The Time Between

by Bryna Hellmann-Gillson

  Mrs P was already awake, sitting over a cup of what she called not-quite-the–real-thing. It was made of dried and ground acorns and was said to be healthy but, without milk and sugar, it was dreadful. Pam sat down and took the bowl of porridge Hester gave her. Milk was reserved for the children, and, without it, the cereal was as sticky as glue. ‘My mother used to say this will stick to your ribs,’ Hester told her. ‘She was right for a change.’

  ‘What are you doing up?’ Mrs P asked, ‘it’s your day off.’

  ‘I know. What happened last night? Fanny said a soldier had come in.’

  ‘Nothing, Pam, he just wanted to get the list of names. Sieny forgot it, and they’d just noticed it was missing. Pam, my dear, you must get used to this. Mr Süskind is doing everything he can, and so are we.’

  ‘I’ll never!’

  ‘No, of course you won’t. But try!’ Mrs P drank the last drops of coffee, shuddered and stood up to go. ‘Do something nice today. What are you planning?’

  ‘I thought I’d surprise the twins and make supper for them. I haven’t seen them for almost two weeks. If I get to the market early, there might be some decent vegetables.’

  ‘The kind of weather we’ve been having, there won’t be much. Hester got some carrots yesterday from her father. You can have a few if you like.’

  Helping Hester one day in the kitchen, Pam had heard about her father’s farm, how she and her three brothers all had daily chores even before they were old enough to go to school. Hester’s was to help her mother feed the chickens, gather up the eggs they laid, and then candle and sort the ones they took to the market every Saturday. They had a vegetable garden, and an orchard of apple and pear trees that yielded enough in season for the weekly market. Her brothers worked the fields, plowing, sowing, weeding and harvesting, missing school whenever their father needed them.

  ‘Where’s all that food now? Look at that,’ she said, pointing at a small sack of carrots somebody had smuggled into the city for her. ‘My cousin had to risk her life to bring something pitiful like that, enough for one meal, but she couldn’t spare any more.’

  ‘I suppose the soldiers get most of it,’ Pam said, ‘and they send a lot to Germany.’

  ‘Don’t they grow their own food there? They must have before they came here.’

  ‘I think most of their men are in the army and the women are in the factories. Maybe there’s no-one left to work on the farms.’

  ‘What about all the Dutch kids who joined up to help them, the idiots? And all the men they’ve kidnapped from us?’ Hester’s brothers had been picked up and sent east. She hoped they were tending cows and sheep, it was what they knew best, and weren’t in a factory making bombs.

  ‘My folks have almost given up,’ she told Pam. ‘It’s too much for a couple of old people. It made Mam cry last fall to see the apples rotting on the ground, but she’s too old to climb the trees to pluck them. And Pa had to sell most of our cows to the butcher. Last summer’s weather ruined almost all his feed harvest, and he couldn’t buy any, and then some of the best milkers dried up.’

  ‘It must be awful to see the farm dying like that.’

  ‘Dying’s the word,’ Hester agreed. ‘We’re all dying.’

  The children were just waking up, and she looked in and waved goodbye. It was important to get to the market while the farmers were setting out the little they still had to sell, the last of the winter kale and cabbage, wrinkled apples, a few hens hung by their scaly yellow legs, headless but still covered with limp feathers. There was one woman who came sometimes with boxes of dried beans, noodles or rice, probably stolen from the Germans. The potatoes, if you were lucky enough to get some, were sold one by one as if they were silver spoons. Half their weight was mud, so it was a good thing they weren’t sold by the pound.

  Pam walked between the tables, found some onions, rejected the beets, and stopped to look with wonder at two oranges and a lemon a young woman had arranged on a blue plate. It was a still life worthy of Matisse and almost as expensive as one of his paintings. The woman smiled at her and shook her head. ‘Don’t ask me who gave them to me,’ her expression said.

  Another woman with a generous friend. What gifts did her three student friends get besides lunch at the American Hotel? Stockings, fruit, real coffee? What did they give in return? She knew what people called making love didn’t always have anything to do with love, but how could it be reduced to a way of saying thank you for a package of coffee?

