Tamar

by Mal Peet

  “Take as much of this as you can carry. I suggest you leave some of it here, as a reserve. Take the bandages, though. And these.” He held out the brown bottle labelled ASPIRIN. “You know what they are?”

  Dart took the bottle. “Of course.”

  “Go easy with them, though. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Dart said, and put the bottle in his pocket.

  Tamar thrust his arm into the gap again and produced a fat wad of guilders. He handed them to Dart. “Money.”

  Dart riffled the notes and whistled. “Hey, I’m loaded. I’ve never had my hands on this much cash before.”

  “You’ll need it,” Tamar said, rummaging once more. “Sister Agatha will be having to shop on the black market soon enough, and it’s not cheap. Now, here’s a box of ammo for your revolver. And some tea. This is coffee. Can you get that lot into the bottom of that magic bag of yours?”

  “I think so.” Dart grinned. “Sister Agatha will think another angel’s arrived at the funny farm.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  Tamar jammed the boards back into place. “There’s more food and clothes and other stuff you should have. I’ll get Trixie to bring it to you a little at a time. Or you could drive the ambulance over, if you feel up to it. You can sort that out with Albert.”

  “Talking of Dr. Veening,” Dart said, “were there any cigarettes in the canister? He’s getting through mine like there’s no tomorrow.”

  Tamar laughed. “I bet he is. You’d think he’d know better, wouldn’t you? Anyway, there’s plenty.”

  The two men stood looking at each other as darkness filled the corners of the barn.

  Tamar said, very quietly, “I know what you’re thinking. It’s crazy, isn’t it? This. What we’re doing.” He laughed softly. “Like kids playing at shops: here’s your tea, Mr. Lubbers; here’s your coffee.”

  “Here’s your bullets; here’s your Benzedrine. Try not to get killed on the way home.”

  Tamar studied his friend’s dark eyes. “Exactly,” he said. “Let’s not get killed on the way home.”

  The lowering sun had spread a long narrow carpet of light on the barn floor. When they reached the edge of it, Dart stopped and said, “Tell me about Miss Maartens.”

  “Marijke? Tell you what?”

  “Well, you know. How come she lives here alone with her grandmother, for a start.”

  Tamar looked at the brilliant doorway. “Her parents are dead; she never knew them. They died within a week of each other when she was a few months old. The flu epidemic of 1921. Marijke shouldn’t have survived, but she did. Her grandparents brought her up. She’s lived here all her life.”

  “I thought she might be adopted, or something. She doesn’t look . . . well, she could almost be Spanish. Or Italian.”

  “I suppose so. There’s a story that the original Maartens were gypsies. Marijke rather likes the idea.” He took a step towards the light, but Dart had another question, the one Tamar had been expecting.

  “And there’s no husband, boyfriend, anything like that?”

  “No.”

  Dart looked at Tamar, raising his eyebrows suggestively. “Really? I find that surprising, don’t you? You’d think the local men would be like bees round a honeypot.”

  Tamar was brusque. “There’s a shortage of men in this country; didn’t you know that?” He tried to soften it into a joke. “Well, apart from the ones in German uniform.”

  Perhaps it was shame that made him consult his watch and say, “Look, it’s getting a bit late. Stay here tonight and eat with us. We’ll work out a reply to the London signal, and you can go back tomorrow after you’ve sent it. It’ll be safer.”

  “Sounds great. I’m bloody starving, as a matter of fact.”

  “Good. Come on.” Tamar stepped through the doorway and had to screw up his eyes against the late sun’s scrutiny.

