by Sara Young
I would never be beautiful. Anneke and I shared the same features—our mothers' features—but fine breads and coarse loaves are made from the same ingredients. And I would never cut my hair; I wore it braided and pinned up, as my mother had. I let An-neke brush it out loose, and when she left, I didn't go downstairs right away. I folded her nightgown, placed it under her pillow, and put the cover back on her lipstick. I straightened the pictures she had cut from magazines and tucked along the mirror's frame: Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, Gary Cooper, Carole Lombard. What would this room be like empty of her things? Empty of her?
After my mother died, my father had paced through the house gathering up her things without looking at them, his face set in angry lines. Everything she had touched, packed in dark boxes. It had hurt him too much to see them. But it had hurt me more not to. I sank down on Anneke's bed, suddenly stung with tears.
Later that day, as I set the brushes and pail out on the front steps to scrub them, Mrs. Bakker called to me from her doorway.
"Have you heard the news? The Nuremberg Laws are to be implemented here."
"Ja," I agreed carefully, pouring the water over the steps. I had heard, although I didn't think my uncle had said so exactly. I bent over the bricks and began to work.
"It will be very bad for Jews here, I think," she continued, and something in her voice made me wary. "For anyone with Jewish blood."
I forced my arms to continue scrubbing, but suddenly I didn't have enough air, and the sounds of the street spun together into a whine. I kept my head down, focusing on the pattern of blue and gray tiles that bordered the threshold, so she wouldn't see my reaction. Never since I'd arrived had anyone asked me about my father or my life in Poland. Never, as far as I knew, had my aunt or uncle explained why I had come, except to refer vaguely to my mother's death. It was a subject we didn't even discuss among ourselves.
"Well," said Mrs. Bakker, "take care of yourself, Cyrla." She closed her door.
I finished the steps as quickly as I could. Inside, my aunt was peeling pears—she had been stewing and canning fruit for weeks.
"I'll do the shopping now," I told her, taking the ration coupons from the shelf. I didn't wait for a reply; I grabbed my bicycle and set out.
But not to the market square.
THREE
I took the bicycle path along the Burgemeester Knappertlaan, which I usually avoided in favor of smaller streets that didn't border the canal. Despite the years I'd lived in the Netherlands, I'd never grown comfortable with so much water, waiting deep and black behind the hunched shoulders of the banks. Nearly a year and a half since the bombings in Rotterdam, I imagined I could still smell the smoke on the canals, and in fact they still carried cinders and chunks of rubble washing down from the seaport. I couldn't help but wonder how long bits of charred human flesh or bones floated in that sour brine also—nearly a thousand people died that day, burned in the hot oven of our ruined city—and so I took pains to stay away. Today the fog rose up from the water like cold breath, but I needed to see Isaak, and the route along the canal was the shortest to the Jewish Council.
A board nailed to the trunk of a willow caught my attention. I pulled over and read the words lettered on it. Park—No Admittance to Jews. Another sign was on the gate to the Promenade. I looked ahead; every clump of trees had apparently been declared a park: No Admittance to Jews. I began to pedal again and tried to see only the flaming scarlet and gold of the chrysanthemums that burned along the banks.
The Council was located in the first floor of a worn brick building, which had once housed a bank, a fish market, and an ice-cream parlor, all of which had closed after the yellow "J"s had been painted on their windows. I had been here many times before with Isaak as he picked up papers or stopped in to speak with someone. Always it had been a simple matter of walking through the doors. But this day was different. Two Gestapo leaned against the gate in their long green coats and black boots, smoking and looking bored. A third stood by the door nailing up a notice. The new restrictions. I stood behind him to read them.
He turned. "This is no business of yours."
I moved to pass into the building, but he blocked me. "Nothing here is any of your business."
"I'm looking for a friend."
"You should know better than to have friends inside here." By the way he looked at me, I could tell it amused him to think a Dutch girl would want to enter this place.
"I need to go inside," I tried again. "I want to find someone."
