Snow on the Tulips

by Liz Tolsma

  “Nothing will happen to me, because I’ll be careful.”

  “What do you plan to do out there?”

  “That is none of your business.” He tried to push past her.

  She stood her ground. “You are my business. And my responsibility. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Holding to what Mem always did, Cornelia stopped arguing and glared at Johan. She wouldn’t let him out the door. Not when it meant an almost-certain death sentence. A few moments later he shrugged his broad shoulders, sighed, and turned up the stairs.

  She won the battle. This time.

  GERRIT BREATHED IN and out. Pain arced through his body.

  Pain. He was still in pain.

  He wasn’t dead.

  German voices floated around him. The soldiers who had attempted to execute him remained here. If he moved at all, he would be dead. The rise and fall of his chest, the twitch of his eyelids, a swallow would mean a bullet in his head.

  The Gestapo spoke among themselves. “Give each of them a good kick. Let’s make sure we got them all.”

  What would happen to him when a jackboot met his side? The pain would be unbearable, but he couldn’t cry out, not even a whimper, no matter how great his agony.

  He heard them as they made their way down the line, reassuring themselves that all of their prisoners were dead. Thud. Thud. Thud. A boot met each body. Each of his friends. Each of his fellow Resistance laborers.

  He gritted his teeth. Forcing himself to go limp, holding his breath, Gerrit lay motionless.

  Lord, please, spare me.

  The soldiers moved closer. They stood right next to him.

  “This one is dead. I hit him squarely. Come on, let’s go. Leave the bodies here to teach these people a good lesson about what happens to those who resist.”

  With that, the sound of the German voices, the clacking of their weapons, and the heavy thunk of their boots faded.

  How could the officer be so sure he was dead? Gerrit didn’t believe his acting skills were quite that convincing. Did his executioner hold himself in such high regard that he believed he couldn’t miss? Or when Gerrit locked eyes with him, did he unnerve the man enough to cause the shot to go astray?

  One thing he didn’t doubt—he needed to be gone from this place before the soldiers came back. No need to put his theatrical abilities to the test again. He also had to be cautious not to leave too soon. They may look this way, spy movement, and come back to finish the job.

  He lay without moving for as long as he dared. Around him, nothing stirred. No one moved about.

  When he convinced himself that the Gestapo had left the area, when he hadn’t heard their voices for many minutes, Gerrit moved. Pain shuddered through his right shoulder when he lifted his head. He looked down and bile bubbled in his throat. The bullet had torn away his skin, and blood spurted from the wound. He needed help.

  Forbidding the anguish in his shoulder to register in his brain, he rolled to his left side. He pulled himself to a sitting position with the greatest of care.

  The world careened, then crashed to a halt.

  He sat without moving for a minute, not daring to look at the broken bodies of his comrades. His chest tightened.

  The brown brick house at the top of the bank beckoned.

  He sucked in his breath, then pulled his feet underneath himself. Pushing off with his uninjured arm, he stood. Or attempted to stand.

  He couldn’t bring himself upright. The world kept moving. Dusk had fallen. A sense of urgency pulled him along.

  The light in the house’s window winked at him. The occupants had yet to draw the blackout curtains. Biting his lip, tasting the saltiness of his blood, he rose to his knees, tucking his injured arm close to his body to keep it from jostling.

  He crawled like a baby, edging his way along. He couldn’t climb the bank. Instead, he needed to get to the place where the land flattened. Each movement sent a searing heat through his shoulder. Each movement brought him that much closer to safety.

  Centimeter by centimeter, he fought his way to level ground. He lay panting for a moment, drenched in sweat, though the cold breath of a North Sea breeze touched the late winter evening.

  He didn’t have time to rest. Any moment those German soldiers could return. Gritting his teeth, he continued his excruciating crawl toward the house at the top of the bank.

  The green door lay a few meters in front of him now. Hand, knee, knee; hand, knee, knee. Then it stood within arm’s length. He reached up, knocked, then collapsed to the ground.

