by Sara Young
Sitting there in the sunshine, feeling that Isaak was near, I felt almost peaceful. I smiled watching a sturdy boy stomping around a birdbath with big exaggerated steps, with a little girl following him, laughing so hard she kept falling down. A young mother came to sit beside me, carrying a baby who looked to be about two months old. "May I see him?" I asked, leaning over the sleeping bundle.
Some new mothers were delighted to show me their babies and some would glare daggers if I dared to steal a peek. This one didn't seem to care either way. She pulled the blanket from the baby's head and held him toward me. I smiled to see his plump mouth purse and open, dreaming his milk dreams, and touched the silky fringe of his hair with one finger.
"What's his name?"
The girl shrugged. "He hasn't been named. There's another ceremony next week." She wore her light brown hair plaited into two long braids, and her skirt was the kind a schoolgirl might wear.
"What do you call him to yourself?"
She shrugged again. "He hasn't been named," she repeated, as though I hadn't understood.
"Well, he's beautiful."
She frowned a little and cocked her head, assessing the child on her lap as if he were a piece of fruit she was deciding whether or not to buy. She nodded. "He's perfect. Do you want to hold him?"
"Of course," I said, and lifted him from her. The girl stood and walked across the lawn to join a group of friends. She didn't look back.
It was the first time since becoming pregnant that I had held a baby. I drank in the scent of his neck, nuzzled his soft cheeks, pressed him close, and thrilled at the rightness of his solid weight against my heart. I worked my fingertip into his fist, and when he squeezed, I felt it pull deep in my belly.
Too soon he stirred, his mouth working in hunger, his face nudging more and more urgently into my breast. His forehead creased in consternation when he opened his eyes and found my stranger's face above him, and he began to wail his distress.
His mother came over when she heard him, almost reluctantly, it seemed to me, lifted him from my arms, and sat down to nurse him, without wiping away his tears. Without even looking down at them.
"How old are you?" I asked, before I could even think about my rudeness.
"Almost sixteen." The girl saw my shock and lifted her jaw to me. "Young mothers are healthy mothers. And the earlier you start, the more children you can bear." Her answer sounded practiced.
I couldn't help myself. "You're already planning on having more?"
"Of course! It's a woman's highest duty and her privilege. The future of the Third Reich will be glorious and vast. Millions of Germans of good blood will be needed."
Her speech was just general propaganda, I knew, but the look in her eyes was aimed more personally. Who did you think was going to run your country once we've won the war? it mocked.
"And what does your boyfriend have to say about all this?"
She looked at me with disdain. "The father isn't my boyfriend. That's an outdated idea. And he's very pleased. His wife was only able to give him three children."
I felt myself gaping, but I didn't care. "Your boyfriend is married and his wife knows about this? And she's going to take the baby?"
"I told you he's not my boyfriend. He's an officer; he taught sports at my youth group. I asked him to help me present the state with a child. And he agreed, as he wanted more children."
"You made love with a man so that—"
"We had relations" she corrected me. The sophistication she was trying for made her seem only younger.
"How old is this man?"
"Thirty-two. He's young enough he should have more children. They're taking this one next month, and then as soon as I can, we'll have another."
"You're fifteen years old, and when you leave this place you're going to have relations with a man of thirty-two, and then hand over the baby to his wife? For the second time?"
She nodded, defiant.
"And then? You'll keep doing it?"
"I'll keep having children, of course. As many as I can. But I might get married next year. I'll be old enough."
Sister Ilse came up from behind us and leaned over, cooing at the baby. "A kiss without a beard is like an egg without salt, you know."
"My aunt used to say that," I said, glad for the interruption. "I thought it was Dutch."
"It's German, too, I guess."
The girl looked annoyed. "What's it supposed to mean?"
Ilse and I answered at the same time: "Don't marry too soon."
The girl rolled her eyes and let out a sigh—she probably meant for it to sound world-weary, but it just sounded petulant. She pulled her baby from her breast roughly and buttoned herself up, then slung him over her shoulder. She left us without saying good-bye.
"That one," Ilse sighed, settling down beside me.
"You know her?"
"I attended the birth. She's one of the faithful. Refused all pain medicine and stared at her portrait of the Führer instead. Even at the end, even when her pelvis cracked. That's the badge of honor, to do that. If you ask me, it's the sign of insanity. Brainwashed out of all common sense."
"Wait." I put my hand on her arm. "Her pelvis cracked?"
"Don't worry!" she assured me. "Your hips look fine. Hers hadn't widened yet. And the baby was over four kilos, I remember that—"
"Could you hear it?" I interrupted.
Ilse reached over to pat my arm. It was the first time someone had touched me in thirty-one days. No, thirty-two. "Please forget I said that. It wasn't very professional of me. Her body was immature. You'll be fine. Besides, you'll be smart enough to take the ether if you need it. Promise me you'll stop thinking about this."
I couldn't. I didn't want to, but I could picture the girl's delivery. Her thin child's legs splayed wide, knees knobby as a colt's. Her narrow child's pelvis cracking under the increasing thrusts of the baby's descent. The doctors splitting her open to pull him out. She bit her lips so hard they poured blood—somehow I knew that was true. And all the while she stared at Adolf Hitler, her God. I shivered.
