by Mal Peet
All of it, the gathering and preserving and storing away, was to insist that a future existed and that somehow they would reach it and live in it. And Marijke could not quite believe this, nor want it. Not back then, not in the silent house where even the most familiar things — a chair, a cup, her bed — filled her with an unbearable sense of his absence. She had lived the year numb and mechanical, waiting to heal.
Yet despite everything — to spite her, even — the slow wheel of the seasons had revolved once more. Now, on this cold Sunday, with the easterly wind whirlpooling in the yard, she and Oma were again busy with preserving pans and glass jars, investing all over again in a future. This time, though, she wanted it, and wanted to believe in it.
And because of this she was afraid. Tamar had left for Apeldoorn the previous day, cycling away from her up the track with his left arm held high in a long farewell. Exactly — exactly — as he had done a year earlier, a brief six hours after the signal from London. This dreadful overlapping of then and now had frightened her so badly that her legs had lost their strength; she couldn’t have run after him.
They were cutting the bruised flesh from windfall apples. Later they would stew them and store them in jars sealed with a thin layer of wax. She cut through an apple that seemed unspoiled but found that something had burrowed to the core. Some tiny thing, some worm, had left a thin black tunnel that her knife had sliced in two.
When she heard the tinny chirrup of the bicycle bell, she thought — just for two heartbeats — that it might be him. “A week,” he’d said. “Maybe a bit less.” But all the same, perhaps . . . Then she looked at the clock and remembered.
She opened the door just as Dart raised his fist to knock. They both laughed a little awkwardly. She put her hands on his arms and kissed him lightly on both cheeks. This seemed to surprise him; he even stumbled slightly in the dark hallway.
“My God, it’s cold,” was the first thing he managed to say. The wind had brought tears to the corners of his eyes.
“Your face is like ice,” she said. “Come into the kitchen and get warm.”
Oma had already shifted the kettle onto the hottest part of the stove, and now she came and kissed him too, pulling on the lapels of his coat to bring his face down to hers.
“It smells wonderful in here,” Dart said. “Apples, bread . . . and what’s that other smell? Blackberries? You’re very busy.”
“It’s an important time of year for us,” Marijke said. “A lot depends on it. Especially this year. I don’t imagine there’ll be much to buy in town this winter. The Germans will take everything before we can get near it.”
Oma put three cups of tea on the table and then acted something out, her head drawn back into her shoulders, making herself furtive.
Marijke translated. “Oma says that this year we will have to hide our food in different places all over the farm too. In case the German thieves come again.”
Dart turned sharply to look at her. “Again? They’ve been here before?”
“Just once. Early in the year.”
“And you’re expecting them to come back?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know what to expect. For all we know, the next soldiers who knock at the door might be Americans.”
He had a sudden vision of Marijke opening the door to a smiling American GI, embracing him. He blinked and it was gone. “That would be nice,” he said. “God, I can hardly bend my fingers around this cup. They’d better thaw out. I can’t send Morse with these claws.”
“They’ll be fine,” she said. “You’ve got nearly an hour before your schedule, is that right?”
“Ah, yes. You don’t mind me getting here a bit early, do you?”
“Of course not. Don’t be daft. Anyway, the good thing about that room in the little barn is that it hardly ever gets really cold. I used to spend hours up there when I was a kid.”
When he had gathered up his bag and coat, she followed him to the door. In the hall she said, “Tamar got off okay, by the way.”
“Ah, right,” Dart said. “I was going to ask.”
Operation Pegasus began a week later. Early in the morning of Sunday 22nd October, small groups of British soldiers began to emerge from their hiding places in the Veluwe. In borrowed civilian clothing they crept from woodsheds, chicken runs, cellars, a cemetery, a church. They followed their Dutch guides — many of them women and children — south, towards the Rhine. Not all could walk unaided.
