by Mal Peet
Dart wasn’t there because Tamar had taken over responsibility for the transceiver for the time being. It had been absurd to expect Dart to struggle back and forth through the white hell of the weather. They’d agreed this on Christmas morning, but the conversation had been strangely spiky and Dart had left abruptly immediately afterwards.
It had been the first morning that Oma had been too ill to leave her bed. Dart and Marijke had spent some time with her, then Dart had come downstairs alone. He’d talked about Julia’s condition in a curiously distant, matter-of-fact way. Then, just as Tamar had been about to raise the subject himself, he’d said, “I can’t keep slogging out here if the weather stays like this, you know.”
His tone of voice had been strange, like familiar music played in the wrong key.
Tamar said, “No, of course you can’t. You could die on the road if you got caught in a snowstorm. I was going to suggest that I take over wireless operations here until the weather improves.”
“Good. You’ve got a copy of the schedule, haven’t you?”
“Yes. It’s bloody ironic, though, isn’t it? While Oma is sick you have the perfect excuse to come here.”
Dart paused in buttoning his coat but didn’t look up. “Ironic,” he said. “Yes, that’s one way to describe it.”
And that had been it. Dart had downed most of a cup of tea and left, shoving the heavy bike up towards the road, leaving an irregular woven track that was later obliterated by afternoon snow.
The memory of that morning, their last meeting, occasionally nagged at Tamar like a torn fingernail. Still, there was probably a simple explanation for Dart’s apparent ill humour: he’d been hungover. They both had.
Tamar concentrated on the map and the coordinates again. He looked up when Marijke entered the room. She put a half-full bowl of broth and a spoon down on the table; then, without touching him, she went to the window and stood there with her arms folded. He watched her back, waiting.
“She wants a priest,” Marijke said.
“Ah.” He stood up to go to her.
When she heard the scrape of his chair, she said, “Don’t touch me. If you touch me, I’ll cry. And I’m not going to cry. I told her not to be so ridiculous. I pointed out that the only Catholic priest this side of Apeldoorn is Father Willem, and that he’s at least as old as she is and wouldn’t last ten minutes out of doors in this weather. I said that since there was no question of him coming here; she has no choice but to get better. I refuse to discuss the matter any further.”
Her voice cracked on the last sentence, so she tried it again. “I absolutely refuse . . .”
She put her hands to her face. Tamar held still. They stood like that for several long moments in the half-light of the kitchen.
Tamar said, “Can I touch you yet?”
“No.”
“I want to.”
She turned then and faced him. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and folded her arms again, hugging herself.
“I’m so angry,” she said. “I was all right until you came back. I’d given up. So many terrible things. Relatives, neighbours disappearing. Opa. The bloody Germans coming to . . . to strip us bare. Oma’s silence. Bam, bam, bam. Like being punched over and over again. You get numb. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Unless you start to hope. That’s the trick, you see: you can take any amount of shit unless you start to hope.”
“Marijke, come on —”
“No, listen. If you weren’t here and Oma died, I’d deal with it. Because there’d be nothing more to lose. It’d be just me. But now it’s different; it’s worse. Because you’re yet another person to lose. You do stupid, dangerous things, and every time you go away, I pray in agony that you’ll come back. It’s unfair. Hope is pulling me to pieces. I can’t stand it. I really don’t think I can stand it. Can you imagine a life for me if I lose you as well?”
He said, “I really believe the war is almost over. It’s all right to hope now. Hope is . . . appropriate. I have no intention of dying. Or leaving. We’re going to stay together.”
She stretched her arms towards him, a beggar’s gesture. “Listen to yourself. Don’t you see?”
Two days later, in response to a signal from Amsterdam relayed through London, Tamar left the farm. He’d wrapped himself in so many clothes that when she watched him walk into the white landscape, he looked like a big clumsy animal. A big clumsy circus animal pushing a bicycle.
