The Boat Runner
Page 29
“We have to know for sure,” the friar said. “Who sent you?” he yelled into my face.
Pain pulsed through my body. My teeth sought each other through the skin of my cheeks. The room moved at an angle. The asthmatic red face interrogated me, Colt revolvers that were looped into the friar’s cassock dug into my gut.
“No. Let him go,” I heard Janna scream as she rushed into the room. Her sleepy little half of a shadow followed behind her, taking it all in.
The friar easily held Janna back as I shook my head no, pinched my eyes shut, and whatever ghastly expression the friar saw on my face said enough. He let go of my throat and resumed pinning me down.
Soon after, they placed the burning metal against my third toe stump, and I passed out.
I don’t remember anything that happened after that. I didn’t dream.
I awoke startled, disoriented, my heart booming. The deep thrumming of my own pulse and short breaths let me know the urgent force of life hadn’t left me. I was still drunk and had a horrible fever. Hot blood pooled inside my stomach.
In the distance a calf bawled. Folds of cloth and quilted blankets were wrapped around my body. My hands began groping at the blankets to feel my legs, to run my palms down my shins, over the ankles, and along the fanned-out bones of my feet to the thick padding around my toes. The two white wads of my bandaged feet bobbed up from beneath the blankets. I stared at the gauze but could not yet imagine the obscene gaps between my toes.
Fear came to me in shuddering, breathless gulps. My clearest thoughts fluttered off like gypsy moths. My body sank back into the sweat-soaked bedding and darkness.
When I woke again, everything seemed far away. Or I was far away, like being pulled out of a photograph. Yanked away from a woman talking. Janna. Janna in the center of the room, far away. She was saying something. It seemed urgent. I wanted to be near her. To walk up to her but everything between us wavered.
Nothing felt real.
Then I felt her hand pushing on me. On my chest. Her fingers splayed, each resting with a gentle force. Her hands touched my chest the way I’d pushed on the tombstone Ludo carved for Edwin. Then there was nothing again.
I woke a third time and there was the girl. Mevi. Her face close to mine. I willed my mind to rise up from the fog pinning me down, but then she was gone.
My eyes opened and closed in a blur. The old woman who helped cut my feet came in with a steaming cup of hot coffee and a bowl of beef broth, and laid them on the small nightstand next to the bed. She walked heavily and wore a thick, tweed skirt and gray sweater. She wiped her hands on her brown smock and then placed a palm on my forehead, then against my cheek, cupping it, which eased some of the desolate feelings that had come to me in the night. She tapped her crooked finger against my collarbone, and smiled with blackening teeth.
“You had me worried for a while, boy.”
When I came out of my stupor the next afternoon, a crochet counterpane was tucked over me. My stomach burned, and both of my feet throbbed all the way up to my hips. The old woman was there. Behind her was a radio tuned to an illicit English station. I heard snippets of news while tossing in bed.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“It’s better we don’t share names, dear,” she said.
Half asleep, and half awake, I lay and stared out the window and thought of going to summer camp with my brother and Ludo years before. There, we had tossed one another up and chanted our names. It shocked me now how casual we were about marching in our uniforms, aiming guns, and lobbing grenades. How all that we had been training for unfurled before us, how easy all that had come.
The memory faded, and I became lucid for a moment. I faced the old woman.
“Where are they?”
She shook her head no.
“Where are they?”
“They left.”
“What. To where?”
“They told you when you woke. The woman told you. She thanked you. You were awake.”
“When will they be back?”
The woman shook her head no again.
“Why? How long have I been sleeping?” I pushed myself up in the bed, but lay back down when the weight of Janna’s hands on my chest felt real again, felt like something very serious and not a dream at all, but stones pushing me down.
The old woman rubbed a rag over my forehead, and the feel of it on my skin, of someone tenderly reaching out to me when I felt so alone, brought wracking sobs up my spine. I choked. “No. Where? No. Where’d they go?”
