Tamar

by Mal Peet

  “What was all that about?” I asked him.

  He hesitated, then said, “Your grandmother says that people are stealing from her room. She has been storing food up there, but it keeps disappearing. She says she is worried that there will not be enough to get through the winter after all.”

  Which was very odd; but he didn’t want to say any more about it.

  Then there was the business about the birds. We usually sat with Gran in the sun lounge. It was nice out there; you could almost imagine you were in a smart hotel. One day, though, Gran flatly refused to go. She was frailer by then, but she struggled like mad when we got near the door. She insisted on staying in the dayroom. We had to sit on three uncomfortable chairs next to the door to the hall, as far away from the windows as possible. Grandad was upset and edgy, because he hated the dayroom. So did I. It was too hot, the TV was usually on loud, and there were always several stroke victims staring at you out of their poor lopsided faces and forgetting to leave the room before they went to the toilet.

  Anyway, we got settled, Grandad holding one of her hands and me holding the other. She wouldn’t speak or do anything except watch the windows for quite a while. Eventually, gently, Grandad got her attention and she started talking. She talked more than usual that day; not that I understood a word she said. But I thought I heard her use the word crying several times. On the way home I asked Grandad about it.

  “Crying?” he said, absently. “No, she didn’t say anything about crying.”

  The next time I was there she refused to go out into the sun lounge again. The same performance. So we sat in the bloody awful dayroom, and again I thought I heard her use the word crying several times. Actually, it was more like cryin’, without the g. Afterwards, on the way to the bus stop, I asked him again. He didn’t seem to have heard me, but I knew he had, so I waited. After a bit he said, “She didn’t say crying. She was talking about kraaien. The Dutch word for crows.”

  “What about them?”

  Again it took him a long time to answer. “Marijke says that there are kraaien in the garden. She says they are huge and walk like men. That’s why she won’t go out into the sun lounge. She says that these crows are waiting to trap her. Or me.”

  “God,” I said.

  “She says that some are black and some are grey, and they have big shiny beaks. She thinks some of them have human faces concealed under their beaks, but she’s not sure. They also have shiny black legs and their breasts are speckled with silver. She says they pretend not to talk to each other, but they do. They have secret ways of talking.”

  I suddenly felt hopeless and helpless and brimful of tears. I looked down, watching my feet move left-right-left-right on the pavement. When I looked up again, Grandad was no longer beside me. He’d stopped walking. He had both hands thrust into his coat pockets and was staring at the ground.

  I turned to face him and said, “What does it mean? Do you know?”

  He sniffed. “Yes, I think so. I think I’ve worked it out. She is talking about the Gestapo. The Gestapo and the SS.”

  I must have looked blank, so he said, “Nazis. Marijke is seeing Nazis in the garden. She is going backwards. She is remembering what we have tried so hard to forget. Christ help me.”

  He looked very old and very scared, like he had that morning outside the flat, watching the car take his wife away. Like a man waiting for a bullet to hit him. It was a February evening, and the passing traffic sloshed rainwater over the kerb.

  A month later he was dead.

  On Sunday 15th October there were strangers among the congregation gathered in the severe and unadorned country church west of Apeldoorn. Nobody commented on them — they knew better — but there were sidelong glances, especially at those who only murmured the hymns or, worse, stayed silent during the spoken prayers. When the strangers lingered to speak to the pastor after the service, the regular churchgoers understood; they went quietly home, buttoned up against the cutting wind.

  There were eight of them, these strangers, and the pastor led them into the vestry. They sat on wooden chairs that had ledges for hymn books built into the backrests. They formed a rough semicircle that had to be adjusted when they were joined by a man and a woman who had stayed outside during the service, suffering the weather because they were Roman Catholics. These two were on foreign ground; this was a sternly Protestant village where the Pope was seen as a second cousin of the devil himself.

