No Greater Love - Eris Field Page 0,5

swallowed the last of his Jenever. “Ah, yes. You wanted to know how Janan got here.” He smiled at Janan. “Where shall I start?”

“Start with how you came to be my honorary uncle.” She set her empty glass on the tea table and got up to spread a wool lap-robe over Carl’s thin legs before returning to her chair.

“Perhaps you already know? Did your mother happen to tell you how I came to the United States?”

“No. Does she know the story?”

Carl sighed. “She knows the story as my solicitor but she is scrupulous in her professional duties. I suppose she would not have told you.” He sat silently, lost in thought. “We have to go back in time, to a time of great fear.” He seemed to shrink in his chair. “In the fall of 1939, I was five years old and my brother, David, almost one. My father was a neurologist teaching at the University of Leiden and my mother, a painter. We lived in an old gray brick home on the Rapenberg Canal, the most beautiful canal in Leiden.” He frowned. “I vaguely remember my parents arguing about the possibility of war. Then suddenly one day, they sent me to live with my mother’s older brother, Henrick Coers. He had emigrated from Leiden to Western New York to work with the copper craftsmen at the Roycroft Institute. He and his wife did not have any children and they accepted me as part of their family. They helped me learn English so that I would not have trouble in school.”

He continued softly, “They were good people but they didn’t know what to do with a five-year-old boy.” He smiled mischievously. “Two years later they had a boy of their own, Roel, and I became an older brother again.”

“It must have been very hard for you to leave your mother and father, your home,” Pieter said, leaning forward in his chair.

“I always believed that I’d go home as soon as the war ended. I told myself that my parents would come for me and I would go back to that lovely old home on the Rapenberg Canal.” He sighed. “I waited and waited for them to come for me, to take me home.”

A dark, foreboding flooded Pieter. He could not ask the question that was burning in his mind.

“In time, I learned that my mother, my father, and my little brother had been taken from their home, deported out of Holland to a German concentration camp in Poland.” He drummed his fingers on the wooden arm of the old Morris chair. “Of the 107,000 Dutch Jews deported, 102,000 were killed. “My whole family was killed.” He stared at his empty glass. “You never give up wanting to go home, even when there is no family waiting for you.”

“You never give up wanting to go home even when there is no home and no family.” Janan knelt by Carl’s chair and put her arm around his shoulders. “And when you lose your language, you have lost the last bit of your identity.”

Pieter’s head snapped up at her words. What must it be like to fear losing your identity? He was Dutch. He could trace his identity back for more than 500 years. Being Dutch was like the shell of a turtle—strong, protective, and irksomely restrictive at times.

He studied Janan’s face intently. She had the rare beauty of the Circassian women who had been forced out of their villages in the Russian caucuses following the Crimean War with many of those who survived the purge settling in Eastern Turkey. She had lost the heritage of her Circassan homeland nearly 200 years ago and she had lost her Turkish homeland as an eight-year-old child. No wonder she feared losing her language, the last link to her identity. He regarded her with wonder. A little girl who had lost everything had grown up into a somber, exquisitely lovely woman who wanted to go home. “Did you lose your language?” he asked hesitantly.

“Well, my adoptive parents usually spoke Dutch at home and English outside of the home.” She spread her hands open in resignation. “They knew that I would need English for school and so they insisted, when I first came, that I speak English.”

“You speak Dutch?” Pieter asked, astonished.

“A little,” she said as she picked up Carl’s empty glass.

Carl chuckled. “She speaks it very well. I always asked her to speak Dutch to me so that I could keep my Dutch alive.” He shrugged.