In yesterday's opening segment, a historian from the States, attending a conference on Dutch immigration, discovers that his father, utterly beknownst to him, had, a lifetime ago, immigrated to Canada with a first wife his son knew nothing of. After discovering her name, he finds her right there in the Netherlands and decides to speak to her about her story with his father, who is back in the States dying of cancer.
Berendina Janssens is as surprised to see and meet him as he is surprised and amazed to meet her.
Today, they begin to piece together what happened a half-century earlier, while they grow, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes painfully, into slowly accepting a long-ago story slowly emerging.
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At that moment, for a reason I don't know myself, I wanted to protect him. I didn't want her to know that she was a personal secret he'd either hoarded or hated or both. "What must I call you?" I asked.
"Dena," she said, a familiarity I wouldn't have expected.
"And your last name?"
"Janssens," she said, "my family name."
Maybe it was myself I wanted to protect, the historian who'd, ironically, known nothing about his own family record. "Was the marriage annulled?" I asked.
"What did he tell you?" she said again.
I brought the cup up to my lips and took a sip of the strong coffee, then lied. "That it ended," I said.
"That's all?"
My imagination created a conversation in which my father told all. We're in our barn, the milking done, and we're standing alongside the stanchions. He would have told me with a moral imperative, in the same way he told me almost everything. I can see him pointing his finger. And then I told Mrs. Janssens, "He told me it didn't matter what happened. What he'd learned was that you have to pick up the pieces and go on." I hunched my shoulders quickly, as he might have. "'Bad things happen,' he said, 'but the point is not to let them ruin your life.'" And then I smiled my father's consecrated smile. "''Suffering can make you strong'--that's what he said. 'The thing is to grow from adversity.'" I was sounding like Robert Schuller.
At that point, I'm not sure she even heard what I'd said. She held up a hand, uncrossed her legs, put her cup on the table, and pointed to what may have been a trapdoor in the floor. "That's where he was, you know--that's where he stayed," she said. "For six months, the man lived with us--six months. I was seventeen and every able-bodied man around was off somewhere, hiding or gone."
"My father?" I said.
"I didn't even know your father then," she said. "Oh, maybe by family--maybe I could picture him--his walk, his thick hair, that high wave. I knew of him, you might say, but I didn't know him."
I had no idea who she was talking about, but I did understand that even though I had been in Dena Janssens’ house for no more than five minutes, she'd already cut to very heart of a story I hadn't heard in all of my years with my father.
"He lived here with us for almost six months at the very end of the war, and I loved him," she told me, her clenched lips enforcing the passion she remembered. "My mother would have killed me--she was one of you people."
I suspected what she meant by that was something religious, but I let her speak.
"It was dangerous really, for my parents to let them talk with us--with the children." She pointed again. then kicked back the rug. "Look, look at your feet."
There beneath me was enough of square line to recognize that just below the kitchen table had been the hiding place, a cellar for whoever it was the Janssen family hid from the Nazis--onderduikers, maybe Jews.
"It was frightfully stupid," she said. "I didn't know that then, but I've thought of it often since that time. It was one thing," she told me, "for my parents to hide them here, but it was another altogether for them to let us mingle with them--and the younger children." She swept both hands up in a gesture of silliness. "Who knows? One of my sisters may have picked up an English word or phrase and used it at church in front of someone who should not have known we were hiding Canadian pilots."
And that’s when I knew the story. She'd fallen in love with a Canadian. She'd been in love with a Canadian pilot--but then why didn't she emigrate herself--a war bride? She must have used my father as a means to immigrate, then left him.
"My mother would have killed me if she knew. My father would have thrown me out of the house." She looked around her, at the stove and the laundry tree across the room, the tiles on the walls. "This house," she said, chuckling, "the one I live in now. He would have thrown me out, to be sure--a sinner because there was a baby--his baby. I needed your father."
As a pretext for getting to Canada, she'd married my father, used him as a means of finding the pilot her family had harbored and she'd loved. She was very young; and in the middle of all that war mess, she'd fallen head over heels. This woman. She was pregnant.
"I'm like a rabbit, I suppose," she said. "Isn't it a rabbit that's supposed to move in circles--that's supposed to always return to it's hokken? Now, here I am."
"A rabbit," I said, "yes. And me too, I suppose. Because here we sit--you and me."
"This is not your home," she said coldly. "You're not coming back to anything. You have no blood here."
