Two Victims
Michael Bradburn-Ruster
Not
until the stranger’s visit did their two stories converge, and only
briefly. The mayor’s wife and the local
historian had known each other for years, often chatting together during a
casual encounter in the midst of sundry errands, occasionally dining together
with their spouses, and once or twice even stopping to share a quick afternoon
coffee or beer when they chanced to meet as she emerged from the Town Hall or
he from the inadequate bookstore. In
these various modes, they enjoyed each other’s company: she always gathered
from him some fascinating morsel about a local site or remote event; he
appreciated hearing about her work as patroness of the Arts’ Council, or about
her three daughters’ busy lives. Rather
than provoking his envy or bitterness, the news of the thriving young women
allowed him to forget his tragic loss, or perhaps even to imagine the sort of
wife his only son might have enjoyed if he had made it past thirty.
One day, emerging from the wine merchant’s with a gift bottle tucked under her arm, she mentioned to the historian that he might want to meet a fellow who was coming from the States, having received a commission to write a substantial article on the region for a well-known travel magazine.
“Not the usual kitsch, I hope—“ Gerrit replied with his usual jaunty boldness. “What’s he like, for starters?”
“I’ve never met him,” the mayor’s wife confessed. “He’s never visited. Almost a cousin, but not quite: he’s the son of a woman who was once married to Willem’s uncle, but by a different father.”
“Complete stranger, yet nearly family. Never been here, but wants to write an in-depth piece. I’m rather fascinated by paradox, Katrien—unless he’s a fool. If it’s history he wants, I’d be delighted. Though not if it’s yet another of those self-congratulatory ‘In the Bold Steps of Market Garden’ efforts in Anglo-American narcissism.”
“I shouldn’t think so,” she frowned, her elegant maturity softened by a girlish chuckle. “More of a general impression: highlights of the landscape, the river and the churches, the cuisine and local culture.”
Gerrit’s skepticism was somewhat assuaged when on the first night of his visit the stranger’s invitation to dinner included the historian and his wife. Between the mayor’s delightful stories, the sincerity of the stranger’s interest in the region became clear, and once between bites of fresh asparagus, he even surprised the historian with a detail or two generally unknown even to most locals. And so Gerrit found himself, by the middle of the second bottle, gladly offering to alternate with Willem’s wife in taking the stranger to various points of interest on those days that she was working or saddled with obligations.
By their third day together, having visited the castle and the mill, and wandered through meadow and museum, Gerrit realized the stranger was interested in a variety of places that went beyond the normal purview of tourism, and so he introduced him to the bleak expanse of moor to the west of the woods, where they stood overlooking the rolling dunes covered in heather whose purplish stems were so dry and twisted that they seemed incomplete without briers. A sudden smile accompanied Gerrit’s haunted look of a historian whose gaze seems to pierce the veil of the present. He spoke of the Romans who had crossed this region, mentioning that not too many years ago one of their helmets had been dragged out of one of the bogs.
“Can you imagine,” he said, gently squeezing the stranger’s forearm as if to stimulate his visionary capacity, “being a Roman soldier in these parts, two thousand years ago: little more than wild forest and marsh—you get separated from the other men, you step into a little soft ground and then… there you are, pulled down into the muck. Must have felt like dying on the moon.”
“How do we know,” the stranger asked, “his helmet didn’t just go astray—that he lost it, dropped it?”
By now the historian knew this was not idle skepticism; the stranger’s challenge was rooted not in a dismissive impulse but in a desire to be convinced, to be enchanted beyond doubt. Already they recognized in each other, beneath the firm surface of empiricism, the secret marrow of the dreamer.
“Alright,” Gerrit sighed, “that’s possible. But you have to admit,” he winked, “not so interesting. And besides, no Roman soldier would ever be so careless.”
Reluctantly, after yet another delicious story, the mayor drove off to his council meeting, leaving his wife and cousin manqué at the table, surrounded by the lengthening shadows of the garden. The evening was fresh and beautiful; together they watered the flowerbeds, soon returning to the table where an ample portion of clear wine yet awaited them.
So far they had not discussed the War; later they could not have accounted for how or when their conversation had shifted from speculating about the strange call of that bird that neither could recognize. Yet once it had, the story Katrien told seemed not only effortless but inevitable.
Her father had received the summons to become a Dwangarbeider in August of ’43, becoming one of the war’s half million Dutch forced laborers. Later, he would always struggle with a sense of shame, because when he boarded the train in Venlo he had vowed to be a model of defiance.
“But the first two days after he arrived at the camp at Aachen, he learned what happened to a former French soldier who refused to follow a degrading order.”
“A gun to the head?”
“Perhaps worse, in the end: a Labor—how would you say?—Education or Reform Camp: yes, an Arbeitserziehungslager. A couple of Belgians told my father what awaited the soldier there—one of them was a priest who had barely survived, and had returned maimed; he was fortunate, he said. Unimaginable atrocities, comparable even to the concentration camps… And so my father watched his vow of bravery fade: he found himself digging ditches, building air-raid shelters, working eleven hours a day without a word of protest. They rewarded him for his submission by sending him to the coalmines. Just what they needed: young, resilient, hard worker, good health.”
