Postcards From No Man's Land (34 page)

It had always been obvious to me that Dirk was his mother’s boy. That was one reason why I had been uneasy about accepting him as a serious boyfriend. I do not think he had ever understood this about himself. But the distress he now felt at his mother’s withdrawal made everything clear. I tried to comfort him by saying that I thought his mother was suffering a nervous breakdown. Awful things were happening. His mother’s way of coping was to withdraw inside herself. She had been under great stress all through the occupation. Our arrival had made it worse. Then her son, the most precious part of her life, had suddenly disappeared. That she might never see him again was more than she could bear. So she had shut herself up to protect herself. Now she behaved towards him as she did because she could not face the hurt of losing him again. As for the harmonium, perhaps when she played she really was living in another world, the happy world she had known as a child when she first learned to play, where none of these terrible things existed. When the war was over she would recover and he would have his mama back again.

When Dirk had pulled himself together, he asked about Jacob. His father had told him what had happened, but only
briefly. He wanted me to tell him more. The tears came almost as soon as Dirk spoke Jacob’s name. I had told no one about us or about Jacob’s death because there had been no one to talk to. It was bottled up inside, and as soon as the bottle was opened everything that had happened between us came pouring out like champagne when the bottle has been shaken before the cork is popped.

What a need we humans have for confession. To a priest, to a friend, to a psychoanalyst, to a relative, to an enemy, even to a torturer when there is no one else, it doesn’t matter so long as we speak out what moves within us. Even the most secretive of us do it, if no more than writing in a private diary. And I have often thought as I read stories and novels and poems, especially poems, that they are no more than the authors’ confessions transformed by their art into something that confesses for us all. Indeed, looking back on my lifelong passion for reading, the one activity that has kept me going and given me the most and only lasting pleasure, I think this is the reason that explains why it means so much to me. The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself.

But that is an aside. I meant only to explain you that I told everything to Dirk that night, not omitting how I was pregnant with Jacob’s child. He listened without interruption, without moving, without any display of emotion. You must remember that this was the man who only a few weeks before had declared his love for me and had asked me to marry him. My story must have given him terrible pain. I shall always be grateful to him for listening with a sympathy rare even from a friend who had not his reason to feel hurt by it.

When I was finished there was silence. I remember a cow coughing below us. The thump of a large gun in the not so far distance. The blink and sizzle as a little bubble of
water leaked from the impure wartime wax in to the flame of the candle on the table beside us. It would be a cliché to say that the world stood still, or that my heart stopped. It takes one of those best authors I was talking about to find words that are fresh and renewing for such a moment. Well, I am a reader, not an author, so you must put up with what words I can come by in these, my weary last days. Perhaps the word I need, for us is
gaping
, for you is ‘hiatus’. (And—a silly pun! your grandfather loved puns—I do assure you this hiatus did gape at us!) All I can say is that something hung in the air for a while and that we, Dirk and myself, were suspended with it, hovering, waiting, trying to catch the meaning of it, its
significance
, as we dangled in the void.

It was Dirk, my dear dear always reliable Dirk, who broke the silence.

‘Will you marry me?’ he said.

And now, truly, I did gape at him.

‘Please,’ I said, ‘don’t joke with me. Not today. And never about this.’

He reached across the table, brushed the tears from my face, took my hand from my mouth, held it in his, and said again, ‘Will you marry me?’

I said, ‘You cannot mean it.’

‘I do,’ he said.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘After what has happened.’

‘I must make two conditions,’ he said, as he always was: businesslike, to the point. No wonder his building company did so well. ‘First, that you tell no one that the child is Jacob’s. We will always say it is mine. And the second is that we begin our life together tonight.’

