The Hormone Factory (24 page)

On July 16, 1940, a train left The Hague’s Hollands Spoor Station jam-packed with foreign diplomats and persons pretending to be such. A representative of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reich minister of foreign affairs in Berlin, came in person to see us off. I took great pleasure in shaking the man’s hand in my diplomatic role and, once inside the compartment, bestowed my most charming smile on the sour-faced bureaucrat through the closed window while wishing him, using the crudest profanities I could come up with, a speedy demise courtesy of some British bomb.

It still gives me a thrill to look back on the moment, weeks later, when we finally crossed over into Portugal. The first part of our journey had taken us to Estoril, a lovely seaside resort just outside Lisbon. There we had time to restore ourselves a bit before setting out for England, arriving on September 24, 1940.

40 …

Our little family found a safe haven in the picturesque Berkshire village of Wargrave. There were good schools for the girls, who adapted amazingly well and, in no time at all, picked up their lives right where they’d left off, soon becoming fluent in English, making new friends, and, in the case of Ruth, having her first experiences with boys. Summertime swimming idylls along the river, horseback riding in the Berkshire hills; they didn’t waste any time thinking about what they had left behind. Rivka, on the other hand, spent most of her time at home brooding about her relatives and all the other people she cared about, from whom she was now totally cut off. As more and more ghastly rumors reached her ears about what was happening on the Continent, stories so horrific that people simply refused to believe them, her anguish grew. In England Rivka lost her previously merry, optimistic disposition, growing dispirited and morose. She hated the long days stuck at home with Ezra, who was turning into a temperamental toddler: demanding, impatient, noisy, and, in Rivka’s eyes, taking up altogether too much room. My youngest was growing into a little macho prince, an obstinate, ornery troublemaker and, young as he was, not only slippery as a tadpole but stiff-necked as a mule. Seeing the never-ending
struggle between him and his increasingly estranged mother, we decided to hire a nanny to deal with the boy. Rivka had as little to do with him as possible after that. She frequently went for walks in the rolling hills, pored over the newspapers, and listened to the radio for hours on end to follow the progress of the war. To Rivka, those five years in Wargrave were five years of heartache, five years of time standing still as she waited for life to resume, which would not happen until she was reunited with all the people dear to her. I, of course, no longer fit that description.

She was just as intolerant of me as she was of Ezra, and there came a time when I’d finally had enough. I refused to be hurt by her rejection any longer. I felt that her behavior was the childish reaction of a spoiled princess who didn’t know how to make the best of the cards she’d been dealt. She had to count herself lucky that I left her so well provided for when I finally turned my back on her and dove head over heels into my work.

In London I had found office space for Farmacom in a large residential building with a great view of the river and Waterloo Bridge; we also installed a manufacturing facility just outside the city. I spent most of my time in London, which was getting the full brunt of the Blitz, especially in that first year. The air raid sirens heralding bombs raining down became a daily routine to which, strange to say, we soon grew accustomed. The first few weeks we’d run to the bomb shelters as fast as we were able, but as time went on we became more blasé; I would keep working when the sirens started going off. Not until I could actually hear the bombs falling close by would I grab the folder with my most important papers, kept always within reach, and dive into the corridor to get as far away as possible from the windows in case of shattered glass. It happened only once, toward the end of the war,
that a bomb actually hit a building right next to ours. The building shook on its foundations, and we watched in astonishment as the entire façade collapsed. It was a hallucinatory experience.

That constant walking of the fine line between life and death tends to bring out the most delicious sense of abandon in people. I frequently spent the night in the city, and seldom spent it alone. The daily threat of death seemed to unleash a devil-may-care promiscuity calling for instant gratification. It was as if the bombs were blanketing the city with testosterone, infecting everyone, women and men alike. Ah, sweet days and nights, when I could again indulge myself completely and without guilt; since my wife had more or less banished me from her sight, I didn’t consider it cheating. And besides, I was no longer alone in being a slave to my urges, but was surrounded by women unabashedly on the prowl for male companionship, while men like me were driven more than ever before by unquenchable cravings, as if our lust could keep death at bay.

