I told him.
“Yes, ‘Ten Boom,’” he agreed. Years swam behind his eyes. “They asked my father first,” he said. “To go to Leiden? But he would not abandon his family. So your father went instead. Disappeared without a word to anyone. And the Nazis took us all. All the Bergmans.” He gave himself a second to consider what else to say, and then transferred my watch to the fingers of his left hand. With the right, he removed the link from his left cuff and turned up his sleeve. I knew what he was going to show me, but my heart still felt as if it had been halved by a cleaver when I saw the hand-printed numerals the Nazis had tattooed on the forearms of the inmates at Auschwitz.
I nodded once to indicate I understood.
“My mother lived and I lived,” he said. “No one else. No one. I remember them every day. Twenty-two people, five children. But I try not to think of your father.” He had now gathered the strength of conviction. He stood and pulled himself straight before reaching over the counter to return the watch.
“It is good to know you,” he said. “But please do not come back.”
We retreated to the museum, as I had planned, but I was in no state to look at anything. Nara and I sat on an upholstered bench inside the entry, just beyond the ticket kiosk at the foot of a contemporary open stairwell that led up to the exhibits. I rested my head against the wall and Narawanda held my hand.
As I had told Nara only a few hours ago, I had always exercised a strict discipline against judging what my parents had done. Yet as is inevitably true of children, I had seen all of this solely from my own perspective, out of an eagerness to understand theirs. I had been pained imagining what it was like for my father or mother when something—a musical note, a Proustian taste, a painting, a fragment of spoken Dutch—provoked a poignant memory of Rotterdam. It had to happen now and then, no matter how much will they exerted. Did they feel sorrow that they couldn’t share with Marla or me what they’d once valued? Or shame about hiding their true selves? I was certain they ultimately set aside their momentary anguish with the same mantra: This was for the best.
But my sympathies hadn’t run to anyone else. I had never even wondered what their choice had meant to their relatives. And so I had learned something excruciating today. My mother and father had clung so assiduously to their identity as the Ten Booms not just for the reasons I’d long understood—so that US immigration wouldn’t discover that they’d entered the country under a false name, or to ensure that they were always taken as gentiles when the next Inquisition began. It was also the final unapologetic renunciation of their families, a way to tell themselves that they had learned the lesson of Lot’s wife and would never look back. They were no longer Bergmans and would not accept blame. At last, I fully understood why they had spurned all things Dutch.
I was grateful to have had my time on earth, although that, like death, is so elemental that it is difficult to ponder the alternate state. But it had never dawned on me that there was an entire shattered community in Holland that regarded my father and mother with scorn.
“That was why they didn’t want us to know,” I told Nara.
“I’m sorry?”
“My parents. It wasn’t that they were Jews—that wasn’t what they wanted to keep from us.”
“What was?”
“They didn’t want us to realize they had betrayed their families.” I faced Narawanda as I said that. “I never thought of them as cowards.”
“Nor should you,” she said without hesitation.
“He does. Johannes.”
“He is bitter—that he suffered, that those he loved suffered, and that your parents did not. But if he spoke to you longer, I suspect you would also find that some of his anger, whether he could stand to say it or not, is with his father, for making a choice that inflicted such pain on him and the rest of his family. And that is what your parents understood. What would it have accomplished, Boom, if your parents refused that chance? Do you think it would have helped anything if the Nazis counted two more victims?”
She was making sense. But there was reason behind Johannes’s indignation as well. There are no rules, no order, no civilization if everyone is simply out for himself. I told her that.
“This is the same conversation we had a couple of weeks ago,” she answered.
I’m sure my expression in response was completely blank.
“When I told you that I have never known what I would do in wartime?” she asked. “People do horrible things, but often because they face horrible choices. We can admire heroes who put principle over peril to themselves. But their behavior is not normal. He—Johannes—might wish to believe that if your parents had stayed, they could have helped avoid what happened, but we both know that is magical thinking. The will of millions was not enough to stop the Nazis. To me, saving two lives was the best your parents could accomplish. And many people, starting with your sons and including me, are grateful they did that and that you are alive.”
She looked at me fearlessly as she added the last thought, her chin raised, eyes clear. There was no flirtation intended, just facts.
We walked back to the station, without saying much. Once we were on the Intercity, I reached over for Nara’s hand and held it for the half an hour plus it took to again reach The Hague. Aboard the train, we agreed we would take the tram out to Scheveningen and the beach, a ride of no more than ten minutes, which felt to me like a good place for continued reflection.
During the winter, life in The Hague goes on as if this neighborhood was far inland, but with the arrival of summer, the huge sandy beach was bustling, with restaurant tables set up outside the seaside cafés, and families playing at the edge of the cool water. The North Sea, usually a leaden green, had turned blue in the sun and rolled in calmly in the soft wind.
We sat on the sand. Nara had worn a long dress and rolled it up and extended her pretty brown legs in the sun. Eventually, we removed our shoes and walked at the water’s edge, hand in hand again.
What is happening? What are you doing? I wondered. But I was caught in the unfolding of time. Given what I’d experienced in Rotterdam, and Nara’s unhesitating comfort, I was impelled by a momentum I felt no will to control.
Still barefoot, we walked up to the yellow tables of one of the cafés for a simple meal. We both drank wine, which sharpened my appreciation of the sea light and the sheer pleasure of breathing.
Around four, as it started to turn cooler, we took the tram back to the Fred and walked home, communicating in isolated words. I entered the dimmer light of the apartment feeling the weight of all that had transpired since we departed a few hours before. I plunged down on the sofa and Nara sat on one of the little square coffee tables, so she was directly in front of me with her knees against mine. She reached forward and took my hands between hers and fastened on me with her immense dark eyes.
“May we please get this done with?” she asked.
I laughed for the first time in hours. I had not been completely sure whether Nara had been holding my hand only to offer consolation as a good friend. I was grateful and I felt far closer to her than when we’d walked out the door seven hours ago. Yet in my imagination, we were going to return home and find some separation. Our coming together, if that was to happen, would require more thought and more time. But Nara was herself, sweetly subject to impulse, and impossibly direct in her communications, and I was glad she wanted to make this easy on both of us.
So our moment came, and again, as in Tuzla, I experienced the drama and definitiveness of a first kiss. Whatever it is that will occur between a man and a woman is more than half done the first time their lips meet in earnest. The wall that separates us from everyone else dissolves, and from then on, the two stand on different ground. And so we did.