Vrouw Wijman puffed up just a little more, broadened her smile and gestured through the door. “Come now, meneer. Your wife wouldn’t want you to make that long journey unrefreshed! And my husband, Marten, will be home soon. He would be honoured!”
Obsequious, Lena thought. The woman was being obsequious.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I must go,” Meneer Klaassen said then, his voice almost brusque. “Come, Sofie. Goodbye, Lena. Ma’am.” And he turned on his heel.
Sofie darted up into the doorway, clutched Lena’s elbow and gestured down the road with her chin. “The train station,” she whispered, “ten o’clock.” And she was gone, smiling and waving over her shoulder as she scampered up the road a few steps behind her new chaperon.
Thus Meneer Klaassen and Sofie set off for the beautiful house on the straight, wide street, and Lena lifted her satchel and followed Vrouw Wijman, who pulled her wool shawl a little more tightly around herself as she walked, down the long hall, herding the toddler before her. “How rude!” she mumbled to herself. “We’ll have no beef for him once this blasted war is over.”
Lena noted that Vrouw Wijman expected the attentions due her, and perhaps an extra measure. That was useful information.
The living room, tucked in behind the butcher shop, was cramped and cold. “We spend most of our time in the kitchen,” the older woman said, and she and Bennie led the way through another door that took them deeper into the house.
The kitchen was even smaller than the living room, but it was warm and boasted a bit of natural light through a window over the sink. A fire burned in the woodstove in the far corner, and a pot of water boiled away on top of it. Lena marvelled at the luxury, stepping close to the stove and holding out her hands.
“Marten has a nasty job to do today,” Vrouw Wijman said, seating herself at the small table and brushing Bennie away when he tried to crawl up on her lap. “He will accept my decision to take you in, but you understand that we take you in for service. Help is hard to come by nowadays. Your place is with me and the baby in the kitchen.”
She stopped and Lena nodded, since some response seemed to be called for.
Vrouw Wijman was winding herself up. “Marten works with the cows and for what? So he can be called out before dawn to provide cattle for the Third Reich. It is not to be borne. And I am stuck at home with a sullen girl who’s gone half the time and hardly lifts a finger when she’s here.” She stopped and glared at Annie, who sat opposite her, a tattered book clutched in her hands. Annie did not look up. “And a child in diapers.” She paused. “You will have enough to eat here, though not as high in quality as your friend will be getting, I’m sure. And you’ll have a bed, but don’t be expecting a room of your own upstairs. I will expect you to work hard, to earn that food and that bed, and to stay out of my husband’s way.” Again she paused. And again Lena nodded, foreboding growing inside her.
“You can start by brewing some tea,” Vrouw Wijman said. “Then you can put your things in the alcove behind that curtain. There is a cot there. We’ll find you some bedding before the day is done.”
Lena followed directions and made tea. She glanced periodically at the curtain in the corner. Another piece of white lace, this one lined so no one could see through.
The day was long. More than help with cooking, more than cleaning, it turned out that Vrouw Wijman wanted that child off her hip and out from under her feet. Annie was no help. For a long time she sat, sullen and silent, reading at the kitchen table, and then, without a word, she was gone, not to return until just before the noon meal.
At one point, Lena stopped by the table and turned Annie’s book over to read the title. Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of a book she had never read. Perhaps one day Annie would lend it to her. It was too bad that the girl seemed so prickly.
“Stop that,” Vrouw Wijman barked at her. “I won’t have another one in my house turning to books instead of chores.”
So Lena left the book and got down on her knees on the kitchen floor. Bennie gazed at her with big blue eyes obscured just a little by blond curls. “My name is Lena,” she said, working hard to keep Bep and Nynke out of her mind and tears out of her eyes. “And I’m going to be living here for a while.”
Bennie smiled, picked up a crudely shaped block from the floor and shoved it at her. Lena took the block and turned it over and over in her hands. “It’s beautiful!” she said. She looked to where eight or ten other blocks were scattered under the table. “Shall we build something together?” Bennie went from smiling to beaming, and Lena put the special block into his hands and reached for one of her own.
