IN THE END, it was Dolly of all people who called. She didn’t seem nearly as haughty as she was the day I met her.
“Can you come?” she asked. “I can’t take her anymore, and she’s really gone off the deep end.”
I left work and hurried over to the address she’d given me on the Achterburgwallen. It was one of those dilapidated canal houses that would probably be condemned nowadays but which, as long as they went unnoticed by the housing department and didn’t accidently cave in on themselves, seemed to attract artistic types and people who were as unstable as the houses themselves. Truly hardworking artists, I thought, with the pedantry needed to boost my own self-confidence, lived in stable houses, where they could carry out their work without constantly having to deal with structural decay. The house was so crooked that I wanted to reach across it with outstretched arms and pull it straight.
I searched for a nameplate above the crumbling front steps, but there was none. Since no one answered the doorbell and the door was slightly ajar, I presumed I could just walk in. The hall was dark and cold. According to Dolly’s directions, I had to go up to the top floor, so I felt my way up the dark stairwell. Above me, I could hear someone playing a waltz on the piano and the shuffling of feet.
“Dolly!” I cried in desperation. It felt like a ridiculous thing to do, but suddenly the waltz stopped.
“Dolly, there’s somebody in the hall,” a man yelled, and the door was opened by a girl in a bathing suit.
I entered a long, empty room, a kind of studio with mirrors and a bar along one of the walls, a bed, a piano, a cabinet, and a trapeze in the corner. The young man at the piano looked at me indifferently for a moment, and in the middle of the room were a few girls eyeing me with curiosity. Dolly came over. So, she was a dancer. I’d never asked what she did for a living, but it made sense. I didn’t know anything about dancers back then, and I have to admit that I looked down on the profession. Frankly, the idea that someone would want to jump around on stage and twist themselves into every possible position filled me with suspicion. Dolly’s skimpy leotard and her unnaturally long, muscular legs sticking out at the groin didn’t put me at ease either. I looked up at her with a lost expression on my face, into her cold, blue eyes, at the rosy-white forehead above them, at all the unfathomable thoughts wandering around behind it. With a gesture of impatience, she tucked her sweaty, red hair behind her ears. What was I supposed to say? What did she want from me? She walked toward another door at the end of the room.
“She’s in here,” she said, as if she were referring to a sick dog.
The small room—Erica’s sanctuary, I concluded—was dark and filthy. That much was clear. The door closed behind me, and the waltz resumed at Dolly’s command. There, under the window, on a low, wide couch that consumed most of the tiny room, was Erica, lying with her face in the pillow. The blanket had slipped halfway off her, and I saw that she was fully dressed.
Can I describe the rest of that afternoon? How it wasn’t until I was feverishly scrubbing and cleaning that it dawned on me that Erica was sleeping off her drunkenness? All the repulsive details that revealed the kind of life she’d been leading? Her hat and coat lying in vomit on the floor, the moldy plates and glasses in the sink, the filthy clothes, empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays, old newspapers, the rotten food all over the place? I hadn’t known that a human being could fall into such a state. And as I stubbornly cleaned, the rehearsal in the studio next door continued. Erica had suffered alone with the sound of dancing feet and mechanical music ringing in her ears. There had been people close enough to hear her, but she hadn’t asked for help and no one had offered any.
I listened to the music outside and waited for an interlude between two lessons to take out the trash. It took a lot of courage to ask Dolly where to go, to let her in on what I was doing. Under her indifferent gaze, I felt like an overzealous Florence Nightingale, a ludicrous saint. I asked for clean bed linen. She didn’t have any at the moment, and besides, what for? The same thing would happen all over again the next day. There was no criticism, no indignation in her eyes, she just shrugged. So, I hurried out of the house and ran to the Damstraat, where I bought bed sheets, towels, underwear, and pajamas.
Erica didn’t even wake up when I rolled her over to change her clothes. I washed her carefully, working around her many bruises, and wrestled the new pajamas onto her lifeless body.
