Mouth Like a Violence

Around​ 150,000 Dutch Jews were living in the Netherlands when Germany invaded on 10 May 1940. Over the next five years, 107,000 were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. After the war, only 5000 returned home, where they were often met with indifference, if not hostility. Some were presented with bills for unpaid taxes or found that their homes had been repossessed. Others were told they were lucky to have been sent to the camps: at least they had been fed, avoiding the privations of the ‘hunger winter’ of 1944-45, when people resorted to eating tulip bulbs and thousands died of starvation.

Historians disagree about the reasons that so many Dutch Jews died – far more, proportionately, than those of any other Western European country. In the years immediately after the war it was argued that the Netherlands – a small, densely populated country with no forests or mountain ranges – offered few opportunities for people to hide. This ignored the fact that Belgium, with a similar topography and population density, had lost far fewer Jews. A more plausible explanation is that, unlike in Belgium or France, the civilian regime that the Nazis imposed on the Netherlands, which piggybacked on the existing state apparatus, was well organised and highly efficient. Historians have also pointed to the isolating effects of verzuiling or ‘pillarisation’: the social and political stratification that has characterised Dutch social life since the Golden Age, dividing religious and ethnic groups into separate pillars, each with their own representative bodies and institutions. This meant that when the Nazis invaded, it was easier not to notice what they were doing to neighbours or colleagues.

This isn’t to say there weren’t moments of heroism. A general strike took place in February 1941 – the only time during the war that citizens of a European country went on strike in solidarity with their Jewish compatriots. Thousands of Dutch citizens offered shelter to onderduikers – ‘under-divers’, or ‘submerged ones’ – or helped in other ways. But there has been a tendency in the Netherlands to emphasise only this aspect of their response. When I used to visit my relatives there in the 1990s, the stories I’d hear most often were about the plucky Dutch who had done what they could to resist. It was a version of history embodied by the most famous onderduiker, Anne Frank. As Yael van der Wouden wrote in an essay a few years ago, the Dutch tend to tell a particular version of Frank’s story: she was ‘mostly Dutch and only a little Jewish’; the Germans were ‘bad and occupied Amsterdam, and the Dutch people were good and helped Anne and her family, but the bad Germans took her away and killed her’.

It’s only recently that Dutch complicity in Nazi war crimes has been widely discussed. A controversial new TV drama, De Joodse Raad, focuses on the Jewish Council. Set up by the Nazis and run by prominent Amsterdam Jews, it was designed to act as a ‘conduit’ between the Jewish population and the occupying regime. In practice, its members were compelled to select tens of thousands for deportation to the camps. The producers have been accused of downplaying the complicity of other Dutch institutions, and society in general, by focusing on the actions of the council. Steve McQueen’s documentary from earlier this year, Occupied City, with lingering shots of Amsterdam and a voiceover describing events that took place during the war, characterises the occupation as a time of suspicion and betrayal. Something of that atmosphere has never entirely gone away.

Earlier this year I visited the new National Holocaust Museum, in a shiny building opposite the Hollandsche Schouwburg in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, where thousands of Jews were rounded up before being deported. It is the first museum dedicated to the experiences of Dutch Jews during the war (a Monument of Jewish Gratitude, initiated by survivors, was put up in 1950 as a token of thanks to those who had sheltered onderduiker). Among the items on display are records of Jews sent to the camps and a bolt of the cloth on which yellow stars were printed (Dutch Jews were required to wear them from May 1942). In a room at the end, there are videos of Dutch Jews reflecting on the experiences of their parents and grandparents, and on their own Jewish identity. Many report still feeling like outsiders in the Netherlands.

This legacy of the unspoken and unspeakable – of repression, in other words – is the central theme of The Safekeep, van der Wouden’s tight, confident first novel, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s set in 1961, in the Dutch countryside. A young woman called Isabel den Brave is the custodian of the home in which she grew up with her two brothers. The family moved there from Amsterdam during the hunger winter; their father died soon afterwards and their mother a few years later. Isabel – anxious, judgmental, deeply repressed – is being courted by her boorish neighbour, Johan, but she’s not sure whether she has feelings for him, or anyone at all. She’s more concerned with the house, even if it has been promised to her older brother, Louis, should he ever decide to settle down. ‘She belonged to the house,’ van der Wouden writes, ‘in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.’

Isabel’s younger brother, Hendrik, lives with his French Algerian partner, Sebastian, in genteel secrecy. Louis is more interested in dating a series of interchangeable women than in his inheritance, and when he brings Eva, his latest girlfriend, to dinner at the start of the novel, Isabel dismisses her as ‘pretty in a way men thought women ought to be pretty’. Eva strikes her as superficial and uninteresting, with her badly dyed hair, cheap skirts and calculated persona – just ‘an actress in a bad play’. When Louis is called away to Brighton for a month-long conference (which seems a little excessive), Eva asks to move into the family home. Reluctantly, Isabel agrees. But she quickly grows suspicious of her new houseguest, particularly when household objects – which have taken on a totemic significance since her mother’s death – start to go missing.

