December 14, 1974
“It’s so cold out there,” she said as she got back in and slammed the door. “As soon as I can afford it, I’m going to buy a car.”
He hadn’t been able to smell her perfume when she was in the back, but he smelled it now. It was as if she had doused herself with it, sickly sweet, cheap, mint-scented perfume.
“You’ll have to get your driver’s licence,” he said as he pulled out into the street.
“Oh, I have my licence,” she said. “Dad taught me how to drive, but he never lets me use the car. What sense does that make?”
“None at all,” he said. “One of my daughters, Gloria, has her licence. She’s in Quebec at university, learning to speak French, which I could have taught her right here at home. What sense does that make?”
They drove in silence for a while. “It’s quiet without Rachel,” the girl said, her voice quavering a touch with nervousness. He wondered how long he’d been lost in thought.
“Gloria got married just recently. She was nineteen,” he said.
“That’s really young,” she said. “I’m almost eighteen and—”
“And you won’t be married by this time next year, will you?”
“Who knows?” she said, laughing and throwing up her arms as if to say there was no telling what might happen to her in a world in which there were men such as him who could not control their daughters.
Pellets of road salt and grains of sand pinged against the windows and the doors. “I’ll probably forget how to drive before Dad lets me use the car,” she said.
“What does he think you’ll do if you go out in his car?”
“He doesn’t give reasons. He just says what he says and that’s that.” She sat there with her knapsack on her lap, her arms folded on top of it, her chin resting on her arms in a pose of reflectiveness. She was pretty for a Jew, petite, delicate, but her personality didn’t match her looks. How could it? The first time she’d opened her mouth, he’d seen that she was like all the Jews he’d ever known, in love with the sound of her own voice, irritatingly argumentative, deaf to the difference between eloquence and cant, and completely self-absorbed.
“You can drive this car if you like,” he said.
“Really? But we’re only about five minutes from my house.”
“That’s true. Not much of a chance to brush up on your driving skills.”
“It was very nice of you to offer, though.”
“I wasn’t thinking. Your parents must be expecting you.”
“I’m the baby of the family, and they treat me like a baby even though I’m as good as eighteen. They didn’t even want me to get a job.”
“But you got one. You put your foot down. Good for you. Rachel’s the baby of our family and, as you saw, she has me wrapped around her finger.”
The girl fell silent.
“No one was watching at the window for me,” he said. “I have them well trained. They know that I hate to be tied down, that I like to get out of the house. I often drive around the city at night just to be by myself. Sometimes I can’t sleep. Too many memories.”
“Of the war?”
“Yes,” he said. “It was not a nice time. I think that, after I drop you off, I’ll drive around for a while. If I go straight home, I’ll only wind up going out again after midnight when it’s even colder.”
“Where will you go?” she said, sounding sorry for him.
“Oh, I usually just drive around, see where I end up and then drive somewhere else.”
“You really wouldn’t mind if I drove your car?”
“Not at all. You have given me your word that you are licensed to drive. I won’t ask for proof.”
She laughed. “It’s a deal!”
“It’s a deal,” he said, pulling over to the side of the street. She giggled and opened her door, which was caught by the wind and pulled her from the car so that she wound up on her backside on the sidewalk.
“Are you all right?” he called.
She laughed loudly as she struggled onto her feet. He held tight to his door as he opened it and stepped out onto the street. When he saw that she was coming around the front of the car, he went around the back, one hand on his fur hat lest he lose it in the wind.
He got in the car on the passenger side. Sitting behind the wheel, she tugged her door with both hands but lost hold of it as the wind kicked up. She reached out and grabbed the door again but couldn’t close it. He leaned across her lap, his left elbow on her thigh and clutched the handle of the door with his left hand, which enclosed both of hers. Together, they barely managed to shut the door. They shared a laugh as he shifted back to his side of the seat. The cold, the smell of her minty perfume, the feel of her hands beneath his, her hair brushing his cheek, their conquest of the screeching wind exhilarated him.
“We did it,” he said. She laughed and shuddered at the same time, hugging herself as her lips quivered.
“Oh my God, it’s cold out there,” she said, blowing on her hands. He nodded and rapidly clapped his hands together to warm them, but she mistook it for applause and joined in. “We did do it, Professor van Hout,” she said, laughing as if he was a child to whom nothing mattered more than her praise and approval.
