Old Heart Read online

  “Anything. General information.”

  Again the lawyer started and stopped. “I shall need two or three days.”

  But he called the next day. “Ja, I have your information. Quite interesting. Pim de Wit was born in Veldhoven in 1922.”

  “Not in Rotterdam, then?”

  “Hmmm? No, here. A teacher of English at two schools in Eindhoven and one here. Married once, divorced long ago. Lives in a rent-controlled house that is owned by a housing association. Two children. A female named Ella, who is a dentist and lives here at Draaiboomstraat 37, which is also her clinic, and a male named Joost, who died in childhood. Now, here is the interesting thing.” Then Tom heard papers shuffling.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Just checking this to make certain. The daughter’s name is Ella Mostert, but according to this, her maiden name was not Ella de Wit like her mother nor Ella van Praag. It was Ella Johnson.”

  Tom rang the bell again, knocked on the door, and then banged on the door. “Pim de Wit. Please. I must talk to you. Pim, I know about Ella. I know. I would like to know more about her. Please.” He banged some more. When the neighbor opened his door again, Tom smiled and stopped. He put the slim envelope he carried through the mail slot and left.

  Tom went back twice more before the children came home from school to ring, knock, and call out, but to no avail. By late afternoon he was sitting in the garden with a book he wasn’t reading. Ilse and Nienke were at the dining room table doing their lessons and taking them very seriously, as children sometimes do, turning work into play or play into work by pretending that they were small adults, and Tom was watching them from outside through the plate-glass window. What did they know of their mother’s worries and heartaches? He had come down to the kitchen one day and found Saskia in her apron crying. She had pointed to the onion she had just cut, but hers were not onion tears. Instinctively he had put his arm around her, as he would have Christine, and she had leaned into him, cried against his shoulder for a few moments. Now Tom looked at the first floor, where Saskia had cranked the windows open and hung the bedding across the windowsills to air and thought that the house would likely get cramped and stale in the winter. He knew that change was coming. He did not know what it would be.

  Tom saw Ilse slip off her chair and go into the hall, and he turned to his book. A moment later she was standing beside him. “Meneer,” she said, “er is een vrouw voor u.”

  “A woman … ?”

  Pim de Wit stood outside the front door. She held an envelope in her hands, which he assumed was the one he had left at her house earlier. She was quivering. Her lips and hands were quivering. Her hair was mussed, and she had been crying, but when she spoke, she did so with forced, enforced control. “What are you doing here? Why have you come here after all these years?”

  Even if Tom might have answered, he didn’t have time.

  “I do not want you to be here. I want you to leave Veldhoven immediately. Do you hear me?”

  This time he chose not to reply.

  And this time her voice broke and her eyes overflowed. “And you are to never, ever speak to Ella. Do you understand? Never! Or see her. I want you to have nothing to do with her.”

  “But I need to know—”

  “All you need to know is that after you left, I raised Ella alone, I had a hard time, we had a hard time, Tom Johnson, but that’s behind us; I’ve made a good life and a good family and now, now …”

  “Sarah …”

  “Please leave them alone. Please leave me alone. Please do not do this to me again.” She caught and calmed herself. “I want to be as clear as you were in this,” she said, handing him the envelope. It was the letter he had written a couple of days after Tony’s birth.

  “Sarah …”

  “I am not Sarah. Sarah is dead. Now, please, I beg you, go away.”

  Tom watched her go across the street and around the corner, and he watched the street long after she had disappeared. He didn’t move or speak. Sarah. But she wasn’t Sarah—yet she had to be. Many things converged in him then. One was the sound of her voice, which he’d not forgotten but now remembered quite viscerally in the pit of his stomach and in the middle of his head and the center of his chest. Another was the pain that voice could not conceal; her use of the word “beg” had not been merely a formalism. Another was the sudden, certain knowledge that of course she could not have been dead or he would have known. Perhaps he had always known that somewhere in the world she was alive because he could feel her there. And another was the thing that had brought him across the world and the years to this place and moment.