But mostly I was working, working. I had to pull out all the stops to keep both Farmacom and the De Paauw Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Co. afloat, and do everything I could to prevent the Nazis from getting their hands on our company, our patents, and our licenses. I transferred our assets to an offshore corporation in Curaçao, out of reach of the fiend who was planning to loot every Jewish business he could get his hands on—now conveniently dubbed “enemy property.” I added a clause to the bylaws preventing any member of our board living in the occupied Netherlands from having a say over any current transaction, thus tying the hands of the directors who had been left behind. Any director who either chose to collaborate with the enemy or was forced to do his bidding no longer had any say over our foreign subsidiaries. Meanwhile, we were able to strengthen our
ties with the North and South American firms already allied with us, forging ahead as best we could with research and production in order to keep the business going in the absence of the parent company. I had a hell of a time trying to keep the various companies supplied with the raw materials they needed; communication was an extremely tough task at best, and most of the time near impossible. I did miss Aaron, who’d had such a good rapport with our partners, the Argentines in particular. At this difficult time my brother could have played an important part in keeping our foreign divisions going. He would have been our point man overseas, where he’d have helped the local management teams navigate an increasingly complex business climate—a minefield of potential pitfalls. Production was being held up by a shortage of raw materials, exacerbated by the fact that the ships transporting the necessary commodities were regularly blasted to a watery grave by the U-boats deployed by that hound from hell.

I realized the Nazis were plotting to take over the Dutch parent company with some stratagem that would guarantee acceptance of their grab abroad, in order to keep the overseas assets from splitting off from those falling into German hands. Levine doubtlessly had an important role to play there, since he was the only shareholder left in the Netherlands. Fortunately, our bylaws stipulated that no one could sell their shares without offering them to the other shareholders first.

At one point I did find out that Levine had apparently been negotiating with Berlin about trading his shares in return for permission to emigrate to America with his family. As if he was entitled to change the rules as he saw fit! It galled me to think the prof was prepared to ride roughshod over our corporate rules in order to save his own skin, so I did the only thing I could: I forbade the foreign subsidiaries from doing business with the
parent firm. The thought of the great scumbag getting his dirty paws on all our hard-won patents and licenses made me shudder. As long as that double-crossing bastard was running the show over there, our little backwater would be off-limits, verboten, and, in case the Nazis managed to wrangle Levine’s shares away from him, we severed all our branches from the parent company that was once so dear to my heart.

Partnering with my cousin Simcha proved to have been an inspired decision. He became a loyal and helpful comrade in our British soul-hormone enterprise; with him I never had to worry about the kind of strife that had arisen between Levine and me. Simcha was much too accommodating and compliant for that to happen. And so Farmacom did after all become the family business I had so much wanted to share with my brother. When Simcha and I put our heads together, there was no dissension. I knew that even after the war was over I’d want to continue our partnership, which would bring us even greater global reach.

Our prime minister, Pieter Gerbrandy, invited me to join the Advisory Board of the Dutch Government in Exile in London. My ideas for restoring our country’s economy once the war was inevitably won, and becoming a prominent trading partner in the global marketplace, were enthusiastically received. I also became a welcome guest at the lavish parties organized by Bernhard, the prince consort.

As the Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, Simcha and I came up with a blueprint for modernizing our company. It was a grandiose plan that called for some radical housecleaning; we would have to hack through the Gordian knot that had caused so many problems at Farmacom. It would be one of my first tasks once peace was at hand.

41 …

Early in the morning of Tuesday, May 8, 1945, that joyful day when the self-proclaimed
Übermenschen
finally capitulated, I returned to the Netherlands. A military airplane full of self-important government officials had flown me across the North Sea, and an army jeep had given me a ride home. There I stood, staring up at the large, impressive house, my parents’ pride and joy, which, to my own surprise, I had so often longed for the past five years. It isn’t until you have had the rug pulled out from under you that you discover man isn’t all that different from a plant: pluck him from his roots, and he’ll wilt.