“Where to next?” she said.
“You’re the driver,” he said. “You decide.”
“Well,” she said, “first we have to move the seat forward.” He reached beneath the seat, took hold of the lever, dug his heels into the floor mat and shifted forward, causing the seat to lurch ahead until his knees were just inches from the glove compartment. “Perfect,” she said, “for me at least. You’re kind of squished up.”
“I’m just fine, Anne. Let’s see how well you drive.”
“I’m serious. Where to next?”
“The driver chooses where the car goes and by what route it gets there.”
“Is that the van Hout rule? Is that what you tell Mrs. van Hout?”
“My wife was raised to think it’s unladylike to drive a car,” he said, resenting the girl for having mentioned Myra.
“Really?” She laughed as if they were sharing a joke about a woman who had tricked him into marriage, the sort of woman other men would have known should be avoided.
“Yes,” he said, “really. It’s not that odd. Many people in South Africa thought that way back then.”
“I shouldn’t have laughed. It just sounded a bit old-fashioned. But maybe it was like that in St. John’s, too.”
“I doubt it. Ladylike women are rare in this place, present company excepted, of course. But Myra enjoys being a fish out of water. She says it makes her feel as if she’s a rebel among a crowd of conformists.”
“She sounds interesting.”
He felt like asking her why she insisted on talking about his wife. Instead, he said, “Very well, then, let’s get this Malibu Classic on the road.”
She eased the gearshift into drive and pulled out into the street. “I still can’t help feeling that it’s magic,” she said, “the way a car just goes when I want it to. It gives me such a feeling of power.”
“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”
Why did he say things he didn’t mean? What was he doing, letting this impudent, gum-chomping Jewess drive his car? Everything she’d said since he stopped to pick her up had been at his expense or that of his wife or one of his daughters. “Can you even see over the dashboard?” he said. “I think this may be too much car for you.”
“Do you want me to pull over? I bet I made a mistake, didn’t I?”
“I was just having fun with you, Anne,” he said. “I am just a passenger. The wheel is yours. You’re a very good driver.”
“You’re so nice.”
The pavement was bare and dry and bore large stains of salt. It hadn’t snowed in a week, after a storm that had changed to heavy rain had left nothing on the ground but wind-polished ice. “Would it be okay if I drove over to the Brow and out to Cape Spear? Otherwise, I’ll be stopping every ten seconds for a stop sign or a traffic light. I’d love to just drive.”
“Of course,” he said, “that would be fine. There’s something about just driving, isn’t there, getting away from all the things that slow you down or stop you in your tracks? There’s freedom in it.”
“Definitely.”
“I often go out to Cape Spear when I drive around at night. You should get a car of your own as soon as you can.”
They crossed the bridge that spanned the small stream that divided the city in two. She really was a good driver, confident, relaxed. As if she had done it a thousand times before, she shifted gears as they climbed the steep hill to the crest from which the road dropped off to the sea in a series of winding curves that led to the unmanned lighthouse at Cape Spear. There were no houses now, and the street lamps were so far apart that, between them, there was nothing visible but the stretch of road revealed by the headlights. “It’s really dark,” she said, “but I know this road like the back of my hand. I like hiking in these woods with my brothers and our dogs, even in the winter. We have snowshoes. I’m a tomboy, I suppose.”
“I’ve never gone hiking in my life,” he said. Everywhere he’d lived, but here especially, he’d assumed that the woods were even more boring than the parks he’d sometimes been obliged to stroll through.
“Because you’ve lived in big cities.”
“I suppose.”
“What’s Amsterdam like?”
“There aren’t as many Jews there as there used to be. Some that survived went to Israel. But many didn’t survive.”
“I’m sure that you and the others in the Resistance saved a lot of people,” she said, glancing at him. “You shouldn’t blame yourself.”
“I don’t like to think about it.”
“I shouldn’t have mentioned it again. It’s just…I remember the first time I read The Diary of Anne Frank. Until I read it, I thought that no one stood up for the Jews. And it’s so sad because, by the end of the diary, she knows that the Allies are so close, and she’s convinced that she and the others will be rescued, but—”
“But the Allies were delayed because they fell short of taking an important bridge. I remember that very well. Too well.”
