Postcards From No Man's Land (33 page)

‘My mother is not most mothers.’

‘But your father—’

‘She loves him. Don’t ask me why.’

‘Hard to understand why some people marry the people they do.’

‘Marriage!’

‘You don’t like it?’

‘Do you?’

‘Why not? With the right person.’

‘Don’t you think it’s strange? Two people swearing to stay together for the rest of their lives and not to love anybody else—’

‘Not in that way—’

‘Whatever
that
way is!’

‘Don’t ask me.’

‘I don’t believe there is a
that way
. Do you? Friends. Can’t do without them. Lovers. For sure, yes please. Someone to live with while it’s right, while it works. Okay. But for ever? Never. Nothing is for ever.’

At that moment they were passing under a bridge, which the map told Jacob he should remember, and that in the reach of canal beyond it they would pass the house where he sheltered from the rain and where Alma rescued him.

‘Could you pull over and stop for a minute?’ he said, and explained about Alma.

It was easy to spot the house across the canal. It and its next-door neighbour were the only ones with the steps up to their front doors recessed in to the building. All the others had them outside, sideways on. And the profusion of plants around Alma’s ground-level windows.

‘Nice to live at this end of the canal,’ Ton said. ‘Also expensive.’

‘I suppose I should have returned the money Alma gave me and thanked her for her help.’

‘So? Do it now. And you should take her something.’

‘Yes.’

‘How about some chocolates?’

‘Sounds good.’

‘Come with me.’

They tied up the boat and walked in to Vijzelgracht, passing the café where Alma had taken him.

‘Panini,’ Ton said. ‘Everybody knows it.’

And a paper shop with postcards on a spinner outside.

‘Hang on,’ Jacob said. ‘I need to buy a card for my parents and post it with some letters.’

It was easy. Mostly the cards were the expected views of the city. But one took Jacob’s eye. A back view of two Amsterdam police in their shirt sleeves on a sunny day. One was a podgy woman, her girth emphasised by her belt, hung about with holster gun and phone and bits and pieces of cop gear. Her colleague was goosing her bum.

He could buy stamps there too. He wrote a quick message on the card.
Well. Happy. Looked after. Hope you’re all okay. With love, Jacob
. By which time Ton had discovered a postbox nearby on Prinsengracht.

Then a cake and chocolate shop, Holtkamp’s, the sort of place Sarah would have liked. A little old-fashioned, women assistants in black dresses with white trim, very polite. Hardly room for more than four or five customers. Ton ordered in Dutch. A fancy little box with flowery decorations and ribbons. An assortment of scrumptious chocs, some very dark brown, some light brown and milky, some white, square, triangular, one a little ball, one with a sliver of glazed fruit on top, one lime green, one sharp orange, one bright lemon. Fifteen in all. And a price that would have paid for a meal at Panini, which, when he saw it flick up on the till, made Jacob catch his breath.

‘Too much?’ Ton asked, grinning.

Jacob shook his head. ‘What the hell. She deserves it.’

They returned to the boat and took it across the canal to a mooring close to Alma’s place. The day was humid by now, the sky veiled with haze.

‘I’ll wait here,’ Ton said. ‘The Dutch don’t call without arrangement. Well, older people anyway. But she’ll be happy to see you, I’m sure.’

She was. Jacob reached through the protective grille and tapped on the window-door of her apartment. When Alma opened up her face broke into a wide smile.

‘Ach! It’s you. Have you been robbed again?’

He laughed. Some people make you feel good the instant you see them.

‘Just passing,’ he said handing her the box of chocolates, ‘and brought you this to thank you for helping me.’

‘There was no need.’ She took the box with obvious pleasure. ‘You’ve been to Holtkamp’s. Come in, come in.’

‘No, I won’t, thanks. I’m with a friend. In his boat. He’s waiting. He’s showing me the canals.’

‘You’ve made a friend. Good. And you’ve recovered from your ordeal?’

‘I’m fine. Staying with Daan. You remember? You phoned him for me.’

‘I remember. Wait a moment before you go.’

She disappeared in to the depths of her cave. Jacob stooped to see what he could of the apartment. A small square room with a blond polished wood floor, bookshelves on the walls, a large black television and sound system, a round antique dining table in rich dark wood, a comfortable armchair by a mock black-metal pot-bellied stove. A neat, tidy, cosy nest.

