River in the Sea (25 page)

She waited to see if Tine would come out and this was when the throbbing began, the blood rushing to both knees. Her tattered skin burned where it opened to greet the air. Her eyes watered, not to cry, but with the sudden rush of her nerves exploding in pain. Taking in one deep breath, Leen shifted onto her left side and gingerly pulled her leg out, letting out breath in small, ragged pants. The stinging erupted when her fingers ran across her scraped skin. She looked again at the dark shadows and finally her eyes made out what her lower half already knew: an entire section of floorboard was missing. Instinctively she felt the wall with jerky fingers, finding the missing floorboard propped up against the wall next to the door to her room. She rubbed her knee, intact but smarting, and tried to calm herself. 

“Renske?” Leen heard Mem call, accompanied by shuffling steps.

“
Nee
, Mem, it’s me,” Leen said. She slowly stood up, her knees screaming. When she tried to put her weight on her left leg the knee bent under the weight, forcing her into an immediate limp. The pain pooled and thudded under both kneecaps but only her right could take it. Her skin did not want to flex over her muscles and she found the wall again and tried to step down.

“What was that noise?” Mem asked, her face a pale moon at the bottom of the stairs. 

“I fell into a hole in the floor,” Leen whispered. She sat down gingerly and put her head on her knees only to sit up again. The pain was getting worse. 

“Oh!
Ver domme
, I’m sorry. I took the radio out and didn’t put back the board. Leen, Leen,
poppie
, I’m so stupid.” Her voice sounded awake, as if she was taking her mid–morning tea. She was dressed.

“The radio? Mem, what time is it?”

“It’s around one, I think.” She said it as if there was nothing unusual about it, like it was afternoon, post–lunch. “Are you bleeding?”

“So that’s where you hid the radio,” Leen said. All this time it was right outside her door. But the knowledge was no good now; the radio didn’t work. She peeled away the nightgown. There was no blood to sop up. The skin was too open and raw for blood. She wanted ice. But it was probably all outside, kept in blocks wrapped in burlap in the small shed. She didn’t trust Mem to get it. Who retrieved it? Issac?
Nee
, probably Tine now.

Mem climbed up the stairs. “Did you hurt yourself?” she asked as she gripped Leen’s forearm. Despite the odd hour and scene, it felt like the old Mem was there, a normal mother sensing her child’s pain and rushing to help her. “Can you come downstairs? Lean on me.” Leen let Mem guide her down the stairs, one by one. She leaned on Mem’s arm, but also steadied herself against the wall with her right hand, afraid her weight was too much for Mem’s gaunt frame. But they made it, and Mem took her to a chair in the kitchen.

“Oh,
leafe
, how stupid of me.” Mem rubbed Leen’s left knee, the worst of the two, and Leen gasped at the pressure of Mem’s fingers. She’d forgotten Mem’s old remedy of rubbing the area immediately after you hit something hard enough to draw a bruise. “Spread the pain out and the bruise goes away quicker,” she always said. It never seemed to work but even now, disoriented from the hour and the fall and the strange lucidity of Mem’s voice that contradicted the absurdity of the situation, Leen welcomed her mother’s warm fingers through the pain. Mem had lit a lantern to light the kitchen and the fuel was low, so the light was soft, and although the air smelled of the diesel, it was still comforting.

The radio sat on the kitchen table as if it was meant to rest there all along. Mem’s voice was almost childish when she said, “I just can’t get it to work. It was set right to the spot, we never changed it, but now, it’s just silent. I don’t understand it.”

Leen’s studied her mother. There were so many familiar details of her decline, the thin frame, the slack, yellowed skin, the dresses that needed scrubbing in scalding hot water, her usual grinning mouth sagging at the corners, now muttering under her breath about the purple already beginning to form on Leen’s knee. In that short bit of time, Mem was gone. 

She took Mem’s hand off her knee and then, not knowing what to do with it, held it limply. As gently as she could, she said, “We have no electricity. We had a generator for a little while, do you remember that?  But only Pater could get it working and then it broke completely and Pater couldn’t fix it. We haven’t been able to listen to the radio for a long time now.” 

