The Dutch Orphan, page 7
“What do you see in him?” he asked at last.
“He’s all I’ve ever dreamed of.”
“Look.” He sat down beside her and pointed to her sketches. “That’s not true.”
“Well, he’s handsome, clever, ambitious. He works very hard, and he takes care of me. What more could I ask for?”
“Fine, if that’s what you think.” He reached over and shut the folder.
“If you mean refusing to see the doctor—”
“Where are your dreams, Lies? Where’s the Paris catwalk in Maurits? He’s a dealer in little pills.”
“Every couple has their spats, don’t they?”
“You’re missing the point. Maybe his little NSB pantomime wasn’t serious at first, but look what it’s turned into. You need to think hard about the life you want, and whether Maurits is prepared to give it to you. He’s chosen his side and it’s not where Jo is standing, or me, or most of the country, for that matter.”
They sank into silence, focused on the folder on her lap. After a moment, Liesbeth said, “You always made fun of my wanting to go to Paris.”
“Find something you believe in and stick to it. That’s all I know. The rest will follow.” He got up, shaking his head.
Liesbeth sat there for a minute longer, tracing her fingers over the quilt, following the thread’s curved pattern. She opened the folder once more and admired the sketches, lost in recollections of the worlds she’d dreamed up for each of them. Gerrit was right: she needed to change her life, but she was afraid it might take some time.
Eleven
Johanna Vos
June 6, 1942
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
It took months for Jakob and me to refine our plan, but once it took shape, the pieces swiftly fell into place. In the spring of 1942, the Nazis ordered Dutch artists to register with the Kultuurkamer, the new Chamber of Culture. Painters, sketchers, dramatists, poets, violinists, sopranos—everyone except the Jews, who weren’t even allowed on a stage. It was a bureaucratic scheme to scrape our country dry of its artists, anyone who might dare to make a statement. When the order came, I, like many others, refused to join. Jakob warned me against it, knowing I would lose any chance to perform legally, to earn a few extra guilders to help out at home. However, the decision to register was a matter of loyalties, and I knew exactly where mine lay.
In the end, the Kultuurkamer is what inspired us to action. We all had to choose a side. Were you merely voicing solidarity with the Jewish artists, or did you actually stand behind them? Within weeks, the registrations came in, a long list of names green-lighted by the Nazis. We found our alliances among the names missing from that list. Jakob and I followed the trickle of rumors to other like-minded artists who echoed our calls for resistance. And it was in one of these meetings, held in a cramped attic room, that our initial idea turned into something real.
The plan was for secret house concerts, unmarked and unadvertised. We would spread the news in trusted circles, giving Jewish artists a chance to perform and earn a living on the sly. Our own hidden music salon: a choral “fuck you” to the moffen.
* * *
We held the first house concert at the home of a Jewish surgeon whose wife was a keen patron of the arts. They lived in a beautiful turreted mansion that overlooked one of the ponds of the Vondelpark, with all its lily pads and weeping willows.
For weeks leading up to the concert, the preparations had commanded my full attention: organizing the venue, the performers, the guest list. Ensuring we had enough ration coupons to provide hors d’oeuvres for everyone and feed the musicians. When the evening arrived, I was so preoccupied that I forgot to jot down the address for Willem, and he was forced to wander the neighborhood until I spotted him from the window and brought him inside.
“There you are,” I said. “The guests are due any minute.”
“Is that all the hello I get?” he joked. “I’ve worn my soles thin trying to find this place.”
“I’m sorry, dear.” He didn’t deserve a curt response, but I had to focus. I surveyed the drawing room, running through my mental checklist. Jakob’s wife, Ida, was stationed in the front hall to collect the entrance fee, one and a half guilders per person, although donations were more than welcome. Blackout paper hung on the street-side windows with the green velvet drapes closed. The seats were arranged in neat rows in front of the grand piano, with chairs brought in from all corners of the house; the glasses for refreshments were polished to sparkling, and the marble busts on the hearth dusted. Everything was spotless. I’d never seen such an elegant house, but the couple’s wealth felt like an afterthought. All that mattered was that the surgeon and his wife were generous and discreet hosts—the first of many, I hoped.