  Not all of the pastor’s guests knew one another, so there was an awkward round of introductions in which most of them gave only their first names, some of which were false. Koop de Vries was one of only two people who gave their full true names; he spoke it with a kind of surly defiance.

  Tamar began the meeting by reading out a personal message from Prince Bernhard. (When Dart had deciphered it, he’d presented it to Tamar with a mocking bow, like a saucy courtier in a Shakespeare play.) The message began with a loving greeting from the prince and his mother, Queen Wilhelmina; they both thought constantly of the suffering and courage of their subjects. It went on to say that despite “recent setbacks”— Koop snorted at this veiled reference to the Operation Market Garden disaster — an Allied victory in Europe was inevitable and the liberation of all the Netherlands was at hand. The prince was certain that the great Dutch virtues of hope, strength, and patience would sustain his people until that longed-for moment arrived.

  Tamar paused briefly and glanced around at the men and women he was supposed to unite. Some of them, including the pastor, were visibly impressed and heartened. Felix, the aristocratic local leader of the OD, looked as though he was struggling against the urge to stand to attention and sing the national anthem. The KP people, Lydia and Johan, gazed back at him stony-eyed; both were devout communists. Koop had clasped his hands behind his head and seemed to find the ceiling more interesting than anything Bernhard had to say.

  Tamar cleared his throat and continued. When the great day came, the prince said, and the Allied armies surged into Holland, there would be vital and dangerous work for the resistance to do. For this reason, two things were of the utmost importance. First, he urged all resistance organizations and groups to unite under the newly formed BS, which he, Bernhard, had the honour to command. From now on, resistance activities should be coordinated by the BS commandant in each zone. He realized that this would involve difficult adjustments and compromises —“Ha!” Johan muttered — but he begged his “valiant countrymen” to see that cooperation was the only way forward at this crucial period of their history.

  Second, the prince urged all organizations to concentrate on keeping their networks intact and in a state of readiness. “Opportunist actions” that would provoke Nazi reprisals should be avoided.

  And that was as far as Tamar got. It was Jaap Smedts, the other freelance agent in the room, who interrupted. He’d been fidgeting for some time.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘opportunist actions’? What other kind of actions are there? We see an opportunity, we act. That’s what we do. That’s what resistance means. Listen: in the last two years alone my group has derailed three Nazi trains, two bringing heavy armour in, one taking loot out. We’ve ambushed five convoys and blown up an arms dump and two of their wireless posts. All opportunist actions, and all bloody good ones, if you ask me.”

  “No one is saying they weren’t,” Tamar said, “but —”

  “But we must look to the future,” the pastor now insisted. “Which, if I may say so, is what we in the LO have always tried to do.”

  Koop groaned audibly, but the pastor was not deterred. He had a very personal interest in the future, in the shape of two Jewish teenagers who had lived in his loft for the past three years, not to mention an English paratroop sergeant who had been hiding in his barn for a fortnight.

  “So it seems to me,” he continued, “that what Prince Bernhard recommends makes good sense. We have all made sacrifices. Some of them have been noble and courageous” —and here he nodd
ed at Jaap Smedts —“and perhaps necessary. But I’d like to remind you all that every Dutch death is a German victory, and that at the present time thousands of Dutch lives are hanging by a thread. With liberation so close, it would be madness to cut that thread by indulging in reckless and provocative activities.”

  That was too much for Koop. He thrust his narrow head forward like an axe. “Reckless?” he spat. “Sacrifice? What would the LO know about that, for Chrissake?”

  The pastor flinched and opened his mouth, but Koop kept going. “I’ll tell you what turns my stomach, and that’s being told what to do by a man who scuttled off to England as soon as the Nazis turned up. Who the hell does Prince Bernhard think he is, appointing himself head of the resistance? Apart from anything else, the bugger is half German. He’s got a brother in the bloody German army, for God’s sake.”

  Felix got to his feet. His moustache writhed on his lip like a threatened caterpillar. “Damn it, man, that’s treason in my book! How dare you!”