Mem’s eyes clouded. Leen wanted to touch Mem’s cheeks, draw a finger gently over them the way Mem used to do to her, stroking her face and hair and lulling her to sleep.
Go back to bed
, she wanted to say.
Go back to bed and stay there. When you wake up be my mother again
. She understood why Tine sometimes sat outside the bedroom door, knitting or darning or sewing, some craft to keep her hands busy. But Tine wasn’t waiting. She didn’t need Mem to come out. She needed to keep watch.

“The sores are gone…” Mem started to say but then she stopped, unable to sustain the diversion. “Oh,” she gasped. She covered her face. The skin on her hands was so thin it looked like water, rippling over veins and old muscles, tendons.

“It’s okay,” Leen whispered, alarmed. Mem had traveled somewhere new and unfamiliar, and Leen didn’t want to follow her there. “It’s okay, Memmy.” 

Mem grabbed the back of a chair and leaned heavily, a row of eight white knuckles straining against her skin. She said nothing, only cried. Someone in their house was always crying.

“Mem?” Leen reached out to cover the bright knobs of bone that looked like they could split right open across the top of Mem’s hand. “It’s easy to be confused, it’s so late…” 

“I dreamt of it,” Mem said. “Maybe I sleepwalked. I don’t know. It just made so much sense.” She looked at Leen’s knee and sat down abruptly. She gingerly peeled the nightgown up and saw the weeping scrapes. “Look at this. Look what I did to you.”

“No, no, no,” Leen tried to interject. Her voice broke on the last syllable. She couldn’t help the thought:
yes, you did this
. “Even if it had worked, you could’ve forgotten the board. Right? Anyone could’ve forgotten.” 

“The electricity,” Mem said and Leen knew what she meant. You just didn’t forget a fact like that. The electricity had been cut off for years. “Where is my mind…I was so sure. I was so sure I could just turn the dials and I could find something out–” She stopped, shaking her head with a bitterness Leen hadn’t seen in Mem yet. She’d only seen confusion and sadness and willful delusion. The frustration washed visibly over Mem’s face, lucidity mixing with the confusion of the sleep–deprived, of a damaged soul. Mem adjusted herself and wiped her hands over her cheeks. It was quiet, the only sounds their breathing and the emerging ticking of the clock. 

“
Poppie
,” Mem said. Her voice sounded new. It was not her mother speaking but a woman, a woman Leen was familiar with, but not one she knew. She wanted the old Mem, she needed her; not this person who angered her, drew out her pity, mixing both of these feelings into a taut, concentrated bead that pulsed in her now, at the top of her knee. 

“Leen,” Mem said, “I cannot go on much longer. I don’t know if I can last.”

“Mem!” Leen said, alarmed. “Don’t say that. It’s almost over. That’s what everyone says, that the war can’t last much more.”

Mem shook her head with a new store of bitterness. “I’m not talking about that. It’s that too, but…” Her head dropped. She whispered, “I can’t pray. I can’t even pray. I can’t talk to God. I don’t think He’s there.”

“He’s there, Mem, God is here,” Leen said, stumbling. She knew intimately the language of their religion but they never talked like this. They didn’t question beliefs. They didn’t question where God was in relation to their prayers. Leen believed what she had always been taught. God was everywhere and He was watching, you could not hide. You prayed to God and you feared God. You did what was right because that was what God required. You went to church and you prayed and you feared it all, deep down, but you never, ever gave it up altogether. That was a sin of no return.

“Then why?” Mem’s head shot up. “Why? Why? What did we do? What did I do? My husband is gone. My husband is gone.”

“We don’t know–”

“He’s gone, Leentje!  I can’t pray to a God who takes away husbands and children. It’s been too long. How long has it been now? So many months.
Doeval, doeval, doeval
, I don’t even know where I am anymore. And see? I say that word,
doeval
, that bad word I tell you not to say, and nothing happens. It’s a silly word and I know my children say it. I hear you. But why? Why does this matter? My husband is gone.” That voice, Mem’s strange voice; Leen didn’t want to hear it anymore. She wanted the confused Mem back, the one who laid in bed and didn’t say such terrible words. Leen prayed silently,
Dear God, what do I say?
 

His answer was to cry. It started in her shoulders, circles of racking sobs that made her shake. “You don’t know that, Mem,” she said. The insides of her nose swelled and her thoughts muddied with the strength of her grief. “Please don’t say that.”

Almost immediately Leen’s weeping evaporated, as if some internal clock sensed this was all she could release now, saving up the depths of her feelings for the time when all things were final and they knew what was the same and what was forever changed.

