My Enemy's Cradle (7 page)

I could almost smell Benjamin's soaped neck, could almost feel his rich damp weight on my hip, sleeping with his fingers twined through a loop of my braid so with every step I took, I felt the smallest of tugs. "I'll make her understand," I told Isaak. "She'll come with me."

"She'll do what she wants to do," Isaak said. Bitterly, I thought. "But wait and see. She probably won't be accepted. Most girls aren't. Do you know about the tests?"

I nodded yes, then shook my head.

"They have to prove their lineage. Have to have acceptable hair color, eye color. Aryans, they call them. Desirables."

Somewhere—I didn't know where—they were doing this to my cousin now. Could they measure her sweetness? Would the light she spilled over our family be acceptable? There was nothing more to be said. I was suddenly exhausted, as if I had been holding myself rigid for days. I leaned my head against Isaak's shoulder and felt him tense.

Anneke had said that once two people began to touch each other, they would know how to make love. But Isaak needed to learn the language of touch first. And it would be up to me to teach him. Who else did he have?

I lifted my hand to the base of his neck, where his shirt collar opened, and very gently stroked my fingertips against his throat, warm and smooth and summer-brown over the corded muscle. In an instant the world narrowed, and then poured into this deliberate questioning of skin. I held my breath for his answer.

He took my hand and held it tight, and then pushed it away.

"Cyrla, no. It isn't ... I have to get back." He got to his feet and looked away.

I wanted to reach out and pull his eyes back onto me. I understood, though. He needed time to become comfortable with this new language. But we didn't have time.

That night, when I washed the dishes after supper, I pulled a teaspoon from the hot suds and slipped it into my pocket.

The person who came home Sunday evening was not my cousin.

When I came up to her, she flinched. She went straight to our room although it wasn't even nine o'clock, and when my aunt and I followed, at first she wouldn't answer our questions, wouldn't look at us with her wounded eyes. Or couldn't.

"All right," my aunt said. She kissed Anneke. "We'll talk tomorrow." She left and I knew she was going to go find out from my uncle what had happened.

Anneke stepped out of her dress and hung it up, something I had never seen her do. Thin crescents of white tipped her fingernails where the polish had worn off—I had never seen that, either. She put on her nightgown and pulled the blankets over her, all of her motions small and careful.

I suddenly felt guilty, as if I had let her down. "I've thought this through. If you left, I'd leave, too. I don't want to be here without you—even if your father let me stay. So why don't you and I move away together? We'll get a place in Amsterdam, and jobs, and no one will know us. We'll tell people whatever you want."

"I'm so tired, Cyrla" was all she said.

"No, wait," I said. "Isaak told me about the Lebensborn. Where did you go? Tell me what happened."

Anneke cringed, inched deeper under her blankets.

I got up and sat on her bed and put my hand on her shoulder. She was cold under her nightgown, but she wasn't shivering. "No," I said again. "Please talk with me. I'm not going to sleep until you do. You're not going into that place, and they're not going to take the baby. Are you all right?"

Anneke sighed and looked at me. "You don't understand." Her eyes were still far away, older and slow; something at her core had vanished. "I'm fine. It was nothing. I saw some doctors ... at the headquarters ... just some tests. They measured ... they measured everything. They asked about our family. That's all. I want to go to sleep now."

"Anneke, do you hear me? You don't have to go." I suddenly had a wonderful idea. "Your mother's to go to Amsterdam tomorrow, to pick up that part your father needs for the order. Let's go with her. We'll see Frannie and Leisje. We'll ask them to help us find a place to live. We'll have fun."

Anneke slipped farther away. "Leave me alone, Cyrla." She rolled over. I grew angry with her for a moment, that she had gotten herself into this situation, and now wouldn't let me show her a way out. Later, when I heard her crying, I was ashamed.

The next morning, she was up when I awoke.

"Well," I said immediately, "Amsterdam?"

"I'm going back to work today. But you go with Mama, Cyrla. It's a good idea. See what you can learn." She put on a gray woolen skirt and a wine sweater, and I thought she seemed better, stronger. "Will you go today?" she asked me a few minutes later, and she waited until I promised. I was pleased—my idea had given her hope.

