Postcards From No Man's Land (18 page)

Another silence. Then:

‘Would you do such a thing yourself?’

Jacob struggled with the question, remembered his tears
yesterday, feared they might come again. This would not be the time. There was too much. And too little.

Time, time! Suddenly everything seemed to be about time. A life time. Time for this, time for that. The time of your life. A time to live. No time left. A time to die.

‘I don’t know,’ he said with steady seriousness. ‘I really don’t. In theory I would. But in … reality. It seems so …’

Words failed him. A glottal stop in his gut.

Clearing her throat of gravel before speaking, Geertrui said, ‘Then you are still glad to be alive.’

A statement not a question.

Jacob paused before saying, ‘Yes. I suppose I am.’

‘Even in your, what was it?’

‘Mouse moods.’

‘Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being.’ She cleared her throat again. ‘Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live. What matters—’

A flash of pain crossed her face. She caught her breath and held it a few seconds. Sweat glazed her skin. Lying on the bed cover, her hands were clutched like claws.

Alarmed, Jacob said, ‘Are you all right? Shall I call someone?’

Geertrui raised a fisted hand, indicating no.

It was a while before she relaxed again.

‘You must go soon.’ Her voice was strained. ‘But before, I must ask you two questions.’ She pursed her dry lips and rubbed them together. ‘Tomorrow you go to Oosterbeek. Will you come and see me again on Monday? There’s something I wish to give you.’

‘Sure. Yes.’

‘Now, the other question. Will you read something to me? A short poem.’

Who can refuse a dying woman? ‘If you want me to. I don’t know how well—’

‘Your grandfather liked it. He read it to me. I read it over his grave. I should very much like to hear you read it.’

Jacob could only nod.

‘The drawer of my cabinet. The book there. A slip of paper marks the page.’

A battered, dog-eared volume, its red and cream cover faded and grubby.

‘The Ben Jonson?’ he asked.

Geertrui’s head turned and her eyes were on him again, intense, devouring.

He had never seen the poem before. He glanced through the few lines, rehearsing them in his head, fearing he might stumble over the unfamiliar Jacobean English.

Time. Time.

He took a breath while telling himself to be calm, to concentrate, to see only the words, follow the lines, trust the punctuation: just as he’d been taught while rehearsing the Scottish play.

He breathed in. And began.

‘It is not growing like a tree

In bulk, doth make Man better be;

Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,

To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:

A lily of a day

Is fairer far in May,

Although it fall and die that night;

It was the plant and flower of Light.

In small proportions we just beauties see;

And in short measures life may perfect be.’

Clinical noises echoed outside.

In the room, hospital air embalmed the silence.

GEERTRUI

THE INNOCENT HAPPY
time came to an end early the next morning. Until then each day our rising habit was thus. Mr Wesseling got up first at five thirty. He revived the fire in the kitchen range before going off to his farm work and to make sure Dirk and Henk were awake, who then got up and milked the cows. At six Mrs Wesseling got up and cooked breakfast for seven o’clock. I got up after her and did some housework until breakfast was ready. After we had eaten I took Jacob his coffee and performed our wake-up ritual.

But that morning Mrs Wesseling and I were still in bed and Mr Wesseling was busy reviving the fire when Dirk rushed in from the cowhouse, shouting for us all to hear, ‘Germans! Germans!’ It was a word that, like a magic spell, conjured us instantly into most vigorous action. Dirk had been dressing in the hideout when by lucky chance he saw from the skylight a German army truck turn from the main road in to our track. As soon as we heard his warning shout, Mr Wesseling rushed out to intercept the soldiers and to prevent them from entering the house for as long as possible. Mrs Wesseling ran from her room to the stairhead, yelling at Dirk to go back to the hideout. As for me, my first thought was of Jacob. I flung myself out of bed and hurried to his room, calling his name, knowing he must be roused and moved quickly somehow. But where? By the time I had reached him and shaken him awake Mrs Wesseling joined us, like me still in her night dress, her sleep-tousled hair loose about her head, and Dirk, despite his mother’s anxiety for him, was pounding up the back stairs in his bare feet.
‘Where are they?’ Mrs Wesseling was shouting to him. ‘On our road in a truck,’ Dirk called back. ‘Father’s gone to stall them.’ At the same time I was explaining to Jacob what was happening, and was helping him out of bed. But his wounded leg still could not carry his weight or even move itself without causing great pain. He was sitting on the edge of the bed when Dirk joined us. ‘Quick, quick,’ Dirk said, ‘I’ll carry him on my back.’ ‘No, no,’ Mrs Wesseling cried. ‘No time. You’ll never do it. They’ll be everywhere. Go, go! We’ll think of something.’ Just as my first thought had been of Jacob, hers was of Dirk. No matter who else was caught, herself included, her only child must not be. Dirk made an attempt at protest, but his mother, quite frantic, took him by the arms and began to push him with all her weight out of the room, crying, ‘Hide, Dirk, hide, hide!’

