I spoke to Esma every night—remarkably explicit conversations in which I nearly gasped at some of the things she said before I slid into lascivious giggles. She was due to head back to New York from London the following week, and we agreed that she’d first detour to Holland to meet me for the weekend. I remained concerned about being seen together. Although Esma had relieved herself of any formal role in the case, as an ardent advocate for the alleged victims, she remained an interested party. Esma thought I was being ridiculous, but we agreed on Leiden, about fifteen minutes from The Hague, and I booked a lovely-looking boutique hotel along one of the canals.
I arrived there on the Intercity train about 3:30 Friday afternoon, walking along on a fine day and absorbing the charm of Leiden, a bit of Bruges without the gingerbread. Its network of canals and iron bridges was surrounded by the usual centuries-old brick buildings with steep tile roofs. The center of the city was crowded with young people, students at the university who’d already gotten started on the weekend. After another few minutes, I recognized the green striped awning of the hotel, which I’d seen on the Internet.
At the tiny reception desk, I handed my passport to the bespectacled middle-aged proprietor. He would keep the document for an hour or two, as they routinely do on the Continent in order to fill out forms required by the EU. He had finished work with Esma’s British passport already and handed it to me, with its eccentric images of a crown, lion, and unicorn embossed in gold on its crimson cover. Holding tangible evidence of Esma’s presence, I felt a lurid thrill below my belt.
In our room, I found her asleep, with the canvas curtains drawn and her eyes hidden beneath a sleep mask. There was enough light, though, to see her. She had kicked away half the covers, revealing those well-turned legs up to her thigh, the rest of her body draped discreetly, as in an old painting. Her face was at the edge of the bed, while one bare arm hung down. In the grip of a dream, her mouth moved over uncertain words and her body twitched slightly.
I undressed quietly, then took hold of the duvet and drew it away slowly from her torso, an inch-by-inch striptease of a sort, relishing everything. The sight had a predictable effect on me and I eventually took my hardened dick and nuzzled it against her cheeks and mouth, slowly pushing away the mask. Deep in sleep, she waved her hand vaguely at first and then finally, without ever opening her eyes, took gentle hold of me, guiding me into her mouth.
I woke Saturday morning, my hand webbed in hers, looking down at that odd collection of rings I’d noticed in Tuzla, which were all on the middle finger of her left hand. I was still staring when she roused herself.
“Is one of those a wedding ring?” I asked, about a plain gold band.
“That?” She laughed and sat up. “Don’t worry about that. That is my problem, not yours.”
“What does that mean, Esma?”
She tossed around her storm of dark hair and finally went off to the bathroom. When she returned, she said, “Are you concerned you have rivals, Bill?”
“Every man who sees you, Esma, is my rival.”
The remark delighted her. She padded to the bed sinuously. Diving down on it, she whispered, “I am with you. Let me show you.”
Afterward, we sat outside in our robes. Our room was tiny but stuffed with antiques, much to Esma’s liking, with a small terrace outside where the potted plants were already in bloom. I pulled two white iron chairs together and took her hand as we looked out over the rooftops and the adjoining canals. She felt distant for a second.
“Enjoy this part, Bill. Make it last. Don’t worry about what comes next.”
“What makes you think I’m worried?”
She reared back to look at me in mild reproof. I wasn’t sure if I was being scolded for doubting her Gypsy voodoo or just for being dishonest.
“That is your nature.” She was right about that. “And I am not very good at the next part anyway.”
“You mean life?”
“This too is life, and very much the best of it.” She snuck her hand under my robe. “Don’t fall in love with me, Bill.”
Given my character, which Esma had correctly assayed, I was already reflecting on what I felt. Certainly I was gripped by addictive lust, and great tenderness and gratitude born of its satisfaction. But between us there was a connection, too, I knew that. From our first instants together, I had felt that Esma, with her passionate nature and galloping intellect, fit a yearning space inside me. But love? I wasn’t even sure anymore what I thought about that word. Yet whatever this was, my ardor was more revitalizing than anything I’d felt in decades.
