Tamar (23 page)

I opened it up. At the top left of the first page there was a head-and-shoulders photograph, a bit smaller than the one in my passport. Black-and-white again, with the blurred print of a rubber stamp across the bottom corner. The man in the photo stared out at me. Lean-faced, dark-haired, with an expression that was blank but somehow defiant at the same time, like someone who’d been arrested and photographed against a police station wall. To the right of the picture there were spaces in which the man’s details had been carefully written in ink, now faded. The first space had the word
BOOGART
in capital letters, and below that the word
Christiaan
in ordinary writing. Below that, next to the word
VERKLARING,
someone had written
Landarbeider
. Next down, there was a date, 19th April 1920, which I took to be his date of birth. There were other entries filled in by someone using the kind of handwriting you don’t see any more. I could only guess at what they meant. Below the photo there were two fingerprints, or perhaps thumbprints. At the bottom of the page, where the brown stain had left a tidemark, there was another rubber stamp with
BIJKANTOOR APELDOORN
in the centre and two longer words around the edge. Next to that was a date, 21st September 1942, and a scrawled signature. The next page had a sheet of very thin paper gummed to it. The same eagle and swastika design, and underneath it, in heavy elaborate capitals, the word
AUSWEIS
. Then came a lot of the same stuff as before about Boogart and three more rubber stamp prints. The first was the Apeldoorn one again; the second had a sort of crest and the word
ESSEN
. The third one was too blurred to make out; it looked as though it had been banged onto the paper by someone in a hurry. Apart from the stain spreading up from the bottom corner, the last page was blank.

I put the London snapshot next to the photo in the identity book and stared at them both. Either one of the soldiers on the Albert Embankment could have been Boogart.

I went to the bookcase in the living room and took down the two photo albums that Mum had brought back from Gran and Grandad’s flat before it was sold. There wasn’t a single picture of them when they were young. The first photo was of them both sitting in the garden of our old house, with Gran holding a baby, me. Grandad didn’t look much different from the way I remembered him. So that was a dead end.

I went upstairs yet again and poked about in the tragic mess I called my schoolwork. Eventually I found a scrap of clean tracing paper. I laid it over the photograph in the booklet and carefully pencilled on a pair of glasses and a moustache. Something like a narrow-faced ghost of Grandad looked up at me.

I chewed my way through the remains of the pizza, thinking. Grandad had never said anything to me about the war. To be honest, I don’t suppose I’d ever been interested enough to ask about it. I knew that he and Gran had lived in Holland and that they’d had something to do with the Dutch resistance. But when I’d read that stuff in the newspaper about him parachuting into Holland and being betrayed to the Germans and so on, I’d been amazed that in all the time I’d spent with him he’d not told me a thing about it. When I’d asked Mum, she said that she’d told the reporter all she knew, and that she’d got it from Dad, not Grandad. She didn’t know anything else.

I looked at the identity booklet again. If this was Grandad’s wartime identity card — and why would it have been in the box if it wasn’t? — he’d once been called Christiaan Boogart. It gave me a creepy feeling. It felt like opening the door to a dark cellar and not being able to see the stairs. But if Grandad wanted to tell me who he really was, why wait until he was dead? And what did it have to do with the other stuff in the box? I started feeling angry again. I put everything back in the box and stuck it in my wardrobe again. I spent the evening trying to concentrate on
The Catcher in the Rye
for my English exam.

On Monday I came home knackered, and slumped on the sofa with a bag of crisps and gazed at the TV without really taking in what was on. I waited until six o’clock, then I went to the phone and called Yoyo.