Now he wasn't so pleasant. "You should be more careful choosing your friends."
One of the other agents stubbed out his cigarette and raised his eyes to us.
I got back on my bicycle and rode the few blocks to the synagogue. Rabbi Geron was in his office; yes, Isaak had been called to a meeting in Delft the night before, he said, although, no, he didn't know when to expect him back. I asked him to take me to Isaak's room. If he was surprised, he didn't show it, and this thrilled me somehow, as if I had stolen an intimacy. I found myself smiling as we crossed the stone courtyard that separated the synagogue from the small outbuilding where Isaak lived.
Before the Occupation, this building had housed offices and storage rooms. Now, anyone who needed shelter could stay here. Isaak told me a lawyer had come, and a man who had lost his position as a professor and was now alone after sending his wife and daughter to relatives in America. The old man who cared for the grounds slept here as well, and a fifteen year-old boy, recently orphaned.
"Do you make a family for yourselves?" I had asked Isaak once. "The boy, is he a brother? Is the professor a father to you?" He had just looked at me, puzzled.
In all the time I'd known Isaak I'd never been inside. As in everything else, he kept what was most private to himself. But when Rabbi Geron opened the door to Isaak's room, I would have known it among a thousand as his.
A single cot in the corner was made neatly with a gray-and-blue–striped blanket. The goosenecked lamp beside his bed was the only curved line in the room. Books were everywhere, but in orderly stacks. Two prints of da Vinci drawings and half a dozen maps hung on the walls, all perfectly aligned.
A cracked white china mug on the desk held a stick of charcoal and three pencils. I lifted each one for the pleasure of touching something Isaak had touched. Beside the mug were two drawing pads. The smaller, I knew, was full of his bird drawings—he loved to draw birds, although he seldom took the time now. I picked up the larger pad and opened to a sketch of the castle ruins at the edge of town. I remembered walking there with him the previous spring and sitting a distance away working on a poem while he sketched, feeling hurt that he wouldn't show me his drawing later or ask to see what I'd written.
Isaak had captured the sense of abiding strength in the old bricks and stone, solid yet softened. But there were no people in the scene, none of the picnickers or lovers reading to each other on their blankets whom I had watched in jealousy, none of the small children running with their dogs. And he had drawn the branches of the chestnut tree rising above the ruins bare of their leaves, like blackened bones. I felt a small chill: Isaak had drawn this scene only a few weeks before the Germans had come with their bombs.
For a few moments more I stood there, breathing in Isaak's air. Tomorrow I would come back with a pot of geraniums for his windowsill. And a basket of apples, and I would take the curtains from my own bedroom window and hang them here for him. Pleased, I took off my shoes and slipped into his bed. Lying there with the scent of him on his sheets, it was easy to imagine Isaak beside me. I slipped my hand into my dress and stroked my breast softly, and felt it swell.
When I awoke, Isaak was sitting beside me. I could tell by the light it was late in the afternoon. "So you heard," he said.
I was confused; how did he know about Anneke?
"But you shouldn't have come here."
"Anneke's leaving," I said, reaching for him. "She's pregnant."
Isaak rose and looked down at me
. I couldn't tell if it was worry or anger in his eyes, but as always I thrilled to have them on me alone. "You shouldn't have come here," he repeated. "What were you thinking?" He glanced at my neck.
The new decrees. I pulled out my legitimization card, which I wore around my neck on a thin cord. "I'm wearing it, Isaak. I was careful! Did you hear me? Anneke's getting married. I can't bear it if she leaves!"
"If she's pregnant, that's her own stupidity."
Isaak was always short of compassion when it came to An-neke. "She's spoiled," he often said. "She has to wear lisle stockings instead of silk now, coffee is too expensive to drink every day, and she can't see the newest films. Well, too bad. All over Europe people are losing their homes, their freedoms. Their lives."