“You must have been so disappointed when you heard they had to stop.”
“I shouldn’t be talking about it.”
“So many people died trying to help Jews get out of Europe.”
“Yes, they did. I was there. I didn’t die. I hope you don’t hold it against me.”
“Oh no, I’m not saying that. I’m so nervous that I’m saying all the wrong things.”
“Why are you so nervous?”
“You’re my professor!” She giggled.
“Do you speak Hebrew, Anne?”
Yet another laugh. “Mom and Dad speak a little bit. But ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ are about as much as I can manage. My brothers were taught it, but I wasn’t.”
“I speak five languages fluently: English, Dutch, German, French and Afrikaans, the official language of South Africa. And I can get by in Spanish and Italian.”
“Wow. Five, almost seven. I’m taking French.”
“You need to live where the languages are spoken.”
“I’ll do French immersion—”
“In Canada. Yes. My eldest, Gloria, did that a few years back. But French isn’t spoken properly in Canada.” He thought of the trip he would soon take to see Gloria in Quebec.
“Almost seven languages and you were in the Dutch Resistance. Everyone in Accounting 214—well, if they only knew.”
“Why? How am I regarded by everyone in Accounting 214?”
“No, it’s not that. I just meant—”
“You meant that, if they only knew, they would think even more highly of me than they do already.”
“Exactly,” she said, sounding relieved that he didn’t mind that his students laughed at him behind his back, didn’t mind hearing that he was the butt of a universal joke.
She pointed out the windshield. “There it is,” she said. He saw the flashing light atop the barrens of Cape Spear. “We’re nearly there,” she said. “I drove all the way. You should drive back, Professor van Hout. I don’t want to push my luck.”
“Whatever you like,” he said as she pulled into the small parking lot at the end of the road. The lighthouse and its ever blinking light were just a hundred yards away, behind and above them.
“Let’s just stop here for a few moments,” he said. “This has been a refreshing change for me. I should hire you to drive me around when I can’t sleep.” She laughed. Did she do nothing but talk and laugh? Every time she had laughed since she got into the car, he had smelled the gum that she was chewing.
“It’s so windy,” she said. “It’s so loud I can’t even hear the ocean.”
She put the car in park and turned off the headlights. “You can usually hear it. It sounds nice at night when you can’t see it.”
“Do you often come out here to listen to the ocean when it’s too dark to see it?”
Another laugh, a loud one, another waft of the gum that she was grinding with her teeth.
“What’s so funny?” he said.
“Couples come out here to park. I came out here with my boyfriend once or twice before we broke up.”
“Aha, a boyfriend. I might have known, a pretty girl like you.”
“Yes, but not anymore.” No flirtatiousness, no guardedness. The boyfriend was history, whoever he was, water under the bridge. He hadn’t known it, but that was all she had ever meant him to be.
“What’s the expression? You washed him right out of your hair.”
“Yes,” she said, vigorously nodding her head and smiling, “that’s exactly what I did.”
“How did he take it?”
“He’ll live.”
He’ll live. “The war wasn’t just about the Jews, you know,” he said.
“Oh, I know…I know there were many other factors.”
“Factors? Factors. Yes, there were many other factors. You’d be surprised how many other factors there were. The kind that people never hear about.”
She nodded solemnly, trying to look chastened, indulging an old man’s memories of things that were still important to no one but him. He could just make her out, looking straight ahead as if she could see the ocean. “I should just zip up my mouth,” she said.
He eased apart the fasteners of his winter coat, each one popping loudly. “So cold out there, so warm in here,” he said. “Ten or fifteen minutes out there and we’d be done for.”
The wind slammed the car so hard that it rocked slightly from side to side. From time to time, the foghorn sounded. The light from the lighthouse came and went, super-illuminating their surroundings for fractions of a second. “I wish we could see the waves,” she said. “But you couldn’t pay me enough to get out of this car.”
“Imagine if the car stalled and wouldn’t start,” he said. “We’d freeze to death. You shouldn’t have suggested that we come all the way out here on such a night.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right, you’re right, what was I thinking? We should head back right now in case something does go wrong.”
