Postcards From No Man's Land (14 page)

This is how it was the morning of Tuesday 26 September 1944, with a hiding place already prepared. In their
overleg
during the night, the Wesselings had decided that I could stay in the house with them. If anyone asked, it was easy enough to explain that I was a friend of the family who had been visiting when the battle with the British began, which prevented my returning home to Oosterbeek. My identification papers were in order. We all agreed it was a convincing story. Dirk and Henk would go on as they had before, working around the farm and sleeping in their den.

Jacob was the problem. Weak and ill and unable to stand, never mind walk, nursing him in the small confined space of the boys’ den would be difficult for everyone. The important thing was to get him fit and well enough to move around as quickly as possible. This could best be done if he was looked after in a proper bed in the warmth and convenience of the house. Though Mr and Mrs Wesseling were not happy about it, because of the risk, they agreed that Jacob should be kept in one of their bedrooms for a few days. We must just hope that the Germans would be too busy dealing with the aftermath of the battle to bother searching or even visiting a farm well away from the area.

But Mrs Wesseling made it very clear to us and to me especially that she expected me to be in charge of Jacob, to do the nursing, the fetching and carrying necessary, as well as helping her with general work around the house. She had enough to do, she said, looking after us all without having to look after a wounded soldier as well. And besides, she added, she did not speak his language.

I did not object or argue. I had, I said, taken Jacob on at home, it had been my own decision to come here with him,
I knew he was my responsibility.

Mrs Wesseling was a firm, even you might say a stern woman, and she was determined the Germans should have no excuse to disturb her family and her home, to which I must say she devoted herself completely. But there was more to the demands she made on me than this.

We all knew of Dirk’s feelings for me, he had made them plain enough to his parents as well as myself weeks before. His mind was set on marrying me. In this I had given him no encouragement. Not because I did not like him. No no. He was a handsome young man and one of the kindest, most considerate of people I have known. But I did not love him in the way, I thought then, you ought to love someone if you married him. I also knew that Mrs Wesseling did not think I would make the right wife for her only son. I knew because she had told me so quite directly one day when we were on our own. Dirk, she told me, was a farmer’s son. One day he would inherit the farm, which had been in the family for generations. He needed a wife brought up to the farming life. She had nothing against me, she said, I was ‘a nice enough girl’, but I was of the town, and brought up to an easy, comfortable, bourgeois life. I did not know the ways of the country or the hard work of a farmer’s wife. ‘If you don’t work a horse when it’s young,’ she said, ‘it won’t work when it’s old. And,’ she added, ‘it’s too late for you.’ Even if I tried to adapt, she told me, I would never be happy. And if I wasn’t happy as his wife, her son would not be happy as my husband. He was infatuated with me at the moment, she went on, but he was very young, it would wear off, and then he would see sense. ‘So whatever you might think, young lady, I’ll thank you to keep off.’

I did not argue. I had no intention of marrying Dirk. And like many who make it their business to ‘speak my mind with no frills’, as she put it, Mrs Wesseling never liked the compliment being returned. So even though I would have liked to say a few straight words on my own behalf, I
kept silence rather than cause a breach between us that might harm Henk’s friendship with Dirk, and my own too, for he was a friend and a good one. Nor did I blame Mrs Wesseling, for she was trying to protect her only son from making a life-long mistake. Perhaps, I thought, in her place I would have done the same. As would my own beloved mother. Mothers and their sons, is there any love more determined? I think not, unless it is fathers and their daughters. The difference, I have often noticed, is that a mother battles on behalf of her son against the world, whereas a father battles to possess his daughter for himself.

