No Greater Love (10 page)

Unable to settle down with the book he had been reading, Pieter paced his mother’s meticulously arranged drawing room. He couldn’t remember there ever being a thing out of place. Not even as a child when he had been brought here each afternoon by his nurse to spend an hour with his mother. As he paused by the large window overlooking the Herengracht Canal, his attention was caught by the pale golden streaks painted on the water by the late-afternoon sun.
The color of the blouse that Janan had worn that night,
he thought.

Through all the chemotherapy treatments and the miserable time after each one, he had carried the image of the last time he had seen her. In his mind, he had held her in his arms each night and kissed her again and again. He had clung to the memory of the lushness of her mouth under his, the caress of her silken hair spilling over his chest, the satin-smooth ivory skin beneath him
.
As always, when he let himself think of her, he relived the exquisite feeling of oneness and then the searing feeling of loss when he had reached for her in the morning and she was gone.

He had to see her again. He had to tell her that he understood now what she had tried to tell him. Love for however brief a time was better than never having known love. It had been six months. Six months of chemotherapy and more chemotherapy.
All in pursuit of a remission that might never come. He had never thought it would be such a long, seemingly hopeless process. And what had he accomplished?

Some improvement but not remission, not enough improvement for a stem cell transplant. Only the thought of Janan had made him persist. He had wanted to go back a well man and ask her to marry him. Now he wanted to go back and beg her to marry him for as much time as he had. He would do anything to have her for as long as possible, even if it meant more chemotherapy, pain, vomiting until he ached, and losing his hair again.

He reached up automatically with one hand and smoothed the short growth of curly gray hair that was replacing what had been thick, dark-brown hair. He had accepted every treatment the Amsterdam Leukemia Center recommended and, in the dark hours when he could not sleep, he had worked on learning Turkish so that he could speak it with Janan and she would not lose her language.
But what could have happened in that time? She could have found someone. She could be married. He frowned as a new thought came to him. Surely she would have contacted him if there had been any consequences from their time together.

Glancing around the drawing room filled with silvery brocade-covered French Provencal chairs, small inlaid tables, and cabinets displaying delicate china figurines, he tried to imagine Janan’s proud, graceful body moving around the room
. No. He had to have a home of his own. No matter how big this house was, he could never bring Janan to live here in his mother’s house. Somehow he would find a house of his own, a canal house in Leiden. It would have a view of the Nun’s Bridge and University Buildings. He would take her to all his favorite places and Janan would learn to love Leiden.

He gritted his teeth as he remembered his mother’s insistence after his father died that he give up his apartment near the University of Leiden and move back home so that she would not be alone.
Twelve years
, he thought.
He had lived in his mother’s home for twelve years. A home that had no mark of him and that would eventually be Crispin’s
. A dull anger crept through him as he remembered his younger brother’s, Dirk’s, response when he had suggested that it was time for him to come home. He could still hear his brother’s careless words, “Why? She depends on you and you have no one else in your life.”

“You seem troubled, my dear,” his mother said as she walked into the drawing room. “Is something worrying you?”

He studied her dispassionately before answering. She was still an attractive woman in an icily perfect way. Her gray Chanel-style suit accentuated with a colorful scarf, her hair carefully styled, and her makeup subtly perfect.
Why had she never remarried? What was holding her frozen in time?
“I think I’ll go to the States, to see Carl.”
He would convince Janan that he loved her more than life itself. He would beg her to marry him, to come back with him.
He paused in his dreaming.
What about Carl? Would she be willing to leave Carl to manage on his own? Not likely, but together they could help Carl move into his old home.
He felt alive, free as he waited for his mother’s protest. She would caution against it. He paused, running her possible objections through his mind.
His health status was too fragile. He was not yet in remission. He might get an infection. If he relapsed, he would not have his own team of doctors to care for him. Which reason would she use this time?

“Carl Ahern?” She paused with a frown on her face. “He contacted me several months ago but I haven’t heard from him recently.”

Pieter tried to keep his voice noncommittal. “I don’t remember you mentioning it.”

“You were in the hospital and very ill.”

“What did he say?” Pieter forced the words out.

“He asked about his house in Leiden as I remember. You know that I have been working on restoring his family home to him.” She pressed her beautifully kept hands to each side of her forehead. “It was not an easy case. The Germans had not confiscated it.” She shook her head. “It would have been easier in a way if they had but his mother’s younger sister who was married to a Dutchman had been allowed to live in it. I thought that it would be clear-cut after she died, but her son insisted that his mother had lived there for over 70 years and he had been born there. He felt strongly that he and his wife should be allowed to continue to live there.” She sighed. “They do not want to leave. I tried to explain that the house belongs to Carl. He is the oldest son. But you know, the German occupation . . . all the Dutch people suffered, not just the Dutch-Jews. And now there are these problems with retributions and the Holocaust Assets Issue. So many opinions. Some want the money to be distributed to Dutch-Jewish Institutions. Some want it to go for International Humanitarian Needs and some want it to go only to the survivors.”

“How could it not go to the survivors?” Pieter asked indignantly. “Those fathers did not go without and save every penny to pay insurance premiums for the international good. They did it for their children in case anything happened to them.”

“The issue of the Holocaust Assets is causing so much trouble for everyone.” She raised her voice. “And now, in addition to the money needed to pay retributions, there are all those refugees pouring into our country expecting us to provide everything for them.”

Pieter was outraged by his mother’s callousness but he managed to control his temper. “Yes, everyone suffered under the German occupation but Dutch-Jews did not just lose their homes and everything they owned—they lost their lives.” He fought to control his growing fury. There was no point in discussing the refugees with his mother. “Did Carl write about anything besides the house?” he asked with a sense of misgiving.

