Postcards From No Man's Land (25 page)

Jacob would have liked nothing better. Everything about this girl appealed to him. Her looks. The things she said. The funny, slightly aggressive way she said them sometimes. And Anne Frank. As always when someone specially attracted him, he wanted to touch her; but he wanted more than to touch this girl.

He pushed the thought from his mind lest he gave himself away, and to allow himself time to answer he looked for Tessel, who was lagging behind somewhere with Wilfred.

‘I’d like to,’ he said. ‘But I’m with Mrs van Riet, with Tessel, and—’

‘I don’t mind,’ Hille said in her matter-of-fact style, ‘she seems very nice, but it wouldn’t be the same, would it?’

He glanced at her, and she smiled the same complicit smile she had given him when they all shook hands.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t.’

‘If I asked, would she mind?’

‘I expect you’d get your way. I expect you usually do.’

‘I’m quite good at it, you’re quite right.’

‘But I’m not sure. It would be a bit rude to desert her when she’s looked after me and brought me here.’ He shrugged. ‘And there are complications.’

‘You’re not going to go polite on me, are you,
Engels
man?’

He laughed. ‘Can’t help it. It’s my nature. As the scorpion said to the frog.’

‘Oh dear, we must do something about that!’

‘
We
must?’

‘Why not? Be fun, don’t you agree?’

‘Quite like being polite, as a matter of fact.’

‘I can see that.’

‘Makes life easier. Oils the works, my grandmother says.’

‘I’ve heard of mothers’ boys. But not of grandmothers’ boys. You’re not a grandmother’s boy, are you?’

He chuckled nervously. ‘A bit. Can’t help it. I live with her, you see.’

‘Your soldier-grandfather’s wife?’

‘The same.’

‘And you’re a Jacob as well.’

‘Incestuous, isn’t it.’

‘My god!’

She gave him a knowing look.

‘What about you?’ Jacob said. ‘Are you a daddy’s girl, like my sister?’

Now Hille chuckled, an echo of his. ‘A bit. Can’t help it. I live with him, you see.’

They laughed.

She added, as if winning a point, ‘So was Anne.’

‘Yes,’ Jacob conceded, ‘true. But not like my sister. She’s not just a bit of a daddy’s girl. She’s more of an obscene daddy’s girl, if you ask me.’

‘You don’t like her.’

‘Not much.’

‘What a pity. My brother Wilfred and I, we get on well. I like him a lot, to tell the truth. He’s
so
serious! It’s funny how serious he takes everything. Perhaps he could lighten up a bit. But I love him just the way he is.’

‘You look a lot like each other.’

‘Everybody says so, which is a good joke.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s adopted. Mother couldn’t have any more children after me, and they wanted a son, so they adopted Wilfred, and I was so pleased. I picked him out.’

‘Really!’

‘Really! That’s what Mother says anyway. I was only four, but she says I took to him right away. So they decided it had to be Wilfred.’

‘But you do, you look so alike.’

‘Yes, I know. I see it too. And I don’t mind, because I think he’s beautiful.’

Jacob wanted to say she was right but that would give away too much of what he was feeling about her.

Even before Tessel had quite reached them, Hille was speaking to her in rapid Dutch, during which Tessel smiled and nodded and replied and glanced now and then at Jacob, who couldn’t pick out much except his own name and the words Amsterdam and
koffie
.

‘Of course you must stay and talk to Hille, if you wish,’ Tessel said to him when the conversation was done. ‘I don’t mind at all. It will be easier for me. I can go straight to Geertrui. But will you be all right, getting back to Daan?’

‘No problem,’ Hille said, grinned and, mimicking with shocking accuracy, intoned to Jacob, ‘Put yourself in my hands. Relax. Enjoy yourself. Trust me to land you safely in Amsterdam.’

