Hunger Journeys (21 page)

Meneer Klaassen reached out his hand, but the handle on the shop door would not turn. He looked at Lena and Sofie and shrugged. “You never know for sure that a shop won’t be open,” he said. “Though they almost never are.” He moved over to the left, to another door with a small window sporting a crisp white lace curtain. Lena had seen nothing that white in years.

The man raised his hand and knocked smartly. You could see the holes where a knocker had been in years gone by, but it must have been a casualty of war. They must have been ordered to turn in their metal here, just as they were in Amsterdam, Lena thought. Not so different.

After a short wait, the door swung inward, revealing a girl, her hair almost hiding her face. “Who are you?” she said, looking right past Meneer Klaassen to Lena and Sofie behind him.

Lena looked at Sofie. Surely she should be the one to speak first. But Sofie stood still, eyes fixed on the doorframe or something above their heads. Lena gave her a small push. Had she turned into some sort of puppet? What had happened to her here, and if it was so bad, why had she wanted to return?

Sofie hesitated for what seemed like forever. Then she stepped forward. “I know you,” she said to the girl. “You were … hmmm, I think you were nine when I was here that summer. With my family. Do you remember?”

She’s the same age as Piet, Lena thought, and homesickness coursed through her. She wrapped her arms around herself and blinked back tears.

“No,” the girl said. Her voice was flat, her head bent forward a little, but her eyes, when flashes of them showed, were fierce.

A voice came down the hall behind her. “Who’s there, Annie?”

The girl, Annie, said nothing. She turned and marched down the hall, to be replaced a moment later by a large woman wrapped in a white apron with damp patches all down the front. Sofie saw determination in her gait and fierceness in her expression. A toddler came running down the hall behind her, as fast as his short, chubby legs would carry him. He caught up and grasped her skirt, peering out at them, all smiles. He liked visitors, it seemed. His mother did not. Lena took a tiny step back.

The woman ignored the two girls and looked, almost glared, at their guide. “Meneer Klaassen, I believe,” she said, bowing her head briskly.

“It’s me, Mevrouw Wijman,” Sofie said, stepping in front of him. “Sofie Vogel.”

The woman’s expression hardened. She knew who Sofie was, clearly, but she did not acknowledge the relationship.

“Vrouw Wijman will do fine for me,” she said glancing at Meneer Klaassen as she spoke. “I’m a butcher’s wife, after all. You’ll find we don’t put on airs so far from the big city. We don’t get above ourselves.”

Vrouw,
Lena thought, remembering Vrouw Hoorn, the kind woman who had fed her and Margriet so well on their hunger journey. She was not in the big city anymore. It seemed so old-fashioned to say
vrouw
to a butcher’s wife and
mevrouw
to a woman in a huge house on an elegant tree-lined street. She had the sense that Vrouw Wijman did not like her title one bit. Was there any chance that this angry woman would take her in? The notion of staying there was terrifying, but the notion of being turned away was worse.

Perhaps Meneer Klaassen would take pity on her too.

At last Vrouw Wijman lowered her eyes to Sofie’s face. “Sofie Vogel,” she said slowly. “Why, yes, I do remember you. You
were just a girl, weren’t you? Ten or eleven?” She looked past her. “Where is your mother? And what are you doing travelling now?” The toddler released her skirt, stepped around her and stood gazing up at the visitors.

Meneer Klaassen entered the conversation then, and there were further introductions and explanations, including the information that the small boy’s name was Bennie, but there were not too many questions. In times like these, people left you with a little privacy. Or was there something more to the silence?

The oddest moment in the conversation came when Meneer Klaassen said that he and his wife would be happy to take one of the girls and asked if the Wijmans would take the other.

