The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  “What will happen to them if war begins?” our mother kept asking. The question radiated from her. “We should send the boys somewhere.”

  “Drika, where?” my father asked. “We don’t have any family to send them to.”

  We had no extended family. My father’s parents were dead and he had no siblings. My mother’s parents were gone as well, her only two distant cousins killed during the Great War, and talk of any of that lot had been veiled and avoided. As for friends, owning the factory in town came with wealth and privilege, but everyone saw us as employers, acquaintances at best, and we had no one we could send our own to for protection, for keepsake. That was the unspoken trade for our fortune.

  If the Germans decided to cross the Rhine into Holland, my mother, Edwin, and I would board the Lighthouse Lady and work our way along the coast, sneaking through the North Sea to northern England, away from any cities. My father would stay behind to shut down the factory and come later with his banking and business books on his own boat. We drilled on what to take and where to meet. My uncle and father stocked the hulls of their boats with food and spare clothing. They told us we were not to discuss our plans with anyone else, not even Ludo or Hilda. It was imperative to our safety that we remain quiet. But every time we went through the plan, I secretly played out my own amendment of sprinting to get Hilda, and the two of us going to gather up Ludo. If I was going, they were coming with me.

  Holland was promised neutrality by the German government. However, all along, the Dutch people seemed to intuit that Hitler would eventually invade our country. It was a case of proximity. Either out of fear or denial, our government didn’t properly prepare for any war, and when the sense of an impending German invasion mounted, they started to scramble, drafting as many men as possible into the army.

  “The boys are too young to get drafted,” I heard my father say through the heating ducts.

  My mother’s reply was unclear.

  “I know, but everything we worked for is at stake here,” he said. “The factory, the house, all of it.”

  On April 9, 1940, when the Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway, they set up a sea blockade around Denmark that stretched to the Frisian Islands north of Delfzijl. Uncle Martin had been working his way back from a North Sea fishing trip when a German navy ship stopped him, checked his papers, and searched his ship. They set up a naval blockade, and from what he could gather, it covered the escape route we had mapped out to England.

  I remember sitting with my parents after we found this out. They were side by side, holding hands, which I always found comforting.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  I think I only ever wanted us to be together, for the war to pass us by and everything to be a smooth sheet of ice for us to glide over.

  “I don’t know,” my father said.

  My mother took her finger and traced small circles on the inside of his wrist.

  “You know,” my father said, softly, as if to himself, “on April twentieth, the Führer’s birthday, merchants decorate their store windows with oil paintings of Hitler looking sternly into the distance. They use these large red wax candles to illuminate the paintings like he were a new god to worship.”

  A second plan was then made. My father’s factory was finishing the giant Volkswagen order; he would have it shipped to Rotterdam via train and then to Germany in early May by steamer. He would finish the order and see it to Rotterdam in person, where he would look for a boat that could take us to England.

  Three weeks later, on May 9, the lights were finally done and ready to be loaded onto the train. Our father took me and Edwin with him, and if he could find a boat, he would wire for our mother to join us. We would leave and wait out whatever would happen in England.

  “I’m not going without Hilda and Ludo,” I said.

  “They can’t come with us.”

  “Sure they can. Buy them tickets.”

  “They have their families. Look. We’ll be back soon. Think of it as a vacation.”

  “Then can I come later with Mother?” Edwin asked. He had started a canvas painting and didn’t want to leave it. The paint was expensive and he used it only when he had a sketch he loved and felt worthy of the materials.

  “No. I want you to come with me. You’ll want to see the shipment off. It will give you an idea of the whole process.”

  “I already have a good idea, and I have something here I want to work on.”

  “What? A drawing? Come on. You’ll miss your whole life if you keep your nose in a sketchpad.”

  Edwin pulled at the sleeve of his shirt, a habit used when he was hurt or angry. He looked straight at my father and almost snapped, “I’m capturing life.”

  “You don’t want to go to camp. You don’t want to go to the city with me. You probably just want to paint all over your skin and go to the sea. Draw the waves all day.”

  “That would be no different than tinkering with lights all the time.”

  “Edwin,” my mother said.

  “That tinkering with lights created a secure life for us. A place for this family in the world. Your painting can wait. Your friends can wait. That’s the end of it,” my father said. “You’ll come with me and see how the lights travel. And besides. Mr. Gunnelburg may be in Rotterdam, and if he is I’d like you boys to tell him how much you enjoyed the camp. It was his idea. It would be helpful to me.”

  “Is that why you’re really taking them, Hans?” my mother said.

  “No. They wanted to travel with me last time. This will be good for them. And might be our way out.”

  We rode in the passenger train while my mother stayed behind and saw to the loading of the shipment on the cargo train several hours afterward.

  The train stopped in Amsterdam, where we had a three-hour stopover.

  “Edwin. I want to make up for forcing you to come,” my father said. “Follow me.”