GEERTRUI

MRS WESSELING WAS
so deranged by her son’s action that she would not leave her room for days. It was as if Dirk had died. She kept repeating, like a mantra, that she would never see him again. In her grief she blamed Henk, saying he persuaded Dirk to leave. She blamed me for coming to the farm and unsettling her son. She blamed me too for bringing Jacob with me and putting her family in even more danger than they were before. She blamed her husband for not being more firm with their son. Worst of all in its vehemence, she blamed herself for allowing this to happen. She should have sent Henk away the first day he and Dirk decided to go into hiding; she should have sent all three of us away the night we arrived; she even said she should have let the Germans find Jacob instead of hiding him in the
bedstee
, because at least that would have saved her son.

Her torment was painful to behold. And nothing Mr Wesseling or I could do soothed her anguish. It was a shock to see an adult who I had known only as a strong woman, controlled in every way, indomitable, so suddenly crumble, becoming almost infantile in her distress. Another lesson, one of the most affecting of my life, in how fragile is human nature. In the moment it took to read her son’s letter this mature, experienced, dominant woman disintegrated as if the yarn that held the garment of her self together had been pulled out and she had unravelled into a tangle of twisted thread. And though Dirk did eventually return, she never completely recovered her former self, never became the confident, imposing person she had been, but for the rest of
her life was a nervous, uncertain woman, withdrawn, hard to amuse, always expecting the worst. Her one constant pleasure, and I often thought her only consolation, was playing the harmonium, an instrument she had learned as a child, but had given up in her teenage years, and now took up again as if she had never left off. She played it only for herself, sometimes for hours on end, never liking anyone else to listen, and invested in her playing all of herself that before she had poured into her son. It was as if, while playing the harmonium, she lived another life, an alternative life that did not fail her as her other everyday life had failed her. Until in the end, before she died, playing the harmonium and listening to records of other people playing it, became her world, and there was nothing besides. All else had vanished, her husband, her son, her previous life forgotten. She remembered only music and the logic of the keyboard. She died of cancer in her early sixties while fingering on the counterpane of her bed the notes of some composition only she could hear.

But I have reached ahead of myself. Let us go back to the days after Dirk and Henk disappeared.

Mr Wesseling was of course upset, but took it better than his wife and with optimism. They’ll return, he said, probably in a few days, when the anger is out of their system and they find it is not so easy as they think to fight like a guerrilla. As for his wife, at first he regarded her withdrawal with the same down-to-earth acceptance. He was not an imaginative man, but phlegmatic and fatalistic. For him always, things were as they were, that was life, and you did well to make the best of it. There was an expression he frequently used: It’s God’s way with us that we deserve what we get. Besides, women were a mystery to him, their peculiarities beyond explanation. Their domain was the house and the domestic animals, with which he did not interfere. So when his wife took to her room, he shrugged it
off as merely a woman’s reaction to bad news, and left her care to me along with the rest of the ‘woman’s work’, paying me no attention, except to say, ‘You’ll be worried about your brother. He’ll be all right. They’re resourceful boys.’ And that was that. Back to work. The unremitting toil of a farm, where animals and crops never take a holiday nor allow those who tend them any time off. The land is a cruel master. And the best I can say of Mr Wesseling is that he loved it and tended it with complete devotion. It was his redeeming quality, and, I must say, I always liked him and got along well with him.

However, Mrs Wesseling was right: I was not born to the farming life and was not the type for it either. I do not know how I would have survived the next few days had it not been for Jacob. But for him my guess is that I would have given up and abandoned the Wesselings as abruptly as had my brother and Dirk, no matter what pangs of guilt I would have felt at such desertion. But Jacob was entirely my responsibility. I had taken him on against everyone’s advice, and to forsake him now would have been to forsake myself. I would never have been able to live with myself ever after. Because of Jacob I had to stay with the Wesselings, had to do whatever work fell to me, however weary and distressed I felt. And must do all I could to help him become fit enough to survive. I do not say escape, because already, though only half-consciously acknowledged to myself, I dreaded the day when he would leave me.

So Mrs Wesseling withdrew to her room, Mr Wesseling buried himself in his work, and I fled from the burden of the housework whenever I could to be with Jacob.

Most of these times with him were in the evenings after our meal. Mr Wesseling would go off to listen to Radio Oranje from England, and I would go to Jacob, with the extra excuse that the skylight in the roof of the hiding place gave the best view of the main road and the track to the house, so I could keep watch for unwanted visitors while
Mr Wesseling listened to the broadcast. He would come to us afterwards, tell us the latest news of the war, check on Jacob’s progress, then leave us together while he went to sit with his wife. His English was very poor so he never stayed with us for long.

