by Sara Young
They had ordered sausages and soup and bread, but I couldn't eat. I couldn't even pick up my cup of tea because my hands would not stop shaking.
TWENTY-SEVEN
It began to rain again. I leaned my head against the glass and from nowhere came a memory: my mother coming to find me at the window, looking out at the rain, disconsolate, wanting to go out. "The rain that falls today doesn't fall tomorrow," she said, patting my shoulder. Later, I learned what the saying meant, but that day I remember pushing her hand off and telling her tomorrow would be too late.
The soldiers hadn't said anything, but as we approached I knew. A granite wall, grown over with ivy, hid the grounds, but the stylized SS initials molded into the iron gates of the entryway left no doubt. From the first time I'd seen them, those double-S runes looked to me like gashes, like the teeth marks wolves might leave in their victims' throats. A tall white watchtower rose up beside the gates; towers like this held girls prisoner in fairy tales. And in the wet dusk, I saw fields sliding away in all directions. Beyond them, to the east and north, mountains rose. There would be no walking into the woods here.
The driver pulled to a stop at a hut and flashed his lights. A guard left the station buttoning his raincoat and came to the driver's door. His muddy boots, rain-slick in the lights, seemed covered in blood—like the butcher's boots back home in Poland when I was a little girl. He leaned in when the driver rolled down the window and spoke to the soldiers for a moment, confirming their orders. Then he pulled a black leather ledger from under his coat and opened it, read something. In the glow of the dashboard instruments, his eyes shone, ice-colored like a wolf's.
He turned them on me. "Anneke Van der Berg?"
"Ja." The lie was not so easy now.
"Date of birth?"
"Eight July, 1920." Had I hesitated?
He nodded, then motioned for us to pass up the drive and followed on foot.
When I stepped out, I was afraid my legs would give way. "Do you feel faint?" the guard asked, reaching for my elbow.
I jerked my arm away. No one in that uniform would ever touch me again.
There was a large desk immediately inside, imposing as another wall. Behind it hung a photograph of Hitler; underneath that sat a middle-aged woman with steel-colored hair piled on top of her head in a braid so tight it reminded me of the cables coiled around the pilings where the canal barges unloaded. She rose and saluted the driver and the guard; standing, she was as tall as they were. The Nazi eagle flashed on her lapel. I stepped away.
"Frau Klaus," the men greeted her. "Heil Hitler."
The driver handed her the file from my envelope, which she checked against some papers of her own. I turned my back to them, my fraud of a face turned away.
Along one wall were more photographs of Hitler—accepting flowers from a girl in a white dress; raising his arm in salute to a vast sea of troops; riding in an open car past crowds of Germans waving handkerchiefs. There were also several of Heinrich Himmler—Isaak had told me he was in charge of the Lebensborns. On the opposite wall were posters of mothers and their children. EVERY MOTHER OF GOOD BLOOD MUST BE SACRED TO US! declared one. THE PRAM IS MIGHTIER THAN THE TANK! read another. My uncle had sent his daughter here. I shuddered and lowered my eyes.
Marble tiles in a black-and-white diamond pattern gleamed in the light of a chandelier. I was unused to seeing lights lit at night anymore. Beside me a mahogany credenza smelled of lemon oil, which was a familiar scent from home, and over that floated the rich aroma of roasting pork, which was not. I smelled bread baking, and also something sweet, with vanilla. Anneke's scent. But I was Anneke now. On the credenza was a huge bouquet of pink roses and white chrysanthemums and in front of that a platter of fruit: crab apples, shiny red pears, and plump grapes so dark they looked black. Fruit used as a welcoming decoration—how long since I'd seen such extravagance?
"Follow me," Frau Klaus said, and in her voice it was an order. Women speaking like men—another thing to get used to. She rose and started down the hall. I had the sudden urge to call out, Wait, wait! But for what? I followed her tall form, her heels clacking on the marble tiles, up a stairway and down a long corridor with rounded corners. She rapped on an open door numbered 12B, startling a girl lying on a bed with her legs propped up on pillows. The girl looked as if she wanted to jump up, but the mound of her belly was so big it seemed to be sitting on her, pinning her down.
