My Enemy's Cradle (6 page)

A vein rose at Anneke's temple. Her skin was stretched brittle as glass, and I thought she might shatter at the slightest tremor. I wished I could think of something to say that would hurry my uncle along without angering him. The meal took hours. Hours. Finally he put down his fork and looked at each of us to see that he had our attention.

"I have found a solution," he said. "A maternity home."

"Anneke doesn't need a maternity home," my aunt said reasonably. "She'll be here, with us."

"No, not here with us. That I won't have." He cut a piece of meat and ate it, drank some beer, and didn't look at us. We waited.

"It's a decent thing they're doing. Very progressive. She'll be treated well. They're not all evil, you know."

"Who're not all evil?" my aunt asked.

"The Germans. They've set up these homes wherever their soldiers are. They're very modern. All the best facilities. They're taking care of this problem all over."

We stared at my uncle. Only my aunt could form the questions.

"What problem? What do the Germans have to do with us?"

"Anneke's not the only one. They're taking care of the girls who've gotten in trouble this way. They're taking responsibility, even if their soldiers aren't."

"How did you learn about this?" I asked. I saw my uncle's jaw stiffen, but I had to go on. "Who told you? Who did you tell about Anneke?"

He didn't answer. But he didn't need to.

"You told them?" Anneke whispered. "You told the Germans in the shop?"

"You shamed me." My uncle's voice rose. "I have found a solution."

"Pieter, what have you done?" My aunt's eyes were fierce.

"Anneke has an appointment tomorrow. An interview and some tests. I'll take her. I can't work anyway, until I get that part."

"What kind of tests?" I asked.

My uncle looked at me for a moment, his eyes narrowed behind the steel rims of his glasses. I couldn't tell if he was considering his answer, or deciding whether or not to speak to me.

"A formality," he said at last. "Medical records, documents." He was lying.

"
Nee.
I do not allow this," my aunt said.

She had never before defied my uncle directly. All of us at the table knew that some axis had shifted, and everything from now on would need to find a new balance.

My uncle's face flushed and his scalp showed dark red through his light hair. "Our daughter shamed us. I've found a way to take some honor from this shame."

"What honor, Pieter?" my aunt cried. "What honor?"

I got up and stood behind Anneke, my hands on her shoulders. "What shame?" I asked. "She loved a man. Love is the opposite of shame. Don't send her away!"

My uncle shoved his chair back and rose. "Anneke, be ready to travel in the morning. We will be back Sunday."

My aunt rose also. "
Nee,
" she repeated. "I will not allow it."

Anneke fell limp under my hands. "Stop," she said. "Please stop. I'll go."

Afterward, she hadn't wanted to talk about her decision. As we got ready for bed, she would only say, "Have you thought about what it would be like for me here?"

I hadn't. When I did, I could see it would be difficult. Everyone would hold it against her that Karl was a German soldier.

They would be wrong. I thought about Isaak. His citizenship had nothing to do with the way my heart caught whenever he came into view, as if it were too stunned to beat. His politics had nothing to do with the way my thigh burned if it brushed against his. It didn't matter that Karl was German. Goethe was German, and Schiller, who wrote about freedom. Rilke. Beethoven, Bach, Brahms. Bakers and teachers and painters and nurses; men and women who loved their families and led good lives. It was the Nazis we hated, and I believed Anneke that Karl was not a Nazi. That she loved him in spite of the army that had conscripted him only showed how large her heart was. She had misjudged his character, but she hadn't violated any standard of behavior by loving him—she had risen above one.

But I could hardly hope to convince a town of this. Anneke was right. She could not stay here. So we would move.

That night I dreamed of my parents, the same image I'd seen often in my sleep. They were lying in their bed; my father on his back, my mother on her side, folded against him with her head over his heart, tucked under his left arm. My mother's hair was loose and it cascaded in an arc of rippling amber up over my father's shoulder and into his beard and hair, where it gleamed gold against the black. My father's other arm crossed his chest just below his ribs, and his fingers rested entwined with my mother's at the small of her waist. A composition of perfect peace. The linking arc of hair and the linking arc of arms formed a circle, beautiful in its completion, terrible in its exclusion.

