‘Do you hear that? Jan has come third!’
But I am looking at a couple of soldiers who are disappearing over the grass bank along the canal, followed by two girls. They saunter to the edge of the water and sit down, so that I can see little more than their heads. One soldier puts his arm around a girl and they slide backwards into the grass, disappearing from sight.
The water in the canal is black and still, a few pieces of weed floating in it and a duck balancing on a rusty bicycle wheel that sticks above the surface. A glimmer of light from the gardener’s house on the other bank makes an oily reflection across the water.
I walk into my dim little room where the hubbub from the street sounds unreal. The house is empty, cavernous.
I bite my pillow and try not to think. I fold my hands between my tightly-squeezed legs and curl up small.
Please God, make him come back, make him find me. If You let him come back I’ll do whatever You want.
I am bicycling to Warns. I have no clothes on. Walt is sitting on the luggage carrier with his arms around me, stroking my belly.
I can see people everywhere, behind windows, in gardens, on the pavements and ducking around corners. I pedal like one possessed but the bicycle hardly moves. I sweat under the firing squad of prying looks. I gasp and struggle on. Mem stands in front of the house, crying and beckoning me with her dependable, stout arms. I can’t reach her. I pedal and pedal.
‘Move,’ Walt whispers, ‘move. Go on, faster.’
His fingers caress my stomach and I feel ashamed, everyone watching us. I want him to stop, I want to cry and shout at him but I have lost my voice.
He puts me up against a wall and points his gun at me, one of his eyes is screwed half-shut and looks cold and inscrutable.
Don’t let me fall, I think, if I fall I’ll drop in the mud.
But my feet are already slipping…
I am standing in the passage and there are my parents, in their pyjamas, giving me surprised and anxious looks.
‘What are you doing out here, why aren’t you asleep? Do you have to go to the lavatory? Jeroen, can you hear us?’
My mother leads me back to my bed. I let her tuck me in, her hands soft and familiar.
‘Did you have a bad dream? You must tell us if there’s something frightening you.’
My father stands in the doorway with a sombre face. I can see him vaguely against the light in the passage.
‘You could have won, you should have carried on. Why did you stop?’ I say to her face bending over me.
‘Whatever’s the matter with him, he sounds delirious,’ I hear my father whisper. Why did he carry on like that about Jan on the balcony tonight, I wonder, was that just to tease me? Doesn’t he think very much of me, just like Jan’s mother? ‘He’s a real boy.’
‘I’ll leave the light on, maybe that’ll make him feel better.’
Their footsteps go creaking back to their own bedroom.
Chapter 3
I set out on a series of reconnoitering expeditions through Amsterdam, tours of exploration that will take me to every corner. On a small map I look up the most important streets to see how I can best fan out to criss-cross the town, then make plans on pieces of paper showing exactly how the streets on each of my expeditions join up and what they are called. To make doubly sure I also use abbreviations: H.W. for Hoofd-weg, H.S. for Haarlemmerstraat. The pieces of paper are carefully stored away inside the dust-jacket of a book, but I am satisfied that even if somebody found the notes, they wouldn’t be able to make head or tail of them. It is a well-hidden secret.
For my first expedition I get up in good time. I yawn a great deal and act as cheerfully as I can to disguise the paralysing uncertainty that is governing my every move.
‘We’re going straight to the field, Mum, we’re going to build a hut,’ but she is very busy and scarcely listens.
‘Take care and don’t be back too late.’
The street smells fresh as if the air has been scrubbed with soap. I feel dizzy with excitement and as soon as I have rounded the corner I start to run towards the bridge. Now it’s beginning, and everything is sure to be all right, all my waiting and searching is about to come to an end; the solution lies hidden over there, somewhere in the clear light filling the streets.
The bright air I inhale makes me feel that I am about to burst. I want to sing, shout, cheer myself hoarse.
I have marked my piece of paper, among a tangle of crossing and twisting lines, with H.W., O.T., W.S.: Hoofdweg, Overtoom, Weteringschans.