By now we could hear the Germans driving in to the farm yard. And I too was becoming distraught. ‘What shall we do?’ I could hear myself saying. ‘Where shall we hide him?’ Such awful panic. I think never so much in all my life. This while I was trying to help Jacob to stand, who was also spluttering, in English of course, words I could not (then!) understand. Later he told me he was cursing himself for allowing himself to relax during the last few days when we should have planned what to do in such an emergency. But they were days, he said, when he had felt suspended, out of time, out of place, with no past and no future, only an endless, self-contained, charmed, timeless time. But now the spell was broken.

Only when we heard orders shouted in German echoing round the yard, and the clatter of boots as soldiers spilled out of their truck, did Dirk, realising there was no time left, obey his mother and stumble away down the stairs, through the dairy in to the cowhouse, where Henk was waiting, ready to swing the ladder up in to the roof when Dirk had climbed it and to close the entrance to their hiding place as soon as they were inside. They made it in the nick of time.
Mr Wesseling’s attempt to delay the soldiers with questions about what they wanted and to inspect their permit were brushed aside by the officer in charge, and the soldiers were sent to search each building: two with their officer came in to the house by the kitchen door, two in to the cowhouse by the big end door. Mr Wesseling was ordered to remain by the truck guarded by the driver.

In the seconds after Dirk left us, Mrs Wesseling recovered her composure with a surety that astounded me. Whatever else I may say about her this I must: she possessed admirable self-discipline and remarkable courage. ‘Calm,’ she muttered as much to herself as to me. And then as if all emotion had been siphoned out of her, she glanced at me with Jacob leaning against me, his arm round my neck, looked round the room, and after a meditative pause that seemed like an eternity there came over her face an almost amused expression.

‘Quick,’ she said, going to the
bedstee
and opening the doors.

As I do not think you have such a thing as our
bedstee
in England I should explain you that it is a bed in a cupboard in the wall. Many of our old houses had them. Usually they were in the kitchen-living-room at the side of the fire. During the day the bed could be shut away from view by closing the doors or a curtain. At night it was a cosy bed. And thus the little space and few rooms of the old houses could be used to the maximum without a bed getting in the way or depressing the eye during the day. Like some of the better-off farms, the Wesselings’ had a second floor and bedrooms up there. But still a
bedstee
provided an extra sleeping place when necessary. Luckily there was one in Jacob’s room. I had not even thought of it till now, when Mrs Wesseling opened its doors.

‘Get him in, get him in,’ she said, and helped me almost carry Jacob to it and tumble him in, he hopping on one foot and me explaining to him what was happening.

‘Now you,’ said Mrs Wesseling as soon as Jacob was lying flat on his back on the mattress.

‘What! Why?’ I said, breathless though I was with the exertion and excitement.

‘Just do it. On top of him. Quick!’

At such a moment there is no time for discussion or even explanation. Already we could hear the clatter of a soldier’s boots on the stone tiles of the floor downstairs and the sharp commands of his officer. Besides, there was no resisting the force of Mrs Wesseling’s will when she was in such a determined temper.

So in to the
bedstee
I clambered, and lay down flat on my back on top of Jacob. Only to find myself covered at once by the duvet, which Mrs Wesseling swept off Jacob’s bed and flung over us.

‘What are you doing?’ Jacob whispered to me.

‘Quiet,’ I whispered back. ‘Don’t even breathe!’

Now we could hear the soldier’s boots stamping up the stairs.

‘Look ill,’ Mrs Wesseling muttered to me before she made for the door, and surged out without a pause on to the landing, where she confronted the soldier as he reached the top of the stairs.

