River in the Sea (23 page)

“Shut up, Issac,” Leen said, ashamed at her impotent response. She squeezed the salt in her hands, clenching it, tighter, tighter still. Her words began clumsily but they righted themselves as she spoke. “I’m sorry I ruined your surprise. You must hate it when someone does a better job than you. Here,” she said, throwing the salt at his chest where he caught it. She wished she had undone the top so that the crystals stung his eyes, his nostrils, reopening the sores on his mouth. “I don’t have a use for it anymore.”

Her words lacked sophistication but they had an effect. His sneer disappeared. He simply looked at her, stony–faced except for the unexpected welling in his eyes. The red that had begun to subside reappeared, deepening the faded crimson that surrounded his mouth. 

Leen walked back to the table. As she sat down, now complete with open tins of peaches and forks happily spearing slice after slice, she whispered to herself, “I took care of it.”

14.

“I think you should go home,” Mrs. Deinum said, coming into the kitchen. 

Leen was darning a sock. She was botching it badly, her stitches pulling and puckering. She blamed her shoddy workmanship on the hard chairs. They were too uncomfortable for such work, even though she had never been good at it and always surrendered the chore to Tine.

Mrs. Deinum brought her hand to her face and it shook. There was a smudge of flour across her knuckles and the color was not very different from her brow.

Leen looked at the clock. 1:30. The table was still moist in spots from when she wiped it down after lunch. “What?” she whispered. Instinctively she put her hand on her pocket, even though it was empty. She’d put the salt back, what was left in the bag after Issac had thrown it twice, first to her, then to the ground after she’d given it to him. She hadn’t asked Jakob why he hadn’t traded it, or at least kept it, and she wanted it out of the house. So she brought it back to its rightful place. And now, after returning the loot, here it was: finally, finally she was caught.
Of course
, Leen thought to herself.
Of course it would go this way
.

Mrs. Deinum shook her head slowly, expressing disgust. Leen braced.

“There was, there was a fight,” she said, and the way she said it made Leen understand right away that “fight” was not the right word. 

Mrs. Deinum had nothing in her hands to hold, no reason to be there other than to deliver some type of news. She nervously patted her hair. “Mr. Deinum just told me and asked me to tell you. It was a witch–hunt. Several men, 21 they say, at the garden at the end of Hoofdstraat. They were Resistance men, men in hiding, men suspected of sheltering others. Gestapo rounded them up and shot them all.”

This time, Leen anticipated the sensations before they began, the way her body told her what she felt before her mind could name the particular mix of emotions. There was the tingle down her neck and spine that shrank her skin, the feeling of cold and hot, the sudden sense of being so small in a large space, surrounded by crushing air. All these sensations were dread, shock, fear; the precursors to grief.

Mrs. Deinum took a step forward. “They do not know the identities yet.” Leen wondered,
is this real? Is Mrs. Deinum real? Am I understanding her words?
She touched each pad of her fingers to the old, slick wood, polished by her own hands last week. Yes, it was last week. She had scrubbed it and all the chairs down, then found an old tin of wax and made the wood gleam until it reflected her face. Never before had she done such good work.

“Leen?”

She stared down, not meeting Mrs. Deinum’s eyes, looking past the frayed socks, past the loose stitches. She couldn’t stop rubbing the wood of the table, wanting to feel the smoothness, couldn’t stop hoping that Mrs. Deinum would stop and declare herself crazy for saying something like that, for creating such a story.

Instead her employer said, “
Famke
, they took the bodies.”

Her words came to Leen as if she was speaking from another room. She explained there wasn’t any reason to take the bodies, unless it was to burn them, or to show them somewhere. She apologized, said this was coming from her husband. But no one had to tell her that there was no sense to it. Just cruelty, a vicious desire to promote confusion. The German forces were at the end of their desperate rope. She kept speaking, her words peculiarly eloquent. Most of the time the bodies were left, so that the women could find them and take them away, a group of Marys coming to care for the dead, tidying up after such a messy death.