Yoyo is my Dutch cousin. Actually, he’s not really called Yoyo, and he isn’t really my cousin. His proper name is Johannes, pronounced Yohannes in Dutch, and he’s been called Yoyo since he was little. He’s my gran’s cousin’s grandson or nephew, something like that. I can never remember. Mum once said that he was “a distant twig on the family tree.” He showed up out of the blue just a couple of months before Grandad died. Then he came to the funeral, wearing a borrowed suit that was too short in the leg. The funeral was awful, one of those quick in-and-out crematorium jobs, with another hearse and two carloads of mourners queuing up behind for their turn. If Yoyo hadn’t come, Mum and I and my other grandparents (who’d come down from Leicester) would have been the only family members there. He came back to the house afterwards for drinks. I had a few glasses of wine, which I wasn’t used to, and ended up babbling and snivelling to Yoyo about Grandad and then Dad. Embarrassing. He was great, though. He just listened and said nice, intelligent things. It was a pity I couldn’t remember them the next day. We’d talked on the phone after that and met up a couple of times. Once he took me to see some electronic Dutch band who were playing in London. He thought they were tremendous and I thought they were crap, but we didn’t fall out over it. One of the most important things about Yoyo, at least as far as I was concerned, was that he never talked down to me. He completely ignored the difference in our ages. Plus, he was very bright, and he made me laugh.

Yoyo is four years older than me, so he was nineteen, nearly twenty, when I called him that June evening in 1995. He lived in Amsterdam, studying English, but he’d got some sort of grant to spend a year at the University of London. He shared a flat down in Greenwich somewhere. It was one of his flatmates who answered the phone. When he put it down to fetch Yoyo, I could hear heavy metal music in the background. Just before Yoyo picked up the phone, I heard a mumble of voices and a door slam, and the heavy metal went dead.

“Aha,” he said, “the most beautiful of my cousins!”

“Shut up,” I said. “Anyway, I keep telling you that you’re not really my cousin.”

“Yes, that’s good. It means we can get married.”

“Yoyo, have you been smoking weed?”

“What, on a Monday? No, of course not.” He managed to sound quite indignant. “Anyway, I have this very, very difficult thing to write about Sonnet 94 by Shakespeare. You know it?”

“Not that particular one,” I said.

“Ah. That’s too bad. I could use some help. I can’t make either head or tail of it.”

“It’s funny you should say that,” I said, “because I’ve got a mystery on my hands too, and I can’t make head or tail of that either. I could use some help. Your help.”

“Really? A mystery? What is it?”

“I can’t really explain. Not over the phone, anyway. Listen, Yoyo, do you have any spare time next week?”

“Yes, I think so. What, to see you? That would be nice.”

“Could you come here?”

“Er, okay. What evening?”

“Not evening. Daytime. One afternoon. Morning, even.”

I could hear him thinking. “You mean when Sonia is not there? Oh, Tamar!”

“Shut up, you idiot. How about Monday? A week today. Lunchtime would be good. I’ll make you a sandwich.”

“Cool,” he said. “How could I resist this offer? It’s just a shame you live so far out.”

“I don’t live far out,” I said. “You do.”

He arrived just after half past twelve. I opened the door and he swooped down at me, kissing me on both cheeks, European style. The first thing you notice about Yoyo is how tall and thin he is. His clothes always look too big for him, as though they’re suspended from coat hangers, not shoulders and hips. His hair is the colour of wet straw, and it sticks out from his head in all directions like the fur on a guinea pig. It’s not deliberate, not a style statement or anything like that. It just grows that way. There’s something slightly oriental about his face. He has wide cheekbones and narrow, dark, very shiny eyes.

“Okay,” he said as we walked down the hall. “I’ve come for a mystery and a sandwich. Which is first?”

We ate sandwiches and drank Coke. He listened to what I told him without making any comment or asking any questions, just glancing now and then at the shoe box on my side of the kitchen table.

I cleared the plates away. Yoyo sat up straight and rubbed his hands together. “So, okay. Let me see what’s in this mysterious box.”

I slid it over to him. He opened it in a melodramatically cautious way as if he expected it to contain an angry rat.

The first item he took out was the roll of money. He weighed it in his hand and whistled. “Wow,” he said, “little rich girl!” He slipped the band off and fanned the notes like a hand of cards. “How much?”

“Nearly two thousand pounds. One thousand, nine hundred and forty-five, to be precise.”

“Really? You know, I don’t think I have had so much cash in my hand before.” He put the band back around the roll and wagged a finger at me like a teacher. “I hope you are not going to spend it all on sweets.”

I gave him a Look.

The second thing he took out was the identity booklet. He pulled a face when he saw it.