The Hoofdweg is close by, just over the bridge. It is the broad street we have to cross when we go to the swimming-baths. I know the gloomy houses and the narrow, flowerless gardens from the many times I’ve walked by in other summers, towel and swimming trunks rolled under my arm. But beyond that, and past Mercatorplein, Amsterdam is unknown territory to me, ominous virgin land.
The unfamiliar streets make me hesitate, my excitement seeps away and suddenly I feel unsure and tired. The town bewilders me: shops with queues outside, people on bicycles carrying bags, beflagged streets in the early morning sun, squares where wooden platforms have been put up for neighbourhood celebrations, whole districts with music pouring out of loudspeakers all day. An unsolvable jigsaw puzzle. Now and then I stop in sheer desperation, study my hopelessly inadequate piece of paper, and wonder if it would not be much better to give up the attempt altogether.
But whenever I see an army vehicle, or catch a glimpse of a uniform, I revive and walk a little faster, sometimes trotting after a moving car in the hope that it will come to a stop and he will jump out.
Time after time I lose my way and have to walk back quite far, and sometimes, if I can summon up enough courage, I ask for directions.
‘Please, Mevrouw, could you tell me how to get to the Overtoom?’
‘Dear me, child, you’re going the wrong way. Over there, right at the end, turn left, that’ll take you straight there.’
The Overtoom, when I finally reach it, seems to be a street without beginning or end. I walk, stop, cross the road, search: not a trace of W.S. Does my plan bear any resemblance to the real thing?
I take off my shoes and look at the dark impression of my sweaty foot on the pavement. Do I have to go on, search any more? What time is it, how long have I been walking the streets?
Off we sail to Overtoom, We drink milk and cream at home, Milk and cream with apple pie, Little children must not lie.
Over and over again, automatically, the jingle runs through my mind, driving me mad.
As I walk back home, slowly, keeping to the shady side of the street as much as I can, I think of the other expeditions hidden away in the dust-jacket of my book. The routes I picked out and wrote down with so much eagerness and trust seem pointless and unworkable now. I scold myself: I must not give up, only a coward would do that. Walt is waiting for me, he has no one, and he’ll be so happy to see me again.
At home I sit down in a chair by the window, too tired to talk, and when I do give an answer to my mother my voice sounds thin and weak, as if it were finding it difficult to escape from my chest. She sits down next to me on the arm of the chair, lifts my chin up and asks where we have been playing such tiring games, she hasn’t seen me down in the street all morning, though the other boys were there.
‘Were you really out in the field?’
‘Ask them if you don’t believe me!’ I run onto the balcony, tear my first route map up into pieces and watch the shreds fluttering down into the garden like snowflakes.
When my father gets back home he says, ‘So, my boy, you and I had best go into town straightway, you still haven’t seen the illuminations.’
With me on the back, he cycles as far as the Concert-gebouw, where he leans the bike against a wall and walks with me past a large green space with badly worn grass. Here, too, there are soldiers, tents, trucks. Why don’t I look this time, why do I go and walk on the other side of my father and cling – ‘Don’t hang on so tight!’ – to his arm?
…‘Now, you’ll see something,’ he says, ‘something you’ve never even dreamed of, just you wait and see.’
Walt moving his quivering leg to and fro, his warm, yielding skin, the smell of the thick hair in his armpits…
I trudge along beside my father, my soles burning, too tired to look at anything.
We walk through the gateway of a large building, a sluice that echoes to the sound of voices, and through which the people have to squeeze before fanning out again on the other side. There are hundreds of them now, all moving in the same direction towards a buzzing hive of activity, a surging mass of bodies.
There is a sweet smell of food coming from a small tent in the middle of the street in front of which people are crowding so thickly that I can’t see what is being sold.
I stop in my tracks, suddenly dying for food, dying just to stay where I am and to yield myself up to that wonderful sweet smell. But my father has already walked on and I have to wriggle through the crowds to catch up with him.
Beside a bridge he pushes me forward between the packed bodies so that I can see the canal, a long stretch of softly shimmering water bordered by overhanging trees. At one end brilliantly twinkling arches of light have been suspended that blaze in the darkness and are reflected in the still water. Speechless and enchanted I stare at the crystal-clear world full of dotted lines, a vision of luminous radiation that traces a winking and sparkling route leading from bridge to bridge, from arch to arch, from me to my lost soldier.