“And why do you say that?” I asked. “Because you are unavailable?” I was thinking about the wedding ring.
“No,” she said. “But I fear I shall disappoint you, Bill.”
“Because?”
“Because I always manage to do that in the end.” She was back to being the essential Esma, humorless and intense.
I tried to joke. “Should I leave now?” I asked.
As I hoped, the remark leavened her mood. She reverted to her sensual gaze and her thin dominating smile. She loosened the belt on her robe and threw it open as we sat there in the daylight in the view of many rooftops.
“If you like,” she answered.
On Saturday night, Esma and I had our first cross moments. Ellen wanted my approval on the plans for the rehearsal dinner before Pete’s wedding, which required three brief conversations between 11 p.m. and midnight. We’d had a call on the same subject the weekend before, while Esma and I were ensconced at the Blue Lamp.
“This is very strange with your ex-wife. You speak to her more than your children.”
I explained that Ellen didn’t have time for these projects during the week, when she was working. But Esma’s dark face was closed off by a look of open skepticism, expressed primarily through a fleshy pout. I thought of replaying the remarks she’d made to me yesterday about being jealous, but I already knew Esma would never make her emotions slave to logic or consistency.
“And you stayed with her when you went back home,” said Esma. “That is strange, too. Is there ex-sex now and then?”
I laughed out loud. “Esma. You’ve heard these conversations. There is nothing but family business. My ex is no one to worry about.”
“Some men can never leave their marriages behind. I have known too many.”
“Well, you’re reacting to what happened with them. Ellen and I are merely planning our son’s wedding, and I consider it a blessing that we can enjoy this together.”
To subdue her, I suggested that we go out for a drink. A mime was performing under a streetlight a block from the hotel and she lightened our moods.
On Sunday morning, we both wanted air again and wandered around Hooglandse Kerkgracht, where tony shops lined the narrow brick streets beside a parklike median.
“Look at that,” Esma said, as we came out of an antique store, where she had looked over several Japanese ivories called netsuke, animal figures that she said she collected. “Your name in lights, Bill.”
She was pointing one hundred feet up to an elegant-looking jewelry store with an oak facade. TEN BOOM appeared in large gilt letters above the shop window. In the lower right corner, the sign read SINDS 1875.
The sight turned me to cement.
“I’ve sometimes thought you made that name up,” said Esma.
I finally said, “I forgot they were in Leiden.”
“Who?”
“My parents. I’m pretty sure my father worked at that store,” I told her. “It was during the Second World War.”
“What did he do?”
“He was a watchmaker.”
But that was hardly the most important detail, and as we meandered for the next hour beside the canals, I shared most of the tale with Esma. The actuality of the store, emblazoned with our name, had removed my parents’ story from the shrouded place I ordinarily kept it to quell my discomfort.
The day I turned forty, my parents asked me to come see them by myself. Like a lot of married people, I rarely visited my mother and father without Ellen or one of the boys as a shock absorber. As a child, I never understood what it was that had infuriated me about my folks, who were in all ways mild and kindly. But getting older, I had recognized that their bond had an intensity that left Marla and me feeling we were forbidden to enter the inner sanctum where they actually lived. As an adult, I preferred not to be alone with them, rather than reexperience that same sense of exclusion.
But I went by myself on my birthday nonetheless. I was fairly certain that they had a family heirloom to pass on, one of the few things they had carried from Holland, perhaps even a piece of jewelry that would find its way to Ellen. I knew my sister had received a diamond necklace that had been in the family since the 1870s when she turned forty, two years before. And my father had made a gift of one of his watches when I reached twenty-one.
Overall, I expected forty to be a good birthday for me. I was on the cusp of middle-aged tranquility, the writhings of youth so far behind me that I couldn’t fully recall how it felt. I was the United States Attorney in my hometown, a higher and more esteemed place in the world than I had ever imagined for myself. My two sons were not yet full-throttle teenagers, and I was wise enough to enjoy them while they remained content with their parents. Even my marriage seemed okay. I knew that I bored Ellen in a fundamental way and that she blamed me for it, but she was an interesting, competent woman who shared my passion for our sons, which, at least then, seemed to be enough common ground.