"Ja, I know," I would always agree. What I never admitted, though, was how much I loved this about Anneke. Just a week before the invasion, she and I had seen Ninotchka. When I was with her, it was possible to believe that any day now we would be able to go to Greta Garbo's next film, or enjoy the feel of silk on our legs, or drink coffee in the middle of the day and gossip about fashion. We could think about entering the university again. And Isaak might allow himself to fall in love. His luxury.
"Verdamt!" Isaak swore softly. He ran his long fingers through his curls, in the way that always made me want to reach out and do the same. "That German soldier? This is bad. Has she told him?"
I stared at him, not understanding.
"Cyrla, it's going to come out, who you really are."
"Anneke would never do that."
"You can't walk around blind just because you don't want to see. Anneke won't care. She'll do whatever suits her."
"Why are you always so hard on her?"
"Because she's too easy on herself!"
Isaak said it as though he knew Anneke, but he didn't. Not the way I did. It was an old argument.
He sat beside me again. I tried to wrap my arms around him, but he held me away. "You're not safe anymore. It's time for you to leave. I'll start the arrangements."
"Don't. Nothing's changed."
"Everything will change. You heard about the restrictions yesterday."
"They don't affect me. And Anneke won't ... Isaak, all these years—how many times have you told me I'm not even Jewish because of my mother? Now, suddenly you're deciding I am?"
"To the Germans you are."
"I have papers. I'm perfectly safe. And I can't leave—this is where my father wants me to be."
Isaak looked away. "Don't. You know where this leads."
I did. I hadn't heard from my father in nearly five months. In his last letter, he reported that the Lodz ghetto was to be sealed. A few months before, he said, girls my age were forced to clean latrines with their blouses. When they were finished, the German overseers wrapped the filthy blouses around their heads. I'd gone to school with some of these girls. I am grateful you are not here, my father wrote.
If my family was in Lodz when they sealed the ghetto, Isaak said, then they couldn't have left afterward. Unless they had been relocated. "Relocated" meant something too terrible to be possible. His logic was harsh. He read me transcripts from his intelligence.
"Not my family," I would remind him. "They're working in a factory. That will keep them safe, my father told me."
Isaak shook his head. "Not for long. We think they're emptying the ghetto. They're taking them to the camps." He didn't stop even when I wept. I had to accept it, to know that my family might be lost; I had to know the danger. Most of all, I had to learn to be strong.
I hated Isaak when he did this, but I forgave him, because it was just his nature to see the worst, to see demons where none existed. He relied too much on logic, but I knew logic was not always the clearest lens. He should have understood; after all, he told me often enough that drawings told more truth than photographs—it took a human being to find the essence in things. But he'd been orphaned at birth, without a family. He couldn't know what I knew.
I knew how much life was in my father. I knew his passion for music and how much he loved his children; I had seen him dance with my mother. People with that much life couldn't disappear. My family's spirit was strong. Not hearing from my father only meant it was dangerous for him to write. His silence was keeping my brothers safe. Isaak and I had stopped arguing about this months ago.
"Last week we got two families out on a fishing boat from Noordwijk. They made it to England. There are still ways. You have papers; it won't be that difficult."
"I'm not leaving," I replied calmly.
"You have to. Anneke's marriage puts you at greater risk."
I was glad I hadn't mentioned Mrs. Bakker's words, or what I had overheard my uncle say. I got out of the bed and stepped into my shoes without looking at Isaak. If I looked at him, I would see the way his hair curled behind his ears, or the gold flecks in his brown eyes, or the crease in his cheek where he wore his rare smile, and I wouldn't be able to walk out of his room. If I didn't walk out of his room, I knew what I would say next: that I couldn't leave because I loved him, and because I had done enough leaving and he had had enough leaving done to him. And I couldn't bear to hear his answer. I crossed to the door.
Isaak followed and reached out to hold the door shut. His sudden nearness made my breath catch. "You can't go now. Wait until it's dark. Phone your aunt if you need to." He opened the door. "There's a telephone in the hall. I'll take you."
"I can find it," I told him coolly. How could he even think of sending me away? If you send people away, they can be lost forever. But it didn't matter. I was nineteen; no one could make me do anything I didn't want to do.