  Rustling came from behind the solid wood door before it opened. Gerrit peered into the soft, round face of a dark-haired woman. She glanced around and, not noticing him lying in front of her, began to shut the door.

  “Please, help me,” Gerrit’s voice rasped.

  She turned her gaze downward. Her mouth fell open into a small O, but she didn’t utter a sound.

  A man came behind her, gray tingeing his hair. “Who is here, Maria?”

  She pointed to Gerrit. “What are we going to do about him?” she whispered.

  “Help me get him inside. Then close the door and bolt it.”

  They grabbed Gerrit by the shoulders and he groaned.

  Maria released her grip while the man clinched him around the waist, dragging him to his feet. “Get that door closed. I’ll bring him to the bedstee.”

  Blackness closed in on Gerrit, but he fought it. He needed to stay alert. These people might be collaborators.

  The man half carried, half dragged Gerrit to the front room and deposited him on the bedstee, a bed in a cupboard with doors that could be opened or closed. Oh, the joy not to be moving, not to be jostled, to have a few minutes to let the throbbing in his right shoulder calm a little.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “Jan Aartsma.” One of his many false identities.

  “We heard the shots. What did you do?”

  Was the man curious, or did he have another agenda? “Last night I was arrested. They caught me out after curfew.”

  The man pulled Gerrit’s shirt away from his wound with jerky actions. The fabric tugged on the raw edges of his flesh and Gerrit tensed.

  Maria examined the hole in his shoulder then turned to the man. They held a brief, hushed conversation. Gerrit couldn’t hear what they said, but the woman shook her head. The man nodded, taking her in his arms. He brushed her dark hair from her face and kissed her forehead.

  He glanced over her shoulder at the entryway, then leaned above Gerrit, the long-forgotten odor of pipe tobacco clinging to his clothes. “Why were you out after curfew?”

  He asked enough questions, questions Gerrit didn’t want to answer. So he told the man what he had first told the Gestapo. “I had a meeting with a woman. A married woman. In the fields.”

  A blush crept into Maria’s pale cheeks and the man took a step back. Good. Maybe they wouldn’t question him further. The occupiers may be ruthless, but they didn’t shoot men for clandestine meetings. They must know there was more to his story than he was willing to share, but the less they knew, the better for them. The less he told them, the better for him.

  Maria handed a bottle of something to the man, whom Gerrit assumed to be her husband. Her hands shook. “You’ll have to clean and dress the wound. The sight of it makes me sick to my stomach.” She ambled out of the room.

  Gerrit bit his lower lip as the man poured the pungent peroxide over his bloody shoulder. Millions of little needles pricked his wound. Darkness crept over him and he wanted to embrace it. But he couldn’t. Not until he determined what kind of people these were, until he could be sure they wouldn’t turn him over to the Germans. They had to know he had fabricated his story like a woman knitted socks.

  He cried out in agony as the man patted his wound dry and when he positioned Gerrit to dress his shoulder. The rough cotton he used to cover the injury rubbed and chafed until tears came to Gerrit’s eyes.
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br />   The man finished his work and stepped back, pacing four or five meters from one end of the small, bright room to the other, pausing for a moment before repeating his circuit. “You have to leave here.” Maria returned to the man’s side and he rubbed her shoulder while she wrung her hands.

  His voice rose in intensity. “The Germans will come back to bury the bodies. When they count them and know one is missing, where do you think they’ll look? Our house is the closest to the bridge, and they won’t hesitate to turn this place over and shake it until they find you. And then they will arrest us for helping you.” Fervor filled his words. “I have to protect my family, and having you here will mean we will all end up in prison. I’m sorry. You have to leave. Now.”

  Gerrit tugged on his hair. The man wanted to guard his young, beautiful wife. Maybe he had children who slept upstairs. He refused to help. He would sit by and let others do the work.

  He would let others give their lives.

  Gerrit wanted to shake people like this.

  “I’ll leave,” he told Maria and her husband.