“Not good for long, I imagine.”
“Of course, many dropped dead, and not just in the mines. Thirty thousand from our country. But my father was fortunate, if one can say that. Yes, I think so: at the camp there was a German guard who would often bring food to the barracks: cookies his wife had baked, fresh fruit they got from God knows where, cheese. Only a little at a time, but he would hand small parcels to each of the eleven men that shared that room with my father. They called him the Provider. With what they were given to eat, you know, the healthiest man would fall sick before long: broth that was little more than dirty water they had passed a bone through, a few rags of cabbage, among the floating worms.”
The stranger winced, took a remedial sip of Gewürztraminer.
“But that’s not all he did for my father.”
“Do you suppose he helped others, as well?”
“He did. Even the Eastern Europeans, who were kept segregated: once or twice Father saw him handing little parcels to people wearing yellow and white patches—the Poles—or blue and white, which were the Russians. And of course he might have been seen by his own Labor Front people, but he was clever.”
“What else did he do for your father?”
“Well, once the word OZO had been found painted on the barracks wall, so they knew the culprit was Dutch.”
“Why?”
“It was a… slogan. Oranje zal overwinnen: Orange will triumph.”
“Ah, yes. House of Orange.”
“When another guard noticed it, my father was only a few meters away; the guard began to berate him, then slap him, threaten to have him shot… But in a moment the Provider appeared, not shouting at his fellow guard, just suggesting that the fellow should stop because that Dutchman hadn’t done it: he’d been doing laundry until just a moment ago, and the slogan hadn’t been there before. Besides, where was the paint, the brush? ‘Don’t worry, we’ll catch the bastard next time, whoever it is.’ It was a lie, of course. My father had not painted the OZO, but neither had he done any laundry that morning, as the Provider knew very well.”
“Did your father ever learn his name?”
“Oh, yes: Herr Pröpper. But of course, when my father was sent to the mines, that was the end of his protection, and they treated them all quite brutally. My father was not the least melodramatic, but he was convinced that he would not last through the winter. But after several weeks there, he was called over to the manager’s office. Forced to wait outside for several minutes, he expected to receive a severe threat: he had become sick, unable to work as he had at first. But when the door opened, it was not the manager or some assistant that appeared, but Herr Pröpper. My father would not have been any happier to see his own brother at that moment; he wanted to embrace him, but Pröpper raised a finger to warn him. Then he noticed that the manager was watching them through the window (Aschke his name was, a thorough Nazi) and Pröpper was afraid that any sign of personal interest would ruin everything. It turned out, you see, that Pröpper had bribed his own camp warden into signing papers requesting Father’s return by offering him the only thing of value that he possessed: a precious old clock that his grandfather had brought from the Black Forest, hand-carved, of course, and very intricate, apparently.”
“Any idea why the Provider favored your father?” At once he regretted asking the question in that manner, for he saw the implication slightly discomfited her. She was too gracious, however, to stumble over it.
“Well, Father was the only one in Pröpper’s section that was sent into the mines; there were others among the rest of the three hundred men and women in the camp, but of course, he could only help the few under his circle.”
“His wing,” the stranger offered gently, hesitant to correct the charming mistake. “Or in his circle.”
She laughed pleasantly at her lapse, without the least sense of embarrassment. Abruptly, she turned quite solemn. “He had to make a choice: he couldn’t help everyone, could he? And he would not allow himself to help no one. But yes, there was something… personal. Or so my father thought. Very simple, yet it seemed to create an immediate—“ she interlaced her fingers, offering a warm glance that challenged him to find a more exact expression.
“And he told you what it was, this affinity?”
Smiling, she nodded, incisors gently dimpling her lower lip. “One morning during the first fortnight or so, my father actually forgot where he was—he swung the pick, and the rhythm of the work took him away. For a while he forgot his imprisonment, forgot his resentment. People don’t believe that can happen, he said, but it did. And he began to whistle; it was the first few bars of Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto.” In her rich alto voice, half closing her eyes, she unfolded the eight notes with which the horn opens the B-flat concerto. “And as he took a breath, my father heard a tenor voice respond with the answering descent of the next two bars.”
He wanted an image of her father’s face, but didn’t intend to interrupt her story; so he asked for his name, as though somehow it would conjure an appearance.
“Hendrick,” she said, and paused before continuing, perhaps savoring his presence.
And so, on that ephemeral, invisible bridge of sixteen notes, Hendrick stopped working and looked up into the German’s affable glance. At that moment, he later told her, he was not below in the trench, with the enemy looming above him; the pick in his hands was not a mark of servitude, nor the carbine slung over the guard’s shoulder a sign of oppression: they were for that instant simply two men released from their twin bondage into a fragile scintillation of grace.