Willem tapped me on the shoulder. “Why don’t you introduce me, and then I’ll find a way to make myself useful.” I obliged, grateful when he swept up the couple in conversation so I could check on things in the kitchen. With his wit and charm, Willem could secure a year’s worth of benefactors in a single pass of a room.
Once I had checked on the food and drinks—the surgeon had pulled several bottles of wine from his cellar, a luxury sure to entice the guests to return—I searched for Jakob. I found him in a side room, going over the schedule with the two Jewish performers.
“What if the Order Police catch wind of this?” I asked quietly, the one question we kept circling around. Gatherings of more than twenty people were prohibited, and while the surgeon had composed the guest list with care, we had to count on their neighbors not to pick up the phone and snitch. In times of conflict, trust is like a gilded egg: precious, rare, and easily shattered.
“Well,” Jakob said, “I hope the guests all ran track in school.” He raked a hand through his curls. “Some of them will come in through the back door, right?”
“Provided they remember the instructions.”
“Good. We won’t always be lucky enough to have two entrances.”
“Let’s focus on making it through tonight.”
The doorbell chimed. I squeezed Jakob’s hand and we moved to greet the first guests. Everyone filed in in cautious silence, removing unseasonably long coats to reveal the gowns and fine suits hidden underneath. Many of them had pinned the new yellow stars to their clothes, a sight that infuriated me.
The concert started at seven thirty sharp. I sat down in the back row between Willem and Ida while our hosts opened with a speech. “I bet the surgeon gets his bed custom-made,” Willem whispered, “and do you see how they’ve raised the height of all the doorframes in here?”
I suppressed a smile. Of course Willem would notice such a thing, tall as he was himself. It wasn’t the surgeon’s height that I noticed but his balding head, which gleamed under the chandelier like a polished apple.
When the surgeon finished speaking, he raised his glass in a toast to Jakob and me and the others who had helped string things together. I fidgeted as rows of faces turned toward me. These guests knew the risk they were taking in showing up, the Jews above all.
When Jakob took the stage to introduce the musicians, I managed to relax. He was a natural in front of a crowd. Beside me, Ida beamed in adoration, reminding me of my sister. She was intuitive and fiercely protective of the man she loved and, by extension, the people and things he cared about. I felt a sliver of guilt for not letting Liesbeth into our plan but brushed this away. A clandestine concert was no place for the wife of an NSBer.
“Here we go,” Willem whispered, as the musicians bowed and took their places. He laced his fingers through mine. The pianist sat down, and the violinist adjusted a string on his instrument. In that long, pregnant moment, the crowd was still. Every sound from the street—a cawing bird, the purr of a car engine—pervaded the room. The pianist let her hands hover over the piano keys. I held my breath. At any moment, a knock could come at the door. We could be fined, arrested, or worse. But then, the pianist’s hands fluttered into motion, and the violinist began to play.
As the room filled with music, I focused on the piece. Mozart’s Sonata in E Minor, K. 304. The allegro began sternly, with a somber tone. It brought me back to Zierikzee: age nine, following my aunt and sister through the streets as they stopped to buy white lilies from the flower cart. Liesbeth clutching the bouquet as she crouched in the cemetery, laying the flowers one by one across my parents’ graves. I closed my eyes and let the sorrow come back to me.
When the second movement came to a close, we all breathed in a collective, wistful sigh. Then, we began to clap, hesitantly at first, as if we were trying to gauge the weight of the noise, whether it would breach the walls and alert someone outside. The applause grew warmer, more assured, and something shifted. The tension disappeared, smiles spreading across the room like sunflowers turning to meet the sun.
