River in the Sea

by Tina Boscha

  “You okay?” he asked. His voice was husky.

  She opened her eyes. His face was somber and pouches gathered under his eyes.

  “I think so,” she said.

  “You should eat something. A little coffee and some bolle. Something plain. Then we need to start cleaning up. Can you do that?”

  It almost would have been better if he had been angry. His gentleness made Leen’s guilt spike.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.” She was still in her clothes. She pulled the quilt up even though she was warm.

  Pater patted her knee. “Acht, Leentje,” he said, shaking his head. “We all feel the same way.”

  “Where is Tine?”

  “She and Renske are taking care of the dishes and the kitchen. You and I can do the barn.” Already the roles were shifting. Renske was big enough now for more housework. Without Issac, Leen would get her way. She’d be in the barn and fields more than ever now.

  Her face burned. She remembered leaving it with Jakob and she remembered walking and there was the ladder leading to the loft in the Feikema barn. She’d left Jakob there to go to Minne. But she did not remember coming home. She let her head drop to her knees.

  “How did I–”

  “The Bosgras brought you back last night,” Pater said. He let go of her knee. “Up now, okay? Get some coffee.”

  He left. She slid, slowly, out of bed. She had to stop, pressing on her stomach with both hands. She slid her hands down and felt the cigarettes in her pocket, there from yesterday, still unopened. She patted the pack. It was good to have it close.

  A plain piece of bread on a plate and a cup of koffie waited for her in the kitchen. No one else was there, and the counter was clean. The dishes had already been wiped dry and stowed. Leen sipped the coffee, hands shaking, and it helped a little. But she could not eat more than three bites of the bolle before the acid filled her mouth. She spit into the sink and sipped more coffee and hoped deep breaths would settle her stomach. She wanted to go back to bed and try to forget. The details were there but they spun together and she did not want to tease them apart. She had said too much, done too much, but she couldn’t help it; a fragment freed itself from the memories she wanted to compress and squelch. She’d offered to help Minne, over and over.

  She heard Pater in the barn. He must be so ashamed of her. She had pushed insult after insult into a gaping injury. He was hardly home and she had yet to spend any time with him and here she had gone off, drunk, leaving her brother’s funeral gathering only to be brought back, passed out, by Minne’s parents. She wasn’t sure what he would say but he would say something. He waited for her in the barn.

  The door to the barn took a dozen steps but by the time she got there she was already crying.

  But all Pater said to her when he saw her tears was, “Komme, stop that. We’ve cried enough.” He handed her a kerchief.

  “I am sick of crying,” she said, handing the kerchief back.

  “There’s a lot to do,” Pater said, sighing. He stood behind a chair and held the back of it. Then he sat down in it heavily, hips creaking as he did so, and took out his pouch of tobacco. “Sit,” he said. He quickly rolled two cigarettes. “Don’t tell your Mem but this will help.”

  He was right. The tremors in her hands were worse now that the caffeine was in her blood but the injection of heat in her lungs steadied her and after the first few drags the queasiness in her stomach lessened. “Dunke,” she said.

  “Was that the first time you drank that much?”

  Leen shifted her feet. She nodded her head once. She drew the cigarette to her lips again. “I do feel better.” She patted her hip. She removed the pack from her pocket. “Issac gave these to me. I think he got them from a German officer the L.O. captured.”

  Pater turned the pack over in his hands. He smelled it. “This is good stuff,” he said quietly. “Was this the day?” He glimpsed at her from the corner of his eye.

  “Ja,” she said. “That was the day.”

  “Can I?” He held it up to her, eyes careful. She nodded. He opened the pack, the foil ripping apart easily. She stopped breathing for a second. He slid one out. “Just one,” he said, putting it in his pocket. He handed the pack back to her and stood up, lighting his second rolled cigarette, and started to move the chairs. She stared at the open top. It was ripped right open.

  “I think Tine got all the dishes and silverware out,” he said. “You and I can return the chairs and then we’ll have to pick up the rest of the garbage.” He eyed the floor. “It needs a good sweep. It gets dirty so fast.” But he didn’t move.