Later that same day, Marijke, busying herself in the kitchen, heard sounds from above. The coughing was routine, and she had tuned her hearing to pick up variations in it. But this was something else. She went to the foot of the stairs. Incredibly, Oma stood looking down at her, clutching the banister. She was wrecked, red-eyed, and full of purpose.
“Oma! What are you doing out of bed? What do you want?”
The old woman wanted to be downstairs, and there was no arguing with her. She refused to sit by the stove and lowered herself onto a chair at the table. There was a coughing fit and a spell of breathing that sounded like cloth being torn. When it was over, she mimed the need for pen and paper. Marijke brought them to her, along with a mug of tea, which was ignored.
Julia Maartens began to write, hunched over the paper like a schoolchild taking an examination in the presence of cheating classmates. When her sweat fell onto the paper, she blotted it carefully with her sleeve. Once, passing behind her, Marijke glanced down and saw that the letter began with the words Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. She fought the desire to seize the paper and tear it apart; instead she lit the lamp because the daylight in the room was failing. When Julia had finished her confession, she folded it into an envelope that she addressed to Father Willem van Dael. With Marijke’s help she got to her feet and went to the dresser. She reached up and tucked the envelope behind the brass and mahogany clock that had not worked for several years. When that was done, she allowed her granddaughter to help her back to bed. It took a long time to climb the stairs. Their progress was twice halted by bouts of coughing that seemed likely to unhinge the old woman’s ribs.
Before he’d left on Christmas Day, Dart had told Marijke there was a possibility that Oma would develop pneumonia. He had described the change in symptoms that would occur if that were to happen. Oma’s breathing would become faster and shallower. The rattle in her chest might well turn into something more like a faint whistling; she would perhaps feel pain high in her back. Her temperature would rise, and she would almost certainly be feverish and confused. Still, Dart had said, Oma was strong and the chances were that none of these things would happen. But his tone had been strangely flat, neutral; and he had not once looked Marijke in the eye. She was not reassured. Within forty-eight hours of Oma writing her confession, the changes that Dart had predicted took hold of her.
But nothing Dart said had prepared Marijke for Oma’s transformation into the thin and ancient stranger who now lay in the bed. Nor was she prepared for her own sense of numb resentment. She had expected to feel pain — would have preferred it, perhaps. This hollowness felt like a lack of love or loyalty. It was familiar, though.
She had not slept in her bed since Tamar had left. Oma was worse during the nights, and Marijke had brought the quilt and a pillow from her own room and nested in the armchair beside her grandmother’s bed. She dreamed incessantly, and in these dreams she was often in an unfamiliar but friendly place in which people with slow-motion mouths called her name. Because she woke frequently, these dreams crossed the border into real time. So, when she woke just before midnight on 13th January, she did not think that she had heard a real voice. Or perhaps, for the briefest moment, she hoped that she would look up and it would be him, speaking her name. She eased herself upright, and the lamplight fell onto her grandmother’s face. Oma’s eyes were open. Her mouth moved.
“Marijke.”
She was too shocked to react. Then she saw that Julia’s hand was lying open on the bed. It looked too big and coarse for the pale, wasted arm it was attache
d to. Marijke reached over and took it in her own and somehow found herself kneeling beside the bed.
“Oma?”
She heard the old woman’s tongue move stickily inside her mouth.
“Oma? Dear God. Did you say something?”
“Marijke.”
It was like ventriloquism. Marijke did not remember the voice.
She said, “I’m here. I’m here.”
The old woman’s hand tightened its grip. Her gaze fixed on her granddaughter’s face, but Marijke was not sure that the eyes could see. They were fading, like pale fish sinking deeper into a murky pool.
“Oma? Oma, stay with me. Please try to stay with me.”
The mouth made small movements, then a single word which might have been “Eat.”
“What? Oma, are you hungry? Shall I get you something?”
Julia Maartens moved her head on the pillow. Her eyes aimed at the dark angle of wall and ceiling above the bedroom door. “It’s here,” she said.