I removed the house key from my wallet; in London I had kept it in the top drawer of my desk and, though I’m normally the least sentimental of men, took it out and cupped it in my hand at least once a day. With some trepidation I inserted it into the lock. It turned effortlessly. I pushed the heavy door open, stepped inside the stately hall, and put down my suitcase. I stood in the very spot where I had stopped to hang up my coat since I was a child. The chrome modernist coatrack Rivka had bought to replace the antique wooden stand that had graced the entry before she arrived on the scene was empty, and when I hung it
up, my overcoat was a lonely, incongruous sight. I shivered in the chill of the lifeless, deserted building.

Wandering through the rooms, I saw that the house was outwardly unchanged. The basic structure was intact, all the different components were still there, and yet it was not the same. It was life that was missing, the life manifest in the murmur of voices, in laughter, in a Duke Ellington recording coming from behind the closed doors of the living room, the smell of cooking tickling your nostrils and making you realize you were famished, the sight of a spinning top trailing in the hall, a stuffed animal on the stairs, a bunch of tulips on the sideboard. My house was still all in one piece, but it was as desolate as the frozen wastelands of Stalingrad after the Krauts had their asses kicked out there.

My footsteps echoed in the empty rooms and the doors I opened made an ominous creaking sound. My home was in immaculate condition; I knew it must be the work of our loyal servants. But where were they? I crossed the living room in a daze, picking up an object here and there and turning it over in my hands, staring at it as if to remind myself what it meant to me. The chrome Bakelite ashtray; the picture the children had made for Rivka’s birthday; the red roses porcelain dish, which Rivka used for offering guests chocolates or cookies; the copper Winkelman clock on the mantelpiece, its silver face showing the hour of our departure five years ago; the empty silver cigarette case that still held the scent of tobacco—a roomful of objects that had witnessed a life that was now a thing of the past.

When I heard the front door open I hurried back to the hall to see my faithful old Marieke standing there. The war years had changed the unflappable custodian of our household into a frail old woman. Her body seemed to have shrunk, you could see the pale skin of her scalp through her sparse graying hair, and
her bony frame was dwarfed by her threadbare summer coat. Startled, she stared at me, blinking, then cried, “Mr. Motke, is that you?” As she began walking stiffly toward me, I met her halfway, and—quite unheard-of for us—we fell into each other’s arms like a mother and son reunited after a long separation. Then she held me at arm’s length, looked me up and down critically, and finally exclaimed, “You are well, thank God!”

“Yes,” I replied, “quite well, and you, how have you fared?”

“Oh, you know, an old rat knows how to avoid the trap, I’m just happy it’s over. What about your wife and the children? They must be so big now, how will I recognize them? I’m
so
looking forward to seeing them again!”

“They are all fine and in good health, but they’ll be staying in England for now,” I answered.

“That’s wise,” she agreed, “there’s so little to be had here yet, they’re better off waiting for things to get back to normal a bit. Everything’s still rationed, so …”

“No,” I corrected her, “Rivka and the children are not coming back. Well, possibly for a holiday sometimes, but my wife and I—we are separating.”

The old woman’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh dear,” she said, and, after a long pause, added, “Troubles can tear people apart, but they can also bring people closer sometimes. What a shame, what a shame.” She shook her head.

The problems between Rivka and myself had not escaped the servants’ notice, and apparently hadn’t been forgotten, even after years of war and occupation.

“Ah well,” I replied, “my wife has decided she no longer wishes to be with me, much to my regret.”

I was surprised at myself for blurting out that Rivka had left me. I’d been planning to save face in public. Marieke shook her
head again and said firmly, “Well, then we’ll just have to take extra good care of you, Mr. Motke. Would you like a cup of coffee? It isn’t real, of course, it’s fake, but nice and hot anyway, I always say.”