“Are you ready for it? Truly ready?”
“I’m ready to piss,” Hendrik said. “While I’m doing that, go up to the attic. Come down and tell me what you see.”
Hendrik only became irritated when Willem tried to assist him with his walker, so Willem left him to his own devices and went ahead of him into the house. He walked through the living room, noting with approval that it was rigged for flood conditions: the floors were tile, laid over a concrete floor slab, softened here and there with rugs that could be spirited away to higher ground when the water came. The hallway leading from there to the stairs was lined with framed mementoes: photographs, clippings, medals, pressed flowers, and so on. It all trended strongly royalist. A large part of what Queen Frederika and her predecessors did for a living was ritual commemoration of wars and tragedies. All the Dutch people who had suffered and died in camps had received letters, medals, and so on. Their remains had been collected from shallow makeshift graves where possible and put in proper cemeteries where kings and queens went and laid wreaths and gave speeches on special days. To organize such observances, to make sure they came off well and that no one was carelessly forgotten, was a part of Willem’s job. He didn’t handle the details personally, but he supervised the people who did. It was routine work that flowed along, day to day, like water in a canal, forgotten as soon as gone by. So it was always a little weird to visit a house like this one and see many such moments frozen in time and memorialized on someone’s wall. Even—especially—when that someone was your father. Some of the yellowed newspaper clippings, inevitably, showed younger versions of Willem, when he had more hair,
posing on the steps of this or that palace with members of Dutch cabinets past, or with royals. He tried not to dwell on these.
He ascended the stairs, which were water-and termite-proof concrete below but gave way to wood above the first landing. Hendrik probably came up here once a year, if that. The bedrooms changed their purpose as younger members of the clan rotated in and out. One of them had been taken over by sewing projects. Another was plastered with posters of K-Pop stars. He felt as if he were intruding on the lives and business operations of shirttail relatives he barely knew.
PanScan was nagging him to put on an N95 mask. He did so. The app had tagged an individual in the second bedroom on the left as an epidemiological risk. His curiosity had been aroused. Who here could possibly be in the same league as Willem? He advanced down the hall to the point where he could look into the open door.
His arrival was no surprise to the young woman sitting there behind a desk consisting of a door on sawhorses. She’d been tracking his approach and put on a mask herself. She stood up as he came into view and made a slight sort of bow. “Uncle Willem!” she said in Dutch. “It is good to see you! Sorry about”—and she gestured to her mask.
Willem had the awkward feeling that he should know who this young lady was. Clearly not a native Dutch speaker, and yet she’d gone to some effort to learn the language. Her accent was somewhere between English and Chinese. She’d decorated the room with maps of Southeast Asia and a fax machine—the only operational fax machine Willem had seen in maybe two decades.
“You’ve changed so much!” he said in English. Stalling for time. He hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. “Between that and the mask, I’m afraid—”
“Beatrix,” she said. “Beatrix Kuok. Great-grandniece of your mother, Bel. I guess that makes us . . .” She turned her hands up. Her eyes were smiling. Kids these days were good at emoting through masks.
“First cousins twice removed,” Willem said. “Or something like that.”
“Well, it’s good to see you!” Beatrix said. “I only met you once before at the family reunion after your mother passed. I probably just looked like one of a hundred little kids running around.”
The most prominent thing in the room was a huge map of the western half of the island of New Guinea. Even the name of which was controversial. “New Guinea” was as colonial as you could get—Europeans naming an Asian colony after an African colony! Indonesia had named it Irian Jaya. The people who were indigenous to it preferred Papua. Beatrix, he was pretty sure, was a Papua kind of gal. Yes, she’d actually taped a sheet of paper over the map’s title so that it wouldn’t draw unwanted notice during Zoom calls. The map was a real beauty, making use of shading and color to show altitude and topography. The mountainous spine of the island, running generally east–west, was its most conspicuous feature. To the south of that, various river valleys coursed down through dark green valleys toward the shallow sea that separated the island from the north coast of Australia. She’d stuck yellow notes and little colored arrows to it. Most of those were strung out along a particular valley. They clustered most densely at a site about halfway between the mountain crest and the sea.