Marijke turned to look; she couldn’t help herself. There was, of course, nothing there; and she was looking at nothing when her grandmother said, “Johannes.”
She’d spent her last breath on the word. It ended in a soft hiss, like a puncture.
On 19th February Dart was scheduled to transmit from the Marionette House at eleven forty-eight. It worried him because he reckoned that Tamar’s signal to London was too long by more than a minute. If London were to ask him to repeat, the German detector cars would have plenty of time to zero in on him. So he wouldn’t repeat. Except that it would screw things up if he didn’t. Jesus.
At ten thirty he put on his white coat and buttoned it, then the shabby overcoat with its red cross armband. He rubbed the lapel between his forefinger and thumb, checking the silk sheet concealed in the lining. Then he picked up the medical bag in which the transmitter crystals and the revolver were concealed and went quietly down the stairs. In the dayroom, his passing was ignored by two skeletal inmates who had pushed their chairs close together as if for warmth.
Propelling the heavy old bike made his emptiness much worse. It was possible not to feel it when you sat indoors doing nothing, but the slightest physical effort caused hunger to unfold itself inside the body. It was amazing, he thought, that he had the strength to move his legs at all. The cold air affected him like alcohol, and he steered an erratic course along the fractured road. He would have to get a grip on himself before he began the transmission. He would have to send very fast and make no mistakes. Yes.
His anxieties about his work were themselves a cover for what truly obsessed him.
During the bitter month of January, he had brooded in the dark seclusion of his cell. It had not been a process of thinking. Rather, he had stared at the hurt in himself until it had become numb. Until it had grown a protective coating over itself, the way soft grey fur grows on mouldering food. If he had been more than usually silent and withdrawn during those weeks, it had gone largely unnoticed. All the inhabitants of the asylum seemed to have entered a state of suspended animation, as though they hoped to survive cold and hunger by dreaming themselves elsewhere. Some of the nuns now wore the same dazed and distant expression as their patients.
Eventually he had come to the conclusion that it was not her fault. She had been seduced, cynically and deliberately, by the man who should have been protecting her. Tamar had abused his position of trust. It had not been easy for Dart to accept this, because he too had trusted Tamar. Trusted him, stupidly, blindly, with his life. He’d recalled Tamar’s cowardice in the plane on the night of the drop, the look of stupefied terror on his face as he stood at the hatch. He should have realized then that the man was weak. He’d been a fool to believe in him. It had come as a huge relief to Dart when he’d understood this, on a night when the blessed Benzedrine had cleared and sharpened his mind. Until then he had been misled by the image of Marijke and Tamar together in the kitchen, writhing on that chair. It had possessed and haunted him. It had tricked him into thinking that they were a single creature seeking furtive and nasty pleasures. He had tried to hate her, to see her as a tainted thing. But it wasn’t like that at all, of course. When a criminal and his victim are locked together, grappling and struggling, it is not always easy to tell them apart.
By the time he returned to the farm, after the thaw, he was clear about the way he would behave towards her. He would simply pretend that nothing had happened. There would be no confrontation. She would see that his love for her had not faltered. Eventually, inevitably, she would recognize the strength of that love and turn away from Tamar’s poisonous embraces. Of that he was certain. All he had to do was stay alive for her. And do something about Tamar.
But this calm resolve had been overthrown as soon as he’d arrived at the farm. Marijke had opened the door and blurted the news of her grandmother’s death before he’d had a chance to speak. It had not crossed his mind that anything might have happened to Julia Maartens. He had not given the old woman a moment’s thought, so he had no idea how to react. And while Marijke was pouring her grief out to him, he was falling helplessly and angrily in love all over again. She was wearing black, naturally, and it deepened her incredible eyes. He’d wanted her so much that he could not think of the proper things to say.