"Leona, this is Anneke, your new roommate. Show her how things are done here."
And then Frau Klaus was gone.
"I'm sorry, I can't get up." Leona crossed her eyes and groaned. "I don't think I'll ever be able to sit up again. But welcome. Make yourself at home." She waved to the far side of the room. "That's your bed ... well, of course ... and the bureau in the corner with nothing on it. I hope you brought magazines.... "
I couldn't move. Just this way, five years before, I'd stood in the doorway of my new home in Schiedam, my grip tightening around the handle of my suitcase, afraid if I stepped inside I would shatter.
Leona struggled to get up and came over and took my suitcase, set it down. "I've been here so long, I forgot how it can seem. Come in. Sit down." She sat on my bed and patted the space beside her. "I haven't had a roommate for weeks."
I sat and found my voice. "There aren't many girls here?" I asked it mostly to keep her talking, for the sweet comfort of hearing Dutch words in a girl's voice—it felt like a lifetime since I'd heard that. Since Anneke.
"There aren't many Dutch girls here. They like to keep us together, you know. But actually, it's almost full. Where are you from? You sound—"
A moment of panic surged and passed. "I was born in Poland. How many girls are here?"
"About a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty." I must have looked alarmed because she told me not to worry. "It won't seem like that many. For one thing, a lot of them are in the mothers' wing. You never see them except in the gardens, pushing their prams with their noses in the air like it's some sort of divine miracle to give birth to a German baby. They've gotten themselves knocked up, is all. Just like the rest of us." She lay back and then heaved herself over to her side to look at me. "Where are you from?"
"Schiedam. You?"
"Amsterdam."
I was glad. Girls from the country kept to themselves. Leona would probably be more open and more generous with information. And she looked open and generous—her face was round and deeply dimpled, as if she was trying to hold back a laugh. She wore her hair waved and pinned up on either side, like the American movie stars.
"So how many girls here are still pregnant?"
"Oh, maybe seventy now. But some of them are the married ones. They keep to themselves because they're so much better than we are ... oh, maybe you're married? No, why would any of us ... well, they have husbands, you see. Except most of the babies have nothing to do with those husbands—they're out on the Volga somewhere. That's why the Frauen come here, and why we're not supposed to use last names ... very secret."
"How many other girls are from the Netherlands?"
"Six others. Counting you and me, that's eight. But Resi will be leaving soon; she's overdue. And there are three girls from Belgium, and two from France. You have to speak German in here—how's your German?—except for in the rooms."
"Good."
"Mine wasn't. It's gotten better since I've been here." She propped herself up on her elbow and pointed to my middle. "You're not even showing!"
Isaak had prepared me for this. "No, but you don't have to be, you know. Things aren't very friendly at home."
Leona's glance darted to my split lip and I saw her decide against asking me about it. "Not for me, either. My parents stopped speaking to me when they found out. But ... why did you tell them so soon?"
"I thought"—a sharp stab, seeing Anneke's face so radiant—"I thought we'd get married."
"So he was your first? I've had a few. Not that they're such good lovers—Germans are the worst, all bus
iness, don't you think? How far along are you?"
"Oh, a couple of months." I relaxed my stomach and rubbed my back. As if that would fool her.
"Well, some of the German girls come in right away. They usually work here for a while first. I've just never seen one of us do it, is all. Watch out for the German girls, by the way. They hold it against us that their men lowered themselves to sleep with us. Anyway, you should unpack. Dinner's soon."
I got up and opened my suitcase. I put Anneke's nightgowns and underthings in the bureau, then her sweaters. Then I went to the wardrobe to hang up her dress and skirts.
"You didn't bring much," Leona said. "Nothing for later? Well, it's fine. There's always a lot of clothing left here by the girls who leave. I'll leave you my things when I go—I'll never want to see them again."
"How long do you have?"
"Five more weeks, can you believe it? I'll never make it. I swear it's twins, but the doctor says no."