She talked with me while I dressed, and asked questions about Isaak and me. How did I feel when I was with him? How did he act? Was I sure? A hundred questions.

"Is anyone ever sure?" I asked her. And then she gave me more advice, about how I'd know if he were the right one, what I might feel. I stopped listening. Isaak had been the one for me since the day I'd met him, the day I'd arrived in Holland. There was no question. What mattered was that Anneke seemed to be herself again. But she didn't check herself in the mirror before she went downstairs, and she didn't fix her nail polish.

I should never have let her out of my sight.

The train was crowded—they were always crowded now. The Germans had requisitioned our modern electric engines and left us with only older coal-burning ones, which broke down all the time, and the worst of the carriages. By the time we reached Amsterdam, there were hundreds of people on board, crushed shoulder to shoulder in the aisles so that if anyone fainted, he probably wouldn't hit the floor, while the last two carriages were empty—
NUR FUR WEHRMACHT,
the signs said, although there were no soldiers in them that day. I thought it was a good omen—all these people traveling to Amsterdam must mean there was work.

The air was sooty and stale, but as Schiedam was early on the route, we had seats, so we felt lucky. On the way, my aunt told me what she'd learned last night. There was a home in Nijmegen, barely a hundred kilometers away, called the Gelderland. Anneke had passed all the tests and she was welcome to have her baby there. Most girls waited until they began to show to enter, but my uncle had pressed for her to go in right away. She was due there next Friday.

"They have food. Fresh vegetables and fruits every day. Plenty of milk. All the finest quality. And it's not that far away—"

"Tante Mies!" I interrupted her. "You're not thinking of letting her go?" But of course she was. I'd heard the words that swayed her—plenty of food, the best quality—words as nourishing to my aunt as the meals she could no longer make for us. Anneke and I had lost weight in the past year. Since meeting Karl, Anneke had grown even thinner, as if she had been burning hotter and faster at her core. Sometimes my aunt would reach out to pull at the loose waist of a skirt, visibly pained by the accusing fabric.

"
Ja,
I am. We can't provide this for her here. I can't even feed her properly. They have doctors and nurses, she'll get the best medical attention—"

"No!" I cried. Several people standing near glanced down at us, but I didn't care. "It's not what you think at all. Isaak told me: It's a Lebensborn. Do you know what that means? Did you ask what the tests were? Did you ask Oom Pieter what will happen to the baby? Where he'll go?"

I told my aunt everything I had learned; then I told her what I wanted to do. There was no reason not to. We were at the end of all choices.

My aunt listened carefully, listened to me for the first time as an adult. She didn't disagree with anything; even when I said Oom Pieter couldn't be told, she only turned toward the smudged window to look at the countryside rolling by and nodded.

"I'll help," she said when I finished.

I felt hopeful suddenly. Anneke and I could make a life in Amsterdam until the war was over. It wouldn't be the one we'd imagined for ourselves, but who in Europe could say any different? The wheels of the train sang against the track.

I had an address for Leisje and Frannie, and I boarded a tram for their district. The tram was crowded also—with men and women dressed for business, with university students, with people of many nationalities, something we didn't see in Schiedam. Amsterdam was always a tolerant and welcoming city, and very modern; sometimes when I visited, I came home thinking Schiedam was living twenty years in the past. The girls especially had a different look here—a look that excited me. I wondered how long it would be before I wore that look, and if I'd notice it on myself.

I felt anonymous and free—as if I'd already taken a new identity and were starting my life over. I'd have to choose a new name. I had always liked Kalie, the name of the girl who had been my first friend in Holland, or maybe I would call myself Alie, or Johanna after my mother. No, not Johanna.

I got off on Konigsstraat and began to walk toward Leisje and Frannie's address. Their flat was above a shoe-repair shop. This was a good omen, too, I thought—in Schiedam the shoe-repair shop had been out of business for months. There was a cheese shop next door, full of customers.

The door to the flats upstairs was in an alcove between the two shops. Tubs of sun-colored dahlias flanked the entrances, and above these, each shop door displayed one of the new signs—
JODEN VERBODEN,
in letters larger than the old signs, and blacker.

