there are cars already waiting on the opposite bank.

  It was the summer of ’56, Emma could not have been mistaken about that year. Whenever she thought about a summer, it was the summer of ’56, the benchmark of her existence, compelling and vast in the smallest possible way, immovably fixed.

  Bruno’s skin complaint had broken out in full force, but in the summer the misery sometimes eased for a few weeks, the skin recovered and the growths, left and right, retreated. That summer, too. The summer when the first gaps in the street had appeared, the first houses were abandoned. The judge, the lawyer, the businessman, they had outgrown the war, they had discovered prosperity.

  Maria and Maarten had moved to a place that Bruno and Emma had vaguely heard of but, once they had visited, no number of wild horses could have dragged them back.

  “Helmond, it’s all in the name,” Maria always said. Maarten had become a director of a textile factory in this “hellmouth,” where they manufactured fabrics worn by half the women in Africa. And by Maria herself, who wore dresses with crazy patterns, as if someone had thrown the dressing-up box wide open. But she wore them with style, a white African, laughing, always laughing.

  The Waal at Gorkum. Bruno’s first memories are there—his father was the town’s mayor before he was “promoted” to Gouda. Anyone who grows up along a river will always want to travel—could that be it? Not especially so for Bruno, although he often has to go abroad for his job. For him, it is more that anyone who has been a child beside a river will always long to go back. The wanderer returned. There! Look, there!

  Emma gets out of the car and goes to stand beside him. She puts her hand into his inside coat pocket.

  “I who hoist the white sails, sit at the helm and sing, life is a strange journey, our heart a gloomy thing.”

  Judith listened to the lines, which seemed to come from another world. She looked at Emma, whose eyes were closed. The words sounded as if she were speaking to someone.

  My goodness, those words, another of her poets for sure, the woman was overflowing with old lines, once read and saved for the right moment.

  Where was she now, Mrs. Verweij? Judith rested her hand on the bed rail.

  “What if we bought a little house somewhere around here, wouldn’t that be nice? I think we could manage it, it doesn’t have to be expensive, and we could go at the weekends, it’s three-quarters of an hour’s drive.”

  Bruno is leaning over the rail of the Brakel. The waves of a passing boat slap against the side of the ferry, which gently sways. He takes Emma’s hand out of his pocket and holds it to his cheek. Back to the river of his childhood, to the dyke villages and the water meadows that are flooded every winter.

  Back.

  Is Bruno’s longing for the time before his sickness, for the war, for the street when it was still intact? For his father and mother? Emma wonders about this as they climb back into the car.

  They drive along the Waal in their Renault 4CV, following the signs for Poederoijen and Woudrichem, heading into Munnikenland. Along the dyke, where goats are grazing and houses peep over, Bruno steers toward Loevestein, the castle he had seen as a child from the quay in Gorkum. A gloomy thing.

  “Was your father in charge of Loevestein too, is it part of Gorkum?”

  “He was in charge of everything his one eye could see.”

  Emma smiles, she has remembered the few stories that Bruno has told her about his father.

  As an officer in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army he had lost one of his eyes in a rebel attack in Aceh. Bruno was the youngest of the children, and the quietest. He was as gentle as his brother Rob was wild, and he did not cope well with arguments. The rift between Rob and their father had broken his heart, and their mother’s, most of all, Emma had sometimes thought. The one-eyed officer barely reacted when his son Rob emigrated to South Africa, but Bruno had often wondered if that was not what had killed his father. Sadness that had turned inward and had no way out.

  “It wasn’t Staal who caused it, Emma. It was Rob.”

  He had lived in Gorkum until he was twelve, with his brothers, who had taught him to skate, swim and sail. They took him with them into the polders, and sometimes fought in town with boys from other neighborhoods, but he never wanted to join in with that. He preferred to go out skating, in the Bommelerwaard or the Alblasserwaard. A
s soon as the water froze, they were out on their skates. He later made the same trips with Michael and Thomas, unforgettable days on the ice.

  He had not changed, Emma had often thought, but had remained a boy of twelve, who had never come all the way home, stopping halfway along the dyke to look out in amazement over the river and at the old landscape of his early years.

  29

  “Stop, Bruno, stop! There’s your house!”

  Beneath them is a potato field with a dyke house at its edge. The top floor looks out over the river in the distance and the silhouette of Loevestein beyond. On a post among the potatoes, barely visible, is a sign: FOR SALE. But the way it has been planted in the ground makes it seem more as if the house is not, in fact, for sale. A man dressed all in black and wearing a black cap is rooting around in the soil with a hoe. He would make a grave-digger look cheerful.

  Once they are out of the car, they notice that the house is exactly at the point where two dykes meet, the Waaldijk and the Nieuwedijk.

  “From Oudedijk to Nieuwedijk, the old to the new.” They laugh, quietly, so as not to make the gravedigger uncomfortable.

  “Excuse me. Is this house for sale?”

  The man removes his cap, takes his pipe out of his mouth, thinks for a while, and then says, reluctantly: “It is.”

  In return, Bruno takes off his hat. He takes hold of Emma’s hand and asks if they can come down there. They can. The steep stone steps to the house are overgrown with dandelions and grass.

  “Versteeg,” is all he says. His name. And then, after another lengthy pause: “So you’ll be from the west, then?”

  The thaw begins, Bruno is at his best. They drive back to Rotterdam, euphoric. Their street suddenly seems so small, without those floodplains outside the window.