I looked at him in the eyes, this man I had known since childhood, with his straight Dutch honesty, this man who was my beloved brother’s closest friend, and as I stared at him learned something about myself I had not known till then, something I would rather were not so. I can be calculating. Behind my emotions, let’s say—whatever they were,
however strongly felt—there was a part of me that remained dispassionate, detached, and which assessed like a mathematician manipulating figures, what was best for me to do next in the circumstances I found myself. This was the first time I was conscious of doing it. And what my inner calculator told me was that here was my best chance. Perhaps my only chance. I even calculated something else: that Dirk needed me as much as I needed him. Because of his mother’s possessive treatment, he learned this about himself that night just as I learned how calculating I can be. He needed to break free, and I could help him do it. So there it is: I was fond of him, I enjoyed his company, he was competent and strong, he loved me deeply, far more than I could ever love him.

However, that part of me I came to think of in future years as mevrouwtje Uitgekookt held me back from saying yes at once. (
Uitgekookt
means ‘shrewd’ or even ‘cunning’, and when we add the suffix
tje
to a word we make a diminutive of it, which means I called my calculating self Little Mrs Shrewd. Or little mevrouw Smartass, as my grandson Daan puts it, he having watched too many American television programmes for his own good or for his use of the English language.) You must give an appearance of hesitation, mevrouwtje Uitgekookt told me. It isn’t wise to give yourself away so quickly or so easily. This man will appreciate you all the better if you show some respect for your dignity and require the same of him. And so I thanked Dirk, and told him how astonished I was by his offer and how happy it made me (both were true and not pretence), but that I could not make up my mind right there and then (which was not true, I knew I would say yes). Would he agree that we should both think it over for twenty-four hours? After all, it would be a very big step for both of us. For him especially, as he would be taking on a child who was not his, as well as a wife for whom he knew he had not been her first choice.

Dirk agreed. And I could see he was pleased by what I had said. It was only after we had been married for a while that I found out that Dirk had always known about mevrouwtje Uitgekookt, just as I had always known that he was a big businesslike mama’s boy. He said it was one of the things he liked most about me. ‘I would not have married a woman who wasn’t
scherpzinnig
.’ (Sharp-witted—you would say smart, I think.) From him, this was the best compliment my Dirk could pay me. I hope, dear Jacob, you begin to see why we were such good companions for all our married life until Dirk died two years ago. For forty-eight years we always tried to be honest with each other, and anyhow, saw through each other so completely that there could be no pretence.

The following night we met in the hiding place. Little mevrouw Smartass had been working overtime. Yes, I told Dirk, I would marry him, do so gladly and with gratitude. But that I too had some conditions.

My first was that he remain here on the farm until the end of the war and not go off again to fight or work with the Resistance. After everything that had happened, after the separations, after the deaths, with the many dangers that still surrounded us, enough was enough. If he was to be my husband, he must stay with me.

My second condition was that, whatever he did after the liberation, he would not ask me to live on the farm. I knew I could never be a farmer’s wife.

The third condition. I could understand, I said, why he wanted to sleep with me. Because then we could always honestly say we had slept together. We would not have to say exactly when. People would assume the child was his. We would not have to say anything about it. Well, I would go to bed with him, I would sleep with him in the literal sense. But nothing more. To do more until after the baby was born would be impossible, an offence against what I felt
for Jacob and our child. And, it seemed to me, an offence against Dirk also. Nor, I added, could I go to bed with him here in the hiding place because for me this would always be the place where I lived with Jacob. So my third condition was that he must now help me pack away everything I associated with Jacob, and then we must dismantle the hiding place completely. This part of my life must be cleared up by both of us working together before I could begin my life with him.

I knew, I said, that I was in no position to impose any conditions on him, but only if he could accept these three would I agree to marry him, because unless he could accept them I knew we would never respect each other or be happy together.

We talked for a long time after that, three or four hours I think. Not because Dirk had reservations or could not accept what I asked. He accepted at once. We talked for so long because there were many questions about ourselves and our future that had to be discussed. And both of us being talkers, how could we do otherwise! I won’t tell you of this, it has nothing to do with what I must tell you about myself and your grandfather. But I’m sure you can imagine it. And we could have gone on through the night, but if we were to fulfil Dirk’s condition that we sleep together at once and my condition that the hiding place be cleared away, we had to leave off and set to work. It took us another two or three hours to complete the task. (How much quicker it always is to destroy something than it is to build it. Dirk and Henk had spent two whole days constructing the hiding place, not to mention the time spent making it as comfortable as possible.)