“It’s best not to know.”
“What. Why. Why now?” I rolled onto my side to cover how raw I felt. “Why’d they leave?”
Though I knew. Even then, newly freed from the fever dream, I knew. I was not a worthy shepherd. Not for them. To them I was a stranger. But to me they had become much more. To me they were a renewed purpose. A tangible direction. Jesus, was I to lose everyone?
“The friar?” I pressed on.
The woman pressed the rag to the back of my neck. “Yes.”
“He took them someplace safe?”
“He brought you here. You’re safe. He’ll take them somewhere as well.”
When I stopped crying, I rolled back to the old woman.
“Will he tell me where they are? If I go back to him, will he tell me?”
She let the rag fall open, then lay the cool cloth over my face so I could not see her.
I kept my eyes closed then and pretended to sleep. When she bent down to feel my forehead I could smell the starch on the cuff of her shirt, the dark odor of boiled vegetables, and the warmth of her breath. When she left the scent lingered, a presence I held on to for comfort.
Once my fever broke, the horrible pain in my feet lessened. It took another week before the swelling went down, and I could stand and start to take a few baby steps. My balance was off. I had to relearn where to put pressure against the floor. The large gaps between my toes felt all wrong. I would put too much pressure on one side of my foot to overcompensate, and at times, the phantom weight of my missing toes ached inside my bandages.
I wandered their home. Now with the girls gone the desire to keep going faded. My appetite for food or love or sex or even safety slipped beyond me. I wanted everything to go black again.
There were a few pictures of the old farmer who took me in as a soldier when he was younger. Looking at them made me feel guilty for running away from my war. I wished for his bravery. I told the old lady as much.
“I’ll get you all killed,” I told her. “You’re risking too much.”
“The old have less to lose, dear,” she said, patting my shoulder as she set a bowl of broth in front of me.
There was another picture on the wall of a young man with a wide, stern face similar to the old man’s. “Is this your son?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
“We don’t know.”
On the wall was another old photograph of a large family standing in front of a small log home. The family bunched together around an old man laid out on a wooden cart that was propped up to face the camera. The old man wore a suit and his long beard had been brushed out, and his hair looked wet and pushed back. At first I thought he had large eyes but when I looked closer, I saw that they had been painted over his closed eyelids. I’d seen pictures like that before. Easterners took pictures of their dead to keep some trace. As pictures were very expensive then, these funeral pictures were an event to dress up for. If you couldn’t travel to see a relative, you could see the picture of them being put to rest. There were old women, rough-looking bearded men, and stern wives with broad children of all ages, some cradled in their mothers’ arms and others as tall as their fathers. It would be a fine way to die, propped up like a meat puppet and surrounded by loved ones. It should be the way we all die.
We had been eating their potato rations, and once, after a bombing close to town, the old man brought back the head of a cow that had been killed. He said he ha
d to use a fellow farmer’s double-handed tree saw to get it loose. He carved the meat off the bone and they both rattled around the kitchen frying it up, and boiling it into a stew.
That night, when I sat down at the table with them and had a meal with them for the first time, the food she laid out almost made me weep. She’d made beef casseroled in beer and served with raisins fried in a pan over the hearth. That night we feasted, but I had a terrible case of the runs. I was strangely happy about this as it meant at least my bowels still worked.
Later that night, the old woman had me lie down on the kitchen floor with a towel under my heels. From a mothballed closet in the shadowed corner of the room she brought out a sewing kit with a polished cherry handle. She undid the bandages at my feet, pinched the rounded eye of a needle, and lanced my cloudy blisters. Each rotting abscess let out a nauseating stench. After that, I limped around the old couple’s house feeling like Thump-Drag himself.
Then I repacked my backpack and readied myself to move on. I left two hundred guilders and the gold coins from the barter kit on the pillow of the mattress they’d given me.
“Thank you for everything,” I said.