  They ate in the kitchen, in the mellow light of a tall lamp. Beetroot soup with coarse bread, then rabbit stew with wild mushrooms, mashed potatoes, and cabbage. With some difficulty — the stove was cooling — Julia Maartens made pancakes and served them with jam. Dart had to force himself to eat slowly, heaping praise on the old lady’s cooking between mouthfuls. No one else spoke much during the meal, and it dawned on Dart that this must be a house of silence most of the time. Although Oma — he’d started to call her that because Tamar did — wasn’t deaf, Marijke frequently communicated with her wordlessly, using her grandmother’s system of signs and gestures and facial expressions. It was fascinating to watch, this speechless dialogue. And Dart noticed that Tamar was already starting to use it. He’d make a little gesture to tell Oma that something was delicious. He’d look at Marijke in a certain way, probably to check that she felt comfortable about having these two dangerous outsiders at the table. And she would reply with a quick smile, a tilt of the head. Dart decided that this meant, “Yes, I’m worried, but it’s okay. We are all in this together.”

  Dart was surprised that these silently shared conversations didn’t make him feel excluded. The lamp had turned the table into a warm yellow island, and he was on it with the others, not a castaway in the surrounding dark. He felt . . . safe. He had to examine the word in his head to make sure it was right, because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d used it to describe himself. And in time he would learn the wordless language that the others used. In time he would do that. Because he wanted very much to share the secrets of Marijke Maartens’s night-black eyes.

  When Marijke began to gather up the used plates and dishes, Oma lit a candle and went down into the cellar. A few minutes later she returned, carrying an earthenware bottle of jenever. She poured a good measure into four little blue-and-white china tumblers, making a small, shy ceremony of it.

  Tamar grinned at Dart. “This is in your honour, my friend. A special treat. I wouldn’t want you thinking that we live it up like this every night.”

  The gin burned going down, but it left in the mouth a trace of dark fruits gathered long ago. It also loosened Dart’s tongue. He found himself talking about the Marionette House and giving fairly hopeless impersonations of Pieter Grotius’s glove-puppet routines. Julia Maartens, in a flurry of gestures that Marijke translated, told them all how, on market days before the war, Bibi and Pieter used to put on little shows outside the shop to attract customers. Her hands danced invisible puppets on the tabletop.

  Later, after more gin, Dart told tales of the asylum. He got to his feet and enacted the lunatic called Gerard trying to trap cloud shadows with his boots. At one point he looked at Marijke and saw her smile. He felt as if he had conjured the sun to come out at night. He flopped back into his chair and lit a cigarette, then immediately launched into an account of the mad old lady who called herself Sidona and talked with angels. Tamar stirred himself and joined in. Soon the two men were inventing ever crazier conversations between the madwoman and various messengers from above. Julia Maartens listened to these fantasies with a sort of horrified delight. Once, when Dart and Tamar were being especially outrageous about the goings-on in heaven, she crossed herself. Dart noticed this; were the Maartens Catholic, then? Marijke’s eyes moved from one man to the other, fixing on Dart longer than on Tamar, watching him.

  The evening died gently, like a torch with an exhausted battery. The four of them sat slumped around the table, full of food and laughter, staring into the black-edged flame of the oil lamp. When Tamar stood up, the sound of his chair on the floor tiles startled them all. He put his hand on Dart’s shoulder. “Time for a security patrol, I think. You’ll need your coat.”

  Dart smiled up at him happily. “I’m not cold.”

  Tamar leaned down and spoke softly into his ear. “Get your coat. I think your gun is still in the pocket.”

  Dart struggled to his feet. “Ah. Right.”

  When he returned from the hall, the two women had gone and Tamar was lifting a Sten from the chest beneath the blacked-out windo
w. Dart was dumbfounded: how could things change so quickly? His spirits dimmed.

  They walked around the farm silently, checking the buildings. When they reached the bench outside the washhouse, Tamar sat, the Sten angled across his chest, his legs stretched out in front of him. Dart remained standing, his hands in his coat pockets, gazing at the moon. It was high and almost full now, with the familiar startled expression on its face. Below it, against the level black horizon, distant orange and white lights flickered and died, again and again. Faint booms reached them, soft as footfalls on a bedroom floor.

  “Good night for a drop,” Dart said. “Do you think there was that much antiaircraft fire when we came in?”

  “I don’t know. Must have been, I suppose.”

  Tamar’s voice was flat. Obviously this was not what he wanted to talk about. So Dart tried again.