For this was the dream: I approach my parents, desperate to be inside their circle, but they don't break open for me. They can't; their hands are melded together—they show me by lifting their arms helplessly—and their hair is woven into one rope. Sorry, sorry.

I awoke with it fresh in my mind, sore as a bruise, and found Anneke gone.

It was just for the day, I reminded myself. Just this one appointment and she would be home tomorrow. And then I would tell her the new plan, the one I'd made before I fell asleep.

At breakfast, my aunt didn't want to talk about what had happened last night. We talked instead about the work we would do that morning, and as it was not much, we lingered at the kitchen table with coffee and sunlight warming us.

I plucked a dead leaf from a geranium. "Tante Mies," I said. "Tell me about my parents."

My aunt looked up sharply. I didn't ask about them often. "What do you want to know?"

"Well, how they were when they met. How they were before I remember them."

My aunt leaned over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. "How do you remember them, Cyrla?"

"Close together." I hadn't known I would say this. "I always remember them standing or sitting very close to each other, touching. When I think of them, I always think of them together." I rested my chin on my fists and considered this. "Except, I remember my mother alone with me in the kitchen. She spoke Dutch then. I thought people spoke Dutch when they cooked." For a second I was lost in that kitchen, my mother's arms white up to the elbows with flour, her face bright with reflecting me.

"
Ja,
from the beginning, it was as though they had always been together. And as though they were two parts of some whole. Although they were so different! You're a lot like your mother, you know that? Sometimes I see so much of her in you; so much of her spirit. She loved your father very much. And you're right, they were always close together, always touching."

I realized that I never saw my aunt and uncle touching. I never saw my uncle touch anyone, in fact. I knew by her face that my aunt was thinking this also.

"Your uncle loves us," she said. "His way is just different. He likes rules. And what Anneke did ... well..."

What did Anneke do? I wondered. Were there rules for love? I was sure if I were ever lucky enough to be part of a whole with someone, that would be enough. I would never ask love to follow rules.

"And with that paper last night ... he's only worried."

I lifted my palms to her. It didn't matter anymore. But she wanted to explain.

"It's complicated. He's not a sympathizer—you know that. Cyrla, listen to me. Try to understand. Your uncle's family was rich. But they'd invested in czarist bonds; a lot of Dutch had. When the Bolsheviks canceled all their foreign debts, they lost much of their wealth. Your uncle had to leave the university and learn a trade. I don't think he ever got over it."

I thought of my uncle, putting up new drapes in our parlor each spring. Only in the parlor—the one room which overlooked the street. The first spring I was there, I remember my aunt scolding him for lining them with the same russet satin as the drapes themselves. "Who are these for, Pieter?" she'd asked. "Us? Or the people passing by?"

"It's good for business," he'd answered.

But I could tell from his face that my aunt's words had opened an old wound. And when she made things from the still-usable fabric of the drapes he took down—coverlets for our bed from the gray-striped damask; capes for Anneke and me from the bottle-green velvet—he scowled.

"So in the beginning," my aunt was saying, "before you arrived, Hitler's anti-Bolshevism appealed to him. But not now."

"Then what is he telling me?" I crossed my arms and braced myself.

My aunt pushed her coffee away and steepled her hands to her lips. "Jews are supposed to register. It's a terrible rule. We don't want any of the Germans' rules. But he's worried about that one. About breaking it. And now with the new restrictions ... I can talk to him, though."

"No, don't," I said.

***

As soon as the housework was done, I telephoned Isaak at work. "Meet me. I need to talk with you."

"Cyrla, I can't. Where would we meet?"

"The park on Burgemeester Knappertlaan," I suggested. It was a beautiful day; we would walk.

I heard Isaak sigh and then I remembered: There was no place Isaak could go without breaking the new restrictions, except within the Jewish quarter. And he didn't want me to go there. But he couldn't keep me away.

"I'll come to the Council now," I told him.

"No, that's not good, you know it. We can talk on the telephone."

