Tamar

by Mal Peet

  He snapped the ring shut and wiped his nose again. Tamar slid his ring onto the second finger of his right hand; Dart found that his fitted best on the third finger of his left hand, where normally a wedding band would be worn.

  “How’s that feel?” Lennon asked. “Comfy?”

  The door opened, and an RAF man lugged two parachutes into the room.

  Looking at Dart, Lennon said, “We need a signal from you at 0648 hours tomorrow confirming that you are both in place. We must get that signal. Otherwise, we’ll have to assume that things have ballsed up. If that happens, you are out there on your own. And I think you know what that means.”

  He stood up. “Right then. Flight Sergeant McKay here will help you on with your chutes and check them for you. Take-off in how long, Rory?”

  “Soon as we’re on board, sir.”

  “Super,” Lennon said, rubbing his hands together. It seemed he had something more to say, but he paused awkwardly. “Um . . . Any letters, at all?”

  Puzzled, Tamar said, “Letters, sir?”

  Lennon hid his discomfort in his handkerchief. He busied himself with his nose and then said, “Well, you know. Some of you, some of your colleagues, have left letters with me. For me to deliver. To loved ones, nearest and dearest, that sort of thing.”

  Tamar and Dart looked at him blankly.

  “No? Fine. Excellent. That’s it then, I think.” He held out his hand, and Tamar and Dart got to their feet and shook it in turn. “Good luck. You’ll be fine; I know it.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Tamar said.

  Lennon picked up his briefcase, buttoned his coat, and left. Outside, he began a long bout of violent sneezing punctuated by curses, all clearly audible inside the shed.

  Two hours later the farmworker and the doctor were semi-rigid with cold and numbed by noise, so they were startled when they looked up and saw Flight Sergeant McKay leaning over them, supporting himself on the steel ribs of the plane.

  “We’re about to cross the Dutch coast. The skipper will start to bank and weave to avoid antiaircraft fire in about five minutes. You’ll get chucked about a bit. Try not to puke, okay?”

  They nodded, dumb.

  McKay leaned closer. “Did Lennon give you a spot of whisky apiece? Aye, I thought so. He pays for it out of his own pocket, you know. Now would be a good time to take it. I’ll be back in a while. All right?”

  They nodded again. McKay went away and the plane began to lose height. Bubbles of pain formed inside Tamar’s ears. Then the world began to rock and buck and tilt.

  Some time later McKay came back, paler in the face, followed by a crew member the agents hadn’t seen before. The containers, metal cylinders the size of corpses, were stuffed with guns, ammunition, medical supplies, radios, explosives, food, and money. The two airmen began to free them from their fastenings and slide them along the parachute line towards the hatch. The sound of the engines wavered, and the plane tilted, then straightened. The two RAF men hauled the hatch door open; working very fast, they shoved five containers out into the howling dark.

  Almost immediately the Stirling banked steeply. Dart and Tamar, strapped into their seats, were tipped backwards at a forty-five-degree angle. Whisky-flavoured vomit rose in Tamar’s throat, and he forced it back down. The plane levelled, then banked again; Tamar and Dart lurched forwards. Tamar felt that his guts had come loose from their moorings. His breath came out of his lungs in ragged gasps. Seeing his terror, Dart reached across and gripped him by the forearm.

  Then McKay was signalling urgently. The two agents unclipped their belts and stumbled across the jolting steel floor. McKay hooked their chutes to the line and checked the clasps. The sixth container went out, then Tamar was at the hatch. The inrush of air sucked the breath out of him. He gaped at McKay, who was holding up his right hand with the fingers outstretched: wait. The hand closed. Then one finger lifted, then two, then three. McKay’s mouth formed words that Tamar could not hear.

  Then he was where nothing could be felt or heard other than the dwindling sound that might have been the plane or his own screaming. Drowning, he tried to swim, but he had forgotten how. He thought he saw below him a pale eye reflected in broken glass. Then something that might have been God grabbed him by the collar.

  Dart heard McKay shout, “Go, Tamar, and good luck!”