  Finally Tom took the letter out of its envelope, unfolded it, and read it. He barely recognized his words. He barely recognized his handwriting. It seemed a very different letter than the one he had written so long ago. Could he ever have been so impersonal? Had it been some stiff-upper-lip attempt at sounding noble? And had he really used the phrase “look to the future” as if he were writing some Chamber of Commerce brochure? Did he have to say “very much”? And why “I’m sure you will understand”? He hated people who said that. And he hated people who said, “they say.” Only the last sentence made any sense at all, and he’d forgotten he’d ever written it.

  Dear Sarah,

  After shipping out I wrote you several times while still in England. When I didn’t hear from you, I assumed it was because you didn’t want to continue our relationship. I decided to look to the future. I came home, found a job, fell very much in love with a girl I knew in school, and married her. Recently two important things happened. Your letter was delivered almost a year after it was written, and our son Russell Anthony was born. I’m sure you will understand that my life is now here with Julia and our baby.

  They say that fate works in strange ways, and this must be one of them. I am sorry. If I live to be a very old man, I shall remember you always.

  Tom

  Tom would have been amused by the two policemen standing in Mrs. Waleboer’s parlor if they hadn’t frightened him so. They both played the Dutch “We’re just a small country” card; the elder as in “I’m sorry to be wasting your time on something so insignificant,” the younger defensively, as in “Don’t think just because we’re small you can come over here and push us around.” He made a production of studying Tom’s passport, although it was all but empty, scanning each line horizontally with his little finger and then half turning away to say something in Dutch to the other man. Fortunately it was the older cop who addressed Tom. “There is a complaint against you by a citizen of the Nederlands”—he pronounced the country’s name quite pointedly in Dutch—”accusing you of”—here he hesitated and spoke to the other man, who answered him behind his hand—“of harrassness. It seems that you have been molesting her. Now, I don’t know—” he continued with a note of qualification in his voice, but the younger man interrupted him.

  “You can be losing your visa over something like this,” he said. “Your residence here is temporary and privileged. You can be exported.”

  But they did frighten him so. They “scared the hell out of me,” he told himself later, walking Leo. But why? When they had spoken the name—Pim de Wit—it hadn’t even registered with him for a second; it wasn’t her name, not the girl he’d once known. It was her sister’s. He realized that he hardly knew who this woman was. All he truly recognized in her was an ancient history and a desperate present, for the only thing they now seemed to have in common was the disproportionality of their reaction to each other, and it slowly dawned on him that this was something more than a last hurrah, an old man’s final lark. No; the stakes were higher than he had known. He became aware that he could now see the vanishing point on which he had apparently always been advancing, the place at which his reality and his destiny would finally meet. The grandiose terms in which he found himself thinking alarmed him, but they also made everything much clearer. It’s just this simple, he thought. It’s what everything boils down to. It’s a
s simple as that.

  He sat down on a park bench because he was a little light in the head and weak in the knees. There was no turning back. No. There was no longer choice involved, only inevitability. This was how he was going to spend the rest of his life, and for the first time he wasn’t sure he was up to it. Perhaps this woman Pim was just as daunted. Perhaps this explained her vehemence and anger and fright; did she somehow know what he had just realized? And what was that thing? That he had set something in motion that he could not stop?

  And what in God’s name was he to do now that he could not knock on her door, couldn’t write her or talk to her or come within “fifty meters” of her without fear of “exportation”? He laughed out loud at that, sitting there on the bench, and Leo turned to him, nuzzled his hand, and wagged his tail. Tom Johnson had not felt this vital in a long time.

  But that was before the letter arrived from the IND. Jan Dekker leaned back in his chair, raised his brow, tapped his lips, and studied it. “Hmmm,” he said. “You have been denied.”

  “Is that common?”

  “Not in my experience. Not when all your papers are in order and you are having health insurance and a private income.”

  “Then why …”

  “Let’s see. It refers to a pending legal action in Illinois.”

  “Yes, my son is trying to obtain guardianship of me.”