As the days passed during the week or two after our arrival I began to see that Mrs Wesseling might have something else in mind than merely keeping me away from Dirk. She knew that however careful an eye she kept on me and however hard she made me work in the house there would still be plenty of occasions when Dirk and I could be together and plenty of places around the farm where we could be out of sight, if we wanted to be alone. Perhaps she hoped that by working me hard and giving me plenty of drudgery and unpleasant jobs to do—like plucking and gutting chickens and cleaning out the family’s outside dry lavatory—she would put me off her son by putting me off the life marrying her son would entail. Well, I did not mind that either. I prefer to be busy, was not afraid of
vuil werk
(dirty work), and had had a good training from my own mother in dutiful behaviour. Though I must admit, in Mother’s hands it was a training sweetened with a large measure of witty humour and easy laughter, which, I’m sorry to say, was absent from Mrs Wesseling’s dour recipe. At her conception I fear her Calvinistic god must have mislaid her funny bone, poor woman. A mistake which that particular deity too often made. But even this did not bother me. I was young. And when you are young, the world bounces.

By nightfall of our first day everything was as Mrs
Wesseling wanted it. Jacob was tucked up and sound asleep in bed in a room next to the stairs that led down to the back-door passage of the house where also was the door in to the dairy, which led in to the cowhouse. If Germans were spotted coming along the track we hoped there would be time to evacuate him to the hiding place before they reached us. Of course, Dirk and Henk had resettled themselves in their den. All signs of our arrival and of the presence of anyone other than Mr and Mrs Wesseling and myself had been carefully removed. With everything done and back to normal, or as normal as it could be in the circumstances, Mrs Wesseling and I cleared away the evening meal and washed the dishes before ironing the day’s laundry, while the men disappeared to one of the outbuildings where they had a radio hidden, and listened to the news on Radio Oranje, our Dutch-language station broadcast from London by the BBC.

Here is memory. For me now there is only memory. Memory and pain. All life is memory. Pain is of now, forgotten as soon as gone. But memory lives. And grows. And changes too. Like the clouds I can see through my window. Bright and billowy sometimes. Blanketing the sky sometimes. Storm-tossed sometimes. Thin and long and high sometimes. Low and grey and brooding sometimes. And sometimes not there at all, only the cloudless blue, so peaceful, so endless. So longed for. But let us not talk of death. Only of clouds. Always the same and yet never the same. Uncertain. Unreliable, therefore. Unpredictable.

Would I had kept a diary all these years. There is no memory so good as that preserved in writing at the time of living it. Had I done so, how much more I could tell you of my days with Jacob. But now the clouds cross my mind according as an unseen wind wills them, and I am not always sure which came before which in the order of events. Unlike the days of the battle, which I seem to remember in
turn as they happened, the period of our time together at the farm, until the time of the end, comes to me as a montage, never the same at each viewing. Always a few scenes, those I treasure the most. But some not remembered for years. And others often but at random. For me, this is a pleasure. Each viewing holds a surprise. But for you, for whom there will be only this one viewing—? Well, I do my best.

Waking Jacob each day while he was convalescent in the farmhouse became a little ritual begun the first morning. He was a great sleeper. He liked sleeping, he said, because he dreamed a lot and enjoyed his dreams. They were often like a wonderful film show. And he slept heavily. All his life, he said, he had hated getting up. And he certainly was always hard to awaken.

The first morning I did not know this, but was not surprised after all he had gone through that he slept so deeply. I took him a bowl of coffee (fake slop, ersatz, all we could obtain by that time in the war, but acceptable when hot and sweetened with honey from Mr Wesseling’s bees). I stood by his bedside with his coffee, and said his name. But nothing, only heavy breathing. I shook his shoulder. But still no sign of waking. Sweat shone on his brow. I put down the bowl on the table by his bed and smoothed his hot brow with my hand a number of times. Still no movement. Even my cool hand did not stir him to consciousness. I sat on the edge of the bed and quietly spoke his name. ‘Jacob. Jacob.’ Nothing. Asleep, he looked like a small boy. So
kwetsbaar
—so vulnerable and innocent.

By instinct, that biological tic which controls our actions far more than we like to think, I began to sing as a mother might to her child.

Vader Jakob, vader Jakob
,

Slaapt gij nog? Slaapt gij nog?

Alle klokken luiden. Alle klokken luiden
.

Bim Bam Bom. Bim Bam Bom
.

This worked no magic either. But then, while singing the canon again and smoothing his hot brow with my cool hand, at last he showed signs of life. His eyes flickered. His mouth spread in a satisfied smile. He moved in the bed. And finally his eyes opened, looking straight in to mine.

