My Enemy's Cradle

by Sara Young

  "I'll help," she said when I finished.

  I felt hopeful suddenly. Anneke and I could make a life in Amsterdam until the war was over. It wouldn't be the one we'd imagined for ourselves, but who in Europe could say any different? The wheels of the train sang against the track.

  I had an address for Leisje and Frannie, and I boarded a tram for their district. The tram was crowded also—with men and women dressed for business, with university students, with people of many nationalities, something we didn't see in Schiedam. Amsterdam was always a tolerant and welcoming city, and very modern; sometimes when I visited, I came home thinking Schiedam was living twenty years in the past. The girls especially had a different look here—a look that excited me. I wondered how long it would be before I wore that look, and if I'd notice it on myself.

  I felt anonymous and free—as if I'd already taken a new identity and were starting my life over. I'd have to choose a new name. I had always liked Kalie, the name of the girl who had been my first friend in Holland, or maybe I would call myself Alie, or Johanna after my mother. No, not Johanna.

  I got off on Konigsstraat and began to walk toward Leisje and Frannie's address. Their flat was above a shoe-repair shop. This was a good omen, too, I thought—in Schiedam the shoe-repair shop had been out of business for months. There was a cheese shop next door, full of customers.

  The door to the flats upstairs was in an alcove between the two shops. Tubs of sun-colored dahlias flanked the entrances, and above these, each shop door displayed one of the new signs—JODEN VERBODEN, in letters larger than the old signs, and blacker.

  "Do you see that sign?" I jumped at the voice behind me.

  "What kind of a world are we living in that we're told who can come into our shops? It makes me not want to bring my business here. But what can we do? They're everywhere now." The man shook his head and passed by me into the cheese shop.

  I climbed the stairs to the flats quickly and willed my heart to slow down, not allowing myself to question why it had raced.

  No one answered my knock, but of course Leisje and Frannie would be at work by now. I went back down to the street and started to walk. I didn't know which bank they worked in, so whenever I passed one, I stopped and asked. No one had heard of our friends, but at each I saw the new signs. At each I asked if there were any jobs. Two of the banks said, no, sorry, and the third said perhaps in a week or so; come back. Well, so I would tell Anneke I was sure we could find work.

  I walked for several hours, gathering things to tell Anneke about Amsterdam, to present to her like gifts: I heard someone practicing a clarinet; a young man was painting at an easel in front of a canal house; a group of students was handing out leaflets for a play. There were German soldiers everywhere I looked, but here they seemed to belong to the city, not the other way around. We could do well here, make a new life.

  It was almost time to meet my aunt. I stopped into a pastry shop and to buy some taartjes for the train. The sign was there on the shop door, once again: JODEN VERBODEN. I wasn't hungry anymore. Just as I turned in the doorway to leave, three elderly women stepped up to come in.

  I flattened myself against the door in politeness, smiled, and wished them "Goedemiddag," and as they made their arthritic way past me I slipped my right hand between my back and the glass door, found the insulting notice, then ripped it off and dropped it crumpled to the tiles below. "It's a beautiful day!" I added, and walked out, smiling even more widely. Yes, Anneke and I might do well here.

  It was dark when my aunt and I walked up to our house, and the telephone was ringing. I hurried ahead, unlocked the door, and ran inside to answer it.

  It was Mr. Eman, from the bakery. He wanted to know if An-neke was ready to come back yet. "My wife's been covering the extra shifts, but if Anneke's going to be gone any longer..."

  TEN

  My aunt understood before I did. As I stood with the telephone to my ear, she came into the hall and called for Anneke. Then she reeled backward as if she'd been struck: The news hung in the air, in the crushing languid smell of so much blood, finished with its lifetime of coursing. She dropped her coat and bag and flew upstairs. The smell was so heavy, it coated my tongue and made me gag; still, even as the receiver fell from my hand, even as I watched my aunt run up the stairs, I refused to acknowledge its meaning.

  My aunt screamed. I followed the cry. There were a hundred steps on the stairway that night, and then a hundred more. I climbed with legs of stone.

  Anneke.

