The Longest Night

by Otto de Kat, Laura Watkinson

Genres: Historical Fiction; World War II; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A masterpiece of literary craft and concision; sparse, beautiful and hugely affecting - Daily Mail Since the liberation of the Netherlands, Emma Verweij has been living in Rotterdam, in a street which became a stronghold of friendships for its inhabitants during the Second World War. She marries Bruno, they have two sons, and she determines to block out the years she spent in Nazi Berlin during the war, with her first husband Carl. But now, ninety-six years old and on the eve of her death, long- forgotten memories crowd again into her consciousness, flashbacks of happier years, and the tragedy of the war, of Carl, of her father, and of the friends she has lost. In The Longest Night, his impressive, reflective new novel after News from Berlin, Otto de Kat deftly distils momentous events of 20th-century history into the lives of his characters. In Emma, the past and the present coincide in limpid fragments of rare, melancholy beauty. Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

Release date: March 23, 2017

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 147

Sample

“What day is it, nurse?”

“It’s Sunday.”

“He’s coming on Tuesday.”

The nurse nodded, she had heard, he would be arriving from Germany in the morning. And the doctor would be coming in the afternoon, and then the team.

“What time is it, nurse?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“In the morning or the evening?”

“In the evening. Look, it’s almost dark.”

Emma knew exactly what day it was, and what time, and what was going to happen. Her questions were a smoke screen, she wanted the nurse to think she was already quite far gone.

“Mother, do you still recall how we, as the day grew long, sat by the window when I was small, and every night we’d sing a song?” Emma softly spoke the lines to herself. The windows were open, it was still warm. A huge moon hung above the row of houses in the distance. Some of them had lights on inside. From Oudedijk came the sounds of bells ringing and trams and cars and the high, plaintive wail of mopeds.

“Tired from jumping, tired from fun, on your lap in the fading light, ready for bed, your little son, I’d think of the mysteries of the night.” Emma turned and saw that the woman who would soon help her to bed was listening with surprise.

“Someone wrote those words a very long time ago, nurse, I think even before I was born, that poet has been with me a long while. There are so many of his lines that I’ve never been able to forget.”

The nurse pulled up the blanket that had slipped from Emma’s lap. “Aren’t you cold?”

Reciting the poem from memory – that was rather impressive.

“As we sang that song without a name, a song with words so tried and true, an age-old song, and ever the same, about God who watches all we do . . .” She hesitated. “Never without shaking, Mother, could you sing that old refrain.”

She had forgotten a couple of lines, nothing rhymed with “refrain”. She searched, but could not find the rhyme. But that did not matter, as the most important and saddest part had been said: that they sang about how God watches all we do.

Did He really? That wasn’t the impression she had. Her God, the God she had believed in so strongly and so sincerely, defending Him, even against her own better judgement, seeking Him and praising Him, but now finding Him nowhere. And yet those lines of poetry filled her with an all-encompassing emotion. She did not understand how a few rhyming words could take hold of her and awaken an ancient longing. That age-old song, ever the same. She had once sung it, had heard its music. The notes had vanished now though, there was no song, only the sounds of the evening on Oudedijk. That song. But which song was it? Her life had shattered into fragments, crystal clear, light and dark, an endless flow. Time turned upside down, and inside out.

“No, I’m not cold. Not yet.”

Emma smiled cautiously. Before she could say anything else, the jangling din of the nurse’s mobile telephone rang out.

They are among the few who still have a connection, and now the telephone will not stop ringing. An aggressive caller. Or a frightened one?

Emma watches the telephone, scarcely able to bear the sound. Is it Carl, is it the Ministry, is it the Gestapo, about to arrest them? No, they don’t call, they just march right into your house. She does not dare to answer, holds herself back even as she becomes convinced it must be Carl.

“Never answer the telephone, Emma,” he had impressed upon her. “We’re not in. Only if I call with our code.”

The day she ignores that telephone, it is July 25. Ignoring as much as possible will maybe give them a chance of getting through it, she tells herself.

Since the 20th, the days had been short and the nights long, and Emma and Carl had lived in a pressure cooker of fear and tension. Every footstep outside, every creaking floorboard, every passing stranger, every car on the street, every door that opens. They say that fear paralyses, and it’s true. The brain no longer works as it should, it’s as if some substance is released that swamps ordinary reactions. Nothing adheres to the rules of normality anymore.

The bomb under the conference table in Hitler’s headquarters had killed people, but the wrong ones. The divine leader himself had escaped and had welcomed his Italian friend Mussolini that same afternoon, the smoke still around his head, battered and bruised – the photographers had recorded it a thousand times. The event had placed a bomb under Carl and Emma’s lives too, hundreds of kilometres away, on the wrong side of the table.

And yet Carl still went to his job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, just as he had for four years. The neighbours in Berlin-Dahlem would have seen him walking to the U-Bahn station as usual, if they had been paying attention.

Adam von Trott, Carl’s boss, had called a meeting. The agenda looked harmless, packed with routine business. For days and nights they had discussed whether he should obey Adam’s summons. Carl had flatly repeated, and repeated, that he could not say no, Emma knew she could not stop him. Carl, her husband, whom she loves better than anyone, and yet she has to let him go because he cannot abandon von Trott. Not at this moment, not at this turning point. Solidarity versus love, betrayal versus future. Friendship versus flight. His life or his wife. The nights had passed in conflict and in silence.