She’d taken him to the crude grave, and he’d been shocked. To have buried her in the potato patch, to have heaped rough stones on her! Dear God. The man was a brute. Marijke couldn’t see that herself, of course; she’d been blinded by misery. He’d been so outraged that he couldn’t speak, or even reach out to touch her, even though she obviously wanted him to. That had been a failure on his part, a lost opportunity, and he bitterly regretted it. Then they had gone into the house and Tamar had been there. Smiling, damn him. It had been difficult not to recoil from his greeting, knowing where those hands had been, what they had done.
Now, on the road to Mendlo, Dart shook his head to dislodge yet again the vile image of Tamar working his body against hers.
The sky was the colour of an old knife. In the ditches and in the dark and furrowed fields, small mounds of dirty snow still lingered. They looked, Dart thought, like slaughtered sheep that had been left where they had fallen. He made himself pedal faster in the hope of warming his slow blood.
The guards at the Merchants’ Gate were unusually sullen. They checked Dart’s papers for the first time in weeks, not looking him in the eye. There was none of the meaningless banter he’d become used to, and this made him uneasy. When he remounted the bike at the far side of the archway, he glanced back; the Germans were watching him.
He’d got as far as the junction where Canal Street met the wider avenue that led to the town hall when two Waffen-SS troopers came round the corner. One pointed at Dart, and they ran towards him, the skirts of their coats flapping wildly, machine pistols slung over their shoulders.
Dart stopped. Panic rose in him like black water, threatening to shut down the valves of his heart. He imagined, as he had imagined so many times before, a cellar full of torture, a final bullet fired casually into the back of his head. His legs began to fail. Before he could topple, a hand seized the handlebars and another grabbed his arm. He looked up into the face of one of the German soldiers. It was a young face, tense and beaded with sweat.
“Doktor? You are a doctor?”
“I . . . Yes. I am. I am.”
“Come with us, please. Come, schnell!”
They took him, running alongside the bike, past the town hall and onto Albrecht Street. He had a mad desire to say “No, stop! I must get to the puppet shop before quarter to twelve!” Seeing them approach, a woman pulled two children into a house. Dart and his escort went past them and turned into the small square called Westerplein.
It was a space shadowed by tall, narrow houses. The ground floors were shops and offices, now dark and shuttered. Three houses had long since been gutted by people scavenging for firewood, their doors, shutters, window frames ripped out; they drooped like old flesh
.
The first thing he saw was the corpse. Lying facedown. It had been a young man, a teenager, perhaps. Its head was a mess, and from it blood had spread, making a dark and sticky grid of the square cobbles. Close to the body an old man, grey-bearded and black-clad, was chanting some sort of prayer, rocking his body back and forth. Behind him a dozen or so people, adults and children, stood in two rows. Their clothes were too big for them. Their faces were as pale as bone. Some of them had their eyes open, huge eyes, as if they had seen nothing for years.
Dart thought, My God. Jews. How the hell have they stayed hidden so long?
A platoon of SS men in grey greatcoats stood in a semicircle facing the captives. One of them had a dog, a big Alsatian, on a leash. It sat motionless, amber eyes fixed on the old man who was praying. Dart dismounted from his bike and, because he was supposed to be a doctor, he walked shakily to the corpse and kneeled beside it. Almost instantly he was yanked to his feet, but not before he saw the legs of a young girl who was standing close to the body. They were trembling out of control, and a stream of urine ran down one of them into her shoe, which was a man’s shoe and far bigger than her foot.
The sergeant who pulled Dart upright had teeth missing. He spoke to Dart in a fierce whisper, spraying spittle. “Not the Jew, you idiot! The major! Come!”
Dart was marched across the square to where a military staff car was parked. An officer, immaculate in field-grey uniform and polished boots, leaned against the passenger door. He was bareheaded. Close to him a trooper stood holding the officer’s cap with its death’s head insignia. He held it rigidly in front of him as if it were some kind of religious object that pilgrims might queue to touch. The major was so white, so pale-haired, that at first Dart took him for an albino. With his right hand he held a field dressing to the side of his head. A track of blood ran down his neck; the double zigzags of silver on his collar were smeared with it. In his left hand he held a Luger pistol.
