Twenty-one

Not long after returning to Dordrecht, Lien switches from saying “Auntie” and “Uncle” to saying “Ma” and “Pa” like everyone else. It first happens one evening as she sits at the table doing her homework, shading a map of Holland. “Ma,” she calls out, and the word shocks her when it comes out of her mouth. But Ma just answers with “Yes, Lienepien,” which is the pet name that she always uses, and after that the change becomes fixed. No word is spoken—the family does not really talk about feelings—but it feels normal, which makes sense because Kees and Ali, who once had a different mother, must also at some point have said “Ma” instead of “Auntie” for the first time.

At least on the outside, life at the Frederikstraat is just as it was at the old house. After school she plays kick the can with children in the street. The tin can is put on the pavement at the corner where the field starts and you can creep up to it in different ways. One way is through the bushes, crouching among the prickles, inching forward, feeling the cold through the soles of your shoes. Or you can edge along the fence. You can also dodge in and out of the hedges on the Emmastraat, risking an angry word from Mrs. Peters, who does not like you bending her plants.

If someone calls out your name and your position then you are out.

“I see you, Lientje, behind the postbox!”

“I see you, Kees, in the hedge on the Emmastraat!”

Kees is not really her friend now. He joins in with the big street games, but alone together, he does not like to play with girls. She has plenty of friends, though, such as Rieka Maasdam, who writes in her poesie album on one of a growing collection of loose sheets tucked in at the back:

1946, 11 March

Dear Lientje,

What shall I write on this page?

I have been thinking for an age!

Hey, Lientje, I know what,

Just be happy with what you’ve got!

For the remembrance

of your friend

Rieka Maasdam

Crosswise at the bottom of the page Rieka writes: “the 29th of November, that’s the day you must remember.” When that day comes Rieka will be twelve. Though they are schoolmates, Lien will be thirteen already because she has gone back a year in school after all the lessons she missed during the war.

Some friends, like Rieka, are from her class and some are from the streets around them, and still others are from the Socialist Youth Club, the AJC, which is where she spends almost all of her weekends. Lien still remembers when the material arrived for her uniform: a rough, brown rectangle of Manchester cloth for the skirt and a blue cotton one for the blouse, plus a red neckerchief, all tied together as one packet with string. Ma cut and sewed it for her. Now, early on Saturday mornings, she, Kees, and Ali will head out to a park, to town, or to the station, collecting others on the way. At the AJC they play rounders, hold quizzes, practice dancing, or do gymnastics. There are also lectures with serious titles like “Women in World History” or “Life on a Collective Farm.”

The big event for the AJC is the annual gathering, where young people from all over the country join together. For this they travel to Vierhouten, four hours away by train. Lien’s group is called the Migrant Birds and they do sound like birds all squeezed together in one carriage, squealing and laughing, making promises about who will sleep where in the tent. The group leader tries to keep order by starting singing practice, but after a while she gives up. At Utrecht the train stops, and through the window they see another youth group waiting in line on the platform, Catholic girls in purple velvet capes.

After two more hours the train stops at a station with no roof and a wooden platform. There the doors open onto a sea of brown, blue, and red. She keeps an eye out for the Migrant Birds flag so as not to get lost in the crush of people as they worm their way through the crowd to find their camping field. Inside the big white tent the light is weirdly hazy and it smells of grass and earth. Lien puts her bag down next to her friend Maartje’s. Through the shining, moving canvas she can hear the camp announcements from the speakers, slightly deadened: there is news of the nature knowledge lecture, the forest hike, the campfire, and the arrival of a group of visitors from France.

In the morning, after a night of secret whispering, they eat their breakfast in the sun. It is porridge from an enormous pan. Seated on hay bales, cradling the hot metal of their bowls, they look across at the neighboring group of boys. Then there is exercise, in long lines facing a big stage that has microphones on it and a woman in a kind of swimming costume who shows them what to do: things like bending, stretching, and doing star jumps on the spot. Later there are running races, which she loves. She glows with inner pride when she wins her heat.

There is a boy called Wim who likes her, Maartje says. By the third day they are exchanging nervous glances and then, in the evening of the fourth, during the maypole dancing, their fingers touch and stay in place. After this, on hikes, they often walk together. She likes the funny stories that he tells her and the way he wears his collar flipped right up against his neck. Wim is also from Dordrecht, so they plan to stay in touch.

