“No,” I said, finding my country a difficult one to explain. “No, I don’t think we do.”
Standing up now, I took a pair of jeans and a denim shirt from inside the bedroom wardrobe and put them on. They hung a little loose on me, for Bastiaan had a bigger build and was more muscular than I, but it felt exciting to wear his clothes. Once, on the second occasion that I had slept at his flat, I hadn’t enough time to return home to change for work and he had offered me a pair of his own underwear; wearing them throughout that day had been such an erotic experience that I found myself masturbating in the toilets at work a couple of hours later to discharge my excitement, a shocking sacrilege considering where I was employed. Wearing his clothes now gave me a similar thrill, although I resisted any urge to lay hands on myself in case his mother marched in unannounced once again. We’d only known each other ten minutes, after all, and she’d already seen me naked. She didn’t need to see me jerking off too.
Making my way back down the corridor, I stepped inside the kitchen, where a man with a gentle expression sat reading a newspaper. He had deep, furrowed lines on his face and wore his overcoat, despite being indoors, but took it off with a sigh when he saw me.
“Edda tells me that you fell in the shit,” he said, folding the paper in half and placing it on the table before him. He wore his sleeves long, I noticed, despite the hot weather.
“I did,” I admitted.
“It happens,” he said with a shrug. “We all fall in the shit many times during our lives. The trick is pulling ourselves out again.”
I nodded, unsure if he was being philosophical or simply stating facts.
“My son should be here,” he said when I introduced myself. “I hope you don’t think we brought him up with such bad manners.”
“He must have been delayed,” I said. “He’s not a good timekeeper at the best of times.”
“He never has been,” said Arjan, asserting his primacy over me.
Edda came over and placed two mugs of coffee on the table, and I sat down, glancing around at the room. Although the Van den Bergh house was small, they had filled every nook and cranny with curiosities accumulated over the years. The walls might have been papered or painted, it was impossible to tell with the collection of family photographs that adorned them. The shelves were dipping with books while a stand next to a record player held an enormous pile of LP albums. It was no wonder, I told myself, that my boyfriend had left it such a calm and well-adjusted adult as opposed to the completely fucked-up creature that I had been when I started to make my way in Dublin. Nevertheless, it astonished me that a couple who had witnessed so much horror in the world could manage to find beauty in it ever again.
I knew their story, of course. On our fourth date, over pints of beer at our favorite bar, MacIntyre’s on Herengracht, Bastiaan had told me how his parents had left their wedding ceremony in 1942 with the words of the Sheva Brachot still ringing in their ears and within the hour had been rounded up by the Nazis, along with some three hundred other Jews, before being sent to the Dutch transit camp at Westerbork. They remained there for almost a month, catching sight of each other only once, when their paths crossed during a work detail, before Arjan was dispatched to Bergen-Belsen and Edda to Auschwitz, journeys and experiences that they somehow survived before being liberated by the British and Russian armies respectively toward the end of the war. It was 1946 before they found each other again by chance in that same place, that same bar, when it had been called De Twee Paarden. Their families wiped out, Edda had found work there as a waitress and Arjan happened to stop in one evening with his first week’s wages in search of oblivion. Almost exactly nine months later, their joyful and unexpected reunion had resulted in Bastiaan, their only child.
Although I’m sure that Bastiaan had told his parents where I had been working for the past two years, they feigned surprise when I mentioned it. I had rather dreaded the moment, being so conscious of their histories, but they seemed interested, despite claiming never to have visited the House itself, for reasons they did not explain. After moving on to completely different subjects for the next ten minutes, however, Arjan surprised me by returning to it, mentioning that he had been in the same class at school with Peter Van Pels during the late 1930s while Edda had once attended a birthday party with Margot Frank although she had never, to the best of her knowledge, met Anne.
“Peter and I played football on the same team,” Arjan explained, looking out the window toward the fields beyond, where the dogs were chasing each other in another burst of energy. “He wanted to be a striker but our coach insisted on his playing in defense. He had no great skill but he was fit, so fit that he could run anyone off the pitch. My sister Edith came to watch the match every Saturday morning because she liked him, although she was too shy to say so. He was too old for her anyway. My father would never have allowed it. Peter was always late for training; it became frustrating to me. I decided one day to have it out with him but that, of course, was the day that he disappeared forever. Into the annex.”
I felt both moved and startled by this information, to know that the man seated opposite me had such a personal connection with someone whose picture I saw every day and whose story had become such a part of my life. I glanced toward Edda but she kept her back to me. Eventually, however, she turned around, clearing her throat but not making eye contact with me as she spoke, as if she was an actress on a stage reciting a monologue.