Who can say how much longer the war will go on – for months, for years or perhaps for the rest of my life, so that I shall never see my parents again, my friends, our street. Everything is too confused for me even to cry about, I just take things as they come, day after day, week after week.
‘Be a brave boy, now my father had said to me that time when we packed my case. I had been kneeling to one side, looking on enthralled at the way all the bits and pieces for my journey were being fitted together: face-cloth, towel, a set of underwear, toothbrush, my last pair of scuffed shoes, the pyjamas Mummy had patched together from a discarded pair of my father’s…
‘Be a big boy, then you’ll please your Mummy a very great deal.’ My father had lifted my face by the chin and smoothed my hair. A big boy? I had certainly grown taller and sturdier. Mem sometimes seized me between her strong hands and Have me a satisfied squeeze. ‘Soon they won’t believe their eyes, your father and mother! They’ll hardly recognise you any more!’
I had acknowledged her approval with a feeble smile. Soon? I thought. How soon? I certainly have grown, she is quite right there. I can’t get into most of the clothes I brought with me from Amsterdam, and instead have to wear Meint’s tilings quite a lot of the time, while he wears Popke’s castoffs. But really big? I still cry a lot, when no one is looking, and I "Hon think of home, and of my mother. Mother’s darling, they always used to call me at school.
Sometimes I look over my old clothes, so many folded away memories. All stored away in the suitcase: the check shirts, the blue linen shorts, the plus fours ‘for best’ (‘Oh, no, you can’t possibly walk about in those here,’ Mem had laughed uproariously, and I had never worn them once), and the woollen cable-stitch sweater that my mother had made herself, just like the shirts.
‘Had made herself.’ I take the folded garments carefully in my hands and feel how smooth, how fine they are. I sniff at them because in the early days the smell used to take me straight back to the bedroom at home, to the wardrobe where our clothes used to hang and to the sweetish scent of Mummy’s slip and stockings. But even the smell of my clothes has faded or changed. Or can it be that I have forgotten what it smelled like at home?
The lorry near the Royal Palace, the nocturnal drive over the big dam, and above all the bicycle ride with my father through the deserted Rozengracht – all have been etched into my memory and are at the same time irretrievably dim and far away. Wiped out, it would seem, the way the master with a peremptory gesture passes a cloth over my slate at schooclass="underline" ‘That sum is wrong. Do it again.’ I have accepted the loss, I have never been brave enough to protest. All I have done is mourn.
I have buckled down, I have conformed. On Sundays I go to church twice, on Saturdays I learn the psalm for Sunday school and on Sundays the Bible text for school on Monday. Early in the morning I help Jantsje and Meint clean the sheep droppings from the meadow, I churn milk in bottles into butter, listen outwardly unmoved to the praying at school, help Hait sometimes to mend his nets and trudge about in clogs like a real country boy.
In short, I have become one of them, outwardly that is, because when no one is looking, when I feel I am not being watched, I often sit at the far end of the stone seawall and look out over the capricious sea, the driving, moving masses of rebellious grey. Then I hope that, some bright day, I might suddenly be able to see over to the other side, there, far away, on that clear, sharp line between sea and sky. Let all go well with them, dear God, I pray, please keep them alive. Make them think of me and please let them come soon, to take me away from here.
The winter months are overwhelmingly bleak, and we spend most of the time inside the small house. We are like animals in our lair, crowded together and taking shelter in the warmth.
A razor-sharp wind blows straight across the bare land and the stripped dykes. Rain lashes the hedges and ditches, snow piles up in spotless layers – it all forces us to live a futile, cramped existence. When we step shivering outside in the mornings the grass is like a crackling sheet underfoot and every step taken sends silvery needles of ice splintering apart with delicate little sounds. Winter crickets. Faces around steaming pans of food, climbing early to bed and the smoke of the blown-out oil lamp: Mem, regularly the last, sighing as she gets undressed.
Sometimes I blow a hole in the ice of the frozen window-pane and stare across the white fields to the dark smudge which I know is where Jan lives. In the spring we shall roll down the Cliff again, our bodies close and warm together. And then I shall ask him straight out – something I have wanted to ask him hundreds of times, rehearsed in every combination of phrase and tone, but never allowed to cross my lips – if I may see his belly again, if the two of us may get undressed together. He will pull down his trousers and I will be able to touch and hold him there. I feel a compulsive and inescapable longing to lay my head against his body and look at that stiff, painful swelling.
How strange, I think, I’ve become like an animal, like one of I he cows here, or the sheep. Licking, sucking, biting, wolfing my food down, a ravenous, greedy beast. It doesn’t surprise me, and I am no longer upset by it either. Aloof and lonely, hidden away in my bolt hole, I am becoming more aware of myself.
And so the winter crawls by, on hands and knees.
LIBERATION
Chapter 1
And then, suddenly, the days grow lighter and warmer, the land seems to brim over with blossom, birds and frogs and the breeze is laden with scents and sounds. Young calves BCamper among the calmly grazing cows and spring in the air without warning as if taken by surprise at the touch of the sun in their skin.
Each day we make our way stolidly to school through the burgeoning landscape: there in the morning, back in the Bllernoon, our daily treadmill. We still go about in our shabby winter clothes despite the tumultuous renewal of life trumpeting its arrival everywhere around us. To us everything is .is it has been, the men working the land and the women In icing the weeds in the vegetable garden or stoking the fire in the stove. Though the land grows busier by the day, to our eyes everything looks unspeakably dull, and most of the time we walk silently along the road paying no attention to our surroundings. Occasionally there is a sudden brief remark or a laugh, and we career around after one another playing tag in a sudden outburst of energy.
It is a cool morning, the sky steel blue and almost cloudless. On the way to school Meint and I trudge along on different sides of the road while Jantsje walks purposefully in front. All three of us, in our own way, are wrapped in thought, reacting huffily to any intrusion by the others. Then, as we approach Warns, we notice that the monotonous everyday pattern seems to have been broken. Something unusual is going on in the village: there are villagers standing about everywhere along the road talking to each other and people have taken to the street whom you don’t normally see about on a weekday. Everyone is walking in the same direction towards the crossroads by the church, where they congregate in an excited huddle.
‘Bet you if s something to do with the Germans,’ says Meint, ‘they’re up to their dirty tricks again, for sure.’
‘Betting is against the Bible.’ Jantsje gives her brother an injured look, but her voice sounds triumphant. ‘Hait won’t even let us say that, "betting". The Germans can bet, if they like, they’re heathens. But not us.’