On that same morning, two platoons of the German Wehrmacht arrived noisily in the village of Bennekom, west of Arnhem. When a large enough number of inhabitants had been herded together, the German officer in charge stood on top of his armoured car and told them that they had two hours to get their stuff together and leave. The village was being evacuated. It would be considered officially empty at eleven o’clock. He didn’t actually say that Bennekom would be smashed and burned at five minutes past eleven, but the villagers got that impression. A woman with two children hiding behind her skirt asked the officer where they were meant to go. The German laughed and jerked his thumb over his shoulder at nowhere in particular. There. Somewhere else.
The expulsion of these people, who had already been picked clean by war, was a godsend for the British escapers. Instead of having to take their chances in open country and on deserted roads, they passed unnoticed among the straggled columns of the homeless. Damaged and dishevelled, anxious and carrying little or nothing, they looked entirely Dutch. The occasional German patrols who idly surveyed the refugees paid them no particular attention.
So it was that by early afternoon one hundred and twenty men had made it to their rendezvous, a logger’s hut in the woods somewhere between Ede and Arnhem. They were greeted by two members of the Dutch resistance and two British officers, a lean brigadier and a madly cheerful young major. The brigadier was disguised in an ill-fitting black suit; he looked like an undertaker who’d fallen on hard times. The major wore rough farm clothes and carried, incongruously, a furled and bullet-torn umbrella. One of the Dutchmen was a heavyset bearded man called Banjo. The other was Tamar.
After a wait that seemed longer than it was, a boy with a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder appeared on the rough track that led to the hut. He stuck two fingers into his mouth and whistled, piercingly. Soldiers who had been sitting beneath the trees got to their feet. Three elderly trucks laboured into view. Powered by charcoal gas, they wheezed and farted horribly as they manoeuvred awkwardly in the spaces between the trees. Each truck carried a great many empty sacks, as well as several containing potatoes.
The brigadier and the jaunty major divided the men into three groups and got them piled into the trucks. The drivers heaped empty sacks over the bodies and scattered potatoes on and around them. Tamar climbed into the passenger seat of the lead truck and shook hands with the driver, a middle-aged woman in overalls whose grip was as rough as tree bark. She wrestled the gear lever into first, growling, “Get in there, you bugger.” The truck gasped and lurched forward; there was some muffled English swearing from the back.
Tamar had little doubt that they would run into German checkpoints before they reached Renkum. He’d talked it through with Banjo and the British officers.
“Banjo has achieved the impossible, getting these trucks for us,” he said. “And the trucks themselves are our ace card because the Germans will think we must be some sort of official convoy. There’s a good chance that they’ll just wave us through. There’s also a chance that they won’t.”
“Understood,” the brigadier said. “Then what?”
“Well, I’ll try to bluff them. What’s in our favour is that no one in his right mind would be taking three truckloads of British soldiers down to the Rhine in broad daylight.”
“Absolutely,” the jolly major agreed. “We’ve got craziness on our side. Terribly sensible, the Germans. Gives us the edge.”
“So,” Tamar went on, “if we are stopped, the drivers will keep the engines running. I�
��ll do the talking. Your men must remain perfectly still, even if the backs of the trucks are opened. But if anyone starts to pull the sacks away, they must yell and scream and attack the Germans without hesitation. I know they have no weapons, but that’s what they must do. Is that all right?”
“Fine,” the brigadier said. “It’s what they’d do anyway, I imagine. I’ll go and have a chat with them.”
As it turned out, there were two checkpoints. The first one, a solitary German private with his motorbike propped against a tree, made a gesture that urged them to hurry onwards, rather than stop. The second was a different matter.
Peering ahead, Tamar saw a single figure on the road: an SS trooper cradling a machine pistol. He reached over and touched the driver on her arm, and she slowed. A second German wandered casually onto the road, lifting his rifle from his shoulder. Just off to the right was a wrecked cottage, a vehicle of some sort parked in front of it.
Tamar looked back; the other trucks were close behind. He stuck his arm out of the window and signalled to them to slow down.
