My father’s family, then named Bergmann, always distinguished watchmakers, had left Frankfurt for Rotterdam in the 1870s in response to one of the periodic waves of anti-Semitism that swept through Germany. My father’s uncles joined them in the 1890s when several proposals were offered in the Reichstag to limit the rights of Jewish citizens, laws that were ultimately adopted decades later once Hitler took power. When that began to happen, in 1933, almost two dozen more cousins came to Rotterdam, joining the diaspora of more than half of Germany’s Jews who left in the next few years. Unfortunately, the Nazis were not far behind the Bergmann cousins and rolled through the Netherlands in 1940, bringing their racial laws with them. The German-speaking relatives were a special burden on my father’s family, since their poor Dutch made them easily identifiable as Jews. My father knew that as a result, sooner or later, the entire family—now called ‘Bergman,’ having dropped an n to sound more Dutch—would be rounded up and sent to camps.
In July 1942, Aart and Miep ten Boom of Leiden were killed when a tree collapsed on their car as they were driving through a fierce storm. The Ten Boom family were leaders of the Dutch resistance, which over time hid thousands of Jews from the Nazis through various means. Aart and Miep’s surviving relatives decided it would be a fit tribute to suppress all news of their deaths and to allow a young Jewish couple to assume their identities. The Ten Booms were jewelers, with need of a skilled watchmaker in their store. When the offer came, my father and mother left their lives behind—and dozens of doomed relatives. They hid in plain sight in Leiden, with the knowledge of hundreds of local residents who never betrayed them.
The end of the war was trying in its own way. My mother, an only child whose parents had died in their forties, wanted to return to Rotterdam to seek the possible remnants of their community. My father apparently regarded it all as better left behind, given the near-certain capture and annihilation of his family. He convinced her that the greatest safety for them and, far more important, their children was in remaining Aart and Miep rather than chancing the vagaries of history’s roulette wheel, in which the Jews’ number, along with several other perennial losers, was always coming up black.
The Dutch neighbors who had hidden my parents throughout the war were confused by my father’s attitude and even somewhat critical. They had risked their lives because my parents were Jews, not converts, and so for the new Aart and Miep the best choice was to apply to emigrate. In 1950, because of the need for skilled tradesmen in the US, my parents were granted visas.
By now, Esma and I had taken a seat on a concrete bench in a brick plaza called Beestenmarkt. A large old-fashioned windmill, with its white canvas sails, turned a few hundred feet away, while the masonry was wetted by a strange fountain, dozens of piddling streams that shot straight up from buried piping. Several tow-headed children were frolicking on a day that was finally mild enough to be welcomed as spring. They dared the water with small hands, splashing while their parents remonstrated, and after soaking themselves, sprinted away with exhilarated screams.
“This is a more familiar story to me than you may know,” said Esma. “There are thousands and thousands of Gypsies, especially lighter-skinned Gypsies in the United States, who have simply melted into the American population without looking back on their Rom ways.”
I stared at her, wondering why it was I was so attracted to women without much native empathy. If I ever went back to therapy, I had to put that question near the top of the list.
We began wandering back to the hotel.
“Wars are horrible,” said Esma. “They do horrible things to everyone.” This seemed a more comforting response and I took the hand she had customarily lapped over my arm. “That was how I died the last time,” Esma said. “During World War I.”
I stopped. “You’re being euphemistic?”
The dark eyes scolded. “Far from it. I was an Ottoman soldier, a poor private from Ayvalik, a tiny town, and not quite eighteen years old. I died of the infection from a shoulder wound at Gallipoli.”
I was far less ruffled by this declaration than I might have expected, perhaps because I’d been struggling with my parents’ two lives, or because I had already accepted Esma’s warning about potential disappointment as meaning that there were important facets of her character I didn’t yet know. Discovering these beliefs was a little more complicated than finding out Esma bit her nails, and probably not a good sign for the long run. But for the near term, I was willing to attempt tolerance, since it was part of the journey to foreign terrain I’d started when I let her into my room in Tuzla. Besides, I recognized an opportunity to gather intelligence on the greatest unknown.
“And was death terrible?” I asked her.
“Not so terrible, no. Lonely. Cold. But I was glad to pass beyond pain. I didn’t enjoy the feeling of distance. But I realized almost at once that it was temporary.”
“I see.”
I found myself in an even, if somewhat resigned, mood processing all of this—my parents, Esma, the fundamental unreliability of humans, and the fact that for me there was, in all likelihood, more searching yet ahead. We returned to the hotel and the world of sensation one more time before I walked her to the station.
16.
The Lab—April 29
The following Wednesday, Goos called me from the crime lab. Several results were now available, which, he suggested, would be easier to absorb if I came out there.
“Am I going to have to look at bones?” I asked.
“’Fraid so.”
I grumbled, largely for show.
In the milder weather, I’d started using Lew Logan’s old bike to get to work, and by now I was up to the forty-minute ride to the outlying neighborhood of Ypenburg. I’d grown accustomed to the eye-rolling and pointing of the local kids when they saw my helmet. Nothing seemed more quintessentially Dutch to me than their scoffing at protective headgear while remaining the world’s leaders in training neurosurgeons.
I had no problem finding the immense Netherlands Forensic Institute, a black square of glass built into a grassy hillside that somehow reminded me of Darth Vader’s headpiece. It was a vast enterprise with nearly six hundred professionals on staff. Once inside, I experienced the place as a world of white, with lab coats and microscope lenses and confounding machines visible through the laboratory windows as Goos strolled me down the corridors.
I asked where we were headed.
“Little hard to do this in order,” Goos said. “But we have results in five different labs—DNA, Path, Microinvasive, Ballistics, and Fingerprints.”
“What’s Microinvasive?”
“You’ll see. But they have a special microscope here. Developed to look for trace fractures in the engine block of race cars.” Goos shook his head about the priorities. “We’ll start with your favorite.” He gave it an Aussie pronunciation, so that the last syllable came out ‘right.’
In the chill Forensic Pathology lab, we donned shower cap–like head coverings and surgical gowns. Goos steered me over to a stainless steel table on which the pieces of three largely complete skeletons had been laid out, the remains of Boldo and his son and brother, if Ferko were to be believed. There were special tungsten bulbs in here that gave the lab an optic clarity that seemed to exceed daylight.
“Okay,” said Goos, “so let us remind ourselves of what we are trying to accomplish.”
“I’d hope, one, to corroborate Ferko’s testimony and two, to find out as much as I can about who killed these people.”
From the slow pace at which Goos nodded, I didn’t think I’d get much better than a C on the quiz. I’d missed some of the sub-issues, specifically the age of these bones and the causes of death.
“Now how much pathology you familiar with, Boom? Don’t want to yabber on, if there’s no need.”