I had come to the bottom of my bag. My back still turned, I slipped the velvet bag from my neck and tucked it into a yellow layette that had been Anneke's when she was a baby, and put that back into the suitcase.
"Cyrla," Leona said. "That's an interesting name."
I froze, then closed my suitcase carefully and turned.
Leona held up Letters to a Young Poet. "I never heard it before."
"It's Polish. She's my cousin. She loaned me the book."
Leona waved to her night table. "I have some romances. I've read them all. You can borrow them if you get bored. It's easy to get bored in here."
I opened my suitcase again. "Is there an extra key for me? For the wardrobe?" I asked, trying not to sound concerned.
"No, you can't lock it. I heard you used to be able to. But then last spring, the Reichsführer made a surprise visit to the Klosterheide home, and apparently he was appalled by how messy the girls were keeping their things. He ordered all the keys to be confiscated so the staff can do spot checks anytime. Himmler is such an old woman. He's got his nose into everything here—"
"And do they? Are the rooms searched?"
"I don't know. I suppose so. I've only been here two months. I've never noticed anything disturbed."
I hid the bundle beneath my coat at the bottom of the wardrobe.
"...and what we eat, for God's sake," Leona was saying. "He was a chicken breeder, you know that? He acts as if we're a bunch of brood hens and he's experimenting with the feed to see how big he can get the eggs. Well, you'll see. It's almost time—let's go down and get in line for the first sitting. Here, help me up."
I gave Leona my hand and she grunted as I pulled her up. I glanced back at the wardrobe—I would find a better hiding place later, when I was alone.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Dozens of girls chattered softly by the closed glass doors leading to the dining room, their hands fluttering up from their round bellies like rising doves, then settling back down protectively. "This is Anneke," Leona told the girls we joined. "She's going to be here for a while, so let's be nice and not scare her too much her first night."
I could see right away what Leona had warned me about. The French and Belgian girls were clustered with the girls from Holland, and the German girls were pointedly ignoring us. In the dining room, we sat together, but we filled only one end of the table; there were German girls at the other end, separated from us by several empty seats, and the air from them was icy.
"Where are the older ones, the ones who are married?" I asked Leona.
"Oh, the Frauen ... never at first sitting ... that's why we come early. They're over in the crèche. They bring their other children here for the food. They'll put them to bed and then they'll come over and talk about their husbands, like old cows chewing their cuds. Would you pass the bread basket?"
I handed it to her and she pointed into it. "See? Just last week ... that Himmler. Oh, those lovely white dinner rolls we used to get. Now it's only wholemeal bread."
Servers were at our table now, setting down platters of food. A groan went up at the bowls of shredded cabbage.
"This is the worst," Leona explained. "Two-thirds of our vegetables have to be eaten raw—that's the new rule—and that includes sauerkraut. Can you imagine? Nobody eats it, of course."
I hadn't seen so much food in a year. Bowls brimming with vegetables, roasted potatoes, onion pies. Pitchers of milk, the heavy cream stirred down, waiting to be poured into tall glasses. There was real butter for the bread. The kitchen girls served everyone a single portion of the roast pork, but you could help yourself to seconds of everything else. I ate until I was ready to burst, and then when an Obsttorte was offered, I ate that, too, and still I wanted to eat and to fill my arms with the food, stuff my pockets. All that food made me careless.
Another girl from the Netherlands, Resi, the one who was overdue, was asking me questions about Schiedam. She had gone to university with a girl from there—Juul Kuyper—did I know her? I didn't.
"Maybe she was ahead of you in school. How old are you?"
"Nineteen," I answered, then realized my mistake.
"Oh, well, she would be twenty-one by now, like me," Resi said. Then she went on to describe her friend, but I couldn't really listen.
When an announcement was made that there would be a film shown in the dayroom after the second dinner sitting, I was still shaken. Leona told me she was too tired to stay up and I told her I was, too, after my long day of travel.