The German with the machine pistol stayed where he was. He gestured to the man with the rifle, who approached Tamar’s truck.
“Your papers, please.”
The driver dug into her overalls, produced the little booklet, and passed it through the window. The German scanned it and gave it back. Then he stepped backwards and looked at the other two trucks. In German he said, “What are you carrying and where are you going?”
She shrugged and pulled a face that said, I don’t understand.
Tamar leaned across her, shoving his identity papers towards the soldier. “Potatoes,” he said. “Kartoffeln.”
The German gazed at him. Tamar saw the exhaustion in his face and made a gesture: Come here, look. He opened the door and stepped down into the road. At the corner of his vision he saw the other German do something with his machine pistol and then lift it. The trooper with the rifle walked cautiously down the blind side of the truck; while he was doing so, Tamar looked over at the half-destroyed cottage and saw the snout of a heavy machine gun poking from the fractured shutters of an upstairs window. He walked to the back of the truck and fiddled noisily with the bolts. He lowered the tailgate, speaking in German, cloaking the words in a rough Dutch accent.
“Potatoes, see? It’s been a good year for them, all things considered. This truckload, ja, is for Arnhem. The other two for headquarters at Apeldoorn.” He nudged the German. “Nothing but the best for them, eh?”
The German stared into the truck, straight at part of an exposed foot that he didn’t seem to see.
Tamar reached past him and hoisted a half-full sack onto the road. “Take these,” he said. “Why should those bastards have them all? Here, take them.”
The young German looked at the sack, then at Tamar. “You speak good German,” he said.
“Of course!” Tamar straightened, stood stiffly like a man on a parade ground. “I was for two years in the Reich. A guest worker. Machine tools, in Essen, until my lungs packed up. You know Essen?”
The young German grimaced. “A shithole,” he said. “I’m from Heidelberg.”
Tamar smiled and shrugged. “Ah, yes. Heidelberg. They tell me it is very beautiful.”
The German looked at Tamar and then at the slumped sack of potatoes. “All right,” he said, “I’ll take these. You can piss off.”
“Thank you,” Tamar said. “Danke.”
He walked slowly back to the cab and climbed in.
They got to the woods above Renkum when the weakened sun was almost at the foot of the sky. The British emerged from under the sacks and spilled out. They at once began to change into their uniforms, which they had carried in their bundles and bags. They carefully packed the borrowed civilian clothes and heaped them into one of the trucks, then moved away, forming quiet groups in the deep shade of the trees. When the trucks had gone, Tamar called together the funereal brigadier, the mad young major, and Banjo, and they walked through falling gold and russet leaves to the edge of the wood.
Tamar indicated markers as they went. “This is the way we will come tonight. Remember this, the big beech tree. Remember this ditch. Here, the wooden posts with wire attached.”
They came eventually to a broken gate where the woods ended and the bare fields stretched down to the Rhine.
Tamar handed his binoculars to the English brigadier. “There’s a German position way over to the left, just where the river veers south. See it? Just beyond that small group of buildings. Now, track all the way to your right. The group of trees throwing the long shadow. Got that?”
“Ah, yes,” the Englishman said. “There’s another one. They look well settled in. What are they, do you know? Mortars? Heavy machine guns?”
“That sort of thing,” Tamar said. “Now I want you to look this way a bit until you see a more or less straight line running down towards the river, through those hedges.”
“Got it.”
“Good. That’s a drainage ditch. It’s over a metre deep, and there’s water at the bottom of it in some places. That’s our route. It’ll get us to within a hundred and fifty metres of the bank. After that, there’s an open meadow, and we’ll just have to take our chances.”
The brigadier handed the binoculars to the major, who studied the ditch. “Looks about, what, a kilometre or more long?” he said. “Hell of a distance to crawl.” He sounded as though he was looking forward to it.