So it was that shared phrase, it seemed, that bridge of music that liberated him from the mines. It was already Advent when he returned to the camp. “A few weeks later, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Pröpper asked my father to follow him to a car he had somehow borrowed, saying there was a task he had been selected for; Pröpper drove up to the gate, showed some papers, and after being waved through, pointed to a bundle of clean clothes beside my father’s seat.”
“An escape?” the stranger wondered.
She shook her head, not losing the faint smile that nearly always played about her lips. “Only a respite. He drove my father to a village not far away. His wife greeted them at the door, and Father almost fainted from the smell: despite the worsening food shortage in Germany, she had managed to procure a goose… in the country, things were often a little better, you know… She served him sweet and sour cabbage, and preserves with a sort of cinnamon cake for dessert. She treated him, he said, like some honored guest, even offering him a special blessing over grace. Their two small children later came to sit on my father’s lap—the only time that night he could not control his tears. At midnight, Pröpper had promised to take him back; his wife Liese filled a small sack with slices from yet another goose, and small jars of preserves, for the others in my Father’s room. Apparently Pröpper had found something else of value with which to bribe the commandant, but he would never tell my father what it was.”
“You still remember his wife’s name?”
“Naturally. Though they were much older when I knew them.”
She smiled at his surprise.
“They never lost touch, you see. The camp was liberated the last week of October, in ’44, just a month after Market Garden; Aachen was the first city, you know. My father made very sure the Americans knew about what Pröpper had done. Every year after that, we would visit them, and they would visit us. My father blessed me, you see: the whole of my girlhood, despite all that horror, for me the border did not exist. It must sound naïve, but to my mind Anton and Liese were the real Germans; all the rest were some kind of monstrous ghosts. Oh, all too real; but phantoms nevertheless.”
It had grown dark; soon the lights of Willem’s car shone briefly against the rhododendrons. When he joined them in the garden, he had removed his chain of office and approached them with a fresh bottle of wine. Only after midnight did Katrien leave the stranger under the elm across from his hotel, at the same spot where she had met him on the first day of his sojourn. It never struck either of them as curious, that with all the people coming and going that afternoon, they had recognized each other at once, without the slightest notion of the other’s appearance.
On the last morning of the stranger’s visit, Gerrit drove him across the border, into the Eifel region, asking as he rounded a curve or accelerated through a tunnel of trees, for details of what his new friend had seen the day before, when Willem and Katrien took him to the monastery and the wild hedgerows beside the river.
In one village an hour from Aachen the historian insisted they stop for an apple pie—“Mit Schlag,” he insisted, his flirtation with the German waitress permeated by an air of shameless innocence; in her turn, she responded with feigned umbrage or wry winks, her good-natured ripostes only half intelligible to the stranger, who was reminded again of the counterpoint of faint whispers, hints of lingering resentment, concealed but still smoldering here and there, some sixty years after the War’s end. During his brief stop in Nijmegen, when he had mentioned to the owner of his hotel that he hoped to visit Bonn, his host had responded: “Better for you to go that way than for them to come here.” And at his guest’s surprise over what seemed a blunt indiscretion, he gently put down the coffee pot and explained, “We like the French. We like the Belgians. We do not like the Germans.” He would have been a baby during the war, the stranger calculated, like Gerrit.
Yet now, watching his guide with the German waitress, the stain of those tensions seemed illusory or exaggerated. He told Gerrit it was good to hear their friendly banter, to see the little sparks of playful dalliance, as if all the scars had never existed, or been utterly erased.
“Between men and women, wherever they’re from,” the historian flung up an insouciant hand, “how can there by anything but rapprochement?” He laughed, “And hopefully closer and closer all the time. Besides, I learned something too important many years ago.” Casually he rubbed a patch of his thin white hair, as though to polish it. He left fifteen euros on the table and rose. “Come on, we have to be back by six, and there are a couple of things you need to see yet.” The waitress called out a goodbye, and with a cheerful Wiedersehen, Gerrit led the way back to the parking lot.
As they passed the brewery at the edge of town, the stranger asked: “What did you mean, you learned something ‘too important’?”
“When? Oh, yes.” The tone of his reply was so casual as to be almost cavalier. “It was my father’s hatred of the Germans that killed him.”
Immediately recalling Katrien’s story, the stranger felt they were entering familiar ground; at once he seized the special delight a visitor takes in recognizing a local pattern unknown or hidden to the world at large.
“Of course,” he said. “Forced labor.”
Gerrit lowered his window, shook his head. “No, that he didn’t experience, not personally. Other horrors, though—better or worse, who can say? Can you measure more or less, in such cases? He lost friends; a cousin who tried to save a Jew was shot. But the worst was our house—and yet it was a miracle. Did you see that tall elm tree across from your hotel?”
“With the circular wooden bench?”
“That’s the one. And the building behind it?”
“Yes. Just opposite the hotel terrace: a children’s shoe shop.”