  “Ja, well, that probably means nothing here. Still, I think I might take most of your money and put it in a bank box.”

  “A safety-deposit box?”

  “Yes. In a different bank. Protect it, but don’t close your account. Now, this also refers to a letter your family wrote challenging your petition.”

  “My family? How did they even know I’d applied?”

  Dekker tapped the letter. “They are having an advocat, a Dutch attorney. Anton Smits in Rijswijk, where the IND offices are. Probably an immigration specialist.”

  “Okay, but what are the grounds of the denial?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s easy to guess. Something to do with your competence, physical or mental, your ability to handle your own affairs.”

  “Okay, Jan, what next? Is there an appeal process? Is there anything I can do? I need time.”

  “Well, yes, you can appeal, and they’ll probably extend your visa if necessary. Otherwise you’ll be required to leave the country when your visa expires, I’m afraid.”

  “Does an appeal stand a good chance?”

  “If Ella Johnson Mostert is your daughter and Pim de Wit is her mother, it stands an excellent chance. If you are willing to use that information, it is all you need.”

  “And if I’m not?”

  “Well, then, you haven’t anything new. They’ll reach the same decision.”

  “But I may buy some more time?”

  “Perhaps. We can ask for a hearing. If it’s granted, we can go together, and I can ask you questions, and, ja, the commission can see for itself that you are not incompetent. It is a bit of a small chance, but it is the only one you have. And it should give you some more time.”

  “And a hearing isn’t part of the process?”

  “No, not usually. We would have to request one.”

  “Not usually or not ever?”

  “Let me look in it. Let me do a little research. I doubt that it would be without precedent.”

  Veldhoven, Autumn 2007 The War, Part III

  Well, Granddaughter, I’m back. Again I have time on my hands, and again I’m going to fill it by writing (I can only hope that your request was sincere). This time the rest of my war story, which really begins when the war, at least the war in Europe, was over, although you’d hardly have known it. Everything was still olive drab, delayed, rationed, and top secret, but the shooting had stopped, and Sarah van Praag and I were in love.

  After returning from Germany, I was billeted in a guesthouse that was more or less on the way to Sarah’s home, so we often walked to and from the compound together. Then we began to take weekend bike rides into the countryside. On one of these we rode along the Dommel River to the village of the same name where they had a little brewery that made a crisp, bitter beer. It was late afternoon and quite warm, with the soft golden hues of summer in the air. People had brought chairs out of the cafés to sit beneath the linden trees, to drink and talk, to relax, to feel the oblique rays of the sun on their faces, to lean toward each other and smile or laugh, to not feel fear or anger this day. We joined them. We drank beer and ate young cheese, still-warm bread, and some of the vegetables that were coming in with the harvest: radishes, scallions, maybe beets and cucumbers. In front of us men in caps and women in scarves rode their bikes back and forth to the shops. An old bus creaked to a stop. A big farmer who somehow had managed to remain fat during the war rode a big workhorse bareback right down the middle of the shaded street, his legs splayed and knees locked, clogs bobbing on his big feet. Two other farmers dismounted from bikes to sit across the way, nursing beers. They looked like old friends who had not met in this way for a long time.

  I asked about Sarah’s sister in Amsterdam. She was an artist. Perhaps she could come to visit. Perhaps I could meet her.

  “How did she escape the Nazis?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean being a Jew.”

  Sarah said that her sister was not Jewish, that they were half-sisters, and while her father, who had died when she was a baby, was Jewish, Pim’s was not. He was the man I had met, Sarah’s stepfather. She told me that she had hidden in their vegetable cellar for more than four years, that she had not left their house from May 6, 1940, until September 17, 1944.

  “My gosh. What did you do down there?”

  “I studied English.” She smiled. “I read books in English and French.” She told me that she loved languages, that they came easily to her. She said she had always assumed that she would become a teacher of languages, but that now she had a new ambition. “I want to do what I do for you. I want to be a translator.” She said she loved helping people who spoke different languages and came from different places understand each other. “I particularly like translating humor, like when you can help one person laugh at the other person’s joke. I like when there is nuance, and you have to take distinctions. Like between ‘slim’ and ‘skinny,’ for instance. Or between ‘rich’ and ‘wealthy.’”