The journey home feels shorter. She leans against the girl beside her as the carriage jolts along. For the final roll call at Dordt station they answer weakly through a fog of sleep. After this, she, Kees, and Ali trudge back to the Frederikstraat. Though Ma has dinner waiting, they are too tired to eat it and can barely speak.

IN THE MORNING the curtains shine bright orange. Downstairs Marianne is running and calling out. Ali stretches in the bed beside her.

“I have slept soooooo well!” she yawns.

Lien points her toes and fingers, making her body as long as it will go.

Then they play the game that they call tickling, scratching, rubbing, which has a precise order to it. One girl lies flat on her stomach while the other tickles and then scratches, gently, down her back. And finally there is the rubbing, with hands flat and warm in circles, which is bliss.

At this point Marianne bounds in and orders them to breakfast.

“You must get up!” she chants, bouncing and repeating “up” with every bounce.

Tousle-haired, the two girls are shooed down to the table, where Ma is seated with a stack of washing, sorting items into different piles. Their three blue shirts are already hanging in a line across the window, darkening the room.

“You girls have slept a hole in the day,” Ma tells them, smiling. “What you need is a bit of healthy sunshine and then tonight you’re off to roost with the chickens. It’s school again tomorrow.”

“Off to roost with the chickens” means going to bed when it gets dark. Ma likes these funny expressions. It is one of those differences between the talk of the Van Esses and what she was used to at the Van Laars.

“If we go to bed with the chickens then we can lay our own eggs in the morning!” Lien answers, but as she says this she knows all of a sudden that her joke has not fallen right. In Bennekom such language of the farmyard was common, whereas here the idea of people laying eggs is somehow dirty, and Lien feels she has caught this infection in her way of speaking and that, because of what she has said, the mood in the room has changed. Ali smiles in her loyal, kind way, but Lien senses an edge of pity. Ma continues sorting the laundry piles.

Feeling downcast in the silence, Lien adds this error to her secret mental list of mistakes. Last week, for example, Ma called her a fusspot for cleaning, as Mother van Laar taught her, with two separate cloths. And then there was the bike trip where she called out “Hooray for the Liegemen!,” which Ali told her afterward was all wrong. The Liegemen, apparently, were the bad ones, not the good ones. The Van Esses, the Labor Party, they were on the Patriot side, whereas the Liegemen, that was the side of the church, which is the side of the Van Laars. So all of her dreams of castles and towers and princes and princesses, which she got from those books that she read in Bennekom and Ede, they were wrong.

Lien sits there scowling.

“Hey, Lienepien,” says Ma not unkindly, “enough now of those dirty looks!”

THERE IS A GROUP PHOTO of the five children—Ali, Kees, Lien, Marianne, and my father—that was taken around 1948. Lien, who is now fifteen and who sits to the far left of the picture, is for the first time too old to have a bow in her hair. My dad, the baby of the family, sits directly in front of her, his sister’s arm holding him steady. Blond and smiling, he looks exactly like my own son did when he was that age. Ali, in an armchair with a wicker back, sits crosswise at the center, already looking like a grown woman in her long skirt and white blouse with a brooch at her neck. By the time I was old enough to remember Aunt Ali she was over fifty, but it is easy to recognize her sweet-natured, timid, serious expression.

Marianne, who is eight and stands behind her older sister, is still more familiar. She looks self-possessed and not at all childish in spite of the big white bow that she wears.

The Van Esses are a good-looking family, but the most striking is Kees, already dressed in a suit and tie, who smiles in a roguish, confident manner. You can see the man in him: the handsome and kindly big brother my father so fondly remembers, for whom everything seemed to come easy, and also the family patriarch of later years.

In the picture there is a big empty space between Kees and his foster sister. The gap looks awkward, yet the two of them had first been such close friends. It is not just from him, though, that Lien seems to be separated. In spite of the physical closeness, she looks somehow set apart from her siblings, and this is not just on account of her darker complexion and differently textured hair. There is a brooding quality to her, at once dreamy and fierce, which matches with Lien’s own account of her feelings at this time.

In the hotel room in Dordrecht, shifting from Lien’s “concrete story of my relations with the van Es family,” I look back at the report by Le-Ezrath Ha-Jeled, which I studied this morning. The report makes mention of “a break in the girl’s emotional engagement” and states that “the child gives the impression of not having fully developed.” “The delay in her spiritual growth,” it concludes, “is noticeable.”

Maybe I am projecting too much onto a single photo, but I do sense this aura of separation in the picture. The light falls differently on her. Lien looks almost as though she has been taken from another photograph entirely and then pasted in.