  Hannah had a fur coat, that was something Adrian couldn’t compete with, even more so if she really loved her Gestapo friend. They had looked at each other in that special way people look when they make each other happy. Ma looked at Pa that way sometimes, and he pretended not to notice, but he did. Sex was complicated, love more so. Hunger was simple. She was taking home three onions, three potatoes, a pack of cigarettes, a bag of pudding powder she’d spent her last guilder on, and Hester’s gift of three carrots. She would make a feast out of it.

  All the curtains were drawn in the apartment, it smelled dusty and damp, there were breakfast dishes on the table, and a pile of newspapers on the floor. The twins needed her as much as the nursery did. When she looked into his bedroom, she saw Ted almost hidden under his blankets. She closed the door softly, glad she would have a chance to talk to him, but not wanting to wake him up.

  In her own room everything was the same, and she sat down at her desk and looked at the spines of her books, Shakespeare’s Collected Plays, The Metaphysical Poets, the Illustrated William Blake Aunt Rezi had given her for her sixteenth birthday, books too precious to keep at the nursery.

  When Ted finally came out of his room, she leaned out of the kitchen door and waved. His face brightened, and he came into the room and hugged her. ‘What a nice surprise!’

  ‘I have the day off, so I thought I’d come around and see how you’re doing without me.’

  ‘Not good, I’m afraid. Have you been cleaning up our mess?’

  ‘It’s all right, I like doing it. What about you? Are you all right?’ He sat down, rubbed his eyes and shrugged. ‘What? Tell me.’

  ‘It’s just that I can’t get used to working at night and sleeping all day. I always wake up with a headache. And life’s such a bore, isn’t it?’

  ‘A bore?’

  ‘Work, sleep, work, sleep, with a bit of luck a beer with my friends on a Saturday night. Are we fighting a war? Where’s the action? All I’m doing is printing illegal newspapers and faking identity cards. I want to do something more useful than that!’

  ‘Something more dangerous, you mean. You sound like Adrian and his famous motto.’

  ‘Pro patria mori?’

  ‘That one. He really thinks if he’s willing to die, so is everyone else.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of willing, is it? We’ll never win this battle if we’re afraid to die.’

  ‘I know that, and I know he’s brave, you both are, but he takes too many risks and not only with himself. A girl came to the nursery one morning to give me a message from him. He told her to come and work for us, to help move the children. Mrs P thinks she’s too young, but the girl said she wasn’t afraid, she’d never been stopped before and, anyway, Adrian said it was important. She sounded as if she’d do anything he asked her to, anything!’

  ‘People have always done what he asks them to, and I guess by now he expects it.’

  ‘Well, he shouldn’t, it’s not fair and he isn’t always right. Things don’t always go the way he wants them to, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, and sometimes I even think he’s stupid and we never noticed.’

  ‘Our clever brother who quotes the Greeks, the Romans and Karl Marx in their own language?'

  ‘Oh quotes! I can do that! I’m talking about real things, real people. You met his girlfriend Hannah, didn’t you? Yes? Well, I met her too.’

  ‘Did you? When was that?’

  ‘Last November I think. Adrian said he wanted to take us out for a meal
.’

  ‘Did you like her?’

  ‘No, do you? She was trying so hard to be friendly, but I could see she didn’t mean it. And she kept looking at the clock and pretending not to. She wasn’t planning to have supper with us, and she couldn’t wait to get away.’

  ‘So that’s somebody who doesn’t always do what he wants.’

  ‘But that’s it, he doesn’t see that. She probably lets him make love to her, so he thinks she loves him. He’s put his life in her hands, and mine and yours too, and he doesn’t really know anything about her.’

  ‘And you do?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Not everything, but enough.’

  ‘To not trust her?’ She nodded and he said, ‘Tell me.’

  ‘She’s having an affair with a German, an officer.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Pam, how do you know that?’