“You can make it up to me,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Just like a girl to ask a question that she knows the answer to. My daughters do it. Rachel does. You know what I mean, Anne. It won’t leave a mark on you or me.”
He unzipped his fly. “Be a good girl,” he said.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” She stared at him in wide-eyed disbelief. He saw it all in the look she gave him, the scorn, the revulsion, the outrage and amusement. Another Jewess had once looked at him like that. “You picked the wrong girl, mister. We’re getting out of here.”
He grabbed her hair with his left hand just as she was shifting the car into reverse.
It might have been over in a minute. Or an hour. All he wanted her to do was what she had done many times with boys she didn’t even like, such as the one she’d come out here with until she’d decided she would rather come out here with a different one. She had done it here in this very spot, in the front seat of her boyfriend’s car. In car after car. Why not in the front seat of his? He had been kind to her. He had indulged her far beyond the point at which other men would have lost all patience with her, and had asked for nothing in return but what she had goaded him into asking for. She wouldn’t do something to him, so he was left with no choice but to do something to her.
So he did it. It was done.
He had got on top of her. He hadn’t been ready for a fight of any kind, let alone a fight like that. All women had to do was announce their availability and men came running. They could get it whenever they wanted it, but not men. Men had to play by their rules. Men had to play their stupid games. He had only done to her what she wanted him to do, except that he ignored her rules and games. It was absurd of her to think she had to play so hard to get. He was used to the dark and silent rooms of his own house, and ever-available daughters who complied and followed his instructions and liked what he did, and didn’t make a sound as he crept back to his room. But this had been fury and anger and vicious desperation, the first fight of his life. She had said things that made him want to shut her up, but that was not his fault. She should not have spoken of Anne Frank or the other Jews whose deaths she thought he was haunted by. She should not have spoken of the girls she thought were still alive because of him. Every word she’d said since she got in the car had been an insult in disguise. He could have let it all pass and driven her home and swallowed his pride as he had done so many times before. But there comes a point when you have to act.
It seemed to him that his life had led inexorably to this very time and place. He’d invited Rachel to stay in the car. He hadn’t stopped for this girl with anything in mind but giving her a lift. And here he was with a woman who was not his daughter or his wife. She had left him with no time to consider the risks of doing what she drove him to. A Jew who so loathed the idea of doing what he asked of her that she couldn’t hide it, or didn’t bother trying to, but laughed at him. What sort of man would accept such an insult from a Jewess who, thirty years ago, would have been his for the taking if not for the Nazis, who kept such women for themselves and were amused when he tried to convince them that he didn’t mind because he had women of his own and no need of theirs? How could he have looked at himself in the mirror again if he’d let her deny him?
He’d heard her fingernails breaking as she tried to get a grip on the back of his coat. She punched the windows until there was no skin left on her knuckles.
When he was done with her, he looked in the rear-view. There was blood on his face, which he wiped clean with his sleeve. Her blood. There wasn’t a mark on him except for a scratch on his left earlobe, on which a drop of blood had formed. A girl who fought and screamed like that would never cease to fight and scream until she brought him down. He couldn’t let her go. So. He crossed the only infinite divide that was left for him to cross. He took another life with his bare hands. He put both hands around her neck and squeezed until all the things that need not have happened stopped and silence took the place of all the things he need not have heard. During the war, others had taken the lives of people he betrayed, but he had managed to keep death at a distance so that, when the war was over, the winners thought his hands were clean.
He had been about to drag her from the car and leave her when he remembered that Rachel had written their phone number on a piece of paper that she had handed to the girl. What had she done with it? He checked the pockets of her coat and uniform. He pulled inside out the pockets of the jeans that he had tossed into the back seat. Nothing but Kleenex and a few coins. He took off her boots and socks. Nothing. She must have put the note in her knapsack. Aside from having innumerable pockets, the thing was crammed with textbooks, into any one of which she might have slipped the piece of paper that, if it were found, would lead the police straight to his front door.
He realized he couldn’t take the time to check the books, and he knew he might have missed the note when he rifled through her clothes. He had to get rid of everything. He stripped her naked and stuffed her clothes in the knapsack, along with her boots and socks. He tried to refasten the straps but couldn’t.