Lien’s “concrete story” describes an incident that occurred around the time the family portrait was taken:

I remember one time that I was darning socks by the stove. I thought it was really rather a fun little job. But at a certain moment I was sent directly to bed without my supper, something that was used as a punishment in the house. Ma’s point was that I had been looking so angry and disagreeable and that I had to learn that sometimes I had to darn socks and that was that. It didn’t matter that I said that I hadn’t minded darning socks at all. The punishment went through.

Ma also said to me quite often, “You are irritating me immeasurably, but I don’t know why.”

As I write this, memories are triggered and I think that I must have been deaf and blind to the signals that my presence was too much for the family. And the question is, did they love me?

Even then, I always had the feeling that they didn’t need me but I did need them. I was conscious that I probably loved them more than they loved me.

There are these moments when Lien feels separate from the family, when she stares into the distance and feels an oppressive sadness, but life is good, really, on the whole. The buzz of the house is a joy to her. Always there are people at the door who need to speak to Pa. And over dinner there are heated conversations, big important topics with principles at stake. Ma and Pa are completely honest. Though the house that they rent is quite large, they own almost nothing, and what they have they share. Come 1953, when the great flood (the Watersnood) drowns much of the country, they will, without a moment’s consideration, open their home to refugees.

As well as sisters and brothers, Lien has many friends around her. Girls still sometimes write in her poem book. She has a special pad of yellow paper, which she now uses for these extra entries, like the following verse:

Two clear eyes, the prettiest I’ve seen

I hope that you love me, my dearest Lien

It is Lien now instead of Lientje. One day in school a teacher tells her that Lientje sounds childish and this moment marks the change.

School is a pleasure. Though a year behind, she is soon again near the top of the class. She enjoys the stillness of homework. Numbers line up and resolve themselves as her pencil moves from square to square. In Dutch, she likes the gentle unpicking of sentences: the subject, verb, and object that are strung together on an invisible line. Best of all, there is geography, in which she traces the edges of continents, oceans, deserts, and jungles, and great sheets of ice.

There are friends at school, at the AJC, and in the street, and also at home where she can talk about Wim (whom she has seen quite a few times now) to Ali, do puzzles with Marianne, or read stories to little Henk. It is only with Kees that she has lost her connection. There is a wildness about him, in which she used to share but that now excludes her. He is always saying that she is odd. Lien wants him to like her again and maybe it is because of this that, one time, when walking through the fields in August, she tells him what happened in Ede and afterward in the woods outside Bennekom.

They have just come back from an AJC meeting and as Lien talks she looks down at her sandals and at her gray woolen socks.

“You know, when I was away, in the wartime, a man did things to me that I didn’t like.”

Kees slows his step.

“What kind of things?” he asks her, intrigued for once.

She hadn’t planned this and doesn’t have the language.

There is a word that has been whispered by wide-eyed girls in class.

Rape (Verkrachten).

“He used to rape me,” she says.

The phrase feels awkward in her mouth.

Kees stands still.

“Did he take your clothes off?” he asks.

As she looks up at him, Kees suddenly looks childish in his red neckerchief and his khaki AJC shorts. Turning away, she starts to walk.

He lags behind and then strides toward her.

“Hey, if you can do it with some stranger you can do it with me,” he puffs.

“I could make you,” he adds after a moment, mumbling.

When he speaks like this she is suddenly frightened and she begins to run.

“You are odd!” he shouts after her, without trying to catch up.

IT WAS AN EXCHANGE that took just a few seconds, and Kees, a fourteen-year-old with no understanding of his sexual feelings, perhaps hardly thought about it. Afterward, he told his parents, who did their best to talk the matter over with Lien. But there was no language for what had happened to Lien in Ede and Bennekom. In that postwar half decade there was barely a language for emotions at all. So the rapes that Lien suffered remained as a fenced-off part of her existence, never referred to but still sensed, perhaps by everyone, as a presence.

IT IS NOT LONG AFTER THIS that Lien finds herself on the broad tree-lined gravel path through Orange Park that leads to the Higher Burgess School (the HBS) on her way to sit for the entrance exam. This is the secondary school that teaches more difficult subjects such as geometry, sciences, Greek, and Latin; from here students can go on to a university, although Lien has not thought at all about that. Almost a year ago, after good reports in all of her subjects, the teachers told her that she should try for HBS admission. They even provided some extra lessons in preparation. Mostly, though, Lien feigned illness and did not turn up.