  We walked out of the train station, passed the canals full of riverboats tied stem to stern, storefronts with diamond traders from Antwerp, and narrow brownstone homes with iron balconies built wall-to-wall with one another. I saw a smutty flyer for a dancing girls show on the ground and when my father and brother weren’t looking I bent down to snatch it up and folded it into my pants pocket. As we walked that day I kept pulling it out to sneak a peek of the pencil drawing of the woman with leggings up to her thighs, a flowing camisole with a hooked line of cleavage, long black hair, and plum-colored lips.

  I kept my fingers pinched on the flyer in my pocket. The pad of my thumb traced the flat line of the woman’s image, desperately imagining the contours.

  “Here we are,” my father said as we approached the giant Rijksmuseum. “We’ll have to hurry, but you’ll love this.”

  We walked through the Renaissance palace, under horseshoe-arch doorways and down the giant marble corridors in barrel-vaulted rooms where Edwin stopped in front of at least one piece of artwork in each display. He squared his shoulders to a Vermeer painting, a maid with a white bonnet pouring a pitcher of milk, and let his eyes fall over the lines.

  “Why don’t you just lick it?” I said, but he didn’t break his gaze, his admiration.

  I was quiet after that and watched as he leaned in closer, studying the direction of the brushstrokes, the flow of brush hairs. He tilted his head to study how those strokes changed tint with the angle of the light. It would not have surprised me if he reached his fingers out to touch where the color floated from the cracked paint on the canvas, or if he fell to his knees before the frame. Vermeer. Van Gogh. Dutchmen. Masters. Keepers of my brother’s heart.

  After the museum, we made our way to the train and finally got to Rotterdam as the sun went down. The nut-brown faces of foreigners strolled along Stieltjesstraat. Outdoor cafés angled toward the harbor with its giant ships and schooners. The men smoked cigarettes and the women in black gloves spun umbrella necks resting against their shoulders so that discs of cloth twirled over their heads.


  “Has Uncle Martin been on boats like those?” Edwin asked.

  “He’s been on almost every kind of ship you could imagine,” my father said.

  The sun dropped to the water and disappeared below it. It made all the sailing boats look like lean, long-necked birds paddling on the horizon. Along the main roads potted trees with russet branches with small, green buds punching out lined the canal, where deeply weathered canal boats were moored side by side.

  Edwin kept eyeing the harbor and the ships. “I’d love to be out on one of those,” he said, slapping at my shoulder and pointing from one vessel to the next.

  We ate at a pancake restaurant along the water. At the tables around us were women in dark blue dresses and men in gray and brown suits, similar to our father. A counter on the way to the kitchen had four large wheels of Gouda cheese; the waiters cut thin wedges from them to deliver to each table. My father cut our wedge into slices, and we passed them around until our orders came.

  A girl my age sat at the table behind my father. She had loose yellow hair and a tight little face. Her bones seemed so close below the skin. She took a chocolate from the table, unwrapped it, and put it in her mouth. Her fingers straightened the paper on the tablecloth, pushing out the folds. She didn’t chew. I imagined the chocolate on her tongue. A communion of sorts. Her head was down but I suddenly wanted to see her teeth, the curve of her white throat, the specks of her eyes. I wanted her to glance at me.

  We each ate thick pancakes with apple, bacon, and syrup. Then we shared a fillet of pan-fried herring covered in olive oil and crushed almonds. My father drank a glass of red wine served from a straw-covered bottle. We shared an artichoke that had been boiled and soaked in melted butter, and we each ate two oranges, leaving a pile of husked artichoke leaves and quartered orange rinds in the middle of the table. Strange accents hung in the air. A girl on a bicycle ticked past. Rims rattled over cobbles. Her basket was full of flowers. Horse carts clopped along the cobblestone between the cars.

  At dinner, we decided that our father would leave first thing in the morning to go back to the rail yard to see the shipment of lights from the train to the harbor, where the boat was scheduled for a midmorning departure. We would meet him at the same pancake restaurant for lunch before going to meet his contact at Volkswagen, Mr. Gunnelburg.

  Finished eating, we worked our way to the hotel, which was a five-story brick structure that shared walls with the office buildings on both sides. It had a wall of windows in the lobby, a key rack and letter rack with pigeonholes behind the reception counter, and a frosted globe chandelier by the fireside. On the hearth’s mantel was a large wooden carving of two eagles that we ran our hands over as our father checked us in. Each set of the eagles’ wings spread out wide, and their heads faced each other in a fierce wooden stare, one on top of the other with their talons interwoven. They were both rising and falling, competing and fighting—locked in some thrall that engaged each, locked in a moment that would mark them forever. When my father had the keys, we followed him up the marble stairs instead of riding the groaning cage elevator. He walked ahead of us with the keys dangling like an ornament from his hooked finger. My father went to sleep in his room, and Edwin and I went to our shared room.

  We stayed up well past normal looking into the street and the surrounding buildings. Edwin sketched how the angle of the buildings descended down the road. I pulled the flyer from my pocket and studied the picture of the woman, imagining the place where this figure, or smoky women like her, might walk slowly toward me, gather up their long hair, and drape it over my body. How I’d get lost in the scent of her cascading locks before they pressed into me.