He got out of the car, walked around the front, opened the driver’s door and lifted her until he was able to push her onto the passenger side. He backed the car up and turned it around. Leaving the parking lot, he pulled onto the road with no thought in his mind but that he would submerge her, her clothing and her knapsack in one of the lakes or ponds out here that were so numerous they had no names. But then he remembered that every stream and pond and lake was frozen over. He would freeze to death looking for a place to safely conceal her.
He stopped in the road, putting the car in park but leaving the headlights on and the engine running. He got out and went around to the passenger side. He opened the door and carried her from the car to the gravel margin. He tried to throw her into the ditch, but she merely tumbled from his arms onto the ground at his feet, lying on her side, facing the road. He crouched and positioned her arm and her leg so as to cover her private parts.
He got back in the car and drove at a steady pace toward the city. A strange calm came over him, almost a sense of peace. He believed he would be caught. He was resigned to it, not because of Rachel, who, he knew, wouldn’t say a word, but because of whatever it was that would catch up with him this time, backfire on him as something had always done no matter how carefully he thought things through, no matter how sure he had been that he had made allowances for everything. He drove down into the city, his ears popping on the steepest hill. He went past his house five, ten, fifteen times, until, at last, there were no lights on but the one above the door.
He felt contempt for those he thought had wilfully misunderstood him, and those who would condemn him even though, dealt the same cards, they’d have played them just the same, or even worse, than he had. He began to laugh in scorn of his hypocritical accusers, because he had done what they had stopped short of doing simply because they lacked the nerve.
He pulled into the driveway and turned off the headlights but left the engine running. He looked at the bulging knapsack resting against the back of the seat beside him like some odd-looking passenger. “Be a good girl,” he’d said to her, as he so often had to his daughters, and to other girls who never saw his face because he wore a ski mask that, even now, was in the glove compartment. She’d decided she would rather be dead than good. Her intransigence would cost him everything.
He turned off the car, grabbed the knapsack, got out and walked to the door with it, swinging it back and forth as if he was coming home after a long but pleasant walk, even as the wind again forced him to grab hold of his fur hat. He opened the front door and went inside, closing the door loudly behind him, then doing the same with the door that led into the vestibule, where, after turning on the light, he took off his hat and coat and boots and threw them on the floor.
In the living room, he drew an armchair close to the fireplace, put the knapsack in the chair, picked up the coal scuttle, which was almost full, and emptied its contents into the hearth. He made no effort to minimize the noise, for he knew that, unless he called out to Myra, she would not come down to see what he was doing. He doused the coal with lighter fluid from the can beside the scuttle. He picked up the knapsack, sat down in its place and settled it on his lap. He lit a match and threw it on the pile of coal, which erupted into flame with a loud whoosh.
He waited for the coals to reach white heat, then began to burn the contents of the knapsack, feeding the fire with her flimsy coat, her jeans, her green store uniform, her underwear. He poked the clothing into the coals and watched it turn to ash. Next he burned her leather boots, which sent up clouds of thick black smoke until nothing but the heels remained, hard, square, wooden heels that he thought would never catch—but, once they did, they quickly vanished. Last, he burned her books, all of them hardcover, tucked into one of which, he was convinced, was the note on which his telephone number and Rachel’s name were written. He placed book after book on the fire, splayed open, covers facing up. He saved until the very end the accounting textbook he had written and self-published and prescribed as a mandatory text in his courses. He didn’t notice that The Diary of Anne Frank was missing.
He watched his textbook burn, certain that everyone in the house was awake and listening. In the extreme unlikelihood that one or more of them came downstairs and caught him in the act of burning clothes and books, they would simply go back to bed and forget about it if he told them to. A roaring fire at one in the morning. Finally, he burned the knapsack.
He found a small Band-Aid in the downstairs bathroom and put it on his ear.
He went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, took out his glass of Horlicks and gulped it down.
No one was more surprised than him that he got away with it, that the knock on the door never came.
He spent the night after he came home from killing Anne Wilansky lying on top of the blankets of the bed in the spare room, his hands behind his head as he stared up at the ceiling through the glasses he thought it would be pointless to remove because of the imminence of his arrest, which he planned to meet without remorse or cowardice.
