Little by little things began to change, Maria’s visits became more frequent, and sometimes she even convinced Willemien to go outside for a little while. Eventually the time came when, ten months after our arrival in Figueres, Willemien would go out on her own, and only went to bed when it was time to go to sleep.
We celebrated the anniversary of our arrival in Cataluña by buying a flat. Willemien said we needed a change, to leave her illness behind in the bed in the flat we had rented, to take another step toward winning this game. The apartment was on Moreria Street; it was January 1978 when we moved in.
That first night in our new home, sick Willemien got into bed and the old Willemien got out of it. She often went out to visit the Dalí Museum, to meet Maria for a walk and a chat, or to take the boys to the Toy Museum, where Robert and Simon, who were seven and ten, felt like they were living a dream, and Arjen, who had grown up quickly in the past year, tried his best to pretend he was not bored to death.
It wasn’t long after these museum visits began that Willemien started to write. She began with the story of the stone houses. She showed me her story and I was delighted to return to the fantasy she had first invented visiting my homeland. Then she told me she was working on a new project but that I couldn’t ask her anything about it until she had finished. So I didn’t. A few weeks later she showed me what she had written.
It wasn’t a story. It was much larger than a sheet of paper, practically a poster, a broad white background broken only by small words scattered in space, connected by fine lines. Before I realized what I was looking at I already had a name for it. It was a constellation. I took a close look at the tiny words and I saw that each of them was a name. In the center I found my name, and Willemien’s, accompanied by the children’s. Around us, a little further away, were the names of my boss, Carles, and his wife, Maria, the woman at the market-stall, Pepita, and Arjen’s teacher,Teresa. In total there were about twenty names that made up our world, the people around us who we had gotten to know since we moved to Figueres. There was still a lot of blank space around these twenty names, space that would be occupied by the other people we’d meet as we proceeded on our journey.
“Arjen’s first girlfriend,” Willemien said, smiling, “the assistant who will work in our shop when we open it, my first student in my painting classes, everyone will have a place in this constellation, they will all be connected to us.”
I looked at the poster for a long time, wondering why Willemien needed to fill a blank piece of paper with the names of our friends and acquaintances. As if she had read my mind she said, “I made it so we won’t forget we’re not alone.”
The good years arrived. Willemien insisted she needed a bicycle to get around town. I didn’t like the idea, it seemed dangerous to me, there were more cars on the road every day, and because in Spain only children rode bicycles around town. I still remember my last conversation with Willemien about this, her vehemence and her reasoning. She needed to get around town easily, she said, she needed to feel the wind on her face, to feel a little bit Dutch. And all of this could be accomplished by buying a bicycle. It was so simple, but all I could think about was what people would say. Then she said it, she spat out one of those phrases she knew would put an end to the discussion: “Why is it that in Holland you never worried about what the neighbors would say when the children were still awake having dinner at nine at night?”
We bought a white Orbea bicycle. Willemien put some colorful stripes on it with electrical tape, to personalize it, and began riding around town. In the beginning the neighbors watched her, surprised, but soon Willemien and her bicycle were accepted as part of the Figueran landscape. When we opened a small painting school a year later, almost everyone in town knew the teacher was the cyclist with the foreign accent.
The school worked out well. Willemien had students to keep her busy and to lavish her creativity upon.
We never did open the electronic appliance store that Willemien had envisioned. We didn’t need to. We were happy, I in my job and she in her school, the boys growing up, playing in the streets, studying in high school and making plans for the future.
Life carried on. One by one the boys left; Arjen to Holland, and Simon and Robert to Barcelona. Things happened the way they were meant to, and we survived what had been thrust upon us. Until we couldn’t any longer. Until she passed away.
Her
A plane was zooming overhead when I walked into Karen Abrams’s bar.
“Have you heard?” Karen Abrams asked me, upset.
“About what?”
“They want to demolish an entire town.”
“What?”
“Some no-name town in Groningen, they’ve decided they don’t need it anymore, this town, and they want to turn it into a nature preserve. Turning it back over to nature. How ridiculous is that?”
“I don’t know the details, but it doesn’t sound so strange to me. If no one lives there anymore, it seems like a good idea.”
“Yeah, but people do still live there! That’s why it’s scandalous! People who chose to live in a quiet little town and along come the city-folk and say, Look, a little town like this, no one wants to live here, it’s too quiet . . . Hey, let’s get rid of it.”
“You know someone from there?”
“No, not a soul. But I do know those young politicians who think they’ll go a long way proposing crazy ideas like this.”
I didn’t have any interest in continuing the conversation. The truth was that I couldn’t have cared less what happened to the town. If Karen Abrams had heard about it, on the news no doubt, then there were already plenty of people on the case. I didn’t need to get involved, too.
I was unmoved by her indignation. She stood there expectantly and I looked out the window.
“What are you thinking about?” she eventually asked me.
“I agreed to be interviewed about my hundred names. Do you remember what I told you?”
“Yeah, the journalist with the Spanish surname.”
“I agreed to meet her here. She’ll be here in half an hour. I didn’t want to meet her at my place. You never know what a journalist might write . . .”
