The Longest Night

by Otto de Kat

  Every Tuesday and Thursday they had come to the street, on bicycles, by bus, later in cars. In the undiluted stillness of their employer’s flat, a woman who had become a friend, almost a mother and a grandmother. This trinity of lives intertwined, the seasons of work repeated over and over in every square meter. The slow and steady circulation of polishing silver, altering curtains, ironing and waxing furniture. The cupboards, the crockery, the paintings, the desk, the candlesticks, the beds—all according to an established cycle of dusting and replacing and changing. Spring cleaning, weekly cleaning, following the rhythm of nature, a holy order of things, a state of unshakable and irrevocable happiness.

  No snake, no tree of knowledge, no fruit to pick in this house, which by the end of the day gleamed like a polished apple. Amen.

  On the endless plains of their days together, which stretched out so far and for so long that memory no longer had any hold on them. Their voices had become so wholly familiar, as had the moment their key turned in the lock, the tap turned in the kitchen, the scent of coffee filled the flat, their work began.

  She told the Lenies how grateful she was for all their work and asked if she could give them something. Big Lenie nodded and Emma pointed at a box beside the pile of books. There was an envelope of money for them too, but Thomas would find that later.

  “My grandmother always used to wear these two rings, in the old days, when I lived with her in Leeuwarden.”

  As she spoke those words, she could picture the house on Eewal, the cobbled street with no traffic, and hear the maid humming as she polished the brass doorbell.

  “They’re for you. Or at least they are if you like them. Maybe you’d wear them every now and then and think of us, of my grandmother and me.”

  They laid their hands over and over on top of one another.

  Leeuwarden in the 1920s, the roaring twenties, ha, even in the north the sun sometimes broke through. Emma as a twelve-year-old, the daughter of a diplomat, who had lived in Dublin and Brussels and Rio de Janeiro, suddenly among the farmers’ sons and daughters at a strict school. Dream and trauma all in one. Caught between her grandparents’ warmth and the loss of a free life in foreign cities. Watse lived there, the boy she grew up with, who had remained her only friend, even after she left for Germany.

  The images slipped unnoticed into Emma’s bedroom, just as quietly as the Lenies had left the room, it was over before she knew it. The bell chimed, nine thirty, ten o’clock, but no, the bells of the Koninginnekerk no longer existed, you had to rely on electricity for the time, on ugly dials, on the radio.

  “The Führer miraculously survived an attempt on his life this morning, a sign that Providence protects the man who is destined to lead our people.”

  The radio predicts widespread raids throughout the country, the eradication of the enemy, the vermin will be chased from their holes, the cowardly attackers will not be safe anywhere. Their families will be arrested, their houses destroyed, they will curse the day they were born.

  Carl, Adam, run!

  Emma stared at the clock radio on her bedside table, a ray of sunshine fell across her bed, Judith had pulled back the curtain a little. Who had turned on the radio? Where was that menacing voice coming from? She could no longer trust her senses—was she dreaming it all? Everything seemed so utterly lifeless and there was a rushing inside her head, as if she were walking toward a sea, toward the surf. Which maybe she was, the sea no longer far away, the surf only a few more hours to go.

  “Judith!”

  “Yes, Mrs. Verweij. I’m here.”

  “Did you turn on the radio?”

  “No, no, it’s not on, would you like to listen to a little music, shall I look for something?”

  Music! The portable gramophone with the Bakelite Marlene Dietrich records, with scratches in her voice and everyone on a dance floor the size of a newspaper. Not too loud, a party member lives across the road. Emma dances with Carl and with Adam as if her life depends on it. And that is how it is—dancing today, dead tomorrow. The bombers do not ask about age or political persuasion.

  Thus far, their part of town has been spared and the British have generally flown to the center, but when would they discover Dahlem and Grunewald, the suburbs with the highest concentration of prominent murderers?

  Her head against Carl’s in a cradle of being lost and longing, they dance like children with no past and no thoughts of tomorrow. Adam and Clarita bump into them, laughing.