Up in our room, Leona pulled her clothes off. I had never seen a pregnant woman's body before and I couldn't help staring at her swollen belly, shot through with purple stretch marks, her heavy breasts resting on it. I tried to picture my own body swelling up, ready to burst. With Isaak's child. Isaak's.
"Awful, isn't it?" she laughed, patting her huge roundness. "I'm a victim of my own lust!"
"Did you love him?"
Leona struggled to pull her nightgown over her middle and fell into bed with a huge sigh, like an old woman. "That night I did. He was a wonderful kisser, I'll give him that much. God, I miss kissing, don't you? He took his time with it. He had chocolate and cinema passes. I had too much beer. And I loved him that night." She sighed, then shook herself. "Well. Just look where it's got me."
"You're almost through it."
"I am. And I'll go home as soon as I can. As soon as they cut that cord." Leona read my glance. "If I let myself hold him or feed him, it'll be worse."
"You're afraid he'll feel like he's yours, then? How do you think of him now?"
"Like a medical condition. Something to get over. Don't look at me that way—you don't know yet."
"You're right. I'm sorry."
"I know how it sounds. But my first roommate gave me that advice—you can't think of it as a baby. Otherwise you could go mad from the pain. Some of them do."
"Go mad?"
"You can hear them. Screaming when they take the babies away. You never hear a sound from the labor ward, and you know that's got to be as loud. But you hear their screams afterward—the one's who've made the mistake of holding them. You'd think someone's tearing off parts of their bodies." Leona eased herself up on her elbows. "Well, tell me about your soldier."
The word brought him back to me for a split second: that one, the Oberschütze, with his pale bristly hair and his ham-red face and his rage. My heart kicked. "My soldier." I pictured Anneke's boyfriend instead, turning his blue eyes away from me in the bakery, with that strange look of worry, it had seemed. Or despair. "His name was Karl. He's gone. Transferred."
"Is he going to take the baby?"
"What? It'll be adopted."
"Well, of course it will be adopted; they certainly won't let you keep it. But the Germans will pressure him to take the baby home to his wife—can you imagine those wives, taking their husband's little souvenirs into their families and raising them?—that's the first option. If he's married, that is. Is he?"
"No." I felt the sweat begin to form on my back—all these details.
"Then they'll give your baby to a good Nazi family." She laughed bitterly. "A good Nazi family. I hate thinking about that part. Well. What did you think of your first night?"
"It was all right," I said. "I liked the girls we sat with, anyway."
"Be careful," Leona said. "You'd be surprised how fast things can go bad around here. A hundred women locked up together, none of us virgins and no men—that's bad enough. Then add a bunch of patriotic German girls—Hitler's whores. Just be careful."
She turned off the lamp and instantly the dark brought me back to that alley, to those knuckles in my mouth.
"I like the rolladen up," Leona said. "It's not allowed, but if the lights are out they don't know. I like to see the stars. But you can leave them closed, if you'd rather."
"No, open. Open." I rolled the wooden slats into their casing and looked out. The sky was familiar, at least—these same stars glittered over Holland tonight. These were my stars, and I really wasn't that far from home. I lay back and closed my eyes. Immediately I saw the other stars, the yellow ones. They were mine, too. And I was very far from home.
TWENTY-NINE
I awoke screaming. Leona was beside me, squeezing my hands. "A bad dream," she said. "Are you all right now?"
I shivered; my nightgown was wet, clinging to me. Leona pulled my coverlet up to my neck. "Can you go back to sleep?"
I couldn't. When I closed my eyes, I couldn't breathe—the stench of motor oil covered my face like a blanket. When I opened them, I saw the mountains outside my window—immense, the tops white and jagged as broken teeth, glowing in the moonlight.
I wanted Isaak, wanted his body next to me. I saw his face, so pained: "I can't love anyone." A sob built like a wave in my chest and I got up quietly and found his drawing pencil on my bureau. Clutching it, I got back into bed and tried to think about him coming for me. It wouldn't be for at least a week or two; until then, I would have to get through these nights. The days would be easier—I would only have to stay out of the staff's way, try to talk to as few of the girls as possible, and take advantage of the resources here.