A memory came to him. The worst row in the history of the family had erupted over Gloria’s decision to leave home when she was just eighteen. That August, she’d announced that she was engaged and had been accepted at Laval University in Quebec starting in September.
“And how are you going to pay for it?” he’d said.
“Stephen’s father is paying for us both,” she said. “Tuition fees, residence, everything.” She’d met Stephen on a trip to Halifax, had become engaged after five days and had been flying back and forth between St. John’s and Halifax ever since, courtesy of Stephen’s wealthy father. Eighteen and flying back and forth for liaisons with her fiancé.
He’d become enraged. “I won’t have another man paying my daughter’s way,” he’d said. “Don’t you see that he is buying you for his son to play with?”
“I love Stephen and he loves me. Stephen’s father knows that. I want to learn to speak French and Dutch and German so that I can be a flight attendant and move back to South Africa.”
“Why don’t you just become a stripper?” he said. “There’s not much difference.”
“They don’t teach French properly here,” she said. “They don’t teach anything properly here. Not even accounting.”
“I speak French,” he said. “The European kind that is spoken by those who visit South Africa. I could teach you.”
She said she was sure he wouldn’t let anything cut into the time he spent dropping in unannounced on total strangers or driving around the city at all hours of the night.
“No daughter of mine is going to leave home before she has the sense to keep her legs closed,” he shouted at her. She ran upstairs to her room in tears. He sat for hours on the back deck by himself until Myra came out and sat with him in silence.
Until Gloria’s departure for Quebec, he acted as if the argument had never happened. So did the rest of them. How he’d hated that a mere boy had won her away from him, got the better of him with the help of his rich father. As she was leaving the house to get in a cab to go to the airport, he whispered in her ear, “Until we meet again.” It was a promise that he’d made good on when he and Myra flew to Quebec six months later and dropped in unannounced on his daughter and her all-but-adolescent husband. There’d be no more surprise visits to Quebec now, all because of that girl.
And so it went, night after night, other memories of other times whose like he would never see again. The unfairness of it made him feel such spite that his stomach churned. A night came when he wished the police would come for him, and another when he considered turning himself in just so that he’d never again have to wait for the knock on the door. But, just as that knock had never come during the war as he lay awake, waiting for it, it did not come now. Eventually, he realized that he was not even a suspect, that he had got away with murder and could resume his life in freedom and impunity.
He often said to himself, while eating, driving, standing in front of a classroom, lying in bed with Myra: Of all the people alive, I am the only one who knows what happened in the car after Rachel went inside the house.
There were others after her. Each time, he told himself that this one was the last.
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
VAN DOBBEN (1980)
Perhaps I shouldn’t write this down—
I think of it when I’m alone,
what happened in that place that night;
no one but me, if I am right,
no one remembers anymore,
though most of us survived the war.
I dream about it all the time;
I may go mad and dream in rhyme
the way my youngest daughter does.
(Am I the only one who knows?
I’ve heard her rhyming in her sleep,
translating from that book she keeps,
repeating lines she heard from me
and memorized indelibly,
the ballad of the family,
but also lines that Rachel wrote,
a rush of rhymes but none of note.)
In a back room at Van Dobben,
the Germans slept with girls and women,
the wives and daughters of the men
who brought their food and drinks to them;
others, too—some were regulars—
the favourites were teenagers
who did what they were told to do
to stay alive, the chosen few,
for those who didn’t please the men
were not brought back or seen again.
The techtelmechtel Night Salon
that never closed till after dawn:
no Dutchmen went into the room
but those who cleaned up after them,
kitchen workers, older waiters,
sullen, bitter Nazi haters
who never said a word out loud,
not even to young Hans van Hout.
(The Luftwaffe left by the back,
the women, too, half-dressed and drunk.)
My fellow Dutchmen wined and dined
on what the Germans left behind,
the glasses of champagne and beer
that were abandoned everywhere—
they drank them all, flat though they were;
on hands and knees they searched the floor.
They ate the smallest scraps of food,
the crumbs of cake and crusts of bread.
As well-fed as the German men,
I sat and watched, ashamed of them.
I locked up after all were gone
and walked home in the morning sun.
I slept until late afternoon
and rose when it was dark again
for the night shift at Van Dobben.