  A lake of blood, drying to crust at its shore and pooling under her mattress, drenched the rag rug between our two beds and made four mahogany islands of the night table's legs. My aunt knelt in the blood beside the bed howling, her head buried next to her daughter's. Anneke's face was white—white as her pillowcase, white as her slip above her waist. Below, her slip was clotted red and black, its lace hem swollen dark, slick as seaweed, knotted up between her legs at the blood source.

  "No. Oh, please no," I begged. I climbed onto the bed next to Anneke's still body and begged her not to have left me, not to have miscarried, not to have been pregnant at all. "No," to everything. Too late. My aunt held her, wailing.

  My uncle appeared in the doorway. He roared and flew across the room, bent over Anneke, and lifted her out of our dark well and crushed her body to his. He crouched with her beside my bed, reached for my blanket and wrapped it around her. I thought, No! Don't take her away! and then I thought, Yes! Warm her, make everything all right again. Bring her back! Bring her back! I climbed from Anneke's bed and knelt beside him and cradled my cousin with him, and my aunt followed.

  We sat on the floor holding her, six arms touching the lost center of our wheel. I didn't know how long—half an hour, or all night—because time lost its meaning. One by one we would spin off from each other, jolted by a fresh stab of pain, then fight our way back. Worst of all was to watch my uncle lose his battle. I could see the blow land each time, like a cannonball to his chest. He crumpled with a single gulping sob and clutched his big head in his big hands.

  My aunt's pain was sharp and terrible to see. But sometime during the night she disappeared into it. She left in her place a woman with eyes that burned brightly but didn't cry. She rose from our circle, breaking its power, and began to fit the day together.

  "Who saw her last? What time did she leave?" She stood in front of us, kneading the flesh around her heart, as if she could dig out what was hurting.

  "We had breakfast together after you left," my uncle said, his eyes never leaving his daughter's face. He seemed to be unable to look away, as if he felt she had only gone deeper into it and he might find her again if he searched hard enough. I couldn't look at Anneke's face because she was gone from it. Worse to look at, though, were her limp arms: Her fingers were stuck together in the dark red glue of her blood, her hands covered to the wrists in it, as if she were wearing wine-colored gloves on her pale arms.

  "I left first. She said she was leaving soon, too. She asked how late I'd be." Oom Pieter brushed Anneke's hair from her forehead and repeated softly, "She asked how late I'd be."

  "But why didn't she call someone? Why didn't she go to a neighbor for help?" my aunt asked over and over, her eyes darting between my uncle's face and mine, but not quite focusing on either of us.

  Anneke had asked me twice if I would go to Amsterdam with her mother. Had she known then something was wrong? Had she wanted me to stay? It had felt exactly the opposite, as if she had been eager for us to leave. I considered telling my aunt this, but didn't. What good would it do?

  I tried to remember our last words, but I couldn't. This seemed to be the most important thing in the world to know. The only thing that was of any importance at all, because if I could remember what Anneke had said last, I could have changed my answer to her. I could have stopped whatever was going to happen.

  My aunt grew desperate to do something, to take any kind of action. I understood her urge, but it frightened me. It reminded me
of her frenzy to strip the house of anything the Germans might come for. The connection was too grim. The Germans had wanted what Anneke carried within her. They wouldn't get it.

  "Go downstairs," she ordered. "Fill a pail with soapy water, very hot, and bleach. Get rags and a scrub brush. Lots of rags."

  I stumbled down the stairs and pulled aside the parlor drapes. Outside there were no lights at all, not even moonlight, and it seemed possible the real world didn't exist anymore. My legs buckled and I vomited.

  When I came back with the pail, my uncle was bent over Anneke's bureau, lifting her brush, her lipstick, her perfume awkwardly, as if his hands were too large and clumsy. My aunt was washing Anneke's hands. She wrung a flannel cloth in a bowl of soapy water. Lavender, Anneke's favorite.

  "Strip the bed first," my aunt said, as if this were an ordinary washday morning. I crossed to the bed, grateful for a task, but unable to look at the dark proof of Anneke's death in the center. I lifted the pillow to loosen the sheet from underneath, where it was unstained, keeping my eyes away from the rest. Under the pillow was a steel knitting needle, smeared with dried brown streaks. I held it up.

