Free Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma Page A

Smoker
    â€œHe was a bit of a moral crusader, wasn’t he?” said she.
“I don’t know why you should say that,” he replied.
“Oh, you’re all such Calvinists!” she rejoined.
“Well, I’m not sure …” he protested.
“Oh, yes, Theo was a Calvinist …”
    W e were sitting in the garden by the lake in Wassenaar. The pink roses were still in bloom, the rippling water was covered in white lilies. A little above where we were sitting on the gently sloping lawn, drinking tea from porcelain cups, was the large white villa, well stocked with family furniture and good books, where Theo van Gogh and his two younger sisters grew up. There was nothing marginal about this, or petit bourgeois. This was the social chic to which the likes of Pim Fortuyn could only aspire.
    Theo’s mother, Anneke, still a beautiful woman, with sharp blue eyes and light blond hair, wore an elegant red twinset, and had a box of cigarettes readily at hand. Johan, his father, a trim figure in slacks and an open shirt, used to work as an analyst for the secret service—a job not discussed athome. He spoke in the cultivated, discreet manner of a professional spook, leaving the faint impression that he always knew more than he was letting on. He was happy to let his wife do most of the talking.
    She told me how Theo was already a rebel at primary school, where he wrote a pamphlet entitled The Dirty Paper . It ran to two issues. The main subject was shit and piss. His co-author was an aristocrat named Johan Quarles van Ufford. I recognized the name. Although Theo was born in 1957, five years after me, and I did not meet him until many years later, I knew the air he breathed where he grew up. The Hague has many social layers, some with very rough edges, but the town of our childhoods was a buttoned-down place of bureaucrats, bankers, and lawyers, where joining a tennis or cricket club meant being quizzed about one’s grandparents’ lineage, where little boys were bullied for wearing the “wrong” kind of neckties, where kids returned to school after their Christmas breaks in Switzerland with bronzed faces and broken legs, where girls wore Hermès scarves and pearl necklaces, where eighteen-year-old boys drove onto the playground in their Mini Coopers, splashing the teachers on their bicycles, and where names like Quarles van Ufford still cut a great deal of ice.
    Wassenaar was a plush extension of The Hague, a verdant suburb of rolling lawns, gravel drives, and large villas, with bucolic touches like thatched roofs and stone lanterns.Ambassadors of the larger countries had their residences in Wassenaar, alongside bankers and captains of industry, hidden from the prying gaze of hoi polloi. Its hushed, leafy streets, well-tended gardens, and sturdy gates spoke of wood-paneled discretion, of quiet evasions, of things left unsaid.
    The Van Goghs, however, were not like everyone else. A rebellious streak runs though the family. Johan, the grandson of Theo, the famous artist’s brother, comes from a family of strict Calvinists who mixed with socialists. His mother was a Wibaut, one of the founding families of the first Social Democratic party. Several Wibauts were in the Resistance during the war. Johan’s brother, Theo, was a member of the student fraternity in Amsterdam when the war broke out. He refused to sign the loyalty oath required by the Nazis, and joined the Resistance, where, among other things, he helped to forge papers and hide Jews. In 1945, he was arrested, along with the rest of his resistance group. Shortly before the end of the war he was executed in the dunes near the North Sea.
    Anneke also came from a line of socialists, but with a vicarious aristocratic pedigree. Because her grandfather worked as majordomo for one of the grander Amsterdam families, her mother was able to attend the French school with the aristocratic daughters and take piano lessons. This