  He would leave, but he didn’t know where he would go.

  CHAPTER 3

  Only the drip, drip, drip of the water from the tip of the rowboat oars broke the stillness of the night. Johan Kooistra dipped the paddles into the water without making a sound, pulled back, and lifted them. A chilly breeze seeped through his thin clothes. The weather had warmed since the blizzard last month, enough to thaw the canal, but winter had not yet gasped its last breath.

  He counted on absolute silence. Needed it. He couldn’t be caught out at night. He couldn’t be caught out at all. At twenty years old, Johan might get picked up at any minute by the Gestapo or the NSB—the dreaded collaborating Dutch police—and shipped off to work in the German factories.

  His sister Cornelia caught him the first time he tried to leave the house, forcing him to wait until she got busy out back. She wouldn’t understand his aching desire to be outside. He loved her, but this war changed her into a different person. Most of the time she acted more like his mother than his sister. He couldn’t talk to her and have her understand his feelings like she did before.

  While he had been working and hiding on his umpka’s farm in the country, he had the freedom to go outside every day and breathe fresh air. He liked staying with his father’s brother and his cousin. Then a few months ago they had been betrayed and the situation became dangerous there. Not having anywhere else to go, Johan returned home to his sister.

  He wished she didn’t watch every move he made.

  He had heard the gunshots by the canal bank. Like a child who runs to the schoolhouse window to watch the first snowfall, he needed to see up close what had happened. So he snuck away in the dim light and pushed their rowboat onto the canal.

  He took a deep breath of the crisp evening air, and liberty filled his lungs. The risk was worth this moment of freedom.

  He had found some orange fabric in Mem’s sewing basket. He didn’t know what she had intended to do with it. Sometimes mothers bought material and never used it. She died in the second year of the war, so he couldn’t ask her, but he didn’t think Cornelia would mind if he took it. He wanted to cover one of the bodies of the executed men with it. Displaying the color of the Dutch royal house would be his show of resistance to the occupiers. He had heard tales of others doing the same.

  A rush of adrenaline surged through him. He couldn’t fight since the Germans had dismantled the woefully unprepared Dutch army. He couldn’t join the Underground because Cornelia kept such a thumb on him. But this he could do. The tips of his fingers tingled.

  He turned the boat to shore and, within a few strokes, beached it on the grass. Though death happened all the time on a farm, he hadn’t prepared himself for the sight in front of him. All these men, shot in the head. He turned away from the gruesome scene while the small dinner his sister prepared burned in the base of his throat, threatening to erupt. He inhaled, then walked down the line of men. At the ninth and last man Johan stopped, pulled the orange fabric from inside his jacket, and laid it over the body.

  His chest swelled. He had done a brave and noble thing.

  Then he detected movement from the corner of his eye. Something—or someone—stirred at the end of the bridge.

  Johan fell to the cold, hard ground and flattened himself. The hair on his arms bristled. Just breathe. He listened for the thudding of jackboots on the pavement but heard none, nor the clack of klompen.

  Cautious or daring—he didn’t know which he was—he lifted his head. Whoever moved before now lay still.

  Lay. Not stood.

  Johan scrambled to his feet but kept low as he climbed the bank toward the figure. A man lay crumpled on his side near the end of the bridge. A moan escaped him. He tried to move but winced in pain. “Help me.”

  “What happened?” Johan crouched but couldn’t see much in the gathering dark. All of the blackout curtains had been drawn and for almost five years the streetlights had been dark. Only a sliver of the moon illuminated the scene. A ring of blood stained the man’s right shoulder, like he’d been shot.

  One of the executed men?

  “Help me.”

  Johan didn’t miss the pleading in the man’s voice. “Where do you live?”

  “Nee. Help me.”

  What should he do? He couldn’t leave the man here. His sister Anki was a nurse, but she didn’t know he had returned. His family didn’t trust her husband.