  ‘Because I saw them together. I did!’ When he looked doubtful, she told him about seeing Hannah coming out of a concert wearing a fur coat, arms linked with the officer, an older man, someone important. ‘She’s a nurse, how could she buy herself a coat like that?’

  ‘So you think he gave it to her?’

  ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘Maybe she’s spying on the Germans and telling Adrian what she finds out.’

  ‘You don’t believe that.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ He sighed, then said, ‘You haven’t told Adrian? Why not?’

  ‘Because I know he’ll just laugh. He’d say there are lots of women who look like her. But she recognized me too, at the café, I could see it, and she left so fast. She couldn’t sit there with me, she was afraid of me.’

  Before he could answer, the outside door slammed shut, and Adrian called from the hall. Ted went out to meet him and Pam, because she couldn’t make out what he was saying, just his excitement, went to the kitchen door to listen.

  ‘We got the uniforms!’

  ‘Enough? How many?’

  ‘Ten, more than enough.’ Ted murmured something, and Adrian protested, ‘It’s my job, not yours. We’ll work it out, now we have everything we need.’

  ‘Hans came through? Good boy! Is he still working for that doctor?’

  Pam edged closer to the door. What about Hans? She hadn’t seen him all week, he’d said something about being careful. Everyone who worked at the hospital had been questioned a few days before, but he had come out of it all right. The police had asked everyone, ‘Are Jewish people hiding here, pretending to be ill?’ He and the cleaners were let off easily, just one of the nurses didn't have all her papers in order. The officer in charge was polite to Mrs Moll, but Hans thought someone, no, not Mrs Moll, might be a collaborator.

  The Germans had known exactly where to go in the building, what papers to take away with them, who just had to show an identity card and who had to sit for hours waiting to be questioned. Hans was one of the lucky ones, and he didn’t know why. He was working now for a doctor, a former NSBer who secretly hated the Germans, a perfect cover for them both. Perhaps that had helped.

  She heard Ted say, ‘Pam’s here,’ and Adrian called, ‘I’ll be right in!’

  She turned away from the door and busied herself scrubbing the potatoes. The water boiled, she threw the vegetables in, put the lid on, lowered the flame as far as possible, and went into the living room. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  Ted was standing in front of the piano, pressing the keys one by one very softly. ‘Leave it,’ he whispered, then said more loudly, ‘Would they mind much if we sold this too?’

  ‘Do we need to?’

  ‘We have to contribute something for what we’re getting, all those stamps for food and clothes. Anyway, Ma’s not here to play it, and who knows if she ever will be?’

  ‘Do you think they might not come back? I suppose, if they love Switzerland, they’ll want us to come there. Would you go? I think I would, after we’re free. You know what Pa said about pianos?

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Don’t you remember? When you were learning to play the violin, he told us about his grandfather Nachman leaving that little village in Poland and taking the train to Germany with his violin on his back.’

  ‘I remember, it was when he went to Munich. Why did Pa tell us that?’

  ‘Because somebody once asked him why there are so many great Jewish violinists and so few pianists, and Pa said you can’t carry a piano on your back to Siberia.’

  ‘Or keep one in a little wooden house in a shtetl.’

  ‘Lots of Jews were sent to Siberia, weren’t they, even when they weren’t criminals. The Russians just hated them. They walked there, it must have been hundreds of miles. Thousands.’

  ‘Now we have trains, same thing, only faster.’

  Adrian had told them that trains came in from Germany during the day loaded with food and guns for the SS and the Dutch police. They left the same day, with carriages for soldiers going home on leave and locked cattle cars for the people Pam saw coming out of the theater, their possessions in canvas bags and bulging rucksacks. Some of the trains went east past Westerbork and straight into Germany, they knew the names of one or two camps, no more than that.

  She laid her fingers next to his on the keys and imitated the melody he picked out. ‘Don’t sell it, Teddie, it belongs here, it wouldn’t be the same without it.’ Her mother had played for an hour every evening, her father sat with a book on his lap and his eyes closed, and she left the door to her room open to listen while she studied. So many things had changed or were gone for good. She looked around the room, at the worn velvet sofa, the pillows her mother had cross-stitched, the one lamp that still worked, and the bare wall where the painting of the music-making party had hung. It had paid for two exit visas and train tickets to Zurich, no questions asked.

