The Tulip Eaters (14 page)

She turned to the
medewerker.
“Please don’t tell me I have to read each and every card to find the information I need.”

He looked at the floor as if ashamed. “Yes, I am afraid so.”

“Is there a cross-index?”

He colored a bit as he shook his head. “Mijnheer Prager created the system using his own criteria.”

“Isn’t there anything that might shorten the process? This could mean life or death for a six-month-old baby!”

Dijkstra gave her a startled glance. “I am sorry. I wish I could give you a different answer.” He drew himself up. “But I shall begin immediately and we shall do our best. Do not lose heart. If I find anything at all, I will inform you immediately.”

“Thank you,” said Nora, still feeling miserable. She sat down in the spare metal chair, feeling overwhelmed. She looked up at the
medewerker.
“Where are you going to do your research? Perhaps I could help you instead.”

He shook his head, his eyes now hooded. “I will be working with materials that are prohibited from use by the general public.”

“You mean because they involve the NSB.”

“Yes, I suppose someone has explained to you that all documents and diaries relating to the NSB have been sequestered.”

“Yes,” said Nora. She felt the now-familiar tears form behind her eyes. She looked down so he wouldn’t see.

“So,” he said brightly. “Anneke Brouwer, Hans Moerveld, Abram Rosen. I shall get started with my task!” He almost ran from the room.

20

Ariel hunched his shoulders as he walked fast despite the rain. Yesterday, when Amarisa had taken Rose, he had rushed to the address the de Jong woman had given him, but he’d seen no one go in or out. This morning he meant to appear nonchalant as he strolled back and forth.

After a sleepless night comforting Leah and racking his brain, he had come up with a plan. That morning he had typed a letter and put it into a blank envelope, careful to wear gloves. Short, but to the point.

Your daughter is in Houston. Ransom is USD 50,000. Return there immediately and await further instructions.

He would hand it to her in the street and then rush off. It was eight in the morning. Probably too early for her to come out. He walked past the house again, this time glancing surreptitiously into the lower windows. The Dutch never used curtains, thank God. Ariel wondered if this age-old custom arose to let in light on gloomy, rainy days, or if it simply permitted the inhabitants to sit and drink tea while pretending not to snoop on their neighbors.

He started to feel like a stupid chicken walking in circles. He decided to make one more pass in front of the flat. But this time as he reached the corner, he saw the American rush out and try to catch the
Spui
tram, only she missed it. He stood a good distance behind and followed her onto the next tram. When they got out, he would hand her the letter. He felt his palms sweat and his heart beat faster.

When the tram stopped, the woman stepped quickly onto the street. He was near the back, surrounded by a throng of commuters. He tried to elbow his way out, but the incoming passengers were just as eager to enter.
Damn! I’m going to lose her!
He finally exited, trying to catch sight of her through the pouring rain.
There she was, already a block away.
He almost reached her, but she stopped in front of an old building on the
Herengracht.
He watched her go through the doors.

He approached it, read the concrete inscription and his jaw dropped.
The War Institute?
Fear gripped him.
What in hell was she doing there? Had Isaac ever said anything about the
Instituut?
Records of some kind?
He could think of nothing.

He stood staring at the glass doors until he noticed the guard inside eyeing him suspiciously. If he went in there—and he had no idea if they would let him—he could pretend to be researching something and leave the note where she was sitting. No, that wouldn’t work. The guard would have seen him and could describe him to the police.

He walked down the street to a pay phone, took out some change and girded himself. Amarisa was not going to be happy.

21

Nora stared at the
dagboeken
upon the desk in front of her and opened the first one. Each diary had a handwritten form pasted onto the inside of the cover. It seemed to Nora to be a pseudo-psychological summary of the
dagboek’
s author. Apparently Mijnheer Prager also fancied himself the Freudian arbiter of whether the subject matter and contents of a
dagboek
warranted reading.

She found handwritten comments in the marginalia, presumably written by Prager, regarding whether he judged the diary to be of historical or social import, and whether he believed the author to be reliable. As Nora skimmed a number of
dagboeken,
she learned that Prager had also deemed a number of the summaries not worth reading because they dealt only with the mundane daily lives of those who survived the occupation. And some were rejected because Prager found the writing style “too sentimental.”

Nora felt annoyed. It was galling that a Cabinet minister who had fled to England before the occupation had the arrogance to pass judgment on what was and was not worth reading and which diaries had sufficient historical importance.