I finished the song and for a moment neither of us spoke. Until Jacob said,

‘Comb me smooth, and stroke my head,

And thou shalt have some cockell bread.’

‘What?’ I said, as I did not understand a word.

But he only grinned and said quietly, ‘Angel Maria, rescuing me again.’

‘Only from sleep this time,’ I said. ‘Thank God.’

‘If we had God to thank,’ he said, ‘we wouldn’t be here.’

‘You talk riddles again,’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Here,’ I said, taking the bowl from the table and bringing it to his mouth. ‘Drink this. If anything will, it will cure you of saying nothing.’

He laughed. I too.

Thus it became each morning a ritual. The waking song and my soothing hand, an exchange of nothings, before my helping him drink his coffee. Some mornings I knew that he was not sound asleep when I came to him, far from it, but pretended to be because he wanted me to perform the ritual. It gave him pleasure. And me too.

Until the morning that brought this happy time to an end.

POSTCARD

I see with an eye that feels

and feel with an eye that sees.

J. W. von Goethe

‘
LOOK,’ DAAN SAID
, ‘this has been a hard day for you. You need some food. Me too. There’s a café round the corner I use a lot. Let’s go.’

Daan bustled, clearing away the empty bottle and glasses. Jacob wanted to say no, wanted to be on his own, but suddenly felt so tired, so drained, he allowed himself to be borne along on the wave of Daan’s determination. There was relief, even pleasure, in giving himself up to the other’s decisiveness.

The small café in a narrow side street full of bars and cheap restaurants was already crowded with young, or anyway youngish, men and women, most of whom it seemed were smoking, hazing the room with the tangy burn of cigarette and pot that made Jacob’s nose twitch. Daan led the way, pausing two or three times to exchange greetings, to a corner table with two vacant chairs by a window looking out on to the narrow street. Where he left Jacob, who watched the tourists wandering by outside so as to avoid the eyes of the people inside.

He tried to loll at ease, alone in this noisy bonhomie, but catching sight of his reflection in the window saw the strain on his face. Would he ever learn to relax and be natural on his own in public? But then, what was his natural self? And what did ‘natural’ mean? He wished he knew. Some people (most people?) seemed right from the start, from birth, to
be at home in the world, seemed to know who they were, what they were, where they belonged. Daan, for instance. But he, me, this person other people called Jacob, did not. Now less than ever. As if (how many hours was it?) thirty hours—only thirty!—in this foreign country had begun to strip away from him, like peeling off a protective skin, the few certainties he thought he knew about himself, leaving him disorientated and displaced.

How to find his bearings?

Or was he just tired? Or maybe a little drunk?

Daan returned after an aeon, accompanied by a cheerfully harassed busty bar girl, bearing between them plates of pasta and salad, a basket of bread, glasses of wine, and eating irons.

‘Enjoy your meal,’ the girl said after a no-nonsense distribution of the goods.

‘How did she know I’m English?’ Jacob asked.

‘Because you look it,’ Daan said.

‘Am I such a stereotype?’

‘Only when you’re trying not to be.’

‘Hey, Daan!’ A big man, all black leather with a crimson scarf snaking round his neck, was breast-stroking his way through the crush to their table.

Daan stood to greet him. ‘Koos!’ They exchanged a bear hug and a rapid three-barrelled kiss—right cheek, left cheek, right cheek again—a national greeting between friends that Jacob had observed at first with some surprise but was now growing accustomed to. The English with their Judas kiss of a single moo; the French with their dual display; the Dutch with their triple smacker. And, he’d noticed, you could tell how trusty the participants were in their affections by how close the kisses came to the mouth. Routine greeting: the lips hardly touched the face and were aimed high and earwards on the cheek. Friends, platonic and enjoyed: the kisses placed lightly on the middle cheek. Good friends, family: the kisses gently planted close to the mouth. Close
close friends, lovers: the kisses delivered full-lipped, on the edge of the mouth. And when sensuous, the last of the three mouth-to-mouth: the life-saving seal of intimate complicity.