“Precisely where our house was. With the jeweler’s shop in front.” For generations his family had been clockmakers, and as factories and automation proliferated, Gerrit’s grandfather had turned an economic eye to watch repair and jewelry. “And right next door, another hotel—wonderful place, I could show you pictures.”
“Where the bank is now?”
“Just so—and who says culture’s not deteriorating! Imagine: two elegant hotels face to face in a town this modest. And each unique; people would cross back and forth when they tired of one or the other, you could go from a dance band to a string quartet—well, maybe not so subtle, but waltzes, certainly: an air of fin de siècle or the latest songs… real variety. My parents loved this.”
“But what about your house?”
A smile flashed across the historian’s face. “Wait! First, I must remind you… So you can see it…” His demeanor was not that of a distributor of sterile facts, a pedantic guardian of accuracy, but of a storyteller delighting in the adumbration of surprise, the delay of resolution, the texture of a detail that might intensify the drama. “Do you remember after we crossed the river this morning, I showed you that windmill?”
“On the crest of that broad slope…”
“A huge embankment, actually, a sort of dyke. Well, from beside that windmill, the Nazis aimed their artillery as they were retreating. Already they had blown up the church tower, as in nearly every village, so the Allies couldn’t watch their retreat. They had no intention of striking our house in particular, but there you are! Photographs, letters, family history, all of it—gone…”
“I’d consider that a tragedy; but you called it a miracle.”
A graceful flourish indicated his breast and head. “Here I am to prove it. It was in the middle of the day, my friend. We should all have been blown to pieces—my father in the shop, my mother and me, little baby Gerrit in the house—for there was nothing left, you see, not one stone atop another. Yet that elm, a few meters away: unscathed. Not a leaf missing. And all of us: intact. Why?” He had asked the same rhetorical question two days earlier, when he told the stranger about losing his son. That day neither of them had been able to offer an answer, but now Gerrit rushed to solve the enigma: “Call it chance, call it Providence: my father was called out by a widow who had to sell some of her jewelry to make ends meet; he never acted as a pawnbroker, but he took pity on her, and frankly, I think he was a little attracted. And my mother had taken me with her to the pharmacy because a friend of hers was terribly ill.”
“So you were all saved, by the misfortune of others. But your father’s hatred, you said… ”
“That was it: because of the house, he couldn’t let go of it. Other things, yes, he might in time forgive. But not that. Years later it killed him.”
For a time, Gerrit fell silent, thinking he had made a wrong turn. He pulled to the side of the road, under a cluster of firs, muttering over the map. “Of course,” he growled after a moment, hastily shifting the car forward and circling back to the last roundabout. Distracted by the need to focus on his driving, he avoided speaking for a spell, then seemed to have forgotten that he was in the midst of a dramatic recital. During the silence the stranger wondered what his friend had meant: was it filial loyalty speaking, or pure historical causality? Was that supposedly lethal hatred a fanciful explanation in the service of meaning, or a simple fact? Might his father have cursed a retreating Nazi and received summary retaliation, or later died from a cancer the son attributed to festering rage or grief…
At last, his patience at an end, the stranger urged him to explain. The historian seemed to emerge from a reverie, or perhaps had viewed his friend’s silence not as delicacy but lack of interest.
“It was a quarter century after the war; I was his partner by then, you see. We went together to Frankfurt, to a—what do you call them in English—a trade fair. You know, different goods and products… On the last day, he had a terrible attack, collapsed: stomach, maybe appendix, we didn’t know… Some associates offered to take him at once to a hospital, but he said, ‘Never. No German doctor’s going to get his hands on me.’ So he demanded we come back; it had to be a Dutch hospital. Someone even provided a Mercedes. But he didn’t make it: dead before we reached the border.”
“But are you sure it wouldn’t have—“
“Absolutely. The doctor in Heerlen said if he had gone to the hospital in Frankfurt, they could easily have saved him; it was a matter of two or three hours.”
By the time the stranger asked him if Katrien had ever spoken of her father’s experience during the war, and received a negative reply, they had arrived at Gerrit’s door, where his ample wife Catalijna had made the house fragrant with her cooking; while they waited for Katrien and Willem to arrive, the scent of ginger wafted between the two candles burning on either side of the staircase: one at the foot of an icon of the Virgin, the other below a picture of their son.
That final night was a series of farewells, and the stranger who felt he was one no more found scant opportunity to mention either person’s story; by the end of the evening he had forgotten his intention amid expressions of gratitude and affection, between promises and embraces. When months later the article appeared and reached his cousin manqué and other new Dutch friends, there was no reference to either the woman’s or the man’s tale, which had seemed both too intimate to mention in a public forum and too specific for the general scope of the subject. In the years that followed, staying in touch at Christmas and birthdays, he thought from time to time of urging the two to share their accounts, but in the excitement of telephoning, the immediacy of writing, never managed to recall the need to mention to one or the other the tale they had not yet heard.