“Here? Don’t you think it’s too busy? Wouldn’t you rather go upstairs and do it in my kitchen?”
Now that she mentioned it, that did seem like a better place to meet—the place where I had begun my search.
“Do you want to go get ready? Have a think about what you want to tell her? You have to be careful with journalists, they know exactly what to ask to get the answers they want to hear,” Karen Abrams said.
I nodded and she said she’d take me up.
“I can help you get ready.” She arranged for someone to watch the bar and for someone to bring Lianne Pérez-Horst upstairs, when she came, and we went upstairs to her living room. She tidied up a little while I looked around, trying to imagine what Lianne Pérez-Horst would see. Karen Abrams’s home was the exact opposite of the journalist’s. Instead of parquet floors, this one had wall-to-wall carpeting; instead of tall bookshelves, Karen Abrams had a jungle of plants. Instead of cats, this old building had mice.
I decided to make sure Lianne Pérez-Horst knew this wasn’t my home.
I looked at the time on my phone. In twenty minutes everything would change. Karen Abrams made two cups of tea and we sat at the same table in the same seats where we’d sat when I asked her that first time we met about Someren. The only difference was that now we were surrounded by winter’s feeble light and the room looked smaller. I realized I was seeing the real Karen Abrams, not the barkeep. Two years had passed, and I still knew nothing about her. Perhaps she had a few more wrinkles, but apart from that she was still the same svelte, frail woman I had met back then. I only saw this side of her in her living room. The other side of her, the one I saw downstairs, always hid her body behind the bar, making her seem stronge
r and older.
“I’ll leave you alone when she gets here,” Karen Abrams said after I looked at my phone for a third time. I knew she would have liked to stay. She went downstairs and a few minutes later Lianne Pérez-Horst appeared. I was looking out the window; I didn’t expect her quite so soon.
The journalist approached me, smiling. She carried an impressive backpack for her photography equipment, which she quickly opened on the kitchen table. She took out a small microphone, a pair of cables, a tape recorder, and a camera. She glanced around as she set the equipment up on the table.
I sat down in front of the microphone and realized she had chosen the seat that gave me a view of the whole room. I hadn’t realized before: it was obviously the “visitor’s seat” with the best view—if there was a good view in the place. Lianne Pérez-Horst sat down in the chair facing the kitchen. With a little luck, or not, she might even see a mouse scamper across the counter.
“Karen Abrams has been kind enough to let us meet up here,” I said just to make it clear that if a mouse did appear, it wasn’t my mouse.
“Yes, it’s very kind of her.” Lianne Pérez-Horst was still busy testing her equipment. She finally sat down in front of me.
“Okay, let’s begin,” she said. She turned the tape recorder on, waited a few seconds, and asked,“Would you like to tell me about your list of one hundred names?”
Suddenly it all seemed like a bad idea. Somehow I had expected her to start by saying something about why we were doing the interview, before throwing the first question at me. Now I felt like I was trapped in a live broadcast. The tape recorder intimidated me. If I said too much, if I said something slightly inaccurate, I wouldn’t be able to take it back. Everything would be recorded on that machine so she could listen to it over and over again.
Lianne Pérez-Horst waited for me to answer but I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t want to talk about the day when Anneke and I had gone to the Someren town hall and police station to request the list. Although everything had happened just as I remembered it, I knew the story sounded completely absurd.
“They sent it to my house,” I eventually said.
“Who sent it?”
“Someone who wanted to help me.”
“Someone who knows who you’re looking for?”
“I don’t think the person who sent the list knows. They just supplied a list of the likely candidates.”
“How did they decide which names should be on the list?”
“I don’t know.”
The doubts. The same doubts I’d always harbored, she had them too. The possibility the list was the result of a misunderstanding, or that Anneke had made it, or that I had made it. Nevertheless, I had always wanted to believe that the police officer had sent me the list; was there really any other option for him? I needed to believe this, like a lie I had decided to accept. As a secret.
There’s no such thing as a life without secrets. Couples have secrets, families have secrets, cities have secrets, countries have secrets. I have my own secrets. But it’s also a fact that sooner or later, secrets come to light.
“One day I folded the list with the hundred names into a paper plane,” I said into the microphone. “I threw the plane into the garden of Anneke and Jan’s house for a reason: if it fell in the pond, and the list sank slowly into the water, it would be a sign that I had to forget about it, that the list was stupid. But if it didn’t, if the plane landed on the grass, it would be a sign it was real, a sign not to give up. If the plane landed on the grass, I would begin searching for my angel.”
Lianne Pérez-Horst wrote the names “Jan” and “Anneke” in her notebook of graph paper.
“You put your fate in the hands of the wind?” she asked, while her pen made a question mark after Anneke’s name.
“I was fifteen.”
“Did you have to fish the plane out of the pond?”
“It landed on the grass.”
I sat there, silent. She held her pen still.
