Stretched out in near-darkness on his sofa sometime later, Otto felt too tired to get up and switch on any lights.
‘Exhausted,’ he muttered, in little more than a whisper.
Once more he wished he had given a better account of himself that day. Chloe’s questions had been rapid and his answers superficial. He hadn’t found the space to gather his thoughts. But then she and her colleagues seemed to operate in a different frame of time to him. Everybody did, nowadays. They all moved on fast forward; he in slow motion. No wonder he’d been left a little dazed. It was all so different to his life back home in Switzerland. There he would sit for days on end at the window of his study, watching the colours change in the autumn forest.
He was glad they would soon be meeting some of the residents – apparently it was next on the itinerary. He was feeling a little apprehensive, however. Supposing somebody swore at him?
‘How would you feel about using this lift each day?’ Chloe had asked him earlier.
With an extended yawn, Otto emptied out his mind, allowing his concerns to drift off into the shadows. Tomorrow would no doubt take care of itself.
Little by little, the dark night enclosed him, but he felt no urge to turn on any lights. The distant glow from the city below cast a halo onto the ceiling. He lay staring at it for quite some time, the harsh glare softening to a flickering of candles.
The cellar in which he found himself was long and narrow. It had a red-brick ceiling and walls, which sometimes dripped with damp, and a stone floor that at night seemed half alive with the rumours of mice. He knew this cellar, in intimate detail, and recalled its layout now. There were two exits: a door into the apartment of the elderly couple who sheltered them, and a hatch leading up into the courtyard directly above. Of these two exits, they had been told that they should never use the first. The second, however, they could use as often as was practicable.
The light of the candles offered some respite from the darkness, although the children later had problems with their eyesight, and their mother eventually lost hers altogether. Otto’s symptoms were less severe than his sisters’, although he always needed glasses for his drawing.
The family moved into the cellar in August 1942, just as the deportations began, having fled to Antwerp from Vienna four years earlier. But it was not far enough to escape the forces of persecution, which seemed, to Otto’s father, to be personally pursuing his family across Europe. The previous two years had seen increased levels of violence and intimidation against Antwerp’s Jewish community. When word spread that the round-ups were starting, the family had almost no time in which to search out a hiding place. Fortunately, they were offered one by friends.
The cellar was always uncomfortable and its low ceiling claustrophobic. It was high enough to allow the four children and their mother to stand up straight, even to stretch upwards a little to exercise. But Otto’s father, who was tall, had to permanently stoop in order to move around. Conditions were at their most bearable during spring and autumn. In summer the cellar could become extremely stuffy, and in winter bitterly cold.
There were mattresses for each of them. Otto, who at nine years old was the youngest of the children, had the smallest space in a corner of the cellar. His three sisters slept in a line running along its narrow length to the wider space at the end where their parents slept. A small table and three chairs also stood in that corner.
Their new living arrangements seemed strange at first, but the children quickly adapted and in time their parents did, too. Their father, in particular, suffered from terrible bouts of claustrophobia during the early weeks, but he hid this from the others fairly well.
Before fleeing Vienna, and for a spell in Antwerp, Otto’s father had practised as a civil engineer. He was a stern man, taciturn, but given to moments of great tenderness towards his family. These would break like unexpected shafts of light through his rather oppressive persona. He had greying hair and a substantial moustache in the old-fashioned style. Otto’s mother, who was dark and petite, with thick and shining locks, had been a ballet dancer until suffering an injury some years before, after which she had become somewhat melancholy.
During the daytime, the children would be given improvised school lessons by their parents in the larger space with table and chairs that doubled as their sleeping area. They called it, half jokingly, ‘the living room’. Classes were held in a variety of subjects, including mathematics, geography, physics, biology and rudimentary English. They used writing materials and books that were left for them, whenever possible, outside the connecting door to the apartment of Mr and Mrs Wouters.
These sessions were conducted as formally as possible, but at a volume that was often little more than a whisper. This generated a strange atmosphere, which left Otto with the feeling that the knowledge he was gaining was somehow forbidden. Perhaps in part for that reason, he developed a great appetite for learning, especially in mathematics and the sciences. He would gladly have spent more time reading than was allowed by his parents, who were concerned about its possible effects upon his eyesight.
Twice a day, buckets containing fresh water for the washing of people and clothing were left outside the door for them to collect, along with modest supplies of food. Normally this consisted of black bread and a hard yellow cheese of indeterminate type. Sometimes they were also left items of clothing.
