Thirty
Nor did they discuss their visit to the house later. It was as though there was nothing to say, Abner thought, and then amended that. It was because there was too much to say, and it was safer to say none of it.
All through their journey to the Keukenhof, bouncing in Willem’s battered old Volvo along the neat Dutch roads, through the neat Dutch towns, he stared out at the now grey afternoon and tried to put order into his thoughts, but order demanded words rather than pictures and all he could get from his head were images. The house as they had seen it, but also as it might have been almost fifty years ago; people moving in shadowy patterns through those rooms, people hiding behind the hinged bookcase that disguised the annexe, measuring the children’s growth against a wall, the children laughing and preening at the way they were reaching nearer to the sky than they used to, and the adults looking at them with their faces carefully blank. And Abner felt the cold apprehension that had filled them slide into the back of his own neck.
‘Did they say Faffenheim?’ The sound man, who was driving, leaned towards Willem who was crouched beside him with his precious camera balanced on his knees. ‘I know the road as far as Haarlem and I know Lisse — but wasn’t it Faffenheim next?’
Willem grunted something and under cover of their conversation Abner leaned across towards Miriam, sharing the back seat with him.
‘Thanks for coming with us this afternoon,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have been the same without you.’
She looked at him and lifted her brows briefly. ‘It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference,’ she said. ‘You know that perfectly well. There’s no need to stroke me, you know. I’m not a ruffled bird, whatever Willem may call me.’ And she looked sharply at the cameraman who had lapsed into silence again and was staring out of the window.
‘I’m not stroking. Just telling you how it is. I’ll remember not to bother again,’ he said savagely and almost threw himself back into his corner. Why the hell did he put up with this? Maybe she had been stirred up by the visit to the house, maybe it had made her feel bad, but hadn’t he been there too? Hadn’t he had the same experience? She had no monopoly of pain, goddamnit, though the way she carried on you’d think she had. In Miriam’s world only Miriam had cause to grieve over the past, he told himself furiously, no one else could, and he glowered into his windowed reflection and tried to hate her. It would make life much less complicated if he could.
After a while she reached out and pulled on his arm. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘You always are.’
‘I know. But that doesn’t make it any the less real. I truly am sorry.’
‘They why do you — oh, never mind. Let it go.’
‘I’ll try harder,’ she said and turned her head away to look out of her window, and so they remained the rest of the journey, each with one shoulder turned against the other. But she had left her hand on his arm, and he made no attempt to remove it and he thought — that shows how it is with us. Half and half. Neither one thing nor another. Half and half. Will it always be?
The Keukenhof undoubtedly saved the day. Even in the dreary light of the dwindling afternoon, the flowers glowed richly, and in the greenhouses they moved from banks of orange and amethyst azaleas to crimson rhododendrons, from massed purple tulips to sheets of creamy hyacinths, half choked with the scent and dazzled with colour; and outside in the grounds they walked along sleek watersides and through wide, wet green lawns where couples behaved in engaging ways, seemingly oblivious of the camera that Willem trained on them to very good effect. Even a pair of pigeons put on a strutting mating dance that Abner persuaded Willem to catch on film.
Willem had stared at Abner as though he were mad when he pointed out the birds and had shrugged and taken the film but had talked all the while of the waste of it. ‘Pigeons use condoms now? If they did, believe me we’d be grateful, the mess they make of the cars. Who needs so many pigeons? But condoms? This I’d like to see. But you want pigeons, so pigeons you can have.’
Miriam had caught Abner’s eye at this and her face had creased with the effort of controlling her laughter, and after that all the animosity that hung around them in the car melted away. She knows how to laugh, he told himself, joyously, as they moved on to get the shots of flower heads floating on the water that Abner wanted; she can laugh. We can sort this out yet, if she can laugh at the same things I do.