Vrouw Wijman used the table to heave herself up. “Remember, your job is to keep him out from under my feet!” she said as she took a large cast-iron pot from its hook on the wall.
Lena shifted herself, Bennie and the blocks toward the wall.
I will see Nynke again before she even knows what a block is, she swore to herself, and Bep will forgive me for leaving. She will.
She looked up to see Vrouw Wijman with several carrots and a potato in her hands. How soon could she bring up the subject of sending food to Amsterdam? she wondered.
For the rest of the morning, Lena played with Bennie, chopped vegetables and stirred the stew. She was relieved not to be asked to cook the entire meal. Specific tasks, she could handle. She had chopped enough potatoes in her time. Still, Vrouw Wijman frowned when she saw the bits of potato heaped on the chopping board. They were not beautiful.
“Up, up,” Bennie called, standing at Lena’s side, grasping handfuls of her skirt and pulling with all his might. Lena looked down at him and smiled. His nose was crusty, she noticed, although his clothes were spotless. What was it about clothes and curtains around here?
She found out soon enough. Vrouw Wijman liked things clean. She had stockpiled soap at the beginning of the war and had access to fat, so she made more soap regularly on the stove in the lean-to. She wanted Lena to take Bennie off her hands so she could get back to her cleaning. Her husband, she told Lena, was off with his brother’s cows. He came home at noon, filthy and exhausted.
“It’s nice to meet you, meneer,” Lena said.
Vrouw Wijman looked at her husband and let out a short laugh. “I told you. You’re not in the big city now,” she said to Lena. “And my husband is a butcher, not a gentleman. You’ll call him Wijman, not meneer.” She said that last word through her nose in a thoroughly disagreeable way. Lena thought that perhaps Vrouw Wijman regretted the missing pair of letters at the beginning of her title: she wouldn’t mind being a mevrouw married to a meneer. Like the Klaassens. Perhaps that explained the excessively clean curtains.
Wijman looked Lena over, shrugged, nodded gruffly at his wife’s brief explanation of her presence and collapsed into a chair in front of his dinner. The meal seemed wonderful to Lena—bits of beef with onions and potatoes floating in thin gravy, soaked up with bread that actually tasted like what it was supposed to be. She struggled not to gulp hers down, keeping her attention on the little boy.
Still, she couldn’t help noticing the man of the house wolfing down his food, his eyes falling on her now and again, but with hardly a word for anyone. His glance was cursory, but it contained something unpleasant nonetheless. Lena was pretty sure that Vrouw Wijman saw those glances, each one of them. Every time Lena looked up from her plate, she caught them both, his gaze comfortable and pleased with itself, hers wary. Lena resolved to stick close to the kitchen, just as Vrouw Wijman demanded.
She also noticed that Vrouw Wijman did not say a word about the other girl who had arrived on her doorstep earlier. She explained Lena’s arrival as if Lena had just shown up, begging for a meal and a roof over her head. No Meneer Klaassen; no Sofie Vogel. Why?
Lena was tempted to say casually, “Sofie Vogel was here,” just to see what would happen. Tempted, but not very tempted.
“There’s a train in today,” Wijman said as he scraped up his last bite.
/> Lena stiffened.
So did Vrouw Wijman. “Taking our food again, are they? They’ve got all our young men. And now they’ve got to have our food.” She looked at her husband, fury and contempt competing for dominance in her expression. “And I suppose you gave them a nice cow or two.”
Annie looked up, her long hair skidding across her plate as she did so. “What do you expect him to do, Mother?” she said. “Hide the cows? Offer himself up instead?”
Wijman reached out and cuffed Annie on the side of her head. She glared at him and went back to eating.
His voice was tired when he said, “Actually, they took six cows, one with calf. Not many left.”
“Well, eat up, then. Enjoy!” Vrouw Wijman said. “There won’t be much more where this came from!”
Her voice was bright now, falsely merry. Lena shuddered.