“After launching the plane,” I continued, “I ran down to the garden to get the list, before Anneke and Jan saw what I was doing. Then I unfolded the paper and I reread all the names on the list until I had memorized them. From that moment on, I knew I would find them all, though I still didn’t know how. I also thought it was possible I might run into the people on the list at any time. So I needed to memorize them, so I’d always know.”
“Would you recite the names on the list for me?”
“Why? I can show you.”
“I’d like to hear you say them.”
I don’t know why I did it. Perhaps because I wanted her to like me.
“Karen Abrams,” I began, reciting slowly,“Anke Adriaans,” it sounded like I was taking attendance.“Henk Bakermans . . . Ana Mei Balau . . . Robert Bayens . . . Paul Jan Blauw . . . Fritz Boertjes . . . Maria G. Bongers . . . Jasper Bouwmans . . . Hans Brinkman . . . Dan van den Broek . . . Jenny Bruijstens . . . Daphne van Bussel . . . Sander Castelijns . . . Femke Castillo . . . Ellen H. Croese . . . Ineke Crooijmans . . . Joost Derkx . . . Willem Díaz . . . Tracy van Diepen . . .”
I stopped.
“That should give you an idea,” I said, to stop her from asking me to continue.
“How many of them have you spoken with?”
“About eighty, I think.”
“In other words you’re nearly at the end of the list?”
“No. Sometimes I find more than one person with the same name. And some of the people have referred me to others, to people who aren’t on my list, but I visited them anyway because they had a connection to the town.”
“And you still haven’t found anyone who can tell you anything about the accident?”
“Not specifically, but many of them have connections to Someren, they have relatives there, they lived there themselves, or they still do. Some of them remember the news and the talk in town the days after the accident. But I haven’t found anyone who witnessed it.”
“And what have you found?”
“What do you mean?”
“I imagine you’ve talked to lots of people. All sorts of people. I’m wondering if you’ve seen their homes, if they’ve told you about their lives. It seems to me that it must be fascinating to get to know all those people, telling them your story and seeing how they react.”
“I guess it may seem fascinating to you, but there’s nothing fascinating about it to me. For me it’s a huge blow every time I ring a doorbell and meet someone who can’t help me.”
Lianne Pérez-Horst seemed disappointed by my reply. I thought she didn’t understand the gravity of my search. She thought the mystery of these hundred names was more important than my need to find the person who had saved me. It was understandable. All she knew was that there had been an accident. She didn’t know how dramatically it had altered my life. Only I knew that.
She recorded my voice for three hours. She got more and more excited and eventually she decided she also needed to speak to Karen Abrams. That was fine with me. I went downstairs to get her and she told her version of the day I first walked into her bar.
Before leaving, Lianne Pérez-Horst took a picture of Karen Abrams and me at a table in the bar. She said she’d let me see the article before she published it. She was already in the street when she realized that she had only meant to take a picture of the list.
She left with a little piece of my life in her hands.
Him
In 1995 I flew to Holland to bury Willemien in her country. It was a very difficult journey. Just three months earlier we had flown to Holland for the birth of our Arjen’s first daughter. Willemien wasn’t feeling one hundred percent, but she wanted to meet her granddaughter and nothing and no one, not even I, was going to come between her and the little one. The trip was fine, I saw that Willemien was very happy, but also that the hustle and bustle of
traveling and the cold weather in Holland weakened her.
Without Willemien, I couldn’t hold the girl. I didn’t want to. I know it wasn’t her fault, but I was afraid of the loneliness I would feel when I held her, since Willemien couldn’t hold her, too. I told Arjen I needed time, and he understood. Luckily he did, because I didn’t. I was afraid of my own thoughts. In some corner of my mind I thought that if the baby hadn’t been born, and we hadn’t visited her three months earlier,Willemien would have lived a few more weeks, or even months. I was tortured by the idea, and I couldn’t get over it until I eventually realized that even if our granddaughter hadn’t been born, Willemien would have wanted to go to Holland. Because she already knew that it would be her final visit.
After the burial, Simon and Robert tried to talk me into moving to Barcelona, to live with one of them. I declined, I didn’t want to impede upon their lives, and I preferred to return to Extremadura.
It had been a long time since I had traveled to my village by train, and with such a small suitcase. That trip was like going back in time. It didn’t occur to me beforehand that without my car I’d have to get around town walking, alone, like I did in my youth. The only thought in my head was that I didn’t want to travel a thousand kilometers by car without Willemien at my side.
I brought Willemien’s wooden box along, as if it were a substitute for her.
When I arrived, after traveling for more than twentyfour hours straight, Antonia was waiting for me, to drive me to the village in her car. After all those years, my sister still looked at me like I was her hero, and I preferred to be welcomed as a hero than as an interloper, which is why it was her I told I was coming, instead of Pedro.
Of course, Pedro was also waiting for me when we got to my parents’ old house. Now it was Antonia’s house, and that day Mariana was in the kitchen making stew for lunch, which we would all share—brothers, sisters, brothers-inlaw, sisters-in-law, nephews, and nieces. I don’t know how many of us there were that day, they took me completely by surprise; what I do know is that I missed Willemien and our three sons terribly.
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