  Lydia and Johan rolled their eyes and smirked at each other.

  Tamar raised his hand. “Gentlemen, please! Felix, please sit down. Can we —”

  But Koop hadn’t finished. “And while I’m on the subject, and with all due respect to our new commandant here, he’s also been out of the country for over a year. It’s us who’ve stuck it out, risking our lives day in and day out, who should have the main say in who does what. We know the turf. As far as I’m concerned, the job’s the same as it’s always been, and that’s killing Nazis.”

  Jaap, Lydia, and Johan all nodded vigorously at that, and Tamar thought, Thanks a lot, you bastard.

  A small bespectacled man who’d called himself Henri now spoke. “I note,” he said, “that Bernhard’s message suggests that the Allied advance will take place soon and that German defeat is inevitable. But recent events don’t suggest that at all. The Germans don’t look whipped to me. So what does ‘soon’ mean? And does the prince speak with any authority? I get the impression that the Brits don’t take him very seriously.”

  Felix bristled again, but Tamar got in first. “The message comes with the full authority and support of Supreme Allied Command.”

  “Ah,” Lydia said. “The all-conquering Americans.”

  “Look,” Tamar said, “can we get a couple of things straight? It doesn’t matter to me if the BS is under the command of Prince Bernhard or Santa bloody Claus. The fact is, it has the full backing of the British and the Americans and the Dutch government in London: I can assure you of that. And I didn’t come back here to throw my weight around, either. Koop is right — most of you know the zone better than I do. Which means I can’t do my job without your cooperation and advice. I think some of you have got things the wrong way round. I’m not here to tell you what to do; I’m here to help you work together, to get you what you need. Surely you can see that supply drops, communications — everything — will be more efficient if we are united.”

  He looked around the group. Some met his gaze; others didn’t.

  “And I hear what you say, Henri. I can’t tell you when the Allies will cross the Rhine. It might be in a week, or a month. We might have to get through another winter before they are ready. But they will come. There can be no doubt of that. And the Nazis will go. What worries me is that they might decide to leave behind them a country of fires and corpses. They are already trying to starve us. They are destroying our sea defences and flooding our farmland. They are blowing Rotterdam to pieces. They are rounding up more and more of our people for forced labour in Germany, and the truth is that few, if any, will ever come home. Reprisals for what they call ‘terrorist attacks’ are getting more and more extreme. Look at what they did over in Putten a couple of weeks ago. You must have been able to see the fires from here.”

  “Hang on, hang on.” It was Koop again. “Are you saying we should go to ground and do nothing in case the Germans take reprisals? Is that what you came here to tell us?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. Not necessarily. But it’s something we should discuss.”

  Several people began to speak, but Tamar soldiered on. “What I am saying is that we need to save our energy and our resources for when the big battle comes. So what we need to do now is seriously consider the risks involved in any operation. If we are all dead or locked up when the Allies attack, what use are we to anyone?”

  “But —”

  “And,” Tamar went on stubbornly, “we need to think very seriously about the question of Todeskandidaten, the death candidates. We must ask ourselves if shooting up a truck or blowing up a railway track is worth the deaths of ten or twenty of our comrades.”

  “You m-might like to know, Christiaan, that we already do a certain amount of f-f-finking about that.” This was Maurice from the RVV. Anger tended to worsen his stammer.

  Maurice’s colleague, a tight-belted and bright-eyed woman calling herself Zena, said, “My brother is a death candidate in Amersfoort. If he were here, Commandant, he would tell you that he is not afraid to die for his country. What he has already suffered is perhaps worse than that. I am not happy that you choose to speak on his behalf.”

  God, he was weary. Suddenly very weary, and impatient. Not the best emotional mix for a negotiator. To Zena he said harshly, “Do you know what Patton once said? Patton, the American general? He said, ‘You do not win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making sure that some other poor bastard dies for his.’”