  “Put on another record, Carl!”

  33

  The fragmentation was increasing. Emma lay looking at the scenes that were taking place just beyond her reach and detaching themselves from her bed. She had to hold off the demons for just a little longer, they were now pressing in on all sides. It had gone well so far, everything was following a mysterious but plausible plan. But it was at risk of derailing, her body was shattered, her brain almost in pieces.

  Just a little longer, another half a day. First Michael, soon, then Thomas, then the team, thank God.

  Michael, her elder son, so suddenly far more ill than his father had ever been. Thanks to that gradual assassin, Parkinson’s, which slowly but surely locked you in, walled you up for good. First an emptiness inside the head, a loss of orientation, no longer being able to find your keys, then the growing panic about trivialities in a life full of information leaflets, side effects, and a fixed rhythm of pills. Emma had found his condition hard to bear, and that had fueled her guilt about her attack on him, an offense she had never been able to put right.

  “Michael?”

  Suddenly he was standing by her bedside, with his slight stoop. That was how he stood these days, as though the storm might break out at any moment.

  “Michael?”

  He looked at her, did not answer immediately. Took a hand-kerchief from his pocket and dabbed his cheek with it.

  “Hello, I’ve just come round to see you, to say hello.”

  Emma saw that his hair was long by his standards, and automatically told him to go to the barber’s.

  “And watch out for your ear, Michael.” She smiled, and so did he.

  “Thomas called yesterday to say he’s coming to help you. My little brother the nurse. Sister Thomas.”

  So he knew. Michael had not visited much in the past few months. Emma had understood, he had enough difficulty with his own condition, with the delusions that were taking hold of him.

  “Yes, he’s going to help me, Michael—he said he’d be here at about eleven. The doctor’s coming too.”

  Had he heard what she said? Where was he? His face had become unreadable, nothing moved in it, the cheeks of parchment, the eyes unnaturally dull and inward-looking. Michael was looking inward and no one knew what he could see.

  “Bye, Michael. Bye, Mickey.” She called him by his old nickname, from before the dawn of time, from before consciousness. He just stood there in his haze, as if he had stepped in by accident, or had forgotten why.

  “I’ll be off, then,” he said.

  He laid his hand on her head, on the thin white hair, an unintentional blessing—or maybe deliberate, who could say? Emma put her hand over her eyes. It was so dark beneath her hand, so directionless.

  She heard the click of the door as Michael closed it behind him, heard his footsteps and the tap of his walking stick. For a moment, she fell asleep, she needed strength to welcome the doctor with a clear head. She would probably start asking questions, one final check to find out if Emma knew what she was saying and what she wanted. A good woman, her doctor, but without a jot of humor.

  34

  “Shalom.”

  It could be only one person. Since their trip to Jerusalem, that had always been their greeting, slightly ironic, but always with the memory of that week in the white city, where the word “shalom” was on the optimistic side. But today it hit the mark.

  She did not want to react to his voice yet, wanted to absorb the sound into herself, to take it with her, to keep it for later,
for the hours alone.

  What would he think of her short hair? A week before, she had decided that she had had enough of it. Just before she had stopped eating, she had asked Judith to take the scissors to her hair, the hair she had cherished for decades and had put up in a kind of wave, day after day. With a subtle maneuver, she had always folded her long hair into a timeless style. But for the past few months she had no longer been able to lift her hands behind her back and neck, so her hair hung loose, a symbol of surrender.

  Thomas, her “German son,” as she liked to call him. What on earth was he doing in Germany? He said he felt at home there, that he found Hamburg so much more expansive and welcoming than Holland. Few cities had been as devastated as Hamburg, and rebuilt with such subtlety and style. Such a difference from Rotterdam.

  Did Clarita still live there? Was she still alive? The correspondence that had begun after their chance encounter had eventually come to an end, everything had been said, every word about their shared past and their husbands. They had drawn a line under it before they started repeating their stories.

  Emma would have to ask Thomas to find out where she was now, and then he could meet her if he wanted to. Clarita and Adam had two daughters, both born during the war. The courage of having children then, taking a stand against the flow of history.