“Dolly’s a little sadistic”—the words played over and over again in my mind like a chorus. It was evening by the time her coat and hat were washed and hung up to dry. The dance rehearsal was over, and Dolly had gone out. Once again, I ventured out into the street to get some coffee, bread, butter, and cheese. I made my supper in the dirty kitchen.
When Erica finally woke at eleven o’clock, I was standing at her bedside with a couple of aspirins and a cup of coffee. She greeted me with an ironic smile and after scanning the room, said in the mocking tone I’d been afraid of: “Hello, Florence Nightingale!”
I stayed with her that night. The next morning, she let me take her to Egmond without protest. She was quiet the entire train ride. The only thing she said, and with that eternal derision in her voice (which may have been directed at herself), was, “Well, at least Dolly saved on the cleaning lady.”
I turned toward the window, but out of the corner of my eye I saw her eyelids squeeze shut against the rising tears.
Under my care, which I tried to administer as unobtrusively as possible, she made a noticeable recovery, and I knew from experience that this would open up a new chapter in her life. She’d been denied her birthright, but I foresaw that, despite the wound she’d suffered, she would graft a new branch and quickly nourish it to full bloom, which would hide the scar for the time being. She started talking about America with determination. And I, having witnessed all the anxiety and doubt of my Jewish colleagues, encouraged her in her decision.
Then one morning, my boss disrupted the staff’s lethargy on the issue when he summoned us to his office and announced that he had sold the company and was leaving for America. I could feel the shame in his voice. As a Jewish man of wealth, he had the money to get out in time. Surely, he felt conscience-stricken and even a little ashamed toward his employees who were facing the same danger he was but couldn’t afford to leave. Of course, he felt more Dutch than Jewish, and his decision, which was quite sensible in my opinion, left him feeling guilty. He tried to absolve himself by reminding everyone of the danger. He made quite a speech. First, he summarized the political situation, then he provided an overview of the methods the Dutch Nazi Party was using and compared its positions to those in Germany, arriving at the conclusion that the Dutch Jews were doomed to the same fate as those under Hitler. He took a book from his desk and asked the bookkeeper to pass it around. Eventually it ended up in my hands. It recounted, with endless details and statistics, the misery of the Jews under the Nazi regime. According to the Nazi ideology, Erica would be labeled “Bastard Jew I” and would likely suffer the same fate as the “real” Jews.
In addition to all the stress brought on by the sale of the business and the director’s impending departure, the atmosphere at the office was incredibly tense. Work was interrupted by constant arguments among the staff. Some people thought the boss was a coward and a sellout, others were jealous and despised him for leaving. No one appreciated him for his insight. Although he’d disturbed their peace of mind, they couldn’t bring themselves to admit that he was right. They were still Dutch citizens after all, and they weren’t ready to relinquish the sense of security that came with it.
I took my boss’s book home for Erica to look at. She put on a cool front to hide her horror, but her reaction pierced my soul.
“It’s crazy, Bea! Now I’m suddenly a Jewess.” She shook her head in disbelief and half-amused despair. “Life’s just full of surprises,” she said with a laugh. “America, America, here I come!” There was comical intonation in her voice. Truth be told, I knew she wouldn’t have even considered leaving if her personal situation hadn’t forced her to make a complete change.
Before the end of the week, we wrote a letter to Judy, which she asked me to sign.
“It’s always better if someone else asks,” Erica argued.
Right before I signed my name, something occurred to me.
“Maybe your real father wasn’t even Jewish.” I blurted it out without thinking. We hadn’t touched on the subject again, and I was shocked by my faux pas. But still, it was a valid point and needed to be said.
“You’ll have to ask Ma,” she replied without hesitation.
“Me?”
“Of course, who else? It was your idea—you didn’t think I’d ever want to see her again, did you?”
“But I can’t … How could I ever ask her that, Erica? I couldn’t. I’m just an outsider here. She’ll shut the door in my face.”
But the idea of holding Ma accountable for her sin had taken hold. Erica was not to be deterred, and in the end, I reluctantly gave in.