Otto’s sisters, kind-hearted girls with long black hair and large eyes, doted on their younger brother, often giving him their rations of cheese or bread. Their mother and father did the same, meaning there were certain days when Otto ate more than the rest of the family combined. This left him with feelings of intense guilt.
For obvious reasons, the most feared presence in the cellar was the large metal bucket that served as the family latrine. Its normal place of residence was a small recess in a corner. Once a day Otto’s father carried it over to the door, from where it was lifted out to be emptied by a benign and unseen hand.
In order for Otto to use the latrine at night, he had to crawl across the mattresses of his sisters, then carefully edge past his sleeping parents. In winter, when temperatures dropped below freezing, using the bucket could be a most uncomfortable experience. In an attempt to avoid this depressing prospect, Otto tried to ignore the aching in his bladder that had woken him each time. Instead, he tried to focus on drifting back to sleep. Normally he failed, and so resigned himself to tackling the human obstacle course that lay between his resting place and his destination. As the disorientated Otto plunged and scrambled across the line of mattresses, his sisters would curse and groan, if they had been asleep, or sometimes giggle, if they were already awake. Yet this drama took place quietly, almost silently, as they all knew that to make any kind of loud noise would be dangerous.
Like the smell from the latrine, fear was a constant presence in the cellar, although the family became highly accomplished at disguising it from Otto, who was not yet of an age to fully comprehend the circumstances in which they found themselves. There were moments when he clearly sensed something. His mother’s voice was naturally weak, but at times, when she sat at the table talking to his father, it became even more tremulous than usual. The occasional look that his father gave his mother also told Otto that mysterious issues were moving beneath the surface. His sisters, who were older and knew more than he, remained generally playful in his presence. But even they sometimes appeared a little pensive, as they gathered in a huddle on a mattress to whisper among themselves.
Despite the distraction of the daily lessons, life in the cellar was routine. Often the worst thing for the children was not so much the constant fear of discovery as the boredom of containment. For all of them, therefore, those hours away from studying were spent thinking of the courtyard above; awaiting the hour when they could go outside and stand once again in the fresh air.
Three sides of the courtyard were surrounded by the backs of tenement buildings – blank walls offering protection from prying eyes. The fourth side was overlooked by workshops that had once been used by local diamond-cutters, now replaced by unfamiliar faces. When these strangers had finished work for the day, the family would receive a special ‘knock from above’, telling them that the coast was now clear.
Each day, as they awaited this signal, Otto would sit on his mattress and watch the blade-thin shafts of light – specks of dust swirling in their midst – penetrate down into the gloom through the hatch that was the portal to those few short hours of bliss. He would feel a surge of nervous excitement whenever the knock on the wooden hatch came: two firm blows from a hobnailed boot, and then three more at a faster rhythm. After waiting a few minutes, his father would go first, pushing up the cover and clambering out, before turning to help up the children in their turn. Their mother, a nervous woman, usually preferred to stay in the relative safety of the cellar rather than join the others outside, fretting until they returned safely to their hiding place.
During those hours outside in what seemed like the harsh light of the courtyard, Otto sometimes played with his sisters, who had developed between them a range of improvised games in which they didn’t need to make a single sound. There were ‘clapping’ games without any clapping, ‘singing’ games that were extravagant mimes, and games of ‘catch’ that involved no ball. At other times, Otto walked silently beside his father, who paced endlessly around the perimeter, his hands behind his back and his long head bowed. At every turn, almost without fail, his father’s moustache would twitch; a restless antenna, transmitting to Otto his thoughts.
At other times, when Otto was in a more solitary mood, he would stand or sit in a corner, his back resting against the cool brown wall, and study the sky above him. Sometimes he would sketch the view in a notepad, but more often he would settle on contemplation. Only the narrowest of views was visible, of that famously wide Flemish sky, closed in above them between the encircling walls of the tenements. Yet month after month Otto studied in all weathers that small patch of sky: the soft cloud-brushes against the intense blue; the thick and glowing layers of grey; the flakes of snow that tumbled from on high in swirling, chaotic patterns – seeming to take an eternity to reach his face.
While looking upwards, he thought of the skies he had seen in the great landscape paintings his father had shown to him; at one time, in leather-bound books in their Viennese apartment, nowadays by the light of candles in the cellar, in pages torn from old magazines. Some of those paintings were kept here in Belgium, in the fine-art museum in Brussels. His father had promised that one day, when it was safe to venture outside once again, he would take them all.
