Tamar

by Mal Peet

  He heard them before he saw them. A faint splash like a rising fish, and then another. Peering forward, he saw patches of darkness take shape in the mist. He moved out of the ruins and went towards where they might land. He heard a louder splash, and then a man was standing blackly in front of him. A suppressed voice, English.

  “Hello? Ride across the river?”

  Tamar tried to speak but found that his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. He sorted himself out and said, “Wait. Hold on.”

  He turned and Morsed the torch towards the ditch. Nothing happened at first, and then he heard a whispering that paused and resumed and then became a continuous rhythmic noise. A column of amorphous shapes appeared and grew in the darkness, and the whispering became the sound of men moving steadily through long wet grass.

  The invisible man who stood beside him said, “Brilliant job, son. Ruddy brilliant. Thought we’d seen the last of these blokes. You all right for smokes?”

  In the hidden room at the Mendlo asylum, Dart paced back and forth between the couch and the blacked-out window. He stopped to check that the equipment was ready, despite knowing that it was. He broke open the Smith and Wesson revolver and removed the cartridges, turned them in his fingers, and put them back again. He adjusted slightly the positions of the notepad and pencil. He sat on his chair and fingered the precise spot on his cheek where Marijke had kissed him good-bye and carefully re-created the precise texture of her lips. He paused, frozen, when he could not remember if she’d had her eyes closed at that moment or not. The fact that he could not remember suddenly depressed him. He felt so tired and so incredibly bored that the effort of staying in the tiny room almost overwhelmed him. He went to the couch and opened the medical bag. He spilled the Benzedrine tablets onto the desk next to the transceiver and counted them, twice. There were seventy-two, and he wondered why. Because it was six dozen, of course. The bloody British, he thought, with their dozens and feet and inches and pounds and ounces and their twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. Always out of step. Always in some awkward world of their own. He poured some water from the jug into the stained cup and washed two of the pills down his throat. It couldn’t do any harm.

  She would be asleep now. In a nightgown, nightshirt, her underwear? Curled into herself? Sprawled on her back? He sat down again and lit another cigarette. Twenty-three minutes before he could lose himself in the hiss and warble that the headphones would feed into his head. He perched the cigarette on the base of the oil lamp and felt inside the lining of his coat for the slithery sheets of code.

  There were plenty of people in the beautiful and damaged medieval town of Deventer who deeply disliked Ruud van der Spil. On the face of it, they had good reason to. Not only was he an outsider, an Amsterdammer, but he was prospering. His bar, the Village Constable, was the only one still open for business in November 1944, and business, for Ruud, was good. Famished townspeople trudging home through the rain and early darkness were enraged by the piano music and the incredible aromas — frying pork chops, schnitzel, garlic, beer, coffee — that drifted out into the night air.

  Ruud was doing good business because he was doing Nazi business. His bar faced the town hall on the opposite side of the wide expanse of the marketplace, and the town hall was the headquarters of the Nazi Party for the province. It was also the regional office of the Gestapo. Ruud’s customers were almost exclusively German officers. After a hard day’s work at the office or in the interrogation cells, they liked nothing better than to stroll across the square to unwind in the Village Constable. They liked the loose talk and the clatter of plates and the pools of candlelight inside the wreaths of smoke. They liked the food and the two big-breasted girls who served it. In fact, they liked the place so much that Ruud hadn’t had an evening off for two and a half years. There were people in the town who wondered why the resistance didn’t put a bullet through his head.

  These people didn’t know that Ruud was the source of the mysterious food parcels that were delivered each week to the hofje, the almshouse for old people. They did not know that he was the anonymous provider of the gifts of money that had kept a dozen fatherless families alive for the past several months. They had no idea that the bar’s profits also financed the underground newspaper Truth. And they would have been astonished if they’d known that the paper was produced in Ruud’s cellar, a mere hundred and twenty metres from the town hall.