“Your fast, running days are over,” the old woman said. “Hide when you can. Please hide.”
Over the next several days of moving west, I stopped in old barns, office buildings, and basements of deserted houses. One home looked ancient, like the small cottages I’d seen with Edwin and Uncle Martin in Borkum, one of the Frisian Islands, which had once been inhabited by whalers. Some of the oldest homes on that island had whale-bone fences surrounding the property.
A Messerschmitt buzzed overhead. The black crosses on the underside of its wings were visible. I stumbled over tree trunks and brambles as it passed. I was always falling, then worming my way forward.
My feet always hurt. Each breath pressurized the feeling I was obligated to carry everyone I ever loved free of this mess. When walking I felt like the beating of all their hearts replaced that of my own.
Outside the town of Guttenfield, there was a parking area and a large sign staked into the ground that read Guttenfield Zoo. There were no cars, and the broad, iron gates were closed and chained shut with a thick iron padlock. A smaller sign hung from the gate on which it had been printed Please Don’t Eat the Animals’ Food. The apostrophe and the word food had been crossed out with a white brushstroke, so the sign now read Please Don’t Eat the Animals.
I kept working my way past farmhouses with thatch-roofed barns and a shadowy castle draped in fog along a river. It felt like I’d marched through centuries, back to some barbaric age. I imagined kings, with fur caps and dark beards, who hunted in the woods along the river, wandering the castle’s firelit hallways. I ate what little food I could scavenge and rooted around for snails on the forest floor, digging the meaty parts out with the tip of my dagger. They tasted like diluted salt and slipped down my throat like hunks of phlegm. After eating, I doctored my feet, changing the bandaging, which soaked through from all my walking. My bare feet showed the charred nubbins where my toes had been, each pinched off like the end of a sausage link.
I crossed into Belgium and made my way to Bruges. There were people in the streets of the city: a French mountain man in a full-length bear-fur coat; an old man with a Lord Kitchener mustache; and a small girl in a shabby smock of a dress, holding one handle of a bag tethered to a tired-looking woman with greasy, brown hair. The bulbous end of a baguette stuck out of their bag, and the little girl’s dark eyes watched the bread as she was dragged along by the woman’s grip. Around them was the rubble of buildings left in the wake of the Allied bombings. The old couple had given me a change of clothes, farmer’s clothes, but the city people eyed my hobbled gait with suspicion anyway.
There were posters on the walls: Nazi propaganda intended for Belgians and Frenchmen, as the British at the time were sinking French naval ships in the Mediterranean to keep them from falling into German hands. The posters said thirteen hundred French sailors had been killed by the RAF. So the Nazis wanted the French and Belgians to take up arms against the RAF. The posters helped me decide on an escape route through northern Europe. I figured the less time in France the better, as the country would likely have every kind of displaced person, and the allegiances would be too varied to navigate safely.
My first night in Bruges, as I slept in the main square of town, prisoners were roped together and shuffled through the streets to the train station. Floodlights filled the air overhead, sweeping back and forth. If I watched the lights long enough, they turned into stars that had become mobile, swirling around in space.
23
The Knight’s Cross was now sewn into the canvas lining on the inside of my backpack. The orders of a soldier, Hedrick Sherman, were in my right cargo pocket. Hedrick was due to report to guard detail on the islands out in the English Channel, which the Germans had taken over. The orders were dated for two months ago, but I took ink and carved a potato with a relief of the new date and pressed it onto the forms. At the train station in Brussels, the guards glanced at the papers, my uniform, and then let me board a train to France. It was filled with immigrant workers, other soldiers, and civilians who looked like this was part of their quotidian lives. It was easier to blend into the crowd than I’d anticipated.
In Rouen, where the tracks would have crossed the Seine River, the bridge had been destroyed. Everyone unloaded from the train, and were ferried across on a small barge to the other side, where we boarded another train and kept on going west and then north to Cherbourg.