  Then he was himself braced at the hatch, and next he was free of everything. Like Jonah, he had been in the belly of the beast for a long time, and now this was beautiful. It was not like falling. He stretched out his arms, and the air ran through his fingers like water. He was almost disappointed when the jerk came and he heard the unfolding bang of the parachute.

  He looked down and saw his legs swinging out of control above a swaying world of dark and complicated mirrors. He saw, too, Tamar’s chute sink like a jellyfish into the water of a deep well, then shrivel and fade. At almost the same moment, he realized that the black scribbles that divided the mirrors below him were trees with hard fingers waiting to seize him. He began to haul desperately at the lines of his parachute.

  Tamar had not been able to drift clear of the surface of the water that rushed up to meet him. He was already fumbling with the harness release when he felt the cold shock of contact; he was terrified the chute would drag him under. He was thigh deep before he felt something more or less solid — a mass of sludge and submerged branches — beneath his feet. With a moan of relief he got free of the chute and saw it settle onto the black water like a gigantic water lily. Then he began to struggle towards the denser shadow of the bank. His flailing right arm struck something hard, and he grabbed at it. It shifted in the water. A boat? Yes.

  He was pulling himself along it, looking for where it must be moored to the bank, when he heard someone speak.

  “Welcome to Holland, Tamar.”

  He looked up. On the bank, distinct against the lesser darkness of the sky, was the unmistakable silhouette of a German soldier. The long field-service coat, the jackboots. Cold moonlight glinted from the steel helmet and the snout of a submachine gun.

  Even before fear took hold, Tamar was filled with a great and bitter disappointment, a sense of ridiculous failure. He stood away from the boat, feeling broken, and raised his arms above his head.

  A short bark of laughter, then the dark figure spoke again. “Put your hands down, man. Don’t be fooled by the fancy dress. It’s Koop de Vries. I’m in charge of your reception committee.”

  Blindly, and in squelching boots, Tamar followed Koop along the labyrinth of paths through the marshes. Koop murmured greetings to dark figures holding Sten guns or rifles. The night was full of muffled business. Shadows moved and spoke in low voices. At a rough landing stage, two containers were being unloaded from a punt. Someone swore; someone else laughed.

  “Wait here,” Koop said, and dissolved into the night. Then he came back, a pale grin in the darkness. “We’ve got Dart,” he said. “He’s fine, more or less. This way.”

  Dart materialized out of the dark, and Tamar embraced him. “Are you all right?”

  Dart let out a long shaky breath, an attempt at laughter. “Yeah. No. Christ! I’m hanging from a tree, and I look down and there’s this bloody Nazi hanging on to my legs. I think I died. I really think I died for a second or two.”

  “No, you didn’t,” said the Nazi. “You gave me a right kicking. I’m going to have the grandmother of all black eyes in the morning.” He reached out to shake Tamar’s hand. “Eddy Dekker. Glad you made it.”

  “Hello, Eddy. Are there any more of you SS men waiting to scare the crap out of us?”

  “Just two. Oskar’s keeping an eye on the transport. Wim is helping carry your stuff up.”

  Koop was twitchy. “We need to get moving,” he said. “The sky’s clearing. There’s getting to be too much light for my liking.”

  In single file the four men emerged onto a narrow causeway between reed beds. Beyond the reeds, on both sides, a glittering track of moonlight lay on black wat
er. They were very exposed now, and Tamar was relieved when the causeway began to rise towards a long line of willows. The agents followed Koop and Eddy through the trees and found themselves standing on a roughly paved road. A rich stink hung on the night air.

  They were at the rear of a convoy. The last two vehicles in the line were big horse-drawn trailers piled high with manure. Up on the nearest one, two figures were pitchforking the stuff over one of the containers.

  “Don’t worry,” Koop said, “that’s not the way you two will be travelling. Come on.”

  He led them past the trailers. The horses stood silently, their faces in nose bags, their hooves muffled in sacking. Next in line was an ambulance, of sorts. It was, Dart now saw, an ageing pickup truck that had been given a canvas roof, a coat of white paint, and a stencilled red cross. He was horrified. It wouldn’t have fooled anyone.

