Hunger Journeys (4 page)

“You do,” Father said. “And you did.” His words were mysterious, and his voice had a tone to it that Lena had never heard before. She did not like it.

Mother’s knife made a sharp click as she put it down. She laid the hand that had held it flat on the table, fingers splayed.
Her other hand went to her belly. Lena knew before her mother spoke what she would say.

“I’m going to have a baby,” Mother said. Her eyes slid up from the table and rested one by one on each of her children before coming to a stop on Father. “There,” she said then. “Now they know.”

“A baby!” Bep’s face had opened up with joy. She was out of her seat, leaning up against Mother, her hand on that pregnant belly. “A baby sister for me!”

“Or a brother,” Father said.

Margriet and Piet, side by side, both looked serious. “There’s not enough food,” Piet said, his voice low. “The war …”

Mother had her arm around Bep, and they were whispering together.

“Well, this war can’t go on forever,” Father said. “The baby’s not going to be born tomorrow.” He paused. “He’s not due till February or March, actually. And there will always be food in the country, even if it runs out in the city.”

“What good is food in the country going to do us?” Piet said. “Besides, who knows what the Nazis will do next. All they have to do is burst a dike here and there, and … no more farms.”

Father glared at him. “Enough of that talk, young man. Finish up your dinner.” His gaze took in the whole table then. “All of you.”

Bep disengaged herself from Mother’s arm and went back to her place, but her glow did not diminish. Mother went back to eating silently. And Father wolfed the rest of his food and left the table.

After dinner, when Lena and Margriet were left alone to clean up, Margriet dropped the dishtowel suddenly and leaned her head against the wall. Lena stared at her.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

Margriet ground out her response through tears. “No, I’m not sick,” she said. “I’m tired. Tired of this house. These people. I’m nineteen years old. I’m finished school. I should be off living my life, not starving slowly in this house, with them …” she trailed off.

“But you … you …” Lena was too stunned to form a reply.

“And now there’s going to be a baby.” Margriet picked up the dishtowel again and dried fiercely, stacking the plates together violently.

Lena flinched at each clank.

After that, it was as if Mother’s pregnancy had never been. Even Bep seemed to realize that she shouldn’t mention it if Father was around. Father was angry at Mother for getting pregnant. Lena had realized that immediately. He had forced her to announce it as some sort of punishment, but now he didn’t want to hear about it.

The news had frightened Lena. Babies were so vulnerable. And Mother seemed so weak and tired.

And it had unsettled her. She was almost seventeen—almost a woman herself—but she didn’t know how babies were made, or how they got out of their mothers and into the world. She had a vague idea, but it all seemed so dreadful and unlikely that she had tried not to think about it until now.

September’s midway point came and went.

On September 17, the British and the Americans failed once again to penetrate the Netherlands north of the Rhine. Maastricht, the southeasternmost portion of the country, had
been liberated the week before. Piet vibrated with excitement as he shook Lena awake and pestered her until she joined him outside to watch the planes pass overhead. Dozens and dozens of them crossed from west to east, their heavy hum almost drowning out his cries to her to “Look, look!” All up and down the street, people rushed outside. Piet shouted his report to her of an upcoming battle at Arnhem, something to do with bridging the Rhine.

Planes or no planes, Lena’s doubts were a match for her brother’s excitement, for the crowd’s. She planned never again to have her hopes dashed as they had been two weeks before. The news that spread in the latter days of September confirmed her doubts. The battle at Arnhem had been a rather spectacular failure, apparently. She watched her brother’s disappointment and congratulated herself on her own cynicism. This time it had kept her safe.

Now, Piet said, the Dutch leaders had issued orders from the safety of London, to which they had retreated four years earlier, when the Netherlands was first occupied. (“Cowards,” Father had said at the time.) Dutch railway workers were to go on strike. They were no longer to help the enemy by operating the trains. That meant thousands of railway workers would have to go into hiding.

Lena felt the emptiness in her own eyes as her brother rattled on. What did she care about railway strikes? What did she care about anything, for that matter?

Annoyance flushed through her; she looked at Piet and slowly, deliberately, raised her shoulders and let them drop.

Piet’s eyes flashed at her.

“We’ll never be free if everyone just gives in like that!” he said, almost shouting.

“Like what?” Lena said.

He opened his mouth but seemed to find no words. After that, he was absent even more, if that was possible. He spent his time talking or running errands with that man, Meneer Walstra, Lena knew, or running errands for him. He didn’t bother to tell Lena for days that in response to the strike of the railway workers, the Nazis had shut down all transportation in the country, including shipping.

When he did tell her, he was brusque about it. “Prepare to be hungry,” he finished, and turned away.

The rest of the family was more and more absent as well, even when they were right there in the house.

Margriet was kept busy lining up for less and less food, ordering Lena around in the kitchen and cleaning everywhere else. She was lucky to bring home any food at all. It turned out that contrary to what Piet had said, food in the country
could
help those in the city, and people were starting to go in search of it, so many people that the dangerous trips got a name: hunger journeys. “Journeys,” Margriet scoffed when she heard of it. “Begging, I’d call it.” And she got up earlier and earlier to be closer to the front of the endless lines.