When Alma returned she handed him a paper bag with four of the chocolates in it.

‘For you and your friend so that you can share with me.’

‘But they’re for you.’

‘I couldn’t eat them all myself. It would be greedy. I like it that you have some too.’

‘Oh, and I nearly forgot,’ Jacob said, digging into his jeans pocket. ‘The money you loaned me.’

‘No. It was nothing. If you don’t need it, give it to someone else who does. The boy in the red cap perhaps.’

They smiled at each other.

‘And,’ she said, ‘before you return to England, come and have coffee. I’d like to hear of your adventures. I’ll write my telephone number so you may call before.’

He felt honoured.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’d better go.’

‘Goodbye. Enjoy yourself.’

On impulse, he leaned down towards her, Alma presented her cheek after only the slightest hesitation, and he gave her the regulation three-barrelled kiss as formally as he could manage from his awkward position, bent almost double and supporting himself on the window frame. But he managed without mishap and was pleased with himself for doing it.

With Ton again, they chugged along at the engine’s slowest pace, mused and brooded, joked and flirted, added new anecdotes to their growing anthology of each other’s history. And now and then sat in silence, Ton gazing at Jacob and Jacob taking in the view.

From Prinsengracht they floated through the warm afternoon via Reguliersgracht in to Keizersgracht, from Keizersgracht via Bouwersgracht again in to Herengracht, down Herengracht in to the Amstel, and toured the river before returning to Singel, and so back to Daan’s.

‘We’ve been threading the maze,’ Jacob said as they re-entered the Oudezijds Kolk.

‘Cruising the spider’s web,’ Ton said.

They laughed together.

Was there, Jacob thought, anything better than getting to know someone who you felt all the time you already knew, as if, in some alternative life, you had always been the closest and best of friends.

GEERTRUI

TWO MONTHS AFTER
Jacob’s death I knew for certain that I was pregnant with our child. I told no one. To have done so would have made my life unbearable. Certainly, Mrs Wesseling would have turned me out of the house. And the child would have been taken from me when it was born.

You cannot know nowadays, perhaps cannot even imagine, what a disgrace it was then for a woman to become pregnant outside marriage. It was regarded as a sin of the worst kind. If a Catholic, the woman was usually sent to an institution run by nuns. There she was made to suffer for her sin and the baby was removed from her immediately after the birth. For the next few days, it was brought to her for breast feeding. Sometimes she was even blindfolded so that she could not see her child, and her hands were strapped to the bed so that she could not hold it. Then a nun put the baby to her breast while it suckled. Only a mother can truly know what cruelty this was. As soon as possible, the child was given away for adoption or sent to an orphanage, where its life would never be anything but vile. It would bear the damnation, the stigma, of illegitimacy, of bastardy, for the rest of its life. The men, the fathers, suffered none of this opprobrium, of course. Never was it more truly said that the sins of the fathers were visited on the children. Only we should add: and on their mothers.

Protestant women suffered a less brutal but no less cruel fate. Often they were sent to relatives or friends far enough away from home to be out of sight of gossiping neighbours. After the birth, if the child was not adopted or sent to an
orphanage, it would be brought up as her own by one of the mother’s relatives. I have known people who found out only when they were grown up that those they thought were their parents were in fact their grandparents, or that someone they thought was an aunt or older sister was in fact their mother.

The alternative, which was tried by many more women than we ever hear about, was either self-induced miscarriage or the humiliating obscenity of an illegal abortion with all the life-threatening horrors, physical, emotional, mental, yes and spiritual too, that went with it. Those who survived the ordeal carried with them like an incurable disease for the rest of their lives the feelings of guilt and wounded self-respect that fate and the people among whom they lived had inflicted on them.

I cannot help thinking that no society, no nation, no religion of any kind anywhere that enshrines such a moral code and imposes it on its people can be called civilised or, except it change, deserves allegiance.

Even in ordinary peacetime I would never have allowed myself to be treated in this way. But as things were, trapped in the ever-increasing chaos of the weeks before our liberation, with my parents out of reach, no doctor I could trust, no friends nearby who might help me, and the grief of Jacob’s death still pulling me down in to the grave, I felt the despair and panic of those who are lost, abandoned, helpless. And because it was Jacob’s baby, I knew I would never give it to others or to an unborn death. It was all I could ever have of him now. And at the times of my deepest despair it was only for this child who was part of him that I kept myself alive, walking the earth, and did not bury myself with Jacob’s body.