  “The thing about the Nazis,” Ruud said, “is that they’re paranoid, but they never see what’s right under their noses. If they did, Hitler wouldn’t wear that bloody silly little moustache.”

  “But what about the noise?” Tamar said. “When you’re actually printing, I mean.”

  The two men were in the Village Constable’s narrow kitchen, Tamar clutching a mug of coffee and shivering slightly in his wet clothes.

  “It’s not that loud,” Ruud said. “It’s a pretty small machine, and it’s in good nick. It’s right at the back of the cellar, and we’ve built a wall of crates and blankets around it. We used to run it in the mornings, but that was too risky. So now we do it late at night.”

  “What, while you’re still open? When the Germans are up here?”

  “Yeah. Three quarters of them are drunk as skunks by ten o’clock. I make sure of that. They make a hell of a noise, banging away at the piano and singing. That’s when we run the press. You know that damned Horst Wessel Song they love? We can print fifty copies while they blubber their way through that one. Here, let me top up your coffee and we’ll go down.”

  At the foot of the cellar steps, Ruud tugged at a dangling string and a bare electric bulb lit up. “Hey, how about that? Your luck’s in. The power is on.”

  He led Tamar over to an ink-stained table. A metal-shaded lamp was clamped to it. It too lit up when Ruud tried the switch. “Incredible,” he said. “It won’t last, though. Candles and matches in the drawer over there. Paper and pencils too. Now, is this okay for you? I assume you know what you’re going to write.”

  “More or less. When are you printing the next edition?”

  “Depends. There’s an old guy comes in lunchtimes, supposed to be the cleaner. He used to be a printer before the war. So I clean the place while he’s down here setting up the type. If he can do it all today, we’ll run it tonight. Write nice and clearly, by the way. His eyesight’s not what it was. Now, how about some breakfast? Bread, eggs, sausage?”

  “God, yes.”

  “I’ll bring it down. Ten minutes.”

  Tamar sat and considered his task. He and Dart — and Marijke and Trixie — had worked on the article throughout the previous afternoon, and he had the text in his head. More or less. Dart had brought with him the latest signals from London and Delta Centrum. They weren’t surprising, but they were shocking. Berlin’s latest tactic was Nazism of the purest kind: logical, ambitious, and insane. No longer content with rounding up a thousand here, a thousand there, they were going to eliminate working men from Holland entirely. The plan had the darkly poetic name of Operation Rosebranch. It worked in two ways.

  First, posters went up all over towns and cities inviting volunteers to become “honoured guest workers in the Reich.” Such guest workers would be comfortably housed and well fed. In addition, their families in Holland would get preferential treatment: extra rations, winter clothing, and coal, as well as half the workers’ wages. A surprising number of men had volunteered. Tamar’s article in Truth was going to be a passionate plea for others not to do the same thing.

  “How can they be so bloody stupid?” Dart had asked. He’d brought with him an abridged version of a report by a Dutch clergyman who had somehow managed to talk his way into a guest workers’ hostel just across the German border. The priest had found an unheated wooden shed in which two hundred and fifty men were dying of hypothermia, starvation, and dysentery, lying in their own shit and vomit.

  “It’s not just stupidity,” Trixie’d said. “People are desperate for s
omething to hope for.”

  “Same thing,” Dart had said.

  Trixie had gazed up at him for a second or two, then said, “And not only that. A lot of these people have nowhere left to hide. Maybe they’d rather go voluntarily than be forced. Or shot.”

  Because that was the second phase of Operation Rosebranch. If there was an unsatisfactory response to the poster campaign, the SS would drag ten, twenty, thirty men from their homes and shoot them dead in front of their families. To encourage the others. It worked. Three and a half thousand men had been taken from Hilversum on 24th October. A fortnight later, fifty thousand — fifty, dear God — from Rotterdam. So there were three options: go, hide, die. Tamar’s task was to persuade the readers of Truth to go for the second of these options.