  One afternoon in 1943, Clarita comes to see Emma, one child in a pushchair, the other on the way. Disaster is in the air, signs of breakdown all around, and Clarita is heavily pregnant, the very image of confidence. But it is a sham, she is at her wits’ end.

  “He keeps traveling all over, but wherever he goes he hits a brick wall, the Allies won’t listen to him. He flew to Stockholm yesterday, and he wants to go to Venice next, and who knows where else. The Gestapo must be tracking his movements. Even though he’s said nothing, I’m sure he’s involved in the conspiracy against Hitler.”

  “I know, Clarita. Carl is involved too. And he’s trying to keep up with Adam, but Carl says he’s only becoming more restless and worried. I think we just need to let them get on with it, even though I’m as scared as you are.”

  Emma jumped when Thomas gently shook her shoulder.

  “You’re here, at last. How was the flight?”

  A short delay, but he had been able to fly directly to Zestienhoven, it could not have been any faster. His father had given his best years to that airport. Long meetings with influential types in Rotterdam, along with civil servants from The Hague and specialists in aviation law. It was the late 1950s, but the idea had taken hold of Bruno and his friends some time before, and everyone was busily working away. On a vision that actually became reality: an airport for Rotterdam, not much bigger than a bowling alley, but it was there.

  Bruno on the way to the airport or back, on an icebreaker at the port, with a fishing rod by the water in Brakel, on his bicycle, in his hat, in long white trousers on the tennis court, pale as death in an endless series of hospitals. Bruno, with whom she had led a double life for so long, as perhaps he had with her. Love is not that easy to uproot and replant. From Berlin to Rotterdam. She had done it, and yet she had not.

  Zestienhoven, had Thomas said Zestienhoven? It was the sound of the most tender of times, the street still in the familiar arrangement. Brakel found, no sign of the war. Emma at her most beautiful, Maria always cheerful, friendship around every corner and time passing slowly and infinitely.

  It was then that she had once seen Bruno and Maria walking hand in hand, along the dyke by Loevestein.

  There is nothing mysterious or forbidden about it, it is happy and light-hearted and with no ulterior motives, secrets or hidden passion. Maarten saw it too, Bruno and Maria, the children, everyone together on the beach by the Waal, near the castle. That is the way it was, so innocent and isolated.

  Walking along a dyke, a picture cut out of a book, the fairy-tale castle in the background, children swimming in the river, meadows all around, on the water a boat with a woman at the helm, a flock of starlings high in the sky, cows with their hoofs in the water, a brick factory in the distance sounding the signal for lunch.

  Emma saw it and never forgot. That was how to walk and to live and to love and to outwit death. That was how Carl and she had once walked on the shores of the Wannsee on Sunday mornings, or along the streets of Grunewald, free and with no history.

  The vision passed before Emma’s downcast eyes. Thomas waited for her to speak.

  Zestienhoven, where she had dropped Bruno off so many times, when he urgently needed to go to Germany with K.P. again, always to that dreaded Germany, which haunted her sleep. Where they murdered Carl—she does not even know where his grave is, he has no grave. Never looked for it, never thought of going to look for it. Dumped probably, burned and scattered, plowed in, carried on the wind. Enemies of the state.

  Emma sensed Thomas looking at her—and how much good it did her.

  “You have to find Carl’s grave, Thomas. Do you think it’s possible, did they keep a record, they must have done, they kept a record of everyone and everything.”

  What a task. Thomas promised without hesitation, he would track it down, absolutely, he would take care of it.

  He lowered the fence around the bed and sat on the edge, close, almost touching her. Emma rested her hand on his arm, as if they were about to go for a walk. His journey still all around him, not even his scarf removed, summer coat on, ready to leave, that was how Thomas sat there.

  “That time in Jerusalem, I’ve often thought back to that evening in the courtyard of the American Colony Hotel—I’m so sorry for burdening you with far, far too many intimate details. Do you remember the look of dismay on that American’s face, though, the man who was so proud of his Lawrence of Arabia?”

