The Hormone Factory (25 page)

“Yes please,” I said, “I’ll come into the kitchen and sit with you, and then you can tell me what happened here.”

After drinking my ersatz coffee with Marieke and receiving a quick briefing from her on what had transpired here over the past five years, I walked over to the factory. It was with some emotion that I walked through the gate and into the yard. Just inside the entryway yawned a huge bomb crater; not a single window of the main building was still intact, the broken panes a patchwork of cardboard. Our factory hadn’t gotten off scot-free, but the damage wasn’t all that bad from the looks of it. I walked into the administration building, where I found my dear Agnes—not half as pretty as before, but as loyal as ever—still sitting behind her tidy desk, as if for five long years she had never left her post. She looked up when she heard the door open and, greeting me with a cry of joy, jumped up and flew into my arms.

“Mr. Motke, you’re back!” she cried, hugging me as if she’d never let me go.

“Yes,” I said, gazing at her, “I am back and you are still here, I’m so pleased to see.”

The Allies had liberated our corner of the country half a year before the war was officially over, so during the past several months I’d been able to correspond with our various managers, giving me a good idea how the factory had weathered the war.

Now, back on home ground, I was keen to swing into action and put together a new and revitalized organization, a modern conglomerate of companies from around the world, bringing the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co., Farmacom,
Farmacom Ltd., and our American subsidiary all under one umbrella. I envisaged a cutting-edge multinational that would have an important role to play in the development of drugs discovered or improved upon over the past few years despite the war’s intrusion, just waiting to be readied for distribution. Penicillin, DDT, vitamins, steroids, synthetic variants of the soul hormones—an enormous world market was there for the taking. We had already lost so much time. To catch up, I wanted a team of people I could implicitly rely on, people without even a whiff of collaboration stench about them. Our brand-new firm had to be swept clean, purged of anyone suspected of collusion with that washed-up gang of swindlers.

At my request, the entire workforce of both the slaughterhouse and Farmacom was ordered to gather in the canteen just before lunch. The people thronged inside with much excitement, and there was a festive mood in the air—elation, even. Peace had been declared that day, the peace so ardently longed for, and the fact that it coincided with the boss’s return brought out fervent expressions of emotion. There was a good deal of back-slapping, handshaking, hat-doffing, curtseying, congratulating, and embracing; many a tear was shed, wiped away with handkerchiefs extracted from sleeves or overalls, and, yes, even one or two demure pecks on the cheek, although I was careful not to be the one initiating this. A new beginning, a completely fresh start, was the wish filling each and every heart, the thought reverberating through every head, there in that overcrowded canteen. It was a wonderful moment in which we all keenly felt that the lengthy separation had not broken our team spirit.

I gave a short speech saying how happy I was that the terror that had gripped our country and the whole Continent was now behind us. I asked for a minute of silence for all the relatives,
friends, and strangers who had fallen for our fatherland, and whose sacrifice had made it possible for us to breathe the air of freedom again. I also said we should not forget those whose fate was still unknown, and that I wanted us all to stay strong and keep hoping for their safe return. I was thinking of Aaron, of course; though I had not yet had any news of him, I was almost certain he was dead.

(On a cold morning in January 1944, I had sat up in bed, awoken not by the air raid sirens, not by the roar of bombers overhead or by the screech of falling bombs, but by the feeling of being stabbed in the gut. It felt as if some force was slashing open my torso and ripping out part of me, the way a butcher cuts through the blood vessels attached to a calf’s heart in stripping the dead animal of that vital organ. I tried to lie quietly and not give in to the urge to roll up into a ball from the excruciating pain. And then suddenly the image of Aaron came to me, the way he had sat facing me the last time I’d seen him, emaciated and glum. The pain began slowly to seep out of my body, and a feeling of emptiness, a dead zone, seemed to have taken root inside me ever since. I can’t explain it, but from that moment on I was convinced my twin brother, Aaron, was no longer alive.)

