In the months that followed, the row on the bench in the stately white embassy building grew smaller and smaller. Finally, he and a chain-smoking playboy in blue blazer and silk scarf were the only ones left. They sat across from each other, in silence.
One day the other man opened his mouth and said, nodding at the book in my father’s hand: “Writer?” My father shook his head: “Reader.” The man laughed. “A strange bunch, we exiles. Writers, adventurers, war-horses, and weaklings, but not a normal person among us.” My father knitted his brows and tried to think whether he knew a writer living in London. “I, personally, am one of the weaklings,” said the playboy. He stood up and held out his hand: “Paul van Zevenbergen ter Borgh.” My father got to his feet and returned the handshake. The man nodded when he heard his name. “So, not a writer, but not an adventurer either. Not a warhorse, I assume. You are like me: you fled because you had something to fear.” He paused, then continued. “I myself fled because the new ideology had a bit of trouble with the notion that one could love a member of his own sex.” It was a while before my father understood what the man meant. “The fundamentals of Grecian culture,” Van Zevenbergen explained. “That’s what my father used to call it. I’m hoping they can tell me what has happened to my dear friend Charles van Dongen. He was an actor. I am…was…an antique dealer. I happened to be here on business when all the trouble began. Cigarette?”
They smoked.
“I didn’t actually flee,” said my father. He told him of how he had left. Van Zevenbergen listened, smiling. When my father was finished, he crossed his arms and looked at the young man before him. “Dear fellow,” he said. “You may not have fled intentionally, but you knew, just as I did, that you were better off getting out of there. Listen. It makes no sense to sit here waiting. If your parents, like so many others, have been transported east, it may be quite some time before they show up on the lists. As far as the Dutch government is concerned, they’re displaced persons. Sometimes they aren’t even treated as Dutchmen. I’ve heard stories…Go to the Netherlands and look for them. Here…” Van Zevenbergen drew a small card out of his pocket, found a pen, and scribbled something. “Take this. There’s a booking office, I’ll jot down the name and address, a friend of mine works there. He’ll help you.”
“But what about you? Why don’t you go back?”
Van Zevenbergen smiled. “Let’s just say I’m a bit of a fatalist. But if you ever hear anything about an actor named Charles van Dongen, I hope you’ll…”
My father nodded and shook his hand.
But Van Zevenbergen wasn’t the only one who was a bit of a fatalist. My father just couldn’t bring himself to make the crossing and return home. He feared both his parents’ reproaches and their possible fate, and he convinced himself that he wasn’t avoiding the one but awaiting the other and that, as long as his letters were left unanswered, he’d be better off in London.
Through someone at the embassy who was in charge of trade he came in contact with Dutch companies that were trying to restore their business relations in Great Britain, and from then on he continued to visit the embassy for his work, meanwhile casting his weekly glance on the lists of missing persons and victims. Van Zevenbergen, however, never showed up again.
One morning he presented himself at a seedy little office in the Edgware Road. He was shown in by the secretary, a woman in her late fifties, who gave him a mug of tea and cleared off a few piles of paper from a little wooden bench so he could sit down. She herself sat down, with a weary smile, at her overcrowded desk and began pecking nearsightedly at the keys of her typewriter. The walls were covered with yellowed posters showing what must have been every cogwheel and bearing that Morris & Sons had manufactured since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Among the posters were a map of the Middle East and another of the Continent. Here and there, little red flags had been stuck into the map of Europe. Many people had kept track of the Allied armies’ progression on maps such as these. My father stood up, teacup in hand, to get a better look. There were a surprising number of flags and they were stuck in awkward places. The British and American armies had never advanced that far. The secretary had stopped typing. He looked at her, about to ask something, when the door of the office swung open. There stood a heavyset man with bushy eyebrows and the wild remains of what must once have been a striking head of hair but was now a corona of gray flames around a gleaming bald pate. He leaned his left hand against the doorjamb and looked at my father with a gaze so intense that he shrank back slightly. The secretary bent over her typewriter again to search for a new letter. With a nod of his head the man beckoned, and they entered the office.
The mass of paper on the rolltop desk against the wall was so huge, and, judging from its discoloration, so old, that it seemed highly unlikely, or at least not for a good ten years yet, that Morris & Sons would ever be eligible for the title “Most Efficient Company in England.” The man with the wide wreath of hair sat down at an empty wooden table, spread two plump hands on the tabletop, leaned back, and regarded the visitor
