Hunger Journeys (7 page)

Lena turned to face Sofie full on, crossing her legs in front of her. “There are rules, you know, Sofie,” she said, already annoyed by her own intensity. “You can’t just do whatever you want with a boy.”

“See? You can’t even call them men. You’re almost seventeen.”

“All right, a man, then. There are rules, Sofie.”

“Oh, yeah. And what are those rules, exactly? And where do they get you?”

“Heaven,” Lena blurted. “They get you into heaven.” Now she was really annoyed with herself.

Sofie was staring at her, cheeks scrunched up toward her eyes. “Ah,” she said at last. “So keeping your tongue in your mouth and your boobs tucked out of sight can get you into heaven … It sounds like a pretty boring place to me. I might just prefer to go someplace else.”

Lena scrambled to her feet, her heart pounding. “Let’s not talk about this anymore, Sofie. Just let me alone!”

Sofie guffawed. “Yeah. Me and all the salivating men out there.”

“No one’s salivating over me, and you know it!” Lena said. “Let’s just go.”

They walked out of the park then, together but not speaking. Lena hated that Sofie read her mind and then attacked her for her thoughts. She also hated that Sofie was right. It wasn’t really hell she was afraid of, though—she was afraid of the feelings in her body and where she suspected they might lead, given an eager boy. Or man.

Her mother’s swelling body and her father’s silent rage about it scared her. Really scared her. In the new year, her mother was going to have that baby. And Lena was pretty sure that she would be expected to help with the birth. She could almost choke on the terror and revulsion that thought brought her.

Neither girl spoke until they were nearing Lena’s apartment.

Then Sofie said, “Let’s go to my house.”

“Your house? But you never …”

“I know what I said, but now we won’t be seeing each other at school. We’ll just have to go to each other’s houses,” Sofie said. “Unless we don’t want to see each other,” she added, not looking at Lena.

“We have to see each other,” Lena said. “We
have
to.”

“All right, then,” Sofie said.

And on they walked.

Both Sofie’s parents were home—her mother and a man Sofie introduced as her father, though Lena was pretty sure he was not. He looked nothing like her, but it wasn’t just that. It was the reluctance with which she said the word
Father,
and the look on his face as she said it.

Her mother was young and pretty, but tired looking.

Meneer Vogel greeted Sofie a little too fondly, both hands in her hair as he kissed one cheek and then the other. She yanked herself out of his grasp just as he finished the second kiss. He looked hurt, and her mother looked sad.

Lena held out her hand to seal the introduction. Was that what Sofie hated so much, an overly affectionate stepfather? Or was there more?

“Would you like some tea?” Mevrouw Vogel said when she had ushered them into the kitchen. Lena shivered in the frigid room and looked at the stove, cold and black.

“No, thank you, Mevrouw Vogel,” she said. “I must be getting home.”

“No, Lena,” Sofie said in the same moment that her mother said, “All right, dear,” and ran a hand over her forehead, brushing back wisps of hair.

She had deep black shadows under her eyes.

“No, really. Mother will be expecting me,” Lena said.

Sofie followed her out into the street, but she didn’t seem to have anything to say once they got there.

Again they walked in silence. Lena was surprised that Sofie came along, but she felt unable to comment.

“They’re not the greatest family,” Sofie said once Lena’s building was in sight.

“Your mother seems nice,” Lena said.

“Sure, if you don’t know her.”

Lena started at the venom in Sofie’s voice. Once again, silence fell.

Then, just as they were turning up Lena’s walk, Sofie said, “My real father’s dead,” her voice flat now and her feet carrying her right up to Lena’s door, where they could no longer converse in private.

Strange, Lena thought, as she followed her friend inside.

Moments later, they were standing in Lena’s kitchen doorway just as they had some weeks earlier and not again since. This time, Mother was standing at the far side of the table, facing them, her belly keeping her at a bit of a distance from the wooden surface. She held a filthy, misshapen object in her hands. She was worn and grubby, her hair—greyer than Lena remembered—pulled out of its bun, a smear of dirt on one cheek. She looked just as tired as Mevrouw Vogel, but much, much older.

Far too old for having babies, Lena thought, and she wondered in that moment why the young Mevrouw Vogel had only the one child.

Mother looked up at the two girls but hardly seemed to register their presence.

“Hello, Mevrouw Berg,” Sofie said brightly.

Lena stared at her. How could she speak so nicely to that miserable, numb-looking woman, and how could she be so cheerful after her announcement on the front step?

“What’s that?” Sofie added.

As Lena’s mother answered, she turned the thing over in her hands. Lena was transfixed by the dirty fingers, the torn nails. “It’s a sugar beet,” said Mevrouw Berg.

“A sugar beet?” Sofie said. “You mean to make sugar?”

Now, Mother’s voice took on an edge. She looked at her daughter. “You’re late, you know,” she said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

The woman paused and Lena squirmed.

At last she spoke again. “Not that it matters. I don’t know what we’re going to eat. No potatoes now. No butter. No gas in the middle of the day. Unless you would like a bite of this raw …”
And she thrust the beet toward Sofie, who actually stepped back. “I’m afraid I’ve got nothing to offer either of you. And … well, normal people make sugar out of sugar beets. We, though, are going to eat them. Lena has her work cut out for her.”

