“Usually only when he was loaded. After I got bigger—quicker—I used to punch him back when my mam was around. To try to keep him off her. But then she died. Also, he was getting old, and his punching arm wasn’t what it used to be. So when he started swinging, I’d just hit the street.” He shrugs again. “I don’t know. I hated his guts most of the time, the old pox.”
Anne swallows quietly. “You have no brothers, no sisters?”
“Nope. After me, something happened to my mam. She couldn’t give birth again. That pissed Pap off, too. He always said it was my fault there’d be no daughter to take care of him when he was old. Mam never seemed to mind so much, though.” Tossing away the broken twig, he tugs out his tobacco pouch. “You want to share a smoke?”
“Sure.” She watches him roll the shag. She’s hesitant to probe further but then does so anyway. “May I ask you something else?”
“I guess.” The boy seals the end of the smoke with a lick.
“How—” Anne starts to say, then stops and starts again. “How did your mother die?”
Raaf swallows. He lights up with a match. “I don’t want to talk about her,” he says. Then he says, “There’s a place I want to take you today.”
“A place?”
“Yeah. A place the rest of the world has forgotten.”
The Transvaal
Oost-Watergraafsmeer
Amsterdam-Oost
During the Hunger Winter, when all of Amsterdam was crazy for wood to burn to keep from freezing to death, people started with the trees. The parks had trees, so why not chop them all down? Also, the wooden blocks in the tram tracks could be ripped out, so that’s something, too. Furniture! Old Auntie’s chipped Frisian cupboard! She won’t mind if we burn it—she’s in heaven anyway. And how about the empty homes of the Jews? Now, there’s an idea, plenty of wood to be had there. Maybe Mr. Puls’s removal company has hauled off all the furnishings, but there’re still wooden beams, wooden floorboards, wooden stair rails and steps and spindles. Just tie a pry bar and a few hammers onto a sledge and you’re on your way.
That was the thinking. In fact, it was so much the thinking that with all the wood stripped out, the walls of Jewish houses began to collapse for lack of support. Buildings crumbled wearily into brick piles. It was a mess. But so what? It wasn’t as if the Jews were ever coming back. Everybody knew that.
They have crossed the Berlagebrug. Anne walks her bicycle through the streets, feeling a gritty disquiet grinding her belly.
Broken walls stand as ugly monuments. Rubble scattered. Signposts continue to boast the grand colonial names of streets: the Krugerstraat, Schalk Burgerstraat, De la Reystraat, the Paardekraal, and Tugelastraat. Street names of past imperial pride in what is now a precarious empire. The Spice Islands, Suriname, and the East Indies on the brink of revolution. The Kaapkolonie surrendered long ago, but here the names remain if nothing else. They are empty shells, these houses, the life husked from them. The vacant Pretoriusplein is surrounded by a square of debris and teetering façades, as if it has suffered under a rain of bombs. A playground for a residential park in the President Brandstraat that once would have teemed with children is now just an acre of mud. The empty corner of the Schalk Burgerstraat is boarded up.
This is the Transvaal.
Before the war it was a smart-looking enclave of workers’ housing populated by Jews of a certain status. Maybe the old Jodenbuurt had been fed by the so-called Orange Jews—three centuries of Ostjuden fleeing the pogroms of the east—but the Transvaalbuurt had been built by the likes of the Handwerkers Vriendenkring to house a hardworking class of Jewish artisans. Cutters and polishers from the diamond district, neighborhood merchants, tailors, grocers, ink sprayers, and government clerks. Still far removed from the haute bourgeois Kultur bastions of the Merwedeplein in the Amsterdam-Zuid, perhaps, where pampered little girls like Anne and Margot Frank had lived, but the Transvaal had been home to Jews scrambling up the ladder. Les petit bourgeois juifs on their way up.
Now it’s a wasteland. A designated “Jewish Quarter” by the moffen, it had been cut off from the rest of the town and emptied, trainload by trainload.
Anne stares up at the broken streetscape. A swirl of air catches dust and whirls it about as Raaf scoops up a chunk of brick and pitches it through one of the few unbroken windows.
“Don’t do that, please,” she says.
“Do what?”
“Break windows.”
Raaf shrugs. “It was just a window. It’s not like anybody was looking through it anymore.” But Anne is not so sure of that. The swirl of dust could carry a thousand souls. Ten thousand.
“Come on,” he tells her, and bounds ahead over a pile of slag.
A vacant block of flats on what was once the Louis Bothastraat. The front door is long gone, but she still pauses with her bike at the empty threshold, as if she should wait for permission to enter. Pigeons flutter out of the window indignantly as Raaf kicks at them shouting, “Shoo!” They’ve already splattered the windowsill with globs of blue-white droppings. There are no floors left. The floors have been taken down to dirt, but Raaf has dropped a few boards as a walkway, and he clomps across them like his own one-man army. “This way,” he tells her. “You can leave your bike outside. There’s no one here to steal it.”
It was probably a bedroom at one point. He’s covered up the windows with a sheet of dirty canvas, but there’s light coming in from a hole in the ceiling. Here the floor is a slab of concrete. An empty crate marked CANNED PEARS turned upside down serves as a table. The actual pear tins are stacked beside it. There’s a dirtied ashtray from a café called De Pellekaen sharing the crate top with an electric flashlight and a few half-burned paraffin candles. The bed is made from an old yellowed mattress covered by a patchwork of blankets. It’s a hideout.
“So what do you think?” Raaf asks her with a crooked smile of pride at his digs.
“What is this place?” she asks, though really she already knows.
“It’s my castle, where I am the king,” Raaf tells her. “King Raaf the First!” he says with a laugh before flopping onto the bedding. Grabbing a pear tin, he applies an opener to the lid. “Want some?” he asks.
“No,” says Anne. “Thank you.”
“Sure? It’s pretty good stuff. I like to drink the syrup first,” he says, and then demonstrates by raising the tin to his lips and tipping it back. “Mmm. Sometimes I pour some schnapps into it, and then it gets even better.”
Anne gazes at him from the doorless doorway.
“Aren’t you gonna come in?” he asks her.
“I’m not sure,” Anne answers. “Is this where you take them?”
Raaf tosses back another swig of pear juice from the tin and wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “Take who?”
“Your other girls,” she says.
He looks back at her with that curiously broken expression he often wears. “Anne. There are no other girls.”
“I bet,” says Anne.
“No, it’s true. Just you.”
“I’m not your girl,” she says.
“No?”
“No. I can’t be.”
“Because you’re Jewish?”
“Because you’re not.”
“Then why do you let me kiss you?”
“Do you want me to stop letting you?”
“No.”
“Then shut up about it.” She glances around at the walls. “This is what you call a castle?”
“I know it’s not much.” He shrugs at the truth. “I started coming here when my pap went on a bender. Or just when I kinda needed to get away from everything.” Lighting one of the paraffin candles with a match, he then lights a cigarette. “So are you just gonna stand there?” he asks, and blows out smoke.