My conversation with Ma in the General’s elegantly furnished living room might as well have been recorded on a gramophone record—I can still replay it word for word in my mind, and the painful sensation I’d felt still comes flooding back. At first, it was jovial reception, lots of “dears” and “darlings,” but the warmth soon faded as my nervousness revealed that I wasn’t just dropping by. I stammered through an explanation of the reason for my visit and then came the big question, which could be asked in no uncertain terms. Ma launched into a passionate monologue with a dramatic description of her living conditions in those years, followed by the plea of a condemned woman. I didn’t like playing the role of prosecutor. Her emotional defense almost made me feel guilty. She wrung her hands, then dramatically pressed them against her heart and reached out to me in desperation. All of her “he” this and “he” that (in reference to her lawfully wedded husband) would’ve caused an executioner to doubt. I hadn’t come for justice, and I tried to make this clear to her. But she wasn’t listening. No matter how many times I said, “Ma, really, it’s none of my business, I just wanted …” it just went in one ear and out the other.
Finally, her materialism got the last word.
“And why do you think I gave her my money, the only pennies anyone’s ever tossed into my lap? I inherited those three thousand guilders from Jan—that was her real father’s name,” she added hastily, “he died and left that money to me.” She started to sob. “I never saw him again, but he hadn’t forgotten me.”
So, the mystery of Erica’s inheritance was solved. It wasn’t her uncle who’d left her the three thousand guilders but her father. Erica was right—there was something fishy about that money. I remembered how strange she’d acted after she received it. She’d also alluded to it the night she confessed—penance money, she’d called it—as she was telling me about her miserable childhood and her mother’s endless lecturing. Ma’s affairs had taken place right under Erica’s nose. As a teenager, she’d had her suspicions, but she didn’t know exactly what was going on until one night when she found her mother with someone in her bed. After that, she was sent to a convent school, “cleared out of the way,” as she put it, “to pay atonement for her mother’s sins.” As Erica told me the story, I could feel the misery of the sixteen-year-old girl who, having just discovered her mother’s eroticism in a catastrophic way, was dragged away from her blissful world at the all-girls’ school and locked up in the abnormal religious world of the convent.
As I listened to her mother relive her past sins, my compassion for her turned to disgust. I got up to leave. Ma began to powder her nose. There was an oppressive silence; we avoided each other’s gaze. With one hand on the door, I said (and it struck me how cold and cruel my voice sounded): “I just came to ask if her father was Jewish.”
Ma whipped around in fury. Her face blotchy from crying, she narrowed her eyes viciously.
“If that girl is so worried about saving her own skin, she should go ask the man herself!” she sneered. “If he even knows! He certainly did his best to figure it all out back then. A sly coward—that’s what he is. He gave me his word that Erica would never … that filthy traitor! That’s what you get from a Jew. You know, Hitler’s right …” I didn’t wait for the rest. I could still hear her carrying on in the hall. It made me dizzy. In the sober neon light of the friendly, affluent Minervalaan, where the first green of spring was sprouting in the trees and the city gardeners were preparing the lawns for flowers, the whole visit seemed so unlikely. I shook my head to wake up from the nightmare, and as I did my thoughts latched onto an old memory, one that may have surfaced to give me direction, to help me reconnect with the old Bea, with my original self. Perhaps it brought with it the realization that, through me, Erica had said goodbye to her mother for good.
It was the memory of the day my mother was buried with the lifeless baby boy who had caused her death. I remembered being in the nursery, looking through the closed curtains, their floral pattern unusually lit by the sun, at the black carriages on the street. The kitchen maid whose care I’d been entrusted to had forgotten about me. She was crying with her face in her hands. I was too young to understand what was going on, and I was curious about the commotion downstairs in front of the gate. The door swung open and my father and grandparents hurried into the room. I was lifted up and smothered with hugs and kisses. For the first and only time in my childhood, I tasted the salt of grown-up tears. For a few moments, the little girl was brought into the family circle. As small as she was, the adults needed her before making the difficult journey to the cemetery. Suddenly, my grandmother realized that she was needed more at home than at her daughter’s graveside. It was a tremendous sacrifice that she was willing to make. She stayed behind at the house and played with me until the black carriages returned. It was the memory of a memory, one that has stayed with me all those years. Only then, at the age of twenty-eight, did I understand what my grandmother had felt during those hours, as she’d helped me dress and undress my dolls, cheerfully pretending, entering the imaginary world of a little girl imitating her mother, pampering and scolding her porcelain friends. She’d had to listen to that, while her daughter was being buried.