My birthday came, they sang to me,
pretending I was twenty-three:
Zum geburtstag liebe van Hout;
they said I was männliche Jungfrau,
too old to be a virgin now.
“We’ll take you to the Night Salon,
where virgins go, but not for long:
hanky-panky, techtelmechtel,
give some frau your pumpernickel;
a strapping lad like Hans van Hout,
make sure you put it in her mouth.”
I claimed I was not a virgin,
I had slept with many women,
some who were almost twice my age,
so famous was I for my sausage.
“I doubt you’ve even kissed your mother,”
one of them said, at which the others
threw back their heads, mouths open wide,
and laughed as if to split their sides.
“You’re going to the Night Salon—
you’ve been a virgin far too long
for one with one that is so long.”
I played the fool to lesser men
(I swore I never would again).
They sang their songs, I played along,
as if I thought nothing was wrong—
but then they sat me in a chair
and stripped me to my underwear.
They hoisted the chair from the floor
and raised it high into the air.
Above my subjects, looking down,
I sat as if upon a throne
that rose and fell upon the sea
of soldiers who served under me.
“King van Hout must not be late—
his queen longs for her potentate.”
They chaired me round the restaurant:
“Three cheers for Hans, the sycophant.”
And then they chaired me to the room,
the techtelmechtel Night Salon—
and then, at last, they put me down.
Before the war, the Dutch elite
had gone there late at night to eat,
to mix with others of their kind—
for this the room had been designed:
leather and lace from wall to wall,
elegant booths and private stalls.
To see and to be seen they came,
the upper crust of Amsterdam.
The middle class, the mere riff-raff
who hoped to glimpse the other half,
always went home disappointed—
they were kept from the anointed.
Now the room was but a brothel:
the whores had once been clientele,
the women who had dined so well,
their husbands the celebrities
the lesser lights had hoped to see.
Despite the half-lit chandeliers,
I couldn’t see the officers,
so acrid was the drifting smoke,
so thick it almost made me choke.
I heard the snickers and the jeers:
“That’s quite a uniform he wears.”
“I think the boy’s a fusilier,
but he forgot his bayonet
or else he hasn’t grown one yet.”
“Well, I can see no sign of it.
It may be in his underwear,
assuming that it’s anywhere.”
“Great oaks from little acorns grow.”
“Well, this boy’s wood has yet to show.”
“He’s got a pair of acorns, though,
to come like that into this room.”
“Good thing for him the light’s so dim.”
“Good thing for us, I think you mean.”
My eyes adjusted to the light—
there was a table on my right:
four men were sitting side by side,
none even bothering to hide
that they wore even less than me—
nothing at all that I could see
but what I guessed were pillow slips
that lay like napkins on their laps;
the crazy images of dreams,
for nothing there was what it seemed,
the smoke so dense I couldn’t see
if they were looking back at me,
those faces conjured from thin air,
or even noticed I was there
or realized that I could hear.
The men who chaired me in were gone.
In many booths along the walls,
some things were taking place, my girls,
that I had never seen before,
and so I couldn’t help but stare:
women with women, men with men—
some Germans stood round watching them.
Their togas had been tablecloths;
their laurel crowns were made of wreaths
from which the flowers had been picked.
The smell of something made me sick
but I did not give in to it.
A woman with a painted face
who wore a tablecloth of lace
came up to me and took my hand—
the woman may have been a man.
In that place it was hard to tell
what wasn’t there and what was real.
She led me through the smoky room—
my underwear was my costume,
a pair of shorts, an undershirt
that I had not removed since birth,
or so it seemed, for they were grey,
their colour long since washed away,
threadbare and frayed and full of holes,
my only set of underclothes.
She turned around and spoke to me—
her voice seemed so unwomanly—
“There was a raid this afternoon,
eight Jews crammed into tiny rooms
like rats that live between the walls
of houses on the cold canals.
Two girls have been our guests tonight,
two virgin Jews still full of fight.
I think they look much better now
than they will look at Birkenau.
Two virgins, just the right reward
for Hans van Hout, who is the third.
Who better, Hans, to lose yours to,
than such a pair of sister Jews?
They’re yours to do with what you will,
they’re yours until you’ve had your fill,
until they are brimful with you,
two untouched girls, two nubile Jews.