And so Katrien and Gerrit continued to live for many years, some ten minutes apart, occasionally dining together with their spouses, encountering each other almost weekly at some cultural event or other, exchanging each time a threefold formal Dutch kiss, sharing stories and photographs from one couple’s trip to Portugal or the other’s to Greece, yet never discovering that remote and elusive figure their two fathers once traced, the symmetry and counterpoint of a now silent phrase of loss and grace.
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For MvSM and HJvC
One day, emerging from the wine merchant’s with a gift bottle tucked under her arm, she mentioned to the historian that he might want to meet a fellow who was coming from the States, having received a commission to write a substantial article on the region for a well-known travel magazine.
“Not the usual kitsch, I hope—“ Gerrit replied with his usual jaunty boldness. “What’s he like, for starters?”
“I’ve never met him,” the mayor’s wife confessed. “He’s never visited. Almost a cousin, but not quite: he’s the son of a woman who was once married to Willem’s uncle, but by a different father.”
“Complete stranger, yet nearly family. Never been here, but wants to write an in-depth piece. I’m rather fascinated by paradox, Katrien—unless he’s a fool. If it’s history he wants, I’d be delighted. Though not if it’s yet another of those self-congratulatory ‘In the Bold Steps of Market Garden’ efforts in Anglo-American narcissism.”
“I shouldn’t think so,” she frowned, her elegant maturity softened by a girlish chuckle. “More of a general impression: highlights of the landscape, the river and the churches, the cuisine and local culture.”
Gerrit’s skepticism was somewhat assuaged when on the first night of his visit the stranger’s invitation to dinner included the historian and his wife. Between the mayor’s delightful stories, the sincerity of the stranger’s interest in the region became clear, and once between bites of fresh asparagus, he even surprised the historian with a detail or two generally unknown even to most locals. And so Gerrit found himself, by the middle of the second bottle, gladly offering to alternate with Willem’s wife in taking the stranger to various points of interest on those days that she was working or saddled with obligations.
By their third day together, having visited the castle and the mill, and wandered through meadow and museum, Gerrit realized the stranger was interested in a variety of places that went beyond the normal purview of tourism, and so he introduced him to the bleak expanse of moor to the west of the woods, where they stood overlooking the rolling dunes covered in heather whose purplish stems were so dry and twisted that they seemed incomplete without briers. A sudden smile accompanied Gerrit’s haunted look of a historian whose gaze seems to pierce the veil of the present. He spoke of the Romans who had crossed this region, mentioning that not too many years ago one of their helmets had been dragged out of one of the bogs.
“Can you imagine,” he said, gently squeezing the stranger’s forearm as if to stimulate his visionary capacity, “being a Roman soldier in these parts, two thousand years ago: little more than wild forest and marsh—you get separated from the other men, you step into a little soft ground and then… there you are, pulled down into the muck. Must have felt like dying on the moon.”
“How do we know,” the stranger asked, “his helmet didn’t just go astray—that he lost it, dropped it?”
By now the historian knew this was not idle skepticism; the stranger’s challenge was rooted not in a dismissive impulse but in a desire to be convinced, to be enchanted beyond doubt. Already they recognized in each other, beneath the firm surface of empiricism, the secret marrow of the dreamer.
“Alright,” Gerrit sighed, “that’s possible. But you have to admit,” he winked, “not so interesting. And besides, no Roman soldier would ever be so careless.”
Reluctantly, after yet another delicious story, the mayor drove off to his council meeting, leaving his wife and cousin manqué at the table, surrounded by the lengthening shadows of the garden. The evening was fresh and beautiful; together they watered the flowerbeds, soon returning to the table where an ample portion of clear wine yet awaited them.
So far they had not discussed the War; later they could not have accounted for how or when their conversation had shifted from speculating about the strange call of that bird that neither could recognize. Yet once it had, the story Katrien told seemed not only effortless but inevitable.
Her father had received the summons to become a Dwangarbeider in August of ’43, becoming one of the war’s half million Dutch forced laborers. Later, he would always struggle with a sense of shame, because when he boarded the train in Venlo he had vowed to be a model of defiance.
“But the first two days after he arrived at the camp at Aachen, he learned what happened to a former French soldier who refused to follow a degrading order.”
“A gun to the head?”
“Perhaps worse, in the end: a Labor—how would you say?—Education or Reform Camp: yes, an Arbeitserziehungslager. A couple of Belgians told my father what awaited the soldier there—one of them was a priest who had barely survived, and had returned maimed; he was fortunate, he said. Unimaginable atrocities, comparable even to the concentration camps… And so my father watched his vow of bravery fade: he found himself digging ditches, building air-raid shelters, working eleven hours a day without a word of protest. They rewarded him for his submission by sending him to the coalmines. Just what they needed: young, resilient, hard worker, good health.”
“Not good for long, I imagine.”