“Do you still pray?” Mem asked.

“Yes,” Leen whispered. It was true. She didn’t pray how she was supposed to, though. Sometimes she stared at the sky, defying God by not bowing her head. She looked straight at the roof, the ceiling, whatever was between her and heaven, her eyes open while saying single words like, “Please.” Sometimes she said, “Help me” and didn’t first offer her praise. She didn’t always ask for her sins to be forgiven. But all the same, she talked to God. 

“Then you must do it for me.”

Leen shut her eyes. She’d never prayed for someone, not like this, when she was the author, the one in charge, and her leg ached but not as badly as her throat, thick with the unformed words damming up behind her tongue. She bowed her head and began to whisper, trying to shame away the feelings of awkwardness and the anger over caring for Mem while it was she who was hurt. The formal opening of Pater’s prayer she could not remember and so all she could do was plead, to pour out just what it was she most wanted to know.

“Please, Lord God, please let Pater be alive. Please let him come home soon. Please, Lord, we are sorry for all our sins. We miss our father. Please God, please let Pater be alright.” Her throat tightened even more, not in an effort to squelch the words but because her need was so strong. She felt it tingle in her hands as she squeezed them together, tighter with each phrase. “Oh, please, God, please, let Pater come home. Please. Please.” 

Leen stopped. She looked at Mem, who was watching her plainly, her hands unclasped.

Mem sighed. “Thank you.” Her voice broke. That strange, cold, womanly tone was gone, and her old voice returned. It sounded high, lilting, a weak frequency difficult to make out. She whispered, “I asked that he hear your prayer.”

“Then you prayed,” Leen said.

“No,” Mem replied, “I didn’t.”

16.

Her knee swelled and bloated and the top of it turned a deep black–purple, the edges a bright pink fringed with yellow–green. Renske liked to poke it and Leen let her, even though it sent a ripple of pain into the inner part of her knee that made her suck her breath between her teeth. Inexplicably, the other knee didn’t bruise, even though when Leen touched it, a tenderness far underneath the kneecap radiated down to her ankle. That knee she did not let Renske touch. This one she kept for herself, unable to stop herself from running a fingertip over it, and then suddenly pressing down, the pain always a shock but somehow welcome. 

For two days she stayed home from the Deinum’s, obeying Mrs. Deinum’s order to stay back, but at the end of the two days Leen still couldn’t carry her full weight on her leg. She fretted about going back, not for the work, but because Leen could not abide being home. She shut herself in her room, and to distract her, Tine gave her a ball of scratchy wool and a pile of thin knitting needles, hinting to Leen that she could keep her hands busy by knitting socks, but Leen dropped one needle after a single round and then gave up in favor of tying the yarn around her puffy knee to see how white the skin became underneath the wool. Then she smoked.

The energy around her and inside her was frenetic. Sitting in the middle of her bed, the infant spring breeze blowing through the open window, she replayed all that had gone badly. She thought of Issac, what she’d said to him that morning.

It was the first time she’d seen him since she had stumbled across him, Jakob, and Mr. Deinum at Mr. Schaap’s, all four a motley mix of Resistance men. She was in the kitchen eating a plate of toast and cheese Tine had fixed for her, an ice–filled towel on her knee. He blinked once, then twice at Leen, surprised to see her there. He spoke to Mem. “I have to go away for a few days. There’re rumors of a new round of conscription round–ups. Mr. Boonstra knows. He’ll send signals if it comes to that.” His voice was loud, as if he thought Mem had gone deaf. 

“More? More round–ups? Now?” Mem asked.

Issac nodded. Leen stared at him with no attempt to hide it. Liar. He was sneaking off with his arm band on under his shirt, cavorting with Jakob Hoffman, instead of staying home, following Pater’s order, suffering with all of them the worst part yet of their father’s absence.

“
Ja
, it’s just a precaution. No one expects anything to happen. The Germans have nothing left.”

“Don’t worry, Mem,” Leen said, her voice as loud as her brother’s. He whipped his head around to look at her. “I’m sure Issac will be just fine. There’ll be plenty around to protect him.”

Issac appeared shocked at her deft response. She watched his mouth drop open and his posture change. She ought to be satisfied, but instead she suddenly felt horribly sad. Issac had been angry with her for so long, finally shouting to her he was meant to protect them. And he was right; they, she, needed him there and he was leaving.