Now morning is stealing into their garden with the chirping of the birds, it is the height of summer, a day is being carved from the darkness. They do not know if they will see each other again this evening. Carl attempts a few words, Emma just looks at him. Their embrace is almost fleeting, three, four seconds, she feels his arm around her, his hand brush her cheek. She does not cry.

They have agreed that she must have a suitcase ready so she can leave the house at a moment’s notice. In the event of an emergency she intends to seek refuge with Mr Wapenaar, a friend of her father’s, who lives in Grunewald, fifteen minutes away by bicycle. In the event of an emergency: their entire existence has become an emergency. Carl and she have clung to the promise of a rapidly approaching end to the war. An end that has shifted, year in, year out. Everyone is speculating, everyone is sure, this cannot go on much longer. Until finally no-one believes it anymore, even von Trott had said he did not know what would happen. Von Trott! Their friend, whom they blindly trust and follow, no matter where he goes.

In the middle of the war Carl and Adam had travelled to Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal, neutral countries with indifferent people who viewed them as traitors. Under the pretence of carrying out useful diplomatic missions for Germany, they had made cautious contact with the Allies. They told them about the growing resistance against Hitler, about the antipathy of the generals, they asked for support for the moment when the leader would finally be eliminated. But it was no good. No-one trusted them. Resistance against Hitler, big deal. Desertion, that was what it was. They were opportunists, changing course just in time, cowards full of noble words. They had been miserable journeys through a crumbling Europe.

Carl and Emma’s isolation has increased over the years. In Dahlem, their suburb of Berlin, where the violence penetrates only rarely, a person could occasionally believe none of it is true, that it is peace as usual. In the heat of July, for instance, when the gardens are quiet, when there is no traffic, no soldiers, and no falling bombs. But now, in the days following the assassination attempt, the reign of terror has once again erupted in full force.

That damned telephone, ringing all morning as she stood staring at it, and then following her throughout the house and into the garden, where there is no escape. It is not the code we agreed, I am not going to answer, we are not in, you can call until the cows come home.

Carl left at seven this morning, as usual. Past the garden hedge and into the street, it takes ten minutes to reach the station, he was at the office at eight o’clock sharp, the meeting was due to begin at nine. At ten they started calling, ten, twenty, thirty times. Why? She is wrong, it must be Carl.

She picks up the telephone and does not speak, waits, for a threat or reassurance, stands with the receiver in her hand, ready for the guillotine.

“Frau Regendorf, it’s me, Ulla. Thank goodness I’ve got hold of you! They’ve taken your husband, and everyone else in the meeting, they took Herr von Trott and your husband to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. You need to leave right now, your husband said they’ll come for the families too.”

The axe has fallen. The killer has invaded her house in the guise of a loyal secretary. Ulla, the executioner.

Emma stammers something, hangs up, then tries to call back to thank Ulla, but the line is busy. Her suitcase is packed and waiting, some clothes, photographs, papers, a marriage reduced to a box with a handle on it, easy enough to carry, yet so hard to bear. She looks around. The room with its view of the garden is silent, tranquil. Dining table, bookshelves, the house is full and motionless, and terrifyingly empty.

Luckily her bicycle still works. She puts the case on the luggage rack and holds it in place behind her with one hand, for as long as it takes. Exactly a quarter of an hour. She pedals onwards mechanically, along the idyllic lanes of leafy Grunewald, guilty neighbourhood of wealth and collaboration. Adriaan Wapenaar must be an exception, as he is by no means wealthy or obliging. Married to Elka, a German, he works as a Dutchman under a Swedish flag. This has made him a point of refuge for the hundreds of his compatriots flowing through Berlin or stranded there, on their way to nowhere, fleeing, escaping labour in the factories somewhere outside the city.

She has to get inside without being seen, in case Wapenaar’s house is being watched. At every bend in the road she expects a checkpoint, behind every tree a soldier. But no-one appears, the streets remain deathly quiet.

The gate is open, she rides down the short driveway, which is lined with rosebushes, she recognises it all from the last time she visited, three years ago.

“Emma!”

Wapenaar calls from the garden and runs over to her. “Careful, Emma. I’ll help you, give me your suitcase.”

He is followed by Elka. They take her round to the side of the house, where no-one can see her from the road, then they shut the conservatory doors and sit her down in a chair.

Wapenaar does not ask her anything, he already understands. He knows that open season has been declared on the families and acquaintances of those who conspired against the “Divine One”. Even friends of friends of friends are suspect, a name in a diary, a meeting years ago, a telephone conversation, everything is being investigated. The neighbour, the maid, the children’s teacher, all of them are under suspicion, all of them could end up on a list for interrogation, all of them will have their opportunity to testify and to vilify. Wapenaar knows the methods that the scum employ, and he channels his fear into effective sabotage.

It is a crucial hour, there around the table with the Wapenaars, slowly working out what to do, where to go, how to stay out of the hands of the hunters. They decide that Emma will have a room upstairs until they find out where Carl is, and what is going to happen to him. Wapenaar says that she can always stay with relatives of Elka’s in the Black Forest, in a Nazi-free village. They still exist, villages of people who are concerned mainly about their cows and more or less ignore the war.

“Would you like me to take you back to bed?”

Emma looked up. The dark rooms around her already felt strange. Her patiently collected objects and heirlooms were scattered about the room, with no gleam to them, se. . .