Along with those remarks were snippets of advice to the reader typed on brittle paper by a typewriter whose ribbon must have expired during the First World War. So anyone seeking information had to first read through the summaries, which were not cross-indexed in any way, and then determine if the
dagboek
itself had something vaguely resembling what the researcher sought.

This is mad!
Her heart clenched as an image of Rose—lost, trapped, hurt—bloomed in her mind’s eye.
What am I doing here? I’ll never find anything remotely related to my parents, Abram Rosen or Rose! I’m a complete fool.

She put her head in her hands and sobbed. She allowed herself a few moments to cry, but then wiped her eyes when some of the
medewerkers
walking by gave her concerned looks. She couldn’t stand the thought of anyone asking her if she was all right.
I’m not all right. I’ll never be all right. Not until I know where Rose is.

She girded herself to continue. It was the only thing she could think of to do. She had called Richards yesterday and had received the same response. “We’re doing everything we can.” If, after a few more days, it became clear that out of desperation she had idiotically jumped on an airplane, then she would go home. She refused to think about how she would feel or what she would do if she returned empty-handed, with nothing to do but wait.
And wait for what?
She banished the thought and turned to the stack that the
medewerker
had given her.

Dispirited, she opened the first binder. Her eyes caught the word “Index” and she felt a glimmer of hope. If the diaries were in alphabetical order, she might be able to shorten this impossible task. She glanced down the list. No such luck. She turned to the second page.
God! A second index—divided into cities.
Under “Amsterdam,” she saw a list of hundreds of
dagboeken,
organized not by author but by numbers of particular index cards. She felt like crying. Maybe she could look at each summary sheet and try to discern which, if any, related to her parents or Abram Rosen. But she didn’t trust Prager’s biased assessment of what each
dagboek
contained. Or she could check each index card related to Amsterdam in the “Index.”

She had no choice. She began.

22

Ariel dialed the number with dread. “Amarisa?”

“What?”

“I followed her.”

“Brilliant. Where is she?”

“At the
Oorlogsinstituut.
”

“What in hell is she doing there?”

“How would I know?”

“Well, keep following her. How are you going to get rid of her?”

Ariel told her of his plan, the contents of the letter. “It’s too risky for me to go into the
Instituut.
I’ll have to wait until she leaves.”

“Well, it’s your own damned fault we’re in this mess,” she snapped. “Give her the letter and beat it. James Bond you’re not.”

“Damn it, Amarisa, it’s only ten. I’m doing my best.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. I’ll give you one more day.”

Ariel felt cold sweat under his armpits. He was again the little boy who had been whipped by her words, stung by her venom. “And if I can’t?”

“Then I’m going to take matters into my own hands.” Her voice was soft, deadly. “Now get off the phone and do something intelligent.”

* * *

After Amarisa slammed down the receiver, she walked into the kitchen and sat at the table. She reached for her bag of
shag
and slowly rolled a cigarette, lightly running her tongue across the adhesive edge of the paper. She sat back and took a few deep drags.

Perhaps she had made a mistake. Ariel had always been a bumbling idiot and she had no reason to believe he would act with intelligence now. She flicked her ashes into a Delft Blue ashtray, weighing the pros and cons. If, by some miracle, Ariel was able to scare off the woman, it was the best solution. Now, thank God, she had complete control where Rose was concerned.

She thought of Isaac. He would have known what to do. God, she missed him. Now she had no one to talk to, no family who understood her, no one to fill her lonely days. And without Isaac, her night terrors had returned. Last night she awoke screaming, her nightgown dripping with sweat. Always the snarling faces of those bastards, the stink of them as they raped her, one after another. Then when she managed to calm down, she had slipped into Rose’s nursery and touched the sleeping angel. As she stroked her soft cheeks her fingers shook. She had curled up on a blanket next to the crib, falling asleep to Rose’s soft breathing.

Amarisa walked into her living room with renewed conviction. She had been reluctant to bring in a third party, as it meant someone else could inform on her. So she would give Ariel one more day. Even blind pigs got lucky.

23

It was late afternoon. After grabbing a quick
broodje
kaas,
Nora had walked back to the
Instituut
under the leaden clouds and light rain that defined Dutch weather. The Dutch had almost as many words for rain as Eskimos had for snow. She would have labeled today as
motregen—
moth rain—that lightly fluttered against her eyelashes.

She barely noticed the shops and streets that were decorated for Christmas. Twinkling lights glittered up and down the canals. All Nora could think of was that this would have been Rose’s first Christmas. Nora had already bought her a special red bonnet with mistletoe stitched along the border to match the bright green elf costume she was to have dressed her in for Christmas morning. What came to mind instead was the soft yellow headband lying pathetically on the living room floor, next to her dead mother.
No, she would not go there. Back to work.
She walked into the building. Before returning to her toil, she swilled a cup of the
Instituut’
s bitter black coffee that cost her two dollars.