“Well, I just don’t know,” Vrouw Wijman said. “Food is short for us.” Was there an emphasis on the word
us?
Lena thought back to the Klaassens’ large house and comfortable kitchen. “And now,” she went on, “with the baby, space …”

Somehow, Sofie knew to jump in at that moment. “The Klaassens have invited me to stay with them,” she said. “We were wondering if Lena—”

Lena had read in books about people’s brows clearing, but she had never seen it for herself. When Sofie said that the Klaassens had invited her to stay with them, Vrouw Wijman’s brow did just that. She didn’t grow friendly, exactly, but she grew a little less rigid. And in the face of Meneer Klaassen’s obvious expectation that she would do her duty, the matter was soon settled.

Then Vrouw Wijman changed in another way. “It’s a chilly morning,” she said, smiling down at Sofie and then, perhaps a touch more intently, at the gentleman behind her. “Would you like a cup of tea before your walk back?”

“You are very kind,” Meneer Klaassen said, “but my wife is expecting me.”

Vrouw Wijman puffed up just a little more, broadened her smile and gestured through the door. “Come now, meneer. Your wife wouldn’t want you to make that long journey unrefreshed! And my husband, Marten, will be home soon. He would be honoured!”

Obsequious, Lena thought. The woman was being obsequious.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I must go,” Meneer Klaassen said then, his voice almost brusque. “Come, Sofie. Goodbye, Lena. Ma’am.” And he turned on his heel.

Sofie darted up into the doorway, clutched Lena’s elbow and gestured down the road with her chin. “The train station,” she whispered, “ten o’clock.” And she was gone, smiling and waving over her shoulder as she scampered up the road a few steps behind her new chaperon.

Thus Meneer Klaassen and Sofie set off for the beautiful house on the straight, wide street, and Lena lifted her satchel and followed Vrouw Wijman, who pulled her wool shawl a little more tightly around herself as she walked, down the long hall, herding the toddler before her. “How rude!” she mumbled to herself. “We’ll have no beef for him once this blasted war is over.”

Lena noted that Vrouw Wijman expected the attentions due her, and perhaps an extra measure. That was useful information.

The living room, tucked in behind the butcher shop, was cramped and cold. “We spend most of our time in the kitchen,” the older woman said, and she and Bennie led the way through another door that took them deeper into the house.

The kitchen was even smaller than the living room, but it was warm and boasted a bit of natural light through a window
over the sink. A fire burned in the woodstove in the far corner, and a pot of water boiled away on top of it. Lena marvelled at the luxury, stepping close to the stove and holding out her hands.

“Marten has a nasty job to do today,” Vrouw Wijman said, seating herself at the small table and brushing Bennie away when he tried to crawl up on her lap. “He will accept my decision to take you in, but you understand that we take you in for service. Help is hard to come by nowadays. Your place is with me and the baby in the kitchen.”

She stopped and Lena nodded, since some response seemed to be called for.

Vrouw Wijman was winding herself up. “Marten works with the cows and for what? So he can be called out before dawn to provide cattle for the Third Reich. It is not to be borne. And I am stuck at home with a sullen girl who’s gone half the time and hardly lifts a finger when she’s here.” She stopped and glared at Annie, who sat opposite her, a tattered book clutched in her hands. Annie did not look up. “And a child in diapers.” She paused. “You will have enough to eat here, though not as high in quality as your friend will be getting, I’m sure. And you’ll have a bed, but don’t be expecting a room of your own upstairs. I will expect you to work hard, to earn that food and that bed, and to stay out of my husband’s way.” Again she paused. And again Lena nodded, foreboding growing inside her.

“You can start by brewing some tea,” Vrouw Wijman said. “Then you can put your things in the alcove behind that curtain. There is a cot there. We’ll find you some bedding before the day is done.”

Lena followed directions and made tea. She glanced periodically at the curtain in the corner. Another piece of white lace, this one lined so no one could see through.

The day was long. More than help with cooking, more than cleaning, it turned out that Vrouw Wijman wanted that child off her hip and out from under her feet. Annie was no help. For a long time she sat, sullen and silent, reading at the kitchen table, and then, without a word, she was gone, not to return until just before the noon meal.