My parents’ house was a modest Kindle County bungalow that they bought in the 1950s, and which each of them eventually left for good only on the EMT’s rolling stretcher. My mother hugged me at the door to wish me happy birthday, while my father, a master of old-school restraint, shook my hand. Then they led me into the living room from which my sister and I were largely banished growing up. They took places on the flowered sofa, as if they had been preassigned by stage directions. My father’s long pale face was rigidly composed. My mother sat close beside him, her plump hands in her ample lap as she gazed toward him, apparently awaiting a sign to begin. They had already been through this two years before with Marla, as it turned out, but even so, it must have been a nightmare revisited for them, realizing that they were again about to place their relationship with one of their children in jeopardy.
“We have decided that we need to tell you something,” my mother said. That clearly was her part. The hard line fell to my father.
“We are Jews,” he said.
The most important thing my parents were saying, of course, had nothing to do with religion or heritage. They were telling me that they had lied to my sister and me all our lives. In retrospect I was always proud of the way I responded: With nothing else, I began to cry, a man who had not broken down completely since my dog had been run over in front of me when I was thirteen.
I called my sister on my drive back home, and merely from the way I said her name, she knew what was up.
“They told you,” she said. “I’m so glad. I’ve been warning them I couldn’t keep this secret much longer.”
“What the fuck,” I answered.
For Marla, whatever the drama within, the practical adjustments were minimal. She had married Jer, a wonderful guy who happened to be Jewish, and she had raised her three kids in the embrace of the Jewish community in Lexington, Mass. Marla had lived the kind of contented suburban life—the kids, the country club friends, the committed acts of charity—that Ellen regarded as a form of early-onset morbidity, an opinion I more or less shared in those years. Only when my marriage ended another decade later did I tumble to the recognition that my sister was happy, far happier than many other people who arrive in their middle years, including me. Now Marla understood my shock and indignation, but the news had clearly not shaken her as deeply.
When I reached home, Ellen absorbed what I had to say with a river of emotion flowing through her face, culminating in a smile. “Oh my God,” she said. “How fascinating. You know, I love them both, you know that, but there’s always been something not quite right. How many times have I told you, ‘Your parents are strange’?” She thought only a second longer and added, “They have to tell the boys,” who were then twelve and fourteen. I do not remember Ellen asking me for many days how this news had affected me.
Although it may be what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance, my enduring reaction was that I was fairly pleased about being Jewish. I had grown up with many Jewish friends and had always felt some envy for their fierce ethnic pride, which contrasted with my parents’ reluctance—now far more understandable—about anything Dutch.
On the other hand, I did not tend to talk about this discovery very often. I made no effort to keep it a secret and I don’t think I was ashamed to have lost my status as a Real White Person. The hard part was accounting for my mother and father.
By the time they died eight years later in close succession, I had gone through many stages, but I had ultimately given them the benefit of the doubt. It was a considerable sacrifice to part with core elements of your identity.
As for what had happened during the war, Marla eased more details from my mom in the last months of her life, after my dad was gone, when my loyal sister often came to town to sleep on a cot beside our dying mother.
My father’s family, then named Bergmann, always distinguished watchmakers, had left Frankfurt for Rotterdam in the 1870s in response to one of the periodic waves of anti-Semitism that swept through Germany. My father’s uncles joined them in the 1890s when several proposals were offered in the Reichstag to limit the rights of Jewish citizens, laws that were ultimately adopted decades later once Hitler took power. When that began to happen, in 1933, almost two dozen more cousins came to Rotterdam, joining the diaspora of more than half of Germany’s Jews who left in the next few years. Unfortunately, the Nazis were not far behind the Bergmann cousins and rolled through the Netherlands in 1940, bringing their racial laws with them. The German-speaking relatives were a special burden on my father’s family, since their poor Dutch made them easily identifiable as Jews. My father knew that as a result, sooner or later, the entire family—now called ‘Bergman,’ having dropped an n to sound more Dutch—would be rounded up and sent to camps.