  Koop saw the look on his face and laughed softly. “I know what you’re thinking. But this is a one-hundred-percent genuine ambulance with one-hundred-percent genuine licence papers. It belongs to the asylum, and you’re damn lucky to have it, if you ask me. Eddy will drive. Me and Tamar will be in the car ahead. If we stop for any reason, do exactly what Eddy tells you, right?”

  Koop moved on. Eddy squeezed into the cab of the ambulance. Dart reached out and put a hand on Tamar’s shoulder. “Good luck.”

  “And you. See you at the farm.”

  Dart might have been about to say something else, but Koop called impatiently and Tamar moved up the road to join him.

  Koop made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “Our transport for this evening,” he announced.

  “Dear God,” Tamar said.

  The vehicle at the head of the line was an armoured SS staff car. Camouflage paintwork, big black-and-white crosses on the front doors, swastika pennant flying from the wing.

  “She’s a huge great pig of a thing, isn’t she?” Koop said, grinning like a skull.

  “How . . .” Tamar tried again. “Where the hell did you get this? Where do you keep it?”

  Still smirking, Koop said, “Do you really want to know?”

  Tamar looked at him, considering both the question and the smirk. “Perhaps not. Not for now.”

  Heavy footfalls came out of the darkness: an SS sergeant and a trooper, shouldering their Stens, hands outstretched to shake Tamar’s.

  “Oskar.”

  “Wim. Good to meet you. Shall we go?”

  Wim climbed into the driver’s seat, and Oskar sat beside him. Tamar got into the back with Koop. In the confines of the car, he became aware of the rotten smell rising from his sludge-filled boots and filthy dungarees. Koop fussed with the skirts of his long coat and then settled back with a satisfied sigh, as if he were an elderly aunt being taken for a Sunday drive.

  “There,” he said. “Three gallant SS men taking a naughty terrorist to headquarters for a chat. What could be more normal?”

  It had a name — Sanctuary Farm — but the few people who knew it called it the Maartens place. For a long, long time the farm had clung to the landscape by its fingertips. It had no right to be there, so far from the good farming country to the east. At its back was a wilderness — the Veluwe, a great expanse of harsh grassland, bog, gorse, and flinching trees. But they had been stubborn, those outcasts or runaways who first settled there and refused to run any farther. Their soil was poor, but they drained it and fed it and hung on. Loneliness and occasional starvation couldn’t shift them. Plagues and wars passed them by. Eventually they acquired the name Maartens.

  Seasons and centuries came and went. Then in 1724 the clan had a rush of blood to the head, a burst of energy that lasted two generations. What brought it on was the building of a new canal. It joined the wealthy towns to the north with the IJssel River and passed within two kilometres of the farm. The Maartens were slow-speaking but not slow-thinking. They got busy, and businesslike, and got what they’d never had before: money. The barges that carried their pigs and sheep to market returned laden with bricks and lime and sawn timber. The Maartens hauled it all back to their farm and went on a building spree.

  They built, first, a barn with a thatched roof that sloped down close to the ground. They gave it big double doors like a gaping mouth. It had two storeys; in winter the animals lived on the ground level while the Maartens, or some of them, lived above, snug in the breath and odour of their livestock. They called this building the big barn, and when it was finished, they immediately set about another. It was pretty much identical to the first but slightly smaller, so they called it the little barn. The two buildings formed two sides of a courtyard.

  The Maartens paused to get their breath back, which took twenty years. Then they demolished their ramshackle medieval cottage and built a sensible, plain-faced brick and thatch farmhouse. It formed the third side of the courtyard. These three buildings remained the heart of the farm forever after. Later generations added bits and pieces: sheds, a porch, a washhouse. In 1899 the family imported a huge, elaborate Belgian stove and rebuilt the kitchen around it. This alien extravagance was the talk of the district for many weeks. In a last spurt of energy, the Maartens built a dairy; they started milking their cows in there two months before the start of the First World War.