I retaliated in kind. "How can you say that? My father's blood is on the back step," I told her. "I felt it when I stood there before coming in." She must have lied to him, told him he was the father--and it had to be fast, everything had to be fast. She had to have taken my father very, very quickly, then used his righteousness. "And his love is spilled here somewhere too, isn't it?" I said. "It haunts the place--it must be here--"
"Not his," she said. "My Canadian hero's is here," she said bitterly, "but not your father's. I don’t hate him. I never did." There was no pretense in her, no politics but truth, but sometimes it seemed as if when she looked at me, she saw a lower species. "You love your father," she said. "And you should. But I didn't--never."
"I lied," I told her. "My father never mentioned your existence--not once in his life. I never knew of a first bride."
Her eyes turned to steel, and the corners of her lips fell.
"Until yesterday, Mrs. Janssen, I didn't even know you existed," I told her. "I had absolutely no idea my father married you. I knew nothing about his taking a wife to Canada." Each line hit her hard, so I kept at it, assaulting her for reasons I really didn't know fully. "You can't imagine how surprised I was when I found your name with his," I told her. "My father married! He never spoke of you--not a word. Never even mentioned you. Only by accident am I here--only by luck. You understand?"
She reached for her cup, gathered what she could of her strength before lifting her eyes to mine once again. And then, some dignity coming back, she said, "So what do you expect me to believe," she said, "this first story or now the second one?"
I pulled the chair up close to the table. "Look at me," I said. "I'm telling you that not once in my father's life did he mention a word about you. I didn't know you existed until--" I looked at my watch, "until yesterday. Not even 24 hours ago."
She looked across the room, pulled her arms back from the table, sat straight on her chair, then lifted herself quickly and stepped back. "That's why I left him," she said. "Damned Christians and their stoic nonsense--'if you don't talk about it, it doesn't exist.'" She raised her hands to her waist, stood there straight and proud. "Damn them--damn them all for their secret sins. Damn them all for their righteousness, their Godliness. Isn't that like them?--like him? You can always tell the Christians because their backyards are full of dirt just spaded--so much they have to bury back there." What she said wasn't aimed at me. The anger spilled from something tipped full inside her. For a moment she seemed to have forgotten I was in the room, and then she looked up at me once again, and something softened. "And he is alive today yet--your father?"
"He's dying of cancer, " I told her.
"That's nothing of my doing," she said.
"I didn't blame you," I told her. "I didn't come here to blame you for anything--"
"How many others like you--brothers and sisters?"
"Three--I'm the oldest."
"America?" she asked.
"He left Canada--he had relatives in the States, in South Dakota." I didn't know the story exactly, but I played what I knew against her. "Probably soon after you left him," I said. Something of the defiance had drained from her face. "And you're back here in Holland?" I asked.
She circled the empty chair and then held both points of the back. "I got what I deserved," she said. "I got what I had coming. I don't think God is who the Christians think he is, but there is a God in heaven." She smiled. "I left your father," she raised her hands, rubbed a palm, "and my war lover left me--not even two years. Never married either. Not that I cared." Then she looked at me. "There's a God, I suppose--I just don't like him."
"Maybe it's a woman," I said.
"He's not a woman," she said. "God has a man's heart, as I do."
"Why do you say that?"
"We could never get along--too much alike, me and God." Deliberately she rolled the g in the Dutch way. "Women who believe in him love God," she told me. "Men who believe respect him. I never loved Him."
"Not even then?" I asked.
"Before the war maybe," she said, reaching for her cup. "Then I was a girl." She pulled it up into both hands but remained standing. "When I was a child, I thought as a child--you know what I mean?"
"And when you knew my father?" I asked.
"I was no child. After the war, there were no children left." She stopped quickly. "Well, maybe your father--I don't know. But none of the rest of us were children--"
"Nonsense," I said. I wanted to grab her--I really did. "You went winging off to Canada after some war hero? You lied with your body to my father for some pipe dream--to chase some guy in a uniform--and you say you weren't a child?"
She stood straight and tall behind that chair, the cup in both hands, and smiled, then laughed. "You're not like him," she said. "You're not like him at all, are you?"
"How do you know?" I said. "How long were you married?--a week?"
At that moment it hit her for the first time that I hadn't been lying to her, that the man she'd once married under pretext, the man she'd hauled on to some straw mattress somewhere in order to cover her sin, the man she had slept with, only to reach her baby's father in Canada--at that moment she understood that the man she didn't know at all had never even suggested her existence to me. She looked at me and said, "You don't know, do you?"
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Tomorrow: there's more to learn.
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