  ‘There’s nothing else left but the piano,’ Ted said. ‘I’ll speak to Van Veen, he knows some people who are still in business and have the money.’

  ‘And no questions?’

  ‘Not if Van Veen does it.’

  Coming in, Adrian asked, ‘Do you trust him?’

  ‘To sell a piano? Sure,.’

  They ate in the kitchen, talking between mouthfuls of mashed vegetables, and Pam made hawthorn tea. ‘This is what killed Socrates, you know,’ Adrian joked.

  ‘Please tell me what’s going on,’ Pam begged. ‘I’d stop worrying if I knew what you two are doing.’ She’d heard of places where the police had come without warning, looking for Jews, resistance fighters or an apartment they could move German soldiers into. If they were doing something illegal, something they would be arrested for, she had a right to know.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ Adrian began.

  ‘But there is! I do! Why can’t you tell me? You’re just like Pa!’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said angrily. It was the worst thing she could have said.

  Dropping her fork noisily on the table, she said, ‘Do the dishes!’ and left the room. Behind her she heard him laugh, ‘That’s our sister all right!’

  She sat on the windowsill in her room and stared down at the small garden below, where somebody had planted rows of beans the summer before. The stalks were brown and leafless, killed by the frosts of a long grey winter. Around the courtyard, all the windows were blanked-out with heavy curtains, with here and there a thread of dim lamplight shining underneath.

  Long ago, before the war, she’d sat at the window listening to music coming from a neighbor’s apartment. Someone played the violin every afternoon, somebody else had a gramophone and so many records that there was a different concert every evening. Sometimes people would applaud or call out their thanks. The gramophone had probably been sold long ago.

  When Ted came in, she moved to the bed and pulled him down to sit next to her. ‘Teddie, I heard what Adrian said about the uniforms. He won’t tell me so, please, you must.’

  Shaking his head, he said, ‘It’s Adrian’s secret, not mine.'

  ‘Trust me!’

&n
bsp; ‘I do!' He shook his head, 'Yes, okay, they’re planning a raid on the city registry. They want to destroy as many records as they can, the names and addresses the police use to round people up and deport them. It’s been done in other cities, and they got away with it.’

  ‘Oh, my God! Adrian’s group is doing that?’ She thought of Jo. He wouldn’t put that little girl in danger, would he?

  ‘No, different ones, and just one man from each. If anything goes wrong, it spreads the loss. It’s been well-planned, the uniforms will get them past the guards, and they have guns and enough benzine to start a fire, and some bombs to set off when they’re safely out again.’

  ‘Will they have to kill people?’

  ‘They don’t want to. They’ll get the guards out of the building before they start the fire.’

  ‘Is Hans going?’

  ‘No, they didn’t need him for that. He got them some needles and stuff to put the guards to sleep. They won’t be hurt, nobody will.’

  She started to laugh. ‘Sorry! It’s just so funny, the way you say nobody will get hurt! Of course everything will go just the way they’ve planned,’ she laughed again, then stopped and sighed. ‘That’s just this time, isn’t it? If it does go well, there’ll be another action after that, and another, until one of them goes wrong.’

  ‘So they should stop while they’re still alive?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Just that they shouldn’t fool themselves about nobody getting hurt.’ She stood up and went to the window. It was a black mirror with the faint smudge of their reflections on it. Pulling the curtains closed, not looking at him, she said, ‘Adrian’s gone out again. Is it tonight?’

  ‘That’s the plan, but they won’t do it unless they know everything’s just right.’ He stood up, went to the door. ‘Don’t tell Adrian I told you.’

  Stretched out on her bed with a book, she realized she’d read the same paragraphs twice and still didn’t know what they said. A raid on a public building must be the most dangerous mission imaginable. She might lose him, never see him again, and they had parted angry with each other. If he became a golden boy tonight, come to dust like a chimney sweeper, she would never forgive herself for making him angry.