  “I’m beginning to work out what Oma is saying. Sorry, that’s a stupid way of putting it. You know what I mean. I suppose that after a while it becomes natural. It must have been hard for Marijke, though, don’t you think? No parents. Growing up with a grandmother who couldn’t speak.”

  “She didn’t.” Tamar crossed his legs and clasped his hands over his knee. He didn’t look up. “Julia wasn’t born dumb,” he said. “She stopped speaking just over two years ago.”

  “Really? What was it, cancer or something?”

  “No. Shock, trauma, whatever the proper word is. Nothing physical, anyway.” He lifted his face now, looking past Dart, half his face in moon shadow. “This is something you should know, I suppose. The Maartens have relatives, sort of cousins, who’ve got a farm near Loenen. The two families always helped each other out at busy times of the year. So in late September ’42, Johannes, Marijke’s grandfather, took his wagon and one of the horses over there to help bring in the sugar beet crop. The field they were working in was a fair way from the farm, and by the time they’d picked up the last load, it was almost dark. Johannes and a boy who was on the wagon with him were about halfway back to the farm when they ran into a German ambush.”

  Dart waited, silent, while Tamar lit a cigarette, cupping the flame in his hands.

  “The Germans had intercepted a signal from London about an arms drop. They were reading all our radio traffic back then. Christ, they were sending most of it. But you know all about that. Anyway, they’d set up this ambush for the reception committee. They were expecting our men to move the guns on a couple of farm carts, probably under a load of sugar beet or whatever. Which is exactly what happened, as a matter of fact. But unfortunately for Johannes, the Germans had read their maps wrong. They should have been on a road three kilometres to the east. When Johannes came along, they didn’t bother asking questions. He took a bullet through the throat and another in the right lung. When the horse panicked, the boy was thrown onto the ground. He broke an arm and a leg. He was still screaming when a German shot him in the head.”

  “Shit,” Dart said. He reached over and took the cigarette from Tamar’s fingers, dragged on it, and handed it back.

  “Johannes’s cousin, and his daughter and another boy, were on their own wagon a way back down the road. They took off into the fields when they heard the shooting and screaming. The Germans didn’t find them; I don’t suppose they were that keen on looking too hard. They still thought they were dealing with armed members of the resistance, I imagine. The Germans didn’t find any guns, of course, so they cleared off, leaving the bodies where they’d fallen.

  “The three people hiding in the fields stayed there a long time. They suspected a trap, which was fair enough. When they eventually crept up, they found that Johannes was still breathing. They carried him to the farm, and the daughter cycled over here to fetch Julia and Marijke. It was the early hours of the morning before they all got back to Loenen. Johannes was still alive, just. They’d had to lie him facedown on a table with his head over the edge to stop him drowning in his own blood. He managed to hang on long enough to see his wife for the last time. He died ten minutes after she got there.”

  Tamar flicked the remains of his cigarette into the dark.

  “Marijke says it wasn’t until the following afternoon that Oma let them wash his blood from her hands and face. She couldn’t speak. When she still hadn’t managed to say anything a month after the funeral, Marijke began to think she never would. It looks like she was right.”

  Dart found that he had nothing to say either.

  Tamar stood up and slung the Sten gun round onto his back. “These people matter to me. More than they should, probably. I would like to think that I can protect them, but the truth is that by being here I’m putting them in danger. I suppose when Nicholson told me where I’d be based, I should have said no. But —”

  “But you don’t argue with Nicholson,” Dart said.

  Tamar nodded as though Dart had hit on the right explanation. “Exactly. No one argues with Nicholson. That’s right.”

  An hour later, Tamar stole barefoot into Marijke’s room. The curtains were pulled back, and the room was full of moonlight. She was sitting upright against the blue-white pillows, the blue-white sheet pulled around her; her face was divided in two by the shadow of the window sash. He sat sideways on the bed, then lowered himself so that his head rested on her shoulder. He felt the hardness of her collarbone against his cheek. She put her right hand to his face. They spoke in whispers.

  “You haven’t told him about us.”