Memories from my childhood are scarce. Nothing remains from the years after my mother’s death to my high school years. Recently, I found myself having to do some calculations when someone here in America asked me how old I was when my mother died. Her death left a gaping hole in my youth. Still, I’d always kept an image of her, and later as I got older my father’s stories about her took on a heavenly form. How different it must have been for Erica! Instead of a guardian angel, she’d had a mother in the flesh and blood who reminded her of all the misery she’d caused.
At exactly two o’clock, the operator announced a call from Egmond. It was Erica, calling as planned.
“Well …? What did she say?” She asked nervously.
“It was a waste of time,” I had to be careful because I wasn’t sure if the line was tapped. “She wouldn’t say. Said you should just ask him.”
“Oh yeah?” she said threateningly. Then there was silence.
“You still there?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, which was again followed by nothing but the crackling of the connection. But behind the silence was hate, a hate so powerful in its own powerlessness that I could almost hear it.
“See you later,” she said dryly and hung up.
I went home that night full of apprehension, but Erica didn’t ask me any more questions. She gave me a two-word thank you for my trouble, and I was relieved not to have to relay the entire conversation with Ma. After dinner, Erica laid the letter to Judy in front of me and asked me again to sign it. We took the epistle to the mailbox together. Before I dropped it into the slot, I looked at Erica.
“Come on,” she said, “you old nag.”
After that, all we could do was wait for a reply. One week later, it was the first thing I asked when I came home from work. Pretty soon, Erica couldn’t take it anymore and told me to stop asking. She’d let me know. In the meantime, she ordered me to gather information from the American consulate and the shipping line. She did nothing to prepare for her departure herself. For the next two weeks, I came home to her lying on her bed reading one of the books I’d given her, the gramophone or the Dutch radio playing in the background. After a while, the bird took flight again, and I started coming home to notes in my room. “Went to the movies” or “Gone to Amsterdam.” It was unusually courteous of her, and she kept it up for a little while—“Not sleeping here tonight”—but eventually there were no notes anymore, and she was gone a lot.
One morning, when I brought her breakfast in bed (something I’d started doing back when she needed it and kept doing when she slept at home), she said: “I might as well tell you—you know everything now anyway. I’m in love again. She’s a cellist in the women’s orchestra that’s playing at the beer hall. You should come hear her sometime. She’s fantastic.”
Thus, she made me a partner in her escapades and in doing so, also made it easy for me to keep my distance. Without realizing it, we’d entered a new phase in our relationship.
That afternoon after work, I visited the bar in the city center where Erica had lost her heart. It was an unusually assertive move on my part. Standing nervously by the revolving door, I took a moment to find my bearings. I wondered how on earth Erica had ended up at such a kitschy German bar. I would’ve never even considered such a place; the patrons were from another planet. A waiter noticed me helplessly searching for someone. After my stuttering description of Erica, he sized me up from head to toe and with a cheeky smile and a wink to his co-worker directed me toward the stage. I found Erica at a table, practically at the cellist’s feet. She was absorbed in her new flame and barely looked up when I, sweating all over, sat down beside her. Still, the smile on her face was for me.
“What do you think of her?” she said without turning toward me.
What do you think of her? Now that I was in on her secret, my opinion was apparently appreciated. There was no way I could tell her that I’d always found women with cellos between their knees unattractive. My father, like so many middle-class Dutch people, had been a lover of classical music, and he used to take me to concerts. One of them had featured a female cellist, and I did not enjoy it. Watching the musician, all dressed up for the occasion with a plunging décolleté to accentuate her fragility, wield the cumbersome instrument between her thighs had been confusing to me, and I’d found myself unable to appreciate her art. Afterward, I got into a fight about it with my father, who thought I was overreacting.