The rest of the novel unspools in a satisfying if not entirely unpredictable way, and it would be unfair to say too much about what happens next. Much of its pleasure depends on the tension between Isabel’s more paranoid interpretation of events and what we gradually infer to be the truth of the situation. Eva, for her part, tries to encourage Isabel out of herself: she should try kissing Johan; perhaps they might surprise the locals by going out for a meal together. Isabel’s slow succumbing to these experiences, which she has resisted for so long, are one way her suspicions are challenged.

Van der Wouden was born in Israel and moved to the Netherlands when she was ten. She has described the isolation she felt after emigrating and the antisemitism she experienced. She was told that she looked like Anne Frank (her response was to refuse to read the diary). The Safekeep was written in English, a decision that might reflect this sense of alienation. It’s an effective performance: van der Wouden’s prose is considered and controlled, with the occasional jolt – such as when Isabel looks at herself in a mirror, her ‘face red, mouth like a violence’, or when she describes the ‘pomp’ of a dog’s coat. Dutch words function as spots of colour, especially when they can’t easily be pronounced by English readers. It’s a nice touch to have Hendrik move to Scheveningen, a seaside town whose name was used during the war to catch German spies (they struggled with the Dutch ‘sch’).

Another stylistic tic is van der Wouden’s fondness for sentence fragments, often joined with comma splices: ‘Opened it for him, still in her palm’; ‘The sea pushed into the streets, the smell of salt’; ‘Isabel looked at him, hoped he wouldn’t elaborate.’ At times this suggests urgency or uncertainty, as though the narrator might be jotting down notes towards a scene, never quite connecting the dots on our behalf. This fragmentary style is shared by Eva, in diary entries that form a section near the end of the book (‘her leg hairs through her pantyhose’, reads one sentence), indicating that she may have had a hand in what’s come before.

The novel’s hesitancy allows van der Wouden to be suggestive when she might otherwise be explicit. The third-person narration sticks closely to Isabel’s point of view but that doesn’t mean we can be sure what she’s thinking. Later in the novel Hendrik and Sebastian come to visit, and go swimming with Isabel and Eva in a lake formed by the crater of a bomb dropped during the war. Afterwards, Sebastian and Eva flirt while Isabel and her brother look on. Eva and Sebastian, the narrator notes, look different from the other people swimming in the lake: ‘darker-skinned, more defined. Sharp. Nose, chin. Italian youths, perhaps, if one were not to look too closely.’ When a rainstorm comes in and the four take shelter in a hotel, Sebastian is made to pay for their drinks in advance. ‘Isabel knew what she’d thought when she first met Sebastian. Foreign had been the word. She hadn’t wanted him in her house. She hadn’t wanted him touching her things. She knew, too, what she thought of Eva when she first saw her.’

Very few people in the novel acknowledge the war, though there are occasional glimpses of it. At one point Isabel remembers her mother telling her not to peer through the windows of the Jewish tailor’s shop in town. She visits an aunt who serves cake on plates ‘borrowed’ from a Jewish neighbour during the war and never returned. ‘No one ever knows anything in this country,’ Eva writes in her diary. ‘No one knows where they live, who did what, who went where. Everything is a mystery.’

The war is not the only – perhaps not even the most important – form of repression driving the novel. Van der Wouden teaches erotic writing, and The Safekeep is unabashedly sexy. Repressed desire thrums under nearly every paragraph: the cheapness of Eva’s clothes, her peroxide hair, her clipped fingernails, even the clumsy attentions of Johan, take on an ambiguous sexual charge. Writing about sex is difficult and doing it well involves maintaining a balance between cliché and defamiliarisation. How many ways are there to describe a kiss or an orgasm? It’s in those moments that van der Wouden’s sentence fragments really earn their keep: ‘She smelled the wine on his breath, knew it was on her breath, too. She was shaking all over, couldn’t stop it. The doorpost pressed into her back. She could only see the blond sweep of his lashes, the way his nose pulled his Cupid’s bow up, kept his mouth open.’

In a recent essay in Backstory, van der Wouden pointed out that much of the best erotic writing isn’t about sex. The Safekeep’s descriptions of eating and drinking are charged with as much latent eroticism as anything else in the novel. In a memorable scene, Eva gives Isabel a pear:

There was no way of eating it in silence – the sounds it made, the wet. Isabel ate through the whole thing: the flesh and stick and pits and core … She made sure nothing was left of it, as though it had never been given in the first place. Her arms were dripping. Wet all around her mouth. She had to wash her face in the basin afterward. The spot on her skirt where the fruit had stained remained throughout the day, a cloying brush to the back of her hand.

Bad erotica trades primarily in metaphor – the train going into a tunnel isn’t just a train going into a tunnel – but here the metaphor almost collapses in on itself. Eva (the name is significant) the temptress, offering fruit; the innocent Isabel discovering its pleasures, almost against her will.

One of van der Wouden’s boldest choices is to use the same language to yoke together different kinds of repression: Hendrik and Sebastian’s necessary secrecy; Isabel’s wariness of her own desires; society’s silence about its wartime guilt. And there’s Eva, unsure what she wants from the situation she finds herself in (or manipulates herself into). It’s the audacity of this move that drives the novel.