  She fingered the cigarette pack. There was nothing stopping her now. In a moment Pater had taken away its perfection and now it was just an ordinary pack of smokes. She removed one and held it. It was a precise cylinder, no stray threads or clumps, no lumps of any kind. It reminded her of a candle. She found a pack of matches on the seat of a chair and lit it with the flick of her thumb.

  “How do you know how to do that?” Pater asked.

  “What?”

  “To do the matches like that.”

  Leen paused. She didn’t want to say his name but she had to. “I used to smoke with Issac,” she said.

  Pater nodded. “Ahh. Yes. I did too. But you knew that.” Abruptly he pulled a chair out from the stack he’d just pushed against the wall and sat down again. With one hand he pulled another chair away from the wall. “Come here,” he said. “Sit by me.” He put his head in his hands, rubbing them all over his head. “Leentje, I tell you, I wish I had come home and he already was in the ground.”

  Her heart beat hard, pumping through her chest and veins caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, her father talking like that, the gale of the recollections of the night before.

  “I told him he shouldn’t have joined,” she choked. “It was too late, I didn’t know for so long, and I know I made a mistake, and we had such a terrible fight–”

  “Shh, ja, ja,” Pater said, interrupting. Tears had gathered and one had fallen, fast, right out the corner of his eye, but his voice was even. His mouth and eyes were wired to different things, Leen thought. One he couldn’t help but one he could. He pulled out the handkerchief again.

  “No one made Issac do anything but himself,” Pater said.

  “But he went into the Resistance to bring you home. You were gone so long and then we thought you were dead, all those men in Dokkum. But it was really me, it was all me. I sent you away.” She couldn’t think of another way to say it and her words struck her as an echo of what she must have said last night, of what she’d been meaning to say all along, out loud, not just in her head, but with volume, with air, with breath.

  “Leentje, hey, enough of that,” Pater said. “Quiet now.”

  But she talked right over him. “I was so stupid. I’m so sorry. I wish you could forgive me but I understand if you can’t.” Her voice grew high, hysteric, a shaking teakettle, a terrible build–up of pressure. She’d wanted to get this out for so long but her words only made her feel like she was being pulled up, strung high, lifted by her neck. “You ought to send me away, it’s all my fault–”

  “Leentje!” he said sharply and she jumped. “Shut up. Heide de boek. Now.”

  His face was hard and lined with anger. His lips barely moved when he spoke to her. “Why do you want me to forgive you so badly? What does it matter?” He turned, staring straight ahead, shaking his head back and forth. He dropped his cigarette straight on the barn floor and stubbed it out. He turned and took her by the shoulders and he shook her, just like she had with Minne. The movements reverberated inside her head and then he let her go. She crouched over her legs, covering her mouth. He would not forgive her. He refused.

  “Doeval, Leen, I’m sorry.” His voice softened behind her. “You, you are my daughter. No matter what you do in this life, I will always forgive you. I’m your heit. I lost two, I wouldn’t lose another on account of something we can’t ever put blame on.
It’s this war that put me in hiding. That’s what kept me wondering every day if something happened to my family. This stupid, vile, goddamned war.”

  “It’s over now,” she whispered, still bent over. Her skirt smelled of stale smoke. “That’s how you finally could come home.”

  He made a sound not unlike a laugh, but it was too bitter for that. “This war won’t be over for a long time.” He pulled her up. Still, she couldn’t face him. She bent away from him as he took her hand. “It’s not your fault,” Pater said. “Look at me.” Now his voice was as soft as Mem’s whimpers and Leen obeyed him. His eyes burned. He pointed to the truck, covered under a tarpaulin. “I bought that thing. I put my boy behind the wheel to help me out. I was selfish, lazy. Don’t you see? If it was anyone’s fault, it’s mine.”

  She stared at him now. That look on his face, the grim line of his mouth, it was exactly everything she felt. His face was a mirror, the way his forehead pulled in and up, revealing something almost childlike in her father’s eyes, a vulnerability, a profound and horrid sense of guilt. “Pater,” she said in recognition. “Pater.”