That done, we went in to the house to prepare ourselves. Mrs Wesseling had already gone to bed. Mr Wesseling was sitting by the fire, though it was well past his usual bedtime, pretending to doze but really, I could tell, waiting to see Dirk again. I went to my room. The two men sat talking for
an hour (I listened impatiently to the old grandfather clock striking). Then their footsteps on the stairs. Their final whispered goodnights. Their bedroom doors. And more waiting as the clock struck two more quarters.

I was lying in bed all this time in order, of course, to keep warm. It was a dreadfully cold night. And as so often when you are waiting anxiously for someone, I was on edge, annoyed at being kept waiting. Until you begin to think they will never come, and you drift off to sleep. As I did that night. The next thing I knew, Dirk was gently shaking my shoulder. I jumped, startled out of my sleep. The bed creaked loud enough to waken the whole house. We had to stifle our giggles. And so our life together began as I am glad to say it continued, with laughter.

Dirk and I were married in secret by the local mayor, a man we knew we could trust, two weeks later. It had to be in secret or Dirk would have been taken by the Germans and sent to forced labour. Our part of the Netherlands was liberated soon afterwards, in April. Jacob’s child, my daughter Tessel, was born the following August. You know her as mevrouw van Riet, Daan’s mother. You might say that she is your Dutch mother. And that Daan is therefore your Dutch brother. Jacob’s body was exhumed and buried in the battle cemetery at Oosterbeek later that year.

I kept my word to my husband Dirk, and, while he was alive, never told anyone who Tessel’s father really was. But when he died two years ago, I thought it right that Tessel should know. This was not an easy thing for her. But I have always believed it is best to know the truth, though it may be hard and hurts. I wanted my daughter to know the truth of her history. It matters where you come from and who began your journey, even though someone else fathered you along the way. Just as it matters that you know your place in the world. Besides, as I say, there is that urge to confession, the desire to tell our most secret stories. And a lie, even if it
is a lie only by silence, by omission as our Catholic neighbours would say, can consume your soul like a cancer. Having a cancer of the body is enough for me. I wanted the cancer of an unspoken truth lifted from my conscience before I died.

There was someone else to whom I had to make confession. Your grandmother, Sarah. I knew, of course, that I had offended against her. It is no excuse to say that your grandfather Jacob and I were young, nor that the strains and conditions of the war were to blame, nor that we both intended to be as forthright and careful as we could be with Sarah when the war was over. These things were so. But they did not acquit us, were not a vindication, were no justification.

When I invited your grandmother to visit me, I had it in mind to tell her. I said nothing of what you, Jacob, now know about my illness and my coming death. Then she wrote back to say she could not come but asked that I invite you instead. Now that you were grown up enough to understand, she wanted you to visit Jacob’s grave and meet me so that you could hear the story of your grandfather’s last days ‘from the horse’s mouth’, as she put it (another of those familiar sayings my father and I learned).

I was upset that I would not be able to make my confession to Sarah face to face. I could have written it for her. But to confess to someone in writing is not the same. To speak face to face is to share the blunt emotion without protection. Its rawness cannot be evaded. There is no hiding place. The guilty teller must endure the wrath or sadness, sorrow or reprisal, tears or scorn of the offended listener. Must endure also, if they are offered, the humiliation of receiving the listener’s understanding and forgiveness. Nothing is more cauterising than those two worst of penances. Rage from the other somehow accepts that we are as we are, no need for change, leaves us feeling virtuous, vindicated, proves we have done the right thing. But calm
forgiveness and quiet, tolerant understanding confirm our mistake, reflect back in to us our wrong, provide no escape, and carry expectation of amendment. All this we avoid when we write our story and send it off to be read, at arm’s length so to speak, and out of harm’s way.