‘What are you doing here? What do you want?’ I heard her demand in angry German.

‘Orders. Out of the way,’ replied the soldier.

‘How dare you! What orders? Show me your orders?’

‘Officer. Downstairs. Out of the way.’

The soldier’s hobnailed boots stomped along the landing to the furthest room, Mrs Wesseling’s bare feet slapping along behind, and she harrying him all the time. ‘What do you think we are doing here? Hiding an army? We are farmers, doing our best despite everything to grow food to feed people like you. How dare you come here like this?’ And the soldier growling back at her, ‘Quiet, woman. Go away,’ as he searched the rooms.

He was not very diligent at his job, or perhaps he just wanted to get away from Mrs Wesseling as quickly as possible, but he did little more than look under the beds, inspect inside the wardrobes (knocking the backs with his rifle butt, for it was well known that people often constructed hiding places in the wall behind a wardrobe), a few taps on the ceilings and walls for any give-away hollow sound of a cavity.

Finally he arrived at Jacob’s room. Mrs Wesseling made sure she preceded him and stood just inside the door, looking across at the
bedstee
. As he entered, she said quietly, ‘A guest. She’s sick.’

The soldier stopped in his tracks.

‘Sick?’ he said with alarm.

‘Tuberculosis,’ said Mrs Wesseling to him with a gesture of resignation, adding quietly, ‘Very bad, poor girl. No hope.’

Peering over the duvet, I saw the soldier’s nose twitch, as if he smelt the dread disease.

‘My God!’ he said, turning on his heel, and stomped out of the room and away down the stairs.

‘Stay there,’ Mrs Wesseling mouthed at me when he had gone, then followed after.

For some time I lay on top of Jacob in the
bedstee
before I heard the Germans driving away and Mrs Wesseling came panting up the stairs to tell me they had not discovered my brother and Dirk. How long this was—ten, fifteen minutes, more—I could not tell. Not because those were less time-tied days; clocks were not everywhere as they are today. But another reason kept from my mind any knowing of time or thought of the soldiers.

While the soldier was clattering about in the bedrooms I lay in the
bedstee
rigid with panic, trying to control my breathing, and fearful for my pounding heart. But when he gave up and went downstairs the relief was so great my bones turned to dough and I lay where I was, too weak to
move, and my nightshift soaked with sweat. It was only then I became aware of Jacob’s body under mine, my weight pressing upon him, his head on its side under my left shoulder, his chest rising and falling as he breathed under my back, his angular hips beneath the swell of my buttocks, my legs stretched inside of his. I felt his warmth percolating through the clinging layers of our sweated nightwear, I felt the architecture of his bones, the cushioning of his muscles.

And because instinctively as I tumbled in upon him he had clasped his arms around my waist and held me firm, while I clutched the duvet close under my chin to ensure nothing of us was exposed but my face, we thus lay clamped together, at first conscious only of the danger stalking the rooms, then conscious only of our two bodies so closely pressed together. Never before had anyone held me like this, never before had I felt the intimate shape of a man’s body against my own. This itself would have been enough to startle me. Not that I disliked it, not at all. Indeed, while before my heart was beating with dreadful fear, now it beat with excitement. But then something else occurred, something even more startling. I felt Jacob’s sex swelling between my thighs. As if it were being inflated by a bicycle pump.

It would be wrong to say that I did not know what was happening, but it would also be wrong to say that I was entirely sure what it meant
for me
. What should I do? How should I respond?

This must seem to you inconceivable. Knowing, as young people, even children, now do, the sexual functions of the body, I can understand how it must seem to you impossible that a young woman of nineteen could be uncertain, if not ignorant, of a man’s stiffening penis. But so it was, and I must ask you to accept that what I felt was such a confusing mixture of surprise, an unfamiliar kind of aroused sensation in my body, and uncertain emotions about what I wished and what I ought to do, that there came over me a shyness so complete that I could not move
but was as if paralysed, unable to respond as part of me wished to do without knowing precisely how, but neither able to flee as part of me felt I ought to do. All I could do was remain as I was, every cell of my body tingling as never before, intensely sensitive to my own and to Jacob’s body and to my own and his every smallest movement.