  Ruud came down the steps with a tray. He set it down on the table, glancing at what Tamar had written: a single sentence, crossed out. “Having trouble?”

  Tamar sighed. “The first words are always hardest.”

  “Last words can be a bugger too,” Ruud said. “Anyway, bon appétit.”

  “Thanks, Ruud. This looks fantastic.” Tamar looked up and forced a smile. “By the way, does Truth have a crossword?”

  When Rosa was settled, Marijke said, “Is Ernst all right, do you think?”

  “I doubt it,” Trixie said. “He lives with old Dr. Veening, six nuns, and two dozen head cases in a place that gives you the creeps just looking at it. He’s up half the night, most nights, with his head plugged into a radio set. He smokes too much; he doesn’t get enough to eat. He’s got nowhere to go except Pieter and Bibi’s, and if he gets there safely, he goes up into the roof and wonders if German detector cars are closing in on him. No, I shouldn’t think he’s all right.”

  “He comes here too.”

  “Yes, he comes here too. He comes on the bike in the rain with his arse clenched tight because he’s scared. I know, because I do the same thing. And when he gets here, you send him to the barn.”

  “I don’t send him to the barn, Trixie. He has to go there.”

  “You send him before you need to, and you know why. You’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

  “Trixie!”

  “Come on, Marijke. Don’t give me that.”

  “Okay, so he’s lonely. Doesn’t he look at you in the same way?”

  “No,” Trixie said, “he doesn’t.”

  “Would you like him to?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.” Trixie smiled. “He’s quite goodlooking, don’t you think?”

  Marijke shrugged.

  “Of course you do,” Trixie said. “Him and Christiaan, they look a lot like each other.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I do.”

  For a short while there were only soft sounds in the kitchen: the clock’s slow, dull tock, Rosa’s breathing, the rain on the window.

  Trixie said, “When’s he next coming here? Day after tomorrow, isn’t it?”

  “Er, yes. I think so.”

  “He’ll be soaked again, if it stays like this. Have you got any spare clothes you could dig out for him, so he could change into something dry?”

  It was as if Marijke hadn’t heard; then after a moment or two she said, “Some of Opa’s old things might fit him. I suppose I should have thought of that, shouldn’t I?”

  Trixie shrugged. A heavier blast of rain drummed against the window. “He still doesn’t know, does he?”

  “Who doesn’t know what?”

  “Oh, Marijke, please. You know what I mean. Ernst still doesn’t know about you and Christiaan.”

  Marijke looked away. “No. He doesn’t.”

  Trixie shook her head. “You can say it’s none of my business, if you like, but —”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “But I think it’s weird. Nuts. I mean, why hasn’t Christiaan said anything? Is it against some sort of regulation, what you two are doing? Is he afraid that London would recall him if they found out?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s not that, anyway. I think Christiaan thinks it would . . . get in the way.”

  Trixie wondered what that was supposed to mean, exactly. But she didn’t ask. Instead she said, “It’s not fair, though, is it?”

  “Fair?”

  “On Ernst. It’s not fair, keeping him in the dark. Maybe I should tell him.”

  Marijke leaned forward. “No. You mustn’t. Please.”

  “But —”

  “I’ll talk to Christiaan about it again. Please don’t say anything. Not yet.”

  “Suit yourself,” Trixie said. “But Ernst isn’t stupid. He’ll realize sooner or later, assuming . . .” She shut up, shocked that she had been about to say what should never be said. She couldn’t meet her friend’s eyes.

  Marijke said, “Assuming they live long enough? That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?” She said it quietly, flatly.

  “Marijke, I —”

  “It’s all right. It’s what we all think, anyway. It’s what we never stop thinking about.”

  Trixie stood up and went to the window. “This bloody rain,” she said. “We’re going to get soaked going home.”