"Do you see that sign?" I jumped at the voice behind me.

"What kind of a world are we living in that we're told who can come into our shops? It makes me not want to bring my business here. But what can we do? They're everywhere now." The man shook his head and passed by me into the cheese shop.

I climbed the stairs to the flats quickly and willed my heart to slow down, not allowing myself to question why it had raced.

No one answered my knock, but of course Leisje and Frannie would be at work by now. I went back down to the street and started to walk. I didn't know which bank they worked in, so whenever I passed one, I stopped and asked. No one had heard of our friends, but at each I saw the new signs. At each I asked if there were any jobs. Two of the banks said, no, sorry, and the third said perhaps in a week or so; come back. Well, so I would tell Anneke I was sure we could find work.

I walked for several hours, gathering things to tell Anneke about Amsterdam, to present to her like gifts: I heard someone practicing a clarinet; a young man was painting at an easel in front of a canal house; a group of students was handing out leaflets for a play. There were German soldiers everywhere I looked, but here they seemed to belong to the city, not the other way around. We could do well here, make a new life.

It was almost time to meet my aunt. I stopped into a pastry shop and to buy some
taartjes
for the train. The sign was there on the shop door, once again: JODEN VERBODEN. I wasn't hungry anymore. Just as I turned in the doorway to leave, three elderly women stepped up to come in.

I flattened myself against the door in politeness, smiled, and wished them "
Goedemiddag,
" and as they made their arthritic way past me I slipped my right hand between my back and the glass door, found the insulting notice, then ripped it off and dropped it crumpled to the tiles below. "It's a beautiful day!" I added, and walked out, smiling even more widely. Yes, Anneke and I might do well here.

It was dark when my aunt and I walked up to our house, and the telephone was ringing. I hurried ahead, unlocked the door, and ran inside to answer it.

It was Mr. Eman, from the bakery. He wanted to know if An-neke was ready to come back yet. "My wife's been covering the extra shifts, but if Anneke's going to be gone any longer..."

My aunt understood before I did. As I stood with the telephone to my ear, she came into the hall and called for Anneke. Then she reeled backward as if she'd been struck: The news hung in the air, in the crushing languid smell of so much blood, finished with its lifetime of coursing. She dropped her coat and bag and flew upstairs. The smell was so heavy, it coated my tongue and made me gag; still, even as the receiver fell from my hand, even as I watched my aunt run up the stairs, I refused to acknowledge its meaning.

My aunt screamed. I followed the cry. There were a hundred steps on the stairway that night, and then a hundred more. I climbed with legs of stone.

Anneke.

A lake of blood, drying to crust at its shore and pooling under her mattress, drenched the rag rug between our two beds and made four mahogany islands of the night table's legs. My aunt knelt in the blood beside the bed howling, her head buried next to her daughter's. Anneke's face was white—white as her pillowcase, white as her slip above her waist. Below, her slip was clotted red and black, its lace hem swollen dark, slick as seaweed, knotted up between her legs at the blood source.

"
No. Oh, please no,
" I begged. I climbed onto the bed next to Anneke's still body and begged her not to have left me, not to have miscarried, not to have been pregnant at all. "No," to everything. Too late. My aunt held her, wailing.

My uncle appeared in the doorway. He roared and flew across the room, bent over Anneke, and lifted her out of our dark well and crushed her body to his. He crouched with her beside my bed, reached for my blanket and wrapped it around her. I thought,
No! Don't take her away!
and then I thought,
Yes! Warm her, make everything all right again. Bring her back! Bring her back!
I climbed from Anneke's bed and knelt beside him and cradled my cousin with him, and my aunt followed.

We sat on the floor holding her, six arms touching the lost center of our wheel. I didn't know how long—half an hour, or all night—because time lost its meaning. One by one we would spin off from each other, jolted by a fresh stab of pain, then fight our way back. Worst of all was to watch my uncle lose his battle. I could see the blow land each time, like a cannonball to his chest. He crumpled with a single gulping sob and clutched his big head in his big hands.