  “What is the difference?”

  “Wealthy people have had their money longer.”

  “Is that true? I’m not sure it is.”

  She laughed and blushed at this. “Oh, dear. Perhaps I have been misleading you all along. Is there a difference between ‘poor’ and ‘impoverished’?”

  I loved watching her. The summer sun had tanned her skin, and it stood in striking contrast to the whites of her eyes and her white, white teeth. I had not known about her teeth for a long time because she hadn’t smiled or laughed for a long time. This day she did both. She twined her legs around each other, crossed her arms, cocked her head, leaned back into her chair as if she knew that it could not fail her, and smiled and laughed. She had slender arms and legs, and when her hair fell over her eyes, she blew it away. I was amused by this because it seemed so casual or tomboyish, and everything else about her was quite elegant.

  Later in grad school I would read Wordsworth’s line about “spots of time” to which we return all through our lives because they contain something essential and restorative. I remember sitting in the main reading room of the Deering Library watching the motes of dust in the great shafts of sunlight coming in the tall windows and thinking of Sarah on that August afternoon, of her words, her smile, her dreams that now seem even more wonderful and magical because they were so young.

  “Perhaps I will live in Den Haag or Geneva or even New York,” she said. “Perhaps I could even help prevent another war.”

  What I said to Sarah that day was mostly youthful foolishness. I told her I wasn’t sure I could go back to the flat, guileless Midwest after all I had see
n. I wasn’t sure I could sit in church and sing “Faith of Our Fathers” with a straight face or pledge allegiance to any flag or rake leaves into a pile and burn them on an autumn afternoon. What would be the point? I said. What I think I meant was that I wanted always to be right there, right then with her.

  That warm evening we dropped our bikes beside a farm canal and lay on our backs in the late northern twilight looking at the new stars. They were gleaming and sparkling and shooting. They were putting on a show just for us. I remember laughing out loud, they were so wonderful. I remember telling each other everything. Just everything. I remember falling asleep and waking at dawn with a new fact in my life, knowing with certainty that I was in love, and despite many years of trying to doubt and deny and negate it, I’ve known it ever since.

  I think it fair to say that the next eight months were the happiest of my eighty-five years on earth. Sarah and I discovered that for all our differences, we saw life in the same way. We agreed about values and people. If someone was phony or genuine or interesting or manipulative, we both knew it and usually at the same time. And the people we agreed about included us. After that night with the resistance fighters and the Germans, we never doubted each other again, at least not until our very last night together.

  And yes, of course I’ve wondered how my relationship with your grandmother would have been different had I never known Sarah. I do not know the answer to that question, Nora. What I do know is that what I never had with your grandmother is what I always had with Sarah. But even that is problematic because what we also always had was a deadline.

  The war was over. We were shipping people home. My turn was going to come. We both knew that. Oh, sure, we talked of my coming back to Holland, and she talked of coming to America, but I’m afraid I discouraged this latter notion, and that led to our big fight, which in turn led to our breakup. I gave her the impression that I didn’t want her to come, and by extension that I didn’t want her. It wasn’t that at all; it was just that I couldn’t quite see Sarah in the church basement on Wednesday nights eating deviled eggs, baked beans, and Jell-O salad. Apparently she couldn’t quite see me living in Veldhoven, either. At any rate, for all our pledges and promises, her coming to northern Illinois sometimes seemed impossible to me, and my coming back to Holland was fraught with difficulties I tried not to think about. If I were honest with myself, I knew I had had nothing to do with getting there the first time. Every single detail right down to the color of my socks had been arranged for me. Still, I had come to appreciate and identify with the Dutch people; they were nothing if not practical. Yes, they’d suffered great losses, been deeply wounded, even left for dead. But someone still had to bake the bread. Slowly they were puttering around, putting their country back together again, and I thought perhaps I could help them do that.