Hunger Journeys (24 page)

But they did not send her back. And Wijman did not fetch her. Not right then. She sat down on the floor and sang softly to Bennie, pushing the cow’s soft ears out of her mind, the long moo and the big eyes, the life. I eat beef when I can get it, she thought to herself. And I won’t say no to beef tonight.

The door opened. “All right, it’s done. Time to earn your keep.”

I’ve been earning my keep ever since I got here, Lena thought. Without comment, she rose, walked to the lean-to door and stepped inside. A ghastly smell greeted her, a ripe, hot smell. Fear, she thought. Death. Blood. The cow lay on the ground on her side, her legs poking out like sticks. Lena did not look at her throat, where she assumed the knife had done its work. Wijman was crouched in front of her among all those legs. In a rush, Lena realized what he was doing and stepped back, tasting bile. He made an incision, and Lena saw the cow’s belly spill open and her insides push out between the two long flaps of skin.

Wijman looked over his shoulder. “Get over here and help me,” he barked.

The hours that followed were some of the worst of Lena’s life, or at least she thought so at the time. She helped disembowel the animal. Then she had to wash out the cavity. Then she had to dispose of the innards. The liver, the heart and the kidneys, she washed and placed in a big bowl for Vrouw Wijman to cook that night. That wasn’t so bad. The worst part was cleaning out the stomachs and intestines, the four sacs and one long tube that ran from one end of the cow to the other. The stomachs could be eaten—they were called tripe—and the intestines could be used as skin for sausages, but it all had to be clean first. The blood and
some of the mess could be washed down the drain in the floor, but Wijman told her to bury the innards that could not be eaten in the back garden. He had already used a pick to dig a hole in the partly frozen ground.

His brother came for part of the afternoon to help him halve the carcass and hang it from the ceiling on huge metal hooks to age overnight. He took the animal’s skin and her head home with him, hidden on a cart beneath bundles of clothes. He would cure the hide in his attic, he said. He didn’t say what he would do with the head. Lena had let her eyes fall on it only once. It looked almost as it had in life, as long as she didn’t look at where it ended.

“All right. That will do for today,” Wijman said gruffly after his brother was gone. “I expect that you’re needed inside.”

The next day, the real butchering took place.

The meat sold as soon as it was cut to a stream of furtive customers who came directly to the lean-to from the back. Wijman had alerted them that meat was available by opening the curtain in the store window. How people still had money after all these years of war, Lena did not understand, but she had seen the black market at work in Amsterdam, and she knew that money burned in the pockets of the wealthy. Restricted from legal purchases by ration books, they found other ways to spend and acquire.

By evening, most of the cow was gone. Lena’s work, however, was far from done.

Wijman waited until the next morning to take her back out to the lean-to, Bennie once again in his mother’s unwilling arms. The man’s hand found her waist once again, this time in a well-lit
room, for the space was extravagantly lit that morning, with half a dozen lanterns strategically placed. He turned Lena’s body with his hand, which meant that his whole arm curved around her, and she felt herself pulled into his side. She held herself straight, as far away from him as she could get, and tried to make her skin shrink away. But shrink though she might, his hand followed.

“See the blood on that wall?” he said, his large palm flat on her back now. She leaned forward a little to see and his hand stroked upward, almost to her neck. He pushed her head down. “And on the floor?” She looked. What else could she do? “It must be clean. You must clean this space until the Gestapo could come here with magnifying glasses and find not one drop, not a speck.” He stepped away from her, swinging her around to face him, a hand on each bare elbow. “Do you understand?”

Lena took a step back, out of reach of those hands. She rubbed at the places they had touched.

“Yes, I understand. I will clean,” she said.

He looked at her and smiled. “You are a good girl,” he said. “A very good girl.” He rubbed his hair back from his forehead and took a deep breath. “I’ll check in on you later.” And he was gone, out into the lane.

Lena heard a rustle behind her, turned and started. Annie stood in the kitchen doorway, still, eyes wide. Could he not have seen her? Lena wondered.

Then Annie’s face split open. Her grin was wide. Her cheeks pushed up almost to her eyebrows. “Bet you weren’t expecting great dead cows spattering blood,” she said. “And him. Bet you weren’t expecting him.” Her grin was a grimace, the words delivered from between her teeth, squashed eyes unblinking.

“Go away,” Lena said. “Go away and leave me to it.” Annie stood for a moment, composing her face.

“He won’t stop till he gets what he wants,” she said. “I’ve seen it before.”

“I said, ‘Go away,’” Lena repeated, her teeth clenched.

And Annie did, then. Lena crept to the middle of the room and vomited into the drain. She pumped a bucket of water from the corner, sloshed the vomit out of sight and turned her mind to her task.

It was a miserable job, scrubbing dried blood off the wall and the floor, checking the space bit by bit for drops she might have missed. She thought of the cow clopping down the lane. She thought of the endless guts she had squeezed and rinsed, squeezed and rinsed. She thought of that man and his hands. And Sofie. How was Sofie?

Then she thought of her family. All this meat and her family starving.

On she scrubbed. On and on.

That night at the dinner table, over the tender fried liver that melted on her tongue despite its source, Lena prepared to ask her question.

“They have nothing like this in Amsterdam,” she said softly.

“We have nothing like this here,” Vrouw Wijman said. “We could be shot for eating this.”

Annie smacked her mouthful noisily and grinned around the table. Vrouw Wijman sighed.