During summer, they spent two or three hours each evening in the courtyard, fewer in winter. As the afternoons advanced, Otto would watch the shadows from the surrounding tenements lengthen across the courtyard, submerging the light until only a small patch of it remained in a corner by a wall. His sisters would gather in that corner, where they stood and sunned themselves with arms outstretched, or played within the glowing circle, their movements increasingly curtailed by its gradual closing. Until suddenly, almost unnoticed, the scrap of light would be extinguished altogether, casting the last of the courtyard into dusk. Their father, stepping forward in the blueness, would signal with his hand that it was time for them to go, and they would gather in a silent group around the hatch.
At night, Otto lay staring at the red-brick ceiling. It flickered dimly in the candlelight from the corner, where his mother and father sat talking at the table. Their words were indecipherable from this distance, and so Otto would let the low comforting hum of their voices wash over him, his thoughts meandering far beyond the ceiling at which he gazed. Sometimes he would think back to Vienna, although his memories of the city were already hazy. He retained no specific incidents, only vague and abstract impressions, removed from any context. He remembered the clanging of a tram bell, the smell of horse manure and rooms with tall mirrors reflecting layers of chocolate cake. There was also the leather couch in his old home, mottled and smelling of antique books, with a texture that would sink softly against his face as he lay and listened to his mother read him stories. Otto liked to recreate that texture in his mind as he pressed his face into the rough hessian sack that acted as a pillow and often left chequerboard patterns on his cheek in the morning.
Sometimes he would think of Antwerp, which lay somewhere unseen beyond the roof of the cellar. The wide River Scheldt he could still picture, black and swaying hypnotically against the quays. And he could taste the pickled herrings that his mother bought at market, dropping them laughing into his mouth while he grunted and clapped his hands as if he were a seal pup. He also liked to think about the trip they had taken to see the tulip fields at Lisse in the Netherlands, back before the outbreak of war. He remembered riding between the long strips of flowers on the back of his father’s bicycle. The individual heads had blurred into thick streaks of pigment, as pure as any squeezed from a paint tube. A long line of pink, and then a long line of red; yellow, orange, purple – each one in turn becoming Otto’s favourite. Later, they climbed up to a platform on the edge of a field, and saw the bright colours run in thick bands toward the steeples on the horizon; a landscape as painted by a child.
If these thoughts failed to return Otto to sleep, he would raise himself slightly, his hands behind his head, and look across the narrow cellar, over the mattresses of his sleeping sisters to the far end of the room. There he could see his parents, hunched in conversation over the table. Many years later, when visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Otto had seen the painting The Potato Eaters, and found himself transported with a terrible immediacy back to that scene of his parents in the cellar. The drawn faces of the protagonists in the shadowy candlelit room made his heart contract in a spasm of recognition, forcing him to sit a moment on one of the benches lining the gallery. Later, in the café, he explained the memory to Anika and felt her fingers brush lightly against his face.
One night, some five months after the family had moved into the cellar, Otto was lying awake on his mattress and staring once more at the red-brick ceiling. He was having trouble getting to sleep. The rain was beating down heavily that night. He could hear it, faintly, on the other side of the ceiling above him, more clearly on the wooden hatch leading up to the courtyard. As he pressed his face into the rough surface of the sacking, and imagined once more the leather couch in their old apartment, he suddenly became aware that the hum of his parents’ voices had risen in pitch and intensity. Unusually, too, he could now make out what they were saying, and it was clear that his mother in particular was upset. Her weak and trembling voice almost cracked with anger.
‘You can’t,’ she was saying. ‘I won’t let you do it. It’s dangerous and irresponsible.’
Otto’s father sounded less angry, but his deep and authoritative voice carried a barely concealed edge of feeling.
‘Irresponsible? What do you mean irresponsible? Europe is at war, Maria.’
Otto heard one of his sisters stirring, before readjusting the sacking on her mattress and settling back down to sleep.
‘You have four children – you have a family. Your duty lies with them.’
‘But there’s nothing useful I can do here, can’t you see? I can’t protect them. I can’t help them – not if they come for us. There’s nothing I can do. And meanwhile all I do here is pace about, taking up what limited space there is in the cellar and using up valuable supplies of food.’
‘But what about their education?’
‘You are more than capable of taking care of that, as you have already shown.’
‘But it’s a comfort for them to know that you are here. It is for all of us. You’re their father.’
