Then I hear the sound of peeled potatoes plopping into a bucket. The cupboard-bed is unimaginably large. I lie like a dwarf between the blankets, the narrow walls miles away.
‘Mem?’ Am I making a sound or am I merely moving my mouth? Tea, I’m thirsty, I want to say, but I can’t talk, I have no voice. Eternities later, I look into Mem’s anxious face.
‘What’s up with you, what are you talking about? Coloured pencils, we don’t have any of those here, you must have had I those in Amsterdam.’ She pulls the blankets up. ‘Just you lie quietly now and try to get some sleep.’ Her hand is stroking me gently. Or is it him, suddenly back?… the soldier pushes chewing-gum into my mouth, a gag that grows thicker and thicker. He shoves it down until it’s stuck in my throat and I can’t draw breath any longer. I fight grimly to free myself and thrash about wildly…
Befuddled, I look into a small basin Mem is holding in front of me. A long thread of slobber is hanging from my mouth and stinging morsels burn in my throat. Mem pats me patiently on the back.
When I try to clutch Mem’s hand so as to have somebody to hold on to, she has already gone. I can hear her clogs in the lane and a dragging sound as if she is moving something, or somebody. Who? I sit up.
But perhaps it’s just the wind…
In the evening, Trientsje softly opens the cupboard-bed doors. ‘Aren’t you sleeping?’
I can see the others in the room having a cold meal, hear the clicking of knives, distant voices, and I see Hait nod to me. Mem feeds me porridge, her hand rises insistently each time to my mouth, and dutifully I accept the spoon. Afterwards, I feel better, the warmth settling like a cossetting wrap around my body. Content and babylike I let Mem get on with the business of wiping my face and neck with a wet cloth and then she tucks me in firmly under the blankets.
‘He’s on the mend, his temperature is down,’ she reports to the room.
Could I ask them for my coat? I want to smell the sleeves and have the soldier near me. I must know what he smelled like again…
When I feel somebody beside me I sit bolt upright, in a panic.
‘I shan’t eat you, you fool,’ Meint chuckles.
In the dark I listen to the creaking of the floorboards and feel him tugging at the blankets.
‘Can you get anything you like from that soldier? Even chocolate?’
I pretend to be asleep and say nothing. If only I had my coat with me, I long for his smell. I turn to the wall and try to recapture his face, the slope of his cheek, the broken tooth.
Meint is asleep, I can hear him breathing gently and regularly.
Did I get sick because I had somebody else’s spit in my mouth, is that dangerous? Then I remember with a shock that he had wanted to take me for another drive today. My body grows hot and wet: will he be cross with me, did he wait for me? I can feel small drops on my forehead and my heart is beating fast.
The soldier crouches on the rails behind the small barn. He looks at me, holding me prisoner with his eyes.
Chapter 3
Because she thinks I am still sick, Mem tells me not to go to church next morning. The dirty breakfast things stand on the table in chaotic confusion. The living-room is deserted.
I step outside and watch Hait, who is walking down the road to Warns with the children. It is glorious spring weather, the girls’ coats are unbuttoned and Popke and Meint are gaily sporting white shirts. An army car comes towards the small group of church-goers, hooting loudly as it passes them, tearing a hole in the Sunday morning stillness.
The car turns off on to the sea dyke, stops a bit further on and a few soldiers get out and walk along the dyke. They look around before disappearing out of sight down the other side. I stroll back indoors and look through the window: the car looks lost on the road, like a motionless decoy, frozen in silence. I am in two minds whether to go up to it or stay at home. Mem is sure to find it suspicious if I’m suddenly well enough to go to the harbour.
I take a few faltering steps. ‘I’m just off to the boat, to see if everything’s all right.’ Obediently I put on my coat. ‘Else you’ll get sick again,’ Mem calls after me.
There’s not a soul at the harbour. A white goat is grazing at the end of a rope and gives a piercing bleat as I pass. The boats’ masts rock lazily to and fro, gleaming like knitting needles. The quay is deserted. I kick a stone into the water: placidly ebbing circles. Should I go back? My longing for the safety of my cupboard-bed into which I can creep and shut out the world becomes stronger with every step I take: the darkness and the seclusion, and the caring hands of Mem bringing food and straightening the blankets.
I walk to the other side of the little harbour. Seagulls flying over the sea wall retreat when they see me, still gobbling helplessly struggling fish in their hooked beaks.
Further along the dyke sheep are grazing. From a long way off I can hear the regular sound of their grinding jaws tearing out the grass.
Silence and wind, not a living soul, no soldier, nothing. A metal drum makes ticking noises as if the heat were blasting the rust off it in flakes. I walk up to it under the nets hung out on poles and lay my hand against the hot surface. A hollow sound. I look at the reddish brown powder that has stuck to my hand and smell it. Iron.
I am vaguely reminded of the smell of the soldier; how is it that I can remember the smell of his touch? On the pier which protects the little harbour from the sea I walk alongside the beams of the weathered sea wall, placing my feet carefully on the rocks, afraid to lose my balance. In the shelter of the timber boarding the heat is suddenly overwhelming. I sit down, my head swimming.
A broken beam gives me an unexpected view of the sea, a greenish-grey surface moving restlessly and filled with light. The wind blows straight into my face and when I open my mouth wide to catch the current of air it is as if the inside of my head is being blown clean, and the last remnants of my lingering sickness are swept away.
The turbulence of the water washes away my lethargy. I stick my head through the opening between the beams and look out over the wide, empty expanse of the coastline. On the distant rocks the vivid, irregular shape of a human figure intrudes upon the splendour of the view, a man lying on his back in the sun, a completely isolated, insulated being.
I quickly turn my head away as if my mere look could disturb the perfect stillness and privacy of that distant man. My gaze settles on the quiet tedium of the harbour boats bobbing against the quay and roofs dipping away behind the dyke. But the sunbathing figure behind the sea wall draws me like a magnet, pulling me with invisible threads that tremble with tautness as if they were about to snap.
Without hesitation I climb over the fencing and am suddenly quite alone at the mercy of the hurrying waves and the solitary sunbather. Holding tight to the beams, I balance across the stones towards him. Every so often, the water splashes up between the rocks and makes white patches of foam in the bright air.
The sunbather has heard me and turns towards me, calling out something cut short by the wind: it is my soldier. He lies stretched out on a rock and smiles at me with his eyes screwed up. When I am quite close, he sticks out his hand. I take it and immediately let go of it again. ‘Hello, good morning.’
Best walk on calmly now, as if I had to be getting on, as if I were on my way to somewhere else. But his hand clasps my ankle so that I can’t move. ‘No, no. Where you go?’ He tugs at my leg and pulls me closer. He is wearing nothing but khaki shorts. ‘Sit,’ he says, ‘sit down.’
He moves up to make room for me and then stretches out in the sun again. His arms are folded lazily under his head and he surveys me with an almost mocking look. The front of his shorts gapes open a bit, confronting me with a part of his body I am not supposed to see. Embarrassed, I turn my head away and look out across the sea as if something in the distance were suddenly attracting my attention. Even his hairy armpits, exposed so nonchalantly, make me feel that I should not be looking: there is something not quite right, something that doesn’t fit.