Piet often didn’t come home until hours after school was dismissed, using the house just for eating and sleeping. Father shouted at him sometimes about homework, but Piet did not appear to be bothered by a bit of shouting.

As her belly began to jut out from her shrinking body, Mother fussed over ration books and guilders and gave orders that were mostly ignored.

Father did mysterious things at his desk, or went on unexplained outings. Pretending to work, Lena thought. She had long ago stopped worrying that Father would be picked up by
the SS and shipped off to Germany. He was over the age limit, for one thing. She knew of other men too old and boys too young who were taken despite their ages, but Father somehow seemed immune.

She had also stopped wondering how he managed to bring home money. Before the war he had been some sort of businessman, though exactly what he did had always been a bit unclear. Since the start of the war, money had become scarcer and scarcer, but he still managed to get his hands on some. Lena suspected him of involvement with the black market. But whatever he was up to, he wasn’t very good at it, judging by the worry lines that sprouted and spread on Mother’s face.

Bep was different from the rest of the family. She was more present than ever, begging for help on homework from her first year of school, or more often, idle and underfoot, as the colder weather made the courtyard uncomfortable and no one made time to spend with her. Shooing her away, Lena sometimes felt stirrings of guilt or moments of compassion, but she went right on shooing.

As for Lena herself, she kept busy with school, with following orders from her parents and her older sister, mostly in the kitchen, and stealing what time she could to disappear into a corner and read. Regularly, she got shouted at when her corner turned out to be next on Margriet’s “to clean” list.

Books were not easy to come by, so she was reduced to rereading, but this still gave her imagination other worlds to occupy. Lately, it had been romance and adventure in Paris; a young man had fallen in love with her, and she was resisting his attentions, which grew stronger with her efforts. He wrote her letters that made her whole body turn liquid, but she would not give in. Ever!

“Lena!”

She looked up, startled, met Margriet’s eyes and jumped to her feet to put a meal on the table, once again torn from the world in the pages of her book.

Dinnertime again.

Lena found it more and more difficult to be bothered with the tasks that were required of her. The war kept shoving itself in her way, insisting somehow that she pay attention. Putting supper on the table and keeping up in school just didn’t seem to matter much. She tried to escape into her books, which she now knew almost by heart; she tried to let dinner conversation float over her; she tried to stay out of Piet’s way, to avoid his latest news.

But today, the Germans had burned the port of Amsterdam, part of their retaliation for the ongoing railway strike. The Bergs had all seen the clouds of black smoke just hours before, and despite Father’s insistence that Piet stay in the house, he had rushed off on foot to see the damage for himself.

Now, at the dinner table, he was so wound up he could not swallow. “Father, you should have seen it,” he said, his voice high
pitched, his face red. “They’re destroying everything. Our whole infrastructure.”

Lena stared. Infrastructure? Since when had Piet talked like that?

“The wharfs were burnt, and the water was black with oil and soot. A ship was on its side, half submerged. The cranes were twisted metal. What do they expect us to do once this war’s over?” He stopped then, as if waiting for a response. “Father?”

But Father shovelled in bite after bite, his silence as solid as a wall.

Mother huffed a breath. “Eat your supper before it gets cold, Piet,” she said. “You’re too young to involve yourself with such things.”

Lena simply refused to listen. With everyone’s bowls empty, she stood to clear the table and wash the dishes, taking no pleasure in the warm water. Then she fetched her math book out of her bag. It was an ancient object, its pages yellowed and threatening to tear under the slightest touch. She sat at the kitchen table, turned the delicate pages to find her place and sank into a reverie.

Lena had never excelled at school, and math had always been her worst subject, until Sarah Cohen came along. Sarah had a head for numbers, and she remained calm even when Lena cried out in frustration.

Lena stared at her math book. Sarah hadn’t been at school for a long, long time.

She and Sarah had been best friends for just over a year when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. They were nearing
the end of the first class of high school. School was cancelled for several days, and the two girls had not seen each other. When they came together again, Lena was breathless in anticipation of discussing the events of the previous days. Sarah’s smile was small that day, her responses brief. After school, Lena linked her arm through her friend’s, eager to enter the warm, busy hub that was Sarah’s home, but Sarah disengaged herself.

“I have to go,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And that was all.

Lena had watched her walk away, her fear at this seeming abandonment greater than any fear she had felt at reports of German parachutists and bombers. The Nazi threat simply did not feel real to her. Sarah’s behaviour did.

In time, however, things seemed to get back to normal between the two girls. Sarah invited Lena to her house again, and it was almost as nice as before. The first class ended. Amsterdam changed: more and more soldiers in the streets, not quite as much to buy in the stores, nighttime blackouts to adjust to and cope with. For Lena, the summer of 1940 was not as idyllic as the summer of 1939 had been, but she still loved her afternoons, after her chores were done, at Sarah’s house or in Vondelpark. The two girls swam at a nearby pool several times a week. They cycled everywhere together, and Lena, at least, paid little attention to the war. Surely it would be over soon.