“I’ll go, mevrouw,” Sofie said quickly, backing away a step as she spoke. “But—”

Lena broke in. “School’s ended,” she said. Her mother’s gaze swung around to her. “No electricity,” Lena went on. “No gas. They can’t—”

“Yes, yes, I know. Bep’s home already. In there.” She nodded her head vaguely toward the hall. “No sign of Piet. Not that I’d expect it.” She paused and looked at them. “I’ve been waiting for you, young lady, for well over an hour. I thought I was going to have to peel the beets all by myself.” But she didn’t seem to care. Not really. And she didn’t seem to mind that Lena had brought Sofie home. She agreed readily to Sofie’s return after some chores had been done and a meal, such as it might be, had been eaten.

Half an hour later, as she paused in her peeling to suck a bleeding knuckle, Lena wondered what the coming winter held in store. Surely Sofie wasn’t serious when she talked about leaving; the world was at war, the Netherlands was occupied, and the Nazis were squeezing, squeezing, driving them all to the brink of starvation.

Besides, with a new baby coming, Lena would be needed at home.

As October passed, Lena seemed to see less and less of her brother. More and more, it was Sofie she wanted to spend time with, not Piet.

One morning, Piet seemed distracted when they were gathering wood together. Lena was the lookout. He was removing a wooden tie from between the tram tracks. The trams couldn’t run anymore anyway, so the ties had recently become fair game, though you didn’t want to be seen taking them.

He dragged the tie to where she stood and dropped it. “Twenty-nine men were shot yesterday,” he said, “in retaliation.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I saw the bodies.”

Lena turned away. She reached down and hoisted the piece of wood. “Let’s go home,” she said.

“Don’t you care?” he said, his voice too loud now.

Lena stopped. “Hush,” she said. “You can’t just talk about these things in public. It’s dangerous.”

Piet stepped up to her and talked into her face, his voice quiet but fierce, his breath stinking, as everyone’s did, from hunger and bad food. “Dangerous? You think talking’s dangerous? What about all the work the Dutch Resistance is doing? For us.” He
glared at her and repeated himself: “For us. I saw the bodies. They laid them out all in a row by the side of the street. Because one German officer was killed.
One.
Twenty-nine in retaliation for one. And they burned a building too. They don’t even care if their victims are in the Resistance. They can be anybody.”

“Stop it, Piet. Stop it.” She didn’t want to know. She really didn’t.

“You could help, you know.”

“No,” she said. “I couldn’t.”

“Why not? Why are you so afraid?” He paused. “And you actually called that girl your friend. For years. If they hauled Sofie off, would you turn your back on her too?”

“They’re not going to—”

“No, they’re not. Because she’s not Jewish. But remember the girl you never speak of? Remember the girl you wouldn’t visit? She’s probably dead right now. Just like the men by the road. And you don’t even care.”

Lena barely heard his last words because she was running by then, leaving the wood for him to lug home somehow. She did care. She did. But Piet needed to shut his mouth. She didn’t want to know about dead bodies at the side of the road. And she didn’t want to think about … about …

Those were the thoughts flying around her head when she pelted through her own front door. Safely home, she actually rebuffed Mother and took an ancient novel, one of her favourites, into the freezing courtyard.

But the courtyard was the wrong place to go. The magnolia stood over her sternly, bare of leaves now, fat buds tight against the cold. The book stayed unopened on the bench by her side. On this same bench, her brother had given her the worst news of her life.

Once Sarah was gone, the Jewish Quarter deserted, Lena had constructed a story for herself: the Cohens were in Germany working in a factory somewhere, or in some kind of a camp, maybe even seeing grandparents and other family again. She had imagined barracks like those where soldiers stayed.

Lena had seen a camp once before the war, when she and Bep and Mother had taken the train to the coast to bring Margriet home. Back then, she was jealous of her big sister. She had wanted to go to camp too.

It was awful to think that the Cohens had been taken somewhere against their will, but she imagined Mevrouw Cohen making do, putting together delicious meals with whatever was available. Somehow, Lena managed to make the imagined camp a warm and welcoming place, thanks to its warm and welcoming inhabitants.

Or she had, until that summer afternoon when Piet came home, his face grey.

Lena was in the courtyard reading, in exactly the spot where she was now sitting. Piet came out through the door from the kitchen, closed it behind him and sat down beside her.

He gave her no chance, not one, to stop the terrible words from leaving his mouth. “They pack them onto trains, into cattle cars, and take them to places far away,” he said. “They kill them, Lena. They kill them.”

“What are you talking about? They kill who?” She heard the hysterical note in her voice, as if she were a third person listening from far away, wishing that she would just shut up, that he would shut up, that this conversation had never begun.

“The Jews,” he said. “Your friend. Her parents and sisters. All the people who are gone.”

“I don’t believe it,” Lena said. “They haven’t killed all of them.” Even as she said it, she could hear how awful and pathetic that sounded.

“All. Some. I don’t know, Lena. But I heard it today. That’s what the Nazis do. They want to kill all the Jews. They want the world to be
Judenrein,
Jew-free.” He fell silent.

Brother and sister sat there in the courtyard under the magnolia tree, the sun, high in the sky, casting dappled shadows down upon them, and tried to think of people killing other people because they were Jewish. Tried to and then tried not to. Sarah came into Lena’s mind then, and a spike of pain pierced the back of her head. She reached up and tugged at her hair. No. She could not think about Sarah. The happy camp of her imagination was in ruins, but she had no idea how to construct a new one, a real one.