“We’ll set off at ten,” Tamar said. “That should give us plenty of time. The hardest part will be the walk we’ve just taken, through the woods. It’ll be pitch dark by then, with any luck, so single file all the way, okay? Each man must keep hold of the man ahead of him. Anyone who gets lost stays lost. We can’t go looking for strays.”
“Fair enough,” the brigadier said. “What’s the drill when we get to the far end of the ditch?”
“You stay where you are; I’ll go down to the river. At midnight, I flash a V signal with a torch, which will tell your people over there to launch the boats. When they reach this side, I’ll flash the same signal to you. Please be watching — I don’t want to have to do it more than once. Then you climb out of the ditch and walk straight ahead to the water, where I’ll meet you. No running. Concentrate on staying together.”
“Understood,” the brigadier said. He turned to the major. “Right, Digby. We’d better get back and brief the men.”
“We’ll be along in a minute,” Tamar said. “There’s a couple of things Banjo and I need to talk about.”
When they were alone, the two men stood staring out at the fading landscape.
“It’s bloody chancy,” Banjo said.
Tamar looked up at the sky, where gathering sheets of cloud were streaked with a bruised red.
“Darkness and surprise, that’s pretty much all we’ve got going for us.” He grinned at Banjo. “And our luck’s good. We got this far.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think we would. So, how do you want to do it? Are we going to be in the ditch with these guys, or d’you want me to cover one side and you the other?”
“I’ll walk beside them, about ten metres this side of the ditch. You’re going to stay here.”
“Like hell I am,” Banjo said.
“You’re going to stay exactly here,” Tamar said. “Because if anything goes wrong, the only thing these men can do is try to get back. And they’ll need someone to cover them this end.”
“Tamar, listen to me. What if you bump into a patrol down there? On your own you don’t stand a chance. I’m coming with you.”
Tamar said, “If it comes to a firefight in the dark, it’ll not make much difference if there’s one or two of us. We’d be as likely to shoot each other as anyone else. No, you’re staying here. That’s an order.”
It was the first time he’d used those words. They sounded false and pompous, a quotation from somewhere. He half expected Banjo to laugh in his face. Instead, he shrugged and turned away to look back at t
he river.
“Come on,” Tamar said. “Let’s go.”
But the other man put his hand on Tamar’s arm. “Look,” he said. “You might be right about our luck.”
Tamar turned and saw that in the chill dusk the river had begun to conceal itself. It was exhaling a fine mist, like human breath on winter air. Already veils of vapour blurred the far bank, and the low dark horizon seemed to float on shifty nothingness.
Nightmarish hours later, Tamar was down there in the hanging fog, alone, close to the invisible water. The strain of listening and staring into darkness had made his body ache and stiffen. He had simply, stupidly, not realized how noisy the business would be. Coming through the woods, the blundering and cursing file of British soldiers had sounded like a stampede of blind beasts. Then he had walked alongside the ditch, probing the night with his Sten. If there had been a German on the same track, they would have banged their faces together before they saw one another. And from the ditch there had come a continuous scrabbling and splashing and murmuring; a march of vast rats that must surely have been audible from any distance.
But, amazingly, they had made it. And now the British were slumped in the ditch behind and to the right of him, and he was wondering what the bloody hell was happening. He had lain on his belly in the dreadfully empty meadow and flashed the signal across the water. He had estimated that it would take fifteen minutes for the assault boats to cross the river; twenty-five had passed now, and there was neither sign nor sound of them. He had moved a short distance westwards because the current ran that way and the boats might have drifted; he had stumbled against the stump of a wall, the remains of some small waterside building, and stayed there in its ruins. The river mist seemed to contain some sort of light within itself, because he could distinguish it from the surrounding night; but both were impenetrable. Rigid with anxiety, he repeated the signal, knowing that the timetable was unravelling. The English major might come wandering along, like a schoolmaster wondering what his boys were up to. Banjo might take it into his head to come down. The British soldiers, lying bruised and wet and lost in a drain, might do anything. Shit! Where were the boats?