  "What's this?" I asked.

  What was left of the world fell apart.

  ELEVEN

  "Gera's aunt says there are ways...."

  The stupid waste of it! For a second I could almost feel myself shaking her to make her see. But then I saw her limp arm, clean and white now, trailing onto the floor from my aunt's embrace, and my heart seized.

  The knitting needle fell from my hand. If I had run it through their hearts, I couldn't have caused my aunt and uncle more pain. My aunt hugged Anneke's body tighter with each image that occurred to her. My uncle sobbed into Anneke's sweater, slumped over her bureau, her things. Their daughter had done this herself.

  She had been alone, she had not wanted me here. But something didn't make sense: I had seen the way she had stroked her belly.

  I saw the answer first, and my hands flew to my mouth as if I were afraid it would spill from me. I would have given anything in the world to be able to shield my aunt and uncle from it. My uncle saw it next, gasped, and collapsed over the bureau under the weight of his guilt: She hadn't stabbed her womb to rid herself of her child, but to avoid going to that place. She had taken her baby herself rather than give him away.

  My aunt rose from the bed and began to beat on my uncle's back, her small fists smashing down as if this would spend her grief. I jumped up, knocking over the pail of suds, and pulled her off him. I held her tight, but she was strong in her fury. She struggled toward him. Her body shook and she swallowed her sobs to pull a voice from them.

  "You and your rules!"

  "Mies—" His voice bled and he lifted his doomed hands to her. One of the lenses in his glasses was shattered.

  "Are you satisfied now? Is there enough honor here now?"

  "Tante Mies, please," I begged. There was already so much damage in this room.

  But she wasn't finished. "She shamed us? She shamed us? Get out of here." Her voice was so low and cold that I didn't recognize it. "Leave this house."

  My uncle caught the accusation in her eyes and absorbed it. He seemed almost relieved to reach the bottom of his fall; anything was better than to keep falling. And perhaps relieved to accept blame, to be given a measure of punishment. Mercy would have been unbearable. He crashed out of the room, still clutching Anneke's sweater along with a lifetime of guilt. On the floor, An-neke's blood drifted through the soapy water in slow curls, tingeing the bubbles pink.

  TWELVE

  The sky was gray now, not black. Or maybe I was getting used to the dark. I wanted daylight, as though daylight would bring back normalcy. I wanted daylight because I wanted more people in this house; neighbors, friends, Isaak. Isaak, mostly. He would make sense of this, know what to do. But my aunt wouldn't let me phone anyone.

  She had bathed Anneke herself. After my uncle left, she hadn't let me back into the bedroom. I was grateful. I would never go back there. But I could hear her washing the floor, and the slow, steady sloshing of the water made my throat hurt. I curled up on the floor of the hall, lost in sorrow and shock.

  Then she remembered me. She came out and knelt down. "You should get some sleep, kleintje," she said, stroking my hair, which had come undone. "There's nothing for you to do now. Go into my bed." She helped me peel off my clothes, sticky with drying blood, and then she washed the blood off my skin. I felt ashamed of my body's warmth, knowing she had just washed this same blood off her child's cold skin.

  Then she gave me a sleeping draught and one of her nightgowns. I didn't argue. I wanted to be unconscious.

  I awoke to a different world. The late-afternoon sunlight was bright and brittle, and it hurt my sore eyes. Instead of clearing away all that had happened in the dark, it seemed an assault. What right did sunshine have here? I found my aunt in the kitchen, washing a window. Her fingers were white and swollen, and there were moons of perspiration under her arms. The harsh scent of vinegar hung in the air; without looking, I knew she had washed all the windows downstairs. We had cleaned them only three days before. A lifetime ago.

  My aunt sensed my presence and turned. Her face was drawn impossibly tight, the color of ashes. A blood vessel in one of her eyes had broken, the bright red shocking against her gray face. She looked as if she had been crying blood.

  She put down her rag and I wrapped my arms around her. "Anneke—" I began.