Now, after Jacob being so dependent on me for his physical needs, I became dependent on him for emotional support. He was my only confidant. Few men are good listeners. (At least, it was so in my young days. Is it different now?) But Jacob was. And for a day or two after Henk’s departure he had a lot of listening to do as I poured out my distress at the loss of my brother, my anxieties about my parents, my complaints about Mrs Wesseling, my lonely plight, and my fears for each one of us. Everything which till then I had so carefully guarded and kept from him because I had been so determined to keep up my spirits and not depress Jacob lest I hinder his recovery. I suppose I had thought of myself as his rescuer, his nurse, even, as he called me, his guardian angel. His Maria. Now, in a day, this changed. The dyke was breached, my emotions flooded out in a deluge, and Jacob became my refuge, my protector, my companion.

And it was such a relief! Not to have to be strong all the time, not to have to appear cheerful and optimistic, not to have to be decisive, not to have to be always undaunted. Not to have to pretend so much. But just to
be
. I think I wallowed in the luxury. For a day or two at least. And Jacob did not discourage me. What a release! Like a prisoner unchained.

One evening, as we sat either side of the little makeshift table in the hiding place, the sound and smell of the cows in their stalls below filtering to us through the walls of hay, I cried as I talked. Cooped up as we were, yet it was like walking out in to the rain after a long dusty time inside.

And as if we were friends walking in the rain, Jacob reached out, and we held hands across the table. This was
the first time we made such intimate contact. As I have told you, I had washed this man, including his most private parts, many times. I had cradled him while he slept in our cellar during the worst of his suffering. I had fed him mouthful by mouthful as one feeds a baby. I had changed the dressings on his wounds. I had even assisted him as he used the lavatory. There was nothing of his body I did not know and had not touched. But that was the touch of his dutiful nurse, his angel Maria.

There had, of course, been the moment in the
bedstee
, and the desires and fantasies that had aroused. But I had tried to suppress them, had tried not to let myself think of them. In those old-fashioned words no one uses seriously any more, I had remained chaste. What had happened, I told myself, had been no more than an accident and must not be dwelt on. Even though at night I could not get it out of my mind or, worse, out of my dreams.

But now it was not Angel Maria who touched him, it was he who touched me, Geertrui, reaching across the table to take my hand as I talked and wept. I did not resist. At that moment nothing could have given me more comfort, nor more pleasure, than my hand held in his. Yet what confusion of emotions it stirred in me, as my distress and fears blended with the desires and longings that had kept me awake at nights and which now at last found a response, an outlet, a reply, a physical confirmation in the caress of his fingers on mine.

Instantly, in the second his hand took mine, I no longer thought of him as a wounded soldier, an escapee, a foreigner. Nor, honesty requires that I add, as a married man either. But only as mine and myself as his. In that uncompromising second I gave myself completely to him. And did so consciously, wilfully (not, please note,
willingly
, but
wilfully
). And have never thought of him or of myself in any other way from that day to this.

I want to be clear. Not for a part of a second did I hold
back, resist, demur. I propose no explanation, make no excuse. Nor do I offer the slightest regret. Quite the opposite. I cling to this moment, this decision. And endure its consequences. Of nothing in my life am I as certain as I am of my love for Jacob. Had he lived, I would have done everything in my power to keep him.

That evening we talked, held hands, gazed in to one another’s eyes, as lovers have done forever in that delicious time when they first acknowledge one another. No more than this. We did not even kiss. Yet it seemed to us that all our lives were there with us in that makeshift secret room. As that favourite poem I mentioned earlier puts it: ‘in short measures life may perfect be’. There is no more. There can be nothing better. The two hours or so which Jacob and I spent together that night were a measure of perfection. Brought to an end by Mr Wesseling calling to me from below, on the excuse of reminding me how late it was, and waiting for me to join him at the bottom of the ladder after I had said a hasty goodnight to Jacob.