“Yes.” She frowned. “I seem to remember him writing a letter to you but you were too ill to be disturbed.”

“He wrote a letter to me?” Pieter tried to keep his voice neutral. “Where is the letter?”

“I really don’t remember. I didn’t want to bother you with any of his problems or requests.” She wiped away a tear without disturbing her makeup. “You were so terribly ill.”

“Did he write again?” Pieter was fighting to control his urge to shake the information out of her.

“No.” She frowned. “I think he may have called but you were in isolation in the hospital.” She sighed. “It was such a worrisome time for me.”

“Has he contacted you recently?” Pieter ground out the words between clenched teeth as he fought to control his urge to shake the information out of his mother.

“The last time he wrote it was personal business. He asked me to register his marriage in Den Hague.” She gave a delicate sniff as she met her son’s questioning gaze. “I was very surprised that he would marry at his age, after so many years of never marrying.”

“Who? Did he say who he was marrying?” Pieter’s voice was barely audible. How could Carl not let him know? But maybe he had in the letter his mother had misplaced.

“It was a non-Dutch name, not a name I knew. A foreigner. That is why he wanted me to register the marriage in Den Hague.”

“Can you look it up in your records?”

“Information between a client and his solicitor is private,” she said haughtily, but after a glance at Pieter’s ashen face, she capitulated. “It was an odd name. I don’t remember the last name but the first name was something like Jan Ann. I remember thinking that it was a strange name, certainly not a Dutch name.”

A surge of bitter desolation encompassed him.
Janan was married, lost to him for all time. Beneath the sharp agony of his loss was the stinging pain of his mother’s deceit. Carl had tried to contact him and his mother had blocked his attempts. It must have been important for Carl to telephone him.
“How long ago?’

“Oh, months ago.” She tossed her head. “It was just a small matter. I sent one of my assistants to do it.” She frowned. “You can’t expect me to remember the exact date.”

Pieter stumbled from the room
. He had to get away from his mother. He had to reach the library before he fell apart. Everything he had dreamed of was gone. Janan was married to another and would never be his. All his struggles to stay alive were for nothing.
He huddled in the corner of the leather Chesterfield sofa unable to stop shaking.

Why had Janan done it? She must have felt the same magic that he had that night. She must have known that he would come back as soon as he could. Why had she married Carl? To take care of him? To protect him from his nephew? But why marriage? He moaned as he tried to re-group. What was he going to do?

He stood, unsteady on his feet, and straightened his tie.
How could he live when he had lost everything? Work. Work was all he had left in his life. Sigmund Freud had said that work was the last bastion. He would go to the Refugee Center and work until he dropped. They needed him, and he needed them.

As soon as Pieter settled himself on the train for the thirty-minute ride that would take him to the Osdorp refugee camp in the western suburb of Amsterdam, he took out his notebook and reviewed the next week’s work. He forced himself to concentrate.
Twenty-three refugee camps in The Netherlands with over 14,000 refugees pouring in every year requesting asylum, nearly a third of them children.
He rubbed his hand across his face.
What irony. The only European country with more refugees was Germany, the country that had deported and killed so many people in the quest of a pure German population was now struggling with masses of people from diverse cultures seeking asylum.

He thought wearily of the child refugees he worked with
.
So vulnerable.
He shuddered at the statistics burned into his mind.
Two-thirds of the girls and at least fifteen percent of the boys would have experienced sexual
abuse. No wonder
the rate of
posttraumatic stress disorder was so high.
Under today’s date, he wrote the word,
Osdorp
, and then under the other days of the week, he wrote the names of other refugee centers in Amsterdam.
Never enough time, never enough help.

As he approached the center with its 350 refugee occupants, he could see the three flags of the Osdorp camp in the distance—the flag of Amsterdam, the flag of the Osdorp borough, and the flag of the Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers. The sight of the three flags rippling in the breeze gave the illusion of competence and security that was belied by a black metal fence surrounding the compound that had been erected to reduce the risk of young women being abducted from the camp that was partially hidden by trees. The illusion would be shattered even further the moment he entered the small room with the worn wooden table and mismatched wooden chairs where he would meet the young people that the volunteer workers had identified as needing his attention.

Late that afternoon, he picked up the last card from the table and read the scant information:
Sophia Sadik, 17 years and nine months old, fled from Kirkuk, Iraq, depressed, not talking to anyone
. He nodded to the volunteer that he was ready to see the next person and followed the age-old psychiatric practice of observing the patient as she walked toward him. Taller than most of the other young women, she held herself erect, her eyes straight ahead as she walked into the room and stood in front of the table.

Pieter automatically clicked off his clinical observations in his mind:
underweight for height, skin pale but smooth, hair covered by a lace-trimmed headscarf, clothing shabby but clean, and expression, melancholic. The slightly rounded oval face, dark eyes under thinly arched dark eyebrows, and ivory skin suggested that she was not part of Iraq’s Arabic or Kurdish populations.
Turkmen
? he wondered.
Could she be part of the third largest minority in Iraq that had been persecuted under Saddam Hussein’s program of Arabization of Iraq and eradication of ethnic minorities?

He glanced at the card again. No mention of language. He searched his memory. According to the required World History class that he had taken at Leiden University, after the Ottomans captured Baghdad in 1638, Ottoman soldiers, civil servants, and traders had settled in Iraq, and now, many of the Turkmen descendants from those Ottomans spoke Anatolian Turkish. “
Merhaba
.” He uttered the universal Turkish greeting and waited.

The response was slow in coming but clear and respectful, “
Merhaba efendibey
.”

He motioned to the chair in front of the table and said “
Lutfen
, please be seated. He waited until she was settled and then said slowly in the Turkish that he had spent hours learning when his treatment had isolated him from the world, “
Sophia hanim
, tell me about your situation.”