Dear Jeroen, I’ll do my best now to get this letter to you as soon as possible. Just a little while longer, and then all of us will be together again. Be a good boy and give everyone in the family there our kindest regards. They’ll all have to come to Amsterdam soon!
And then, in a schoolgirl’s hand:
Hello Jeroen, Daddy has written almost everything already. We’re having a good tuck-in now with all the things you can get in the shops again, real milk sometimes, and white bread, and powdered egg, it tastes wonderful. Your little brother is turning into a real fattie, he is almost too heavy to lift up. When you get back home you’ll be able to take him walking by the canal, we are trying to get a push chair for him. Is everything all right in Friesland? Mummy.
Is that all? I turn the sheets of paper over. Nothing. Mem has got up and looks at me expectantly. Her eyes are soft and she comes and stands close to me.
The lady who is putting me up.
‘Isn’t that lovely?’ she asks. ‘Now everything is sure to be all right.’
‘Were they liberated in Amsterdam by different soldiers to ours?’ is the first thing I want to know. ‘Ours were Americans, weren’t they?’ I look at her, but she shrugs her shoulders.
‘I don’t exactly know, my boy, you’d best ask Hait about that.’
‘The letter was sent on the ninth of May,’ I say, ‘what day is it today?’
She goes up to the small calendar and slowly counts the days.
‘The twenty-seventh,’ she says, ‘it took a long time getting here.’
I put the letter back in the place where it stood, behind the little vase on the chest.
In the little passage I take my coat off the hook and press my face into the cloth. I move my nose slowly over the sleeves, the collar, the back.
Sometimes it is as if I can vaguely identify his smell, that mixture of metal and hospital, and when I do I am indefinably happy and reassured. But now I can smell nothing, no matter how fiercely and desperately I try.
Without warning, Mem opens the door and gives me a somewhat disconcerted look. ‘Don’t you want to put the letter away in your suitcase? Then it won’t get lost.’
‘No,’ I say. I hang my coat back on the hook.
Chapter 11
The living-room floor creaks, a chair is pushed back, a plate clatters across the table. Meint is not yet asleep, he has a cold and his breath sounds laboured and congested. Outside it is still warm and light, but I can tell from the muted impenetrability of the sounds that the heat is dying down and seeping into the earth.
The fields are lifeless, no sound can be heard, and the house is immersed in an ocean of stillness. Inside, too, no one has spoken for a while, the silence broken only by an occasional sigh or a tired yawn.
Night in the country, the day’s work done.
Mem sits by the window, as she does every evening, looking out over the countryside as she knits. Almost no one is about at this time of day, just a few cows or a fisherman still straining his eyes out to sea.
Two people are coming over the Cliff,’ I hear her say. Hait answers the broken silence with an indistinct mumble. I turn over and pick at the scab on my arm. One edge has come away and I try carefully to continue the painful process of levering it off. Just so long as it doesn’t start to bleed again.
Silence, nothing moves, except for the scab slowly coming off.
‘It’s two women.’
I can hear Hait turn his chair around. His footsteps move across the floor and the door gives a sharp creak.
Mem yawns and shifts in her chair. There is the noise of the pump in the shed: Hait is filling his mug. I can hear the gurgling flow of the water.
‘They’ve got bicycles.’ Mem gets up, her voice growing agitated. Hait has come back inside and I hear him put the mug on the table and then drink in slow gulps so that I can follow the course of the water as it passes through his body with funny little sounds.
‘They aren’t from round here, they’re wearing townish dresses,’ the report continues, getting faster.
I push one of the cupboard-bed doors a bit further open and see Mem leaning against the window, one hand over her eyes to see better. ‘What could they possibly want here, so late?’ Hait has moved next to her. The evening sun falls over their faces and lingers on a piece of furniture. Dust whirls in the late light, astonishing quantities of minuscule particles on silent, everlasting journeys.
Why do I just lie there, why don’t I move?
‘Oh, my goodness, they’re turning this way!’
I gather that the two women have left the dyke and are coming in the direction of our house. Two women from the town. My heart begins to thud, an unreal feeling pervades my body.
‘They’re pointing at our house,’ says Mem, now clearly excited, ‘could it possibly be for Jeroen?’
I sit up straight, petrified.
‘Take it easy, man, nothing’s going to happen,’ says Meint and blows his nose noisily.
‘They’re climbing over the fence, they’re either going to Trientsje, Ypes next door, or coming here. Goodness knows which. My, oh my!’
She drops back into her chair, looking like a goddess sensing disaster. Then she gets up, looming large in the low room, and goes to the back of the house. The outside door rattles violently.
‘Could well be your mother come to fetch you,’ says Hait and opens the cupboard-bed doors. I am sitting bolt upright, completely at a loss. There are more voices from the other cupboard-beds and Meint beside me gives a protesting cough.
My mother.
If it is her, then the war is definitely over…
But is it her? Has she really come? Has their longing for me finally become strong enough? My body feels feeble and limp, my belly seems to have dropped to the floor. When I try to take a step, my knees are out of control and I have to cling to the wall in case I collapse.
I can’t believe it and I mustn’t believe it either: I can’t afford to any more, it’s sure to be just another empty hope drifting by like a useless tuft of sheep’s wool.
I stand in the doorway and lean my head outside just far enough to take in the stretch from the side of the house to the fence. Hait and Mem are standing halfway down the path, and when I see that Hait has quickly slipped on his Sunday jacket my knees start giving way all over again: what’s going to happen next? Mem is busy with a lock of hair that refuses to stay in place, her hand patting her head and running down her hip in turns. Seeing her standing there, solemnly, yet on her guard, watchful as if she were about to have her photograph taken, makes my breath escape with a jolt, like a gasp. I am suddenly very aware that the inevitability of the moment has been impressed on everything around: on the gusts of wind bending the tall grass, on the evening sky as it dims to pale grey, and on the expectant silence of the landscape in which the two dark figures have now become motionless. I had tried to steel myself against my own fantasies and dreams, but all of a sudden I have become defenceless and vulnerable, an abject and easy target.
As if sensing that I am hiding in the doorway, Mem turns and looks straight at my face peering around the corner. She takes a few steps towards the house and calls out in an attempt at a whisper, ‘Surely you’re not standing there in your underclothes? Hurry up and get dressed, they’re nearly here.’
I dash back into the room, breathlessly pull my trousers on, wrestle with the buttons and leave my shirt undone.
‘Don’t bother with your socks,’ says Diet, when she sees me bending over. They are all sitting up in their cupboard-beds and are following my frantic scramble with curiosity but also with some awe: I feel that I have suddenly taken the centre of the stage, that tonight I have taken over the main role in the household’s doings, that they are all aware that the denouement of an unfinished tale is about to be played out.