  He clutched her hand. “I bought it. I bought it. Your mother didn’t want me to but I did it anyway and honestly, I don’t know if she will ever forgive me.” When he looked at Leen his face twisted and his body hunched over further and she noticed how the spots on the backs of his hands stretched over the raised tops of his veins and in that posture he looked small. Small and old.

  “God, that boy suffered,” Pater choked, voice breaking. His face wrenched further. He looked grim, sad, so much more – and then Leen saw it. He, her father, he was terrified. Just like she, terrified of his own remorse. “I kept him close to me, I told him every day he was a good son. But he was never the same, was he? We lost Wopke once but we lost Issac twice. He carried his brother with him every day until the day he died.”

  “Heit,” was all she could say. It was not enough. He still held her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said once more.

  But the words tasted different. The guilt still filled her. It would always be there. Yet now she felt heavy, pulled by gravity, tethered. Pater held her hand tightly and that was how he held his own guilt. Everyone around her, in their own way, felt so badly. That was why Issac had been so quiet, mean even. He’d wanted to speak too, to say he was sorry, but he must’ve known what Leen hadn’t, that it wouldn’t be enough. Wopke could not be resurrected. Leen wished she could tell him that it would’ve been something. For her, at least. She’d tell him, I understand now. You’re right, she’d say, voice deep, palms outstretched. Wopke would still be dead. And she’d also tell him, yours was always an accident. The same could not be said for me. That if anything, he should take comfort in that fact; he’d been doing as instructed. They’d both been driving, just driving, they both had split–second moments that changed everything. And you could never change that second, just relive it until you can’t anymore. Then, if you can, you just live. She’d say, I’m so sorry, and Issac, I forgive you, and hope he could find a way to say the same to her.

  But Issac was gone. And Pater was home.

  She didn’t say any of this to her father. Instead she asked something she had wondered about for a long time. “What did you and Issac do with the engine?”

  Pater pointed towards the back of the barn, in the shadows where he stored tools and where the horses had once been kept. He sniffed deeply and the sound was sharp and gruff. “Outside, in the dugout.”

  Leen nearly laughed then. What if Minne had agreed to her help? That was what they would’ve found, a block of metal hidden underground. In the end her help would have been worthless.

  Pater sighed. Leen felt it too, the little bit of rest after the storm of weeping was over. There’d be more, she knew, but maybe for the afternoon they would allow each other a reprieve.

  Leen stared at the outline of the truck. It had been a long time since she had driven it, and looking at its familiar shape, she remembered those times when she was alone, smoking and humming, enjoying the freedom, before it had all happened the way it did. She wanted to drive that way again, someday. But not that truck.

  Leen asked, her father still holding her hand, “Are there Frisians in Germany?”

  “Maybe,” Pater said. “Probably. Friesland was once quite big. There were Frisians before there ever was the Netherlands. Maybe before there was Germany.”

  He looked at her as if he knew what she was thinking. He took the cigarette out of his pocket. He lit it just the way Issac had, with the flick of the thumb. He’d probably taught Issac first before the technique was passed to her.

  He acknowledged none of this. Instead he said, “You should’ve been taught that in school.” He stood, his knees grinding. He dragged on the cigarette, then passed the cigarette to her.

  He said, “Come, let’s clean up.”

  25.

  Every day began the same way: footsteps creaking slowly above Leen and Renske’s heads as they ate breakfast, the groans and pops in the joints of the upstairs creaking in time with Pater’s knees and hips as he slowly led Mem down the stairs. He said it was to make up for so many lost days, that a husband and wife ought to start the day together, but Leen knew his accompaniment was for different reasons. In the days and weeks after Issac’s burial, despite Pater’s return, Mem refused to get up. Pater reminded her that she had a house to run and children to watch. But Mem protested that her children were grown. She was of no use anymore. “Renske, she is not grown,” Pater said, but Mem replied that Tine was more her mother than she was, had been for a long time.