I grip my father’s hand. ‘Come on,’ I say, ‘let’s have a look. Come on!’
Festoons of light bulbs are hanging wherever we go, like stars stretched across the water, and the people walk past them in silent, admiring rows. The banks of the canal feel as cosy as candle-lit sitting-rooms.
‘Well?’ my father breaks the spell. ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it? In Friesland, you’d never have dreamed that anything like that existed, would you now?’
We take a short cut through dark narrow streets. I can hear dull cracks, sounds that come as a surprise in the dark, as if a sniper were firing at us.
My father starts to run.
‘Hurry, or we’ll be too late.’
An explosion of light spurts up against the black horizon and whirls apart, pink and pale green fountains of confetti that shower down over a brilliant sign standing etched in the sky.
And another shower of stars rains down to the sound of muffled explosions and cheers from the crowd, the sky trembling with the shattering of triumphal arches.
I look at the luminous sign in the sky as if it is a mirage.
‘Daddy, that letter, what’s it for? Why is it there?’ Why did t have to ask, why didn’t I just add my own letters, fulfil my own wishful thinking?
‘That W? You know what that’s for. The W, the W’s for Queen Wilhelmina
I can hear a scornful note in his voice as if he is mocking me.
‘Willy here, Willy there,’ he says, ‘but the whole crew took off to England and left us properly in the lurch.’
I’m not listening, I don’t want to hear what he has to say.
W isn’t Wilhelmina: it stands for Walt! It’s a sign specially for me…
The army has arranged a dance for the neighbourhood. The playground is brightly lit up with floodlights and is chock-full of people, pressed close together up against the fence and listening to a small band seated on the steps of the gym.
I hear the fast rhythm, the seductive, slithering tones, the trumpet raising its strident voice, sounds you cannot escape.
‘Off you go,’ says my father. ‘Liberation happens just once in a lifetime. Mummy and I will be coming to have a look too.’
There is frenzied dancing on an open piece of ground ringed by curious spectators. Most of the men are soldiers.
They hold the women and girls tight, then suddenly thrust them away fast, turn round, catch them on one arm and bend over them with practised ease.
The girls move about on agile, eager legs, turning flashily in time with the music and moulding themselves compliantly to the masterful bodies of their partners.
The few older residents who are dancing do so sedately, moving around carefully with dainty, measured steps, smiling about them politely.
‘Swing’s great, hey?’ Jan is leaning over my shoulder, his mouth close to my ear. ‘See how tight a grip they’ve got on those bits of skirt?’
His body moves in time with the music, and he hums along with delight.
We look at the couples clamped together, the quick bare legs under the short skirts, the firm grip of the soldiers’ arms, the heavy boots moving effortlessly like black, hot-blooded beasts. The heat given off by the dancers transmits itself to us, rousing us.
‘Christ, take a look at that, will you? That sort of thing oughtn’t to be allowed. Look, quick!’ I feel a push and am propelled forward. ‘See her? You keep your eye on her, it won’t be long before she’s walking around with a big belly.’
I admire them, I think they’re exciting; I want to go on looking at them for a long time, the way the two of them dance, the way he puts his arm around her and looks at her.
‘Come on,’ says Jan, ‘let’s go and have a smoke, I know somebody with a packet of Players.’
The soldier spins around like greased lightning, kicking his heels so high that they tap his bottom. He presses the girl hard up against him, his hands on her buttocks as she hangs meekly on to him. They whirl about between the other dancers, disappearing from view and turning up suddenly somewhere else. Whenever he finds enough space the soldier throws the girl up in the air, swings her between his legs as she comes down, sleekly rotates his quick hips and then takes a few long steps, one of his legs thrust out between hers.
In a corner of the playground some boys are sitting on their haunches against the fence, and when Jan joins them I squat down as well. They are smoking with self-important expressions and an appearance of doubtful enjoyment. When the military band strikes up a new tune they snigger and sing along softly so that the bystanders cannot hear them: