by Mal Peet
Albert slurped thin soup from his spoon. “There can’t have been much of it,” he said. “It’s the only horse in town the Germans didn’t bother to take.”
“I was talking to Father Willem,” Sister Hendrika said, “and he told me that two days ago the police were called to a house on Rose Street because the neighbours reported a terrible smell. When they went in, they found that the woman’s husband had died two months ago, but she’d kept the body in the back room because she was still using his ration book. She needed to, because her son-in-law was hiding in the cellar.”
The sisters shuddered and crossed themselves. Dart lost interest in the soup.
Dart’s trips to the Marionette House did little to lift his apathy. Just as Trixie had predicted, the guards at the Merchants’ Gate checkpoint paid him less and less attention. Now, when he wheeled Bibi’s heavy bike towards the barrier, the Germans didn’t even leave the shelter of the archway. They stood, shapeless in their grey rain capes, and watched him struggle through the gap. They gestured dismissively if he bothered to fumble for his forged papers, and Dart would plod past without even giving them a sideways glance. They had become as much a part of his routine as he had become a part of theirs. When he thought about it at all, Dart marvelled at the memory of the terror he’d felt on that first occasion, how he’d almost fainted with fear as he’d approached the gate. Sometimes the contrast between how he felt now and how he’d felt then filled him with unease and he would lecture himself sternly on the dangers of complacency. But then the grey wet tedium of his life would overwhelm him once again. Until the next time he saw Marijke.
In reality, Sanctuary Farm was no less bleak than anywhere else. Like its neighbouring farms, it was beginning to resemble a brick island in a sea of mud, and the dimly lit kitchen was the only warm room in the whole gloomy place. In Dart’s mind, though, Sanctuary was a magically bright oasis in a dismal wasteland. The ordeal of getting there only intensified the pleasure of arriving. Tamar had forbidden the use of the ambulance; there were now only ten litres of petrol concealed at the asylum, and they needed to be hoarded, in case of an emergency, until more could be stolen. So there was no option but to take the push-bike. The old waxed-canvas cape that Albert had given Dart was little protection against heavy rain driven at him by the easterly wind. He’d had to learn the trick of withdrawing into himself, of turning his body into a blind unfeeling machine that drove the cycle onwards. He would force himself to remain this numb thing until the moment Marijke opened the door to him and brushed his cheeks with her lips. Only then would he allow himself to feel the aching cold in his body, because it no longer mattered and because she might take pity on him.
On one particularly filthy day, she’d found him a set of dry clothes to change into. It was a small thing, a natural thing, to have done, but he was deeply touched that she’d thought of it. He stripped off in the washhouse and put on the heavy old work trousers and the polo-neck sweater. Marijke took his wet clothes and spread them on a clothes horse by the stove so that they would be dry by the time he left. This became a little ritual throughout those wet weeks, and the kindness of it made him almost dizzy. Putting on these other clothes made him feel that he was discarding one life — a false one, in which he had to wear a disguise — for another that was more real, more truthful.
Dart struggled to deny it, but he was glad that Tamar was away for much of this time. When they were both there, Marijke was definitely a little — what was it — edgy? Detached, somehow. That was understandable. After all, he and Tamar had business that often excluded her. And if Germans scavenging for food happened to turn up, having them both there would be hard to explain.
But there was more to it than that; he was increasingly sure of it. There could be no doubt that Marijke’s behaviour towards him had changed during November. He was not imagining it. She was warmer, more attentive. As well as the dry clothes, there were other small but exhilarating developments. When he arrived, she no longer made him something to drink and then went on with what she was doing. Now she sat with him and smiled at his stories about life at the madhouse or the details of Bibi’s latest dream menu. She was concerned that he was not eating enough and always made sure there was something warm for him before he set off on the grim journey back. And once, when Trixie was there, he’d seen the two of them exchanging sly girlish looks when they thought he wasn’t watching. There was no doubt that those looks had to do with him. He’d examined his memory of that brief moment over and over again, and he was sure. It had made his heart lurch. So it was not difficult to understand why there was a certain awkwardness when Tamar was there. She wouldn’t want to make the other man feel envious. She was far too kind.
Late in the morning of 6th December, in his bedroom at the asylum, Dart jolted awake from a Benzedrine nightmare in which large spiders with glass legs were walking on his face. The first thing he saw was Tamar grinning down at him. When the panic had subsided, Dart understood that the brittle jangling of the spiders’ legs had not been part of the dream. Tamar was clinking together two small glasses that he held nipped in the fingers of one hand. His face was dark with stubble that folded into creases when he spoke.
“Happy Sinterklaas, my friend.”
Dart licked his dry lips but was unable to speak straight away. He watched Tamar sit down at the foot of the bed and produce from inside his coat a slender-necked bottle of amber liquid.
“What’s that?”
“Only the finest French cognac that money can’t buy.”
“Bloody hell. Where did you get that?”
“It’s a Saint Nicholas’s Day present from our friend in Deventer. I just got back from there.”
Dart yawned and rubbed his face. “Oh, right. You were over there again, weren’t you? I forgot. How is Ruud?”
“Splendid.”
Tamar twisted the cork from the bottle and filled the two glasses. “Cheers,” he said in English.
“Christ, wait a minute.”
Dart groped on the floor beside the bed until he found a mug of water. He drank two big mouthfuls and put the mug down again. Then he chinked his glass against Tamar’s and took a swig. His mouth filled with fire and honey.
“My God,” he said when he could speak.
Tamar grinned. “Now, tell me the truth. Isn’t that the best cognac you’ve ever tasted?”
Dart thought about it while his chest filled with mellow heat. It seemed to shove the hunger down a level. “I think it’s the only cognac I’ve ever tasted,” he said.
Tamar laughed and leaned back against the iron footrail of the bed. He sipped from his glass and studied Dart’s face. “You look like you needed it,” he said. “You look rough, if you don’t mind my saying so. Have you been sleeping okay?”
Dart shrugged. “Now and again.”
“What about eating?”
“Now and again. But don’t talk about food, please.”
“Sorry,” Tamar said, “but that’s exactly what I’m going to do. No, wait — were there any signals last night that I should know about?”
“Loads. But nothing top priority.”
“Good.” Tamar drained his glass, murmuring with pleasure. Then he lifted his left foot onto the bed and began to unlace his boot.
Dart said, “Is it really Sinterklaas today?”
“Yep. Not that you’d know it. I imagine if Saint Nicholas did try to ride that white horse of his across the sky last night, he’d have been blasted to bits by German antiaircraft fire.”
Tamar grunted as the boot came off. He stuck his hand into it and pulled out the inner sole and the folded sheet of paper that he’d concealed beneath it.
“You know how British children write letters to Santa Claus telling him what they want for Christmas? Well, this is our letter to Santa. Except that our Santa is in London, not the North Pole.”
Dart took the paper. It was covered with Tamar’s tiny fastidious handwriting. The lines of items were separated by angled penc
il strokes followed by three-letter groups that Dart recognized as the codes for local resistance organizations. He scanned the list. There were, at a quick guess, two hundred requests. Of these, there were less than a dozen asking Santa for plastic explosives, ammunition, weapons, and radio equipment. All the rest were for basic food items, in very large amounts, and medicines.
Tamar said, “I had to bang a few heads together, but I’ve persuaded our bickering colleagues that staying alive is a fairly important part of the resistance effort. Even the hard cases like Jaap Smedts are having to admit that right now the greatest enemy we face is starvation. That tough bitch Lydia from the KP, bless her, backed me up by pointing out that the Germans are using starvation as a weapon, and that’s the way we need to look at it, as something we have to fight. So we’ve agreed — no more offensive actions until the new year, then we’ll review the situation. Instead, we’ll use all networks for food distribution. We’ve even agreed on where to store stuff in each area.”
He refilled his glass and topped up Dart’s. “Aren’t you impressed?”
“Er . . . yes. Yes, of course. Well done. What did Koop de Vries have to say about all this?”
“He wasn’t there, the awkward bastard. He’ll fall into line when he finds out that everyone else has. Cheers. Oh, and it’s stopped raining, by the way.”
Dart scanned Tamar’s list again. “This is a lot of stuff. It’ll be a big drop.”
“I know. We need to think about how we do it. That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”
“Do you think London will agree to all this? What if they say no?”
“You and I are going to send a signal they won’t be able to argue with. For a start, it’ll ask for twice this amount. I reckon they’ll feel obliged to send us at least half. You know how sentimental the Brits are about Christmas. So come on, you lazy sod, get your trousers on and we’ll go to your hidey-hole and write it. And we’ll add a few treats for ourselves while we’re at it. I reckon we deserve it, don’t you?”
Two days before the Christmas drop, Dart began work on the ambulance. It took half an hour of stomping on a leaky foot pump to get the threadbare tyres up to an acceptable pressure. The battery was flat, so he’d spent more than an hour in the hidden room pedalling the recharger, reflecting bitterly that if he’d been on the bike, the same amount of effort would have taken him to Marijke. It was not surprising that after five weeks of almost continuous rain the distributor and the HT leads were wet. Drying them with rags didn’t work, and he had to put them in the slow oven in the asylum kitchen. Later he had to do the same thing with the spark plugs, after he’d spent an hour getting the damn things free of the engine block and ripping two knuckles in the process. And after all that the engine still wouldn’t start.
Dart had been shocked when Tamar told him he would be taking the ambulance to the dropping zone. It was almost unheard of for WOs to be used in operations of this sort. But, as Tamar pointed out, getting eighteen containers sorted and transported to five different distribution points would require every vehicle they could lay their hands on. It would be the biggest drop ever made into this zone.
“Why aren’t you taking the ambulance?” Dart tried to make the question sound like a simple request for information.
“Because I’ll already be there.”
“Oh, right. But look, I don’t know the roads.”
Tamar said, “That’s why you’re going to have Sister Agatha riding shotgun.”
“What?”
“Agatha knows the area as well as anyone. You’ll be fine with her.”
“But —”
“But what?”
“Well, you know. Sister Agatha isn’t . . . she isn’t supposed to be involved in this. In what we do. Is she?”
Tamar considered the question. Then he said, “Would you like to be the one who tells her what she is and isn’t supposed to do?”
“Lord, no.”
“Very well, then. Now, if you get stopped on the way there, you say you’re on a mercy dash somewhere. You can sort out the story between yourselves. Make sure you’re wearing your white coat, by the way. And bring your bag.”
Dart lit a cigarette.
“When you get to the DZ, you and Agatha wait with the vehicles. Jaap Smedts’s guys will be guarding them. When the reception committee has sorted the containers, we load the stuff for the asylum and the farm into the ambulance and spread a mattress over it. I get in, lie on the mattress, and cover myself with a couple of blankets. I figure there’s less than a one in twenty chance of us running into a checkpoint, the route we’re taking. But if we do, you say you’ve got a patient in the back suffering from typhoid fever and you’re rushing him to an isolation ward here. Tell the Germans they’re welcome to check me over, but they’ll need to mask their faces. Ask them if they’re sure they’ve got access to vaccine back at their barracks because they’ll need a jab if they get close to me.”
Dart tried to imagine this scenario acted out on a dark road with German machine guns pointed at his head.
“And if they don’t buy it? If they decide to search us?”
“Then I’ll have to shoot them.”
Dart went to the small window in the wireless room and stared at the low moody sky, smoking.
“Okay?” Tamar said.
“Yes. I don’t know. Christ.”
Tamar looked at his friend’s back for a moment or two, then said, “Another good reason for Agatha going with you is that there are Germans who are still reluctant to shoot nuns. Maybe even some who think nuns don’t tell lies.”
Now, leaning on the bonnet of the stubborn ambulance, Dart realized that Tamar must have discussed this lunatic scheme with Albert and Agatha before he’d discussed it with him. And that was wrong, absolutely out of order. The bastard. He slotted the crank handle through the gap in the radiator grille and heaved again. And again. Bastard!
During the night the wind had swung from west to north. The morning was bright and bitingly cold; the puddles in the yard and the water in the fields glittered like shards of glass. Marijke was alone. Tamar had left for the dropping zone at daybreak. Her grandmother was still in the village of Loenen, where her cousin’s daughter was recovering from the difficult birth of a son. Marijke had nursed the stove back to life with tiny doses of wood, then gone out to see if any of the chickens had managed to produce an egg. Halfway to the barn she stopped, somehow aware that she was being watched. She felt the usual flash of fear, then turned.
A woman and a child stood motionless where the track from the road came into the yard. Marijke’s first thought was that they were ghosts. They were colourless, as if they had leaked all their blood. Their hair did not move in the wind. Their faces were all bones. The boy had what looked like a threadbare rug wrapped around his shoulders; the woman was supporting a bike with a warped front wheel that had no tyre.
“Can I help you?” Marijke said, and instantly felt absurd because it was something that a hotel receptionist might say.
The boy looked up at the woman as if expecting her to say something. When she didn’t, he looked back at Marijke. “Please. We have a good watch. We need some food to take home.”
She took them into the kitchen, and the woman started to lose consciousness just inside the door, perhaps because the room was a few degrees warmer. Marijke grabbed her by the slack of her coat as she fell and managed to get her to the sagging armchair by the stove, where she slumped with her eyes closed.
The child said, “Is she dead?”
“No. Your mummy isn’t dead. She’s just fainted.”
“She’s not my mum,” the child said. “I think she’s my aunt.”
Marijke slid the heavy kettle onto the hot plate. The woman did, in fact, look like a corpse, and Marijke felt panic rise inside her body. She turned to the boy. “You look terribly cold. Take those wet clothes off and stand close to the stove.” She lifted the rug off him, but the child didn’t move. She went to the cupboard and found
a tablecloth. “Here. Wrap this around yourself.”
Still the child didn’t move. Marijke draped the tablecloth around him, then reached beneath it and pulled the pathetic wet clothes off. They were, she realized, the remains of a school uniform. She hung them on the stove rail, wondering about lice. The boy stank like a rats’ nest. Marijke made weak tea and poured two cups, adding a spoonful of precious sugar to each. The boy’s eyes never left her. They were sunk deep in his face, like two black marbles pressed into putty.
“Have you come far?” she asked him.
He seemed to find the question difficult, so she said, “Where are you from?”
The woman spoke for the first time. “Utrecht.” The word was a faint murmur.
“Utrecht? You’ve walked here from Utrecht? Dear God. How long has it taken you?”
The woman struggled to sit upright. She wrapped her hands around the cup that Marijke held out to her. “We left three days ago. Things are very bad there.”
“Yes,” Marijke said, “I’ve heard. But to have come so far . . .”
“There are so many of us on the roads now,” the woman told her. “From Amsterdam, Rotterdam, everywhere. The farmers say they have nothing left to give us. Some of them chase us away. We have to go farther and farther each time.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Yes. We have to. We have extra people to feed.” The woman had shocked herself. She shouldn’t have said that. “I mean we have relatives staying,” she said hurriedly. “Not, I mean . . .”
Marijke put a hand on the woman’s arm. “It’s all right. I understand.”
“The tea was nice,” the boy said. Wrapped in the white tablecloth, holding the cup in both hands, he looked like a shrunken priest.
Marijke filled their cups again, and when she turned back from the stove, the woman had produced a man’s pocket watch from somewhere inside her clothes.
“It’s a good one,” she said. “Real silver, the chain as well. It was my father’s. Please.”
Marijke could not meet the woman’s eyes. “Oh, no, no. I couldn’t. I don’t need —”