“Well, I was wondering,” Lena said. “Might I send a parcel? Might I send some butter and some beef?”

Vrouw Wijman put down her fork.

“It’s not enough that we feed you?” she said, her voice sharp. “Your family expects us to feed them as well?” It was half question, half shrill statement of injustice.

“Oh, no,” Lena said. “They expect nothing. I just know how
hungry they are. And with the new baby. In Amsterdam, there is no food. People are starving to death. And they can’t bury them all. They have to keep the bodies in the churches.”

Wijman spoke then, around a mouthful. “Oh, Martha, be easy on the girl.” He winked at Lena, and Lena’s insides shrank. “She’s worked hard for us, haven’t you, dear?” he said, and the
dear
stuck to Lena’s skin like a sticky bit of offal from her day’s work. “Yes, you can send a parcel. Of course you can.” He turned back to his wife. “Put one together for her on Monday. Bosse is going to the city anyway. I’ve given him a good-sized cut of beef. You never know,” he said, thoughtful now. “One good turn deserves another. This war can’t go on forever. Who knows what these people might be able to do for us.”

“We’ve done enough for them already,” Vrouw Wijman said. Her hands were on the table, unmoving, her food growing cold on her plate. She looked at Lena briefly, and then turned her gaze back on her husband. The rage of two days ago was gone, but Lena could not tell what this new look meant, except that it held a great deal of pain.

No more was said then. Vrouw Wijman ate her cold food. Dinner was finished. Lena cleared the table and washed up while Bennie played on the floor with a pot and an enormous wooden spoon. Wijman sat at the table, reading by what little daylight was left. Vrouw Wijman sat opposite him, her eyes on her lap. Annie was gone out the door, who knew where, one hour left before curfew.

Lena wanted them all to go away so she could pull out the big washtub and fill it with water hot past bearing. She was desperate to cleanse away all the blood, along with the man’s unwelcome touch and the pain that came off Vrouw Wijman in waves. She longed to strip down and crouch in the tub and scrub
and scrub. At least she could plunge her hands into the steaming dishwater, washing herself up past the elbows he had grasped. She concentrated on the heat and on the thought of Mother and Margriet and Piet and Bep oohing and ahhing over the parcel of meat and butter, maybe a bit of cheese too. Some flour? She had noticed that they had some flour in the pantry. Would they spare a bit?

She settled a large platter into the dish rack. What had happened at the dinner table? What had made Wijman order his wife’s compliance? She remembered his wink and the feeling it provoked, as if he had dashed dirty water onto her. It was all tied up with the hands, with the strange, hungry gesture he had made just before he left her to her day’s scrubbing. And everything about it was nasty. It was all nasty and dangerous, but because of it, her family would have a bit of nourishing food to eat.

Maybe she would concentrate on that, she thought, as she let the dirty dishwater run down the drain.

The next day was a Saturday. And that afternoon, Lena went all on her own to see Sofie. She hadn’t planned it, but in the afternoon, Bennie went down for a nap, and Vrouw Wijman lay down as well, something she had not done before. The other two members of the household were out.

And Lena’s feet led her into the lean-to. She took the bicycle that leaned there and wheeled it out the door. Annie had taken the other one, but strangely, Wijman seemed to prefer his own two feet, despite the worn state of his wooden shoes.

It took only minutes to get to the Klaassens’ on two wheels, and Sofie flew out the back door and into her arms
when Lena knocked. The two huddled on a bench in the back garden, oblivious to the cold. Mevrouw Klaassen brought mugs of warm milk and several cookies on a small tray. Lena looked at the food in wonder as Mevrouw Klaassen smiled and gave them their privacy. Partway back to the house, she turned, the smile gone.

“If you convince our girl here not to be slipping out after dark,” she said, “it will be safer for her. We think she’s met a boy—though where she’d find one nowadays, I don’t know—and we’re worried about her. Do have a word!” And she turned back on her way.

Before the woman was done speaking, Lena knew. “You’ve seen Uli,” she said.

Sofie’s smile was soft, filled with guileless joy. And Lena’s heart clenched at itself, as if all the blood had drained away. She straightened her shoulders. Now was no time for jealousy. Now was a time for strength of character.

“You can’t, Sofie. You just can’t. You’ll be caught. It’s just a matter of time; you know it is.”

“I don’t know anything, Lena, except that I love him.” Then her face lit up even more, and she pulled a small bundle of paper from her pocket. “And someone loves you too! I saw Albert, you know, the very next day after we got here, before the train left. He wanted to come find you, but I knew you didn’t want that, and with you in the centre of town, it would be dangerous.”

“You never told me.”

“There was nothing to tell. Truly,” Sofie said. “Only a day had passed since our night in the bar. And I never saw you. If you’d visited, I would have told you …”

Lena settled back on the bench, dissatisfied. “Well, I’m here now,” she said. “What have you got?”

“It’s not much, Lena,” Sofie said, and she handed her the merest scrap of paper.

On it a heart was drawn. In the heart, words were written.
Think of me often,
the words said,
as I think of you. Yours forever, Albert.

Lena had to force herself to look up. She hated it that Sofie had seen what was on the paper. It wasn’t in an envelope. She had had it for weeks. “Why didn’t you bring it to me?” Lena asked.

“I’ve been meaning to,” Sofie said, “but they keep me busy here.”

“Not so busy that you haven’t seen Uli again,” Lena said. And she added, “Were they together?” She could not bring herself to speak Albert’s name. Jealousy and anger poisoned her.