  “No,” he said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Tamar sighed but didn’t speak.

  She said, “It was so difficult tonight. I thought you must have told him, but then I watched his face and saw that he had no idea. I wanted to touch you but your eyes kept telling me not to.”

  “My love, I’m sorry.”

  “Oma actually told him, did you see that? And Ernst didn’t understand. He thought she was still talking about the puppet shows, and I didn’t translate. She looked so . . . confused.”

  “Marijke, I —”

  “Is it against the rules, our relationship?”

  He let his breath out: a sigh, almost a laugh. “Probably. I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you trust him?”

  “Of course I trust him. Of course I do. It’s not that.”

  She turned and let his head fall gently onto the pillow. She looked down at him, leaning on her elbow. “But this is all about trust, isn’t it? Are you afraid that if Ernst knows about us, he won’t be able to trust you? He’ll start to think you’d put me first, rather than him?”

  And he wondered how he could have forgotten how clever she was. Sooner or later she would work out what he was actually afraid of. It wasn’t exactly a matter of trust, or lack of it. It was something more dangerous than that: envy. In English just a little word, but in the sound of it there was something green and grasping and wormy.

  He said, “I just don’t want anyone — anything — to touch us. There are things I want to . . . keep out.”

  Later, when Marijke was asleep, he kissed her again and eased himself from the bed. Then, reluctantly, he went to the cold spare bedroom.

  Dart had fallen into deep sleep so quickly that when the nightmare woke him, he felt panicked and confused, completely ignorant of where he was. The strange gargling noise was coming from his own mouth, he realized. Someone had stabbed him in the throat with a pen and his windpipe was filling with black ink. He was so certain this had happened that his hand flew to his neck to feel for the wound. After a while, he was calm enough to realize that he was cold. He felt on the floor for his sweater and put it on, then spread his coat on top of the thin quilt. The gun slipped from the pocket and clattered onto the bare floorboards. He groped around for it and laid it on the cabinet next to the bed.

  Moments later there was a light tap on the door, then a creak as it opened.

  “Dart, are you all right?”

  “Yes, I . . . I’m fine. Really.”

  Tamar was merely a shadow deeper
than the others. “I thought I heard something fall,” he said.

  “The bloody pistol fell out of my pocket. Stupid of me. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

  “That’s okay. I’m a light sleeper.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing to be. In our line of work, anyway.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Good night.”

  Dart heard a floorboard creak. He did not hear Tamar’s door close. He must sleep with it open, Dart thought. And with his ears cocked, like a gun.

  Comforted by the thought, he was asleep again in less than a minute.

  From the West London Post, 12th May 1995

  TRAGIC DEATH OF WAR HERO

  An inquest yesterday recorded an open verdict on a man who died after falling from the balcony of his sixth-floor flat. William Hyde, 74, was found dead in the car park of Maris Towers, Hammersmith, on 19th March. The coroner, Dr. Rose Lambert, said that although there was some evidence that Mr. Hyde may have deliberately taken his own life, that evidence was not conclusive. Mr. Hyde may have been suffering from depression; however, there was no suicide note and a postmortem had revealed that he had been drinking.

  Mr. Hyde was Dutch by birth, but at the time of the Nazi invasion of his country in 1940 was a graduate student at Imperial College, London. He was recruited by the Special Operations Executive, a branch of the British secret services, and trained in sabotage and secret warfare techniques. He was parachuted into occupied Holland in October 1944 and became a key figure in the reorganization of the Dutch resistance, surviving the “Hunger Winter” of 1944–45, when thousands of his countrymen died of starvation. In the spring of 1945, his group was betrayed to the Gestapo, and he was forced to flee for his life with a female member of the resistance, who later became his wife. The couple escaped across the Rhine, under German fire, shortly before Holland was liberated.

  Mr. Hyde was awarded the DSO in 1946 and became a British citizen in 1947. He worked for the security services for five years and then joined the Post Office, where he enjoyed a distinguished managerial career. He was a leading member of the team that developed the computerized postcode system that has revolutionized mail delivery.