A chair scraped, followed by a shuffling, stumbling sound, and Mrs. Deinum’s hand lined up directly in her line of vision, and Leen stared at it, curious that she had never noticed the pale freckles and the wide, flat fingernails of her thumbs. Leen saw the hand disappear and a second later felt a hand – only later realizing it was the same one – grip her firmly under her arm and begin pulling her up, and it wasn’t until this moment that Leen realized she had slumped to the tiles, hard floor on hard knees, like the knobs of her spine on the back of the wooden church pew.

“Leen?” Mrs. Deinum said. Her face was knotted in tenderness. “Are you alright?”

“I’m okay.” She looked at Mrs. Deinum and recognized her thoughts. It was Pater there. But Mrs. Deinum said no. She said, “
Nee, nee
, now you listen to me. That’s not what happened here.”

She shook Leen a bit, gripping her hard at the shoulders. “Go home. Stay home the next few days, okay? The soldiers are out in the streets and the L.O. is bound to retaliate. It’s going to be an ugly time. Stay close to home. Do you understand me?”

Leen stared at her and she peered back until Leen nodded. Mrs. Deinum didn’t let go. Not until she said to her sternly, again repeating, “Listen to me.” Mrs. Deinum stared at her hard and Leen saw what she was like as a mother, what it was like when she had to confront her children, any matter that was serious. She was suddenly not a gossip but direct, and she stared and while she was not soft it made you want to fall at her feet.

“Leentje, you don’t know anything, okay? You don’t know anything for sure. You just hold tight.”

Even as Leen nodded she felt the beginnings of it, the mouth pulling down, of the disintegration, the struggle behind her eye sockets.

“Hey,” Mrs. Deinum said, “
Komme
. Not now. Not yet.” She winced at her words and Leen wanted to say,
But you see it too! It’s possible that my father is dead. It’s why you’re telling me.

Mrs. Deinum got her coat and helped her put it on. “Can you make it by yourself?”

Leen nodded once more. She was glad that all the things Mrs. Deinum asked required only movement to reply. She worried that if she let any air into her mouth it would set off. She wanted to be alone before she fell apart. Her legs felt like rubber as she pushed off on her bicycle.

There was no one in the streets anywhere, no soldiers marching, no women scurrying with satchels of packages or children, no men smoking and looking wary. Everything was deserted and many of the home’s windows were covered over with the familiar black paper even though it was not yet afternoon tea time and the sun pushed through the clouds, insisting on warmth.

Leen shivered. 

She stopped at the last road where she might encounter any traffic, before she was in the countryside. She remembered: turn left, double back into town, and then right at Leiden street, and right again. It was never a place she had gone to with a purpose, only walked or ridden past, noting the roses, admiring how someone had trained vines around the gate. Old men congregated there, finally old enough not to worry about work, too old to worry about conscription even, reading, talking, sitting in silence, relying on habit to get up and get dressed and get out of the house with some destination in mind.

They wouldn’t be there now. The courtyard would be empty.

She had to see it.

Pedaling fast, she barely slowed when roads intersected. She lifted off the seat, muscles burning, mouth open, hair getting caught on her tongue, making her gag and spit. She was off her bike before she braked and she let it topple onto its side, wincing at the sound of metal and brick colliding, but not stopping to right it. She went to the gate and touched a vine. The buds were plump. The warm April air had finally teased them out, the sun too tempting. The daffodils already had flirting tips of yellow. She looked up. This sunshine, this weather was blasphemy against the deep stains on some of the brick walkways, darker spots on the grass. She knew what a blood stain looked like. It wasn’t red. The stain was always deeper, more brown, more black.

She tugged weakly on the gate. It clanged, barely moving two centimeters. She looked down. It was padlocked. By whom, she didn’t know. She walked along the perimeter until a sturdy hedge blocked her way. She tried counting the stains. It was impossible. Everything in shadow could potentially be a place where a man bled and died, one out of what was it? Twenty–one. 

She started to see it, the entire scene. Images emerged slowly, like the first bubbles in a pan set to boil. One by one they shot up to the surface into a coherent vision of what happened in the silent courtyard, the action unfurling right in front of her eyes.