That feeling lingered the rest of the evening. We broke for an intermission, and the hosts brought out their trays of canapés. For the first few minutes, people clung to their own circles, but when the wine came around, they started to mingle, talking and laughing and sharing toasts with strangers: nurses with lawyers, Jews with Calvinists. In the corner, the editor of the Catholic newspaper threw his arm around the man next to him in raucous laughter. Willem leaned in. “That man he’s talking to is a socialist.” I watched, astonished as people crossed the lines of their own segregated worlds, as a sense of camaraderie filled the room.
The surgeon and his wife came over to me with an extra glass of wine. “Thank you,” the surgeon said. “It feels wonderful to have the house filled with laughter again. It’s good of you to want to help.”
“Regardless of our beliefs,” I said, “we share this city as neighbors.”
The hostess smiled. “Tonight’s been a reminder of the beauty that still surrounds us.” She leaned in and my attention fell to her necklace, which glimmered in the light. It was such an eye-catching piece of jewelry, a deep red stone cut in a hexagon and set in a gold pendant, the corners decorated with flowers.
“What a gorgeous necklace,” I said. “It suits you.”
“Thank you. My grandfather was a jeweler. He made it for my grandmother with her birthstone, but she found it too modern for her taste.” The hostess then excused herself to gather everyone back to the drawing room for the rest of the program.
The musicians carried on, playing Debussy and Rachmaninoff and Mendelssohn—names the Nazis had banned for being too French, too Russian, too Jewish. I thought back to the night at the Concertgebouw, Jakob’s final performance with the orchestra. All those engraved cartouches lining the hall. Surely by now the Nazis had removed the plaques with Jewish composers, like they intended to rename the city’s Jewish street names. Erasing an entire people. At least within the walls of private homes, these people remained safe.
Jakob and I exchanged relieved smiles; the night was a success. All these people, Jews, gentiles—all Amsterdammers, all uncertain of where the war would lead them. But for those few cherished hours, we were all there together under one roof, free to think and laugh as we pleased. Free of the Nazis’ grip. Free of their cruelty and terror. There was only the music.
Before I knew it, the performances had drawn to a close. The audience called out for an encore. But that, too, had its end, and I found myself rising to usher the guests toward the study that had served as a cloakroom, ensuring everyone had a good excuse to be outdoors as I saw them out the door. And when it was all over and the room was empty and the hired help had cleared the empty glasses and trays, and the violinist had packed his violin, and the surgeon was beginning to doze off in the corner armchair, I found my way into Willem’s arms.
“We did it,” I said, nuzzling my cheek into his lapel.
“You did it,” he replied.
* * *
After the success of that first evening, news of the house concerts began to spread, and our artists’ Resistance network grew as more and more people opened their homes to the performers. Yet the Nazis continued to impose new rules, tightening the tethers on Jewish life. First, the Jews were forced to “deposit” their valuables at a special new bank. Then they had to give up their automobiles and bicycles. And when summer set in and the days grew longer, the Nazis forbade the Jews from using the telephone, from being outside after 8:00 p.m. We struggled to work around this curfew. Sometimes we held our house concerts on Sunday afternoons, but otherwise they had to run through the night until the curfew ended at dawn, so we began to call them our zwarte avonden, black evenings.
We needed to make it easier for people trying to find the concerts, since it was too risky for them to bring along the written address. I suggested a code to be left on the windowsill of the house in question, a vase containing a silk black tulip—silk, because there was no such thing as a true black tulip. A black tulip to mark the music in the shadows, under the cover of night.
Content as I was to stay backstage, recruiting and organizing, those nights of music stirred something in me. I watched while the music swelled to fill the small sitting rooms, enchanting the audiences. It was so unlike the grand hall of the Concertgebouw, with its acoustics that amplified and echoed, with musicians on a far-off stage. Here, you could see the perspiration on the performers’ foreheads, see their muscles quiver at the stroke of their bows.
In early October, an opportunity fell into my hands. I had vowed not to take up anyone’s spot to perform, least of all a Jewish artist’s. However, a poet from Rotterdam had stopped replying to the letters about his upcoming performance. People believed he had gone into hiding. On hearing this, I had the sinking feeling that this would be the first of many of our performers who would be forced to disappear, to leave their houses and belongings and loved ones behind at a moment’s notice. How much worse could things get?