  We had planned on sleeping until we had to wake and go meet our father. But that didn’t happen.

  Very early the next morning, we were awakened by the loud hum of approaching airplane engines, followed by heavy artillery gunfire. I lay in bed, trying to remember where I was. Voices came in from the hallway. Doors swung open. People yelled to one another. Others ran down the corridor, their footfalls manic and heavy.

  The strange noises washed over my bed.

  “Jacob. Get dressed,” Edwin yelled, and then something in me snapped to attention. I pushed the covers off and pulled clothes on. We stepped into the hallway. My father had already left to oversee the light shipment. People ducked down the stairwell and we followed. The stairwell sounded like Pauwel’s drum line at camp. There must have been thirty people hurrying down to the lobby, where the hotel workers pointed everyone into the basement.

  “Down the steps, down the steps,” a bellhop yelled. Behind him, through the hotel’s main glass doors, came the steady and terrible howl of an air raid siren.

  The hotel’s basement was an unfinished room full of guests in their nightclothes. Most were silent except for a woman our mother’s age in the back who kept praying in quavering utterances.

  With each crack of gunfire, dust shook loose from the corners of the walls. Several of the people huddled up and started wrapping their arms around one another. Some of them must have been strangers, but they hugged like old friends. Their faces sour with fear, arms around shoulders, heads tucked into each other’s chests. The room became one giant tangle of a frightened body. The noise of planes overhead echoed down through the skeleton of the building.

  “What is this?”

  “They’re coming.”

  We stayed in the basement for several minutes. I thought about the general talking to us camp boys on the beach about how one scalding push of violence would put the world back to its proper order. I had not imagined that heat touching my own country.

  “We have to go get Father,” I said to Edwin.

  “He’ll come back for us,” Edwin said.

  “We told him we’d meet him, we have to go the restaurant to meet him,” I pleaded. Chaos pounded from outside, but if it was the Germans who were coming, we would be fine. We were dagger-carrying members of the youth camps, after all.

  This. This is what I honestly thought. Now, I can track any memory back to this moment. This moment when I proved to be such a fool.

  “This changes the plan, Jacob. He’ll know to come back here.” My brother hunkered against the basement wall, bobbing on his bent knees, coiled to spring up. His hair was messy on the left side from resting on the pillow. His eyes were recessed pools of dark liquid as he scanned the room.

  “No. We have to go get him, we have to,” I insisted. “We have to go,” I continued until Edwin agreed to at least go up to the lobby.

  “Boys, stay here,” a woman said.

  “Go, go.” I pushed Edwin.

  At street level a young bellhop leaned against the corner of the door and looked down the road. We ran up and crouched next to him. The sun rose and cut the street with slanting light. Streams ran over the cobblestones.

  “What’s the water from?” Edwin asked the bellhop.

  “Either the artillery hit and broke a canal wall or we opened it as a defense, because some of the dykes are opened and the streets are flooding.” He had pouch cheeks, aquamarine eyes with long lashes, and thick, dark eyebrows, each the size of a mustache.

  “We won’t be able to get to him,” Edwin said.

  I gripped his arm. I felt the rush and lift of panic—a feeling of total powerlessness of not finding my father worming around my chest. “We have to.”

  Edwin looked up and down the street, then at me for a long time. I don’t know what he thought of me in that moment—if I wanted to be brave and save my father or if I truly needed him near to save me. In truth, it was the latter—but whatever Edwin saw in me made him act.

  “Do you have your identification papers?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  The water in the street in front of the hotel didn’t look very deep. Edwin peered at me closely again. The start of a light silk mustache shadowed his upper lip. He looked up and down the street again and then back at me.

  “All right,” he said. “Come on
.”

  Outside, the rattle of heavy machine-gun fire echoed from every direction. When the first major wave of planes stopped flying overhead, Edwin started down the street toward the port. Nothing was said between us. We walked with our shoulders touching the wall of buildings along the road. Over the rooftops, a paratrooper floated under his inverted bowl-shaped parachute. The white, silk chute bloomed out of the sky. A limp body descended the last hundred meters onto the street, landing between us and the road to the port. The man crashed hard and his parachute covered him as if he had never been there. I froze. My legs locked, my shoulders squared toward the man. The canvas of the chute ruffled with the breeze as we passed. It was the first dead body I’d ever seen.

  “Don’t look at him, Jacob,” Edwin said. He grabbed my hand and pulled me away, but his eyes never left the dead paratrooper. His eyes were wide open. I imagined soon I’d be seeing such men drifting down slabs of butcher paper, through charcoal clouds.

  At last I came unstuck and walked on, passing a dozen other similar lumps on our way up Plantagestraat to the market. People huddled in the wedges of door frames. Faces gazed out of shop windows as we walked along the edge of the canal. Sewers brimmed over. The water in the canal surged. Some levies had been shifted to control the flow. It rose up along the brick walls toward street level.

  Our father had taken us to the docks the day before while he signed the incoming shipment over to the customs workers. He would have been by the docks waiting to see off the freight.