It is not the thought of the school itself that frightens her; it is the thought of what will happen at home. Once, when she brought an English book back from the library, Ma told her that she could not possibly understand it and she ought to be careful of showing off. That comment has stuck like an awkward piece of grit inside her. With Kees and Ali already at the MULO (More Advanced Lower Education College, where the subjects are easier), how would it feel if she were suddenly one of those boastful HBS girls?

On all sides children are heading in the same direction, some with their parents beside them offering last-minute advice. The building is enormous: row upon row of high, blank windows staring out across the park. The muted crowd is gathering around a side door, digging holes in the deep gravel with their shoes. After twenty minutes the door opens and a man with whiskers invites them in.

It smells of chalk, chlorine, packed lunches, and damp clothes. Rows of wooden benches are lined up opposite a lectern and a clock. On them there are little stacks of printed sheets, facedown, evenly spaced. These are the exam papers. The big room echoes with the squeaking and scraping of wood.

And now it is really happening. When the whiskered man calls out there is a frantic rustle. Beside Lien, a girl starts writing immediately, her tongue edging in and out to the ridge of her teeth.

Part I is mental math, with no rough working allowed. Lien turns her paper:

88 -. . . . + 8 = 70
3⁄25 =. . . .

The girl beside her is working fast.

What would it be like to be here? Lien looks up above the paneling to the white wall and the clock.

88 -. . . . + 8 = 70

Is it true that the girls who go here are mostly snobs?

88 -. . . . + 8 = 70

If she gets in, how will the news be greeted back home? The thought gives Lien a shiver. In her imagination, she can see Kees scoffing at some “Burgess School expression” that she will pick up here, and Ali, though supportive, inwardly hurt, as if by an act of betrayal. And then Pa? Almost every evening he sits at the dinner table at his studies. What will happen if Lien brings home books about geometry, Greek, and Latin? Thinking of Pa and Ma, the idea fills her with shame.

Lien decides that she does not want it. She does not want to stand out as a HBS girl. And so, after five more minutes, she starts to guess at the answers almost at random, her figures crossing the dotted lines.

A few weeks later she gets the news of a disappointing performance in the examination. Admission, the letter says, is permissible, but it is not recommended in her case. The decision to go to the MULO instead comes to Lien as a relief.

AND SO LIFE GOES ON as before in the household, with Lien in the class below Kees at the MULO, where he rises with distinction to become head boy. And life really is happy. After Henk there is another baby brother, Geert Jan. There are holidays to the seaside and long visits to the grandparents in Strijen. And there is Wim from the AJC, who becomes her fiancé, though in the end they break up.

Of course there are family tensions. Pa is, to be honest, a man with a temper, and Lien too has a passionate side. At rare moments Lien can boil over, hot with fury at some injustice, defiant of consequence, railing in her anger. On these occasions Pa will hit her, hard. This, though, also happens with Kees (with Ma just the same, screaming and desperate to stop the beating), and on the street these rages from fathers are far from unique. Lien has nothing to complain of. Her lot is far better than most.

When the time comes, Ali leaves home to go to nursing college and Kees, the star of the MULO, goes on to train as a flight engineer and then to work for Fokker in aircraft design, quickly rising through the firm. And Lien? She would like to work with children. There is a place in Amsterdam that would suit her: a residential nursery. She can live there and get training and return to Dordrecht most weekends. Then, after a year, she would progress to Middeloo College in Amersfoort to complete a qualification in social-educational care.

So in 1950, aged seventeen, she takes the train to the big city and then the tram to a grand villa with gates around it, where she gets her uniform: a white apron over a blue dress. The evenings are lonely because few of the other girls stay over, except to do the night shift, and she never goes out. But the work appeals to her. They take children with behavioral problems and work with them, giving them confidence, drawing them out. As she follows her course of studies, Lien takes a special interest in organizing little concerts, with the children playing their recorders all in a line.

On Fridays Lien will pack her bag and head out to the bus stop, looking forward to Ma’s cooking and to seeing everyone at home. She will sleep in her old bedroom and chat, maybe, to Ali, if she is also back for the weekend. Downstairs Pa will be smoking and reading, first the work papers from his briefcase and then his books on politics and history and science. It is all so comforting, and because of this it hurts her that Ma, feeling that the house gets crowded, says sometimes, “You know, you don’t have to come.”