All afternoon she played with Bennie. She changed him and put him down for his nap. She took him out for a walk, exploring the neighbourhood. The train station was quite a few blocks away, and she had to carry Bennie almost the whole distance, back through the long square and onto the long, straight road. If she was going to find the station in the dark, though, she needed to make sure she knew the route. The last thing she wanted was Sofie and Albert and Uli showing up at the Wijmans’ looking for her.
She walked up the station steps and peered in the door. Then she moved back, out of view. The train was still there. German soldiers milled around. She was turning to pull Bennie into her arms and retreat when a voice spoke softly. “There you are!” It was Uli. He stood inside, out of sight of the street. “Where is Sofie?” he asked, his voice urgent.
Lena looked up at him and back out the door. “She’s with a family,” she whispered, “down that street there.” She gestured in the right direction.
“We’ll see you tonight.” He made it a statement and Lena bridled, fear stirring her insides.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He stepped toward her.
“Yes,” she said quickly. “We will try.”
“You must do more than try,” he said. “I …”
Lena didn’t need to hear what he would say next. She must not be seen here, on German territory, chatting with the enemy.
“Bang, bang,” Bennie said over Lena’s shoulder as she stumbled down the steps with him in her arms. “Bad guy!”
And he kept on like that once they were home, marching around the living room, shouting things he had probably heard his parents say. It took Lena the better part of an hour to distract him.
Ten o’clock. Sofie expected Lena at the station at ten o’clock. And Lena wouldn’t put it past Sofie to come knocking on the window if she stood her up. With her feet back on solid ground, a couple of good meals in her belly and a handsome man waiting for her, Sofie would have her old confidence back. Enough for both of us, Lena thought, or hoped. Or hoped not. She wasn’t sure.
The alcove was tiny, but once the family had retreated upstairs to bed, Lena was alone. Truly and completely alone. Light was precious even here, so bedtime was early. By eight thirty, the house was silent. Lena sat on her narrow cot, which she had made up with crisp white sheets and two thick wool blankets. She stroked her pillow. It was soft and inviting. A single candle burned on the tiny bedside table, but it would not last long. Lena knelt to slide her satchel under the bed and paused. The cologne. She had decided to throw it away. She snapped open the latch on her bag, eased up the lid, leaned her forehead against it and gazed inside.
An idea occurred to her. She could give the cologne to her hostess as a little gift. Lena’s mother had taught her few rules of good conduct, but in the books she read, guests always came bearing gifts. She rooted around in her bag, in search of the tiny bottle, and as she rooted, she remembered: the snow, the view, the cold, Albert’s coat warming her, Albert holding her mittens while she discovered his small offering.
Abruptly, she pulled her hands free, snapped the bag shut and shoved it beneath the bed. Vrouw Wijman would have to take her gift in peeled potatoes and babysitting. The cologne was staying right where it was.
She ran her hands over her skirt and sweater. Vrouw Wijman had looked at her clothes with distaste. “Tomorrow you will give me all your clothes. You can wear something of mine for the day.” Lena couldn’t help it: her eyes flicked down to Vrouw Wijman’s large body and her tent-like dress. Vrouw Wijman gave a small huff of annoyance. “Yes, I know they will be too big for you, but you can stay in for the day. By the next day, your clothes will be dry.” She paused. “And you will bathe.”
Lena wasn’t sure why she couldn’t have bathed today. She had slept in straw for two nights. She had crouched on damp, snowy ground. She had huddled up to a fire. She had sweated terror. Her hair was heavy with grease. It smelled sour.
Vrouw Wijman did allow her to take a basin of warm water into the lean-to with a sliver of soap, a worn washcloth and towel, a comb and a bit of soda to use on her teeth. Lena had done what she could, afraid to remove her clothes in case someone came in, as the door to the outside did not lock. And it was cold in the lean-to, the stove black and empty.