"Anneke?"
"I'm sorry. It's just that she's so young. Fifteen!"
"Girls grow up fast these days. Children always lose the most in wartime."
"And she's so cold, completely without romance—that seems very sad."
"It is sad. When I was her age, we were so excited about our possibilities. It felt like the world was opening up to us. To women. My mother was very modern—she told me I could be whatever I wanted to be, and there was no shame if I didn't choose motherhood. What a difference now."
"What does she say now?"
"She would have been ... she's dead. She died in childbirth with my sister."
"I'm so sorry." I suddenly ached to tell her that we shared the sad bond of motherlessness, but instead I asked her if that was why she'd gone into obstetrics.
"It is." Ilse gave a wry laugh. "This isn't exactly what my mother would have chosen for me, though. Or my sister. She's just like that girl. Except that she hasn't yet been asked to give a baby to the Führer. She's dark and short like me, so she's not being recruited. But she's brainwashed all the same. I don't even try to talk to her about it—I don't dare. I swear she'd turn me in if she thought it would get her into the Little Brown Sisters."
Ilse stopped herself then and looked around. The young mother was standing across the path beside the statue with two other girls; all had their babies slung on their hips as if they were nothing more than sacks of grain. Ilse flicked her fingers at them in a quick wave, then she stood up. "Let's take a walk."
We walked along the edges of the property. There was no one else around, but Ilse didn't speak about her family again, or about the girls here. I was glad enough to leave those subjects. I looked out over the meadows stretching out to the east. "These back fences. They're patrolled all the time, or just at night?"
Ilse looked at me sharply. "Are you going somewhere?"
"No. I just wondere
d, you know, how safe everything is here. That's all."
Ilse stopped. "Anneke, why did you come here so early? You can't be more than three months along, and Holland isn't so bad off that you need the food."
I gave her my lie about my parents being so angry they kicked me out. Ilse didn't believe me—I could see it in her face. And she looked hurt that I had lied to her.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"What would it feel like...." I caught a breath, suddenly dizzy. "What would it feel like to bleed to death? Would it ... hurt?"
Sister Ilse stared at me.
"A friend of mine died. Please. I want to know. Did she feel pain?"
"Well ... no. If you bled to death, you would just feel weak. Weaker. Until..."
"She wasn't in pain?"
"No. She would have felt cold, but no pain. But what caused the bleeding?"
I pictured it, streaked with blood, lying under that white pillow. I saw my uncle's face. My aunt's. "A knitting needle," I said quietly.
"A knitting needle? How...? Oh." Ilse's face fell. "Oh, how terrible! Abortion is illegal here, but the real crime is what it forces girls to turn to."
I clenched my jaw, close to tears now. I saw her gaze drop to my bag, where the crochet needle lay on top. She pulled her head back to look at me harder. "Anneke, are we really talking about something someone else did?"
"Yes, really. Someone I knew. Did it hurt?"
Ilse looked at me for a long moment, her eyes sad. "Yes. There would have been pelvic pain from that. But she wouldn't have felt it for long. She would have slipped under. Anneke, are you sure—"
I raised my hands and took a step back.
"Anneke," she said again. "If you ever want to talk..."
THIRTY-FIVE
I had never felt the need to talk more in my life—to tell someone about Anneke's death; how frightened I was here; my pregnancy; all the things that needed to be made right between Isaak and myself. Everything I needed to make him see.
I couldn't talk, so I began to write instead. Not about these things, though. I began to write poetry. Or, rather, it began to write me.
Lines would come to me, challenging me to make sense of them, to chase them down to their meaning. I would bend over the paper, forcing words into couplets, couplets into stanzas, stanzas into completeness. I would finish a poem and feel one measure of calm, and then I would feel the need to start again.
The problem was paper. Sheets of stationery were available, but if I took paper to write letters on, wouldn't someone expect me to have letters to mail? And to whom could I possibly write? I became the oddest of thieves. Everywhere in the home I kept watch for things that wouldn't be missed: the wrappings from deliveries, drawer liners, and once a windfall—a full sheet of discarded gift-wrapping paper. I wrote as small as I could, tiny cramped words, crossed out and written over dozens of times.
I became equally clever at hiding these orphan sheets, lining the bottoms of my drawer with them, sandwiching them between my mattress and box spring, slipping the smaller ones inside my few books.
But once I was careless.
Leona had thrown away an envelope and I'd retrieved it from the wastebasket and had been working a poem on it for a week. I had just slipped it beneath a book on my bedside table when she walked into the room.
Maybe she recognized the address or the handwriting on the corner sticking out. Before I could do anything, she pulled out the envelope.
She read the poem, turning the envelope around and over, squinting to read my tiny notes, my scratched changes. She read it a second time. Then she held it up toward me, raising her eyebrows.
"I was only ... it's nothing."
"It's not nothing." She chided me as though I'd said something that hurt her. "I didn't know you were a poet."
I reached for the envelope, but she lifted it away. Then she held it out again. "Read it to me. Read it the way it's supposed to sound."
