Eventually, I migrated upstairs. Every day since I’d left Leiden, I’d thought briefly about a question that, in the same cagey game of unconscious avoidance, I’d never gotten around to trying to answer. The Ten Booms were still in business in Leiden. What about my father’s real family, the Bergmans?
Searching the net on my tablet, I found no store by that name, but there were a number of listings in Rotterdam for Bergmans. Eventually, Googling around, I found an article, basically an advertising flyer for local jewelers that referred to a ‘Meester Horlogemaker’—master watchmaker—at the shop in Rotterdam of a fancy international jewelry chain. The store was open Saturdays, and no more than three-quarters of an hour by train. I felt a fateful weight when I decided that would be my destination tomorrow.
I woke late and was ready to depart for Rotterdam, when Narawanda came through the door, evenly balanced with a small bag of groceries in each hand. We stared across the living room.
“I thought you were at work,” I said. It was the kind of stupid obvious remark you make when you can’t think of anything else.
“I was. I had to finish a motion. But once I sent the draft to Bozic, he called to tell me to go home. He says I will burn out if I keep working at this pace.”
“He has a point.”
“Yes,” she said.
Neither of us had taken a further step.
“Are you on your way out?” she finally asked.
“There’s an exhibit at a museum in Rotterdam whose name I can’t pronounce.” I tried anyway. This was not quite a lie, since I’d figured I’d stop in there for whatever refuge I needed after seeking out my father’s relatives.
“Boijmans Van Beuningen. The Bosch show? I’d love to see that.” She was suddenly alight, but that reflected her vulnerability to impulse, which in this case sprang from her joy in art. I also imagined that after several days, her embarrassment was starting to slacken. “Would it be all right if I come?”
“Please.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
We walked to the train station. The day I arrived, I’d briefly thought I was hallucinating when I caught sight of the massive bike-parking structure outside Den Haag Centraal, a double-tiered network of steel that stretched most of a block and housed thousands of bicycles. It was now a familiar sight.
The weather was fabulous, bright, warm, with lighter wind than normal, part of the brief season when The Hague actually became a beach city. Nara said we should walk down to the sea if there was time once we got back. Goos and I had meant to go to the shore when we left Kajevic, but had taken a wrong turn. I agreed with Nara, trying not to wonder about her assumptions.
Aboard the Intercity, I faced her.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
“Of course.” Her eyes fluttered with anticipation.
“It’s about why I want to go to Rotterdam.”
“Oh.” But she put her chin on her hand as she listened to me, her big eyes warm with feeling.
“That is very complicated,” she said, when she had heard the whole story. “It has been extremely hard on you,” she added, a deep truth I’d never been willing to say to myself.
“It’s been difficult to process,” I said, “much worse than I anticipated at first. It turns out that it messes you up to find out at age forty, when you finally think you’ve settled into yourself, that everything beneath you, your foundation as a person, isn’t really there and never was. I’ve been shocked to discover how angry I am with my parents. Not for the choice—which I don’t judge. But for not trusting their children with the truth when we had a chance to grow up with it.”
She reached over and took my hand for a second.
By the time we arrived in Rotterdam, I was anxious and aswim, with the worst kind of anxiety, which is always about more than you can name. We exited the train station, a triumph of sleek angles, into the swarming center of the city, which was an architectural showplace. A few older buildings remained, but skyscrapers dominated, many seemingly erected in an experimental spirit. I admired the intrepidness of a business community willing to support those kinds of innovations, but several of the results invited laughter. One place had a facade of sheet metal joined by enormous rivets, as if the architect was inspired by a heating duct.
The address of the jewelry store where Bergman worked was in my hand. Feeling like somebody off the boat, I followed the navigation app and led Nara down a classy old street with trees in full leaf and century-old buildings with limestone faces. The store was easy to spot because a round clock with a gold rim, a Rolex, hung over the doorway.
A young man in a rayon short-sleeved shirt and a tie was behind the display cases. I asked for “Meneer Johannes Bergman.”
The fellow looked up, thought about that, and extended his palm. It took me more than a second to realize he was asking for my watch, and rather than explain myself, I removed it from my wrist. It was a Patek Philippe that my father had given me for my twenty-first birthday, a vintage model called a Calatrava. I had always enjoyed wearing it because of its unaffected appearance, with its round face and black leather band. Over the years, when I’d had the watch cleaned, I’d learned it was quite valuable, a model that dated to 1932. For me, however, the meaning in the gift lay entirely in the fact that I’d seen my father wear the watch almost daily during my childhood. He had told me a thousand times that Patek Philippe was the world’s first maker of watches. Thus when he opened the band and fastened the timepiece to my wrist, it felt like he was passing along something essential.
A few seconds after the young fellow went to the back room with the watch, a man of at least eighty swept through the curtains that screened off the rear area. On first impression, he seemed too tall to be a member of my family. He was probably close to six foot three even now, his bald scalp framed by a springy moss of long white hair. He had emerged without removing his jeweler’s headpiece. The monocular lens, with multiple rings, was embedded in a leather eyepatch that was secured around his head in a scuffed band that bespoke generations of use. My father had worn a similar device, which, when I was a very young child, had made him seem as terrifying to me as the Cyclops. My watch was in the man’s hand and there seemed to be incredulity both in his expression and the hasty way he’d emerged from the back.
“This is yours, sir?” His English was spoken with a heavy Dutch accent.
Even with half his face concealed, I could suddenly see the resemblance—my father’s long nose and long chin and the same faint blue to his one visible eye, even though this man was handsomer than my father had ever been.
“This reference number is quite rare,” he said, meaning the watch model. “But it appears to be working quite well. Is there an issue?”
“The watch was my father’s. I believe he may have been your older brother. Daan Bergmann?” When I had awoken this morning, I couldn’t even remember my father’s birth name and had texted my sister.
“Daan Bergmann?”
“Yes.”
He repeated the words, then looked behind himself to a bar-height chair and sank upon it. He removed his headgear. His mouth was parted and he looked outward for a second without appearing to be focused on anything here. He still held my watch delicately in one hand. He woke to that first and looked down, as if to assure himself it was still there. Then he spoke to me again, beginning in Dutch before repeating himself in English.
“Your father?” he had asked.
“Ja,” I answered. After that, he spoke only Dutch, with Nara once or twice whispering translations beside me.
“And what name do you take?”