  Thomas laughed, as if there were nothing in the air, nothing about to happen. His mother seemed able to recall her life in flashes and fragments, without worrying about time or sequence. In exquisite detail, almost like a play, as a carefree observer.

  “Yes, he was so deeply offended that he went striding off. We saw him in the Garden of Gethsemane later, too—do you remember? And we heard him declaring to someone in his party that he’d met Lawrence at exactly that spot. The Judas. We were crying with laughter when we left the holy site, and you said it was most inappropriate.”

  Emma looked at Thomas. The way he spoke, it lifted her up. Her life had gradually come to a standstill, but when he was around it momentarily sprang back into motion. Thomas, who had painlessly slipped away from her, who was so close to her, even though he lived abroad and was always traveling.

  “New hairdo, Mother? Very perky.”

  The seriousness was yet to come, although Emma’s request had been weighty enough. But they never managed to go for long without a few little jokes. He was the only one who could still make her laugh.

  “I couldn’t put it up anymore. It’s so strange, that your own arms can become too heavy to lift. My hair was just hanging there, doing nothing. So Judith cut it off for me. They say hair has no sense of feeling, but it hurt all the same.”

  A joke? Honesty? What she said sounded so ordinary, so beyond any suspicion of pretension. Hair that hurts, strength ebbing away. What had for so long been part of an animated life—take out the scissors, chop it all off.

  35

  Tuesday morning, April 29, 2008. Thomas saw his mother’s diary lying open, one of those big art diaries from Museum Boijmans, in which she had noted her daily business for as long as anyone could remember. In her distinctive handwriting. “My scrawl,” she called it. A hand at war with the language. Right to the last she had written with letters that grew bigger and bigger, as if she were constructing a defensive wall.

  Emma’s gaze followed his, she pointed at the diary, asked him to keep all her letters and papers and take them to Hamburg. She had prepared for this moment, rehearsing what she wanted to say. This was her legacy, she had nothing but some old pieces of paper, the flotsam of history.

  “Letters from Clar
ita von Trott, and from Bruno, and from Rob. And from Mr. Wapenaar, whom you sadly never knew. He slipped away quietly, his letters are about his friendship with your grandfather. Don’t throw them away, Thomas, don’t throw anything away. Oscar’s letters from the days I was at school in Leeuwarden and lived with my dear grandparents, I kept them because . . .” Emma hesitated. “I kept them because they were the nicest letters I ever received from him. Every word is full of longing for the time we were still together, in Rio and Dublin and Brussels. They’d left me behind in the Netherlands and were roaming the world, but you know that already. And still, if there’s one place I felt at home, it was in Leeuwarden. With Watse . . .”

  Emma paused. What she had said was still hanging in the air. Thomas saw how tired she was and how much effort it took for her to continue.

  Skating with Watse, her childhood friend from Leeuwarden, her protector, the man who had warned her so often about Naziland, where no one was any good and no love could ever last. Skating across the Frisian lakes, black ice, she could hear the blades swishing, a sound that echoed across eighty years.

  They put on their wooden speed skates and fall into a swift rhythm, racing toward a horizon of wild geese, snowy skies, sunrises and sunsets. Without tiring, they skate along after each other, into their youth and an unknown future.

  A bullet in the back for Watse. But no, it was not a bullet. Much later she hears that he was not shot while trying to escape at all, as she was told at first. He had fled the Netherlands, and went to Sweden and then the East Indies, where he died.

  It was a false rumor, and she had cried for him in Berlin, while he was still alive. She had mourned as he was sailing on a boat to Stockholm, she had pictured him falling down dead, she was exhausted with grief for him.

  Then, then, in that terrible city, in that sinister building on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, the Gestapo headquarters, where she is humiliated and interrogated by a lewd and leering man who smokes and taps his shoe on the floor, that tapping on the bare concrete floor, that brazen, indifferent tapping. That leg, with its crude and nasty foot.