I ended my speech by expressing my profound gratitude to everyone who had tried to resist or sabotage the fiend, no matter how humble or highly placed; anyone who’d had the guts to act heroically and refused to give in to fear. I assured them that each and every lowdown traitor or collaborator would get what was coming to him. Then we all sang the national anthem, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house—the sound of sniffling nearly drowned out the bracing words. With that, the assembly came to an end.

At my meeting with the skeleton executive staff that afternoon, I asked about those who were missing. No one was able to give me any information about my brother. No one had seen him, and nothing was known about his fate. There was plenty of information about Levine, however. It turned out that he was one of the very few Jews who had survived the war in Amsterdam, in his own home, and neither he, his wife, nor their one daughter still living at home had even had to wear the Jewish star. How that was possible nobody knew, but there was plenty of speculation that he must have taken advantage of his many important connections, and that he could only have saved his neck by collaborating with the enemy. I remembered the rumors that had reached me about Levine’s attempting to trade his shares in the company for an exit permit. That ploy had apparently not worked, but he still seemed to have managed to pull some strings. He who spits into the wind spits in his own face. Naturally, the other executives, the ones who had stayed at their post during the occupation, had cooperated with the German authorities by keeping the factory churning out our products at the scumbags’ behest; I had to take their word for it that they’d only done what was best for the company. By staying on the job, they had tried to forestall a total takeover by the Hun so that the firm’s precious secrets wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. They assured me that in their dealings they’d always had my best interest in mind, finessing it the way they thought I would have done wherever possible. Although I had resolved to give every collaborator the boot, I now realized that a certain opportunistic expediency had been unavoidable. I could hardly get rid of the entire administrative staff, even though some had cooperated rather enthusiastically with the occupying forces. Having to run a severely truncated operation just when it was
going to take a gigantic effort to make up for lost time would be most inopportune. I therefore decided to sack only the true turncoats, or those tangentially implicated on account of their background or some other connection with the crooked mob. I was by no means the only one to take that position. Our compatriots’ antipathy to anything that smacked of our neighbors to the east in those months right after liberation found an outlet in widespread harassment and abuse, fanatical hatred, and harsh reprisals against anyone of Teutonic origin, making no distinction between the criminals who’d been licking the brownshirts’ asses, and the assholes’ victims.

Nuance is a luxury no one has time for in the midst of war, and that goes for the aftermath as well, when people are trying to put the war’s abominations behind them. I have to confess that I too found it a great consolation to let myself loathe all that was German.

42 …

When, several weeks later, I was finally able to get to Amsterdam, I found it in a deplorable state. It was with growing dismay that I toured the great city, once so proud, now a drab, impoverished, bare, dilapidated urban desert with no electrical power and very few trees. No buses or trams were running, and many of the houses were in ruins, stripped of anything for which the desperate citizens might have had any use. Some shop windows displayed the official portrait of the queen, as if her likeness could make up for the lack of merchandise. As I walked through the former Jewish quarter, now practically razed to the ground, the ominous silence chilled me to the bone. That teeming anthill of shouting and yelling, laughing and singing humanity that had once tried to eke out a living here in abject poverty had vanished. Those proud, distinctive folks with their singular brand of humor, Amsterdam’s heart and soul, had been eradicated like a plague of rats.

I had gone to the capital to try to find out what had happened to my brother and Rivka’s parents, and also to see Rafaël Levine. I had to have the talk with him that would clear the way for the new enterprise.

With a suitcase full of provisions from our rural town, which for once was far better off than poor, plundered Amsterdam, I trudged through the gray streets to the house of my former in-laws. I was scared of what I might find, worried I would find them gone, but just as afraid of the unlikely chance that I’d encounter them at home and have to tell them Rivka and I had split up.

I halted in front of the house that for twenty years had been a warm substitute for my own childhood home. The building looked run-down, but it was not in ruins. At the second-floor windows I could see the curtains that had hung there since Rivka’s childhood. I thought I saw some movement inside. Could it be my parents-in-law? Had they survived? Lugging my heavy suitcase, I climbed the front steps and rang the doorbell. The shrill noise reverberated inside the house. A few moments later I heard a voice calling from the window, “Who’s there?”