They fight like cats when we come near,
they bite and scratch and pull their hair.
We were saving them for later—
I think Hans, the Nazi waiter,
could make a meal of both of them:
I’d rather watch than touch the scum,
so you can have the Jewesses.
What would der Führer think of us?
We can use the inspiration
and avoid miscegenation.”
“It’s not as if he has a choice—
a boy that age could do both twice
and still have room left for dessert;
it’s time he had a piece of skirt.”
The voices came from in my head,
or so it seemed, from what they said:
“They’ll need some taming, I’m afraid,
before they’re well and truly laid.
They’re locked in cloakroom number one:
we’ll let them loose and have some fun.
They’re here, just here, behind this door,
bound, gagged and naked on the floor.”
Then, as if of its own accord,
the door swung open and I heard—
nothing at all, not one small sound.
The German men all gathered round.
“They seem to be much more subdued—
you’d think they were already screwed.
There’s not much left for Hans to do—
he might not have to force them to.”
The two girls lay upon the floor,
bound back to back, beyond the door,
heads bowed as tears ran down their cheeks—
one bit her lip and crossed her feet.
Their hair was wet with tears and sweat;
I couldn’t see their faces yet.
They slumped to hide their breasts from me;
I saw more than I’d ever seen,
one blond, the other raven-haired—
I didn’t care that they were scared.
It was not as if I could refuse
this gift of virgin sister Jews.
I’d never touched a girl before—
they soon lay naked on the floor
in front of me, their legs splayed wide,
two sisters lying side by side,
afraid to move lest they be shot.
“It’s time to show us what you’ve got.
Are you a man or are you not?”
They made one get up on all fours:
“Show her that massive thing of yours—
it’s time, young Hans, to drop your drawers.”
I wanted them so much it showed—
it showed too much—“Oh look, good God,
the Cock of Doodle Do has crowed.
We thought you were the Prince of Males.
Prince Hans has crowed before two girls.”
“He saw a bit of Jewish tit
and off his gun went, just like that.”
They went on with their gleeful rhymes,
their stupid jokes, their stupid games—
and then began to shoot their guns.
They shot the pictures on the walls,
they shot the leather booths and stalls,
they even shot the ceiling fans.
I covered my ears with my hands,
for they were ringing from the noise,
and tears ran freely from my eyes,
so heavy was the smoke by then—
the popping of spent Luger shells,
the dust as chunks of plaster fell…
I grit my teeth and shut my eyes—
I was convinced that I would die
when all at once the shooting stopped
as if someone had spoken up.
“Good Lord, young Hans just came again.”
“His gun goes off so easily.”
“It doesn’t look like that to me.
I think young Hans just took a pee.”
And so I had, unknowingly.
Despite them I continued to—
you know what’s coming next, don’t you?
“Let’s leave him here with his two Jews.”
The German soldiers laughed and roared:
“He really put them to the sword.
He’ll never be much of a suitor,
judging by that small pee-shooter.”
How could a man feel more absurd?
I shouldn’t write another word.
I might forget but for that girl,
the one still on her hands and knees,
the one still staring at the floor,
the younger of the Jewish whores—
the raven-head looked up at me
(the coldest eyes I’d ever seen;
brown eyes with little flecks of green),
her face a mask of plaster dust:
she might have been some sort of ghost.
She wiped her mouth with one small hand
and, whispering, said, “Ik ben Anne.”
That’s all she ever said to me.
I can’t be sure; I can’t, you see,
for Anne is such a common name
and girls that age all look the same.
And she was all but in disguise,
except, of course, for those cold eyes
that looked at me so scornfully,
so gleeful was her mockery…
“It’s easier for you,” I said.
“You only have to lie in bed.
The slightest touch and you get wet—
you only have to wait for it.”
At least that’s what I should have said,
but all I did was turn my head.
I can’t be sure; I can’t, you see—
unsure is all I’ll ever be.
Eight Jews, black hair, the greenest eyes…
I’m almost sure I recognized
her later when I found that book:
I think I recognized that look.
“Ik ben Anne” I heard again—
I’ve heard it many times since then.
That smirking face keeps me awake;
I see it often at daybreak.
I hear her say, to me, a man:
“You can’t deny that I am Anne.”