In my grief after Jacob’s death I could not bear to clear up the hiding place where we had spent our ‘married’ time, and pleaded with Mr Wesseling to leave it alone till I was strong enough to do it myself. He agreed, fearful of worsening
my unhappiness, I think. And there I would sit, for hours sometimes, in a kind of waking coma, holding little items Jacob had used, his drinking mug, his knife and fork, his shaving brush, and reading the poems we had loved. Also writing him long long letters, as if he had only gone away to some unknown destination and would return one day, when he would want to know what I had done and what I had thought about while we were apart, and I would give him my letters to read.

In this way, by the time I knew I was pregnant the hiding place had become a sanctuary. A refuge, a place of safety and, yes, a holy place, a shrine to my lost love, where I prayed for help and comfort to the God who by then I knew is not God but is the unnameable unknowable source of all our frail being.

Besides my grief, which because of my nature I could express only in private (I detest displays of personal emotion in public), I had to hide what I knew of my condition from the only two people I saw every day and on whom I depended for food and shelter, for all my needs. And the hiding place was the only part of the house where I could be myself, could relax and let my feelings show, where I could weep and wail or brood or curl up on the bed, Jacob’s bed, in which the smell of him lingered,
our
bed, and be sure no one would observe me or unexpectedly intrude. So precious did it become that when I think of all the rooms where I have lived in my life, that is the one I remember with most affection and the only one I regret I cannot see again—that roughly made, cold, barely furnished, hay-scented, cowhorned hiding place.

Another of the English sayings father and I learned: The darkest hour comes before the dawn. So it was for me.

I was in the hiding place one dreary evening in March 1945, brooding on the impossibility of my plight, when I heard someone climbing the ladder. My instant foolish
wishfulling thought was that it was Jacob. But as instantly I knew it could not be and wondered who it was, for Mrs Wesseling never even came in to the cowhouse now and if Mr Wesseling wanted me, he called from below. By the time I had stirred myself to go and see, Dirk was there, standing in the doorway, darkly glowing in the light from a single candle burning in a jar on the table, his face so welcome and familiar and yet also the face of a stranger. Events separate people quite as much as time and distance. What has happened to one in the absence of the other makes foreigners of them. In the few weeks since we had last seen each other Dirk and I had lived through experiences that changed us. Neither was a youth any longer. We had entered into a new, adult phase. We both recognised this as soon as we looked in to the other’s eyes before a word was said. And so our greeting was quieter than it would have been before, a little wary, but more tender too.

As we embraced, I remember saying with genuine relief, for here was a friend in need, ‘You’re home!’ and Dirk saying, ‘Yes, I’m home.’ (What obvious things we say at such times!) And, as I released him and stood back, saying, ‘Is Henk with you?’, Dirk replying, ‘No. I thought he would be here.’

They had been doing something for the Resistance about which Dirk said he would tell me later. It had gone wrong. They had run for their lives, had decided they should split up, and agreed to meet again at the farm. It was months before we heard that Henk had been caught and shot. But the night Dirk returned and until we heard the truth, we kept hope alive by telling each other that he was sure to be hiding somewhere, that Henk was a survivor, and that once the war was over he would come back to us. I never really believed it. But at such times one pretends, even to oneself, or life would not be possible. As one of your poets says, ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality.’

We sat down at the table then, just as Jacob and I had
sat so often. Dirk explained he had seen his parents before coming to me. ‘But, Geertrui,’ he said, ‘what has happened to Mama?’ Far from the joyful welcome he had expected, her coddling him, her treating him as if he were still a boy, she had been cool, almost bitter. ‘Ah, so you’ve decided to come back, have you!’ she had said. ‘You walk out on us when we need you most and now you come back, you’re in trouble or you want something, is that it?’ He had tried to explain but she wouldn’t listen. Even while he was still talking she had gone to her harmonium and started to play. And then Dirk used the words I had often said to myself when I watched her playing: ‘It was as if she was not with us any longer but living in another world.’