I stepped back out onto the sidewalk and looked up. A blonde with a bouffant hairdo waving on top of her head like a proud cockscomb was leaning nonchalantly out the window. She wore a flowered apron and had a dust rag in her hand.

“I’m looking for Mr. and Mrs. Salomons, are they home?” I asked.

“No idea,” the woman answered in a surly voice, “why don’t you ask them? They don’t live here, anyways.”

“But they used to live here,” I called up to her. “Will you let me come up?”

“Why should I?” the woman yelled back. “
We
live here now, we’ve been here two years and we ain’t got nothin’ to do with no Salomons. They left, and now it’s ours. Good day, mister.” She slammed the window shut.

I sighed, considered ringing the bell again and making a pest of myself until the broad let me in, or even kicking in the front
door, but decided instead to go see Levine first; perhaps he’d have some more information.

Crossing the Amstel River, smooth and indifferent as ever, as if the most harrowing scenes had never taken place on her banks, I made my way to the Levines’ house, which looked untouched except for the peeling paint on the window frames. The electric bell didn’t work, but after quite a bit of knocking I heard footsteps, and the Dauphine threw open the door. There wasn’t much left of her once portly girth. Her old-fashioned, matronly dress hung loosely around her emaciated frame, her face was wan, and her double chin, which had once billowed majestically over her tight collar, was now a deflated jumble of empty skin drooping over the lace jabot like a quivering turkey wattle.

“Motke,” she exclaimed in surprise, looking me up and down, “do come in!”

She gave me a hug, and I followed her up the stairs. The familiar living room looked emptier and more austere than before. She served me a cup of ersatz coffee and told me that Rafaël had gone to his lab for the very first time that day. But before letting me go after him, she said, she wanted me to tell her what had happened to us.

I told her that Rivka would be staying in England with the children for the time being, and that we had decided to separate. I also said Rivka was anxious for some news of her parents, and that I’d promised to try to find out what had happened to them. I hoped the Dauphine might be able to enlighten me.

Enlighten me she did, and gladly. She rattled off her story at top speed, about their terrible suffering during the Hunger Winter of that year, and their anxiety about the two daughters who, with their husbands and children, had been deported to the east and whose fate was still unknown. About all that Rafaël
had done in trying to save as many of the hunted and persecuted as he could. And about Aaron, who, I was surprised to hear, had once paid a visit to them in their canal house.

It seemed that one day in 1943 Levine and my brother had bumped into each other in the crowded corridors of the Jewish Council, where Rafaël spent most of his time in a never-ending quest to obtain the coveted
bis auf weiteres
reprieve for every desperate soul turning to him for help. If you were lucky enough to have that stamp in your identity papers, it meant the feared “transport to the east” was temporarily deferred in your case. There, in the nerve center of the deportation industry, the building where despicable officials—conniving with assiduous civil, police, and railway authorities—had facilitated a smooth and flawless transport operation, Levine and Aaron suddenly found themselves standing face-to-face. They had not seen each other since the 1938 debacle and, in light of the extraordinary times, were able to put aside their onetime antipathy. When Levine invited Aaron to go home with him, my brother accepted. Sitting in the very chair I was now occupying, he had given the Dauphine and the professor an account of how he was surviving.

He was living in a poky little room in the Jewish quarter, which was crowded with Jews from all over the country who’d all been ordered by the occupiers to move into that sector of Amsterdam. When members of the “inferior race” were instructed to hand over their valuables, he had managed to hide some money from those crooks. What was left of his capital was going into helping people postpone deportation. Like Levine, he had been arranging reprieves and helping with medical deferments; he also seemed to have underground connections, although he was very vague about those. It was clear, however,
that he was involved with acquiring forged identity papers and arranging hiding addresses.