In July 1942, Aart and Miep ten Boom of Leiden were killed when a tree collapsed on their car as they were driving through a fierce storm. The Ten Boom family were leaders of the Dutch resistance, which over time hid thousands of Jews from the Nazis through various means. Aart and Miep’s surviving relatives decided it would be a fit tribute to suppress all news of their deaths and to allow a young Jewish couple to assume their identities. The Ten Booms were jewelers, with need of a skilled watchmaker in their store. When the offer came, my father and mother left their lives behind—and dozens of doomed relatives. They hid in plain sight in Leiden, with the knowledge of hundreds of local residents who never betrayed them.
The end of the war was trying in its own way. My mother, an only child whose parents had died in their forties, wanted to return to Rotterdam to seek the possible remnants of their community. My father apparently regarded it all as better left behind, given the near-certain capture and annihilation of his family. He convinced her that the greatest safety for them and, far more important, their children was in remaining Aart and Miep rather than chancing the vagaries of history’s roulette wheel, in which the Jews’ number, along with several other perennial losers, was always coming up black.
The Dutch neighbors who had hidden my parents throughout the war were confused by my father’s attitude and even somewhat critical. They had risked their lives because my parents were Jews, not converts, and so for the new Aart and Miep the best choice was to apply to emigrate. In 1950, because of the need for skilled tradesmen in the US, my parents were granted visas.
By now, Esma and I had taken a seat on a concrete bench in a brick plaza called Beestenmarkt. A large old-fashioned windmill, with its white canvas sails, turned a few hundred feet away, while the masonry was wetted by a strange fountain, dozens of piddling streams that shot straight up from buried piping. Several tow-headed children were frolicking on a day that was finally mild enough to be welcomed as spring. They dared the water with small hands, splashing while their parents remonstrated, and after soaking themselves, sprinted away with exhilarated screams.
“This is a more familiar story to me than you may know,” said Esma. “There are thousands and thousands of Gypsies, especially lighter-skinned Gypsies in the United States, who have simply melted into the American population without looking back on their Rom ways.”
I stared at her, wondering why it was I was so attracted to women without much native empathy. If I ever went back to therapy, I had to put that question near the top of the list.
We began wandering back to the hotel.
“Wars are horrible,” said Esma. “They do horrible things to everyone.” This seemed a more comforting response and I took the hand she had customarily lapped over my arm. “That was how I died the last time,” Esma said. “During World War I.”
I stopped. “You’re being euphemistic?”
The dark eyes scolded. “Far from it. I was an Ottoman soldier, a poor private from Ayvalik, a tiny town, and not quite eighteen years old. I died of the infection from a shoulder wound at Gallipoli.”
I was far less ruffled by this declaration than I might have expected, perhaps because I’d been struggling with my parents’ two lives, or because I had already accepted Esma’s warning about potential disappointment as meaning that there were important facets of her character I didn’t yet know. Discovering these beliefs was a little more complicated than finding out Esma bit her nails, and probably not a good sign for the long run. But for the near term, I was willing to attempt tolerance, since it was part of the journey to foreign terrain I’d started when I let her into my room in Tuzla. Besides, I recognized an opportunity to gather intelligence on the greatest unknown.
“And was death terrible?” I asked her.
“Not so terrible, no. Lonely. Cold. But I was glad to pass beyond pain. I didn’t enjoy the feeling of distance. But I realized almost at once that it was temporary.”
“I see.”
I found myself in an even, if somewhat resigned, mood processing all of this—my parents, Esma, the fundamental unreliability of humans, and the fact that for me there was, in all likelihood, more searching yet ahead. We returned to the hotel and the world of sensation one more time before I walked her to the station.