“Of course, many dropped dead, and not just in the mines. Thirty thousand from our country. But my father was fortunate, if one can say that. Yes, I think so: at the camp there was a German guard who would often bring food to the barracks: cookies his wife had baked, fresh fruit they got from God knows where, cheese. Only a little at a time, but he would hand small parcels to each of the eleven men that shared that room with my father. They called him the Provider. With what they were given to eat, you know, the healthiest man would fall sick before long: broth that was little more than dirty water they had passed a bone through, a few rags of cabbage, among the floating worms.”
The stranger winced, took a remedial sip of Gewürztraminer.
“But that’s not all he did for my father.”
“Do you suppose he helped others, as well?”
“He did. Even the Eastern Europeans, who were kept segregated: once or twice Father saw him handing little parcels to people wearing yellow and white patches—the Poles—or blue and white, which were the Russians. And of course he might have been seen by his own Labor Front people, but he was clever.”
“What else did he do for your father?”
“Well, once the word OZO had been found painted on the barracks wall, so they knew the culprit was Dutch.”
“Why?”
“It was a… slogan. Oranje zal overwinnen: Orange will triumph.”
“Ah, yes. House of Orange.”
“When another guard noticed it, my father was only a few meters away; the guard began to berate him, then slap him, threaten to have him shot… But in a moment the Provider appeared, not shouting at his fellow guard, just suggesting that the fellow should stop because that Dutchman hadn’t done it: he’d been doing laundry until just a moment ago, and the slogan hadn’t been there before. Besides, where was the paint, the brush? ‘Don’t worry, we’ll catch the bastard next time, whoever it is.’ It was a lie, of course. My father had not painted the OZO, but neither had he done any laundry that morning, as the Provider knew very well.”
“Did your father ever learn his name?”
“Oh, yes: Herr Pröpper. But of course, when my father was sent to the mines, that was the end of his protection, and they treated them all quite brutally. My father was not the least melodramatic, but he was convinced that he would not last through the winter. But after several weeks there, he was called over to the manager’s office. Forced to wait outside for several minutes, he expected to receive a severe threat: he had become sick, unable to work as he had at first. But when the door opened, it was not the manager or some assistant that appeared, but Herr Pröpper. My father would not have been any happier to see his own brother at that moment; he wanted to embrace him, but Pröpper raised a finger to warn him. Then he noticed that the manager was watching them through the window (Aschke his name was, a thorough Nazi) and Pröpper was afraid that any sign of personal interest would ruin everything. It turned out, you see, that Pröpper had bribed his own camp warden into signing papers requesting Father’s return by offering him the only thing of value that he possessed: a precious old clock that his grandfather had brought from the Black Forest, hand-carved, of course, and very intricate, apparently.”
“Any idea why the Provider favored your father?” At once he regretted asking the question in that manner, for he saw the implication slightly discomfited her. She was too gracious, however, to stumble over it.
“Well, Father was the only one in Pröpper’s section that was sent into the mines; there were others among the rest of the three hundred men and women in the camp, but of course, he could only help the few under his circle.”
“His wing,” the stranger offered gently, hesitant to correct the charming mistake. “Or in his circle.”
She laughed pleasantly at her lapse, without the least sense of embarrassment. Abruptly, she turned quite solemn. “He had to make a choice: he couldn’t help everyone, could he? And he would not allow himself to help no one. But yes, there was something… personal. Or so my father thought. Very simple, yet it seemed to create an immediate—“ she interlaced her fingers, offering a warm glance that challenged him to find a more exact expression.
“And he told you what it was, this affinity?”
Smiling, she nodded, incisors gently dimpling her lower lip. “One morning during the first fortnight or so, my father actually forgot where he was—he swung the pick, and the rhythm of the work took him away. For a while he forgot his imprisonment, forgot his resentment. People don’t believe that can happen, he said, but it did. And he began to whistle; it was the first few bars of Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto.” In her rich alto voice, half closing her eyes, she unfolded the eight notes with which the horn opens the B-flat concerto. “And as he took a breath, my father heard a tenor voice respond with the answering descent of the next two bars.”
He wanted an image of her father’s face, but didn’t intend to interrupt her story; so he asked for his name, as though somehow it would conjure an appearance.
“Hendrick,” she said, and paused before continuing, perhaps savoring his presence.
And so, on that ephemeral, invisible bridge of sixteen notes, Hendrick stopped working and looked up into the German’s affable glance. At that moment, he later told her, he was not below in the trench, with the enemy looming above him; the pick in his hands was not a mark of servitude, nor the carbine slung over the guard’s shoulder a sign of oppression: they were for that instant simply two men released from their twin bondage into a fragile scintillation of grace.
So it was that shared phrase, it seemed, that bridge of music that liberated him from the mines. It was already Advent when he returned to the camp. “A few weeks later, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Pröpper asked my father to follow him to a car he had somehow borrowed, saying there was a task he had been selected for; Pröpper drove up to the gate, showed some papers, and after being waved through, pointed to a bundle of clean clothes beside my father’s seat.”
“An escape?” the stranger wondered.