At work they are developing new approaches. It is a matter of understanding the child as a whole person, with a specific background and a character of his or her own. The idea is to give children the freedom to develop not only as individuals but also as part of a social world. To help them with this, there are methods such as counseling, setting child protection guidelines, home visits, and play therapy, which change the old routines.

After a year, Lien moves, as planned, to Amersfoort to continue her studies. Then, another year on, she must fix on a placement. The director asks Lien to come to his study to look at the options for where she might go. There is a new children’s home called Ellinchem that, he suggests, would suit her. The establishment is based on innovation. It is the first to mix boys and girls together, from babies to the age of twenty-one. With a humanist ethos, it sets out to tackle issues such as loneliness and bereavement. He has spoken to the management. Might Lien take up a position and continue her education there?

She considers for a moment. The place is quite near Bennekom, which spooks her a little, but she agrees.

SO IN 1953 SHE IS TWENTY and working in another villa, this time in a rural village rather than in a big town. Less than a decade back, Ellecom, where the institution is based, was the home of the Dutch SS training college, but to most people that now feels like a long time ago. And the director was right; it does suit Lien. She is expanding her contacts, becoming more of a leader, finding a mission in life. But still, like all young people, she wants a home to go to, and she feels the pull of the Frederikstraat.

It is on a Monday there in late autumn that she is dozing on the sofa at the end of a weekend visit, having been a bit under the weather and planning to go back by train the next day. Rain slants across the window. The objects in the room are so familiar: the clock, the armchair, and the cabinet of polished wood with its china teapot and matching unused cups. For once, the house is peaceful. Even Ma is out. Only Pa is to be heard in the kitchen, clinking crockery as he brews his coffee.

She drifts off, well now but still tired, and only wakes when the door opens and Pa asks if she’s okay. It is not like him to ask. Lien lies there, confused and dozy for a moment, and then answers that she’s fine.

Then something strange, frightening, and unexpected happens. As an event it is fleeting, and what actually occurs is open to interpretation, but the consequences will be profound. Pa is there beside her as she lies on the sofa, his breathing unsteady. Before she knows what is happening he is kissing her and stroking her hair. This man, whom she thinks of as a father, seems excited by her as a woman.

Lien stands up and laughs a little, her heart running incredibly fast. He stands close by her, his hand touching her arm.

“I’m not so well, I’m going upstairs to bed,” is what she thinks she says.

As she rushes up, her mind is scrambled, unsure what has happened. She paces and looks out onto the rain-slicked balcony, trying to calm down. Her hands are trembling, more from shock and confusion than from fear. After ten minutes of silence in which her hearing buzzes, she curls up on the bed and lies there under the covers staring in the half-light at the door.

And then the handle turns and he is there again, to get something from the cupboard, he says. He’s gone within a minute, but then he’s back and standing by her bed. Pa bends to kiss her and she hears that heavy breath.

Perhaps she screams? She really doesn’t know.

And then he’s gone and it’s over and nothing happened. But for Lien, the world has altered and it can never be the same. For her, Pa is no longer her father; he is just a man.

She writes a note to say that she needs to be alone for a while and then she leaves the house.

IN MY HOTEL ROOM a sharp smell of cigarette smoke is pushing through the closed vent above the window from the terrace. I head through to the bathroom, where my skin looks blue in the mirror under the tile-reflected light.

SOME MIGHT SAY THAT LIEN, her perception distorted by the rapes she endured at the hands of Uncle Evert, imagined intentions that were never there. The circumstances—the empty house, the trusted older man who seems at first to comfort—have something in common. Perhaps they triggered an association that had long been latent in her mind?

In the end, though, I do not believe that what Lien experienced was a projection. Her testimony in the typescript “the concrete story of my relations with the van Es family” is straightforward:

Suddenly he came toward me, breathing very fast, and began to kiss me. I can still feel the shock and the fear of it. Pa, the stern father, the uncompromising moralist, who was suddenly so tactile and excited. . . . He saw me as a woman.

Later, Lien and I will discuss her recollection of those moments. Aware of the danger of a false accusation, she has played the incident again and again in her memory, but her judgment has remained the same. In the end, I must write my account of these few minutes from her perspective, aware that it could color my grandfather’s reputation, risk distorting the legacy of a life of courage and ideals.

Tomorrow I will go to the Frederikstraat to look onto the balcony and to walk around those rooms. After that I will take the train to Amsterdam, where I am meeting Lien. She wants to show me the Portuguese Synagogue, the place where she got married.