Now, in her grubby clothes, Lena was not going to get between the sheets, but she longed to close her eyes, just to rest for a moment before the ordeal to come. She pulled out one of the blankets Albert had given her on the train, spread it over the bed, lay down on top and pulled it around her. The bed supported her all the way along her body. She listened. Silence. When had she ever been alone like this? No one near? It was exquisite. She closed her eyes and immediately began to drift, softly, into a world of delights. There were people there—people she loved, people she had left—but they gazed at her in silence, smiling. All is well, they seemed to say, and she felt it too. All was well. She spiralled deeper. Rest had never felt this good.
Deeper. Faces faded away and sleep took their place.
She started awake to pitch blackness. The candle had burned itself out. Now that wasn’t safe, was it? She should have blown that candle out before she lay down.
Then the clock struck the quarter hour. Time. She hadn’t meant to go to sleep because she—Time. She was supposed to—Time. She was supposed to meet Sofie. Ten o’clock. Lena crept from her bed, pushed aside the lace curtain and thrust her face close to the grandmother clock on the kitchen wall. Ten fifteen. It was ten fifteen! Her coat and her shoes were by the front door. Fearful of creaks, she made her way down the hall, even more fearful that any second Sofie was going to knock. She reached the door, pulled her coat off a hook and pushed her feet into her shoes. The door was locked. She had wondered earlier if the door would lock with a key Wijman kept with him. It was a bad plan in case of fire, but many a man liked to keep his family secure in that way, risk or no.
The key was in the lock. She turned it, but the door would not give. Lena looked up toward the top of the door and found the bar, an extra level of security almost beyond her reach. She stretched up and grabbed the small knob that secured it. She had trouble turning the knob from that angle, but dragging a chair down the hall would make a racket. If she could just push … She stretched a little higher, concentrated on the muscles in her forearm and pushed again. It gave. A moment later, she had pulled the bar free. She pushed the door open a crack, peering out. If she was caught by the Germans during curfew, she had no idea what the penalty would be.
She heard a rustle and another sound. A giggle. She pushed the door open the rest of the way, her heart pounding. Please don’t let them be … But they were. Sofie and Uli and Albert were right there, in front of the shop window, jostling one another like a trio of teenagers playing a prank. Right above their heads was the Wijmans’ bedroom window. Lena had seen it from the inside when she was putting Bennie to bed. She gave thanks for blackout paper and hoped theirs was extra thick. Closing the door firmly behind her without looking at any of them, she marched off down the street toward the station.
Albert came into step beside her. “Lena, I am gl
ad to see you,” he whispered.
She ignored him.
“We turn here,” he said as the square opened up in front of them.
“I know,” Lena said, without meeting his eyes. Behind her she could hear the lovers’ scuffling steps and quiet voices. Her fury mounted.
As they approached the far side of the square, Albert led them off to the right, to a row of buildings facing the canal. They stopped at a doorway just as dark as all the others, though it had the look of a restaurant or a pub from bygone days. The sign was gone, but Lena could see where it had been attached above the door. Uli stepped past them, turned the handle and ushered them in. The space they entered was dark and cramped, but they found the inner door easily enough. Checking that the outer door was closed behind them, Albert opened the second door. Warm light, real tobacco smoke, music and excited conversation poured over them.
Even though the room was full of men in German uniforms, and Lena had spent little time in pubs, she immediately felt as if she had entered an earlier time in her life, a happier time. The room was crowded with tables, each enjoying its own small circle of candlelight. The tables were crowded with men and covered in glasses. Smoke from cigarettes and cigars burning in dozens of hands clouded (and scented) the air. At the far side of the room, the bar glowed. Made from wood and backed with a mirrored wall, it reflected light. Bottles lined the shelves, empty—beer seemed to be the only available beverage—but still filled with promise.
Lena looked more closely at the people in the room. There were women. Several women were waiting on the tables. Older women, it looked like; Dutch women, certainly. A large man worked behind the bar, filling glasses with pale beer. And there were women at the tables. Lena saw four at first count. A pair at one table with three men, and single women at two others. One young woman at a nearby table met Lena’s eyes. Instinctively, Lena looked away. She drew a deep breath. At least she and Sofie weren’t the only ones.
Hunger Journeys Page 15