She shook her head, not losing the faint smile that nearly always played about her lips. “Only a respite. He drove my father to a village not far away. His wife greeted them at the door, and Father almost fainted from the smell: despite the worsening food shortage in Germany, she had managed to procure a goose… in the country, things were often a little better, you know… She served him sweet and sour cabbage, and preserves with a sort of cinnamon cake for dessert. She treated him, he said, like some honored guest, even offering him a special blessing over grace. Their two small children later came to sit on my father’s lap—the only time that night he could not control his tears. At midnight, Pröpper had promised to take him back; his wife Liese filled a small sack with slices from yet another goose, and small jars of preserves, for the others in my Father’s room. Apparently Pröpper had found something else of value with which to bribe the commandant, but he would never tell my father what it was.”
“You still remember his wife’s name?”
“Naturally. Though they were much older when I knew them.”
She smiled at his surprise.
“They never lost touch, you see. The camp was liberated the last week of October, in ’44, just a month after Market Garden; Aachen was the first city, you know. My father made very sure the Americans knew about what Pröpper had done. Every year after that, we would visit them, and they would visit us. My father blessed me, you see: the whole of my girlhood, despite all that horror, for me the border did not exist. It must sound naïve, but to my mind Anton and Liese were the real Germans; all the rest were some kind of monstrous ghosts. Oh, all too real; but phantoms nevertheless.”
It had grown dark; soon the lights of Willem’s car shone briefly against the rhododendrons. When he joined them in the garden, he had removed his chain of office and approached them with a fresh bottle of wine. Only after midnight did Katrien leave the stranger under the elm across from his hotel, at the same spot where she had met him on the first day of his sojourn. It never struck either of them as curious, that with all the people coming and going that afternoon, they had recognized each other at once, without the slightest notion of the other’s appearance.
On the last morning of the stranger’s visit, Gerrit drove him across the border, into the Eifel region, asking as he rounded a curve or accelerated through a tunnel of trees, for details of what his new friend had seen the day before, when Willem and Katrien took him to the monastery and the wild hedgerows beside the river.
In one village an hour from Aachen the historian insisted they stop for an apple pie—“Mit Schlag,” he insisted, his flirtation with the German waitress permeated by an air of shameless innocence; in her turn, she responded with feigned umbrage or wry winks, her good-natured ripostes only half intelligible to the stranger, who was reminded again of the counterpoint of faint whispers, hints of lingering resentment, concealed but still smoldering here and there, some sixty years after the War’s end. During his brief stop in Nijmegen, when he had mentioned to the owner of his hotel that he hoped to visit Bonn, his host had responded: “Better for you to go that way than for them to come here.” And at his guest’s surprise over what seemed a blunt indiscretion, he gently put down the coffee pot and explained, “We like the French. We like the Belgians. We do not like the Germans.” He would have been a baby during the war, the stranger calculated, like Gerrit.
Yet now, watching his guide with the German waitress, the stain of those tensions seemed illusory or exaggerated. He told Gerrit it was good to hear their friendly banter, to see the little sparks of playful dalliance, as if all the scars had never existed, or been utterly erased.
“Between men and women, wherever they’re from,” the historian flung up an insouciant hand, “how can there by anything but rapprochement?” He laughed, “And hopefully closer and closer all the time. Besides, I learned something too important many years ago.” Casually he rubbed a patch of his thin white hair, as though to polish it. He left fifteen euros on the table and rose. “Come on, we have to be back by six, and there are a couple of things you need to see yet.” The waitress called out a goodbye, and with a cheerful Wiedersehen, Gerrit led the way back to the parking lot.
As they passed the brewery at the edge of town, the stranger asked: “What did you mean, you learned something ‘too important’?”
“When? Oh, yes.” The tone of his reply was so casual as to be almost cavalier. “It was my father’s hatred of the Germans that killed him.”
Immediately recalling Katrien’s story, the stranger felt they were entering familiar ground; at once he seized the special delight a visitor takes in recognizing a local pattern unknown or hidden to the world at large.
“Of course,” he said. “Forced labor.”
Gerrit lowered his window, shook his head. “No, that he didn’t experience, not personally. Other horrors, though—better or worse, who can say? Can you measure more or less, in such cases? He lost friends; a cousin who tried to save a Jew was shot. But the worst was our house—and yet it was a miracle. Did you see that tall elm tree across from your hotel?”
“With the circular wooden bench?”
“That’s the one. And the building behind it?”
“Yes. Just opposite the hotel terrace: a children’s shoe shop.”
“Precisely where our house was. With the jeweler’s shop in front.” For generations his family had been clockmakers, and as factories and automation proliferated, Gerrit’s grandfather had turned an economic eye to watch repair and jewelry. “And right next door, another hotel—wonderful place, I could show you pictures.”
“Where the bank is now?”