At one point, Lena stopped by the table and turned Annie’s book over to read the title. Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of a book she had never read. Perhaps one day Annie would lend it to her. It was too bad that the girl seemed so prickly.

“Stop that,” Vrouw Wijman barked at her. “I won’t have another one in my house turning to books instead of chores.”

So Lena left the book and got down on her knees on the kitchen floor. Bennie gazed at her with big blue eyes obscured just a little by blond curls. “My name is Lena,” she said, working hard to keep Bep and Nynke out of her mind and tears out of her eyes. “And I’m going to be living here for a while.”

Bennie smiled, picked up a crudely shaped block from the floor and shoved it at her. Lena took the block and turned it over and over in her hands. “It’s beautiful!” she said. She looked to where eight or ten other blocks were scattered under the table. “Shall we build something together?” Bennie went from smiling to beaming, and Lena put the special block into his hands and reached for one of her own.

Vrouw Wijman used the table to heave herself up. “Remember, your job is to keep him out from under my feet!” she said as she took a large cast-iron pot from its hook on the wall.

Lena shifted herself, Bennie and the blocks toward the wall.

I will see Nynke again before she even knows what a block is, she swore to herself, and Bep will forgive me for leaving. She will.

She looked up to see Vrouw Wijman with several carrots and a potato in her hands. How soon could she bring up the subject of sending food to Amsterdam? she wondered.

For the rest of the morning, Lena played with Bennie, chopped vegetables and stirred the stew. She was relieved not to be asked to cook the entire meal. Specific tasks, she could handle. She had chopped enough potatoes in her time. Still, Vrouw Wijman frowned when she saw the bits of potato heaped on the chopping board. They were not beautiful.

“Up, up,” Bennie called, standing at Lena’s side, grasping handfuls of her skirt and pulling with all his might. Lena looked down at him and smiled. His nose was crusty, she noticed, although his clothes were spotless. What was it about clothes and curtains around here?

She found out soon enough. Vrouw Wijman liked things clean. She had stockpiled soap at the beginning of the war and had access to fat, so she made more soap regularly on the stove in the lean-to. She wanted Lena to take Bennie off her hands so she could get back to her cleaning. Her husband, she told Lena, was off with his brother’s cows. He came home at noon, filthy and exhausted.

“It’s nice to meet you, meneer,” Lena said.

Vrouw Wijman looked at her husband and let out a short laugh. “I told you. You’re not in the big city now,” she said to Lena. “And my husband is a butcher, not a gentleman. You’ll call him Wijman, not meneer.” She said that last word through her nose in a thoroughly disagreeable way. Lena thought that perhaps Vrouw Wijman regretted the missing pair of letters at the
beginning of her title: she wouldn’t mind being a mevrouw married to a meneer. Like the Klaassens. Perhaps that explained the excessively clean curtains.

Wijman looked Lena over, shrugged, nodded gruffly at his wife’s brief explanation of her presence and collapsed into a chair in front of his dinner. The meal seemed wonderful to Lena—bits of beef with onions and potatoes floating in thin gravy, soaked up with bread that actually tasted like what it was supposed to be. She struggled not to gulp hers down, keeping her attention on the little boy.

Still, she couldn’t help noticing the man of the house wolfing down his food, his eyes falling on her now and again, but with hardly a word for anyone. His glance was cursory, but it contained something unpleasant nonetheless. Lena was pretty sure that Vrouw Wijman saw those glances, each one of them. Every time Lena looked up from her plate, she caught them both, his gaze comfortable and pleased with itself, hers wary. Lena resolved to stick close to the kitchen, just as Vrouw Wijman demanded.

She also noticed that Vrouw Wijman did not say a word about the other girl who had arrived on her doorstep earlier. She explained Lena’s arrival as if Lena had just shown up, begging for a meal and a roof over her head. No Meneer Klaassen; no Sofie Vogel. Why?

Lena was tempted to say casually, “Sofie Vogel was here,” just to see what would happen. Tempted, but not very tempted.

“There’s a train in today,” Wijman said as he scraped up his last bite.