I called my aunt, suddenly hungry for her voice. From her tone, I could tell she hadn't heard Anneke's news yet—she wouldn't be able to keep this from me. I asked to speak to her.
"She's not here," Tante Mies said. "I thought she might be with you. She was to work until three, so I thought you had met. I suppose she's with that man. And where are you, Cyrla? You're not with ... your uncle says that now with the new restrictions..."
"I'll be home soon." I hung up and walked back to Isaak's room. Inside, the space between us loomed huge, silent. Isaak took a thick book from the shelf, Birds of Europe, and placed it on his desk. From the window sash he drew out a fine wire I hadn't noticed before. I watched over his shoulder as he opened the book. Inside, fitted into a hollowed-out rectangle, was a radio. The Birds of Europe were songbirds.
He fitted the wires together and made adjustments, and in a moment I heard the radio crackle. The broadcast was from the BBC, and as my English was poor and there was a lot of static, I could catch only a few words.
"The news is bad today," Isaak said, after he had disassembled the radio. "Eighteen thousand Jews murdered in the Ukraine, at Berdichev. Nearly twenty-five thousand in Kamenets-Podolski last week. Hitler is stepping things up there. But Churchill didn't address it. He talked only of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia, as if the killings were a military defense instead of murders."
"Then maybe it's not true," I tried.
"It's true. I think he can't say it publicly because then the Nazis would know he's getting this information. I hope that's it. But he knows. And Roosevelt knows. What we heard from Berdichev was confirmed by the London underground. Also that the numbers are high in Lithuania. It's getting very bad in the east, especially in the Baltic countries."
"But not in Lodz."
"Not in Lodz."
"And not here." I regretted it immediately.
"What does it matter? Eighteen thousand, twenty-five thousand!" Isaak frowned and rubbed his forehead. "No, not here. Yet. But it's only a matter of time. After the restrictions, we'll be forced to wear the stars. After the stars, the ghettos; and after the ghettos, the deportations. It's the same pattern in every country. There are 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands. Maybe not enough to make us a priority right now. But soon, I think. If Anneke is marrying a German soldier, you have to leave."
"Anneke loves me.
"
"She'll be careless. She doesn't understand the danger ... she doesn't need to. You need to, and you won't understand. That's worse. Sometimes, Cyrla.... "
"This isn't your decision to make," I said quietly, and gathered my things to go home.
FOUR
My aunt was sitting on the window seat in the kitchen. An issue of Libelle and a cup of tea were beside her, untouched. I put the ration coupons back. She didn't notice.
"You know how she is," I said, unbuttoning my cardigan. "It's not even eight o'clock." I moved to take my aunt's cup, to put fresh tea in it if it were cold. "She's fine," I added, irritated with Anneke. It was just like her to forget about everyone else if she were having a good time.
My aunt caught my wrist. "There were soldiers everywhere today ... new checkpoints.... "
I put her cup down and pulled away. "What would they want with Anneke?" What about me? I wanted to ask. I'm the one you should worry about with those new checkpoints.
Then I froze.
The scent of baked sugar.
"Wait here." I ran up the stairs to the attic and threw open the door to the bedroom there, unused since Anneke's grandmother had died. She lay on the bed on her side, facing the wall. The light from the hall curved along the silhouette of her hip. She looked diminished and vulnerable. I knelt beside her, my arm around her shoulder.
"Tell me."
Anneke turned her face to me.
"He's stupid," I whispered. I peeled a little moonstone earring from her jaw; a lacy pattern was pressed into her wet skin from the gold filigree. She had been weeping for hours. "He doesn't deserve you." Suddenly I felt guilty, as if my not wanting her to leave had caused this. I was sorry for everything I had wanted to steal from my cousin. "You don't have to keep the baby. Or you can, and I'll help you."
Anneke found my hand. New tears pooled, but she still didn't speak.
"Your mother's worried. You need to tell her. Can you...? Never mind." I kissed her cheek. "I won't be long."
