It is quiet in the room. I am crouching in front of my father's desk. Carefully, I open the door to the left-hand cabinet. With the shy gesture of a ten year old who knows he should not be there, I pick up a pile of old notebooks. They do not all look the same. Some have rings, others are like the notebooks we use at school. I open one, ever so quietly, feeling as if, at any moment, someone of the living, or even the dead, might chance upon me here in the midst of my mischievous curiosity. I look at the first book, but, to my disappointment, I cannot decipher a single word of the closely written pages. All I can make out is one letter: a capital S with a dot after it. Would that be an abbreviation of my father's last name, our family name? The dotted S returns throughout the pages of the notebook. Is it possible Etty wrote so much about my father? Quickly, I close the notebook and, gently, I put the pile back in its place. I think for a moment before I stand up. These are Etty Hillesum's journals and she expressed her wish to my father that they be published. But he has had little success in getting it done and his failure begins to feel like my failure.

Stories

My parents are sitting at the table with my half-sister Johanna. Later, I will read in the diaries that Etty Hillesum called Johanna Jopie. Our housekeeper Rosa is at the table with us, as is my aunt Cato, and my uncle Jaap. Uncle Jaap is a disabled veteran, who had been maltreated by the Germans in a POW camp in France and never recovered. He can barely speak, but he can react to what others are saying.