Jakob took the news with a grim nod. He had been immersed in such stories for months now, since the deportation summons began appearing in his neighbors’ mailboxes. His mixed marriage with Ida kept him safe for the time being, but he struggled with that fact while his friends and family tried to gauge their chances for survival.
Still, it was Jakob who tried to see the spot of sunshine amid it all, urging me to step up and perform. “We have a ballerina performing, Edda van Heemstra, but it won’t look good to have a gap in the program. Donate your earnings, if you wish, but give yourself something for once.”
“The other singers have been opera sopranos. I’d need an accompanist.”
“How about a contrabass?” Jakob asked, and that settled it.
* * *
We prepared several numbers together, renditions of popular songs. Every day for a week, I put “I’m Gonna Lock My Heart” on the gramophone, trying to mimic every shift and trill in the music and memorize the English lyrics. I was no Billie Holiday, but I tried to pour something of myself into the song. When my voice was hoarse and Willem arrived home from the zoo, I changed the record to “And the Angels Sing.” We belted out the lines over top of Martha Tilton while dancing around the room. When the record crackled to its end, we collapsed on our bed and made love like we hadn’t in ages.
On the day of the house concert, I felt more than ready. I’d even started dreaming in English. But that morning, I woke up blurry eyed and exhausted after a troubled sleep. It was the third day in a row I’d woken up like that, my stomach tied in knots. A heightened bout of stage fright. Here I could walk around giving instructions and reaching out to strangers, but I knew if I was in front of an audience, I could be wobblier than a bowl of velvet pudding. After Willem left for work, I ran to the bathroom, and my breakfast came tumbling back up. I tried to coach myself in the mirror—pull yourself together!
Jakob and Ida and I had agreed to meet at the patron’s house to set up. The country estate lay on the Amstel River at the outskirts of Amsterdam. It took me the better part of an hour to cycle there with my outfit and good heels in my bicycle saddlebags. I arrived flushed and breathless.
Ida took one look at me and told me to sit down.
“Clearly,” I said, “I’ve been spoiled living in the city center.”
We met the lady of the house and helped the maids position the chairs, while the hostess fretted over the details. I struggled to remember everything that had to happen. Ida put down what she was doing and came over. “I’ll take it from here. Why don’t you and Jakob rehearse before it’s time to meet the other performers?”
I glanced at Jakob, who nodded in agreement. “Thank you,” I said. He set up his contrabass while I conducted my vocal warmups. I felt faint and reached into my satchel for the sandwich I’d packed, but the smell of it turned my stomach so I tucked it away again. In the future, I’d stick to organizing the concerts.
“Ready?” Jakob asked.
He counted us in and started plucking away at his bass until the notes signaled my cue. I began to sing. A few lines in, the room went blurry: the art on the wall melting like a Dalí painting, the herringbone floorboards multiplying. When I tried to bring everything back into focus, I felt myself sway.
The next thing I knew, I was on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Something cushioned my head. Ida’s fuzzy face appeared in my vision, a look of concern. She cradled me on her lap. “You fainted,” she said. A cool, damp cloth brushed my wrists.
I peered up at Jakob as he dabbed my forehead with the washing mitt. “I did?”
“Out cold as a pickled herring,” Jakob said.
I made a move to get up, but Ida urged me to rest. “Go easy on yourself,” she said. “You have a big night ahead.”
I took a few deep breaths to satisfy Ida and then tried again to stand. A wave of nausea rolled in. “A little stage fright,” I said, but a thought came to me. How many weeks had it been since my last period? With all the excitement of the Resistance work, I’d lost track. I thought of Willem, of the measures we’d taken to be careful. But lately…
“Unless,” I began.
Ida gave me a knowing smile. “You need to see a doctor. You’ll want to know sooner rather than later.”