"Isaak, wait. My uncle's shop is closed today. Meet me there in an hour."

"Cyrla, no. I put a lot of people in danger if I get caught...."

"The back door," I said. "Just this once."

As I dropped the receiver into the cradle, I was struck by something: I always needed a reason to see Isaak, a problem for him to solve. I presented my problems to him like coins to pay for my admittance to him.

Isaak was irritated, I could tell when I opened the door for him. He walked in, and just as he did I realized what he would see: counters covered with bolts of brown wool. It would be so easy for him to ask what such a big order was for.

"The roof. It's safer." I took his hand and led him to the stairs, and for an instant I felt him stiffen. Isaak didn't understand touch. How much having no family had cost him. He'd been raised by good men, he told me; he'd spent the first few years of his life in an orphanage, but then the elders in the synagogue of his town had seen to him. No one had held him at night, though, to explain to him through his skin how he was loved. Isaak never pulled away when I touched him. But he never returned the touch.

He relaxed on the roof. We walked to the edge and gazed out. The brick houses with their stepped roofs glowed ocher in the afternoon sun, the canal was a cool ivy green, and the trees were turning gold as far as we could see. It was quiet and peaceful above the sounds of the street, and when I looked at Isaak, I could tell he was wishing he had brought his sketch pad.

"Listen, Cyrla," Isaak said. He crossed to the other side of the roof. "An oriole. I think he must be in those pear trees. But that's his mating song. I've never heard it so late in the season."

"He has no mate yet?" I thought of Rilke's poem about the coming of autumn, the one that haunted me. I recited the lines to Isaak.

He who has no house now, will no longer build.
He who is alone now, will remain alone.

"Like your oriole." I said. Like us.

"Well, not exactly. It's more likely he had a mate and she died. And if she died their babies most likely didn't live. If she even had a chance to lay eggs."

I saw Isaak's face close, and knew we had stopped talking about birds. We settled ourselves on the sun-warmed gravel, our backs against the short wall.

I told him about my uncle's threat and what Mrs. Bakker had said. That Anneke had told Karl about me. There was no point in hiding it anymore. "You're right," I said. "It's time to leave." I stole a secret glance at his face, to see if he felt pain at the thought of my leaving. But of course he was careful to hide his feelings.

"I'll start making arrangements. The
Verzet
are good at this. I trust them."

"No. I'm going to move, but not too far. Not out of the Netherlands. There's no need."

I told him my plan, about how I would move to Amsterdam or Rotterdam and take a new identity. He could help me with that, I said. He only listened, nodded. Until I mentioned that An-neke would be moving with me. He lifted an eyebrow. I told him where she was and what my uncle had done.

"I've heard of those places," he said, gathering a handful of gravel and shaking it in his palm. "Lebensborns. You know what they are, don't you?"

"Places for girls to have their babies safely and not be ostracized."

"Not exactly." Isaak sieved the gravel though his fingers. "Not exactly a humanitarian service. Do you know why they do it?"

"She's pregnant by one of them. They're taking responsibility; they want her to be healthy and safe."

"Yes, but why? Think of what the word 'lebensborn' means. Wellspring of life. Source of life."

I felt Isaak studying me, waiting. He always said I should question things to their end. I wanted to please him now, so I thought about it through his mind. And there was the answer: "No."

"Yes," Isaak insisted. "Those are dark cradles.
'Have one baby for the Führer'
is the slogan. All German women, whether they're married or not, are expected to have children. Every place they take over, they will want to fill with their own. And they'll always want troops. Do you know what really frightens me about them? How far ahead they think. Babies aren't babies to the Nazis, Cyrla. They're resources. And now they're taking them from occupied countries."

I pictured the child Anneke was carrying. A little boy, a little girl. The Germans wanted to take Dutch babies the same way they were taking our fuel, our food, and our textiles. A blessing ran through my head, one we had spoken at the naming of my youngest brother, Benjamin:
May you live to see your world fulfilled, may your destiny be for worlds still to come, and may you trust in generations past and yet to be.