When the train got to Cherbourg, I’d intended to steal a boat and work my way across the Channel, but all the small passenger boats in the harbor had been sunk, and soldiers even took axes to the hulls of the little dinghies. My only other option was to wait in a military compound for a boat out to the island of Jersey to take me to my fake post and try to steal a boat from there.
I spent the night debating whether I’d made a huge mistake staying to the north to try to cross the Channel as opposed to going south, through the Pyrenees Mountains, and trying to work my way to Gibraltar. Though there was no way of knowing if I could have made it such a distance. I decided to start practicing a story about being late arriving to my post.
In the morning, with the identity of Hedrick, whom I decided had been delayed after having his feet wounded in a bombing raid in Utrecht, I boarded the boat to Jersey. It was a fisherman’s boat, not that different from Uncle Martin’s. The boat’s owner was a Frenchman who had also been conscripted into service. His name was Fabien. Fabien’s face was narrow and rigid, and he wore a thick bird’s nest of a beard. In the wheelhouse with Fabien, we spoke English because Fabien’s German and my French were both poor.
“This is a good boat,” I said to him after we pushed off.
“She’s been good to me.” Fabien eyed the water ahead of him.
The only other person onboard was another soldier, who had gone belowdecks to sleep. I asked Fabien about how he’d come to be a ferryman, and told him my family had done the same thing. I shared that I was a Dutchman and couldn’t wait for the war to be over. “I would like nothing more than to jump the Channel and travel to Britain,” I said, watching Fabien’s reaction. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“Dangerous talk,” he said.
“Profitable though, I imagine.”
The two of us sailed in silence for a while. Belowdecks, the other man slept. From Cherbourg to Southampton across the Channel it was a mere hundred miles, and I contemplated pulling my gun and making the two men blow by Jersey and sail closer to England. But in the end, I took a gamble, and was frank with Fabien.
“In here, I have papers,” I said, kicking at my bag.
“What kind of papers?” he asked.
“Papers for the other side.”
“I see. Both lucky and dangerous for you,” he said.
“It is, but it could be a big advantage for you.”
“How so?
”
“I can pay you to take me closer to the shore, I’ll row the rest of the way.”
“We’ll get blown to hell before we get close, and what would you row on?”
“I can pay you for trying. Get me close enough for an honest shot at fighting the currents with your inflatable life raft.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I have money. A lot of money. You could take care of your family through the rest of the war.”
“You’re a crazy kid, now be quiet.”
“Fabien. Listen to me. All you need to do is get me close enough to row the rest of the way.”
“Even if we didn’t take fire, the rocks on shore would cut you to ribbons, and if that didn’t happen, the British would eat you whole.”
“Get me close. I’ll deal with those things.”
I leaned into Fabien and begged him. “Drop the other soldier off, wait until dark, and we’ll run without lights. I’ll help you navigate. When we’re within sight of land, any land in Britain, I’ll pay you, and you can turn back.” I pulled a stack of francs from my backpack. “This offer expires as soon as I see land on Jersey.”
“What about the other soldier? He’ll know something’s not right.”
“You wake him up and tell him I’ve already gone ashore. I’ll hide in your steering hold until night when you push off again. I’m going to be paying somebody to help me get there, might as well be you. It’s a lot of money. Consider it.”
When Fabien pulled his boat up to Jersey, I ducked down below the wheelhouse console and hid with my backpack in the slimy bilge tank. My Luger was stuffed in my jacket pocket, ready to draw if Fabien changed his mind.
At the dock, he tied the boat off with the help of several soldiers, and then woke the man in the holds.
Every sound on the fishing boat was familiar. I listened as time passed. I practiced the story I would use if I was found in Yarborough’s RAF uniform once in England. I was shot down over Delfzijl, in Holland. I’d been in hiding and had worked my way back. My parents came to Britain after the Great War. I was born in Holland but grew up in London. That was my first mission, and I bartered with a fisherman to smuggle me offshore.