But the subject of Erica’s interest made a better impression on me, and my expectations were a bit lower in the bierstube.
She was more enthusiastic than devoted. She played freely, in a way that was almost rough, as if ready to throw all caution to the wind.
Days later, when Inge (that was her name) played for us in Egmond, I discovered that she was incredibly talented, a true artist heart and soul. Hunched over her instrument in Erica’s room, her sleek dark hair falling down over her cameo face, she was a completely different woman from the one I’d seen in the smoky bar. There, she played for money, a concession that didn’t bother her because she had created another self that no one could touch. At our house, she released that other self and played like a woman possessed. It didn’t even bother me that she stayed over once a week. I cared for her like I cared for Erica. The one thing that did bother me at first was the fact that she was German. Even then, people knew that Germans weren’t being allowed to leave Germany, unless of course they were spies. There were a lot of rumors flying around about German tourists, and although some members of the population wrote them off as exaggerations, I couldn’t rule out the possibility. Artists were only allowed to travel under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda—that much was clear. Inge’s orchestra was there to create cultural propaganda for the Third Reich, but it was also possible that their assignment extended beyond the four walls of the bierstube. My suspicions were soon dispelled. Inge proved her trustworthiness by speaking openly about the situation in Germany. She went on and on, her delicate, heart-shaped face taut with anger and rage, until we were fully convinced of her hatred for the regime. They left you no choice, she said. You did what you had to do to survive. But a few members of the orchestra actually were Nazis, and, she whispered with an anxious glance over her shoulder, they were paid more because they did other work on the side. She didn’t tell us what exactly these side jobs consisted of, but it was clear enough. Her pale face whitened even more as she warned us: things would go wrong. Germany had its eye on Holland.
Erica started whistling a little tune and got up to put a record on the gramophone. It was a tic of hers that I knew well by then. My heart started pounding in my throat. We were still waiting for Judy’s reply. Even if she said yes and supplied the necessary funds, it was unlikely that Erica would go at this point. I had no more illusions. Inge was more important to Erica than her desire for change or self-preservation. And time was running out. It was already early April.
When I went to the American consulate (without telling anyone) to see if there might be a message for Erica, there were long lines of Jews. The shipping company where I’d reserved a passage for Erica on good faith was now demanding payment. I had already been planning on borrowing money to cover the costs. It was up me to take care of it. Erica could no longer be bothered.
But now, standing by the gramophone, she blurted out, “Ich bin halb Jude.” I’m half-Jewish. She spun around to see how Inge would react. I was suddenly aware that there was some kind of drama going on between them. Erica didn’t care about the danger, she just wanted to know how much Inge had been influenced by racist theories, and whether or not her feelings for Erica could withstand Hitler’s ideology. In spite of myself, I felt sorry for Inge.
“That’s not possible,” Inge said, ready to scold Erica for making such an off-color joke. But Erica pierced her with her eyes and didn’t let her go, betraying nothing. Inge looked to me for help. I’ll never forget how uneasy I felt in that moment. All I could do was nod in agreement.
“But then …” Inge began, “then …” She jumped up and looked wildly from Erica to me, searching for the right words to adequately express her horror. “But then there’s no time to lose!” She fixed her eyes desperately on me. “What are you going to do? What are we going to do?”
She sank back down in the chair. In a few steps, Erica was behind her with her face pressed against hers. I got up and collected the dirty ashtrays. As I emptied them, I heard Erica whispering into Inge’s ear. She’d passed the test, I thought bitterly. Maybe deep down I was hoping that Inge would react differently. Who knows? Maybe I’d become overly suspicious, maybe I was trying to get too deeply involved.
After a wave of inexplicable bitterness, I concluded that Erica had come to terms with her own illegitimacy. Her father had officially recognized her as his child, so it was on her record. Rather than calling her Ma to account or interrogating Pa further, she simply resigned herself to the situation.