She sighed. Each passing hour felt more depressing than the last. She had plowed through hundreds of note cards, quickly discarding those that had no relevance to the names she sought. Ultimately, she had found only eight
dagboeken
that seemed to hold even a vague promise of useful information. She hunched forward over the wooden desk and made her way slowly through the first five.

Each
dagboek
consisted of loose pages bound into an ancient, thick cardboard cover and tied by a dark, twisted ribbon. A few contained typed copies, but most had the original scrawl of the author, written in fountain pen on pages of dried onionskin, so delicate that Nora feared they would tear in her hands.

Many of the
diaries
were truncated, as if Prager had decided to omit certain paragraphs and, in certain circumstances, entire pages, based upon his subjective selection process. Others contained actual photographs of the original pages, which were blurred and almost impossible to read.

Perhaps the authors had insisted on keeping the originals,
she thought,
especially if they knew what that idiot’s criteria were for chopping a diary up or rejecting it outright. I know I would have.

Some pages were pasted to a piece of cardboard with some kind of industrial glue. Those were the most difficult to read because the handwriting was crabbed and microscopic. She had gone to a shop in the
Spui
during her lunch break and bought a small silver magnifying glass. It helped, but it was an enormous strain to read that way for hours on end.

Nora rubbed her eyes and stretched her arms over her head. She pulled out one of the index cards and read it. She already knew that by 1944, there was no more meat; milk powder was scarce; and people started smuggling in potatoes and other staples from the north of Holland. Over 20,000 men, women and children starved to death in what was called the
Hongerwinter.
This card, written by a housewife, told her something new.

We have no milk, no bread, no potatoes—just rotten peels. The boys now have to go far into the fields to pull frozen tulip bulbs from the ground. We grind the pulp and make thin soup and watery porridges from them. They are bitter, practically inedible, but we choke them down because otherwise we will starve.

* * *

Nora felt miserable. To her this represented the nadir of the war—starving Dutchmen forced to forage and choke down their national flower.

She imagined a young Anneke, dressed in her brown NSB uniform, sitting warm before a hearth, well fed and clothed as she watched her starving neighbors shiver in the bitter cold, standing in endless food lines for a scrap of rotten potato peel.
Had Anneke’s family been NSB proponents before the war? Or had they joined after the occupation? Had any of them refused to join?
Her heart clenched.
If so, why didn’t Anneke have the same fortitude?

Nora could not reconcile that bitter image with her memories of Anneke, dropping off food at a homeless shelter and donating money and clothes to abused women with children. Nora felt her heart harden.
If I were an NSB-er during the war and had an ounce of remorse for what I had done—and God knows what horrible things Anneke did—I guess it would be easy to be generous after it was all over. Especially if I got off scot-free, as she did.
Now every time Nora thought of Anneke’s generosity, it would be bathed in a shadow of shame. But there were many NSB-ers.
What could Anneke have done to single herself out for murder?

She looked at the back flap of a book the
medewerker
had suggested she read. Seyss-Inquart, the
Rijkscommissaris
in charge of the Netherlands, had sent five million Dutchmen to German labor camps. He deported 120,000 of the 140,000 Dutch Jews to three concentration camps in Holland: Vught, Amersfoort and Westerbork.

He personally plundered the Dutch economy so that barely a cent was left. Nora had not known that the Netherlands was the only country in Europe that not only had paid the Germans for its own occupation, but also for “administration costs” of eight and one-half billion guilders. The total damage was twenty-five billion guilders. Nora felt her jaw drop.
He was one of the greatest looters of all time.

She glanced at the photo on the back cover. Seyss-Inquart was a slight, pale man with a receding hairline and round, thick spectacles. The eyes that stared back were black and intense. Nora felt a grim satisfaction. He was convicted and sent to Nuremberg to be executed with the others. Goebbels had already swallowed his cyanide capsule and lay dead. Seyss-Inquart had been the last to walk the thirteen steps up to the gallows. As they put the black hood on his head, he had spoken for the last time.

I hope that my execution will be the last act of tragedy of the Second World War and that the lessons will be that there must be peace and understanding between people.

I believe in Germany.

* * *

Nora flipped to the final photograph of him. He lay on top of his coffin, the thick black rope used to hang him noosed tightly around his neck, his tongue protruding.

She slammed the book closed. She wished she could have pulled the trapdoor herself.