It must’ve started as a
razzia
. Heavy trucks sped onto the streets, so quick they seemed to appear out of nowhere: a sudden line of gray and brown metal, one, two, three. Doors opened and boots stomped as they hit the ground. The men’s movements were between a walk and a run, each step exact, each footfall precise. The officers signaled each other, spoke words in a low voice, and then they split up.

There were three or four soldiers per truck. They had guns and that counted as another soldier altogether. The soldiers held their guns, one hand on a holster, one with a rifle, the shiniest part of their uniform. They used the rifles to nose open doors and rush past, voices shouting, guns pointing at the frightened people inside. Some of the soldiers were sneering but there were a few, just a handful, whose fear filtered through. There hadn’t been much killing in Friesland, in this charming little town of Dokkum, a sophisticated relief amid the peasant villages. This was new. This was different. This was terrible.

There was a woman, an older woman, like Leen’s
beppe
in Hantumheizen, with white hair and ruddy cheeks and a sunken mouth because she had lost her teeth. This mouth, combined with the scared look in her small, pink–rimmed eyes, gave away the depth of her terror. The soldiers saw this. They could get whatever they wanted to know from this old woman. Pointing a gun in her face, they threatened to shoot into the walls or to shoot her. She crumpled, from her eyes to her mouth that folded in on itself only to gape open as she pointed upstairs. She watched the soldier’s boots stomp up a narrow curving staircase, just like the one that curved up to Leen’s room. They returned with two, yes it was two, Leen decided, two disheveled men with wrinkled clothes and unkempt beards. They had been hiding in a small room behind a false wall with nothing more than an old bucket to relieve themselves and opened tins of food that were licked clean. The floor of their space didn’t have a single crumb from their bread.

The soldiers herded the men past the grandmother, who was shielding her eyes and shaking and crying out in an old, old Frysk that she was sorry. The men were ushered out, guns at their back, and loaded on the truck. Their eyes were wide and they knew this and so they looked down and said nothing. They wouldn’t beg for their lives because that was already clearly decided. Just as the truck began to scream away, one called out to the old woman who had sheltered them, now standing outside, sobbing. He said thank you, and everything would be alright, and the other called to her to tell his wife, please tell his wife. 

At first, she didn’t define the features on the men’s faces but Leen knew the first man was Pater. He’d been close by all along, in Dokkum, not out of the province as Leen had hoped, not in Groningen or Flavoland or to the islands. He had never gotten to Ameland or Texel or Teschelling, places off the coast that had less people and less houses and less Germans. She pictured him, she saw him, in the back of that truck, just as she’d watched the Van Der Sloots and the Veenstras and the Kuipers rounded up in Wierum two years before, sitting almost politely on the rough benches before they were driven off, the crowd that gathered a mute witness. No one had ever seen them again. Leen had never known they were Jews. Not one of them had worn the yellow star.

Pater had a jagged beard, spotted white on each cheek. It didn’t suit him. His eyes were the same green–gray, but today they were not dancing or sparkling. They darted back and forth. He’d be searching, Leen knew. He’d be searching for a way out.

The trucks collected at the end of the street. All the men, 10; 13; 18; finally all 21, waited on the trucks, guarded by too many soldiers, some silent and watching, some commanding in a perfected shriek not to move. How long did this take? Twenty minutes? The SS had been planning this for months, securing locations, paying informants, still finding sympathizers even now as other countries fell to the Allied liberators. 

None of the men spoke to each other. The few who had tried had been hit. One man was unconscious, knocked out by the butt of the gun. He’d lost several teeth. A molar rested on his boot, the sunlight glinting off the fresh blood. Pater glanced at the others in his truck. A head was shaken, nearly imperceptibly. Escape was impossible. Each took a glance at the courtyard. They knew why the Germans had chosen it. The green shoots of the tulips and jonquils were a convenient reminder of the season and the cutting down of life. The soldiers would step on every shoot, every bud about to burst.

The 21 were lined up in one long row. The men were ordered to turn around, hands behind their backs. “Kneel,” a soldier said, as if the word was new to him. The soldiers paused to look at the men, now facing the gate, eyes stony, crying, some hands trembling. Pater’s face would be calm. It would be set. Silently he would pray, committing his soul to God and asking for care and mercy for his family.