‘We’ve been here some months now, and the children are more than accustomed to this way of life. They, at least, appear calm and controlled about the situation.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Please, let’s not argue any more. You know how I feel – we’ve spoken about this many times. I cannot continue to sit here, in a cellar, doing nothing, while people outside are fighting this evil. We hoped at first it would be for a few months only, but clearly it’s going to last for some time yet. I cannot countenance years of sitting here passively, waiting for my wife and children to be plucked like chickens from a coop and slaughtered. I have to do something.’
‘Not so loud.’
The sound of his father’s voice dropped slightly, but Otto could still decipher the sharp whispering from across the room.
‘This mission will last no more than a few weeks, as I’ve explained. My expertise will be invaluable. Indeed, it has been specifically requested by those concerned. Already we owe these people our lives. I cannot ignore such a request for assistance.’
A few days later, after the family had taken their usual turn in the courtyard, and finished their supper of bread and powdered milk, Otto’s father asked to speak to the three sisters while Otto read on his mattress. They talked softly around the table, glancing over at him occasionally as they did so. Otto looked up, curiously, when one of his sisters appeared to gasp, but the voices dropped back down immediately and the conversation continued. A few minutes later, Otto was also called to the table and told that his father would be going away for a short while.
‘Is this the mission?’ Otto asked, surprising everyone with his words.
When they said nothing, he continued, ‘I heard you talking last night while I was in bed. You said something about a mission.’
His father had recovered himself.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It is a mission. And do you know what it is for?’
Otto shook his head.
‘I’m going to find us some books.’
Otto said nothing.
‘I think we need some more books for this apartment, don’t you?’
He always called the cellar ‘the apartment’ in front of the children.
‘Why, you’ve quite worn out the ones we have here, Otto, with all that reading you do. I’m going to go in search of some more.’
His father had tried to adopt a playful tone, which was among the least familiar in his repertoire. Otto did not really believe him, and realised that something was seriously amiss, but he also sensed that everyone in his family wanted him to believe his father’s story. So he convinced himself, for their sakes, that he did.
That evening, Otto’s father packed a holdall with some belongings, put on his overcoat and a warm leather cap, and went round to kiss each of the children in turn. Later on, when they were fast asleep, they were woken by the thumping of the hobnailed boot on the hatch above, in the same familiar pattern that always called them out to their early evening exercise. Otto, bleary and confused, looked across and saw the dark shape of his father, threading his way upwards through the hatch.
For many weeks they heard nothing. Otto could sense his mother’s anguish, her body language and voice taking on an air of desperation. At night he sometimes heard her whimpering, a sound that would never quite leave him throughout his life. As the only male in the household, he tried his best to assume extra responsibilities. He insisted on climbing up first through the hatch during their daily trips outside. He also started lifting the bucket from its position in the recess to the door to the adjacent apartment, leaving it there for collection every day. Otto sensed that it was his role to be positive; to play the carefree child, in order to lessen his mother’s burden. So he took on this happy-go-lucky role, almost convincing himself that it was real; while sensing, deep down, that some calamity was about to befall them.
It came in March 1943, two months after his father’s departure. Otto, wrapped in his mother’s thick coat, was reading on his mattress one morning while his sisters sat and played with a pack of cards. Suddenly, they heard their mother’s voice, talking to someone at the door to the Wouterses’ apartment, something that had never happened before. She had gone to collect a bucket of water, having received a signal of three quick knocks, followed by the sound of the key turning in the lock. This was normal procedure, so much so that the children barely even noticed. When they heard a man’s voice, however, talking to their mother in the hallway outside, the atmosphere in the cellar quickly changed. Otto’s eyes met those of his sisters, and all of them carried the same expression. The fear, so well hidden for much of the time, was instantly there.
Raising himself from the mattress, Otto felt the muscles tighten in his legs. His sisters did the same, all of them braced for flight, remembering the instructions that had been drilled into them by their father. Otto repeated them calmly to himself, just as he had been taught:
‘If they come for us through the apartment next door, make quickly for the hatch. Once outside, run to the eastern wall of the courtyard, that’s the one where the light falls when we play. There are some loose bricks in the lower right-hand corner. Push them all in and help each other climb through the gap. This corner of the wall gives onto a small road. If Mr and Mrs Wouters are able to help you, they will. One of them will be standing there to show you where to go. They might even be able to come with you part of the way. If no one is there, try to remember the following combination of streets: turn to your right, then run along until you reach the old synagogue, left, then to the plane trees, then right again. This will take you to the big street with the trams. From there you must try to get north to the port, where someone may be able to help you. Be careful who you speak to, however. No one in uniform; no officials. Try to talk to one of the ordinary workers.’