  He could take the man home. Cornelia wouldn’t like the arrangement, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. “Can you walk at all? We have to get to my boat.” He couldn’t leave their rowboat on the opposite shore. It would raise too many questions with the Nazis about how it got there.

  The man reached with his left hand and Johan pulled him to his feet. He held the injured man around the waist while he flung his good arm over Johan’s shoulder. Together, with the man leaning much of his weight on him, they made their way to the canal bank. Though sloped, it was shorter than going to the flatter ground. The wounded fellow distributed more of his mass Johan’s way.

  “Don’t pass out on me.”

  “I won’t. I don’t think I will.”

  Lifting milk pails and working around the farm made Johan strong, but they still struggled down the bank, slipping and sliding. All the while, his heart kept time with his legs. They could get caught at any moment, so exposed they were out here. He wanted to hurry but the man couldn’t.

  Please stay conscious. He wouldn’t be able to lift him if he passed out.

  Johan tried not to jostle his patient, but it proved to be impossible as they slid down the icy bank. The man cried out in pain.

  “Hush or both of us will end up dead.”

  The man nodded.

  They reached the boat and now Johan faced another difficulty—how to get the man in.

  “I can do it.” The injured man managed to sling one leg into the boat. The vessel wobbled, then stilled. Carefully, he leaned one arm on the boat’s edge, then pulled the other leg in. He slunk in the seat.

  Johan pushed the boat away from shore, then hopped in, picked up the oars, and headed for the little house on the far shore. When he left home tonight, he wanted adventure. He sure got it. More than he planned.

  They didn’t talk, the need for silence absolute. Where had the man come from? He had been shot, that wasn’t in doubt. But how? He couldn’t be one of those executed, could he?

  No one survived his own execution. The Nazis weren’t that sloppy.

  Johan had no other explanation, though.

  Wouldn’t his sister be surprised when she saw what he brought home?

  CORNELIA RELAXED IN her rocking chair, enjoying the peace and quiet of the darkness. Right now, no planes flew overhead on their way to bomb Germany—a rare occasion these days. Silence enveloped her. Johan must have fallen asleep upstairs because all remained still. Since her parents had died and her sister, Anki, had mar
ried, the job of caring for her younger brother had fallen to her.

  Three years ago, when he was seventeen, he had received notice that he had to register for service in Germany. They promised good meals and a salary. Right away, Cornelia didn’t trust it. Since Hitler broke his pledge to respect the Netherlands’ neutrality, she didn’t trust anything that man or his compatriots said. After a lengthy talk with her umpka, they agreed that Johan should go into hiding at his farm. He could work there and earn his keep. Umpka Kees had plenty of places to hide, and his own son, their cousin Niek, would hide there too.

  Two months ago they had been betrayed. Someone must have seen the boys working outside as they often did. Both of them managed to get into the hiding spot in the hay mow, but she and her umpka agreed it was too dangerous there now. Niek had gone to another farm while she and Umpka Kees constructed a hiding place here so Johan could come home.

  She sighed and her black-and-white short-hair cat, Pepper, stirred at her feet. She wanted to stroke his head but didn’t want him to jump up and find another place to sleep, so she resisted.

  This war had a way of turning everything upside down, like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces didn’t fit together. They had lost so much. Too much.

  She rubbed her temples, erasing all of these musings. She didn’t want to think about the past. Or the present. She gathered Pepper in her arms and nuzzled his soft neck. “Come on now, time for bed, though you have slept all day today, haven’t you?”

  He answered her with a lick on her cheek with his rough, bumpy tongue. A gurgle of laughter bubbled inside her, the rare treat sweeter than chocolate.

  A knock at the door tightened her throat and her pulse rate kicked up a few notches. Who would come unannounced at such an hour? No one would dare venture out after curfew. Only the Gestapo and a few audacious Resistance workers roamed the streets at this time.

  Whoever was outside now pounded on the door. Could it be the police? You never knew when the Gestapo or the NSB would show up. She had to warn her brother and get him into his hiding place before they broke down the door.