They came back to Amsterdam in the twilight, just in time to take their booked seats on the canal boat that plied its candle-lit ways through tourists’ Amsterdam, and this time she sat away from him, against the rail, her coat wrapped warmly around her against the bite of the wet air, watching the water slide by as the crew got their last shots; and Abner stopped worrying about her. She was relaxed and comfortable now, he knew, and afterwards, when the boat came back into its little harbour and Willem and his silent sound man had packed themselves into their Volvo and gone away, they went to one of the Indonesian restaurants on their hotel’s recommended list.
‘We can’t be in Amsterdam and not eat at a Reistafel,’ Miriam said gaily. ‘I read it all up and I know exactly what we have to eat and what it tastes like.’
And that was fun too, with apparently innocuous-looking dishes proving to be so fiery that Abner, disbelieving her warning and taking an unguardedly large mouthful, was reduced to choking tears, much to Miriam’s amusement; and a good deal of banter from the waiter looking after them about the aphrodisiac effects of what they were eating, which managed to combine a startling explicitness with a total lack of any offensiveness.
‘A great tourist experience,’ Abner said as they got back to their hotel. ‘I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.’
‘Nor I,’ she said, and looked up at him, laughing again. Her face seemed to have changed its very shape, he thought; the cheeks looked rounded beneath the wide bright eyes, and her mouth had a softness that nearly dissolved his bones, and he had to clench his fists in his pockets to stop himself hugging her; to do that here, where they had adjoining bedrooms, would be asking for trouble, he knew that. He was beginning to know which of Miriam’s eggshells that he walked upon were the most fragile.
‘Tomorrow I’ll show you the dock workers’ statue,’ she said then. ‘And perhaps we could go to the Jewish Museum. You could find it useful — ’
‘Anything you say,’ he said and smiled and stepped back. ‘Goodnight, Miriam.’
‘Goodnight,’ she said and they moved like a somewhat under-rehearsed pair of dancers to unlock their bedroom doors. It wasn’t until he was inside his room with the door closed behind him that Abner dared to think of what he thought he’d seen on her face; had she looked, just for a moment, disappointed?
‘It’s too much,’ Abner said. ‘Just too goddamn much. How can anyone take all this in? It’s like — oh, hell, I don’t know. Like overeating, you feel sick and nothing tastes of anything any more and you don’t really care anyway. And that’s the worst part of all.’
She lifted her brows, but didn’t look at him. She was still turning the pages of the album of photographs in front of her. ‘You’re a novice,’ she said with that familiar note of scorn in her voice. ‘That’s your trouble. If you’d had Barbara for a mother, you’d be used to it. I’ve been dealing with this stuff for ever.’
Suddenly he couldn’t bear it any longer. He slammed shut the album of pictures he had himself been going through and slapped his hands, palms down, on top of it.
‘Listen, Miriam, this has to stop! You can’t go on and on like this.’
‘Like what?’ She stared at him, her face blank with amazement, for he had shouted it.
‘Competing! Jesus, it’s like no one else is allowed to feel any — any reaction that you don’t sneer at! No one else is allowed to look back on what happened to them and feel bad about it without you making it plain that what happened to you was much, much worse and much more important. I feel you thinking it, as well as saying it, for God’s sake! It is
n’t like that. It can’t be like that. There are hundreds of thousands of Miriams and Abners, hundreds of thousands, and more to come — it won’t be all that much easier for the grandchildren than it’s been for the children of these people we’re reading about here, believe it or not. Are you going to rubbish what they say too, and rubbish their feelings simply because they aren’t yours? It’s got to stop, Miriam, it’s got to.’
She stared at him with her face seeming pinched and he realised she had gone pale. ‘Rubbish?’ she whispered. ‘Do I do that? Rubbish — oh, God, don’t say that, Abner! I didn’t mean to be — oh, hell, why can’t I get through to people? It’s like no one can hear what I’m really saying. I — I thought you understood, but you’re the same as everyone else.’