  And so, after that first argument, Pater pulled Mem out of bed and he all but forced her down the stairs. Leen had watched, as did Renske and Tine, who hadn’t yet left the house, as he took her slack frame step by step, her feet dragging in a scuffling protest. He admonished her to move, his tone belying the anger despite his gentle words, “Come now, Aafke, let’s just get downstairs. To the kitchen. For some breakfast and a good strong cup of coffee.” By the time Mem reached the bottom of the stairs her head rested on Pater’s shoulder. She begged him to let her go back to bed.

  “You okay, Renske?” Leen whispered to her.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m not a little girl.” She was seven. But Leen reminded herself, her younger sister had seen a lot.

  And then Renske turned eight. And nine. Ten. Still, every day, it was the same. Mem no longer protested, she didn’t scream as she had one day, only weeks after May 8, that she didn’t want to set foot downstairs again, nor did she shut her eyes mid–conversation as if she had suddenly left her body. But each morning Mem waited for Pater until he took her arm and there was not a day that Pater did not offer it.

  Even now, moss collecting on her brothers’ gravestones in autumn, drying to a cracked brown layer in summer, Leen burned with impatience at this new tradition. She thought of Pater’s habit like starting an old car. Sometimes, you just wished it would start on the first try; sometimes you just wanted to bang your fist on the wheel. Once in the kitchen, Mem moved around their home slowly, and the house was never quite like it used to be, especially with Tine’s attentive hands gone. She was ready to give birth in a few months’ time. No one asked her after names. Wopke if it was a girl, Woppie for short; Issac if it was a boy. Her husband, Hilke, their first hired hand, was allowed to name the second child, when that time came. But Tine had spoken firm. Pregnancy had made her bold, her round, hard stomach filling her with confidence as her fingers danced with needles, thread, and fabric in preparation for the baby. Leen liked Tine this way.

  Pater never spoke it aloud, but Leen knew that he thought leaving for America would be good for Mem, for all of them, to start over. Even if Tine and Hilke could not come right away, they’d join them after the baby was old enough to make the journey. Make a new life.

  Leen couldn’t wait.

  America rejuvenated Pater, filling him again with the twitchy De Graaf energy. He rose before 5 a.m., jumped ou
t of chairs, and his face was constantly flushed, as if the endless brainstorming sent all the blood to his head. He instructed Leen to scribble notes as he thought of new ideas and tasks and then he stuffed them in his pockets. This is what they would do: travel first to England, then Ireland, and then New York; from there, they would take the long train to Chicago, where their cousins would pick them up and drive them to Racine, Wisconsin. The family of Cornelius Visser, Pater said. His sister’s husband. Leen barely remembered them. They had lived just outside Leeuwarden and had left years before the war began, when there was no exodus for North America, not like now. As their sponsor, Cornelius would help them get jobs, find a nice house to rent, even arrange their train tickets.

  “He says there is plenty work,” Pater said. “Plenty.” He rubbed his hands together as if he was about to dig into a meal.

  “What kind of work?” Leen asked.

  “Factories, farms, everything,” Pater said. He must’ve seen Leen’s face fall. “Poppie, you can work in an ice cream winkel if that’s what suits you. You can do whatever you like.”

  For Pater’s benefit, she smiled. But she knew already she wouldn’t work anywhere like that, nothing with a broom or a wet towel dripping on her hands. She wasn’t even sure she wanted dirt under her nails. Wasn’t the point to start over, do something new? She wanted to see this country Amerika, where everyone had such white teeth, where there were forests and mountains and round hills randomly placed on the land, nothing like the uniform, unbroken line of the dike. She wanted to feel wind without salt in it and she wanted to see the landscape change. Whatever job she had, she would be behind a wheel. And when she drove, she would drive fast.

  It became a sport to predict what day the immigration papers would come, and the postman never reached their door; he was always greeted at least halfway down the road. Others waited there too. It seemed half of Wierum was laying plans. Most had selected Canada, Ontario or the western coast. Jakob Hoffman was waiting to hear if Toronto would have him. He’d lost nearly his entire family, save for a sister, but she’d been so small when they were sent out of Amsterdam that she hardly remembered him and wished to stay with her “family” in Groningen.