  Dart caught his first moonlit glimpse of the place when Eddy followed the German car down a gently sloping track. The shaggy thatch of the three main buildings put him in mind of beasts sleeping in a field. At the bottom of the incline, Wim and Eddy jolted the cars into gear and headed for the black mouth of a great brick barn. At the last possible moment, the headlights of the staff car came on, and both vehicles passed safely through the doors and rolled to a halt.

  “Wait,” Eddy said.

  Dart heard the scrape and slam of the barn doors. Eddy got out of the ambulance, so Dart did too. He looked back, hearing heavy bolts sliding into place. An oil lantern threw grotesque shadows onto the walls. The person at the doors was a young man, perhaps a boy. He wore a black coat, rubber boots, and a cloth cap too big for his head. Dart was expecting a greeting but didn’t get one. The boy stared past him, lifting the lantern. Dart saw a smooth face dominated by large dark eyes, eyes that closed briefly when Koop and Tamar climbed out of the staff car. Now Wim and Eddy switched on big electric hand lamps and began to unload the boot of the staff car.

  Amid the jittery shadows, Koop said, “Tamar? We’ll stack everything here in this stall and chuck straw over it. How long do you need to set up, Doc?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Dart said.

  Tamar took the lantern from him and said, “Ten minutes. Fifteen at most.”

  The boy opened a small door cut into the main doors, and Tamar and Dart followed him through it and along the yard to the little barn. Inside, the boy lit a second lantern, then led them up a wooden staircase and along the length of the upper storey. In the swaying light, Dart could just see that the space on either side of the aisle was divided by wooden partitions into small rooms or pens. Ten paces from the end wall, the boy stopped and reached above his head, feeling along a beam. A trapdoor swung down from the ceiling. Tamar stretched up, groped, pulled down a ladder. He climbed up, taking his lantern. Dart heard him say something like “Pah!”

  “What?”

  “Cobwebs. Wait a second. Okay, come on up.”

  Dart climbed into a room tucked under the thatch. Much of the floor space was taken up by junked and dusty furniture. Tamar had stood the lantern on an ancient dressing table with a blotched mirror. Now he set an upturned chair on its feet and placed it against the table.

  Turning to Dart he said, “I sent my last transmission from here almost exactly a year ago. I never expected to come back.”

  “How does it feel, being here again?”

  Tamar’s eyes shifted to the yellow light shining up through the trapdoor. He seemed about to answer, then merely shook his head. “Let’s check the equipment.”

  He went to a lopsided chest of drawers that was shoved into the angle of roof and
floor and dragged it a little way into the room. On his knees, he rummaged in the exposed thatch and produced a small tan suitcase, a car battery, and a metal box wrapped in lengths of green and black wire. He set all three things on the table. The suitcase transceiver was thick with dust. Tamar wiped it off with his sleeve and opened it.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to the beams overhead. “See those six hooks? For your antenna.” He unwound the black wire and handed it to Dart. “The battery should be charged up. Now, are you all right to check this out while I go and see how Koop’s doing?”

  “Sure,” Dart said, unravelling the power leads. “Shouldn’t take long. I’ll come and find you.”

  The boy led Tamar down to ground level. At the foot of the stairs, he turned to face the agent and stood his lantern on a ledge. Having done that, he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Eventually he folded his arms and shoved his fingers under his armpits. He looked up at Tamar; below the peak of the cap, his eyes were dark pools reflecting the lamplight.

  “They told us only ‘Tamar.’ I prayed it would be you. I begged God to let it be you.”

  Tamar said, “There was no way I could let you know.”

  “No. But when I saw you get out of the car with Koop, I almost fainted.”

  Tamar let go of the stair rail and came down the last step. They were very close now.

  “Has anything changed?”

  Tamar smiled. “Many things.”

  “No. You know what I mean. Between us. Do you —”

  “Yes,” Tamar said, and something inside him opened, something he’d kept locked for a long time. “I still love you. I haven’t stopped thinking about you. It’s been like living with a part of my body missing.”

  He reached out and gently removed the cap, releasing a fall of dark hair that came almost to the narrow shoulders, framing the pale oval face in which the eyes now closed. He put his hands under the hair, cupping her head. He tried to say her name, but his throat was tight and he had to try again.