But all I can think of is the mysterious event that has just taken place. I am dying to know more, to ask questions. But Jan has suddenly turned tired and surly, he seems to have forgotten the whole thing.
Above, on the road, he stops. ‘So long,’ he says, ‘I’ll take a short cut here.’ He climbs over the fence beside the road and stands still on the other side, as if he were having second thoughts.
‘Come here,’ he says, beckoning brusquely. I walk over to the fence and Jan grabs hold of my throat with both hands. ‘Don’t you dare tell a soul that you’ve seen my prick,’ he whispers, ‘or you’ve had it.’ He pushes me back and runs away across the fields.
On the way back home I keep thinking of Jan’s vulnerable white belly and of the drowned airmen, suspended upside down in the water. Now and then I look around to see if Jan is still in sight. I feel like running after him. I have to protect him, make sure no one dares lay a hand on my friend. No one must ever get to know our secret.
A leaden stillness hangs over the meadows. The cows stand about listlessly on a bare, well-trodden patch where the farmer is about to milk them. It’s late, almost half past five. Hurriedly I race along the dyke.
Chapter 8
The minister’s wife is dead. Mem raises her arms up to heaven with a hoarse cry when she hears the bad news -someone from Warns had come running straight across the fields to our house and banged on the window like one possessed – and then stumbles back into a chair where she sits gasping for breath.
‘Go and fetch Hait,’ she calls to us children, as we stand speechless around her chair. But Jantsje has already rushed off, over the fences and up the road. Her clogs fling lumps of mud up in the air and in her zeal she nearly falls over several times.
At the midday meal Hait prays aloud for the deceased – ‘our dearly beloved and respected late friend,’ he calls her – and for the minister as well.
I had never seen much of the minister’s wife, who had always remained a mysterious and admired stranger in the village. The minister lived across the street from the church in a stately house, a house with stiff white curtains that hung there daintily without creases or stains, and with two flowerless plants on the windowsill, one in front of each pane of glass, exactly in the middle. Behind, you suspected cool rooms, no doubt spotlessly tidy at all times and smelling of beeswax, with gleaming linoleum floors in which the furniture would be reflected.
I had seen the lady occasionally in the garden, cutting roses or raking the gravel. We would make a point when we saw her of walking close alongside the fence and greeting her loudly and insistently. If she greeted us back we would feel a little as if some Higher Being had wished us good morning. She rarely came to church, which I thought a bit strange, but then she probably spoke to the minister so much about God during the week that she had less need for church than the rest of us.
I had learned – thanks in part to her – to tell when people looked ‘townish’. The minister’s wife had been townish: always in proper shoes, always in a smart Sunday dress, and her hair – symmetrical little waves lying like a kind of lid over her head instead of the farmer’s wives’ knot more usual here – was always impeccable. She looked older than the minister, grander: sometimes I thought she could easily have been his mother rather than his wife. The minister would occasionally make a little joke with us and, although his hair was grey, his face looked younger, smooth and carefree, with quick eyes behind gold-framed spectacles.
In Amsterdam, in our street, twins were born not so long ago in Kareltje’s house, next door to Jan. Kareltje’s father was in the police. Two weeks later the twins were dead. ‘On account of the war,’ said my mother, ‘it’s all those rotten Jerries’ fault.’ Two men in black had carried the tiny white boxes out in their arms, with Kareltje and his father and mother the only people following behind.
Appalled, I had watched the mystifyingly sad spectacle, half-hidden behind the front door because I was afraid to be seen staring so shamelessly from the front steps. Dying, what was that?
The day the minister’s wife is buried we are let off school and nobody does any work. We wait by the low church wall until the cortege, black and threatening, approaches, slowly, to the sound of frenziedly chiming church bells.
All the women walking behind the coffin have long black pieces of cloth hanging down from their hats to their waists. We can see Mem in the cortege, wearing her black church clothes and a black straw hat with a veil. I can make out her face through the black cloth, dim and wan. She seems overcome with grief and doesn’t look at us. ‘Mem,’ says Meint and I hear awe in his voice, ‘our Mem.’ I nod respectfully, and swallow.
The minister looks straight at us, to our surprise. He even gives a brief nod in our direction and smiles. I cannot conceive of Mem changing back into the usual loudly chattering, bustling housewife in our overcrowded little living room. I fully expect this death to have turned her, too, into a silent, motionless figure for good.
The children wait outside until the cortege is in the church, then we go in last and sit down at the very back. The church is so full that we can see almost nothing of what is happening at the front. ‘She’s next to the pulpit,’ says Popke, ‘there’s going to be a service first.’ I want to look for Hait and Mem, but am too ashamed to be seen peering around the church while she is lying there dead: what would she think of me?
When everyone stands up as the minister walks in, I look up tensely at the pulpit, unable to imagine what the minister is going to do next. What do you say when your wife has died? But a different minister gets up in the pulpit, a strange, ordinary-looking man who makes nervous gestures with jerky, disjointed waves of his arm. He keeps sipping water from a glass standing ready next to him. At one point he starts to cough convulsively, barking like a dog, and afterwards he looks out into the body of the church in consternation, as if thinking, What on earth was I saying just now?
I am disappointed, no, furious: what is this man doing in our minister’s place? Does he imagine he can take over his job, or that any of us are going to believe anything he might tell us? I watch him carefully. It looks as if his Bible is about to fall off the pulpit, and he can’t even preach. The lifeless, listless mumbling carries no further than the front pews.
Although I have never actually spoken to our minister, I have the feeling that we know each other well and that many things he says in church on a Sunday are meant, not for the whole village, but for me alone, to console me or to give me courage or simply to let me know that he understands me.
I would sometimes glow with pride and excitement when he looked in my direction during a sermon: you see, he’s making sure I’m there! During the hymns I often looked straight up at him to let him see that I was singing along at the top of my voice. I thought that the minister, just like myself, felt a bit of an outsider in the village, a duck out of water. Townish people are treated differently, they don’t really belong.
Sometimes I indulge in fantasies. I see myself rising suddenly out of my pew as the organ starts to play by itself, and all the swallows come flying in through the windows. Then I float up high in the church on beams of golden light, my arms spread wide. I am wearing flimsy white clothes that flutter in the wind and there are voices raised in songs of praise. I am drifting on these voices. They lift me up while the swallows circle about in glittering formation. Everyone in the church looks up in awe as I hover there between heaven and earth, and some people fall on their knees and stretch out their arms towards me. ‘That boy from the city, the one who’s staying with Wabe Visser – he isn’t just an ordinary boy, he is someone special in God’s eyes.’ The singing becomes louder and louder and I call down to them that they have no need to be afraid, that everything will turn out for the best. Filled with impatience I await the day when all these things will come to pass. Sometimes I feel that it is near at hand, and there I’ll be, up on high. But something always intervenes. No doubt some arrangements still have to be made. And when the time comes I shall first of all do something for my parents, and for Jan. But also for Hait and Mem, and for the minister’s wife. And the minister. That’s quite a lot of people. I have only to ask and things will change, will get better. God will see to that.