“Just so—and who says culture’s not deteriorating! Imagine: two elegant hotels face to face in a town this modest. And each unique; people would cross back and forth when they tired of one or the other, you could go from a dance band to a string quartet—well, maybe not so subtle, but waltzes, certainly: an air of fin de siècle or the latest songs… real variety. My parents loved this.”
“But what about your house?”
A smile flashed across the historian’s face. “Wait! First, I must remind you… So you can see it…” His demeanor was not that of a distributor of sterile facts, a pedantic guardian of accuracy, but of a storyteller delighting in the adumbration of surprise, the delay of resolution, the texture of a detail that might intensify the drama. “Do you remember after we crossed the river this morning, I showed you that windmill?”
“On the crest of that broad slope…”
“A huge embankment, actually, a sort of dyke. Well, from beside that windmill, the Nazis aimed their artillery as they were retreating. Already they had blown up the church tower, as in nearly every village, so the Allies couldn’t watch their retreat. They had no intention of striking our house in particular, but there you are! Photographs, letters, family history, all of it—gone…”
“I’d consider that a tragedy; but you called it a miracle.”
A graceful flourish indicated his breast and head. “Here I am to prove it. It was in the middle of the day, my friend. We should all have been blown to pieces—my father in the shop, my mother and me, little baby Gerrit in the house—for there was nothing left, you see, not one stone atop another. Yet that elm, a few meters away: unscathed. Not a leaf missing. And all of us: intact. Why?” He had asked the same rhetorical question two days earlier, when he told the stranger about losing his son. That day neither of them had been able to offer an answer, but now Gerrit rushed to solve the enigma: “Call it chance, call it Providence: my father was called out by a widow who had to sell some of her jewelry to make ends meet; he never acted as a pawnbroker, but he took pity on her, and frankly, I think he was a little attracted. And my mother had taken me with her to the pharmacy because a friend of hers was terribly ill.”
“So you were all saved, by the misfortune of others. But your father’s hatred, you said… ”
“That was it: because of the house, he couldn’t let go of it. Other things, yes, he might in time forgive. But not that. Years later it killed him.”
For a time, Gerrit fell silent, thinking he had made a wrong turn. He pulled to the side of the road, under a cluster of firs, muttering over the map. “Of course,” he growled after a moment, hastily shifting the car forward and circling back to the last roundabout. Distracted by the need to focus on his driving, he avoided speaking for a spell, then seemed to have forgotten that he was in the midst of a dramatic recital. During the silence the stranger wondered what his friend had meant: was it filial loyalty speaking, or pure historical causality? Was that supposedly lethal hatred a fanciful explanation in the service of meaning, or a simple fact? Might his father have cursed a retreating Nazi and received summary retaliation, or later died from a cancer the son attributed to festering rage or grief…
At last, his patience at an end, the stranger urged him to explain. The historian seemed to emerge from a reverie, or perhaps had viewed his friend’s silence not as delicacy but lack of interest.
“It was a quarter century after the war; I was his partner by then, you see. We went together to Frankfurt, to a—what do you call them in English—a trade fair. You know, different goods and products… On the last day, he had a terrible attack, collapsed: stomach, maybe appendix, we didn’t know… Some associates offered to take him at once to a hospital, but he said, ‘Never. No German doctor’s going to get his hands on me.’ So he demanded we come back; it had to be a Dutch hospital. Someone even provided a Mercedes. But he didn’t make it: dead before we reached the border.”
“But are you sure it wouldn’t have—“
“Absolutely. The doctor in Heerlen said if he had gone to the hospital in Frankfurt, they could easily have saved him; it was a matter of two or three hours.”
By the time the stranger asked him if Katrien had ever spoken of her father’s experience during the war, and received a negative reply, they had arrived at Gerrit’s door, where his ample wife Catalijna had made the house fragrant with her cooking; while they waited for Katrien and Willem to arrive, the scent of ginger wafted between the two candles burning on either side of the staircase: one at the foot of an icon of the Virgin, the other below a picture of their son.
That final night was a series of farewells, and the stranger who felt he was one no more found scant opportunity to mention either person’s story; by the end of the evening he had forgotten his intention amid expressions of gratitude and affection, between promises and embraces. When months later the article appeared and reached his cousin manqué and other new Dutch friends, there was no reference to either the woman’s or the man’s tale, which had seemed both too intimate to mention in a public forum and too specific for the general scope of the subject. In the years that followed, staying in touch at Christmas and birthdays, he thought from time to time of urging the two to share their accounts, but in the excitement of telephoning, the immediacy of writing, never managed to recall the need to mention to one or the other the tale they had not yet heard.
And so Katrien and Gerrit continued to live for many years, some ten minutes apart, occasionally dining together with their spouses, encountering each other almost weekly at some cultural event or other, exchanging each time a threefold formal Dutch kiss, sharing stories and photographs from one couple’s trip to Portugal or the other’s to Greece, yet never discovering that remote and elusive figure their two fathers once traced, the symmetry and counterpoint of a now silent phrase of loss and grace.
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For MvSM and HJvC