I hesitated for a moment, then nodded, and Leona gave me my poem. She sat on her bed with her feet up and leaned back against the headboard, closing her eyes.
Dusk is endless here, and you would love
These indefinite walks inside its long red bottle.
I sing alone
Past black branches and white picket fences
To the corral that says No Trespassing.
The brown horse has heard me singing from down the road
So he brings the lightning on his face
Over and nudges it under my hand.
Sometimes I know why I am not dead yet.
I still haven't brought a human to the edge of the fence.
Leona opened her eyes and looked at me thoughtfully. "Tell me what made you write that."
Maybe I trusted Leona. Maybe poetry felt like a safe subject. Or maybe there was a quota: After a hundred lies, or a thousand, a person simply must tell the truth. Whatever it was, for the first time since I'd come to this place, I told the barest truth.
"I was trying to understand what was missing between us—the father and me. That seemed a good way to explain it—that in the end, I never brought him to the edge of the fence."
"Maybe you shouldn't have to bring a man there. Maybe he should go that far himself."
I shrugged. "Maybe I should have given him more reason to." But Isaak would never go to the edge of the fence for any single human being. Only for an ideal. Ideals can't abandon you, can't hurt. Ideals can't let you down.
"Is that why you write poetry—to understand your life?"
I thought about it and then nodded. "That's part of it. Sometimes, though, I think I'm trying to write myself out of my life. To escape myself."
"You're lucky, then." Leona sounded more serious than I had ever heard her. "I escape myself by sleeping with men." She looked down and stroked her huge belly. "At least no one else has to pay the price for your escape."
The envelope suddenly began to burn in my hand. I slid it inside the book and stood up.
"Wait." Leona shook her head and gave me her funny smile—the one where her lips didn't curve upward, but the dimples at the corner of her mouth deepened. Then she got up and went to her bureau. She opened a drawer and pulled out a box of stationery—large creamy sheets with deckled edges and a bunch of lavender tulips in each corner.
"My mother gave me this before I left. To write to her. I tried once, but I couldn't do it. It was as if I didn't want to make this real for her. When I get home, I just want to pretend none of this happened. So take it. For heaven's sake, at least write the finished ones down on decent paper."
All that next week—the sixth week I was in that place—I wrote every day.
I wrote and Isaak didn't send word and he didn't come.
Every day of that week, I woke up thinking, This is the day. As soon as I got up, I searched the horizon for signs of good or bad weather and tried to decide which would be better. Each day, my eyes strayed to the door of whatever room I was in more and more often, until finally one afternoon, Leona asked me what on earth I was always watching for.
"Nothing," I answered with a laugh. But I was shaken and I learned to watch doors from the corners of my eyes.
Leona grew larger that week and her belly seemed to rise higher and tighter. Then one morning she looked down as she was dressing and gave a little cry. "Look, Anneke! I've dropped! I didn't know I'd really be able to see it. But it feels different, heavier. I feel even heavier. Can you tell?"
Our eyes met. She kept a pamphlet by her bedside—Signs Your Baby Is About to Be Born—and each evening she read it to me. "Do you think my ankles are bigger?" she'd ask, anxiously. "Do I seem more restless to you, more emotional?" Number four was "As the baby prepares to be born, he will often begin the descent toward the birth canal, and your whole belly may actually drop."
"You are lower. Today, do you think?"
"I don't know. Anneke, what if I can't do this?"
"You can do this. You're going t
o be fine."
All that day, I would often catch her staring at nothing, concentrating as if she were struggling to hear something and then melting into a dreamy smile, as if the thing she had heard was secret music. I felt very lonely then. And worried for her—she no longer seemed like a girl who wanted to be rid of a medical condition.
The day after that, I awoke to find her already up, although not dressed. She was standing by the window, her suitcase beside her, and she turned as soon as I stirred, as if she'd been waiting.
She gave me a little smile—worried but resigned. "It started a few hours ago."
"You should have gotten me up."
"No, it was too soon. It's mild right now, like a squeezing, that's all. And it was nice to be alone with it. It felt sort of ... I don't know ... mysterious, I guess, to be awake with it in the dark. And then we watched the sun rise together." She laughed. "That sounds strange, doesn't it? But that's what it felt like—like my baby and I were watching this new day, his birth day, being born."
I got up and joined her at the window. "Are you changing your mind?"
She waited too long to answer. "No. No. What would I do with a baby, anyway? And can you imagine how my family would treat him? Or my neighbors? It's just that ... well, now I wish things were different and I could keep him. I wish there weren't a war on and I wish I had a father for him and a family that would welcome him. It's just going to be harder to give him up than I thought."
I took her hand and squeezed it.
"You should go down," she said when the bell rang. "I can't eat."
"No, I'll stay with you."
"Oh, don't. This is going to take a while. I'll still be here when you get back."
I was gone only an hour—there were announcements and a number of new regulations were read—and when I got back to the room, it was empty. The silence was deep—different from the quiet Leona left when she was out of the room for a minute. I realized that the girl I knew really was gone—the next time I saw her she would be a different person. If I ever saw her again. I missed her already.