“That’s the main thing I need your help with,” I said. “I want you to tell me what it says. You speak German, don’t you?”

“Some,” he said. “But this is Dutch.”

“Is it?”

“Of course. You don’t know the difference?”

I shook my head, and he tutted at me.

“But it’s got a German swastika on the front,” I said in self-defence.

“That’s because this is an identity book from the war. I have seen such things before. Made by the Germans, yes, of course, but for a Dutch person, this Christiaan Boogart.” He looked at the photograph. “Who is he, do you know?”

“I think he’s Grandad.”

Yoyo looked at me, frowning. “Your grandfather? William? Why do you think that?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute.” I reached across and pointed to the handwritten entries down the right-hand side of the page. “Tell me what these say.”

“Okay . . . His name is Christiaan Boogart; his profession,
verklaring,
is farmer. No, not farmer exactly. Land worker.”

“Farm labourer?”

“Yes, farm labourer, correct. Then his birth date; and the place he was born, Zutphen.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s in Gelderland. In the middle of the Netherlands, then a bit east. Nice place. Then next his father’s name, Jakob; and his mother’s name, Christiana.” His finger moved down the page. “This next part is what you call, like, er . . . physical description details. So here is his height: one metre seventy-nine.”

“What’s that in English?”

“Oh, shit,” Yoyo said, “your crazy feet and inches? I can never work this out. It’s something like six feet, a bit less. I am one metre eighty-eight.”

“Okay.”

“Then it says his hair colour is dark, which means nothing; he has no moustache; his eyes are brown; his face is
smal
. But this does not mean small; it is . . .” He mimed stretching his face longer and thinner.

“Long?” I guessed. “Narrow?”

“Yes, narrow, that’s it. It also says his nose is straight.” Yoyo smiled slightly. “The Nazis were very interested in the shapes of noses.”

He pointed to the rubber stamp print at the bottom of the page. “This is the mark of the, ah . . . employment office in Apeldoorn, not so far from Zutphen.”

He turned the page and studied the stuck-in sheet of paper. “Hmm . . . This is more difficult.
Ausweis
is a German word, meaning something like passport, but not exactly. Permit, perhaps. Then more of the same information about Christiaan Boogart. But this written here, see, is hard to read. It’s all in German. Something about a hospital, but . . . No. I cannot read the rest of it. But look, this mark here? It says
Essen
. Essen is a place in Germany. So the plot thickens. Boogart seems to have been in Germany during the war.”

He looked up; I looked blank.

“Why do you think this Christiaan Boogart is your grandfather, Tamar?”

“Grandad was Dutch, wasn’t he? So he must have had another name before he was William Hyde.”

“And you don’t know what it was?”

“No,” I said, and the look on his face made me feel stupid and lost and young. “I never asked. Why would I? And no one ever told me. He was just Grandad, right?”

Yoyo nodded slowly. “And so you think he was really this man, this Boogart, because he left you this thing in a box with your name on it, yes?”

“Yes, because it belonged to him. And because of this.”

I reached over and took out the photo of the two smiling soldiers and put it down next to the booklet.

Half an hour later Yoyo lolled back in his chair and surveyed the contents of the box laid out on the table and the maps spread out on the floor. I waited.

Eventually he said, “Tamar, have you not thought of asking your grandmother about these things?”

“What would be the point? She’s forgotten how to speak English. I told you that.”

“Okay, so maybe I could go with you to translate.”

“She doesn’t make sense in Dutch either.”

“But —”

“No, Yoyo. Forget it. Honestly. It would be a waste of time.”

He looked at me with his eyebrows hoisted up, but all he said was, “Okay, cool.”

I didn’t want to show the contents of the box to Gran; that was the truth. And Yoyo knew it, of course. I just thought it would be . . . dangerous. I didn’t know what I meant by that. And I didn’t want to talk about it, either.

So after a second or two, Yoyo let out a long breath and said, “Well, if it was just the identity papers and the photo and the crossword, I would say these are only what you could call souvenirs, yes? But the silk thing and the maps and the money, these make it very complicated. They take us to what my friend Luke calls ‘headache territory.’ Worse than Shakespeare’s Sonnet bloody 94.”