While silently reciting these instructions, Otto and his sisters made their way over to the hatch, waiting for a raised voice or the sound of a struggle that would be their signal to flee. The door creaked on its hinges and closed: footsteps approached down the stairs. When their mother re-entered the room, they saw that she was alone. She looked calm, despite the redness of her eyes, and gently told Otto to go back to his reading while she took his sisters upstairs and into the apartment next door.
The news was broken to Otto in stages, in a bid to lessen its impact. At first, he was told that his father had been taken ill and that he was being looked after in the hospital. Later, he was told that there were complications with his illness, and that Otto must prepare himself for bad news. Later still, he was told that his father was dead.
In the weeks that followed, his mother grieved terribly, but what made it all the more difficult to watch was the effort with which she tried, without success, to hide it. Every night she sat weeping on her mattress, while Otto’s sisters gathered sobbing in a desolate group around her. It was like one of the Renaissance paintings he had seen in his father’s books. The sadness etched onto their candlelit faces was biblical.
Otto, at first, did not feel such grief, but a slight numbness and a sense that this story wasn’t quite to be believed, like his father’s tale about the mission to hunt out new books. Each night he lay and stared at the hatch, trying to convince himself that his father would never again come through it. But the idea, when he thought of it, seemed absurd.
Finally, some weeks later, he was sitting on his mattress when he thought once more of their trip to see the tulip fields near Lisse. He wanted to talk again with his father about the long strips of colour they had seen. He also wanted to tell him about a new plant he had discovered, in a book that had been left outside the door for him by Mr Wouters. This plant had a red mouth with fangs, and it liked to eat insects for its supper.
From the mattress, Otto’s sobbing brought his mother and sisters running quickly to his side.
‘I can never talk to him again,’ he said, while they did their best to console him. ‘I can never show him the pictures in the book.’
Otto’s mother held her son in arms that suddenly grew stronger. During the eighteen months or so in which the family remained in the cellar, the children never again saw or heard her shed a tear.
Otto did not learn the full truth about his father’s death until some time after the war had ended. Once again, he heard the story in stages. Shortly after the end of hostilities, when they were living in the Wouterses’ apartment, Otto was told by a boy at school that his father had been involved in a plot to detonate a bridge. His experience as a civil engineer meant that he played a vital role in planning the mission. Unfortunately, in the days before it was scheduled to have taken place, a member of the public, walking his dog, noticed suspicious activity inside a warehouse. Immediately he had alerted the authorities. Within half an hour, the warehouse had been raided, the explosives discovered and the men responsible arrested. Two days later, Otto’s father and his three cohorts were hanged in a public square in the city. As it was winter, the authorities left the bodies outside on display for several days – the crimes of which they had been accused written out on notices hung around their necks.
Some years later, Otto learned from a family friend that the plotters had been tortured before their execution. The rumour was that they had not given away a single detail to their captors, who did not even know the names of the men they hanged.
After the war, the family remained living in Antwerp, where a formal education in any traditional sense was difficult to obtain. Both books and teachers were in short supply, and schooldays often curtailed. To add to Otto’s problems, he developed a debilitating bronchial condition on his return to the outside world, although it did clear up in time.
Despite these setbacks, Otto’s teachers were astonished at his rate of academic progress, outstripping the achievements not only of his classmates, but of children several years older than himself. His gifts in a variety of subjects were exceptional. Otto’s teachers were not only dumbstruck by the depth and range of his knowledge, but wondered about the sources from which it had come. The headmaster, calling Otto into his office one day, told him he was a true autodidact. He was even more impressed that the boy appeared to know what this meant.
Six years after the end of the war, Otto left Antwerp to take up his architectural scholarship in London. Two of his sisters remained in Belgium – marrying and living long enough to see their grandchildren do the same. His third sister returned to Vienna, where she died some fifteen years later after a short illness. She had never married. Otto’s mother, worn out beyond her years by her wartime experience, lived alone in Antwerp for a while, before moving in with one of her daughters and her family as her health steadily worsened. Blind for the last two years of her life, she suffered a stroke one morning while admiring the scent of the spring blooms in the local park. A few days later, she passed away in hospital. She was fifty-three years old.