‘No,’ he said, wanting to comfort her, wanting to hold on to her and reassure her and knowing he dare not. ‘I’m not the same as everyone else. It’s you who’re always the same when you talk about this, about what happened to you and what happened to these people.’ He slapped the album lightly with both hands. ‘You’re the one who’s trying to take all the pain on to yourself. Maybe you do it for right reasons, Miriam, but it’s coming out wrong. If everyone else is out of step with you, couldn’t it just be your problem and not theirs?’
There was a long silence and then she said, still almost whispering, ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, consider it possible you may be mistaken — ’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Cromwell,’ she said drearily. ‘Talking to the English parliament. Oh, Abner, what am I to do? How can I get it right? I want to get it right!’
Around them the museum was heavy with silence. At this time of the morning, the curator had told them, there weren’t too many people around.
‘They seem to cope better with it all in the afternoons,’ he had said dryly. ‘I can understand it! It’s a difficult matter after all. The Holocaust collections? Over there. Those are the relevant cases. And if you wish you can see the collections of photographs we have, as you’re Professor Hinchelsea’s daughter. We don’t show those to ordinary visitors.’ And he had smiled at Miriam, a wintry smile, but the first he had produced since he’d met them, and gone away to fetch the albums and then left them alone in this small room to go through them. And now she sat with her head down, staring at the page open in front of her, which was, as far as he could see upside down, of a row of crematoria ovens of the sort he had already seen so many times this morning, and let the silence grow.
‘You will,’ he said at last, as gently as he could. ‘You’ll get it right if you work at it. At least you accept that there’s a problem.’
She looked up at him then, her eyes glinting. ‘My God, you sound so American! You’ll be dishing out the psychobabble next.’
He relaxed. This was better; the spurt of anger mixed in with her distress cheered him absurdly, as though she were a patient and he her doctor, elated to discover her temperature had dropped by a half degree, even though it remained dangerously high still.
‘And you sounded so English back there I thought I’d choke! “Ai’m Miriam Hinchelsea. Mai father, ai think, has had some correspondence with you in the pa-a-st …”’ And he dragged out the long ‘a’ like a wail.
‘If you don’t want to use any help I might have for you, then that’s fine with me! You don’t have to. I just wanted to be useful and — ’
‘Oh, shit,’ he said and closed his eyes. ‘Here we go, fighting again. I don’t think I’m strong enough to handle it any more.’
Again a silence and then she said a little gruffly, ‘Nor am I. End of it, all right? No more arguing. Listen, I had an idea.’
He opened his eyes and stared at her. She nodded at him, sharply, like a school teacher. ‘It was that business with Brazel. Wanting lists of Amsterdam diamond dealers in the Forties. I know you said we’d see what we could find out through the diamond bourse, but I was thinking — it’s always been a very Jewish trade. Maybe they’d have the sort of information he wanted here? Maybe if we asked Mr Van Gelder whether he can think why someone would want that sort of thing — ’
He blinked, trying to clear his head. ‘Is that an apology?’
‘I suppose so. I can’t keep on saying I’m sorry, can I?’
‘No,’ he said and shook his head at her, rueful now. ‘No, you can’t, can you? OK, apology accepted. And yes, why not? Though I can’t see that finding out’ll make a lot of difference. Even if we get the information he asked for, we still don’t know what he wanted to do with it.’
‘Geoff always said, get the data first, then analyse it. You can’t do a thing till you’ve got all the facts.’
‘He sounds more like a kid’s comic-book sort of professor every time you quote him. Wasn’t he ever any fun?’
‘I’m not supposed to complain about what happened to me, remember? We’re playing this game Abner rules now.’ She got up and made for the door. ‘I’ll ask Van Gelder.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ He stood up and picked up the two big albums. ‘I’ve had as much of this as I can take.’