  “Why don’t you stay here tonight? It would be better for Rosa.” Marijke went over to Trixie and stood beside her. Seen through the streaming glass, the world outside looked warped and molten. “I’d like you to stay. I’ve started feeling lonely again since Christiaan came back. Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  Tamar put the pencil down and read through yet again what he’d written. The passion in it, the anger, still had a hollow ring. He’d told the paper’s secret readers that Operation Rosebranch was an attempt by the Germans to depopulate the Netherlands. That the Nazis, knowing defeat was inevitable, intended to leave the country crippled and castrated. He had described in brutal detail the conditions in which men who had already gone had lived and died. The promises made to guest workers and their families were a cruel ruse, an evil deception. He had repeated the pleas for non-cooperation broadcast by the Dutch government in exile. He had reminded his fellow countrymen — Dart had insisted on this bit — that volunteering to work for the Third Reich was a form of collaboration.

  Tough stuff, straight stuff. But it was hopeless. It was literally hopeless; there was no hope in it. The people who read his words would hear the emptiness inside them. The choices they faced were equally deadly: go and die; resist and die; or hide, dive. And dive into what? A black and bottomless well. A night sky, without a parachute.

  He sighed and added a last sentence: Do not doubt for an instant that the hour of our deliverance is at hand.

  Dart had not been told — and would not have believed — that it is possible to live in a state of constant fear and be bored at the same time. Boredom had not been among the dangers that the SOE had prepared him for. No pompous little officer had stood in front of his class and said, “Right, chaps, today we’re going to learn how to deal with a particularly nasty little situation that secret agents tend to find themselves in: being bored abso-bloody-lutely rigid.” It seemed to Dart this had been a serious gap in his training, because by the end of November boredom had spread a grey slime on his brain and on his soul.

  He’d recognized the early symptoms: a tendency for his attention to wander when Albert or Agatha spoke to him; bouts of tiredness that had nothing to do with his lack of sleep; finding himself in a room unable to remember why he’d gone there. He knew this was dangerous. His own life, and the lives of others, depended on his nerves being as alert as the trigger hairs on a flea, but the sheer awful dullness of his everyday life was beginning to blunt and numb them.

  There wasn’t much he could contribute to the work of the asylum. His aborted medical training was almost irrelevant. The lunatics didn’t know him or trust him, and trust was all that Albert and his staff had left to work with. So Dart stayed out of the way, or reduced himself to a fleeting, smiling presence, like a well-meaning ghost harmlessly haunting the endless cor
ridors. He began helping Agatha and the other sisters with the work in the garden, but the ceaseless November rain soon made even that pointless.

  He saw little of the dwindling winter daylight. At the end of his nocturnal radio watches he’d slip quietly back to his room through the dark murmuring house. Often, though, the steadily increasing doses of amphetamine that had sustained him through the night would still be working in him. At such times, he’d lie stubbornly rigid in his narrow bed, thinking of Marijke and trying to force her into his dreams. Then he’d awake to the terrible clamour of the alarm clock and groggily prepare himself for a transmission or a visit from Trixie.

  And all of this took place against a background of hunger, of an incessant obsession with food, food, food. Dart had discovered that a welcome side effect of Benzedrine was loss of appetite, but when its effects wore off, the need to eat was sharper than ever. And the constant talk of food, of remembered meals, of fantasy meals, sometimes made the lust for it unbearable. Each day, two of the sisters gathered up the ration books and set off for town. They returned hours later with pathetic bags of mouldy vegetables, sticky grey bread, sometimes a small chunk of greasy belly pork. And the occasional horror story.

  Sister Angelica said, “You know Paul Kloos, the carter? His horse died in the street, the poor old thing.”

  “Paul or the horse?” Albert asked.

  “I beg your pardon, Doctor?”

  “You said ‘poor old thing,’ and I wondered . . . Never mind, Sister. What happened?”

  “Well, Mr. Kloos went off home to get help to carry the horse away, and when he got back . . .” Tears filmed the young nun’s eyes. “When he got back, the meat had been cut off both the poor creature’s back legs.”