  Her head jerked and she took a step away from me.

  "Tante Mies—"

  She opened her mouth, then bit the side of her lip. She took a card from her pocket and handed it to me. A notice. I recognized it at once as the one Isaak had showed me in January that had been tacked to his door. They had been everywhere then.

  JEWS MUST REGISTER WITH THE AUTHORITIES.

  FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT

  IN SERIOUS PENALTIES.

  "Where was this?" I asked in a voice so calm it couldn't have been my own. Last night had wrung me dry.

  "I found it this morning, slipped under the door."

  While we were upstairs losing everything, someone had been here, taking even more. In that one moment I lost all hope. But in its place poured relief. I'd been dreading this unspoken threat for too long and it was better to have it face me. I crumpled the notice and threw it onto the table. "Anneke—" I tried again.

  My aunt reached for the notice and flattened it out. "Not the Wehrmacht; they would have posted it on the door last winter, when the orders came. Mrs. Bakker, do you think?" she asked. She looked twenty years older than she had yesterday. "Maybe another neighbor, maybe she told someone else. Or maybe Karl."

  We searched each other's faces, neither of us able to speak my uncle's name.

  "Well. It doesn't matter today," I said.

  "You're right." My aunt's voice held a strange urgency. She left the kitchen and came back with another piece of paper.

  I felt the breath leave my body: CERTIFICATE OF DEATH.

  "She's gone? They came already?"

  My aunt pushed the certificate into my hand. "I've taken care of it." The way her eyes jumped warned me something was wrong. But of course everything was wrong.

  I looked at the certificate again and I reeled: my name.

  She led me to the window seat, still staring at the paper, and sat down next to me. "Yes. You died last night, not ... You're safe now—no one will know."

  I almost laughed, but I caught myself in time. My aunt's bloodshot eyes were too desperate. "You didn't really do this, did you? Tante Mies, did you sleep at all? You'd feel better—you'd see that this is wrong."

  "The Schaaps were just here." She nodded to a bouquet of asters and a loaf of bread on the table. "They saw the funeral cart. I'm sure they're telling the other neighbors now. People will be here soon. Go upstairs. You'll have to hide, just until I can take you to Nijmegen. No one will look for you there. It will give us time to——"

  I held up my
hands. "Tante Mies, you're not making any sense. This is just wrong. When the others come we'll tell them there's been a mistake. But you need to sleep. I'm worried about you."

  My aunt leaned over and dug her fingers into my shoulders. "I've lost one child. I will not lose another." Her voice was steel wire, beginning to snap. I grew a little afraid. I understood she was frantic and had lost her reason. Where did reason fit when you have lost a child?

  "We'll talk about this later," I said gently. "After you've slept."

  The doorbell rang. My aunt rose and I followed her. She looked out the parlor window to see who it was.

  "Mrs. Bakker," she whispered. "Go upstairs now."

  "No, Tante Mies, let me help you ... please listen. You're not thinking right; you're so upset. But you can't say it again, that it was me, not Anneke. I'm going to get Mrs. Sietsma, we'll tell her everything, and then she'll help us. All right? I'll get her now."

  "Cyrla, go upstairs now! Let me handle this. I will not lose another child!"

  What could anyone say to those words? It seemed dangerous to argue with her now—like taking a hammer to glass. I didn't have the strength to face Mrs. Bakker yet, anyway. Another few minutes wouldn't matter.

  I hurried up the stairs and hid behind the door to my aunt and uncle's bedroom.

  My aunt opened the door and Mrs. Bakker invited herself in, filling the hall with her bustle. "My God, Mies! I've just heard. So terrible. Come, let's make you a cup of tea, such a sad thing! Such a young girl!"

  They went into the kitchen. I crept halfway down the stairs.

  "A miscarriage. Cyrla was ... we hadn't known.... "

  I listened, stunned. There was a moment's silence, or perhaps I couldn't hear Mrs. Bakker's response. But I could almost see her take in this piece of news, the way she always did when she heard something she could tell others: head cocked and eyes glittering like a magpie who's found a shiny coin.