They made their way back through the museum, now occupied by a few desultorily staring visitors, and found the curator’s office. He was sitting very upright at his desk, hitting the keys of a computer set to one side, and Abner sighed. Even here in a museum, those ubiquitous machines; he was beginning to hate them and their faint scent of ozone and the greenish flickering of the screens.
‘Mr Van Gelder,’ Miriam said. ‘We’re grateful for the material we’ve seen but there’s other information we’d find useful.’
She came and sat on the edge of his desk and the man looked up, faintly disapproving, and Abner looked up at her and found his own puzzlement growing; she could go from pomposity to laid back coolness so fast she almost left speed lines in the air, and he sighed and thumped down the heavy albums left, her to do all the talking. He stared round the room as she did so, noting the extreme tidiness of everything and wondering vaguely whether people became tidy in this obsessive fashion because they worked in museums among carefully tabulated collections, or whether they became curators of museums because of their passion for order. A silly surmise, for the answer was obvious, he told himself sternly and dragged his attention back to Miriam and her conversation.
‘ … so you see, we were just wondering if you were able to help our colleague with this. He had to go off and do another piece of work in the States, I’m afraid, so I couldn’t check with him whether he’d been in touch with you, and, if he had, where the material was. So I just thought, you might remember?’
Abner blinked. That sounded like the end of a carefully fabricated tale and he caught her eye, and she stared limpidly back at him with no hint of a smile on her face and he shifted his gaze to the man, who was now hitting his computer again and peering at his shimmering screen.
‘Oh, yes, here we have it. He is on the same piece of work as yourself, Miss Hinchelsea? I’m most interested. I said to him, now I recall, that I was startled to find anyone outside Holland showing as much interest in our wartime business, for it is a delicate area — yes, very delicate. But there it is. He wanted to add the material to the book he was working on about the survival of the internal economy of Europe during the war years. And that is your area of interest too? I seem to recall that Professor Hinchelsea was not so much interested in economics as in other aspects of the period and — ’
‘Oh, indeed he was,’ Miriam said swiftly. ‘But I developed my own interest in parallel, you understand, and I have always been quite fascinated by the economic factors. History of banking and so forth. So did dear old Brazel find the data he wanted?’
‘Oh, yes.’ The man nodded complacently at his pale green screen. ‘Yes, we gave him his print-out and he gave us a generous donation to the museum’s funds, you know, and — ’
‘Oh, dear,’ Miriam said. ‘If only he’d left it available to me before he went off to the States! I could have used it to make excellent
use of our time here. As it is, I shall have to wait till he returns, I suppose.’
‘I could give you a print-out again,’ Van Gelder volunteered. ‘It is no difficulty, I do assure you.’
She looked charmingly struck by the commonsense of his suggestion. ‘Could you really? How very kind that would be! Brazel may not be back for weeks, you see — and well, I would indeed be grateful. So would my junior assistant here.’ Once more she turned her limpid gaze on Abner, who looked blank for a moment and then hastily nodded. ‘So if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition …’
Half an hour later they came out into the Waterlooplein where the gulls whirled and screamed over the flea market and stood there with the wind whipping their cheeks to crimson as Miriam stared down at the sheaf of computer print-out paper Van Gelder’s secretary had put into her hands.
‘Well,’ she said with some awe. ‘There it is, Abner. You’ve got whatever it was Brazel wanted. Now, can you work out why he wanted it?’
And then, as he held out a hand to take it from her she said, ‘There are about three hundred names here. So we can hardly ask all of them if they know him and what he wanted, can we? Or can we?’
Thirty-one
‘I can see the Rijksmuseum another time,’ Miriam said. ‘I’ve made it to Amsterdam once. I can do it again.’
Abner grinned. ‘More Hungarian forints?’
‘I haven’t spent all the first lot, yet. Look, do you want me to help or don’t you? If you don’t, of course, then say so, instead of just — ’
‘Of course I do! There’s no way I can sort this out on my own. And I suppose I do have to — ’
Postscripts Page 33