  Jaap Smedts surprised Tamar by laughing and slapping his knee. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s very good. I’ll remember that.”

  “It’s not only good; it’s true. It’s the simple truth about war. The survivors win. I can see no point in dead people being liberated.”

  The pastor cleared his throat. He had something to say on that subject. But Johan the communist beat him to it.

  “This is all very interesting,” he said, “but we cannot make decisions as a group until we actually are a group. Which we are not. We are several groups. If we agree to become a single organization called the BS, then we can act — or not act — together. But we have not yet agreed to unite under the command of the BS.”

  “So let’s take a vote on it,” Felix suggested. “Or is that a bit too democratic for you chaps?”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Lydia said. “The KP is a collective. Johan and myself are here as its representatives, not its leaders. We cannot cast a vote on a matter of such importance without consulting our comrades.”

  Tamar looked up at the one window that illuminated the room. It was small and bullet-shaped, crisscrossed with bars of lead, and the light within it was flat and metallic. He had a long way to go. He thought about lost souls gathering at a dark river. He thought of Marijke, how beautiful her body was inside her shapeless clothes.

  It was the third Sunday in the month, so the parish curate had walked out to the asylum — the Germans had taken his bike, and he damned them to hell for it — to hold a morning service. In the kitchen, thawing his hands around his cup, he inhaled and said, “Sister Agatha, this is real tea! Incredible! I know better than to ask where you got it.”

  “It fell from the sky,” Agatha told him, quite truthfully.

  “Ah,” the curate said. “Great is the power of prayer.”

  They gathered in the dayroom. The hymn singing was ragged, to say the least, which is not unusual when some members of a congregation are singing to tunes known only to themselves. Dart did not sing. He was completely tone-deaf. When he could not avoid situations involving singing, he opened and closed his mouth silently, out of consideration for others. Albert Veening spotted him doing it and grinned across at him.

  When most of the worshippers were seated, the curate gave a short sermon. He took his text, he told them, from Saint Mark’s Gospel: “If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” He had a good deal to say about the perils of division at a time “when this, our house, our nation, is still besieged
by the powers of darkness.” There were some groans of alarm from his audience. And, the curate said, there were other kinds of division. Perhaps most dangerous of all was the divided self, in which the force of good and the force of evil were equally powerful, where love and death were locked in never-ending battle, when mind and soul were torn and sundered. Dart thought that this was an insensitive choice of topic, given the state of the congregation. He drifted a little — he hadn’t had much sleep — so he didn’t quite catch the bit about the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which makes us whole.

  They spoke the Lord’s Prayer, then sat more or less quietly while Sidona recited it a second time, her upturned face clenched in concentration. The curate blessed them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and Dart wondered how much ahead of schedule he could arrive at the farm without it seeming . . . odd.

  For as long as Marijke could remember, the house had grown smaller for the winter. When the ploughing was finished, or just after. Her grandparents had called the parlour and the sitting room “the summer rooms,” although traces of darkness lingered among the glum furniture even in sun-dazed August, when baffled flies fumbled at the windows. There had always been that ritual moment in autumn when Oma removed the wedges that held the doors to those rooms open; she would stand with her hand on the brass doorknob and look into each room, and sigh and then close the door. Winter. The sad clack of a lock. The retreat into the warm kitchen, the gathering in to the wintering heart of the house.

  Marijke had done that to herself, a year ago. Tamar had left in autumn, and she had closed her doors. Then she and Oma had busied themselves with the seasonal work. They had packed potatoes gently into sacks, layered carrots and beetroot with sand in the big wooden boxes in the cellar. They had gathered mushrooms and dried them above the stove, where they curled into themselves like human ears. They had picked and bottled blackberries and bilberries from the heath, purpling their fingers and lips. Marijke had cycled to town and bought — a miracle, this — a block of sugar the size of a small loaf. She had wrapped it in a cloth and hammered it to pieces on the washhouse floor and used it to make jam from the last crop of damsons.